Well, ok, a couple weeks behind ...

It's been quite busy, as more energy and interest builds in our St. Paul's Community, our ideas for a day community center for people who have few other places to go during the day. We'll collaborate with local friends, agencies, businesses, churches, to open our parish hall to people in need. Lots to do -- the need is great.
A terrific day on Pleasant Street, today! Tony, from the clothing store, and Fred, from the laundromat, organized dozens of teens and adults to pluck weeks and sweep trash from the sidewalks. They fed everyone with a picnic on our front lawn. Nice, indeed, to participate in a community ritual of hope and reconstruction.
What would Jesus do in such a time and place? No doubt pick up the rake and join in.
There probably was a time when Pleasant Street was always clean and tidy -- when it was Pleasant, indeed -- perhaps even a green and pleasant land. Some people would say, it's just chaos here now, a mess, why bother to clean it up today? "They" will just trash it tomorrow.
What would Jesus do? I don't think he'd give up on Pleasant Street; I think he'd pitch in.

God doesn't give up on us, any of us. Read on ...

Proper 18 C 9-9-2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 18:1-11

Psalm 139 Philemon 1-21 Luke 14: 25-33

When I was growing up, our neighbor was a potter. He was a very fine potter, taught in an art school, and made wonderful sculptures. But in order to pay the bills, to feed a family of four children and to fix up an old farmhouse with a barn for a studio, he had to make these, these blue bowls. He made hundreds of them, and they are lovely. They are smooth, perfect, whole, and the blue glaze he developed himself. I think these blue bowls, as beautiful as they are, became a burden to him. Now that he is retired, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t make blue bowls anymore.

We children were welcome to visit Henry in his studio. Sometimes he would give us clay to play with, or we could look at the racks of pots waiting to be fired in the silo kiln, or watch them be pulled out, finished, put on racks to cool. One day one pot – a small vase – came out not a perfect blue but a mottled brown and green – an unnatural color, really. Henry was ready to throw it out. Wait, I said. Can I have it? It was shaped perfectly; it was only the color that was wrong. Henry looked at his wife. An artist of his skill would of course smash any pots not up to his standards, especially pots that were supposed to be fired in his signature blue glaze, pots that were the livelihood for his family. Henry looked at the pot. His wife looked at me, and then said, “Oh, come on, Hank. Let her have it.” It’s a treasure of mine, I love the mottled color, the bumpy surface. He couldn’t sell it. He would have destroyed it, but it is quite fine and unusual indeed.

The image of the potter, from the prophet Jeremiah, is a familiar one. “You are the potter,” the Christian crooners sing, “I am the clay.” The lesson Jeremiah took from his visit to the potter’s studio was also one of an imperfect creation, a flawed pot in the potter’s hands, which he nonetheless reshaped into something pleasing and beautiful. This flawed pot, for Jeremiah, was the people of Israel, who had wandered from God – who had even done evil. They were so flawed, as Jeremiah saw it, that God had every reason to smash them to the ground. But like the patient potter, God will try again. God will implore the people of Israel to try again. God will even threaten them with destruction. But what God really wants is for them to come back. The prophet Jeremiah might mention a pot like this thrown on a potter’s wheel, but what he is really talking about is, about our relationship with God, and how God yearns for us and has created us as perfectly, as minutely, as carefully, as this potter created this bowl.

It’s a busy world, 2007. How do we find God, this God whom Jeremiah says is looking for us? Is God there among the hundreds of cable TV channels at our disposal? Does God hang among the racks of dresses at Macy’s? Is God a guest at our weekend picnics, or jumping in the waves at the beach? We who come to church every Sunday might think we have it all figured out: God is locked up here, waiting for us. Well, yes, God is here, and we do meet God – in the bread and wine, in the fellowship at coffee hour, with each other, serving lunch at St. Paul’s Table.

Here, God rules. Here is our Sabbath place, the place where we find companionship. As one wise rabbi describes this Sabbath place, "There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control, but to share."[1] It is a place where we can listen to hard lessons, like today’s lesson from Luke, where Jesus tells us to leave our families to follow him – where Jesus tells us to lay a solid foundation to our work – where Jesus advises us not to enter into a war we cannot win. We don’t have the absolute answers to the questions those stories pose, but like the potter we can take those bits of clay and work them into something pleasing, something beautiful, something meaningful, something we can share.

Life is full of tough questions like the ones we read in today’s gospel, and all of us yearn for some time to stop and think and figure things out – we yearn for some people with whom to share our struggles, and we would like a little refreshment and nourishment along the way. We are a tiny group, but we have kind of figured out how to do those things for ourselves, here and in our relationships with each other.

But what about people who have not yet stumbled across our threshold? They are still looking for something meaningful, for community, for refreshment, for something – the word, the gesture, the music – that will change their lives.

How many of you have been to Starbucks?

Starbucks was the idea of one man who visited Italy and realized that coffee houses there were not just for getting coffee.[2] They were, as he said, the “third place” in people’s lives, between work and home, a place where people lingered, where they met other people. He found that these places were attractive, welcoming, inviting. “Everything matters,” Starbucks would say. Here’s your coffee, but here’s also a comfy chair to sit in while you drink it, and here’s today’s paper, and some nice music, and someone across the table you can have a conversation with. Location matters for Starbucks. They are located at the busy places in town, where many people’s paths cross; not isolated but central, easy to find, open.

If the point was just coffee, well, you could go anywhere for coffee, any hole in the wall, any lunch counter, even make it at home, alone. But Starbucks took that lump of clay, that ordinary, kind of misshapen thing, and reformed it into something pleasant -- maybe not as beautiful as this blue bowl, but certainly into something that gives people a respite in their busy lives.

God is the potter; we are the clay. How is God re-forming and re-shaping our lives, re-forming us into disciples and followers of Jesus? Where is your lump of clay, and what might your blue bowl look like? How is God re-forming and re-shaping our life as a community? If we open our doors even more, invite more people in to this place of respite and community, how will it change us? What shape will we be in when God has reformed our clay?

---

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, TheSabbath

[2] "Cafes of community: the Starbucks principle" by Billy Coburn. Strategic Adult Ministries Journal, (Vol 18, No 5, Issue 145). Pages 8-9.

New Look, New Start, New Paint, New Garden

No picture yet, but you MUST come to St. Paul's and see our renovations:
new red door -- not "fire engine" red but a true deep Henry Hobson Richardson-Frank Lloyd Wright red, a red that I think Ralph Adams Cram, the original architect of the building, would like.
Secondly, the interiors of both of our entrances have been painted -- clean, welcoming, cheerful -- Come on in!!
Thirdly, a garden! Well, there has always been a garden outside the chapel door, but today I planted some mums -- lovely fall mums, donated by a faithful donor. Come by, quite nice, indeed!

Here is last week's sermon -- it's about mission and hospitality. And a clean, welcoming entrance, nicely painted and fresh, is a good start. Come and see.

Proper 17 C 9/2/2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81 Hebrews 13:1-8,10-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14

These lessons today are about two things:

Mission is something you give away.

Mission is the work of God.

“Mission” is a buzzword in today’s corporate culture. Businesses follow mission plans and boards write mission statements.

But “mission” as we use it, as God uses it, is not about the bottom line. “Customer satisfaction” is not a mission, nor is “meeting our target goals” nor even “our mission is to get 500 more people in here every Sunday so we can pay our bills.”

No, those things are not part of God’s mission. They do not, as Jeremiah would say, spring from the fountain of living water. Such mission statements are more in the category of the cracked cisterns of our own making. In the words of the old Prayer Book, such things are among ‘the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

When it is not being used as a corporate slogan, “mission” is kind of a dusty word. In some contexts it has a very bad rap indeed. “Mission” is something that went with “empire,” and “missionaries” accompanied invading armies, and built institutions and came to care more about institutional survival than they did about the original impulse which sent them out into the world in the first place.

That original impulse is the mission of God, which, when we first hear it, sends us out into the world with urgency and fire. We are doing God’s work, which is to help bring God and the world closer together.

Which brings us to the point of today’s parable: hospitality.

The parables of Jesus are not wise sayings, or universal declarations. They are stories which always point us back to ourselves and to our relationship with God. When Jesus talks about hospitality, what is he then saying about us, about our relationship with God, about our participation in this mission work of God?

Mission work is hospitality, and it is hospitality given away – absolutely given away to people who can never hope to afford to be able to pay you back. In the economy of the ancient near east, you would receive a dinner invitation as a mark of status: the status of your host would be somehow improved by your accepting her invitation, and your status as a guest would be enhanced, and then you would invite your host back to have dinner at your house, and so it would go: gracious, kind, hospitable – but reciprocal. You ate; you owed. Such patterns served to keep social relationships intact.

But God’s hospitality serves to upset social relationships. You don’t invite the high-status people to dinner; you invite the low-status. Everybody gets a seat at God’s table, and you don’t get any brownie points for the best outfit or the fanciest college degree or the highest paying job. The first guests to be seated are the ones not on the social register – the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, to be exact – the ones who, as a matter of fact, are on God’s A-list for all the best parties. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews might say, you never know when you welcome in that stranger that you have entertained an angel unawares.

Now we certainly do not do this hospitality perfectly. All too often this kind of hospitality is more like charity, with the “have’s” playing the parts of the Ladies Bountiful with the “have-not’s.” No, in God’s mission, around God’s table, with God’s seating chart, everyone is equal. At God’s table, we all eat family style, and when God passes around that big bowl of green beans, yes, the ones who are hungriest get to eat first, but there will be plenty – more than enough – to go around.

Mission – doing God’s work – is not a zero sum game. It doesn’t get used up. There is no bottom line. Just when you think your old Aunt Tilly, so crippled up with arthritis, has just eaten the last slice of roast beef, why the next thing you know, someone else has come in, and Tilly has gotten up and served this newcomer a plate of God’s best prime ribs. At God’s table, everyone is a guest, and everyone a host. It’s a beggar’s banquet with every place fit for a king.

So let’s not get too puffed up here about what we are doing. We are not inventing any wheel with this “new mission” in Brockton. It’s not St. Paul’s Table downstairs; it’s God’s Table, just as this is God’s Table, where we gather each Sunday, each one of us a beggar, starving for the sustenance that only God can provide – each one of us a king, looking out for the weaker ones among us who need a better place in line. This is where we come when our cisterns are empty. This is where the fountains flow with living water. Come. It’s time to eat and drink.

Now, I did not put this poem by George Herbert in the sermon, but it fits. It's a love song to Jesus, from an ordinary person, who recognizes just what a gracious, abundant gift God gives us, each day, each week, even. Come and see.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.

Some sad news ...

A good friend died this week: Barney Farnham. He was a very kind man, a priest, a risk-taker, a gentle soul, who did indeed listen for the voice of the Spirit moving among us. Here is his obituary from the Baltimore Sun, which does not mention his summer duties. He served the parish in Blue Mountain Lake, NY, where we worship every summer, where the congregation gives more than half of its income away to folks who struggle to make a living in the Adirondacks. We never got the chance to have our annual summer evening of dinner and drinks and real conversation. He is missed.

I have also missed a couple weeks of sermons to post!! This is the one from August 19. "God expects a lot from us," I begin. Yes, indeed. When God hands us turmoil -- like moving (!) -- like the death of a beloved friend -- like uncertainty about where we are to go next -- not to mention those things which cause us deep despair, like the global climate change we have created, or the war in Iraq we let happen, or the homeless we let sleep on our city streets ... yes, God expects a lot from us.

Proper 15 C 8/19/2007 St. Paul’s Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80 Hebrews11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56

God, I am afraid, expects a lot from us.

This passage from Isaiah, for example, is an impassioned plea. Isaiah begs the faithless people (us) to get back with God, God the heart-broken and bereft, God the anguished, feeling abandoned. If God’s anger seems over the top, it’s because God’s investment in the people – in us -- has been so high. God expects, well, those same old things. God expects us to hold up our part of the relationship with God, by showing love, hospitality, generosity, service with all our neighbors. That is the seed God has planted in us, God’s garden, and God expects that seed to flourish.

Jesus, I am afraid, also expects a lot from us.

Today’s gospel is a difficult passage for those of us who look to Jesus for a little peace and quiet in our lives. According to this passage, we won’t get it. This is Jesus as the disturber of the peace, the upsetter of the apple cart, the one who will soon overturn the tables of the money changers and all the business-as-usual that represents. Fire, stress, division, clouds rising, wind blowing, scorching heat: when we pray for Jesus to come among us, this is what we will get. When we ask Jesus to come into our lives, we had better be prepared for change.

Ninety years ago the world was in turmoil, and people in the countries which were engaged in bloody and violent war believed that everything they had come to rely on was shattered. Many thoughtful people were shocked that human beings could behave as barbarically as they were doing on the battlefields of Europe. In this all-out war, towns were destroyed, families shattered, whole populations displaced. The painful irony of the First World War is that it came after an era hailed as one of great progress: for society, for science, for peace and prosperity, for Christianity. The spreading empires of the great European Christian powers, as well as the missionary efforts here, across North America, surely meant the world was becoming a better place, with the dawning of a new, harmonious day.

But with the horror of the First World War, those progressive hopes were gone. Rather than Jesus the bland, pious and optimistic, a new understanding of God in the world had to emerge. "The only safe place for the Christian in this life is in the center of the storm, in the midst of the battle, for that is precisely where Jesus is,” wrote German theologian Karl Barth, who lived through the First World War, and whose theology was a life-long reflection on that experience. God meets us, Barth says, where life is the hardest: where violence and anger erupts in families and among friends; where people are suffering and starving; where the demands of the gospel pit even people who love each other against each other. Barth knew that a Jesus depicted as harmonious and sociable could not sustain people wrenched from all their moorings, a people plunged into a social conflict not of their own making: "To defend the poor,” he wrote, “provokes the anger of the rich; to defend the outcast enrages the in-group; to support a fair wage irritates the robber-barons, to call for peace incites others to war."

The urgency we read in the 2000-year-old gospel, or the 80-year-old writings of Karl Barth is the urgency of a world out of balance. The demands of the prophet Isaiah 800 years before the birth of Christ could be written today, as God cries in anguish over young murder victims on the summer streets of Brockton, or over this seemingly unwinnable-by-any-side war in Iraq. Do we read the signs of the times any better than we predict the weather? Not if the people of New Orleans left vulnerable by the governments they thought were protecting them are any measure – or the people of Haiti, having lost every roll of the dice in the global economy, who fear the next hurricane that will wash their poor soil and poor people into the sea. It’s this world that is out of balance, and we know it, and God knows it, and only heaven can help us now.

Jesus may be expecting extraordinary things from us, but Jesus is not expecting us to go it alone. Jesus, Emmanuel, the God-with-us, also takes us up into God, right into the heart of the divine activity. We are not only following Jesus, doing what Jesus would have us do, but when we are doing God’s work of repairing this broken world, it is Christ working through us.

This gospel passage is about what we do when we see the fractures and terror of the world around us, about what we do when things have gone awry. The number of murders here in Brockton is a sign, pointing to deep social and personal problems, to a lack of well-paying and meaningful work, to a lack of decent, affordable places to live, to a surplus of vital young people with time on their hands and death-dealing drugs and guns too easy to find. What Jesus is saying is when we see those things, when our eyes are opened to the signs of the times and we can measure how far off we have come from the people God created us to be, then there is hope. Then the work of change, of healing, of rebuilding can begin.

BACK AT WORK!

We've had vacation, moved, more or less, and are back in town. The adventure begins: of creating a new and revitalized presence of the Episcopal Church here in Brockton.
Challenges hit us immediately this week: 11 murders already this year on the streets and in the homes of these people. Domestic violence, crimes of passion, anger, fueled by drugs and alcohol and the craziness they engender. St. Paul's Table, where we feed 75 people a day who have no where else to eat lunch, is a place of hope and hospitality, but also of challenge as we struggle to do all this on a shoestring budget and with good-hearted volunteers.
I spent two days last week with the federal government -- a workshop for community and faith-based organizations on how to sustain our work for the long haul. As one seasoned organizer told us, our communities need our work. People count on us, and we have an obligation to live up to their expectations that we will be there and do the work they call us -- and God calls us -- to do. For the moment, that is providing lunch and hospitality. Maybe soon there will be more for us to do, here at the corner of Pleasant and Warren.
Parishioners told me not to post my sermons BEFORE I preached them, so here is last week's. Things are heating up for Jesus, and by Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke ...

Proper 14-C Aug. 12, 2007 St. Paul’s
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Psalm 50 Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Moving is not easy.

I think our family’s move to Brockton has been one of the longest on record – maybe, by the end of the week, we’ll have our worldly goods all in one place. But then, within a few days, two of our children will leave on their own journey to adulthood: off to college.

Even though we have not been quite living in tents, as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes Abraham and Sarah, we have been feeling just as unsettled, just as temporary. I suppose, if one were young, that kind of unsettlement would be fun. The movement would be exciting. But in advanced age, like Abraham and Sarah’s, it can’t be fun. It’s not the kind of excitement we need! So when we really think about our own life experiences – moving to a new house, immigrating to a new country or a new city, having children leave home -- and then read carefully about the lives of people in the Bible, we can find texture in those stories that make them seem real, and up-to-date. OK. So Abraham and Sarah were on a mission from God; OK, they were faithful, obedient. But all that movement, that living in a foreign land, in temporary housing, waiting for something permanent to be built: they set out, not knowing where they were going! It certainly wasn’t easy for that old couple, and it probably wasn’t fun. All they had was a promise: someday all this will be yours, descendents as numerous as the stars in heaven. Someday no longer strangers or foreigners, but at home, on a firm foundation, in the beautiful city of God.

One of the things that disturb me about Christians is when they get all too certain about right and wrong. Many Christians must be truly ignorant about the Old Testament because they read it so selectively. Take today’s reading from Isaiah. Chapter 1, verse 10: God is chastising the people of Sodom and Gomorrah for their sin. God is angry. But this passage is NOT about homosexuality. God is angry because these people are wasting their time with the blood sacrifices of bulls, goats and lambs. They are praying the wrong way, and apparently God is sick of it. Then Isaiah lists the evil the people are doing, the evil God wants them to stop: they are avoiding justice, they are condemning the oppressed, they are abandoning orphans and widows, the poor and the dispossessed of their cities. Amazingly – and I think many Christians never understand this – God even says, “Come now, let us argue it out.” God condemns these sins -- red as crimson – but God believes in the relationship – God is willing to argue, to persuade, to cajole the people into doing good. This is not about the merely personal. Through prophets like Isaiah, God is calling the PEOPLE of God to repent, to cease to do evil and to learn to do good. God doesn’t care about a little goat here, a little lamb there, the sacrificial behavior that makes us think we can get off the hook. God cares about the big picture: be obedient to that, like Abraham and Sarah, and you shall eat the good of the land. God’s promises of abundance are as big as God’s demands for justice.

Jesus brings an even greater sense of urgency to these demands of God. “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” Be alert when the master comes, for the Son of Man will come at an unexpected hour. I’ve said this before, that each of the four Gospels gives us a slightly different picture of Jesus. Here in Luke, many scholars say, we see Jesus at his most powerful. In his first speech, in his hometown synagogue, remember, he quoted Isaiah, saying that he was come to set prisoners free, to enact those demands of God for justice and compassion. Luke’s Jesus is a liberator, a healer of the broken-hearted and ill, the one to restore the outcast to the center of God’s promises of abundance, the one who gives us the example of what it means to do good. Jesus sees the big picture – God’s big picture – and is impatient with those who are not ready to act on it.

We people of God are stuck in two places: we live knowing the promise of the heavenly city, the place of God’s reign of justice and mercy, and yet we also live in our flimsy and portable tents. We are strangers and foreigners and sojourners, knowing our true home is up ahead, leaving our past behind knowing we cannot look back. We know what it is like to live in places where thieves can break in, where the rules are unfair, where the dice is loaded and the deck is stacked against us. But like Abraham and Sarah, we live in the promise and hope for that better country. And because we do, because we press on, and struggle, and even though we don’t always have much fun or feel we are making much progress, God is with us. Unlike those foolish people making foolish sacrifices, focusing on foolish small-minded things, God is not ashamed to be called our God. God is preparing that heavenly city, and welcoming us home.

Put your hand to the plow and don't look back

Missionary journeys and the end of empire ...
Today's lessons made me ponder the end of the Anglican Communion, as I was reminded of the end of the British Empire. Ten years ago, you'll remember, this weekend, the British returned Hong Kong to China.
Twenty-seven years ago, and a few weeks, I was ordained, and the church into which I was ordained no longer exists.
But hasn't Jesus been telling us this all along, not to put our faith in empires, to put our hand to the plow and not look back?? To go with Jesus on a missionary journey is a scary thing. Some churches, with full pews and large pledged incomes, have the luxury of pretending that those scary missionary journeys, strict and spare, are not for them. They are. They are for all of us, if we want an Episcopal Church that reflects the gospel imperative -- if we want an Episcopal Church at all. Put your hand to the plow and don't look back.

Proper 8-C July 1, 2007 St. Paul’s
1 Kings 2:1, 6-14 Psalm 77 Galatians 5:1, 13-25 Luke 9:51-62

Ten years ago the United Kingdom handed over a bit of its empire. It returned Hong Kong to China. There was once a time when Christianity and empire went together, and for many many years, the sun never set on the British Empire – which included the Church of England. In commemoration of those years, let us sing two stanzas of Hymn 24 – stanzas 3 and 4.

As o'er each continent and island
the dawn leads on another day
the voice of prayer is never silent,
nor dies the strain of praise away.

So be it, Lord, thy throne shall never,
like earth's proud empires, pass away;
thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
till all thy creatures own thy sway.

Many of us are the products of that imperial church. Here in North America, of course, where we have recently celebrated 400 years since the founding of the English colony Jamestown, Virginia. Lillet in Jamaica, Joanne in Trinidad, Benjamin in Ghana, James in Kenya – many of us have experiences shaped by a church that was a big, powerful cultural institution, even if we did not belong that that particular church, we knew the power of its traditions, we recognized the cadence of its language, our hearts beat to the downbeat of its four-square – or waltz tune -- missionary hymns.

Well, as the residents of Hong Kong will tell you, times have changed. Things in that British Crown Colony are not quite the same as they used to be. If the Chinese are now in control of China, well lots of people are in control of North America, and not very many of them are Episcopalians any more. Instead of that downbeat, we wiggle to a strange, syncopated rhythm. To many Episcopalians, it doesn’t seem like our world anymore.

Look at what happened to poor Elisha. He was a dedicated follower of the prophet Elijah. “As long as you, yourself live, I will not leave you,” he said to Elijah. They travel a while, to the bank of the River Jordan, and in a whoosh of a chariot of fire, Elijah is taken up, leaving Elisha behind, wondering what would happen next. In the words of another old four-square missionary hymn, “Elijah’s mantle o’er Elisha cast.” Elisha now becomes Israel’s leading prophet, but we the reader are left with the sense that things have changed, and that things will never be the same again. We are uncertain as Elisha was uncertain as to what would happen next.

The Jesus we encounter in this week’s Gospel is serious, stern. We are not yet half way through the Gospel of Luke, but already Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, toward his confrontation with the powers and principalities, toward his passion and death. Jesus is on a mission which is serious, and spare: he has no possessions, not even a place to call home. Whoever follows him is required to take up a similar strict regimen: “Let the dead bury their own dead” – the disciples are not even allowed the bare minimum of fealty to their families – “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” If Jesus’ face is set toward Jerusalem, so then are the faces of his disciples – and of all of us who even today consider ourselves followers of Jesus.

Signing up for the kingdom of God means we don’t know what will happen next. Elisha had no idea Elijah would be taken up in a dramatic whirl of fire, leaving him in charge. The disciples following Jesus wanted a better life, and they recognized in Jesus the One who could bring that Good News to them; those disciples just had no idea they had to make such a dramatic and permanent break with everything they had known and loved in the past. Those British missionaries thought they could just bring the Church of England with them wherever they went, but it seems that not even the glories of the Church of England can contain the kingdom of God as it breaks in – as it always has done – around us.

I’ve been thinking lately with all this upheaval in the Anglican Communion, and here in the Episcopal Church, that the Church into which I was ordained 27 years ago no longer exists. It feels like it is crumbling around my ears. What happened to Anglican reasonableness, to our pride in being the middle way between Protestant and Catholic, to all those wonderful hymns, missionary or not? What happened to a sense of security in this institution, to this church as a place where we could all go to be baptized, married and buried, to its reliability as an employer, a deliverer of pastoral care? We’re all on the banks of the River Jordan, watching something go rising up in a blaze of fire, although we don’t know quite what we are seeing.

Welcome to the missionary life. Apparently, if we read the Gospel of Luke correctly, this uncertainty is the way it has always been. The chief cornerstone of our faith is not this building, or any building, or any institution or empire. It is Jesus Christ, and to mix our metaphors, Jesus is on the move, to Jerusalem, not to security and stability, but to danger and to change.

Today’s reading from Galatians is one of those lessons from Paul we preachers would rather do without – a list of sins we’d rather not read about in church, thank you very much. But at the very end of the lesson, Paul gives us the reason why we follow Jesus, one way to describe what discipleship is all about: The fruit of this Spirit, Paul says, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Those are not the things empires can deliver, even empires based on the Church of England. But for we who live by the Spirit – who put our hands to the plow and do not look back – those are the fruits by which we will live.

Moving In -- Moving On

Moving: it's whacked. There is no way around it: it's hard, it's not fun. One wonders where all this STUFF came from.
Our family is mid-move to Brockton.
We have Bishop Gayle Harris coming to St. Paul's tonight. We need to close a building we don't need anymore, a building we are selling to use the assets to fund our new growth activities. The building used to be the Sunday school, with a chapel and classrooms.
Last Sunday's lessons were about God breaking in -- God making some really big noise with Elijah, and then revealing the divine self in the silence -- the still, small voice.
This parish had a huge, nasty, noisy split some years ago, over what are now the all too public issues of sexuality and authority in the Anglican Communion. It was earthquake, wind and fire all over the place.
Yet that conflict was not the whole cause of the diminution of this congregation. It was social change -- the city of Brockton changed, drastically. From its heyday in the 1920s as one of the nation's largest shoe-manufacturing cities -- well, it's followed the course of other North American factory towns. It is still an immigrant city -- it is a growing and young city -- but now the immigrants come from Cape Verde and Brazil, from Jamaica, the West Indies, from Latin America. What will it look like, a new Episcopal Church in this wild, multi-cultural community? This community of immigrants and children and hopeful people?
We are now like Elijah at the edge of the cave, listening for the still, small voice, the voice of God after the whirlwind. Listen.

Proper 7-C June 24, 2007 St. Paul’s 1 Kings 19:1-15a
Galatians 3:23-29 Luke 8:26-39

I heard on the radio the other day that Dr. Phil, the tv psychologist, is very popular in Iraq. The journalist told the story of a Dr. Phil fan “forced to stay inside almost all the time. The daily bombings, murders and kidnappings make it too dangerous to leave the house. But being a prisoner inside her own home, like so many other Baghdadis these days, her days often comprise of crushing boredom punctuated with fear.” What advice could Dr. Phil offer these people? In the words of one Iraqi woman, “I remember one day when I was surprised to find Dr. Phil discussing the problems of a mother and her estranged daughter-in-law. The next morning, we discussed it at work and wondered, can you imagine we have the same problems in America?” When asked about what else troubled her, the woman said, “Frankly, we suffer from the fact that because of the security situation we’re locked inside our homes for a long time, not able to go out. The family has no solace, no time for relaxation. This has really affected our psychology.” And what was Dr. Phil’s advice? He named the demon: “…that kind of claustrophobia can cause people to lash out at each other even at those they love. … avoid the non-directional frustrations, so you don’t just lash out aimlessly and talk very much about what’s going on because when you’re given a voice, it’s not so luminous.”[i]

Dr. Phil is no Jesus but both recognize the same thing: when you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy. When the society around you is crumbling, you can feel yourself coming apart. When there are conflicting voices and threats and challenges and fears, outside of you, you can feel them inside yourself, possessing yourself, almost taking your real self away from you. The world might be mad, but that madness is manifested one person at a time. As our friend in Iraq says, it can really affect your psychology.

We have lessons today about naming the demons and confronting your fears. We have God taking a direct hand in the righting of some individuals. Elijah, caught up on a deadly conflict with King Ahab and his powerful wife, Jezebel, runs into the wilderness, prepared to die – willfully to die. But God intervenes, makes him eat and drink, sends him to a mountain cave. After all the noise of earthquake, wind and fire, it is in the sheer silence, the solitude, the absolute aloneness that Elijah hears the voice of God. God restores him to his right mind, to his mission, to his life. Now go back to Damascus, God says; right those wrongs.

In the story of the person filled with so many demons their name is “legion,” we hear great noise as well. The poor soul screams and hollers and breaks his bonds. When Jesus commands the demons to come out of him, they jump into a herd of squealing pigs and hurl themselves off a cliff. And here, too, as in the story of Elijah, all the drama is followed by silence and stillness: the man sitting clothed and in his right mind. He wants to follow Jesus, but Jesus sends him back to his home, to tell this story of God’s power.

That’s the thing about all these stories of healing in the bible. Yes, an individual is healed, but it is always an individual in a social context, in a setting, a person with a mission. The healing is to right a wrong, to get someone back on track, and then to get that person back into the community. There is not the sense that the person is at fault alone for his predicament. It’s the demons, it’s the persecution by the king – something from the outside is causing the trouble here. And when the person is healed, back he or she goes to work. The healing itself is proof that God is in charge of the world, not those demons who throw individuals out of whack, not power-hungry kings. There are no HIPA laws in the bible, no medical privacy acts. When God heals you, it is your job to get back out there, and tell the Good News.

There are a lot of stories of healing in the Gospel of Luke, so many that Luke gets nick-named “the physician.” These healings are signs, for this Luke who is telling this version of the story of Jesus, that the kingdom of God is breaking in all over. The reign of God is happening. God is in charge here, God is healing the world. God’s spirit and God’s goodness cannot be contained. They are specific incidents: Jesus healing that man in that place, and that man is living in a Jewish country occupied by a massive Roman military force – by the Roman military legions. The Gospels are pinpoint specific to that time and place.

And yet if we would but hear it, we can hear how these stories of healing apply to us, and to our time as well. God is breaking through in our lives, and in our time and place – God moves in to any situation where things have gotten out of whack, and if God has ever restored us to our rightful minds, then we should get out there and spread that Good News that the world is dying – literally dying – to hear.

Let’s remember this where we are, here in the heart of this city, that the treasure we have is the treasure of the Good News. Like the man healed, wouldn’t we love to get in to boat with Jesus and sail away, but Jesus speaks these words to us, too: "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So let us then proclaim throughout this city how much Jesus has done for us.

---

[i] From “Dr. Phil finds an audience in Iraq,” heard on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, June 23, 2007

Early Pentecost Update: two weeks, two sermons!

It has been a busy time -- it seems we are moving ahead with our new start plans in Brockton, which includes our family's move to a new home there. So, sitting amid moving boxes, two sermons for early Pentecost.
We have two stories this month of God's radical inclusion. Jesus used the plight of women on the outside edges of society to illustrate how clearly those "outsiders" heard the Good News and responded enthusiastically to the love of God.
These two weeks also saw two dramatic developments for us Episcopalians here in Massachusetts: the legislature reaffirmed the right of persons of the same sex to marry in this Commonwealth, and the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church answered the challenge of some bishops in the Anglican Communion. No, we're not going back on our constitution and canons, our democratic tradition. We're not going to abandon the bishops we've elected, nor the ones we will elect in the future (one more woman elected this weekend, too -- hooray!).
So two sermons, based on two episodes in the 7th chapter of Luke, two stories from fairly early in Jesus' ministry. Jesus is shocking, new, startling. Come, let us begin.

June 17, 2007, Proper 6-C, St. Paul’s

“For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

We are free. This is Paul writing from his letter to the Galatians, his freedom-loving, wildly egalitarian exuberant self, early in his ministry, thrilled to the bone. He has finally gotten this extraordinary truth: that a slavish devotion to the law, to lists of do’s and don’ts, to a definition of “sin” that makes a person a “sinner” because of the category in which he or she lives – all this is behind him, for now Paul has found true love, true grace, true life. Christ did not die for more rules, more strictures, more definitions that make people sinners. Christ died for us to be free of all that, free to be like him. It is no longer we who live, but Christ lives in us.

And who is that Christ who lives in us? Today’s Gospel story is a good illustration. Let’s start with the setting: where is Jesus in this story? In the house of a Pharisee, someone very like Paul, the old Paul, when he was Saul and lived under the law. A good, righteous, law-abiding man who recognizes that Jesus is someone special. They are sitting down to eat, which in the first century meant a group of men kind of lying around a table, reclining on benches.

Then a woman comes in, and this is definitely surprising, and the text declares that she is a sinner. Now we do NOT know WHAT kind of sinner she is. Since she is from the city, maybe she is a prostitute. Maybe an adulterer. Maybe her sin is of that categorical kind – listen again to even the liberated Paul from Galatians: “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.” Whole groups of people were designated sinners according to the law. Even today, we consider all sorts of characteristics sinful. The outspoken woman is aggressive or pushy. The skater kid is a high school drop out. The graffiti artist is a hoodlum. The immigrant without papers is a criminal. Laws protect, but laws, and attitudes, also exclude. So suspend all judgment about this woman and her personal morality. Whatever her sin is, it’s between her and Jesus.

What did the other diners see when this woman came in? She knelt at Jesus’ feet, weeping, wiping his feet with her hair, anointing them with ointment. They probably would have seen two things: grieving women in those days did wear their hair down. They would have seen a woman weeping – that her sins have been forgiven by Jesus? That her sins weigh her down so much that she wants Jesus to forgive her? Were her sins something she did, or is she one of those “categorical” sinners, who has heard that Jesus accepts all kinds of people, that Jesus’ love and forgiveness extends to society as well as to individuals, that Jesus proclaims a gospel of love not only to those “inside the law” but to outsiders, to outlaws as well? Is she weeping because finally, finally someone saw her as she really was, and loved her despite of it? Loved her because of it?

The second thing those diners saw was an act of extraordinary hospitality and grace. To anoint the feet of a guest was a gesture of extravagant hospitality in those days – a welcoming above and beyond what custom, or law, would require. Here, too, she is an outlaw, an outlaw in love, guilty of the sin of extravagant kindness and devotion. This is the Gospel truth, and in Galatians, Paul demonstrates that he gets it: “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Two events in the news this week were signs to me of the radical welcome of Jesus’ love. It is likely that every pulpit in Massachusetts this morning is going to come down on one side or another of the vote in the legislature that affirmed the right of two people of the same sex to marry in this Commonwealth. Now every individual is a sinner; as Paul wrote elsewhere, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But sin, as we know, is not the result of the category we inhabit; straight people are not categorically sinners. Gay people receive the full benefits of the grace of God – and in Massachusetts, the grace of marriage.

The second was this sentence in the response of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church to the demand by other bishops in the Anglican Communion that we abandon our practice of ordaining bishops elected by the people of their diocese: “We strongly affirm this church’s desire to be in the fullest possible relationship with our Anglican sisters and brothers, but in truth the only thing we really have to offer in that relationship is who we are.” I would be the first to admit that the Episcopal Church is flawed, and that we even have (a few) bad bishops. But by the grace of God those flaws of ours are not categorical; Jesus loves us for who we are.

What else do we have than this outrageous realization that Jesus loves us for who we are? Isn’t that what that weeping woman saw in Jesus when she knelt at his feet? That he loved her for who she was? What good, good news is this, that God knows us as we are? And that the best model of response to that love of God is the overflowing, abundant, wildly extravagant actions of a woman called a sinner?

June 10, 2007, St. Paul’s (Proper 5-C)

There is a bad word in today’s Gospel. Right in the middle. Luke 7:13.

The word is translated into English as “compassion” but that is an inadequate translation. In Greek it is splanchna, and it means bowels, guts, innards. It was used to describe the anatomy of that part of the body, but it was also used symbolically to mean the “bowels of mercy,” to indicate deep, gut-wrenching feeling, more physical than mere sympathy.

In this story no other word would do to describe what Jesus felt on seeing the funeral procession for this woman’s son. Was it her grief, her alone-ness, her courage that moved him to such gut-wrenching compassion? That moved him to act so powerfully?

We know in ancient times that women alone were as good as dead. In the stories of women alone, we have often glimpsed the divine, have often seen God at work, bringing these women out of their isolation and into social balance. God’s gut often wrenches when God sees poor women, marginalized women, grieving women, women without status, without men or fortune to protect them, women without children and hence without hope of a future.

God stepped in, in the person of the prophet Elijah to save the life of the son of the poor widow. Now this woman was not a woman of the covenant; she was a pagan, a Ba’al-worshipper, like the other Ba’al worshippers Elijah had denounced. But this woman was compassionate. She gave the prophet a meal out of the little she had. Her son then becomes sick, and is near death, and Elijah performs this wonderful and strange miracle. The son is brought back to life. The larder is full. Life in all its abundance is given to this poor woman.

It was the grief of the widow of Nain that caused Jesus to act. It was her plight that wrenched his gut. It almost doesn’t matter if the son was really, truly dead or not. Maybe he was just in a deep coma, just seemed to be dead – who knows. This was not an emergency room, a “code blue,” a get-out-crash-cart-stat kind of setting. He was not in the tomb, three days dead and stinking as Lazarus would be when Jesus raised him. But there, on that road outside of Nain, he was dead and his mother the widow was as good as dead, and the deep pathos of the scene stopped Jesus in his tracks. In his gut-wrenching compassion, he brought them both back to life.

We are all called to compassion. It’s not an easy calling. The Greek word for how much it hurts your gut is aptly descriptive. That is the depth of compassion to which we are called, as disciples of Christ, as followers of the one who brought the widow and her son back to life. In a book called, The Search for Compassion, the author says*1*, “The practice of compassion is the practice of ministry. Compassion means ministry. … [It] means getting involved in another’s life for healing and wholeness.”

We all might wonder where we as a community are going, wonder what will become of this church. Exploring gut-wrenching compassion could be one way to describe that journey of discipleship, that process of discerning our mission in this place. You may have heard of the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen who wrote frequently about ministry and healing and who wrote this about compassion:

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. … compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there. *2*

Jesus’ gut-wrenching compassion took him to those people and places, to people like us and to places like this. This is the place where Jesus has built a home, where Jesus has pitched his tent, where God dwells among us. If it is good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us. Let us begin.

Some notes:
*1* Andrew Purves, The Search for Compassion: Spirituality and Ministry (1989)
It was in this book that I found the quote from Nouwen, et al., on compassion

*2* Donald P. McNeill, Douglas A. Morrison and Henri J.M. Nouwen, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life (New York: Doubleday, 1982)