Month: May 2020

5/17/20

Lord, may my spoken words be faithful to the written word, and lead us to the living word, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

A few months ago (which probably seems like a lifetime to many in view of what we are facing today), Pastor Jack asked me to present the sermon today.  I read today’s gospel at that time, and gave some thought to what I would say, but then the Covid-19 virus invaded our world, and quite frankly, I had forgotten that I was to speak today. Pastor Jack reminded me just a few days ago, and so I re-read John 14, verses 15-21.  And I realized right away, that this Gospel is very appropriate for the circumstances that we find ourselves in today.

In this short scripture reading, we find the word “love” four times.  This is certainly the time for all of us to love and care for each other, and also important to remember that GOD loves us, and HE will never abandon us.

For those of us who believe, we encounter the Resurrected Christ, the one who has triumphed over the cross and the grave, our Lord Jesus Christ, who says to us as He did to his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans.”

Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  At first glance, you might think that He is putting a condition on his promise to love and walk with us forever.  But, He is only reminding us that keeping the commandments of GOD is simply a natural expression of our love for Him.  It should not be difficult, if we truly love and believe in him.

In John’s writings, the commandment to “love one another” is emphasized over and over again.  I have a cousin who no longer associates with any particular church.  He and I grew up together. Attending the First Baptist Church in Ossining, NY: Sunday school every Sunday morning, followed by the regular church service with the adults.  But as we grew older, he moved away from any organized religion, and began to say that his religion was to follow the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  

This passage is found in both Matthew and Luke.  And it’s really not all that different than the passage in John that we are discussing today.  When you strive to love the Lord your GOD with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, you gain the help of the Holy Spirit which helps you to love all others.

Well, despite my cousin’s decision not to attend church regularly, and not to stay true to any particular sect, he has followed that path.  He has always been drawn to those less fortunate, and no that he is comfortable in life, he has made it his mission to spend as much money on charitable endeavors as he does on himself.  For every dollar that he spends on himself, he spends another dollar on one of his favorite charities.  He does that religiously, as the saying goes.

Well, there is a need right now, and we are called upon to fill it.  When you think about it, following the Golden Rule is very much what every religion is, or should be, about.  We want to please those who love and care for us, and they will return that obedience and love in kind, just as GOD has returned that affection by providing us with another advocate, to be with us forever.

There is no shortage of people today who we need to think about and remind them that they are not alone.  Those who have lost loved ones to this virus, those who have lost jobs, those who are home alone, those wh are having difficulty putting food on the table, those who are simply living in fear of the unknown.  

For the millions of people throughout the world who are facing this dreaded disease, without a knowledge of Christ, who si there to say to them: “Jesus has not left you as an orphan.  GOD will never abandon you.”  WE ARE HERE TO SAY THIS TO THEM.  We are here to bring them comfort, love, compassion, understanding.  Our lives are filled with technology: computers, smart phones, big screen tv’s. All these things bring us the news our world.  But they can’t bring us what we need most: the love and comfort of Jesus Christ. The knowledge that we are not orphans facing these perilous times alone.  Because we are never alone.  GOD made that promise to us, and HE has kept that promise.  This is a calling for all of us right now to be that voice in the dark.

More than 2000 years ago, Jesus assured us that we would never be alone when he gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We are not forgotten.  We do not have to live in a state of fear, GOD is right there with us through the suffering, pain and frustration.

These are very difficult and trying times for many of us, but remembering that we are not orphans, we are not alone, will help to guide and give us strength. This is an opportunity for all of us to open our eyes, and truly seeeverything around us.  An opportunity to reinforce this message to others who may need our help. We can do this through our prayer, our words, our actions, and deeds.

Let us use this opportunity wisely.  We will all get through these trying times.  Because, we are never alone.

                                                                                               – Bill Kamp

5/12/20

            I grew up about five miles from my first cousins, my father’s brother’s family; and we were very close, we spent a lot of time together.  When I was 15, my oldest cousin married a young woman who, over time, became a mild irritation to everyone in the family: it seemed like she never really listened to what anyone else was saying, and she usually didn’t have much to say that anyone else was interested in.  I was no different than anyone else in the family, but I think now we just made her so self-conscious she could never relax and be herself.  Eventually they divorced; but, years later, my father told me that he had been sitting next to her at one Christmas dinner (a duty that everyone dreaded annually, but you knew your turn was going to come up sooner or later) and, completely out of the blue, a propos of nothing, she had said, Uncle Kay, why do you go to church?

            My father was a lifelong churchgoer, and told me this story as just one more example of what an oddball she was, but of course it’s not an oddball question at all, it’s one that we should make a point of asking ourselves every now and then: Why do I go to church?  And in these times, when we’re not meeting together in our church building, what is church?  What is it that we do here?

            Well, of course, there are many specific answers to these questions.   We worship God, in many different ways; we give thanks; we pray for others, and for ourselves; we confess our sins, we try to be honest with God about what’s really going on with us; and so on..  But there are also broad, overarching ways to answer the question; and one of them occurred to me to talk about today because a couple of things.  The first is something in one of the Scripture readings we just heard, which I’ll get back to.  

The second is something I read in a book a while back, called Flash Boys, by a financial journalist named Michael Lewis. It’s about a discovery that was made several years ago by a small team of people, at a bank in New York City.  It’s complicated, but just very briefly to summarize, they found that traders at an investment firm were using high-speed computers and complex software to steal money from trades being made on the stock market.  They had found a way to get an advance peek (just a second) at trading orders and shaving off for themselves just a penny or two, so nobody noticed, but it was from billions of transactions, so it added up to a lot of money. 

               And the team that was investigating this also discovered that, over a couple of years, people at a few other financial institutions had stumbled onto this racket; but rather than blow the whistle on these people, they joined them, they started doing the same thing.  

            The point of the story (at least for me) was contained in two sentences, buried in the middle: Lewis wrote: “The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia.  So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became.”  Now, it’s certainly not a startling revelation that there’s greed in the financial world, and that people will do dishonest things to make money.  But there’s something about this situation that I think the phrase “moral inertia” captures pretty well: it describes the mindset that holds, If I’m smart enough to understand something and you’re not, that’s not my problem.  It’s your problem.  You could call that survival of the fittest; but it’s also moral inertia – moral paralysis – and as Christians, we call it sinful.  It’s willful ignorance of the communion in which God intends us all to be.

            This is what can happen when we allow ourselves to be defined by the boundaries of whatever small world we choose to inhabit; and we each do inhabit a particular world, our family, our job, the path each of us chooses in life.  The danger is when, on that path, we abandon our awareness of God’s creation, the wholeness that each of our particular worlds is rooted in, and gets its life from, and thereby is joined to all the others.  So when someone else is being hurt, we’re all being hurt; and when someone else is feeling joy, we all share in that joy.  It’s the way God created us; and it’s the root of the second Great Commandment: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  If you don’t, you’re not living in the real world: you’re perpetuating a false world.

            The story Lewis tells is a specific example of that disconnect.  It’s an extreme example, but we all experience it.  We show it in our anger, in our impatience, in our selfishness; say, for instance, if we have an in-law who we think is a bore, and we don’t want to have to sit next to her at Christmas dinner; because we’re ignoring  who she really is, her real life, and our chance to learn something  new from her: like when she asks us why we go to church.

Sometimes it takes work to see all that.  And there’s a verse in today’s reading from the first letter of Peter which points us that way.  The author of this letter is writing to a very young church, in the first century, a group of people who have felt called to Jesus Christ, just like us; and what the letter tells these people to do is this:

            “Come to him, a living stone, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”

            “A living stone.”  Both Old and New Testaments frequently use “stone” as an image of the presence of God.   It represents permanence, absolute reliability, something you can stand on, that will always support you.   Today’s passage from 1 Peter follows this invitation (“Come to him, a living stone”) with several quotations from Scripture, which have to do with stones, two of which speak specifically of a cornerstone, seen in this letter as a prophecy of Jesus Christ: from Isaiah: “See, I am laying in Zion…a cornerstone chosen and precious…”; and from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.”     

            Now, back then, when you built a building, the cornerstone was the very first stone put into place.  So every other stone was set in reference to that first one.  So the cornerstone determined the building’s orientation, the solidity of its foundation: everything that followed in the construction of the building was determined that first step.

            This verse from 1 Peter asked those people then, and asks us now, to make Christ our cornerstone: that first stone of the spiritual house which each of us builds.  Every single human being, in church or not, builds a house in life, one way or another. The question is, are we paying attention, when we build our house?  Are we recognizing the life that is real?  Do we build it for the life lived in communion, the life of love and peace and joy; the life God wants for all of us?  Do we build our house on a living stone, from which life eternally opens out in front of us?  That’s what we’re doing here.  That’s why we come to church: wherever church is: where two or three of us are gathered together.  Thanks be to God.

5/3/20

(Acts 2:42-47; Ps. 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10)

            “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

I read something on the internet this past week that was written by a college professor, lamenting one of the many little tragedies that the coronavirus pandemic has created, that was specific to his life as a teacher: that, because of the shutdown, his students (like students in college courses all across the country) would not be taking their final exam. (Of course most students would think yeah, what a tragedy.)  But the fact is that this professor, like any good teacher, knows that the purpose of a final exam is not just to make sure people have done their homework.  It’s a chance for them to bring together what they’ve learned in the course (whatever it might be), to see how the pieces fit; it’s a chance for them to use their knowledge, to be creative, to see that they can be creative.  In the language of faith, it’s to embrace the gifts that God has given each of them uniquely; to grow into who they really are, what they can be.  In fact on one level that’s the whole point of the course. Of any course.  It’s the point of all education.  Of any kind.  “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

In our Episcopal Church the fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday, because in each of the three years of the lectionary cycle the gospel reading for this Sunday is a passage from John chapter 10, the discourse of Jesus in which he calls himself the good shepherd.  Jesus speaks about his caring and protective relationship with “the sheep”, meaning, of course, us.  All of us.  A lot of people instinctively have a negative reaction to that characterization of themselves: sheep being understood as brainless creatures who need to be, and can be, led by the nose in order to survive.  (Of course this is not what Jesus means.)   Our reading today is the first part of that discourse in chapter 10, in which Jesus establishes the world of sheep as the metaphor for his ministry, but refers to himself, not as the shepherd, but with a different image: one which I think deserves a lot more attention than it tends to get.

            But first we have to remember something. This whole discourse is actually the conclusion to the story we hear in John chapter 9, Jesus healing of the man born blind.  And we cannot really understand the whole Good Shepherd thing outside of that context. So – very briefly to remind you – Jesus comes across a man who’s been blind all his life.  The healing happens very quickly, at the beginning: Jesus spits on the ground, makes a little mud, puts it on the man’s eyes, tells him to go wash in a nearby pool, which he does, and comes back able to see, Jesus having gone on his way.

But the bulk of the story is what happens afterwards. Because word spreads that it’s Jesus who’s done this miracle, an uproar starts among the religious authorities, who’ve already identified him as a dangerous renegade and troublemaker.  At first they deny that the healing really happened; when it’s proven to be true, they deny that Jesus had anything to do with it, saying to the man, it’s God who did this, we know Jesus is a sinner (so he cannot possibly have done it.)   The chapter ends with Jesus and the man he healed talking about what happened, the man coming to faith in Jesus, and Jesus trying to teach the Pharisees something, which they reject.

There’s a lot more to this story, and you could spend a lifetime talking about it.  The point for our purposes today is this.  The Pharisees and Sadducees – the religious establishment – are insisting that they know how God works in this world: in certain ways which they have long since identified, which they alone can provide knowledge of and access to; and which they therefore control.  Jesus is saying, That’s a lie, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.  In fact, worse: you are preventing people from seeing the love of God that is alive around them, and inviting them to join in, all the time.  And within the metaphor of the sheepfold, he calls them thieves, and bandits.

And here’s where, in chapter 10 verse 9 Jesus uses another image to help us understand who he is, and what he’s doing: he talks about the gate of the sheepfold, and tells them, “I am the gate.”  And then he says what that means: “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

“I am the gate.”  It’s one of the great “I am” statements that Jesus makes in this gospel: I am the good shepherd; I am the light of the world; I am the way, the truth, and the life; I am the gate.  These metaphors all represent a means to an end: whenever Jesus points to himself, he is pointing through himself to God.

But there’s a unique beauty to this one: in the way that it’s about this life, our lives.  “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.”  “Saved” does not mean “admitted to heaven when you die.” “Saved” means fulfilled; redeemed; “saved” is the coming-to-be of who we really are.  “Whoever enters through me will come in and go out and find pasture.” “Come in”: to the place we know is home: where we know we are loved for who we are; where we are safe; where there’s trust, and communion, and rest.  “Whoever enters through me…will go out and find pasture”: this is our life, every day: we go out into the richness of creation. Pasture is what grazing animals eat, it’s what gives them sustenance.  “Pasture” isn’t a big empty field: it’s what is in that field.  Pasture is the nourishment, not just for our bodies, but our souls, that God gives us: that God is giving us, all the time.

            This is Jesus, the gate: through whom we wake up; through whom we open our eyes; through whom we go out and find pasture; through whom we come in, and are home.  “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  Thanks be to God.