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Not Known, But Trusted

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by Genevieve Zetlan, Licensed Lay Preacher

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

Welcome to Trinity Sunday! If there’s anything that’s hard for non-Christians, or even most Christians to understand about our idea of God, it’s the Trinity. Our Nicean Creed uses a lot of beautiful language to talk about the Trinity – God from God, Light from Light, begotten not made, proceeding from, of one being with … but do we really know what any of that means?

Theologians have struggled for thousands of years to explain the unexplainable, to put into words the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—as if in defining God we could somehow know God. As poor Nicodemus struggles this morning. Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark of night – a Pharisee who nevertheless recognizes that Jesus has some sort of special relationship to God—but what that is, he’s not exactly sure. He comes seeking answers, seeking explanations. And what does he get in response to his earnest—if timid—inquiry? A Jesus who speaks in riddles and never seems to answer a question straight! Nicodemus comes confessing his faith, wanting to understand, and Jesus puts him off!

And how many times do we feel this way about God? We seek after God in the dark places of our lives—when change is all around us and we don’t know what the future holds—faithful, yes, but wanting to understand: Why did a loved one die? How can we possibly heal from a heartbreak? Where do we go from here?

How can these things be?

But this Jesus in John gives us no satisfying answers. He is rather remote, certainly confusing, frustratingly un-knowable. Today we are not given the comforting shepherd or the parable teacher. Today we are given a God incarnate who reminds us how little we understand—the wind of God’s Spirit blows where it chooses, and we do not know where it comes from or where it goes. Because God cannot be fully known.

But, God can be trusted.

Trust doesn’t happen instantly. It happens gradually, one step at a time, as we find that over and over, when things seem darkest, God is with us. St. Tim’s began with 9 people in 1868. As we were preparing to construct our first building, we needed to come up with $200 to purchase the land. We couldn’t afford it. But when the land owners realized it was wanted for a church, they envisioned what God could do in this place and they sold – for $1.

Twenty years ago during the search process for our current rector, the Vestry conducted an 18-month process culminating in an offer to a candidate, who then backed out – resulting in our call to Brad. From generation to generation in our history, we have learned to trust God.

We humans tend to trust others once we get to know them. But of course the difficult part of faith is in putting our trust in something that is ultimately, sometimes frustratingly, un-knowable. And so we tend to ask, over and over like Nicodemus, questions that are mostly the wrong questions. Because God doesn’t generally hand down timely answers to Why or How or When?

Instead, in response to our search for understanding, God continually offers us something completely different – and sometimes not at all what we’re asking for: a glimpse of the holiness that does indeed fill the earth. A taste of bread and wine. A birdsong breaking through our thoughts. A vast expanse of starry sky. A vision, like Isaiah’s, of heaven. A holy moment in which all our questions and worries become somehow irrelevant.

To get a glimpse of the holy is not to have our questions answered or our problems solved. And to trust God doesn’t mean everything will turn out exactly as we want—as Isaiah found out when his people went into exile and slavery after his glorious vision of God.

Trusting God means that somehow, if we seek after God, if we come questioning in the dark places of our lives as Nicodemus did, God will give us a glimpse of the holiness that fills the earth, and work with us to fill our lives with that holiness.

Nicodemus’s encounter with God incarnate does just that. After his encounter with Jesus, it is Nicodemus who calls into question the legality of his trial. After Jesus’ death, it is Nicodemus who brought 100 pounds of embalming spices for his body — an abundance that exceeds all normal proportions and would have been more than enough for even a royal burial. He does these things despite being a Pharisee, despite the personal danger of associating with a criminal executed for treason and blasphemy .

Some time ago I had the opportunity to walk a labrynth. A labrynth looks a bit like a maze, but there is only ever one way to move forward through it. The first time I walked it, it was daylight. I could see my destination in the center of the circle, but to get there, I had to walk the pathway that doubled back on itself, moving me sometimes closer and sometimes farther from the middle. For a type A personality like myself, I have to admit, it wasn’t the peaceful, spiritual experience I had heard others recommend. It was actually rather maddening! I could see the destination, but there was no straightforward way to get there. And it took SO LONG.

I returned to the labrynth at night though, and walked it again. This time, it was much harder to see the destination in the center or even the direction the path in front of me was taking. To move through the labrynth in the dark I had to put one foot in front of the other, over and over, knowing that eventually I would get where I needed to be.

In the dark places in our lives, when we are in gut-wrenching sorrow or heart-breaking pain or deep confusion, we cannot clearly see the path ahead, much less the final destination. We cannot know what God has mind, to what good God will turn our walking in darkness. But we can trust that if we keep putting one foot in front of the other, God will walk with us, and we will reach the center, and it will be filled with God’s holiness. Because God cannot be known. But God can be trusted.

And when we are not, ourselves, in the midst of darkness?

It is then we get to walk with someone else. It is the reason we come here, week after week, not only to seek solace, but to get a glimpse of the holy that fills the earth, so that we can be solace to others. At Shrine Mont about 60 members of our congregation had a chance to share the places in our service that they felt were holy. It was different for everyone, and sometimes the experience of the holy varied from week to week. But when we come here and are touched by the holy on earth—the holy we experience during Eucharist, during quiet moments of prayer, during the exchange of the peace or the singing of a hymn—we can put aside for a moment all our questions, our need to understand the Whys and Whats and Hows …

and respond as Isaiah did, when the hosts of heaven ask “Whom shall I send?”

“Send me.”

Because whether we are walking in the dark places ourselves, or walking with others through their dark places, God cannot be known, but God can be trusted—one step at a time.

Amen.

 

Transforming Hearts, Feeding Souls

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by Genevieve Zetlan, Licensed Lay Preacher

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Psalm 124
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

It’s really tough for us to get on board with the idea of plucking out an eye. Mark is the earliest of our four Gospels, the one most concerned that the end time is near, Jesus’ return is imminent, and the message of repentence is urgent.

Frankly, after 2,000 years, we’ve lost a bit of that urgency. Sure, we say in our creed that we look for the kingdom of heaven, but mostly we mean we’d like to visit it after we die, and we’d really prefer that the world keep right on turning pretty much as it is—with maybe a slightly better job or slightly more mindful children or slightly better health than we currently have.

But what Jesus is saying here is vitally, urgently important – woven through the exhortations to take this as seriously as the loss of a limb is the real point of this morning’s Gospel: Jesus’ insistance this morning that God is not about following our idea of proper procedure.

God is about transforming hearts and feeding souls.

When Jesus’ followers try to stop others from casting out demons in his name, Jesus says “whoever is not against us is for us”. Note that this is the counter-cultural opposite of the oft-heard saying “if you’re not for us, you’re against us”. Jesus is urging his disciples — that’s us, by the way — to start with the assumption that we are all on the same side—all working towards the same Good, regardless of how we do the work we’ve been given to do.

We humans aren’t very good at that. We like order. We get caught up in all the whos and hows and whys, in all the details of proper procedure and authority and the “right” way to do a thing.

The church I attended in in Virginia Beach was a very old, very historic place with long traditions. Every year for decades the church held an Oyster Roast and bazaar on a Saturday in November—the kind of event that lasts all day and draws people from miles around to enjoy the food and shop the various rooms. One of the most popular and lucrative rooms was the “pickle room”, where a thousand homemade pickles made great Christmas gifts. And one year some new folks volunteered to help the ECW make pickles under the direction of, as she was known, the “pickle lady”. Well, as they began cutting hundreds of cucumbers into spears the pickle lady came by, tsking and shaking her head. “No, no. They really need to be one and three quarters by five eighths inches.” she said. “I like to make a mark on my cutting board.”

Now as many of you know I’m a type A personality and I am all about having things done well, and right. I get it. Without proper channels and procedures and process, there’d be chaos, I say! And we’re human. We’re going to disagree with each other from time to time about how to best go about doing the work we’ve been given to do.

But there’s nothing that kills the Spirit faster than having your freely given gifts rejected. To try to stop other people from doing God’s work simply because they are not doing it “our” way, Jesus says, is a great evil. It is not just thwarting the work of God—although it is that—it is thwarting another’s faith, the work of their soul.

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And that is a terribly serious thing.

The Good News is, the Gospel is: God will not be constrained by our ideas of proper procedure. God is bigger than our institutions, and God’s transforming work will be accomplished anyway, often because of us—but sometimes, in spite of us.

The warning this morning is that all too often we want things done our own way, and that can starve our spirits. Like the pickle lady, we are oh-so-good at finding fault with others when things aren’t to our exact specifications. Like the Israelites in our first lesson things morning, who after having been redeemed from slavery, given water from a rock, given manna in the wilderness, are now complaining that they are starving for meat and melons!

It is astounding, our ability to one-up each other with our complaints about work and spouses, parents and children, in-laws and exes, illness and inconvenience, traffic and weather, hectic schedules and church committees and Congress.*

And when we focus on how the world isn’t conforming to our exact specifications, we utterly fail to appreciate the ways in which God is feeding us every day. We fail to see the miracles God pours out on the world. God poured out the Spirit on Eldad and Medad, and all Joshua saw was another problem to be solved. God poured out the Spirit on some random person in Judea to cast out demons, and all the discliples saw was a process foul.

Because even more important than doing God’s work, Jesus and Moses tell us today, is living in a community that is accepting of all kinds of ways to do God’s work. If you can’t do that, well, you might as well cut off a hand, because it is less important for any of us to have two hands than it is for us to have many hands working together.

And it is urgent that we do this. Urgent that we catch the seriousness of Mark’s gospel not necessarily because we want to avoid the fires of hell, but because we must avoid quenching the fire of each other’s souls.

This is risky. Saying “yes” to the Spirit when it doesn’t fit within our notions of what is proper, efficient or orderly. But God will not be constrained by our notions of proper procedure, so we must not let those notions constrain our vision for this community, either. Eldad and Medad didn’t follow proper procedure. That guy healing people in Jesus’s name didn’t get official permission to do so. But God’s spirit came upon them anyway. Because God’s not really about following our procedures.

God is about transforming hearts and feeding souls.

And doing God’s work is transformative. Jesus tells his disciples that no one who does God’s work can afterwards speak evil of Him. And the transformative power of doing God’s work doesn’t even need to begin with something as showy as casting out demons—work as simple as offering a cup of water will do.

I know a deacon who, long before becoming a deacon, was just looking for a place to volunteer, wondering what work God wanted her to do. She signed up one day to go to a nursing home, and after being there a couple hours was headed out the door fully convinced that volunteering in nursing homes was definitely not for her. On her way out, she passed an open door and glimpsed a resident in her bed, straining for a glass of water on the nightstand that was just out of reach. So, she went in and held the glass of water while the woman drank. Then the woman leaned back into her pillow, sighed, and said “I was SO thirsty.” And in that moment she saw Jesus asking for a drink of water. She was transformed. Both she and the women were fed, and she eventually became a deacon and spent the next 20 years ministering in nursing homes.

In the smallest of ways, doing God’s work leads to more doing God’s work, more faith, more hope, more love in the world. It is food for our souls, to be engaged in the work of the Spirit, and it is work that feeds the world, one person, one glass of water at a time. And that is our job: to create a community where everyone can use their gifts of the Spirit—a place that feeds everyone’s soul.

As our letter from James this morning reminds us, building a community is really what God’s work is all about—pray together! He says. Call together the elders of the church, he says, because where any two or three are gathered together, that’s where Jesus is to be found. The church, and St. Tim’s, isn’t about the person who is the past, present, or future rector—it’s not about when our services are held or how they are structured—it’s not about the Vestry’s decisions or each Ministry’s charter—it’s about who we are. It’s about how we feed each other’s souls—how we recognize the Spirit in each other and build that up. That’s the kind of community that feeds and transforms the world.

We will certainly starve—ourselves and each other—if we think that our way is the only way. Because God’s not about following our procedures.

God is about transforming hearts and feeding souls.

And so are we.

Amen.

 

 

*Adapted from the prayer by Maren Tirabassi and Joan Jordan Grant

 

 

 

Prophets of Discomfort

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Genevieve Zetlan, Licensed Lay Preacher

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62: 6-14
1 Corinthians 7: 29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Prophets are uncomfortable people. There was a man when I was in college who carried around a giant cross – I have no idea how he lugged that thing about – and stood on the lawn in the center of campus shouting that we were all doomed – most especially the girls wearing short skirts. In this day and age we are likely to walk by him or any other street corner preacher proclaiming the end of the world, averting our eyes and thinking privately that he’s more than a little bit, well,crazy.

Because prophets are embarrassing. Poor Jonah from our reading this morning walks the city of Ninevah end to end – it takes three days – shouting imminent destruction. And he wasn’t the only one. The prophet Isaiah went naked and barefoot for 3 years, as a sign to the Egyptians that the Assyrians were going to conquer them and drag them naked into exile. Ezekiel cooked his food over cow dung for over a year to show the people how disgusted God was by their degredation – imagine the flavor imparted by that particular kind of smoke.

All of them lived out visions of God, because a true prophet is someone who calls attention not just to him or herself, but does uncomfortable things in the service of God and others.

Some time ago a friend of mine was acting as the caretaker for her mother in law. “I’m not Miss Nurse” she said, explaining how far outside of her comfort zone this was. She administered morphene, bathed her mother in law, did all the messy, terrible, uncomfortable things you do for someone at the end of life, and she was afraid of making mistakes. But, she said afterwards, “It gave me compassion. It changed me for the better.”

God gives us comfort, but that is very different from making us comfortable.

God asks of prophets that they leave their comfortable lives behind to spread his message, and the prophets in turn ask that we leave the familiar behind in the service of God and each other—and frankly, none of us are happy about it. Jonah, you may remember, gets God’s call to Ninevah and heads straight in the opposite direction, finally arriving there after a detour through the belly of a great fish. Like Jonah, and like James and John, Simon and Peter – being called by God means leaving stepping out of our known lives to something new.

The problem is, deep down we’re pretty sure our comfortable lives are what we deserve, or at least, part of God’s “blessing” on us. After all, how often do we say “I’m blessed” when referring to our house, our income, our lives that are going just as we planned. And there are preachers who will agree, who will say that God wants us to be “happy”. (Sorry, I’m not one of them.) It seems in our readings this morning God has other priorities than making people “happy” – at least, our usual definition of happy. We often equate being happy with being comfortable, and God seems to be all about disturbing our lives and calling us to be more than that.

Ninevah was the capital of the Assyrian empire – decidedly not Jewish – and God sends an extremely reluctant Hebrew prophet to preach to them. Not only that, they actually listen and change – profoundly. They start a new life. In the Gospel this morning Jesus calls his first followers to leave their boats and the life they know and do something new. And Paul’s letter this morning, in which he tells us to imagine a completely different life from the one we currently lead – rejoicers not rejoicing, married people not being married – invites us to overcome our contentment with our own status quo and imagine something new: wherever you are, Paul says, imagine that you are the opposite.

And all of this doing something new and listening to prophets and imagining change that God asks us to do is uncomfortable.  Because while God gives comfort, that is very different from making us comfortable.

Yet, as Christians, we are actually uniquely equipped to tackle uncomfortable things – things we initially think “I could never do that”. Because Christianity is mainstream, because we do this every week, we have a certain blindness about how utterly preposterous we Christians are. We have forgotten that to believe an all-knowing, all-powerful God became a limited, utterly dependent, human baby is beyond belief. That to believe Jesus was killed, and then came back and walked and talked, is utterly without precident. That to eat his flesh and drink his blood in some sort of celebration of that is actually pretty disturbing when you think about it. Like the white queen in Alice in Wonderland, we Christians may believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast!

It is part of who we are, to be a little bit well – crazy. Which is actually comforting, because when it comes down to it, God needs more people who are willing to do uncomfortable, unsettling, seemingly impossible things in order to proclaim by word and example that God’s kingdom is here, all around us, and to build that kingdom up. We are called to be Prophets –all of us.

That doesn’t necessarily mean leaving home to far-flung places like Ninevah, or to Haiti, Pine Ridge, or Dungannon. It means listening to what God is nudging you to do, most especially when it makes you uncomfortable. It can mean hosting a coffee hour or going up to a stranger and starting a conversation after church – even if you’re an introvert. It can mean volunteering to perform music during a service even if you don’t consider yourself a performer. It can mean standing up here and reading the lesson or administering communion or preaching – even if you’re afraid of public speaking (you know, just as a completely hypothetical example).

Because when we care for the sick and poor, reach out to a stranger, feed one another’s souls, we are acting as prophets. We are living out God’s vision of the Kingdom.

As a church family, we are exploring transitioning the 11:00 am service to a bi-lingual, Spanish and English service. We are about to spend more than a year conducting worship without organ music. Your new Vestry is setting visionary goals related to Involvement, Growth, and Outreach. In all of this and much more, God is with us – doing new things – and God will give us comfort, but that is very different from making us comfortable.

We can choose to try to run away, like Jonah. Or we can step out with Simon and Peter, James and John. Because notice that Jesus, when he calls those first disciples, does not offer to make them farmers or bakers. He takes the skills they already have and puts them to use in a new way – I will make you fish for people. When we do that, take what we have and use it in the service of God – even when it’s new and uncomfortable – we bring the kingdom of God nearer to those around us, and the Kingdom of God is indeed at hand.

So I offer this prayer, adapted by Bishop Desmond Tutu, for all of us as Prophets in training this year:

Disturb us, O Lord
when we are too well-pleased with ourselves
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little,
because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, O Lord
when with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the water of life
when, having fallen in love with time,
we have ceased to dream of eternity
and in our efforts to build a new earth,
we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.

Stir us, O Lord
to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas
where storms show Thy mastery,
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes
and invited the brave to follow.

Amen

 

The Christmas Spirit

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by the Rev. Mark A. Michael, Interim Rector

“I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” St. Luke 2:10-11

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that Christmas makes people crazy. About a month ago, my neighbor affixed a two foot-tall stuffed antler on either side of her SUV and a red pom-pom the size of a basketball on her front grill. She’s a very sensible person really, a German, for heaven’s sake, but—you know, it’s Christmas.   Only at Christmas do we get up on ladders to affix dozens of tiny lights to our down spouting. It’s our only time for drinking out of vessels that look like a deer’s head or an elf’s boot. Christmas is the only time quite a few of us would be caught dead singing in public.

It’s not just that we become silly at Christmas. It’s also the season for generosity. We remember to greet people at Christmas. We set aside a little gift for so many of those folks that we usually take for granted: the poor fellow who delivers the newspaper so early in the morning, our children’s longsuffering teachers. I heard a story on the radio last week about an anonymous man who went into two Walmarts in Cleveland and paid for everything on layaway. He spent over $100,000 buying items from socks to big screen TVs for people struggling to get by.   And of course, he did it at Christmas. The official Walmart spokesman put it this way: “Christmas is a time of year when many people go above and beyond to give back to their neighbors and communities. When customers anonymously pay off others’ layaway items we’re reminded of the amazing things people will do to support each other.”[1]

There’s something magical about this time of year, something that calls out the child that lies within us, and encourages us to try, if only for a day or two, to become our own best self. A friend of mine, who is now a priest but who grew up in a rather secular home, describes the way he experienced Christmas before he came to faith in this way: “There was a magic and wonder to the whole thing that was not just about Santa Claus. It was not intellectual. It was an experience, a feeling even, almost imperceptible, that Christmas meant that the world could change. Christmas meant that old things would die, and something new and larger than life would be born. Christmas meant the beginning of the end of evil, as good was being born into the world.”[2]

I want to go on record, as a priest, to say how grateful I am for all of this magic and wonder that is often shot through the holiday experience. We professional Christians sometimes get a reputation for being rather grumpy about the secular American Christmas. Either we’re raising a furor about red Starbucks cups and public Nativity scenes, or we’re tut-tutting about crowded shopping malls and tacky Santa songs.

But I think my friend is right. Beneath all that seems so silly and maudlin and excessive there is a real longing for something beautiful and profound. What if there could truly be peace on earth? What if there could be strength in the midst of suffering, an authentic second chance for me and those I love? What if poverty was really made history and the ancient divisions between races and peoples really healed? What if God loved us so much that He would bend down to touch us, when a tiny infant reached out his hand to touch his mother’s face? You know how the carol says it, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”[3]

One of the central claims that we Christians make about this child, Jesus the Christ, our Lord, is that He has come to fulfill the deepest longings of all people. In our Old Testament lesson, a prophecy made many centuries before His birth, God promised through Isaiah that He would send a new kind of ruler to the Jewish people. He would be full of wisdom and completely just, with the power to bring light into the dark places of the world and establish universal peace. For centuries the Jews prayed that God would send Him soon, this promised Savior, the Christ. He was the theme of many of their most beautiful songs. In the temple old men and women fasted day and night hoping that they would live to see His day.

And when an angel appeared to a virgin named Mary in Nazareth, some nine months before the event we celebrate today, he assured her that the day had come. Through her child, the miracle coming to life in her womb, God was answering His people’s steadfast hope. Israel’s great and final king was coming.

But, as so often in God’s way of doing things, it would all go a bit off script from there. In every miracle of grace there are a few surprises. This poor young woman, Mary and her husband-to-be, Joseph would get caught in a nationwide census, and were forced to move miles from home. There would be no place in the palace for the new king, not even a bed in a properly appointed inn. Instead His first cry would come from the stable, among the cattle and sheep, and she would lay His head in the manger, bundled tightly against the cold.

The news would not be sounded first in the palace or even in the temple, though it would get there too, soon enough. God would send word instead to shepherds, ten thousand angels filling the sky with light and song. Shepherds. They don’t usually pass the time drilling each other on the catechism. The boozy eggnog and ugly sweater crowd to be sure, those shepherds. This Savior would be for them as well.   “I bring you good news of great joy which shall be to all people,” the angel would say. All people, not just the pious, not just those who’ve known the story all their lives, not just those who’ve scrubbed up and made themselves presentable. To you, even to you, is born this day, in the city of David, a savior.

For you he is born. Something much like that would in time be perceived by wise men, hundreds of miles away. Scanning the stars, they also learned that this child would fulfill their hopes and dreams. They were Gentiles, people like most of us, who didn’t know the words of the prophets.   But they set out anyway, and when they had found Him, they knew He was just what they had been looking for all along. “The grace of God has come,” Saint Paul summarizes in our Epistle lesson, bringing salvation to all.”

The One who lies in the manger, you see, has come to bring us back to God. He has come to teach us the way of love, and to lay down His life to make peace between God and sinful humanity. He has come to defeat the power of death, to heal sickness and to plant in people’s hearts a deep and abiding joy that nothing can take away. And at the right time, He will return, to raise up all things and make them perfect as God has always intended.

When you’ve come to know and believe in Him, it might well make you a little crazy. We call it the Christmas spirit, that transforming power that fills us with the wonder and delight of children, this compulsion to extravagant generosity, this sense that the world really is being made new. But it’s meant to be the pattern for all of us, all the time, not just in December.  The voices stirring up fear and anger around us seem to be so loud, and we can be taken in by their claims that power and violence rule the day. But this Child promises something different, and the kingdom he rules will ultimately triumph.

So, by all means, be a little silly tonight. Sing loud enough that your wife wonders what got into you. Wear those twinkling socks and have that second glass of eggnog. Do something extravagantly generous to bless the poor and lift the spirits of that suffering person God has placed in your life. Because this Child has made all things new. He pours out His love abundantly, and deep and lasting joy is His precious gift.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

 

[1] Durando, Jessica. “Layaway Angel Pays Off More Than 106k at Walmart Stores.” USA Today. 16 Dec. 2015. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2015/12/16/layaway-angel-walmart-customers/77414800/

[2] Mitchican, Jonathan. “Stop Being Jerks about Christmas.” Covenant. 15 Dec. 2015. http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2015/12/15/christians-stop-being-jerks-about-christmas/

[3] Hymn 79, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” 1982 Hymnal.

Written on Our Hearts

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Genevieve Zetlan, Licensed Lay Preacher

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

 

Once, God was with everything, and everything was with God. God was with the rocks and plants and animals and people, and they were with God and each other. God talked with the people, and they shared the Dream of all of creation. And God declared it Good. But the people wanted to decide for themselves what was Good. And to know what is good, you have to know the Differences – between good and evil, right and wrong, close and far, faith and fear. And when they knew the differences, the people became afraid. So they hid.

And God saw their fear, and God let them go. He stayed near them still, but not so near that he would frighten them[i]. Sometimes God came very close to some of them. Once, God came very close to Noah, so that Noah knew in his heart what God wanted, and the earth was saved. Once, God came very close to Moses, so that Moses knew in his heart what God wanted, and the Israelites were taken by the hand and brought out of the land of Egypt and saved. Over and over, God came close to people – Elijah, Isaiah, Jonah, Jeremiah. But mostly, the people were still afraid. And in their fear, they hid. They put up more and more barriers between themselves and God. Priests. Temples. Rituals and Requirements.

Jeremiah knew what God wanted – that not just the prophets but everyone would come close to God again, everyone from the smallest to the greatest. That instead of using the Differences against each other – saying to each other “know the LORD” as if there were only one way to know God – instead they would know that God was with them and everything, and they and everything were with God, and they would not be afraid anymore.

So God decided to come close to the people in a way that wouldn’t frighten them. God would make himself like one of them[ii]. Small. Helpless even. And in Jesus, ordinary people came close to God again. They began to see what the prophets wrote – that God longs for a relationship with people. All people. And Jesus began to teach people how to read the will of God already written on their own hearts. On our hearts.

For God to write on our hearts means its possible for each of us to know God’s will, to know what God’s law is, to know what God considers Good.

But it is hard to read our hearts when fear gets in the way, when our hearts are troubled by our job or a family crisis or overwhelmed by grief. It’s hard to read our hearts when there are so many distractions and other objects of our affection. When our heart is busy reading Twitter and CNN. When our heart is chasing after tomorrow or next week.

Jesus tells us today that he draws all people close to God, into the relationship that God longs for with each of us. During Lent we look for the things that draw us from the love of God, that pull our hearts in other directions. One of St. Tim’s members said she’s spent most of Lent trying to let go of her anger at a former boss. We all have things we need to let go of. But despite all the things other than God that occupy our hearts, on this last Sunday of Lent we are offered the promise that we can learn to read our hearts, and find God’s Dream written there.

Jesus shows us how. With prayer. And not just any prayer. He prays “Glorify your name” instead of “Save Me From This Hour”.

Now we humans do a lot of “Santa Claus” prayer – “God, here’s what I want, help me with this, please do that, I really need …” God knows there is certainly much we need help with, and there’s not really anything wrong with asking for help when we need it. But prayer is a relationship. It’s a conversation. Imagine if 90 percent of the conversations you had with a loved one, a spouse, a parent, or a friend, consisted of “Could you do this for me?”

Not much of a relationship is it?

For prayer to help us cut through our fear and distractions to read the word of God written on our hearts, it has to be more than “save me from this” – it has to be “to your glory” – not our own. It has to be “thy will be done” – not our own.

I’ll admit this is usually my prayer of last resort. Many years ago my parents and my sister had a falling out. The reasons don’t really matter, but the family I knew and loved, which had been so “normal”, was gone. I spent years doing everything I could to “fix” it – listening to both sides, suggesting courses of action, trying to interpret one side to another – and none of it helped. Until I gave up. And my prayer changed from “fix this, please!” to “Your will be done.”

Of course, answers to prayer aren’t always what we want, and they aren’t always clear. The crowd that heard God’s answer to Jesus thought it was thunder, or an Angel. Because prayer isn’t just about the answer we receive. We ask so often to save our own lives, to fix the things we think are wrong with our family or our health or our job. And Jesus tells us today that trying to preserve all the things we love about our lives is the surest way to lose the life God offers to us. “Those who love their life lose it”.

Because what we ask for is often so much smaller than what God has to give us.

One of our member’s has a son who desperately wanted to attend Thomas Jefferson High School. He didn’t get in. Instead, he went to Chantilly, where he received honors and accolades that sent him on to the Naval Academy. It’s where he says he was clearly meant to be.

Another member of St. Tim’s, many years ago, attended a convention where she couldn’t wait to get to know a young man she was interested in. Instead, she met someone entirely different, who became her husband of 35 years.

Several years ago St. Timothy’s was part of a group of churches that started a Hypothermia shelter during cold months here in Herndon. The people who visit the shelter go there because it’s the only alternative to freezing to death. Because they live on the streets, they keep to themselves, and they are used to receiving other’s leftovers – unsold bread from Panera, overstocked pasta from Costco. They are generally suspicious – some are mentally unstable, potentially violent, possibly criminal. They gather at the shelter hoping for just a night out of the cold and a basic meal.

And then, one Sunday, members of St. Timothy’s showed up to serve dinner. Platters of home cooked Southern food began emerging, the smell of fried chicken and beans and corn and potatoes began to fill the room. Suddenly, everyone wanted to help carry trays, set out dishes, and pour drink. As plates were piled high, more food kept emerging. They went back for seconds. And thirds. The room changed from tense to almost jovial as people ate and talked and laughed. One man, on his third plate full, confessed “I can’t actually eat any more. I just can’t believe I can have more” and settled down to sleep with the plate of food next to him.

What God has to offer us is so much MORE than what we ask for.

How we view the world determines how we act in it. If we view ourselves always in need, we fail to appreciate the abundance that God called “Good” all around us. If our conversations with God are mostly about what we want, we cannot learn to read what God has written on our hearts, to see how we can act on what God wants.

To pray “Thy will be done” is to let go of our own dreams for our life and look for the Dream God has written on our hearts. And like a single grain of wheat, that Dream bears much fruit – enough to feed the world.

Amen.

Grace, With Skin On

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Genevieve Zetlan, Licensed Lay Preacher

1 Samuel 17: 32-49
Psalm 9:9-20
 2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

Spiders. Public Speaking. Change. Death.
What are you afraid of?

We don’t much like to think about fear except to talk about how we should really get over it. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Or that old saying, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”, implying that all we have to do to live life to the fullest is just ignore all our fear. Even our scriptures might have us believing that fear is a problem to be eliminated –every angel ever starts out with “Fear Not”.

And our stories this morning are dramatic illustrations of fear, and our reactions to it. Saul, the King the Israelites asked for, is facing the Philistine army, and he and all of Israel are “greatly afraid”. The disciples, weathering a great storm in a small boat, are afraid. Someone once said “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear”, and this morning our story of David facing down Goliath and the Gospel where Jesus contrasts fear and faith seem to be saying that, too. These stories seem to be saying that if we just have enough faith, we won’t be afraid anymore.

The problem with this neat little juxtaposition is that when it comes down to it, there’s plenty of room in us broken and flawed human beings to be both very afraid and very faithful. And when life gets messy and our boat is swamped and we are facing challenges that loom like Giants over us, saying “just have faith!” makes weathering the storm all about us. It says to those in the deepest of crisis that if only their faith were stronger, they wouldn’t be so afraid.

Shortly after my son Davis was born, I was a certifiable wreck. Davis was premature, he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t sleep, he cried all the time and I think I cried about as much as he did during those first weeks. And at some point I said to my mother, “I’m worried about him all the time. I’m afraid I’m showing an appalling lack of faith.” And my mom said, “Oh honey— (Now if you’re familiar with Southern expressions, you know that “oh honey” is less a term of endearment than a commentary on exactly how off-your-rocker you are)—“Oh honey”, she said, “God doesn’t need you to have faith. God doesn’t need anything from you. God just loves you.”

The danger of thinking that our faith in God banishes our fear is that is makes everything dependent upon us, upon our measure of faith—as if there’s some sort of faith yardstick and some people measure up and some people don’t. And God doesn’t operate that way.

God doesn’t need for us to be or stable, or serene, or sober in order to calm the storms or slay our giants. God sends David to save the Israelites in spite of their fear, in spite of king Saul’s lack of faith, because God is faithful, not because they are.

In our Gospel story this morning Jesus acts to calm the storm first – because God’s calming of our stormy seas has never been dependent on us earning God’s grace, or having “enough” faith to deserve a little help.

But wait, you say—what about what Jesus says after calming the storm? “Have you no faith? Why are you afraid?”

Why are you afraid?

The disciples got in the boat with Jesus expecting that, with him, they’d be safe. But the storm comes anyway and the boat is swamped and it looks for all the world like God is literally asleep at the wheel. So they cry out, “Do you not care that we’re afraid and this is awful!”

And this is the heart of their fear—and ours. We put our faith in God, we get in the boat with Jesus, and then sometimes it feels like God doesn’t care, or at least isn’t listening. When first graders are gunned down in school and church goers are murdered in bible study, when over and over we pray and wonder why God doesn’t step in and save the innocent, stop the evil.

Faithful as we are, we’re human, too. We exist in a physical world in which there are real dangers, and we sometimes desperately need some tangible evidence – some “Grace with skin on” – to remind us that we are not alone, that God does care. The disciples don’t lack faith in God’s ability to save them — they lack faith that God cares.

In a nursing home in Virginia Beach was a woman who was 102 years old. She was convinced God didn’t care about her anymore. There was nothing in life left for her, she said, confined to the bed, in pain but alert. Her 97 year old sister had checked in after she did, and died within weeks, yet here she was, and she was sure God had forgotten her. One day, talking with the nursing home chaplain, she mentioned she really wanted her very own box of graham crackers – not the little packets of individual crackers from the cafeteria, but an entire box of her very own. She was asleep later that afternoon when the chaplain brought in a box of graham crackers and left it on her bed. And when she woke up, she told the chaplain, “Because you did this for me, I know now that God has not forgotten me.”

I know someone who once reached the lowest place you can reach, who was convinced no one cared, and the world would be a better place without them in it. And while being checked into suicide watch at the hospital, a very old college friend showed up to say how important they were, how loved. And that one message from that one person saved a life.

When we look around at our own messed up lives or at a world gone insane, we fear God isn’t listening. But it is when we are in the worst of raging storms or facing down enormous obstacles that we find out how much God really does care – because God sends people, “grace with skin on”, to show us. A note from someone long ago or far away. Flowers, delivered unexpectedly. That phone call you really needed, exactly when you needed it. Mr. Rogers said “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers.” Because in the midst of fear and pain, they are there. They are us.

Being someone else’s grace doesn’t take any special skills – it just requires us to be who we are and listen to God’s calling. It is no coincidence that God sends a shepherd to defend the Israelites against the giant Goliath. Israel, after all, is God’s flock, and David already knows how to defend a flock of sheep. And when Saul tries to convince David to wear the King’s armor, David says “I cannot walk in these for I am not used to them”. Because it’s impossible for us to put on someone else’s armor. David has spent a lifetime developing his own skills and talents, and his existing gifts are more than enough for God to use – he doesn’t need to change who he is to be an agent of God’s saving grace.

This morning we will have a baptism. We don’t do full immersion here, but if you’ve ever seen an orthodox or baptist baptism, you realize the power of the symbol – baptism is all about being swamped, about going under the water and the waves where there is chaos and darkness, and coming up out of that with the surity that we are beloved, and God’s grace has marked us, forever.

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And this new child will be part of a community in not only this church, but throughout the world, of people who look at each other and see Jesus, and then turn around and be Jesus for each other – Grace with skin on.

And after the storms are calmed and the Giants are slain and we realize once again that God does care, that we are not alone, we can be in awe, as the disciples and the Israelites were. In awe that what we thought was impossible is possible. In awe that Grace is a gift given because God loves us, and not because we deserve it because we’ve met all the right expectations for being good, faithful people. In awe that the faith God wants us to have is the faith that we are cared for, deeply, eternally, and nothing we have done or will do can change that.

God is continually both sending us Grace, and chosing us to be Grace in a broken world.

Grace—with skin on.

Amen.

Who do you say that I am?

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Rev. Mark A. Michael

“Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”  St. Mark 8:38

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

A few years ago, Pastor Allison and I led a mission trip to Washington DC for teenagers from our two churches. We were aiming to help these rural kids understand what urban poverty is really like, and to support a number of ministries that were working among the poor in the city. It was an amazing experience for all of us, and together we lived on a food stamp budget, visited and prayed with the homeless, chopped vegetables at the DC Central Kitchen, and helped serve meals at a shelter. Our Bible studies each day focused on different parts of the Magnificat, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s revolutionary song of praise, which we prayed together each evening.

We also gave the teens an assignment, to memorize the Magnificat over the course of our time, so that its message could form their spiritual lives. One beautiful evening of the trip, we were walking up 14th Street, on our way back to our dorm from a concert on the steps of the Capitol. Unprompted, a few of our girls joined hands, and started to recite the Magnificat together as they walked down the street. “He has put down the mighty from their seats, and has lifted up the lowly,” they chanted. “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”[1] We were just past the Willard Hotel, about a block from the White House, and on the sidewalks, filled with tourists from every part of the world, all eyes turned to the girls. Now they may have just been trying to learn the lines, but knowing those particular girls well, I think there was something more to it.

It’s one thing to hear those words, sweetly sung by a choir through a wreath of incense in a beautiful church. It’s another thing to hear them at the heart of the world’s most powerful city, against the backdrop of the offices of topflight lobbying firms, with secret service agents subtly making their rounds through the crowd.   There was something subversive to it, this joyful announcement of God’s eternal kingdom in such a place. If people really understood them, without our free speech laws, I wondered, would the girls have been silenced? When Reginald Heber was sent off to serve as the first Anglican bishop of Calcutta in 1823, the East India Company allowed him in on condition that the Magnificat not be used in the Cathedral’s liturgies. It was just a bit too dangerous for public use.

That scene on 14th Street was so poignant, at least for me, because it brought ultimate questions to the forefront. Who holds the real power over the nations of the earth? Whose justice will ultimately prevail? Whom, above all, do you serve?

In these ways, that scene not far from here is much like the scene described in our Gospel, when Jesus took his disciples to Caesarea Philippi and asked them “Who do you say that I am?” The location is deeply important. First, Caesarea Philippi was in far Northern Palestine, in a mostly Gentile area. The city also had an important past. Caesarea’s ancient name was Panias, and legend had it that the god pan was born in a grotto at the heart of the city. Pan was the king of the nymphs and fairies, a fertility god worshipped all over the ancient world. Half-man, half-goat, he was associated with intoxication, sexual license and the carefree life of the shepherd. A few decades before Jesus and his disciples made their visit, the nominally Jewish local king, Herod Philip, had rebuilt the city and renamed for Caesar Augustus, acclaimed as a demigod, the founder of the Roman Empire. The city was crowded with pagan temples, and its highest hill was capped by a marble shrine to Caesar, trimmed in gold.[2] This is a city that represents both debauchery and iron-fisted power, a kind of cross between Las Vegas and Pyongyang.

Who do you say that I am, Jesus asks, and maybe he gestures at the panorama behind Him. There are alternatives, you see.   The scene is perhaps most reminiscent of that moment in St. Matthew’s Gospel when Satan tempts Jesus by taking him up to a high hill and showing him all the kingdoms of the world. Whom do you choose? What will you worship? How will you live?

It’s interesting that these very Jewish disciples give Jesus very Jewish answers to his question. Some say you are John the Baptist, they note, others Elijah. And even Peter’s answer is rooted deeply in Israel’s hope. “You are the Messiah,” he says, the deliverer promised by the ancient prophets. You have come to restore God’s people, he means, and to forgive their sins. Of course, Peter has spoken the truth. And for now, that is enough. Jesus orders to tell no one what they have perceived.

But in time, when Jesus is fully revealed through His death and resurrection, these same disciples will be sent to speak of Him openly. At the end of this Gospel, He commissions them to preach the word about Him “to every creature.”[3] They will go back to places like Caesarea, among those who openly worship other gods. They will speak subversive things in His name, and their words will open the door to sincere faith in some and to unremitting hostility in others.

If you would be my disciple, He goes on to say, if you have truly believed and commit yourself to my way, you must take up your cross and follow after me. If you bear witness to me, He means, if you speak the truth and stand fast, you will suffer as I will suffer. And of course, they all did suffer, and mostly in public places where all eyes were turned toward them. James, the first of them to die, was thrown from the parapet of the temple in Jerusalem—talk about death in a symbolic place. Peter, rebuked this day at Caesarea, would be crucified at the heart of Rome itself, upside down on the Vatican Hill.

Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” can only be answered with inner conviction. It demands serious thought, and a heartfelt commitment. But we deceive ourselves if we think the religion of Christ is essentially a private matter, relevant only to our opinions and emotions. Jesus must be confessed, the cross must be taken up. And confessions and crosses are intensely public things.

We answer His question, “Who do you say that I am?” here, week by week, when we acclaim Him as the true God, the long-promised Messiah. “For you alone are the Holy One,” we say in the Gloria, “you alone are the Lord, you alone are the most high.”[4] “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,”[5] answers the Creed. Our common worship is so important because it centers us in what is truly lasting and significant. It reminds that the Triune God alone deserves our fullest love and most obedient service.

And true worship then leads us directly to discipleship. If Jesus is only a remarkable teacher or a distant hero, it sufficient to admire Him. But if he is the promised Messiah, God’s only Son, our final judge, then He must be obeyed. Those who are ashamed of me in this generation,” He warns us, “of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father.” We show our shame of Christ when we hide our commitment to Him, when we shrink back from the challenge of His way. When we just keep our heads down and politely demur, we are actually turning away from him, forsaking His Cross, the faithful disciples’ burden.

I know that it’s not easy here. One you told me this week that I had moved to the “world’s capital of worldliness.” Another of you said a few weeks ago that he didn’t think I could bless his workplace, but I might want to think about performing an exorcism from out in the parking lot. I know he was joking, but not entirely. Many of you live in a world dominated by false gods, the Pans and Caesars of our times. And that precisely is where Christ asks you “Who do you say that I am?” “Will you take up the Cross?” In the way that power is used around you, in the way people talk about the vulnerable and the weak, in the face of pressure to bend the truth, are you confessing Christ?   Are you taking up the cross when money calls the shots, when sex is used as a tool and a weapon, when angry outbursts are used as a negotiating technique?

Know that when you must speak out and bear scorn for it, you do not stand alone. Think back to those teenagers walking up Fourteenth Street chanting the Magnificat—they were hand in hand. You are but one small part of that “company of all faithful people,” sustained by Christ’s risen power, united in prayer, nourished by His Body and Blood. A hundred thousand martyrs have trod the path before you and the journey ends in glory. He who asks the question gives the strength to make the faithful answer. “Who do you say that I am?”

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

 

[1] Luke 1:52-53.

[2] Green, Michael. The Message of Matthew. Leicester: Intervarsity, 2000., 177.

[3] St. Mark 16:15.

[4] “The Holy Eucharist.” The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 356.

[5] “The Holy Eucharist.” The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 358.

Invitation to New Life

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Mark 10:17-31

by Taylor Poindexter, Seminarian

I have been invited over and over to leave my perfectionistic tendencies behind. This past summer when I did a hospital chaplaincy internship, I was invited yet again to let go of what my supervisor thought was holding me back. To let go of the to-do list, to let go of the high expectations. And I wondered, but how will it get done if I don’t do it in this way? What does life look like if not like this? This is not the first or last time that faithful, caring people will invite me to loose the bonds that hold me, and invite me to live in a different way. One of you may be the next to remind me that my to-do list and I will not be the ones to bring forth the kingdom of God. But it hurts, it literally pains me, to let go of a piece of my identity, of a part of my self-worth. The growing pains are not over, I am afraid.

When Jesus answers the anxious rich man’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life? – What must I do to draw near to you, what must I do to have what I most deeply desire?” Jesus loves him, I imagine the corners of his eyes crinkling with understanding. Jesus knows human yearning, desiring, and seeking God. He knows forsakenness, he knows confusion. So he says “Follow the commandments, you know them…” and recites them from memory. And with love for this human predicament, he tells the man to let go of the thing that is holding him back. He’s got the commandments, he’s got the law and faithfulness and desire. But Jesus lovingly knows there is more for him. There is deep, abiding presence with God, there is eternal life, there is a kingdom to which he is invited. And the man wonders, and hangs his head, knowing he is not ready to give up that aspect of his identity that keeps him from living the faithful life that Jesus offers at the time. Jesus knew it wouldn’t be easy for this man to follow him. His investments were in an identity that he would have to give up, in order to identify as a follower of Jesus. And those caring people who have offered me another vision of my life, one with less pressure, one with less perfectionism, they knew it wouldn’t be easy for me. But I wonder, what hope lies beyond the identity to which I cling? What must I do to inherit eternal life? The rich man’s identity was invested in comfort, and that kept him from making his investment into the deeper reality of life with God.

Jesus talks to the disciples and reminds them that this teaching refers to them too. What must they do to inherit eternal life? Where is there investment? The disciples are taken aback by this news that the rich, those with that identity blinding them, will have a really hard time entering the Kingdom of God! Those who normally do such a good job of taking care of themselves and others, cannot save themselves. Disciples, holy followers of God in Christ are scared. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it. This teaching by Jesus is scary. To give up an identity focused on security and wealth and doing fine, is scary. It’s scary to think this is the good news-that a comfortable life on earth may not lead to the union with God, that deepest desire. It’s scary. But what’s scarier than letting go of those attributes holding us back, is the idea of the kingdom being so far away. And the idea that my attribute leads me to a lack of trust in God. It’s impossible for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. It’s metaphor, hyperbole, where Jesus seems to be saying, hey guys! It can’t happen. So the disciples are anxious, like the man Jesus spoke to is anxious, and the disciples may be a little angry, since they had worked so hard to be who they are. And they ask, maybe whisper to each other “who can be saved?”

For mortals it is impossible. For God all things are possible, for God camels might just fit through holes of needles, for God all are invited, for God, nothing is impossible, in God we have our breath and being and identity. And we are invited to act out of the gratitude that comes with the relief that my whole self and your whole self are invited. Invited to a life of discipleship. Invited to a new identity. Invited to a new understanding. Invited to seek the kingdom of heaven. Invited to follow Jesus. Invited to embrace one another, the last, the first and the in-between. Invited to give up what holds us back form seeking God and God’s face in one another. I remember when I was early on in my year in the Episcopal Service Corps in Baltimore, Maryland. I was having a hard time adjusting to the daily experience of poverty and violence in Baltimore, it was all so close for the first time. I remember thinking in anger-“this is going to change me!” After that heated moment, my boiling point, there was this sense of calm, like, “Oh, I see. That’s the point.” I felt different after releasing myself to be changed, like a weight had been lifted. Learning to live and love in a new environment and as an outsider surely was going to change me. Once I made my investment in following the call to this community, I was ready. I could experience that closeness of God that I so desired on difficult days, I knew that what I was doing was hard, but that God was with me and molding me. Knowing that God invites us to change for the better, to let go of what binds us reminds me of how close God is.

The new identity we are invited into, as followers of Jesus, is one that is well-articulated in our Baptismal Covenant. We promise to let go, to die with Jesus and rise with Jesus. We promise to follow the commandments and then some. We promise to seek righteousness and turn from things holding us back from fullness of life. That is our identity. Our identity is in baptism, our identity as followers of Jesus is that we are Christ’s, Christ’s own, forever. Our investment is with Christ. With our baptized identity we promise to love one another and seek Christ in all people. We have a lot to lose, but it’s not money or comfort or my perfectionism. It is the loss of the opportunity to have a life that trusts the love and salvation of Jesus. We stand to lose the joy that comes from living in relationship with God and one another. We stand to lose that sigh of relief when one recognizes “for mortals it is impossible. But for God all things are possible.” We cannot save ourselves through perfectionism or money or status, but Jesus invites us into a saving relationship, into the reign of God.

Jesus invites the rich man and the disciples to abide in eternal life with God, saying “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

Amen.

Remember the Sabbath?

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The Rev. Leslie E. Chadwick

Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2: 13-22

In Bible Study last week, someone pointed out that we have no natural limits anymore.  She said, “My nephew’s boss expects him to be available 24 hours a day.  If she e-mails him and he doesn’t write back within 30 minutes, she’s irate.  He is never free.” Others nodded, ‘Yeah.  The expectation is to respond to texts or messages immediately.  What else are you going to do? You have a family to support, so you do what it takes.”

Our world is amazing. Thanks to technology, we are connected in ways we never could have dreamed.  And we are inundated with information.  People can reach us 24/7.  It’s hard to sift through what’s important and what can wait.   Culturally, we get zero help setting limits.  Remember the Sabbath day? Oh, yeah. Back in the day, nobody scheduled sports or activities on Sundays.  Everyone went to Church. All businesses were closed. People hung out together as a family.  One Bible Study member recalls her father saying, “Once stores start opening up on Sundays, it will be the downfall of the family.”  There may still be holdouts like Chick-Fil-A, but we concluded, “There’s no goin’ back. Nothing is sacred anymore.  Everything is fair game. We can’t get back to the way it was, and even if we could, that would not solve our root problem.”

The problem is that we’ve sacrificed intentionality for convenience.  That problem goes back to the beginning of time.  We have taken control of time as if it is ours to do with what we wish –and yet, we often end up controlled and driven by the order we have created where there are no limits or boundaries for our souls.  The Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel writes, “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it” (The Sabbath, 28).

God ordered creation to remind us that in him alone we are free.  He built into creation a limit and a boundary that keeps the way open for our souls to get back to him.  We hear in our reading from Exodus the command: “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.”  This command is no sentimental question like, “Remember the Sabbath day?”  as in “Remember the good old days?”  It’s a very present command to guard with our lives this limit God gives us to keep us fully alive in Him.  Genesis tells us that “On the seventh day God finished the work that he had done.”  The ancient rabbis wondered why the Bible didn’t say that God finished his work on the 6th day since God “rested” on the seventh day.” They “concluded [that] there was [also] an act of creation on the seventh day:  rest.  Not just freedom from toil, but inner freedom:  tranquility, serenity, peace, repose—the essence of the good life—experiencing eternal life now.”

Heschel, a devout Jew who observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday night through sundown on Saturday night, sees the 4th commandment as guarding that sacred boundary:  He admits that it seems impossible to get all our work done in six days—our work always remains incomplete.  So he urges us, “Rest on the Sabbath as if all your work were done.  Rest even from the thought of labor.”  Heschel sees the Sabbath not just as a chance to rest up for more work, but as a time “to mend our tattered lives” (18) “to tend the seed of eternity planted in the soul” (13).  When we set aside time to do that, God heals us, and sets us free from the tyranny of our lives.

In today’s gospel, Jesus acts in a way that shows us he’s fully tapped into that freedom.  He’s not about to be dominated by any person or thing.    He comes up to Jerusalem for the Passover after doing his first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.  Passover is the festival celebrating Israel’s freedom, deliverance from slavery (W. Hulitt Gloer, F o W, 93).  When Jesus arrives at the Court of the Gentiles (93), the courtyard outside the temple, what he sees is not a clear path to the God who sets his people free. He finds instead a cluttered, smelly, chaotic mess.  In the guise of preparation for worship, people are selling unblemished animals to pilgrims who will  pay more for convenience.  It’s easier to buy animals for sacrifice there than dragging them on a long journey from home (93).  Money changers have become fixtures—they have settled in, made themselves quite at home.  The temple leaders sanction their presence. Again, for people’s convenience, they change out the coins with the Emperor’s face on it for coins without images required for the temple tax.  These sellers are essential to the business of the temple.

But Jesus is not buying it. He thinks the essential business of temple is allowing people to mend their tattered lives.  To rest in God’s loving presence.  To worship him with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their strength. So with all his strength, he ties together leather cords and drives out the sellers and animals as if he’s driving out demons.  He pours out the coins of the money changers; all of the money with Caesar’s face gets mixed up with the temple coins as they clatter to the floor and roll under every crack and surface. He yells at the dove sellers, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”

Jesus makes quite a scene.  And for what?  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the scene takes place at the end of the story—right before Jesus is arrested, tried, and crucified; those Evangelists suggest that the sellers and moneychangers there were price-gouging.  But here, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus seems upset about the sheer presence of the marketplace.  It is creeping into time and space that should be sacred.  He’s upset about the steady encroachment of the commercial world on his Father’s house and on God’s people. Jesus does not worship the temple itself.  By the time John wrote his gospel, that temple was long gone.  The Romans had knocked it down and turned it over.  As Jesus told the woman at the well, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, but …in spirit and truth.”  He knows buildings won’t last.   Jesus cares about one thing:  drawing people to the Father and knocking aside anything that gets in the way of that.  The point of his coming isn’t to get back us to the way things were, but to get us back to God.

When the dust clears, it seems that Jesus’ tantrum has made no difference–the world remains unchanged.  The next day, the money changers probably set up their tables again and kick back to do business.  The animals saunter back in and the pilgrims continue to do their business outside the temple to get in.  The temple leaders definitely continue business as usual.  They aren’t about to let an upstart from Galilee tell them how to run things.  They plan to kill Jesus for calling God his own Father and making himself equal to God (5:18).  But Jesus’ inner freedom, his insistence on keeping what is holy set apart, sticks in the mind of one person who longs for more than commercial, material, business as usual.  Later that night, secretly, tentatively, Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, comes to Jesus to ask him about being reborn, about tending that seed of eternity planted in his soul.

And maybe that’s how the change happens for us, too.  Our world continues to go on with business as usual.  Like, Nicodemus, we come to Jesus tentatively at first, and ask him to show us more about what he guards for us so passionately: the holy limits that keep the path open between God and us.   Little by little we ask Jesus to help us reclaim or perhaps claim for the first time the rest, life, and freedom God intends for us.  There’s no going back to the good old days when the culture set aside a whole day for us.  Even then, we had the same problem of things encroaching on our relationship with God.  The answer for us is not just “setting good boundaries” as any counselor or self-help book would suggest.  What our Scripture today invites us to do is: Remember the Sabbath.  Keep it Holy.  Rediscover it.  Let it set us free to be who God created us to be. Let Jesus knock over and drive out whatever encroaches on our need to rest and delight in God’s loving presence.  And ultimately let go of the way we’ve been doing things. To reclaim our independence from the things that control us.

The Sabbath may no longer a whole day for us; Jesus himself was not a stickler for its rules, but he did make time to be still, to pray with others, and to be alone with God.  So, as a start, Sabbath may mean setting aside 5 minutes a day to be silent in God’s presence; setting aside our I-phones for a media fast for a day, or an hour, or a few minutes so that we can be truly present with the people around us. It may mean coming together to worship or study the Bible in community.  It may mean journaling to let go of whatever worries or scenes we rehearse at the end of the day; Letting go of our pettiness or our anger at others that encroach on us not only us in the moment, but linger in our minds past the time we are to surrender to rest at the close of the day. As we approach this mid-point of Lent, may we remember the Sabbath.  Not as an antiquated thing of the past, but as a very present way God intends to set us free to worship him and to rest in his loving presence.  To be the people he created us to be:  whole and sound (Psalm 19:13).

Amen.

 

 

What do you choose?

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The Rev. Bradford A. Rundlett

1st Samuel 8:4-11; 16-20
Psalm 138
2nd Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

If you’ve ever walked into the middle of a conversation, without any direct connection to the people or circumstances in that conversation, you know it takes a while to understand what you’ve walked into and to become a contributing participant.

We do that here every week.

We listen to some part of a story in a long succession of stories that began more than 3500 years ago. We hear them not in their original language, context, or time, but through our current view of this world and life. That can feel so awkward and (all things considered) be as dissonant as worms and ribbons that we often fail to appreciate our sacred texts in any way that is remotely authentic. We run into gaps and rifts that just don’t make sense; go figure! In the reading and hearing of Biblical passages we walk into a conversation that began long before we arrived, in a foreign land, by people significantly unlike us, with a radically different world view; with the inordinate assumption that words have univocal meaning for all people, times, and places.

That doesn’t work.

Good research and study can make a big difference. Consider the passages we’ve heard this morning.

Samuel was a prophet and priest when a selection of judges governed Israel. That was very unusual. The Hebrew people were surrounded by neighbors who were governed by kings. They had strong armies, lots of weapons, walled fortresses, and stores of food and water. The Jewish people felt vulnerable and threatened because they did not have a strong king. So they pleaded for a strong monarch who would protect them.

Some of the more zealous religious leaders viewed this as a rejection of the sovereignty of God. “If we are faithful” they swore, “The Almighty will protect and care for us.”

That ideological conflict is the central issue of our first reading this morning, and that collision of beliefs is still a very potent source of conflict al around the world.

Does that bit of contextual information help us understand the passage?

Consider our second reading. The Christian community in Corinth was likely the first ecclesia, the first Christian community that Paul started. Within twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus there was a full-fledged Church with all the questions and discord a Church can have. In the Epistles we have a record of the issues this completely unprecedented “Good News” raised for that first generation of converts. The passage we just heard represents the struggle to understand the implications of the resurrection. Jesus was dead; then he was alive again. He prepared and ate a meal with his disciples, he walked right through locked doors to bestow his Spirit upon them, Thomas confirmed he was not a ghost; he was real flesh and blood. He ascended to heaven, sat on a throne next to God, and he glowed, in fact still glows, with holiness.

That’s wonderful for Jesus, but what if anything does that mean for the rest of us? Will we die as humans always have? Or will we be taken up as he was when he ascended? If we die will God make us alive again as God did for Ezekiel and the dry bones? Will we be like Jesus, gloriously iridescent as he was on the Mount of Transfiguration? Will we be transfigured? Will we live in resplendent, eternal glory?

What do you think?

And then there’s the Gospel. According to Mark Jesus spoke the truth and that seriously upset the religious and political leaders of that time. His family feared for his life. You can ignore the ranting and raving of a crazy person because almost everyone does. But you can’t ignore a prophet who tells the truth and insists that we must topple the structures of power “that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”

His popularity with the people became a very serious problem for the Jewish leaders; Rome would not tolerate this. A lot of people would die at the sharp end of a legionnaire’s spear. If the leaders could discredit Jesus that would prevent the slaughter of thousands of innocent Jews. Crazy and prophetic sound much the same. For the good of all, Jesus had to be stopped. However, faithful to his mission, Jesus cut right through their false claims and bogus declarations because there was a lot more at stake than their sense of security, wealth, or power.

These passages present some of the most serious concerns for the authors of the Jewish and Christian Scripture. When Moses got the Hebrew refugees out of Egypt he said “I set before you this day life and death; choose wisely.” That has been a major theme from the very beginning. Life or death; in the Kingdom of God, or not, it’s our choice; be careful.

Live the way Christ showed us how to live, or do it the way you’ve always done and see where that gets you. There’s more at stake here than may first appear.

So, who or what is most important in your life? Is your love and faith evident in your priorities and choices? How do you want to live and how do you want to be remembered? Jesus said there are only two great commandments – love God, and love your neighbors, all of them – actively, not passively.

On a scale of one to ten (one being not well at all and ten being very well), how do you think the people who know you best would rate you?

The passages we have today require us to examine our beliefs and values, and it’s not an easy thing to do. Our forebears in faith would insist that a thorough and honest self-examination is necessary. One way will ultimately consume us. The other way will fill us with a lively new spirit.

So what’s more important, more fulfilling – short term wealth and power, or a long term, really long term, joy that is greater than anything we have ever known?

Christ died for us so we can live. That choice has been made. We are now free to live generously, and without fear; to live the “abundant life” as Jesus called it, or settle for much less. We are free to live the way God wants us to live, loving God and our neighbors.

Do we accept or decline?

The changes that have just begun here in this magnificent Christian community St. Timothy’s won’t be painless or over and done quickly. We may reject them out of fear, or embraced them in faith. I don’ know what’s ahead for me or for you, but I believe there are wonderful surprises, blessings beyond comprehension, grace in great abundance, joys that will cause all of us to shine!

Amen.

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