Lent 5-B; March 29, 2009
Jeremiah 31:31-34;Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

We shall not, we shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall not be moved.
Just like the tree standing by the water
We shall not be moved.

How many of you remember that as a civil rights anthem? The civil rights movement was, of course, one of the great turning points of human history, when people dug in their heels and said, here we are; we shall not be moved. Ordinary people, poor people, people who had been turned away from the corridors of power, from all rights and privileges: ordinary people stood their ground, would not be moved, would not take the easy way out. It would not be an easy fight, they knew, but they would not take the easy way out.

In this passage we read today from the Gospel of John, people called “the Greeks” come to Jesus to offer him an easy way out of what is beginning to seem to be an inevitable and dangerous confrontation. The “Greeks” are the pagans, the non-Jews. Even they had heard of Jesus’ remarkable teachings, and their presence there, at that festival in Jerusalem, is a sign that Jesus has an out. People other than the Jews would embrace him as their teacher – he could leave this dangerous place, Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee even, and go back with them.

And what is Jesus’ answer? He sings a version of “We shall not be moved.” No, Jesus says. This is the hour, this is the moment: it is only when the grain falls to earth and dies that it grows to bear fruit. It is only when people give up their lives that they find them for eternal life. It is only this moment when the end is so apparently near that is the moment of glory.

We know the civil rights movement was full of religion. People knew they were led by the spirit, that they were walking the way Jesus walked. Bayard Rustin was one of the leaders of that movement, one of Martin Luther King’s closest associates. In 1952, he sent these words in an Easter greeting* to his friends:

Easter in every age . . . recalls the imminence of the impossible victory,
the power of the impotent weak.

From all those years back, Rustin reminds us, followers of Jesus, that we

need to be reminded that Easter is the reality, and that the awesome structures of pomp and power are in the process of disintegration at the moment of their greatest strength.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth … those who love their life lose it … Now is the judgment of this world, now the ruler of this world will be driven out. Think of the circumstances when Jesus said this: he is surrounded by enemies, powerful enemies. His friends are poor peasants and outsiders, the cast-offs of society. NOW is the judgment of this world? The rulers of THIS world will be driven out?

Bayard Rustin knew this, even if it would take more than a decade after he wrote that Easter letter for “the awesome structures of pomp and power” to begin to disintegrate.

Today, on the 5th Sunday of Lent, we are still on this side of Easter; we don’t yet know the ending of the story. Jesus’ words seem mysterious and inexplicable to some, as preposterous bluster to others. How can a world be put back together after its destruction?

Jeremiah, writing hundreds of years earlier, writes to the people of Israel in just such a situation. They are in captivity in Babylon, their city and nation destroyed, and God sends Jeremiah to them in exile. Yes, you broke that covenant – you broke my heart, God says – but I am still with you. I love you, I will be with you. My law will no longer be something external, something you can break or change at will. Now I will be in your hearts, God says. Not out there; in here. Wondrous, wondrous love.

The worst can happen, Jeremiah says to the people, but God is still there. The world can be dark and discouraging, but God is still there. God’s judgment will prevail, God’s glory will shine. What is hard, today, is to hear Jeremiah’s good news next to what Jesus says.

What is hard, today, is that mostly we hear all too clearly the words of death and judgment; we don’t yet know what Jesus means by bearing fruit or eternal life or glory out of thunder.

We may not yet, but we will.

* I thank my friend Gale Kenny for calling my attention to these words of Bayard Rustin, quoted by David L. Chappell in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 56

House of Prayer, House of Bread

Lent 3-B
March 12, 2009
Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

I’m going to start this week’s sermon where I left off last week:

Most people in the world have the deck stacked against them. This is not news to us here in Brockton. Many people in the world don’t get enough to eat, don’t have a decent place to live, don’t have good medical care, don’t have the opportunity to earn a living. What does that have to do with us?

What does it mean, then, to be a follower of Jesus?

Let’s look again at these Millennium Development Goals:

End Poverty and Hunger
Universal Education
Gender Equality
Child Health
Maternal Health
Combat HIV/AIDS
Environmental Sustainability
Global Partnership

This is what I said about them last week:

These were set by the United Nations, and have become a benchmark for relief and development workers the world over. My problem with them is that they have been used by all sorts of people – especially church people – to focus our attention and efforts on the suffering of our neighbors far away, at the expense, I believe, of our attempts to create a just society here, to change the structures of our neighborhood, to improve the lives of our neighbors.

Yet look again at this list: what would it mean to work toward the millennium development goals here, in Brockton, in this neighborhood we so hopefully call “PleasantGreen?” Read this list again, think of Brockton. Take up your cross, Jesus said, and follow me.

It does not always happen that my sermons are on the cutting edge of “what’s happening now” in the Episcopal Church, but this week I was very surprised to read these words from the Presiding Bishop:

The Episcopal Church focus on the Millennium Development Goals has raised consciousness in our own faith communities and the broader culture about the need to address abject poverty in developing nations. This work has increased mission fervor and deepened spirituality. We need to bring the same passion, organization, and accountability to our work on domestic poverty – in the poorest regions of the United States. Social statistics and the conditions of life are quite similar in the poorest areas, both in the U.S. and abroad, but the MDGs are addressed solely to poverty in the developing world. We need to use both lenses (international and domestic; distance and near vision) to see the least among us and around us.

On Friday, the Presiding Bishop released a report on how the Episcopal Church can take seriously – and seriously support – the kind of work we are doing right here in Brockton.

The group that met to develop this report came up with another list, the Eleven Essentials of Justice:

Affordable food
Employment
Affordable quality childcare
Education
Healthcare
A just immigration policy
Cultural affirmation
Equal protection under the law
Economic opportunity
A healthy environment
Housing

It also seems like the Episcopal Church is getting ready to re-organize its institutional life to make some changes in who we are as the people of God, living and working in communities like this – who we are as the people of God, as agents of social transformation – who we are as the people of God who can make a difference in communities like this and in the lives of the people – us -- who live here.

… the Episcopal Church commits to participating in combating domestic poverty by revitalizing our often under-utilized buildings in rural, suburban and urban areas so that we may minister with the marginalized and become transformational communities working to eradicate domestic poverty.

… In addition to the demographic tools used currently for church growth and outreach, we will commit to partnering with local groups working to alleviate poverty.

We ask a reassessment of our budgets to be aligned with the gospel mandate of addressing domestic poverty.

Domestic poverty is multifaceted … We are called as Christians to stand with the poor and fight for the dignity of all people. Our presence in many poor communities is predicted by the existence of Episcopal Church buildings, many in a state of disrepair or indebtedness. We believe that these buildings are a blessing to be used for the people of the community.

Which brings us to our gospel for today: Jesus threw the money changers out of the Temple because they were not living up to the way God said people should live. They were selling short. They were squandering the resources of God’s creation, resources that were intended to be open and free for everyone. The money changers were trying to fulfill the law by getting around a difficult situation: no one wanted to use dirty Roman money to buy the animals they would sacrifice in the Temple – sacrifices they piously wanted to make to repent for their sins and ask God’s forgiveness. So the money changers took dirty Roman money and gave them Temple money, so the people could buy their sacrificial offerings.

What angered Jesus was how people could take the great, powerful, comprehensive understanding of the law as the way to live out love of God and love of neighbor – to take the law based on those 10 commandments Moses received – and reduce it to an exchange rate. Jesus is going to Wall Street, and pulling the power cords on the trading floor, exposing sub-prime mortgage rates as crimes not only against the poor people who were stuck with them but as crimes against God.

What we are doing here is what Jesus would have us do. This house of prayer is also a house of bread. A house of hope. A house of community and friendship. How timely that the rest of the Episcopal Church is catching up with what God has been calling us to do and to be.

What do the Millennium Development Goals have to do with Brockton?

Lent 2-B March 8, 2009
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16;Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38

When do we get to the good parts? To the easy stuff? To the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? It seems like we spend all our time struggling, working through difficult times, keeping our chins up. When do we get a break? When does our ship come in?

Getting to Easter is not, as one preacher I know said, the next stop after our spring tune-up at the spa or wardrobe refresher at the shopping mall.[i] We are invited instead into this close examination of our relationship with God, and here, in the midst of all that examination, well, we come upon some difficult texts.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if the Bible were fully of easy stories. How useful would those be during these days, of economic hardship, of people losing their jobs, of services being cut, of homes lost to bad bank loans.

Let’s cut dear old St. Peter some slack: we don’t like hearing the tough news any more than he does. Peter does not want to hear what Jesus tells him, that suffering and death will come, are inevitable. Jesus’ words are not welcome ones; let’s not kid ourselves.

The Bible is not full of easy stories, but it is full of God – of God wanting to be in relationship with us, with us human beings. If God is the center of the universe, the all-important creator, then the Bible is the story of how much this God want us close. The Bible is the story of how God keeps trying, even though we fail, drift away, deny, wander, pay attention to other things.

The story of Abraham and Sarah is the story of God’s third big try in getting us humans into a loving relationship with God. The first – creation. Adam and Eve pulled away from God, and God got angry and threw them out of the garden. The second – the flood and the rainbow. We read this last week. God was angry, so angry, with us human beings that he killed all of us except one family, who floated in a boat, on a destroyed earth, for 40 days. I think that experience terrified God – God repented of that anger-filled destruction, and said no more.

Today, what do we have in the story of Abraham and Sarah? God tries again. Here, God says. We are bound together – me to you, you to me, together. As a sign of this love I hold for you, I promise you this: you will have a future. You will have a child, and that child will give you as many descendents as there are stars in the sky. You who are wandering in the wilderness: you will have a home. You who do not know what to believe in: you will have a God.

We are followers of God – all of us. That is why we are here. At some point in our lives someone assured us that God loves us. Someone told us some version of this Abraham and Sarah story, and for us, it took. We believed it. Now it is up to us: how can we make other people believe this Good News of God on our side, people who may not have heard it before? People who may not think it applies to them? People who are caught up in some very non-God-like things?

Most people in the world have the deck stacked against them. This is not news to us here in Brockton. Many people in the world don’t get enough to eat, don’t have a decent place to live, don’t have good medical care, don’t have the opportunity to earn a living. What does that have to do with us?

What does it mean, then, to be a follower of Jesus?

God likes to talk about a covenant: I will love you, God says, and because I love you, I want you to do some things for me, and for each other. Love me, love your neighbor as yourself. I will keep my side of the covenant; it is up to you to keep yours. Being a follower of Jesus means keeping our side of the covenant. It means loving our neighbors as our selves.

We have close-in neighbors: our literal next-door neighbors, wherever we live. The neighbors of this church. The people who come to lunch, who are finding more community and recreation in our modest afternoon programs. Being a follower of Jesus means doing what we can to make our neighborhood a better place to live.

We also have far away neighbors, and yes, there is a connection between needs of the far-off and the right-next-door.

Look at this list of the Millennium Development Goals.

End Poverty and Hunger

Universal Education

Gender Equality

Child Health

Maternal Health

Combat HIV/AIDS

Environmental Sustainability

Global Partnership

These were set by the United Nations, and have become a benchmark for relief and development workers the world over. My problem with them is that they have been used by all sorts of people – especially church people – to focus our attention and efforts on the suffering of our neighbors far away, at the expense, I believe, of our attempts to create a just society here, to change the structures of our neighborhood, to improve the lives of our neighbors.

Yet look again at this list: what would it mean to work toward the millennium development goals here, in Brockton, in this neighborhood we so hopefully call “PleasantGreen?” Read this list again, think of Brockton. Take up your cross, Jesus said, and follow me.

---

[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Late Bloomer”

Has God had it?

Lent 1-B March 1, 2009
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

God is going to have to have a word with Barack Obama, because God has had enough of the war in Iraq. The President’s “revised” timetable is, I am afraid, not fast enough for God.
For God has had enough: not only of the war in Iraq but of what’s going on in Pakistan and Afghanistan, too. God has had enough of Al Qaeda’s sneaky bomb tricks and the Taliban’s violence. God has had enough of Robert Mugabe’s running Zimbabwe into the ground. God has had enough of those drug and gun gangsters in Mexico, of the kidnappers in Columbia, of the Crips and Bloods and of their buddies, the Green Street Gang right here in Brockton. God has had enough.
God had had enough of everybody, except Noah. God was sick of the whole violent lot, so God flooded the earth and got rid of everybody, except Noah and his family – and of course, the animals. All those animals on that ark. That was a long 40 days.
God had had enough of those evil-doers, and saved the good, yes, but I think our reading today shows us that God’s mind had changed. Today’s reading shows that God repented of that terrible, awful wrath, of that flood of death and destruction. God had a taste of that violence and retribution that humans love so much, and God repented. God realized that violence and retribution were not the way to go. No more, God said. I won’t do this any more. I won’t be the one who causes the violence. Let’s stop it now. I will be the first one to offer a sign of peace.
God has not gone back on God’s promise but I think we humans have not kept up our part of the bargain. Some of that all too human virus of violence and destruction snuck on board and hid on the ark. It spread out into the world just as it was drying up from the flood, and we know all too well what has happened ever since.
Fast forward a few hundred years to Jesus, standing in the rushing waters of the River Jordan. Jesus, thrown by the spirit into the wilderness, like Noah on the flooded seas, for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus, tempted by Satan and all those all-too-human sins of violence and retribution, of death and destruction, of envy, greed, oppression, cruelty.
But like the rainbow in the clouds, the angels came to Jesus, feeding him, taking care of him, supporting him in the struggle against sin and temptation. There in that desert Jesus faced death and destruction – the dark side of human experience – and came out on the other side. With the angels on his side and the rainbow over head, he realized that despite all its power to strike terror into the human, death was not the final answer. Death would not win. Death would not define what it meant to be human. Sin would not rule the day.
We here at the corner of Not-so-Pleasant and Warren know what it is like to look death in the face. Like Jesus, we also know what it is to be down and out, exhausted on the desert floor, and look up to see a rainbow in the sky. We know what it means to have angels look after us. We know what it is like to have a God who has had enough with the bad stuff, and who is here with us, now, in the middle of everything. We know what it is like to have a God who stands with us, who send angels into our very midst.
I was talking with a parishioner this week, who said, “I really like our little congregation.” She could have said, our little congregation of misfits and oddballs, of people who would not feel comfortable in other churches, of people who are honest about how Satan comes to tempt us with anger or violence or loneliness or drug abuse. She could have said, our little congregation of angels, who help each other out in times of need, who hold rainbows over each other’s heads, who are carriers of the promise that God gave us so many thousands of years ago, that God will be with us, that God is with us, that God is always with us.
Amen.

Listen up, people!

Last Epiphany B Feb. 22, 2009

2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9

“This is my son, the Beloved. Listen to him!”

What does it mean to listen – truly listen? To listen to God? To another person?

To list

en to what is going on in the world around us?

To listen means more than mere hearing, the mere physical sensation of sound waves hitting the ear drum. The old English roots of “to listen” are “to pay attention.” When we truly listen we lean in toward the person who commands our attention.

These past weeks we have been listening to stories of Jesus healing people. If we really paid attention to those stories, we would see that they are not about the mere physical healing, but about restoration – the person is brought back into community, into wholeness, in her family, into his society.

It is easy to be dazzled by God – to see so much glory or majesty or distance or power that we, perhaps, miss the point. In this story where Jesus and his disciples climb the mountain, something astounding happens – so astounding that the disciples do not know what to make of it. Jesus is transfigured – changed – morphed – yet all that dazzling glory gets in the way. The disciples are afraid – who wouldn’t be? Rather than leaning in, paying attention to what is going on on that blazing mountain, they step back. They want to contain the experience, by building shelters, erecting tents, hiding away this thing so glorious that they can barely stand it. They are so missing the point that God has to shout out from the cloud, Hey you! Stop running around! THIS is my Son, the one I love. Listen to him!

Jesus stands there with Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. Both Moses and Elijah acted for God when things were bad for the people – Moses was the liberator who brought the people out of Egypt, the one who put up with their grumbling in the wilderness, the one who told them how God wanted them to live. Elijah, the man of God, lived when the people were ruled by corrupt kings and were tempted to worship other gods. Both Moses and Elijah are massive figures in Jewish memory and imagination. Jesus is standing on that mountaintop with the A Team, definitely.

But think on this: neither Moses nor Elijah got to the finish line. Moses died, having seen the Promised Land to which he was leading the people, but not able to cross over. Our story today, about Elijah leaving earth in the chariot of fire, is a story also of not being finished. There is more work to do, and Elisha, Elijah’s successor, feels unready to take up the task. What does is say that Jesus stands there with these two mighty ones?

This story is smack dab in the middle of the Gospel of Mark. From this point onward, Jesus is heading toward Jerusalem. Soon after these verses, Jesus tells the disciples the hard news of what they will face: the confrontations with the powers, the heavy burden of the cross, the inevitable suffering and death.

The disciples no more want to listen to this hard news than they can comprehend the dazzling glory of the mountain. Listening to Jesus now involves much more than they counted on when they became his disciples.

We are about to enter Lent; the church has always put this lesson of Jesus on the mountaintop, of God shouting out, “Listen to him,” on this Sunday before the beginning of Lent.

Lent is the time, then, when we are to be listening to God. When we are supposed to be paying attention to what God is doing in the world. In that sense, then, Lent is the season of solidarity. It is the season when we pay attention to what is going on – when we notice who is sick and in need of healing. When we notice what is out of whack in the world, what needs to be restored. When we listen to the cries and whispers, the hopes and dreams, of God’s people, the people God has put in our care.

Lent is the time we listen to Jesus. We try out that heavy cross a little bit. We pay attention to that dazzling glory. And we wait, in the days of lengthening daylight, for the great time of trial that lies ahead. Listen.