C: Proper 21

Luke 16:19-31

Amos 6:1-7

I Timothy 6:11-19

Ever since I was a young adult, the concept of self-esteem has been repeatedly talked about and written about by talk-show psychologists and school teachers and even preachers. A healthy sense of self-esteem, we’re told, is grounded in an innate sense of one’s own essential “okay-ness”, in spite of the mistakes, poor choices, and bad luck that are part of everyone’s past by the time we reach adulthood. But human beings do not always look for self-esteem in such a healthy way. Some of us—and I use the first-person plural very loosely here, because I’m not talking about myself!—some of us identify our sense of “okay-ness” with our appearance, a face and body combination that’s guaranteed to turn heads. Others look to their own health and fitness to define their sense of well-being.  Others attach their self-image to their intellectual and educational achievements—just look at the agony high school students go through every year taking tests and writing essays in order to get into a “name-brand” college or university. And many, of course, find that their regard for themselves rises and falls with their bank balance and their net worth. 

The only problem with locating our self-worth in any of these places is:  What happens if we lose them?  What happens when all we do to maintain our looks just can’t keep up with the effects of aging?  What happens when all we’ve done to keep our bodies in shape is laid waste by the onslaught of disease?  What happens when a changing world renders our education obsolete? And what happens when an economy over which we have no control wrecks all the careful plans we’d made for the accumulation and preservation of wealth?  What happens when we lose it all?  Where is our self-esteem then? 

That’s a profoundly important question, because if we really do look for our sense of worth in such things, our attitude toward them is going to be dominated, more than anything else, by fear. Every moment of our lives is going to be ruled by the terrifying prospect of losing whatever it is—looks, money, health, intelligence, social status—whatever it is that has become the perceived source of our self-esteem. 

We’re all familiar with the character Ebenezer Scrooge. The very name “Scrooge” has become a synonym for a sort of miserly nastiness that nobody finds attractive.  Yet, in the story, Scrooge is not really a mean person.  He’s nasty, but not mean. Once Scrooge is actually confronted with the suffering of Tiny Tim and the rest of the Cratchitts—suffering which was well within his power to alleviate—his heart is genuinely moved with compassion, and he does the right thing. The hard part was getting him to that point, getting him to the point where he could look for a moment away from himself and at everything and everyone around him.  This was exceedingly difficult, because Ebenezer Scrooge was consumed with fear.  He was afraid of losing his fortune, and because his self-image was tied up with his fortune, if he lost his fortune, he lost himself.  Scrooge placed his trust in a false hope—the hope of being able to hang onto his fortune.  When our lives are dominated by fear, we become like Scrooge. We accumulate, we horde. We become miserly, reluctant to share what we have. We need to constantly reassure ourselves of our security, so we can’t take the risk of expending any of whatever it is that is precious to us because it tells us who we are, defines our identity, our self-esteem. 

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is one that most of us heard in Sunday School before we were old enough to read. “There was a rich man,” Jesus says, “who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.”  Now you and I may not be very impressed by the ability to wear purple clothing, but back then purple dye was obtained only from a very rare, and therefore expensive, shellfish.  So this guy was rich. He lived not only comfortably, but ostentatiously.  And just outside the front gate of his home was Lazarus—homeless, unemployed, and sick.  Lazarus would have been grateful to make a meal out of the table scraps, the garbage from the rich man’s home, but the implication is that he didn’t even get that. Two men, one right under the other one’s nose, but unseen.  Like Scrooge, the rich man in Jesus’ parable is consumed by fear, fear of losing that to which he had attached his self-esteem. He placed his trust in a false hope—the hope of finding eternal validation from his wealth.  As long as he had purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously, he knew who he was. Without those things, he was nobody. So he clung to them, fearfully, tenaciously. 

As the veteran Episcopalians among us realize, as we move into the fall, we’re entering stewardship season, that time of year when, as a parish church, we ask one another to think and pray, and then go on record, confidentially, with what we believe the Lord is calling us to give to this community in the coming calendar year. As a priest, as I confessed last week, stewardship season makes me uncomfortable. To a certain extent, my discomfort is grounded in the knowledge that the whole thing makes some of you uncomfortable. And as the pastor of this congregation, I know that a good part of the discomfort my parishioners feel about stewardship happens only because I bring it up in the first place! 

But my discomfort with this time of year operates on a deeper level as well. It has nothing to do with my being a priest, and everything to do with my being a baptized Christian who is a member of this particular parish community.  The same issues that I and the vestry bring up to the larger congregation, I also bring up to myself.  I wrestle with my own fears and frustrations about money, my own insecurities, my own self-esteem. We’re embarking on an uncomfortable season, because it makes us own up to just where it is that we get nourishment for our self-image, just what it is that, if we lose it, robs us of our personhood. 

Lazarus and the rich man both died, and, in that event, both learned that neither one controlled his own future, his own destiny. The fate of each was in the hands of God. Within the fabric and structure of the way he has created the universe, God has ordained that there are consequences, both temporal and eternal, for our actions. Both Lazarus and the rich man found this out, only in very different ways. Lazarus dies, and is carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham. For a pious Jew, this was as good as it gets. The rich man died, and found himself in rather unpleasant circumstances. Now, the point of this parable is not to supply us with details about life in the hereafter, and it’s a mistake to get distracted in that direction. Rather, this is an invitation to concentrate our attention on the fact that God is vitally interested in where it is we look for our self-esteem. He wants us to find our self-esteem in him, is his love for us. 

This is not an easy move to make. We are deeply conditioned to ground ourselves, to root ourselves, elsewhere than in the love of the one who made us and redeemed us. It’s a move that we can only make with the help of God’s own grace. But if we make the move, if we find our self-esteem in him, we will find ourselves truly free, free of fear, and free of false hope. If my esteem for myself is grounded in nothing other than God’s esteem for me, rather than in my bank balance or my looks or my health or whatever, then I am truly free from fear of loss. This is the kind of freedom from fear that Jesus, by means of this parable, invites us to experience. 

As I reflect on my own life, and the false hopes that have tempted me over the years—a new pair of shoes, a new friend, a new job, a new car, a new house, even a new career—I realize that none of these has brought me anything near true peace and happiness. None of these has been an appropriate source for my self-esteem. Time and again I have returned, if not to the bosom of Abraham, then to Abraham’s God. Freedom from fear and freedom from false hope allows us to take a “liberal” attitude toward the wealth that God has blessed us with, whether that wealth is an abundance of money, an abundance of time, or an abundance of knowledge and skill. And I don’t mean “liberal” in any political or religious sense, but in the sense of an open, free-flowing generosity. Such liberality enables us to let go of potential earned income in order to take the time to spend with children or grandchildren, or to help an illiterate adult learn to read, and to count doing so a joy. Such liberality allows us to let go of having an impeccably clean house or an award-winning yard in order to spend time in a small study/prayer/sharing group of other Christians, thereby building up and strengthening the body of Christ, and to count doing so a joy. Such liberality allows us to give sacrificially of our monetary wealth to the ministry of our local parish and to the mission of the church throughout the world, and to count doing so a joy. Jesus wants to be the only source of self-esteem we’ll ever need, to cast out all our fear, and replace it with joy.  Amen.

C: Proper 20

Luke 16:1-13

There is officially no such liturgical season, but this is “Stewardship-tide”—the time of year when most churches are ramping up the process of making financial plans for the coming calendar year, encouraging their members to make an estimate of how much they intend to give.  I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of those who assembled the lectionary—the table of scripture readings for Sunday services—but, as it turns out, the readings appointed for the early Fall indeed often lend themselves to stewardship sermons. At the very least it’s convenient for the clergy, who must not only responsibly interpret the word of God from the pulpit, but also lead people in making faithful stewardship decisions. In any case, I hope not to be utterly gratuitous in what I say on the subject today, but actually make a valid connection with the gospel reading that we’ve just heard.

If there’s any accurate generalization one could make about any sermon on the subject of money, it’s that it is bound to generate anxiety. For a first-time visitor to the parish, who just happens to show up when the sermon is about money, or to a relative newcomer, the anxiety takes the form of “Uh, oh, is this one of those kinds of churches, that are always harping on money?” [So, if you’re a visitor to St Anne’s today, please don’t form your opinion too quickly! We do talk about lots of other things.]

For the average “parishioner-in-the-pew,” stewardship anxiety is served with a generous garnish of guilt: “I’m giving all I can, but they say I should give 10%, and I’m certainly not doing that! Can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, you know.”

For the Finance Committee, and for members of the Vestry, the anxiety is of a different sort: “The diocesan assessment is going up, insurance costs are skyrocketing, the staff are all going to want cost-of-living raises, at least, and we’re already using our endowment income and dipping into reserves quite a bit for operating expenses. Something’s gotta give.”

And for the clergy—well, we also have our peculiar stewardship anxieties: “Why haven’t more of ‘them’ discovered the joy of tithing, the euphoria that results from faithful stewardship? Why don’t more of ‘them’ love Jesus more, why don’t they ‘get it’ when they say ‘All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee?’”

Well…there’s a certain cleansing effect from getting our anxieties out in the open, isn’t there? Yet, more basic than the different forms our anxieties about stewardship take, are the differences in our underlying perceptions of what stewardship is.

For starters, it’s certainly difficult to escape the impression that when we talk about financial stewardship, that’s just a euphemism for keeping the institution going—raising enough money, by any legal means, to pay the essential expenses of keeping the church up and running, providing “services” to its “clients.” When you turn in a pledge card, or drop an envelope into the offering plate, you’re just doing your part to ensure that when the time comes for your spouse’s funeral or your daughter’s wedding, or your grandchild’s baptism, St Anne’s and its clergy will be here to serve you on that occasion. There are differences in philosophy within this viewpoint: Some are only interested in giving enough to support a barebones budget that tries to cut corners whenever possible; others have a more generous vision of what the parish’s mission and ministry is. Either way, however, it’s institutional maintenance that we’re talking about.

Now, I have to say, there are important elements of truth in this perception. Among other things, the church is an institution, and being an institution carries with it certain inherent costs. Roofs leak and furnaces break down and carpets need to be cleaned. And if these costs are not met, the institution of the church is compromised, which compromises other aspects of what the church is.

There is also a way of understanding stewardship that comes at it from a distinctly spiritual direction. Stewardship is, quite simply, about pleasing God. When we give to the Church, we are actually giving to God; the church is only a conduit—a conduit, in fact, approved and sanctioned by God for such giving. Our giving has the effect of sustaining the institution, but that’s not the reason we give. Still less do we have any intention of controlling the institution through our giving.

So…seeing stewardship as a matter not of institutional maintenance, but of pleasing God, is surely a step higher up the ladder of spiritual maturity. But there is yet, to borrow a phrase from St Paul, there is yet “a more excellent way.” Christian stewardship, financial stewardship in particular, is one of the tools at God’s disposal by which he fosters our growth in holiness. Stewardship is one of the means at our disposal by which we can practice living in Heaven. Heaven is our destiny, as the community of those who have been redeemed for God by the death and resurrection of Christ. But it is, for us, a foreign tongue and an alien culture. Practicing stewardship helps us learn that language and adopt that culture. In the sixteenth chapter of St Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells his followers

He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own?

The invitation to stewardship is an opportunity to practice for the greater responsibilities God wants to give us in His kingdom. God gives us a little, that we may develop the skills to be entrusted with responsibility over much. God entrusts us with what is not actually ours, that we may show ourselves worthy to be entrusted with that which is, in fact, ours.

Many of us have made promises to God about what we would do if we were to win big on the lottery. I know I have! We’ve told God that, if we win the lottery, we’ll give huge amounts to the church and to all sorts of other good causes. Sometimes I wonder whether the fact that I haven’t yet won is a sign of something other than the astronomical odds against anyone doing so. God certainly knows me better than I know myself, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t won the lottery! (Of course, another reason is that I don’t actually buy tickets, but that’s another matter!) God knows that we need to master addition and subtraction before we study calculus. We have to learn to be faithful in little things—like the paycheck we get once a week or twice a month or whenever it is. Like the savings that we’ve accumulated. Like our time, our talents, and our abilities. Like our families and our job. Do we see these as “ours,” as things that we’re free to dispose of as we please? Or do we see them as “on loan” from a God who will one day demand an accounting?

By the way, do you know where the word “steward” comes from? The first syllable is from the word “sty,” as in “pig sty.” The second syllable, then, is “ward,” or “warden.” So, a steward is a “sty-warden,” a “warden of the sty”—the one entrusted with the responsibility of taking care of the pig sty and its inhabitants! Of course, the word has picked up a few more connotations over the centuries, but realizing its humble origins helps put our invitation to stewardship in a proper perspective. When the day comes for all stewards to render an accounting for all that has been entrusted to them, will you and I be found to have been honest and faithful in our stewardship? Will we be ready to live in Heaven? Will we speak the language and know the culture? That is the question of the day. Amen.

C: Proper 19

Luke 15:1-10

Exodus 32:1, 7-14

I Timothy 1:12-17

As the economy has tanked over the last couple of years, a lot of good people have had to make some awfully difficult business decisions. Nothing personal, you know, but we have to lay a bunch of you off, or lay all of you off, or close the plant, or move the plant to another state or another country where the labor is cheaper. Sorry about that, but there’s nothing we can do. You understand, don’t you? It’s just a business decision.


Various versions of this story have played themselves out all over the country, especially in parts of Indiana that are very close to us here in Warsaw. Indeed, it seems that Indiana has heard more than its fair share of such news. The phrase “business decision” may or may not be invoked, but the underlying assumption is the same—the assumption that the financial best interest of a corporation—otherwise known as the bottom line—must take precedence over the welfare of employees, customers, or whomever.


Now, I realize that very often such an action truly is necessary for the survival of the company. Nonetheless, “business decision” is an interesting expression. It’s supposed to remove the moral stigma that would otherwise be attached to any action that causes large-scale economic or social or emotional dislocation. I mean, if you deliberately set out to throw someone into bankruptcy, or put unbearable stress on a marriage, or cause feelings of depression and despair—why, that’s morally inexcusable. But if it’s a “business decision”, that’s a different story. If an attempt to improve operating efficiency, or show some more black ink on the quarterly report, has the same negative effects as I’ve just mentioned, then it’s, well, a business decision.


This sort of moral irony has a pervasive influence on the way we as a society think and act. Almost on a daily basis, it influences the decisions made by legislators and government officials on the way public revenues are going to be allocated. It even influences—and I’m sure this comes as no shock to anyone—our relationships as members of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church. For several years prior to entering seminary, I was closely involved with the preparation of adults and young people for the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. We chose to follow an unusually intense and fairly long process modeled after the catechumenate of the ancient church; in fact, it was very much like Focus on Faith, which many at St Anne’s remember very fondly.
We had a team of between three and five lay catechists, and each candidate was linked with a sponsor who also attended the instruction sessions. We met as a group two hours a week for the better part of nine months. During Lent, the candidates were prayed for by name at each Sunday liturgy. Yet, the parish in which we were doing this was slightly smaller than St Anne’s, so in any given year, it was very typical for us to have only two or three candidates in the process.


On more than one occasion it was suggested to us—and on more than one occasion we on the catechetical team suspected ourselves—that this was a terribly inefficient way of meeting our objectives. To put it in business terms, it was a terribly labor intensive process, wasteful of the human resources that are so precious to any parish church, large of small. A good “business decision” would have been to find a different way of doing things.


In a somewhat obscure novel from many decades ago, called The Keys of the Kingdom, the main character is a missionary priest who spends thirty years in China proclaiming the gospel, with only one solitary convert to Christ to show as the fruit of his long labor. His superiors in the order eventually—very belatedly by their own estimation—made the obvious “business decision” and recalled Father Chisholm back to the equivalent of a desk job at the home office. He and many of his peers considered his ministry to have been an abject failure. Yet, the reader of the novel learns that Father Chisholm has always been revered by God, and in the end acquires the respect and admiration of his peers as well.


And, the parish in Oregon which sent me to seminary continues to hang in there, going on nearly thirty years now, with the inefficient and wasteful process of the catechumenate. Most of us will go along with the severe but compelling logic of the business decision only so far, when something deep in our hearts rebels with a resounding “Yes, but ...”—or even a contemptuous “So what?” Several years ago I had the moving experience of touring a state of Wisconsin facility for the severely developmentally disabled, people who are physically, mentally, and emotionally completely helpless. The ratio of care-givers to care-receivers in that place was astonishingly low. Care and concern and affection were lavished on these people. About that same time, I became familiar with the work of the now-departed Roman Catholic scholar and spiritual director Henri Nouwen, who chose to leave the prestigious academic community of Harvard University and make his home in Canada, in a community dedicated to the same sort of developmentally disabled men and women whom I met in Wisconsin. Father Nouwen died while living in that community.


From the standpoint of the most efficient use of tax dollars, the kind of care given at Central Wisconsin Center is not a sound business decision—the patients could be kept alive in a sort of warehouse fashion for less money. From the standpoint of Father Nouwen’s “career path”, his departure from Harvard was not a sound business decision, for many reasons. Yet few of us, I would imagine, are inclined to stand up and cry “foul” at either of these examples of “wastefulness”. There is an impulse in the human soul that challenges the ethical supremacy of the business decision.


How many stories have you heard about conspicuous bravery in combat by men who are motivated not by the strategic objectives of their superiors, or even by the opportunity to save their own lives or the life of a colleague, but by the irresistible desire simply to recover the body of a fallen comrade? Such risk-taking is surely not a good business decision, but neither is it one with which many of us would care to argue. There are in the human psyche certain emotional and symbolic instincts which defy the absolute sovereignty of efficiency.


I would suggest to you this morning that these instincts are telltale signs of nothing less than the image of God present in human nature. Today’s liturgy proclaims to us that God does not always, if ever, make what we would recognize as a sound business decision. In effect, the scribes and Pharisees who complained about Jesus’ consorting with tax collectors and sinners were accusing him of making a poor business decision.
One would think that, from a P.R. standpoint, it would have been in Jesus’ best interest to cultivate a relationship with the religious establishment—you know, a weekly golf date with the High Priest or an occasional round of drinks for the Sanhedrin. He certainly did not help his prestige by socializing with those who collaborated with the Roman Empire or whose occupations were less than morally circumspect. But Jesus responds to this indictment with the parable of the shepherd who abandoned 99% of his capital assets in order to recover the 1% which was lost. And he didn’t leave the 99 in the safety of a sheepfold or a bank vault, but, the text says, in the wilderness, where they would be easy pickings for a hostile takeover by wolves or ... whatever. If there was ever a bad business decision, this was it!


Yet, Jesus suggests, such is the nature of God—to be wastefully labor intensive in pursuing each individual wayward human soul—in pursuit of your wayward human soul, and mine. Indeed, the image of Jesus the good shepherd, with sheep #100 lovingly carried on his shoulders, warms our hearts and fills us with gratitude, for we are that sheep. In our Old Testament lesson from Exodus, God, as chairman of the board, announces to Moses, as chief executive officer, a business decision he had made. There would be a corporate restructuring of the nation of Israel which would involve “out-placing”—perhaps with a few well-directed thunderbolts—the “human resources” of the company. Moses couldn’t argue with the logic of the decision as it was presented on paper—or, perhaps, carved in stone. Each of the twelve divisions of the company showed a disastrous bottom line on the quarterly report. In fact, there was strong evidence of a planned employee takeover with the intention of selling out to a competitor. Yet, as much as the move made sense, Moses didn’t like it. He felt like the plan betrayed the memory of the company’s founding fathers—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God wasn’t so sure, but purely out of his regard for his CEO, he abandoned the restructuring plan and called back the thunderbolts.


And when we hear the story once again of God changing his mind and sparing the people of Israel after the intercession of Moses, even though they had lapsed into infidelity and idolatry, our hearts are warmed and filled with gratitude, for we, too, are, as the hymn says, “prone to wander”. We, too, have lapsed into infidelity and idolatry and are the beneficiaries of God’s bad business decisions—his abundant, labor-intensive, inefficient, and wasteful grace shed abroad into our hearts even at this moment by the Holy Spirit.


As St Paul reminds the young bishop Timothy, and us, in today’s epistle: “The saying is sure, and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. ... [we have] received mercy that in [us] ... Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. To the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever.” Amen.

Year C: Proper 18

Philemon 1-21

It hardly ever happens that we get to read nearly an entire book of the bible all in one sitting. But today we do that with St Paul’s letter to Philemon; only a couple of lines at the end dealing with incidental details are omitted from the reading.

So let’s set the stage. Paul is in prison as he writes this. It’s a pretty humane imprisonment as that sort of thing goes; his friends and other visitors apparently have generous access to him, and he’s allowed to have a secretary to write down what he dictates. One of these visitors is a fellow named Onesimus, which, in Greek, means “useful”; that’s an important fact to know because Paul plays a little word game with that name at a really key point in the letter. Paul is instrumental in leading Onesimus to Christ, and becomes the young man’s mentor and spiritual father. They are very close.

But there’s a problem. Onesimus, it turns out, is a runaway slave. And, to make matters worse, the master he ran away from is also a Christian, and somebody whom Paul knows fairly well from his missionary work prior to this particular imprisonment, a guy named Philemon. One of those uncomfortable “small world” moments. Of all the people for Onesimus to hook up with, he had to choose somebody who knew his boss!

So Paul wants to fix things. But before we dig in and begin to look at his strategy, which is very impressive, we have to do just a little bit of mental housekeeping, and at least be aware of, even if we don’t set them completely aside, the prejudices and assumptions we bring to this story. One important reality we need to realize that that, while slavery is always slavery—one human being claiming to own another human being—slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world was a much, much less brutal institution than it was in the American South prior to the Civil War, which is the mental model you and I are most likely to import into the mix between Paul and Onesimus and Philemon. Still, from the standpoint of pure justice, Onesimus was within his rights to run away. No human being has the right to own another human being. This may not have been as self-evident to Philemon as it is to us, or even as it was, I would suggest, to Paul. But it’s nonetheless true. From the standpoint, like I said, of pure justice, Onesimus didn’t do anything wrong.

So why didn’t Paul just give Onesimus a high-five and shoot an email off to Philemon, “You idiot! Christians can’t own slaves! What were you thinking?” Because, not only did he not do that, but he sent Onesimus back to Philemon with only this lousy letter for protection, all at some considerable risk, one might imagine, to Onesimus. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation! What’s going on here?

I haven’t formally studied mathematics for 42 years—and counting! But one thing I do remember from studying math is that it usually not enough just to get the right answer. You’ve got to get the right answer for the right reason. That’s why teachers make you show your work, rather than just fill in the blank with the right answer. Well, that’s kind of what’s going on between Paul and Philemon. That “right answer,” of course, is for Onesimus to be free, to no longer be a slave. The “right answer” is for Philemon to permanently set Onesimus free—to do so openly and legally, as only he was able to do. Paul wants Onesimus to enjoy freedom that is not tainted by being technically illegal and underground. He wants Onesimus to be free openly, transparently, not in the shadows. Onesimus deserved that much as a human being created in the image of God. For Philemon to liberate Onesimus was most definitely the right answer. It would satisfy the obvious demands of justice—obvious to us, at any rate, though probably not so much to Philemon and his contemporaries.

But even that is not good enough for Paul. He doesn’t simply want Onesimus to be free. He doesn’t simply want Onesimus to be legally emancipated by Philemon just because it’s the right thing to do. He wants Onesimus’ freedom to flow naturally from both Onesimus and Philemon having a mutual epiphany, a simultaneous “Aha!” moment. He wants them both to understand that the entire foundation of their relationship is no longer determined by Roman law, or by Greek social custom, but by the new identities that have been given by having both been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul wants them to know that their union in Christ trumps and transforms all other dimensions of their relationship.

But in order to bring them both to such a realization, especially Philemon, Paul has to persuade Onesimus to once again put himself in a very vulnerable position, putting his very freedom at risk. Paul wants Onesimus to return to Philemon and say, “I’m back. What’s next?” And he wants Philemon, in turn, to not merely come to his senses about the immorality of slavery, but to see Onesimus not as a slave, or even a former slave, but as a brother in Christ. “Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother.” And he wants it to be Philemon’s idea, not a matter of bowing to pressure from his old friend Paul. He says, “I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own free will.”

Now, chattel slavery is no longer an institution of our society. So we might be tempted to admire Paul’s rhetorical skill in this letter, but then cast it aside as not really relevant. We would be wrong to do so. While we may not deal with slavery in our experience, we do deal with issues of identity. Even more than he wanted freedom for Onesimus, Paul wanted Onesimus and Philemon both to set aside entirely their slave-master relationship. More than wanting it to be over, he wanted them to see it as meaningless, moot, yesterday’s news. Our society invites us to claim our identity—in effect, to name ourselves—in a multitude of ways. Young … old … fat … sick … successful … poor … gay … straight … American … disabled … educated … wealthy … depressed … beautiful … clever … illiterate … illegal … bright … addicted … and many, many more. We are every day sucked into defining ourselves, and therefore our relationship with others, whether we’re aware of it or not, according to these labels. Paul invited Onesimus and Philemon to cast aside “master” and “slave” as categories by which they understood themselves and their relationship to one another, and to adopt instead “brother in Christ.” He invites us, through this letter, to do the same. He invites us to set all those other identities down on the ground—not necessarily as garbage, but simply as no longer necessary, no longer relevant—and keep on moving. He invites us to see our relationships with one another not as people who agree on something, or who share the same political views or the same taste in fashion or music, or whatever, but as sisters and brothers in Christ, marked as Christ’s own forever and sealed with the Holy Spirit in the waters of new birth.

Do we know who we are? Are we ready to live like we know who we are? Amen. 

C: Proper 17

Sometime during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, I had a career as a Boy Scout. It lasted all of about one month. The brevity of my own time in scouting, however, is no reflection of my opinion of the organization.  I have particular respect for Boy Scouts who make it to the rank of Eagle. Having served on an Eagle Scout board of review, I am very impressed with the strength of the requirements, and the strength of character needed in any young man who would attempt to meet them.  It’s a demanding process that many begin and few finish.  It’s not easy, but it is doable.  It can’t be done absent-mindedly or half-heartedly, but it can be done. The required steps are clearly laid out in the Boy Scout manual. Boys who attain the rank of Eagle Scout do so as a direct result of their own initiative and dedication.

Many times, Christians think and act as though our standing before God, the process by which we achieve a right relationship with God, is the same sort of process as that by which a boy becomes an Eagle Scout. If a person can muster enough initiative and dedication, and follow the path of moral virtue that is clearly defined in places like the Ten Commandments, then he or she can earn God’s favor, can deserve, by right, to be accepted and approved by God.  The problem is, the more “successful” we become at cultivating such moral virtues, at deserving such favor and approval, the more prideful we become. After all, look how much we’ve sacrificed and how much we’ve accomplished, to have reached such a point. And the more prideful we become, by definition, the more we are alienated from God. It’s an ironically treacherous cycle that feeds on itself and grows until it catches us in its trap.  The more we “improve”, the more we appear to deserve God’s approval, and the less we think we need it! Here we are—just and charitable and prudent and wise, all as a result of our initiative and dedication. So who needs God now? What started out as growth toward God ends up in separation from God. We become like many religious people in Jesus’ time who were punctilious about observing every last detail of the law in an excruciatingly correct manner.  Time and again he warns them of the danger of pride and arrogance and that their very ability to keep the law is itself a gift from God.

Perhaps Jesus was familiar with the story of a certain Rabbi Simeon, who had lived about a hundred years earlier. Rabbi Simeon was invited to a royal dinner party, and took the liberty of seating himself directly between the king and the queen, remarking that someone who had cultivated wisdom as much as he had deserved nothing less than to be seated among royalty! Wisdom may have been among Rabbi Simeon’s virtues, but humility was apparently not.

This may even be the background for the advice Jesus gives to his own disciples when they were invited to a dinner party given by a local dignitary. When you enter the dining room, take the least desirable position. Perhaps the host will then invite you to come at sit at the head table. But if you seat yourself at the head table, you run the risk of being embarrassed when you’re asked to make way for someone the host would rather have there. Now this advice that Jesus gives is neither particularly original—very similar versions are found in other literature of the time—nor is it particularly profound—its merit is rather obvious. But generation upon generation of men and women have found it extremely difficult to put into practice!

Humility does not come naturally or easily to most of us. It’s a virtue that is scorned by our peers as often as it is admired. We Americas in particular, with our heritage of self-reliant frontier individualism, are apt to get a lump in our throat when we hear Frank Sinatra sing I Did It My Way.  This is the opposite of humility: arrogant pride, the rebellious assertion of one’s independence from God. Such pride is the root, the wellspring, of all other sin, because it cuts us off from God.  Real virtue, however, is grounded not in pride, but in humility, the kind of humility that is the only possible result of walking closely with God.

If you drive by just about any school playground in America on a Saturday afternoon when the weather is mild, there’s a good chance that you’ll find young people there playing basketball.  And at each of these informal games, there will be one or two players who stand out among their peers for their ability, who set the standard of play to which everyone else aspires.  But if LeBron James and Kobe Bryant were to show up and offer to go two-on-two against whoever the local hotdog basketball players in that place are, what do you think is going to happen? In the presence of real basketball ability, any local schoolyard hotdog is going to be humbled.

Your Rector takes a certain amount of satisfaction in his accomplishments as a cook. I’ve dabbled with Chinese food for 25 years, and picked up some Louisiana cuisine about 20 years ago when we lived there. More recently I’ve been trying to learn Mexican cooking, and even venture a bit into barbecue.  But if, say, Emeril Lagasse or Bobby Flay were to step out of the television set into my kitchen, I assure I would not be talking about my cooking ability.  I would be humbled.  In fact, the hotdog basketball player, and the amateur chef would all be the first to acknowledge their own insignificance in the presence of authentic excellence and greatness.  They would attempt to focus attention away from themselves and onto the source of such greatness.

I would like to think that, having had chef Paul Prudhomme in my kitchen, I would want to have him back again and again, just to delight in the beauty of what he does with food.  Having once witnessed and experienced cooking excellence, I would want to participate in it again and again.  And while my attention is focused on the master chef, not thinking of myself at all, I would probably, in the process, become a pretty terrific cook!

When we walk closely with God we experience such authentic holiness that we can see clearly that we have none of our own.  We’re humbled to the point where we can see how un-humble we are, how inadequate our humility is. But humility is a virtue that we can’t aim for directly.  In fact, a humble person is never aware of his or her own humility, because to be aware of it is to lose it.  Humility is the habit of looking to God alone as the source of our self-esteem.

So growth in humility cannot occur if we focus on growth in humility.  We cannot aim for it and work toward it the way a Boy Scout aims at the rank of Eagle. Growth in humility is a side-effect, an indirect result, of our walking closely with God, of making him our focus, our delight, and our joy. If I want to become a good cook, my chances are much improved if I hang around a good cook, and simply take delight in that person’s mastery of the art.  If I want to become humble, my chances are much improved if I stop thinking about becoming humble, and concentrate instead on enjoying and adoring and serving Christ, the model of humility. This is the way we derive our self-esteem from God, by hanging around him, in prayer, in the sacraments, and in the communal life of the church.
When a soldier displays heroism on the battlefield, the only thing going through his mind is the task at hand: accomplishing the military objective, and saving the lives of his comrades. The one thing he is not thinking about is receiving a medal for his valor.

If we follow this path of humility, if we reach the point where taking the least honorable seat at the dinner party becomes second nature to us, then we will eventually, in the ironic economy of the kingdom of God, be granted that which our arrogant pride would have sought but not found.  We will be granted the respect and admiration of our peers. We will hear the voice of the host of the banquet saying to us, “Friend, come up higher.”  And in the act of walking to the head table to accept the honor, we will, once again, be humbled.  Amen.

St Mary the Virgin (8/15/10)

Since the feast falls on a Sunday this year, we chose to avail ourselves of the Prayer Book rubrics that allow use of its collect and readings, without technically supplanting the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost. The principal liturgy was observed according to the customary of this parish for major feasts.

When the Virgin Mary made a journey to visit her cousin Elizabeth while both women were pregnant—Elizabeth with John the Baptist, and Mary, of course, with Our Lord—Mary is reported by St Luke’s gospel as having broken out into an extended canticle of praise, during which she exclaims,  “All generations will call me blessed.”

All generations will call me blessed.

Those who pray the Daily Office, Evening Prayer in particular, repeat these words from Mary’s Song daily.

All generations will call me blessed.

These words have at times been controversial. For about the last four and a half centuries, Protestant Christians have tended to think that Catholic Christians take them a little too seriously, and pay too much attention to the mother of Jesus. Catholics have tended to think that Protestants don’t take these words from scripture seriously at all, and pretty much ignore Mary altogether.  Among others, the notion of every generation calling Mary blessed has been given lip service, but without any concrete follow-up behavior. I have to say, this is kind of an Anglican thing. We say or sing the Magnificat—the Song of Mary—every time we offer Evening Prayer. But in most Anglican communities, that’s pretty much it.  

All generations will call me blessed.

What does it look like for any given generation to call Mary blessed? Devotion to the mother of Jesus arose fairly early in the history of Christianity. There’s a legend—not reported in scripture and not particularly supported by any outside historical sources, but an enduring tradition nonetheless—that Mary never experienced physical death, but was assumed bodily into heaven, after living for some time in the city of Ephesus, surrounded by all the apostles. In western Catholicism, this event is known as the Assumption of Our Lady. In the Eastern tradition, it is referred to as the Dormition—literally, the “falling asleep”—of the “God-bearer.”  The Greek word for “God bearer”—theotokos—is extremely important in Christian history. It’s an affirmation of the Nicene Creed, which teaches that Jesus is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, of one being with the Father.” As incredible as it may sound, the child to whom Mary gave birth is … God; hence, it is appropriate to speak of Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. It may be somewhat unfortunate that theotokos got translated into Latin as mater dei, which means, literally, “mother of God.” This expression has caused confusion and conflict because it seems to say that Mary pre-existed God, which is obviously ridiculous. In actuality, however, it’s an affirmation about Jesus more than it is about Mary.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, life was harsh and difficult for most people.  In that atmosphere of constant danger and despair, people began to develop a style of  Christian devotion that saw Mary as “Mom,” and as we all remember from our experience of being children, and perhaps raising children, Mom is more likely to respond to our concerns with understanding and gentleness than “Dad” typically is. So they started to frequently voice their petitions to Mary. To most of the Protestant reformers, this sounded like idolatry, like it was putting Mary on the same level as God, a sort of “fourth person of the Trinity.” So they overreacted, and expunged Mary from any place in either public worship or private devotion. Of course, all along, we see the Blessed Mother appear in great works of art—paintings, statues, poems, songs—both before and after the Reformation.

But is any of this “cal[ling Mary] blessed?”

All generations will call me blessed.

Devotion to Mary can certainly be overblown. There’s story about Jesus walking into St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. In one of the side chapels there was the proverbial “little old lady” on her knees in the front pew praying the rosary. Jesus tried several times to get her attention, but without any success. Nonetheless, he persisted.  Finally, the lady turns around and looks at him in irritation and says, “Can’t you see I’m talking to your mother?”  Yet, I would say, the tradition of Marian devotion and piety is overwhelmingly good. And Anglicans, by and large, are certainly not in any danger of overdoing it.

All generations will call me blessed.

If we look at the context of where the phrase comes from—that is, from the Magnificat—we are left with a much different notion of what calling Mary “blessed” might look like. The Song of Mary is an intensely political text, and it’s all about reversal—reversal of fortunes, reversal of expectations.

If you’re familiar with the major stories of the Old Testament—and we might presume that Mary was herself—you can’t help but notice a striking resemblance between the Magnificat and another song offered by a woman who became a mother under strange circumstances—Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel. Both her song and Mary’s talk about the expected winners turning out to be losers, and the expected losers turning out to be winners. The proud are scattered and the mighty are cast down, but the lowly are lifted up. The rich are sent away empty, but the hungry are filled.

You and I tend to interpret reversals like these through a particular cultural lens. About a hundred years ago, when silent movies were packing people into theaters, there was a sort of melodramatic formula that told the same story a hundred different ways: A poor widow is being hounded by evil villains wearing black hats. They tie her to a railroad track in the hope of causing her certain death. The train approaches and poor widow struggles to get free. Finally, the good guys, wearing white hats, ride their white horses into the scene. They free her from the tracks at the very last moment before the train comes barreling through, and then chase down the bad guys and give them what they so richly deserve while the movie audience cheers. Come to think of it, a number of contemporary movies and TV shows follow that same formula, don’t they?  

But, by interpreting the reversals of the Magnificat through the lens of a silent film melodrama, we deprive ourselves of its true impact.  In the time of Mary, wealth and power were seen as presumptive signs of God’s blessing on righteous living. If somebody was rich, it was because God had rewarded them for living right. Poverty and weakness were seen as presumptive signs of moral inferiority. If someone was poor, it was because they deserved to be poor. They were nasty people. So, for God to favor the poor and weak at the expense of the rich and powerful is an astonishing reversal of expectations. It was like saying Democrats favor giant corporations over labor unions, or Republicans favor government programs over private enterprise.

But the point is not a merely moralistic—“God loves the poor and we should too”—as true as that may be. It’s more radical than that. The point is this: God’s modus operandi, God’s default way of doing business, in any given situation, probably runs counter to our expectations.  We may as well assume that whatever God does, it’s going to surprise us in a way that we can’t anticipate, and that will seem illogical or foolish, something we would never have advised Him to do!

In the second part of C.S. Lewis’s adult science fiction trilogy, a novel called Perelandra, most of the action takes place on floating islands. There was dry land on the planet, and the island dwellers could visit dry land during the day, but they could never spend the night there. Life on the islands was challenging, because they were floating, The action of waves in the water was transferred to the surface of the island. The ground was always sifting under their feed. So the island dwellers of Perelandra had to learn to let go of any need to control their environment. They had to learn to literally “go with the flow.”  This is a wonderful image for our relationship with the Son of Mary, the one who was born of her as God. It describes, in fact, the way in which we continue to call her blessed in our own generation. It is by learning to go with the “flow” of God’s wild and untamed grace—grace that turns up in unexpected ways and unexpected places. We call Mary “blessed” when we understand that the gospel of her Son is likely to upend some of our conventional expectations.

Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death. Amen.

C: Proper 14

  Luke 12:32-40                            

Genesis 15:1-6

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Whenever the summer Olympic Games roll around every four years, one of the events that I always find a joy to watch is diving—both men’s and women’s, both springboard and platform. Sometimes, though, I have to say, I’d rather watch the diving competition with the sound turned down. I find that my enjoyment of the event is diminished by the non-stop commentary of the announcers, who are usually retired divers themselves.

Before each dive, they describe in detail what it’s going to consist of, and how difficult it’s considered, etc, etc. And immediately after each dive, before the diver is even out of the water, they analyze and critique it, telling us precisely what was done well and what was done poorly, what worked and what failed. 

I have a confession to make.

Unless they belly-flop, or hit the platform on the way down they all look the same to me!  They’re all beautiful to me.  They all leave me breathless with awe at what a human body can be made to do.  But it is next to impossible for me to distinguish the stupendous 9.9s from the not-so-stupendous 6.9s.  I simply don’t have the eyes to see the difference. 

Eyes to see. 

A hard-driving business executive suffers chest pains, and wonders whether this is indeed “the big one”.  He rushes off to the doctor, but tests reveal that it’s not a heart attack, but a pre-ulcerous condition that can be best treated by altering his stress-filled work-addicted lifestyle.  The man takes this as a warning that could spare him a more serious problem in the future.  Is it happy coincidence, or something more? 

Eyes to see. 

The security of a marriage is threatened by the “seven-year itch”, and the wandering eyes and wandering fantasies that go along with it. But one of the partners is offered an attractive job in another part of the country, and they decide to accept it and relocate. 

Once they’re removed from the immediate sources of temptation, they realize how close they came to disaster, and they resolve to devote renewed enthusiasm to their relationship.  Is it a happy co-incidence, or something more? 

Eyes to see.

A depressed teenager swallows a dose of sleeping pills that should have been more than enough to complete her suicidal intentions, but through some inexplicable fluke of body chemistry, it isn’t, and she’s found, and revived, and gets the help she needs.  Is it a happy coincidence, or something more? 

Eyes to see. 

I’m sure that if you and I were to sit down and share the memories of our lives and the lives of those we have loved, we could come up with countless other examples of just being at the right place at the right time, or with the right person, situations where the same question could be asked: Is it a happy coincidence, or something more? 

Eyes to see. 

In the time just before everything began to happen on a computer, there was a training technique that tested the learner on the content of the text even in the course of reading it.  This was done through the strategic placement of blanks in the narrative, blanks which the reader should be able to mentally fill-in if he or she has been paying attention.  On one margin of the page was a column that, to the naked eye, looked like a jumble of nonsense characters printed in red ink.  But if the reader comes across a blank in the text for which the missing word doesn’t come readily to mind, he or she could take a piece of red-tinted transparent plastic and place it over the column of nonsense characters.  In the margin, next to the mysterious blank, the correct answer shows through.  The red plastic filtered out the nonsense, providing the “eyes” necessary to see the hidden answer. They provided a way of seeing that which would otherwise be invisible. 

Eyes to see. 

For Christians, they eyes with which we are invited to see are the eyes of faith. 

Faith. 

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us this morning that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  The difference between providence and coincidence is faith.  Faith is a way of seeing, a quality of vision that looks at a happy co-incidence of circumstances, but sees—do you understand the difference between looking and seeing?—sees God actively present in our lives. 

Throughout human history, women and men and children have had such faith, such a way of seeing.  Abraham and Sarah looked at their advancing age—heck, they weren’t advancing in age, they were old—Abraham and Sarah looked at the fact that they were old, but, through the eyes of faith, what they saw was God’s ability to fulfill his promise and bless them with a child, an heir born of their own flesh. 

Abraham and Sarah’s grandson, Jacob, looked at a youth of quarreling with his twin brother, an adulthood of being continually cheated by his uncle, and an old age of being victimized by famine, but through the eyes of faith, what Jacob saw was God beginning to fulfill his promise to make him the father of a great nation, a nation that would bear his own name, the name God had given him: Israel. 

Jacob’s son Joseph looked at his being sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, but through the eyes of faith, what he saw was God present with him, even while he languished in a dungeon, preparing the way for him to assume such power in Egypt that he answered only to Pharaoh himself. 

Generations later, the people of Israel looked at themselves wandering in circles through the desert wilderness, but through the eyes of faith (the faith of some of them, at any rate) what they saw was the land flowing with milk and honey which God had promised to lead them to. 

The disciples of Jesus looked at their abandonment of their trades and professions, their only known means of livelihood, in order to follow him, but, through the eyes of faith, they saw the inestimable riches of participating in God’s plan for the salvation of the human race and restoration of the created order. 

Christians today look at the changes and chances of this life.  Seeing through the eyes of faith is what enables us to see the hand of God equally present in both the happy “coincidences” and the painfully tragic moments of our lives.  And we, who live after the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and with two thousand years of collective Christian experience behind us, have a tremendous advantage that our ancestors in faith did not have. We have seen the tangible first fruits of God’s work of redemption.  In the hearing of the word, in the celebration of the sacraments, and in the fellowship of the Christian community, we see this redemption in progress. 

The patriarchs and prophets of the old covenant, as the author of Hebrews tells us, “died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”  You and I, at least, have a clearer and closer vision of our common destination and home than they did. Our eyes of faith enable us to look at personal wealth, and see spiritual danger.  Our eyes of faith enable us to look at human need and suffering, and see an opportunity to serve our Lord Jesus by cultivating the virtues of charity and generosity. 

Our eyes of faith can look at the delay in our Lord’s return and see an opportunity to become more fully prepared to give an accounting, as stewards, for that which has been entrusted to us. And our eyes of faith, a few moments from now, will be able to look at bread and wine, made from wheat and grapes and fashioned by human skill—we’ll be able to look at these ordinary elements and see the broken body and poured out blood of Jesus, through which you and I become once again the Body of Christ—taken, blessed, broken and given for the life of the world. In every Eucharist, we have an opportunity to not merely look, but to really see. Amen.