19th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 25A
October 23, 2011
Messenger by Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.i
When the lawyer approaches Jesus in today’s gospel, he asks Jesus, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers him first with the Shema, the cornerstone of Jewish faith, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
“In quoting the Shema, Jesus points out that the aim of the law is to orient one’s entire life toward God. However, one cannot love God without loving what God loves!”ii And what does God love? Everything. Everybody. All of creation. You, and your own unique life.
The question for us this day is How do we do this work? How do we do the work of ‘loving the world;’ how do we do the work of rejoicing, of gratitude? How do we love God whole-lifedly?iii
We love God whole-lifedly through our stewardship. Stewardship is all that I do with all that I have after I say “I believe.” Stewardship is not a season in the church year when the church is trying to make its annual budget. Stewardship is the choices that you make every single day of your lives. It is how you choose to be in this world, how you choose to be in relationship with God. Do the choices you make day in and day out drive you closer to God, or do they drive you away from God? Do your choices bring you closer to God’s people and God’s creation or do they separate you from them? Do you spend your time in this life taking? Or do you spend your time in this life giving, caring, supporting?
Some of these choices involve money and some do not. I had a conversation with my mother not too long ago, where she shared with me the fact that my parents’ decision to become vegetarians was a stewardship issue. They had learned about the miserable existence of most animals who are specifically raised to be food, and they no longer wanted to participate in that system. They had researched about the ways that they could reduce their carbon footprint in this world, to better care for the earth, and so they gave up meat, and they sold their SUV and replaced it with a much smaller, more fuel-efficient car. They are doing this work of conservation and in it they are loving the world and loving their children and grand-children. So the other day, after I had heard my mother talk about this, I was running out the door and went to grab a bottle of water from the fridge, and I stopped. I realized that it would only take a couple of extra minutes to get my aluminum bottle out and fill it with the filtered water from the fridge. Will I save the world with that one bottle of water? No. But in that choice, I chose to be a giver instead of a taker, and I felt more connected with God, the earth, and the people I love because of it.
Last week, I shared with you the fact that Jesus talks about money more than anything else except the kingdom of God. He talks about money more than he talks about heaven and hell combined; 11 of his 39 parables are about money. That should tell us something! There is a direct connection between our money and our relationship with God. I asked you to recall your first memory of money and examine what that memory says about your image of God. I know some of you did this, because you shared your stories with me. Today, I’m going to ask you to do another sort of examination this week. Jesus summed up the spiritual connection with money and the choices that we make in our financial stewardship when he said (in Luke12:34), “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” So I’m going to ask you to do this exercise at some point in the week. Take some time and look at your check-book, online bank statement, and your other financial resources. Just look and see what your checkbook says about where your heart is. Take some time and ask yourself: How do I love through the way I spend my money? Who do I love through the way I spend my money? What does my checkbook show about my relationship with God and others? In the ways that I spend my money, am I loving God whole-lifedly?
Next week is our Consecration Sunday, where we gather to worship and eat together, to celebrate our life together and to make our commitment to what we will give to God through God’s church in the coming year. As you are reflecting on how the choices you make shape your relationship with God, I invite you to pray about how you might grow in your giving and thus grow in your relationship with God. If you don’t normally pledge, then perhaps your step in growth is to pledge this year. If you are pledging, then perhaps your step is to examine what portion of your money you are offering to God and if you feel good about it, that it is an accurate representation of your gratitude for all the good things that come from God. Take the sheet from your bulletin home and see where you fall; look at what percentage you are giving and pray about whether you might be able to grow in your giving. If you show up next Sunday and write a number on the card, that is great! But you have an opportunity now to grow in your relationship with God if you are intentional and prayerful about this process.
I’ve been praying over this whole month about what we are going to write on our card next Sunday. We currently give 10% of my stipend to the church, and it is a spiritual practice for me to write the very first check after I get my paycheck back to God in thanksgiving. Writing that check for me, every other week, is truly a prayer, and I think about all the good things in my life which come from God for which I am grateful as I write it and as I drop it in the plate. When David started working last year, we started giving 10% of his income to different organizations for which we are thankful--organizations which have made a difference (and continue to make a difference) in our lives and in the life of our family, and this also has been a prayer for us. We’ve given to Stewpot and to their capital campaign; we’ve given to MPB, to our alma maters; we’ve give to General Seminary twice, to the Society for the Increase of Ministry (which gave David scholarships during seminary). We’ve given to CES, to the Humane Society. And boy, does it feel good to support these organizations that have supported and formed us! We will continue to do that with the tithe from David’s income, and this year we will be increasing our pledge to St. Peter’s by $50 a month.
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” How do you do this work? How do you do the work of ‘loving the world;’ how do you do the work of rejoicing,of gratitude? How do you love God whole-lifedly ?
You love God whole-lifedly through your stewardship, through the choices that you make every single day of your lives. It is how you choose to be in this world, how you choose to be in relationship with God. Do the choices you make day in and day out drive you closer to God, or do they drive you away from God? Do your choices bring you closer to God’s people and God’s creation or do they separate you from them? Do you spend your life taking? Or do you spend your life giving and loving?
i. From Thirst. Poems by Mary Oliver. Beacon: Boston, 2006, p 1.
ii. Beach-Verhey, Tim. “Theological Perspective.” Feasting on the Word Year A Vol 4. Westminster: Lousiville, 2011, p214.
iii. This concept of whole-lifedly is attributed to Allen Hilton. “Homiletical Perspective.” Feasting on the Word Year A Vol 4. Westminster: Lousiville, 2011, p215.
Readings for today can be found at http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp25_RCL.html
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
18th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 24A
18th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 24A
October 16, 2011
A man suffers a serious heart attack and has open heart bypass surgery. He wakes up from the surgery to find himself in the care of nuns at a Catholic Hospital.
As he is recovering, a nun asks him questions regarding how he was going to pay for his treatment. “Do you have health insurance?”
"No,” the man croaks. “No health insurance."
“Do you have any money in the bank?”
"No money in the bank."
"Do you have a relative who could help you?" asks the nun.
"I only have a spinster sister. She is a nun."
The nun bristles. "Nuns are not spinsters! Nuns are married to God."
“Alright, already!” croaks the patient. "Then send the bill to my brother-in-law."
Perhaps not quite what Jesus meant when he said, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
In our gospel reading for the day, two opposing parties have teamed up in an attempt to trap Jesus: the Herodians who support the Roman rule and law and the Pharisees who do not. They approach Jesus with a question which is really a trap, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” There are a couple of issues at work here. The Romans claim that Caesar is the son of god, and they require the Jews to pay their taxes with a special coin that carried the image of the divine Caesar. The Pharisees saw the use of this coin as a violation of the first and the second commandments. So they are trying to catch Jesus between a rock and a hard place; if he says to pay the tax, he is advocating paying tribute to another god, but if he says don’t, then that is treason against Rome. So Jesus answers them with two questions, asking to see the coin used for the tax. Jesus points out that it is the emperor’s image and likeness that is imprinted upon the coin, and he answers their original question by saying, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
Now, we’re Episcopalians, and we aren’t always so comfortable talking about money. But did you know that Jesus talks about money more than anything else except the kingdom of God? He talks about money more than he talks about heaven and hell combined; 11 of his 39 parables are about money. That should tell us something! There is a direct connection between our money and our relationship with God.
I went to a workshop not too long ago, where the speaker asked us each to consider the following question. What is your first memory of money? Think about it for a moment. What is your first memory of money? When I spent some time with that question, I discovered that my first memory of money is of the day that my grandfather took me to the bank to open up a bank account. He had been saving his change (I think it was quarters) that he’d take out of his pants pocket every night to help me buy a piano. I had been taking lessons, but my family didn’t have a piano for me to practice on, and so, on this one particular day, Pop took me down to Citizens Bank in Columbia, and we opened a bank account together. We got one of those little blue bank books they used to use, and it had both of our names on the account. After time and a whole bunch of Pop’s quarters, we were able to buy me a piano. It is a powerful memory for me, about ownership in this process, even though I was just a little child; it taught me about abundance and generosity and gratitude.
After the speaker at that conference asked us what our first memory of money was, he then asked us to think about what that memory says about how we understand God, because the two are intricately connected. Our understanding of money (as shaped by our earliest experiences and memories) tells us a great deal about our understanding of God. How we feel about and deal with money reflects what image we hold of God. I invite you to spend some time with these ideas this week and ponder the question, “What is my image of God?” And talk to someone about your earliest memory about money, at brunch today, at coffee hour, at some point in the week; it is a beautiful and strangely intimate practice to share another person’s memory, and it helps us to understand each other and ourselves on a deeper level.
We become like the God we adore. Like the coin in the gospel imprinted with the emperor’s image, our lives have the potential to become imprinted with the image and likeness of God. Every day of our lives, we make decisions about how we spend our money, our time, our attention, and those decisions either help us grow more deeply into the image and likeness of God or they push us away from that.
What image is imprinted upon you through the God you worship? Is it the image of the living God as manifest in Jesus Christ—the image of compassion, hope, generosity, forgiveness? Or is it the image of the world-- fear, scarcity, despair, and un-forgiveness? What God are you really worshipping in your choices every day?
To God you are worth as much today as you were worth the day that you were born! What will you do with that worth? How do you spend this one precious life which is yours to spend?
The readings for today can be found at
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp24_RCL.html
October 16, 2011
A man suffers a serious heart attack and has open heart bypass surgery. He wakes up from the surgery to find himself in the care of nuns at a Catholic Hospital.
As he is recovering, a nun asks him questions regarding how he was going to pay for his treatment. “Do you have health insurance?”
"No,” the man croaks. “No health insurance."
“Do you have any money in the bank?”
"No money in the bank."
"Do you have a relative who could help you?" asks the nun.
"I only have a spinster sister. She is a nun."
The nun bristles. "Nuns are not spinsters! Nuns are married to God."
“Alright, already!” croaks the patient. "Then send the bill to my brother-in-law."
Perhaps not quite what Jesus meant when he said, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
In our gospel reading for the day, two opposing parties have teamed up in an attempt to trap Jesus: the Herodians who support the Roman rule and law and the Pharisees who do not. They approach Jesus with a question which is really a trap, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” There are a couple of issues at work here. The Romans claim that Caesar is the son of god, and they require the Jews to pay their taxes with a special coin that carried the image of the divine Caesar. The Pharisees saw the use of this coin as a violation of the first and the second commandments. So they are trying to catch Jesus between a rock and a hard place; if he says to pay the tax, he is advocating paying tribute to another god, but if he says don’t, then that is treason against Rome. So Jesus answers them with two questions, asking to see the coin used for the tax. Jesus points out that it is the emperor’s image and likeness that is imprinted upon the coin, and he answers their original question by saying, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
Now, we’re Episcopalians, and we aren’t always so comfortable talking about money. But did you know that Jesus talks about money more than anything else except the kingdom of God? He talks about money more than he talks about heaven and hell combined; 11 of his 39 parables are about money. That should tell us something! There is a direct connection between our money and our relationship with God.
I went to a workshop not too long ago, where the speaker asked us each to consider the following question. What is your first memory of money? Think about it for a moment. What is your first memory of money? When I spent some time with that question, I discovered that my first memory of money is of the day that my grandfather took me to the bank to open up a bank account. He had been saving his change (I think it was quarters) that he’d take out of his pants pocket every night to help me buy a piano. I had been taking lessons, but my family didn’t have a piano for me to practice on, and so, on this one particular day, Pop took me down to Citizens Bank in Columbia, and we opened a bank account together. We got one of those little blue bank books they used to use, and it had both of our names on the account. After time and a whole bunch of Pop’s quarters, we were able to buy me a piano. It is a powerful memory for me, about ownership in this process, even though I was just a little child; it taught me about abundance and generosity and gratitude.
After the speaker at that conference asked us what our first memory of money was, he then asked us to think about what that memory says about how we understand God, because the two are intricately connected. Our understanding of money (as shaped by our earliest experiences and memories) tells us a great deal about our understanding of God. How we feel about and deal with money reflects what image we hold of God. I invite you to spend some time with these ideas this week and ponder the question, “What is my image of God?” And talk to someone about your earliest memory about money, at brunch today, at coffee hour, at some point in the week; it is a beautiful and strangely intimate practice to share another person’s memory, and it helps us to understand each other and ourselves on a deeper level.
We become like the God we adore. Like the coin in the gospel imprinted with the emperor’s image, our lives have the potential to become imprinted with the image and likeness of God. Every day of our lives, we make decisions about how we spend our money, our time, our attention, and those decisions either help us grow more deeply into the image and likeness of God or they push us away from that.
What image is imprinted upon you through the God you worship? Is it the image of the living God as manifest in Jesus Christ—the image of compassion, hope, generosity, forgiveness? Or is it the image of the world-- fear, scarcity, despair, and un-forgiveness? What God are you really worshipping in your choices every day?
To God you are worth as much today as you were worth the day that you were born! What will you do with that worth? How do you spend this one precious life which is yours to spend?
The readings for today can be found at
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp24_RCL.html
Saturday, October 8, 2011
17th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 23A --The Runaway Bunny edition
17th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 23A
October 9, 2011
Our readings this morning are just chock-full of parties! There’s the party that Aaron and the children of Israel throw while Moses is on sabbatical that results in the construction of the golden calf and Yahweh’s wrath burning hotly against the people. And there’s the wedding banquet that is thrown by the king in honor of his son’s wedding which results in the murder of the kings slaves and the first round of wedding guests and then also results in one of the second string guests getting cast into the outer darkness.
Now, we’re Episcopalians, and we all love a good party. So, my question for you today is who wants to come to this party?
What is the good news in this parable of judgment? A king is determined to throw a party—a wedding banquet for his son. So he makes out a guest list of all the nobles in the land, and when he sends his servants with the invitation, the would-be guests refuse to come, even going so far as to kill the servants. The king acts and wipes them all out, but he is still determined to give this party. So he tells his servants to go gather up everyone, the good and the bad, and invite them to the party. Now these folks he’s inviting, literally gathering up off the streets, do not have appropriate attire so custom dictates that the king provide them with wedding garments that are fitting for the occasion. Everything is going along well, until the king sees one wedding guest who has accepted the invitation but who is unwilling to dress the part (and who won’t even answer the king when he asks him why), so the king has the guest thrown out of the party into the outer darkness.
So, who wants to come to this party?
In her sermon, "Wedding Dress" from the book Home by Another Way, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this party. I’ve changed her language slightly to make it more appropriate for this place, this party at which we find ourselves today.
“Everyone in Harrison County was invited to be here this morning, but as you can see, some of them had other things to do. Some are on the golf course and some are at work. It just so happens that, for our own good and bad reasons, this is the invitation we decided to accept this morning. But like the underdressed guest, some of us have rolled in here without thinking much about it. We have showed up with our spiritual shirttails hanging out, lining up at the buffet as if no one could see the ways in which we too have refused to change - refusing to surrender our fears and resentments, refusing to share our wealth, refusing to respect the dignity of every human being. These are the old clothes we wear to the king's banquet - the clothes we prefer to the wedding robe of new life.”
So, who really wants to come to this party?
I used to think that our relationship with God is like the children’s book—The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. There’s this little boy bunny who wakes up one day and arbitrarily tells his mother that he is going to run away; she tells him that she will chase after him, and so he constructs more and more elaborate disguises in an attempt to get away from her, but every time he changes, she changes into something so she can follow him. “I will become a sailboat to sail away from you,” he says, and she responds, “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me, ….I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.” Until finally, the mother’s love is so persistent that the little bunny decides to give up and stay at home with his mother. (And she gives him a carrot.)
Our Eucharistic Prayer C (that we will pray together in just a few minutes) says it this way: “From the primal elements you (God) brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another. [Now here’s the runaway bunny part.] Again and again, you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous Law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.”
It is saying that ultimately, God wins; love wins. And do get me wrong, I still believe that with all my heart. But while I used to be more focused on the ending, how God’s love always wins, now, I’m more interested in the running away-- why we do it and what it does to us. It’s the same reason someone would accept an invitation to a wedding banquet, but not be willing to wear the appropriate garb. Because these days I see, day after day, this running away, in my own life and in your lives too. I see this refusal to put on the wedding garment, which is obedience to God, because our own holey-worn-out clothes of our own wills and desires and priorities are just much more comfortable. It is so much easier and more comfortable to worship a god of our own creating that to worship the living God who holds us accountable for our refusal to give and receive grace.
Gregory of Nyssa, one of the church fathers, says, “Sin happens when we refuse to grow,” and we can spend so much of our energy in running away from God, in refusing to grow, that we make our own lives and the lives of those around us a hell on this earth, a hell of our own choosing.
So, who really wants to come to this party? God’s invitation is there, waiting for us to accept it. But once we get here, we must decide if we are willing to clothe ourselves in the wedding garments, if we are truly ready to put on our party clothes. Another question you might ask yourself this morning besides the one, ‘Do I really want to come this party?” is “what am I clothing myself in these days?” or “How am I allowing God to garb me?”
For the apostle Paul, we are called to put on the garments of rejoicing, of gentleness, of getting along with one another, of prayer and supplication, of the peace of God. We are called to put on the garments of truth, honor, justice, purity, excellence . And we are called to put on the fullness of Christ himself, who has taught us how to be in this world.
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich says it this way: “Our good Lord is our clothing that for love wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, beclosing and hanging about us, for tender love.”
So, who really wants to come to this party?
Here's a link to the readings for this Sunday.
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp23_RCL.html
October 9, 2011
Our readings this morning are just chock-full of parties! There’s the party that Aaron and the children of Israel throw while Moses is on sabbatical that results in the construction of the golden calf and Yahweh’s wrath burning hotly against the people. And there’s the wedding banquet that is thrown by the king in honor of his son’s wedding which results in the murder of the kings slaves and the first round of wedding guests and then also results in one of the second string guests getting cast into the outer darkness.
Now, we’re Episcopalians, and we all love a good party. So, my question for you today is who wants to come to this party?
What is the good news in this parable of judgment? A king is determined to throw a party—a wedding banquet for his son. So he makes out a guest list of all the nobles in the land, and when he sends his servants with the invitation, the would-be guests refuse to come, even going so far as to kill the servants. The king acts and wipes them all out, but he is still determined to give this party. So he tells his servants to go gather up everyone, the good and the bad, and invite them to the party. Now these folks he’s inviting, literally gathering up off the streets, do not have appropriate attire so custom dictates that the king provide them with wedding garments that are fitting for the occasion. Everything is going along well, until the king sees one wedding guest who has accepted the invitation but who is unwilling to dress the part (and who won’t even answer the king when he asks him why), so the king has the guest thrown out of the party into the outer darkness.
So, who wants to come to this party?
In her sermon, "Wedding Dress" from the book Home by Another Way, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this party. I’ve changed her language slightly to make it more appropriate for this place, this party at which we find ourselves today.
“Everyone in Harrison County was invited to be here this morning, but as you can see, some of them had other things to do. Some are on the golf course and some are at work. It just so happens that, for our own good and bad reasons, this is the invitation we decided to accept this morning. But like the underdressed guest, some of us have rolled in here without thinking much about it. We have showed up with our spiritual shirttails hanging out, lining up at the buffet as if no one could see the ways in which we too have refused to change - refusing to surrender our fears and resentments, refusing to share our wealth, refusing to respect the dignity of every human being. These are the old clothes we wear to the king's banquet - the clothes we prefer to the wedding robe of new life.”
So, who really wants to come to this party?
I used to think that our relationship with God is like the children’s book—The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. There’s this little boy bunny who wakes up one day and arbitrarily tells his mother that he is going to run away; she tells him that she will chase after him, and so he constructs more and more elaborate disguises in an attempt to get away from her, but every time he changes, she changes into something so she can follow him. “I will become a sailboat to sail away from you,” he says, and she responds, “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me, ….I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.” Until finally, the mother’s love is so persistent that the little bunny decides to give up and stay at home with his mother. (And she gives him a carrot.)
Our Eucharistic Prayer C (that we will pray together in just a few minutes) says it this way: “From the primal elements you (God) brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another. [Now here’s the runaway bunny part.] Again and again, you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous Law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.”
It is saying that ultimately, God wins; love wins. And do get me wrong, I still believe that with all my heart. But while I used to be more focused on the ending, how God’s love always wins, now, I’m more interested in the running away-- why we do it and what it does to us. It’s the same reason someone would accept an invitation to a wedding banquet, but not be willing to wear the appropriate garb. Because these days I see, day after day, this running away, in my own life and in your lives too. I see this refusal to put on the wedding garment, which is obedience to God, because our own holey-worn-out clothes of our own wills and desires and priorities are just much more comfortable. It is so much easier and more comfortable to worship a god of our own creating that to worship the living God who holds us accountable for our refusal to give and receive grace.
Gregory of Nyssa, one of the church fathers, says, “Sin happens when we refuse to grow,” and we can spend so much of our energy in running away from God, in refusing to grow, that we make our own lives and the lives of those around us a hell on this earth, a hell of our own choosing.
So, who really wants to come to this party? God’s invitation is there, waiting for us to accept it. But once we get here, we must decide if we are willing to clothe ourselves in the wedding garments, if we are truly ready to put on our party clothes. Another question you might ask yourself this morning besides the one, ‘Do I really want to come this party?” is “what am I clothing myself in these days?” or “How am I allowing God to garb me?”
For the apostle Paul, we are called to put on the garments of rejoicing, of gentleness, of getting along with one another, of prayer and supplication, of the peace of God. We are called to put on the garments of truth, honor, justice, purity, excellence . And we are called to put on the fullness of Christ himself, who has taught us how to be in this world.
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich says it this way: “Our good Lord is our clothing that for love wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, beclosing and hanging about us, for tender love.”
So, who really wants to come to this party?
Here's a link to the readings for this Sunday.
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp23_RCL.html
Sunday, October 2, 2011
16th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 22A
16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 22A
October 2, 2011
“On the 11th of September 1522 Sir Thomas More wrote a short letter to his daughter Margaret. Obviously she had asked him to send her some money, and in his reply More wrote, ‘You ask for money, my dear Margaret, with too much bashfulness and timidity, since you are asking from a father who is eager to give…As it is, I send only what you have asked, but would have added more…So the sooner you spend this money well, and the sooner you ask for more, you will be sure of pleasing your father.”i
This morning in our collect of the day, we pray to a God who is “always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve” and we ask God to pour upon us the abundance of God’s mercy…forgiving us and giving us those good things for which we feel unworthy to ask. It is important to remember this—what we are praying, what we are believing about God this day before we even begin to think about the readings for today.
Let’s start with the gospel. Today we hear Matthew’s version of Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants, which is the second in a series of three parables that Jesus tells in the temple after he has ridden into Jerusalem in triumph, thrown the money changers out of the temple the day before and come back to teach the next day. These three parables are all set in the context of the chief priests and elders’ question to Jesus: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
In this second of the three parables, Jesus tells about a landowner who planted a vineyard and then left it in the hands of some tenants and went away to another country. The wicked tenants don’t want to give the landlord the fruits of their labor in the vineyard, so when the landowner sends two different groups of slaves and then his own son, the tenants resort to more and more dramatic acts of rebellion, finally killing the son of the landowner in a ridiculous and unreasonable plan to inherit the vineyard themselves from a landowner who is still living and whose wrath they have now provoked.
In its original setting, the parable holds at its heart the idea of how Israel rejects God. It also may serve us this morning as an invitation to examine how we reject God.
How do we reject God? In the Old Testament reading, we see the people of Israel receiving the 10 commandments. God begins with not a commandment but a deep truth about God’s relationship with Israel out of which all the following laws flow: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other Gods before me.” In a part that is left out of our reading today, God tells the people that they shall not bow down to or worship other idols, “for I the Lord you God am a jealous God…” God is claiming the full affection and demanding full relationship with the children of Israel. And so we reject God (or at the very minimum, we two-time God) when we bow down to worship other idols. We do this when we give our hearts to something that is not of God. We do this when we order our lives and our priorities around something that is not God. When we try to divide our attention with God, we are rejecting God.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians today, we see a glimpse of what has happened to Paul in his conversion, how he goes from pride in his own achievements to gratitude for an utterly gratuitous call to a completely new way of life. In the past, Paul has rejected God when he placed too much pride in his own achievements. And so do we also reject God.
We reject God when we let others tell us who we really are and do not listen to the God who knows us and loves us for our most true selves.
We reject God when we reject other people for reasons of our own; we reject others because they do not fit into our standards of what is good, appropriate and fitting, and when we define others as being less worthy, less human, less valuable than ourselves, then we are rejecting God.
We reject God when we do not value and believe in the goodness in which God has created each of us. We reject God when we cannot believe and trust that we are, in fact, good.
We reject God when we place our trust in the world’s scarcity that says you’ve got to hold onto and fight for what is yours because there is not enough to go around; we reject God when we do not give our hearts to God’s abundance that says, not only is there always enough, but there is radically more than enough—resources, love…-- for everyone.
We reject God when we live too much of our lives and our faith in the sacrifice of the cross—in the “no” and we do not include the surprising gift, the “yes” of the resurrection.
We reject God when we refuse to die to our old selves and are not accepting of God’s gift of renewal and new life.
We reject God when we are not grateful for all the good gifts God so freely gives.
In the book The Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon writes about this parable of Jesus and this phenomenon of how we continue to reject God and to reject God’s grace through Jesus Christ saying, “So it is with me, if I am honest. And so it is with you. The Father’s will for you—his whole will, his entire plan of salvation—is that you believe in Jesus, nothing more. He has already forgiven you, he has already reconciled you, he has already raised you up together with Jesus and made you sit together in heavenly places with him. And better yet, Jesus himself has already pronounced upon you the approving judgment of having done his Father’s will. But if you do not believe him—if you insist on walking up to the bar of judgment on your own faithless feet and arguing a case he has already dismissed—well, you will never hear the blessed silence of his un-condemnation over the infernal racket of your own voice…”ii
This morning, may God who is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve inspire our hearts to
Choose God. Choose blessings. Choose abundance.
i. O’Driscoll, Herbert. Prayers for the Breaking of Bread: Meditations on the Collects of the Church Year. Cowley: Cambridge, 1991, p161.
ii. Capon, Robert. The Parables of Judgment. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1989, p110.
October 2, 2011
“On the 11th of September 1522 Sir Thomas More wrote a short letter to his daughter Margaret. Obviously she had asked him to send her some money, and in his reply More wrote, ‘You ask for money, my dear Margaret, with too much bashfulness and timidity, since you are asking from a father who is eager to give…As it is, I send only what you have asked, but would have added more…So the sooner you spend this money well, and the sooner you ask for more, you will be sure of pleasing your father.”i
This morning in our collect of the day, we pray to a God who is “always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve” and we ask God to pour upon us the abundance of God’s mercy…forgiving us and giving us those good things for which we feel unworthy to ask. It is important to remember this—what we are praying, what we are believing about God this day before we even begin to think about the readings for today.
Let’s start with the gospel. Today we hear Matthew’s version of Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants, which is the second in a series of three parables that Jesus tells in the temple after he has ridden into Jerusalem in triumph, thrown the money changers out of the temple the day before and come back to teach the next day. These three parables are all set in the context of the chief priests and elders’ question to Jesus: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
In this second of the three parables, Jesus tells about a landowner who planted a vineyard and then left it in the hands of some tenants and went away to another country. The wicked tenants don’t want to give the landlord the fruits of their labor in the vineyard, so when the landowner sends two different groups of slaves and then his own son, the tenants resort to more and more dramatic acts of rebellion, finally killing the son of the landowner in a ridiculous and unreasonable plan to inherit the vineyard themselves from a landowner who is still living and whose wrath they have now provoked.
In its original setting, the parable holds at its heart the idea of how Israel rejects God. It also may serve us this morning as an invitation to examine how we reject God.
How do we reject God? In the Old Testament reading, we see the people of Israel receiving the 10 commandments. God begins with not a commandment but a deep truth about God’s relationship with Israel out of which all the following laws flow: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other Gods before me.” In a part that is left out of our reading today, God tells the people that they shall not bow down to or worship other idols, “for I the Lord you God am a jealous God…” God is claiming the full affection and demanding full relationship with the children of Israel. And so we reject God (or at the very minimum, we two-time God) when we bow down to worship other idols. We do this when we give our hearts to something that is not of God. We do this when we order our lives and our priorities around something that is not God. When we try to divide our attention with God, we are rejecting God.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians today, we see a glimpse of what has happened to Paul in his conversion, how he goes from pride in his own achievements to gratitude for an utterly gratuitous call to a completely new way of life. In the past, Paul has rejected God when he placed too much pride in his own achievements. And so do we also reject God.
We reject God when we let others tell us who we really are and do not listen to the God who knows us and loves us for our most true selves.
We reject God when we reject other people for reasons of our own; we reject others because they do not fit into our standards of what is good, appropriate and fitting, and when we define others as being less worthy, less human, less valuable than ourselves, then we are rejecting God.
We reject God when we do not value and believe in the goodness in which God has created each of us. We reject God when we cannot believe and trust that we are, in fact, good.
We reject God when we place our trust in the world’s scarcity that says you’ve got to hold onto and fight for what is yours because there is not enough to go around; we reject God when we do not give our hearts to God’s abundance that says, not only is there always enough, but there is radically more than enough—resources, love…-- for everyone.
We reject God when we live too much of our lives and our faith in the sacrifice of the cross—in the “no” and we do not include the surprising gift, the “yes” of the resurrection.
We reject God when we refuse to die to our old selves and are not accepting of God’s gift of renewal and new life.
We reject God when we are not grateful for all the good gifts God so freely gives.
In the book The Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon writes about this parable of Jesus and this phenomenon of how we continue to reject God and to reject God’s grace through Jesus Christ saying, “So it is with me, if I am honest. And so it is with you. The Father’s will for you—his whole will, his entire plan of salvation—is that you believe in Jesus, nothing more. He has already forgiven you, he has already reconciled you, he has already raised you up together with Jesus and made you sit together in heavenly places with him. And better yet, Jesus himself has already pronounced upon you the approving judgment of having done his Father’s will. But if you do not believe him—if you insist on walking up to the bar of judgment on your own faithless feet and arguing a case he has already dismissed—well, you will never hear the blessed silence of his un-condemnation over the infernal racket of your own voice…”ii
This morning, may God who is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve inspire our hearts to
Choose God. Choose blessings. Choose abundance.
i. O’Driscoll, Herbert. Prayers for the Breaking of Bread: Meditations on the Collects of the Church Year. Cowley: Cambridge, 1991, p161.
ii. Capon, Robert. The Parables of Judgment. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1989, p110.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
15th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 21A
15th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 21
September 25, 2011
I want you to take a minute and imagine this scene. We are all sitting in here on an average Sunday, worshiping God in our usual custom, when a man enters Gulfport in a triumphant procession—a parade where crowds gather along the side of the roads and they proclaim him king as he comes into town. And then this man walks into our church and starts criticizing the ways that we make worship, conduct our business, help the poor, teach our children, and he starts tearing up the place, turning over tables, throwing prayer books and hymnals out of the backs of the pews and running people out of church. After he leaves, and we manage to recover ourselves, and we come back the next day to try to worship God, then he comes back. You can imagine that we would be somewhat wary and wanting to know why he is doing all of these things.
This is what has happened to the people in the temple in Jerusalem just prior to today’s gospel reading. Jesus has entered Jerusalem in a triumphant procession, with the people shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus then proceeds directly to the temple where he turns over the tables of the money changers and drives out all who are buying and selling in the temple, and then he proceeds to heal the sick in the middle of the temple. Then he leaves and goes to the outskirts of town to spend the night, and he comes back to the temple the next morning. That’s where our reading for today picks up. When he shows back up in the temple, the chief priests and the elders know he is dangerous, and they know they do not want to provoke a similar scene as the day before. So they ask Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” It’s a reasonable question. Perhaps we would ask, “Why are you doing this?” So Jesus, like a good rabbi, answers their questions with a question, and when they do not answer, he tells them a parable, and he concludes the parable by telling them (us) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the drug dealers and the petty larcenists are going into the kingdom of heaven before them (us).
In our Wednesday night class this past week, we talked about authority, about what is authoritative for us as Anglicans and Episcopalians, what is authority for us as the people of St.Peter’s by-the-Sea and as individuals. John Westerhoff writes in his little book—A People Called Episcopalians: A Brief Introduction to our Peculiar Way of Life—that authority is the source of our life of faith that is grounded in God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit; and he says that authority is essentially how we come to know the mind and the will of the triune God (6). Authority is how we come to know the mind and the will of God. So in our reading today, perhaps it might help us to look at the question the chief priests and elders ask Jesus as being—how do you know this that you are doing is a part of the mind and the will of God? And we see how Jesus answers that question.
So, how do we know the mind and the will of God? Paul has an interesting take on this in the portion of his letter to the Philippians that we read today. Paul is writing to the Philippians in this letter about a conflict that they are having between two women in the congregation—Euodia and Syntyche—and he is urging the two women and all of the people to “be of the same mind.” For Paul, this is what that “same mind” looks like: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…” Paul is teaching them that to be of the same mind as Christ Jesus, they must be humble, they must be empty of their own selfish desires and ambitions and be filled with concern for the other. That is what it means to have the same mind as Christ Jesus. He ends this section by writing, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Get yourself out of the way and allow God to work in you and through your work.
So Paul is saying that we know the mind of God through humility. We find our authority in humility. How does that work?
When the chief priests and the elders refuse to answer Jesus about where John the Baptist’s authority came from, he tells them a parable saying, “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…’”
What is the dynamic that is going on with the two sons to make the one answer no and then change his mind and go and the other answer yes but not follow through? I imagine that after the father comes to the first son, and he tells his father he won’t go work for him in the vineyard; the son goes back to whatever he is doing, but he can’t stop thinking about his father and his father’s request. He knows his father needs his help to bring in the harvest of the vineyard; he remembers all the love and the support and the goodness he receives from his father, and so he gets over himself and his own preoccupations; he lets go of whatever plans he had that would prevent him from working in the vineyard, and he changes his mind and goes to work. The second son tells the father he will go work, but maybe he gets busy. He’s caught up in the middle of a drama in his own household, he has a major crises he needs to tend to; he’s just gotten to the best part of this novel he’s reading and just can’t put it down. He doesn’t give any thought to the father and the father’s request of him after he answers yes, and he is so preoccupied with his own affairs.
We can only know the mind of God when we make room for God through humility and self-emptying. Humility and self-emptying can only occur when we are focusing on the needs of the other and on the priorities of God.
When writing about this concept of self-emptying in Philippians, theologian William Greenway writes, “One does not ‘self-empty’ by focusing upon oneself. One is emptied of self to the degree one is overcome by the needs, pains, hopes, and desires of others. When concern for others takes one utterly beyond self-interest, beyond obsession with achievements and self-obsessing guilt over failures, beyond self, then one receives the comfort of an Easter ‘yes’ so overwhelming, unconditional, undeniable, and absolute that it is experienced as unfailing and forever—a yes more potent and enduring than any imaginable no”(Feasting on the Word, Greenway,114).
Humility is not comfortable, nor is seeking the mind of God easy. In both, we come into contact with our own brokenness, with our own pain and suffering and with the pain and suffering of the whole world. It is not work for the faint of heart, but through it we will receive the yes of the resurrection.
In closing, I share with you the words from the end of the little book, Falling Upward: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that get to the heart of this understanding of humility and God’s invitation to us to participate in the mind and the will of God. Rohr writes, “Pain is part of the deal. If you don’t walk into [growth and spiritual maturity and the kingdom of God], it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful. All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them” (Rohr 160).
September 25, 2011
I want you to take a minute and imagine this scene. We are all sitting in here on an average Sunday, worshiping God in our usual custom, when a man enters Gulfport in a triumphant procession—a parade where crowds gather along the side of the roads and they proclaim him king as he comes into town. And then this man walks into our church and starts criticizing the ways that we make worship, conduct our business, help the poor, teach our children, and he starts tearing up the place, turning over tables, throwing prayer books and hymnals out of the backs of the pews and running people out of church. After he leaves, and we manage to recover ourselves, and we come back the next day to try to worship God, then he comes back. You can imagine that we would be somewhat wary and wanting to know why he is doing all of these things.
This is what has happened to the people in the temple in Jerusalem just prior to today’s gospel reading. Jesus has entered Jerusalem in a triumphant procession, with the people shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus then proceeds directly to the temple where he turns over the tables of the money changers and drives out all who are buying and selling in the temple, and then he proceeds to heal the sick in the middle of the temple. Then he leaves and goes to the outskirts of town to spend the night, and he comes back to the temple the next morning. That’s where our reading for today picks up. When he shows back up in the temple, the chief priests and the elders know he is dangerous, and they know they do not want to provoke a similar scene as the day before. So they ask Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” It’s a reasonable question. Perhaps we would ask, “Why are you doing this?” So Jesus, like a good rabbi, answers their questions with a question, and when they do not answer, he tells them a parable, and he concludes the parable by telling them (us) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the drug dealers and the petty larcenists are going into the kingdom of heaven before them (us).
In our Wednesday night class this past week, we talked about authority, about what is authoritative for us as Anglicans and Episcopalians, what is authority for us as the people of St.Peter’s by-the-Sea and as individuals. John Westerhoff writes in his little book—A People Called Episcopalians: A Brief Introduction to our Peculiar Way of Life—that authority is the source of our life of faith that is grounded in God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit; and he says that authority is essentially how we come to know the mind and the will of the triune God (6). Authority is how we come to know the mind and the will of God. So in our reading today, perhaps it might help us to look at the question the chief priests and elders ask Jesus as being—how do you know this that you are doing is a part of the mind and the will of God? And we see how Jesus answers that question.
So, how do we know the mind and the will of God? Paul has an interesting take on this in the portion of his letter to the Philippians that we read today. Paul is writing to the Philippians in this letter about a conflict that they are having between two women in the congregation—Euodia and Syntyche—and he is urging the two women and all of the people to “be of the same mind.” For Paul, this is what that “same mind” looks like: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…” Paul is teaching them that to be of the same mind as Christ Jesus, they must be humble, they must be empty of their own selfish desires and ambitions and be filled with concern for the other. That is what it means to have the same mind as Christ Jesus. He ends this section by writing, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Get yourself out of the way and allow God to work in you and through your work.
So Paul is saying that we know the mind of God through humility. We find our authority in humility. How does that work?
When the chief priests and the elders refuse to answer Jesus about where John the Baptist’s authority came from, he tells them a parable saying, “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…’”
What is the dynamic that is going on with the two sons to make the one answer no and then change his mind and go and the other answer yes but not follow through? I imagine that after the father comes to the first son, and he tells his father he won’t go work for him in the vineyard; the son goes back to whatever he is doing, but he can’t stop thinking about his father and his father’s request. He knows his father needs his help to bring in the harvest of the vineyard; he remembers all the love and the support and the goodness he receives from his father, and so he gets over himself and his own preoccupations; he lets go of whatever plans he had that would prevent him from working in the vineyard, and he changes his mind and goes to work. The second son tells the father he will go work, but maybe he gets busy. He’s caught up in the middle of a drama in his own household, he has a major crises he needs to tend to; he’s just gotten to the best part of this novel he’s reading and just can’t put it down. He doesn’t give any thought to the father and the father’s request of him after he answers yes, and he is so preoccupied with his own affairs.
We can only know the mind of God when we make room for God through humility and self-emptying. Humility and self-emptying can only occur when we are focusing on the needs of the other and on the priorities of God.
When writing about this concept of self-emptying in Philippians, theologian William Greenway writes, “One does not ‘self-empty’ by focusing upon oneself. One is emptied of self to the degree one is overcome by the needs, pains, hopes, and desires of others. When concern for others takes one utterly beyond self-interest, beyond obsession with achievements and self-obsessing guilt over failures, beyond self, then one receives the comfort of an Easter ‘yes’ so overwhelming, unconditional, undeniable, and absolute that it is experienced as unfailing and forever—a yes more potent and enduring than any imaginable no”(Feasting on the Word, Greenway,114).
Humility is not comfortable, nor is seeking the mind of God easy. In both, we come into contact with our own brokenness, with our own pain and suffering and with the pain and suffering of the whole world. It is not work for the faint of heart, but through it we will receive the yes of the resurrection.
In closing, I share with you the words from the end of the little book, Falling Upward: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that get to the heart of this understanding of humility and God’s invitation to us to participate in the mind and the will of God. Rohr writes, “Pain is part of the deal. If you don’t walk into [growth and spiritual maturity and the kingdom of God], it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful. All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them” (Rohr 160).
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
13th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 19A (10th Anniversary of 9/11/01)
13th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 19A
September 11, 2011
It was my second day of seminary at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. I was just beginning to fathom what I had done—having left behind my Mississippi home and family and moved to NYC (with my faithful cat) to follow God’s call into the priesthood.
I was in a small group session on this second morning of classes with some of my classmates, and we were discussing our first book we were reading as seminarians. It was a book titled Resurrection by a man named Rowan Williams—whom none of us had really heard of but who was soon to be named the next Archbishop of Canterbury. And it was a fascinating book about how Jesus’s resurrection and the Christian interpretation of the Easter gospel is the foundation of the Christian life, and the book explored new ways of interpreting the resurrection in our daily lives.
In this little book, Williams talks about how all of creation is caught in this cycle of victims and oppressors and how, periodically, the victims rise up, overthrow the oppressors, and then change places-- with the oppressors becoming the victims and the victims becoming the oppressors.
Williams says that it is Jesus’s crucifixion and his resurrection that finally breaks this cycle—for Jesus the victim does not become the oppressor. Rather, through his resurrection he offers forgiveness to those who crucified him and to those faithful disciples who abandoned and betrayed him, and he offers to all reconciliation and salvation.
It is a provocative little book, as Williams peels back the layers that have built up around the notion of resurrection and invites us to see Christ in the face of all victims—even those who perpetrate great crimes.
Our small group was in the thick of our mid-morning discussion on these issues when the chapel bells started ringing incessantly. Now we’d only been in class two days, but we knew this was odd. The chapel bells rang, as scheduled, three times a day for worship, and it was currently class time and not time for worship. We continued our discussion somewhat distractedly as our tutor, Chris Keller, a seasoned parish priest and PhD student, went to find out what was going on. When he came back, his face was stark white and he said to us, in a breathless kind of voice, “Someone has bombed the World Trade Center! We all need to go to the chapel!”
Confused and alarmed we headed to the seminary chapel where the others students, faculty, and staff were already gathered and praying the Great Litany in the BCP while the 1st Tower burned and chaos erupted less than two miles away.
For weeks following that horrible day, as the ashes blew over NYC and the smell of burned metal hung heavy in the air, I struggled to hold onto hope in the face of so much hatred and so much suffering.
And 10 years later, I still struggle. How do we follow the way of Christ in the face of this? How do we hold on to the hope of the resurrection in the face of evil and suffering? How do we preach about forgiveness on today of all days? How do we hope for healing of these old, deep wounds that we all carry around with us and that don’t ever seem to get healed?
My brothers and sisters, there is good news on this day. There is hope of resurrection. First, there seems to be chaos and destruction for the enemies of Israel and Yahweh in today’s Old Testament reading. It seems to be good news for us because our ancestors in the faith, the Children of Israel are saved from slavery under the Egyptians in one divisive act by God, as they walk through the Red Sea unharmed and then all of Pharaoh’s army and their horses drown in the Red Sea. But it’s rather a grisly picture if we take a moment and think of all those dead bodies floating in the Red Sea, and it’s certainly not good news for the army of Egypt. How can something that is good for one people and so terribly bad for another be good news in the Kingdom of God?
There’s an old Hasidic tale that says that the angels were rejoicing over the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea. They were playing their harps, blowing their horns, singing and dancing and laughing with joy. When one angel noticed something and said to the others, “Look! The Creator of the Universe is sitting there weeping.” When the angels approached God and asked “Why are you weeping when Israel has been saved and delivered by your power?” The Maker of the Universe answered, “I am weeping for the dead Egyptians washed up on the shore—somebody’s sons, somebody’s husbands, somebody’s fathers.”i
The story of the God weeping over the Egyptians is our story too—the story of God weeping for those who died in the attacks on September 11th, 2001; it is the story of God weeping for the families who lost loved ones, mothers, fathers, and children. It is the story of God weeping over the deaths of those who have died in combat since then, fighting for peace. It is the story of God weeping over the deaths of the terrorists who perpetrated such evil and those who still seek to do others harm.
It is the story of God weeping for us, who cannot lay aside our own wounded-ness and fragmentation; it is God weeping for us who continue to hold onto old wrongs, old grievances rather than relinquish them to God, asking forgiveness for our own hardness of heart and offering our own forgiveness. The Maker of the Universe weeps for all of creation in our wounds and in our suffering whether we are the good guys or the bad guys, the winners or the losers, the victims or the oppressors. God weeps for all and longs for reconciliation with and forgiveness for all.
In this week’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Anybody recognize this passage from a service in the Prayer Book? I’ll give you a hint. (sing portion here: “For none of us has life in himself/ and none becomes his own master when he dies. For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,/ and if we die, we die in the Lord. So, then, whether we live or die/ we are the Lord’s possession. I am resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.”) It’s in the BCP on page 491--the opening anthem for our burial liturgy. It’s the liturgy of the church in which we find the most comfort, the most meaning in the Resurrection of our Lord; it is where we say that no matter what happens to each of us in this life, we find our hope in Christ’s resurrection which proves, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death. It is how we, as the Body of Christ, find hope and meaning in the midst of our sadness and suffering, by giving our hearts to the hope that the lives of those who are the Lord’s possession will always be the Lord’s possession.
In the gospel reading, Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if a brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?” Peter and the other disciples are embroiled in some minor dispute or offense among them stemming from their previous discussion of who is the greatest, and Jesus says to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Do not ever cease in offering forgiveness, Jesus tells them. It’s important to remember what happens in the rest of Peter’s story—how he denies Jesus, abandons him in his most difficult hour, and after the resurrection, Jesus appears to Peter alone, and he forgives him and restores the relationship with him.
Peter tastes the grace of God in Jesus’s forgiveness, and he is formed and shaped by it; he carries this taste of grace into all other conflict he encounters in spreading the gospel of our Lord.
Finally, it is important on this day, to remember that not just our little lives and our individual hurts and wounds will one day be healed and reconciled. All of creation which now groans and longs for fulfillment, for its hurts and its wounds to be healed, will one day become a new creation through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is not something that happened once long ago. It continues to happen, continues to break into our reality and Christ’s resurrection continues to restore not just individuals but the whole big story of all of humanity.
So while you might not be yet healed of your deep wound, your deep sadness, your deep grief, through the Lord’s resurrection, you will be. And while all of humanity may not be healed of our deep wounds, our deep sadness, our deep grief, we will be, through the Lord’s resurrection.
Did you know that every Sunday in the church is a feast day? It is a celebration of the Lord’s resurrection! A sort of mini-Easter, every Sunday. Every week, we are an Easter people, a resurrection community. So even as we wait for the fulfillment of the resurrection in our lives and in our world, we celebrate Easter, we celebrate resurrection.
And we wait. We hope. We pray for healing. We taste the graciousness of God, and we invite others to taste God’s grace. We forgive others, again and again and again. We ask for our own forgiveness. We allow ourselves to be forgiven. And we allow ourselves to be healed.
i. Referenced in 9/6/11 Christian Century article “Living by the Word” by Theodore J. Wardlaw (18). Originally from Albert C. Winn’s sermon ‘A Way Out of No Way: Exodus 14:5-31’ published in Journal for Preachers.
September 11, 2011
It was my second day of seminary at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. I was just beginning to fathom what I had done—having left behind my Mississippi home and family and moved to NYC (with my faithful cat) to follow God’s call into the priesthood.
I was in a small group session on this second morning of classes with some of my classmates, and we were discussing our first book we were reading as seminarians. It was a book titled Resurrection by a man named Rowan Williams—whom none of us had really heard of but who was soon to be named the next Archbishop of Canterbury. And it was a fascinating book about how Jesus’s resurrection and the Christian interpretation of the Easter gospel is the foundation of the Christian life, and the book explored new ways of interpreting the resurrection in our daily lives.
In this little book, Williams talks about how all of creation is caught in this cycle of victims and oppressors and how, periodically, the victims rise up, overthrow the oppressors, and then change places-- with the oppressors becoming the victims and the victims becoming the oppressors.
Williams says that it is Jesus’s crucifixion and his resurrection that finally breaks this cycle—for Jesus the victim does not become the oppressor. Rather, through his resurrection he offers forgiveness to those who crucified him and to those faithful disciples who abandoned and betrayed him, and he offers to all reconciliation and salvation.
It is a provocative little book, as Williams peels back the layers that have built up around the notion of resurrection and invites us to see Christ in the face of all victims—even those who perpetrate great crimes.
Our small group was in the thick of our mid-morning discussion on these issues when the chapel bells started ringing incessantly. Now we’d only been in class two days, but we knew this was odd. The chapel bells rang, as scheduled, three times a day for worship, and it was currently class time and not time for worship. We continued our discussion somewhat distractedly as our tutor, Chris Keller, a seasoned parish priest and PhD student, went to find out what was going on. When he came back, his face was stark white and he said to us, in a breathless kind of voice, “Someone has bombed the World Trade Center! We all need to go to the chapel!”
Confused and alarmed we headed to the seminary chapel where the others students, faculty, and staff were already gathered and praying the Great Litany in the BCP while the 1st Tower burned and chaos erupted less than two miles away.
For weeks following that horrible day, as the ashes blew over NYC and the smell of burned metal hung heavy in the air, I struggled to hold onto hope in the face of so much hatred and so much suffering.
And 10 years later, I still struggle. How do we follow the way of Christ in the face of this? How do we hold on to the hope of the resurrection in the face of evil and suffering? How do we preach about forgiveness on today of all days? How do we hope for healing of these old, deep wounds that we all carry around with us and that don’t ever seem to get healed?
My brothers and sisters, there is good news on this day. There is hope of resurrection. First, there seems to be chaos and destruction for the enemies of Israel and Yahweh in today’s Old Testament reading. It seems to be good news for us because our ancestors in the faith, the Children of Israel are saved from slavery under the Egyptians in one divisive act by God, as they walk through the Red Sea unharmed and then all of Pharaoh’s army and their horses drown in the Red Sea. But it’s rather a grisly picture if we take a moment and think of all those dead bodies floating in the Red Sea, and it’s certainly not good news for the army of Egypt. How can something that is good for one people and so terribly bad for another be good news in the Kingdom of God?
There’s an old Hasidic tale that says that the angels were rejoicing over the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea. They were playing their harps, blowing their horns, singing and dancing and laughing with joy. When one angel noticed something and said to the others, “Look! The Creator of the Universe is sitting there weeping.” When the angels approached God and asked “Why are you weeping when Israel has been saved and delivered by your power?” The Maker of the Universe answered, “I am weeping for the dead Egyptians washed up on the shore—somebody’s sons, somebody’s husbands, somebody’s fathers.”i
The story of the God weeping over the Egyptians is our story too—the story of God weeping for those who died in the attacks on September 11th, 2001; it is the story of God weeping for the families who lost loved ones, mothers, fathers, and children. It is the story of God weeping over the deaths of those who have died in combat since then, fighting for peace. It is the story of God weeping over the deaths of the terrorists who perpetrated such evil and those who still seek to do others harm.
It is the story of God weeping for us, who cannot lay aside our own wounded-ness and fragmentation; it is God weeping for us who continue to hold onto old wrongs, old grievances rather than relinquish them to God, asking forgiveness for our own hardness of heart and offering our own forgiveness. The Maker of the Universe weeps for all of creation in our wounds and in our suffering whether we are the good guys or the bad guys, the winners or the losers, the victims or the oppressors. God weeps for all and longs for reconciliation with and forgiveness for all.
In this week’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Anybody recognize this passage from a service in the Prayer Book? I’ll give you a hint. (sing portion here: “For none of us has life in himself/ and none becomes his own master when he dies. For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,/ and if we die, we die in the Lord. So, then, whether we live or die/ we are the Lord’s possession. I am resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.”) It’s in the BCP on page 491--the opening anthem for our burial liturgy. It’s the liturgy of the church in which we find the most comfort, the most meaning in the Resurrection of our Lord; it is where we say that no matter what happens to each of us in this life, we find our hope in Christ’s resurrection which proves, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death. It is how we, as the Body of Christ, find hope and meaning in the midst of our sadness and suffering, by giving our hearts to the hope that the lives of those who are the Lord’s possession will always be the Lord’s possession.
In the gospel reading, Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if a brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?” Peter and the other disciples are embroiled in some minor dispute or offense among them stemming from their previous discussion of who is the greatest, and Jesus says to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Do not ever cease in offering forgiveness, Jesus tells them. It’s important to remember what happens in the rest of Peter’s story—how he denies Jesus, abandons him in his most difficult hour, and after the resurrection, Jesus appears to Peter alone, and he forgives him and restores the relationship with him.
Peter tastes the grace of God in Jesus’s forgiveness, and he is formed and shaped by it; he carries this taste of grace into all other conflict he encounters in spreading the gospel of our Lord.
Finally, it is important on this day, to remember that not just our little lives and our individual hurts and wounds will one day be healed and reconciled. All of creation which now groans and longs for fulfillment, for its hurts and its wounds to be healed, will one day become a new creation through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is not something that happened once long ago. It continues to happen, continues to break into our reality and Christ’s resurrection continues to restore not just individuals but the whole big story of all of humanity.
So while you might not be yet healed of your deep wound, your deep sadness, your deep grief, through the Lord’s resurrection, you will be. And while all of humanity may not be healed of our deep wounds, our deep sadness, our deep grief, we will be, through the Lord’s resurrection.
Did you know that every Sunday in the church is a feast day? It is a celebration of the Lord’s resurrection! A sort of mini-Easter, every Sunday. Every week, we are an Easter people, a resurrection community. So even as we wait for the fulfillment of the resurrection in our lives and in our world, we celebrate Easter, we celebrate resurrection.
And we wait. We hope. We pray for healing. We taste the graciousness of God, and we invite others to taste God’s grace. We forgive others, again and again and again. We ask for our own forgiveness. We allow ourselves to be forgiven. And we allow ourselves to be healed.
i. Referenced in 9/6/11 Christian Century article “Living by the Word” by Theodore J. Wardlaw (18). Originally from Albert C. Winn’s sermon ‘A Way Out of No Way: Exodus 14:5-31’ published in Journal for Preachers.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
12th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 18A
12th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18A
September 4, 2011
One of the blogs I occasionally read had a slight retelling of our gospel reading for this Sunday.
And Jesus said, “If another member of the church sins against you…just talk about them behind their back.”
“If another member of the church sins against you…just call a bunch of people in the church to complain about them. You may even want to start a letter-writing campaign against them.”
“If another member of the church sins against you…just send them a nasty email. Copy the clergy. And while you’re at it, cc the bishop…”
“If another member of the church sins against you…don’t say anything. Just avoid them. Unfriend them on Facebook. And if you can’t avoid them on Sundays, then just leave the church…” i
Hmmm. Maybe not…
Let’s go back and look at today’s gospel.
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” I don’t know. Seems like the first way might be easier. Let’s look at what’s going on in Matthew’s gospel in this section and in the surrounding sections.
Here is what scholars say about this passage. First, the NRSV does a disservice by translating the Greek to read “another member of the church.” And it is not certain that the words “sins against you” are in the original text either. A more accurate translation of this passage might be to say, “If a brother or sister sins, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone…” Second, we are reminded that sin in this text does not necessarily have all of the connotations that we put upon it. The word for sin in this text is an archery term which means “to miss the mark.” So now we have, “If a brother or sister misses the mark, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone…” Third, this section of Matthew’s gospel has been called the “Rule of Christ” “because [it] redefine[s] the goals of confrontation or intervention in seeking to rescue and forgive, to offer care in a spirit of humility.”ii Fourth, it is important to look at the context of this passage in Matthew’s gospel. This is only the second instance in the gospels where the term ‘church’ or ekklesia appears, and the first one, we heard two weeks ago, also in connection with the roles of binding and loosing. Fifth, this passage is nestled in between two other passages that shine light upon it, all within the context of the entirety of chapter 18, in which Jesus answers the disciples’ question about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven by referencing a little child and in which Jesus speaks, again and again, about “little ones”. The passage just preceding today’s gospel is the parable of the lost sheep—in which Jesus tells of a shepherd who has 100 sheep and leaves the 99 to go chase down the one who has strayed. And this passage is followed by Peter’s question of how often we should forgive, and Jesus answers him that we should forgive in a radical abundance, over and over again.
So what do these points tell us about today’s gospel? They tell us that the writer of Matthew’s gospel is speaking to and about a family-the family that is the church universal and the family that is the local church. They tell us that the focus is not on punishment of the offenders but upon reconciliation. They tell us that “the Rule of Christ is to care for the offender or sinner and not necessarily to establish the rights of the offended”. They tell us that it is the “responsibility of the offended one to seek reconciliation.”iii They tell us that reconciliation is an important part of the work that the community of believers does together, and they tell us that one of the key elements in this process and in discipleship itself is humility.
If the church is to be a place of forgiveness, grace, and mercy (for which I believe we all long in our deepest heart of hearts), then we must treat one another with forgiveness, grace, and mercy. So much is at stake in this! We are not just individuals standing before God, we are the entire body of Christ, bound together by virtue of Christ’s love and saving work, bound together by our baptism, bound together by our need for forgiveness and reconciliation. We are in this together, and if we are not actively doing the work of reconciliation within, we are actively thwarting the kingdom of God which we try to proclaim. In his book, Forgiven and Forgiving, Bill Countryman writes, “So I can’t be the only forgiven one. God has forgiven everyone else in the same way and at the same moment as me. That’s a fundamental reality I have to live with. God’s forgiveness isn’t available to me as a separate, private arrangement. It’s available to me only as a part of this big package. This reality has consequences. If I want to withhold forgiveness from my neighbor, I’m effectively withholding it from myself, too. If I am willing for God to forgive my neighbor, I’m allowing God to forgive me, too. It’s all or nothing, everybody or nobody.”iv
The apostle Paul writes about this in today’s portion of his letter to the Romans, and he writes about our call to love, inviting us to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” inviting us to “live honorably” and equating quarreling and jealousy with the sins of reveling, drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness. Paul ends this passage by challenging the church to “Make no provision for the flesh.” For Paul, the flesh isn’t just our fleshly desires. The Flesh represents all the devices and desires by which we try to fortify ourselves—not with Jesus, but against Jesus and against our neighbor. ‘Make no provision for the flesh’ means ‘By God’s grace turn from your self-absorption.”v
It is hard and costly work, this work of reconciliation; this work of turning from our own self-absorption; this work of forgiveness; this work of growth in humility; this work of being in community; this work of loving our neighbor; this work of being the church. And yet, it is the way that we have chosen. It is why we are here, because we have been chosen by Christ, called out to follow him, and in response to his calling we choose to follow Christ; because we choose to follow a different way than the way of the world; because we choose the resurrection, we choose life, we choose the love of God above everything else.
May God give us the grace to do this work God has called us to. And may God help us to continue to choose the way of Jesus Christ, the way of forgiveness and reconciliation, above all else.
i From Rick Morley’s blog post “Before you Unfriend” at www.rickmorely.com
iiFrom Estrella B. Horning, ‘The Rule of Christ.’ as quoted in Feasting on the Word p 45.
iii Andrews, Dale P. Feasting on the Word p 47.
iv Countryman, William. Forgiven and Forgiving (Harrisburg, Pa: Morehouse, 1998), p 42.
v Bartlett, David. Feasting on the Word p 43.
September 4, 2011
One of the blogs I occasionally read had a slight retelling of our gospel reading for this Sunday.
And Jesus said, “If another member of the church sins against you…just talk about them behind their back.”
“If another member of the church sins against you…just call a bunch of people in the church to complain about them. You may even want to start a letter-writing campaign against them.”
“If another member of the church sins against you…just send them a nasty email. Copy the clergy. And while you’re at it, cc the bishop…”
“If another member of the church sins against you…don’t say anything. Just avoid them. Unfriend them on Facebook. And if you can’t avoid them on Sundays, then just leave the church…” i
Hmmm. Maybe not…
Let’s go back and look at today’s gospel.
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” I don’t know. Seems like the first way might be easier. Let’s look at what’s going on in Matthew’s gospel in this section and in the surrounding sections.
Here is what scholars say about this passage. First, the NRSV does a disservice by translating the Greek to read “another member of the church.” And it is not certain that the words “sins against you” are in the original text either. A more accurate translation of this passage might be to say, “If a brother or sister sins, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone…” Second, we are reminded that sin in this text does not necessarily have all of the connotations that we put upon it. The word for sin in this text is an archery term which means “to miss the mark.” So now we have, “If a brother or sister misses the mark, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone…” Third, this section of Matthew’s gospel has been called the “Rule of Christ” “because [it] redefine[s] the goals of confrontation or intervention in seeking to rescue and forgive, to offer care in a spirit of humility.”ii Fourth, it is important to look at the context of this passage in Matthew’s gospel. This is only the second instance in the gospels where the term ‘church’ or ekklesia appears, and the first one, we heard two weeks ago, also in connection with the roles of binding and loosing. Fifth, this passage is nestled in between two other passages that shine light upon it, all within the context of the entirety of chapter 18, in which Jesus answers the disciples’ question about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven by referencing a little child and in which Jesus speaks, again and again, about “little ones”. The passage just preceding today’s gospel is the parable of the lost sheep—in which Jesus tells of a shepherd who has 100 sheep and leaves the 99 to go chase down the one who has strayed. And this passage is followed by Peter’s question of how often we should forgive, and Jesus answers him that we should forgive in a radical abundance, over and over again.
So what do these points tell us about today’s gospel? They tell us that the writer of Matthew’s gospel is speaking to and about a family-the family that is the church universal and the family that is the local church. They tell us that the focus is not on punishment of the offenders but upon reconciliation. They tell us that “the Rule of Christ is to care for the offender or sinner and not necessarily to establish the rights of the offended”. They tell us that it is the “responsibility of the offended one to seek reconciliation.”iii They tell us that reconciliation is an important part of the work that the community of believers does together, and they tell us that one of the key elements in this process and in discipleship itself is humility.
If the church is to be a place of forgiveness, grace, and mercy (for which I believe we all long in our deepest heart of hearts), then we must treat one another with forgiveness, grace, and mercy. So much is at stake in this! We are not just individuals standing before God, we are the entire body of Christ, bound together by virtue of Christ’s love and saving work, bound together by our baptism, bound together by our need for forgiveness and reconciliation. We are in this together, and if we are not actively doing the work of reconciliation within, we are actively thwarting the kingdom of God which we try to proclaim. In his book, Forgiven and Forgiving, Bill Countryman writes, “So I can’t be the only forgiven one. God has forgiven everyone else in the same way and at the same moment as me. That’s a fundamental reality I have to live with. God’s forgiveness isn’t available to me as a separate, private arrangement. It’s available to me only as a part of this big package. This reality has consequences. If I want to withhold forgiveness from my neighbor, I’m effectively withholding it from myself, too. If I am willing for God to forgive my neighbor, I’m allowing God to forgive me, too. It’s all or nothing, everybody or nobody.”iv
The apostle Paul writes about this in today’s portion of his letter to the Romans, and he writes about our call to love, inviting us to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” inviting us to “live honorably” and equating quarreling and jealousy with the sins of reveling, drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness. Paul ends this passage by challenging the church to “Make no provision for the flesh.” For Paul, the flesh isn’t just our fleshly desires. The Flesh represents all the devices and desires by which we try to fortify ourselves—not with Jesus, but against Jesus and against our neighbor. ‘Make no provision for the flesh’ means ‘By God’s grace turn from your self-absorption.”v
It is hard and costly work, this work of reconciliation; this work of turning from our own self-absorption; this work of forgiveness; this work of growth in humility; this work of being in community; this work of loving our neighbor; this work of being the church. And yet, it is the way that we have chosen. It is why we are here, because we have been chosen by Christ, called out to follow him, and in response to his calling we choose to follow Christ; because we choose to follow a different way than the way of the world; because we choose the resurrection, we choose life, we choose the love of God above everything else.
May God give us the grace to do this work God has called us to. And may God help us to continue to choose the way of Jesus Christ, the way of forgiveness and reconciliation, above all else.
i From Rick Morley’s blog post “Before you Unfriend” at www.rickmorely.com
iiFrom Estrella B. Horning, ‘The Rule of Christ.’ as quoted in Feasting on the Word p 45.
iii Andrews, Dale P. Feasting on the Word p 47.
iv Countryman, William. Forgiven and Forgiving (Harrisburg, Pa: Morehouse, 1998), p 42.
v Bartlett, David. Feasting on the Word p 43.
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