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Second Sunday of Christmas January 3, 2016 Trinity Church Hartford
Here we are already on the tenth of the twelve days of Christmas, beginning a year of significant changes for Trinity Church, and still in Christmas Season, reading stories from the gospels of the earliest years of the life of Jesus.
On Christmas Eve we read of the birth of Jesus from Luke’s gospel, who tells how Joseph and Mary came south from Nazareth to Bethlehem where Jesus was born, and how shepherds alerted by angels came into the stable for a look-see.
Now today, the Second Sunday of Christmas, we read from Matthew’s Gospel, which says nothing of the pre-natal trip from Nazareth, but tells of the arrival of the magi, their meeting with Herod the so-called Great, and their visit to the house — notice that detail — in Bethlehem, which appears to be Joseph’s and Mary’s hometown. Warned to avid returning to Herod, they went back east by another route and Herod, furious, targeted the male children of Bethlehem to eliminate the threat to his power.
We don’t often read in Matthew’s Gospel the story that follows, of the “Flight of the Holy Family” from what in this gospel was their hometown of Bethlehem, south to “Egypt,” because of the military massacre Herod planned. In the nighttime Joseph and Mary with their son escaped to the south, into the desert and across the border, to be outside the jurisdiction of the government and power of King Herod.
Imagine the fear, the loss and risk and unknowing contained in those few lines of the Family’s flight.
Fear, in that the parents got word (from an angel) of an immediate threat — that Herod was to launch a pogrom in Bethlehem, seeking to execute boys less than two years old (which included their son Jesus) in an attempt to eradicate the threat to his earthly throne. Loss: Abandoning their home, relatives (Elizabeth and Zechariah lived nearby, they say in Ein Kerem), possessions, livelihood. Risk: nighttime travel into the desert. Unknowing: among a foreign, non-Jewish people (Nabateans?), how would they be received? Would any one there provide them help, food, shelter, hospitality, work? (Thank God, yes, they did. For hospitality is the code of the desert as it is the expectation of the Bible.)
And then, living in “Egypt,” even when Herod died, they could not return to Bethlehem, because Archelaus, Herod’s son, was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod. They rightly were afraid to return home. And after being guided in a dream, they went way north outside of Judea to the district of Galilee. There they made their home in a town called Nazareth.
Again, a long uncertain journey, to escape persecution and possible death, across several borders, without means or support, to, according to Matthew, resettle in an unfamiliar country and having to start all over again.
Look at them. The Holy Family: innocent and threatened, living in terror for their lives, leaving everything, fleeing persecution, crossing borders — The Holy Family ==== refugees, blessed to have found welcome, a new home, and livelihood, and roots, in Nazareth of Galilee.
Can you see how their story is so completely similar to the plight of the victims of the civil and military chaos of countries of central Africa and the Middle East? Those who were living productive lives, caught up in political powers and plotting beyond themselves they want no part of, threatened by war, serving as hostages or in forced so-called marriages, executed summarily because of faith or whatever, bombed in civilian centers, schools, and hospitals, farms and shops and homes destroyed. …
Who have become refugees in our day: their safety threatened, leaving their homes, roots torn up; the uncertain risk of flight, crossing a political border into an unknown country and people, and future, unable to return.
As with the Holy Family, can we ask the same questions for them? Can they find help? And food. And shelter. Hospitality. Will they find work, a new life?
The next question: can these refugee families of our time find those blessings here, right here, among us, in America, in Hartford, who cherish the countless blessings, freedoms, the security and opportunity which we cherish and for which we work and pray?
Yes. Let’s be the ones who welcome the refugee, the stranger, and open ourselves so others can have a new life.
Yes. Several members of Trinity have looked in to what it takes to form a neighborhood coalition, here on Asylum Hill and the West End, maybe of more of Hartford, a coalition of religious and community groups. Two of us recently visited Integrated Refugee and Immigration Services based in New Haven (disclaimer: I am a board member): IRIS is available to come to meet with us here on a Sunday later this month, to give us information about what would be entailed.
Yes. It is a huge work, and will take focused and consistent, shared leadership and long-term effort to help resettle even one refugee family. Those of us who helped resettle refugees from Southeast Asia in the 1970’s can attest to the “Jeremiah-joy” of seeing those who have lost everything flourish in the rich opportunity and hospitality our country offers. I am ready to begin again.
Yes. Even as we are looking at a parochial metamorphosis into an unknown future here within Trinity Church — the wardens’ letter arrived at our home this weekend — one aspect of Trinity that must remain fixed is our out-reaching to others in need. For our God knows of our solemn assemblies but cherishes for us to love mercy, do justice, and go humbly where goes God.
And remember how Jesus taught: On that Day the righteous will ask him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you food, naked and give you clothing, thirsty and give you a drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or interned and visit you?
And the king will answer them, For certain I tell you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.
Yes. It’s the Gospel story. It’s the Gospel way. Together, let’s say:
Yes.
Trinity Episcopal Church
Christmas Day 2015
John 1:1-14
Twentieth century writer G.K. Chesterton wrote that “When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.” The passage from the prologue of John’s Gospel is testimony to the choice of God in Christ. The One through whom all creation occurred chose to enter the world in a new way – to actually take on the body of a human being – to be at once both fully human and fully divine.
That is God’s gift to us – an invitation to draw more closely and more deeply into relationship with Godself in human form. And we all have to ask for the grace to prefer that life that Jesus offers to our small life because we have been offered the shared Life, the One Life, the Eternal Life, God’s Life that became visible in this world in the person of Jesus. All we have to do is allow the connection.
But we find opening ourselves to Jesus difficult today even as his contemporaries found it difficult during his lifetime. John writes, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr observes that in Jesus we come to find out that the Kingdom of God is ultimately to be identified with the person of Jesus. Think of all the occasions in the Gospel when Jesus offers a parable that begins, “The Kingdom of God is like . . .” – The completion of the sentence is always something that the person of Jesus stands for.
You may recall that during the season of Advent each petition in our Prayers of the People always concluded, “Lord Jesus, come soon.” So when we say, “Come Lord Jesus,” on this Christmas Day, we are preferring his Lordship to any other loyalty system or any other final frame of reference. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not! If Jesus is Lord, then the economy and stock market are not! If Jesus is Lord, then my house and possessions, family and job are not! If Jesus is Lord, then I am not! That multileveled implication was obvious to first-century members of the Roman Empire because the phrase “Caesar is Lord” was the empire’s litmus test to determine cultural purity and political loyalty.
What we are all searching for, Rohr says, is Someone to whom we can surrender, something we can prefer to life itself. And the good news here is that God is the only one to whom we can surrender ourselves without losing ourselves. The irony is that when we surrender ourselves, it is only there that we can begin to become most fully the person Jesus is calling us to become.
But surrendering ourselves is not something we humans – and particularly we Americans – are good at. It is hard. But that is what God calls us to do in offering us the gift of God’s son, Jesus. Mary and Joseph had trouble finding room at an inn. As we celebrate Christmas, let’s make sure that Jesus doesn’t find a “No Vacancy” sign on our hearts as he seeks a place there. Christmas really comes when we are intentional about opening that place in our hearts – then every day becomes Christmas as we see Christ in every human being and live our lives as though Christ is in us.
So in or Anglican tradition of focusing on the goodness of the Incarnation, humanity has the right to know that it is good to be human, good to live on this earth, good to have a body because God in Jesus chose and said “yes” to the humanity that we now share with the God who created us. AMEN.
I have been struggling this year as I prepare to celebrate Christmas. It’s a struggle I have every year, but this year perhaps I am engaging it a bit more deeply. And the struggle is the tension between the glitz and the glitter, the joy and the celebration, the giving and receiving of gifts, on the one hand, and the realization that there is something more that we are missing. It has been said that in order to see what is in the manger on Christmas, we have to first go through that crazy prophet in the wilderness who dressed in camel’s hair and ate wild locusts and called for a baptism of repentance. And it is true that part of my dilemma is connecting the John the Baptist message of repentance with the joy at Jesus’ birth. Two weeks ago on Advent 3 I shared that tension in what I was considering as a possible Christmas card:
On the front of the card was a depiction of John the Baptist, standing beside the Jordan River, with the saying, "Greetings from our house to yours.” And when you open the card you find these words:
Our thoughts of you at this time of the year are best expressed in the words of John the Baptist, 'You brood of vipers!' The axe is laid to the root of the trees, and every tree thatdoes not bear good fruit will be thrown to the fire.
Merry Christmas from Don and Debbie.
Not the sentiment we want to hear when we celebrate this holiday.
And then it hit me as I was reading an Advent devotional I have been following this year. All of the magical and glorious events in Luke’s infancy narrative -- the angel appearing to the shepherds in the fields, the heavenly chorus singing “Glory to God in the Highest,” the star that attracted the Wise Men’s attention to travel across a continent – all of those were necessary to get our attention, to get us to pay attention to this thing that God was doing.
Think about salvation history from the very beginnings of the Hebrew Bible and you see a history of God not getting our attention: The creation of everything; the Garden of Eden prepared for the first man and the first woman, the call of Abraham to leave his home for a place unknown to start a new nation, the rescue of that nation through the miracle of the Exodus as they fled Egypt, the rise of the nation of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. When the Jewish nation was going astray, God sent The Prophets, saw the Jewish nation through defeat and exile, and restored the nation of Israel. And when that didn’t bear the fruit that God intended, I can just imagine God saying, “Okay, I guess I need to do this myself.”
And so God sent Jesus. And to make sure God got our attention, God pulled out all the stops: Virgin births; previously barren old women conceiving and bearing children; Angels and Heavenly Hosts proclaiming to shepherds in the field and singing celestial anthems; stars leading wise men across continents. I can just imagine God saying, “That ought to get their attention.” And that’s what we hold onto and think of as “The Christmas Story.”
But that is just the packaging – the wrapping on the real gift.
The packaging is beautiful, and it is important. It is important to our human nature and to the ways in which we engage as human communities that we celebrate the beauty and the glory of the remarkable, indeed unimaginable gift that God has given us and the way Jesus is introduced to us.. And yet, when we focus more closely on how God arrives, we discover the real meaning of the gift: A vulnerable infant, born into humble circumstances, homeless at birth, born to parents as yet unmarried. This is the reality of how God chose to enter directly into human history. All made possible because a young virgin opened herself to the possibility of the impossible, consented to be God’s instrument in breaking into our human cycle to forever change the course of human history.
The form in which God chooses to enter in the person of the infant Jesus tells us something about God. It also tells us something about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. God has come to us because we, by our own power, can never create communion with God. True communion, truly opening ourselves to be touched by God directly, is done by opening ourselves to the reality that God has come to us; communion is created by God, not by anything we ourselves can manufacture or create. Nothing we can ever do or say will bring us closer to God; opening ourselves to receive the Gift God provides is the only way.
The Carol “Joy to the World” perhaps says it best: Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and Heaven and Angels sing . . .
For us to fully accept the gift of Jesus this Christmas, we must turn away from the notion that we initiate and God responds. That’s the way we like to think it works. No. It doesn’t work like that. God is the giver. We are the receivers. Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room.
As we think of our heart preparing room to receive Jesus, think of it as a 21st century version of Mary and Joseph’s search for a room in the inn. As we celebrate Christmas, does God see a lot of frantic activity and a “NO VACANCY” sign on the outside of our hearts? The Spirit is knocking on our door: All we need to do is to make room for that Spirit to enter our hearts, and to re-learn the truth that heaven and earth always have been joined, and that God re-entered the world in the person of Jesus to remind us of that.
Even many of the activities we typically associate with Christmas can get us off track a bit. Look at what leads up to Christmas: Every church, including this one, has some sort of holiday giving tree or program. Each commercial radio and television station has some sort of giving program that people can contribute to. The Salvation Army has the red buckets out at all of the grocery stores and shopping malls. And let’s be honest – we feel good about it when we give to any of these things. And they are all wonderful and necessary parts of the holiday, and certainly in the spirit of our honoring the birth of God’s son.
But all of these opportunities to give can overshadow the reality that accepting the birth of Jesus into our hearts requires us to be good receivers. And that is not so easy for most of us. It is part of our American ethic to be self-reliant and not dependent on others, and without realizing it, we can adopt that same attitude about our relationship to God. We don’t really need God’s help, we convince ourselves, and in our own way, figure we’ll just double up on prayers if and when we do.
And yet the message of Christmas is exactly the opposite: God is the giver, and we, like Mary and Elizabeth, have to open ourselves to God’s action in order to receive this most extraordinary and unexpected gift. One of our favorite Advent and Christmas texts is from Isaiah Chapter 7: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.” (7:14). But we don’t usually hear the context, which is the prophet trying to convince King Ahaz to put his reliance on the promise of God rather than in alliances with military powers like Syria. And the king scoffs when the prophet tells him that the sign God will send is a baby.
Just as King Ahaz thought he knew better than God what he needed, so too we like to think it is we who advise God what we need. And as is so often the case, God answers with gifts we may not have asked for. And they make us nervous because accepting Gods gifts, if we do it authentically, can transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be.Accepting God into our hearts can lead us to places we had not planned on going, and that makes us nervous. We tend to be much more comfortable in our relationship with God when it is about giving a little of our abundance and our power in order to confirm to ourselves that we are indeed as self-sufficient as we claim. But that religion is not what Christmas is about. And it certainly is not what is involved in being a follower of Jesus.
This Christmas, let us remember that the real meaning of the season is first learning genuinely to receive and hold onto the gracious, unimaginable gift that God has given us. It is fine and good to love the packaging; but we miss the whole point if we stop there. Like Mary and like Elizabeth, we need to acknowledge our need for Jesus and open ourselves to the possibilities that letting Jesus into our hearts creates. Don’t hold onto the wrapping paper and leave the gift behind. This Jesus we claim to follow does make a difference. And unless we accept the gift, nothing else that we do makes much of a difference. And unless we accept the gift of Jesus into our hearts, the real work of Christmas never gets started, and nothing else that we do makes much of a difference. Amen.
4th Sunday of Advent
December 20, 2015
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
“Overcoming Fear and Retaining our Humanity”
If there is a phrase that best seems to capture the mood of our times it might be this one: be afraid, be very afraid. Fear has become the dominant emotion in much of America today. It has become the fuel which has inflamed people’s passions against others whom they are told, usually without any shred of justification, they ought to fear. And it may well become the emotion that will eventually destroy everyone in our path because we fear them and believe we can only eliminate them if they are no longer to pose a threat to us. And in the process fear will destroy our own humanity as well.
It is sometimes said that the opposite of love is hate. But I’d like to suggest the true opposite of love is fear, and that fear, when it is not assuaged, eventually leads to hate and hate to violence and ultimately violence to the erosion of our fundamental humanity, of our nature as the persons we were created by God to be. I’d also like to suggest, however, that from our Christian faith we can find resources that will help us to confront our fears and in the process reconstruct the way in which we relate to others whom we are now being taught to fear and to destroy. Through that reconstruction we can begin to restore the humanity in ourselves and in others, a common humanity that fear seeks to undermine and erode.
Fear of the other begins with a fear for oneself. I want only the best for myself and those I love and if I perceive someone as threatening these things then my fear for myself, my insecurity in the presence of others, develops and increases. This self-protective fear, based on the belief that I am who I am only when I can count only on myself and my own resources, convinces me that unless I disarm or neutralize the threatening Other, I will lose myself and all that I hold dear. While this view of the threatening other is often in harmony with an economic view that puts the satisfying of self-interest ahead of the satisfaction of the needs of others, it is a view of human relationships that is at odds with a fundamental Christian conviction or belief: a belief that I am essentially, through God’s intention and creation, actually and most fully myself when I stand in a mutual relation of love and trust toward the other. The great mystery, and at the same time the greatest of all truths found at the heart of the Abrahamic tradition, is that as human persons we were made by the same God to live in and for each other, not primarily for ourselves: we were made for love. Love means accepting the other person, with his or her own unique and irreplaceable personhood, as a complement to myself, as one who helps to complete me, who through mutuality brings me to the highest state of fulfillment and flourishing, as I do to him or her. And this is because we were created to achieve the greatest possible degree of fulfillment and flourishing only in and through a mutually loving relationship. My deepest humanity is realized and protected only when I remain true to the basic conviction that living in love will fulfill me even when others threaten me with their hateful power. My deepest humanity is realized only when I refuse to respond to the siren call of those who would seek to enhance their power and personal agendas by exploiting my fears and attempting to drive me by their rhetoric and demagoguery into fighting my fear by threatening others with violence and exclusion. This is the abuse and manipulation of fear: and it is morally reprehensible especially as part of a campaign for the presidency of the United States. Living out of fear, in other words, can destroy my truer and better self and it can lead to the destruction of others if the demagogue convinces me that they are my enemy who must be destroyed by me if I am to live fully for myself.
But psychology and experience demonstrate that my destruction of the other will not make me live at peace with myself: it will only lead me into deeper bastions of fear and insecurity from which I will peer out with suspicion, mistrust, and hatred toward others whom I do not know and whom I choose to treat as profoundly different from me and who, therefore, are worthy of my disdain and ultimately of standing at the end of the barrel of the gun I or the forces deployed on my behalf are am aiming at them.
The prevalence of fear as a way of life is based on a false narrative that tells us that we are fully human only when we exist in fearful relations with others and are successful in finding ways to dominate, exclude, or suppress them. But the Christian story is at bottom a story of how fear-based and domination fueled relationships have been superceded and replaced by relationships based on reconciliation and acceptance of the Other because we are all simply human. Reconciliation and love, according to the Christian narrative, are the motives that led Jesus to accept death at the hands of fearful people rather than destroy them by his godly power. By accepting death on a cross he annulled the power of fear and overcame it by the power of love. Now to avoid misunderstanding, we should carefully note that Jesus’ lack of fear did not mean that he was not crucified painfully on a cross: he died in pain, but he died without fear or insecurity and his humanity remained intact and was not overcome by fear.
Today of course acts of terrorism and gun violence fill our minds with fear: fear for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for all those innocent persons upon whom violent acts of terror will be unleashed. But as people of faith we need to come to grips with this fear and not let it define who we are and how we should live. We might recall Elizabeth’s words to Mary in this morning’s Gospel:
“blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord”. Mary accepts these words from Elizabeth and reminds herself that God’s mercy is absolutely reliable according to the promise he made to our ancestors.
These are the two poles on which all our hope depends. There is fear and in many instances we are justified in responding to it by acts of protection. It is prudent to take steps to disarm the ones who intend us harm. It is equally prudent to remove the weapons of violence from our own midst. But even the most responsible attempts to disarm others cannot overcome the roots of our fear. For that we need God’s merciful love which can address our fears and overcome them. This overcoming of fear does not necessarily mean that what we fear is unreal or imaginary. Hatred and violence will not simply disappear if we have enough faith in God’s mercy. What we fear may actually happen. But our fundamental conviction is that when evil things happen they will not be able to overwhelm us, or diminish us, or turn us into people who seek revenge by escalating violence and calling for hatred of other people or forces which threaten us. It cheapens our humanity if we live out of fear: it drives us into an unbreakable cycle of violence in which our true humanity and that of the other fade from sight. We cannot overcome fear by weapons of war or worshipping the gun.
Love does not magically remove all harmful things from our lives. But it can remove the false and ultimately futile ways in which we live in the presence of harm and threat. It can help us greet those things that might harm us, whether it be someone with a gun or a weapon of terror, even a dread disease, with the assurance that there is nothing in heaven or earth that can stand between us and the love of God through whom all things are possible and in whom the fullness of our lives is ultimately attained.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Year C – 3 Advent
December 13, 2015
Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3: 7-18
John the Baptist? Prophet or Scrooge?
As part of our Advent preparation, the church, in its wisdom, has always demanded that if you really want to see what's in Bethlehem's manger, you must first confront this crazy prophet out in the wilderness, who dresses in camel’s hair, eats wild locusts and honey, and whose sermons call us up short with a demand for repentance.
And so as Debbie and I have been considering the heart of the Christmas message this year, I’ve been considering the following as our greeting card: On the front of the card will be a depiction of John the Baptist, standing beside the Jordan River, with the saying, "Greetings from our house to yours.” And when you open the card you find these words:
Our thoughts of you at this time of the year are best expressed in the words of John the Baptist, 'You brood of vipers!' The axe is laid to the root of the trees, and every tree thatdoes not bear good fruit will be thrown to the fire.
Merry Christmas and Joyous New Year from Don and Debbie.
So what do you think?
Okay, maybe not.
But contemplate what we have just experienced. Advent is the season of preparation for the coming of our Lord in the birth of the infant Jesus. John the Baptizer is the one sent by God to prepare the way of the Lord. Yet, notice, from the example of my contemplated Christmas card, how John collides with what we have done to Christmas, and to ourselves. John's image at Yuletide is striking contrast to the jolly, fat elf in a red plush suit, with a bag full of gifts, many of them headed for those who have too much already. What happened along the way?
But wait, you say. Our other two readings this morning are joyful and comforting and warm and fuzzy. Doesn’t Zephaniah write, “Shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart!” The Lord has taken away your judgments against you, he has turned away your enemies.” That’s joyful! Ah, but see, this is the problem with proof-texting scripture, plucking one passage out from a larger text. This morning’s text is from the very END of the book of the prophet Zephaniah. The entire rest of the book is a warning to the people of Judah – and in particular its leaders. Zephaniah is warning them that their failure to live according to the law of God, their idolatry and their corruption, was going to put them into the hands of the Assyrians. And indeed that happens shortly after Zephaniah is writing. So the message of Zephaniah is anything but joyful – indeed, it is one of the darkest prophecies of the Old Testament. And yet, there is hope in the prophet’s very last verses.
But wait, you say. What about Paul’s letter to the Philippians? “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice,” he writes. “Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.” That’s joyful and reassuring. True enough. But once again, we have to look at the context. First of all, Paul is writing from prison. I don’t know about you, but prison isn’t my first thought when I think of places to rejoice. Secondly, Paul is writing to a very troubled church that is struggling in at least three ways. It’s two leaders are arguing with each other (ch. 4). There are outsiders encouraging false teachings to the faithful—false prophets that Paul calls “dogs” and refers them to teaching a “false circumcision.” (ch. 3). And there are certain opponents to the church itself – whether the challenge is social or physical is unclear, but Paul is obviously concerned that the challenge might divide the church (1:27). So as the news of Paul’s letter arrived into the living rooms of the people of the church at Philippi, the people hearing these words would have likely responded, “Really? Rejoice always? Right!”
So you see, despite the joyful and reassuring language of both Zephaniah and Paul, their circumstances – and the circumstances of those to whom they are writing – are anything but joyful and secure. How do these two passages, along with the passage from Luke’s Gospel this morning, relate to our Advent preparations. More importantly, what do these three passages, appointed for the third Sunday in Advent, have to say about that for which we are preparing – the arrival of the Son of God on Christmas?
Note what all three of these passages have in common: The writer is pointing to something that is to come, but is not yet. The writer may be writing in the face of disaster, impending loss, certain conflict, but he is assuring his audience that God is faithful and that to God’s faithful people, there is indeed joy awaiting them.
And that’s the meaning of Gospel, or The Good News, isn’t it? When the Jews were awaiting the Messiah, it wasn’t to continue business as usual, to maintain the status quo. It was to change lives, to turn the present unjust society into an alternative future of justice, mercy and love. It was to change the entire foundations of society. It wasn’t to be an event that just makes us happy – it was to be an event that shapes our common lives together and makes them better. When Zechariah reacted to the birth of his own son – the one who would become John the Baptizer – he proclaims, You my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way, To give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. In the tender compassion o four God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, To sine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:76-79).
And when John began his own preaching, his “good news” to the people was to tell them that the tree that doesn’t produce fruit will be cut down and burned. And when they asked him, “What shall we do?” what did he say? To the tax collectors, he said, “Don’t collect any more than is due.” To the soldiers, he said “Don’t extort money from anyone by threats or false charges.” In other words, change the way you do things. Operate according to God’s values, not the ones society teaches you and the world rewards.
The common theme in all of today’s passages is that the way to experience the joy, assurance and inner peace and hope that God promises in Jesus who is to come is by changing the way we do things. And this change is not like changing our brand of toothpaste. When John calls for repentance, he is calling for us to turn our lives around – the Greek word metanoia – turning the mind around, actually changing our attitudes. It calls us to reflect on our social practices, “fruits worthy of acceptance,” new ways of using possessions and power.
And where do we get the inner strength to do this? Look back at Paul and how he inspired the members of that struggling church in Philippi. When he writes to his people, he is not writing from a position of strength. He is in prison, and yet he speaks with confidence that God holds a brighter future. When he calls his people to prayer and faithfulness rather than to anxiety and fear, he does so as one who knows the power of prayer from his own circumstances. Not even the chains that bind him or the enemies that beset him can take away “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding” that will “guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
And in the midst of his exhortation to his people to rejoice and to pray, Paul adds a third guideline: Don’t look inward at your own difficulties and anxieties – but “let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.” This outward orientation “to everyone” is Paul’s remedy to those struggling Christians, both spiritually and communally. If Paul has overcome his imprisonment by prayer; if he has forgotten his own struggles to concentration on the struggles of the people of Philippi; if Jesus has abandoned his own personal comfort for the greater good of all God’s people, then the Philippians, too, can grow beyond their present struggles to a brighter future in faith and trust that God offers us a better way.
And so can we. Zephaniah, Paul and John the Baptist this morning teach us that the peace of God which passes all understanding is found not in the unwavering safety of what we know or what we have or even what we understand. That peace is not found in the familiar and the comfortable, but in the ever-new and unfolding journey with Jesus the Christ. They are found in turning our hearts and minds – indeed, our lives – to the One whose earthly journey began in a cave and ended on a cross. AMEN.
Year B – Thanksgiving Eve
November 25, 2015
Grace Lutheran Church, Hartford
Mt 6:25-33
Thanksgiving – the very name signifies gratitude. And on this Thanksgiving 2005, as with every Thanksgiving, there are so many things we have to be grateful for. This year in particular, it occurs to me to be thankful that I was not a victim of any of the several natural disasters that occurred during the past year.
I missed the Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia; I did not lose my home or livelihood to the ravages of the Gulf Coast hurricanes Katrina and Rita; I was not a victim of the terrible earthquake in India and Pakistan, or the floods and mudslides in Guatemala.
I could focus on being spared those horrors, but I won’t. Because to focus on being thankful for the bad stuff that DID NOT happen to me leads me to an understanding of God that I do not believe, and one which I certainly don’t want the church to teach. Because such a focus springs from an understanding of God that says God deliberately inflicted such natural disasters on those areas, that God willed for those particular people living in those areas to be killed or affected by the disasters. The unspoken piece that flows from that kind of belief is that God decided to spare me.
Then there is the logical but theologically repugnant extension of that type of belief, that God deliberately wrought those natural disasters on those areas and on those people because of some sin that may have been committed by some of the people there – a sin that was deemed so unforgivable by God that God decided to punish them.
I don’t believe in that God, and our church doesn’t teach or preach such a God. And that is not the sort of God whose goodness we celebrate this day.
For if anything, the first English settlers to arrive on this continent gave thanks not to celebrate the absence of adversity in their lives, but to celebrate God’s abundance and faithfulness even in the midst of the adversity which they experienced in those first months and years in a foreign land. They celebrated the overwhelming evidence of God’s goodness and abundance even in the midst of the rugged, cold conditions.
The author of the book of Deuteronomy recalled God’s salvation history with the Israelites, God’s saving acts in history in bringing them out of slavery in Egypt, leading them through the wilderness and sustaining them with food and sustenance, even this strange thing called “manna” which was unknown to their ancestors. And so it was for the early English settlers. They, too, were fleeing persecution and oppression, both religious and economic. They, too, were so desperate to leave that even the prospect of a long and dangerous ocean voyage, followed by an uncertain life in an unknown wilderness seemed like a preferable option. They knew what it means to truly rely on God. They knew what it means to have faith in God’s Providence.
What does it mean to have faith in God’s Providence? What does Jesus mean when he says, “. . . do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” Does he mean that such things are not important? Does he mean that we don’t have to take responsibility for our own care? Does he mean literally that if I do nothing, God will give me sustenance, a roof over my head, and clothe me?
I don’t think so. Indeed, even with the tremendous faith exhibited by the author of Deuteronomy, he certainly knew that many Israelites did not survive the flight from Egypt or the time in the desert. With the tremendous faith of the early English settlers, we know that many died of starvation, that entire settlements were wiped out by disease and famine. Clearly, Jesus’ admonition not to worry did not signal the end or the absence of adversity in our lives.
I often quote Mark Twain on the subject of the value of worrying. He wrote that worrying is like paying interest on a debt you may never owe. Think about that – you’re paying interest on the possibility of having a debt. It’s bad enough paying interest on the debts we DO have. Why would we want to pay interest on a debt we don’t even owe?
The context of today’s Gospel passage provides some insight into what Jesus means when he tells us not to worry about material things. Tonight’s passage occurs as part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount which includes, among other sayings, what we know as the Beatitudes, which begin with the admonition, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Tonight’s passage also follows closely the passage in which Jesus has just taught his disciples how to pray what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, with it’s petition to “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus is speaking to his disciples, all of whom have left gainful employment in the secular world to join Jesus’ small contingent of faithful followers. They no longer provide for themselves – their livelihood and wellbeing are now at the mercy of sympathizers in the community who will provide them with clothing, with shelter, with food and other basic necessities.
I believe that giving thanks to God is not about God providing us with the things or stuff in our lives. I think that giving thanks to God is an attitude toward our own lives, and a gut understanding of our relationship to the God who created us and all things. And when Jesus advises us “not to worry” he is not saying that bad things won’t happen to us, or that we will have everything we want out of life. Look at one of the examples he uses – “Consider the lilies of the field.” Going out on this frigid night, I don’t think any of us would really want to be one of the lilies of the field.
The key is in Jesus’ question, “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” Jesus is not saying that such considerations lack importance. He is saying that they are secondary to the ultimate meaning of lives that are created in God’s image, and for whom Jesus walked this earth and died.
Jesus calls us to an attitude of gratitude. Jesus calls us to give thanks for all the possibilities that come with life in God’s Spirit, for all of the aspects of our lives that give them ultimate meaning. In a few moments, in place of the customary “Prayers of the People,” we will together share a Litany of Thanksgiving outlining only some of God’s gifts for which we give thanks this day.
On Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks for our very lives, for being the people God has made us to be. We give thanks for God’s grace to become the people God intends for us to be, understanding that those lives include times of happiness and times of sadness, occasions when God seems near, and occasions when God seems more distant. We give thanks for those opportunities when we can reflect God’s presence to others, and we give thanks for those opportunities when our own powers are not enough, when we seek and find God’s face in the fellowship and support of others. We give thanks when God has blessed us in such a way that we can give back to God abundantly, and we give thanks when, lacking our own resources, God takes care of us through the bounty of others.
We who have been around the block know that every life is a combination of what we perceive as “good” and “bad”, “happy” and “sad.” But all of the events of our lives go into making us the people we are, the people whom God desires for us to become. Some of us have known difficulties and even tragedy in the last year; others have had it easier. Some of us have endured the sudden death of loved ones; others of us have welcomed new life into our homes. Some of us have endured the strains of illness; others of us have celebrated a return to health. Some of us have undergone stress at the workplace or loss of jobs; others among us have come to new jobs and new opportunities in our careers. Some have struggled in relationships; others have entered into new relationships. It is so hard to find God in the midst of some of these events in our lives, and so much easier to find God in others. But the same Jesus who suffered and died for us reminds us that he walks with us through all of the difficult times, just as he is with us in the times of rejoicing.
In his book, Bread for the Journey, the late author Henri Nouwen acknowledges the occasional difficulty of finding God in the events of our lives. In a meditation entitled, “The Spiritual Work of Gratitude,” he writes:
To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives – the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections – that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say “thank you” to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.
And he concludes, “Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.”
My prayer for each of us on this Thanksgiving Day 2015 is that we are able to see God's guiding hand in all of the events of our lives, and to give thanks in all things. AMEN.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Pentecost 24 – November 8, 2015
Mark 12:38-44
“Is It Really About the Money?”
I sometimes wonder if, when this passage from Mark’s Gospel was included in the lectionary in November, it was a conscious decision to lob a soft ball to every preacher in Christendom who is in the middle of an Annual Appeal or so-called Stewardship campaign. When you think of it, the whole role of the treasury in the Temple was not unlike the role of our Annual Appeal: It was to raise funds to underwrite the administrative and program apparatus of the Temple: That is traditionally the role of our Annual Appeal.
And yet, it is all too easy to think that this story is about money. It involves money, but it is about much more than money. It is also all too easy to think about this story by putting the poor widow on a pedestal and thinking about all of the rich people in the Temple as slackers. The problem with either of those understandings is that we tend to idealize people on pedestals and assume we can never attain to their level of greatness. And nobody wants to think of themselves as a slacker – we are all more comfortable somewhere in between. Which of course is the safest place – we can hide there! Right? We don’t have to wrestle with the real issues this passage presents if we don’t identify with anyone in the story!
And while the story of the Widow’s Mite may seem like a soft-ball for the preacher, this text presents challenges on all sides:
n As in the days of the Temple, since the traditional purpose of the Annual Appeal is to raise funds to support the work of the institution, it is not surprising that emphasis often is on those who are perceived to be – at least potentially -- the largest donors. The problem for the preacher in this morning’s passage is that it hardly holds up what the Gospel calls “the rich” – those who “give out of their abundance” – in a good light.
n The story also holds a deeper and seldom-asked question: Does Jesus point to the poor widow as a model for giving, or does he point to her as a tragic example of the potential for religious organizations to suck the life out of people?
Think about that: In the story, the widow gives all that she has to support an institution which, in the very next chapter, Jesus says is soon to be destroyed. In verse 40, Jesus makes it is clear that he holds the scribes of the Temple responsible for devouring widows’ houses. The whole enterprise has been perverted: Those in charge of the institution lead privileged lives propped up by the offerings of the widows and the poor – the very people the institution is supposed to serve. A very disturbing picture Jesus paints of the inner workings of the Temple.
So where’s the Good News in this passage from Mark’s Gospel? I think some context may help us here. This scene is one of the last events in Jesus’ public ministry as related by Mark; all that remains in that Gospel is Jesus’ Temple discourse and the narrative of Jesus’ passion and death. So in this sense, the widow’s selfless act of self-giving – her sacrifice for a broken institution – may be seen as a precursor to what Jesus is about do: sacrifice himself – giving the whole of HIS life – for the benefit of a sinful and broken world.
Perhaps part of the Good News in this passage for us at Trinity is Jesus’ own acknowledgment of one of the observations of our Mission Discernment Group: That care for the widows, the poor, orphans and others on the margins of society are not just good deeds – they are important spiritual practices. The word sacrifice comes from two Latin words meaning “to make sacred.”
The important point here is that the church as a whole must come to understand that church-sponsored activities that care for others and promote the common good have got to be part of the fabric of who we are. God’s mission of caring for others is not one small slice of a larger pie called church – caring for others has to be a major ingredient that is a part of the very essence of everything we do. We need to understand that caring for one another both inside and outside of the church is intimately connected with – indeed flows out of – our act of worship in the church. So when Jesus is criticizing the scribes in this morning’s passage, he is not showing disdain for their religious practices – he is passing judgment on the emptiness of those practices when they are disembodied from the central work of the God whom they are purporting to worship. And that central work is to be a channel of God’s lovingkindness and mercy to the wider community. Likewise, in giving all of the little that she had rather than from great abundance, the widow’s meager offering was sacrificial – made sacred.
This notion of sacrifice can be a hard one for us. In our daily lives, we tend to think of “sacrifice” as giving more than we want to and frequently giving less than we should. Giving up stuff for Lent is a great example. When we look at people who have really sacrificed – people like Mother Teresa, St. Francis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, those who devote their lives to serving needy populations in remote areas of the world, or, as we approach Veteran’s Day, those who sacrifice their lives and their own personal safety for our protection – we look at them and say, “Wow, that’s awesome.” We put them on a pedestal along with the widow in this morning’s story, and admire their work from afar – but we seldom relate it to ourselves and our own daily lives. We marvel at the enormity of their giving – and the inadequacy of ours. By putting them on a pedestal, we distance ourselves from them, thinking that we don’t have that much to give, or that what we have to offer isn’t worthy, or not imagining ourselves being able to give that way. And so, rather than challenging those notions and really stretching ourselves, nothing ever changes. We objectify our heroes – holding them at arm’s length even as we stay in that warm, comfortable center and hide. But we don’t change.
And we don’t change because we aren’t able to see ourselves in this story. We don’t want to identify with the poor widow who gives everything, and we don’t want to identify with the wealthier folks who give less than they should out of their abundance. And so I invite you this morning to place yourself in this story that we’ve all heard a thousand times not as the widow; not as a scribe, if you serve on the Vestry or in a position of leadership; not as one of the wealthy who gave out of their abundance. Take a moment and picture yourself in the story as the two coins that the widow placed in the Temple offering. And as you do that, think of two words: “Faithful” and “offering.” What are you adding toward the faithful work of following Jesus the Christ?
What comes to mind for you when you think of “offering” as being personal – a real giving of yourself? For St. Augustine, and in our own Anglican liturgical tradition, our duty is to present all of who we are as an offering at the communion table, sharing in Jesus’ own sacrifice of himself. But it shouldn’t end there. We will be reminded of this when we pray this morning: Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only and not for strength; for pardon only and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name.
In his sermon on the Incomprehensible Nature of God, St. Chrysostom writes: When the widow put into the collection box only two small coins, the master did not give her a recompense worth only two coins. Why was that? Because God paid no attention to the amount of the money. What he did heed was the wealth of her soul.
My friends, our Gospel story this morning is not at its heart about money. Nor is it about extolling the virtues of poverty or condemning the rich. It is about the gratitude with which we accept the gifts that God has given us and the faithfulness with which we offer them to God’s glory and to further God’s mission in the world.
So the REALLY GOOD NEWS is that Jesus has something better in store for us – not only in the hereafter but right here, right now – and that is the ability to change, to be more than we think we can be. I was thinking of the lyric to that Josh Groban song,
You raise me up so I can stand on mountains,
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders,
You raise me up, to more than I can be.
Jesus invites us to be more than we think we can be. Several weeks ago, when we celebrated Children’s Sabbath, I mentioned the term Lifestyle Stewardship. Lifestyle Stewardship is the faithful offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies in everything we do. It becomes a part of our very being. Will we fall off occasionally? Of course – we’re not Jesus. But imagine if, rather than confining Augustine’s understanding of offering of ourselves to the act of communion around the table, we make it a part of who we are, 24/7, 365?.
Look around you this morning. Look at the richness of who we are, what we represent; the struggles we have endured; the faith that has sustained us; the stories we have to share; the gifts that each of us has to offer; the hopes and dreams that each of us has for ourselves, for those we love, and for our common life together as faithful members of the Body of Christ. Think of yourselves as the coins. And think about how your faithfulness makes you more valuable than you could ever imagine. AMEN.
Sermon: October 25, 2015
Mark 10: 46-52
Dennis Winkleblack
I begin with a word of advice: One might want to think twice before engaging Jesus. Take Bartimaeus, for example.
Bartimaeus is a beggar. He sits beside the road on the outskirts of Jericho waiting for handouts. When he gets something, he wraps it in a corner of his cloak – his outer coat. He uses this cloak to shield himself from rain and for warmth in the cooler months of the year.
Now, Bartimaeus, as you heard, is not only a beggar. Bartimaeus is blind.
As well, Bartimaeus is not only a beggar, not only can’t see, but is also a sinner. That is to say, in first century Palestine, if you were blind most everyone figured you must have done something awful to deserve it. Good people just didn’t become blind.
What’s more, Bartimaeus is not only a beggar, not only can’t see, not only a sinner, but because everyone knows he’s a sinner, he’s an outcast. No one will have anything to do with him. He’s considered “unclean” by the religious authorities, and thus barred from Temple worship.
So, Bartimaeus sits and begs by day, and curls up with his cloak for a cover by night. This is his life.
Then, one day, he’s joined on the roadside by more than the usual number of people. He hears someone say that Jesus is coming. Not surprisingly, Bartimaeus has heard about Jesus and his miracles just from sitting on the roadside, overhearing the conversations of others. Jesus is quite the talk of Jericho and the Galilee. So, when Bartimaeus learns that Jesus will be passing through Jericho, he’s ready. Maybe he’s even fantasized about an opportunity exactly like this.
Thus, as Bartimaeus perceives Jesus and his entourage to be in the vicinity, Bartimaeus hollers out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”
Now, mercy in this context means probably what you think it means, even 2000 years ago. Bartimaeus is saying to Jesus, “have compassion for me and help me.”
What happens next is what happens most times when someone in a crowd makes a ruckus. The crowd turns on him and says, “shush!” After all, most of those on the roadside will have heard of Jesus, too, and want to be polite to him while he’s in their city.
But Bartimaeus seems not to care what the crowd thinks, and he cries out even louder, the gospel writer says: “Son of David, have mercy on me.”
Remember my caution about engaging Jesus? Well, Bartimaeus has taken a risky first step. “Son of David, have mercy on me.”
And Jesus stops. And then Jesus says, “Call him here.”
“Call” him. We should know that Jesus is using the same verb for “call” that is used by the gospel writer, Mark, for the calling of the disciples. Uh, oh. It’s really getting close to being too late for Bartimaeus.
So, the disciples say to Bartimaeus, “Take heart, get up, he’s calling you.”
Okay, now it pretty much is too late.
Bartimaeus then quickly throws off his cloak with his money wrapped in one corner, not to mention the figs and whatever else he might have had for a meal in another corner, and springs to his feet.
Springs to his feet, the gospel says – springs – most likely wearing only a loin cloth, this being Jericho some 800 feet below sea level where it stays pretty warm 12 months of the year, and downright suffocatingly hot in several of them.
Springs to his feet and goes to Jesus. Not being able to see, I’d guess someone guided him.
And, then, here’s really the very last chance for Bartimaeus, even with his heart pumping blood so fast his brain can’t think straight. Last chance because Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”
What do you want me to do for you? Really. The man can’t see. It’s surely obvious to everyone. What do you want me to do for you?
And Bartimaeus says, “Let me see again.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. There’s no taking it back now, Bartimaeus.
You may remember that, usually, when Jesus heals a person, he touches them. One time, Jesus even spit on his fingers and then touched the person in the act of healing. This time, though, there’s no mention of Jesus touching Bartimaeus. Instead, Jesus says only, “Go; your faith has made you well.”
And, we read, “Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.”
But, let’s back up a sentence: Your faith has made you well?
Faith? I mean, I didn’t hear Jesus ask him if he believed in the virgin birth or the Holy Trinity, did you? Or to name the five books of the Pentateuch? Bartimaeus had absolutely no time to finish a confirmation class, did he?
Your faith has made you well? What in heaven’s name did Bartimaeus do to earn that affirmation from Jesus?
The only thing or things obvious to the reader is that, one, by referring to Jesus as “Son of David” he essentially identified Jesus as Messiah. So that’s a plus on the “knows his doctrine” scale.
Oh, and asked twice for mercy. And, in fact, biblical scholars suggest it was this asking twice that is linked to the response from Jesus. And, not just asking twice, but asking twice after first being told to shut up by everyone around him.
The point being that Bartimaeus wanted Jesus’ mercy and compassion badly! Wanted Jesus more than anything else in the world! So badly, that he was bold, audacious, persistent in the face of adversity. Clearly, you’re not persistent in the face of adversity without a powerful internal drive. This man badly wanted to see, and he knew Jesus was his best and only hope. His. Only. Hope. That’s it.
And immediately, Mark says, Bartimaeus regained his sight.
Bartimaeus initially only wanted to regain his sight, which would mean restoration to fellowship in the Temple, which would mean losing the sinner label, which would mean no longer being an outcast, which would mean he wouldn’t have to sit in the hot sun from morning to night.
That’s all Bartimaeus wanted. And, he got it, every single bit of it.
But, of course, this isn’t the end of the story. And here’s where the consequences of engaging Jesus for you and me come in to play.
Because next we read that Bartimaeus decided to follow Jesus on the way. Didn’t turn around, pick up his cloak with his lunch and the few coins he’d received, and go off to explore his brand new color-filled world. No, he followed Jesus on the way.
So, where did Bartimaeus follow Jesus?” This is Mark chapter 10, the very last verse. Mark chapter 11, very first verse, finds Jesus and his followers entering Jerusalem. As you know, Jesus would not leave Jerusalem without being hung on a cross until dead.
Now, you should know that we never hear anything more about Bartimaeus in the New Testament. Curious, isn’t it? If anyone knew what became of Bartimaeus, it never made it into the New Testament.
So, what do you think happened to Bartimaeus?
I have an idea, a very strong hunch, but before I tell you what I bet happened to Bartimaeus, two things:
One, Jesus never calls anyone to follow him that he doesn’t need. Doesn’t really need. Doesn’t call people to follow him that he doesn’t really need to help in his mission of mercy and compassion for the salvation of the world. Safe to say, if Jesus calls you, he needs you.
Two, Jesus never calls anyone who isn’t equipped to fulfill the calling. Equipped at the moment, or at least eminently teachable.
So, now, what happened to Bartimaeus up in Jerusalem?
I don’t know. Nobody knows.
But, I bet – I bet – Bartimaeus had the time of his life.
If we’re honest, most of us, like Bartimaeus, first sought out Jesus for personal benefit, either long ago or fairly recently. As well, personal benefit is at least partly the reason we crawled out of bed this morning to come here. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. In fact, it’s a good thing, the way we’re made by God. As Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O God.”
And, here we are again. In a place where we’ve become accustomed to seeing Jesus – to meeting Jesus, to engaging Jesus. It might even be said that, as with Bartimaeus, by being here today we’re revealing a truth about ourselves that we are nothing if not persistent. We could have stayed home today. We didn’t.
So, here we are, still needy, though persistent faith-motivated people watching Jesus head up the road to where Jesus goes.
Plus, if we’ve engaged Jesus from our depths, we’ve also heard Jesus call us. Heard Jesus call us for the first time or again. Heard Jesus call us to follow him to Jerusalem. To follow Jesus into hostile environments – our Jerusalems – right through those doors.
The reality of this momentous calling to follow Jesus through these doors will, once again, be ours today. As usual, and as usually overlooked in significance, as the last act of our worship, Father Don will bid us in effect, “to follow Jesus into the world.”
For example, Jesus says, Call her here, you, perhaps, and says to you, follow me to your school, your work place filled with beautiful people and impossible people and love the hell out of them.
Or, call him here, you perhaps, and says, follow me and have mercy on that person in your family whom you can hardly stand. Have mercy, compassion. After all, do you really know what it’s like to be that person?
Or, call her here, you perhaps, and says, follow my example and do something that’s getting harder every day in America: Give a darn about people who don’t think like you. Right wing, left wing; Republican, Democrat. Listen. Care.
Or, call him here, you perhaps, and says, follow me and choose your life’s work not by money you might make, but by the opportunity you can gain to love and serve.
Or, call her here, you perhaps, and says, just tell the truth as you see it. Just tell the truth. And, remember, I’m with you always.
Or, call him here, you perhaps, and says, spend your money on things that last, not on things that perish, for where your treasure is, there is your heart – and I need your heart.
Dear friends: We are here, and if we’ve been engaged with Jesus, we’ve heard ourselves called. Called to follow Jesus to Jerusalem – follow through these doors, then north, south, east, west. Follow Jesus to challenging, dangerous places and situations. Where Jesus needs us. Not someone like you or me, but needs exactly you or me.
And, yes, it’s true. Like Bartimaeus, we may never be heard from again.
But, by all accounts, we’ll have the time of our lives.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Pentecost 21 – October 18, 2015
Raising Up the Lives of Children: A Sermon on Children's Sabbath
by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
Job 38: 1-7, 34-41 Mark 10: 35-45
I always love that story about James and John – known as the Sons of Thunder – because it describes so wonderfully how many Christians understand their relationship with God. You know, I have a cartoon in my office in which a female parishioner approaches the priest and says, “Rector, I think you ought to be canonized.” And the cartoon shows the little cloud with the image that is going through the Rector’s head – and in that image his face is in a stained glass window with a halo over his head. The little cloud over the parishioner’s head pictures the Rector with duct tape over his mouth, with his hands tied behind his back, ready to be shot out of a canon. Two different images of what it means to be “canonized.”
And so it is for Zebedee’s two sons in today’s Gospel passage. James and John envision themselves perched in Heaven, one of them at Jesus’ right hand, the other on his left, looking down on all creation from the heavenly throne. They want to follow Jesus, but their image of what that looks like is being framed in a stained glass window. Jesus has no problems in seeing them at either side of him – but the background is a very different image. Their image of greatness and Jesus’ image of greatness are two different things.
Today we honor National Children’s Sabbath, when we are asked to consider – and do something about – the plight of children throughout the world who face hunger, inadequate or transient housing, deficits in early childhood development, chronic illness, threat of injury, lack of access to adequate health and mental health care, abuse and neglect, too few positive role models – and public schools that are overwhelmed by the daunting tasks of educating children whose ability to learn is compromised by these situations. And our lessons – especially from Job and Mark – provide us with both opportunity and challenge. The opportunity is to acknowledge that this suffering exists. The challenge is to ensure that we do not take away the message that there is nothing we can do to address it. We may not be capable of ending all suffering, but, like the boy throwing the endangered starfish back into the sea, one starfish at a time, we are surely called to end the suffering that we can affect.
It is all too easy to throw up our hands and say, “It is too big of a problem” or worse, “We don’t have the resources to begin to address the problem.” I have a lapel button that says, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” If we think we don’t have the resources, consider the fact that the United States Congress is about to pass a bill that eliminate the federal estate tax -- what amounts to around a 250 billion dollar tax cut that benefits only the top .2% of Americans with estates of more than $5.4 million. We have the resources. The fact of the matter is that addressing the curse of child poverty is far less expensive than what we do now – which is pay for the costs of dealing with the repercussions of NOT addressing it.
I am proud that Trinity Church has taken an important role as we recognize the value of educational opportunities for all children through the ministries of our Choir School and Trinity Academy, through the ministries of our Christian formation programs for children and youth, and through the ministry of our acolyte program, which has become a leadership development program over the past several years.
Let’s look at what the Book of Job has to tell us. At the heart of the Book of Job lies the question of suffering and Job speaks for all of us when he questions why people suffer. In last week’s lesson, we heard Job lamenting the fact of the wretchedness that had befallen him – he who had formerly had wealth and comfort – and he questions God in the form of a trial. This week we hear God’s reply, in which he questions the audacity of Job to question the provenance of God, who created all things. But even at the end of the book of Job there are not really definitive answers about why there is suffering in the world. But author Carol Newsome explains this doesn’t mean that we can’t draw some conclusions. She writes:
To deny that there is a single definitive answer is not to say that one cannot gain insight into the problem of suffering in a world created by a loving God. What the book of Job models is a community of voices struggling to articulate a range of perspectives, each one of which contains valid insights as well as blindness to other dimensions of the problem. . . By refusing to give the book a neat resolution and declare one of the perspectives to be the solution, the book of Job draws us toward a recognition that our craving for an answer is an attempt to evade what we know to be true. Especially in times of religious crisis, richness of meaning and even a sense of peace are not to be found in a pre-packaged answer but emerge from wrestling with God.”
We as Christians have lost what our Jewish forebears had as a part of their spirituality – the idea of “wrestling” with God, not as equals, but in an effort to explore and find the deeper truths to which God points us.
Job gives voice to all who are concerned about suffering in the world, and today especially, about the suffering of children. How, we should ask, can over 5.2 million children be without health coverage? How, we should ask, can 14.7 million children live in poverty in the richest nation on earth? How, we should ask, can a Black boy born in 2001 – that is, 14 years old – already face a 1 in 3 chance of imprisonment in his lifetime, or his Latino age-mate face one in six odds of imprisonment? God does not provide an easy answer; indeed there are no “easy” answers. But there is a faithful answer for those who are listening.
This brings us to the passage from the Gospel of Mark. The theme of this entire chapter is service: Earlier in the chapter, Jesus instructed his disciples to let the little children come to him, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. He then instructed the rich young man that the meaning of discipleship was not to know and keep the commandments but to place everything one has to the service of others. Immediately following the passage we heard this morning is the healing of Blind Bartimaeus. So in this one chapter Jesus teaches us about the importance of serving those who are young, poor, and in need of healing.
Indeed, servant leadership is the theme of today’s Gospel. James and John want to be rulers; Jesus calls them to be servants. The disciples were as susceptible as most of us are, if we are honest with ourselves, about cultural notions of status, wealth, honor and power. So they naturally thought they should try to get the best seats in Jesus’ entourage – and the other disciples naturally were upset by this grab for power and glory. Recall that back in chapter 9 Jesus caught the disciples arguing over who among them was the “greatest”. Jesus’ response to that argument was to place a child among them and took it in his arms saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” But still in this chapter, the disciples regard the little children as distractions not worthy of Jesus’ time or ministry.
In fact, Jesus’ emphasis on servant leadership runs through all four of the Gospels; this is not some fluke in the Gospel of Mark – it is central to Jesus’ message. It is central to the Gospel. On this Children’s Sabbath, I urge us to think about servant ministry in two ways. The first is the traditional personal way – what we think of when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, the type of service that Mother Teresa offered to the poor of India. That type of “hands on” service that so many of us offer through so many of our ministries here at Trinity.
And then there is the second type that requires an entire community to address systemic issues around human need. Just as all of Job’s neighbors had a kernel of the truth in their analysis of Job’s situation, so we as a nation are called to form a consensus around the issue of confronting the issue of child poverty. I cannot believe that there is one member of Congress who believes that child poverty is a good thing. And yet members of Congress do nothing about it and instead respond to the lobbyists and interest groups that finance their campaigns. As voters in a democratic society, we can do something about it.
We need to recognize that servant ministry is more than the manual acts of service that we perform in service to others. It is a way of life, based upon an appreciation of all of God’s creation and our relationship to it, that guides us in the paths of justice as we care for the least, the last, and the left behind in service to our Lord, Jesus Christ. That is lifestyle stewardship. That’s lifestyle servant ministry. And that is what we need to do in order to achieve the greatness to which Jesus calls us. AMEN.
The following sermon was preached on Sunday September 27, 2015 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford CT The Gospel text for the sermon is Mark 9:38-50, and can be found here. You can also listen to the sermon as preached at the 10am liturgy over on SoundCloud.
When I sat down to begin preparing this sermon, I cracked open my Bible and read the gospel appointed for today. When I finished reading the text I sat back, took a deep breath, and thought, “What have I gotten myself into?” Last week the rector got “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” and this week I get, “if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.” What sort of new seminarian hazing is this!? But the more I think about it, the more thankful I am to be preaching on such a difficult passage. This text, just like life, is hard, difficult, and messy. It seems to me that it offers and reveals a few very important lessons for those of us attempting to walk this hard, difficult, and messy road we call the Christian journey – that we call the Jesus movement.
Held together with last week’s Gospel these two passages offer to us what is effectively Mark’s discipleship catechism – Mark’s teachings on what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. The part we hear today, in the concluding verses of chapter nine, is a sort of mash up on discipleship. It consists of a series of originally independent sayings that are linked together with various catchwords, phrases, and roughly speaking, are linking together by subject matter. For those of you interested in theories of biblical interpretation this is what scholars refer to as redaction criticism. All this is to say that what we have before us are two clusters of teachings concluded with a trio of salty sayings.
“John said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” If you look between the lines you can almost see Jesus shaking his head and thinking, “these guys really don’t get it.” What the disciples are mad about isn’t that someone is casting out demons in the name of Jesus – they are upset because this person isn’t one of them. They are upset because, as they see it, this person doesn’t have the right qualifications. He hangs out with the wrong group of people; he doesn’t think the right way; he went to that other seminary. But, Jesus is clear. Those things that divide the 12 and this other man – the things that divide us and them – do not matter. What matters is that the power of Jesus’ name is spreading, casting out demons, rooting out sin and evil, and making people whole again. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Whoever proclaims the name of Jesus in order to heal this broken and hurting world is for us.
The next cluster, the next teaching, directs our attention from worrying about what others are doing to worrying and paying attention to what we are doing. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.”
The language Jesus uses here is figurative and hyperbolic, intense and harsh. Now let’s be clear, the “cut it off” command is not to be taken literally, but it is to be taken seriously. These words are an incredibly vivid way of saying that entering into the Kingdom of God is worth any sacrifice necessary to attain it.
In saying, “if any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones,” Jesus is drawing attention to the way our actions impact others. This alludes to how, at times, our actions and social structures can hold others captive resulting in harmful consequences; be it marginalization, dehumanization, or worse. When Jesus speaks of “these little one,” he is not just talking about children. He is talking about anyone, and everyone, who is vulnerable in society. He is talking about women, children, the orphaned, the widowed, those who live on the margin, even those who are new believers. He is talking about people of color, people who are differently abled, members of the LGBT community. He is talking about people who are under educated, under housed, and under employed. We hear these words of Jesus echoed elsewhere in Scripture when Paul says, it is better not to do something than to do it and cause your brother or sister to fall.
Jesus’ moral barometer is always, the welfare of the vulnerable – the welfare of the “least” of these. This barometer is incredibly clear in the part of Mark’s Gospel we currently find ourselves in. We are not to do anything that will cause someone else to sin, or prevent them from growing closer in the knowledge and love of God.
Next Jesus turns to our actions, “if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.” The amputation of a limb or the excision of a part of the body by surgical means is sometimes the only way to preserve the life of the whole body. In the spiritual life, the same kind of thing can happen.
Ched Myers, author and theologian, uses the image of addiction in reflecting on this passage:
A recovering addict knows in her flesh the searing truth that kicking a habit is very much like cutting off a part of oneself, and such “amputation” is life-saving surgery on the cancer of our illusions and appetites. . . Recovery is a life-or-death discipline, and Jesus’ metaphor captures that urgency.
I wonder, if Jesus were giving this teaching today what might he say?
If your drive to get ahead causes you to ignore those who hunger, cut it out. If your need for the newest, shiniest, and fastest stuff causes you to forget those who go without, cut it out. If your focus on your favorite sports team causes you to neglect your own prayer life, cut it out.
Jesus is calling on all of us to do the hard work of stripping away every disillusioned idea we have about what matters in life that does not conform to the Gospel of Jesus. For it is better to be deformed than to conform to what oppresses the most vulnerable members of our community and the society at large.
Finally, the Gospel passage ends with three sayings about salt. The phrase, “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?” hints at the nature of salt as flavor and as a preservative. In cooking salt adds flavors to food, more importantly it enhances the natural flavors already present in the dish. When salt has lost its saltiness it looses the ability to spice things up and highlight the natural deliciousness of what we eat. Elsewhere in Scripture we are called to be the salt of the earth. So disciples whose lives are not characterized by lowly service, nor by openness to Christians who are different, nor by care for those who are young in the faith, nor by rigorous self-discipline are like flavorless salt. They have lost the sharpness, which sets them apart from their environment and which constitutes their usefulness.
In addition to a flavor enhancer, salt is also the earliest of all preservatives. The Greeks used to say that salt acted like a soul in a dead body. Dead meat left to itself went bad, but, pickled in salt, it retained its freshness. The salt seemed to put a kind of life into it. Salt defended against corruption.
The world in which the disciples lived was so corrupt that Rome itself was compared to a filthy sewer. Purity was gone and chastity was unknown. It is into this world that the disciples practiced their ministry. Here Jesus is saying to the disciples, “The world needs the flavor and the purity that only my followers can bring. And if they themselves have lost the thrill and the purity of Christian life, where will the world get what it needs?”
Just as Jesus calls on us to strip away everything that gets in our way of inheriting the Kingdom of God, so too is he calling us to remember the purity and faithfulness of our call as Christians.
This morning we hear the urgent reminder to live this Christian journey faithfully, making every sacrifice necessary, because it is not only our lives that are at stake, the lives of the whole world are at hand. This is a daunting and overwhelming challenge, but it is not impossible.
Week by week we gather together in this space, like Christians around the world have been gathering for centuries. We listen to the word of God revealed to us in Holy Scripture. We share the ministry of prayer for our own needs and the needs of others. Most importantly we participate in the most holy meal at this altar. We receive the body and blood of Jesus, and invite the very incarnate nature of God into the depths of our beings. We are being fed, pardoned, strengthened, and healed so that we might go out and be the salt of the earth. This sacrament of bread and wine allows us to focus on what truly matters and sacrifice the rest – to discard all the extra stuff we’ve picked up along the way. This meal gives us the nourishment to be salt.
In a few moments as we gathered at this rail let us pray together that Christ strengthens us to cut off all that binds us to sin and gives us the strength, grace, and courage to stand that we may go forth from this place and change the world.
AMEN
