Author: admin

(Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Ps. 145:1-5, 18-22; 2 Thess. 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38)
 

“Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living.”

            In the 1970’s, when I was in my mid-20’s, I began to discover an awareness of God’s presence in life, my own life and the life of the world around me.  This wasn’t because I had any particular convictions that I wanted to see fulfilled, it was years before I started going back to church; but it seemed more and more apparent to me that just about any human situation, when you boiled it down far enough, was essentially a matter of where God was, or was not.  Whether the people involved thought of it that way or not – and most certainly didn’t – God was either being loved, or not: ignored, denied, yelled at, misunderstood, run from screaming; or listened to, delighted in, joined with, learned from, followed.  Again, whether the people involved thought of it that way or not, this was what I saw happening.

             I was talking about all this at the time with two friends who were professional writers, very smart and good guys, and they put up with me – people don’t talk about God, and I’m sure that what I had to say was rambling and incoherent from me, but they listened; and finally one of them put up his hand and said, Look: God’s a good Monday-morning quarterback.

            For those who may not be familiar with that euphemism, it means a second-guesser, someone who, after the fact and from the safety of the sidelines, tells you what you should have done differently.

            If my friend really meant that about God, then of course it’s tragic that his understanding of God was so impoverished, so completely off.  If, however, what he meant was that that’s the way people in general think about God, then he had a point.  I think it’s indisputable that the picture of God as someone who spends all his time grading our performance is quite common; and we have to acknowledge that the church, over the centuries, bears a lot of responsibility for that terrible misconception.

            And it is a misconception.  God does not look back.  God looks forward.  The three readings today, each in its own way, all testify to this, they all look forward.   The Old Testament reading from the prophet Haggai, writing near the end of the Babylonian exile, is a beautiful statement of hope, God telling the people to look forward, to the reestablishment of the temple in Jerusalem: Take courage, do not fear; my spirit abides among you.   The reading from 2 Thessalonians looks forward to “the day of the Lord”, looks forward to a clearer understanding, by the grace of God, of what that means, what it’s going to look like.

            The reading from the gospel of Luke looks forward as well, but not just in the way that would seem most apparent.  The reading has to do with the resurrection, which is obviously looking forward, to the life after this one; but in this story we heard words from Jesus that involve something much larger, that’s easy to miss.  Years ago, during this week of the lectionary schedule, there was a meeting of clergy in our western part of the diocese with Bishop Jim Curry, and at the beginning, as kind of an icebreaker, he invited each of us to name our favorite gospel story. One or two people chimed right in, and then there was a little pause, and someone said, “Not this week’s.”   I think everybody there knew what he meant, today’s gospel seems like kind of an in-group story about a point of theology that doesn’t seem terribly relevant to this life, and the argument’s kind of hard to follow; but there’s certainly more here than that. 

            In this story Jesus is confronted by a group of Sadducees.  In the Judaism of Jesus’ day there were two main subgroups, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees were a smaller number; they were the aristocrats, and the conservative party.  They recognized as Holy Scripture only the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and they refused to believe any doctrine that was not authorized by those books.  This therefore meant that they did not believe in a bodily resurrection after death – that idea was a development in Jewish thought that occurred at least 500 years after the Torah was written – and the Sadducees approach Jesus to test him on this issue, apparently either to trip him up like the Pharisees were always trying to do, or to convince him, to get him on their side.

            To prove their case, they refer to a passage from Deuteronomy that has to do with marriage laws: if a woman’s husband dies and they have not had a son, the man’s brother is required to marry her and provide her with a son.  This law existed for two reasons: it kept property within a family, because only males could inherit property; and it provided some measure of protection for women, who in that patriarchal society were economically powerless.

            The Sadducees who come to Jesus to get him to weigh in on the resurrection have cooked up a hypothetical case in which a woman marries seven brothers in succession, because they each die, and each leaves her childless, and their question is, if there is a resurrection, in the next life, which one of the seven would be her husband?  They evidently believe that this cockamamie story is a bulletproof argument on their side because it irrefutably demonstrates that belief in the resurrection is logically excluded by the law of Moses.

            The whole idea reminds me of a famous story about St. Augustine, who was once asked by an atheist, What was God doing before he created the universe?  And Augustine answered, He was busy creating hell, for people who ask stupid questions like that one.

            It’s a stupid question because this is God we’re talking about, and it’s futile to expect God to behave according to our own expectations, to conform to our human notions of logic, to live by standards that we establish.  Jesus makes essentially the same point with the Sadducees (although he does it with a good deal more patience than Augustine) when he says that we shouldn’t expect the life we live on earth and the life of the spirit to operate by the same rules.  Jesus is telling the Sadducees that they’re wrong, that the resurrection is a reality.

            But the point he comes down to, the principle on which he bases everything he’s been saying, is contained in the words he finishes with: God is not God of the dead, but of the living.

             These words do not simply address the question of the resurrection.  Jesus is saying something that has much bigger implications, something that affects all of our life, something about who God is.  He’s saying that God cares about what’s going on now, with you and me; God is involved with what’s going on now, with you and me. That’s God’s work.  It’s another way of what Jesus has said from the beginning: that the kingdom of God is among us.

            In Christ, God is our friend on the way of life: our friend who loves us; who is always gently drawing us forward into that kingdom of love and peace and joy and justice; who is always inviting us to join in the creation of that kingdom in this world.  This is not a Monday morning quarterback.  This is God for us, God beside us, God within us: not the God of the dead, but God of the living.  Thanks be to God. 

(Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; Ps. 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31)

              In our church calendar, the final three days of Holy Week are Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday (when we celebrate the Great Vigil of Easter.)  In church-speak we refer to those three days as one unit which we call the Triduum (“Triduum is Latin for “three days’.)  We do that because those three days are all part of one continuous story, from the Last Supper through Jesus’ death on the cross,  It’s a time that we always encourage you, every year, to participate in the services we hold on those days, to walk that path that leads to Easter Day: because each day has a different spiritual dimension to it, and it’s a unique opportunity to grow in the knowledge and love of God, in living through that one story, to prepare for the Resurrection.   

            Today we celebrate All Saints’ Day (which was actually this past Friday.)  All Saints is one of the seven principal feasts of the church year, and there are some in the church who consider it to be the second day of a fall Triduum: All Hallows Eve (Halloween), which is almost entirely a secular holiday, but does have a particular spiritual reality in Christian faith; All Saints’ Day, which celebrates all the Christian saints, known and unknown; and All Souls’ Day, which even most Christians don’t  know exists, but commemorates all the faithful departed (as we call them) – all who have walked this Christian way, as you and I are doing, not just those who have been canonized.

            This fall Triduum, in the words of the Christian writer Cynthia Bourgeault, is a kind of mirror-image of the one in Holy Week: both “deal with that passage from death to life that is at the heart of the Christian…path….”  In the spring, at Eastertime, there’s new life, that’s all around us, and we focus on the life that springs forth out of death.  In fall, we’re surrounded by the cycle of life coming to an end, and we behold our mortality, and remember those who have passed beyond this life, into eternal life.  We do this because it’s all part of the truth that we proclaim, as people of faith.   

            And today we proclaim it in beholding the saints; and in the spirit of this day, I brought along a little show-and-tell.

            In 1985 I acted in a production of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, CT.  The play was directed by a woman named Zoe Caldwell, who was one of the great stage actresses of the second half of the 20thcentury.  Her opening night gift to the actors was a piece of parchment – each of us got one – at the head of which was written, in fine calligraphy, “The Great Chain of Acting”.  Beneath that are 18 names, in 18 degrees of separation, that establish a direct line from William Shakespeare to every one who was in that production: 1598 – William Shakespeare worked with Christopher Beeston; 1637 – Christopher Beeston worked with Michael Moone; on down to 1982 – Dame Judith Anderson worked with Zoe Caldwell; 1985 – Zoe Caldwell worked with Jack Gilpin, The Taming of the Shrew, Stratford, Connecticut, May 18, 1985.

             All these old names were the stars of their day: these are the saints of the English-speaking theater, up until all of us on that last line.  The point Zoe Caldwell was making in this opening-night gift was that all of us who chose this particular line of work have, in some measure or other, a particular seed of the spirit, which was passed along to us by those in whom that seed had flowered before; and which we have, to nurture and grow in our own way; and in the process, pass along to others.  It was to remind us of the common purpose – the common mission – joined in by all of us, all the people on that list, we who were doing the play, and everyone who ever set foot on a professional stage, down through the years.  We on that last line are names that won’t be remembered the way the others are; but we’re nonetheless part of the same, much bigger, picture.

            You see where I’m going with this, on All Saints’ Day.  We here in the household of faith are part of an infinitely bigger picture.  It’s a picture which is expressed, in majestic language, in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: the big picture of what we Christians sometimes refer to as God’s plan of salvation; and how, along with all the saints, each one of us fits into it (because we do.)  In the verse that immediately precedes the passage we just heard, we hear the thumbnail version of this big picture: that God “has made known to us the mystery of his will…that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”  So that’s God’s ultimate plan: to gather up all things – the sacred and the profane, what’s whole and what’s broken – and heal it all; and there will be one kingdom of God.   

            And we – you and I – have a part in this process: three times, in this passage, we hear the word “inheritance”.  In the first verse (v. 11): “In Christ we have…obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purposes of him who accomplishes all things….”  So it’s not just that God, in Christ, has done something for us, and we just sit back, fat and happy: God, in Christ, has given us something, that is now ours, to live by, to use: that’s what an inheritance is for.  Then in v. 13: “…you…were marked with the seal of the…Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people…..”   So the inheritance we have from God in Christ is pointed to our redemption – our return to the wholeness in which God created us.  In Christ we have been given something that fuels us forward in that process.

            And then verses 17-18: “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints….” You hear the process, the movement, in all of that: always moving forward, in faith.  In faith, because it’s so hard to believe, that we could be part of all that; so impossible.  We’re too small; too insignificant.

            Well, today is the day on which we remember those who – just like us – were also too small, and too insignificant; but – trusting the power of God – didn’t let that stop them, and put one foot in front of the other, in whatever they were each called to do; and through the power of God, were able, one way or another, to make the kingdom of God a present reality: a foretaste, and a promise, of the time when God will “gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

            This “gathering up” is the vision of the book of Revelation: that in God’s good time, all will be made well: there will be nothing but peace, there will be nothing but justice, there will be nothing but joy; God will dry every tear, the lion will lie down with the lamb, throughout the Bible there are images of that great gittin’-up morning.  And somehow – impossibly – somehow, as we are in Christ, God asks, and empowers, each one of us to have something to do with that, every day, no matter how insignificant it might seem: some way to witness to the eternal and all-powerful love of God: to plant the tiniest seed of it, that’s all it needs, to take root, and grow, and flourish.

What a call!  What a gift!  What a blessing!

This is what we behold, in the saints that we honor on this day: saints who were just folk like you and me, like it says in the hymn, that’s no lie. This is our inheritance, in this great chain, that goes back 2000 years.  Hallelujah.   Thanks be to God.

Sermon by layspeaker Bill Kamp​

(Luke 18:9-14)
 
Lord, may these spoken words be faithful to the written word and lead us to the living word, through Jesus Christ our Lord.                    
 
The parable that is today’s gospel reading is fairly well known, and is a great life lesson and reflection for all of us. The same faith embraces both the Pharisee and the tax collector, although they are quite obviously two very different men.  
 
 
Dr. Philip McLarty, a well known Presbyterian and Methodist minister, and also the 
Reverend Charles Hoffacker have both outlined this parable very well, and so in full 
disclosure, I offer that some of my words this morning were taken from their writings.

Pharisees are regularly treated in the gospels as Jesus’ opposition, as self righteous 
hypocrites who, in general, were not good people. In this story, this Pharisee is pictured in a slightly different light.  He is no liar. He fasted more often than called for, he tithed far more of his income than required. He seemingly did everything he could to follow the written law of his people, and its centuries of interpretation.  He worked hard to earn his place in life.  He really was, in many ways, a good man.  Perhaps, except for his total lack of humility, he was a man to be admired and emulated.

Yet, in many ways, his words are troubling.  In his prayer, he denigrates so many other people: he points out that he is not like “THEM”. His words center on himself only, and cuts off all others from consideration. Four times in his brief prayer, the word “I” appears.  Remember the old saying, “there is no “I” in team”.  

Unlike the tax collector, he doesn’t confess his sins.  Surely he has some.  He doesn’t 
ask God for strength, or help, or guidance, or mercy.  In his mind, he is above all that.  He merely “reports” to God all the reasons that God should be proud of him. He is so obnoxious that he is also a pretty easy target to dislike.

The tax collector, on the other hand, asks God to be merciful to him.  He knows he is a sinner. Is he the good man in this parable? Well, let’s look at that a little closer.
In the days of Jesus, tax collectors were little more than white collar criminals. Many made huge fortunes.  They routinely charged two or three times what they should have.  They kept this “profit” to enrich themselves at the expense of others, many of them among the poor.  Tax collectors were among the most hated and despised members of the Jewish community. Maybe he is the one who is not so likeable in this story. 

Or perhaps, we can all learn something from both of these two very different people.  Jesus said that the tax collector went home “justified” because he confessed his sinfulness and asked for mercy from almighty God.  While that may sound great, there is no indication that the collector would not go right back to his thieving ways.  Perhaps he went home feeling righteous, even though God knows, and we know, he wasn’t.  We really can’t be sure what direction he took.  But maybe, just maybe, he is sincere in his prayer, and IS moving in the right direction.  Perhaps God’s forgiveness to all who come to Him, will lead this collector to feel compassion to others around him, and change his sinful ways.  

We cannot be sure which direction the collector moved in after his time in the temple. But, if we can picture ourselves as the tax collector in this parable- perhaps saved by faith and forgiveness – we can understand the depth of God’s grace and move on from judgment to compassion. God’s forgiveness for all is a very powerful force. 

And the lesson to be learned from the Pharisee?  He condemned others to make himself look better.  In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said:
 
“Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged.
   For with whatever judgment you judge, 
         you will be judged;
    and with whatever measure you measure, 
     it will be measured to you.” 

As McLarty said, perhaps the lesson to be learned is that no matter what your sin may be, the self-righteousness of the Pharisee, or the unworthiness of the tax collector or something else, there is mercy and pardon for all who call upon the Lord. When you recognize your own sins, and remember that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ those sins are forgiven, then you can be just as forgiving of others. 

So for me, the lesson to be learned from this story is that yes, God is forgiving of everyone, no matter who you are, no matter what your sins. But is up to us, each and everyone one of us, to use God’s forgiveness wisely, to move forward in less sinful ways, to be the best person we can be, and not allow ourselves to sit in judgment of others.   AMEN. 
 

(Jeremiah 31:27-34; Ps. 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8)
 

I have a pretty simple message today.  This sermon could be titled, Prayer For Dummies.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the “…for Dummies” series of instructional books – yellow and black, with a blackboard-style logo, and a cartoon “dummy” figure on the cover.  They’re on all kinds of topics: Music for Dummies, Personal Finance, Medicare, there’s even a Christianity for Dummies – the titles run into the hundreds. It’s a huge, international franchise.

            But ironically, the original inspiration for this wildly successful moneymaker may well have come from a professional-turned-hippie in the late 1960’s.  A little over a half-century ago there was an aeronautical engineer named John Muir (a distant relative of the famous naturalist) who, in the mid-1960’s, “dropped out” (in the style of the time): quit his job, moved to Taos, New Mexico, opened a garage, and spent the rest of his life as a car mechanic.  The reason his name is remembered today is that, in 1969, he wrote a book which became a cult classic.  It was called How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot.  This book was definitely a product of the hippie generation: it was hand-lettered; and the illustrations and diagrams were drawn by a cartoonist: not the kind you expect in a typical manual, but nonetheless, finely detailed, and perfectly comprehensible.  And it was published in a spiral notebook: eminently practical, you could leave it lying open and work with both hands.

             Volkswagens were very popular for a long time in this country, and the book sold millions of copies.  And in the early 1970’s, my first car being a Volkswagen, I bought it; because even though I had very little aptitude for this kind of work, if you own something you should learn how to take care of it, and this book seemed not just user-friendly, but idiot-friendly (or dummy-friendly), which I certainly was. The whole presentation sent the message, Relax, folks, this is something anyone can do.

            And it didn’t turn me into an expert mechanic; but I learned how to change the oil, I learned how to adjust the carburetor (I learned what a carburetor actually did); and when slightly more complicated problems came up, I learned that with application and what little common sense I possess, there were things I could get done. 

It’s much the same in the life of the spirit.  This is the point Jesus is making in today’s gospel reading: a point so simple, and natural to us all, that he illustrates it with a funny story (as if to say, Relax, folks, this is something anyone can do.) Luke tells us up front that this story is a parable, and that it’s about prayer (“Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart”); and it’s in the Bible; so we automatically approach it with hushed reverence.  But I’m quite sure Jesus means his hearers to laugh at this story.  I think he probably didn’t tell them it was about prayer until the story was over. It’s even structured like a joke: there’s a setup, and a payoff, and it happens fast.  

Jesus tells us, In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.  That’s a laugh in itself: he’s saying, Once upon a time, there was a judge who was the world’s worst judge.  And he tells us there was a widow who kept coming to this judge and saying, Grant me justice against my opponent.     Now, Jewish law, and tradition, and the Hebrew Bible, were all emphatic about the requirement to care for the helpless: especially widows and orphans.  But – being the worst judge in the world – that makes no difference to this guy, and he ignores her, despite the fact that she keeps coming back to him (he’s evidently stubborn and lazy on top of everything else); until finally he says to himself, Though I have no fear of God nor respect for anyone else – even though I’m the worst judge in the world – yet because this widow keeps bothering me (whether her cause is just or not is completely irrelevant to him), I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out.  The words “wear me out”’ are a bad translation: the literal meaning is, “give me a black eye.”  So the worst judge in the world gives this widow what she wants because he’s afraid she’s actually going to haul off and sock him in the kisser.  This is slapstick.  And (for my generation) central casting for this little sketch would give us Phyllis Diller as the widow and Rodney Dangerfield as the judge.

Luke tells us at the beginning of today’s passage that Jesus tells his disciples that this story is “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”  He makes several points about prayer in the story, but first and foremost is, however we pray, we keep at it.  This is Prayer For Dummies, chapter 1. Jesus uses the clown-show story the same way John Muir used the funky lettering and cartoon illustrations to show that prayer is not reserved for holy persons. Anybody can pray; and everybody should pray.  It should be as natural as breathing. 

Now: “Pray always”, Jesus tells his disciples (which would include all of us.)  “Pray always.”  This does not mean that he wants us to spend our whole lives on our knees, or in church. So what does he mean by the word “Prayer”?

            In the back of our Book of Common Prayer, beginning on p. 845, is a section called “An Outline of the Faith”, which describes itself as “a brief summary of the church’s teaching” on various subjects: God (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), the Holy Scriptures, the sacraments, and a number of others.  It’s in a question-and-answer format.  On p. 856 there’s a section on prayer, which opens with the question, “What is prayer?” And this is the answer: “Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words.”  So prayer is not just about asking for things, and then crossing our fingers, hoping God is listening and in a good mood; which is unfortunately what I think a lot of people understand prayer to be., and therefore why they don’t get around to it very often.

            I think the BCP definition of prayer is a good one.  I would expand on it this way.  When we pray, we open ourselves to the reality that God is alive; and present in our lives: always inviting us to join in the creation, every day, of God’s kingdom here in this life: the creation of a world full of all the good things we talk about here: love, joy, peace, justice, hope.  All of us dummies can be part of that.

            And Jesus tells us “not to lose heart” in the practice of prayer because he knows our human tendency is to expect results from any expenditure of effort; and prayer usually doesn’t yield the kind of results we’re used to looking for, in this life.  These are matters of the Spirit, and the effects usually aren’t immediately apparent: which shouldn’t concern us (don’t lose heart, Jesus says.)

When we are praying in this way – when we are responding to God by thought and by deeds, with or without words – we are enabling the Holy Spirit to work through us for God’s purposes, stumbling, bumbling dummies though we be.   And on this Stewardship Sunday, let us remember that we’re not just keeping the building open.  We’re maintaining the Body of Christ, in the fulfillment our mission: through the Holy Spirit, trying to live into the kingdom of God.   And for our call to that mission, thanks be to God.