May 02, 10:30 am (John Harris)
There is no audio. We are a people today who want to know what’s behind certain actions or events we witness either in person or in the news. What influenced someone to do what they did? What did the perpetrators of the Boston bombings experience to lead to their horrible actions? Police and the FBI and journalists will be researching this question for quite a while. What is the “backstory?”
Download
Full Text
Sermon preached at Trinity Church, Buffalo, New York
by the Rev. Jerre W. Feagin, on the Fifth Sunday of Easter,
April 28, 2013. (John 13:31-35)
Almighty God, give us the courage to never fear the power of evil more than our trust in your power and love. Amen.
We are a people today who want to know what’s behind certain actions or events we witness either in person or in the news. What influenced someone to do what they did? What did the perpetrators of the Boston bombings experience to lead to their horrible actions? Police and the FBI and journalists will be researching this question for quite a while. What is the “backstory?”
In reflecting on the Gospel reading for today, I pondered the same question with regard to our faith. What is the “backstory” to what has been called the Greatest Story Ever Told? How did Christianity get off the ground and then spread like wildfire against all the odds? How did this obscure “messianic movement,” a sect that started out on the fringes of Judaism, become, within 400 years, the foremost religion of the Roman Empire - and indeed of Western civilization?
Were Christian preachers simply that persuasive? Were Christian healers that successful? Were Christian teachers that intriguing? Was Christian worship that compelling?
A noted sociologist at the University of Washington offers a theory of why Christianity grew so successfully. Depending on your background in what you might have been taught in Sunday school or heard in sermons, some of his answers may surprise you. He holds that it was not due to the coming of the Holy Spirit. Nor was it attributable to the preaching of Peter or Paul. Nor could it be pinned down to Emperor Constantine’s making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. And it is not even explained by what Karl Marx suspected – that Christianity was a triumph of a proletarian revolution.
It wasn’t the preaching in the market place or the healings in the highways and byways that made Christianity grow. The researcher takes a more “sociological” tack, pointing out that “conversion tends to proceed along social networks formed by interpersonal relationships.”
Take for instance, the experience of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Mormon missionaries average only one convert for every 1,000 random house calls. But, they convert one of every two persons they meet through relatives or friends. Early Christianity spread in the same way – primarily through family and friendship networks. Interestingly, it was not from the “underclass” that Christianity drew most of its converts, but from the “privileged” classes. Just as the “Unification Church” or the “Unitarian Church” attracts the better educated, this early “cult of Christ” found more of a home in the middle and upper classes than among the poor.
Another interesting point – most Christians in the Roman Empire were women. Why? Because “Christianity promoted liberating social relations between the sexes and within the family.” Women enjoyed a greater status in Christianity than they experienced in Roman society – a society in which they were mostly regarded by men as chattel.
From the outset, Christianity forbade the gruesome procedure of infanticide which kept the pagan culture disproportionately male. The Church encouraged Christian women to marry pagan husbands – even senators – as a way for the faith to spread throughout the society by the conversion of spouses and children. In this manner, a community with just a few hundred believers could grow to a critical mass of 10% of the population by 300 A.D.
In other words, Christianity spread the “old-fashioned way” – by providing a “better, happier, more secure way of life.” When epidemics struck, Christians, unlike the pagan culture, would care for the sick and the dying. Christians proclaimed a God who cared and then they lived this faith in God by loving one another. Drawn like moths to light, converts came to Jesus and discovered a New Creation.
The New Testament’s way of describing this “revitalizing” power is a simple one. It originates not so much in sociological constructs, or in similar class patterns, or in inventive ecclesiastical structures. No, the “revitalizing” power of the Gospel came directly from the mouth of Jesus just after his last supper with his disciples: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).
This sacrificial love of God in Jesus, reaching its apex in the Cross, became the model that “revitalized” and “converted” the ancient world. Manifested in the person of Jesus – and cherished as the greatest of all spiritual gifts by his followers – this love came to have a name. (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). When the Greek word agape was picked up by Christians, it meant a “generous act for the sake of the other,” usually in reference to love of parents for an only child. But it eventually was used to describe one’s core experience as a Christian. In the writing of St. Paul, agape was used without a direct object. Agape-love was an unmotivated, objectless love – a sort of fragrance or atmosphere in which Christian community was built up (1 Cor. 8:1b) and grounded (Ephesians 3:17), as well as a drive that guided all Christian conduct (Eph. 5:1-2).
More than any other Christian attribute, agape-love was the sign of Jesus-discipleship. Through the Holy Spirit, a believer entered into the sacred union between God and Jesus and this sacred union was agape-love.
This is how it all came about. This is the backstory. This is how we are won over to Christ. We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).
Agnes Sanford, the world-renowned spiritual healer of the 20th century, wrote: “Only love can generate the healing fire. When we pray in accordance with the law of love, we pray in accordance with the will of God.”
As Jesus has loved us, we are commanded to love one another. The newness of this commandment is not some new injunction to love. People of almost every religion and society value love. Our love flows from the example of Jesus who washed the feet of his followers, laid down his life, and revealed the love of God through his suffering on the cross. If Jesus revealed the essence of God in the glory of his sacrificial love, then the disciples also would reveal the essence of Jesus by the sacrificial love they demonstrated to those who would draw near them. The Church, in other words, is the sacrament of Christ. The revealed essence of this sacrament is the disciples’ love for one another.
When Jesus gave this new commandment, it was not a suggestion or a recommendation. Nor was it religious advice – something that would be good for us, if we have time to do it.
His directive “to love one another as I have loved you” was Jesus’ farewell command. It was his last instruction, the climatic teaching he chose to impart as he was leaving his friends.
This is the bottom line of Christianity: what Christians do. You know this at Trinity through all the ministries you are providing to the Buffalo community, throughout the week, especially on Thursday evenings in addition to your Sunday services. Its not how much Scripture you know or how much sin you’ve somehow been able to avoid or even how many people you’ve successfully evangelized.
Love is what Christians do, in this and in every generation. There is no promise that this will be easy. Yet it is the only path that leads to life and joy. How we act and how we treat each other is how we are recognized for who we are. When we open ourselves to Christ we find that he does have the words of eternal life.
Almighty God, give us the courage to never fear the power of evil more than our trust in your power and love. AMEN.
April 24, 10:30 am (John Harris)
In addition to a great deal of profound inspirational and spiritual themes in the Scriptures, there is some pretty horrible stuff in the Bible. There is no audio for this sermon.
Download
Full Text
Almighty God, give us the courage to never fear the power of evil more than our trust in your power and love. Amen.
In addition to a great deal of profound inspirational and spiritual themes in the Scriptures, there is some pretty horrible stuff in the Bible. It is not remotely filled with sweetness and light. Listen to this passage from Leviticus: “One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death; the whole congregation shall stone the blasphemer. Aliens as well as citizens, when they blaspheme the Name, shall be put to death.” (Lev. 24:16)
This Levitical stature seems eerily like something that would be found on the lips of an Islamic jihadist – even though it is clearly part of the canon of Jewish-Christian Scripture. It could also have been found, and was, to be the collective mind of the Council of the Sanhedrin (an assembly of 20 – 23 men in every city of Israel to deal with religious matters). They used this passage from Leviticus as a proof-text to lynch the first Christian deacon and martyr, Stephen, by stoning, for blasphemy. Preaching the Gospel can be dangerous work – go read the 6th chapter of the Book of Acts.
Stephen, after revealing his view of salvation history – clearly mediated through his Christian conversion – was found to be a “Jesus blasphemer,” a fact that is made even more distasteful when Stephen chastises the leaders of Israel for being “stiff-necked people,” who didn’t have the ears or heart to hear the message of Jesus. (Acts 6:51). The Council becomes enraged and arrests Stephen on the spot.
Hebraic law knew little of “innocent until proven guilty,” and the right of “habeas corpus” is denied. The “perp walk” amounts to Stephen being dragged away to be stoned to death. All this is done according to the law; that is according to Scripture. At the verdict, Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit declares: “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (Acts 7:56). That does it. The Council becomes ballistic, and Stephen proceeds to become the first adult Christian martyr. While the stones were ripping into Stephen, the onlookers lay their coats at the feet of one Saul of Tarsus, the one who approved the execution, and could easily have been the man ordered to preside over the death of the blasphemer.
Some have suggested that it is when Saul saw Stephen forgive Saul and his executioners as he lay dying that the first seeds of his conversion to Christianity took hold. Watching agape love in action has a way of changing all who witness it.
All this leads to that radical statement of Jesus in today’s Gospel story: “The Father and I are one.” (John 10:30). This scene occurs in winter at the temple, during the Festival of Dedication in Jerusalem, the City of David and the Seat of Orthodoxy. Right out there, in front of God, and the Hebrew doctors of orthodoxy, Jesus utters the unthinkable. He and the Father God of Israel are one. Wow! What does he mean? One in spirit? One in being? One in like-mindedness? One in personality? The particulars are not mentioned. But enough is enough, for even to insinuate, to give the slightest impression that this country rabbi who speaks with a Galilean accent is equivalent to the HOLY ONE of Israel is beyond laughable; it is dangerous. Somehow, Jesus escapes being stoned on the spot – only to endure death by crucifixion a short time later.
What makes us believe? What gives us the ears to hear and the eyes to see who Jesus is? Well-meaning, good, smart people can be in the same room and hear the same message, and some will be moved to faith by the Gospel message while others consider it sheer jibber-jabber and Wishful Thinking. John Calvin, the great 16th century protestant reformer maintained that those who heard the Gospel were the “elect”; while those who did not take it seriously, were of course the “un-elect.” The “elect” were called to heaven and the “un-elect” got to fry for eternity. And according to this theology, both conditions were predetermined by God. Most people’s response to predestination over the years eventually inspired Alfred E. Newman of Mad magazine fame to come up with the motto, “”What, me worry?” It’s all been pre-decided anyway, so why bother?
But we must remember, Jesus never stalked people to heal or to convert. He always did these things on the way to do something else. He had no grand design to evangelize the world – except to call twelve people, whom you would least expect to lead a crusade. And he also sent out seventy unnamed others, all of whom had no idea how to preach or do revivals or save souls. But carry the message they did.
Call it the “mystery of hearing.” As our Gospel reading states, some people hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and respond like sheep. Others don’t hear anything resembling a voice, only the rustling of the wind or the sound of traffic around them. Clearly to hear Jesus as the Shepherd – as the one who embodies the Way, the Truth and the Life – is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Being predisposed to hearing Jesus as the One who is trustworthy and reliable in a fallen world is a grace-gift too.
There is a old Persian proverb which says, “Trust in God, but tie up your camel.” The cold, hard reality is that none of us wants to be considered “sheeple.” We don’t like to be “herded” or managed – by a parent or a spouse or a teacher or the government or even a higher power. We like self-direction and autonomy. Self-will or “personally running the show” is the key to a happy, productive life, we think; and we chafe at any sort of life lived in the “passive,” not “active” voice of doing “our own thing.” If there are greener pastures to satiate us, we will find them on our own, thank you very much. If there are still waters to revive our souls, we will locate them too – at a spa or a bar or in a new neighborhood or new stock options or a new car.
But to have your life directed and governed by an unseen Shepherd? To risk becoming mutton in this crazy world we inhabit by listening to a disembodied Voice from an Unseen World – to build your life around such a gamble? This seems to border on insanity at worst and laughable naïveté’ at best. So we fall back on that Persian proverb: Trust in God, but tie up your camel.”
But sooner or later we have to face it - the Gospel for today confronts our culture’s wisdom of living by self-propulsion for self-preservation. Living by our wits and our willfulness.
While it can be tempting for us, the Gospel message for today should not be dulled down.
As the Psalmist reminds us, “Be still and know that I am God.” (46:11). We are to abandon our lives to the Model Shepherd who is God. Even if it happens by inches, we are to keep at it. Turn over the direction of your life to the Good Shepherd and trust that your prayers will be answered in ways beyond anything you can ask for or imagine. Sometimes we will stumble and fall. By God’s grace, get back up and surrender again and again. Listen - and make room for the voice – be present with ears to hear. When we practice this daily, we will lose our life little by little, and in doing so, find our real life. And finally, when it comes time to make that last passage through the valley of the shadow of death, we will find a peace that passes all understanding. Having trusted the Good Shepherd daily to keep us faithful, we will find him trustworthy with things eternal. The proof of the pudding, the Gospel says, is in the eating!
Almighty God, give us the courage to never fear the power of evil more than our trust in your power and love. AMEN.
April 24, 10:30 am (John Harris)
In 1836, when a group formed Trinity Church in the midst of national economic Depression, they chose a one-word mission statement: “Onward.” There is no audio for this sermon.
Download
Full Text
In 1836,
when a group formed Trinity Church
in the midst of national economic Depression,
they chose a one-word mission statement:
“Onward.”
I see that there is a party today
with that name attached to it as well.
Good choice.
Later that year, in 1836,
the first rector of Trinity Church came to town –
a 20-something, Native American
with the way-too-cool name of Cicero Hawks –
and he gave his first sermon
based on the Gospel,
“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s
and give to God what is God’s”.
We know that 177 years later
because it was captured in the newspaper.
Judy Shanley will tell you,
if you care to ask,
that the first sermon I preached at Trinity
began with the line:
“Dead Man Walking.”
It may have proved prophetic.
Frankly, I have been dreading this sermon,
the last sermon,
because I have no idea what to say.
After all we have been through together
there is no way to say, “good bye.”
I mean really,
individually and communally,
we have been through some…‘stuff’.
It is not Sunday or Thursday evening
so I can’t use the ‘S’ word,
but seriously,
we have been through some ‘stuff’ together.
You may not know this,
but my first actual contact with Trinity Church
was on the phone,
a late November morning –
November 22nd if I am not mistaken –
in 1999.
My mother had just died,
early that morning.
I had stopped by my office
to pick up a few things
on my way to Indiana
where my Dad and sisters
were waiting for my brother and me.
The phone rang on my office desk.
My head told me not to answer it
because I was in no condition to talk.
But I did it anyway,
an example, Judi Spear would tell you,
of my tendency to ignore my head
(sometime to good effect, sometime to bad).
It was Diane O’Bannon
from Trinity’s Search Committee.
Diane, if you are here,
I apologize once again.
What a horrible situation for you.
To her serene and steady voice
I blurted out,
“My mother just died.
I can’t talk now.
Maybe we could talk later.”
But that’s what I mean;
we have been through some ‘stuff’ together –
even from the beginning.
Just before I arrived,
or during the interim period prior to my arrival:
the organist of 30 years, retired;
the long time treasurer, died;
the bookkeeper/accountant, move to Florida;
and shortly after my arrival,
the parish administrator of 20 years,
who held the institutional memory
about everything, quit.
There were 45 funerals
in my first three years.
On the morning of 9/11/2001,
when the whole world was glued to their televisions,
Rick Spaulding, Larry Christ and I
were locked in my office
trying to figure out
how much money Trinity had,
and what we could actually afford,
and how in the world
we were going to make it through the next five years.
We have been through some ‘stuff’ together.
And there were terrible conflicts.
Those of you who were not around back then
cannot imagine
the level of conflict
that often became very personal
in those first four years.
The organist
and almost the whole choir
up and quit,
just left in anger.
But some of that conflict was about important stuff,
like mission.
Some of that conflict
was about important stuff,
like, what God was inviting us to do together.
We had some rip-roaring good fights
over things that really matter…
if you happen to be a church.
Nobody was allowed to run and hide
or live in denial
about differences of value
and opinion,
or which elements of Trinity’s
historical character and tradition
were going to lead us into the future,
and which were going to be jettisoned as heirlooms
of the past to be appreciated
but let go.
And honestly,
Trinity has never attracted
people who did not have strong values and ideas.
So the conflict was an act of faithfulness
as was working it through.
And as a side note to the future,
a spiritual community
that does not engage in conflict with one another
is in danger of irrelevance.
When we do stuff that matters, conflict happens.
But all that ‘stuff’ at the beginning
tempered and prepared us for things to come.
The weekend Gene Robinson was elected
Bishop of New Hampshire,
the first openly Gay bishop in the Episcopal Church,
it was big news in the media.
It was a summer Sunday
and I was in Michigan,
so when the television crew
showed up in the courtyard to interview
people at Trinity,
Clara Gillies was there and ready.
The earnest television reporter asked her
what it meant to Trinity,
and how could the Church possibly weather this storm?
Clara,
in her Manhattan accent
and deacon’s collar, responded,
“What’s the big deal?”
We gained members in the weeks ahead
while other Episcopal congregations
were losing them.
Well…I would be up here too long
if I started cataloguing
all the ‘stuff’
we have been through together.
Over ten trips to El Salvador – I lost count.
How many new marriages?
How many new births?
How many personal and family crises?
How many theological,
socio-economic,
ethnic,
racial,
and sexuality boundaries
have been pushed or crossed?
How many meals shared?
How many tears shed?
How many hopes dashed
and how many reborn?
How many dollars given and how many deficits bled?
How many moments in the dimmed light
of a hospice room,
or under the florescence and blinking lights of an ICU,
or words spoken at eulogies uttered from the eagle?
In addition to all the other preachers,
I have given something in excess of 1,300 sermons here.
But it is too much ‘stuff’
and too many ‘things’
to talk about.
And yet all of it is here;
held in this space,
in these pews,
in these hearts,
in these memories.
Too much to talk about
and too many to tell;
so, I am going to preach the gospel.
Like Cicero Hawks,
I picked the Gospel I wanted to preach on.
It was not the one assigned in the Lectionary for today,
nor were the first two readings;
so I have taken a bit of personal privilege.
You will not find many people who,
given a choice,
would pick that story from Mark
for any occasion,
let alone a swan song.
But check it out.
Jesus is someplace he is not supposed to be.
He has wandered into alien territory
and is among people
with whom his people do not associate.
In other words,
he is pushing limits.
He is crossing boundaries.
He is ignoring,
once again,
limitations that his religion
created to keep people from wandering astray.
He finds himself
“on the other side of the lake”,
which we should hear as a euphemism
for the wrong side of the tracks.
And wouldn’t you know it,
it turns out exactly
the way his friends and colleagues
warned him it would:
Some crazy,
naked lunatic
immediately confronts him while
shouting at the top of his lungs.
This is one of the most cinematic stories
in all of the New Testament.
A huge Wildman
is forced to live among the tombs,
shackled to gravestones,
so strong he breaks the irons that bind him
and terrorizes the neighborhood.
The marquee emblazons the story line:
“Hairy, naked lunatic meets Bambi.”
Of course,
Jesus ain’t no Bambi.
So I could go on and on,
almost line for line,
about the symbols and metaphors
in this graphic story,
but I am going to zoom
to the punch line.
The happy ending
has a poignant twist.
First of all,
the man is clothed
and that is a relief to everyone around him.
He probably gets a bath too.
He is gentle now.
He is “socialized and appropriate”
they might say down at the community mental health center.
Everyone is pretty amazed
at the transformation of the Wildman,
but weirded-out by Jesus’
ability to make it happen.
Now, at the end of the story,
Jesus is ready to go home.
He is ready to take his boys and girls
and get back in their boat
and shove off
for the right side of the lake.
It was a fun visit,
but eating your own food
and sleeping in your own bed
really feels good after being away.
But wait!
The guy transformed
from Wildman
to Gentleman
wants to go with Jesus.
Check it out.
Jesus says, “No.”
But the guy doesn’t just ask,
it says he ‘begs.’
He begs Jesus
to please,
take him to the other side of the lake
and allow him to become one of Jesus’ guys.
It is easy to conjure up
an image of this pathetic scene.
They are out in the water
climbing into big, clunky wooden boats
with beat up sails
and rough hewn oars,
and the big guy
gallops out into the watery spray.
“Wait! Wait!” he cries.
“Wait for me!”
You see,
Jesus was likely the first person
to meet the man where he was,
as he was,
without fear.
Imagine, having been shunned
and the object of hatred and abuse,
and then have someone
NOT run away
and actually speak to you…
well, it must have been stunning.
Little wonder
that he wanted to go with Jesus.
But Jesus says, “No.”
What a great story!
I love it
that Jesus said, “No.”
It is right there in black and white:
not everyone has to follow Jesus.
I am convinced that Jesus did not think
it was all about him.
The Church that followed
in the generations and centuries later,
made it all about Jesus.
But Jesus
didn’t think it was all about him.
For Jesus
it was all about GOD.
“Stay with your own people,” Jesus says.
“And show them how much GOD has done for you.”
Isn’t that great?
It is the perfect response.
Jesus knows
that the ‘Big Guy’
will have zero credibility
among the people Jesus is going back to.
But among his own people?
That is another story.
Among his own people
the Big Guy will forever
be an icon
of what is possible.
He will be a living ‘sacrament’ –
an outward and visible sign
of an inward and invisible presence –
of the hope
that God can
and does do
new things.
“Stay with your own people,” Jesus tells him,
“and show them how good God has been to you.
Show them what ‘mercy’ God has shown you.”
Let’s just hold that for a moment.
It is not about being followers of Jesus.
But just because it is not about Jesus
doesn’t mean that those of us
who ARE followers of Jesus,
and I am a follower of Jesus by the way,
do not value
and cherish
the wisdom of Jesus.
What it does mean
is that Christianity
is not about making everyone Christian.
It does mean
that Church
is not about OUR Church
being the only
or the biggest
or the bestest Church.
It does mean
that Church
and Christianity
are about meeting people where they are
and meeting them without fear,
and allowing them to be
who they will be
and become who they will become,
and along the way
sharing with them
how much God has done for us.
Think about it:
That is how you and I
came to be Trinity together.
We reversed the common assumption of Church,
just like this Gospel story from Mark does.
We stopped thinking
that Church
was about becoming ‘like us.’
We stopped acting
like Church
is a club you join.
We stopped talking
as if Christianity
is the only possible religion.
We stopped assuming
that everyone knew how to
be in Church
and do Church ‘like we do.’
We started being
hosts;
acting as if
we were having
company for dinner at our own homes.
We started going
out into the community
instead of waiting for the community to come to us.
We joined the neighborhood
even though we had been
here for 150 years.
We said and acted
as if everyone IS welcome
in anything
and everything we do.
We started treating
NEW people
with as much credibility
and privilege
as those who grew up here.
We offered
baptism as an initiation
into the community of faith
instead of a get-out-of-hell card.
We offered
Confirmation as an invitation
to become an Episcopalian,
but without the slightest hint
that it made a difference to anyone else
if it did not make a difference to you.
Basically,
we stopped doing Church
and we started doing community…
spiritual community.
And spiritual community means
we recognize and acknowledge
that we have all spent time
running wild in a cemetery
possessed by the angels of our darker natures.
And spiritual community means
we have a deep sense
that we cannot make it alone,
and that neither love nor healing nor faith
are the by-products of individualism.
And spiritual community means authenticity.
Authenticity is what got us here,
to this place of being Trinity together.
Authenticity,
when it comes to spiritual community,
means there is NO certain language we have to use.
It means there is not a right or wrong way
to be
or do
or engage in worship.
(You can say, “Amen” Diann).
It means we abandoned the idea of perfection,
not only abandoned it,
but treat perfectionism as a disease
from which we need healing.
It means we acknowledge our common brokenness
and whether or not we are willing to talk out loud about it,
we welcome one another to do as is needed.
It means that if your faith is Evangelical
or Catholic
or Spiritualist
or nearly non-existent,
you know you can talk about it out loud
as one of many possibilities.
Authenticity means
whatever pressure you feel to conform
to societal norms
and beliefs
in the dominant culture,
you do not
feel it here
in this place
among this people.
Authenticity,
within the spiritual community,
means that you have a place
and a people
with whom
you can try out new behavior
and new ideas
and new hopes.
Authenticity means
we can curse God
for the horrendous pain of our grief,
and feel angry with God
about the grievous, painful suffering
we see foisted upon the young and innocent,
as well as the suffering we have known.
It means we trust God
enough to be indignant and angry
about our powerlessness.
Authenticity means
we can THANK God
even if we are uncertain God
had anything to do
with the gifts and good fortune and healing
we get to hold and share
now and again.
Authenticity,
in a spiritual community,
means there will always be tears.
It means that when we are together
tears are as much a part of the conversation
as laughter
and smiles
and confusion
and embrace.
Where else in the culture
can we come together and publicly
engage in such open, inclusive and challenging behavior
and not be consider crazy? (Or not too crazy).
So it is worth remembering
how we got to where we are…together.
And I will end with that word, together.
There has been an awful lot said
and even written,
about what I have done here
or accomplished here.
And it is just wrong.
WE have been the recipients
of God’s grace.
And in addition to that grace,
WE,
together,
have done the work
and had the hurt
and struggled with the conflicts
and shared the expenses
and fought to stay open
when we felt fear causing us to close up.
WE did that,
together.
All 14 years have been like my first Christmas here,
when I amazed that
as people streamed out of Church
and they were so incredibly complementary to ME
about the worship,
which was mostly the children’s pageant.
I was dumbfounded
to get the credit for something
I had done nothing to create.
Heck, I didn’t even know a donkey was involved
let alone a dang Lama!
Whatever has been accomplished here,
it is because WE
did it together:
you,
our great staff – both present and previous –
me,
all of us.
So as we party today,
I would ask that we celebrate
what WE, all of us,
have done along the way
to come to where we are as Trinity, together.
AND,
I would ask that our celebration
also look with anticipation
and excitement
about the NEW partnership
between the community
and rector-who-is-to-come.
She or he
may be short,
polite,
introverted,
and someone who does not sweat very much;
and some day out in the distance,
you will look back
and say, about these past 14 years…
“That was great;
but thank God for
what happened next.”
Jesus and his disciples
sailed back across the lake,
to Buffalo and Trinity Church.
The Big Guy turned
with a certain trepidation in his heart
but a new found confidence,
and went to Vermont…
where he shared
how good
God had been to him.
Thank you.
Amen.
April 10, 10:30 am (John Harris)
When a couple is pregnant or adopting or in some other way expecting a child to arrive, anticipation and hope ripple along the lining of the stomach – that bodily conductor of emotional voltage. But at the same time, Doubt sends a current to the brain. Doubt posts a blog in grey matter. Doubt stalks the corridors of the mind.
Download
Full Text
Good morning.
When a couple is pregnant
or adopting
or in some other way
expecting a child to arrive,
anticipation
and hope
ripple along the lining of the stomach –
that bodily conductor of
emotional voltage.
But at the same time,
Doubt
sends a current to the brain.
Doubt
posts a blog in grey matter.
Doubt
stalks the corridors of the mind.
But expectant couples are not the only ones
to stand at the door
through which Doubt enters.
Any of us
who have ever received a promotion,
taken a new job,
or been thrilled
by an announcement
offering some splendid new
challenge or opportunity,
know the sensation of Doubt entering in.
The happy voices celebrating within us
cringe when Doubt enters the body:
Oh no, not him…
And it doesn’t even need to be a very big doubt
to wither the good mood
of all those inhabiting our inner space.
Doubt is like a facial blemish,
even a small one.
Whether or not
anyone else even notices a little zit
or scab on our face,
we feel as if it is huge.
It can be covered up
but its presence is larger than the blemish itself.
That is what doubt is like:
even a small doubt
worms its way in
and chews a hole
bigger than the doubt itself.
Expecting parents
cannot help but wonder
what kind of parent they will be;
and what kind of child
their secret little stranger will become.
And even the most confident among us,
when faced with a new job or promotion,
or a new marriage or partnership,
are haunted by wisps of “what if.”
Doubt gets a bad rap
because it is hard to enjoy –
kind of like a relative
who gives us
great Christmas and Birthday presents
but with whom we always feel strangely uneasy.
Doubt is simply
part of our spiritual muscle and sinew,
it helps make possible the movements
of the spirit in our lives.
So it is important to remember
that the opposite of Faith
is not Doubt.
Did you catch that?
Doubt is not the opposite of Faith.
In fact, Doubt
is a reoccurring note
in the musical score
we call Faith.
Doubt
is integral to the faith experience.
Doubt is part of faith.
The exercise of Faith
requires doubt as an agent
to mature the spirit,
and as exercise
that strengthens spiritual muscle.
Doubt is not the opposite of Faith;
the opposite of Faith
is Cynicism.
Cynicism
is a general lack of faith
or hope
in God’s dream for humankind;
and toward any human effort
to embody that dream.
You see,
Faith is not an idea
that we believe or doubt,
or that we assent to or reject.
Faith is an experience
that we engage in…or not.
The Biblical notion of Faith
is always entangled
in encounters with God;
experiences that human beings struggle
to understand and communicate to others.
Faith
is not about intellectual beliefs
or doctrinal formulas –
that is religion
and the institutions of religion,
which seek
to get the rest of us
to go along with a prescribed
set of beliefs and ideas about God.
But Faith
is a human encounter
with The Holy;
whether it is a wee small voice
whispering to us in the dark of the night,
or a blistering dream
that shatters our previous plans,
or the warm depth of God
in community
making itself known in the bread and the wine.
Faith
is an encounter with God;
a personal or communal experience
with the actual presence of God in our midst.
Faith
is an experience
that we engage in or not,
not an idea
or doctrine
that we believe in or not.
Here is what I want us to remember
when we hear that story about Thomas:
The author of John
mangles it,
and interprets it badly.
For reasons we can never know,
John is crippled by the idea
that Doubt
is some kind of horrid spiritual crime
embedding us with darkness.
Clearly John’s story about Thomas
is told as an argument
against his contemporaries
who were sensible enough
to question the claim of
Jesus’ physical resurrection.
“Oh yeah!” John says,
“Well Thomas didn’t believe it either,
and let me tell you what Jesus told him!
‘Blessed are those who do not see
and yet believe.’”
It seems rather juvenile
all these years later.
On the other hand,
it is easy to imagine that most,
if not all of the folks
personally witnessing the events
around Jesus’ death
would have rejected
a post-crucifixion appearance
by Jesus unless they saw it personally.
Like Thomas,
they would have experienced
the gruesome spectacle
of Jesus dying a slow,
agonizing death
while hanging naked in public
and picked at by bugs and birds.
Those who witnessed such a scene
would have rejected the claim of reappearance.
It would be natural
to reject such a claim.
Now bring it forward and
we could probably agree
that we should reject
authoritarian claims
that insist we embrace their ideas while
rejecting our own personal experience.
Many of us
would agree, that
we need to see
and feel
and think for ourselves,
rather than believe the claims of others
that are so far outside
our own experience.
Being 21st century
Christians,
we may want to do
just the opposite of what John
is trying to get us to do
with his story.
We might want to say,
“Look, John,
we were not there;
and we cannot put our fingers in the holes,
so don’t set up
a false dichotomy by telling us that
either we believe YOUR experience
and explanation of events, OR…
we are somehow
lesser human beings for it.”
Instead, as 21st century
Christians
we will ask questions
we can pursue,
and enter into relationships
in which we can
encounter God
here and now,
in our own midst.
We can ask questions like these:
How is the structural
and systemic violence that executed Jesus,
also symptomatic of the way
you and I organize our lives?
How can the violence embedded
in our own life-style choices
be changed and redeemed?
How can the deep
and penetrating truths
embedded
in our ancient wisdom,
be heard
and perceived
and understood
in a century obsessed
with measurable and replicable data?
How do you and I,
without the benefit
of sticking our fingers
in the blood and puss of encrusted wounds,
discover
the meaning
and hope
and experience
of resurrection?
What we need to ask the text,
the one we heard today in the Gospel, is,
“How do we practice resurrection, John?”
“How do we, 21 centuries later,
practice resurrection, John?”
You see, we must not allow John
to define the landscape for us,
nor paint us into an impossible corner.
Rather, we create and allow
Wendell Berry to enter into the conversation
with John
and Isaiah
and Bill Franklin,
and the all of us sitting right here.
We allow the conversation
to be around,
“How do we practice resurrection”
rather than, “Did it really happen?”
We do not get to know if it really happened,
or how it happened,
or any such question…
nor do we need to know.
Instead,
we get to ask,
and have a chance of encountering an answer
to the question,
“How do WE practice resurrection?
And because I am leaving soon,
much too soon,
I am going to tell you
how I answer that question –
something,
as you know,
I do not normally do.
Here is my answer.
“Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done…
on earth
as it is in heaven.”
To practice resurrection
is to bring forth the kingdom of God
on earth
as it is in heaven.
Or to put it in slightly different,
a little less religious language:
“God has a dream for us,
even a best dream for us –
as individuals and
as a species –
and when
we enter into that dream,
and midwife it
from a dream into actuality,
then we are practicing resurrection.
It is not a tyranny of perfection,
in which we are held liable
for turning Buffalo into the Garden of Eden.
It is not a tyranny of preservation,
in which we are supposed to recreate
some past vision of righteousness
that never really existed anyway.
It is not a tyranny of ego,
in which real life
with all its bumps and bruises
and cuts and wounds,
suddenly disappears and
we get to swim in a perfect 82-degree pool
of peace and fulfilled desires.
It IS
God’s best dream for us
revealed and unfurled
one step at a time
without a known end,
and without a strategic plan.
It IS
God’s best dream for us
that depends upon
the healing power of our brokenness
at least as much as on the strength
of our intelligence and muscle.
It IS
God’s best dream for us
that is an
exquisitely delicate balance
between common need
and personal need;
and far more deeply rooted in common need
than in our own personal desire.
So practicing resurrection
is engaging in an earnest attempt
to know God’s best dream for us,
and the patient,
incremental effort
to live out that dream
in the place
and among the people
with whom we live and work and play.
And, as it turns out,
that is exactly what we claim about Baptism.
Baptism is about doing our best
to help one another
come to know
God’s best dream for us,
as individuals
and as a community,
and even as a species.
Baptism is not required…
for anything.
It is not, a la John,
a categorical choice
between believing and doubting.
Baptism is about practicing resurrection.
It is true that there are still some
medieval ideas out there
about how we will go to Hell
if we are not sprinkled with water
under an incantation
of a three-fold name.
There are still superstitions
that God will only love
and embrace Christians
but not Jews or Muslims or Atheists.
But come on now.
God,
in the 21st century,
knowing what we know
and experiencing what we have experienced,
does not reject anyone, and
especially not on the basis
of a brand name
or an initiation ceremony.
We are baptizing
Nolan and Caroline
because their parents desire
to raise them up
in the community of faith,
and because they know
that practicing resurrection
is not something that any of us
can do alone.
We require the community of faith,
not only to uncover and unfurl
God’s best dream for us,
but also to practice it,
in real time
and with the real people
with whom we live and work and play.
We cannot practice resurrection
in isolation.
We CAN sit in a room all by ourselves
and believe
all the doctrines and dogmas
any Christian institution
ever wanted us to believe.
But believing ideas
is not practicing resurrection.
We can say the Rosary all day long,
and pray all the prayers ever written,
but solitary
petitions to God
is not practicing resurrection.
Christianity is a communal project,
a communal experiment,
a communal practice.
It is practicing resurrection
in such a way
that God’s best dream for us
becomes
the world we create…
on earth
as it is in heaven.
So…
let us gather up
as in a draw-string bag,
our doubts
and our passions,
our beliefs
and our ideas
and even
our un-knowings…
gather them all up
and symbolically,
perhaps even sacramentally,
empty them…
empty all of them,
into the water
in the Baptismal Font.
Then,
with all of that swirling in there,
we will use its amazing mix
of faith and doubt –
a mix that can only
be concocted
from a community vigorously engaged
in practicing resurrection –
to baptize
Nolan and Caroline.
Remember, faith is not
a matter of believing
that Thomas
could put his fingers
in the holes.
That is only believing in a story.
But Faith:
Faith is an experience;
Faith is an engagement;
Faith is a practice.
Faith is the practice of resurrection
that allows God’s best dream for us
to awaken on earth
as it is in heaven.
So let’s practice it
a little right now,
and baptize these guys.
April 10, 10:30 (John Harris)
The bottom is falling out of organized Christian churches in the United States. In parts of the country we are becoming like Europe. No, not socialist, churchless. (Don’t ask me which I would choose if I had to pick).
Download
Full Text
Happy Easter,
and welcome to Trinity
for those of you who are visiting today.
There is a bunch of people here today
who did not grow up in church.
There is a bunch of people here today
who do not go to church now,
except for a couple of times a year.
There is a bunch of people here today
who would not go to any other church
if they did not go to this one.
Then there are a few people here today
who would go to church,
and to this church,
no matter what.
They are a dying breed.
The bottom is falling out of organized Christian
churches in the United States.
In parts of the country we are becoming like Europe.
No, not socialist, churchless.
(Don’t ask me which I would choose if I had to pick).
In the Northeast,
on any given Sunday,
7% of the population participates in church.
In the Northwest,
it is 3%.
The Midwest is more,
and the South almost 50% --
because Church-going is still part of the culture there.
And it doesn’t matter whether we are talking
about Protestant, Roman Catholic, or
Evangelical churches
because all of them are declining,
and even the high growth churches
have big back doors
through which people exit
as fast as they enter.
It is little wonder.
Churches are mostly boring attempts
to preserve relics of the past.
It does not really help
that the music is magnificent,
and the buildings with
art glass windows such as these,
are spectacular.
While people may appreciate such elegance
and fine art and architecture,
they are not going to get up on Sunday morning
to go see and hear what
they can see and hear
any time,
any day of the week
all year long.
If you had never heard the Gospel story,
and you had never heard about Jesus,
and I told you
that thousands of years ago
there was a guy
who was executed for insurrection
but wouldn’t stay dead,
you would chuckle knowingly.
It is not a story that most people
educated in the late 20th & early 21st centuries
would believe with any passion.
It does not work with our current worldview.
We might believe
that the story was what people at the time
sincerely believed,
but many of us would know
there is a scientific explanation for it.
Many of us,
if not most of us,
would know
that either there is a scientific
explanation for it
or it was a hoax;
or it was some kind of hysterical reaction
on the part of those
who thought they saw something.
And so Easter,
if it is told as an historical event
that is supposed to prove the truth of something
or the supernatural powers of somebody,
simply will not register much impact.
Oh, the flowers are great;
and again,
the music is terrific;
and the windows are out of this world…
but anyone with a computer
and an iPod,
and a floral section at Wegman’s
can access 90% of the experience.
None of that church stuff,
in and of itself,
can deliver an encounter with God.
And as boring and
intellectually assaulting
as many churches are, the beauty
and the preservation of old structures
and ideas
simply won’t be enough.
So here is the problem,
not only for the churches
but for you and me.
If our worldview is limited
to the confines of what the rational mind
and science
say it is limited to,
then an encounter with God
is pretty much out of the question.
Whether it was Jesus
or old weird uncle Fred,
or in your own spiritual life,
an encounter with God
is not an allowable element of human experience
within the current dominant worldview
we all wear like coke-bottle glasses.
Let me show you what I mean.
Have you ever seen the color, reddish-green?
The answer is no.
We see brown
when red and green are mixed together,
but there are colors that exist in nature
we cannot see.
Yellowish-blue is another one.
These colors, in pairs,
are hues with light frequencies
that cancel each other out
in the human eye.
They are impossible for us to see simultaneously.
Isn’t that interesting?
Here is another little tidbit
that is essential to know,
if we want to understand
our dominant worldview and ourselves.
Because, you see,
we think that OUR own worldview
is the way the world actually is:
in fact,
we define reality
by how WE see it.
And people who are especially dogmatic
with this extreme human near-sightedness,
tend to be people
who are either fanatically
in the church
or fanatically
out of church.
So here is the little tidbit I want to share, and
you may know it already.
You probably do
since my storehouse and aptitude for science
is more limited than most.
Some of those who study and postulate
“Cognitive Theory” –
or the science of how we perceive
and how we process information –
have made some killer observations
about US,
you and me
and our funny little species.
It turns out
that when we see things
that are close together,
we assume they form a group
even if they do not.
(Think race and ethnicity
or gender and sexuality).
Also, our eyes and brains
prefer to see and process
things that are simple
more than we like to take in things that are complex.
(Think smooth lines verses sharp angles).
AND…our brains give priority to
processing things
that have a beginning and end,
or some kind of border or boundary,
over things that are unconnected.
So what does this mean?
It turns out,
that our brain constantly searches,
like a computer reading data,
for what it considers a ‘good match’
between what we see with our eyes
and the stored information
we keep in our memory.
This processing happens very quickly
and we tend to make sense out of things
that we have made sense out of before.
In other words:
we tend to find what we are looking for,
and see what we expect to see,
and encounter what we believe
there is to encounter.
In other words,
our worldview
delivers the world
we wanted
or expect
to experience.
The more devoted we are to our worldview
the less likely it is
we will encounter anything
that might subvert it.
So the question for you and me,
is how many lenses can we wear
at one and the same time,
so that we can SEE
through more than one worldview at a time?
If we have only one worldview,
or one exceptionally dominant worldview,
then our depth perception
will be exceptionally shallow.
And…
if somehow,
you and I can get good
at allowing what we already think,
to be subverted and
broken open by surprises
on a regular basis,
then we will have spectacular perception!
Our spectrum of vision
will grow and grow and grow
and be amazing.
I am not going to tell you Jesus
did not die
or came back to life.
None of that is in our experience,
and besides,
it has almost nothing to do
with you and me today.
(Just as an aside,
I care much more about what Jesus taught
when he was alive,
than I do about who or what
people say he is today).
But what I am going to tell you today,
here on Easter,
in the presence of baptism,
is that if you want to
encounter God
then you better be able to wear
more than one lens
through which to view
and process
your own experience.
If you think you are special,
and you think
that your eyes and your brain
are not limited
by what you expect to see,
then there is not much hope for you.
But…if you want to know about resurrection,
like the desire to see colors
that the cells in our retina
will not let us see,
then you have to try on some
new assumptions
and get some emotional chutzpah
and be prepared to have your socks knocked off
or even just hear a wee small whisper
that comes to you in the night
or on the wind
or in a dream.
God is subversive.
When we think that we have gotten life
entombed in our own neat little worldview,
God, if we do the spadework
to prepare ourselves for it,
will subvert us
from the inside out.
Things we thought were solid
will unravel.
Things we thought were ridiculous
will turn out to be authentic.
Things we never sought
will appear with our name on it.
Things we did not want
will turn out
to be the very thing our life depends upon.
In short,
all of our worldviews
will turn out to have holes so big in them
that light can shine through
and allow us to see out.
When God is involved with human beings,
no worldview is safe –
not one of them.
So if you are too fragile
to discover that your worldview
is, well…
just your worldview,
then go home.
Don’t be looking here.
This place,
this Gospel,
this community
will tear you up
from the inside out
because it is subversive.
So, for example,
and I will leave you with this one little
brain-worm to crawl around in your thoughts:
What if, instead of God being the
cosmic engineer that the Age of Enlightenment
imagined God to be;
what if we were to imagine God is a
Jazz improvizationalist,
and we can joined the improvisation?
Well, now,
that would change a lot of our assumptions,
wouldn’t it?
We might start seeing and hearing
other things
if we imagined God as an improvizationalist.
Resurrection might,
if we wore more than one lens
and heard more than one music
and entertained more than one dominant worldview,
suddenly make more sense.
Happy Easter…
and may your worldview
have big holes blown through it. Amen.
March 27, 7:00pm (John Harris)
And then there is the fall, and the letting go and falling backwards and knowing or hoping or simply not knowing who or what will catch you, if or when.
Download
Full Text
And then there is the fall,
and the letting go
and falling backwards
and knowing
or hoping
or simply not knowing
who or what will catch you,
if or when.
I was thinking about that
while reading a recent email
from someone I love dearly,
who is about to undergo a life-saving
but gruesome surgery
and facing months of recovery in the aftermath.
Her family and friends
have gathered around her in stellar fashion –
making and doing thoughtful things
big and small,
some I would have never thought of,
to take care of her
in practical ways
as well as fluffing the nest
around her
as needed.
But in the end
there is the fall backward…
…well, into uncertain arms.
I want to put my arms there
and I know that dozens if not scores
of others
want to put their arms there,
and we will
and we are
but in the end,
our arms are not the ones
that can catch her.
Perhaps
I feel it in another way as well;
because the vehicle of my body
is stuck in the mud of transition and
the sorrow of a long, slow motion good-bye.
And the readings tonight,
with no obvious
thread that jumps out and says,
“Look at me!”
nonetheless
has the ghostly echo
of such falling too.
That falling,
by another name,
is ‘surrender.’
Now that word, “surrender”
has the slight glitter of a popular idea on it.
It is of course
at the heart
of numerous world religions.
And it is
at the heart
of the 12-Steps.
So it gets bantered about
way more than it should,
and much too easily.
Because,
truthfully,
it is a hard word.
The actual idea of surrender
is way counter-cultural
and a flagrant foul
against the commercialism
that feeds and warps our culture.
And surrender is not a good marketing strategy either,
since the very word
causes a rash.
It’s a word,
if taken seriously
that tightens the groin.
“Sur-ren-der”
is not a pleasant sound
and the best of its the multiple bad images
evokes is a white flag -
capitulation.
It is a word derived from French.
“Sur” means, ‘over’;
and “Render” means, ‘give back.’
So surrender means
to give oneself over or back.
Surrender,
to give oneself over,
to turn oneself over
to someone or something else.
Think of it:
What do we have
more precious than the Self
and what is more unnerving
than to give it
to someone else…
even for a second?
“Surrrrrr-ender” is not a word for a grown man,
and it is not a word that a big man
ever wears comfortably.
Yet, there it is,
like the carcass of a dead rat
at the bottom of our steps.
Surrender lies there
at the ankles of each religion.
Judaism begins with it.
Christianity begins and ends with it.
Islam begins with it and never migrates far from it.
Even Buddhism, the religion
toward which so many of us
look for sanity
amidst the more whacky elements of Western religion,
reckons surrender at its heart:
surrender of the mind,
surrender of illusion,
surrender of Self.
But the fact that surrender
hovers like a bird of prey
over these religions
is actually a double comfort:
first, because misery loves company;
and secondly, because clearly
no one in the history of these religions
thinks it is easy.
It is comforting to know
we are not alone
in our fierce resistance to surrender.
But with all of its prominence,
and all of the easy, loose talk about it
from the four corners of the Self-help industry,
surrender remains pretty unclear.
What exactly it is
and what it looks like
when we actually lower ourselves into its cauldron
is never clear ahead of time.
But in short,
surrender is a spiritual practice.
It is a whole practice in and of itself.
AND,
as a spiritual practice,
it does not play well with other practices
because it is so demanding.
It is an only child
that insists on its own way
and has little tolerance for excuses.
And in fact,
surrender is more readily seen
in its absence
or in its negative reflection
than in its presence.
Personally, I don’t recommend it
unless urgently required.
The person I know
who is about to face a horrific surgery,
has not great choice
other than to practice surrender.
She is not any better at it than I am,
so she will need all the help she can get.
But what else can you do
when you come to that moment
when everyone who loves you
wants to make it all okay
but nobody
has the power except,
if you believe it,
God?
You raise the white flag,
and you fall backward
and you hope
or you trust
or you smile and know.
Likewise, for myself: I did the easy part
in squeezing the trigger of a
Rube Goldberg machine
that ends with me losing my present job
and house, but with only a dim idea
of what awaits me.
The next part,
raising the white flag
and giving myself over to…who:
God?
The stars?
Life?
Fall backward into darkness
is scary.
Who does that
unless absolutely necessary?
But there are times when surrender is indicated;
it is like a surgery that is required
if we are going to have a shot at breathing again.
Surrender is indicated
when we have hit a limitation
that we cannot accept,
and that rubs us raw like rough rope through fingers.
When our refusal to accept a limitation
endangers our health
or our hope
or our peace
then surrender is indicated.
Surrender is indicated
when all is NOT well, and
to be well,
and for all manner of thing to be well,
our mind must rest eyeball-to-eyeball
with the very thing
that keeps us from knowing
wellness,
then surrender is indicated.
Surrender is indicated
when there is a fear
or anxiety we can’t get through…
When there is a grief
we cannot exit…
When there is an obsession
or compulsion
or habit we cannot will ourselves against…
When there is a problem
that we cannot solve,
or the pieces of a puzzle
we cannot fit together…
When a relationship simply can no longer
find its balance
or reconciliation
or health…
When our sense of vocation
or purpose
or meaning is lost,
and cynicism
is darkly attractive while
hope seems impossibly exotic…
Surrender is indicated.
Surrender is a free fall,
that horrid release of balance and strength
that ends in falling backwards
into the arms of God,
or a power greater than ourselves,
or an unknown mystery,
or even
simply into an unknown.
When we have tried everything
we know how to do
and nothing has worked…
and when we are in fact trying things
over and over and over again
that did not work the first, second or third time…
it is time to acknowledge our powerlessness
and entrust ourselves
to the unknown and waiting thing.
Now even if you do not hold out the possibility
of a spiritual power greater than your own,
such surrender has a logic
and a physics
that makes sense.
Giving up,
letting go
and opening up
to see and hear and learn,
allows for and makes
other things happen
that our insistence and steely determination
has inhibited or prevented.
Some people say
that when we surrender
we make room for God to act.
Some people say
that when we surrender
we allow ourselves to see things we couldn’t see before.
Some people say
that when we surrender
we change the circumstance just enough
that new possibilities sprout through the cracks.
Some people say
that when we surrender
we make ourselves available to serendipity.
I say maybe…
maybe all of the above.
But what I DO know,
from my own experiences
and from the privilege
of standing with others in theirs,
is that God is present in our midst at all times;
and surrender allows us
to perceive what just moments before,
we were blind to.
At the very moment our instinct
would have us flail around
in the effort to exert our own will over the chaos,
surrender is another option.
It is counter-intuitive,
quite difficult
and even painful to achieve,
but it is effective
in creating new possibilities
where once there seemed to be no options.
Tonight, as we light candles,
perhaps there is a little surrender
that has been waiting for you.
I invite you to grant it the power to take you by the hand,
and to light a candle in thanksgiving for it,
even if you don’t feel grateful…yet.
March 27, 10:30 (John Harris)
I wish we all had such a fresh and unadulterated perspective. Most of us have been told what to think about Palm Sunday for too many years and by too many people. After all those years our eyes and our hearts and our brains have grown dull and too flaccid about church-stuff to be curious or crave new light. It is a symptom of domesticated religion.
Download
Full Text
Today is Palm Sunday.
I know that some of you do not know
what Palm Sunday is
because you did not grow up
in a Church,
and so no one ever told you
what Palm Sunday is;
nor was there anyone to tell
you what you are supposed to think
about Palm Sunday.
Luck you!
How wonderful
to have fresh eyes and ears.
I wish we all had such a fresh
and unadulterated perspective.
Most of us
have been told what to think
about Palm Sunday
for too many years
and by too many people.
After all those years
our eyes
and our hearts
and our brains
have grown dull
and too flaccid about church-stuff
to be curious or crave new light.
It is a symptom of domesticated religion.
At the start of the most terrifying and wild
part of the Jesus story,
we embark on one of the most
domesticated weeks of the year.
Today begins Holy Week, which
by tradition has prescribed observances
with intense ritual
that involve re-enactments,
confession of sin,
Stations of the Cross,
and all kinds of serious and
solemn piety.
There are places in the Philippines
and India
where young men vie to be the
volunteer chosen annually
to be crucified –
literally nailed to a cross
and hoisted up
during the community’s ritual observance.
But in our culture, these days,
even in church culture,
it is an occasion more often observed by
hoisting ‘one’ up on spring vacation.
Trips to Cancun
and Fort Lauderdale replace
trips to shrines…
and the next few days will be your
last chance
to buy Easter candy
at Tops and Wegman’s
before the holiday display
changes to a deck and garden motif.
Those of you, who
do not know what
Palm Sunday is all about,
have likely heard the story someplace,
or parts of it.
You know about Jesus getting
nailed to a cross,
and if nothing else you have seen
Salvador Dali’s
or Leonardo Di Vinci’s
paintings of,
“The Last Supper”.
But what
is the story about?
What
is the meaning of the strange rituals
that get enacted all around us?
In my last congregation,
located on the campus of
The Ohio State University,
all the area churches gathered in one place
for the Blessing of the Palms.
Then hundreds would process
down the main street,
with each congregation peeling off
toward their own church.
We were all led by a huge wooden cross
carried on shoulders like a casket,
and everyone waved palms.
To be honest, it caused me a slight embarrassment
because I could not help but see
our strange behavior
through YOUR eyes –
those of you who did not grow up in a Church.
“What must this look like,” I thought,
“to people who have no idea
what it is all about?
When the media captures images of churches
re-enacting the Palm Sunday story,
and inevitably there is someone
dressed up as Jesus
riding on a donkey,
and crowds waving palms a little too enthusiastically
in dramatic fashion,
I still feel an embarrassment
for the same reason.
I cannot help but think of people
who already believe Christianity
is about as rational as Voodoo,
and seeing adults performing
really bad make-believe
and wondering what they must think?
The truth is,
I have always had one
foot in the Church
and one foot out of the Church.
The one foot that is out
continues to look in
as if a stranger,
and still often scratches his head.
So to those of you
who do not know what Palm Sunday is all about,
I DO,
and I still have a hard time
making it lie flat
on the scheme of things.
Here is the problem
for any of us
who have been transformed into post-modernists:
The Gospel is not history.
We treat it like history
but the Gospel is not history.
The Jesus story,
no matter which Gospel is narrating it,
and no matter whether
it is the part about his baptism,
or the Seder he celebrated at Passover,
or his execution by the Romans…
it is not history.
And when we act like it is history,
and we literalize it,
we rob the story
of its actual truth and power.
It is a paradox
that when we treat the Gospel story
like it is history
we make it unbelievable;
when in fact,
as story
it is incredibly powerful and true.
What I mean
when I say the Gospels are not history,
is that they are not historical accounts
of Jesus’ life and death
in the way
we have come to think of history.
In the 21st century we treat history
as a social science
and imagine that we can
reconstruct past events
for which no one with memory
is still around.
We imagine that someone
telling us a story from out of the past,
is telling us history;
or that they are narrating
an actual description of events
the way we have come to expect
from such dubious sources
as The History Channel.
But that is not what the Gospels are,
and the very idea
that we could reconstruct
events from stories that are not history
does damage
to the credibility
of our spiritual wisdom.
AND…
because imperial, establishment institutions
like the Church
have been the filter
through which this story is told,
it is a severely
domesticated story.
So those of you
who did not grow up in a Church
and are hearing these stories
for the first or second time,
you need to know
that the Gospel’s
are not first person accounts.
The authors
were less author
and more editor.
They did not know Jesus personally.
They took stories
and snippets of stories,
and sayings
that were passed down
word-of-mouth
for sixty, seventy, eighty, or even ninety years,
and put them together
in a way they saw fit
like an artist placing tiles in a mosaic.
Mark,
Matthew,
Luke and John
would have received
many of the stories and sayings
without any actual context, and so as a narrator
they had to make up the context.
Having scraps of papyrus in hand,
or the oral account of
Jesus stories
and Jesus parables
and Jesus sayings,
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
living a geographic and temporal
distance from one another,
would have to ask themselves:
Was it nighttime or at Noon?
Did Jesus say that to a religious authority,
a friend, or enemy?
Did he say this to one person
or to a whole crowd?
What was the motivation of that character?
And how did that event come to pass?
The editors of the Gospels had to create a context
for the material they inherited;
and they edited it
in such a way
as to reflect their particular point of view.
In other words,
they created their narrative
to tell us who THEY thought
Jesus was and
what THEY thought Jesus was all about.
In those days stories were told,
not as facts,
but as vehicles
for wisdom and truth.
Think about that now,
because it is different from how we do things.
In those days,
stories were told as
the vehicles of wisdom and truth.
In our world,
stories –
which we encounter mostly in
movies and novels –
are vehicles of fiction
and entertainment.
Sure,
the vehicle
might contain an insight
or moral or two,
but in our world a story
is mostly for fun.
Mark is not trying to tell us
exactly what happened
on the day
that Jesus entered Jerusalem
and was arrested.
Mark is trying to tell us
what Jesus meant
and what he still means to us.
But more than that,
Mark is telling us a story
to communicate
something about
who Jesus was,
and
who we are,
and
what God is.
Think of this story
that we tell every year in Holy Week,
as a little song we are learning to sing
by watching the bouncing ball:
it bounces
from a happy little refrain on Palm Sunday
to a quieter verse on Thursday
to a strident dissonance on Friday
to a huge harmonic chorus next Sunday.
The story-teller,
in this case Mark,
had to make sense
out of all that material he was given
and give it a unity and coherence
that in fact,
in real life…
in real time…
it never had.
Think of any horrific event,
the Newtown, Connecticut
massacre for example.
We still have no sense of coherency
about that event
even though we have the advantage
of thousands of hours
of media reporting.
Any major event,
be it good or bad,
happens in real time
and in real time
we do not have perspective.
Those who witnessed Jesus’ torture
and horrific death on a cross
would have been stunned,
shocked,
terrified and panicked.
Mark,
forty years after the fact,
is trying to bring coherence to the event
and tell us what it meant.
Mark
is not telling us history –
there was no such thing as history back then –
he is telling us a STORY
and the story communicates
with metaphor
and symbol
and inference
and provocation of the imagination.
When we treat it like history
we don’t see
or hear
or feel
any of what Mark
is trying to communicate!
We ask stupid, literal, 21st century questions
like, “Did it really happen?”
All the while
Mark is shouting:
“Look,
listen,
feel.”
It is like walking through the Albright-Knox
staring at a de Kooning painting
and asking, “Well what’s that supposed to be?”
Or it is like having a spiritual experience
and taking the risk to tell someone about it,
and they respond with droll, matter of fact
clichés about what it means.
Excuse me if I get a little agitated here
but I am so tired of treating Gospels
like history
instead of receiving them
like story.
It is a STORY!
It is an epic POEM!
Jesus did not really ride a donkey into Jerusalem.
That is a metaphor.
The donkey thing is the narrator
making a reference
to a Hebrew text
in Zechariah,
and by doing so he is saying,
“Look, you think
Caesar, with his palaces and chariots,
are the image of his divinity and power,
but true divinity and
godly power
looks like this…
Using a centuries old image
from a Hebrew text,
a prophetic text at that,
is a means of saying to his audience,
“Look, we go back farther than Rome,
we even go back
further than Greece.”
It is Mark’s way of giving it coherence.
Here is another one.
In the story of Palm Sunday,
the part from which the palms come,
we hear that crowds placed branches and cloaks
on the road for Jesus to ride over,
and as he did
they shouted,
“Hosanna! Hosanna!
Blessed is He who comes
in the name of the Lord.”
The church lifts that line of scripture
and puts it in a place of prominence
in the Communion prayer as if those words
were only about Jesus.
But again, Mark is using them as metaphor.
Any pilgrim who was entering
the Holy City of Jerusalem
at the time of The Passover
would be greeted upon entering the gates
by fellow pilgrims, with:
“Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
Mark’s point:
Jesus is an outsider,
a pilgrim
entering the Holy City.
He is an outside agitator
not an insider.
I could go on and on
almost line for line,
raising up metaphors
where the Church has literalized it
and tried to turn the STORY into history.
But that kind of analysis
kills the story too.
So instead,
let me wind down
by giving you the elevator version
of Mark’s story of Jesus.
You know,
we are getting on an elevator
at the first floor
and going to the 32nd floor.
It is not a particularly fast elevator
but even so, there is not much time.
From beginning to end,
in one minute and five seconds
if you want to time it,
here is Mark’s story of Jesus.
Ready set, go:
We don’t know where he came from
or what he did before
that fateful day at the Jordan River,
when he had a spiritual awakening
at his baptism.
He was about thirty years old then.
After that,
he became an itinerant preacher and teacher,
and some people say
he was a healer.
A lot of people say
he could chase
evil spirits and bad behavior
right out of people.
But in the end,
his friends did not understand him.
In the end, is mother and brothers and sisters,
along with the neighbors he grew up with,
thought he was possessed.
In the end, leaders of his religion
did not like him either;
they did not like who he associated with and
who he ate with,
and because of it,
they considered him impure
and spiritually dirty.
In the end, ironically, only
the bad guys in the story recognized
who and what Jesus was.
In the end, evil spirits feared him;
and the evil empire
occupying his country,
felt so threatened
that they decided to execute him.
In short, the good guys don’t ‘get’ him
and the bad guys really do.
And that’s The End of story:
at least the end of the pre-Easter story.
That is the Jesus STORY according to Mark;
who was, by a decade or more,
the earliest of the four Gospel story-tellers.
Now by dressing it up
with robes and donkeys
the way we do the Christmas story,
an awful lot gets hidden in the embellishment.
By trying to make it history,
as if it is an actual verbatim account
of an event that took place
exactly that way
two thousand years ago,
we are also domesticating its actual implications.
But if this is a STORY
meant to be a vehicle of wisdom and truth
instead of history,
what is it conveying?
Just this (are you ready?):
If we want to know
about God’s presence in the world,
and we want to know
something about what God is actually doing,
then where should we look?
Not to the people
who claim to know the most about God.
Not to the institutions
that claim to know the will of God.
But, if Mark is to be believed,
we are to look to the margins
where the principalities and powers
isolate people like Jesus.
That is the story!
If Mark’s STORY of Jesus
is a vehicle for wisdom and truth
rather than an historical chronicle of events,
THAT is the wisdom and truth
Mark’s STORY conveys.
You don’t have to believe me,
just read his story –
it is not very long.
Just read his story
and listen to it as a story
instead of as a chronicle of events.
Maybe you will hear something different than I do,
and more power to you.
The STORY does not have only one meaning.
But I promise you,
if you read it
and listen to it
and allow it to do its work on you,
it will get under your skin.
If you pull back the covers
of domestication we have laid on top of this story,
you will reveal a nest of critters
that will spring up
and unleash the wild underneath.
It is a STORY
that will not be tamed.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Amen.
March 20, 10:30 am (John Harris)
So my point is, as it so often is, we must never accept one story or one verse in the Bible as representative of the entire thing. God did not write the Bible, it was written by human beings to explain and promote spiritual experiences and encounters, and it was written and edited with literally thousands of editorial points of view.
Download
Full Text
Good morning.
While the Gospel has a delicious story in it,
it is not on the menu today.
But I DO want to note something
about that story from the Gospel of John
just as a general acknowledgment.
This story about Jesus
getting a therapeutic massage
it is one of the few stories about Jesus
that is actually included in all four Gospels.
✺ The idea that his mother, Mary, was a virgin
is not in all four Gospels – only two of them.
✺ The idea that Jesus was born in a manger
as we describe on Christmas
is only found in two of them.
✺ Even Jesus appearing to someone else
after the resurrection
does not appear in all four of the Gospels.
The point being,
when a story appears in all four Gospels
you can bet it was part of the bedrock
of stories
that were told about Jesus from the beginning.
And this little story about Jesus’
therapeutic massage was there
at the beginning.
BUT…
Mark has the earliest version of this story,
and Mark’s version is earlier than John’s
by at least twenty-five years –
maybe even forty years.
And with all such stories that begin in Mark
and make their way down to John,
embellishments have been made.
First, in Mark, the massage takes place
in the home of a leper –
not the upper-middle class domicile
of Lazarus and his sisters.
Secondly, in Mark,
the woman is nameless.
She was not part of the inner circle,
and she does not even get the respect
of a name…
which means,
more than likely,
nobody knew her name.
Third, in Mark,
the authenticity of Judas’ outrage
is never questioned.
Mark accepts at face value
that it was VALUES
that separated Judas and Jesus
not lack of character.
Finally, in Mark,
the story is told to highlight what the nameless
woman did for Jesus at a moment
of likely despair,
while in John, it is told to disparage Judas
and give him a motivation for betrayal.
So my point is, as it so often is,
we must never accept one story
or one verse in the Bible
as representative of the entire thing.
God did not write the Bible,
it was written by human beings
to explain and promote spiritual experiences
and encounters,
and it was written and edited
with literally thousands of editorial
points of view.
The Bible is not one book
but 66 books;
and it is not one story
with one story-teller,
but thousands of stories
with thousands of story-tellers
who lived across the span of two millennia –
more if we consider
the pre-biblical stories
that were absorbed into the Bible.
That is why, for example,
when people take the two verses
found in the Bible
that actually
say something about homosexuality,
and try to use those two verses
to make some kind of theological case
against ANY kind of sexuality,
their logic is more than a little absurd.
The Bible never actually
makes a case
against polygamy,
or for that matter slavery,
but we can use two lines
at either end of the Bible
to make a case against biology?
I don’t think so.
God did not write the Bible,
it was told – verbally for the most part,
then slowly over time,
those ‘tellings’
were edited
without great sophistication
and often repetitively
and in contradiction.
They were told,
and then edited,
by people.
To be sure,
they were people like you and me
in search of understanding
and seeking to penetrate the veil
between God and us.
The stories in the Bible
are told to thin the veil between us,
and they are told
about moments and experiences and people
who were part of the thinning.
It is like Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem we heard,
“Between us there is but a narrow wall,
and by sheer chance; for it would take
merely a call from your lips…to break it down…
the wall is built of your images.
They stand before you hiding you like names...”
The very thing meant to thin the veil,
the Bible,
can also thicken it;
and thicken our own sense of perception
with its complexity of names
and wild cacophony
of claims.
And still,
God shines through it all,
because God shines through us
and through our feeble history.
Among other things,
that is why the Bible is so vital to us,
as is any sacred text
of any religion.
The ancients
are unencumbered by our present blindnesses.
The blindness of the ancients
is easy for us to see and recognize
and so look past
on our way to mining their wisdom.
But our own blindness
we are unable to recognize,
and so the ancients
through these archaic texts,
help us to see what we cannot otherwise see.
God did not write the Bible,
people did,
and they wrote it with their lives.
And that is why it is a rich source of wisdom
but a toxic source of prescription.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against celibacy.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against Baptism.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against marriage verses living together.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against homosexuality.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against abortion.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against divorce.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against Christianity as the only religion.
The Bible does not make a case
for or against any of the doctrinal absurdities
that have been claimed
and used for violence and domination.
As a source of prescription
the Bible is absolutely toxic,
and our use of it that way
poisons the deep well of wisdom
that it otherwise provides.
Heck,
I bet that the majority of people
sitting right here, right now,
do not give the Bible much credibility
precisely because of how it has been misused.
And that is so tragic.
How did this happen?
Well, religion by its very nature
is conserving.
All religion.
It collects the memories
of human encounters with God,
of moments when the veil is thinned
between us.
And then,
the memory gets enshrined
in a place
or in a style of worship
or in a kind of music
or with a particular people,
and then we become devoted to the shrine
rather than the substance of the memory.
That is how human beings are,
and we do that with all kinds of things.
We have always become devoted
to the wrong things.
And then, because
we are human,
we encrust the shrine with culture
and forget that we are wearing
the lens of culture.
Take for example, this silly robe I am wearing.
This robe is simply a contemporary version
of common street garb
in the Roman Empire at the time
when Christianity became the state religion.
Back in the day,
everyone dressed something like this,
but the Church,
in its worship customary
held onto that one moment in time;
and when styles changed
it preserved what had always been.
That is an innocent example.
Here is a darker one.
For two to three hundred years
European and North American Christians
read the Bible
from the point of view of Colonialism.
We did not hear the voice of Jesus
or Moses
or Ruth
as the voices of indigenous peoples
issuing testimony against us.
But if you turn that equation upside down
and listen to the Bible
from the perspective of those who are
marginalized by Colonialism,
it totally alters the meaning of the Biblical text,
not to mention the tone of the voices we hear.
That is what Liberation Theology was all about.
U.S. Southern slave-holders
heard nothing against slavery in the Bible
and in fact,
heard a rationale FOR slavery.
Same Bible,
same verses, very different voice.
Or take this small piece of information:
Jesus was illiterate.
From the perspective of modern
anthropology and archeology,
we can make a very good case
that Jesus,
a first century Judean peasant,
could neither read nor write.
We know the word ‘rabbi’
did NOT mean then
what it means now.
Jesus was painfully poor,
unabashedly rural,
and very anti-urban elite.
He was executed for insurrection
by the Roman military authority,
not conspiratorially put to death
by Jews for claiming to be the Messiah.
So the Jesus we know today
is quite a bit different
from Jesus clothed as a kingly emperor
bestowing his blessing upon
a Byzantine religious empire.
And the Jesus we know today
is quite a bit different,
I might add,
from the religion of
Evangelical prosperity capitalism.
And the Jesus we know today
probably did not have an Episcopal or liturgical
bone in his body.
If we take off our cultural lenses,
and we set aside our doctrinal assumptions,
and we listen to the voices
that come to us from the Bible,
we will hear
the gurgle of a ceaseless fountain of wisdom
that will amaze and challenge,
and agitate and astound us.
More than anything I know of,
the Bible will change us
from the inside out.
I know…
that seems very far-fetched and unbelievable.
Such is the struggle and challenge
of a preacher today.
But let me end with one final example.
For those who have not been here,
and who do not visit the website,
I have been engaged
in trying to name
the four or five core sermons
in which almost all of my preaching
has been rooted.
This is sermon Number Three.
And here is a little secret
just for those of you who are here today.
Palm Sunday and Easter
are Numbers Four and Five.
I will not say that out loud in those sermons,
because those occasions
beg for their own focus
and I do not want to draw attention
away from those occasions in any way.
But just know,
if you are here,
that sermons Number Four & Five
are embedded in the next two weeks.
Anyway, I want to end today
by drawing our attention to an element of Biblical descriptive wisdom
as a counter-example to
the prescriptive toxins
that have so malformed our
opinions of the Bible.
But also because it is a wisdom that literally
keeps me alive and empowered.
And if it keeps me alive and empowered,
it is also a descriptive wisdom
that is likely at the core
of anything and everything
I have ever known to preach.
It is a wisdom found
at the heart
of what may have been the
darkest moment
in the history of Israel,
at least until the Nazi Holocaust –
and that includes some pretty dark moments
as one Christian empire after another,
isolated the Jewish community and
relentlessly persecuted it.
But in the midst
of that first dark moment,
the prophet Isaiah
thinned the veil of darkness and light.
Isaiah, with words
and only words,
lights a candle in the midst of darkness
and with poetry that refuses to
acquiesce the last word
to moaning and grief.
When he could have been overwhelmed
by despair,
as were his contemporaries,
he ignites something else altogether.
I am not talking about ‘wishful thinking’
or ordinary ‘optimism’.
Something much deeper,
much more muscular,
and far more wise
is at work in Isaiah.
In his inimitable poetic style,
Isaiah figuratively lifts up his hands
and says to an imagined encircling crowd
of grieving voices:
“Stop!”
Isaiah says, “Stop.
God is about to do a new thing.
No, really, stop and listen.
This is bigger than the Red Sea –
this is a new thing,
and it arrives just when you thought
there were no more ‘new things’
to be done
or seen
or known.”
Such poetry is perfect for us in 2013.
I mean really,
who believes God can do a new thing?
Who believes you can do a new thing?
Who believes worn out human enterprise,
whether government
or education
or churches
can really do a new thing?
Who believes that within their own life,
within their own personality,
within their own psychology
a new thing is really possible?
Isaiah’s incredibly courageous act
of spiritual leadership
in an otherwise
spiritually unimaginative moment
sustained his people
through the darkest of times
and gave them a lens
through which to see the way out
when it finally arrived.
I don’t want to go into too much detail
here at the tail end of a sermon,
but just so you have some perspective,
allow me to remind you of
what Isaiah’s poetry was up against.
Israel has lost the land of milk and honey
promised to them centuries before,
a promise upon which they weighted
their very reason for existence.
They had been ripped away from the land
by the bloody and cruel Babylonian Empire.
Their captors had scorched the land
and reduced its holy city of Jerusalem
and its magnificent temple
to absolute rubble.
The people once called, “Israel”
now lived in servitude
under the humiliation and pain
of rape,
torture
and economic marginalization.
In essence,
they were back in slavery again
under a new Pharaoh
and in a new Egypt.
Into this darkness and despair
Isaiah says:
“God is about to do a new thing
and bring us home
on the tide of living waters
coursing through the desert.”
And you know what? It happened.
I am not saying
that Isaiah’s words were magic,
but it did happen.
Persia,
modern day Iran,
destroyed the Babylonians.
Then Cyrus,
the King of Persia,
actually invited the remnant of Israel
to return home
and rebuild Jerusalem
and even the Temple.
That is history.
It happened.
It was suddenly a new day
and the hope that Isaiah’s poetry
had uttered
came to pass:
poetry of hope
that seemed ludicrous at the time;
poetry of vision
that seemed like naiveté;
poetry of possibility
that seemed like wishful thinking.
Now, I suspect
that some of us here might
have difficulty believing
that God directed the geo-global politics
of Isaiah’s day.
The idea that God
had oversight for the killing,
maiming,
plunder,
rape and destruction
of thousands of people
so that the remnant of Israel
could make their way home again,
seems – well, it seems
beyond credibility.
I would be equally unprepared
to believe that God directed
Osama bin Laden
or George W. Bush.
BUT…
Isaiah was able to perceive
something happening
that others around him could not.
He was able to see light
appearing in the darkness,
and he was able to follow the presence
of that light
to its possible or likely conclusion
and see the newness it would provide.
Those who can see the presence of God
in human agency,
and in human history,
need not know why
or how
in order to give it voice.
Let me repeat that,
because it is hugely consequential
to us in 2013:
Those of us
who can see the presence of God
in human agency and events,
need not know
how or why in order to NAME it.
And in fact,
we do better to say it with poetry
than try to
argue it
or explain it
or prove it
with any kind of rational argument.
God is an artist after all,
not a philosopher.
But here is the point.
Isaiah knew that God was about to
do a new thing…
he could see that God
was DOING a new thing;
and then,
because he trusted God,
he had the courage to announce it
in the poetry of relentless hope and vision
that is still being read
two thousand and five hundred years later.
Come on, don’t you think that is amazing?
Of course it is.
Anyone who is unable to see an awesome sunset in that
needs our special love.
It is exactly the voice
we need to know and to hear in 2013
when HOPE is under attack.
We are drenched in cynicism:
drenched in it –
as if being disinfected
for some horrible infestation.
The idea that God
or anybody else
can actually do a new thing
is not tolerated by our culture and economy
of acidic cynicism.
All of our institutions are
tremendously fragile right now,
and we recognize it.
From Wall Street to the Church,
to the ability of security and police
to keep us safe,
we have the sense
that nothing and no one can save us.
And maybe they can’t;
but maybe,
the point is not to save us
but to do a new thing.
If Isaiah were here,
which of course he is in his poetry,
he might say,
“Stop.
Stop and listen.
The very hope you grieve
is present within the very thing
you fear.”
I tell you,
the wisdom of the ancients
that comes to us
through the pages of the Bible,
and that penetrates the blinders
we do not even know we wear,
will infect us with hope.
And once infected,
even commercialism
and cynicism
will have difficulty putting the blinders back on.
Can you imagine what it would be like
to live in a world,
in which we knew
deep down in our bones,
that God could
and would do a new thing?
Never mind
that we rarely get to know
how or why or when,
but knowing that God can
and does in fact,
do new things
as surely as life has breath,
makes all the difference in the world.
And here is the final punch line:
Those who know
that God can do a new thing,
in fact
become the agents of it.
Amen.
March 13, 7:00pm (John Harris)
I want to invite you to close your eyes and squint your memory and conjure up the image of a river you know and love… There must be a river in your life.
Download
Full Text
I want to invite you to
close your eyes
and squint your memory
and conjure up
the image of a river you know and love…
There must be a river in your life.
I think one of the reasons I am in Buffalo
is that we fell in love with the Niagara River
before we moved here.
So powerful,
so blue,
so compelling
in its headlong rush toward
violence with the rocks.
Where is the special river in your life?
Langston Hughes wrote
“A Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1920,
in the summer after he graduated from high school.
He was on a train
crossing the Big Muddy
on his way to visit his father in Mexico.
The sun was setting on the Mississippi,
its orange tang reflected in the slow brown water
as the train rocked to and fro
and called its mournful cry
into the dusk.
It was then that The River’s big face
reached up and in its pooled eyes
revealed to young Langston,
the history of his people.
It was as if the river itself was a witness
to the misery of slaves…
and the inhumanity of slave owners…
and of Abe Lincoln’s story
of taking a raft down to New Orleans
like Huck Finn,
and how he saw for the first time
human beings bought and sold
and bleeding from their chains;
and how, Lincoln would later say,
the images never left him…
And so he wrote,
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
I’ve known rivers…
The White River running through my hometown,
that flooded every spring
and we helped stack sandbags
until the year they built real levies.
The White River looks and smells like home.
The Mississinewa,
that dirty little river
that runs as fast in the spring
as it runs slow like a clogged drain
in the summer.
I knew its fish
and nests of water snakes,
and those ugly prehistoric gars
swimming in its black water.
The Mississinewa looks and feels like
a steamy August afternoon
when nothing moves in Indiana
that doesn’t absolutely have to.
I’ve known farms and farmers…
I grew up surrounded by them.
As a boy
I measured myself in
the tire ruts of Massie Ferguson tractors, and
chased piglets in the spring mud.
As a teenager
I compared my strength to others
as we fell rotted trees as tall as Trinity’s tower
and split every last log into fireplace size splinters.
The farmers had an aura about them,
somewhere between the grim silence of a judge
and the heroic silhouette of a Fire Fighter.
They were the ones
that knew everything
but who spoke little…
and they did exotic things like
chewed and spit.
Farms and Farmers smelled
like the Earth
and felt solid like a rock.
I’ve known moons…
Lonely moons
when I was desperate for company,
in anguish
without someone for whom I swooned.
Moons in the west,
behind the Grand Tetons,
or casting shadows over the Badlands;
a moon over Ohio
so massive and hanging so low
it might have nudged the earth.
I have known moons so pale,
as to have the flu;
moons that warmed the heart
even when you could see your breath;
moons so placid in the midst of a storm
that it gave peace of mind.
I once performed an outdoor wedding
under a blue moon,
and afterward we ate Moon Pies.
The moon is one of God’s extravagances –
there for no more purpose than
an over-abundance of elegance.
Now I could go on like this
for quite some time,
because I just love thinking about
and writing about
the song nature sings.
Each of the readings tonight
sing on those sweetened lips,
and all about our relationships to the Earth.
Our relationship to Earth
is more than molecules,
more than biology,
more than ecology…
It is history
and memory
and the personal
projection of our own internal lives
onto the world of living things
all around us.
Most of us here live within the city,
surrounded by the stuff human beings make
yet still syncopated
by voices of Earth
and its relentless abundance.
The abandoned Brownfield’s of Buffalo,
their rambling dead factories
and refuse piled akimbo,
stand as silent testament to that relentless
nature of Earth
to recapture whatever we steal from it.
Human hardness’s
made of iron
and steel
give way and break apart
as Earth heaves upward in winter,
cracks apart in summer,
and grows and grows and grows
until even waste
is buried over time.
You and I live as if Earth is
subservient to us when
it is we who are buried by Earth.
Ours is a spiritual relationship
with Earth,
and those of us who live in the city
are always in danger of drifting away from it.
We are always in danger
of forgetting,
of growing distant,
of becoming disconnected,
of turning deaf and blind and mute
when it comes to loving
and being loved by Earth.
There is no such thing as spirituality
apart from Earth.
We are of the Earth…
ashes to ashes
and dust to dust.
If we yearn to be spiritual
then it is to Earth we must turn.
So tonight,
directed by the voices we have heard
to return to the dust,
to return to Earth,
to cross the distance
that urban life creates
and to come close again to Earth,
let us open our ears.
Let these voices speak to us;
let them touch us;
let them sooth and rattle us.
Let us re-enter our Earth-bound natures,
even as we are surrounded here by stones
cut from its bedrock
and with timbers of giant trees forming a canopy
over our heads.
Allow the Earth to speak to us,
to whisper to us of what we have forgotten.
And now, to make a right beginning,
let us make fire – Earth, wind and fire –
and offer it to Earth
and to our love of Earth.
Let us make a prayer this night,
evoked by our memory of places
that root us to Earth –
rivers, moons and farms,
mountains, trees
and canyons;
lakes, cloudless skies
and fields of green.
Let us light a candle
in thanksgiving
to places
and creatures
and vistas
that have brought us close to the Creator.
March 13, 10:30 am (John Harris)
I knew a prodigal once, we all have. Some of us are prodigals, some of us are the insecure and jealous siblings, and some of us may be forced to decide which kind of parent to be – one wielding mercy or one exacting justice.
Download
Full Text
I knew a prodigal once,
we all have.
Some of us are prodigals,
some of us are the insecure and jealous siblings,
and some of us may be forced to decide
which kind of parent to be –
one wielding mercy
or one exacting justice.
But all of us
know,
in the chamber of secrets
within which our heart
is carried,
the daunting spiritual struggle of the prodigal
written between the lines
of this epic story.
The prodigal I knew
began his decent with avid pot smoking
in 8th grade.
He picked up whiskey in 9th grade,
added other drugs when in college,
and never looked back.
Here is a little secret
for those who may not have been a prodigal:
the reason WHY someone like the prodigal
began his or her descent into addiction
does NOT matter.
To the one who has slipped down
that slippery slope,
a REASON just becomes another EXCUSE.
So reasons are a luxury
that the prodigal cannot afford
because it simply plays upon his or her
propensity and expertise
at making excuses,
and feeling victimized,
and otherwise finding more and more
REASONS
not to return home.
So while we might
dig around in the dirt of this young prodigal’s
home life
or social context
or psychology
to discover REASONS for his early
descent into drugs and alcohol,
and the subsequent pigpen of a life
such allegiance created,
in the end
the reasons are a distraction
to his returning home.
That will be an important
bit of information later,
so hold onto it.
Like the prodigal in Jesus’ story,
the prodigal in my story,
and likely most prodigal stories,
found his way home
beginning with a moment of surrender.
Now I dug myself a deep hole last Sunday
when I mentioned the common lore
that preachers only have a few sermons in them,
and every sermon is merely strumming on
one of those basic cords.
I then said I would deliver my five core sermons
over he next seven weeks.
That, however, presumed I knew those five sermons!
As soon as I was done
I sat down last Sunday afternoon and said,
“Oh crap, what are they?”
So I asked Katy
since she’s been listening for 31 of those 33 years,
and she gave me one more of them.
But I DO know
that SURRENDER is one of the five.
It has to be,
if for no other reason
than surrender is the bedrock of spiritual wisdom
in all three Abrahamic religions.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam
each begin with stories of surrender,
and they end with stories of surrender.
And of course,
I hate that so much.
I bet you do too.
Only a masochist likes surrender.
Instead, we demand autonomy
even when we secretly
or unconsciously crave dependency.
We are all twisted up like that,
you and me.
Don’t take my word for it,
just read from any period of literature
beginning with ancient Greece and China
and wading deeply into contemporary novels.
We’ve been doing this Hokey Poky
with autonomy and dependence
since the Garden of Eden.
But I digress.
So just like all the prodigals
before and after him,
‘my’ prodigal had a moment of surrender.
It came,
oh so ironically,
a month after he was ordained a priest.
He suddenly had an awakening,
looked around his pigpen,
and realized he still had a choice.
If he surrendered his will to God,
because his own will alone
had not gotten him home,
there was a chance he might not have to
die among the pigs in the mud.
You can’t really describe
a moment of surrender to someone else.
It is not something you can give to someone else.
It would be like a little kid
trying to meet the demand of his first crush
to prove with his words that he loves her.
A moment of surrender,
like any religious experience,
is completely trapped
within the confine of that
chamber of secrets
I mentioned,
the one that holds our heart within it.
We just cannot hand our experience of surrender
to another person for inspection.
Like manna,
it evaporates as soon as it
leaves our own heart
and cannot be transferred to another.
But as significant as the moment of surrender is,
that is only one chapter in this amazing story –
the story of the prodigal son, I mean.
So after that big moment
when the prodigal,
or any of us
turns our will over to the love of God,
it opens the way
to new life.
In the prodigal’s case,
it opens the way to go home.
And home for any prodigal,
is not to mom and dad
or back to Kansas and the farm.
‘Home’
is getting back to the person
and the life
God dreamed for us
in the first place.
Home is the place
from which our life has always
called to us;
and it is the place which we immediately recognize
after being away,
because we suddenly
“feel at home” in ourselves again.
So the prodigal in my story
woke up,
had a hard fought moment of surrender,
and stepped back into his life.
He entered into sobriety and,
like all prodigals,
assumed that abstinence
was sobriety.
He assumed climbing out of the pigpen
was recovery.
He simply took for granted
that ending his dependence upon
mind-altering substances
and cleaning up his outer life,
would naturally take him home INSIDE himself as well.
He could not have been more mistaken.
Enter chapter two,
written between the lines
of Jesus’ story.
The journey toward self-acceptance
is the journey all of us are on,
prodigal or older sibling;
merciful or judgmental parent;
it does not matter.
It is a journey of common brokenness
and every single one of us
is on that path,
right now,
right this minute,
and we will never, ever,
never, come to the end of it.
It is the journey toward self-acceptance.
That is why,
in the mission statement of Trinity,
it is so dramatic
and essential
that we say out loud,
that we share “a common brokenness.”
Why else would we be here,
I mean really?
If we were sufficient onto our own
there would be no reason
for us to be here,
with a bunch of other wounded people
searching for the promises
of a healing God.
But I digress again!
I am running out of time
so here is the thing:
The things that are broken in us cause us pain.
They hurt.
Every time they get poked,
inadvertently or maliciously,
they get tenderized
and broken open again,
and they hurt more.
Whether you are the prodigal
whose self-centeredness and lust
are worn like a brightly colored silk shirt;
or you are the sibling
whose dutiful behavior
masks debilitating hidden injury to your own soul;
or you are the parent
exacting justice upon your child
because that is what was inflicted on you,
or a parent unable to practice necessary tough-love
because your own wounds are bleeding profusely…
our own brokenness is just plain painful.
We can speak glibly about our brokenness
in generic, philosophical terms
but the truth is,
in real time,
inside,
there in the chamber of secrets
where our hearts are held,
our woundedness
just plain hurts.
Anything and everything we have ever done wrong,
failed at,
were afraid of failing at,
were humiliated by,
bore resentment or rage toward,
couldn’t do what we wanted to do,
were incapable of
or feared we were incapable of…
all of that stuff
is like a stigmata that won’t heal.
All of us seek relief from the hurt,
and it is in seeking relief from the hurt
that we get lost
and lose our way.
Some of us use alcohol or drugs
to numb the pain.
Some of us use our work or jobs
to numb the pain.
Some of us use other people
to numb the pain.
Some of us use our children
to numb the pain.
Some of us use exercise or sports,
or fashion,
or the limelight,
or surgery,
or food
to numb the pain.
Some of us use anything
and everything we can
to numb the pain.
But the way home
is not by way of pain avoidance,
it is by way of the wounds we carry.
The way back home
is by entering those wounds
and understanding them.
The way back home
is by feeling the ache,
and knowing the source,
and seeing the inhabitants of those wounds
and learning what there is to know.
It does not feel good,
and it does not do away with the hurt.
But it does lead us home.
So sermon Number Two
is about surrender;
surrender to God,
and to our own brokenness,
in order to find our way home.
It is about living through the pain,
and in spite of the hurt,
rather than numbing it
or avoiding it
or pretending we can have a life
without it.
Sermon Number Two
is shinning a light on the older siblings
and the father and the mother,
that reveals that it is not only the prodigal
that has wandered far from home
and needs to find his or her way back,
but all of us.
Sermon Number Two
has no where to hide in it
because it takes a story that we like to pretend
is about one person –
the Prodigal Son –
and demonstrates that every character in the story
is deeply wounded
and offers the hope,
that it is through those very wounds
we will find healing…
even though we will never be cured.
I really like, and hate, sermon Number Two.
March 06, 10:30 am (John Harris)
If you have ever heard me preach then you have heard this sermon before because it underlies all of them. In fact, ‘they’ say most preachers only have three or four sermons in them and that every sermon is a riff on one of those core sermons. At most, it is also said, even the greatest of preachers has only six or seven such basic sermons.
Download
Full Text
If you have ever heard me preach
then you have heard this sermon before
because it underlies all of them.
In fact, ‘they’ say most preachers
only have three or four sermons in them
and that every sermon is a riff on one of those core sermons.
At most, it is also said,
even the greatest of preachers has only six or seven
such basic sermons.
I have seven Sundays left to preach at Trinity
and I do not think that I am one of those greatest preachers.
BUT, Easter and my last sermon are in there,
so now we are down to five.
Maybe, just maybe, I have five.
But regardless of how many sermons
reside in this woefully inadequate body and mind,
what I am about to share with you
is the first sermon I ever learned –
or knew
or was given
or had the ears to hear.
(Even though my vocation is ‘preacher’,
after thirty-three years of preaching
I still do not know where they come from).
Okay, so here is sermon Number One;
with sermons two, three, four and five to follow
in the weeks ahead.
Surely there are endless possibilities
for talking about this strange,
awesome and exquisite wisdom
from the Book of Exodus,
but today
I am going to do like the Television Preachers do,
and walk through this story in Exodus
like a docent doing a tour
of some ancient ruins.
There are a handful of texts in the Bible
that I hope to have the capacity to remember
as I lay dying,
and this is one of them.
Anything and everything
we can say about God
rests upon this
one moment of revelation.
When we come to the story
of Moses and the burning bush,
the first silly thing we do is ask,
Did it really happen?
It is a knee-jerk reaction
and most of the time we just can’t help ourselves.
Our minds have been molded by modernism
to ask such questions
even though
it is impossible for the text
to answer such questions.
So instead, and
because deep inside us is buried
the ancient memory
of our pre-modern ancestors,
we can ask:
What is the wisdom embedded in this story?
If we LISTEN to a text like this
instead of asking if it really happened,
then the first thing we notice
is that Moses
is not among the Hebrews.
He is watching his father-in-law’s sheep,
and his father-in-law is the priest of another religion.
Remember,
there is no Hebrew religion at this point,
no such thing as Judaism.
Just as the history of Christianity begins
with Judaism,
Judaism begins
in the crucible of another religion,
one centered on Mount Horeb,
the mountain of a Midianite God.
Scratch back through the soil of history
as far back as we can in our sacred book
and what we find
is a deeply PLURALISTIC theology.
Clearly, right
from the beginning,
there is more than one understanding of God.
So the message, if we are LISTENING
instead of fixated on whether miracles are possible, is:
This is a story about GOD, not “our” God –
this God does not belong to “us.”
Imagine how differently things would be now
if that little piece of information had stuck!
Okay, the next thing that happens is weird.
The text describes a fire that does not consume.
(Nan Clarkson told us at the Wednesday Eucharist
that her gas fireplace does the same thing).
What we need to notice from the story
is that such spookiness
is simply assumed.
In a pre-scientific world, the same things
happened as in our world
but they are explained quite differently.
I have no way to explain miraculous events
but we do know,
even from our best perception studies,
that human beings see what we expect to see
and often miss the obvious
waving its arms in front of us
if we are not looking for it.
I think that is an interesting fact
that can explain both,
why some people see miracles that are there to be seen
and why others see miracles that are not actually there.
But today,
for our purposes, we need to notice that the text
does not ask how it is possible.
The text does not ask why it happens.
The text does not even seem surprised
by a fire that does not burn.
The text just says, the
bush is burning without being consumed
and an angel’s voice is emanating from it.
No big deal;
as if it is a daily event up here
on the mountain of God.
Moses,
even though he doesn’t know the God
he is about to meet,
and even though he has no experience
with any gods other than Pharaoh…
somehow knows what to do and what not to do
when meeting a god:
DON’T LOOK and
TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES.
Moses knows that for humans to look upon God
insures certain death.
So what is the text
trying to tell us by this odd behavior?
Just this:
The finite cannot know the infinite.
The temporal cannot look upon the eternal.
The part cannot see the whole…and survive.
It is in the very nature of being human,
or being a small part instead of the whole,
that if we are suddenly placed in
the presence of everything-that-is…
we will go out of existence.
Why?
Because we would lose our Self – our partness.
The part
is no longer a part
when it is taken into the whole –
it loses its Self.
It goes out of existence.
Which, by the way,
is also the Buddhist concept of Nirvana.
Hmmm.
Okay, let’s recap.
What we know up to this point, is
that Moses knows the protocol
for what to say and do
when entering God’s air-space.
Now remember, there is no such thing as Judaism at this point
and Christianity is more than a 15 centuries away.
So what the TEXT is telling us is:
When it comes to an encounter with God,
there is no religion.
Get it?
When the veil between the holy and the human
gets thin
or is removed altogether,
there is no religion.
Religion –
Brand Name –
is utterly and totally irrelevant at the moment of encounter.
Religion is about ideas
and rituals
and sacraments
and methodologies
and organization
and all those things
we need and cherish and hate.
There is nothing wrong with all that human paraphernalia
but when it comes to an encounter with GOD,
it is utterly irrelevant.
So at some very basic level
the message of this story
is that an encounter with God
is beyond all religion
and available to anyone of any religion or no religion.
That is a pretty big message right there
at the beginning of the Bible, isn’t it?
Because of the way the Bible has been used
and misused by religion,
it comes to us as a bit of a surprise.
But there is an even bigger another message tucked in there.
But we are not done juicing this story
for its extraordinary nectar
so I hope you are not getting antsy.
Now the focus of the story shifts.
We leave the realm of human beings,
filtered as it is through Moses and his reflection of us,
and we move into the realm of the holy.
In other words,
the TEXT is about to tell us
something about God.
We might imagine that,
because it is the Bible,
such information is normal.
But the Bible is far more about human beings
than it is about God.
And as it turns out, God is stingy
with information and self-revelation.
Remember the Garden of Eden story –
the only tree God would not allow them to eat from
was the tree that granted knowledge of good and evil –
which of course,
is the knowledge of everything.
They could even have had eternal life
but not the knowledge
that God did not want them to have.
So in this text from Exodus,
God is revealed in a radical and unique way.
It is God’s first and most elemental revelation
about who God is
and what God is like.
Here is what we learn about God.
First, we are told “who” god is:
The God of Moses’ ancestors.
God begins the introduction,
not with God’s occupation or achievements,
but with a description of God’s relationships.
Again, we might take note
that the TEXT wants us to understand
that “who” we are
has to do with
who we are in relationship with
rather that what we do for our work.
Then, the text describes what God does;
and what God does is remarkable.
God sees.
God hears.
God feels.
God sees the misery of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt.
God hears their cries when they are abused.
God feels their suffering.
But that is not all.
Because God sees and hears and feels,
God acts.
God is going to DO something,
he tells Moses,
to liberate those who suffer at the hands of oppression.
Okay, let’s just stop right there for a moment.
Many of us are stuck in “science-head”
and so we might need a moment to catch up.
Some little voice in our brains
is likely muttering, “Yeah, sure…”
If so, you are going to have a hard time LISTENING
to what this text has to say.
It is like asking if the burning bushing really happened.
So disengage from that highly sophisticated
voice in your brain,
pat it condescendingly on the shoulder
and assure it that you don’t really believe
God acts in human history
on behalf of those who are marginalized,
or anybody else.
Now, ponder this amazing fact about the text.
Prior to this moment,
or if you do not believe the burning bush was an actual moment,
prior to this idea,
the gods of the ancient world
were not liberation gods.
In the world prior to this Exodus TEXT,
if you needed something from a god –
like someone to fall in love with you,
or to get pregnant,
or to have your crops yield an abundant harvest,
or for your enemy to get the runs and have a miserable day –
you went to the proper god
that had the power
to act in the sphere you needed action.
Once you knew which was the right god
to get the job done for you,
you made a sacrifice
at the altar to that god, and
through the appointed priest.
In other words,
you had to purchase the desired benefit
with the required sacrifice
and that undoubtedly necessitated money.
People with discretionary income
were few and far between.
But if you did have money, then
you had greater and better access to those gods
and to those benefits.
It was perfectly natural to believe that
the universe operated as a divine hierarchy
because human society was rigidly stratified like that too.
But suddenly,
with this TEXT from Exodus
a new God enters the scene:
a new God is encountered.
Suddenly there is a new god on the block,
a god who hears the cries of slaves.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who sees what is going on among the marginalized.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who actually listens to the groans
of people who are considered the dregs of society.
Suddenly there appears in the world
a god who actually feels – knows personally –
the suffering of the nobodies.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
‘Science Heads’ listen up.
Whether you think this is an actual moment in time –
as in an actual mystical encounter with God –
the immergence of this idea
is historic and amazing
and radically changed forever the human imagination.
Even though everything that human beings can see
would suggest the existence of a God
who only cares about the powerful
and the privileged,
there appears an ancient text that says:
Actually,
God sees
and hears
and knows
the suffering of those who are
beaten and abused and exploited.
And not only that…
what God does,
what God is all about,
is acting in history on their behalf.
What an incredible TEXT.
Whether we believe it is true or not
we simply must recognize how amazing it is.
So that is a lot to learn about a God from one small text.
But the big, dramatic punch line of the burning bush story
is the unveiling of God’s NAME.
In this Exodus text
God’s personal name is revealed to Moses.
That is a big deal.
We take it for granted
because we toss our names every which way
and for us privacy has gone out the window.
But it used to be
that one’s Name was thought to reveal their essence
and it was even connected
with life beyond the grave.
So God’s decision
to unveil God’s name
to this guy Moses, is pretty dramatic turn of events.
God’s name, the Text tells us, is
YHVH (Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei).
It is related to the Hebrew verb: “to be.”
It is often translated as the phrase,
“I am who I am”
or “I will be who I will be.”
It is a phrase that becomes a name.
The phrase Yahweh,
or I will be who I will be,
gets shortened over time to “Yah”
or even “Yahu”
which references another phrase:
“The Lord is my Salvation.”
(Stay with me here
because it is building to the punch line).
So Yah,
or “The Lord is my Salvation”
becomes a proper name: Yo-shua.
Yoshua
is of course the name we know as Joshua.
The name Joshua
becomes Latinized as Jesus.
So Jesus is Joshua,
which is Yoshua,
which is Yah,
which is short for,
“The Lord is my Salvation,”
which is a reference to Yahweh,
which is the name that means:
I will be who I will be.
Now…please do not hear more than I am saying.
There is nothing about Jesus in the Exodus Text.
The Jesus story appropriates the Moses story,
and Jesus’ name is just another example
of how intentional and intimate his connection with Moses is.
But like Moses, Jesus brings us a new Name for God.
While Jesus likely referred to God as others around him did,
to Yah or Yahu or Elohaynu in public worship,
Jesus’ name for God was, “Abba.”
“Abba” conveys a relationship of intimacy.
“Father” is too formal.
“Dad” is not intimate enough.
“Daddy” is perhaps a better transliteration.
And I don’ think it is a stretch to say, “Mommy”
because the name indicates the intimacy of the relationship
rather than the gender of the god.
So Jesus calls God, Abba (translated at “Father”)
and reveals something new in that name:
the intimacy with which we are related to God.
Okay, that’s it.
Sermon Number One
could actually go on and on and on.
The implications from that little text in Exodus
are both obvious
and far-reaching.
If we listened to the text better
it would radically change our religion
just as that story radically changed human civilization.
But as grand and global as it is,
allow me to end by bringing it closer to home
and personalize it for each of us:
What is your name?
Your name and mine,
begins with WHO we are in relationship with,
and it comes to be known
by what we DO and WHOM we do it for.
My father was a very quiet, shy,
introverted man
but when his name was spoken
in the small city where we lived,
those who knew him
knew the meaning of his name,
and it was honorable.
What is your name?
What does your name convey
and what do you want it to convey?
Even in 2013,
our name and what it means
is an exceptionally worthy spiritual contemplation
for any of us.
What is the meaning of your Name?
March 06 (John Harris)
Years ago, about fifteen to be exact, I was with my spiritual director of the time and he gave me the grandest of liberations
Download
Full Text
Years ago,
about fifteen to be exact,
I was with my spiritual director of the time
and he gave me the grandest of liberations.
He was a spritely Roman Catholic priest,
Irish from South Boston
then living in Ohio.
Honest to goodness,
he looked just like a leprechaun.
As small as I am big,
he nearly sparkled.
Some people shine, don’t they?
Not many, I admit,
but don’t you know some people
who just seem to shine
or glitter a little bit?
That is the way he was,
and when his expression turned serious
it made you sit up and take notice
all the more.
He had a bit of a brogue,
just a hint.
While we were colleagues
in the same area,
on the campus of Ohio State University,
he was probably twenty years my senior
and a whole lot wiser.
One afternoon I arrived at his office
burdened with heavy thoughts
about what I was going to do when I grew up.
I was in my early 40’s
so it wasn’t like I was a stranger to Life.
“Vinny,” I said,
“I need you to help me discern…”
Now let me stop there.
“Discern” is a religious code word.
It is the worst kind of religious jargon.
What it means is, ‘decide’.
Only if you say you are ‘discerning’
it implies that somehow God
is involved in the decision.
And if God is involved in the decision,
1) it is not fully your decision so you can be a little detached from it, and from responsibility for it, and,
2) if it doesn’t work out, well, it is not your fault, is it?
Anyway,
I said, “Vinny, I need your help discern
where God is calling me
and what wants me to do.”
Vinny looks back at me,
the sparkle instantly evaporated from his eyes,
and the sudden seriousness
dispersing any light around him.
He says to me,
“Don’t play cute with God.”
A cold wind blew through me
and I knew exactly what he was saying to me.
Don’t pretend that God makes decisions for us.
Don’t ask a Fairy Godmother to come down
and whisk you away.
Don’t look for magic when all that is needed
is contained in the mud of every day life.
“Don’t play cute with God.”
Do not ask God to do
what you can do for yourself.
That is how I hear
that wonderfully playful poem by
Wislawa Szymborska (“A few words on the soul”).
“We have a soul at times. No one’s got it
non-stop, for keeps…
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when your body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty…”
That’s what happens when
we wrestle with a decision too.
One minute we can feel supremely grounded
and centered in the goodness of our lives
and ‘smack’,
as soon as the need for a decision
enters the room,
that pleasant, peaceful sense of soul
slips out the back door.
I don’t know
if I should talk about this,
so I apologize in advance if it makes you uncomfortable.
If you are visiting for the first time tonight
you may not know that I will be leaving Buffalo.
After 14 years here,
serving in this community at Trinity,
I am moving to Vermont in May.
That was a decision I had been wrestling with
for several years;
deciding stay
and then within a short time,
wrestling with it again.
It was one of those decisions
I made over and over and over again
but never settled with.
A number of things mitigated
against staying,
but at the same time
there were many other things
pushing back
and insisting that staying
was the proper decision.
To put it in the terms
of that wonderful poem,
I kept trying to drag my soul
into the decision,
and my soul
could always see me coming
and left for the Caribbean.
So I could find no peace with the decision.
Like a transmission that grinds
and won’t slip into gear,
the uneasy tug-of-war
simply ground on and on.
I kept trying to make pieces fit together
that simply would not fit until
finally, the committee
in my brain
called a meeting
and everyone climbed on board
all at the same time.
Now I do not believe God tells us what to do.
That is not to say
that God is not accessible
or that the presence of God is not with us
in any given moment.
It is not to say that God
is not influential and impacting us
in any given moment.
It is to say, however,
that I do not believe God moves
or directs or controls us
in any way.
It is up to us
to listen to our own lives,
to feel for and find
the current
that can move us forward
like nothing else
instead of fighting it
and walking up stream.
I know that you and I have done both in our lives.
We know what it is like
to walk up stream against
the current of our own life
because each one of us has done it before.
It is terribly exhausting.
The problem for us
is that we have such competing voices
calling at us,
even shouting at us,
from both banks
and from both ends of the river.
It is almost always difficult
to know which voice to listen to
and which voice is the kiss of death.
But that is exactly what we need, isn’t it:
To know which voices to follow
and which ones to ignore.
The spiritually honest thing, I think,
is not to ascribe divinity
to any one of those voices.
They are all our voices.
The come from within us,
and speak to us
from within the wisdom
of our own lives.
We have the capacity
to make decisions
that flow
within the current of our lives
and when we do,
even if we have failures and struggles,
we never regret it.
When we are patient enough,
and when we give ourselves whatever it is we need
in order to listen to our lives speak,
we make the decisions
that flow
even when surrounded
by turbulence.
Feeling
and finding
the current of our life
IS the spiritual journey.
And while listening
and exploring
and trusting
the voices within us
to eventually come to relative consensus,
we must also acknowledge
we will never know
until afterward –
looking back –
whether or not we made
the right decision.
In this sense,
as I intimated last week,
our lives are more like sacred texts of scripture
that we read in retrospect
rather than tea leaves
that we read to tell us the future.
In my case,
with this current decision,
I finally had a dream;
a dream so clear and
so compelling
I knew immediately
what to do
when I woke up.
Do I think that was God talking to me?
More likely I had wrestled long enough
and listened well enough
and processed it through enough
that all the voices in my head
finally came to consensus
and said, “Wake the poor boy up,
so he can open his eyes
and move on.”
Of course,
just as Szymborska’s poem says,
that “…joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for (the soul)”,
God is not incapable
of also speaking through all of our voices
yammering and yucking it up
in our own heads.
I guess in the end,
it is the patient listening
to whoever or whatever is in there,
and allowing those voices the time to speak
and giving them the trust it requires
to finally come to terms.
Feeling and finding the current of our lives,
and taking the risk to enter
its sure and swift flow,
IS the spiritual journey.
Now…
I invite us to gather at the candle walls
and light a candle or two,
in prayer,
and in thanksgiving,
for the rowdy cacophony of voices
that call to us from within.
February 27, 7:00pm (John Harris)
“It don’t snow like that no more, too bad.” (from a poem by Paul Zimmer) That’s not a confirmation of global warming, it is a feeling.
Download
Full Text
“It don’t snow like that no more,
too bad.” (from a poem by Paul Zimmer)
That’s not a confirmation of global warming,
it is a feeling.
Zimmer’s poem is about
memory,
and all the poems tonight
are about the feeling-quality
of snow
and cold.
So much of what
we want to write about
or read about
or tell stories about
has to do with sunshine
and the succulence of fruit in season,
and the warm breeze in our faces
and the hot nights of our youth.
And yet
so much of the time
we spend living our lives
is in the dark,
cold winter when snow
blankets the earth like a lumpy comforter,
and ice swallows
the darkened branches
of trees whole.
Doesn’t snow
reach inside and pull out memories
every bit as powerfully
as the fragrance of bread
or the glowing crackle of a fire?
Some things are just like that;
they play the strings of our memory
and up pop random images
that have rested quietly
underneath the press of daily event.
What I want to suggest
is that God’s voice
rises up from those memories
like an air bubble under pressure
is released from below.
Maybe it is not a voice,
maybe it is an inkling
or a vague recognition
or even a ghostly whisper…
but whatever or however God speaks
or reaches out
or provokes us,
it resides in a dormant heap
of memories
moldering like a pile of leaves
under the arms of a tree.
So much of what we might call
our spiritual resource
or our capacity to mine wisdom,
rests in memory
and awaits us
inside
where we least
expect
to hear it.
We seek it
most often
elsewhere -
OUTSIDE ourselves.
We figure
it is resting there
for us to find
in some sacred text
or some guru’s method
or a holy recipe someone somewhere offers.
But if I am right about this,
God has a word for us
already waiting
in the nest
of former events.
In fact, if
I am right about this,
there are many words
and multiple echoes
and a veritable hive
of voices
in the moments of life
already lived
and waiting
to be heard
like a wallflower quietly hoping
to be asked to dance.
It works like that because we
are much better at listening
to memory
than hearing in real-time.
Awareness of God
and of the presence of holiness
in real-time is
like trying to hear and
write down all the numbers
in a voicemail message
before it stops.
It is just hard to do
because, first of all,
we are very rarely fully present in the moment.
And secondly
…because we are also
paying attention to so much
at any given time
that an unobtrusive little
voice
like the one
God speaks with,
rarely captures our attention.
Our attention,
of course,
in on how we FEEL
and what WE think
and how it SHOULD be,
rather than
the voice
that may be speaking
to us of something
we could care less about
and that has nothing whatsoever to do with US.
Our orbit
in any given situation
is usually
around OURSELVES --
what I think
and what I feel
and what I believe
and what is good or bad for ME.
But the voices
or whispers
or invitations
of God
rarely have to do
with US,
and are rarely
specifically about US.
So we just
do not hear it.
But when we go
rummaging around in memory,
if we do,
and if we do it
with an inclination to listen
for what is there
rather than
looking for what
we already expect to be there,
we may begin
to see
and hear things
that surprise us.
Do you have a memory of snow?
Conjure one up.
A time of snow…
a memory of snow…
snow…
Who was there?
What did you feel?
What was the snow like?
Did the cold get inside
or were you warm and cozy against it?
What do you remember most?
Was it the sound
or the taste
or the feelings?
Is it possible
to squint your memory
and hear or see
something in that snow memory
you have never seen
or heard before?
Or maybe
you see it
or hear it
differently than before?
What I am suggesting here,
is that there are piles of memories
scattered and collected
within the folds of our brain
waiting to be mined
for things we did not see
or hear
or understand
at the time.
They are not lost to us
they are waiting for us.
God,
who knows not time
and is patient beyond time,
waits for us
to hear
and see
and know
what we missed
the first time.
We would do well
to visit our memory more
and the how-to books
and gurus less.
And if we need it,
take someone along with us
to help us remember
and helps us to discern
the things we are remembering.
What are sacred texts after all,
if not communal memory?
What are our memories
if not sacred texts?
I invite us to come forward now
and light a candle or two,
and to allow the flicker of light
against the amber night
to evoke our memories.
February 20, 10:30 am (John Harris)
We have a lot to talk about in the next few moments, and quite a bit to DO as well. I am going to ask you to do something you will not like doing – at least, if you have any kind of sanity you won’t like doing it. I am going to ask each of us to touch our fear.
Download
Full Text
We have a lot to talk about in the next few moments,
and quite a bit to DO as well.
I am going to ask you to do something
you will not like doing –
at least, if you have any kind of sanity
you won’t like doing it.
I am going to ask each of us
to touch our fear.
We have to actually touch it,
tip-toe up and touch the fear,
in order to actually FEEL it.
That is because we are really sophisticated
at avoiding,
denying,
pretending,
and numbing.
We kind of have to be,
because were we to walk around
cognizant of our fears 24/7
we would rattle like an old car
playing the bass
so loud you can hear it two blocks away.
Now remember,
a lion knows as much fear
as a Thompson’s Gazelle,
it is just that the Gazelle wears its fear
much more visibly.
The lion and Gazelle have fears about different things,
but they both know fear
and they both carry it with them
wherever they go.
So do we.
I am going to talk about our fears
because that is what the Gospel story of
Jesus in the Wilderness is all about.
But before I do,
I want to collect some of OUR fear.
This is my backpack.
It is my favorite backpack –
I bought it in the airport when I was
flying by myself for the first time
to El Salvador.
The backpack I took with me
fell apart in the Atlanta airport –
just kind of disintegrated,
so I bought this one.
I was traveling with my fears that day.
I don’t love flying to begin with;
and because my Spanish
is almost non-existent, and
I was not going to being met
by anyone at the airport,
I felt apprehensive about finding
my way for the first time all by myself.
All of which is to say
my backpack here
already has some fear in it.
I am going to pass it around
and invite you to deposit one of your fears in it.
Nobody knows which fear you will put in,
and because this is an exercise in imagination,
nobody else knows how big your fear is.
It’s just a game of pretend
and you do not have to play,
but why wouldn’t you play along?
Except…because it is scary.
So the backpack is coming at you
whether you decide to play or not.
If you do,
exercise your imagination
by touching one of your fears –
in other words,
call out a fear,
to yourself,
inside your own head or gut.
Call it out by name
and see if you can’t feel it.
Then pretend to put it in the backpack
as it comes around.
If you don’t want to play,
just pass the backpack on to the next person.
When the last fear has been deposited,
please bring it up to me here.
If it takes longer
than the sermon to make it all the way around,
then Krista will play a bit of music for our meditation –
a meditation on fear.
Now, take just a moment
in quiet,
to call up your fear.
silence
The ‘Wilderness’ is where we go
to find freedom from our fear.
I know that seems like an oxymoron,
but the Wilderness is where we will discover
freedom from fear.
Please do not hear
more than I am promising:
it is not that we will no longer be afraid,
but that we may find the freedom
that comes with living in spite of our fears.
There is only one way
that I know of,
that we discover that kind of freedom.
But let me leave that hanging
while I talk a little about this Jesus story.
Before I tell you
why this story is all about fear,
I need to tell you where this story comes from.
I need to tell you that,
because one of my fears
is Christian anti-Semitism
and “Exceptionalism”.
What I mean by that,
is that most Christians have no idea
how Jewish we are,
and how absolutely rooted in Judaism
Jesus and our teachings about him are.
That ignorance, in part,
has led to horrendous Christian persecution
of Jews over the centuries,
and continues in the form of anti-Semitism today.
But also, Christianity
fell into a very bad habit
of believing and claiming
that it has the only truth about God
and things spiritual.
We have just made ourselves stupid about it –
making claims about the exclusivity of
our beliefs and ideas.
Understanding that Jesus
and the Jesus stories
are thoroughly derived from
the Hebrew tradition that came before him,
undercuts such whacko Christian claims.
So anyway,
the story of Jesus in the wilderness
is told in order to make him look and sound like,
Moses.
Moses leads the escaped slaves
in the wilderness for 40 years
and Jesus is in the wilderness 40 days and 40 nights.
Moses spends 40 days and 40 nights
on the mountain of God
during which time he neither eats nor drinks anything.
Jesus, in his wilderness,
does not eat or drink either.
Moses, when the people he is leading
rebel and question God, reminds them
that they do not “live by bread alone.”
Jesus, in his story, reminds his nemesis
that we “do not live by bread alone.”
Moses lectures the escaped slaves
as they prepare to enter The Promise Land,
not to forget in the midst of their prosperity,
who brought them this liberation and
to worship that God, and God alone.
Jesus, when offered great power and authority,
reminds his nemesis of the same thing:
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only God.”
Finally, Moses cautions his people
not to test God
but to remember that their identity
derives from the meaning of how they live their lives.
Jesus recalls the same thing
when he is challenged to test God’s
real-world/real-time power.
The story is told this way
as to shout out loud,
that Jesus is the “New Moses.”
Moses was ‘da Man’
and you and I just do not get how big a deal
Moses was for first century Judeans.
To say that Jesus
did all the stuff that Moses did
is to say that Jesus is a great prophet,
in the mold of the greatest prophet.
So as Christians,
we need to understand that Jesus
did not come out of nowhere
or sprout from nothing.
Jesus is Jesus
because Moses was Moses,
and they are both peas in the same pod.
Okay, telling you that
addresses one of my small fears
and we can move on now.
How is that backpacking coming along?
Is it getting laden with fear?
Don’t worry, it is just pretend.
Wilderness.
Wilderness is the place of freedom.
Wilderness is any time
and any place
we discover freedom
from our fears.
That Mary Oliver poem,
“Wild Geese”
is such a lovely ode to our fears.
One of our great fears,
one that we all share,
is that we do not have a place
in the family of things
because we are not good enough.
We are not good enough
or special enough
or loveable enough
of whatever it is we measure worth
and value by.
The fear is that we are not
loved,
or will not be,
if indeed others find out
about what we are really like
on the inside.
I suspect all of us know that fear.
That is the fear of our first category: Hunger.
Jesus’ first temptation
has to do with hunger.
Now we can see hunger in this story
as having to do with an empty stomach,
and bread as having to do with satiation,
or we can understand them as metaphoric.
As in, we have HUNGER –
deep and abiding hungers.
We are hungry…
for love,
for acceptance,
for affirmation,
for success,
for companionship,
for comfort,
for security,
for beauty,
for youth,
for health,
for whatever it is
we have and are AFRAID of losing;
and for those things we do not have
and for which we FEAR
that we are not okay without.
We do not need a Devil in our world
to create the situation Luke has described,
we have marketing
and advertising
and consumerism
and literally millions of people
hawking wares that claim
to satiate our hungers
and put away our fears.
With Convenience Stores
and Snicker’s Bars
and Gatorade,
we need never be hungry or thirsty
ever again.
And should we feel hungry
or afraid
or disappointed with anything,
we can get an app for that,
or a pill for that,
or a surgery for that.
Jesus says,
be hungry.
FEEL the want
and feel the FEAR that the want
may never be met.
In touching it,
in feeling it,
we will find freedom from it.
It does not mean we have to stay hungry,
or that we can’t feed our need,
but that until we feel the want
and touch the fear,
they will own us.
You and I both know, even
if we never thought about it in those terms before,
how true that is:
If we do not FEEL our want
and we do not TOUCH our fear,
they will own us.
The second category of fear in this Jesus story
is powerlessness.
We hate it.
It drives us crazy.
What is the proverbial ‘need for control’
if not the fear of powerlessness?
Some of us are better at tolerating it than others,
but no one likes to smack up
against their limitations.
A limitation
is what you hit
when you cannot do something,
or do something as well as you would like;
or have something you want;
or make something happen that had you planned.
A limitation is when you want the world
or your life
or your relationship, or another person,
to do and be the way you want them, but we just can’t make it happen.
A limitation
is like a slap in the face,
and when we encounter limitations
in a public kind of way,
it evokes a very special kind of humiliation.
Jesus says,
be powerless.
Know your limitation;
let it bark in your face,
and be fully immersed in its hot, dark mud.
Then, when you are,
you will be able to surrender
to a power greater than yourself.
And until you do,
you will never be able
to surrender.
Powerlessness is a base human fear for all of us,
and yet, if we do not touch it,
we will never learn
the base human experience of faith:
which is surrender.
The third category of fear in this classic Jesus story
is the fear of death.
But this is truly
the trickiest of the three fears.
It is not about death –
as in mortal ending.
The fear is about meaning,
or the loss of it.
Most of us,
if we had a rock bottom confidence
in the meaning and purpose of our lives,
could let our lives go quite willingly
when called upon to do so.
The FEAR
is that our life
does not have meaning,
or that the meaning will not be known by anyone.
The FEAR
is that we will go silently into the night
and no one will notice.
The FEAR
is that we lived for the wrong things
or that we lived wrongly for the right things
or that we were not good enough
or that we did not achieve enough
or that we will not be loved
by the One whose love
matters most when we die.
We FEAR death when we do not trust
in the value of the meaning
we have chosen to spend with our lives.
Is that backpack full yet?
So the wilderness is any place
or any time
that we allow ourselves
to TOUCH our fears
and FEEL them;
to get in their face
and say, “Yeah, I know you.”
Don’t do it
because somehow it will chase them away
and we won’t have any more fear.
We always have fear.
Whether we are the lion
or the gazelle,
we always have fear.
There is always stuff to be afraid of,
and for good reason.
But our fears need not own us.
And as long as we keep them at arms length,
and as long as we numb ourselves from feeling them,
and as long as we engage in
intricate dances to avoid acknowledging them,
they will own us.
When we do not see them;
when we do not feel them;
when we do not know where they are…
we can be certain
they are moving about in the shadows
and that we are acting and reacting
to their presence
without being fully conscious.
That is when they are the most dangerous.
That is why,
as Jesus did,
we enter the wilderness and touch them
from time to time;
and ask God to hold our hand in the process.
That is what the season of Lent is about.
Whatever ritual practice we engage in,
like giving something up
or doing something we would not normally do,
it ought to help us be in the presence of a fear
so that we might discover freedom in the midst of it.
Where’s that backpack?
Now if you thought I was collecting these fears
to get rid of them,
or to somehow magically make them disappear,
you were wrong.
I collected them
to place them in our midst.
God, if we ask, will hold our hand
as we walk out into the wilderness
to touch our fears.
(Cam now hangs the backpack on the cross).
February 13, 10:30am (John Harris)
Let’s just take that story from Luke at face value, as if Jesus actually did what it says rather than as a metaphoric story. So the storyteller left a lot of things out, or stuffed them between the lines and we are so darned literal when it comes to retelling these ancient stories that we don’t even hear the laughter.
Download
Full Text
Okay, let’s get real.
Let’s just take that story from Luke
at face value,
as if Jesus actually did what it says
rather than as a metaphoric story.
So the storyteller
left a lot of things out,
or stuffed them between the lines
and we are so darned literal
when it comes to retelling these ancient
stories that we don’t even hear the laughter.
It says that Peter and the Zebedee boys
have been up fishing all night.
Who goes fishing at night?
People who weren’t able to catch anything
during the day,
and because their income depended upon it,
they get out there and fish at night.
Maybe it stormed all day,
or maybe there was a funeral,
or maybe the fishermen all got food poisoning…
But whatever the cause of paucity in their daytime fishing,
they go night fishing.
But,
as the story goes: nada.
Nothing. Skunked.
I’ve been skunked when fishing with Pat Maloney.
Never mind his bold promises
of giant bass,
or that his engine will work this time,
or that the boat won’t take on water,
we were just skunked.
No fish.
But I have that effect on people sometimes.
My friend Jon Sams is a great sportsman
and an accomplished fisherman;
he’s even written books about fishing.
He got skunked with me once.
Then there is Joey;
one of my brother-in-laws
who is as lucky in business
as he is in fishing and hunting.
He always catches fish,
except once when he took me fishing in Indiana.
Skunked.
I believe that if I had kept track,
I have been skunked more than not –
which is a good reason
not to keep track.
So I know what those boys felt like,
and it wasn’t happy.
Any adult past the party-stage
who has stayed up all night
knows how you feel the next morning –
even if you were not partying.
Remember that feeling?
If you do,
drape that heavy-drag-of-weight sensation
over Peter, James and John.
Work all day – nothing.
Work all night – nothing.
Money in your pocket – nothing.
Food on the table at home – nothing.
Cash to pay back the nudnik for the loan – nothing.
You got nothing.
Along comes a crowd of people
yammering and shouting and
all abuzz.
You, dog-tired,
back aching,
bent over
and cleaning the crap off your empty nets,
could really care less.
Except…
except the local chair maker
gets in YOUR boat.
That’s right,
he just steps in your boat
that is drifting by a rope from its anchor on the beach.
He doesn’t ask,
he just steps in your boat.
Then he waves you over, just like that.
He waves you over
as if he has something to do with you.
“My good man,” he says,
“how about a little lift?”
Is he serious?
Can this really be happening?
If you weren’t so tired,
and there wasn’t a crowd of your
friends and neighbors watching,
you would rap that net around that
skinny little body of his
and toss it in the water like lake junk.
But instead,
for whatever reason,
you go along with it.
So you know the rest of the story.
But really, I don’t think Peter says
to the guy, “Master, we have worked all night…”
He says…well, I can’t say what he says.
He says, “You,”
insert your favorite nasty adjective,
“You, (blank), we have worked our butts off
all night long and got nothing,
and you have the, blank,
to tell me where to throw my nets?
You, blankety-blank-blank,
chair-making blank!
Where do you get off
telling me my business?”
All that tiredness
has just pushed its way to the surface
like a bubble under pressure,
and ‘pop’,
it explodes all over Jesus.
But Jesus does not take the bait
and he does not get offended,
and he does nothing
but look at you sympathetically.
Then Jesus, without speaking,
picks up one end of the net
and hands Peter the other corner,
like you do with your partner or spouse
with a bedspread.
Peter, exhausted by his rant,
sighs, and then takes the corner of the net.
They heave it –
Jesus with earnest intention
and Peter with half-hearted resignation.
Almost immediately,
like a bass bites a lure,
the net heaves
and the boat rolls
and Peter and Jesus struggle
to regain their balance
and rock with the waves.
Did you ever have someone tell you something
that you strenuously disagreed with,
and when THEY turned out to be right,
you just fumed?
Remember that feeling?
Sometimes in that situation
we continue with our refusal to agree,
even though we KNOW they are right.
We hate ourselves for it,
because we know it is like a little kid
folding his or her arms across their chest
and holding their breath.
That little kid
lives in all of us –
we know it.
We can feel that little kid
make an appearance
at the most inopportune times.
I am guessing, or projecting,
that Peter was standing in solidarity
with his little kid inside,
when he tells Jesus to “Get away from me!”
Now in his story,
Luke makes it all okay:
Peter acknowledges his own
sinfulness,
and then they all go away happy at the end.
He has to tell the story that way
because he is telling people that story
so they will also follow Jesus.
The way it has been told,
that is what the story is about –
it is a metaphorical story intended to
deliver the audience
to a moment of personal decision
in which they say,
“Me too! Me too!”
And they raise their hands
and wiggle them in the air
and exclaim, “I want to be a fisher of men and women too!”
Luke has turned this story
into a motivational speech
and if the speaker tells it just right,
the audience is clamoring to sign up.
But I’m not buying it.
I’m the guy in the audience that says,
“Oh yeah, let’s hear what REALLY happened.”
Well, what really happened is that Mr. Zebedee,
the father of those boys,
was left
with a sudden labor shortage.
And Peter’s wife and kids
were left
with a sudden income shortage.
And in truth,
Jesus got three new recruits
who had divided loyalty
because they kept thinking about
where they should be
and what they should be doing.
And, if I am right about this,
when Jesus asked them to follow him,
he did not mean full time
and forever.
What?
Whoa.
Stop right there.
Wasn’t Jesus asking Peter, James and John
to give up everything else
and follow him
full time
and forever?
That is the usual story line, but really,
where does it say that,
even in the actual words of the story?
It does not say that –
that is the sermonic interpretation of the story
that has been preached ever since
the first days that the Jesus movement
became the Christian Church.
The way ‘we’ –
WE being preachers and religious professionals –
have told this story,
it is about becoming a
full time follower of Jesus,
forever.
We have made this story
about a singular,
personal commitment
to Jesus
as if he is the only truth, way, and light.
Follow him and be blessed,
or reject him and be cursed.
Either/Or.
We have made this story
into an Either/Or
decision
meant to motivate
or frighten.
If you want to be good instead of bad;
if you want heaven instead of hell;
if you want to be faithful instead of a reprobate;
then you will be like Peter
and the Zebedee boys.
But let’s be honest.
You and I are more like Mr. Zebedee
or Mrs. Peter and the kids,
stuck with the chores
and the bills.
If stories like this are to have any meaning
for us, then they simply
cannot really be categorical
up or down votes
as they have traditionally been interpreted.
Because let’s remember,
those who are doing the interpreting
have a professional bias,
and are deeply invested in you and me
and everyone else,
jumping up and yelling, “Me too! Me too!”
So we know what Luke’s editorial bias is:
He wants us to sign up
and follow Jesus
full time
and forever.
And we know what angle
the Church professionals are coming from:
They want us to sign up
and follow Jesus
full time
and forever…
and oh, by the way,
the Church is the current incarnation of Jesus.
But I have a different take on this story.
I am not going to tell you what my editorial bias is,
because I am not really sure what it is at this moment.
But I will warn you about this:
it is just one man’s opinion
and the Gospel asks YOU to form your own opinion.
In the end, you are responsible
for your own interpretation,
so whichever interpretation you listen to
it is only a starting point for your own.
So here is my take.
We may get skunked during the day.
We may work all night
and discover it was for nothing.
We may be dog-tired
and morose,
and angry and bitter.
BUT…
if we allow ourselves to get stuck there
we are in danger of missing
the big catch
waiting for us underneath the boat
at every moment we breathe.
I don’t think it is magic
or any kind of supernatural juju.
Instead, it is much more simple and direct.
The wisdom of Jesus,
which is a wisdom that came to him
through the ages,
just as it comes to us,
will give us access
to the catch below the boat
when otherwise we would have just
followed our tiredness
or bitterness
or frustration
and missed the opportunity.
Following the wisdom of Jesus,
which is indeed infused with the presence of God,
will give us a resource
or capacity
or perspective
that allows us to keep fishing
when everyone else has been skunked
and we don’t really even feel like trying any more.
You and I
may think we know more about
our own business than
God or Jesus or the other wise guys,
but the fact is,
most of the time
we have no idea
of the abundance that is swimming under
our own little boat.
The Inuit’s have an expression for it:
Riding a whale
while fishing for minnows.
Well, that what I think that story is about.
January 29, 10:30am (John Harris)
Here is the skinny on this funky little story about Nehemiah and Ezra...
Download
Full Text
“I am in love with life,
the sun, the howling of mountain winds,
the storm, the clap of thunder…
the promenade of the snails
after the rain…” (From a Julia Esquivel poem)
I am in love with life too.
I am.
Sometimes it is so sweet
you just want to lick your lips
and give thanks for the juiciness of it all.
Succulent, just like today’s reading
from the Book of Nehemiah.
What, you didn’t find it juicy
and sweet
and dripping with goo-gobs of gems?
You see, right there
is the biggest problem with the Bible.
It is not obvious.
It’s much more like Herbie Hancock
than Brahms -
or if you prefer,
more like Ani DiFranco than Beyonce.
The Bible requires interpretation.
It doesn’t just sit there on its own
like a garbage truck hogging the street.
So allow me to peel back the rind
on this lethargic and lumpy reading
from Nehemiah that John read
with such vim and vigor.
Inside is a juicy fruit
we should be astounded to encounter.
In fact, allow me to pique your curiosity
and tell you that this scene
from a rarely read book of the Bible
holds within it
something that changed the world.
That’s right,
that boring and confusing
glop of Bible
changed the history of human civilization.
And I am not using sermonic hyperbole!
I am not even stretching the truth,
which I have been known to do
from time to time
(as any good story teller must).
Here is the skinny
on this funky little story
about Nehemiah and Ezra.
Picture this scene.
A disparate remnant
of freed slaves
limps and hobbles back into their homeland
after more than a century of absence.
Of course, they have never actually been there before,
but they have heard about it all their lives.
It may be like your grandchildren
who hear about Buffalo
from your children
because they wax eloquently about what a great place
Buffalo was to grow up,
but the grandchildren have never actually been here.
So this ragtag group of ancients,
the only ones brave enough
to risk the harsh distance,
return only to find their once famous city
in rubble.
Maybe a few of the oldest among them
had any memory of the place –
and only early childhood memories at that.
The rest of what they know,
they know from stories passed on
from one impoverished and
poorly treated generation
to another.
All they knew before stumbling into the ruins
was that once,
once upon a time,
in a generations past,
they had had a magnificent homeland.
They had had a capital city
with an enormous and ornate temple
where all the people came to worship.
They had had a king,
and they had had farms
and they had had orchards
and they had had rivers
and they had had a pastoral life of goodness
that, in just five years,
vanished.
All of it destroyed,
and eclipsed from them by miles and miles
of forced exile.
I know this sounds like a bad movie,
but a dark and fearsome empire,
the Babylonian empire,
had crushed their army,
and stolen them away to another country
and enslaved them.
But now…
now generations later,
the Babylonian empire
was itself ground into the dust of history.
Now…
generations later,
a straggly group of poorly educated,
labor-hardened
and fiercely independent people
returned to the land they knew
only through the memories of elders.
Now…
a hundred years later,
when they returned
they found only rubble.
To be honest, not many came back.
Most of them stayed right where they had been taken
in captivity;
stayed where they were now
assimilated into a new empire.
Just a few came back,
returning with hope-gilded hearts
and an imagination to rebuild.
We all know the history of human migration,
no land remains uninhabited,
especially not good land otherwise surrounded
by more barren lands.
So the few who returned,
returned to a land they found occupied
by other people –
people with different languages
and unfamiliar customs
and strange gods.
The few who came back,
did not even speak their own ancient language;
they did not even know the language of their religion –
kind of like us who do not speak Greek.
So we need to stop the story right here
for just a moment.
This is something we do not think about
when we read the Hebrew Scripture
or tell the ancient stories of our religious ancestors.
They did not know how to speak Hebrew.
By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah
Hebrew was already a dying language.
Hebrew was not spoken among ordinary people
of Israelite descent,
it had become only religious language –
the language of ritual,
as Latin became to Roman Catholicism.
By the time the arrived back
in the land of their ancestors,
very few even understood Hebrew.
So now we can understand the scene depicted
in the first reading today.
Even though it seems remote
and dry
and terribly uninteresting on the surface of it,
this little story creates a lovely
cinematic image:
it is the very first reading of Torah
read to a gathering of strangers
amidst the rubble of Jerusalem.
After a century of exile, forced labor
and absence,
Hebrew is spoken in the place
where the temple once stood.
That image might give you a chill
if you have ever lost something you cherished
and then suddenly arrived
at a moment
or a place
or a time
you never expected to experience
ever again.
So there in the rubble
Ezra, a priest,
and Nehemiah, a lay person,
begin the task of re-educating Israel
and bringing back to life
a nearly dead religion
and culture.
Just think about that,
let it take hold of your imagination.
Take just a moment to think about
what we know of Judaism today.
All that it was,
and all that it would become over a millennium,
was hanging by a thread,
a fragile spider’s silk.
Ezra and Nehemiah
stand there telling the people
that the present moment is a time of joy,
an occasion for feasting and celebration.
Then, the story says, people weep.
Joy runs freely into the river of grief,
and they are mixed together into poignancy
by the currents of memory, relief and hope.
It could have been one of those moments
that Julia Esquevel’s poem captures,
when sweetness and poignancy
pucker your lips
with the juicy tartness of it all
and you exclaim,
“I am in love life.”
If we can imagine such a moment
through our own memories of gratitude,
when the grief of loss
has been overcome by relief and joy,
then we will understand
how moving that moment must have been.
There are few moments
in the history of civilization
that would come to have as much impact
as this one mythical moment
with Ezra and Nehemiah
in the rubble of Jerusalem.
That is because it was there,
beginning in that moment
or surrounding that moment,
or in some way connected to that moment,
that the idea for “The Bible”
was born.
Yes, the IDEA of a Bible
had a moment of genesis
and the actual pages grew out of an idea –
as most milestones in human history
can be traced back to an idea.
As one author has noted,
“…the idea
of a divinely inspired anthology of literature
that purports to declare
the universal will of God
is found nowhere
outside ancient Israel…”(Texts for Preaching, Cousar, Gaventa, McCann, Newsome)
In other words,
the very beginning of the idea of “the Bible”
is born in that moment
in the rubble of Jerusalem.
Of course, all of us here today
have had our hands on the Bible
for thousands of years.
We do not think of it as beginning
in a moment of time,
all of a sudden.
It just is, always has been.
But the Bible was an idea
before it was a book.
Remember,
what we know of as Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy,
Isaiah, Ruth, and all the rest,
were first,
before the Bible,
scraps of parchment and scrolls
littering the history of the ancient Near East.
Before they were in a book,
they were told and re-told
and delicately preserved on rough fabric
without the foreknowledge
that one day
they would all be brought together.
First, there had to be the imagination
that through events
and through the story of events,
God speaks.
The very idea of the Bible,
the idea that God would speak directly to a people
through an anthology of books,
only comes into existence
at this very late moment in Israel’s history.
It is at the moment Judaism
hangs over extinction
by the slimmest of threads,
that the idea of the Bible is born.
Centuries later, Christianity and Islam
would inherit this idea of a sacred scripture
through which God speaks directly to human beings.
And as we know,
whether we know anything else about the Bible,
human history has been totally influenced
for good and for ill
by the Bible,
and the idea of the Bible,
ever since Ezra and Nehemiah.
So this unassuming little description
that you likely found confusing and vague,
is actually one of the most stunning moments
in human history.
But wait!
There’s more.
Think about this.
Those people gathered around Ezra and Nehemiah
did not speak or understand Hebrew.
The oldest Biblical texts,
probably scraps and pieces of scroll,
were written in ancient Hebrew.
Ezra read the Hebrew to those people, and then?
Well, if they could not understand the language,
he had to translate it.
Into what?
Into Aramaic,
which was the language of the common people.
So the ancient text of Torah,
and the rest of what would become Hebrew Scripture,
had to be translated
in order to keep the religion
and the culture alive.
But remember,
there is no such thing as pure translation.
Translation always involves interpretation.
So, from DAY ONE of the Bible,
it has been interpreted.
Openly interpreted.
You see,
what immediately sprang up
after the Exiles returned to the land of Israel
from their captivity in what is now Syria,
was an Aramaic interpretation
that explained the meaning
of the original Hebrew text.
In the modern world when we think of the Bible,
we think of a text –
of words ordered and numbered
and headed by subtitles or chapter headings.
But in the ancient world,
when as the Bible was evolving
it was more sermon than text.
It was Ezra and Nehemiah
and others who followed them,
expounding on the original meaning
of stories or texts,
some of which no longer existed.
So the Bible,
in the beginning,
was sermon more than text.
And actually,
a great many sermons and sermon ideas
got embedded into the Bible
that today we think of as the verses of text.
For more on this, Google “Targum”
I know you may not think this has anything to do
with anything that matters,
but it does.
In the 20th century,
somehow
some Christians
got the crazy idea
that the Bible was literally
the ‘words’ of God.
Somehow
some people
become obsessed and obsessive
about the actual words in the Bible
and imagined that the words themselves
contained God like some magical Genie in a bottle.
But the words in the Bible,
before they were anything else,
were actually parts of sermons –
the words are embedded
in interpretation of words.
What we have in the Bible is
layer upon layer upon layer upon layer
of interpretation
of the ancient words
that were translated
from very ancient texts.
So instead of a treasure trove of God’s words,
the Bible is a box of highly interpretive renderings
about what the translators-preachers-teachers
thought was the meaning
of the original text.
If you have followed me so far,
what I am saying is that
the Bible itself is sermon.
Okay, hang in here with me just a little longer.
Zoom ahead 450 years…
from Ezra and Nehemiah
to Jesus.
We just heard a little story
about Jesus going home
to teach and preach
in the synagogue where he grew up.
You know as well as I do,
that is a tough gig
no matter who you are
or where you are from.
Luke imagines Jesus returning to his home synagogue,
which was likely not in a building
but an outdoor gathering place
set aside for worship.
Once there, he reads from a scroll.
What we need to realize is that Jesus
is NOT doing
what we do here on Sunday morning.
He is not READING,
word for word
from an Aramaic translation
of the Hebrew text,
the way we read
word for word,
from an English translation
of a Greek text –
which is the langauge our Bible is translated from.
Instead, what Jesus is doing
is offering a free-style rendering
of Isaiah’s prophetic poetry,
and saying what he thinks it means.
But get this.
If modern New Testament scholars are correct,
Jesus couldn’t even read –
in Hebrew or otherwise.
What Jesus is doing
in this little story from Luke,
is what others like him would do at the synagogue:
Stand up and offer from memory,
what he had been taught to memorize from the Bible;
and then,
he would sit down to preach.
He would sit down
and tell them what he thought it meant.
Here is what I hope we pick up
from these two stories,
the one from Nehemiah and the one from Luke:
The Bible is not a how-to book.
The Bible is not a precise instrument.
The Bible is not an exact translation.
The Bible is not anything permanent, universal or final.
What the Bible IS,
is a wide-open interpretive challenge. Period.
There are all kinds of reasons
that is a big deal.
The first and most obvious reason
is that no one owns the absolute truth
about the meaning of the Bible…
because there is none.
There is no singular,
once and for all
meaning of anything in the Bible
because all of it is interpretive
and always has been interpretive.
When someone in high authority
in any denomination or tradition of Christianity
makes a claim that what they say
is authoritative,
without error,
or absolute in any way,
we can know that they just wrong;
and that such a claim
is not based upon what the Bible actually
claims for itself.
But I think that is obvious to most of us here.
The other reason this is a big deal –
to you and me
in the 21st century –
is that the history of Christianity
is so marred by authoritarianism
and Biblical fanaticism
and whacko, moralistic, religious imperialism,
that Christianity is losing credibility
as fast the Titanic lost ballast.
And I don’t know about you,
but I am in love with the heart of Christianity.
I am in love
with the very thing
that so many millions of people
now think is corrupt
and lunatic
and at the very least, irrelevant.
I get my hair cut by someone who thinks that.
I know, you didn’t think
I had to get my hair cut.
Mostly I go for the scalp massage.
Anyway, this wonderful soul
who cuts my hair
and is adorned with more tattoos
than I have ideas,
thinks that Christianity
is a dark blanket of mindless conformity
that deadens the imagination of all who suffer from it.
She is a musician by passion
and a hair cutter by trade
and we have delightful conversations
about the meaning and soul of life
but if she knew I was a priest
it might be the end
of those wonderful conversations.
But to tell you the truth,
that has been my experience for over thirty years.
There are a lot of people
with whom I have become friends
only because they did not know my profession
before we became friends.
I like to think that, if nothing else,
they got a glimpse of another Christianity
from the one they assumed.
I have no doubt
that the Christianity I am in love with
will survive.
I believe it will be like that small remnant
that heard Ezra and Nehemiah
reading Torah aloud
in the rubble of the once sacred temple.
I believe
that out of the rubble of Consumeristic Christianity
and Imperialistic Christianity
and Christian Moralism
that a remnant
will find their way back
to the heart of Christianity
pulsating in the memory of stories and sermons
from Jesus and from those who came before Jesus.
I believe that it matters
what you and I do with our faith;
and I believe that it matters
how you and I learn to talk about our faith;
and I believe that it matters
that through us, others can come to know
and love those stories and sermons,
and that they can come to offer up their own
interpretations
and there own sermons.
I believe that you and I have work to do
because the rubble is already piling up
and it is never too early to rebuild.
January 25, 7:00pm (John Harris)
Look, the wolf will never live with the lamb, at least not for long...
Download
Full Text
I am going to be short tonight – it’s too cold to sit for long.
Look,
the wolf will never live with the lamb,
at least not for long!
The wolf will live
but the lamb will be a short-timer.
The leopard won’t lie down with the kid,
except to eat it,
and the little child
will only lead the fatling down
the gullet of the lion.
To imagine anything else
is make-believe,
pure childish magical thinking
that can only end
it despair and hopelessness
when the realities of life
smash it.
A dream,
a true, divinely inspired dream,
is not offered as a literal mathematical formula
that we can point to and say,
“There, that’s what hope looks like!”
Isaiah, in pairing
wolf and lamb,
lion and child
together
is evoking an image
and pulling at our imagination
and saying to us,
“Come on, think bigger,
risk greater,
live larger.”
We have childish, magical thinking
because we do not allow ourselves
to dream big
about the stuff that really matters.
Can you imagine what was in
Martin Luther King’s mind
when he began?
Or any of those who elbowed
their way into the civil rights movement?
Do we imagine
that they began thinking to themselves,
“Oh, if only we could eat at the lunch counter?”
Or, “If only we could just ride in the front of the bus once?”
If that had been their dream,
we would be living now
in an even more
segregated
and even more unjust, racist
society than we do.
Imagine if the Women’s Movement
or the Gay Rights Movement
began with only the desire to be tolerated?
Those of us, who learned how to numb ourselves
with any one of a number of addictive
or compulsive behaviors,
do not know how to dream.
We know how to engage in magical thinking,
but allowing ourselves to experience
the extreme discomfort of anxiety,
fear,
or the dread of failure
is not something we risk that often.
We prefer the safety of magical thinking
and Disney dreams
to molding a true dream
out of the mud
of life-as-we-live it,
and so risk failing to accomplish
what we set out to do.
We dream of peace,
and justice,
and a kinder, gentler world;
but launching a dream
that would have us actually make it happen
is something we may not want or
know how to do.
And I don’t want to leave out
any co-dependents here!
Magical thinking
is like peanut butter and jelly
for those who are always
adjusting
to other people’s dysfunctions.
The art of co-dependency
is keeping everything
just like it is
because the monster you know
is less fearsome than
the one you don’t.
To be a dreamer of true dreams,
to be an Isaiah
or a “God-wanderer” –
which is what I call true dreaming –
is to have your feet
planted firmly in the mud
of every-day life
and as you go about drudging in it
one step at a time,
you also have your mind
open to sniffing
the scent
of a new direction.
God-wandering
is when we
expect
to stumble over God in the ordinary;
and we
expect
to be troubled by such an encounter
because we know
that to follow it
will get us into more discomfort
and maybe even danger,
than we have at the moment.
To be a God-wanderer
is to know
in our heart-of-hearts
that there is no place
we get to rest
for very long.
To be a God-wanderer
is to know
that change
is to faithfulness
as oxygen
is to breathing.
To be a God-wanderer
is to know
that when we get comfortable
we should expect to lose our place of comfort
because God has already
sent the winds of change our way.
Now, to be honest,
most of us do not like this one bit.
We pull the hat of delusion
over our brains
and pretend that what God wants
is for us to have it good.
We suck up
the delirious drug of fantasy
that says God
is all about our prosperity
and our comfort
and getting us what we want
for our birthday
or Christmas
or any of our many
little self-centered prayers.
What God wants
is a better world
for all human beings,
and for the Earth,
and all that God created.
We are a piece of that,
not the center of it.
Get it?
When our dream
takes us into the arena
of advocacy
and battle
for a better world,
a sustainable Earth,
and helping to bring
and nurture
wellness
and recovery
and loving-kindness…
then our own comfort
and our own safety
and our own success
and our own prosperity
is not the criteria
of a dream.
Magical thinking
and wishful thinking
are all about how good it is going to be FOR US
when our ship comes in,
or our woundedness is fixed,
or our partner is acting the way we want him or her to act.
The true dream,
evoked by a life of God-wandering,
has at its center
the vision of a better world,
and a life that creates and nurtures that better world
which is…the world GOD dreams of.
January 25, 10:30am (John Harris)
Miracles can be somewhat problematic for many of us.
Download
Full Text
Miracles can be somewhat problematic for many of us. I mean, what rational thinking person accepts things that don’t make sense? This miracle just doesn’t make any sense!
We can explain away the healing miracles, the religious leaders were the doctors of the day. We have split them up these days … can you imagine a priest setting a broken arm or a doctor baptizing with water? Actually, I can, but they are separated into two distinct specialties today but back then they were one and the same. So, we could explain the healing miracles away as part of the care given much like a medicine man might.
The bible is full of miracles; they pop up all over the place, not just the New Testament either. Moses parts the red sea, Joshua stopped the sun in its path. It can be hard to rationally accept some of the stories at face value.
Miracles like walking on water might be explained away as symbolic or metaphorical. The feeding to the thousands can be explained as everyone sharing what they had. But if we follow this path we begin to sound like the Egyptians dealing with Moses. God sends Moses down and gives him signs like the staff that turns to a snake. Well the Egyptians do that too. They don’t see the miraculous at all. Time after time, Moses pulls out a miracle from God and the Egyptians counter.
Are miracles magic? My father once told me “we don’t do magic son; there is mystery and miracles but we don’t do magic”. So what is the difference?
I have a friend that does these really neat magic tricks. He showed me how one was done and then when he did it again, I still couldn’t catch it; Even when I knew what he was doing. Magic is about misdirection, sleight of hand, creating illusions. I don’t think that is what the miracles in the bible are about so I concede to my father that it’s not magic.
Mystery now that’s a bit different. We do mystery here every week at the Eucharist. Mystery is that which we are aware of but do not fully comprehend. Now whatever God is for you, if that understanding is of a power that is greater than you, then how can you fully comprehend it? We can see evidence of God’s love for us and it is beyond our capabilities to understand why. Why does God love us so much that he was willing to die for us?
Even basic questions are a mystery, why are we here? Why is there life? Part of what drives us here, I think, is precisely that, there is mystery and we don’t have the answers.
Miracles are a different thing altogether. While we might be able to explain away Jesus restoring sight to the blind there isn’t an easy way to do that with the transformation of water into wine.
This miracle isn’t a teaching lesson say about the power of faith. You can shake it, poke it, prod it, and it just won’t open up to reason. I mean, Jesus made a lot of really good wine for a group of people that were already drunk! Where is the rationale in that?
I would like to suggest that there is another way. There is a way to open up this story for us; a key that is different than the one we usually use to open up the world around us. It’s not reason, rather if we approach this from the Holy Spirit, from a spiritual place, we can be drawn into it and something new begins to be revealed.
Put ourselves into the large containers made for purification. Our tears, our pain, our very selves are poured into those jars. Imagine all your sorrows, all your anguish and tears as water being poured into the stone jars by where Jesus is standing. As his mother says, do whatever he tells you. Jesus can and will transform them into fine wine. Jesus can and does transform us, almost off handedly. Allow yourself to be transformed, have faith, not in reason, but in the power of the savior to give new life. We don’t have to know where it comes from, we don’t have to know how it happens; we can be transformed.
Do you see miracles in your life? We might know all the mechanics of how a baby is made but anyone that has witnessed a birth can testify to having seen a miracle. Farmers till the soil and plant seeds but they don’t make them grow. Doctors set bones but they don’t cause them to mend together.
Just as the farmer doesn’t cause the plant to grow, our whole lives are similar. We do what we do, dream the dreams we dream, but what comes up in our lives is beyond our power. If we want to be transformed by the living God in our lives, we must first be willing; we must till the soil and do what is in front of us, but surrender the results to that which we cannot ever understand.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Junior had no idea where his work would go. He tilled the soil, did the work that was in front of him to do and look at what happened. The transformation that occurred has reached across the whole country and beyond.
Jesus was about bringing the kingdom of God here for us to see. This isn’t a story about being a good Christian so you can play all day in heaven after you die; this is a story of bringing new life into our lives here, today. We too can help bring on the transformation if we are willing to till the soil, pour the water into the jars, do as God would have us do.
So I would conclude by saying that Miracles are real, even, or maybe especially when they don’t reveal themselves to our normal way of thinking; changing water into wine of all things.
January 15, 7:00pm (John Harris)
The religions with God at their center have also largely sculpted God from our own human image – mirroring that beautifully fascinating story in the Book of Genesis about how God creates us in God’s image.
Download
Full Text
The religions with God at their center
have also largely sculpted God
from our own human image –
mirroring that beautifully fascinating story
in the Book of Genesis
about how God creates us in God’s image.
It is not because of something heinously
egotistical about the human character
that we create God in our own image,
but because
we do have certain limitations.
We cannot help but be anthropomorphic –
we have no choice
but to see the cosmos through human eyes.
Even when we see through our imagination
it is still the human imagination.
We feel the textures of life
through our fingertips,
and we cross the wind with the bow
of our beautifully human bodies.
We hear the music of life
blown upon the whisper of air
riding like a fairy upon the rippling curvatures
of the human ear.
We taste the bitter and the salt,
the sour and the sweet
upon luscious lips opening to wet human tongues.
We smell undulating aromas and scents
arising from ocean and soil,
rain and sweat,
food and refuse
all pouring through the portals of the human nose.
We see color, the very currency of life,
and we perceive distance,
and we behold the human face
with these glassy orbs of the human eye,
giving and receiving as they do –
human love.
So how could we not imagine
that God is somehow shaped in human form,
or ever encounter that God
outside of the glorious island prison of the body?
If fish can imagine God,
then surely it is an exquisitely streamlined
and magnificently colorful fish god.
If frogs perceive God at all,
then surely theirs are long-legged, froggy gods.
And if ever a naked-mole rat
encountered the holy,
it came to them in pink-skinned bare nakedness.
My point is this:
ever since we got so smart with numbers
and particles
and genomes,
we lost a certain poetic license
we enjoyed during our former ignorance.
Now we pooh-pooh anthropomorphism
as antiquated thinking
and as embarrassingly primitive.
How could we ever refer to God
in masculine or feminine pronouns again?
How could we ever, with any self-respect,
think about God in human terms?
Never mind that Michelangelo masterpiece
with two fingers
extending from naked bodies
desperately trying to reach intimacy.
We can no longer fathom
or tolerate such paternalism,
such human-centric imagination.
But out here in the 21st Century
Post-modern galaxy,
it is a lonely and sad existence
we have imagined for ourselves.
For we have sworn off a connection with God
through what we know best:
the human form,
the human mind,
and the human touch.
What else can we do
but imagine God
and the cosmos through human eyes,
and EXPERIENCE God in
lusciously physical, embodied splendor?
If we give up knowing God
through what we know –
our hopelessly sexual,
gendered,
needy
bodies –
we really, truly
must give up knowing God.
But wait!
We could take all that we know about the universe
and say to ourselves,
“Gee, if God is the creator of all of this,
perhaps all that we see
reveals something about the nature
of the creator?”
And that would be a reasonable, logical thought.
Something of God is in the flood and the earthquake
and the prairie fire that both burns and reinvigorates life.
Something of God is in any, and every, eco-system
that reveals an amazing interdependence
between competing creatures
both large and microscopic.
We can look around and imagine
that the cosmos is sacramental –
an outward and visible sign
of God’s life-giving
and unseen presence.
AND…
in looking at all of that –
from the sub-atomic
to the gastronomic
to the entropydic –
we would also be looking
through human sensory organs.
We would be interpreting
through human thought-processes.
We would be limited
in what we see and perceive
by human limitations.
Everything we see,
even if we are looking through the mechanisms of science,
is viewed through our anthropomorphic lenses.
So why not take a look at ourselves,
and the universe,
and at God,
through the poetic eyesight
with which we were blessed?
Why not use
the full range of our senses
and the full range of our imagination?
Why not use reason and logic
braided together
with imagination and sensation?
What not?
As the Sufi says,
“In an insect’s wing is an ocean of life,”
which also means
that in your slowing breath
God sings a thousand songs.
So…
I guess what I am suggesting
is that we pry open our
21st century
secularized and
highly sophisticated thinking;
and come down off our high horse,
and get down and play in the mud
of our experience;
and mix it up
with a lot of very human-centric
kinds of imagination.
Get down,
get basic,
get elemental,
get primitive,
get very poetic
and human
even with God.
Bring God a little closer.
Put your tiny little fingers
in that massive hand
of a God that has holds a universe or two.
Place your beautiful face
right in between those massive
celestial breasts
and say “Amen.”
Cuddle up, whisper out loud,
and bring God humanly closer.
It’s just an exercise.
It’s just imagination.
It’s just poetry.
But heck,
so often we live into what we imagine.
So tonight,
I invite you to light a candle in prayer –
a kind of quiet little invitation to God,
who is looking over your shoulder
hoping like a teenage wallflower,
that you will be the one
…who wants to dance.
January 09, 7:00pm (John Harris)
I have to confess that I have a split personality when it comes to talk of spirituality. Part of me gives assent to the fluffy ideas of soul and spirit and transcendence of the Self into a greater Source of Life and Being. But another part of me lives in the mud, and scoffs at such talk as pie in the sky.
Download
Full Text
I have to confess
that I have a split personality
when it comes to talk of spirituality.
Part of me gives assent
to the fluffy ideas
of soul and spirit
and transcendence of the Self
into a greater Source
of Life and Being.
But another part of me
lives in the mud,
and scoffs at such talk
as pie in the sky.
I have meditated and engaged in centering prayer
since I was 19 years old,
and I have participated in numerous
religious rites
and spiritual encounters,
and I have seen and witnessed
things I would probably not talk about in public.
At the same time,
I have listened to my own
internal rhetoric fly the coop
and soar out beyond
not only the believable
but the true,
in pursuit of a desired security
and knowledge
that is not within reach
of any human being.
So, like you, I suspect,
I know the flighty and ungrounded
part of me that pretends to know more
than is possible to know;
and at the same time,
I know that part of me that is
cruelly skeptical
and tethered to reason
like underwear to a wedgie.
In the end,
neither one is very helpful
but, in the end,
both are with us…to the end.
The question is,
what bidding or lead can we trust
when it comes to imagining
the soul
and the spirit
and the residual presence of the holy
within us?
The answer resides
in the IMAGINATION
because spirituality is always,
to some degree,
the act of imagination.
I have a very graphic
and earthy image
in which my spiritual imagination
is grounded.
It is one that has been with me
for decades,
but made both real
and surreal
by a trip to Tanzania.
I had the privilege of traveling the Serengeti Plain
and Ngorongoro Crater,
and seeing in person
what I had watched on television for years.
You have probably seen this a hundred times
on one of the 50,000 useless channels
that comes with cable television,
but it never ceases to amaze me
as an example of how the Creation
is balanced delicately upon the pin of interdependence.
In the Serengeti plain
that traverses the borders of
Tanzania and Kenya,
in East Africa,
the Great Wildebeest Migration
has been going on since well before
Christianity or Judaism
were even a gleam in God’s eye.
Now close your eyes
and just try to imagine this scene:
a million and a half Wildebeest -
one million, five hundred thousand Wildebeest,
migrating clockwise
in a massive eighteen hundred mile circle
for twelve months of the year.
But it is a migration with a purpose.
It all evolves around grass.
The Wildebeest’s eat the long, rough grass
found in the Serengeti and along the migration trail.
But following the million and half Wildebeest
are 200,000 Zebra
who can only eat the grass after the Wildebeests
have chewed off the tops.
And following the Zebra
are half a million Thompson’s Gazelle
who can eat the same grass
but only after it has been tenderized
by the Wildebeest and Zebra
trampling it.
Another two or three HUNDRED thousand
assorted herbivores
insert themselves into the migration
wherever makes sense for their digestive needs.
But wait!
This cast of millions
includes thousands of meat-eaters too.
Predators stationing themselves along the route
or following the herds all along the way,
and culling the sickest and slowest of the prey.
And scavengers too,
and parasites,
and microbes,
and unseen soil biology
thick with activity connected to,
and utterly dependent upon,
the Wildebeest.
All of this activity,
and all of these relationships
revolving around grass
that can be eaten by one
and shared by all
simply because it gets beaten down
and trod upon
by the one.
It is a freakishly simple
and yet awesomely complex prism of our own
relationships.
Think about the Serengeti
as an amazingly spectacular example
of a Cosmic truth
that is present
in every moment,
and every place,
and with every breath
that is taken anywhere
on Earth:
we are utterly,
completely
dependent upon one another.
For me,
this simple but exquisitely complex truth
IS spirituality.
The most popular ideas about spirituality
have to do with beliefs –
beliefs about heaven and hell
or reincarnation
or karma
or blessing
or Salvation
or ‘Adl
or Samsara
or Adab…
theological ideas
about what God thinks or wants or does.
To me
the Wildebeests of the Serengeti
are the image of what spirituality is.
In other words,
spirituality is the matrix
that holds it all together.
It is not a category of life,
it is the web,
the matrix
of all life
that makes it work or not.
When we live within that matrix,
even when it means we get eaten or trodden upon,
we are living spiritually.
When the way we live
destroys that matrix
or cuts holes in it
or otherwise imagines
that we are individuals
unrelated to the people and lives around us,
then we are living decidedly UNspiritual lives.
We can argue about
the best word for UNspiritual,
but that would be a distraction at the moment.
So…that’s all I got.
I invite us to come forward
and light a candle to the matrix,
to the web
that is holding us all together
even now.
January 09, 10:30 am (John Harris)
Do you remember this story from a few years ago? It was about a fifty year old man from Harlem who jumped onto the subway tracks in an effort to save a stranger.
Download
Full Text
Do you remember this story
from a few years ago?
It was about a fifty year old man from Harlem
who jumped onto the subway tracks
in an effort to save a stranger.
The incident began
when the man from Harlem
and his two young daughters
witnessed a stranger
writhing on the floor with an apparent seizure.
The Good Samaritan used a pen
to keep the man from biting or swallowing his tongue.
Then the man with the seizure seemed better
and started to get up
only to fall over the edge
of the train platform
and down into the track well.
The poor fellow,
already disoriented from the seizure
was desperately trying to climb out
of the track well when
the headlights of an on-coming train
flashed through the station tunnel.
In a split-second decision,
the man from Harlem
jumped down onto the tracks
and pounced on top of the flailing man
in hopes the train would Passover them both.
They both survived without serious injury.
When asked what could conceivably
motivate someone to risk his life like that,
the man from Harlem said,
he did not want his two young daughters
to witness that man’s awful death.
It was fidelity
to the love of his daughters,
to love them no matter what,
that compelled him to jump in front of a moving train.
It was the thought of his daughters
beholding, in awful detail,
another human being torn apart
limb from limb and
blood soaked concrete,
which compelled the father to act.
In other words,
actual love (for his daughters)
transformed theoretical love (for a stranger)
into action.
Note to self:
It is not until we see
the direct link
between those we know and love
and all the others
we care about in theory,
that the world begins to change.
In order for you and me
to be God’s true agents of change in the world,
we need to experience one of two things.
Either we come to see
that the fate of those we know and love
is inextricably connected
to all those strangers
who live at the margins of our lives,
OR
we actually enter into relationship
with those strangers.
Either we see and feel the link
between our flesh and blood
and the flesh and blood of strangers,
OR
we actually connect with those strangers.
Until one or both of those things take place,
our love is theoretical
and our talk is cheap.
Frankly, that is what baptism is in a nutshell:
entering into relationship
with strangers,
and knowing that we have
a direct relationship
with those who live on
different margins from our own.
Now I know the popular misconception in Christianity
is that baptism is about what we believe;
that baptism is some kind of an equation
composed of doctrinal ideas
that add up to having the right belief.
But that is not Christianity,
as it is understood in our tradition,
(which, by the way, is why I am an Episcopalian).
Rather, baptism is about relationships
we allow ourselves to enter into, and
that make us dangerously susceptible
to risky behavior.
Baptism is about the relationships
we allow ourselves to fall into
that cause us to feel oddly wedded to strangers.
Take that peculiar little story from Matthew.
Now that story gets thrown into a blender
with Luke’s birth story,
as if it is about the same thing.
Those that came to the last night of Café Trinity
before Christmas,
got the scoop on how we have corrupted
Luke’s and Matthew’s birth stories
by acting as if they are the same story
told for the same purpose.
They are not,
and they have wildly different punch lines.
But that is for a sermon on another day.
Suffice it to say,
this story we call “The Epiphany”
is a dark little tale
about subversion and revolution
and infanticide and oppression.
But at its core
is a very accessible
and human story
about three privileged and insulated adults
reaching across miles
and ethnicity
and class
to enter into relationship
with total strangers.
Take away the miraculous elements
such as floating celestial omens,
and what we have is a story about
people of deep faith
engaging in extremely risky behavior
because they understand that their lives
are inextricably connected
to the lives of people
living on an entirely different margin of society.
Just look around here,
look around the pews
at the people who are here with you.
Rich, poor;
Straight, Gay, Lesbian;
highly educated and lightly educated;
former Roman Catholics,
former Evangelicals,
folks with no church background
even some Episcopalians.
Here, together,
some of us having formed deeply
significant relationships
in which we are conservative
and moderate and liberal.
Some of us here, together,
have very New Age spiritual views,
while others quite traditional Christian notions,
and still others, highly progressive Christian beliefs.
Westside, Eastside, suburban, exurban, South Buffalo,the Old First Ward…we live all over.
By being here,
by connecting to this place
and this people,
we are forming a relationship
that links our spiritual well being
with people quite different from ourselves --
we are making ourselves vulnerable,
in other words,
to becoming inter-dependent
with people who are not just like us.
That is a dangerous thing to do
because it will change us.
And yet,
that is exactly what Baptism demands from us.
Like the man from Harlem,
baptism places us in harms way
because it connects our own destiny
and the well being of those we love,
with strangers.
If we take very seriously the Christian idea
of “Incarnation”,
of Jesus,
then we understand that God
has become vulnerable
by entering into relationship with us.
The punch line of Matthew’s story,
is embedded in those three privileged and insulated Wise Men
making themselves vulnerable
by searching out
and entering into relationship with Jesus:
God, in other words,
somehow
makes godself vulnerable
by entering into relationship with us.
I don’t know that we understand
the particulars of that vulnerability,
but we can understand the principle of it.
We understand it in principle
because we experience it ourselves
when we enter into relationship
with those who live on the other margins of society
from the ones we occupy.
Let me get a little more graphic, cinematic even.
You have probably seen this a hundred times
on one of the 50,000 useless channels
that comes with cable television,
but it never ceases to amaze me
as an example of how the Creation
is balanced delicately upon the pin of interdependence.
In the Serengeti plain
that traverses the borders of
Tanzania and Kenya,
in East Africa,
the Great Wildebeest Migration
has been going on since well before
Christianity or Judaism
were even a gleam in God’s eye.
Now close your eyes
and just try to imagine this scene:
a million and a half Wildebeest -
one million, five hundred thousand Wildebeest,
migrating clockwise
in a massive eighteen hundred mile circle
for twelve months of the year.
But it is a migration with a purpose.
It all evolves around grass.
The Wildebeest’s eat the long, rough grass
found in the Serengeti and along the migration trail.
But following the million and half Wildebeest
are 200,000 Zebra
who can only eat the grass after the Wildebeests
have chewed off the tops.
And following the Zebra
are half a million Thompson’s Gazelle
who can eat the same grass
but only after it has been tenderized
by the Wildebeest and Zebra
trampling it.
Another two or three HUNDRED thousand
assorted herbivores
insert themselves into the migration
wherever makes sense for their digestive needs.
But wait!
This cast of millions
includes thousands of meat-eaters too.
Predators stationing themselves along the route
or following the herds all along the way,
and culling the sickest and slowest of the prey.
And scavengers too,
and parasites,
and microbes,
and unseen soil biology
thick with activity connected to,
and utterly dependent upon,
the Wildebeest.
All of this activity,
and all of these relationships
revolving around grass
that can be eaten by one
and shared by all
simply because it gets beaten down
and trod upon
by the one.
It is a freakishly simple
and yet awesomely complex prism of our own
relationships.
Think about the Serengeti
as an amazingly spectacular example
of a Cosmic truth
that is present
in every moment,
and every place,
and with every breath
that is taken anywhere
on Earth:
we are utterly,
completely
dependent upon one another.
Now, the difference between us,
who have baptism as an option,
and Wildebeest and Zebras that do not,
is that they do not need to remember!
They have no idea
about the relationship between their munching
on the grass
and a Cheetah munching
on them.
They do not need to know it
in order to do it,
but we do.
We imagine that we are
self-sufficient,
terribly unique
and uniquely wonderful
little creatures
that have nothing in common
with those who do not look like us,
or act like us,
or think like us.
But in fact,
we are all on the same migration –
you and me and all those strangers.
We are just as connected to,
and dependent upon,
people we do not know
and may never want to know,
as the Wildebeest and Zebra and Cheetah
are dependent upon each other.
Baptism
is our reminder.
We are one in God;
and because of God
and with God,
we are one.
There is no “I” in baptism
it is all “We”
because there is no “I”
in God’s creation;
it is all “We”.
The “I” is an illusion
because we do not have very good vision,
and the connections between us
fade into the background
as we look out upon the world
from our very egocentric places.
We think it is all about us
but Serengeti and Baptism
are lenses
that bring it back into focus
so that we can see clearly
and remember
we are directly,
and deeply
and utterly connected.
Note to self:
It is not until we see the direct link
between those we know and love
and all the others we care about in theory,
that the world begins to change.
So we are bringing Paris and Brayden
into relationship
with a global community --
with people we do not know,
and people we may not agree with,
and people we may not even like;
but bringing them into community
with people
we know for certain,
with whom are spiritually interdependent.
It is scary
and risky
and it is acting like God acted
when God became vulnerable
in relationship with us.
Amen.
January 04, 10:30pm (John Harris)
I mean to get slightly personal this evening, and share with you a letter I wrote that I might never send, but one that I wrote to help me find Christmas this year.
Download
Full Text
Good evening,
and Merry Christmas
on this quiet night,
in this sacred space,
here in this moment of peace
at the eye of the cultural storm.
If you haven’t already,
I encourage you to let go of the tension,
allow your body to settle into the pew
as best you can,
maybe even close your eyes for a moment,
and take a nice, slow, deep breath.
Just take a moment
to bring yourself fully present
and drink from the stillness that is here tonight.
I mean to get slightly personal this evening,
and share with you a letter I wrote
that I might never send,
but one that I wrote
to help me find Christmas this year.
It is to a friend of mine,
someone who helped me a great deal,
in a way I can never repay.
Several months ago
he had a massive stroke
and the last I knew,
he still could not communicate well.
He lives in another place
and so I have not been able
to tell him the things I wish I could,
which mostly have to do with gratitude.
His name is Karl,
and Karl is a deeply spiritual man
though I don’t think he has much use
for organized religion any more.
In fact, he was once a Baptist minister,
having grown up in the Deep South.
He left my profession for another one
sometime in his mid-life
and, though I do not know for certain,
I intuit that he still bears some wounds
from his early church experiences.
That makes Karl like a lot of other people,
especially a lot of people
who find their way here, to Trinity Church.
Well Karl helped me remember
what hope is
at a very critical time,
and he did it without pretending
there wasn’t darkness all around.
And so tonight,
I share my letter to Karl
about Christmas,
about a reflection of hope
burning at the center of our story.
Dear Karl,
Uncertain that your wife or a friend will
read this to you, I write it anyway,
in thanksgiving
for our special friendship,
and in the belief
that nothing that we do
is without benefit
somewhere
and elsewhere
even where we might least expect it.
It is unclear to me
the extent of your access to the news
and events of the world around us
but it has been bleak.
A hurricane named Sandy ripped
open a gash
along the East Coast,
and while people were still cleaning up,
in a school named Sandy Hook,
in a little Connecticut town,
twenty children were gunned down
along with adults who tried to protect them.
These tragedies are just the tip
of the iceberg,
as horrendous news
from Syria and Kenya and the four corners
of the earth,
poke the surface of our consciousness
whenever the news media or bloggers
need to keep our attention riveted to them.
Sometimes, Karl,
there seems to be no more padding
and each new knock or bump
goes to the bone.
I know the birth narrative of Jesus
has lost power for many people today,
sentimentalized beyond recognition,
and made into Hallmark Card sound bites
to sell candles and poinsettias.
But I thought of you, Karl,
and I thought that what I wish I could give
you for Christmas
is the power of our story back.
Remember how it begins?
“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus…”
They called him Emperor Augustus.
He had more titles too:
“Savior”
“Prince of Peace”
“Lord”.
It was no a coincidence that Jesus was hailed with the same titles as the Emperor.
Why didn’t they teach us that in seminary, Karl?
Can you imagine the humor of it?
An obscure
illiterate peasant,
a Jew not a Gentile,
a Judean not a Roman,
a nobody not a supreme commander,
and they give HIM
the same titles as
the emperor of the world!
It is no accident that our story,
the Christmas Story,
begins with that line:
“In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus…”
Because our story
was told in the Emperor’s face,
and it was meant to be heard in contrast
to the notion that the Emperor
was the ‘August’ one,
and against the idea
that the emperor was the chosen one.
I feel certain you see it too, Karl,
even though you may be a little hardened to it.
There is something about this story of ours,
this Christmas Story,
that not only tickles us on the inside,
it even offers a little padding for us
on the outside.
This story of ours,
this Christmas story,
is an anti-empire story.
It is THE anti-empire story.
We see it in the script of
Star Wars,
The Matrix and
Lord of the Rings,
and in fact, those stories
are cut from the mold of the Christmas story.
This story of ours,
this Christmas story,
was told
by people huddled together
in the bowels of the imperial beast.
It was told
by people who lived on the lip of desperation.
It was told
by people that lived perpetually
on the verge of
indentured servitude or outright slavery.
This story was told
by people who got profiled
and thrown into prison without due process.
It was told
by people who lived on the ledge
of a dark precipice called the Roman Empire,
and into which
many of their family and friends fell
never to be heard from again.
It was told
by people who lived in rented apartments on the most burned out streets in Buffalo
or in tarpaper shacks in the Adirondacks.
This story,
this Christmas story of ours,
was told by people who had no padding;
and never had any padding.
They were people in circumstances
that forced them to always
live close to the bone.
I forget sometimes,
that we all live close to the bone
and that the padding is an illusion.
You helped me remember that,
and now, my friend,
I know you are living without padding
and close to the bone yourself.
I wish so much
that I could take that away somehow,
and give you back
a voice
and hands and legs.
All human beings live only
a split-second away from a tragedy
such as you now know,
or a darkness such as the one
you helped me escape.
But truly, many of our friends and colleagues
have enough padding
to cushion them from many of life’s hits –
at least economic ones.
And so we forget,
and in forgetting,
we no longer hear or feel
the power at the center
of this story of ours.
So I just wanted to remind you
about the people
from whom we first received our story,
this Christmas Story.
The people who told this story to Luke,
and to whom Luke conveyed it,
lived on the edge of tragedy
every single day of their lives.
And still,
and still,
and still they saw light.
They saw light in the midst of darkness
and they shared it with us
thousands of years later.
So how can we do anything less?
That light they saw in the darkness
was like a waft of music
into forced silence,
or a deep breath
into shallow lungs.
Do you remember what that light was, Karl?
I hope you have not forgotten.
We have to look deeply into the story
not on its surface.
Yes, there are baby’s born
in a cave or under trees or in rice paddies
every day somewhere in the world.
Yes, there are ogres and oppressors
who strategically and arbitrarily abuse those who live at the margins, or consider them
collateral damage to their more important aims.
Yes, there are hurricanes and maddening violence and devastating disasters
everywhere and every year.
Everyone can see the darkness.
Any fool can see tragedy and pain and
go around reinforcing anxieties about them.
But to see the light, even a small flame,
in the sometimes ferocious darkness,
only certain people can see that.
Only certain people
have the wherewithal to share what they know
about that light and about the source of that light.
Only certain people
can see the light that shines in the darkness
and can share it –
and so lift up hope
for those who cannot see it.
Karl, you are one of those people.
You are the light.
I am writing to you tonight
out of the darkness of the world all around,
the same way those ancient people
told Luke their stories about Jesus.
In the birth of a peasant child,
they saw an alternative
sprouting up in the darkness of empire.
They saw,
in a vulnerable,
marginalized,
and otherwise anonymous birth,
the making of a powerful reversal of fortunes.
Tonight, in you,
even now marred and hobbled by stroke,
I see reflected a light that makes known
a path through the dark.
The power of this story
is that it is NOT about a miracle.
It is NOT about a miraculous birth.
The power of this story
IS that it happened among the common,
ordinary people
in a world made bleak
by the abuse of power
and the stinginess of human greed.
It is NOT about a successful revolution,
but it IS about a subversive undertow
that destabilized
and corroded
an empire.
It is NOT about the kind of power
used for coercion,
but it IS about the kind of power
revealed in woundedness
and vulnerability
and even weakness.
This story IS about how the things
we try to pad ourselves with
to soften life’s blows
and live in the pretense of a gated life,
are the very things
that keep us from knowing
the light
that will allow us to see
when we are surrounded by darkness.
In a time when I saw only darkness,
you showed me how to uncover light
and follow that light.
You did not pretend that the darkness
does not exist;
you did not lull me into wishful thinking
that all endings are happy ones;
you did not promise that the light
would eliminate the dark.
What you did do,
which is what our story does,
this Christmas story of ours,
is point to the wounds
and the vulnerabilities
and the grief, and remind me that God is born
into the midst of them.
The promise is not of empire,
it is of ordinary presence
in the midst of darkness.
The promise is not of coercive power,
it is of wisdom with the power
to transform us from the inside out.
The promise is not of a cure for what ails us,
it is for the healing of what keeps us
from being well
in the midst of where we are in the moment.
You were, for me, Karl,
a light.
I pray this evening,
that you have such people with you now,
people who will remind you
that the light resides
even in the thing that now wounds you.
As always, Karl, thank you.
In peace,
Cam
Well, that is my letter to Karl,
and a reminder for me
that the light resides
not in the things we imagine
will pad us from danger,
but in the wounds
and bruises,
the vulnerabilities
and weakness
we most often seek to avoid.
The truth is,
you and I would much rather be
Emperor Augustus
than the child born in the manger.
And yet,
our healing
and our hope,
our transformation
and our vision…
are not on the throne that pads us
but in the thin straw
that keeps us close to the bone.
The people who first gave us this story
knew a lot about finding light in the darkness
and we have much to learn from them.
I invite you to take this story home with you
and keep it close for a few days;
and see if you can find your own life
reflected in it somehow.
Write your own letter to someone in your life
who has been that light in the darkness,
and see if you can find
the Prince of Peace
and the Light of the World
waiting for you
down close to the bone
in your own life where you live it.
And now, please remain seated
as we sing about that deeply subversive birth
so very long ago,
and yet taking place
right now
in your life
and mine.
January 04, 5:00pm (John Harris)
It is the, “Host” wafer. Whether it is actual bread as we use most weeks, or a wafer as we are using tonight, it is called ‘The Host’. The ‘Host’ of course, is Jesus.
Download
Full Text
First of all,
let’s thank the children and their parents
for their gift of a Christmas Pageant.
We also need to thank Holly, Jamie and Ann
who brought it together and made it possible.
Now, we are going to share “The Peace”
on our way to sharing Communion,
but before we do,
I want to take a moment –
as obvious as it may seem –
to say what it is we are doing here tonight.
Do you see this large round wafer?
When it is this size
it almost looks like a small pizza crust.
The name for this round disc of bread,
the one I hold up each week when I say,
“Alleluia, Christ our Passover has sacrificed for us”
is, “The Host”.
It is the, “Host” wafer.
Whether it is actual bread as we use most weeks,
or a wafer as we are using tonight,
it is called ‘The Host’.
The ‘Host’ of course,
is Jesus.
Jesus was the host when he gathered
his friends around him
at the Last Supper,
which was a Passover Seder.
And so, the first piece of bread we raise up
and break into pieces,
is symbolically, Jesus, the host.
But tonight, on Christmas Eve,
which is the beginning of the story instead of the end,
I want to invite us into another metaphor,
an added refraction of light off
the Host prism.
I would like to ask you to imagine this wafer
as a “portal”
as in a window.
This large, round wafer
is a portal
through which we see
the presence of God
in humankind.
So this is a window,
and we are used to thinking of Jesus as a portal,
and we even have a name for it:
“Incarnation.”
We claim that by looking at Jesus,
his teachings and his life and even his death,
we can see what the presence of God
looks like in human form.
But if WE can see God through this portal,
then GOD can see us.
And that is the reflection I invite us into tonight:
What does God see
when God looks back through the portal
and sees us?
When we look into the portal of Jesus,
we see our better natures;
and when God looks back at us
through the portal of the Host,
God sees is our full humanity.
God sees us fully as we are,
just like we are,
in our complete, unvarnished character.
And what we know,
from the story of Jesus’ baptism,
is that when God sees us in our fullness,
God exclaims,
“You are ‘Beloved.’”
That is the punch line,
and I could stop right there,
but I am afraid that if I stopped here,
you might not really get what I am laying down.
So give me just two more minutes of attention,
even though I know there are some squirming kids out there.
God sees our full humanity
and calls us “Beloved,”
in the same way we see a tiny infant and
are at one and the same time,
AWED by his or her utter sweetness,
but also AMAZED by his or her
utter and complete vulnerability.
Can you recall the last time you saw
or held a really tiny infant –
even a newborn?
Some people are even afraid to hold one;
for fear that somehow
they might inadvertently
hurt it or cause it damage.
In response to our full and
unvarnished humanity,
God coo’s
and calls us, “Beloved.”
Often, in response to seeing our full humanity
as reflected in the life of Jesus,
we shrink at our terrible neediness,
and at our obvious vulnerability.
There we are in total and sheer helplessness
in the presence of wolves,
tyrants, and
deranged killers.
We would really rather have a Hercules
than a Jesus;
a superhuman warrior to protect us
rather than an infant,
and later a victim of oppression.
But we have a ‘Beloved’ instead.
And you know what it is to be a Beloved?
Go back to beholding
that sweet, tiny infant for a moment.
That sweet, tiny, vulnerable infant
is nothing but a LOVE-MAGNET.
Holding an infant
is a one-way gaze of love:
we shower him or her
without expectation of any kind of return.
We get nothing from an infant,
other than the experience of holding or
suckling him or her.
We shower her with love,
and we want nothing more than to protect him,
and give him or her
whatever is necessary to thrive.
Whatever it is God sees
when God looks back at us
through the portal that is Jesus,
evokes the words,
“You are my Beloved.”
WE ARE, GOD’S BE-LOVED.
Break it down:
Be Loved.
Hey you, God says, be Loved.
That is all.
Be…loved.
Through the portal that opens a God-eye view
onto us silly, wonderful,
sad, horrific, beautiful and ugly
human beings,
comes a voice that says,
“Be loved.”
We need not return that love even;
we need only be nourished by it;
held by it;
loved.
Whether we are religious or skeptic,
spiritually aware or only rationalistic,
God sees us through that portal and
coos in utter awe,
“You are be-loved.”
If,
when all is said and done,
we want to engage in
the spiritual practice of Christianity,
then what we can do
is practice being like God.
I’m not kidding,
that’s what it is all about.
We practice being like God by
pouring out love on one another,
and sometimes even people we do not know;
practice the act of pouring out love
with no anticipation of return,
and as we do,
say, with our hearts
and with our minds,
and sometimes even with our words,
“Be loved.”
Be loved.
That is the meaning of Christmas.
That is what we are doing here.
It is a reminder that we are “Be-loved”
and that we can practice being like God
by the pouring out of such love on one another.
Be Loved.
Be Loved.
Please, be loved.
And…
the peace of the Lord be always with you.
January 02, 10:30 am (John Harris)
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Download
Full Text
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
~ T.S. Eliot ~
Ellen and John do not have to wait any more,
Madelyn Elizabeth was born this week.
But Brandi and Richard still have to wait,
wait and wait for their child to be born.
OUR wait is almost over.
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.
When I was a little kid
one of my three older sisters
could not stand to wait.
She would sneak into my room
before anyone else was up
and recruit me as a partner in crime.
I always had the feeling that she had
already gone downstairs before she woke me up;
but with me in tow
we would steal down the stairs into the living room
and fondle the stockings full of presents.
We did not dare approach the cache under the tree,
but somehow stockings did not seem too wrong.
We would open the one on top
and peek at it,
giggle,
and then re-wrap it
and carefully put it back.
I guess my other two sisters could wait,
or were just better sleepers.
Waiting comes harder for some than others.
One of the people with whom I had the privilege
of attending unto death,
taught me something about waiting.
She was the matriarch of a big family,
several generations,
socially important,
not only in that community
but in various circles across the country.
I knew her only in illness,
in the last six months of her life.
Perhaps it was that distance from everyone else in her life
that allowed us to get close.
Because she had money
she tried every kind of treatment there was,
medical as well as alternative medicine.
She even went away to another country
to try something that was not permitted in the States.
A Healer, who was also a friend of mine,
treated her throughout those last months as well.
Who knows whether all those efforts paid off
in some extra time
or a better quality of life,
I would not know how to judge such a thing.
But she died well; I do know that.
She entered Hospice,
which was a residential Hospice in that community,
and she was in a little cottage with its own entrance.
It was summer, and very pleasant.
Her children and grandchildren
and her friends and other family
could come and go without checking in anywhere,
and if you did not know she was dying,
you would have thought it was a family reunion
with lots of coming and going,
sharing of food and stories,
laughter and tears,
even arguments here and there
as they were a very boisterous and extraverted clan.
When she seemed to be getting weaker
I scheduled a bedside communion
with her husband, best friend, and children.
It was exceptionally intimate
and emotional
and an amazing moment of grace.
The next day,
in the afternoon, I visited her once again,
and she was hopping mad.
She was visibly irritated, maybe even angry.
Surprised, I asked what was upsetting her.
“I am alive!” she lamented.
She had said all her good byes,
had the perfect evening with everyone,
and by all rights,
she should have died the night before.
What, she wanted to know, was God waiting for?
Waiting was not one of her strengths,
but wait she did,
until she or God, or whatever it is
that sets the clock,
determined it was time.
She waited a couple more days as I recall,
and much more peacefully than that day of impatience.
WAITING,
when it is waiting for things beyond our control,
is a spiritual practice.
Did you catch that?
Waiting is a spiritual practice.
Often when we are forced to wait
we do something while we wait
rather than actually waiting.
And now that we have Smartphones,
iPads and Kindles,
we never have to wait
while we are waiting
ever again!
And yet,
waiting
as a spiritual practice,
means waiting without doing…
anything.
That makes some people want to crawl
right out of their skin.
Waiting as a spiritual practice
teaches us
how to listen,
how to see,
how to become aware of the subtlest shifts
in our thoughts and feelings.
Some of you have heard me talk about
Tom Whittle before,
a Native American who owned the land
in Southern Indiana
where I went to camp for several summers.
He would take us,
all pre-teen boys,
into the woods and drop us off
one at a time
so that no one was within hearing range
of anyone else.
And once stationed, we were to squat,
not sit, but squat and wait.
Each time we did it,
it would be for a little longer
so that our tolerance was extended.
And when he collected us up again,
we compared notes
on what we heard
and what we saw
and what we thought
and what we felt.
Each day,
our lists grew longer and longer.
Our capacity to listen,
to hear,
to open up to every twig, bird and bug around us,
to open up even within ourselves,
grew and grew and grew.
While God is in all things,
in every place and moment,
even Smartphones and iPads,
I am pretty sure that those instruments
and all the other activities we engage in
while we wait,
diminish our capacity to see
and experience
the presence of God in our midst.
Did you ever give up waiting?
Did you ever just stomp off
or hang up
or otherwise throw in the towel
and quit waiting?
It is that very frustration,
that irksome resentment that we are not being served,
or not getting what we are waiting for,
or not in control…
that hardens us.
It hardens us
to what is right there in the moment
with us.
The inability to wait without doing
reveals a spiritual Achilles heal,
one that deserves the practice of waiting.
That is why we have been observing Advent,
this little four-week season before Christmas.
But our wait is not over the day after tomorrow.
We will still be waiting.
We will still be waiting for things beyond our control.
We will still be waiting for healing,
for reconciliation,
for peace,
for simple understanding.
The day after tomorrow we will still be waiting
for prayers to be answered
and hope to be revealed
and grief to end.
The day after tomorrow we will still be waiting
for relationships to mend
and pain to subside
and our deepest aches to dull.
The more frantically we avoid waiting,
and the more manic we are in distracting ourselves
during the wait,
the less likely it is
we will hear
and observe
and experience
the very thing we have been waiting for
when it actually shares the moment with us.
Our best bet is to practice waiting.
In the practice of waiting
we begin to expand and enhance our receptors.
It does not matter whether it is waiting in line
at Dick’s Sporting Goods
or Wegman’s,
or something more sublime
like waiting for birth
or Communion
or death.
There is an intimate connection
between the ability to practice waiting
and access
to the deep well of hope
that resides within all of us.
The ability to wait without activity,
to wait without motion,
to wait without distraction,
enhances our ability
to apprehend authentic hope;
hope that is not tethered to outcomes
WE think should take place
or that WE insist are the only appropriate outcomes.
Rather, hope
that opens the window of perception
so that we can see God’s presence in outcomes
we least expected,
or outcomes we never courted.
Hope that is hinged to OUR own agenda
and OUR own predetermined outcomes
is in fact wishful thinking,
not hope.
Hope is a lens
that perceives God’s presence
and impetuous activity
on every horizon
and under every leaf
whether it is in our best interest or not,
and whether it conforms
to our expectations and values or not.
Hope is a lens
through which we see the holy
even when we are unsure of the outcome,
and even as we await outcomes.
The better we are at waiting,
the more often we will be able to access
and utilize hope
as a lens through which
to perceive and navigate
the world around us.
To practice waiting without doing
will enhance our perception
through the lens of hope.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
~ T.S. Eliot ~
And now, for the moment you have been waiting for,
the end of this sermon. Amen.
