Homily: The Fourth Sunday in Lent [March 30, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

            Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished on March 8, just over three weeks ago.  The disappearance of a daily routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing is many things at once:  it is a human tragedy, of course.  It is also a mystery.  And, I’m sorry to say, the ongoing coverage has also turned it into something of a farce.  If you watch cable news, particularly CNN, you will have seen probably three solid weeks of wall-to-wall speculation about the fate of the plane.  At one point, a CNN anchor asked if the cause might have been a black hole, the Bermuda Triangle, or the plot of the TV show Lost.  And one day last week, the breaking news headline simply read, “No New Developments.” What’s sadder, of course, is that even without any real information to go on, this spectacle of speculation about flight 370 has doubled CNN’s ratings.  I don’t know why, but we all seem to enjoy watching well-dressed people talk endlessly about nothing at all. Perhaps we’re in training now for 2016 election coverage.

We have three readings this morning, all of them centered on the idea of true perception and the lack of it. Searching for a new king, Samuel naturally looks to the bigger, older brothers rather than the young David.  The Letter to the Ephesians reminds us, “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light-- for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” [Ephesians 5:8] In the seemingly endless Gospel reading for today [John 9: 1-41] Jesus heals a man blind from birth, and this miracle provokes a storm of moral and spiritual misperceiving ignorance in the minds and hearts of the Pharisees.

            We’re now at the Fourth Sunday in Lent, a season dedicated in part at least to getting us all to focus our vision in the right direction.  As one of the traditional Lenten antiphons for Morning and Evening Prayer puts it, in this season we ask that God “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless; * give me life in your ways.”[Psalm 119.37 BCP]  I wouldn’t find the mindless speculation of CNN’s disappearing flight coverage so annoying if it didn’t remind me of my own foolish spiritual tendencies.  I spend most of my waking hours thinking about, attending to, the wrong things. When something important happens, I’m often looking in the opposite direction.

In Shakespeare’s play Othello, one of the Venetian characters refers to the Turkish enemy’s military strategy this way:  “'tis a pageant,/To keep us in false gaze.” [First Senator, Othello, 1.3] If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your time in what Shakespeare called “false gaze”, or in what our antiphon calls “watching what is worthless.” Much of what passes for news in our culture is a similar “pageant,/To keep us in false gaze.” How do we stop “watching what is worthless”? How do we step out of the practice of “false gaze”? These are the questions our scripture readings pose us on this Fourth Sunday in Lent, and I believe they are the spiritual questions that all of us, in some form or another, confront continually in our daily lives.

            Today’s Gospel reading (Don’t worry—I’m not going to reread the whole thing!) ends with this interchange between Jesus and the Pharisees:

Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.’ [John 9: 39-41]

 

The very length of this morning’s Gospel makes it hard to take in all at once, but essentially it’s John’s ironic account of Jesus giving sight to a blind man and that action becoming the occasion of the Pharisees becoming morally and spiritually sightless themselves. The blind man knows his limitations. The Pharisees are blissfully unaware of their own. For John, Jesus is “the light of the world”, and the tragic part of his story centers on the increasing inability of the religious and secular authorities to perceive the truth he represents. The Pharisees and the Romans think they see quite clearly. But, like Samuel in the David story, they judge with human criteria; they do not see as God sees. They are trapped in their own self-congratulatory narrative. They are not open to what God is doing now in the world around them.

The verse I quoted earlier from the Lenten antiphon actually asks God for two things: to “turn my eyes from watching what is worthless,” and to “give me life in [God’s] ways.” In John’s Gospel, as in the account of Samuel looking for David, we have seen what it means for human beings to watch what is worthless. What might it look like for us to have life in God’s ways?

I once attended a retreat where the leader announced, as the theme of his addresses, the following proposition: “We become what we attend to.” He wasn’t talking precisely about false gaze, but what he said seems connected to what we’re thinking about together this morning. “We become what we attend to.” If we attend solely to the junk and glitter and glitz of 21st century developed world culture, then that’s what we turn into. As Pope Francis says in The Joy of the Gospel, “technological society has succeeded in multiplying occasions of pleasure, yet has found it very difficult to engender joy”. The gadgets that claim our attention keep us addicted and slightly depressed. If we shift our attention to Jesus, we become both joyous and free.  That is because if we keep our eyes on Jesus, we might just over time become like him.

We live in a world where, as in a game of three-card monte, our attention is continually misdirected. And look at the result: a planet full of stressed-out, burned-out, alienated people looking in vain for what, if we could stop for a minute, we’d see we already have. That’s what we become when we attend to what is worthless. What would we become if we attended to what is worth everything, which, for us Christians, means: what would we become if we kept our eyes focused on Jesus?

When Christian people are baptized, one of the promises we make is that we will “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.” This is essentially a promise to go to church—to hear the Bible stories read, to participate in the Eucharist on some kind of regular basis. We’ve made this a part of our agreement with each other principally because if we are to become godlier we will need each other to get there. That is what going to church is about: it’s about hearing the story of Jesus and then coming together around his table in a way that gently but forcefully reminds us of what really matters. “We become what we attend to.” The goal of the Christian life is to become like Jesus. For us, Jesus represents the authentic good life that the things we falsely gaze at promise but never deliver. Jesus is just and loving and compassionate. He cares about the poor. He is a healer. His table fellowship gathers everyone—even the outcast and the disreputable—into a community of wholeness and blessing and love. Jesus lives an abundant life in the midst of scarcity. He knows who he is, what he needs, and how to live creatively with other people in God’s world. What we want to be, when we’re honest with ourselves, is like him—joyously alive in the life God offers and intends for us all. And the best way to be like Jesus is to direct our attention toward him—as he is revealed in the Word (our scriptures) and in the sacrament (the bread and wine of communion).  Looking at and listening to Jesus are lifelong endeavors.  Over time, they make us into our authentic selves, the people God made us to be.

I am not sure how long CNN will continue to cover the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 story.  I do know that you and I will always find it difficult to turn our eyes away from the shallow and pointless, and that we will always need the help of God and each other to center our focus on the true and valuable blessings of life.  The way we do that is to keep our eyes on the one who came into the world that we all might see.  For God’s ongoing gift to us of Jesus, for Jesus’s image of what it means to be human on God’s terms, and for grace to so point our gaze in his direction that we become the one we attend to, let us proceed in this meal together to pray and give thanks. Amen.

Homily: The Second Sunday in Lent [March 16, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

Gary Hall

Washington National Cathedral

March 16, 2014 [The Second Sunday in Lent]

 

 

 

I love baseball, and even as winter hangs on, I feel growing joy that spring training season has finally arrived. At least they’re playing now in Florida and Arizona.  Soon they will even be here—no matter that it is supposed to snow tonight.

I have probably spent more hours of my life than I care to count watching the national pastime on TV.  If you have watched baseball on television too, you may remember a time, not so many years ago, when there would regularly be somebody behind home plate holding a sign with the words "John 3:16".

Canny baseball functionaries figured out long ago how to muscle those sign-wielding evangelists away from camera range.  I'm sure there were a lot of people who saw those signs on TV and had no idea what they referred to.  Indeed, if you're watching an athletic contest and you don't know how to read a Bible verse, you might think of "John 3:16" as a partial score. "Some guy named John got 3 but some other guy got 16, so I guess John lost."

If you have always wondered what John 3:16 means, then you’re in luck this morning.  It is a Bible verse, and it's what Jesus says toward the end of today's gospel reading:  "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."  Those who are evangelically minded are attracted to that verse, no doubt, because it summarizes Christianity in a nutshell.  It tells you what is behind the Jesus event.  God sent Jesus into the world so that we might not die but live.  God sent Jesus into the world not because God hates the world but because God loves the world.

The world is a complicated place for all of us—it carries a multitude of meanings.  The world is the created order, the planet, the human community, the totality of everything that God has made.  The world is also everything else not us, “out there”.  It’s at once all that is and all we are afraid of.  Jesus uses “the world” in the former sense, our psalm for today in the latter.  If there’s a psalm other than the 23^rd which people know and love, it is Psalm 121, the psalm we sang this morning:

1

I lift up my eyes to the hills; *
from where is my help to come?

2

My help comes from the LORD, *
the maker of heaven and earth. [Psalm 121]

 

As deeply as we love that psalm for its depiction of God’s protecting love, many people love it without quite understanding it on the literal level. Psalm 121 portrays the world as a fearful, not a safe place.  I lift up my eyes to the hills not because the hills are beautiful but because that’s where my enemies sit encamped all around me.  I’m like a sentry at a cavalry fort in the old west under attack by warriors on horseback.  Who is going to ride to my rescue?  Only God can get me out of this one!

Those of us who seek to follow Jesus will always find ourselves caught in the tension between these two visions of the world:  it’s a beloved place, and it’s a scary place.  God so loved the world that God sent Jesus to save it.  God knows how dangerous the world can be and so sleeplessly watches over us.  That double vision of the world places us in a profound tension.  How do we live in it together?  How do we live in it personally? On this Second Sunday in Lent, I invite you to join me in thinking about the world and how we, as followers of Jesus, make our way in and through it.  

How do we live in the world together?  This weekend we at Washington National Cathedral are observing our second annual Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath.  Ever since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut in December of 2012, our cathedral and diocesan communities have joined with thousands of congregations around the country to see what we can do to end the epidemic of gun violence in American streets, schools, and public places.  On Tuesday Bishop Budde and I greeted the Team 26 bicycle riders from Newtown as they made their way from Connecticut to Capitol Hill to press for federal legislation that would keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those with mental illness.  On Thursday afternoon we joined other faith leaders as we blessed the two groups of people who know the reality of gun violence up close: the families of victims and the first responders (police, fire, emergency medical teams) as they gathered near our t-shirt display representing the 103 people who died by gunfire in the District of Columbia last year.

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  “I lift up my eyes to the hills; *from where is my help to come?” As we think about the world and what it means for us as Christians together, two things stand out as powerfully true.  First: Christians care about things like gun violence because we believe God loves the world and wants all of its creatures to live.  Gun violence is like any other threat to life that people of faith have always worked against.  Gun violence and cancer are both threats to human life.  But only gun violence is entirely of human origin. In the same way we have over time lessened the number of yearly deaths due to smoking and car crashes, so can we reduce the number of gun deaths.  We Christians care about any threat to human life and happiness because as God does, so do we also try to love the world and all its creatures.

And there is a second truth that emerges for us about the world.  It can be a scary place. But as dangerous as we feel the world might be, the good news for us together is that we are ultimately safe in the world.  But our safety does not come from our own self-protectiveness.  It does not come from living in a gated community or from the barrel of a gun. It does not come from our career successes, our social position, or our advanced degrees. Our safety comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth.  It is God who watches over us sleeplessly.  It is God who shall preserve us from all evil.  It is God who shall keep us safe.  As spiritual teachers from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus himself, from Pope Francis to the Dalai Lama would remind us, our weapons and castles will always fail us. When we put our trust in our power and strength, we are always disappointed.  The only one who will finally protect us is God, and the only way we will ever really be safe is to live lives of justice, humility, and compassion. 

I don’t doubt that many people believe that guns will keep them safe from the threats and dangers of the unknown in this world.  I do know, from a lifetime of reading the Bible, that this belief is an illusion.  Human life is fragile and finite.  In one sense, we are never safe.  We are all vulnerable.  We are all mortal. If your definition of safety entails living forever without any suffering at all, I’m sorry to tell you you’re out of luck.

But in another sense we are in luck—we are deeply safe, we are all finally OK.  And that is because there is one who watches over us, who is our shade at our right hand, so that the sun shall not strike us by day or the moon by night.  That one watches over our going out and our coming in from this time forth for evermore. That one is with you even in your fragility, your mortality, your loss and your pain.  That one’s love for you is finally more real and more powerful than anything else that might assail you.

Both together and individually, we hold on to those two truths of the Gospel. We will always be vulnerable, and we will always be safe. Our guns will not save us.  Our power will not save us.  Our things will not save us.  The only thing that will save us is the one who came among us in love to assure us that God so loves the world that we all might have eternal life.  You lift up your eyes to the hills:  where does your help come from?  It comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth.

As we move together through Lent, let’s remember that its real destination is Easter, the ultimate celebration of God’s love for the world and for you and me. Let us use this season to let go of clinging to the things that won’t save us and to turn to the one who will.  Easter, like baseball, really will eventually arrive.  And when it does, may we all be ready to begin to take in the depth of our safety in the one who so loved the world that he came among us so that we might not perish but have eternal life.  Amen.

 

 

 

Homily: The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany [February 16, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

 

            When I hear Jesus talk about anger in this morning’s Gospel, my mind immediately goes to the great scene in the movie Network. Nightly news anchor Howard Beale goes into a rant live on the air, and finally shouts to the camera,

“I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’”-- Howard Beale, Network, 1976

 

And immediately we see apartment windows opening up and people leaning out them shouting Beale’s phrase to anyone who will listen.  What they’re mad about, and who they are mad at remains, of course, mysterious.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Network came out in 1976. The 1970s were full of other memorable phrases as well:  “May the Force be with you.” “If it feels good, do it.”  “Have a nice day.” All these continue to resound inside my brain along with one I heard regularly in my 1970s seminary days:  “Get in touch with your feelings.”

            Back then I thought the admonition to get in touch with my feelings was just so much psychobabble—another 1970s expression, by the way. (I’m full of ‘em.)  Yet, as the years have passed, I have come to see the wisdom inherent in the idea that you might actually be present to an emotion as you are experiencing it.  The shouters in Network were funny of course because they weren’t really mad.  They were just doing what a celebrity told them to do.  But often in life we real people are in the grip of emotions we neither acknowledge nor understand. The older I get, the more I aspire to knowing what it is I’m feeling when I’m actually feeling it.

            Now this may sound like a strange ambition, but you and I live in a culture that privileges thought over feeling and good manners over authenticity.  Those of us who have thrived by suppressing our feelings and soldiering on in spite of them have paid a certain price for doing so.  It’s not only that we don’t know what’s actually going on inside us.  It’s more that, when we are out of touch with our feelings, we behave in ways that isolate and estrange us from others.

            When you start trying to access your own feelings, the first one to come up is usually anger. But because expressing anger is not a socially acceptable in polite society, it presents itself in different kinds of behaviors and poses:  we become distant, sarcastic, irritated, or skeptical [VISIONS feeling wheel].  These attitudes, though socially permitted, become toxic over time both at work and at home.  You may not want to hear someone tell you they’re angry very often, but you’ll like dealing for very long with people who are distant, sarcastic, irritated, and skeptical even less. Trust me.

            Now I raise the issue of anger this morning not because I’m turning into Doctor Phil but because of what Jesus tells us in this morning’s Gospel reading:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire. [Matthew 5:21-22]

 

This passage is from the Sermon on the Mount, the seemingly impossible series of ethical teachings that Jesus gives in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew’s Gospel.  You’ve heard it said don’t kill anybody.  I say to you, don’t even be angry. Jesus then emphasizes this point by giving an absurd exaggeration as an example:  if you’re making your offering of a goat, a lamb, a pigeon, at the Temple altar in Jerusalem and you realize that you have unresolved enmity with someone else at home, leave your animal to wander around the Temple courtyard and go home—perhaps to Galilee, far in the north--be reconciled to the other person, and then come back and make your offering, hoping all the while that your goat, lamb or pigeon hasn’t wandered away.  If we did that here on Sunday mornings, people would storm the exits every time we passed the peace. Imagine the traffic jam in the garage.

Is Jesus really telling us not to be angry?  Or is he telling us that there is not a lot of moral difference between the feeling and the action it leads to? I’m not exactly sure, but one of the people who has helped me understand what Jesus might be saying is the Roman Catholic monk Richard Rohr, who writes and teaches about Christian spirituality.  For all of us, part of the problem with being in touch with your feelings is that sometimes anger isn’t even anger:  it’s really grief.  Rohr wrote this about men, but what he says is also increasingly true about women in our society. Here is how he puts it:

But how else would a man be expected to act if he does not know how to identify, much less know how to share, his sadness, his anger, or his endless grief—often about his own love and losses, or the world that he once dreamed would happen? . . . Much male anger is actually male sadness. Men often have no way to know this themselves, and many probably even think of themselves as “angry men.” They are often very sad men, but they have no differentiated feeling world, no vocabulary, no safe male friends, no inner space or outer setting in which to open up such a chasm of feeling—not even in their churches or with their partners. [Richard Rohr "Boys Don't Cry" Sojourners July 2010]

 

 

            In the language of spirituality, anger is really grief.  It is sadness over a loss.  All of our lives are filled with loss every day—from the absences and deaths of those we love to the escalating pace of change in our world to the waning of our own power and privilege over time. To live is to lose, and learning to live well means learning to lose well.  But if your self-image in wrapped up in holding on to and projecting power and control, admitting any kind of diminishment is very difficult to do.  Hence the grief.  Hence the anger.

If anger is grief, in the language of psychology, anger is a response to a violation—of our dignity, of our boundaries, of our selves.  We get angry not only because we’re not in control.  We get angry because other people violate us. What we need when we’re angry is not to hit or kill somebody.  What we need is to set limits or reestablish boundaries and expectations. A priest friend of mine in California has the best of all responses when he experiences a personal violation:  “I invite you,” he says, “to step back over to your side of the line.”

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire. [Matthew 5:21-22]

How would life be different if, instead of yelling and screaming at each other, we asked those who violate us to step back over to their side of the line?  How would life be different if, instead of calling people abusive names, blaming them for our troubles, or peppering our talk with hostile or sarcastic phrases, we admitted the sorrow and fear occasioned by our losses?  How much social and family and personal violence could we avoid simply by knowing what we feel when we feel it and reaching out to each other not in anger but in humble acknowledgment of our vulnerability?

To be human is to live in community, and Jesus would remind us that we have been given each other not as punching bags but for support. Even religious obligation is less important than mutual love and reconciliation:

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. [Matthew 5:23-24]

 

The people we love, we work with, we live with will always cross over our boundaries. The things and people we love will always be passing away.  Our own powers and privileges will inevitably diminish.  These are the givens of life, and our choice is to live it either by constantly sticking our heads out our windows and shaking our fists, or to live it by reaching out to each other in forgiveness, acceptance, and love. 

It’s easier to be angry than it is to grieve.  It’s more acceptable to be snarky than it is to be hurt.  Jesus calls us into the hard emotional work of growing up, knowing what we really feel, and acting accordingly.  We are not alone in this process.  We have each other as companions on this lifelong journey.  It won’t be easy, but it will be real.  And when we are real we are who God means us to be.  So forget about being mad as hell.  Get in touch with your feelings.  May the Force be with you.  And have a nice day.  Amen.

 

Homily: The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany [February 9, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

            When my wife Kathy and I were first dating, we would often argue in a playful way about figures of speech we didn’t quite understand.  (Not, perhaps these days, a thrilling hookup strategy, but it worked for us then.  Washington’s perfect power couple:  a priest and a librarian.)

            Anyway, each of us had a cliché we just couldn’t figure out.  For Kathy it was “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good”. Does that mean that an ill wind does no good for anybody?  Or does it mean that even an ill wind does good for somebody?  We would go round and round about these questions late into the night, in conversations fueled by cigarettes and Gallo Hearty Burgundy.  My cliché was the term, “salt of the earth”.  When my relatives used this phrase they usually meant by it someone who was solid and totally unremarkable.  I never heard it used to describe someone who might be, well, interesting. But when I would come upon it in Matthew’s Gospel, “salt of the earth” seemed to mean something entirely different.

            Though Kathy and I still battle about figures of speech we do so during daylight hours and over decaf coffee. Kathy still expresses dismay about ill winds that blow nobody good, and I still throw up my hands when I hear someone described as salt of the earth.  And don’t get me started on “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”.

            Today’s Gospel is from Matthew, and it gives us part of the Sermon on the Mount just after the Beatitudes.  Our passage begins with this inscrutable observation from Jesus:

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. [Matthew 5:13]

Now when you hear this, forget for a moment what your grandmother meant when she called someone the “salt of the earth”.  What, here, can Jesus actually mean?  It’s easier to answer this question if you’re at all familiar with Mark Kurlansky’s fascinating 2003 book, Salt:  A World History.  Salt (formally known as sodium chloride) does several things.  It preserves.  It adds flavor. And it has other, less obvious, uses.  Salt is necessary for the life of our animal cells. In pre-modern cultures salt was used as currency. More than that, salt has religious significance.  According to Kurlansky,

Salt was to the ancient Hebrews, and still is to modern Jews, the symbol of the eternal nature of God’s covenant with Israel.  In the Torah, the Book of Numbers, is written, “it is a covenant of salt forever, before the Lord,” and later in Chronicles, “The Lord God of Israel gave the kingdom over Israel to David forever, even to him, and to his sons, by a covenant of salt.” [Mark Kurlansky, Salt, “Introduction”]

            When we hear Jesus tell his followers, “you are the salt of the earth,” we need to understand the many associations that salt has for them.  Salt is at once a preservative, a spice, a life-giving mineral, and a sign of the holy.  To call someone “salt of the earth” is to say something much more powerful than merely to call them reliable if rather dull.  To call someone “salt of the earth” is to remind them just how important in the scheme of things they really are.

            The Sermon on the Mount has always been a challenge for Christians.  In it Jesus says so many things that go against our conventional wisdom:  blessed are the poor, turn the other cheek, love your enemy.  It is in the context of this sermon that Jesus tells us we are the salt of the earth.  If we are to hear this saying as more than a backhanded compliment, what can he possibly mean? Let’s listen again:

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. [Matthew 5:13]

            One way to get at this inscrutable phrase is to ask whether Jesus is speaking to us as individuals or as a community.  Does he mean that you, personally, are the salt of the earth?  Or does he mean that we, together, are?

            Let’s start with the idea that he might be speaking to us as a group.  After all, he does use the plural pronoun “you” here.  We, Jesus’s followers, are the salt of the earth.  Translation:  we, together, are necessary for the world’s life.  We are its preservative.  And more than that:  as the salt of the earth, we are the ones who seal the covenant between God and the world.  The church—not the institutional church necessarily, but the company of those who follow Jesus—is necessary to the world’s flourishing and survival on God’s terms.  And “saltiness”—our taste, our zest—is central to who we are.  We bring a perspective, an attitude that enlivens the human community.  Without us, everything would spoil.

When we hear “salt of the earth” applied to the Christian community, we get a fresh understanding of what we’re here for.  Many people think that the church exists to bless and reinforce the status quo.  We’re the ones who are supposed to tell you to eat your vegetables, pay your taxes, and floss.  Many people want to confine religion to the realm of ethics and appoint us the hall monitors of human behavior.

But when Jesus calls us the salt of the earth he is reminding us of what religious communities actually do.  Just as salt flavors your food, so we bring out the deep essential meaning of life.  Just as salt keeps things from spoiling, so through our prayers and witness we keep the world from turning solely to its own devices and desires.  Just as salt seals covenants, so we remind both God and the world of why we need each other.  When we hear Jesus call us, collectively, the salt of the earth we remember why we’re here: to show the world what it means to be fully human and fully alive on God’s terms.

But there is another, personal, aspect to being called the salt of the earth.  When Jesus addresses us together, he also addresses us as individual people. You are the salt of the earth. I am the salt of the earth. Hear that in all its power and depth.

You are the salt of the earth.  You are salty in the sense that you have a flavor, a taste, a point of view, a perspective that is unique.  Part of your job as a human being, as a follower of Jesus, is to bring the fullness of yourself into all you do.  Human beings sin both through arrogance and through self-doubt.  We all know what it is to make too much of ourselves—you can’t live in Washington for five minutes without seeing multiple examples of inflated self-regard.  But we forget that we can also make too little of ourselves.  The world needs your saltiness.  As Jesus says, “If salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.” [Matthew 5:13]

But your saltiness consists of more than the gift of your individuality. You are salt of the earth in other ways.  You are vital to the life and preservation of the world. You are a sign of God’s covenant with us.  When we hear Jesus call us salt, we should take in the holy and precious essence of who we are.  God has become one of us in Jesus.  Human life—your life—is endowed with a meaning and purpose beyond what you can see on its surface.  As a follower of Jesus, you are a sign of what God is doing in the world.

As nice as that is to hear, we should remember that Christianity is not merely a self-esteem workshop.  Christianity is about the ongoing redemption and blessing and transformation of the world.  Each of us is unique and precious not only for our own sake.  We have been given gifts—symbolized by salt and light in Jesus’s language—so that we may bring God’s life and healing to each other and the human community.

You are the salt of the earth.  You are unique.  You are precious.  You are a walking sign of God’s covenant with the world.  Your job—my job—is to bring all that  you are—your saltiness, your zest, your unique perspective-- into your life with others so that God’s purpose can be worked out in and through everything you do. 

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. [Matthew 5:13]

I’m not sure that I will ever completely understand this phrase, but I do know this.  The great gift of following Jesus is the opportunity to try and live life on God’s terms.  Of course we don’t always make it and usually fall short.  But there is a beautiful and crazy nobility in the attempt. Don’t sell yourself short. Live into the fullness of God’s vision of who you can be.  That is a high calling.  But it’s a calling we are up to, because before we were Jesus is, and he is the true salt for us all. Amen.

Homily: The Second Sunday after the Epiphany [January 19, 2014] Washington National Cathedral

 

            When I first walked into the nave this morning, I had to suppress a wave of disappointment.  “The chairs are back.”  This past week we took the chairs out of the central expanse of the cathedral, an experiment we called “Seeing Deeper”.  For five days the center aisle was entirely cleared of chairs, and we used the space to try out a wide array of different offerings: Tai Chi on Monday, a cappella polyphonic choral music on Wednesday and Friday, Muslim noon prayer, the labyrinth and healing prayers on Thursday, an all-night vigil Friday night into Saturday.  And we used the space in a combination of ways.  We moved the musicians around the space in the evening concerts and held our regular Daily Offices in a chapel we rarely use, St. John’s Chapel over here behind me to your right.  And there was plenty of time for walking around in the open, empty nave.

            “Seeing Deeper” was a powerful experience for everyone who entered it.  We allowed the building to do its work in us simply as a transcendent space. But for those of us who regularly serve here, much of the power of the week lay in the way people responded to it.  As the week went on the crowds grew, and especially in the evenings the cathedral was filled with people who were obviously moved by the sheer beauty and elegance of the building.  And as the week went on I found myself increasingly moved by the depth of the spiritual search that so many people in our world find themselves on.

            In this morning’s Gospel [John 1:29-42], Jesus encounters two of John the Baptist’s disciples and asks them what they are looking for.  They respond with the Hebrew word, “Rabbi”, which means teacher.  Do they mean that they’re looking for a rabbi?  Or do they mean that they recognize Jesus as their rabbi?  It’s hard to know.  But Jesus’s next statement changes the terms of the discussion.  He says, “Come and see”.  We know that they have been looking for him. It turns out that he has also been looking for them.

As the passage unfolds, one of the two (Andrew) goes and gets his brother, Simon (who will become Peter).  He tells him, “We have found the Messiah.” As we think together about this little story, it’s clear that what we have here is a parable of the spiritual search that all of us are on. Whether we come to church week after week, or wander in because we’ve heard about something mysterious and beautiful, each of us is looking for something.  We may not use the words “rabbi” or “Messiah” to describe it.  But by whatever name we call it, we are drawn to the possibility that something ineffable lies beyond.

            In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus poses a simple question: "What are you looking for?" This story asks that we acknowledge a truth about the relations between God and us.  All the time we have been searching for God, God has been searching for us.  Christians have come to name that search “the call”.  God calls to us, as in this story when Jesus invites Andrew and his friend to “come and see”.  Jesus not only calls this first pair.  He calls Simon and changes his name to Peter.  In this encounter Jesus’s followers not only get a life; they get a community. And more than that, they find their true identity.  The one we have been looking for turns out all the time to have been looking for us.  That one knows that we need life and purpose and meaning.  They have always been on offer and are ready, any time, for the taking.

            Today’s Gospel prompts two thoughts.  One concerns this story’s mysterious, gracious implication that God has called each and all of us into fellowship with Jesus and each other. Just as we sometimes take the givenness of this cathedral building for granted and miss the transcendence that is always present, so we find ourselves strenuously looking for one who is seeking us at the same time. The other thought has to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. whose national holiday we celebrate tomorrow.

Because Dr. King preached his final Sunday sermon in this pulpit, we here at Washington National Cathedral feel a special connection to him. Yet I think he remains a misunderstood figure in American life. I love King’s writing, and I’ve taught several of his pieces to high school and college students. As great as the “I Have a Dream” speech is, though, its over-exposure tends to obscure the sharpness of King’s theological intelligence and make him sound like a bit like a greeting card. The great Cornell West refers to this process as the “Santa-Claus-ification of Martin Luther King”.

Sentimentalizing King blunts some of his force; he had, after all, one of the great, analytical minds in the history of the Christian tradition. If one point this morning is God’s search for us and the call to follow, the other point is that God is always leading us toward some place specific. Yes, God is looking for us, but God is looking for us with a deeper purpose than only to love and bless us.  God is looking for us to be disciples, witnesses, agents of love and blessing ourselves. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and witness give us a good image of that specific place toward which Jesus asked Andrew and Peter to go then and you and me to follow today.

One of King’s greatest achievements was the letter he wrote to the Birmingham, Alabama clergy when he was imprisoned in the Birmingham Jail in April of 1963. The white clergy had criticized his practice of civil disobedience, calling him that favorite phrase of the 1960s, an “outside agitator”, and he replied with a defense of civil disobedience grounded in a profound analysis of Christian history. The letter is usually referred to as “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Here is one bit of what he says near its end:

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. [Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, April 16, 1963]

 

            Like Jesus, like Andrew and Peter, Martin Luther King, Jr. answered God’s call to follow. Like them, King understood that the call was not only to follow but to go with God toward a specific place—the place Jesus called the “Kingdom of God”, a zone of blessedness, peace, compassion, and health, a place where we experience the world on God’s terms, a place where the blind see, the lame walk, the prisoners go free, and the poor have good news preached to them. King knew that the Kingdom of God was less about his own personal salvation than it was about building a world where wrongs are set right and all of God’s precious children can share in the abundant blessings God holds out to everyone.

            If you are here in church this morning, I will bet that you, too, are searching for the one who is behind and in this transcendent space, the one we come to know in word and sacrament, music and liturgy, fellowship and service.  That one is already searching for you, and that one holds out to you the gift of life, of identity, of community, of meaning and purpose. That one calls you into a life in which you can become not only a seeker of God but a seeker with God of others, a life in which you serve as an agent of love and justice, healing and hope in the world. This search and call are not only about being found and saved.  They are about a new life in which we, as Jesus did, offer life and hope to others.  That new life takes as many shapes as there are people, but this weekend we honor one unique life and witness that transformed our nation and our world.

God called Martin Luther King, Jr., and in answering he gave himself up to a vision of America and humanity that continues to inspire and bless us today--a vision of justice, equality, compassion, and love. This vision is more than a dream. It’s the destiny God holds out to all of us.  It’s a picture of how the world and the universe finally are. God’s search for us has led us first into this cathedral and now out into the world. “What are you looking for?” “Come and see.”  Amen.

 

Homily: The First Sunday after the Epiphany [January 12, 2014] Evensong

 

            I am a city boy, and I when the Bible talks in agricultural images I am pretty much at a loss.  So in this evening’s Gospel, when John the Baptist looks at Jesus and says, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”—my first association with lambs is, of course, the recalcitrant sheep in the movie Babe.  Who can ever forget “Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe?”

            Aggressive sheep and sheepherding pigs aside, John’s identification of Jesus as the Lamb of God feels, in this context, pretty startling.  In the version of Jesus’s baptism from Matthew’s gospel we heard in church this morning, John the Baptist confines his opinions to a simple expression of his own unworthiness when compared with Jesus:  "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" [Matthew 3:14]  But in tonight’s account from the Fourth Gospel, John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. For city folk like you and me, what can that statement possibly mean?

            In the religion of Israel, as in many world religions, animals were used as sacrificial victims.  Especially if I wanted to atone for a wrong I had committed, I would bring the best animal I could find (and afford) to the Temple and sacrifice it in the belief that my own guilt would be transferred to the animal.  Poor people sacrificed pigeons.  The more affluent sacrificed higher quality victims.  A perfect lamb was considered the best possible offering.

            So when John sees Jesus and calls him “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” he is referring to a whole tradition which the people who followed him would understand.  Even at this opening moment of his ministry, Jesus is identified as someone whose death will have consequences for the human community.  He is more than a teacher and a healer.  He is more than a prophet.  He is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.

            I have always been interested in the way Christian symbols have developed over time.  In the earliest days, of course, the Christian symbol was the ikthus, the fish.  Christianity was an underground movement, and the Greek word ikthus served as an acronym for the Greek words “Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior.”   The fish symbol was like a secret handshake, a way of identifying yourself as a Christian in a hidden, subversive way. 

A bit later on, as the Christian community emerged into public life, its primary symbol became the lamb.  If you think about lambs, you realize that they are not only spotless and pure.  They are also innocent.  They are not a threat.  As the church emerged into a suspicious Roman world, it wanted to show how peace loving and non-threatening it could be.  “We may not worship Caesar as a god, but we’re not going to overthrow the established order either.”  What better symbol than “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”? When you look at early Christian archaeological sites, you see symbolic lambs all over the place. 

But in the fourth century, after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity not only legal but the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church rather quickly moved to a new symbol by which to represent itself.  Being a dedicated viewer of the series Mad Men, I can imagine the decision-making process as a Madison Avenue-style exercise in marketing.  The fish?  Too mysterious.  The lamb?  Too wimpy.  We’re not skulking around the catacombs anymore!  We’re the official religion of the civilized world! We need an image that subtly projects power and influence. How about using the cross?

That version of imperial Christianity’s marketing strategy may sound a bit sarcastic, but I actually believe that the disappearance of the Lamb of God and the emergence of the cross signaled the church’s transition from a movement to an institution.  A world historical religion couldn’t possibly use an innocent victim to symbolize itself.  It needed a visual representation of an instrument of state power to show who was really now in charge.

The great Lenny Bruce once observed, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” As snarky as that observation sounds, it reminds us that Jesus died at the hands of state power, and it suggests that we Christians should always approach power—the power of the state, the power of business, power of our own--with a huge dose of skepticism. 

In coming to John the Baptist and submitting to John’s baptism, Jesus was saying a couple of things that we his followers need to hear today.  The first is that he submitted himself to someone else.  Jesus’s first public act is not an exertion of power but an act of submission.  Religious people like to talk about God using the language of power and authority:  “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might.” But this first moment of Jesus’s ministry suggests that Jesus understands God rather differently than you and I do.  Just as Jesus submits to John, so the God we know in Jesus is manifested more in weakness than in power.  “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Jesus demonstrates his credibility not by a miraculous demonstration but by an act of submission. We who follow Jesus are called to a similar kind of humility. Before it was the cross, our symbol was the lamb.

That’s the first thing we need to hear.  And here is the second:  Jesus begins his ministry the way you and I begin ours, by being baptized.  It is not an accident that Jesus goes through the same act of initiation that you and I experience as his followers.  One of the ways we talk about the church is to call it the “Body of Christ”, and what we mean is that in baptism you and I become one with each other and with Jesus.  Baptism is an act of commissioning, and it’s also an act of solidarity.  You and I, together, are Christ in the here and now.  On my own I am not Christ, and on your own you are not Christ.  But together, we are. In submitting to John’s baptism Jesus not only demonstrated God’s powerless humility.  In submitting to John’s baptism Jesus showed himself to be one of us, our brother in the struggle.

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  On this, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, Jesus comes to John for baptism.  In submitting himself to that washing, Jesus has both humbled himself and dignified us.  If he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, by virtue of our baptism you and I are, too. You and I, together, are Christ in the world.  You and I, together, are the ones called to empty ourselves in love for the service of those who hunger, who suffer, who mourn.  You and I together, are the ones who will bear forth God’s transforming love to the world. 

Jesus’s baptism is our baptism.  His ministry is now ours.  The best image for that ministry is neither the secret fish nor the tortuous cross.  As John the Baptist saw when he said it, the best image for our shared ministry is the lamb.  “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Jesus was baptized and so are we.  So:  “Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe!”

Let us, together, live the baptized life taken on by Jesus, so that all humanity and all creation may be transformed into the image of the heavenly city toward which we are walking with the Lamb of God.  Amen.