All Saints' Day (2009)

John 11:32-44

Wisdom 3:1-9

Revelation 21:1-6a

Psalm 24:1-6

So it’s All Saints Day … the actual day, this year, instead of the Sunday following. I don’t know precisely where “All Saints” ranks among the most popular names for Episcopal churches, but it’s in the top five, I would bet. This parish shares Kosciuscko County with an “All Saints” church—the congregation up in Syracuse. The word “saint,” of course, means “holy one,” and one of the ways it’s used in the Christian tradition is to refer to all Christians, all those who have been set apart in baptism and thereby made “holy to the Lord,” to borrow a phrase from the Old Testament, regardless of their particular moral character. But the way we’re using the word today, it has a more specific meaning. It singles out a minority of Christians, all of them now having passed out of this world, who are deemed worthy of remembrance by all, people who get churches named after them, and appear in stained glass windows, and have their own days on the calendar. So, how does one get to be on this list? What are the qualities of those who have “Saint” put in front of their names?

The Psalmist gives us a clue when he writes

3 “Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? *

and who can stand in his holy place?”

4 “Those who have clean hands and a pure heart, *

who have not pledged themselves to falsehood,

nor sworn by what is a fraud.

Like I said, a clue. But it’s kind of an intimidating clue! Who of us can hope to meet that qualification? –basically, never done anything wrong and never wanted to! But the fact is, by virtue of our baptism, we are all called to be saints, and not just the generic kind but the special kind, the kind we’re celebrating today. In words that will cross our lips several times during our closing hymn at this liturgy: “…and I mean to be one too!” Nonetheless, it looks impossible and we are understandably discouraged. We are all very much “works in progress,” and sometimes the progress doesn’t seem that impressive.

When we look at today’s Old Testament reading from the Book of Wisdom, it doesn’t appear to offer us any help. The portrait of the “righteous” that the author paints doesn’t seem to have room for most of us in it:

God tested them and found them worthy of himself; like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.

When ore is removed from a gold mine, it has to be refined before it can be of any value. And gold is refined by putting it into a furnace and subjecting it to intense heat, and this separates the impurities from the real thing. We might say that gold “suffers” in the process of being refined, of having its true nature and character revealed, just as the righteousness of the people the passage from Wisdom talks about is revealed as a result of their suffering. And this invariably confronts us with an uncomfortable realization, which is that there is a disconnect—sometimes a huge disconnect—between the character that is revealed in the suffering of the saints and the character that is revealed in our own suffering. The gap between the two can be quite sobering, and lead quickly to despair: How can we possibly be saved when there is such a gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness?

There are generally three common theological responses to this question. One of these responses recognizes—correctly, I would say—that we have no righteousness of our own, that God alone is righteous, God alone is holy. Jesus lived a completely sinless life in thought, word, and deed and then offered himself on the cross, satisfying the just demands of God’s holiness. Christ’s righteousness is then “imputed” to us—that is, we get the credit for the life Jesus lived. We don’t deserve it, but when we respond in faith, God gives us that credit anyway. God overlooks our sins, and sees only the blood of Christ, and applies that righteousness to our account.

Another way of understanding the business of how God saves us combines the sovereignty of God—God’s absolute freedom to do whatever He wills—with the grace of God—that is, God’s underlying inclination to shower good things on those who He has made—and sees the moment of our death, the moment of our passing from this world to the next, as a moment when God miraculously and instantaneously fixes everything that’s wrong with us. All our flaws and foibles suddenly disappear, and we wake up in the likeness of Christ.

Yet another approach solves the problem of the disconnect between the righteousness of the saints and the righteousness of us ordinary Christians by redefining “righteousness.” We are not really captive to the power of sin and death, but have been deceived into thinking and acting as if we are. In truth, each one of us still bears the full and undistorted image of God. Salvation lies in simply remembering and reclaiming this reality.

There is, I believe, an element of truth and hope in each one of these accounts, but I also believe that each one is ultimately a dead end. In each case, both grace and salvation are cheapened in ways that don’t go the distance. They give us short-term spiritual relief without solving our long-term spiritual problem. One of our problems is that we have an innate and habitual desire for quick fixes and shortcuts. It stems from the same impulse that leads to clean our house for company by indiscriminately gathering up all the clutter, throwing it into a spare room, and shutting the door. It creates the impression of a job getting done without the job actually getting done.

By contrast, the path to sainthood is a journey of actual change, not just throwing the clutter in a spare room. It is important, and a fact for which we should be immensely grateful, that God “imputes” righteousness to us on the basis of what Jesus accomplishes on our behalf. But it’s only a stopgap. It gets us onto the playing field, but we still have to actually play the game. It is important, and a fact for which we should be immensely grateful, that God’s grace is an unmerited gift; we do not, and indeed cannot do anything to earn or deserve it. But it’s never magic, and it always requires our active cooperation. Spiritual therapy is in that respect no different than physical therapy, and anybody who’s had physical therapy can tell you that the therapist is there to help you and guide you and help you, but you’ve got to be the one to actually do the work. And, yes, we have all quite forgotten who we are as creatures in the image of God, and we do need to recall and reclaim our identity in God. But the Fall of humankind, my brothers and sisters, is real, and we only deceive ourselves and others if we ignore that abundant evidence that we live under the power of sin and death just in the interest of making everybody feel better about themselves.

Consider, for a moment, that dramatic and emotionally-charged moment when Jesus calls a very dead Lazarus out of his tomb. After Lazarus complies, what does he instruct those around him to do? He says, “Unbind him, and let him go.” So Lazarus is not only risen from death, he is unbound and let go; the symbolism of that secondary act should not be lost on us. In our reading from Revelation today, God says, “Behold, I make all things new!” The Saints are those who have been made new, who have fully put away the “former things” that they have been, who have been unbound and let go from everything that was holding them captive. The author of the Book of Wisdom tells us that the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God because God has tested them and found them worthy. Well, I suspect they have been found worthy because they have been made worthy.”

So the whole experience of faith in Christ, the whole journey of following Christ as a disciple, the whole process of salvation, is about having our souls taken apart and rebuilt, with the eventual result that the image of God in which we were made, but which has been distorted by sin, is perfectly restored. This begins when we initially come to Christ in faith and are “covered” with his righteousness “credited to our account.” It continues as we cooperate daily with God’s free and abundant grace as we worship and study and serve in community with others who are on the same journey. It concludes when we have fully remembered who are, when we can look God in the eye and not instantly turn to dust, because we “look like” Jesus in every respect. Then we will have joined the company of the saints in light whose heroic witness to the gospel we celebrate today. Praised be Jesus Christ in his angels and in his saints. Amen.

B: Proper 24 (2009)

Mark 10:46-52

As Bill Cosby put it so well in one of his comedy recordings from the ‘60s: “I started out as a child.” The one thing I can safely say, is that every one of us either is a child, or once was a child—there are no exceptions! Childhood carries with it both blessings and curses.

Children themselves tend to see the curses—they’re smaller than adults, physically weaker, and are forever having grownups tell them what they can and can’t do. It’s really a pain.

Adults, however, tend to be nostalgic, and dwell on the blessings of childhood, the chief of which is that if you get yourself into a jam, your parents will get you out of it—unless, of course, it’s your parents you’re in a jam with, in which case, if you can’t play one off against the other, you’re cooked! But if you’re in trouble at school, or with the neighbors, or you get lost somewhere or forget something, your parents fix it. You don’t always know how; you probably don’t want to know how, but somehow it happens. It’s just magic.

Eventually, though, we have to grow up. And one of the measures of adult maturity is the realization that there is no magic. Getting out of a jam costs somebody something. There is no free lunch; somebody pays the tab. Some people who are physically and legally grown up cannot face this fact. Intellectually and emotionally, they are still children. They cannot face responsibility for their own actions; they try to shift blame and shift adverse consequences for their behavior on to other people. They expect a Sugar Daddy to come to the rescue, to bail them out.

I suspect that it’s this sort of arrested moral development that lies behind many of our social ills, from crime to drug abuse to poverty. Many of us, however, who are well-adjusted adults, and make our way in the world fairly well, nonetheless revert to childish attitudes and behavior where our relationship to God is concerned. Children are always asking for things, telling parents what they want. Have you ever noticed how much we equate prayer with asking God for something? Of course, God invites us to make our requests known to Him. But that’s not the be-all and end-all of our relationship with God.

In our catechism, there are seven different forms of prayer defined. Petition—which is asking God for something on our own behalf—and intercession—which is asking God for something on behalf of someone else—are two of these seven. But the other five—which are praise, thanksgiving, confession, adoration, and oblation—the other five do not involve asking God for anything at all. Yet, how much time do we spend on those categories of prayer in comparison with petition and intercession?

Even our liturgical prayer—which is probably more balanced than our personal prayer—even our liturgical corporate prayer is filled with petition. In particular, we are frequently asking God for mercy— “Lord, have mercy … Show us your mercy … Have mercy upon us.” Asking for mercy has been a consistent feature of the liturgy, both in the east and in the west—but particularly in the east; if you’ve ever been to a Greek or Russian service, you know what I mean—asking for mercy has been a consistent feature of Christian worship since the very earliest times. And what is mercy? It’s a rich and all-encompassing word that includes, but is not limited to: pity, blessing, favor, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, patience, and understanding. This is what we’re asking from God when we ask Him for mercy.

In the tenth chapter of St Mark’s gospel, a blind man named Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus repeatedly, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” He had a hard time getting Jesus’ attention, but he eventually succeeded, and it became clear that he had a very specific kind of mercy in mind. He didn’t want just general blessing and favor. He didn’t even want money. He wanted to be healed of his blindness; he wanted to be able to see. Bartimaeus, apparently, was not blind from birth. He knew exactly what he was missing, and he wanted it back.

Well, Jesus grants Bartimaeus’ petition—immediately, fully, and without the drama and complication that accompany some of his other healing miracles. He just does it, accepts Bartimaeus’ grateful thanks, and continues on his way. But if we close the book there— “…and Bartimaeus lived happily ever after” —if we close the book there, we miss a very important point. The timing of this account within the larger structure of St Mark’s gospel narrative is critical. It takes place just as Jesus is nearing the end of his slow trip from Galilee to Jerusalem and the final drama which awaited him there.

Because of this timing, then, there is tremendous symbolism in the healing of a blind man at this point. Bartimaeus’ gift of sight enables him to see. But he sees more than people and trees and sheep on the hillside. He sees Jesus enter Jerusalem, and he sees Jesus go to the cross. For Mark, this is significant, because the cross is absolutely central to his purpose in writing his gospel. Fully one-third of the entire length of Mark’s gospel is devoted to the three days of Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection. Some scholars have called it a “Passion narrative with an extended prologue.” For Mark, everything Jesus ever said or did falls under the shadow of the cross; nothing about Jesus has any meaning apart from the cross.

So, the healing of blind Bartimaeus, when understood on a spiritual and not just a literal level, tells us that God’s answer to our repeated requests for his mercy, even as Bartimaeus had begged for his mercy—God’s answer to “Lord, have mercy” is none other than the cross of Christ. If we look at Jesus but don’t “see” the cross, then we are as blind as Bartimaeus was before he was healed. The gospel of “Christ crucified” is the cure for our blindness. Those who would follow Jesus, those who would want to imitate him or emulate him, those who would ask themselves “What would Jesus do?”, those who would call themselves Christians, cannot avoid the cross, because Jesus does not avoid the cross. The cross is a scandal and a source of shame, a place of suffering and grief, but there is no knowledge of God in Christ apart from facing that scandal and shame and suffering and grief. These are the conditions from which we need to be healed, and the cross is the place of healing. Those who imitate the persistent faith of Bartimaeus—acknowledging his wretchedness, calling out for mercy, calling out for Jesus’ attention—those who imitate Bartimaeus in this way will share with him in the miracle of enlightenment, illumination, restored sight.

As long as we think of God as a Sugar Daddy, one who magically fixes things for us whenever we get into trouble, we will be disappointed. Of course, God is our Father, and we are His children. But that fact does not absolve us of responsibility for becoming spiritual adults, for becoming God’s grown-up children. Child-like trust in God is positive; child-ish spiritual immaturity is not. If our spiritual development is arrested, we are susceptible to one faith crisis after another. We get sick, and pray, but don’t get better, so we question whether God hears our prayers. We encounter financial hard times, and we ask God for relief, but things go from bad to worse, so we question whether God really loves us. We are horrified by the wars and conflicts that are going on all over the world, and we pray for peace, but the violence escalates, so we question whether God even exists. This is what happens when we look past the cross, when the cross becomes optional in our understanding of how the universe fits together.

But if we embrace the mystery of the cross, if we enter into that mystery, our eyes are opened along with Bartimaeus, and we know the cross to be not only an instrument of shameful death, a symbol of humiliation and defeat, but a source of light and restoration, and the very way of life and peace.

Yes, we started out as children. God invites us to see the light and grow up.

Amen.

B: Proper 23

Mark 10:17-31

There’s a rather inane movie from the early ‘90s called The First Wives Club, that I probably wouldn’t even know about, except for the fact that it has Diane Keaton in it, and I’ve had kind of crush on Diane Keaton since the ‘70s. At the end of the film, after they've supposedly got their lives and their relationships with men all straightened out, the three members of the club sing a hit song, from the ‘70s—You Don't Own Me.

They were referring, of course, to their former husbands, who had all behaved rather badly, and in that sense they may have been correct. But these three ladies, whether they realized it or not, were very much still owned. One was owned by an obsession with her own good looks, and went to more than extraordinary lengths to preserve them as her years inexorably advanced. Another was owned by an idealized vision of the perfect mother and perfect wife living with her perfect family in their perfect home. The third was owned precisely by the lack of any vision of who she was as a unique human being. And all three were owned by—possessed by—a desire for all the creature comforts and material perks they could get their hands on.

In that aspiration, they probably represent the majority of us who are gathered here in this church, and the majority of those in our surrounding culture. North Americans and Europeans just after the turn of the third millennium tend to over-focus on the accumulation and preservation of material wealth. When I was in grade school, futurists were predicting that the major social problem my generation would face as adults is what to do with all our leisure time. Technology was going to make human labor obsolete, nuclear energy too cheap to even run through a meter was going to drive the cost of living down, and everybody would enjoy an abundance of freedom to pursue hobbies and become citizen-philosophers. Instead, the average work week, after bottoming-out sometime around 1970, has crept steadily upward. Yet, average income, adjusted for inflation, has gone down. True, more and more households enjoy that elusive “middle class lifestyle,” but we do it with two full-time paychecks instead of one.

And the list of standard equipment for that hypothetical middle-class household keeps growing. Cell phones and personal computers, which were luxuries for the elite when my children were young, are now considered normative, essential. Yet, when Brenda and I were married thirty-seven years ago, cell phones were still the stuff of science fiction (remember Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio?), and the internet, such as it was, was the playground of egghead scientists.

The bar keeps getting raised, as we're working longer hours at less per hour to continue to be able jump over it. Oh, sure, there are “the rich,” the “well-to-do,” the “financially independent.” But do you know what my working definition of “rich” is? Anybody who has a dollar more than I do. And I would suspect that that's the definition for everybody here, although the amount will vary according to how much we have. Most of us have the feeling of being just behind the curve financially. How much would it take to feel like we're ahead of the game? Not much. Just a little bit more than I'm bringing in now. That would give me some breathing space. Only when we start to make that little bit more, that amount that we had in mind, it still isn't quite enough. How much would it then take to get ahead? Just a little bit more.

You can see how this plays out. Whether we're living on twenty thousand dollars a year or twenty thousand dollars a month, it isn't quite enough. If you're living on that lower figure, you probably find that difficult to believe.

But if your income is in the neighborhood of that higher figure, you're probably thinking to yourself that I've called it correctly. But wherever we are in relation to those two figures—below, above, or, as is most likely the case, somewhere in between, we are probably in a position where we can truthfully say that we don't own our possessions, because our possessions, in fact, own us. We may be able to sing You Don't Own Me to our spouse, or our parents, or our children, but we cannot sing it to our bank account or our mutual funds or our living room furniture or the clothes hanging in our closet or the books lining our shelves or the paintings adorning our walls or the trees and shrubs and flowers in our yard or the car sitting in our garage. In fact, when we reflect on it, these things do own us, just as surely as if they had recorded a lien on our lives down at the county courthouse.

When Jesus said 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, he wasn't talking about Bill Gates or Donald Trump or Warren Buffet. He was talking about us—you and me. The young man who approached Jesus wanting to know what he must do to inherit eternal life discovered, to his great sadness, the extent to which he was owned by his possessions. Indeed, he was faithful in keeping the commandments, and Jesus commended him for this. But even in his exemplary conduct, the young man was fearful.

Perhaps he was once poor, and didn’t want to ever be poor again. Many who are alive today who lived through the Great Depression, which makes this recession that we’re in look like a walk in the park, share a similar fear with this young man in our gospel story. Perhaps the young man had an insecure ego, an under-developed self-image, and very much enjoyed the social prestige and recognition that came along with his wealth. You and I know people—don’t we?—who fret interminably over what significant social events they get invited to, or don’t get invited to. Someone whose financial star is rising is presumed to be of more personal substance, and one who has fallen upon hard times is presumed to be somehow unusually flawed.

So the rich young man who was so good about keeping the commandments was also afraid of losing the material and social security that his wealth afforded him. And when Jesus paid him the highest possible compliment, and invited the young man to follow him, to become a disciple, he could not accept the invitation. One of the consequences of following Jesus—and in this case Jesus actually spelled it out clearly—is to dis-connect ourselves from anything that might distract us from that one all-important obsession, the obsession with discipleship. In the case of the rich young man, this involved a garage sale of monumental proportions, and he didn’t have the heart, didn’t have the strength, didn’t have the consuming will, to go through with it. He may have wanted to find his security and fulfillment in following Jesus, but he couldn’t make the leap. He couldn’t let go of that which would have become an intolerable weight on the road of discipleship. He could not bring himself to sing to his worldly goods, “You don’t own me.” He did not realize that Jesus was offering him freedom. By saying to Jesus, “You do own me” he would have been empowered to say the opposite to the wealth which hung about his neck like an albatross.

As the scriptures teach us, to be a slave to Christ is to be free from every other form of bondage, which is a pretty good deal, because his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Following Jesus enables us to be a steward of our wealth rather than a slave to it. A steward operates under a different emotional dynamic than either an owner or a slave—in fact, both the owner and the slave have more in common with one another than either has with a steward. A steward knows he doesn’t own the property he manages, therefore it can’t own him. When I write a check from my personal checkbook, I wince a little bit—or a lot sometimes—because there’s some pain involved. When I ask for a check to be written from the Rector’s Discretionary Fund, it feels much different. I might have a little anxiety if it’s running low, or over whether I’m making a wise decision about who I'm helping, but I don’t get nearly as emotionally invested as I do with my own bank account, because it’s clear that I’m just a steward of the Discretionary Fund. I don’t own it, so it can’t own me.

Now, the fact is, of course, the exact same thing is true of the checks that say “Daniel H. Martins” across the top as the ones that say “St Anne’s Church.” In both cases, I am a steward, not an owner. When I electronically send my pledge payment to St Anne’s every month, I am not giving away “my” money. I am exercising the primary duty of my stewardship. And it’s a generous deal: I get to keep the great majority of the assets that are entrusted to me! What other steward can get away with a 90% expense ratio without getting audited—and then fired?! When I look at tithing, not as having to give away 10% of my money, but as getting to keep 90% of God’s money, it becomes something else entirely.

Stewardship season is upon us. The Estimate of Giving cards will soon be mailed. This morning’s gospel invites us to ask ourselves whether we are slaves or stewards. Either we are slaves to our wealth because it owns us, or we are stewards of it because we recognize it all belongs to the Lord. Will we succumb to fear as did the virtuous young man who could not bring himself to have that garage sale? Or will we follow the lead of the disciples who left everything to follow Christ? Even they had some anxiety about the whole thing. Peter spoke for them all: “Lo, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus responded with a re-assuring promise:

Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands…and in the age to come eternal life.

Being a steward of the Lord’s assets is a well-paying job! He promises to meet our needs—not all our desires, necessarily, but our needs—in this life, and to exceed all that we can ask or imagine in the life to come. So which is it, slave or steward? I will pray that you make the right choice. Please pray for me, that I do the same. Amen.

B: Proper 22

Genesis 2:18-24

Mark 10:2-9

Very often, subjects which we think we’re the most familiar with turn out to be the ones we actually know the least about. I suspect that the subject of marriage is in this category. Today’s Old Testament reading from Genesis, and the gospel passage from Mark, certainly do not exhaust what the Bible has to say about marriage, but any Christian reflection on marriage has to deal with this material. It is absolutely central to an informed Christian understanding of what marriage is.

I have three main points I want to share with you today on the subject of marriage as it is illuminated by these scripture readings. It will help if you can visualize a garden plant—a sunflower will do very nicely. It has a root system, which is unseen, but which anchors the plant in the soil and without which it couldn’t live. It has a stem, or “shoot,” which is the main body of the plant and which gives the whole organism is height and standing in the world. And on top of it all is what we might call the “fruit” of the sunflower—the flower itself, which contains those wonderful seeds which are good either for roasting, salting, and eating; or—better yet, from a biological point of view—for producing more sunflower plants. The production of this “fruit” is the whole purpose of the sunflower’s existence. Root…shoot…fruit. I want to talk about the root, the shoot, and the fruit of the institution of marriage.

The root of marriage is that it is a gift from God. We learn this from the virtual beginning of the beginning of the Bible, the oldest material in scripture, the book of Genesis, chapter two. The Lord is with the newly-created man, Adam, in the Garden of Eden, and decides that it’s not such a good idea for there to be only one of him. It would be better if he had a partner, someone to share his life with. So he parades all the animals in front of Adam, hoping to find a suitable candidate. Adam thinks they’re all splendid, and he gives them names, but he is not impressed with the potential for any of them to become his partner—not even the dog, apparently, despite what we have since come to say about “man’s best friend.” So the Lord reverts to Plan B, and puts Adam under a general anesthesia, removes one of his ribs, and fashions the woman, Eve. After waking up, Adam takes one look at her and tells God that, this time, He got it right! The author of Genesis then tells us: “For this reason…” —that is, “in order to enter into this sort of relationship”— for this reason, a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh.”

Therefore, we can affirm that God invented marriage. It is not merely a human invention, an institution that human societies have evolved and adapted, and will continue to evolve and adapt however it seems appropriate and desirable to them. Marriage is God’s idea, not ours. The fact that we first encounter it in the book of Genesis, and not in Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament, is extremely significant. This tells us that marriage is part of the order of creation, part of the very fabric of universal human existence. It is not merely part of one of the succession of covenants that God made with humankind. It is more basic than even the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law of Moses. Marriage is from the beginning. Marriage is a gift from God. This is the root of marriage, and when we ignore the roots of something, then we don’t really understand it properly.

So if the root of marriage is that it is a gift from God, then the “shoot” of marriage is that it enables human beings, both those who are married and those who are single, to share in the very life of God, the love that exists within the Blessed and Glorious Trinity. I’ll try not to digress too much into complicated Trinitarian theology, but we need to remind ourselves that, contrary to the way we may often think of Him, God has revealed Himself as a “complex” Being. We might even say that God is a “community” —a community of three “persons”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as long as we’re careful not to extrapolate from that the idea that there are three Gods. The Church believes that there is one God who subsists in three co-equal “persons” who are in a relationship—an ordered relationship—with one another. There is an essential unity among the Persons of the “Godhead”—they are all equally 100% God. But they are also distinct, and not to be confused with one another. They have their own unique characteristics. Now this is hard to wrap our minds around, I know. It’s a paradox, not really “logical” in the way we think of logic. There is a sort of tension between the “unity” of God and the “community” of God, between the essential sameness of the Persons of the Trinity, and their distinctive differences.

The theological and spiritual significance of marriage is a reflection of this same kind of paradox, this same kind of logical tension. When Adam lays eyes on Eve, he exclaims, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” He was rejoicing in the sight of someone who was like him, an equal, a peer. Yet, it was obvious that there was also something mysteriously different about her. She was like him in her essential humanness, but at the same time undeniably and distinctly different. This tension between sameness and difference is reflected in our very language: In the Hebrew of Genesis, the word for a male human being is ish, and the word for a female human being is both the same and different, ishah. We see the same thing in the English words “man” and “woman.” A marriage, then, both for those who are in the marriage and for those who are observing the marriage, those whose lives the marriage touches in some way—a marriage is a living icon of the Holy Trinity. In it, we see something of the nature and life of God. This is where marriage “happens,” the daily “living into” the paradox of sameness and otherness. My favorite prayer from the wedding liturgy asks that the marriage which is being blessed will be a “sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.” So the “shoot” of marriage, the main body and life of marriage, is to be a sign, a sign that points to a deeper and higher reality.

Root…shoot…now this brings us to the “fruit” of marriage. The fruit of marriage, is the experience of responding to a call out of and beyond ourselves, into the ideal which it represents. Jesus’ blunt words to the Pharisees are still echoed in traditional Christian marriage services: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” Marriage is an ideal, and Jesus’ words affirm that ideal. In the meantime, though, we are sinful human beings. All too often, we fall short of our ideals. When that happens in a marriage, the courageous response is to admit failure, make amends, seek forgiveness and reconciliation, repent, and move on. Hopefully, “moving on” means doing so together. God hates divorce. But sometimes the damage is too great and the wounds too deep, and “moving on” means doing so separately. The cowardly response to failure to attain the ideal of marriage is to conform the ideal to what is supposed to be real—in effect, to abandon the ideal. If we can’t jump over the bar, then we just lower it until we can. That way there’s no failure, and no need to repent. This might make us feel better temporarily, but it’s dishonest, and in the end it’s a deal with the devil.

A true ideal, by contrast, invites us to extend ourselves, to stretch, to grow, to risk, to have the gall not to accept the unacceptable. Estrangement is the norm of human experience, but the ideal of marriage calls us to unity. Guilt is the norm of human experience, but the ideal of marriage calls us to forgiveness. Despair seems to lie at the end of human experience, but the ideal of marriage calls us to hope. Marriage is an ideal that is desperately needed by all of us. We need to be reconciled with that mysterious Other who is also like us. In our human experience, we generally recognize the mysterious Other in the opposite sex. But ultimately, that is a mere shadow of a veiled Reality. Ultimately, the mysterious Other with whom we seek union is God Himself. The purpose of marriage is to prepare us for Joy: consummated union in bliss with the One who is the true object of all desire, the One who is both the same and “other,” and whose very name and life is Love. Amen.

B: Proper 20 (9/20/09)

Mark 9:30-37
Wisdom 1:16 - 2:1, 12-22
James 3:16 -4:6


Refrigerator door and bumper sticker slogans are usually good for a chuckle, and are often profound. One of my favorites is also ironic and insightful: “I’ve given up my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.”

Anyone who would make a remark like this is probably expressing sarcastic frustration with real life, and does not intend to be taken literally. It is, in the cold light of self-evident logic, ludicrous to prefer any fantasy, no matter how appealing, to what is actually true. Truth is, ultimately, inescapable. It is what we are, in the end, accountable to. But what is ludicrous to our minds is still often the choice of our passions. Human beings do sometimes prefer an appealing fiction over an unpleasant truth.

The evil men in that we hear about today in the Book of Wisdom did not want to face their own wickedness, and they shamelessly plotted the murder of the righteous man, whose goodness was a constant reminder to them of their lack of it. By doing away with him, they could continue to indulge their fantasy, and not come to terms with the truth.

The disciples of Jesus also fit into this category. As St Mark’s gospel relates it to us, Jesus point-blank tells his disciples that he will be arrested and tried and put to death, and rise from the dead three days later. One would think that a prediction so startling would freeze them in their tracks, and that after recovering their composure they would bombard him with questions about when and how and where and why this would all take place. But Mark tells us that they decided instead to just keep quiet about it. They were more comfortable with a fiction of their own making—“He can’t really be serious; we didn’t really hear what we think we heard”—they were more comfortable with such denials than with the horrifying truth of what Jesus had told them.

But Jesus, who is the incarnation of the God of truth, and who is himself the truth, insisted to his followers in Mark’s gospel that they know him as no Christ but a crucified Christ. This is what lies behind all the instances in the gospel of Mark where Jesus commands people who come to faith in him as the son of God to keep quiet about it. Mark does not allow anyone in his gospel to publicly proclaim Jesus as the son of God until the Roman Centurion does so at the foot of the cross, on which Jesus has just died! So critical was the cross to Mark’s understanding of who Jesus is.

Some time ago I saw a news story about a very special summer camping program for children and youth. The setting—the buildings, the activities—were all standard summer camp fare. But the campers themselves were quite special. They were all young people who had been critically burned, and were substantially disfigured as a result. The aim of the camp was to help these kids along in the process of accepting themselves as they are, disfigured in ways that would make most of us want to avert our eyes. What fire has done to their appearance is an unpleasant truth, but it is the truth, and anyone whose life is touched by one of these kids can know them in no other way than as someone whose appearance has been radically altered by fire. You and I can know Christ only as one who has suffered and died on the cross. It is disturbing, but true, and to evade this truth is to indulge in fantasy, not reality.

It is, no doubt, easy for us, with our 20/20 hindsight, to be critical of those first-century followers of our Lord who were scandalized by the prospect of his being crucified, who did not want to recognize the utter centrality of the cross. But I’m afraid that they have company, and that company is us. Yes, twenty-first century Americans—even twenty-first century American Christians—want a Christ who is untainted by the shame and scandal of the cross. The cross stands as a horrifying sign of human sin and suffering, because all human sin and suffering was fastened on to it when Jesus died there. It is a manifestly unpleasant truth, a truth we would just as soon avoid if we could, a truth we would gladly trade for any number of more appealing fictions. We would trade it for the fiction of a religion that makes no demands: no demands on our time, no demands on our money, no demands on our affections, no demands on our minds. We would, in the proverbial “New York minute”, trade it for the fiction of a religion that does not presume to exercise any judgment on our behavior, or hold us accountable to anything other than our own whims and desires. We would enthusiastically trade it for the fiction of a religion that is really more magic and glitz than faith and holiness, a religion that promises to cure us from every disease and deliver us from every adversity simply upon demand. We want a God we can be proud of, not one who empties himself of his glory, takes the form of a servant, and dies the shameful death of a criminal.

And this is one instance where our theology has immediate practical implications for us. Because of our reluctance to accept the scandal of the cross, because we prefer the fiction of a savior who protects us from suffering over the truth of a savior who makes us whole through suffering, we follow in the steps of Jesus’ disciples who got to wrangling with one another over who occupied what spot in the pecking order. And as St James tells us in his epistle, “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.” When we as a church, the Christian community, lose sight of the centrality of the cross—the cross of Christ, and the cross that he invites us to take up and follow him with—when we lose sight of the centrality of the cross, we descend into intellectual and moral and spiritual disorder. We find ourselves cultivating relationships with other people, not in joyful recognition of the image of God in that person, but in view of the ways he or she might benefit us. We find ourselves attaching strings to our generosity: I’ll give you this...or do that … if … We find ourselves attempting to control and manipulate members of our families, friends, co-workers, and, yes, even the church to which we belong!

The cross of Christ is a scandal, because it’s just . . . there. It’s true. We can ignore the truth, but we cannot for long evade it. It isn’t going anywhere. We can only go through it. And when, in faith, we do follow Jesus through the way of the cross, our experience is that of the peace that passes all understanding. We come into contact with what James calls “the wisdom from above”, which he describes as “first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity.” It is the ability to sleep at night with a clean heart and clear conscience, a sense of purpose and ultimate security, because we are grounded, not in any ephemerally appealing fantasy, but in the truth of the saving and redeeming cross of Jesus Christ. To him be all glory throughout all ages. Amen.

B: Proper 19 (9/13/09)

Mark 8:27-38

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Last January, as you may know, I was privileged to make a visit—my first—to the Holy Land. On a glorious sunlit day, our group of sixteen pilgrims left our hotel on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, got into our bus, and drove northward and eastward across the Jordan River—and upward—into the Golan Heights, territory that was once part of Syria but was annexed by Israel following the 1967 war. In a mountainous and heavily forested area, in the shadow of Mount Hermon and close to the borders with Syria and Lebanon, lie the ruins of the ancient Roman settlement of Caesarea Philippi. The jewel of this site was and remains a glorious temple to Pan, built into the side of a mountain. Pan was a Greco-Roman god, and for first century Jews, a symbol of the “evil empire” of Rome, a symbol of everything they resented about foreign domination.

It is against this backdrop—and if I could show you pictures of the place you could see how dramatic it would have been—it is against this backdrop that Jesus puts his questions to the disciples: “Who do people say that I am … who do you say that I am?” It’s Simon Peter, of course—never one to keep his thoughts to himself—who at first gets it right, spectacularly right, in fact: “You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One of God.” Peter’s “confession” is honored with a feast day in our calendar; in fact, I was on that spot just a day or two after that feast this year. But then he turns around and undoes his good deed: Jesus goes on to talk about his own impending suffering and death way down in Jerusalem. Peter objects, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lord. Quit talking that way. You’re bringin’ us down.” To which Jesus responds with startling sharpness: “Get behind me, Satan.”

Get behind me, Satan.

What was Jesus really saying here? What he was probably really saying is, “You don’t know me. You don’t get it.” You see, Peter—and, for that matter, the other disciples—would have wanted Jesus to fit the mold of their expectations about what a Messiah should be and what a Messiah should do. There was a long tradition within Judaism about the Messiah, so they had very specific expectations. The Messiah would effectively be a reincarnation of David, the prototypical “ideal king” of Israel—if you will, the “father of his country.” Back in my youth, American school children were taught to think of George Washington as the “father of his country,” and were pretty much given a narrative that covered over any flaws in Washington’s character and behavior. He was the “ideal President” who set the standard for all of his successors. For first century Jews, King David, despite his flaws, held a similar place in their imagination, and the Messiah would certainly be someone who, like David, would rid Israel of foreign interlopers and invaders, and secure the national borders. He would be a great military and political hero. So, when Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, he wasn’t “confessing” the real Jesus, he was trying to squeeze Jesus into a pre-set mold.

Here, in the northernmost extent of his travels—everything that follows is a long journey to the cross—Jesus has to deal with everyone’s false expectations, and he does so through Peter. His prediction of his own suffering and death, coming on the heels, as it does, of Peter’s confession, begins to set the record straight.

Being the post-Easter people that we are—that is, people who have the advantage of 2000 years of hindsight looking back at Jesus’ resurrection and its effects—it’s pretty easy for us to judge Peter, to say, “Yeah, get behind him, Satan! What are you thinking, anyway?” But we are hypocrites if and when we do that. We are hypocrites because we also have false expectations about what Messiah Jesus (aka Jesus Christ) is about. We have remade Jesus into any number of false images, images of our own design.

One of the false images we might call Fire Insurance Agent Jesus, the Jesus that…you know…saves us from going to Hell. Now don’t get me wrong here: I’m not denying that Jesus is our Savior and that his saving work includes delivering us from what we might call our “default fate” of eternal separation from the presence of God. But if we limit Jesus to just being our Savior, and confine him to that compartment of our lives that we label “Religion”, then we are creating a false Christ. If we don’t allow Jesus to be our Lord, the central organizing principle of our lives, then we are, in effect, preventing him from being our Savior.

Another false image that we have created is Personal Assistant Jesus. Jesus is the name we call on to make all the lights turn green so we’re not late for work, to help us do well on a test because…well…we didn’t actually study for it all that much, or to blind the eyes of the IRS to the “creative” entries we make on our tax forms because, after all, we “really” need the money. Am I denying that Jesus wants to help us? No way! But he wants to be the one to tell us where we need help. He wants to be a mentor and guide, not a member of our household staff, and if we insist on treating him like one, we’ve created a false Christ who will be of no help at all.

Or, some of us may be devoted to the false image of Community Organizer Jesus. This is the Jesus who’s all about making the world a better place, and he needs us to be his hands and feet and voice. So we get involved in the social causes that stir our hearts—and these causes can cover the political spectrum from one end to the other—we get involved in social causes, feeling very holy because we are making God’s work truly our own. But all too often we end up erasing any distinction between the Kingdom of Heaven and our political causes, and we lose both. Does Jesus want the world to be a better place? Of course he does. But God is in charge of ushering in his own Kingdom, and the moment we consider ourselves indispensible to that process, we have created a false Christ.

Here’s the thing: Our calling as Christian disciples is to be conformed to Jesus, not to conform Jesus to our expectations. This includes, of course, conforming ourselves to his cross (or, as he puts it, taking up our cross—it amounts to the same thing), and when you strip away all the other symbolic baggage that we have loaded onto the cross—good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, appropriate and inappropriate—when you strip away all the baggage, the cross is an instrument of suffering. Christian faith doesn’t save us from suffering, it enables us to find meaning in suffering, and to make that suffering productive—productive for the perfection of our own holiness and for the redemption of the world. This is what Jesus’ cross is about, and it’s what our cross is about.

This is an important message for contemporary Christians to hear, because there are voices out there that give the impression that if you’re sick or in chronic pain or are addicted or your marriage has failed or you’re going down the tubes financially, then you must be at odds with God, and it’s your fault; you’re not doing something right. Now, sometimes we are our own worst enemies; there’s no denying that. But suffering is not a sign of failure for a Christian; it is, in fact, a mark of identification with the cross of Christ. Suffering is normal. Suffering is to be expected.

And … suffering is Good News. Here’s what the Prophet Isaiah has to say today about suffering:

For the Lord GOD helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who is my adversary? Let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord GOD helps me; who will declare me guilty?

Isaiah, the prototypical “suffering servant,” a prefigurement of the crucified Jesus, knows in whom his confidence lies, and that he will be vindicated in the end. You see, suffering may be universal, but it is not permanent! Jesus’ prediction of his suffering and death also included a prediction of his resurrection. Jesus was “vindicated” by the Father. We who throw in our lot with Jesus, we who take up our cross and follow him, can look forward to the same. We who are conformed to Christ in his death will be conformed to him in his resurrection.

Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.

B: Proper 17 (8/30/09)

Deuteronomy 4:1-9

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

I’m grateful that my parents sent me to Sunday School—beginning more than a half-century ago now!—and that I learned, through repeated exposure at various grade levels, the grand biblical narrative of the history of the Hebrew people, the nation of Israel. I learned about Abraham and Sarah, their son Isaac and his wife Rebekah, their son Jacob and his wives Leah and Rachel and their twelve sons. I learned about one of those sons, Joseph, whose brothers sold him as a slave to Egyptians, but who was able later able to redeem that act of betrayal by rescuing his family when a massive famine struck their part of the world. I learned about how Jacob’s descendants multiplied into a great nation while they were in Egypt, so much so that they became a threat to the native Egyptians, whose king enslaved them in hard labor. I learned how Moses, a Hebrew child raised in the Egyptian royal court, was called by God to lead his people out of slavery into freedom, and how God liberated them by leading them through the divided waters of the Red Sea and through the wilderness of the Sinai desert for forty years until Joshua, Moses’ successor, led them across the Jordan River to the land that God had promised would be theirs to settle in and prosper in and otherwise enjoy.

On the eve of the crossing of the Jordan, just before his death, Moses made what was possibly the most important speech, the most critical pep-talk, of his entire life. Up until that point, the Hebrew people had been a nation without a land, a people without a piece of real estate that they could call their own. For more than an entire generation, they had been nomads, living in tents, always on the move. Before that, they were slaves. Now everything was about to change. They were going in to take possession of the Promised Land. They needed to learn a different way to live. Moses, in his final act of leadership, wanted to help them create a clear national and ethnic identity. During their wilderness sojourn, the people of Israel had indeed come to know God—Yahweh, the LORD—as a living reality, one who guides and directs, and with whom communion and fellowship is something to be desired and sought. But that was in the desert, where they literally needed to be guided day by day. Now they were going to live in settled towns and villages, tending crops rather than gathering manna every morning, pasturing their herds and flocks in the same general area rather than being constantly on the move. They needed to learn a new way to live, and Moses was right there with the prescription—which was the Torah, the Law of Moses.

Moses saw the Torah as God’s gift by which to accomplish the goal of creating a new national identity for Israel, a means of constantly reminding the people who they are and to whom they belong. The Torah consists of outward public and private observances—613 individual statues, to be precise. They govern a wide array of concerns, ranging from corporate worship to healthcare to criminal justice to family relations to social and civil relations to economic order to sexual behavior and even personal diet and hygiene. Each of the 613 individual laws was intended to help shape and form the people into a community that “walks with the Lord,” that continues to rely on the Lord for provision and guidance and direction, just as they had done during the forty years in the wilderness. Far from being an oppressive yoke around their necks, the people were encouraged to see the Law of Moses as a veritable gift of life, straight from the hand of a gracious God. Listen to Moses’ words to the people:

And now, O Israel, give heed to the statutes and the ordinances which I teach you, and do them...Keep them and do them; for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.' …make them known to your children and your children's children.

Well, as you know, the people of Israel settled the Promised Land. Years and decades and centuries passed. The Law of Moses was successively “forgotten” and “rediscovered” several times. Some of the leaders of Israel were faithful to the Lord and led the people in His ways. More, however, were unfaithful, and led the people astray. There were periods of peace and prosperity, but longer periods of great political and social and military turmoil. Eventually, about 500 years or so after they had crossed the Jordan, Israel was once again largely a landless nation, as they found themselves in exile, only to have a remnant return some seventy years later and re-establish the capital city of Jerusalem. During the rising and falling of their national fortunes, the people of Israel—the Jews, as they eventually became known—engaged in an ongoing struggle over how, or how not, to adapt the Torah to the changing circumstances of their existence. In the process, their understanding of the Torah tended to become rather brittle, rather mechanical, exceedingly legalistic. Layer after layer of “expert” opinion on the interpretation of the Law of Moses piled themselves on top of one another. In time, this collection of interpretation and explanation began to weigh more than the actual law itself. People got caught up in these secondary matters of interpretation and lost their focus on the laws themselves and the intent behind the laws. This gave rise to various classes of professional Torah scholars and teachers—such as priests and scribes—as well as “parties” within Judaism—Pharisees and Saducees come readily to mind if we’re familiar with the New Testament, but there were others as well. These scholars and teachers and parties all offered conflicting viewpoints, and the Torah came to be seen as an end in itself, rather than a means to a holy end. Keeping the Law correctly in every detail became more important than knowing God and pleasing God and having fellowship with God, which was the whole reason for the Law in the first place.

Some 1200 years or so after the giving of the Law of Moses, Jesus appears on the Jewish scene. In one incident, as recounted for us in the seventh chapter of St Mark’s gospel, he encounters and engages the dry, brittle, legalistic handling of the Torah that had become so prevalent in Palestinian Judaism. Some scribes—members of a professional class of Torah teachers—notice Jesus’ disciples failing to observe one of the secondary interpretations of the Torah that had become standard ritual practice, and they take Jesus to task for it. Jesus wastes no time in condemning their legalistic hyper-technical approach to the Law:

There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man.

Now, as Christians, we need to be very careful not to read this passage in isolation from the rest of scripture. Yes, Jesus excoriates the scribes and their allies. He calls them “hypocrites” and “whitewashed tombs”—some pretty strong language. But he does not condemn religious practice itself. On the contrary, he faithfully observed it, even to the very end of his life on this earth. He was circumcised on the eighth day and presented in the temple on the fortieth day of his life. He accompanied his parents on pilgrimages to Jerusalem for religious festivals. He participated in synagogue worship while living and working in Galilee. Indeed, the Last Supper, at which he instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist, was, depending on which scholar you read, either a Passover or a Chaburah meal. Jesus was an observant, religiously practicing Jew during his entire life, even while speaking out against the abuse of religious practice.

You know, the word “religion” has a bad name in some Christian circles these days, but I would contend that this is undeserved. I think we can safely say, with ample scriptural support, that Christian religious practice, foreshadowed in the Torah, is an effective means to the end of fellowship with God. The particular things we do that would come under the category of the practice of religion are intended to help us know God better, to walk with Him and follow Him. They are channels of light and life. We make it a priority to come together for corporate worship on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, because the resurrection of Christ is the foundation of our hope. We keep the seasons of the liturgical year—the feasts, the fasts, and the ordinary times—because doing so constantly drills us on the essentials of our faith. We say our daily prayers at regular times because we know that God is present in and works through the mystery of the repeated cycle of time. We fast on Ash Wednesday and on Good Friday, and we keep the other Fridays of the year, outside of festival seasons, as days of special devotion, because we know that in fasting and prayer God speaks to us and leads us. We examine our consciences and confess our sins regularly because only by receiving God’s mercy and forgiveness can we grow closer to Him. Just as the Law of Moses formed the people of Israel and gave them a sense of national identity, so the practice of Christian religion forms us as the Church and gives us a sense of Christian “ethnic” identity.

Can these good things be abused by latter-day “scribes” and “Pharisees”? Yes, and they can be and have been and continue to be. I once had a newly confirmed adult—a college professor, no less, a smart guy—ask me on the very day of his confirmation: “OK, now what are the rules?” Clearly, he thought of the practice of religion not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. But, as we know, just because something can be misused doesn’t mean we should throw it out. Rather, we should discipline ourselves to use it properly, and teach others to do the same. Christian religious practices can be misused. But they are also the very means of grace, and we embrace them with joy and expectation that they will facilitate an encounter with the Holy, that they will escort us into the courts of the most high God. Praised be Jesus Christ. Amen.