Category: Sermons

7/26/20 

(Genesis 29:15-28; Ps. 105:1-11,45b; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52)

            You may remember a movie made in the early 1990’s called “Philadelphia”.  It starred Tom Hanks as Andrew Becket, a young lawyer at a prestigious Philadelphia law firm, who is gay, and who has AIDS.  We need to remind ourselves that, back then, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence; and, back then, most gay people didn’t openly acknowledge their sexuality because of the prejudice that was still dominant then.

            We quickly learn that Becket is a rising star at the firm, but about a third of the way through the movie he gets fired.  The senior partners – who have been his friends and respected mentors – tell him it’s because of his poor job performance.  But Becket thinks it’s because they’ve discovered that he’s gay, and that he has AIDS. So he takes them to court over it.

            Near the end of the trial, which is very angry and contentious, Becket himself testifies (he’s very sick with the disease by this time); and when his lawyer asks him, Are you a good lawyer, he says, I’m an excellent lawyer.  I love the law.  His lawyer asks him, What do you love about the law, and he answers, Many things. What do I love most about the law? His lawyer nods; and Becket says, That, every now and then – not often, but occasionally – you get to be a part of justice, being done.  It really is a thrill when that happens.

            And the movie cuts to a shot of the three senior partners – the people he’s suing, at the defense table – all looking at Becket, with something approaching love; and with quiet pride – in him.  And it’s clearly because he has just articulated what they all feel about the law.  And all the bitter division between them – anger at the lawsuit, the fear of AIDS,  the homophobia –  for those few seconds, that’s all gone  away; and for that moment they are brothers again.

            This is just one moment in an old movie.  But I think it’s a good illustration of what Jesus calls “the kingdom of heaven.”   

            For the last three weeks we’ve been hearing from Matthew chapter 13, which is the heart of Jesus’ teaching on that subject, which is at the heart of our lives as Christians.

            The first thing we have to do is shake off the idea that “the kingdom of heaven” is the place where God lives, up in the sky somewhere, where hopefully we’ll go after we die, if we obey the rules.  No.  Jesus is talking about the presence of God we experience now, in this life: when what God wants is what happens: where there is love; and peace; and joy; and justice.

            Because the kingdom of heaven is of God, it defies precise definition, but Jesus gives examples to point us in the right direction.  In today’s reading those examples differ widely, but they have two things in common.  First, they’re all similes: the kingdom of heaven is likea mustard seed, likeyeast that a woman mixed with flour, liketreasure hidden in a field.  God is always creating, and what God creates is always new.  So Jesus gives us indications, not definitions, because they would be meaningless: what he wants to do is put us on the lookout, for the kingdom of heaven that’s going to show up in our lives, in ways that are impossible to predict.

            And the second thing these parables have in common is that they each describe the kingdom of heaven by telling a story from life, something with which his hearers are familiar: a tiny mustard seed which grows into a big shrub; a woman using yeast to make bread; a merchant who deals in pearls: very ordinary things.

Jesus is saying that the kingdom of heaven exists in this life, in things that seem so ordinary to us, it’s easy for them to escape our notice; but if we have the ears to hear and the eyes to see, we can find the kingdom of heaven around us all the time.   

            I’m going to flesh this out by commenting briefly now on the first four parables of the kingdom of heaven which we heard today. 

            These four parables really make two pairs.  The first pair is about how, in the kingdom of heaven, little things can have infinitely big effects.  The mustard seed is tiny, but produces a shrub that becomes a tree: a tree that’s big enough to have branches; where birds come and make nests; where birds lay eggs; which hatch new birds; and the cycle repeats itself. So from this one little seed, comes the creation of a world of new life, extending infinitely outward.

            Jesus makes the same point, in different circumstances, in the story of the woman who takes yeast and leavens three measures of flour with it.  To a modern ear this sounds unremarkable.  But in those days a measure of flour was about fifty pounds; so three measures made 150 pounds of dough, enough to make bread for a hundred people.  So that one woman, with that one little bit of yeast, provides nourishment for a great number of people: people who go on in the strength of that nourishment to live their lives: again, one small thing creating new life that extends infinitely out into the world, and the future.

            The second pair of parables is about the kingdom of heaven we feel in the pure gift of the love of God.  It’s a gift which we do not earn, but which God just gives us. Just think about this for a minute: God…loves…us.  It’s the most mind-boggling thing there could possibly be; and it’s a gift for which we would give everything we have.

             This is the experience of the man who finds treasure hidden in a field, and sells everything he has to buy the field, to get that treasure.  This makes him sound kind of sneaky.  But in that time, the people of Israel were under constant threat of invasion, and burying your valuables was a common way of protecting them; and the implication is that the original owner didn’t know the treasure was there, so it wasn’t his to begin with.  So the discovery of it was a pure gift of God, out of the blue: that’s what causes the joy, which happens before he even acquires the field (“in his joy he goes and sells all he has and buys that field…”): the pure gift is the real treasure; for which the man would pay anything.

            And finally, the merchant who deals in pearls finds one that’s greater than any he’s ever seen, so he sells all the pearls he’s already got to buy that one.   The beauty of this pearl is what he’s been looking for all his life; so now none of his other pearls, which he’s spent his life acquiring, matter, and he’ll give them all up for his heart’s desire. That’s the beauty of the kingdom of heaven.

             I’m going to close with a quick story of a little glimpse of the kingdom of heaven I had a while back here at St. John’s.  For many years, every summer, we hosted something called Camp Jonathan.  It was a one-week day camp for young people who have recently experienced the death of someone very close to them (usually a family member), a unique and wonderful program.  One day I was invited to join their opening gathering; I got there a little early, and fell into conversation with a very energetic six-year-old boy. He was playing with two toy helicopters he had brought; I asked him some questions about what they could do, and he showed me how they took off and landed; he also showed me a grenade launcher he’d made with a rolled-up piece of paper and a pipe cleaner.  

            The next day, I was in my office just before lunchtime and that little boy (with one of the teachers) showed up at the door. He had a piece of construction paper in hand, and the teacher said that he wanted to show me his drawing.  So I came out from behind my desk, and the boy held it up so I could see it.  It was not immediately apparent to me what was represented; there were a number of odd, and brightly colored, shapes; so I asked him what it was, and he said, It’s a circus at my church.  I said,  A circus at your church?  And he said, Yes, there’s a circus at my church.  Evidently wherever his family went to church, somewhere around here, a circus had set up its tent and was performing on the grounds.

            Now, I happen to love circuses, I’ve gone to the circus all my life, I’ve told circus stories in sermons.  And the idea of a circus at a church was something that had never occurred to me, but the idea instantly took root in my head (there’s something of the kingdom of heaven in a circus, in the pure delight the circus creates.)

            But of course the most wonderful thing was that it was just as exciting to this little boy, and that he had come down to share that excitement with me, on the basis of our five-minute friendship the day before.  That was a gift of God, out of the blue, unmerited, with some implications that could be infinite (the exhilaration of a circus in a church), and from a very small source.  To me, that has “kingdom of heaven” written all over it.  As we become more aware of the presence of the kingdom of heaven in our lives, we grow in thankfulness, in hope, in joy; and, in the working of the Holy Spirit, all those spread out all around us.  In the words of Andrew Becket, it really is quite a thrill when that happens. Thanks be to God. 

7/19/20

(Genesis 28:10-19a; Ps. 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43)

            I’m going to preach a regular old sermon today, but first I need to acknowledge with you the fact that we’re in a different place today.  There may be some of you watching this now who are not on our parish email list, or the parish grapevine; so: for you folks: this past week I announced that I will be retiring from St. John’s and from parish ministry at the end of August.

            So if we were all gathered together here in church today for worship, there’d be a different feel in the room (there’s definitely a different feel here now, with just me and Flora and the camera.)  We’re in a period of leave-taking now, you and I. And I’m not going to dwell on it. It’s just necessary to name it; and to remember that the way forward – for us all, you and me -is to keep our minds firmly on what we’re here for, what we’ve always been and always will be here for: to worship our God, and to grow in the knowledge and love of God, and of God’s Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

            So here’s the sermon.

            This past week I had a new experience: I was the guest on a podcast, called “Better Known.”  It’s hosted by a man who lives in London, who asks people to talk about five things they think should be better known (and one thing that should be less well known.)   He sent me some episodes to listen to in preparation; most of the guests on them were a lot younger than I am, and a lot of the choices they made were completely unknown to me.

            As some of mine would certainly be to them. I talked about a contemporary composer whose music most people don’t know, and an American playwright whose plays were popular in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s but have been largely forgotten.

            But in thinking about this question – what should be better known – what occurred to me first, and instantly, was the Bible. It sells 100 million copies a year, but very few people actually read it.  I think a lot people who go to church don’t read it.  I think that may partly be because they think they already know what’s in it (from having heard parts of it read in church): or, they think, I should know what’s in it – shouldn’t I – so if I act as though I do nobody’ll be the wiser; or they think, I’m already a Christian, I’m down with the program, I don’t need to read it.

            But the Christian life is not a steady state. It’s a life of constantly drawing closer to God: a life of transformation, and liberation.  And the Bible leads us down this path.  The Bible challenges us: it disorients us; confuses us; astonishes us; thrills us; sometimes it outrages us.

            We have a prime example in the passage from the book of Genesis which we heard today.  This reading is one of the cycle of stories about Jacob, whom we know – don’t we? – as one of the most august figures in the Old Testament: father of the twelve tribes of Israel, one of the Big Three whom God always includes when self-identifying (“I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”.)   And that revered stature seems justified by today’s story, a well-known and beautiful one about Jacob’s ladder: his dream of the ladder set upon earth and reaching to heaven, and angels moving up and down it: a vision of God’s living presence among us.

            And, as we heard today, the Bible tells us that God stands beside Jacob, and makes him the covenant promise of God’s eternal faithfulness: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  This is God’s covenant with Jacob and all his descendants (which, in the life of the Spirit, includes you and me.)

            And out of this dream Jacob has both a physical and a spiritual awakening: as we heard, “Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!’ “  And Jacob gives God the glory: he creates a memorial for the place, which remained for many centuries one of the most sacred places in the Promised Land.

            Beautiful, inspiring story, right?

            What we don’t get from this story – but what the Bible has firmly established, in the stories we’ve already heard (if we’ve read the Bible) – is that not only has Jacob done nothing to deserve this experience – this dream, this vision that would seem to be reserved only for the greatest of saints, and this association with one of the holiest places on earth – to the contrary, the Bible has shown us in no uncertain terms that Jacob is a thoroughly detestable person: a crook, a con man: someone none of us would want anything to do with in our own lives.

            From the beginning: the Bible tells us that when Jacob is born, his twin brother Esau comes out first – making him the eldest, and therefor the privileged one – but Jacob grabs at his heel, trying to pull him back and get ahead of him.  In the very next story, the Bible tells us how Jacob swindles Esau out of his birthright – his right as eldest son to leadership of the family and a double share of the inheritance.  Jacob trades him a bowl of stew for it (because Esau’s really hungry; Esau’s admittedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer.) And in the story right after that, the Bible tells us how Jacob cons his aged, feeble, half-blind father into thinking he (Jacob) is Esau, and giving him the blessing of a father to his eldest son (which gives him  power over all his brothers, obviously including Esau, and a great destiny.)

            When Esau finds out about this he comes after Jacob to kill him.  And that’s where today’s story begins: “Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran.” That’s what we heard.  Sounds like a normal day, yes?  No.  Jacob is on the run, he can’t go home, Esau’s on his tail.  And lest we think he was a changed man after his dream, the Bible tells us later on that he cons his father-in-law out of most of his livestock, and runs off with not only that, but also both of his daughters, and his household gods.

            This is the one to whom God says, “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go….”  

            The great Christian writer Frederick Buechner sees two lessons here.  One is that “…even for a dyed-in-the-wool, double-barreled con artist like Jacob there are a few things in this world you can’t get but can only be given, and one of those things is love in general, and another is the love of God in particular.”

            And the other is that, “…luckily for Jacob” – and luckily for us – “God doesn’t love people because of who they are but because of who he is.  It’s on the houseis one way of saying it and it’s by grace is another, just as it was by grace that it was Jacob of all people who became not only the father of the twelve tribes of Israel but the many many times great grandfather of Jesus of Nazareth, and just as it was by grace that Jesus of Nazareth was born into this world at all.”

            This is the kind of place the Bible – and only the Bible – takes us.  This is the world the Bible leads us into: in all its wildly different voices, over so many centuries.  May we always know it better, as the life-giving Word of God that it truly is.

7/12/20

(Genesis 25:19-34; Ps. 119:105-112; Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9. 18-23)

            I think the vast majority of people who don’t go to church think they pretty much know already what it is that we do in here and they just don’t buy it.  (And if what we do in here were in fact what they think it is, I doubt any of us would buy it either.)  One friend, whom I’ve known for many years and who’s smart and lives a life of service to others, once earnestly put it to me this way: she said, “Jack, how could you possibly subscribe to a reward and punishment system of thinking?” 

            Well, of course I said I don’t, that’s not what we do.  But the painful truth is that for much of the church, for much of its history, that has been the dominant mindset: rules-based, looking to a specific reward at the end of life.  This is a distortion of what Jesus preached – as someone once put it, Christianity is not an exit strategy for this world – and I think it stems in large part from a simple misunderstanding of something fundamental to the Christian gospel.

            From the beginning of his ministry to the end, Jesus preached essentially one sermon, in many different ways, by word and example: that the kingdom of heaven has “come near”; is “at hand”.  (Matthew uses the term “kingdom of heaven”; other gospels call it the “kingdom of God”; it’s the same thing.)  In Matthew’s gospel the heart of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of heaven, mostly by means of parables, is in chapter 13, which today’s gospel reading is from, and which in this lectionary cycle we will hear over the next two weeks.   

              Here’s the misunderstanding.  When Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven, he’s not talking about the place where we go after we die if we’ve been good, and follow the rules.  No.  Jesus is talking about the life of God that is here on earth and that is available to us, a life of joy and peace and justice, and true communion with each other, which God wants us to have.  This life that God offers us is the only true life – which constantly creates new life, which is in fact eternal – and which most of the time we’re just too stupidly self-absorbed to be aware of.  

            Jesus begins this teaching on the kingdom of heaven with what we heard today, the parable of the sower.   That’s how it’s commonly referred to, but in fact in the parable Jesus barely mentions the sower at all: his focus is on the seed, and the ground that is to receive it, the ground which the seed needs to take root and grow in.  The story Jesus wants to get across is the new life that is constantly being offered the Holy Spirit.   

            Now, in this parable it sounds as though Jesus is talking about four distinct kinds of people who hear the word, kinds of people for whom he is preparing his disciples, people they will encounter as they go out and preach the gospel themselves.  The first three of these are plainly negative examples, the ground that won’t grow the seed, and Jesus appears to be warning the disciples about these people – you’re going to be running across these folks, but don’t be discouraged, just be ready.

            And then the final example is the positive one, the good soil, in which the seed can take root and bear fruit: the one who truly hears and understands the word, so the word can bring about new life in that person: new life that bears fruit – that creates new life itself – a hundredfold, sixtyfold, thirtyfold.  So this is a kind of person, apparently, the disciples can look forward to.

            But I think Jesus is doing something more than all that, in this teaching.  Again, it seems to us that Jesus is talking about the people his disciples will encounter in their ministry, and we will encounter in our lives as Christians: those people, out there.  And that understanding is partially correct.  But I think, in each of these metaphors, Jesus is also talking to the disciples, and to us, about what we need to be aware of , as we prepare ourselves to receive the word.    

            He first speaks of the path: some seeds fall on the path, and they just sit there, and the birds come and pick them off.  This is the metaphor for those who hear the word but don’t understand it, it makes no impression on them, it doesn’t sink in.   A path is a well-trodden way, it’s beaten smooth and hard.  It’s where we know others have been before; it’s where we have been before, and we know where it’s going to take us.  So we don’t have to think about where we are, and where we’re going.  So we don’t think about it.  So we deaden our capacity to be surprised.  We blunt our ability to wonder.  We hedge against the possibility that we might experience  anything new, that we might allow the Holy Spirit really to work in us.  It’s easy, on the path, just to trudge along, oblivious to the new things that are happening right where we are.   In this way we may hear the word, but we don’t understand it; we don’t hear it as the Word, we are numb to its radical invitation.   

            Jesus speaks then of the seed sown on rocky ground, which has only a thin layer of soil, so the plant can’t grow roots. This is the metaphor for the one who hears the word and, Jesus tells us, “immediately receives it with joy” – which is not the same thing as understanding it – but who, just as immediately, withers away when trouble or persecution occurs.

            Roots: the means by which a plant gets sustenance, what it needs to keep it alive and growing.  And roots are underground, so we don’t see them.  This stands for the growth in faith that we are not conscious of, growth which occurs as we cultivate good spiritual practices.  And I’m not just talking about prayer, reading Scripture, the things we do in church.  I’m talking about living the Golden Rule, about being thankful in all circumstances, about letting all we do be done in love.  In trying to live our lives this way we create room for the Holy Spirit to do its work, under our radar.  Jesus knows that trouble is going to occur, our faith is going to be challenged, that’s inevitable, given the broken world we live in, the gulf between ourselves and God. When those times come, the root system is there to give us stability – to keep us in place – and to continue feeding us, just as it always has.   Growing those roots needs continual attention.

            Jesus identifies the seed sown among thorns as the metaphor for the one who hears the word, but it’s choked out by “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth.”  Well, this certainly seems like familiar territory, we’re all well rehearsed in the danger of greed, and so we check it off.

            But think about the cares of the world that are justified, the cares with which we rightly and properly concern ourselves: to provide for ourselves and our families, to care for our children and teach them about what’s important in life, to do well in school, to do a good job, to be honorable and conscientious in our occupations, to do proper honor to the gifts that God gives us.  These are all cares of the world that we should be attending to.

            But they are truly and rightly done only in the awareness of the kingdom of heaven, only as the fruit of the Holy Spirit. It’s easy – I do it all the time – to allow the cares of the world to fill up all our time and attention, to allow them to choke out the Word.  We lose the connection between what we do and how it is that we are truly able to do it. If we allow the cares of the world to crowd out the Spirit, then we can’t attend to those cares with the clarity, and energy, and joy, that they need, and that God intends.  This is the kingdom of heaven: the true source of our life and strength.

            So Jesus is not just talking about them, out there: he’s talking about all of us.   Which means that he’s also including us in the last example: the one who hears and understands and bears fruit, and yields.  And notice the way he puts it: yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.  That’s the reverse of the progression we’d expect, from little to great. Because for God, it’s not about quantity: the important thing is how each of us responds truthfully to God’s presence among us.  That’s providing good ground for the seed; which takes root and grows and bears fruit, infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  That’s the kingdom of heaven.  Thanks be to God.

7/5/20

(Gen. 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67;Ps. 45:11-18; Rom. 7:15-25a; Mt. 11:16-19, 25-30)

                        Our son Harry had a somewhat checkered career in high school (academically and otherwise), but the one thing he was really proud of – and will be all his life – was making the varsity soccer team his senior year.  He was never a starter, only got into about half the games; but his school is known for having one of the best soccer programs in the Northeast; it recruits from all over the country, and internationally; so just making the team was a big deal.  

            Harry had been good at sports since early childhood, but the training regimen, and the self-discipline, required at this level were of a whole different order than what he was used to.  And I’m glad that he had this achievement to be proud of; but I’m much more glad because of what the experience taught him, and which has stayed with him: that is, the value of staying in good physical condition, how it makes your life better; and how to maintain that condition, through exercise and diet.  He can literally feel the benefits, and can feel the cost when he doesn’t keep it up: the cost to his work, and to how he feels about himself.  And I’m glad he learned that when he does keep it up, it gets results.  This experience changed his life forever.

            I think the single most important factor in what changed Harry’s approach – what made him willing to buy into that self-discipline – was the coach.  He  was a young man, not a slave-driver, he didn’t yell; he motivated his players by quietly communicating to them the connection between their personal commitment to the work that was necessary, and the result, which was not defined in wins and losses: it was in knowing their commitment to each other to give their best; and knowing what it felt like when they didn’t, when they failed to honor that.  Once that connection is made, the work isn’t nearly as hard; because it’s a matter of the spirit. 

Jesus says something along the same lines in today’s gospel reading.   (It’s a passage which sounds disjointed and a little obscure, and I’ll try to address that.) But Jesus’ words at the end are (I think) some of the most profoundly moving in the Bible: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest….For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  It’s hard to imagine a human to whom that invitation would not appeal.  Especially these days, with the burdens of the pandemic, and the cultural upheaval  that’s going on all around us, and not just in our community, or our state, or our country, but around the world.

But in Christian experience we learn to trust the words of Jesus.  We know that this is the voice of our good shepherd, whose words are truly timeless, and who speaks to us all across the centuries.  Whatever burdens we are carrying, Jesus says to us – each of us personally – “Come to me, and I will give you rest” – is like a drink of cool water to a parched throat.

            But Jesus immediately follows this promise with an instruction: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.”  This is the first step in our part of the process: through which Jesus gives usrest.  Some people might react negatively to the image of a yoke, which seems to equate us with so-called “dumb animals” and seems to ask us for mindless submission to forced labor.  But in Jesus’ time, when most people literally earned their bread this way, the farmer and the draft animal in the yoke, pulling the plow, had to work together – each needed the other – to get the work done.  And the yoke was there to give direction and discipline, without which the goal – to create what was needed for the sustenance of life – could not be achieved.  Jesus chose his metaphors pretty well.

            Today’s reading sounds disjointed and obscure because it contains jagged pieces of one unified context.  I’m going to spend a little time giving you that context from Matthew chapter 11, from which today’s reading is drawn, so please bear with me a bit, because it’s necessary in understanding what Jesus says: why his yoke is easy, and his burden is light; how it gives rest and refreshment. 

Jesus is speaking to a world that is in just as much turmoil as ours: first-century Palestine, suffering under the iron-handed occupation of the Roman Empire, and the domination of the religious authorities, who were suffocating the Spirit.   Jesus is speaking to a crowd, and he begins by speaking to them about John the Baptist: John who preached the coming of the Messiah, God’s Chosen One; and the need for repentance – turning in a new direction – as the necessary preparation for that event.  

Jesus is talking about John because, as Matthew tells us at the beginning of chapter 11, John is in prison, has heard about Jesus and his ministry, and has sent some of his own disciples to ask him, Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? 

When they do ask him this, in chapter 11, Jesus doesn’t answer them with a yes or no.  He says, instead, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them.  And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”   As he does all the time, Jesus is saying, essentially, the answer to your question involves you.  As he says to his own disciples, Who do you say that I am?  The answer involves you because that’s the only answer that’s going to be meaningful: honest and truthful; and because then we’ll be in a relationship with each other: alive, together; and that’s the whole point. 

As John’s disciples depart, Jesus speaks to the crowd in praise of John (“…among those born of woman no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist…”), but then immediately connects this to his own mission: “…yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”  Jesus has come to proclaim the presence of that kingdom. 

And that’s where we come to the first verses of today’s reading. Jesus talks about children playing games in the marketplace to compare the people’s reaction to John and to himself: make-believe sad games in imitation of John, make-believe happy games in imitation of Jesus.  Jesus tells them, Don’t get wrapped up in such trivialities.  John and I are involved in one mission: God’s mission.  We just have different jobs.  John was the one who came to you to say, Get ready! The axe is headed for the root of the tree; so repent!  Turn in a new direction!  John was hard to take, a doomsayer, because he had to shake you awake.  That was the first part of God’s mission, here, now.

My part (Jesus says) – now that you’re awake – is to tell you the good news: of the peace, and the joy, that are yours, here and now, because of God’s love, for you, which is infinite; and eternal.  That’s what makes my yoke easy, and my burden light.  I am here to show you how that happens in practice. So come to me; and you will find rest for your souls.

God’s presence has to happen through us.  That’s what makes it a yoke: our commitment to live in the awareness of God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s justice: to see where it wants to happen – because it does want to happen – every single day, right around us; and to be part of that, through what we say and what we do.  When we take on that yoke, we see how light it is; how it’s really not a yoke, at all: it is life; and life in abundance.  Thanks be to God.

6/28/20

(Genesis 22:1-14; Ps. 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42)

            Some of you may know of the legendary basketball coach John Wooden.   His teams at UCLA won 10 NCAA championships, including seven consecutively (from 1967 to 1973), a record never even approached before or since.  He had the pick of the best high school players from all over the country, and many of his players went on to star in the NBA.

            Every year, on the first day of practice in the fall, the first thing Wooden did was ask his players to take off their shoes and socks; and then he’d say, Now I’m going to show you how to put them back on.  (It didn’t matter if you were a senior and had already been through this three times; you had to do it.)  He would say, Hold up the sock, and pull it on slowly; work it around the little toe, and the heel area, so that there are no wrinkles.  Then pull it up the ankle firmly and smooth everything out well.  Then hold the sock up while you put the shoe on.  And the shoe must be spread fully apart, when you put it on.  And don’t simply pull on the top laces: tighten them from the bottom, snugly, eyelet by eyelet.  Then tie it. Then double tie it.  If you don’t do it this way, he’d say, you’ll get blisters. If you get blisters you can’t play. If you can’t play we can’t win. That’s why this is important.

            So the operative principle was, Start at the foundation (in this case, literally.)  And pay attention to the little things: the big picture starts there.  And make this a habit: do it regularly.

            Of course the same applies to the life of faith. We need regularly to refresh our awareness of the basics; and remember the primary importance of the little things.

            We have been on our present fast from in-person worship in church for 17 weeks now; and we don’t know when we’re going to be able to resume (that’s an open question that your Wardens and Vestry and I are continually revisiting.)  But our present status is also a learning opportunity: as is the disruption of anything we do habitually.  Church on Sunday has been such a given, such a fixture in our lives for so long – even those who come infrequently know we’re here, know we’re going to be here, know it’s available – that its absence is a chance for us to reexamine the question of what it means to be a church.  If we’re not meeting together to worship God, who are we?

By the grace of God, the gospel we heard today bears directly on that issue.  Today’s reading is the conclusion of chapter10 in the gospel of Matthew.  This is the chapter in which Jesus commissions his disciples: tells them what to do, and sends them out to do it.  He co-missions them: in this chapter we hear Jesus enlisting his disciples in his ministry. Matthew 10 is a picture of that ministry, and over the last three weeks we’ve heard that chapter in its entirety.  The story begins with verse 1: “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits,, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and sickness.”  Then Matthew tells us their names: simply recites them, all twelve; and there’s a teaching in that.  We know them as saints ( St. Peter, St. John, St. Andrew), but they weren’t called saints when Matthew was writing this near the end of the first century, and certainly not when Jesus called them to be disciples: they were just people like you and me.  And when Jesus is speaking to them, he is speaking to you and me.

              Jesus sends these twelve disciples out to the people they live among, and in this chapter we hear him tell them what to do: “…proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ “  That is: God’s reign – life the way God intends it to be, is at hand, is possible, is available to us: if we open ourselves to God’s presence in our lives. And God needs us to make it happen. 

And then Jesus goes on to give specific examples of how to make it happen: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”   He’s talking to the people who are to be his church.  He’s talking to us.

            To us, these tasks are from another age, another mindset; and all very well for a miracle worker like Jesus.  But not things we can realistically think about doing, yes?

            Well…let’s think again.  Cure the sick?  None of us is going to cure someone’s cancer; but are there not many kinds of sickness, which we can address, by beng living witnesses of God’s love?  Are there not many kinds of cure?  Little and big?

            None of us is going to bring a dead body back to life.  But are there not many forms of death?  Death through anger?   Death through despair?   The paralysis they create is a kind of death. In Christ we are free from anger, we are free from despair. And Christ calls us to live a different way: to be a living witness to that different way, and so bring hope.

            I doubt whether any of us have ever known someone suffering from leprosy, but we certainly do know people who are shunned, ostracized, treated as less than human, the way lepers were back then. Don’t tell me there’s nothing we can do about that.

            Casting out demons?  We all know people whose lives are dominated to some degree or other by obsessions, addictions, illusions.  We can be part of healing those wounds, by what we say, and much more importantly by what we do; how we live.

            As Jesus commissions his disciples, he commissions – co-missions – us to join in his ministry of healing by being living witnesses of the presence of God’s love among us.  That ministry – the ministry which is described in Matthew chapter 10 – t is happening around us all the time, in little and big ways (and little things can have big reverberations.)  That ministry is who we are, as a church.  One of my fellow clergy, years ago, always said the same words every Sunday at the conclusion of the liturgy: he would say blessing on the congregation, and then dismiss them with these words: “The worship ends.  The service begins.”  Amen.  Thanks be to God. 

6/21/20

(Genesis 21:8-21; Ps. 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39)

            Some of you may recognize the name John Lewis.  He is a congressman from Georgia, African-American, 69 years old, currently serving in his 17^thterm in the House of Representatives, he’s been there for 33 years.  Lewis is a Democrat, but because of his 50-year involvement in the fight for civil rights, he is also one of the (unfortunately) very few members of Congress of either party who is revered by people on both sides of the aisle.  

            Lewis has long been in demand as a commencement speaker at colleges around the country, and in those speeches he often talks about what he calls “good trouble”. I’m going to read to you now some things he said about this in a magazine article two years ago:

“When I was growing up as a child in Alabama, I saw signs all around me – I saw crosses that the Klan had put up, an announcement about a Klan meeting. I saw signs that said White, colored, white men, colored men, white women, colored women. There were places where we couldn’t go.  But we brought those signs down. The only place you will see those signs today will be in a book, in a museum or on a video. 

“When I was growing up, the great majority of African Americans could not participate in a democratic process in the South. They could not register to vote. But we changed that. When I first came to Washington to go on the freedom rides in 1961, black people and white people couldn’t be seated together on a Greyhound bus leaving this city. When I was growing up, my mother and father and grandparents would tell me, “Don’t get in trouble. This is the way it is.” 

“But then I heard Dr. King speak when I was 15.  Dr. King and others inspired me to get in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.  When you see something that’s not right or fair, you have to do something, you have to speak up, you have to get in the way. And I think we’re going to have generations for years to come that will be prepared to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.  The next generation will help us to make this society less conscious of race.  It’s a struggle that doesn’t last one day, one week, one month, one year. It is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe many lifetimes.”

The demonstrations that have erupted around the country the last few weeks in response to the most recent killings of black people by white people testify to the truth of what John Lewis says: that though those signs that say “White” and “Colored” may be only in museums now, we’re a long way from being done with the problem of racism. And as Christians, we have a special responsibility to be aware of and involved in this struggle.  

We have that responsibility because what John Lewis calls “good trouble” is just the kind of thing Jesus is talking about in today’s gospel reading from Matthew, when he tells his disciples: “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”; and then shows how deeply that sword cuts: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother”, and so on; as John Lewis went against his father and mother and grandparents.

This is one of those passages that falls under the heading, Things We Wish Jesus Had Never Said.  (Which means we need to pay attention all the more closely.)  We don’t want this Jesus.  We want the Jesus of love, and joy: the resurrected Jesus who conquers death; the Jesus who tells us our sins are forgiven; and…he hasn’t come to bring peace? Didn’t we just hear this same Jesus four weeks ago telling us , Peace be with you?   Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you?

Yes, we did.  But that’s the peace of Christ.  What Jesus is talking about today is the peace that the world gives: false peace.  It’s the peace that’s really just the temporary absence of conflict: peace in which the truth, God’s truth, is silenced, or ignored; peace created by the power of this world, to maintain the illusion of its own dominance.   That’s the peace that Jesus has come to put to the sword; which is – in John Lewis’ words – good trouble.

            It is false peace that disguises the racism in American society. And we need to confront that racism: both in the sense of opening our eyes to it, seeing it for what it is; and in the sense of combatting it: speaking up, getting in the way:  making good trouble.

Like anybody else, I am being educated about this, and I’ll share with you an episode in my experience of that ongoing process.   Years ago I served a term on what’s called the Chapter, the governing board of our Episcopal cathedral in Hartford.   About five years ago, during that time, I was on a telephone conference call (we didn’t have Zoom yet) with about half a dozen other Chapter members, mostly clergy, discussing the Cathedral’s response to what was then the most recent killing of an African-American by a white man which was currently occupying the national attention.  (It’s both to my shame, and an indication of the nature and severity of the problem, that I can’t remember who it was.)  The meeting was being led by the Dean of the Cathedral, Miguelina Howell. Lina (as she is know to her friends) is extremely articulate and very practically minded, and one of those rare people who can be, simultaneously, both gentle and forthright.

            One proposal we were discussing was the placing of a banner on the iron railing which borders the cathedral, a banner on which would be repeated, for its entire length, the words “Black Lives Matter”, a phrase which at the time was still  relatively new.  In the discussion, a clergyperson named Michael, who happened to be white, proposed instead the words “All Lives Matter”.  The conversation moved on, and I didn’t participate for about five minutes, because I was thinking about that; and then there was a pause, and somebody said, Jack, are you still there?  And I answered yes, and that I had to say my inclination was to agree with Michael, that “All Lives Matter” would be better.

            And Lina –  gentle and forthright – responded; and mostly what I remember that she said is this: Jack, I am married to an African-American man.  And every day, when he goes off to work, there is an awareness in the back of my mind that he might not come home. 

            And I understood instantly that she was right, that the validity of what she said was undeniable, and I apologized.  Because I saw, in the terms we’re using here today, I was helping to maintain a false peace.  And it’s not that all lives don’t matter; of course they do.  But the plain evidence is that American society tends to treat black lives as though they matter less.   This is starkly clear in the current pandemic, and its disproportionately high rates of infection and death among black and brown people.  The root cause is racism.  And what we need to do is identify it, describe it, and dismantle it. 

            As John Lewis said, this is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe many lifetimes.  But it’s part of our mission as Christians.  Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once wrote, “A proclamation of the gospel that does not call into judgment specific forms of hostility and exclusion is empty.”  Christ is calling us, here: to join in this work; to get in good trouble: first of all, within our own souls.  May we always hear, and answer, that call, and find the true peace of Christ. Thanks be to God.

6/7/20

(Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Ps. 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20)

            Since the beginning of the shutdown three months ago, and we all started communicating through the internet (as we are doing now), I’ve been part of a group that has met online at the beginning and end of every day for the Prayer Book services of Morning Prayer and Compline. The group was organized through our Northwest Region of the ECCT, but there are people in it who participate from hundreds of miles away: about fifteen in the core group, though not everyone makes it to every service.  We have taken to referring to ourselves as the Zoomastery, because it’s a like a little monastery and we meet on a Zoom call.

            Those two services each provide time built in for personal prayers, and we also share our responses to the different Bible readings that we hear every day.  So there are opportunities, which we take, to talk with each other how we see the world today: how it’s reflected in Scripture, how the Spirit is moving in us, every day; and where we see God to be active in the world.

            And there’s been plenty to say, because this has certainly been a very trying time, since the beginning of our little Zoomastery: under the lethal threat of the covid pandemic, and the radical changes it’s caused in the way we live, and our constant awareness that we don’t know how long it’s going to take to resolve, or what the new normal is going to look like when it finally does.

            And then on top of all that, in the last two weeks, the murder of George Floyd, following so recently on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery: two African-American men, killed by white men; and the stark witness of those events to the racism embedded in our society, and culture; and the social upheaval we’ve all been watching, and living in the middle of, for the past two weeks.

            So it’s a strenuous time – a chaotic and anxious time – for all of us; but especially, in a particular way, for us Christians: we who strive to see where God is in all this; where Christ is leading us; what we feel the Holy Spirit is moving each of us individually to do about what we see and hear.  Because we try to live faithfully.

            I’m going to get back to these questions: to our present circumstances, to the bewilderment and helplessness that we feel crowding in on us, and to something about all that which came up in the Zoomastery. I’ll get back to all that in a minute. But did you notice I just snuck something in there?  

I just made reference, in a single sentence and one continuous thought, to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.  And I did that because today is Trinity Sunday.  This day – one of the seven principal feasts in our church year – celebrates the foundational belief of the Christian faith: there is one God, who exists in three Persons, but one Substance  (don’t get too hung up on the language for now.)  This understanding took the first three centuries of church history to hammer out.  A lot of smart people spent a lot of time and energy over those years trying to make sense of just what it was that had happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  These people all understood that those events had something essential to do with who God is, and therefore who all of us are, and how we live.  

            So the doctrine of the Trinity came about, not because it sounded nice, and made for pretty pictures: it described their actual experience of who God is, and what God had done, and was doing, in their lives.  From the first days of Christ’s church, Christians have agreed that they experienced God – the one God – in three distinct ways.  I once heard a description of the Trinity that I think puts it well.

               God the Creator is God for us: God who loves us infinitely, God who gave us life, and created the world in which we live and thrive: God the Creator, God for us; God in Christ is God with us, God alongside us, in this life, God who teaches us, God who rejoices and celebrates with us, God who suffers and grieves with us: God in Christ, God with us; and God the Holy Spirit is God in us, working in us as we think and act and feel, as we grow in knowledge and love, as we make choices about our lives, as we try to do God’s will, every day, because we know that’s what best for us, that’s who we really are: God the Holy Spirit, God in us.  We Christians say that God, the one God, is real, and alive, in each of these three persons, these three ways of being: God for us, God with us, God in us.  

            Now: back to the Zoomastery, and this embattled world we’re living in right now.  In Morning Prayer one day this past week we were talking about the feeling of being overwhelmed, unable to get our bearings, as people of  faith, because things seem so out of control, and the stakes are so high.

            And a member of the group, an older woman who has bad asthma and sometimes has to literally gasp for breath but is relentlessly cheerful, said that what she tries to remember at such times is this: concentrate on doing the next right thing.  Whatever it is.  Just: do the next right thing.

            So, what does the Trinity have to do with that?

            Here’s the way I think of it. God the Creator loves me and will not ever stop loving me, even when I foul up.  In fact, when I foul up, I just feel God loving me harder. This is my foundation, my starting point, every day: this is what enables me, no matter what, to get started doing the next right thing: God for me.   

God in Christ teaches me to know how to look for the next right thing.  In this connection I think of Jesus, in the gospel of Matthew, on the two great commandments: love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself; and how everything else flows from that, all the Law and the prophets. To love God means to love truth and justice and peace and joy and love itself.  And to love your neighbor as yourself means to love that person as though that person were you; so what’s happening to them, is happening to you; and what are you going to do about that?  That’s the knowledge that guides us to what the next right thing is: God beside me.

And it’s the Holy Spirit in me that actually identifies that next right thing, moves me to it, and gets it done: someone or something that needs help.  A misunderstanding that needs clearing up.  Something I’ve done wrong that I need to fix.  The next right thing is in front of us all the time.  And no matter how tiny it may look to us, nothing is tiny to the Holy Spirit.  And neither is anything is too big, for God in me.

That’s how God, in three Persons, is alive in this world: alive for, with, and in  each one of us.  Let us live joyfully in that knowledge, and joyfully do that next right thing. Thanks be to God.

5/31/20

(Acts 2:1-21; Ps. 104:25-35,37; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 20:37-39)

            The men in the family I grew up in tended to be conflict-avoiders.  I’ve always thought of this as mostly a good thing, because it recognizes some important truths about life: that we’re all different – God made us each uniquely – and what unites us is more important than what divides us.   So the operative principle was, don’t sweat the small stuff; let’s be friends.

            Which is fine as far as it goes.  But, aside from the fact that that attitude tends to sweep things under the rug that need attention, and can turn into worse problems, it also tends to prevent real listening.  Which means that we miss opportunities to learn; to hear truth that we don’t know; to clear up misunderstandings; to recognize new gifts which God is giving us.

            I have one near relative in whom this tendency has created a habit which drives me crazy: in conversation, he’ll finish your sentences for you.  This is to show that he already understands and agrees with what you’re about to say. Except that, usually, what you were actually about to say isn’t exactly what he says you were about to say.  So it’s not really a conversation (even though he thinks everything’s going swimmingly; because he’s not really listening.) Now, in the great scheme of things, this is a tiny complaint.  But it relates to a much larger reality of the Christian life which is one of the things we lift up on this day, the day of Pentecost.

            In the ECCT, for some years now we’ve had a little document going around titled “Rules of Engagement”, which is a guide for honest, meaningful dialogue.  The first two rules are the most important.  Rule One: It’s okay to disagree.  Rule Two: It’s not okay to blame, shame, or disrespect.  (Just think how much our national discourse would be improved if everybody obeyed those rules.) The reality they recognize is that the world is a troubled place: always has been, always will be.  And Christian faith looks that square in the face.  In the Lord’s prayer, we say, Thy kingdom come. This means we acknowledge that God’s kingdom is mostly not here yet.  And God calls us as people of faith to join in bringing it here, making it a reality in this world.   

Christians are not conflict avoiders.  To the contrary: we look for it.  You can’t be part of the healing process if you don’t know what needs to be made whole. It is precisely our mission to look for those places where the world is broken, and to heal, to reconcile.  And we are enabled to do this in, and through, the gift of the peace of Christ; which goes hand in hand with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

 This is concisely reflected in today’s gospel story from the gospel of John, a resurrection story. This encounter between the risen Jesus and the disciples occurs on the day of resurrection, Easter Day.  The disciples, at this point, are paralyzed by fear.  They’ve retreated to the house in Jerusalem in which they’ve been meeting and have locked the doors “for fear of the Jews”: that is, fear of the religious authorities (that’s what the words “the Jews” mean in the gospel of John: that small group of people in power)  These are the ones who had just tried and convicted Jesus for being a blasphemer and handed him over to the Romans for execution. The disciples  – who were of course themselves all Jews, and believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Chosen One of God, which those authorities had pronounced to be blasphemy, and punishable by death –  the disciples are afraid the same thing is going to happen to them.  It’s just two days since Jerusalem was boiling over about all this, and the situation’s still very hot.   That’s why they’ve locked the doors; and why they themselves are locked in fear, and incomprehension.

Now, today is Pentecost, so probably the main thing you heard in this story was Jesus breathing on the disciples and saying, Receive the Holy Spirit.  But the first thing he does when he comes through those locked doors – comes through their fear, their paralysis – the first thing Jesus does is tell them, Peace be with you.  This is not a greeting: it’s a gift of the Spirit, which the resurrected Christ is giving them.  And before he gets around to the Holy Spirit, he repeats it: Peace be with you.  At this point it’s the most important thing he can give them: peace: his own peace.

In the gospel of John Jesus talks about peace only one other time: in chapter 14, in John’s telling of the Last Supper.  He has told his disciples that he’s going to die, and he’s giving them his final teaching.  He tells them, “I will ask the Father and he will send you another Advocate…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.”

But then Jesus gives his own parting gift to them: “Peace I leave with you.  My own peace I leave with you.“  The peace that Jesus gives is not a cease-fire.  It’s not the absence of conflict.  As we heard, Jesus says, “I do not give to you as the world gives.”  The peace of Christ lives in the middle of conflict, goes right there; because it’s the one essential, that heals.  

 Because what we call the peace of Christ is in the knowledge of the resurrection: the knowledge that we are never lost to God; that God reaches right through fear, and ignorance, and death itself: all the different dark powers that threaten us in this life are finally revealed to be powerless, an illusion; it is the knowledge, finally, of what in Christian faith we call our salvation.  There, is the peace of Christ.  The letter of Paul to the Colossians tells us, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”  In our lives as Christians, as apostles sent out in this chaotic world, may that always be true of us.  Thanks be to God. 

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.