Sermons: June 2010

Sunday closest to June 8

Proper 5, Year C, RCL

June 6, 2010

1 Kings 17:17-24   Psalm 30

Galatians 1:11-24   Luke 7:11-17

In today’s readings from the Old Testament and the Gospel of Luke we have two miracles. Since the word “miracle” is now burdened with so much baggage, I prefer the term “healing.” In today’s readings from the Old Testament and the Gospel of Luke we have two healings.

In 1 Kings Elijah cries out to God to heal a widow’s son. But we need to hear, really hear, Elijah’s voice:

O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?

What do you hear in Elijah’s voice? [Ask congregation.] Anger. Frustration. Sarcasm.

We do hear all of these. But what do we really hear?

Relationship. We hear relationship. God is not only someone Elijah can talk to; God is someone Elijah can talk back to.

As we all know, our relationships—with spouses, kids, friends—need humor. Between Elijah and God I hear relationship—and relationship’s bosom buddy, humor.

To see this, we need Mel Brooks’ help.

In The History of the World, Part I, Brooks is playing Moses, who’s about to get a big surprise:

God (Stef): Moses! Moses! Can you hear me?

Moses (Hank): Can I hear you? A deaf man could hear you.

Now here’s our conversation today between Elijah and God:

Elijah (Hank): Great job, LORD. That food you had the ravens bring me at Wadi Cherith was really cool; but what good did it do me when you let the water dry up?1 And that food you made for this widow and her household was really kosher of you;2 but what’s the point if you kill her kid? Huh?

First you blow that call at first base in Detroit. What? Are you blind? It cost that kid a perfect game! And now you go and kill this widow’s son? What the Sheol are you doing up there? Blind’s not enough? Now you’re deaf, too?

God (Stef): Elijah! Enough already with the kvetching! You, Moses, the people of Israel: all I get is bitch, bitch, bitch. I give you food; I give her food. I give her whole household food! And when something goes wrong, you blame me? All right, all right, the boy’s alive again. Satisfied?

Now, humor has its limits. In our little play today, and in 1 Kings, for Elijah to talk to God, for God to talk back, we have to imagine a God who is somewhere else; as played by Stef, God also has a basso profundo set of pipes.

If we stay at the level of farce, all this is good, clean fun. But if we get theologically and relationally serious, there’s a big problem.

When the Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright was college chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford, many students told him, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in God.” Wright’s stock response was, “Oh, that’s interesting. Which god is it that you don’t believe in?”3

Wright says that his Oxford non-believers would stumble out a description of the god they didn’t believe in: “a being who lived up in the sky, looking down disapprovingly at the world, occasionally intervening to do miracles, sending bad people to hell while allowing good people to share his heaven.” Wright would respond to these students, “Well, I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god. I don’t believe in that god either.”

The New Testament scholar (and Episcopalian) Marcus Borg describes this understanding—common to believers and non-believers alike—as “literalistic, doctrinal, moralistic, exclusivistic, and afterlife-oriented.” He rightly says that this understanding “has ceased to work for a large number of people.”

OK, but what God do we believe in?

I can’t presume to answer for you. Each of us has his or her own answer. But here’s where I am now.

Marcus Borg points us to Jesus.4

“As a lens through which we see God,” Borg explains, “Jesus enables us to see a great deal. What we see is deeply Jewish: Abraham, Moses, the prophets, psalmists, and teachers of wisdom. Jesus, Borg says, “becomes a magnifying glass of what is most central about God.”

I like that metaphor. As most of us discovered in childhood, a magnifying glass, by focusing the sun, can create fire. And fire, as we’ve seen this Pentecost, is a symbol for the Holy Spirit.

Following Borg, here is what I see as most central about God:
  1. God is near, at hand, and we can experience God. God is not a distant being “out there,” but rather the one in whom we live and move and have our being.5 God is “Spirit” in the rich biblical sense of the word. In both Hebrew and Greek, the words pneuma and ruach, in addition to “spirit,” also mean “wind” and “breath.” God as Spirit is like the wind that moves around us and the breath that moves within us.
  2. God is immediately accessible. As the Qur’an beautifully says, “God is closer to you than the vein in your neck.”6 Because of this, God is accessible both within, and always apart from, convention, tradition, and institution. Jesus’ spiritual life and his activity as a healer, his teaching about wisdom, and his inclusive community all point to this.
Voices in Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican traditions have often claimed a monopoly on access to God, whether it be through the Bible, Church tradition and doctrine, the clergy, or the sacraments.

But voices in all these traditions have also challenged these claims. Jesus did, too: he taught and embodied an unmediated relationship with the sacred. God is accessible to those who don’t count for much, or worse, including the radically marginalized and outcasts.
  1. God is love.7 In 1 John, John defines God by saying that "God is love." It’s the unanimous human experience that love expands life:
·         Love is not something any human being can create.

·         We must receive love before we can give it.

·         We cannot hoard love once we have received it.

·         Love that is not shared always dies.

So love is a power that relates us to something beyond ourselves. Love, therefore, allows us to transcend ourselves: it enables us to go beyond ourselves in relationship with others; love then enables us to journey beyond the boundaries of the human and to embrace that which transcends us.
  1. Because God is love, God is compassionate. Jesus embodied the compassion of God and taught that God is compassionate: Be compassionate as God is compassionate.8 Our compassionate God is life-giving, nourishing and embracing. Like a mother who sees some of her children being victimized by others, God’s compassion can become fierce.
  1. Therefore, God is passionate about justice. God’s passion for justice is central to Moses and the prophets. God’s passion for justice led Jesus to side with the poor and marginalized; in doing this he inevitably confronted and criticized the religious and political elites. Jesus’ passion for justice in the name of God was the cause of his death: he challenged and suffered the wrath of the powers and principalities of his day.
Present, accessible, loving, compassionate, and passionate about justice. These don’t define God—we can never define God. But these words do help us see and experience God, in relationship.

Imagine someone asking you why a certain person is your close friend. You say your friend is present, accessible, loving, compassionate, and passionate about justice. Could you think of any higher praise?

When I die, if people say that about me I’ll die happy.

Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost 3, Proper V

June 13, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church, Bakersfield

Rev. Vern Hill

I am pretty good about doing my homework reading in the areas of theology and biblical studies, but in the past few years I have come to read and develop extended connections with regular folks  – thanks in no small part to the web.  The collection of these folks checks in from spots throughout the world.  One such fellow is A E Hunt, a creative thinker and retired pastor of the Uniting Church of Australia.  Recently he put me on to an old Celtic Rune of Hospitality that I would like you to reflect on for a few moments.1

‘We saw a stranger yesterday, 
we put food in the eating place, 
drink in the drinking place, 
music in the listening place 
and, with the sacred name of the triune God, 
he blessed us and our house, 
our cattle and our dear ones.

‘As the lark says in her song: Often, often, often, goes Christ in the stranger’s guise’.

We have the contribution of two major story-tellers in what we have heard this morning.  From the Hebrew scriptures comes this amazing story of evil intent and intrigue and murder –

of Ahab the King and Jezebel, the King’s wife who clearly demonstrates why if you are called a “Jezebel”, it is not compliment to your character.  Few places in scripture do we find someone so ruthless, conniving and ambitious, the Lady Macbeth of Samaria.

In his lusting greed for Naboth’s vineyard, a prime piece of real estate standing in the way of his own explansion project, Ahab the King accepts Jezebel’s offer to create a solution  (hard to believe this story doesn’t take place in New Jersey and is a segment in the HBO classic, the Sopranos).  Naboth, a simple common guy, is murdered and Ahab sets out to seize the property.

Elijah, speaking as the prophet of God, but really speaking for the corpse of Naboth confronts Ahab’s sin.  Ahab has chosen to ignore what he has been called to be as king, to protect his subjects from injustice and evil. Ahab has become injustice and evil incarnate.

The message in the story is simple and without apology – to do evil, to bring harm to those for whom we are to care is not without consequences.  Rather bluntly spoken, Elijah says to Ahab - "Thus says the LORD: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood."   A truth that Jesus reminded the disciples of at his arrest in the garden – “he that lives by the sword will die by the sword.”

What we choose to do is not an irrelevant or casual thing – there are connections and consequences.  Mindful of that it is to the other story-teller, the gospel writer Luke, that I would like to really focus our attention.  The story of Simon the Pharisee.

Here are some things we know from the story –

Simon was a Pharisee;  he was probably a good man.  Even a religious man.  And we can speculate further.  He was open-minded enough or at least curious enough to invite Jesus to dine with him.

As a Pharisee, Simon did his best to keep God's law, to follow Torah.  God would have mattered to Simon.  Holiness in God’s sight was important to him.  He would have put enormous effort into doing the right thing.

However, Simon, like so many other people then and now, lived in a world simply constructed – a world of white and black, good and bad, insider and outsider, blessed and otherwise.  Uncomplicated space - No shades in between.

For Simon the Pharisee, Bad people, poor people, brought all their troubles on themselves.  And so he readily condemned the ‘stranger’, the woman who so easily gate-crashed his dinner party  (calls to mind the President’s surprise guests but not quite the same thing – in fact significantly different).

It was of course -
  • scandalous that this woman of ill-repute should dare to enter the house of a righteous Pharisee.
  • It was scandalous that she knelt by the feet of the guest of honor and wet his feet with her tears.
  • It was scandalous that she used her hair to wipe his feet.
  • It was scandalous that she poured her perfume  (perfume always the key tool of trade for a prostitute) over the feet of Jesus. 
Everyone especially Simon would have been most uncomfortable.  Everyone would have been greatly offended.  Everyone that is, except Jesus according to Luke the story teller.

Jesus did not see her actions as those which might subvert his image or identity.  She did not represent the collapse of morality or the decline of civilization.  He not only accepted her actions as part of the culture of hospitality, of welcome similar to our Celtic Rune, but received the gift of her tears as an expression of profound gratitude.

His concern and thoughts, it seems, were not on himself, but on her, the ‘outsider’.  She was the one that mattered.  She was enriching the moment with her presence.

Some sixty years ago a Canadian by the name of Marshall McLuhan introduced us to the notion of living in a media “global village.”  The identity of the village was not singular but plural – a gathering of many differences in religious, social and cultural diversity.   This morning’s gospel story by Luke has some affinity with the modern concept of the global village and pluralism.  Let’s play with that for a moment.

Since the 1960s we have seen our world change significantly, and much of that change supports a global village paradigm –
  • International trade partnerships, the democratization of the village by email and the world wide web with its infinite connections among people and information.
  • Environmental issues reaching beyond regional boundaries – fossil fuels and energy use,  food production,  pollution of air, water and land, and the challenge of global warming
  • Media and popular culture the product of a co-mingling without borders.
  • And even International terrorism; a new kind of violence and conflict beyond the scope of nationalistic confrontations. 
Karl Edward Peters in his book, Dancing with the Sacred: Evolution, Ecology, and God,  observes that how we think about ourselves in relation to the rest of the world in part determines how successfully we behavetoward ourselves, 
other human beings, our planet, and its creatures  (Peters , p.14).2 

It is no Channel29 Breaking News alert that many people today are threatened by the patterns of change and this evolving larger village because of the othernesses that come with it, and that many of those othernesses are no longer willing to behave as second or third class passengers on the lower decks out of sight and mind.    

Looking carefully at the rigid faces and hand scribbled signs as well as the voices raised to screech level in some recent political protests we see an angry eruption of racism and jingoism at issues thought settled by Civil War, World wars, the Great Depression and the years following the Civil Rights Act.  Peters goes on to say in his book that our future depends on a salvation from that thinking – any future seeking after peace or safety or well-being is “in peril, simply because [many] have not included the rest of our planet in their thinking…”  (Peters, p. 14).

The symbol for all this is ‘the stranger’ or ‘the outsider’, the woman party crasher.  The many who are different from the singular US.

Any brief survey of human history finds the ‘others’ usually relegated to a place outside the gate, as aliens, as inferiors or even as an enemy.

This was true of the European settler mindset towards aboriginal Americans.  This was true of every immigrant arrival – give us your cheap labor but don’t live in our neighborhood.  This is true of religious fanatics yesterday and today, be they Christian or Moslem or Hindu or Jew.  The DNA of Simon the Pharisee continues.  People who see themselves as devout believers and patriotic have in the name of that devotion and patriotism circled the wagons against the outsiders and the uninvited, even against our President.  Their self-righteous voices are heard all around -

In South Carolina,  Republican State Sen. Jake Knotts  in an appearance on “Pub Politics,” an internet talk show, called the Republican Gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley a "raghead." Haley is of Indian descent though she is a Methodist by religion.  What Knotts said – and remember this is not Joe of plumber at the local bar after 8 beers; this is a state senator - "We already got one rag head in the white house.  We don’t need another one in the governor’s mansion." 

And then there is Arizona, already caught up in controversy because of the immigration ID laws; they have moved on.   Prescott City Councilman Steve Blair roused residents during his radio talk show to pressure local artists into "lightening" the faces of kids on a mural at Miller Valley Elementary School. "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask why," Blair said.  "I think it's pathetic. You have changed the ambiance of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn't exist..." The school's principal   allowed the more colorful work of art.  [Arizona Republic]

The real person of faith in this story of Luke is the gate-crasher.  She shows Jesus the welcoming hospitality owed to a guest.  She welcomes Jesus because she knows what it is to be unwelcome, to be abused and cast aside.  She and many of us know what it is to be homeless in all the many senses of that phrase, to know that we are someone’s enemy for no other reason than we exist and believe and think as we do.

This leads to the second important message of Luke’s story – the richness of grace that awaits the world from those who have been cast aside and marginalized.  This woman gives Jesus the gift of her heart. 

How much has the Episcopal church changed in the last fifty years as we have discerned and accepted in faith what the Spirit speaks out of the life and teachings of Jesus, as we have worked to embrace the full inclusion of women, of gay, lesbian and transgender persons, of the aged and the young – all gathered about the Table of the Lord,  all embraced, their stories welcomed?  How much has been received and learned from those who for so long were kept outside the gate and silenced?  The existence of Grace Church testifies to the richness of this blessing.  What we are within and about, I believe, is the next great “salvation awakening”.  And this is why what we are about at Grace is so important.  It is the heart of the Gospel message in the teachings of Jesus.  We are one of more and more lights bringing greater light overcoming the darkness.

Everything… everyone, has its own inherent worth and unique contribution to the village.  We marvel at and appreciate and celebrate that rich diversity of life. 

Returning for a moment to the nightmare of Ahab and Jezebel,  there are consequences to what we and others choose.  Diminishing life, hindering human flourishing is wrong and leads to further brokenness, violence and wasted living and a barren earth. Those who do deny the obligation of their birth – to uphold justice, to resist evil and show mercy and kindness – they become the evil of their fear.

The Rune of Hospitality reminds us of the Jesus truth – what you do to the least, you have done to me.  Calling others to think differently about the stranger, the outsider, the person at the gate, enriches our world and our living and causes garden earth to become as it was created to be.  Amen.