One of my favorite cartoons is a George Booth drawing which appeared in The New Yorker when I was in seminary. It shows a parson being chased out of a lovely white clapboard frame church by an angry congregation: everybody –even nice old ladies and staid businessmen—is visibly enraged. What, you ask, could have made these people so furious? Then you notice in the lower right corner the parish signboard which reads, “United M.E. Church, Reverend Clayton Millstone. Sermon: ‘Are We All Prostitutes?’ You Are Welcome.”
I feel that I risk engendering the same kind of reaction here tonight, because the title of this sermon might well read, “Are We All Pharisees?” Now I know enough about human nature to realize that no-one wants to be called a prostitute; and I know enough about religion to believe that no-one wants to be called a Pharisee, either. But, as regular, church-attending, rule-abiding Christian people, isn’t that what we are?
I ask this without trying to be either accusatory or cute, because I think the New Testament has always given Pharisees a bad rap. That’s understandable: as my New Testament teacher Krister Stendhal used to say, the Pharisees were simply the “Jews down the street” who didn’t sign on to the Jesus movement. Consequently they got caricatured as hopelessly hypocritical fussbudgets who were so blinded by their slavish obedience to rules that they couldn’t recognize the Messiah when he was right in front of them.
But in fact scholars know that the Pharisees were, like us, ordinarily pious religious folk who were attempting, as best they could, to follow the received practices of their religion and live a faithful and respectable life in the world. The New Testament portrays them as almost melodramatically nefarious beings—first century Darth Vaders, skulking around, playing practical jokes on Jesus—but really they were just average conventionally religious folk trying to make sense out of life with the tools their tradition had given them. As someone who believes in regular attendance at worship, living by an ethical code, and in following processes and procedures agreed on by the larger community, I can pretty much count myself as the 21st century equivalent of a Pharisee. And so, I believe, can most of us Episcopalians.
So why is Jesus so cranky about them? And does that mean that Jesus’s critique of them applies also to us?
‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach.—Matthew 23.2-3
When you correct for the first century grumpiness factor, I believe that you’ll find that Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees (similar to Amos’s railings against pious Israelites in the first reading) is really a critique of common sense, or received wisdom. As creatures of habit, we human beings tend to codify our behavior and traditions as the will of the gods, or in our case as Episcopalians, “the way we’ve always done it.” Though there is certainly a component of self-interested sin in this—especially if your bread is buttered on the side of the way we’ve always done it—really the problem is our collective inability to see that God might be actually doing a very new and different thing.
And that’s why we need prophets. We need them not so much to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable” as we need them (just as we need artists) to help us try on a new way of looking at things. Consider the life and career of Thurgood Marshall, whom we celebrate tonight. We know that Marshall was the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court, appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967. Before that, he was Solicitor General (again appointed by Johnson) and a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals appointed by President Kennedy. But Marshall became famous earlier in the 1950s when he served as Chief Counsel to the NAACP and, in that capacity, argued the plaintiff’s case in Brown versus the Board of Education before the Supreme Court. It was that decision, of course, in which the Warren Court decided that “separate but equal” was inherently inequitable and so made an end to school segregation in the United States.
Now there was certainly plenty of human sin and hypocrisy and selfishness involved in school segregation. But to some extent school segregation persisted because of the human habit of becoming entrenched in certain ways of seeing things. And so what Thurgood Marshall brought about was a kind of change which took not only moral courage but also visionary imagination. He and his colleagues had not only to change the system; they had first to be able to imagine that it could be otherwise.
And that combination of moral courage and visionary imagination is what Jesus brought to first century Palestine and what you and I are called to bring to our time and place. Jesus lived in a time when life in the Roman Empire meant political oppression, economic subjugation, and all-around privation and scarcity. In the midst of this bleak situation, Jesus dared to say that human beings could live differently. What brought Jesus to the cross was his implicit challenge to Empire and all its presumptions. You can live an abundant life, he said, even in the midst of privation. By coming together and having things in common, rather than cowering in your corner and holding on to what’s mine, you and I can find joyful plentiful life and love in solidarity with each other. That was liberating and dangerous news. As, of course was the message of the Civil Rights Movement. Thurgood Marshall lived to a good old age. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not.
Jesus challenged the common sense and received wisdom of first century Palestine. Thurgood Marshall challenged the common sense and received wisdom of 1950s America. As we gather tonight—surrounded in our country and our world by men and women suffering at the hands of an economic downturn, in a nation waging two wars (one of which, I’m sorry to say, seems to be expanding), living in a society where 40 million people have no health insurance and where children bear the brunt of our social and economic injustices and inequalities— those who study and teach and graduate from places need to be able to respond to all that. Our vocational question, now and then, is this: how is God calling you and me to witness to this hurting world tonight?
Are we all prostitutes? Are we all Pharisees? At the risk of sharing the fate of Reverend Clayton Millstone: sure we are. That, it seems is human nature. And helping us see how we will always be caught in that trap is why Paul wrote his letters, and why Augustine, Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Barth continued to grapple with the dilemmas our nature offers when confronted with grace.
I wish that Christianity offered a cure for Pharisaism, but two thousand years of lived experience tells me it doesn’t. We’ll always be people who hold on to rules and traditions and practices because we’re ritualistic creatures of habit with lizard brains, and we just can’t seem to keep ourselves for investing our energy in the wrong things from time to time. But I do believe that Christianity holds out a vision of abundant life to a hurting world. As in Jesus’s day, the way toward personal abundance lies not in hoarding but in sharing. As in Thurgood Marshall’s day, the way toward my liberation lies in my standing with you in the struggle for yours. Then as now, the Gospel proclaims that the way to abundance and freedom lies in solidarity and compassion. And what God needs now, as then, is a group of men and women who have both the moral courage and the visionary imagination to glimpse ways in which that just might be true.
The church, of course, is the place where we practice and learn that. And this meal we now come to both proclaims that abundant compassion and enacts it. For this meal, and for the life and witness of Thurgood Marshall and the vision of Jesus to which his life gave witness, let us proceed, together, in the Eucharist, to give thanks. Amen.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
Homily: May 8, 2009 [St. John/Seabury Awards Night]
Because the Seabury chapel is named for St. John, and because the school is always on vacation after Christmas when his feast day comes, we always use the propers for St. John’s Day [December 27] for this annual celebration of Awards Night. The Gospel which we just heard [John 21.19b-24] gives us John’s account of Jesus’s final appearance to his disciples, and it is quite an arresting story: Peter has just heard that he is destined to die a grisly death at the hand of the Romans, and then he asks about the fate of the disciple whom Jesus loves. Jesus answers, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” [John 21.22] As compelling a story as this is, the way we just heard a snippet of it leaves out some of the other elements which make it so deeply evocative. Here are just a few lines from the earlier part of John 21:
After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. . . . Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. . . . When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. [John 21. 1,4,9]
I grew up in Southern California, and when my parents divorced early in my childhood my father moved out to Malibu and got a house there because, if you can believe this now, it was cheap. So I spent many of my elementary school weekends at the beach, and that early experience probably colors the way I hear the 21st chapter of John’s Gospel when it is read. I cannot hear about Jesus at the beach sitting around a charcoal fire without thinking of what that looks, feels, and smells like from my own early experience. One of the things I remember best about those Malibu weekends was going down to the beach and sitting around a fire. In that seaside setting you have all the elements which early humans thought made up the universe: earth, air, fire, water. There is something primordial and eternal in that kind of moment, and also something fleeting: everything in that scene is ephemeral. As a scene which mixes the eternal and the ephemeral, a fireside by the water is the perfect place to say goodbye.
So since my earliest days of reading the Bible with some care, I have been moved that the risen Jesus’s final meal with his companions occurred on a beach gathered around a charcoal fire. As much as Easter is about the joyful return of Jesus to his friends, it is also ultimately about the loss of Jesus, too. Jesus is returning to the One he calls his Father. This is the last time his companions will see him. And without trying to sound impious or inelegant about it, it means something at least to me that Jesus leaves his friends after a final beach cookout, and the meal he shares with them takes place in the setting not only of a beautiful natural place but also in the context of the work of fishing, the stuff of their daily life.
“Lord, what about him?” [John 21.21] Peter, of course, stands and speaks for all of us here. Having lived with Jesus and the other disciples through the events of Holy Week and Easter, Peter cannot help but wonder that human destinies can be so various. “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go,” Jesus had told him [John 21.18]. And when Peter asks about what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, he is gently chastened: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” How precisely is this fair?
As Jimmy Carter once said, when talking about the differences between what rich people and poor people could afford, “there are many things in life that are not fair.” It’s not fair that one disciple goes to a martyr’s death while the other dies in peace on an island in the Mediterranean. It’s not fair that some live to old age in health while others die young. And speaking as one who lives in the rhythm of seminary life, it’s not fair that teachers and students grow close to one another through all the shared experience of their time here and then have to go their separate ways.
Tonight begins the observances of a week in which we will do things as we have always done them pretty much for the last time. We will have Awards Night and Commencement next year, but they’ll be smaller, more intimate occasions. Tonight marks the beginning of a week of the final observances of a certain kind of way of being Seabury. Like the Easter season, the week we begin tonight celebrates both resurrection and loss. Graduating students and departing faculty are going on to new life and new work. And the seminary itself is in the midst of being dramatically reborn. All this is good news. In almost all measurable ways, our individual futures are bright.
Nevertheless, there is considerable loss in what we do this week. We will never be together in precisely this way again. Traditions and relationships will change. And we all know how much Episcopalians like change.
I have to confess (if it hasn’t been otherwise obvious) that I have been in a bad mood much of this Spring, and I believe my grumpiness results, in part, from my inability to express the sadness I feel at the graduation of the class of 2009 from Seabury. Part of that is because everywhere I turn, people are telling me how wonderful it is that Seabury has succeeded in reinventing itself. Part of that is because I do not like to say goodbye to people I care about, even if I do so for some very good reasons. And part of that is, no matter how liberal or progressive you and I might think I am, I really don’t like change. As much as I believe in and look forward to that new thing that Seabury is becoming, I loved and valued the old thing, too. That was why I came here. So, for me, this is the first graduation week in which I get to watch not only the students but the faculty and the whole school itself go on to what Milton called “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” [“Lycidas”]
Now I don’t know if you are in quite the same emotional place as I am—which I would describe as hopeful and sad at once—but I will bet that like me you feel some combination of excitement and loss as you contemplate what it means for all of us to do these things together in this way for the last time. And as we face into this paradoxical task—what Claudius in Hamlet called “mirth in funeral and . . . dirge in marriage,/ In equal scale weighing delight and dole” [Hamlet 1.2] Jesus’s remark to Peter serves at least as a sharp slap in the face to call us back to our senses and our values.
“If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” Working in a seminary, like working in the church itself, is not about preserving a museum exhibit of the past. It is about being agents of God’s love, justice, healing, and reconciliation. Because our life together in a place like this is so intense, it is our natural human tendency to want to build a wall around it and preserve it as an artifact of our experience—much as Peter wants to do at the Transfiguration. But what Jesus says to Peter here tonight is what Jesus says, in a variety of ways, to each of us. If it is God’s will that we separate and go our different ways, and if it is God’s will that Seabury itself be transformed into something different than any of us has ever known, and if it is God’s will that God use each of us in ways that we could never ask for or imagine, what is that to us? Our task, like Peter’s and like the Beloved Disciple’s, is to follow Jesus. That is what we are here for. As Jesus said to his friends in another context, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9.62]
The briskness of that retort does not, in fact, leave us comfortless, because God never does. As we all prepare ourselves to drop what we are doing and follow Jesus, let us never forget that Jesus’s last earthly gathering with his friends took place at a meal on the beach, gathered around a charcoal fire, sharing the Eucharistic elements of bread and fish. Earth, air, fire, water. Bread, fish. The ephemeral and the eternal. We will never be together in precisely this way again. But we are together, because, in our various ways, we share this meal and then get up and go out to follow Jesus. Amen.
After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. . . . Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. . . . When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. [John 21. 1,4,9]
I grew up in Southern California, and when my parents divorced early in my childhood my father moved out to Malibu and got a house there because, if you can believe this now, it was cheap. So I spent many of my elementary school weekends at the beach, and that early experience probably colors the way I hear the 21st chapter of John’s Gospel when it is read. I cannot hear about Jesus at the beach sitting around a charcoal fire without thinking of what that looks, feels, and smells like from my own early experience. One of the things I remember best about those Malibu weekends was going down to the beach and sitting around a fire. In that seaside setting you have all the elements which early humans thought made up the universe: earth, air, fire, water. There is something primordial and eternal in that kind of moment, and also something fleeting: everything in that scene is ephemeral. As a scene which mixes the eternal and the ephemeral, a fireside by the water is the perfect place to say goodbye.
So since my earliest days of reading the Bible with some care, I have been moved that the risen Jesus’s final meal with his companions occurred on a beach gathered around a charcoal fire. As much as Easter is about the joyful return of Jesus to his friends, it is also ultimately about the loss of Jesus, too. Jesus is returning to the One he calls his Father. This is the last time his companions will see him. And without trying to sound impious or inelegant about it, it means something at least to me that Jesus leaves his friends after a final beach cookout, and the meal he shares with them takes place in the setting not only of a beautiful natural place but also in the context of the work of fishing, the stuff of their daily life.
“Lord, what about him?” [John 21.21] Peter, of course, stands and speaks for all of us here. Having lived with Jesus and the other disciples through the events of Holy Week and Easter, Peter cannot help but wonder that human destinies can be so various. “When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go,” Jesus had told him [John 21.18]. And when Peter asks about what will happen to the Beloved Disciple, he is gently chastened: “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” How precisely is this fair?
As Jimmy Carter once said, when talking about the differences between what rich people and poor people could afford, “there are many things in life that are not fair.” It’s not fair that one disciple goes to a martyr’s death while the other dies in peace on an island in the Mediterranean. It’s not fair that some live to old age in health while others die young. And speaking as one who lives in the rhythm of seminary life, it’s not fair that teachers and students grow close to one another through all the shared experience of their time here and then have to go their separate ways.
Tonight begins the observances of a week in which we will do things as we have always done them pretty much for the last time. We will have Awards Night and Commencement next year, but they’ll be smaller, more intimate occasions. Tonight marks the beginning of a week of the final observances of a certain kind of way of being Seabury. Like the Easter season, the week we begin tonight celebrates both resurrection and loss. Graduating students and departing faculty are going on to new life and new work. And the seminary itself is in the midst of being dramatically reborn. All this is good news. In almost all measurable ways, our individual futures are bright.
Nevertheless, there is considerable loss in what we do this week. We will never be together in precisely this way again. Traditions and relationships will change. And we all know how much Episcopalians like change.
I have to confess (if it hasn’t been otherwise obvious) that I have been in a bad mood much of this Spring, and I believe my grumpiness results, in part, from my inability to express the sadness I feel at the graduation of the class of 2009 from Seabury. Part of that is because everywhere I turn, people are telling me how wonderful it is that Seabury has succeeded in reinventing itself. Part of that is because I do not like to say goodbye to people I care about, even if I do so for some very good reasons. And part of that is, no matter how liberal or progressive you and I might think I am, I really don’t like change. As much as I believe in and look forward to that new thing that Seabury is becoming, I loved and valued the old thing, too. That was why I came here. So, for me, this is the first graduation week in which I get to watch not only the students but the faculty and the whole school itself go on to what Milton called “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” [“Lycidas”]
Now I don’t know if you are in quite the same emotional place as I am—which I would describe as hopeful and sad at once—but I will bet that like me you feel some combination of excitement and loss as you contemplate what it means for all of us to do these things together in this way for the last time. And as we face into this paradoxical task—what Claudius in Hamlet called “mirth in funeral and . . . dirge in marriage,/ In equal scale weighing delight and dole” [Hamlet 1.2] Jesus’s remark to Peter serves at least as a sharp slap in the face to call us back to our senses and our values.
“If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” Working in a seminary, like working in the church itself, is not about preserving a museum exhibit of the past. It is about being agents of God’s love, justice, healing, and reconciliation. Because our life together in a place like this is so intense, it is our natural human tendency to want to build a wall around it and preserve it as an artifact of our experience—much as Peter wants to do at the Transfiguration. But what Jesus says to Peter here tonight is what Jesus says, in a variety of ways, to each of us. If it is God’s will that we separate and go our different ways, and if it is God’s will that Seabury itself be transformed into something different than any of us has ever known, and if it is God’s will that God use each of us in ways that we could never ask for or imagine, what is that to us? Our task, like Peter’s and like the Beloved Disciple’s, is to follow Jesus. That is what we are here for. As Jesus said to his friends in another context, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9.62]
The briskness of that retort does not, in fact, leave us comfortless, because God never does. As we all prepare ourselves to drop what we are doing and follow Jesus, let us never forget that Jesus’s last earthly gathering with his friends took place at a meal on the beach, gathered around a charcoal fire, sharing the Eucharistic elements of bread and fish. Earth, air, fire, water. Bread, fish. The ephemeral and the eternal. We will never be together in precisely this way again. But we are together, because, in our various ways, we share this meal and then get up and go out to follow Jesus. Amen.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sermon: The Fourth Sunday of Easter [Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, IL, May 3, 2009]
I.
All the recent media talk about swine flu has put me in mind of pork in general, and that has made my thoughts turn to everyone’s favorite film about pigs, Babe. You’ll remember that Babe is a pig who wants to be a sheepdog, and the climax of the movie comes when Babe unexpectedly wins the sheepdog trials. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Babe is the way in which it puts in a good word for the dignity and intelligence of sheep, a claim you don’t hear made a lot in churches on Good Shepherd Sunday. You may remember that early on, when Babe tries, as the dogs do, to boss the sheep around, he fails. He asks his adoptive sheepdog mother why, and she replies: “You’re treating them like equals. They’re sheep, they’re inferior.” “Oh, no they’re not,” says Babe. “Of course they are,” she rejoins. “We are their masters, Babe. Let them doubt it for a second and they’ll walk all over you.” She must have had a prior career as a Middle School teacher.
Chanting “Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe.” the sheep on Babe’s farm have an un-sheeplike sense of their own dignity, and they respond to Babe’s interspecies respect with cooperation. Like the duck who thinks he’s a rooster and the pig who thinks he’s a dog, the sheep in Babe refuse to accept the world’s definition of them. Our cultural stereotype of sheep, to the extent that we urban and suburban people still have one, is that they are dirty, smelly, stupid creatures who need guidance and direction from dogs and people. What that stereotype fails to acknowledge, however, is that even dogs and people need guidance and direction. Sheep may need a shepherd, but so does everyone else. And not because we’re stupid. We need guidance and direction because we are social beings, and it is one of Western culture’s most dangerous presumptions to think that we can navigate all the thickets of life without the aid and companionship of others. “I Did it My Way” is a song best sung by a sheep hurtling over a cliff, followed closely by a dog and a man.
Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, a day commonly called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of the phrase from today’s collect which calls Jesus “the good shepherd” of God’s people and prays that “when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” [John 10.14] To be a Christian one must come to terms with this metaphor in all of its implications. Jesus tells us that he is our shepherd and we his sheep. We need guidance; we need direction. But to need guidance and direction is not, contrary to what Babe’s sheepdog’s mother says, to be inferior. How do we hear this comparison of us to sheep in all its fullness without forgetting that we, like sheep, have both limitations and dignity, too?
II.
That comparison which Jesus made was not new:
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned everyone to his own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [Isaiah 53.6]
That’s the Servant Song from Isaiah; and our Psalm for today, the familiar 23rd Psalm, begins by proclaiming, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Israel turned to sheep as a human metaphor because they saw in sheep some observable aspects of human behavior. They saw that sheep do not always know or do what is in their best interest. They saw that sheep flourish more in an ordered community than they do in a wild free for all. When looking at shepherds and sheep, Israel’s prophets saw an image of the human condition. We think we’re individuals and that we know what is best for us. But the actual facts are otherwise. We achieve our fulfillment not alone but in community. We flourish as part of something bigger than we are. And we need guides, mentors, friends, companions to help us navigate away from life’s thickets and cliffs.
That is certainly the way the book of Genesis understands the human condition in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. And that is certainly how our Gospels understand the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. We human beings mistake our own interest. When we think only of our own personal needs, wants, and aspirations we can become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues. When we follow what we think is our own self-interest divorced from that of others, we see what happens: Adam and Eve get expelled from the Garden; Jesus gets crucified; Americans live in a world with failed financial institutions, bankrupt companies, collapsing infrastructure, massive unemployment, two wars, and a society where 45 million Americans have no health insurance, to say nothing of what we’ve done to the planet. “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way.” We like sheep get into trouble when we fail to realize that there is a larger, shared, common good. And that is why we need shepherds—prophets, mentors, guides, companions, friends—to help us remember that human life is impossible without the sustaining fabric of a community and culture and a commitment to mutual respect and obligation. As they say, “It Takes a Village.”
III.
So we are like sheep in that we can get ourselves into personal and social trouble. And we need shepherds and sheepdogs to nip at us and guide us not just into safety but toward God’s vision of our real human destiny. Because the purpose of life is not just to be safe. The purpose of life is to live, as Jesus did, a fully realized joyous and compassionate existence. And that brings us back to the question of our sheeply and human dignity.
If we think again about what sheep represent in the ancient Near Eastern economy, we’ll see that sheep are, to their owners and shepherds, precious. The sheep are worth a good deal to those who own and maintain them. So when Jesus calls himself our “Good Shepherd”, or when Psalm 23 tells us that the Lord is our shepherd, what we should hear in that is not just a program of divine command and control. What we should hear in that is about human dignity and worth. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Lord as shepherd leads the sheep through the valley to green pastures and still waters. You don’t lay down your life for someone worthless. You don’t give your shepherdly attention to someone whom you don’t care about. God, as shepherd, sacrifices and leads us precisely because we have so much worth and value in God’s sight. God made you and me in God’s own image. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us as one of us. God loves us not out of sentimental pity but out of identification and worth. God in Jesus knows what it is to be us. God desires that we have life and have it abundantly.
Right before we saw the movie Babe¸ our family spent a summer in England where we became familiar with a BBC show called “One Man and His Dog”. Every week for a half an hour, viewers of “One Man and His Dog” used to watch a shepherd put a sheepdog through the complex trials of guiding sheep through a complicated set of gates into pens. Like many people, we found this show oddly soothing. There was little commentary, and the only sound you heard was of the calls the man would make to the dog. Watching it was like sitting outside on a farm at the end of the day watching the advance of evening. It was also like finding yourself in the vision of the loving, safe, and generous world which God holds out to us at Easter.
I think about those sheepdog trials whenever I hear the words from today’s Gospel: “I am the Good Shepherd.” You and I, like sheep, need the nipping of that heavenly sheepdog at our heels to keep us thinking about how what we want can more closely resemble what we need and can live in harmony with what the everyone else needs. And you and I, like sheep, are blessed to have each other and the continued presence of the One who cares enough about us to guide and lead us away from thickets and cliffs and towards pastures and still waters.
Easter is about many things, but most deeply it is about what God means to us and what we mean to God. What God means to us is that the Lord is our shepherd, and this is good and gracious news. And what we mean to God is that we are precious to the One who lays down his life for the sheep. You mean everything to God. The fullness of both these meanings is what Easter represents. And Easter’s gracious surprise--for that One and for all of us-- is that we now have a resurrected, risen life with Jesus and God and each other and the world in which to live out the joyous implications of what being precious in God’s sight can mean. May our love and gratitude toward God and our compassion and solidarity with each other be the most contagious things we experience this spring. Amen.
All the recent media talk about swine flu has put me in mind of pork in general, and that has made my thoughts turn to everyone’s favorite film about pigs, Babe. You’ll remember that Babe is a pig who wants to be a sheepdog, and the climax of the movie comes when Babe unexpectedly wins the sheepdog trials. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Babe is the way in which it puts in a good word for the dignity and intelligence of sheep, a claim you don’t hear made a lot in churches on Good Shepherd Sunday. You may remember that early on, when Babe tries, as the dogs do, to boss the sheep around, he fails. He asks his adoptive sheepdog mother why, and she replies: “You’re treating them like equals. They’re sheep, they’re inferior.” “Oh, no they’re not,” says Babe. “Of course they are,” she rejoins. “We are their masters, Babe. Let them doubt it for a second and they’ll walk all over you.” She must have had a prior career as a Middle School teacher.
Chanting “Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe.” the sheep on Babe’s farm have an un-sheeplike sense of their own dignity, and they respond to Babe’s interspecies respect with cooperation. Like the duck who thinks he’s a rooster and the pig who thinks he’s a dog, the sheep in Babe refuse to accept the world’s definition of them. Our cultural stereotype of sheep, to the extent that we urban and suburban people still have one, is that they are dirty, smelly, stupid creatures who need guidance and direction from dogs and people. What that stereotype fails to acknowledge, however, is that even dogs and people need guidance and direction. Sheep may need a shepherd, but so does everyone else. And not because we’re stupid. We need guidance and direction because we are social beings, and it is one of Western culture’s most dangerous presumptions to think that we can navigate all the thickets of life without the aid and companionship of others. “I Did it My Way” is a song best sung by a sheep hurtling over a cliff, followed closely by a dog and a man.
Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, a day commonly called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because of the phrase from today’s collect which calls Jesus “the good shepherd” of God’s people and prays that “when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” [John 10.14] To be a Christian one must come to terms with this metaphor in all of its implications. Jesus tells us that he is our shepherd and we his sheep. We need guidance; we need direction. But to need guidance and direction is not, contrary to what Babe’s sheepdog’s mother says, to be inferior. How do we hear this comparison of us to sheep in all its fullness without forgetting that we, like sheep, have both limitations and dignity, too?
II.
That comparison which Jesus made was not new:
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned everyone to his own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [Isaiah 53.6]
That’s the Servant Song from Isaiah; and our Psalm for today, the familiar 23rd Psalm, begins by proclaiming, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Israel turned to sheep as a human metaphor because they saw in sheep some observable aspects of human behavior. They saw that sheep do not always know or do what is in their best interest. They saw that sheep flourish more in an ordered community than they do in a wild free for all. When looking at shepherds and sheep, Israel’s prophets saw an image of the human condition. We think we’re individuals and that we know what is best for us. But the actual facts are otherwise. We achieve our fulfillment not alone but in community. We flourish as part of something bigger than we are. And we need guides, mentors, friends, companions to help us navigate away from life’s thickets and cliffs.
That is certainly the way the book of Genesis understands the human condition in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. And that is certainly how our Gospels understand the story of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. We human beings mistake our own interest. When we think only of our own personal needs, wants, and aspirations we can become easy prey for charlatans and demagogues. When we follow what we think is our own self-interest divorced from that of others, we see what happens: Adam and Eve get expelled from the Garden; Jesus gets crucified; Americans live in a world with failed financial institutions, bankrupt companies, collapsing infrastructure, massive unemployment, two wars, and a society where 45 million Americans have no health insurance, to say nothing of what we’ve done to the planet. “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way.” We like sheep get into trouble when we fail to realize that there is a larger, shared, common good. And that is why we need shepherds—prophets, mentors, guides, companions, friends—to help us remember that human life is impossible without the sustaining fabric of a community and culture and a commitment to mutual respect and obligation. As they say, “It Takes a Village.”
III.
So we are like sheep in that we can get ourselves into personal and social trouble. And we need shepherds and sheepdogs to nip at us and guide us not just into safety but toward God’s vision of our real human destiny. Because the purpose of life is not just to be safe. The purpose of life is to live, as Jesus did, a fully realized joyous and compassionate existence. And that brings us back to the question of our sheeply and human dignity.
If we think again about what sheep represent in the ancient Near Eastern economy, we’ll see that sheep are, to their owners and shepherds, precious. The sheep are worth a good deal to those who own and maintain them. So when Jesus calls himself our “Good Shepherd”, or when Psalm 23 tells us that the Lord is our shepherd, what we should hear in that is not just a program of divine command and control. What we should hear in that is about human dignity and worth. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The Lord as shepherd leads the sheep through the valley to green pastures and still waters. You don’t lay down your life for someone worthless. You don’t give your shepherdly attention to someone whom you don’t care about. God, as shepherd, sacrifices and leads us precisely because we have so much worth and value in God’s sight. God made you and me in God’s own image. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us as one of us. God loves us not out of sentimental pity but out of identification and worth. God in Jesus knows what it is to be us. God desires that we have life and have it abundantly.
Right before we saw the movie Babe¸ our family spent a summer in England where we became familiar with a BBC show called “One Man and His Dog”. Every week for a half an hour, viewers of “One Man and His Dog” used to watch a shepherd put a sheepdog through the complex trials of guiding sheep through a complicated set of gates into pens. Like many people, we found this show oddly soothing. There was little commentary, and the only sound you heard was of the calls the man would make to the dog. Watching it was like sitting outside on a farm at the end of the day watching the advance of evening. It was also like finding yourself in the vision of the loving, safe, and generous world which God holds out to us at Easter.
I think about those sheepdog trials whenever I hear the words from today’s Gospel: “I am the Good Shepherd.” You and I, like sheep, need the nipping of that heavenly sheepdog at our heels to keep us thinking about how what we want can more closely resemble what we need and can live in harmony with what the everyone else needs. And you and I, like sheep, are blessed to have each other and the continued presence of the One who cares enough about us to guide and lead us away from thickets and cliffs and towards pastures and still waters.
Easter is about many things, but most deeply it is about what God means to us and what we mean to God. What God means to us is that the Lord is our shepherd, and this is good and gracious news. And what we mean to God is that we are precious to the One who lays down his life for the sheep. You mean everything to God. The fullness of both these meanings is what Easter represents. And Easter’s gracious surprise--for that One and for all of us-- is that we now have a resurrected, risen life with Jesus and God and each other and the world in which to live out the joyous implications of what being precious in God’s sight can mean. May our love and gratitude toward God and our compassion and solidarity with each other be the most contagious things we experience this spring. Amen.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Homily: John Muir and Hudson Stuck [Earth Day: April 22, 2009]
Although I am a longtime admirer of John Muir (hey, the guy’s on the back of the California quarter!), I must admit that until a couple of days ago I had never heard of Hudson Stuck. John Muir, as many of us know, was a naturalist and writer who emigrated from Scotland to Wisconsin and then spent most of his life in California. He is most famous as the author of The Mountains of California, My First Summer in the Sierra, and as the founder of the Sierra Club. Hudson Stuck was also an immigrant: born in England he came to America in 1885 and attended the University of the South. He was ordained a priest and served as Dean of the Cathedral in Dallas, Texas before becoming Archdeacon of the Yukon in 1905. He was well-known in his day as the author of such books as Ascent of Denali and Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled. In 1913 he organized the first successful ascent of Mount Denali.
Now I never quite know what our lectionary makers are up to when they set aside days for us to remember saints. I don’t know if Muir and Stuck were friends, but aside from their love of nature I’m not sure they had a lot in common. While Hudson Stuck was both a mountaineer and a priest, John Muir was not what any of us would call conventionally pious. I always get nervous when our church tries to claim celebrities as our own—I’m old enough to remember how we bragged when Vice President Spiro Agnew was an Episcopalian, a fact we tried to hide after Watergate—and I’m not sure that Muir would appreciate being lumped together with the Archdeacon simply because they are dead Britons who loved the American west. But taken on their own terms, each is an admirable person and their separate and joint witness has something important to tell us about our own relationship to God in nature.
What has always interested me about John Muir’s life is the moment when he made the vocational transition from nature-lover to activist. When you read Muir’s earlier writings, you get the sense that his earliest experiences of nature were private, personal ones. He moved to Yosemite Valley and lived there because he loved the transcendent qualities he experienced there. But, over time, Muir began to realize that some kind of collective action had to be organized to save the California wilderness from the encroachments of industrial society. So Muir gave up living in the wild and moved back into the world and in 1892 organized the Sierra Club. In 1901 he led the unsuccessful fight to stop San Francisco from buying and flooding the Hetch Hetchy valley, a near duplicate of Yosemite, also in the Sierra. For the rest of his life, John Muir was a tireless advocate of natural preservation.
And something like this transition from nature-lover to advocate took place in the life and ministry of Hudson Stuck. Though Stuck obviously combined the active and contemplative lives by being a mountain-climbing Archdeacon, he too moved more and more into political activism on behalf of the natural world as he got older. Stuck’s last great cause became his effort to outlaw large fishing ships called “floating canneries”, and this campaign led to the regulations of 1920 for salmon conservation in Alaska and the restoration of native fishing rights. As they aged, both men moved from a spirituality of individual “communing with nature” to a corporate, communal understanding of nature as a shared and sacred space to which all creatures, including people, have rights of access.
The Gospel which we’ve read today [Luke 8.22-25] tells the familiar story of Jesus calming the storm: “They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm.” [Luke 8.24] Just as I’m a bit suspicious of the lectionary-makers, so I’m not so sure that Luke would understand being in touch with nature in the same way you and I would. If anything, this story seems to be about command and control rather than about organic connectedness. Nevertheless, beneath the easy and overt connection that’s being proposed, I think there is a deeper and truer way in which this story about Jesus says something about John Muir, Hudson Stuck, the planet, and us.
What has always struck me about this story in Luke’s Gospel is the way it shows us a Jesus who knows who he is. And what Jesus knows in this particular moment is that he is at home in God’s world. Right now, that world appears to be a dangerous place: the winds are roaring and the waves are crashing. But Jesus knows he is safe there because he knows that this world is God’s world and his world, and so it is his home. He belongs to it. He knows it, he loves it, he accepts it on its own terms. And so he is able to speak to it precisely NOT from a command-and-control mode but from a posture of love.
And it is by speaking to the world from that sense of being at home and that posture of love that Jesus is able to take on advocacy on behalf of those in the boat with him, people who operate out of alienation and fear, who see the natural world as more of a problem than a gift. So in a profound way, Jesus embodies the characteristics we admire in John Muir and Hudson Stuck. He loves the natural world on its own terms and makes himself at home there. And his love for that world moves him beyond mere appreciation of it into advocacy both for it and for the people with whom he is in community. Jesus knows what America’s indigenous people know: that the natural world is as much about community and justice as it is about Romantic transcendence.
Today, of course, is Earth Day, an occasion celebrated in America since 1970. As we gather at Jesus’s table to give thanks on this day for the created world and our place in it, let us remember and give thanks for the lives and witnesses of John Muir and Hudson Stuck. Yes, they were sensitive souls who responded to the sublime transcendence of the natural world. But they answered God’s call in their lives to be more than chroniclers of nature and its beauties. They stepped into the responsibility of standing for and with God’s world against those who would treat it as an object and not as the precious subject that it is. Like Jesus, Muir and Stuck loved the world, were at home in it, and they gave the last part of their lives in service not only to the planet but to all us creatures who live on it together. It is not enough just to admire something or someone. True love and compassion call us toward the next step—to move beyond appreciation into advocacy. May we embrace this day’s calling with similar love and commitment. And may we also gather at Jesus’s table in solidarity with John Muir, Hudson Stuck, and all those who love and serve God’s world and God’s people, and together with them give thanks. Amen.
Now I never quite know what our lectionary makers are up to when they set aside days for us to remember saints. I don’t know if Muir and Stuck were friends, but aside from their love of nature I’m not sure they had a lot in common. While Hudson Stuck was both a mountaineer and a priest, John Muir was not what any of us would call conventionally pious. I always get nervous when our church tries to claim celebrities as our own—I’m old enough to remember how we bragged when Vice President Spiro Agnew was an Episcopalian, a fact we tried to hide after Watergate—and I’m not sure that Muir would appreciate being lumped together with the Archdeacon simply because they are dead Britons who loved the American west. But taken on their own terms, each is an admirable person and their separate and joint witness has something important to tell us about our own relationship to God in nature.
What has always interested me about John Muir’s life is the moment when he made the vocational transition from nature-lover to activist. When you read Muir’s earlier writings, you get the sense that his earliest experiences of nature were private, personal ones. He moved to Yosemite Valley and lived there because he loved the transcendent qualities he experienced there. But, over time, Muir began to realize that some kind of collective action had to be organized to save the California wilderness from the encroachments of industrial society. So Muir gave up living in the wild and moved back into the world and in 1892 organized the Sierra Club. In 1901 he led the unsuccessful fight to stop San Francisco from buying and flooding the Hetch Hetchy valley, a near duplicate of Yosemite, also in the Sierra. For the rest of his life, John Muir was a tireless advocate of natural preservation.
And something like this transition from nature-lover to advocate took place in the life and ministry of Hudson Stuck. Though Stuck obviously combined the active and contemplative lives by being a mountain-climbing Archdeacon, he too moved more and more into political activism on behalf of the natural world as he got older. Stuck’s last great cause became his effort to outlaw large fishing ships called “floating canneries”, and this campaign led to the regulations of 1920 for salmon conservation in Alaska and the restoration of native fishing rights. As they aged, both men moved from a spirituality of individual “communing with nature” to a corporate, communal understanding of nature as a shared and sacred space to which all creatures, including people, have rights of access.
The Gospel which we’ve read today [Luke 8.22-25] tells the familiar story of Jesus calming the storm: “They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm.” [Luke 8.24] Just as I’m a bit suspicious of the lectionary-makers, so I’m not so sure that Luke would understand being in touch with nature in the same way you and I would. If anything, this story seems to be about command and control rather than about organic connectedness. Nevertheless, beneath the easy and overt connection that’s being proposed, I think there is a deeper and truer way in which this story about Jesus says something about John Muir, Hudson Stuck, the planet, and us.
What has always struck me about this story in Luke’s Gospel is the way it shows us a Jesus who knows who he is. And what Jesus knows in this particular moment is that he is at home in God’s world. Right now, that world appears to be a dangerous place: the winds are roaring and the waves are crashing. But Jesus knows he is safe there because he knows that this world is God’s world and his world, and so it is his home. He belongs to it. He knows it, he loves it, he accepts it on its own terms. And so he is able to speak to it precisely NOT from a command-and-control mode but from a posture of love.
And it is by speaking to the world from that sense of being at home and that posture of love that Jesus is able to take on advocacy on behalf of those in the boat with him, people who operate out of alienation and fear, who see the natural world as more of a problem than a gift. So in a profound way, Jesus embodies the characteristics we admire in John Muir and Hudson Stuck. He loves the natural world on its own terms and makes himself at home there. And his love for that world moves him beyond mere appreciation of it into advocacy both for it and for the people with whom he is in community. Jesus knows what America’s indigenous people know: that the natural world is as much about community and justice as it is about Romantic transcendence.
Today, of course, is Earth Day, an occasion celebrated in America since 1970. As we gather at Jesus’s table to give thanks on this day for the created world and our place in it, let us remember and give thanks for the lives and witnesses of John Muir and Hudson Stuck. Yes, they were sensitive souls who responded to the sublime transcendence of the natural world. But they answered God’s call in their lives to be more than chroniclers of nature and its beauties. They stepped into the responsibility of standing for and with God’s world against those who would treat it as an object and not as the precious subject that it is. Like Jesus, Muir and Stuck loved the world, were at home in it, and they gave the last part of their lives in service not only to the planet but to all us creatures who live on it together. It is not enough just to admire something or someone. True love and compassion call us toward the next step—to move beyond appreciation into advocacy. May we embrace this day’s calling with similar love and commitment. And may we also gather at Jesus’s table in solidarity with John Muir, Hudson Stuck, and all those who love and serve God’s world and God’s people, and together with them give thanks. Amen.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Homily: April 9, 2008 [Maundy Thursday]
A few weeks ago I saw a presentation in a parish I was visiting in which a priest was talking about the Lord’s Prayer with teenagers. As much as I like and admire this priest, I couldn’t help finding his discussion of prayer and its obligations rather one-sided. In this account, we’re supposed to hallow God’s name and declare God’s glory because we’re all God’s creatures and that’s what God’s creatures are supposed to do. That’s all true enough, I said to myself as I listened, but why exactly is this equation he describes so one-sided? What is God’s obligation toward us? The God whom this man described was at best a benevolent despot, a being mysteriously insistent on being hallowed and glorified. There was no suggestion in anything he said to these kids that there might be some deeper mutuality to this relationship. The Lord’s Prayer sounded as he spoke like a decidedly uneven proposition.
I want to go easy on my clerical friend, because this assumption about the one-way obligations of the divine-human relationship is broadly shared in our church culture. About a decade or so ago I attended a clergy conference led by Martin Smith, a priest and monk and writer, who told a story about a question he often poses to clergy coming to the monastery on retreat. On the first night he tells them to go back to their room and ask themselves what they would like Jesus to do for them. Without fail, he said, the next day the clergy always show up with long lists of what they are supposed to do for Jesus. No, Smith said, you didn’t hear me right. I didn’t want you to ask what Jesus wants you to do for him; I asked you to think about what you want Jesus to do for you. Not surprisingly, when the question is put that way, his retreatants have a very hard time coming up with any ideas. Jesus do something for me? Isn’t that backwards?
That’s the way it is in this Gospel for Maundy Thursday. When Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, Peter becomes distraught.
"Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." [John 13]
Though we are tempted to think of Peter as they guy who never quite gets it, in tonight’s Gospel it looks to me as if he responds as any one of us might. Jesus is the teacher, the disciples are his students. The normal order of things in a hierarchical culture is for them to serve him. Jesus calmly but radically turns that hierarchy upside down. He establishes the primary obligation as being on his part, not theirs. He serves them.
I’m not a big fan of long homilies in Holy Week, so tonight let’s just sit with Martin Smith’s question as we think about the events we witness tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday. At most parish churches last Sunday many of us shouted “Crucify him!” as part of that dramatized Palm Sunday reading of the Passion Gospel. If you’re anything like me, you’ve thought a lot this Lent about the many and myriad ways in which you regularly let God and Jesus down. Fair enough.
But it’s too simple to say that we are the crowd in that Gospel. It’s more true to say that we are both the crowd and Jesus. And tonight Jesus’s act of washing his companions’ feet asks us to think about why God and Jesus are going through this whole experience of betrayal, crucifixion, and death in the first place. They are going through it for you and me. They are going through it because you and I are worth something to them. They are going through it because we’re precious enough in Jesus’s sight for it to be worth his while to wash our feet.
Maundy Thursday is both a penitential and joyous occasion: we gather both to lament Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and to give thanks for Jesus gift to us of the Eucharist as the way to be together in the world. As you enter into these three days of betrayal and death and resurrection, what is it that you want God to do for you? What is your need for God right now at this moment in your life? What would grace for you look like? How do you want God to act toward and for you? How have you been betrayed or misunderstood or mocked? How would God heal and restore you in the light of that? What would new, risen life look like for you if you dared to ask for it?
"Unless I wash you, you have no share with me," Jesus replied to Peter. In one sense we should hear that as judgment. But, in the context of the infinite love which undergirds the mighty acts of these three great days, we should hear that as a promise, too. Jesus washed his companions’ feet; God hears our prayers not because we grovel but because we are loved. Use the time between Maundy Thursday and Easter to ask yourself and God what you need Jesus to do for you. And then do your best to live-- creatively and joyously and maybe even with a little bit of risk and a lot of love-- into the answer you hear. Amen.
I want to go easy on my clerical friend, because this assumption about the one-way obligations of the divine-human relationship is broadly shared in our church culture. About a decade or so ago I attended a clergy conference led by Martin Smith, a priest and monk and writer, who told a story about a question he often poses to clergy coming to the monastery on retreat. On the first night he tells them to go back to their room and ask themselves what they would like Jesus to do for them. Without fail, he said, the next day the clergy always show up with long lists of what they are supposed to do for Jesus. No, Smith said, you didn’t hear me right. I didn’t want you to ask what Jesus wants you to do for him; I asked you to think about what you want Jesus to do for you. Not surprisingly, when the question is put that way, his retreatants have a very hard time coming up with any ideas. Jesus do something for me? Isn’t that backwards?
That’s the way it is in this Gospel for Maundy Thursday. When Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, Peter becomes distraught.
"Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." [John 13]
Though we are tempted to think of Peter as they guy who never quite gets it, in tonight’s Gospel it looks to me as if he responds as any one of us might. Jesus is the teacher, the disciples are his students. The normal order of things in a hierarchical culture is for them to serve him. Jesus calmly but radically turns that hierarchy upside down. He establishes the primary obligation as being on his part, not theirs. He serves them.
I’m not a big fan of long homilies in Holy Week, so tonight let’s just sit with Martin Smith’s question as we think about the events we witness tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday. At most parish churches last Sunday many of us shouted “Crucify him!” as part of that dramatized Palm Sunday reading of the Passion Gospel. If you’re anything like me, you’ve thought a lot this Lent about the many and myriad ways in which you regularly let God and Jesus down. Fair enough.
But it’s too simple to say that we are the crowd in that Gospel. It’s more true to say that we are both the crowd and Jesus. And tonight Jesus’s act of washing his companions’ feet asks us to think about why God and Jesus are going through this whole experience of betrayal, crucifixion, and death in the first place. They are going through it for you and me. They are going through it because you and I are worth something to them. They are going through it because we’re precious enough in Jesus’s sight for it to be worth his while to wash our feet.
Maundy Thursday is both a penitential and joyous occasion: we gather both to lament Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and to give thanks for Jesus gift to us of the Eucharist as the way to be together in the world. As you enter into these three days of betrayal and death and resurrection, what is it that you want God to do for you? What is your need for God right now at this moment in your life? What would grace for you look like? How do you want God to act toward and for you? How have you been betrayed or misunderstood or mocked? How would God heal and restore you in the light of that? What would new, risen life look like for you if you dared to ask for it?
"Unless I wash you, you have no share with me," Jesus replied to Peter. In one sense we should hear that as judgment. But, in the context of the infinite love which undergirds the mighty acts of these three great days, we should hear that as a promise, too. Jesus washed his companions’ feet; God hears our prayers not because we grovel but because we are loved. Use the time between Maundy Thursday and Easter to ask yourself and God what you need Jesus to do for you. And then do your best to live-- creatively and joyously and maybe even with a little bit of risk and a lot of love-- into the answer you hear. Amen.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Homily: Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent
The older I get, the more I understand salvation in the terms which Thomas Merton used to describe it. “For me,” Merton said, “to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.” [New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 31] The most pernicious effect of our culture is the way it thrives by alienating us from ourselves. Its materialism implies that we can only be ourselves by consuming things produced by others. Its ceaseless internet and broadcast noise distracts us from our interior lives. We don’t know who we are, let alone what we feel, what we think.
These problems are not new, of course. Take, for example, the problem of desire. The story of Susannah and the elders has long been used as a figure for what happens when the respectable folk repress their desires. One of Wallace Stevens’s great early poems, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, talks in just such language:
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
Because he is an artist, Stevens’s Peter Quince is present to what he is feeling. The “red-eyed elders” are not: the Bible story uses the almost comic secrecy and confusion as a way of showing the elders’ alienation from themselves: “Both were overwhelmed with passion for her, but they did not tell each other of their distress, for they were ashamed to disclose their lustful desire to seduce her.” [Susannah 1.10-11] The ugliness and violence to which the elders resort shows that there is nothing more dangerous in this world than a self-unaware person capable of wielding power. The elders’ desire for Susannah expresses itself not as love but as aggression. Because they do not know and accept their own feelings they translate their shame into threats toward the person who symbolizes what they desire. It’s as if they want to kill the person who arouses them.
This form of blaming the victim is not new. We see it all through the racial and sexual stereotypes of human history. We see it in church sexual misconduct. And we see it most potently today in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel, the account of Jesus, the Pharisees, and the woman taken in adultery. Like the elders in the Susannah story, the Pharisees in this account are using their very respectability as a shield against their own interior lives. I wonder how Jesus would have responded if they had simply come up to him and said, “Jesus, help us. We want to sleep with women who are not our wives.” But of course they don’t do that. Instead, they bring in the adulterous woman. [Note: they do not bring the adulterous man! If they caught her in the act, there needed to be what we used to call a “co-conspirator”. Where is he in all this? I wouldn’t be surprised if he were one of the woman’s accusers.] They ask Jesus whether she should be stoned, in accord with Mosaic law. And he replies with this famous and inscrutable gesture: John tells us, “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” [John 8.6] When finally pressed for an answer, Jesus responds with one of his most famous teachings: “‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” [John 8.7] Instead of blaming the one who elicits desire, Jesus dares to expose the interior lives of the Pharasaic accusers to light. Instead of focusing on “the other”, Jesus says, pay attention to what is going on within yourself. Instead of worrying about what all those other people are doing in their bedrooms, pay attention to what you are doing in yours. Instead of projecting all the things in yourself that you can’t accept onto women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and undocumented workers, come to terms with the parts of yourself that you do not acknowledge, let alone understand.
All of us do this, of course. The point here today, in this fifth week of Lent, is that Jesus points us to self-knowledge and self-acceptance as the keys to personal and spiritual wholeness. When I refrain from picking up the stone to throw at you, I do that in Jesus’s terms because I’ve come to see that the behavior for which I want to stone you is actually an expression of the aspects of my own identity that I want to refuse. And so in putting down the stone I’ve not only taken a step toward self-awareness, I’ve also taken a step into community. Because if we are one in our sinfulness we have the beginnings of solidarity with each other. Our oneness in sin is, as Bill Coffin used to say, “no mean bond.”
And then there is that mysterious gesture. “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” He did it not once but twice. Every reader of this story has a different take on what Jesus was writing there, but I don’t think he was making a list of the Pharisees’ sins. I think, instead, he was looking into himself. Something about his encounters with women—here the woman taken in adultery, in Mark’s Gospel they Syro-Phonecian woman, not to mention Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, and a host of others—something about these encounters calls forth something in Jesus we have not seen before. I think that when Jesus wrote in the earth he was taking account of his own internal life, he was exploring and describing all of the complex feelings and thoughts that this woman and her predicament elicited. As she is “taken in adultery”, so Jesus is caught in the act of knowing, discovering himself. This gesture of looking inward and writing is something that the woman’s accusers and Susannah’s elders are incapable of. Their responses project outward and so result in aggression. Jesus’s response turns inward and so results in compassion. “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” [John 8.11]
As we head into Holy Week, let’s remember that it was precisely the kind of self-awareness which Jesus exemplified which drove his self-unaware opponents crazy and eventually sent him to the cross. The big Holy Week drama we are about to encounter essentially re-enacts the age-old conflict between those who know and accept themselves and so can come to accept others and those who don’t. The real power of the resurrection is the way in which it shows that God can love and bless everything that is true about us, even the things that we cannot quite yet love and bless ourselves. Let us join Jesus in looking inward and writing on the ground. If we do that faithfully, we might, in this new community built on trust instead of threats, go our ways separately and together and try to help each other sin no more. Amen.
These problems are not new, of course. Take, for example, the problem of desire. The story of Susannah and the elders has long been used as a figure for what happens when the respectable folk repress their desires. One of Wallace Stevens’s great early poems, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, talks in just such language:
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
Because he is an artist, Stevens’s Peter Quince is present to what he is feeling. The “red-eyed elders” are not: the Bible story uses the almost comic secrecy and confusion as a way of showing the elders’ alienation from themselves: “Both were overwhelmed with passion for her, but they did not tell each other of their distress, for they were ashamed to disclose their lustful desire to seduce her.” [Susannah 1.10-11] The ugliness and violence to which the elders resort shows that there is nothing more dangerous in this world than a self-unaware person capable of wielding power. The elders’ desire for Susannah expresses itself not as love but as aggression. Because they do not know and accept their own feelings they translate their shame into threats toward the person who symbolizes what they desire. It’s as if they want to kill the person who arouses them.
This form of blaming the victim is not new. We see it all through the racial and sexual stereotypes of human history. We see it in church sexual misconduct. And we see it most potently today in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel, the account of Jesus, the Pharisees, and the woman taken in adultery. Like the elders in the Susannah story, the Pharisees in this account are using their very respectability as a shield against their own interior lives. I wonder how Jesus would have responded if they had simply come up to him and said, “Jesus, help us. We want to sleep with women who are not our wives.” But of course they don’t do that. Instead, they bring in the adulterous woman. [Note: they do not bring the adulterous man! If they caught her in the act, there needed to be what we used to call a “co-conspirator”. Where is he in all this? I wouldn’t be surprised if he were one of the woman’s accusers.] They ask Jesus whether she should be stoned, in accord with Mosaic law. And he replies with this famous and inscrutable gesture: John tells us, “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” [John 8.6] When finally pressed for an answer, Jesus responds with one of his most famous teachings: “‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” [John 8.7] Instead of blaming the one who elicits desire, Jesus dares to expose the interior lives of the Pharasaic accusers to light. Instead of focusing on “the other”, Jesus says, pay attention to what is going on within yourself. Instead of worrying about what all those other people are doing in their bedrooms, pay attention to what you are doing in yours. Instead of projecting all the things in yourself that you can’t accept onto women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and undocumented workers, come to terms with the parts of yourself that you do not acknowledge, let alone understand.
All of us do this, of course. The point here today, in this fifth week of Lent, is that Jesus points us to self-knowledge and self-acceptance as the keys to personal and spiritual wholeness. When I refrain from picking up the stone to throw at you, I do that in Jesus’s terms because I’ve come to see that the behavior for which I want to stone you is actually an expression of the aspects of my own identity that I want to refuse. And so in putting down the stone I’ve not only taken a step toward self-awareness, I’ve also taken a step into community. Because if we are one in our sinfulness we have the beginnings of solidarity with each other. Our oneness in sin is, as Bill Coffin used to say, “no mean bond.”
And then there is that mysterious gesture. “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” He did it not once but twice. Every reader of this story has a different take on what Jesus was writing there, but I don’t think he was making a list of the Pharisees’ sins. I think, instead, he was looking into himself. Something about his encounters with women—here the woman taken in adultery, in Mark’s Gospel they Syro-Phonecian woman, not to mention Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, and a host of others—something about these encounters calls forth something in Jesus we have not seen before. I think that when Jesus wrote in the earth he was taking account of his own internal life, he was exploring and describing all of the complex feelings and thoughts that this woman and her predicament elicited. As she is “taken in adultery”, so Jesus is caught in the act of knowing, discovering himself. This gesture of looking inward and writing is something that the woman’s accusers and Susannah’s elders are incapable of. Their responses project outward and so result in aggression. Jesus’s response turns inward and so results in compassion. “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” [John 8.11]
As we head into Holy Week, let’s remember that it was precisely the kind of self-awareness which Jesus exemplified which drove his self-unaware opponents crazy and eventually sent him to the cross. The big Holy Week drama we are about to encounter essentially re-enacts the age-old conflict between those who know and accept themselves and so can come to accept others and those who don’t. The real power of the resurrection is the way in which it shows that God can love and bless everything that is true about us, even the things that we cannot quite yet love and bless ourselves. Let us join Jesus in looking inward and writing on the ground. If we do that faithfully, we might, in this new community built on trust instead of threats, go our ways separately and together and try to help each other sin no more. Amen.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Homily: 1 Lent [March 2, 2009]
It’s probably a dangerous undertaking to ask a liberal to preach about Matthew 25. I mean: there it is, the whole Christian progressive social agenda summed up in one pithy Bible story. You want to serve God? Give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty. Welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the prisoner. There isn’t a lot more to say about the Christian life, really, than what Jesus offers us in Matthew 25. We serve Jesus by serving others. And note: when Jesus talks of serving others he doesn’t mean just any others. He means the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned, what he calls “the least of these”.
Now we could stop there—adding, of course, a few examples from contemporary experience which would give some heft to what we mean by “the least of these”—and we would have honored what Jesus is talking about in the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. A contemporary thinker I like very much, Terry Eagleton, wrote a small book last year with the gigantic title, The Meaning of Life. And you might be surprised that Eagleton—a British literary theorist and highly secular philosopher and cultural critic—ends his meditation on life’s meaning with a discussion of just this chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. For Eagleton, the genius of Matthew’s 25th chapter lies in the way it takes the “meaning-of-life question” out of the hands of philosophers and “returns it to the routine business of everyday existence.” As he elaborates, “The key to the universe turns out to be not some shattering revelation, but something which a lot of decent people do anyway, with scarcely a thought.” Correcting the 17th century priest and poet Thomas Traherne, Eagleton muses, “Eternity lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick.” [The Meaning of Life, pp. 164-165]
There is a lot to be said for the way Terry Eagleton reads this chapter, for the way that a lot of the secular people with whom I find common cause would read it: whether or not we agree about the big questions, certainly we can all find common cause by alleviating human need. Jesus himself seems to turn us from a consideration of the big questions to an extended parable about meeting him in the service of those who are up against it. Though they might differ on how they would identify what 20th century Republicans used to call “the truly needy” (or 19th century Tories “the deserving poor”), the value of serving others is is a truism that even Gene Robinson and Peter Akinola—not to mention Sarah Palin, Ralph Nader, Bill O’Reilly and Barney Frank—could probably agree on.
And yet, as a follower of Jesus there is something beyond this truism that nags at me, and it’s a verse from the Leviticus reading we heard a few moments ago. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” [Leviticus 19.2b] When Yahweh commands us to “love your neighbor as yourself,” the reason given for that commandment seems simply to be the statement, “I am the LORD.” [Leviticus 19.18] As a follower of Jesus, I want to give a glass of water or a piece of bread to a person in need not only because it’s a nice thing to do but because I believe that in doing so I serve and meet Jesus. As a creature of Yahweh’s, I am commanded to love my neighbor as myself because somehow doing so is all tied up with God and God’s holiness.
I don’t mean here to part company with Terry Eagleton and my liberal friends (or even with compassionate conservatives) on any of this, because frankly I believe as they do that serving the suffering is what Kant called the Ding an sich—the “thing itself” which without any philosophical embroidery is itself the meaning of life. As Christians we play around a lot with symbols, but we should never forget the basic definition of a symbol: that it stands for both itself and the thing it represents. A symbol has to be something real to start with or it can’t represent anything. The rose that stands for love is first of all a real rose. When the writer Mary McCarthy opined that the communion wafer is a symbol of the Holy Ghost, Flannery O’Connor famously replied, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” [New York Times Book Review 3/1/09] We don’t feed the hungry or visit the sick because they’re symbolic. We feed and visit them because their need has a real claim on us, because they have value in and of themselves. Regardless of what we think about it, serving the oppressed counts for something before we attach any meaning to it at all.
But that Leviticus phrase still flits around the back of my mind: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” Once we recognize—as Jesus does--that the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned have value in and of themselves, then we as followers of Jesus can take service to them one step further. In traditional Christian terms, we serve the poor because in them we meet and serve Jesus. In traditional Jewish terms, we attempt to live out God’s holiness in service to those who bear God’s image into the world. Loving your neighbor as yourself turns out to be not just “good works” but a rather high order of piety too.
As we embark on the first full week of Lent together, most of us find ourselves working out a quest for personal and corporate holiness. As we do that both together and alone, let’s remember what today’s readings illuminate for us. Holiness is not some abstract personal quality like serenity or calm. Holiness is living out a response to the need we see everywhere around us. Holiness is loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Holiness is serving the least of these who are members of the human family. We seek to be holy because God is holy. And God lives out God’s holiness by loving and serving the ones made in God’s image, even you and me.
Like the neighbor, the least of these, you are a member of the human family. You, as they do, bear God’s image into the world. Let us use Lent to seek to be holy as God is holy—to recognize and serve the dignity of every human being as a fact with value and meaning in and of itself. This means at least recognizing and accepting your own dignity, that you are someone with meaning and purpose and value. As the Baptismal Covenant puts it, “Let us seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourelf.” Let us seek to be holy, as God is holy. Amen.
Now we could stop there—adding, of course, a few examples from contemporary experience which would give some heft to what we mean by “the least of these”—and we would have honored what Jesus is talking about in the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. A contemporary thinker I like very much, Terry Eagleton, wrote a small book last year with the gigantic title, The Meaning of Life. And you might be surprised that Eagleton—a British literary theorist and highly secular philosopher and cultural critic—ends his meditation on life’s meaning with a discussion of just this chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. For Eagleton, the genius of Matthew’s 25th chapter lies in the way it takes the “meaning-of-life question” out of the hands of philosophers and “returns it to the routine business of everyday existence.” As he elaborates, “The key to the universe turns out to be not some shattering revelation, but something which a lot of decent people do anyway, with scarcely a thought.” Correcting the 17th century priest and poet Thomas Traherne, Eagleton muses, “Eternity lies not in a grain of sand but in a glass of water. The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick.” [The Meaning of Life, pp. 164-165]
There is a lot to be said for the way Terry Eagleton reads this chapter, for the way that a lot of the secular people with whom I find common cause would read it: whether or not we agree about the big questions, certainly we can all find common cause by alleviating human need. Jesus himself seems to turn us from a consideration of the big questions to an extended parable about meeting him in the service of those who are up against it. Though they might differ on how they would identify what 20th century Republicans used to call “the truly needy” (or 19th century Tories “the deserving poor”), the value of serving others is is a truism that even Gene Robinson and Peter Akinola—not to mention Sarah Palin, Ralph Nader, Bill O’Reilly and Barney Frank—could probably agree on.
And yet, as a follower of Jesus there is something beyond this truism that nags at me, and it’s a verse from the Leviticus reading we heard a few moments ago. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” [Leviticus 19.2b] When Yahweh commands us to “love your neighbor as yourself,” the reason given for that commandment seems simply to be the statement, “I am the LORD.” [Leviticus 19.18] As a follower of Jesus, I want to give a glass of water or a piece of bread to a person in need not only because it’s a nice thing to do but because I believe that in doing so I serve and meet Jesus. As a creature of Yahweh’s, I am commanded to love my neighbor as myself because somehow doing so is all tied up with God and God’s holiness.
I don’t mean here to part company with Terry Eagleton and my liberal friends (or even with compassionate conservatives) on any of this, because frankly I believe as they do that serving the suffering is what Kant called the Ding an sich—the “thing itself” which without any philosophical embroidery is itself the meaning of life. As Christians we play around a lot with symbols, but we should never forget the basic definition of a symbol: that it stands for both itself and the thing it represents. A symbol has to be something real to start with or it can’t represent anything. The rose that stands for love is first of all a real rose. When the writer Mary McCarthy opined that the communion wafer is a symbol of the Holy Ghost, Flannery O’Connor famously replied, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” [New York Times Book Review 3/1/09] We don’t feed the hungry or visit the sick because they’re symbolic. We feed and visit them because their need has a real claim on us, because they have value in and of themselves. Regardless of what we think about it, serving the oppressed counts for something before we attach any meaning to it at all.
But that Leviticus phrase still flits around the back of my mind: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” Once we recognize—as Jesus does--that the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned have value in and of themselves, then we as followers of Jesus can take service to them one step further. In traditional Christian terms, we serve the poor because in them we meet and serve Jesus. In traditional Jewish terms, we attempt to live out God’s holiness in service to those who bear God’s image into the world. Loving your neighbor as yourself turns out to be not just “good works” but a rather high order of piety too.
As we embark on the first full week of Lent together, most of us find ourselves working out a quest for personal and corporate holiness. As we do that both together and alone, let’s remember what today’s readings illuminate for us. Holiness is not some abstract personal quality like serenity or calm. Holiness is living out a response to the need we see everywhere around us. Holiness is loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Holiness is serving the least of these who are members of the human family. We seek to be holy because God is holy. And God lives out God’s holiness by loving and serving the ones made in God’s image, even you and me.
Like the neighbor, the least of these, you are a member of the human family. You, as they do, bear God’s image into the world. Let us use Lent to seek to be holy as God is holy—to recognize and serve the dignity of every human being as a fact with value and meaning in and of itself. This means at least recognizing and accepting your own dignity, that you are someone with meaning and purpose and value. As the Baptismal Covenant puts it, “Let us seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourelf.” Let us seek to be holy, as God is holy. Amen.
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