Proper 7 C 2010
I Kings 19: 1-15a; Ps 42, 43; Gal 3: 23-29; Luke 8: 26-39
How lost is lost?
Today we find Elijah hustling his way out of town. Jezebel swore she would do Elijah in, and our prophet is no noble martyr. He literally heads for the hills. Depressed and discouraged, he lays down, waking up to find just enough food to keep him going for the next step.
He crawls into a cave, feeling ready to die. But the God who first breathed into his heart is not done with his prophet and friend. Fire, earthquake, wind—all the terrifying chaos of creation blazed outside, as dangerous as the hate of a powerful and revengeful queen. “But the LORD was not in the earthquake…nor in the fire…nor in the wind…”
Elijah was lost, lost in his fear, lost in his helplessness, lost in his hopelessness, lost in a cave in the wilderness. He had lost, too, his sense of what God wanted of him and what God was doing in his life and in the life of his people. And then, after that storm washes over him, he hears a voice made of silence.
That still voice calls Elijah from depression and fear to living once again as a prophet, a prophet who now knows that the power of God can pick us up when we are lost and at the end of our rope. In that stillness Elijah hears he is not done, and God is not done.
Ever feel totally lost? Ever felt at the end of your rope, like there is nothing but anxiety and fear? The power and strength of God is greater than this. God finds us when we are lost, and God can speak in silence with power greater than the chaos.
There’s lost, and then there’s lost.
For anyone who has been really lost or loved someone who was really lost, today’s Gospel can make your skin crawl. A man lives in the cemetery, completely lost, lost outside and lost inside. It’s amazing what a strange cave one’s own head and heart can be when we are overwhelmed with darkness. This hopeless man is filled with a teeming horde of powerful spirits. When Jesus finds him, he answers Jesus’ question with an awesome image. “Legion”, he says, a legion is inside of me. A Roman legion was an unstoppable fighting force of at least 6,000 battle-hardened soldiers. When the legion shows up, it’s best to surrender. He lives in the tombs, the dead outside, the teeming legion inside—no one could be more lost.
But Jesus finds the lost. And Jesus brings hope and new life to the lost. Frankly, I’ve always felt sorry for the pigs as they are the new hosts for the mighty legion of possessing spirits. But the point is made clearly—the all-powerful legion that filled this man, who drove him to isolation and hopelessness and despair—they’re only fit company for pigs. In fact, even the pigs can’t stand them, and would rather jump off a cliff than host the filthy legion.
Everyone else had accepted the possessed man’s hopelessness. Maybe some people need to think that some other people are beyond hope so they can be ignored and we can go back to our well-ordered lives. The life-changing power of God in Jesus is too much for the locals. They “beg him to leave the district.”
Well, people who feel their lives are well-ordered tend to resist any upset to their lives, even an upset caused by God. But the lost and the fearful and those in need are more ready, more open to accept the saving power of the God who finds the lost and speaks in stillness.
How lost is lost? No lost is too lost for God. No hopelessness is beyond hope for God. No wound is beyond healing, no darkness too deep, no legion too strong for the God who comes in Jesus to find us, to heal, to drive away darkness, to bring new life.
“O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your lovingkindness.”
archived musings and preachments
Monday, June 21, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Need
3 Pentecost/Proper 5 C 2010
1 Kings 17: 8-16; Ps 146; Gal 1: 11-24; Luke 7: 11-17
I had traveled all day on the top of a wooden diesel bus. Half the time I was seated on a live pig that a farmer had kindly offered me as a bench. The roads were dirt and dust, pitted with holes and studded with large rocks. When the bus finally stopped in the marketplace of that rural Filipino town and I climbed down the side, I was exhausted and filthy with sweat and dust and literally smelled like that poor shrieking pig.
I walked wearily into the church residence and found a Filipino community organizer seated on a bamboo chair. He greeted me, and I dropped my pack on the floor and rummaged about in it. Realizing with dismay the one thing I had forgotten to pack back in the city, I asked him, “Arthur, may I have some soap so I can scrub this dirt off, please?”
Arthur looked up slowly with an incredulous expression on his face. After a moment he said, “Yes I do, and yes you may. But you have to pardon me for saying that I do not expect a wealthy, self-sufficient American to have to ask me for something so simple as soap. Just now, as you asked me, you became much more real to me, not a powerful figure who would never need to ask anything of a rural Filipino.”
At the time, I did not want social reflection, just a bath. Arthur’s soap was a Godsend. I do not think being clean ever felt so good.
But as I read these texts for today, I remembered Arthur’s bar of soap and reflected that even God becomes real when we reach out in our need to one another. God’s generosity can break forth when we admit our need and our poverty and when we act as if God is generous. For God is generous, and we need one another, and when we reach out and live in this generous space God will not fail us.
When Elijah came to town in today’s Hebrew Scripture, he too was dirty, and he was starving. The great prophet was a hungry and hunted man. The person he approached was as poor and powerless as the ancient Near East could present—a destitute widow, trying to keep a child alive at a time and place where there were no safeguards and no rights for a woman who had lost her husband and his clan name. She knew all this—she was going out one last time to perform a last gesture from the normal life she had once known: build a fire, make a small cake with the last of their flour, and then hold her son and die together. But God whispered in the prophet’s heart, and something else happened that reversed the story.
Turn to one another in need—we have enough to help a hungry stranger. Live as if God is generous and there is hope. Live this hope together. And God’s generosity can break into the world. “And they ate for many days” says the story.
What else can happen if we shake off our dead sense of scarcity and hopelessness, reach out to one another and to strangers, and live as if God is generous?
The Gospel story also asks us that question. The story of Elijah and the widow forms the background of this tale, but the Gospel widow’s need is deeper and more hopeless—her son is already dead. But God’s generous power is deeper still—God in and through Jesus raises even the dead young man to life. What is there in us that seems hopeless may be raised to new life, what may be raised among us, by the power of a generous God?
But we need to ask—we need to ask God, we need to reach out to one another and to others, we need to be ready to act like citizens of a generous cosmos. For most of us, that takes a change of life and of heart.
This year’s Stewardship Campaign has already begun, and these texts come at a perfect time for us to hear and to welcome the word that God speaks in them. Saints Peter and Paul is a wealthy, abundant, and blessed community. We are not blessed in a way that can leave us living complacently as we are. We are all, priest and people, called to a change of mind and heart. Hear the Word of God read today, and let’s ask these questions:
As Elijah reached out to the widow in his need, to whom are we called to reach out in our need? Is it to one another first of all? Do we truly value the gift of one another, old friends as well as those brand-new among us? (It was told to me that a long-time member was recently asked to share a cup of coffee after Mass, and she was pleased as in all these years no one had personally invited her to just sit and share some coffee after Mass). We need one another, first of all, and in that glad need to welcome one another.
And we need to reach out beyond ourselves. We need Montavilla, we need the neighborhood. It is true that we have gifts to offer them. But they have many gifts to offer us, and we need to be a vital part of the neighborhood, to be good neighbors, in order to truly be “Your church here” as our bulletins say each week. Talk to Judy Bishop or to me about how we are trying to do that, and know that we need your help, the help of everyone here.
And we need to accept God’s generous gift and live as if that gift has already been given to us, for it has! Our consultant for this year looked at our statistics and said, “You are one of the larger churches in the Diocese,” and we are. I think we often act small and poor and think that way, and so it is no surprise that we start to feel poor, as poor as a famine in the Middle East.
Today God says: reach out to one another, admit your need, welcome the generosity of God that can come even from the poor, live like citizens of a generous cosmos. Years ago, doing all that got me a decent bath in the Philippines. What may God do for our whole community today?
1 Kings 17: 8-16; Ps 146; Gal 1: 11-24; Luke 7: 11-17
I had traveled all day on the top of a wooden diesel bus. Half the time I was seated on a live pig that a farmer had kindly offered me as a bench. The roads were dirt and dust, pitted with holes and studded with large rocks. When the bus finally stopped in the marketplace of that rural Filipino town and I climbed down the side, I was exhausted and filthy with sweat and dust and literally smelled like that poor shrieking pig.
I walked wearily into the church residence and found a Filipino community organizer seated on a bamboo chair. He greeted me, and I dropped my pack on the floor and rummaged about in it. Realizing with dismay the one thing I had forgotten to pack back in the city, I asked him, “Arthur, may I have some soap so I can scrub this dirt off, please?”
Arthur looked up slowly with an incredulous expression on his face. After a moment he said, “Yes I do, and yes you may. But you have to pardon me for saying that I do not expect a wealthy, self-sufficient American to have to ask me for something so simple as soap. Just now, as you asked me, you became much more real to me, not a powerful figure who would never need to ask anything of a rural Filipino.”
At the time, I did not want social reflection, just a bath. Arthur’s soap was a Godsend. I do not think being clean ever felt so good.
But as I read these texts for today, I remembered Arthur’s bar of soap and reflected that even God becomes real when we reach out in our need to one another. God’s generosity can break forth when we admit our need and our poverty and when we act as if God is generous. For God is generous, and we need one another, and when we reach out and live in this generous space God will not fail us.
When Elijah came to town in today’s Hebrew Scripture, he too was dirty, and he was starving. The great prophet was a hungry and hunted man. The person he approached was as poor and powerless as the ancient Near East could present—a destitute widow, trying to keep a child alive at a time and place where there were no safeguards and no rights for a woman who had lost her husband and his clan name. She knew all this—she was going out one last time to perform a last gesture from the normal life she had once known: build a fire, make a small cake with the last of their flour, and then hold her son and die together. But God whispered in the prophet’s heart, and something else happened that reversed the story.
Turn to one another in need—we have enough to help a hungry stranger. Live as if God is generous and there is hope. Live this hope together. And God’s generosity can break into the world. “And they ate for many days” says the story.
What else can happen if we shake off our dead sense of scarcity and hopelessness, reach out to one another and to strangers, and live as if God is generous?
The Gospel story also asks us that question. The story of Elijah and the widow forms the background of this tale, but the Gospel widow’s need is deeper and more hopeless—her son is already dead. But God’s generous power is deeper still—God in and through Jesus raises even the dead young man to life. What is there in us that seems hopeless may be raised to new life, what may be raised among us, by the power of a generous God?
But we need to ask—we need to ask God, we need to reach out to one another and to others, we need to be ready to act like citizens of a generous cosmos. For most of us, that takes a change of life and of heart.
This year’s Stewardship Campaign has already begun, and these texts come at a perfect time for us to hear and to welcome the word that God speaks in them. Saints Peter and Paul is a wealthy, abundant, and blessed community. We are not blessed in a way that can leave us living complacently as we are. We are all, priest and people, called to a change of mind and heart. Hear the Word of God read today, and let’s ask these questions:
As Elijah reached out to the widow in his need, to whom are we called to reach out in our need? Is it to one another first of all? Do we truly value the gift of one another, old friends as well as those brand-new among us? (It was told to me that a long-time member was recently asked to share a cup of coffee after Mass, and she was pleased as in all these years no one had personally invited her to just sit and share some coffee after Mass). We need one another, first of all, and in that glad need to welcome one another.
And we need to reach out beyond ourselves. We need Montavilla, we need the neighborhood. It is true that we have gifts to offer them. But they have many gifts to offer us, and we need to be a vital part of the neighborhood, to be good neighbors, in order to truly be “Your church here” as our bulletins say each week. Talk to Judy Bishop or to me about how we are trying to do that, and know that we need your help, the help of everyone here.
And we need to accept God’s generous gift and live as if that gift has already been given to us, for it has! Our consultant for this year looked at our statistics and said, “You are one of the larger churches in the Diocese,” and we are. I think we often act small and poor and think that way, and so it is no surprise that we start to feel poor, as poor as a famine in the Middle East.
Today God says: reach out to one another, admit your need, welcome the generosity of God that can come even from the poor, live like citizens of a generous cosmos. Years ago, doing all that got me a decent bath in the Philippines. What may God do for our whole community today?
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