Proper 21 C 2010
(Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31)
A young preacher told of a conversation she overheard outside of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. One man told another, “Man, I’m just starting out in recovery, and each day is hard.” The second man he spoke to laughed and said, “Dude, I’ve been in recovery for years, and every day that same ditch is right there in front of me.”
That’s a 12-Step version of the ancient desert saying, “This is our life: we fall down, and we get back up again.”
That ditch and that harsh, no-nonsense wisdom is right in front of us today, and it is good that we are here to face it together. Jesus tells a haunting and rather dark parable. “Be nice to poor people” is the simplest meaning if we are looking for a moral. By all means, be nice to poor people. But the parables are never just morality tales—they are stories of the strange reality that is the Kingdom of God and how the Kingdom calls us over and over to change and transformation. And that is never easy.
A few years ago Phil Collins sang a haunting song, “It’s just another day for you and me in paradise...” as we walk by while the poor call out for help. It was just another day in paradise for the rich man in Jesus’ story, with the poor man waiting at his gates for a hand-out. The rich man is not a bad man. He’s just living his life as it is, where there are rich and poor and isn’t that too bad, but there’s a lot of poor and I am only one man, and what can I do?
The rich man has no name. The poor man has a name—Lazarus, which means roughly “God has helped.” This story is about to flip our world upside-down, since in our world the rich and famous have names and the poor have none.
The rich man dies and enters a harsh reality—it is no longer just another day in paradise for him. He who doled out scraps to Lazarus begs for Lazarus’ finger to moisten his mouth. Have you ever looked at the fingers of a poor homeless man? Those are the fingers that the rich man begs to be put between his lips.
The father of his nation says, “No my son, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed…” Who can cross over that?
That ditch is right there in front of us, and that chasm has been fixed. What can we do? How can we deal with the ditch, how can we cross the chasm opened by our blindness to the truth of God’s kingdom?
We can make a bid on a wild hope. Jeremiah was in jail while the Babylonians were beating down the gates, and what does he do? He swings a real estate deal with his cousin, right when property values were bottoming out and the Babylonians were just dying to depreciate values even more. Despair and flee? No, buy the land and seal the deal. Live and act in hope, and the God of hope will fulfill the promise—land, freedom, and new life. Ask people recovering from the hopeless hell of addiction about the wildness, the pure improbable faith of hope when they are locked in despair.
And we can fight the good fight.
One thing we learn in martial arts is to never give up, to never, ever stop fighting. Only the teacher calls the end of the match. Says Paul, Paul who no doubt saw wrestling and boxing matches in Tarsus and Corinth: “Fight the good fight of the faith...make the good confession...just as Christ Jesus made the good confession before Pontius Pilate.” Ours is a fighting life—never stop fighting, even if we are knocked down or see defeat before us.
Jesus ends his parable on a dark note. I believe he asks us these questions:
No matter how long we’ve been on a Gospel path, do we see that ditch before us, the chasm that is fixed if we take for granted the way things are, the way we ourselves are, the way we are living today?
Do we wish to bridge that chasm, to deal with that ditch?
Do we wish to live into a wild hope, the hope that we might live a different and transformed life, and that we might transform life for the poor of this world?
Do we believe that the fight is worth fighting, that it is worthwhile to get back up when we fall?
If we answer yes, if we even want the courage to be able to answer “yes”, then we’ve made Jeremiah’s crazy land deal, we’ve made Paul’s good confession. All that remains is to fight the fight—to live the upside-down values of the kingdom, where the poor have names and where we are to live and to be the abundant mercy of God.
And so we will fall down, and get up, together with one another and with the Spirit. Never stop fighting. Only the teacher calls the end of the match.
And only the Teacher gives us the promised glory when the match is finally over.
archived musings and preachments
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
enough, and more than enough
“Fill The Church” Sunday 2010
Isaiah 45: 21-25; Ps 98: 1-4; Phil 2: 5-11; Luke 9: 10-17
What drew us to this man?
Was it his beauty? It’s strange, but we cannot remember the details of his face. We could not take our eyes off of him some days. John was more handsome, Peter was louder and his presence filled a room. Magdalene was beautiful and the men perspired slightly when she was near. But our eyes were drawn to him, the rabbi, the master, only to him. Why?
Why did we listen to this man? He was not a professional teacher, he did not set out to found a school. He had not studied with great teachers or even with the Gentile philosophers. But his words—he spoke them with his whole body, with his life and actions, with his whole being—no difference between what he said and what he did and who he was. To hear him was like listening to a waterfall while bathing in the pool beneath it.
Why did we follow this man? If we knew where the road would lead when we first met him, we would have shuddered and run away. But when he called, we stood up and took first one step after him, then another. It was all those steps, on the dust and on the paving-stones, on the sand of beaches and through the growing grain, that strengthened us so today we can bend and lift our cross as he lifted his on that terrible day, all alone, while we hid and shivered and secretly thought how lucky we were that we did not share his pain. And we have been changed—now we think we are blessed because by the mercy of God we are allowed to walk his way, from pain to glory.
That day in the wilderness was just such a day of change.
The teacher was tired, and so were we. So many thronged around, holding up their empty hands, opening their famished mouths, baring their famished souls. He spoke and touched, healed and blessed, but he was just one man and all we could do was stand and try to help in small ways—bring him water for his dry throat, support a drooping man for him to heal.
We were drained and exhausted. And of course we were broke—always broke. Thomas was practical—“Tell people to go now, tell them to scatter so they can hit the villages for food before the merchants close their booths for the day.”
The teacher surprised us. “You give them something to eat.”
It was impossible, and we told him so. A couple of us had brought a loaf or two of bread, not very fresh, and a couple of dried fish, workingman’s lunch. That was all the food in sight.
The teacher held that food, that working-stiff food, so tenderly. He raised his eyes in that way he had which was not sticky-sweet but natural. In simple words, he thanked his Father, broke the bread, carefully handed the pieces to us.
Numb, we obeyed. Piece by piece, we handed fragments to the open hungry hands. Break, hand, break, hand. Often we were sure we held the next-to-last piece. Each time there was more, there was more. The people watched us, and even in their hunger they themselves began to break pieces from their own pieces, and passed them on.
At first there were murmurs, then a strange hush, as if everyone were holding their breath, waiting for the very last piece to be passed, waiting to see who would be fed, who would be hungry. And then the buzz—faint at first, then the more hopeful began to say that something strange, something wonderful was happening right here, right out here in the middle of nowhere. The buzz became a deep, resonant, satisfied roar. Even the people on the fringe of the crowd, those who were just curious and not very interested in the teacher’s words, even they were handed their share.
There is nothing as content as a group of people filled with good food.
Andrew started picking up the pieces. He always worried about things like that. He had to find twelve baskets to hold them all. Enough for today, and for tomorrow. Our ancestors in the desert, fed with the manna, did not eat any better.
And we were changed.
Never again would we worry that a gathering of the faithful was broke or poor. The master said that if even two gathered remembering just his name, he would be there. If he is there, if he is here, then there is always more than enough. All we need do is remember the story, give thanks, share what we have. All shall eat, and be satisfied. And we shall be changed.
This is out story, Saints Peter and Paul. This is our teacher who is here with us today. Here is the bread—the bread of the altar, and the bread which is our lives. Have you ever felt broke? Have you ever felt stretched thin? Have you ever felt that there is just not enough, that our lives and energy are just not enough, that we can’t keep our lives, our families, or our church going another day?
Well, we have followed the teacher. He is with us today. He takes the bread of the altar and the bread of our lives and the story happens again—give thanks, break, and give. When we do that, there is enough and more than enough. We need him, we need each other, and we need to tell this tale. Know this—when we tell this tale together, when we live this tale today, there is enough. There is more than enough. And we shall be changed.
Isaiah 45: 21-25; Ps 98: 1-4; Phil 2: 5-11; Luke 9: 10-17
What drew us to this man?
Was it his beauty? It’s strange, but we cannot remember the details of his face. We could not take our eyes off of him some days. John was more handsome, Peter was louder and his presence filled a room. Magdalene was beautiful and the men perspired slightly when she was near. But our eyes were drawn to him, the rabbi, the master, only to him. Why?
Why did we listen to this man? He was not a professional teacher, he did not set out to found a school. He had not studied with great teachers or even with the Gentile philosophers. But his words—he spoke them with his whole body, with his life and actions, with his whole being—no difference between what he said and what he did and who he was. To hear him was like listening to a waterfall while bathing in the pool beneath it.
Why did we follow this man? If we knew where the road would lead when we first met him, we would have shuddered and run away. But when he called, we stood up and took first one step after him, then another. It was all those steps, on the dust and on the paving-stones, on the sand of beaches and through the growing grain, that strengthened us so today we can bend and lift our cross as he lifted his on that terrible day, all alone, while we hid and shivered and secretly thought how lucky we were that we did not share his pain. And we have been changed—now we think we are blessed because by the mercy of God we are allowed to walk his way, from pain to glory.
That day in the wilderness was just such a day of change.
The teacher was tired, and so were we. So many thronged around, holding up their empty hands, opening their famished mouths, baring their famished souls. He spoke and touched, healed and blessed, but he was just one man and all we could do was stand and try to help in small ways—bring him water for his dry throat, support a drooping man for him to heal.
We were drained and exhausted. And of course we were broke—always broke. Thomas was practical—“Tell people to go now, tell them to scatter so they can hit the villages for food before the merchants close their booths for the day.”
The teacher surprised us. “You give them something to eat.”
It was impossible, and we told him so. A couple of us had brought a loaf or two of bread, not very fresh, and a couple of dried fish, workingman’s lunch. That was all the food in sight.
The teacher held that food, that working-stiff food, so tenderly. He raised his eyes in that way he had which was not sticky-sweet but natural. In simple words, he thanked his Father, broke the bread, carefully handed the pieces to us.
Numb, we obeyed. Piece by piece, we handed fragments to the open hungry hands. Break, hand, break, hand. Often we were sure we held the next-to-last piece. Each time there was more, there was more. The people watched us, and even in their hunger they themselves began to break pieces from their own pieces, and passed them on.
At first there were murmurs, then a strange hush, as if everyone were holding their breath, waiting for the very last piece to be passed, waiting to see who would be fed, who would be hungry. And then the buzz—faint at first, then the more hopeful began to say that something strange, something wonderful was happening right here, right out here in the middle of nowhere. The buzz became a deep, resonant, satisfied roar. Even the people on the fringe of the crowd, those who were just curious and not very interested in the teacher’s words, even they were handed their share.
There is nothing as content as a group of people filled with good food.
Andrew started picking up the pieces. He always worried about things like that. He had to find twelve baskets to hold them all. Enough for today, and for tomorrow. Our ancestors in the desert, fed with the manna, did not eat any better.
And we were changed.
Never again would we worry that a gathering of the faithful was broke or poor. The master said that if even two gathered remembering just his name, he would be there. If he is there, if he is here, then there is always more than enough. All we need do is remember the story, give thanks, share what we have. All shall eat, and be satisfied. And we shall be changed.
This is out story, Saints Peter and Paul. This is our teacher who is here with us today. Here is the bread—the bread of the altar, and the bread which is our lives. Have you ever felt broke? Have you ever felt stretched thin? Have you ever felt that there is just not enough, that our lives and energy are just not enough, that we can’t keep our lives, our families, or our church going another day?
Well, we have followed the teacher. He is with us today. He takes the bread of the altar and the bread of our lives and the story happens again—give thanks, break, and give. When we do that, there is enough and more than enough. We need him, we need each other, and we need to tell this tale. Know this—when we tell this tale together, when we live this tale today, there is enough. There is more than enough. And we shall be changed.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
following the heart
Proper 19 C 2010
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Ps 14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
There was a man in the Middle East who thought he knew his own heart as well as the heart of God.
The young man grew up in privilege. He received a good liberal education. Perhaps it was his loneliness and sense of alienation among sophisticated fellow-students which set his feet on a dark path. See, the young man was raised in a stern faith which believes in one God, in the purity of God’s faithful people, and in observing clear laws that God has set down. As the world grew more complex, as their young people were exposed to more and more temptations of the flesh and of ideas, the teachers and leaders of this faith grew more stern in their demands and more angry in their preaching. The nations of the West, they said, brought nothing but greed and conquest to their lands and pollution to their young people and to their faith. A few teachers even advocated violence, violence against the Western forces who occupied their land, violence against their own people who co-operated in any way with those Western forces and who did not live up to the stern demands of those teachers. Any who died in this holy war, said the teachers, were God’s martyrs, guaranteed a hero’s reward in the life to come.
The bright and idealistic young man drank in this harsh teaching like cold water on a hot day. His heart thrilled to the white-hot, single-minded commitment required of a warrior for God. He was finally drawn into violence. He helped his new friends kill a man, a man whose beliefs ran against the approved teaching of the young man’s group.
Inspired, and secretly thrilled at violence for religion’s sake, the young man set out with the blessing of his leadership to harass and arrest his own people whose faith fell short of his standards and haul them before religious courts.
And the young man would have lived and probably died for this harsh, utterly committed faith, sure of his own heart and of the heart of God. But the strangest thing happened. The One God in whom the young man believed with all his heart showed up. God knocked the young man down and told him he was wrong, wrong about his own heart and about the heart of God.
This story sounds strangely like the tale of a member of the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda. In a sense it is. The young man was not Muslim, he was Jewish. His given name was Saul. Today we call him Saint Paul.
Saul thought he knew his heart and the heart of God. Do not underestimate the depth of his fanaticism. Only the lack of technology limited its power. I myself need little effort to imagine unchanged Saul sitting in a cave on the Afghani border, watching the Twin Towers fall on CNN and nodding in approval.
One Desert Father said, “Of all evil suggestions, the most terrible is the prompting to follow your own heart.” Now that’s really dark, and really counter-cultural—over and over again we are urged to “follow our hearts.” If you do not follow your heart, says popular wisdom, then you are allowing external authority to force you to be untrue to yourself.
Today the Scriptures suggest that we may not really know our own hearts. Our impulses and our most deeply cherished, unexamined beliefs are not necessarily our deepest truth. That poor fellow in Florida who was about to burn the Koran—he was following his heart and his most cherished beliefs. So are many misguided people, small or great. I am still on a journey to listen to my own true heart. Since our true heart is made to rest in God, it takes at least a lifetime to know ourselves even somewhat as God knows us. In the meanwhile, I face the fact that as often as I felt certitude, even a deep sense of passion about my ideals, all too often I have strayed into self-deception. “My people are foolish; they do not know me”, says God in Jeremiah. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” says Paul. “But I received mercy…”
“But I received mercy…” This weekend, we remember the death and destruction worked by young men who were absolutely sure they were right, that God was guiding them, that they were willing to die for their faith and their truth. As we remember, let us humbly ask for the grace to make a better world, not by rushing to assert that our enemies are wrong and we are right. That path leads all too easily to our willingness to make others suffer and die for our rightness. The violence, the single-mindedness, the self-deception is in us, and it awaits us always if we think we always know our own hearts and the heart of God. Our hope is not in our own sense of rightness. Our hope is in the God who is willing to search for us even in our times of anger, fear, and violence. Like a shepherd so single-minded he will leave the other sheep to search, like the woman who quits even cooking food to search her house for one coin, the God who truly knows us will search us out from every crack and crevice we have rolled into chosen for ourselves. Just ask Saul—God searched hard for him and finally had to knock him down to get his attention. Our single-mindedness does not save. The God who searches our minds and looks beneath our illusions and fears—it is this God who saves.
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Ps 14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10
There was a man in the Middle East who thought he knew his own heart as well as the heart of God.
The young man grew up in privilege. He received a good liberal education. Perhaps it was his loneliness and sense of alienation among sophisticated fellow-students which set his feet on a dark path. See, the young man was raised in a stern faith which believes in one God, in the purity of God’s faithful people, and in observing clear laws that God has set down. As the world grew more complex, as their young people were exposed to more and more temptations of the flesh and of ideas, the teachers and leaders of this faith grew more stern in their demands and more angry in their preaching. The nations of the West, they said, brought nothing but greed and conquest to their lands and pollution to their young people and to their faith. A few teachers even advocated violence, violence against the Western forces who occupied their land, violence against their own people who co-operated in any way with those Western forces and who did not live up to the stern demands of those teachers. Any who died in this holy war, said the teachers, were God’s martyrs, guaranteed a hero’s reward in the life to come.
The bright and idealistic young man drank in this harsh teaching like cold water on a hot day. His heart thrilled to the white-hot, single-minded commitment required of a warrior for God. He was finally drawn into violence. He helped his new friends kill a man, a man whose beliefs ran against the approved teaching of the young man’s group.
Inspired, and secretly thrilled at violence for religion’s sake, the young man set out with the blessing of his leadership to harass and arrest his own people whose faith fell short of his standards and haul them before religious courts.
And the young man would have lived and probably died for this harsh, utterly committed faith, sure of his own heart and of the heart of God. But the strangest thing happened. The One God in whom the young man believed with all his heart showed up. God knocked the young man down and told him he was wrong, wrong about his own heart and about the heart of God.
This story sounds strangely like the tale of a member of the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda. In a sense it is. The young man was not Muslim, he was Jewish. His given name was Saul. Today we call him Saint Paul.
Saul thought he knew his heart and the heart of God. Do not underestimate the depth of his fanaticism. Only the lack of technology limited its power. I myself need little effort to imagine unchanged Saul sitting in a cave on the Afghani border, watching the Twin Towers fall on CNN and nodding in approval.
One Desert Father said, “Of all evil suggestions, the most terrible is the prompting to follow your own heart.” Now that’s really dark, and really counter-cultural—over and over again we are urged to “follow our hearts.” If you do not follow your heart, says popular wisdom, then you are allowing external authority to force you to be untrue to yourself.
Today the Scriptures suggest that we may not really know our own hearts. Our impulses and our most deeply cherished, unexamined beliefs are not necessarily our deepest truth. That poor fellow in Florida who was about to burn the Koran—he was following his heart and his most cherished beliefs. So are many misguided people, small or great. I am still on a journey to listen to my own true heart. Since our true heart is made to rest in God, it takes at least a lifetime to know ourselves even somewhat as God knows us. In the meanwhile, I face the fact that as often as I felt certitude, even a deep sense of passion about my ideals, all too often I have strayed into self-deception. “My people are foolish; they do not know me”, says God in Jeremiah. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” says Paul. “But I received mercy…”
“But I received mercy…” This weekend, we remember the death and destruction worked by young men who were absolutely sure they were right, that God was guiding them, that they were willing to die for their faith and their truth. As we remember, let us humbly ask for the grace to make a better world, not by rushing to assert that our enemies are wrong and we are right. That path leads all too easily to our willingness to make others suffer and die for our rightness. The violence, the single-mindedness, the self-deception is in us, and it awaits us always if we think we always know our own hearts and the heart of God. Our hope is not in our own sense of rightness. Our hope is in the God who is willing to search for us even in our times of anger, fear, and violence. Like a shepherd so single-minded he will leave the other sheep to search, like the woman who quits even cooking food to search her house for one coin, the God who truly knows us will search us out from every crack and crevice we have rolled into chosen for ourselves. Just ask Saul—God searched hard for him and finally had to knock him down to get his attention. Our single-mindedness does not save. The God who searches our minds and looks beneath our illusions and fears—it is this God who saves.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
trust and cost
Proper 18 C 2010
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
Trust in God is hard for me.
That may sound like a surprising admission from a priest. But trust in God has been a lifelong, ongoing, and unfinished project for me.
I envy my youngest daughter’s trust who, when she was three, jumped down the basement steps into her mother’s arms. But then I remember that when I was three I fell down our basement steps while my own mother watched helplessly. I still have dreams that end with my tumbling down a set of stairs.
Today’s Collect asks God to give us the gift of trusting with all our hearts. For me, and I suspect for many of us, that trust is not a simple religious sentiment, but something that we wish we had but must admit that we often do not. That we struggle with trust is understandable—life gives many of us good reasons to struggle with trust.
But we want that sense of trust, we want our lives to be transformed by that trust. And we want that transformation in the face of what God calls us and empowers us to do.
Today it is Jesus himself who presents us with a sharp challenge to trust in God. Jesus turns to us and speaks challenging words, words that I even hesitate to explore in a pulpit for fear that they will drive some people away. Hating father and mother, hating children, carrying crosses, giving up all possessions—Jesus says clearly that admiring him is easy, but following him is hard. One contemporary writer says that Jesus has many fans, but few real followers. So Jesus gives some practical examples of “counting the cost”—make sure you know what you are getting into if you wish to be my follower.
After serving here as rector for 15 years, I have seen us move from being a church who defined ourselves in terms of how we do our liturgy to being a church who tries to live what our liturgy means. Instead of talking about “the right way to do things”, we began to speak of “what does the Gospel call us to do?” “Who is our neighbor and how do we welcome and serve them?” “How does Christ call us to renew our lives?” These questions are hard but they are open questions and they are the right questions, they are Gospel-based questions. Some of the results of engaging these questions are in our midst—renewed outreach to the poor, outreach to women in the sex trade, dental services to the poor, a growing Hispanic presence, an urge to deepen our lives of prayer and discipline, new members with new vision and new hopes. This journey has not been easy. My life was in some ways much easier in those years when I first arrived. Our life together was not as challenging. Sometimes I have wondered if I have asked too much of Saints Peter and Paul, and perhaps even of myself.
But then I hear Gospel texts like this one, and I feel again that strange urge—to learn again how to trust God and to live a Gospel that is not so much soothing as it is challenging. Even as the seasons of our lives change, and as one old rock ‘n roller sang we “find ourselves seeking shelter against the wind”, I find I still love the wind and I hope that we may always be a church that can ask and act on hard questions. I think that is our only hope as a congregation for the future: to fearlessly allow the Master’s words to move us, kindle us, and sometimes disturb us. Count the cost—yes indeed. Many people try out a Gospel path, but now as in the beginning of the Gospel adventure people do fall away when they count the cost. May we be among those who trust and stay.
It is the Old Testament that gives us a note of gentle hope.
Jeremiah goes down to the local potter’s workshop and watches the potter at the wheel. Have you ever seen a potter work? I am always amazed at how many times the pot seems to grow and take shape, only to be touched and collapsed by the potter and spin again from a shapeless lump of clay. I always wonder why one shape is suddenly acceptable to the potter, why she chooses that moment and that shape over all the others. But the potter knows. And the potter makes all the past shapes, curves, flaws, and false starts into part of the pattern. Nothing is wasted.
We can trust the divine Potter to have an artist’s way with us, to make all our stumbling attempts to be a follower of the Master part of the final lovely product. At least, we can long for that trust, and ask for it as a gift. And the gift of trust will be given.
It takes humility to admit that we have a long way to go, that our trust and our faith is small or weak. But that’s a good place to start. God isn’t very interested in finished products. The potter cannot work with a lump of stone or steel. When we pray each day, “Today I begin again to be a follower of you—what would you have me learn and do?”, we allow the divine Artist to make of each of us, and our life as a church, a lovely and surprising work of art.
And we learn to trust that even if we fail and fall, the Potter can make us new.
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33
Trust in God is hard for me.
That may sound like a surprising admission from a priest. But trust in God has been a lifelong, ongoing, and unfinished project for me.
I envy my youngest daughter’s trust who, when she was three, jumped down the basement steps into her mother’s arms. But then I remember that when I was three I fell down our basement steps while my own mother watched helplessly. I still have dreams that end with my tumbling down a set of stairs.
Today’s Collect asks God to give us the gift of trusting with all our hearts. For me, and I suspect for many of us, that trust is not a simple religious sentiment, but something that we wish we had but must admit that we often do not. That we struggle with trust is understandable—life gives many of us good reasons to struggle with trust.
But we want that sense of trust, we want our lives to be transformed by that trust. And we want that transformation in the face of what God calls us and empowers us to do.
Today it is Jesus himself who presents us with a sharp challenge to trust in God. Jesus turns to us and speaks challenging words, words that I even hesitate to explore in a pulpit for fear that they will drive some people away. Hating father and mother, hating children, carrying crosses, giving up all possessions—Jesus says clearly that admiring him is easy, but following him is hard. One contemporary writer says that Jesus has many fans, but few real followers. So Jesus gives some practical examples of “counting the cost”—make sure you know what you are getting into if you wish to be my follower.
After serving here as rector for 15 years, I have seen us move from being a church who defined ourselves in terms of how we do our liturgy to being a church who tries to live what our liturgy means. Instead of talking about “the right way to do things”, we began to speak of “what does the Gospel call us to do?” “Who is our neighbor and how do we welcome and serve them?” “How does Christ call us to renew our lives?” These questions are hard but they are open questions and they are the right questions, they are Gospel-based questions. Some of the results of engaging these questions are in our midst—renewed outreach to the poor, outreach to women in the sex trade, dental services to the poor, a growing Hispanic presence, an urge to deepen our lives of prayer and discipline, new members with new vision and new hopes. This journey has not been easy. My life was in some ways much easier in those years when I first arrived. Our life together was not as challenging. Sometimes I have wondered if I have asked too much of Saints Peter and Paul, and perhaps even of myself.
But then I hear Gospel texts like this one, and I feel again that strange urge—to learn again how to trust God and to live a Gospel that is not so much soothing as it is challenging. Even as the seasons of our lives change, and as one old rock ‘n roller sang we “find ourselves seeking shelter against the wind”, I find I still love the wind and I hope that we may always be a church that can ask and act on hard questions. I think that is our only hope as a congregation for the future: to fearlessly allow the Master’s words to move us, kindle us, and sometimes disturb us. Count the cost—yes indeed. Many people try out a Gospel path, but now as in the beginning of the Gospel adventure people do fall away when they count the cost. May we be among those who trust and stay.
It is the Old Testament that gives us a note of gentle hope.
Jeremiah goes down to the local potter’s workshop and watches the potter at the wheel. Have you ever seen a potter work? I am always amazed at how many times the pot seems to grow and take shape, only to be touched and collapsed by the potter and spin again from a shapeless lump of clay. I always wonder why one shape is suddenly acceptable to the potter, why she chooses that moment and that shape over all the others. But the potter knows. And the potter makes all the past shapes, curves, flaws, and false starts into part of the pattern. Nothing is wasted.
We can trust the divine Potter to have an artist’s way with us, to make all our stumbling attempts to be a follower of the Master part of the final lovely product. At least, we can long for that trust, and ask for it as a gift. And the gift of trust will be given.
It takes humility to admit that we have a long way to go, that our trust and our faith is small or weak. But that’s a good place to start. God isn’t very interested in finished products. The potter cannot work with a lump of stone or steel. When we pray each day, “Today I begin again to be a follower of you—what would you have me learn and do?”, we allow the divine Artist to make of each of us, and our life as a church, a lovely and surprising work of art.
And we learn to trust that even if we fail and fall, the Potter can make us new.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
true religion
Proper 17 C 2010
Sirach 10: 12-18; Ps 112 ; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16;
Luke 14:1, 7-14
“…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.”
I remembered this quote from Rilke this week. Today we prayed my favorite Collect, one that is filled with questions. “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name”—how does God do that and what does it mean? “Increase in us true religion”—in an age full of voices claiming to know what “true religion” is, how can we ourselves know? After “nourish us with all goodness”, the prayer ends almost strangely with “bring forth in us the fruit of good works.”
We Episcopalians are more comfortable with questions than some other folks, and we take Rilke’s advice to “love the questions” more easily than some. We come each Sunday with our questions, questions about God, questions about meaning and sanity in an often-crazy world, and questions about ourselves—how am I to live? How do I deal with the changes in my life? What does this talk about God mean for me really?
“Loving the questions” can be an honest stance, but it can also be cheap grace. We can say “I love the questions”, and simply walk home unchanged and unchallenged, secure in not allowing a single question to move us. I fear that at this juncture of my own life. I want those questions—Who is God? Who am I? How am I to live?—to burn in me and take me somewhere new, where I can see God and the world and others and myself with fresh eyes.
The readings present us with this burning need.
Sirach says, “The beginning of pride is sin; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” I don’t think that Sirach is saying that those who do not cling to approved-of ideas about God will be punished. I think that Sirach urges us to look beyond our own assumptions and know, once again, that we are all beginners in the way of the Spirit. We are created, made in wisdom, but we need the Creator’s ongoing presence and dynamic re-creation in order to fulfill our deepest nature. Daily we are tempted to feel and think and act as if we define ourselves, are self-sufficient. Sirach urges us to a larger life, a more creative imagination of who we are and who God is, and how we are to be.
The writer of Hebrews speaks of how we are to live if our hearts are rooted in our Maker. God the creator and re-creator is the fountain of life and all goodness, each moment overflowing with generosity and abundance. There are moments when our lives seem far from this divine generosity, but the wise heart returns to the deep wellspring of God’s own goodness. And when we do, we shall be changed, we shall live out this abundance in the way that Hebrews counsels us. Hospitality to the stranger, mutual love, honoring our partners, freedom from the love of money—all this flows from walking a dynamic path rooted in the divine wisdom, drinking from the cup of divine abundance.
And that path we walk is the path of freedom.
Once again Jesus finds himself a guest of the Pharisees. Jesus was sharp-eyed to see that the gathering was shaped by privilege and status. What Jesus proposes might seem like doormat spirituality—take the lowest seat. But Jesus’ advice is the path of wisdom. Be free of scrabbling for puny scraps of self-assurance and importance. Be free of that smallness of soul, do not play that game. God’s abundance will lift you if you trust and let your life be shaped by that trust, that overflowing goodness. If you play that fighting-for-status game, eventually the music will stop and someone will push you off the chair.
Welcome each day as the amazing gift of an abundant God. Express that abundance with open hands and hearts and minds. Choose freedom from the status-standards of the world.
That sounds like at least one of those questions. That sounds like “true religion” to me.
Sirach 10: 12-18; Ps 112 ; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16;
Luke 14:1, 7-14
“…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.”
I remembered this quote from Rilke this week. Today we prayed my favorite Collect, one that is filled with questions. “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name”—how does God do that and what does it mean? “Increase in us true religion”—in an age full of voices claiming to know what “true religion” is, how can we ourselves know? After “nourish us with all goodness”, the prayer ends almost strangely with “bring forth in us the fruit of good works.”
We Episcopalians are more comfortable with questions than some other folks, and we take Rilke’s advice to “love the questions” more easily than some. We come each Sunday with our questions, questions about God, questions about meaning and sanity in an often-crazy world, and questions about ourselves—how am I to live? How do I deal with the changes in my life? What does this talk about God mean for me really?
“Loving the questions” can be an honest stance, but it can also be cheap grace. We can say “I love the questions”, and simply walk home unchanged and unchallenged, secure in not allowing a single question to move us. I fear that at this juncture of my own life. I want those questions—Who is God? Who am I? How am I to live?—to burn in me and take me somewhere new, where I can see God and the world and others and myself with fresh eyes.
The readings present us with this burning need.
Sirach says, “The beginning of pride is sin; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” I don’t think that Sirach is saying that those who do not cling to approved-of ideas about God will be punished. I think that Sirach urges us to look beyond our own assumptions and know, once again, that we are all beginners in the way of the Spirit. We are created, made in wisdom, but we need the Creator’s ongoing presence and dynamic re-creation in order to fulfill our deepest nature. Daily we are tempted to feel and think and act as if we define ourselves, are self-sufficient. Sirach urges us to a larger life, a more creative imagination of who we are and who God is, and how we are to be.
The writer of Hebrews speaks of how we are to live if our hearts are rooted in our Maker. God the creator and re-creator is the fountain of life and all goodness, each moment overflowing with generosity and abundance. There are moments when our lives seem far from this divine generosity, but the wise heart returns to the deep wellspring of God’s own goodness. And when we do, we shall be changed, we shall live out this abundance in the way that Hebrews counsels us. Hospitality to the stranger, mutual love, honoring our partners, freedom from the love of money—all this flows from walking a dynamic path rooted in the divine wisdom, drinking from the cup of divine abundance.
And that path we walk is the path of freedom.
Once again Jesus finds himself a guest of the Pharisees. Jesus was sharp-eyed to see that the gathering was shaped by privilege and status. What Jesus proposes might seem like doormat spirituality—take the lowest seat. But Jesus’ advice is the path of wisdom. Be free of scrabbling for puny scraps of self-assurance and importance. Be free of that smallness of soul, do not play that game. God’s abundance will lift you if you trust and let your life be shaped by that trust, that overflowing goodness. If you play that fighting-for-status game, eventually the music will stop and someone will push you off the chair.
Welcome each day as the amazing gift of an abundant God. Express that abundance with open hands and hearts and minds. Choose freedom from the status-standards of the world.
That sounds like at least one of those questions. That sounds like “true religion” to me.
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