Jeremiah to us: God is calling, and wants you back.

Proper 18 C Sept. 5, 2010
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Psalm 139: 1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-21; Luke 14:25-33

“I am the potter; you are the clay.”

Like a lot of the religious clichés we hear, that can be heard in a kind of “happy-clappy” way. We are nothing; we give up all autonomy to God’s all-powerful hand.

Well, God IS all-powerful, and compared to God, we ARE but clay in the potter’s hand, but if we look more closely at two of our texts today – the one from Jeremiah and the one from the Gospel of Luke – I think we will also see that God does not want us just to give up and be nothing but some wet mud. God expects us to act and to live a certain way.

In our first reading, the prophet Jeremiah is struggling with how to interpret current events to the people of Israel. Their “current events” are quite gloomy – they have been invaded by the Babylonians, their temple destroyed, and they and their leaders carried off into exile. Everything they had built – all their glorious past and their plans for an even more glorious future – have been wrecked. They indeed are nothing more than clay smashed by the potter – they are an inadequate and imperfect first attempt at something the potter does not even want to keep on the discard shelf.

This potter has expectations of the clay: if it starts to repent and act in the way God wants, well there is a chance for it. If it chooses life, then it has a chance; if it chooses evil, then it will be smashed.

And in the Gospel – well, once again we read of a harsh and serious Jesus. This is Jesus the construction engineer, Jesus the military strategist. Jesus has great expectations of those of us who call ourselves disciples. We must cast aside everything in our lives that does not concern this task of building. We must be careful planners, and if our foundation is not secure, well, then we must be ruthless destroyers. We must take our clue from Jeremiah’s potter: smash the imperfect clay vessel if it cannot stand up to the expectations of the potter. We must wage only the war that we can win; if not, negotiate the best peace terms we can get.

What kind of good news is this, either from Jeremiah or Jesus? These are tough lessons. But if we look behind them, behind the high expectations that God seems to be laying out here, we find God who reaches out to us in love, and yearns for us to reach back. We find the God of creation, who has shown us mercy and compassion, the God who took us by the hand and loved us as a parent loves a child. This God yearns for us to act like that, too, to love God back but also to love our neighbors with that same compassion and mercy. If we were the clay, that is the shape the potter wishes us to take: a vessel large enough to hold all the bits of this broken and hurting world.

The prophet Jeremiah can talk a lot about destruction, about what we are not – about how we do not measure up to God’s expectations for us. But Jeremiah also talks about building and planting – even as the old established order is being smashed, he is beginning to imagine the new thing that God wants to bring into being. But Jeremiah is a prophet, not a predictor. Neither he, nor we, know what will replace the things around us that are coming to an end. We can only know that we are in God’s good and gracious hands.

What a contrast our psalm today poses to both Jeremiah and the gospel. The psalm tells of God the potter of the human form, the human form God loves and has created in the image of God’s own self. Having been shown such love and care in our creation, can we not understand how much God wants from us, to show this very same love and care to all around us as well?

Proper 17 C August 29, 2010 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81:1, 10-16 Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14

When the people of Israel trudged out of Egypt all those many thousands of years ago, God expected something of them. Yes, God was generous, yes, God was gracious, yes, God provided, yes, God led them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, but really, this was not a free ride. God expected something of them.

The prophet Jeremiah is trying to explain to the people of Israel, now happily ensconced in privilege and luxury in the Promised Land, that God expected something from them when God led them out of Egypt and brought them to this place that they now call home. Jeremiah is trying to explain to them that God is not so happy with them now. Jeremiah is God’s mouthpiece, calling these people back to their first principles, to the events that shaped and formed them as the people of God.

This call to repentance and return would be fairly easy if the people of God were a collection of individuals. Stories of individuals who repent and return to the Lord are very popular – always have been. There was a tv show in recent years called My Name is Earl. Earl, kind of a ne’er-do-well, finds he has a winning lottery ticket, but at the same time he finds the ticket, he gets hit by a car, and has the revelation that this is a sign – that he should now spend his time doing good things, that his life was spared for this purpose. He turns his life around. Now, this is a comedy, not an inspirational show, so all of Earl’s attempts to do good things are played for laughs. But the theme of an individual who can turn his life around, can return to his origins as a good and generous person, does strike a powerful chord in our hearts.

Think also of the beloved holiday tale, A Christmas Carol, where miserly Scrooge – himself the very definition of greed and selfishness – gets hit over the head with the consequences of his miserliness. He wakes from nightmares on Christmas morning, a new person, determined to be generous to the people he knows who are in need.

The problem with these wonderful tales of individual repentance and change in direction are just that: they are individual. And of course, I suppose, we must all start somewhere, and the place we start is right here. I bet the people of Israel, whom Jeremiah is very busy scolding, -- I bet each individual among the people of Israel thought they were being good people, living good lives. They had really gotten into their good and prosperous life. Jeremiah accuses them of Ba’al worship – not worshipping God alone – which might be kind of like the search for good karma that Earl embarks on – kind of, I’ll do some good things, and some more good things will come my way.

But I don’t think that is quite what God had in mind. God called the WHOLE people of Israel out of Egypt – and as God called them, they BECAME a people. God wants a relationship with those people, not with a collection of individuals, but with all those people. If God was generous to them, God wants them – all of them, as a PEOPLE – to be generous with others. Thousands of years later, Jesus is preaching the same message: Friends, set the table and invite everyone in, and let least among you get the best seats. When Jesus delivered that little sermon on hospitality to his friends, in the back of their minds was the story of the deliverance from Egypt. “When I took you by the hand and brought you out of the land of Egypt,” they hear God say, in the back of their minds. One of the first obligations of this deliverance is to show generosity and hospitality to others – to show it to others as God showed it to them.

Today we baptize Aaliyah Naila. We make her a member of the household of God. She becomes one of God’s people – an inheritor of the deliverance from Egypt – and of the obligation to give to others the generosity and hospitality God showed to all God’s people.

And so baptisms are not private, individual things – they are public, group events. We are people-making here. We are adding to our collective. We are enlarging what it means to be the people of God.

And so to you, her family and friends, we join in this process of welcoming this little girl into something much bigger than a collection of individuals. I said this at the baptism we had a few weeks ago, and I will say it again. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes more than a mom and a dad, thinking they have to go it alone. It takes family and friends and neighbors and teachers and doctors and nurses and a faith community – it takes not just individuals, but the whole people of God to show generosity and hospitality and love to this little person, so she can grow up to be the kind of person who can show generosity and hospitality and love to others.

Jeremiah and the Long Haul

Proper 16 C August 22, 2010
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6 Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

We live in a youth culture, don’t we? A culture of instant gratification. A culture of let’s have it now or it’s not worth having. It’s all about the celebrity of the moment. How about that Jet Blue flight attendant who proclaimed that he’d had enough and he wasn’t going to take it anymore, before he grabbed two beers from the airplane galley and headed down the emergency landing chute? Instant celebrity – last week. This week, I haven’t heard anything about him. We live in a culture of NOW.

So when we read this passage from Jeremiah, about God calling him to be a prophet, we read it as, this must be happening to this young boy, now. This is the story of a young person’s call, about a young person’s life – a life blessed by this close relationship with God.

We are embarking on several weeks of reading passages from the Book of Jeremiah, and we will soon see that this book is not just about blessings of the young prophet’s life. It is a long, troubling book of prophecy, some of it angry, some of it full of the disappointments Jeremiah felt when his 40 years of preaching the Word of God seemed to fall on deaf ears – except when the people to whom he was sent to preach abused him and scorned what he was saying. The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, we shall see, is not the book of a young whippersnapper, but the account of “a seasoned prophet,” a “mature, battle-scarred veteran looking back over a long and tortuous journey.”[1] Over the next few weeks, we “people of a certain age” can read this prophet, and perhaps read some of our own life experience in his words.

Jeremiah lived in the midst of the greatest crisis faced by the people of Israel – the crisis which has defined who they would become as God’s people. Their kingdom in Judah was caught between Egypt and Babylon, the superpowers of their day, and Babylon won. Jerusalem was destroyed, and the people of Israel were marched off into captivity in Babylon. Everything they had worked, hoped, dreamed for, was shattered. Their very identity as the people of God was apparently gone. They were done for – now mere stateless slaves, weeping for their past in a foreign land. Why, why, why, did this happen to them? Did the glories of their past, and how much God loved them, then count for nothing? Where was God now?

In the midst of this horrible crisis of death, destruction and displacement, two great prophets arise: Isaiah and Jeremiah. They speak for God, and begin to tell the people of Israel how to make sense of this terrible calamity. Unfortunately, the people of Israel don’t want to hear the answers to their questions, “Why us? Why now?” As we read Jeremiah over the next few weeks, we’ll get a lot of those answers, and we’ll hear Jeremiah’s anger at not being listened to. But today, in this first chapter, we read of his call by God to this thankless job. What does this text say?

The first few verses we read are powerful and poignant. They affirm God’s care and faithfulness. God has known Jeremiah, and each of us, from the moment of creation. And in contrast to this mighty God, who would not feel utterly inadequate? Jeremiah is not inhabiting that celebrity culture that is so familiar to us, that “me first; I am great” culture of stars and success stories we know all too well from our tabloid press, the blogosphere, and talk radio and tv. Jeremiah does not have “self-esteem” issues that just have to be cleared up with a little positive thinking. Jeremiah and each of us ARE dwarfed in every way by the majesty of God.

And yet look what God says: “Do not be afraid, for I am with you to deliver you.” And why? Not just because God loves Jeremiah, just as he loves us, but because God has given Jeremiah the Word of God to speak. Jeremiah is not just making it up as he goes along. “You shall speak whatever I command you,” God tells him. Who would not be inadequate to such a purpose? And of course, if God wants something to get done in this world, then God seems to have no choice but to work through the people God has created – people like us: thoroughly inadequate. Think about this impossible scenario: Jerusalem is shattered; the people are crushed and sent into exile far away, and God sends Jeremiah the Word to tell these people that what has happened to them is also, somehow, their fault. The people do not want to hear what Jeremiah has to say; who would be adequate to this task?

Look again at the text, where God sums up this Word that Jeremiah must deliver: pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow. What a shattering message. Can this really mean, the people of Israel think, that God sent this terrible thing to happen to us, that our kingdom, our city, our temple is destroyed? That what we were doing there all those years was somehow not what God wanted us to do? Why would God do such a thing?

Look again at the end of the passage. God appoints Jeremiah to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, but also to build and to plant. That is the key to understanding the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah. The destruction of everything the people of Israel had worked so hard to create was necessary in order for the Word of God to build and to plant what God had in mind for them. God’s last Word is not the destruction that the people would see all around them, but new life. New hope. A renewed and re-created world.

Think about your own life and times. What in your life has been shattered and scattered? What destruction has happened to you out of the blue? And what Word did God send to you, to help you understand it? A Word that perhaps at the time you did not recognize or embrace? A messenger you dismissed as a crackpot or irrelevant? A stumbling block you thought was just an irritant in your smooth trajectory to success? Perhaps it is only now that you can look back and see what it meant, and that out of that experience in which you were shattered and overthrown, God was indeed beginning to build and to plant something new and wonderful inside of you.

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[1] http://www.cresourcei.org/lectionary/YearC/Cproper16ot.html

Saints and Superheroes

Proper 15 C August 15, 2010 Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18 Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

We are making a saint today. And all around us are a great cloud of witnesses, cheering us on.

Several years ago, Hillary Clinton wrote a book: It Takes a Village. She got the title from an African proverb: it takes a village to raise a child. It takes all the people who love a child, who care for the child’s future, to support that child into maturity. It’s not just the parents, the little nuclear family, who have to carry this burden alone: it takes a village. Or in our modern American context, it takes all of our extended family, the people we are born related to and the people we choose to be related to – our special friends – to support and love a child, and help him or her grow up to be the adult they want him to be.

We are all here today for Ernesto Jose. We are that modern village, a collection of family and friends – some very close to Ernesto Jose indeed, and some of us who maybe are just meeting him today for the first time. It takes all of us to raise this child, or in the words of the baptismal service, it takes all of us to see that Ernesto Jose is brought up in the Christian life and faith. Parents and godparents have the intimate, day-to-day responsibilities, but all of us here today in this church have a stake in how Ernesto Jose grows up. Today, we are making a saint.

What is wonderful about the church is that there are many more saints with us here today, cheering Ernesto Jose on – the Communion of Saints – the great cloud of witnesses, the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. There are those saints who are known only to us – parents, grandparents, loved ones who have died and gone before us. They are with us today. There are those great saints whose names everyone knows – great superheroes in the faith: they are with us today, as well. Today is also the feast day of Our Lady, St. Mary the Virgin, Mary, the mother of Jesus. Yes, indeed, all the saints in heaven and earth are here with us today.

Those saints are like superheroes to us – the examples of wise and brave ones who help us in our everyday lives. When we wonder if we are making the right decision about something important, when we need help with our family, or raising our children, or worrying about what is around the next corner, we can just call those superheroes to our minds, for help and guidance and wisdom. How would we make it without those special personal saints of ours, those superheroes known perhaps only to us alone?

So, as we baptize Ernesto Jose today, we may be making a new saint, but we are also making some new superheroes: you who love Ernesto Jose the most – you parents and godparents and dear friends: you are being made into superheroes today. To Ernesto Jose you will be those great and wise ones to whom he will look for love and guidance. If it takes a village to raise a child, well, in today’s world it takes a village of superheroes to raise a child. We all know the stresses and strains on family life, and no, no one can do it alone. No two parents can do it alone, no matter how superheroic. It takes friends, family, teachers, counselors, fellow church-goers, neighbors. All of us here are cheering you on.

The bible tells us we are running a great race: a race toward God, really, toward our home, toward our hopes for a world in which all children are as beloved and cared for as Ernesto Jose. There are times when that race is tough, the course is bumpy, when we slow down or get side tracked. Sometimes we think we’ll never get to the end, we’re discouraged or troubled. But it is just at those times when the going gets rough that the superheroes really start to cheer us on. That’s when the saints earn their stars and the cloud of witnesses work up a head of steam. They are not going to leave us to run this race alone. Listen. Can you hear? They are with us.

Ernesto Jose, welcome to the company of the saints in light.

Our own personal Gulf of Mexico

Proper 13 C August 1, 2010

Hosea 11:1-11;

Psalm 107

Colossians 3:1-11

Luke 12:13-21

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures in heaven …”

When I was a child, the priest switched around the words of that verse from the Gospel of Matthew. He quickly rectified his mistake, we all laughed, and he continued with the offertory sentence in the familiar way:

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”[i]

I think one of the reasons we laughed is that many of us probably wanted to lay up treasures on earth, despite all those risks Jesus mentioned. We would nod sagely at the prospect of the true treasure that would lie in our hearts, but isn’t the desire to accumulate things just built in to human nature? A dictionary search on the word “greed” reveals the Old English word grædig, meaning “voracious” or “covetous.” The root is found Old Saxon and Old Norse, in words meaning hunger, or eager. In Greek, the word was philargyros, literally, “money-loving.” A German word for it is habsüchtig, from haben “to have” + sucht “sickness, disease,” with sense tending toward “passion for.” The word “greed” has long conveyed, in many languages, the power of just how eagerly we desire things – indeed greed “is a sickness to have something.”[ii]

Or, in the words of Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of the 1987 film, Wall Street, “Greed is good.” If such a tendency toward greed is an old human trait, so too do equally ancient sacred texts urge us to turn from these wicked ways. Jesus is very much in this very real world here, with his conversation with the unnamed man he calls, “Friend.” Jesus is not particularly nice to this “friend,” teasing him ironically, and then denouncing the man’s concerns with the wealth he seems to be assuming is rightfully his.

Humans just seem to have a hard time with having enough. We all want to have more. And as St. Paul reminds us, that act of “wanting more – and more, and more” takes us away from God. The act of wanting becomes our god; we idolize greed. We worship it. We end up choosing all those things that money can buy over God. Amazingly God wants us anyway. Even with all that greed-worship, God still chooses … us.

The whole book of the prophet Hoses is about that love affair God has with us wayward humans who over and over again make the wrong choices. Hosea reminds the people of all the things they have done, and how angry this has made God. But in one of the most poignant verses in all of scripture, Hosea uses the intimate language of home and family to describe just how deep God’s love is for us:

When Israel was a child I loved him … It was I who taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in my arms … I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down and fed them …

The people of Israel have been faithless and foolish. They have worshipped other gods, they have not followed the law God gave them through Moses. They have been greedy, unjust, selfish, murderous, adulterous – you name it. You know the drill. But through it all, this is how God talks about these people: with words of poignant passion, with the never-ending love of a parent for a child.

But as for us – well, there are some lessons that we never learn. Somewhere in all of our lives is a place like the Gulf of Mexico, a place that absorbs all of our baser instincts. I have heard that as terrible as this oil spill is, it is just the last assault in a long line of problems: pollution, excessive drilling, over-fishing. The dead spot in the Gulf is the result of fertilizer run-off from the upper Mississippi. The levees on the Mississippi keep the river in its banks (mostly) but also cause the erosion of the fertile and protective wetlands. The Gulf has been the place where if we wanted more, we just got it, no matter what the consequences. We greedy human beings know that place well; somewhere in all of our lives is a place like the Gulf of Mexico.

But also somewhere in our lives is a place where the love of God is known, a place where we know just how much God loves us in spite of our tendency to be greedy. There is always a chance to turn around. Even in the Gulf of Mexico many people are saying, Now, maybe, we can start really to clean it up, to figure out ways to end the complicated chain events that so pollutes that body of water and hurts the heart of God. If we can begin to turn things around there, don’t you think we can begin to turn things around here? God is waiting. Like a parent teaching a child to walk, God is cheering us on.

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[i] Matthew 6:19-20
[ii] http://thelisteninghermit.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/lifting-our-mater-from-our-materialism/

Lose the trappings. Gain the life.

Proper 8-C June 27, 2010
1 Kings 2:1, 6-14
Psalm 77
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62

Some years ago, in the early 1960s, there were two popular books by then-young theologians. One was The Secular City, which talked about how little American society seemed to care about religion, or God, or the church – that we were moving into a “post-religious society.” The other was The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, which put some of the blame for this lack of interest held by the wider society in things religious, at the steps of the church door. The church had been domesticated, had become captive to the nice life of the suburbs. The church had become the place where middle class values reigned, where people went to church not because it meant much to them, or God forbid cost them anything too valuable, but because it was the thing to do. The church would bless and sanctify THEIR life style choices, their comfortable homes, the aspirations they had for their children to do well in school, succeed and prosper. Indeed, the church itself was the place to be comfortable, to be friends with people like “us,” whoever “we” were. Looking back, we can really see a dialog between these two books: one of the reasons one theologian noticed that fewer people were taking the church seriously and preferring a “secular city” to a religious world view was that the church had become something that it was not supposed to become, something that Jesus had never intended it to become: a safe place, an orderly place, a place with no poor people, no conflicts, no challenges.

Well, some 40 years later, times have changed. Instead of increasing secularization, society has become increasingly religious. Part of the reason is the richness America receives from immigrants from all over the world: Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, and of course Christians from all those places that used to be colonies. Soon after that book was published, the 1960s and ‘70s erupted in times of great upheaval – and so people began to realize that religious texts and faith were relevant – could provide guidance in troubling times.

Ah but there is the rub – and perhaps the explanation to the mindset of “the suburban captivity of the church.” These biblical texts, these words and stories about Jesus, are often themselves troubling. Jesus seems to be offering us comfort at the same time he challenges us to leave everything that is comfortable behind. No wonder people want the church to be a place of order and calm; if we took this Jesus too seriously, what kind of trouble would we invite?

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.

The passage we read today from Paul’s letter to the Galatians reminds me of another text from the 1960s: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Remember that when Paul found Jesus, he lost everything else: his status, his job, his comfort zone of being a Jew with power to persecute others. Paul here recognizes that when he lost all those things, he found freedom. He became a disciple of Jesus long after he knew that following Jesus meant following him to his death. As yet another theologian, who reads these texts very closely, noticed that when you read today’s Gospel and this passage from Paul together, as we do today, you see that following Jesus does bring freedom but freedom …

of a very peculiar kind. It is not self-indulgent freedom, but freedom that enhances the neighborhood. The sum of the new freedom is “love of neighbor” …[i]

This church – St. Paul’s Church in Brockton – long ago lost all the things that made it so valuable in the Diocese of Massachusetts: it lost its status, its money, its members – all gone when the prosperity which built this neighborhood shipped out with the last shoe factories for China and Korea. For us indeed, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

But look at it this way: when this church lost all the trappings of its “suburban captivity,” it gained many more things. It gained this neighborhood. It gained people knocking at the door who needed help. It gained a soup kitchen. It gained a reason for being in this place at this time. This church became a follower of Jesus. It became a holy place.

Over the past 25 years, members of this church became disciples of Jesus. You stayed in this neighborhood when you could have moved to the suburbs. You learned that in service you find freedom. You learned that it is more blessed to give than to receive. You learned that the gifts you received by living and working here made your cup overflow with things more valuable than money.

This is what today’s lessons mean for us today: the life of this church is inextricably tied up with the life of the soup kitchen. Being a disciple of Jesus means working for the welfare of this neighborhood, and the resources of the church – our money, our buildings, our people – should be dedicated to that purpose. Read these texts again. Pray seriously and deeply as you do. There is a cost when we follow Jesus on this road, where our tasks are to bring life and hope to the people God has given us to serve.

[i] Walter Brueggemann, “June 27: Discipleship is No Picnic,” A Cast of Emancipated Characters, from Sojourners Magazine, June 2010 (Vol. 39, No. 6, pp. 48). Living the Word.

Seeing the world through God's eyes

Proper 5-C; June 6, 2010
1 Kings 17:8-24; Ps. 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17

Death comes in many forms: the gradual death from sickness or old age. The violent death of war, of gunshots on the street on hot summer nights, of crimes of passion or anger. The accidental deaths of children dying too young, tragically before their parents. The cruel, lingering death that comes from famine, poverty, drought. The death of the spirit, that comes from a broken heart, or a profound disappointment, of promises lost or hopes waylaid.

We fear all of these kinds of death, and more, and many parts of the world in which we live are gripped by that fear of death. Paralyzed, people shut off all possibilities of change, all hope that anything could be any different than the way it is now.

One way we indulge in the fear of death is by remaining isolated, singular. We alone have faith in God who has a personal relationship only with us, like we are at the bottom of a long tube. The rest of the world doesn’t really matter, when we live in that kind of fear, that masquerades as faith. If it is just about me and Jesus, well, what is happening in, say the Gulf of Mexico right now is not my concern; there is nothing I can do about it, so hey? A neighborhood like this is not my concern, not if I don’t live here. People coming to lunch at the Table are not my concern, nor are victims of drive-by shootings, or people trapped by addiction or alcohol. The foreclosure crisis doesn’t affect me, nor the stock market’s ups and downs, unless I have an investment portfolio.

The society we live in reinforces that life of fear, and if we remain captive to that ungodly fear of death, then no, there is nothing we can do about all those things swirling around us. Walk by the body of that dead man being carried out; don’t even get too close for fear of contamination.

If we see the world through God’s eyes, however, we see things very differently. We feel things very differently. We feel compassion, and that compassion causes us to act, and through that action, the circle of our self widens out into the world, the great world God has made, and for whom God has endless compassion.

Scholars believe that this letter that St. Paul wrote to the Galatians came early in his career. Reading Galatians, we encounter a wild and enthusiastic man, burning with the spirit and passionate about this Gospel that is so new and life-giving to him. Paul has turned away from a life that dealt in death, and remember, was struck blind, until Jesus came to him. From that moment on, he saw the world through God’s eyes, a world that needed all the welcoming embrace and Good News that it could get.

Our first and last stories from scripture illustrate that Good News, that view of the world through God’s eyes. In fact, Jesus himself cited this story from 1st Kings, of Elijah bringing the widow’s son back to life. Way back last winter, on the 3rd and 4th Sundays after the Epiphany,[i] we read about Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue in his hometown, the one where he said he had come to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind. Great, the people said; do it here. Heal us. Take care of us. No, he said, this prophecy, this work, is bigger than this hometown, bigger than our little world, our own concerns. He reminded them of Elijah, who brought back to life not someone from his own community, but a foreigner; Elijah saw the poor widow of Zarephath through God’s eyes, and saw that God’s compassion and new life must extend to her as well. This really made the people of Nazareth mad; they tried to throw him off a cliff.

So when Jesus brings another widow’s son back to life, this Elijah story must be in everyone’s mind. This is another poor widow, who will be bereft and condemned to a slow death without her son to support her. To touch a dead body would be the height of improper, impure behavior. Death, and fear, and loss, and grief: that is the way the world works, and everyone would think that Jesus should just leave this situation alone.

But remember: Jesus sees the world through God’s eyes, with compassion for the suffering widow. When he raises her son, she too is restored to wholeness. No longer caught in that no place of grief, that tunnel vision of fear, she is now fully restored to her place, as mother, as a productive member of her community.

Jesus healed many people, brought people back to life, gave sight to the blind and set the captives free – but not literally each captive. Surely there were thousands of people Jesus did NOT walk by, and thousands more who only heard about what Jesus was doing, very like we only hear about what Jesus did, sitting here two thousand years later.

But what Jesus and Elijah and Paul, and the Psalmist, want us to know is that Jesus does not have to rub mud on us for us to see the world through God’s eyes. Our dead bodies don’t have to be brought back to life in order to believe in God’s compassion. Letting go of our own fear, and of the hold the fear of death has over us, is enough. You and I may not literally be able to raise people from the dead, but we are called to be conduits of God’s grace.[ii] We are called to see the world through God’s eyes, to see it with the compassion with which God sees it – all of it: this neighborhood, the friends and strangers who come to lunch, the people who have moved to this town from all over the world and who find this city a place of hope and new life.

We are not here to care only for ourselves in this church; indeed, if we did nothing in this neighborhood, did not support the Table, did not work to tear down blighted buildings and create a better, more beautiful block, if we did not work the political system, and raise money, then no, God would not be pleased with us. We would not be seeing the world, and this neighborhood, and these people around us, with God’s eyes.

But we cannot stop here, rest on our laurels of good works. Like that young man who was dead, let us sit up and rub out eyes and begin to speak of compassion and mercy and welcome. There is so much more to do.

[i] Luke 4:16-30
[ii] Susanna Metz, http://www.episcopalchurch.org/sermons_that_work_86242_ENG_HTM.htm

God is on the side of the people who do not even know there are sides

Easter 7-C May 16, 2010
Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26

On this Sunday after the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, we proclaim that God is truly Lord over the earth. This great Lion of justice reigns. Evil – this dragon – is defeated, wrapped in chains, trampled underfoot.

Let us not be naïve; there are many things that trouble us in this world. If Jesus is born, risen from the dead, ascended into heaven, why do things still go wrong? Evils unpunished, feelings still hurt, injustice still perpetrated?

Paul and Silas, fresh from their dazzling conversion of the wealthy Lydia and her household, encounter this slave girl who is very much out of whack. She is a diviner for hire – kind of a spiritual prostitute, working for some men who exploit her gifts. She is very annoying to Paul and Silas, with her proclaiming boldly that they come from “the Most High God.” She is very loud. That is one of the names of the Emperor. Paul and Silas know that such unwanted publicity could get them in a lot of trouble – and she is confusing their message. Why can’t all converts be like Lydia? Rich, thoughtful, quiet, obedient, generous? Who is this annoying girl who speaks the truth in a most inconvenient way, even though it will cost her her meager livelihood?

The world is a troubled place, even here in the Acts of the Apostles, the early years after Christ’s Ascension. In this passage alone we read of slavery, sexual exploitation, imprisonment on trumped up charges, cruel punishment like beatings and shackles and underground cells. The money men, and the power men, and the military men – they are all still in charge. The Acts of the Apostles tells a disturbing story of a world like ours – a world into which, nonetheless, the powerful spirit of God breaks through disturbing, destabilizing, and freeing.

Spirits are a powerful force in human nature. We may give them different names at different times of our lives or in different cultures. They inhabit our childhood dreams. Even as adults we may fear what lurks around the corner. Are not cruel and evil people caught up in spirits that take them away from their true nature? How else could anyone even imagine torture or murder, unless they were no longer in their right mind?

We may learn from the wisdom of some African cultures who give names to these spirits, and by so doing bring them out of the darkness where we fear them and into the light where we can see these powerful forces in perspective. In the Central African Republic, I recently read, witchcraft is outlawed. There are lawyers in that country who want to get rid of that law as outdated, as unjust – there is no proof for witchcraft. There can be no due process without proof; the accused often confess to this crime which they did not commit, just to get a lighter sentence. But there is some logic to this seemingly unjust law: the belief in witchcraft is so powerful that if there were not the possibility of criminal prosecution, people could just grab any one they considered to be witches, “bring them to a pit and bury them alive.1”

We have much to learn also from the wisdom of our new friend Moses, who brings to us his experience working with women who are disempowered, neglected, abused. They turn to witchcraft, he says, because they feel they have no power against a husband who beats them, against a system that exploits their down-at-the-bottom status. Would not the key to their liberation be to break the cycle of abuse by their oppressors? To convince these men that they too are imprisoned by this system of domination and exploitation?

It was almost an afterthought for Paul to exorcise the spirit that imprisoned the slave girl. But later, after his own experience of powerful and evil spirits, shackled in an underground jail cell, he frees his own jailer of his imprisonment. The earthquake caused the jailer to fear for his life – not because the quake was an act of God, but because the prisoners might go free, and then he, who had had the power to beat and imprison, was in danger of receiving the same treatment if his charges escaped. When Paul and Silas acted generously toward their jailer – stayed put when they could have run free – it was the jailer they freed, freed him from the domination system in which he was only one cog in the wheel, one more lackey to be punished if the powerful spirits at the top did not get their way.

We, too, live in troubled times. But God-with-us is also with us in the troubled times. God is on the side of the people who do not even know there are sides, people who only know what it means to be pushed around and told what to do and taken advantage of. The power of God can break through it all, and bind us together instead with love and friendship and compassion and hope.

1 “Hex Appeal” by Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, June 2010, p. 20.