Sermons: April 2011

Sermon, April 3, 2011
Lent 4
Grace Episcopal Church
The Rev. Vernon Hill

Jason read - “ Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  Live as children of light-- for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.”
What pleases God?  What does God want of us?   I think we please God when we come to understand more clearly what we have been created to be and live for.

This morning in the Gospel we have another lengthy story from John; this time about the man born blind and who is miraculously healed by Jesus.  And . . . once again we need to be cautious about John’s technique of storytelling if we want to get it.

I have said that John uses his story characters as  “stick figures,” or foils.   This is his writing strategy to explain who Jesus is and how Jesus by his life explains what God wants for us and from us.  So this is NOT simply a physical healing miracle story at all.  Healing the blind man is “stage furniture” for a larger story about what is pleasing to God (borrowing words from Jason’s reading).  John’s story is about our truth, the truth of the human condition, its complexities, tragic misdirections and moments of aha – I get it . . . maybe.

First, let me share two fables  which may help our thinking -

A story is told of the Buddha who when asked by one of his disciples to describe the human condition likened it to a man walking through the forest who is struck by an arrow. Too often, the Buddha cautioned, we indulge ourselves in the kinds of questions that are irrelevant to the situation at hand. As an observer of this tragedy you may have the luxury of wandering down rabbit trails: I wonder who shot this arrow? Why was he so careless in his aim? How far did it have to travel to reach its unlikely destination? If the police were only doing their job. . .  But if you are the man writhing in pain, all of these distracting abstractions are detours from the only pertinent question: How can I remove this object from my body and relieve my misery? 

Another fable

One day the devil and one of his little helpers,
were sitting on a cloud looking down at the humans below,
when they saw a man walking down a road
who stopped, picked up something from the road,
put it in his pocket and walked on.
“What did he find?” asked the devil’s helper.
“A piece of the truth,” chuckled the devil.
“A piece of the truth? Don’t you want to stop him?”
“Stop him? No,” said the devil.
"It’s only a tiny piece of truth.
Before long, he’ll turn it into an orthodoxy, a capital T truth.
And then he’ll be doing my work!”

John intertwines two challenges in his story today.

First:  Our storyteller begins with a “shooting with an arrow sidebar discussion” between Jesus and the Twelve Confused who on seeing the blind man begging ask why is this man blind – what did he do to deserve this?  Why has a just and compassionate God sent such a thing?  There must be a reason for his darkened life and for his suffering.   You see, in Jesus’ day and continuing into our enlightened times there were many who believed that much of suffering is deserved – the result of sin at work, some behavior contrary to God’s will.  The blindness is divine justice at work; God gets even!  Jesus rejects this silliness but seems to create an even greater conundrum when John has Jesus say – “he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  You mean God chose to terrorize this man with darkness so that he might serve as a tool to explain who Jesus is?  That’s cold, but notice, this is not unlike the nonsensical belief that “God sends stuff to test us, to test our faithfulness, but not more that we can stand.”  As disturbing as what the disciples offer to explain blindness, this, from Jesus, seems to say some really troubling things about the nature of God.  Did Jesus really believe that God made this man blind so that he could perform some impressive magic?  A “yes” to stuff like this could make me a non-believer in a heart-beat.   Fortunately, no such thing; Subtlety is at work in what Jesus says.  Pay close attention – God didn’t make the man blind; the man’s blindness becomes the “occasion” for understanding, for an aha moment.  Occasions are the “stage” for amazing grace moments.  What happens is that Jesus acts to answer the pertinent question; he “removes the arrow” – the blind man can see. 

What happens in this story is seriously loaded with symbols that early Christians would have understood.  Jesus takes earth (adama, the feminine form of Adam), waters it with his spit and places it on the man’s eyes.  The man goes to a pool and washes his darkness away (remind you a bit of baptism?) and he sees: he enters into the world of light.   What John teaches us is Jesus did not just heal the man's eyes but, in a manner of speaking, fashioned new ones from holy, mother earth itself.  He completes his creation with sight.  Another creation story.

The second challenge:  A kind of dark comedy now begins  - we have this whole Q&A routine with the disciples repeated first among the neighbors who debate whether he is indeed the same person who begged at the gate. You see, since they believed disabled were marked by God with darkness, the disabled were excluded from the community and left with begging for survival.  The concerned neighbors want the truth and they question the legitimacy of what has happened.  They speculate that this must be a conspiracy; someone has switched the blind man for a sighted man who resembles the one who was blind.   Next the religious experts

So our storyteller gives us the blind man and the multitude of “why” questions about his blindness, the Jesus healing from darkness to light and the continuing distraction from those with pieces of “truth.“

OK, Now, what is missing from all of this dark comedy?  How about a simple WOW, this is a great thing that has happened.  The man “shot with the arrow of blindness” has been healed.  Jesus acts.  The moral?  Stay focused on what is important!  As that hymn, “Amazing Grace” declares – I was blind and now I see.”  Yeah and an Amen to that.

What John gives us is a cautionary tale about becoming distracted and, worse,  lost from what is really important.  We can contribute to the suffering.  Our human reality will always be in some way like the one who picks up a piece of truth on the sidewalk.  It’s one of those limits in our humanness.  As Paul confesses – we see in a mirror dimly.  We are caught up in a “groaning of creation,”  but we are also being led, called,  prodded and confronted with an on-going birthing narrative of what we are in Jesus.  This yin/yang dilemma is part of being the children of Adam led by the Spirit who guides us. 

Which is why we do Lent.  Lent is the Adam season  – the season of humans.  We humans are made from the earth and Lent is a time to wear the ashes of creation on our foreheads and accept that we are always engaged in a struggle between earth and divinity, between darkness and light. 

We always have just pieces of truth and that should give us pause and a humility about our journeying.  Our incompleteness and shadows of ignorance struggle with the comedy and arrogance of our certainty.  This is a journey of “getting stuff” about ourselves and those around us.  Humility must be an important addition to our DNA story.  Jesus and those who have followed after him lay before us the perfection we are to reach toward as imperfect as our efforts often are.

The story of the man born blind asks us to redefine ourselves -  to act as we see ourselves in the life of Jesus and to be tempered by a humility, that our understandings are incomplete even as we search out what pleases God. This is our journey between darkness and the light as we seek after the light. 

On Monday in the calendar of Saints we recall the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.  He is one of our many lights shining in the darkness which leads us onward to the things that matter about ourselves.  This morning’s reading from the Montgomery speech is cloaked completely in the Jesus vision that we as ancestors of Adam are to act for what is good and fair, to live in humility with each other, to be trustworthy, to benefit our neighbors and do to others as we would wish done to us.

The good neighbors of Montgomery wanted a return to normalcy – they wanted the blind man to return to begging at the gate with an arrow stuck in him.  They wanted a debate on state’s rights surpassing human rights.  King’s response is, for God’s sake,  “remove the arrow.”  His words echoed across Montgomery -

The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgment to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.  The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, [and] the normalcy of justice.

This is Truth for Adam’s ancestors – this is the full story of where we have been and when we have become badly lost and it is the story of what we are to reach for – Light-filled living.  This is a journey which will please God.  Amen.

Maundy Thursday 2011 Sermon – Cathy Bader

Good evening.

I have moved 57, or maybe it’s 58 times. Crazy, huh? That’s moving every 12 ½ months. Who would willingly do something like that? It was sort of like the Juliette Binoche’s character, Vianne, everytime the north wind began to blow, she had to leave wherever she was. I don’t know that my moves were quite that conscious. I really thought that the house Matt and I bought in Citrus Heights in 2002 was going to be our “forever” house. I imagined us living there at least until he retired. But that was not to be. Instead I moved again…Maybe that’s why this passage from tonight’s readings struck me.

From Exodus: “This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly.”

Did the Lord really mean for the Israelites to be dressed to leave at a moment’s notice? What was the point? Where did they need to rush off to? What was God’s thinking here? What’s the back-story? And more importantly, what does this mean to us?

To me, this passage has great power. How many of us eat dressed as if, for some random reason, we may need to rush away? How many of us feel that level of urgency that we need to be ready to leave in a moment’s notice? Do we believe that God may, at any time, tap us on the shoulder and insist that we immediately leave where we are and start anew somewhere else? Really? And did you notice that the passage mentions nothing about them packing their stuff, just that they needed to be ready to go? Could they do that? Could we?

Notice how the Lord gave the Israelites very specific instructions here? They were told the exact manner in which the lamb was to be slaughtered, how it was to be eaten (not boiled or raw), what was to be done with the leftovers, even the admonishment to be dressed and ready to bolt, if demanded. The final touch of the blood on the lintel of the door, as a sign to God that we have followed Your orders as required, Sir - Ma’am. Explicit orders that left no room for doubt!

How lucky they were to receive such clear and concise directions! Of course, they had interpreters in Moses and Aaron, who helped them along, but still. How nice to have it all spelled out for you. I sometimes find myself jealous of these explicit orders that our ancestors received. I mean, really? How can you go wrong if you know exactly what God expects of you?

But that’s not all. In the Gospel, we hear Jesus giving His disciples exact instructions on what to do to be considered one of His followers. Become like a servant, wash one another’s feet, and love one another. Clear directions. If only we could believe it is really so simple.

I don’t know about you, but I have lived through many a sleepless night and many an anxious day, stressed about what I was supposed to do about one crisis or another, or about one transition or another. I think perhaps those transition times were the most difficult. You know those times - graduating college, getting married, starting a relationship, ending a relationship, retiring, moving. It’s the early stages of the change, as the change is approaching, that can be the most stressful. They provide so much self-created drama. Typically, I’ll have some feeling, some suspicion that it’s time to move on, that it’s time to do something else, learn something else, but the question that plagues me is - what? What is this elusive something?

Have you ever experienced that? You know you’ve gotten some sort of message, from God, you presume. Usually, the message isn’t all that clear. Often it’s just a niggling in the gut, or a clinch in the heart, or a weight on your shoulders, an intangible something that bothers you. Things just don’t feel right, and this feeling doesn’t go away. You stress and worry and wonder. You keep plugging away at life, going to work, taking care of the business of you life, but all the while you wonder, why isn’t the message more obvious, like the sky writing in the Wizard of Oz?

Wouldn’t that be awesome? Wake up one morning, and there blazed across the sky is a message written just for you. “Cathy, this is God. Move to Bakersfield!” Or even better, a text message, “BTW go 2 Bako. LOL”

But, no. Instead, it seems our messages come in metaphors, and hints, and nudges. Perhaps something a friend says triggers a new and unusual thought. Maybe lines from a book or a movie cause a gasp or a start, or maybe a billboard - my son told me this morning that his message came on a billboard advertising beer - it said, “Are you listening or waiting to talk?”
Sometimes the message comes as a feeling of discontent and we can’t quite put ourr finger on it. The message is there; we just think it’s hidden. It makes one wonder if we didn’t hear it, ignored it, or are pretending we didn’t hear it.

Here’s a truth I’ve discovered the hard way. I have found that if I don’t pay attention to these little pushes, the nudges, the random thoughts of “Go, you’re done here”, I find myself thrown out the door (As if God is saying, “Didn’t I tell you to eat, dressed ready to leave?”) One of my favorite spiritual authors, Caroline Myss says, “If you get a message that you need to make a change, believe it. If you don’t initiate it, God will and no one can create the kind of chaos God can.” If you have ever lived in the kind of chaos God creates, you know exactly what I’m talking about. (When I’m in the midst of that chaos, I am either angry with God ((who reminds me I had plenty of warning)) or angry with myself because I didn’t pay better attention.)

So here I am back again, with the Israelites and the disciples - why did they get such clear, step-by-step instructions, and I seem to get innuendo and metaphor? Is the God of Clarity only in the Bible? Is it true that God only sends muddled messages, messages so confusing and cloudy that we despair of ever understanding them? I don’t think so.

If it’s true, as I believe, that God is in all - capital letters A L L - things, and if it’s true, as I believe, that God cares so much about us, about me, that even the apple I choose at the grocery store was especially grown just for me, how can I then believe that God would send muddled messages?

Honestly, God speaks to us all the time. It’s just that we don’t listen, and if we do listen, we don’t hear. We really don’t want to. Listening is active and requires attention. Listening is dangerous and requires faith. Listening is frightening and requires trust.

See here’s the thing - we’re, I’m, afraid, afraid of listening to closely to what God may ask of me. I mean really, we’ve all heard the stories about the saints - beheadings, crucifixions, stonings, being hermits, vows of silence. That’s intense stuff! That’s not a trip to the beach or a day at Disneyland. That’s hard-core living. Could it be that we all like the rich kid who asked what he needed to do to become a follower of Jesus, and Jesus said, “Sell it all”. What did the kid do? He walked away. Can’t you imagine what went through his mind? “Are you kidding me? I worked to hard to accumulate all this stuff! Why on earth would I sell it, so don’t give me THAT message!” Don’t we think the same thing? I’ll follow you, but don’t ask me to love them; don’t expect me to go there; don’t expect me to give up that. See, we really don’t want to hear. We want to talk, to tell, and we do that because we’re afraid.

I’ve come to believe that our fear is all about perception - how we see the events of our life. We label them - a job is good; a lay-off is bad. Money in the bank is good; being broke is bad. Fast moving traffic is good; stop and go traffic is bad. We decide that living in Bakersfield can’t be as glamorous or as life giving as living in, say Ventura. Driving a truck can’t be as holy as being a priest. We put so many conditions on what is acceptable, on what we deem worthwhile. In our attempt to control our destiny, we tie God’s hands or at least we try.

But none of that is true - those are just ideas and ideas aren’t real. God is as present in traffic as she is at the retreat center; as present in the paycheck as in public assistance. Bakersfield is as good as anywhere to live. There really is no good or bad when it comes to these events or these situations. Events themselves are neutral. We attach the good or the bad. We decide whether to YAY or BOO. We choose our response, whether to be happy or to be sad. We are the ones who put our demands, our fears, ahead of the message.

The truth is we don’t know the back-story. We don’t know the plan. We can’t see the big picture. We don’t know how this message or these directions are connected to things that have been put into motion behind the scenes. All we have is one rather damaged piece of the puzzle and while we’ve been hiding and whining and saying no and making bargains, God has been at work and waiting for us to join the party. Will we be attentive and listen?

Suppose, just suppose, that listening and following your “Go” message results in finding your true place in the Kingdom? Suppose “selling it all”, whether goods or outdated beliefs, is exactly what you need to do in order to reach your full potential, in order for you to become the “you” God means for you to be? Suppose breaking out of your current limits and embracing those nudges and pushes, opens you to experience the God of the Unexpected, the God outside your plans?
What if the Israelites had said, “Gosh, you know, I like to eat relaxing, in my sweats, shoes off, just chilling. Thanks, but there really isn’t anywhere we want to go tonight.” Or if the disciples had told Jesus, “Thanks for the input, but feet are pretty smelly, and we’ve seen you like to hang out with, and, honestly, how can you expect us to go THERE?” What then?

Thankfully, the Israelites listened and followed and went on to become God’s chosen people. The disciples listened and followed and went on to help found Christianity.

So what about us?  Can we listen attentively to what is being said to us? Can give up the fear? Can we hear and trustingly follow? Can we become like the Israelites - loins girded, sandals on, staff in hand, and like the disciples - servant-like, washing feet, and loving one another? Can we?

Amen.

A parable:

There was once a farmer. One day, the farmer’s only horse broke out of the corral and ran away. The farmer’s neighbors, all hearing of the horse running away, came to the farmer’s house to view the corral. As they stood there, the neighbors all said, "Oh what bad luck!" The farmer replied, "We’ll see."

About a week later, the horse returned bringing with it a whole herd of wild horses, which the farmer and his son quickly corralled. The neighbors, hearing of the corralling of the horses, came to see for themselves. As they stood there looking at the corral filled with horses, the neighbors said, "Oh what good luck!" The farmer replied, "We’ll see."

The farmer’s son decided to break the wild horses. While working with one particularly wild horse, he was thrown off and ended up with a broken leg. As a result, he became ill with fever. Upon hearing about the son’s leg and fever, the farmer’s neighbors came to see for themselves. As they stood there looking down at the son lying in bed, the neighbors said, “Oh what bad luck!” The farmer said, “We’ll see.”

At that time in this country, there was a war going on. The king of the farmer’s village was involved in this war. In need of more soldiers, he sent one of his captains to the village to conscript young men to fight in the war. When the captain came to take the farmer’s son, he found a young man with a broken leg who was delirious with fever. Knowing there was no way the son could fight, the captain left him there. A few days later, the son’s fever broke. The neighbors, hearing of the son’s not being taken to fight in the war and of his return to good health, all came to see him. As they stood there, each one said, "Oh what good luck!" The farmer replied, "We’ll see."

Responsibility & Consequence
 add their humor with a silly discussion about violating the Sabbath since this healing had  happened on the Sabbath.  A huge argument takes place – “This man is not from God because he violates God’s laws.”  “Yeah, but how could a good work as this be a violation of Sabbath observance?”  And in a moment of understatement John observes,  “And they were divided”  each clutching  their pieces of sidewalk capital T Truth.  When the former blind man offers that “Jesus is a prophet”, he is driven out of the synagogue for engaging in religious uppity-ness .  He doesn’t know his place. Good Friday (RCL—all years)
April 22, 2011

Isaiah 52:13-53:12                             Psalm 22Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9            John 18:1-19:42

Who is this Jesus?

Note the verb tense. Who is Jesus?, not Who was Jesus? If it were Who was Jesus, we wouldn’t be here.

That’s the question the first Christians were asking after Easter. This was long before the theological hand-to-hand combat began, long before the Church came up with the Nicene Creed. Who is Jesus? was a question when there wasn’t a Church with a capital “C,” or even the dream of a capital-C Church.

Since the first followers of Jesus were Jews, to answer their question they looked to the Bible. There they found answers that made sense for them. Our reading from Isaiah 52 today told his story; it told their story:

See, my servant shall prosper;
he shall be exalted and lifted up,
and shall be very high . . . .
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.

From what the first Christians found in the Hebrew Bible, they fashioned a theology, an understanding about God. They fashioned also both a Christology and a Soteriology, understandings of Christ and of salvation.
On Good Friday we Christians need to sit humbly at the feet of our Jewish sisters and brothers and listen attentively and carefully to what they tell us.

Isaiah 52, which we’ve just heard, is the “Suffering Servant” passage.What is clear—and most important—for both Jews and Christians is that the Suffering Servant represents hope; repentance and hope; repentance and hope and salvation.

Salvation as deliverance. A second Exodus. A rescue from Pharaoh. A rescue from bondage.

For us, long years and much distance removed from Isaiah, our bondage is self-made: out of our selfishness, self-satisfaction, and self-absorption we craft ropes to bind ourselves.

It’s quite a trick to tie yourself up, but we human beings are pretty good at it. Spiritually and morally, we’re all too often Harry Houdinis in reverse.

When I first typed “we craft ropes,” I wrote “we craft our own rapes.” Was that my subconscious, or my soul, or both, nudging me with a far more difficult truth?

One of the most liberating things any of us can learn is that each of us is his or her own Pharaoh. It’s not that we gathered here are better than those who are not:
  • it’s just that we here have accepted, embraced, even welcomed, the opportunity to claw our way out of denial;
  • we have embraced and welcomed the opportunity to cast off our mind-forg’d manacles (1) made of fear, anger, and hatred;
  • we have welcomed the opportunity to move from rape to relationship, the rape of the soul to relationship with God.
Isaiah today tells us that if we “make [the Suffering Servant’s] life an offering for sin . . . / through him the will of the LORD shall prosper.”
A Christian reading of the Suffering Servant passage has long required Jesus, nailed to the cross, to be the sacrifice that bears away our sin. This reading has also reasonably concluded that since we can’t offer the sacrifice for the sins of the world, God has to sacrifice his Son. A Christian reading of the Suffering Servant passage requires us to glorify a God whose will, as Isaiah says, was to crush Jesus with pain.

Or does it?

In pairing Isaiah 52 and the Crucifixion, many a Christian has understood that Jesus was a “satisfaction” for our sins; Christ suffered as a substitute on behalf of humankind, satisfying the demands of God's honor (2). A variant of this is that Jesus, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished in the place of sinners; thus hejustice so God can justly forgive our sins.

That’s just great: God as Lord High Executioner.

This sounds like God sent Jesus expressly to die. I’ve never been able to reconcile that with a good and loving God. Just as for me it’s impossible to reconcile a good Deity with the god of the idiots who say God punished New York with 9/11 and New Orleans with Katrina.

To borrow from a movie title I remember my boys watching: You Can Take That God and Shove It.

The scholar John Dominic Crossan asks, “Does God will the execution of Jesus?” For many Christians, he observes, the answer to that question is still an emphatic “Yes, of course, God willed the death of Jesus” (3).

As proof Crossan cites the wild popularity of Mel Gibson’s bloodthirsty The Passion of the Christ. Posters for the film triumphantly boasted: “Dying Was His Reason for Living.”

Huh?

As Crossan succinctly and devastatingly concludes, “That theology of Jesus as replacement victim was all about dying and not about either living beforehand or rising afterward” (4).

No mystery of the Incarnation. No ministry. No healings. No teaching. All death all the time (5).

As I reflected this week on Good Friday, I had the great good fortune—or blessing—to read this simple yet profound question by Crossan: “But what if God’s justice and righteousness operate not by punishments, but by consequences?”

Let me repeat that: “What if God’s justice and righteousness operate not by punishments, but by consequences? And what, then,” Crossan continues, “if the focus of divine justice and the interpretation of God’s will were removed from externally added punishments and placed on internally derived consequences?”

The understanding that the God of Love inflicts punishments is for me on a par with the self-deception and moral abdication of “The Devil made me do it” (6).

Which brings us back to us and that ol’ interior Pharaoh, who won’t go away.

Whoever thinks Christianity is either all fun and games or playground escapism doesn’t have a clue what being a Christian means.

Good Friday reminds us of responsibility, not denial; consequences, not divine punishments.

Good Friday reminds us that we are both Jesus’ responsibility and his consequence. His horrible death was and is a consequence of what we do--not, as some would have it, what we are. His responsibility was and is to bring everyone the Kingdom of God: the rule of peace, love, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

A responsibility he has passed on to us.

Good Friday assures us that God so loves the world that God gives himself to us in Jesus: who for our sakes and our wholeness, health, and well-being (7) comes to us still: birthing, working, caring, and healing, devoting himself to each and every one of us, here and everywhere, world without end.

Amen.

NOTES

 satisfied the demands of
  • William Blake, “I wander thro' each charter'd street.” http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/London_by_William_Blake_analysis.php.
  • As Article XXXI of “The XXXIX Articles,” once adhered to in Anglicanism, has it: “The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin.”
  • John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer: Recovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer, p. 99. All quotations and allusions may be found in Chapter 5.
  • Which is why the film focuses on Jesus’ final twelve hours.
  • But, someone will counter, what about 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul lays out the basic, and earliest teachings of the Christian community?
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures . . . (1 Cor 15:3-4).

But what does “died for our sins” mean? The two most common understandings are
  • Jesus died because of our sins;
  • Jesus died to atone for our sins.
But there are numerous other possibilities:
  • Jesus died for our sakes;
  • Jesus died working, caring, and concerning himself about us;
  • Jesus died devoting himself to us.
(Frederick William Danker, ed., A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, hyper, 1030ab.).
  • Which we need to remember, as part of the comedian Flip Wilson’s routine, was a running joke. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SLifea3NHQ.
  • Salvation < Latin salus: health, well-being; in English, “whole” and “health” are related.