C: Proper 26

Luke 19:1-10

I don’t know if you’ve even heard the expression “post-modern,” but it’s a term that has been cropping up more and more over the last several years. Those whose business it is to make wise and penetrating observations about the evolution of our culture have coined the phrase to describe the way people of certain generations tend to think. Post-modernism as a thought process is largely absent from what has been called the “World War II generation”—those who were children during the Great Depression. It begins to become visible among “Baby Boomers”—that is, my own generation, those born between 1946 and 1964. But in the succeeding generations—so-called “Generation X,” people who are now in their 30s—as well as what many refer to as “Millennials,” young people who are presently in their 20s—among these younger generations of adults, post-modernism is not only one visible thread in the fabric, it’s the dominant thread in the fabric.

Without taking the time to describe all the features of the post-modern way of thinking, let me just say this: People who are around my age and older are conditioned by a fairly large dose of scientific skepticism. Therefore we don’t naturally accept spiritual claims and spiritual assertions at face value. We tend to want to see some proof for what people say about spiritual reality. This is the “modern” way of thinking, and has been in vogue for about the past 300 years. The post-modern way of thinking, by contrast, is completely open to a wide range of notions and beliefs about spiritual reality. In fact, there seems to be no end to this openness. Post-modernism is accepting of just about any sort of spiritual claim, with the sole criterion of authenticity being that the person who makes the claim finds it useful or comforting or even perhaps just vaguely interesting.

So, the hallmark of the post-modern generations is a pervasive spiritual restlessness—a deep hunger for spiritual experience and a sense of purpose and direction in life, combined with a willingness to try just about anything. But at the same time, there seems to be a widespread difficulty in actually sticking with something for an extended period. All around us, there is this massive hunt for truth going on, but those who are chasing the truth seem to be alarmed by the possibility that they or anyone else might actually catch it! So often, the assumption seems to be that truth is by nature inherently difficult to find and hold onto.

But while the younger generations are spiritually restless, middle-aged and older Americans are, to a large extent, spiritually deaf and blind. We are heavily conditioned to value such things as personal independence and rugged individualism—the “I did it my way” philosophy of Frank Sinatra’s song. And, as I mentioned before, we are also conditioned to be “scientific” in our attitudes. It seems quite clear to us that any knowledge, any claim about truth—physical, emotional, or spiritual—any knowledge worth having results from, and only from, rigorous investigation. Maybe you’ve noticed how popular certain TV shows are that deal with crime scene investigation. The heroes of these shows are not street cops who rely on instincts and hunches based on years of experience, but, rather, science geeks who solve crimes in laboratories and surrounded by millions of dollars worth of scientific testing equipment.  Truth that can be had too cheaply doesn’t interest them. Only if it’s a scientific smoking gun is it worth taking to court. Oddly, then, for different reasons, these shows appeal both to modernists and to post-modernists.

There was once a fellow named Zacchaeus who was neither a modernist nor a post-modernist, but whose attitude combined both perspectives. St Luke the Evangelist tells us about Zacchaeus, and mentions two very salient facts about him: a) he was a tax collector, and b) he was short, noticeably shorter than the average adult male of his day. The first of these meant that he was considered beneath contempt, a social outcast. The second guaranteed that he was the object of a lot of laughing behind his back. Somehow, Zacchaeus got word that Jesus was going to be visiting Jericho, the town where he lived. He was determined to meet Jesus. It was really, really important to him to meet Jesus. So he did what it took to make that happen. He was willing to risk turning himself into a spectacle, a laughingstock. He climbed up into a sycamore tree along the route he figured Jesus would take, and edged himself out onto the branch overlooking the roadway.

Zacchaeus didn’t have the confidence that Jesus would even give him the time of day, let alone stop for a chat. It was up to him to make the encounter happen, if it was to be at all. Very often, people take a similar attitude in their relationship with God and God’s love. If the encounter is going to happen, they figure it’s up to them to make it happen. We flit from spiritual fad to spiritual fad. We try a little bit of this and a little bit of that, hoping that we might stumble across God in the process, just based on mathematical odds, if not our own wisdom and skill. In the end, though, we are swallowed up either by false pride for having “found” God on our own, or by despair for having failed to do so.

Fortunately, Jesus’ interaction with Zacchaeus shows us a different path. Indeed, Jesus’ route through Jericho does take him right under Zacchaeus’ perch. At that point, though, everything takes an unexpected turn. It’s time to think outside the box, to draw outside the lines. Not only does Jesus stop and chat with Zacchaeus, he invites himself home with Zacchaeus. “Zacchaeus get yourself down from that tree; I’m comin’ to your house right now!”  Zacchaeus had thought he was looking for Jesus. The stunning truth, however, is that it was Jesus who was doing the looking; Jesus was looking for Zacchaeus.

There is a tremendous lesson for us here, whatever generation we’re a member of. It demonstrates to us that God’s love, far from being merely passive and responsive, waiting for us to make the first move—it demonstrates to us that God’s love is proactive—seeking us and pursuing us and finding us. And God’s love is tireless; it even seeks out the “hard cases.” It’s easy to love cute little kids and sweet old ladies. But funny-looking tax collectors like Zacchaeus? Well, that’s a love worth sitting up and taking notice of.

We need to work a little bit to understand just how impressive it was that Jesus publicly announced his intent to invite himself over to dinner at Zacchaeus’ house. You see, Zacchaeus was not only a tax collector, and not only short, but he was also rich. And it would have been presumed that his gains were mostly ill-gotten. Now, Jesus has already established, earlier in Luke’s gospel, that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But, what does Jesus say about Zacchaeus? What does he say for all to hear? “Today salvation has come to this house…”  Wow! It sounds like a camel has just squeezed through the eye of a needle! It’s a veritable miracle, a miracle of God’s proactive love, love that doesn’t wait for us to seek it out, but, instead seeks us out, hunting us down relentlessly, and never giving up the chase.

What a blessing this is, my friends. God’s proactive love means that we can really rest spiritually. Of course, this is the complete opposite of the spiritual restlessness that consumes so many in the younger generations. It’s also the opposite of the spiritual blindness and deafness—a poisonous skepticism and callousness—that consumes so many in the older generations. When we come to terms with just how determined God is to love us, we begin to experience the truth of one of my favorite prayers from the Daily Office, from Morning Prayer on Thursdays, to be specific: “Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life, we may not forget you, but…” – and here’s the kicker – “…that we may not forget you, but remember that we are ever walking in your sight.”  To be “ever walking in [God’s] sight”—this is both a comfort and a challenge—sometimes, we would rather not be walking in God’s sight, right?—but even as a challenge, it’s a powerful bit of evidence of Divine love, love in which Jesus seeks us out and invites himself into our hearts, even as he invited himself to Zacchaeus’ home, love that we don’t have to climb any trees to find, and which we can never outrun. Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.

C: Proper 25

Luke 18:9-14

Jeremiah 14:1-10, 19-22

John Donne was a distinguished priest of the Church of England in the seventeenth century. He finished his career as the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But John Donne is probably best known as one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language. There is scarcely a high school literature student who has not run across the poem that talks about a church bell tolling to call the townspeople to a funeral, and contains the lines, “No man is an island, entire of itself ... ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

No one is an island, independent and self-sufficient. Even a professed hermit depends on other people to keep him supplied with food and water. We all live in a complex web of relationships. Some of our relationships are more important to us than others. These relationships that are important to us are the source of a great deal of anxiety over a lifetime. Will my parents be proud of my report card? Will the one I immediately fell in love with across a crowded room return my feelings?  Will my children still love me in spite of all the mistakes I make as a parent? Will my grandchildren want to visit me?  Will they want to go home? 

Each of us wants to get these crucial relationships right. We always want to know where we stand with the important people in our lives. Most of all, the majority of us, whether or not we would actually name it and express it this way, want to know where we stand with God. We have an innate sense that that’s one relationship it would be a good idea for us to get right.

Getting right with God. 

The New Testament’s word for “getting right with God” is ‘justification.’  We want to be justified, to stand in the right place, in our relationship with God. Now, in everyday talk, we usually use the word “justify” to mean “give a good reason for” or “make an excuse for”.  As the word is used in the Bible, though, a more helpful image is that of a “justified” margin on a type-written page. All the characters line up with one another down one side of the page—they stand in the right place in relation to one another. So, the million dollar question is, How are we justified with God? What determines where we stand in our relationship with God, that most important of all relationships. 

The conventional, off the street, wisdom is that this involves some form of stockpiling good deeds. One way of picturing it is that we have to accumulate a certain number of total “points” on some celestial scoring system. By this standard, the longer you live, the more opportunities you have to score points, so the better your chances are of justifying yourself with God. Pity those who die young!

Another way of looking at it is somewhat more sophisticated: it’s all relative.  As long as your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, whatever the absolute number of either of them is, then your right standing before God is assured. So if you can just be sure you keep a credit balance, you can sneak in quite a bit of sinning and still not have to worry. Just be sure you have a good accountant! 

The Pharisee in Jesus’ parable is a shining example of this tally-sheet approach to justification.  He was a member of a movement within Judaism that saw itself as an assembly of super-Jews.  They were not only correct, they were excruciatingly correct—in their religious piety, in their social and civic duties, and in their personal discipline. 

Whatever the law of Moses said, the Pharisees did that much and more. So the Pharisee, as Jesus tells the story, came into the temple to pray, much as you or I might come into a church to pray, during the week, when there’s not a public liturgy being celebrated.  He’s careful to couch his prayer in terms of thanksgiving, but the tone of what he says is really self-congratulatory; he’s bragging in God’s presence. He’s upright in his dealings with his fellow human beings—he’s not an adulterer, not an extortionist, he gives everyone what is their just due. He’s also fastidious about his religious discipline—he fasts twice a week, and he tithes! Sounds like the kind of guy we could use more of, doesn’t it? 

There was a made-for-TV movie in the mid-80s that, for a while, appeared in reruns every time you turned on the TV, in which Andy Griffith portrayed the decline and fall of an alcoholic, and everything his family went through during the process. What struck me was how his wife and grown children were all obsessed with pleasing him—whether by becoming like him, a drinking buddy, which is what one son did, or by becoming a hyper-achiever in the business world, which is what his oldest daughter did, or by just cleaning up the messes that he continually left in his wake, which was his wife’s job. They were all trying to “get right” with him, to justify themselves, to make sure where they stood. 

This is where the illustration breaks down, of course, so please don’t think I’m suggesting that God is like an alcoholic!  But in a twisted sort of way, the behavior of that tragically co-dependent family toward their alcoholic, and the behavior of many of us toward God, is curiously similar. It didn’t work for the movie family. Andy Griffith’s character died, and his family would spend the rest of their lives working through the consequences of their behavior. It didn’t work for the Pharisee either. In the end, as Jesus tells the story, his punctiliously correct behavior did not justify him. It did not determine where he stood with God. 

Trying to get right with God through living virtuously has a reverse-image counterpart, like a photographic negative. This approach assumes that where we stand with God is determined by our sinfulness, by our weakness and inadequacy, by the great gulf that separates us from God’s holiness, God’s glory, God’s perfection. “I know I’ll never be good enough to deserve God’s favor; I know I’ll never be worthy of getting into heaven, so just leave me alone and let me at least enjoy my sins while I can!”  This is a sort of pre-emptive strike—it looks like God is going to reject me, so I’ll just reject him first!  It’s an effort to maintain some sense of control over our own destinies.  “You can’t fire me; I quit!” 

But the other character in Jesus’ parable, the tax-collector, reveals the error of such a way. 

Now, we have to understand that a tax collector, in Jesus’ world, was an even more odious figure than an IRS auditor! First, he was a collaborator with a foreign military power that was occupying the country against the wishes of the populace. He was, by definition, a traitor to his homeland. Second, Roman tax collectors worked, as it were, “on commission”. They were responsible for turning over a certain amount of money to the authorities, and whatever they collected in excess of that amount was theirs to keep. So there was a tremendous temptation to resort to fraud, extortion, and plain old gouging in order to maximize their income. Jesus’ audience would have assumed that the tax collector in his story was guilty of all these crimes. He comes into the temple to pray, and dares not even lift his eyes toward heaven. He just strikes his breast and prays, “God, be merciful to me...a sinner.” 

I’ve read that scientists who use animals as part of their research make a special point not to form any emotional bond with their subjects, for understandable reasons. Yet, I’ve also read that, even in the midst of an uncomfortable experiment, a dog, for instance, will affectionately lick the face of a researcher, and wag his tail. From the dog’s perspective, the researcher is guilty of a great crime. Yet, that guilt apparently does not determine where the researcher stands in the dog’s estimation!  Neither did the tax collector’s sins determine where he stood in God’s estimation. Not only is he not summarily condemned by his sins, but, between the two men, it’s the tax collector who leaves the temple justified, right with God, and not the Pharisee. 

How can this be? Our good works do not determine where we stand with God. Neither do our sins. So what does? How are we justified? How do we get right with God? This parable presents us with a conundrum. It turns our expectations upside down. So what’s going on here that we can’t see? 

What’s going on here is grace. Grace—God’s loving inclination and movement toward us and for us. During the time of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, the kingdom of Judah, which was the remaining remnant of the nation of Israel, suffered from a prolonged drought. In the passage which we read in today’s liturgy, Jeremiah gives voice to the people’s anguish in their adversity. Yet, in the midst of that anguish, they neither blame God for punishing them unjustly—“Our iniquities testify against us, O Lord ... for our apostasies are many”—nor do they jump to the conclusion that God has abandoned them forever. They’re humble, they confess their offenses, they don’t try to justify themselves with a catalogue of their virtues or good deeds. But in the middle of their contrition, there is a statement of great faith:  “Lord, you are in the midst of us, and we are called by your name; do not forsake us, O Lord our God.”  They—or Jeremiah, at least—never lost faith in God’s grace, in God’s loving inclination and movement toward them and for them. 

In his simple humility, the tax collector in the temple also gave evidence of an underlying faith in God’s grace. As human beings who live in relationship, we want to know where we stand with God. But as sinful human beings, under the power of pride, we want to control where we stand with God, to justify—or choose to not justify—ourselves in God’s sight. Only when we surrender that need to control where we stand, either through our virtues or through our offenses, is where we stand revealed to us. Grace reveals where we stand, grace reveals the basis of our justification, grace gets us right with God. We are ransomed by the blood of Christ, healed by the power of Christ, restored through the intercession of Christ, forgiven, died-for, raised-for, and lived-for, saved not through works, but by grace, through faith.  Amen.

C: Proper 24

II Timothy 3:14-4:5

Let’s talk about the Bible. You know, that’s something we don’t actually do it very much. We read it and study it, and, honestly, those are the best things we can do with it. But, once in a while, it’s a good thing to step back and ask ourselves some fundamental questions about our relationship with that collection of sacred writings that we call Holy Scripture.

In the second reading for the past several Sundays, we’ve been working our way through St Paul’s two letters to his younger protégé Timothy, a man who held the position that we would now call Bishop in the Christian community of the great ancient city of Ephesus. Paul writes to Timothy, “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

All scripture is inspired by God.

Some find this sort of affirmation kind of scary, and understandably so. To put it bluntly, St Paul’s words have been abused, abused in many ways. People have tried to make the Bible something it’s not—a textbook on science, or history, or psychology, or economics, or a manual for making moral and ethical decisions. It’s none of those things. To affirm the inspiration of scripture does not relieve us of the responsibility of using the brains God gave us, and the words of scripture are certainly complex and demanding enough that we have plenty of opportunity to engage those brains.

All scripture is inspired by God.

Of course, it’s also possible that we find these words scary because we perceive them as threatening—threatening to some of our habits of thinking and behaving that we have grown very attached to. We instinctively recoil at the idea of anything objective, anything outside ourselves, cramping our style, presuming to sit in judgment over us in some way. But scripture itself, if we pay attention to it, reminds us that we see the world through distorted eyes. Our vision is clouded. We can’t help it. We inherited the condition. We do well not to fully trust our own perceptions, and this is where the witness of scripture—a witness that is “inspired by God”—can be very helpful. Attending to scripture can protect us from a condition that Paul refers to in his letter to Timothy as “itching ears.” “Itching ears” might be described as a compulsive curiosity that can be relieved only by “scratching” with interesting and spicy bits of information, bits of information that simply confirm our prejudices. The sort of weird speculation we’ve seen over the last several months about the President’s birthplace or the President’s religion is an example, I think, of “itching ears.” And in the interest of giving offense in a bipartisan manner, so is the scandal-mongering that’s been going on trying to discredit a certain former governor and vice-presidential candidate. The speculation and the scandal-mongering do little more than confirm us in whatever prejudices we already incline toward. We have made ourselves—our whims, our desires, our perceptions—the sole measure of our experience. The more we scratch our itching ears, the less of the truth we are able to hear.

All scripture is inspired by God.

As I’ve said, this affirmation is subject to distortion. The Bible isn’t a science book or a history book, and needs to be interpreted properly. But it’s nonetheless our foundational document. For the Church, Holy Scripture functions in a way similar to the way the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Gettysburg Address function for our nation. It’s the lens through which we read our past, interpret our present, and anticipate our future. The Bible is not just a source we turn to when questions arise about what we believe or how we should behave, and it’s not the only source, but it is the first such source and the last such source, and the one to which we hold ourselves accountable as an authority. Being judged is never pleasant, but we do, collectively and individually, sit under the judgment of Scripture. It’s not an option that we can take or leave, or a cafeteria from which we can eat what appeals to us and ignore all the rest. It’s the word of God.

All Scripture is inspired by God.

Scripture certainly comforts us in our affliction. This is why St Paul includes "encourage" is his mandate for Timothy's ministry. Few among us have not heard the words of the 23^rd Psalm at a time of grief or loss and taken heart from them in some measure. How many brides and grooms choose to have Paul’s own ode to love from I Corinthians 13 read at their wedding liturgies precisely because it offers them encouragement right when they’re stepping into the abyss known as marriage. And scripture also, and rightly so, afflicts us in our comfort. This is why St Paul says that its good for “reproof” and “correction”, and urges Timothy to “convince, rebuke,” and “exhort,” in his ministry as a bishop, employing scripture as one of the useful tools in that ministry.

All scripture is inspired by God.

Comforting us and afflicting us, I would suggest, are important functions of Scripture, but not its primary one. The primary purpose of Scripture is to enable us to see with God’s eyes, to see what God sees, in effect, and in a scaled-down way, to know what God knows. In the pages of the Bible, we know ourselves as we really are—as created in the image and likeness of God, as infinitely loved by God, and as fallen creatures with distorted perceptions, under the grip of Sin and Death. In the pages of the Bible, we know the world as it really is—the creation of an almighty and majestic God, and something that has been entrusted to human care as stewards, not something to merely exploit and destroy. In the pages of the Bible, we see an alternative to our own mercurial whims and prejudices—an anchor, a rock, an objective reference point.

It is our privilege, in our public worship and in our private study, to bathe ourselves in Scripture, to let its vocabulary and phraseology plant themselves in our hearts and imaginations, to become second nature to us. Doing so enables us to resist the allure of “itching ears,” and gives us the sort of quiet confidence that is not bigoted or pugnacious, but is not timid either, because it is rooted in the magnificent reality of God himself.

All scripture is inspired by God. As our collect four weeks from now will exhort us, let us “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it,” to our great good and God’s great glory. Amen.

C: Proper 23

Luke 17:11-19

Those of you who have been at St Anne’s during the cycle of liturgies that lead up to, and include, Easter each year know that these are very rich and spiritually rewarding experiences. They are the very essence of what makes us who we are as the people of God, the people of the New Covenant between God and mankind. They are also very intense and demanding, particularly on those who plan and lead and assist with them. For me personally, I can tell you, while I remain excited about and committed to these complex services, they are a lot of work—work that can sometimes begin to feel like a chore, a burden, something to be endured until it’s over with. So every year, as the process of preparation for Holy Week picks up, I have found that it helps keep me focused, it helps keep my enthusiasm fresh, if I think of one person—there’s usually more than one, but one person, at least—who I know will be experiencing the liturgies of Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, observed in all their symbolic richness, for the very first time. I discipline myself to look at my experience through the eyes of an “outsider,” and this renews and refreshes the experience for the benefit of my own soul.

But the liturgical observance of Holy Week is a relatively trivial concern when weighed against the fundamental and everyday experiences which are also vulnerable to going stale and flat and becoming more of a chore than a joy. Many of us have been blessed to have found daily work which we consider to be truly a vocation, a calling. Yet, even among those who are so blessed, there are days when our work feels like drudgery, and we’d rather be doing any number of other things. Many of us are or have been a partner in a marriage that was once fantastic, but later became just okay—still on solid ground—or so we hope—but kind of ho-hum, lacking the pizazz that it once had. Many of us are faithful in saying our prayers daily, and may have had profound experiences in the past of God’s presence and involvement in our lives, but lately our prayer life is kind of flat and uninspiring. Many of us are commendably regular in our attendance at public worship, and make an honest effort to participate in the liturgy with heart and mind and soul. Yet, when Sunday morning comes along, we find ourselves drawn in other directions. There was a mother once who knocked on her son’s bedroom door and said, “Son, it’s Sunday. Time to get up and go to church.” The son responded, “But I don’t want to go to church. I want to stay in bed.” The mother responded, “But you have to go to church. So get up and get dressed.” “But, Mom, why? Why do I have to get up and go to church?” “Well, son, I’ll give you two reasons. First, because I’m your mother, and I said so. Second, because you’re the rector and they’re paying you to be there.”

Prayer and worship had evidently become a little flat for that particular priest! But it can happen to any of us, and, as we have seen, in a number of different ways. And we are most vulnerable to this experience of life and work and marriage and prayer and worship feeling stale and dry and confining when we are focused inward, looking only at ourselves. And when this happens, when our gaze is inward, when our perception is limited to our own perspective, our own point of view, then it becomes alarmingly easy for us to stray from our faith and commitments in these areas. This is what lies underneath mid-life career crises and infidelity to marriage vows and the abandonment of worship and prayer.

When this happens to us as individuals, life becomes “all about me”—a syndrome we talked about last week. We descend into a psychology of victimhood, and obsess on how we are being ill-treated by the world. But it also happens to communities—nations, cities, corporations, and, of course, churches. When institutions and communities get stuck looking inward on themselves, seeing themselves and the world only from an “insider” point of view, they indulge in an inordinate focus on the past, and are easily consumed by survival anxiety. Group morale sags because there is very little sense of mission, and it becomes an inexorable downward spiral into oblivion.

What would happen, though, if we began to train ourselves to look at our experience, not through the weary and glazed-over eyes of an insider, but through the fresh and wondering eyes of a stranger, a foreigner? In St Luke’s gospel, we encounter a compelling example of seeing the familiar through the eyes of the unfamiliar. Jesus encountered ten men with the dreaded skin disease of leprosy. Lepers in that culture were complete pariahs, social outcasts. It was a terrible existence. Jesus, in his mercy, healed all ten men of their leprosy. Only one, however, returned to praise God and offer thanks. And this one, it turns out, was a foreigner, an outsider—a Samaritan. And if there was anything worse than just being a leper, it was to have been a Samaritan leper! Yet, this Samaritan, who had every reason to be suspicious of Jesus, a Jew, because of the tremendous ethnic hostility between the two groups—this Samaritan, an outsider, came and fell at Jesus’ feet and poured out gratitude from a heart that was now wonderfully appreciative of all things Jewish.

And what we see in the Samaritan leper, most of us have seen with our own eyes. We have all either known or at least heard about a naturalized American citizen who is more patriotic than most native-born Americans.  Many of us have known people who come to faith in Christ as adults, and whose devotion and enthusiasm puts to shame many who have always known the Lord, who have never been unbelievers. And within the Christian family, when someone discovers a particular expression of the faith that makes him feel like he has found the home he never knew existed—well, there’s no zeal like that of a convert! I encountered the Anglican tradition as a young adult, and that describes my feelings. Now that I’ve been an Episcopalian for 35 years, I feel very much an insider—susceptible to jaded cynicism, so when I encounter someone who is eager to learn about our glorious Anglican inheritance, it lifts my spirits to see my “old” reality through that person’s “new” eyes.

This is a move we all need to make, time and time again. The Samaritan leper stands before us today as an invitation to see our old reality, not through our tired insiders’ eyes, but through his fresh outsiders’ eyes. He invites us to shift our attention outward, to involve ourselves authentically in the lives of those around us, to be consumed by the mission to which God has called us, both as individuals and as a community, to re-connect with our vocation with the same sense of wonder we felt when we first knew ourselves to be called to it, to not settle for an “okay” marriage but to insist on a superior one, to nurture our love affair with the Lord so that prayer is not simply a chore but the very air we breathe, and wild stallions couldn’t prevent us from worshiping at the Lord’s own altar with the Lord’s own people on the Lord’s own day. And in the process, we become more appreciative of the advantages and blessings that are ours. Among Anglicans who have had some sustained experience with the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, the words of the General Thanksgiving come to mind here: “We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.” As we view our experience through the eyes of the Samaritan leper and the stranger in our midst, our personal holiness is refined through the development of an “attitude of gratitude,” a habitual mindset of thanksgiving, and on that day when all secrets are revealed and the piercing eye of the Holy One looks into every human heart, our hearts will reflect back to him his own image, brought to perfection through His Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ. To him be all praise and glory. Amen.

C: Proper 23

Luke 17:11-19

Those of you who have been at St Anne’s during the cycle of liturgies that lead up to, and include, Easter each year know that these are very rich and spiritually rewarding experiences. They are the very essence of what makes us who we are as the people of God, the people of the New Covenant between God and mankind. They are also very intense and demanding, particularly on those who plan and lead and assist with them. For me personally, I can tell you, while I remain excited about and committed to these complex services, they are a lot of work—work that can sometimes begin to feel like a chore, a burden, something to be endured until it’s over with. So every year, as the process of preparation for Holy Week picks up, I have found that it helps keep me focused, it helps keep my enthusiasm fresh, if I think of one person—there’s usually more than one, but one person, at least—who I know will be experiencing the liturgies of Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, observed in all their symbolic richness, for the very first time. I discipline myself to look at my experience through the eyes of an “outsider,” and this renews and refreshes the experience for the benefit of my own soul.

But the liturgical observance of Holy Week is a relatively trivial concern when weighed against the fundamental and everyday experiences which are also vulnerable to going stale and flat and becoming more of a chore than a joy. Many of us have been blessed to have found daily work which we consider to be truly a vocation, a calling. Yet, even among those who are so blessed, there are days when our work feels like drudgery, and we’d rather be doing any number of other things. Many of us are or have been a partner in a marriage that was once fantastic, but later became just okay—still on solid ground—or so we hope—but kind of ho-hum, lacking the pizazz that it once had. Many of us are faithful in saying our prayers daily, and may have had profound experiences in the past of God’s presence and involvement in our lives, but lately our prayer life is kind of flat and uninspiring. Many of us are commendably regular in our attendance at public worship, and make an honest effort to participate in the liturgy with heart and mind and soul. Yet, when Sunday morning comes along, we find ourselves drawn in other directions. There was a mother once who knocked on her son’s bedroom door and said, “Son, it’s Sunday. Time to get up and go to church.” The son responded, “But I don’t want to go to church. I want to stay in bed.” The mother responded, “But you have to go to church. So get up and get dressed.” “But, Mom, why? Why do I have to get up and go to church?” “Well, son, I’ll give you two reasons. First, because I’m your mother, and I said so. Second, because you’re the rector and they’re paying you to be there.”

Prayer and worship had evidently become a little flat for that particular priest! But it can happen to any of us, and, as we have seen, in a number of different ways. And we are most vulnerable to this experience of life and work and marriage and prayer and worship feeling stale and dry and confining when we are focused inward, looking only at ourselves. And when this happens, when our gaze is inward, when our perception is limited to our own perspective, our own point of view, then it becomes alarmingly easy for us to stray from our faith and commitments in these areas. This is what lies underneath mid-life career crises and infidelity to marriage vows and the abandonment of worship and prayer.

When this happens to us as individuals, life becomes “all about me”—a syndrome we talked about last week. We descend into a psychology of victimhood, and obsess on how we are being ill-treated by the world. But it also happens to communities—nations, cities, corporations, and, of course, churches. When institutions and communities get stuck looking inward on themselves, seeing themselves and the world only from an “insider” point of view, they indulge in an inordinate focus on the past, and are easily consumed by survival anxiety. Group morale sags because there is very little sense of mission, and it becomes an inexorable downward spiral into oblivion.

What would happen, though, if we began to train ourselves to look at our experience, not through the weary and glazed-over eyes of an insider, but through the fresh and wondering eyes of a stranger, a foreigner? In St Luke’s gospel, we encounter a compelling example of seeing the familiar through the eyes of the unfamiliar. Jesus encountered ten men with the dreaded skin disease of leprosy. Lepers in that culture were complete pariahs, social outcasts. It was a terrible existence. Jesus, in his mercy, healed all ten men of their leprosy. Only one, however, returned to praise God and offer thanks. And this one, it turns out, was a foreigner, an outsider—a Samaritan. And if there was anything worse than just being a leper, it was to have been a Samaritan leper! Yet, this Samaritan, who had every reason to be suspicious of Jesus, a Jew, because of the tremendous ethnic hostility between the two groups—this Samaritan, an outsider, came and fell at Jesus’ feet and poured out gratitude from a heart that was now wonderfully appreciative of all things Jewish.

And what we see in the Samaritan leper, most of us have seen with our own eyes. We have all either known or at least heard about a naturalized American citizen who is more patriotic than most native-born Americans.  Many of us have known people who come to faith in Christ as adults, and whose devotion and enthusiasm puts to shame many who have always known the Lord, who have never been unbelievers. And within the Christian family, when someone discovers a particular expression of the faith that makes him feel like he has found the home he never knew existed—well, there’s no zeal like that of a convert! I encountered the Anglican tradition as a young adult, and that describes my feelings. Now that I’ve been an Episcopalian for 35 years, I feel very much an insider—susceptible to jaded cynicism, so when I encounter someone who is eager to learn about our glorious Anglican inheritance, it lifts my spirits to see my “old” reality through that person’s “new” eyes.

This is a move we all need to make, time and time again. The Samaritan leper stands before us today as an invitation to see our old reality, not through our tired insiders’ eyes, but through his fresh outsiders’ eyes. He invites us to shift our attention outward, to involve ourselves authentically in the lives of those around us, to be consumed by the mission to which God has called us, both as individuals and as a community, to re-connect with our vocation with the same sense of wonder we felt when we first knew ourselves to be called to it, to not settle for an “okay” marriage but to insist on a superior one, to nurture our love affair with the Lord so that prayer is not simply a chore but the very air we breathe, and wild stallions couldn’t prevent us from worshiping at the Lord’s own altar with the Lord’s own people on the Lord’s own day. And in the process, we become more appreciative of the advantages and blessings that are ours. Among Anglicans who have had some sustained experience with the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, the words of the General Thanksgiving come to mind here: “We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.” As we view our experience through the eyes of the Samaritan leper and the stranger in our midst, our personal holiness is refined through the development of an “attitude of gratitude,” a habitual mindset of thanksgiving, and on that day when all secrets are revealed and the piercing eye of the Holy One looks into every human heart, our hearts will reflect back to him his own image, brought to perfection through His Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ. To him be all praise and glory. Amen.

C: Proper 22

Habakkuk 1:1-13; 2:1-4

Luke 17:5-10

Psalm 37:3-10

OK, I’ve got to level with you right at the beginning here. This gospel passage is not one of my favorites. I’m talking about the little mini-parable that Jesus tells about the landowner who has a field hand working beside him all day, working just as hard, doing the same stuff, and when quitting time rolls around, the boss puts his feet up and makes the field hand—now turned into a domestic servant—he makes his servant fix dinner and serve it to him, and only then can the servant sit down and have some for himself. The insufferable arrogance of that landowner! The obvious injustice of it all! And we’re supposed to see this guy as a symbol for God, and identify ourselves with the hard-working but exploited servant? Who would want to serve that kind of God, anyway? He certainly isn’t the kind of God that makes you proud to call Him your own!

I suspect that many of you have a reaction similar to my own, and in that—I hate to tell you—we’re being quite typical twenty-first century Americans. For us, the motto that gets us through life is, “It’s all about me.” When we go out to a restaurant, we expect top-notch attentive service, and if we’re working at a restaurant, we expect courteous customers who tip generously. When we buy something at a store, we expect to be able to return it for a full refund with no questions asked. As employees, we expect top pay with full benefits, flex-time, and a generous company contribution toward our retirement plan. As employers, we expect workers who don’t have a personal life, and preferably never have to go to the restroom during working hours.

Well, Jesus’ little illustration encourages us to realize that it’s not all about us. That’s a hard lesson for Americans to learn. Our British cousins perhaps have an easier time of it because, until rather recently, theirs was a rigidly class-oriented society. When the now-retired Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, was appointed to that position in 1990, he was considered a remarkable exception to the rule, because he had been born into a blue-collar working class family, and didn’t have the benefit of a prestigious private school education. The fact the he even was made a priest, let alone appointed bishop and then primate, was seen as evidence that he was one the very few who was able to transcend the class into which he was born. Even during his term as Archbishop, there were those who saw him as a sort of country bumpkin, and explained various things that he said or did with reference to his supposed poor breeding. The majority are taught to be content with their “place.” If you’re nobility, do not aspire to become royalty. If you’re a commoner, do not aspire to become a noble. If you’re a coal miner, learn to accept the fact that you will never have a country estate. This can be a tough lesson to learn, because we are all naturally self-centered, and want to think of ourselves as exceptional, in a good way.

Jesus’ disciples say to him, “Lord, increase our faith.” It’s no surprise, then, given how we’re conditioned, that, when we think of the notion of faith, we associate it with hoping that God will choose to act in accord with our own best interests, according to our own desires—our own desires for safety, for health, for love that is returned in equal or greater measure than we give it, and for material prosperity. There’s a prayer attributed to a certain British noble and wealthy landowner of the nineteenth century that beautifully capsulizes this attitude. It goes something along the lines of, “O God, I beseech thee of thy tender mercy on behalf of the counties of Essex and Lancashire, that is may please thee to spare them excesses of wind and rain, and also on behalf of certain estates in the county of Hertfordshire, that thou mayest establish such civil tranquility as shall issue in the prosperity of the region. In all other diverse parts of the country, thou mayest exercise thy divine providence according to thy holy will.” Well, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out where this guy owns property, does it?!  Seriously, though, the problem with identifying faith with God granting our wishes—aside from the fact that it buys into the “It’s all about me” syndrome—is that, when our wishes are not granted, it becomes a crisis of faith for us. Where is God? Why has He abandoned me? Why am I being punished? What did I do to deserve this? God must not love me. God must love my adversaries more than He loves me. Where is God? After all, it’s all about me, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

This is where it becomes wonderfully good news that grace abounds and that God is an opportunist. In that place of brokenness and self-pity, God comes to us and enables us to transcend our own egos. When that happens, we see faith in a whole new light. There’s a pop song from the early seventies with the repeated refrain, “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” Now, that can certainly be interpreted in a rather cynical and scandalous way, which I’m sure is what the author of the lyrics intended (!), so let me see if I can redeem it with a paraphrase: If faith doesn’t make what God is doing conform to what you want, then let what you want conform to what God is doing. Faith is not about God doing what we want; faith is about wanting what God does. 

We have a fascinating reading today from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk starts out by complaining about how miserable life is, and why doesn’t the Lord do something?

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongs and look upon trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is slacked and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous, so justice goes forth perverted.

But God replies, in effect, “I am doing something. You just don’t see it yet.”

Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told.

And not only that, but look at the instrument God has chosen to carry out His plan:

For lo, I am rousing the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, who march through the breadth of the earth, to seize habitations not their own. Dread and terrible are they; … They all come for violence; terror of them goes before them. They gather captives like sand. At kings they scoff, and of rulers they make sport. They laugh at every fortress, for they heap up earth and take it. Then they sweep by like the wind and go on, guilty men, whose own might is their god!

In other words, these Chaldeans are really nasty guys. And God has chosen them to be the means of accomplishing what He wants to accomplish with His chosen people of Israel. So, let’s see if we have this straight. We complain to God that life is miserable, and ask Him why He isn’t doing something about it. God replies that He is doing something. And we go, “Oh, by using the neighborhood bully, the Bad Boy on the block, our worst enemy? What are we not getting here?” And the answer is, Yup. But wait, there’s more! God is not only doing something we can’t see, and using the Chaldeans to do it, but He’s going to take His own sweet time! God says to Habakkuk:

Write the vision; make it plain upon tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Behold, he whose soul is not upright in him shall fail, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

There’s that word “faith” again. Faith in a God whose love will never let us go, faith in a God who redeems even the most distorted and twisted set of circumstances for His glory and our good, faith that God can use even our worst enemies to accomplish His purposes, faith in a God to whom one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day, faith in a God whose grace is ubiquitous and permeates every situation we might find ourselves in.  When we place our faith in this God and what He is doing, rather than spinning our wheels waiting for Him to do what we want, we are on the path which leads to peace, to patience, to contentment in life, and to growth in holiness. And the best part is, it’s also the road to increased faith. Amen.