Share God's Nature

Enlightenment

2012-01-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

1 Samuel 3:1-10
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

The unanimous and consistent teaching of the universal church from early times is that baptism is enlightenment. It is a mystical initiation. It is a symbolic death and a spiritual rebirth into a new life of grace, of freedom, and of consecration to the mission of God in Christ.

But it might be hard for us to believe that when we baptized 18-month old Karina Klein last Sunday the event meant that for her. It’s always interesting to see how children behave at their baptism. I don’t know if you noticed but Karina, who had been quite restless and vocal in the service up to that point became quiet and still. It seemed like she knew something was happening. But we are hard put to say that she experienced enlightenment. But maybe that’s because we don’t understand what enlightenment is.

Last Sunday Karina may not have had a consciousness-altering experience, but it was the beginning of a relationship with Jesus. We believe in the actual fact of that relationship because we were there on Jesus’ behalf to call her into it. We take it seriously because we know that now, and for the foreseeable future, we will be responsible for fostering that relationship for her in the practices, the sacraments and the fellowship of the church. Whatever sense she ends up making of that event, and whether or not she “saw the light,” depend on this— that we saw her in the light of our life together in Christ and the power of his grace to bring her life’s purpose to fulfillment.

Having an intellectual understanding of what her baptism means, or even the memory of some ecstatic moment, will be less important for Karina than the overall long-term of experience of being loved and included, of being seen by us as God’s beloved and invited by us to participate in the mysteries of our membership in Christ’s body. She will learn what it means to bear the light of the world in her heart by seeing others receive the same baptism that Jesus did and that she did too. She will learn what it means to bring that light to others by seeing the world from the vantage point of this place, by turning toward the world from this center. For this is where she will learn that she is God’s beloved, receiving the body and blood that are the tokens of that love, and seeing her family and all the rest of us doing the same.

Often when I call on members of our parish who are sick and shut in, I am confronted with the limits of my capacity to help. I can see the struggle and the suffering that people are experiencing and so often there is really nothing I can do about it. But I am tempted to try. I am tempted to try to be an amateur social worker, or nurse, or psychologist, and help them find a solution to their problems. But what I always find is that these visits go better if I stick to the things that I know how to give—a listening ear, a prayer, a reading from the scriptures, Holy Communion.

I’m not sent to tell them how to have faith or what to believe. I’m not there to advise them about the practical matters of their situation. What I’m sent for is to been seen by them in the light of Jesus Christ and his mission in the world. Usually I don’t know what that means for them. I don’t know their faith stories— what they learned from parents or Sunday school teachers or other pastors they have had; I don’t know what their spiritual experiences have been; or what religious commitments they may have made over the years. I don’t know these things, but they’re not really my business. I’m simply there as a reminder of baptismal grace. Seeing me they remember Jesus. And with that recollection comes the promise that the relationship that was begun at baptism is not forgotten. He still loves them as his own, is still committed to the relationship they’ve had, and their present suffering in fact only takes them deeper into the mystery of it. I don’t have to say this in so many words—in fact it’s usually better if I don’t—my merely coming to visit communicates it.

I usually end up seeing that people are capable of finding their own meaning even in the most difficult situation. In the midst of darkness, they see a ray of light, and it is a light that comes from Jesus. From some stirring of love at his name, some presence of wisdom and peace in a word from his teachings or in an incident from his life, comes a breath of hope, a gathering of strength, comes the faith that no matter how frightening and overwhelming the present circumstances may be, all is not lost. And seeing that happen my own faith is strengthened, by own heart and mind are enlightened with baptismal grace.

I reflect on these two aspects of our life as a church, the baptism of the toddler and the visit with the shut-in, because, although they seem to be opposites, each of them illustrates what we mean by enlightenment. It has something to do with seeing and being seen and the light that travels between us. Another word for “enlightenment” is “epiphany” and we are in a season of the church year that takes Epiphany as its theme. It is a word that means to see something that shines, to have a vision of something that radiates or reflects light. And for the church that vision is of a human face.

Following his own baptism, Jesus began to gather the first of his disciples, and the theme of seeing and being seen is a recurring motif in the stories of these encounters, especially in the Gospel of John. In the passage we hear today Philip invites the skeptical Nathanael to come and see whether in fact anything good can come from Nazareth. The exchange that follows preserves something of the extraordinary impact that meeting Jesus had on people’s lives. That Nathanael was converted so suddenly and completely cannot be simply because he was impressed that Jesus could tell him where he was before they had met. Something about the way he was seen and the way he was known enabled Nathanael to see Jesus for who he really was.

This story represents becoming a disciple of Jesus as a process of being seen and then seeing, of seeing a little but being promised more. We may not know at the beginning exactly what we’re looking at. We may never have some dramatic epiphany. We may never experience ourselves as being enlightened. But we are not the source of the light that is in us. Our vision may be dim, but we are not lighting our own path. However feeble our flicker, even the tiniest spark is still the one true light, the Epiphany light, the star that guided the wise men from the east and the brilliance more dazzling than the sun of the Transfigured face of Christ. No matter how dim and narrow our vision may be, it is not our vision that guides us, but a reflection of the vision of God.

And it does seem to be true that if we trust the little circle of light before our feet, it gets a little wider. It does seem to be true that when we hold the light for others, we see a little further. It does seem to be true that if we look for the light in others, what we see expands our vision of ourselves. And it makes you wonder how far the light could really go. It makes you wonder how vast the vision really is. And I can’t speak for you, but that makes me want to follow someone who knows.

The Name of names

2012-01-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Numbers 6:22-27
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 2:15-21
Psalm 8

When my wife became pregnant we decided that we wanted to wait until the baby was born to find out whether it was a boy or a girl. So we had asked the ultrasound technician to keep whatever she could determine to herself. For a variety of reasons, we decided to forgo amniocentesis completely. Nevertheless, in the final weeks it seemed like everywhere we went we were accosted by practitioners of the science of determining the sex of a fetus by the shape of the woman carrying it. They all seemed to agree it was a boy and they all insisted that they were never mistaken. Whether for that reason or some other, we came to the onset of labor with a name all picked for the baby should it turn out to be a boy. But our choice of girl’s names was still stuck at the final three.

As it turned out, within five minutes or so after our daughter was born, Meg and I both, independently of each other, decided on the same one of those three names as the right one. “Risa”, like Lisa but with an “R”, was one that Meg had found in a book of baby names and put on our master list. When we each agreed to select our top ten, Meg had placed it on her list, and when we met in conference to compare and merge, “Risa” made it into the final round. It means “laugh” or “laughter” in Latin, and also in Spanish, and somehow when we finally met our baby girl in person, we knew it was the name for her.

Looking back, I wonder if some deeper wisdom had guided us to wait. Maybe, by some intuition, we knew that we would have a girl and that we needed to see her before we gave her her name. Because a name is important. When we give a child a name we are giving her the cornerstone of their identity in the family and society. We are giving her the currency to present themselves to the world as a person, as a free and complete human being, with a unique history and personality, and a destiny all her own. To name a child is to say to him, “You exist, on a par with everyone else who has or who has ever had a name.” It is to invest that child with a true and lasting significance.

If a name really carries with it this deeper kind of meaning, then it is something to be treated with respect. And if that is true of your name and my name, it is the more true of the name of God. In the Hebrew tradition, God’s name holds something of the power and mystery of Godself. In the book of Numbers, Moses instructs the priests of Israel, to bless the people in with a repeated invocation of that name. It is the same name that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush, the same name whose wrongful use is forbidden in the commandments of Mt. Sinai. Our Church translation preserves the custom of Jewish piety, when it uses a euphemism— “the LORD”. Just as it is forbidden to depict the form of God in a created image, so it is not proper to speak God’s name.

We’d be hard put to say that a similar kind of reverence has carried over onto the name of Jesus. Generally speaking, the vernacular English I grew up with was one in which “Jesus Christ” in all its countless and creative variations served as a general purpose expletive for those occasions when you didn’t want to, or didn’t feel the need to, use something really profane. At the other end of the same stick is popular Christian culture with its mass-marketing the name of Jesus on bumper stickers and t-shirts and AM radio.

So what’s different about the way we’re talking about the name of Jesus here this morning? By way of an answer, I’d begin by pointing out that when we sing, as we did this morning, of “the Name of names for us he bore,” we are not praising a particular combination of phonetic sounds. We are not praising the name, but the person it communicates to us. Jesus’ name is not a magic formula—it is not a switch, tapping into some current of supernatural force for our benefit. Rather it is the person, the total consecration of his life to God and to others, that the name makes present.

That is why Luke’s story of the birth of the Messiah is not complete until the child has received his name. The name Mary gives him is the one that God ordained for him through the angel. It means “God saves.” But it is also the name of a folk hero, of Joshua, the successor of Moses. It is a common name, a traditional name that any Hebrew woman might have given her son. The child may have been conceived by divine agency for a unique sacred purpose, but he is born into the traditions of a human family and a human culture.

Luke reminds us that, as it would have been for every male child of his time and place, the naming of Jesus is a cultural and ritual process. It is linked to his initiation into the tribal identity of his people through the practice of circumcision. The holy child of God, the Savior of all humankind, is also a child of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and bears in his body, as in his name, the indelible imprint of his cultural and religious heritage. This paradox is not accidental—it represents in a nutshell the New Testament’s transformation of the Hebrew tradition, a transformation which began in the imagination of Jesus and continues to be available to the world in his name.

In our modern bureaucratic society the legal and ceremonial act of naming has been reduced to signing a form and receiving an official Certificate of Live Birth from the civil authorities. There is a kind of vision of universal humanity implied here. But it is one that ultimately reduces individuals to anonymity—that’s why this act, like all the really important initiations of the modern state, also requires a number.

Yet our collective memory still holds traces of a tradition of sacred naming. Our word “christening,” as a synonym both for Baptism and for naming, recalls the time when we received our names—our “Christian” names—at our baptism. According to this traditional worldview, the family continuity implied in the act of naming a child is of a piece with initiation into a new covenant people, made up of people of every tribe, family, language, and nation. The same naming that confers the status of unique individual personhood, also initiates into the shared personhood of the mystical Body of Christ.

To speak the name of Jesus is to repeat the act of a Jewish woman of the first century, naming her first-born son. At one and the same moment it names our hope for the future, a new kind of humanity, known to us most vividly in the man that Mary’s son became. St. Paul sums up that hope in a single word, “adoption”—one of his great metaphors for our transformation in grace. To be adopted, of course, is to receive new parents and a new family, maybe even a new name, and the whole purpose of the incarnation of Jesus, says Paul, is to reveal us to ourselves as children, all of us, children together with him, in one family.

And the sign of our entrance into that new family is that we will learn a new name. Not only for ourselves, or for each other, but also for God. In the place of the old name, the proper name, the dread name that we must not speak, we will learn to call God by the name that Jesus called him—Abba! Daddy! And in that naming we will know ourselves as we have never been known before, as bearing a life and a name that is long in the giving. It is prepared for us and yet withheld with the greatest of tenderness and care, until we are truly and completely ready to claim what was ours from the beginning, the name of Christ.

Someone you do not know

2011-12-13T09:46:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Canticle 15
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

Six years ago this week I put in my first official day on the job at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Carmel. The rector of 18 years had just left, and the vestry was still trying to line up an interim pastor to lead them through searching for his replacement. My title was “Assisting Priest,” although it was not exactly clear who I was assisting, since I was the only priest on the staff—everybody, I guess. We got through Christmas somehow, which was followed by the beginning of a string of big funerals, as all the old pillars of the community had seemingly conspired to die at once. And when February came, it brought with it the interim pastor, a fine old Texas warhorse of the Episcopal Church named John, who agreed to come out of retirement and drive down from San Jose every Sunday morning, staying until Tuesday afternoon.

On Mondays John and I would sit down together for an hour or so and compare notes. He hadn’t been there long, maybe a month, when I came to him with a problem. Some folks in the parish had been talking, apparently, about the trouble and expense of the search for a new rector: the formation of a Search Committee, the congregational self-study and creation of a parish profile, the interviews and more interviews. They observed that they might go through this lengthy, laborious process and still end up with someone that it turned out they really didn’t like. And they already knew someone they did like, someone of (relative) youthfulness, with a charming, attractive wife and an adorable little girl, someone who was already there, and available at a bargain price. They already had me. Why not just make me the new rector and be done with it?

I’d caught wind of this, but hadn’t taken it very seriously, until the Senior Warden of the parish came into my office and proposed it as the new plan. I knew it was a bad idea, so I wasn’t tempted—not much anyway—but I needed to talk to John. As I’d expected, he thought it was a really bad idea, and walked me through all the reasons why. I won’t go through the litany, but there was one paramount reason that is relevant to this season of Advent and the scriptures we read this morning, and that is this:

One of the great benefits of the interim period between pastors is precisely the uncertainty, the not-knowing about the future that the people of All Saints’ were trying to avoid. For eighteen years their sense of themselves as a Christian community had been formed around the personality of their rector. With him gone, they had to rediscover who they were. Without anyone to tell them what they wanted, what was important, what was their part in God’s mission in the world, they had to wonder about it for themselves, and not just for a minute, but for a good while. They had to remember how to wonder, and wait, and hope.

John and I agreed that I had to say no to the Senior Warden’s offer clearly and emphatically, and to explain why. I suggested that it might be best to follow up on that by communicating something to the parish as a whole. John agreed, and then said, “It would be best if it came from you.” So I published an open letter in the next church newsletter thanking the people of All Saints’ for the complement, but explaining why I was not going to be their next rector, and encouraging them to use the time of waiting that lay before us to good use.

That’s kind of what John the Baptist is doing in the passage we heard from John’s Gospel today. People keep coming to him asking him who is he is, and he keeps telling them to forget about him—that he is not the point. His purpose is to get them ready for the one who is coming after him, to set them to the work of wondering, and waiting, and hoping. Looking for evidence, pressing to draw conclusions, making bets on this person or that person--all these kinds of activities will only confirm them in their opinions, which is to say their ignorance. Someone is coming, is in fact already among them, but he is someone they do not know.

We are now in the heart of Advent, the season of the church year dedicated to complaining about what our popular culture has done to Christmas. I have to admit to being sympathetic to the “what’s wrong with Christmas” party, but not for the reasons that are usually given. Many people grouse about how it starts too early, with seasonal decorations and musk appearing in the stores and the advertising media on Thanksgiving Day, if not before. The reason they usually give for why that’s bad is simply that it makes everyone fed up with Christmas before it ever arrives. And I understand that criticism—I want people to come to church on Christmas Eve and sing “O come, all ye faithful” with joy and triumph, not an inward groan of “not this again.”

But there’s a bigger price we pay than just “Christmas burnout.” By jumping immediately into Christmas, we lose Advent. And I don’t think Advent is something we can afford to lose. I say that not as a traditionalist, like “The church calendar says there are four weeks of Advent. It’s a tradition, by God, and it must be preserved.” And I don’t say it as a moralist, like “people these days are all about instant gratification—can’t they restrain themselves?” No, I say we need Advent because I care deeply about Christmas. And if we don’t understand waiting, wondering, watching and hoping, we don’t understand Christmas at all.

Now at this point my fellow Christmas grumps are going to jump in and start agreeing with me all over the place. “You’re right!” they’ll say, “the true meaning of Christmas is forgotten— it’s not about Santa Claus, and presents under a tree, and vestiges of pagan winter solstice celebrations—Jesus is the reason for the season”. They have a point, of course, but that’s not quite what I’m trying to say, and in a way it’s just another form of the problem that Advent is meant to address, which is that we think we already know what we’re waiting for. As if once the big day comes the drama is over. As if Christmas erases every trace of Advent. As if the waiting and hoping and wondering were just a game to test our patience, and not an ongoing aspect of the Christian mystery. As if the coming of the Christ child was the end of the story and not the beginning of it.

“Among you stands one whom you do not know”, says John the Baptist, and those are words we need to remember. If we think we know who it is that is coming to be among us, we’ve forgotten what it is like to look into the face of a newborn child. If we think that we don’t have time to wait, or need to wonder, or anything more to hope for, we’ve forgotten how to dream. The church year is a Mandela in time, a circular image of the whole of reality— the whole is present in each part, and each part is in the whole. Advent is the place on the circle when take the coming of Christ out of the past and put it in our future. It is the season when we remember that we are always wondering, always waiting, always hoping. If we can’t manage that, even for four weeks, can we still say we know what we hope for? If we think we already know who it is that stands among us, can we be sure that it is Jesus Christ? I encourage us to find a little time, in what remains to us of this Advent, for waiting on God, for wondering who is coming, for hoping for his justice, liberation, mercy, and grace.

You can't go home again

2011-12-04T17:24:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

This is a time of year when people think about going home. “Home for the holidays” is a catchphrase that speaks of the universal human longing to return to the place we came from, to go back to the people and places that color our earliest memories, to connect us with the innocence of childhood, when the world was full of wonder and we did not know what we know now. This longing is the stuff of the nostalgic images that make up the secular myth of Christmas, those Norman Rockwell, Currier & Ives images of the ancestral home, the extended family, the pastoral landscape, the old ways of work and pastime, the traditional foods and crafts and songs, the sights, sounds and smells of a simpler time.

But of course, for many of us, there is no home to go back to—parents have died, property has been sold, the family is scattered to the four directions. Maybe there never was a home like that to begin with. When I was twelve or thirteen I left my family in Vermont and went back to visit a friend in my old town in Indiana. While I was there I walked a mile or so over to my old house, just to look at it. I remember standing behind one of the trees that lined the driveway, looking up at the place where I had lived with my brothers and parents for five years. It didn’t look much different, but I was struck by the fact that I could not go in, that it was now occupied by people I didn’t know, people to whom I was a stranger. I thought of the times that we had in that house, some of them happy, many of them painful, but all of them gone beyond recapture, and I burst into tears...

“You Can’t Go Home Again” is the title of a 20th Century novel that is also a catchphrase of our culture. I read these words as a child in a classic Peanuts comic strip, and they came to me as I stood grieving that day by the driveway. But as much as “you can’t go home again” is a motto for our times it is not a new idea. It was central to the experience of the people who wrote what we now call the Old Testament. Modern critical scholars believe that the Hebrew Scriptures began to be compiled and edited in the form we have them now by Jews who could not go home, who were in exile in Babylon.

This exile was exactly what the prophets of Israel had been warning might happen. For close to 200 years prophets like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah had been calling on the Israelites to come home. But the returning they spoke about was not a physical homecoming. The prophets called the people back to their covenant with God. They called them to leave off idol-worship, to put an end to unjust dealings with their neighbors, to return to the way of holiness laid out for them in their law.

The prophets pleaded and cajoled, but they also threatened. They threatened the people that if they did not return to God and his covenant they would be torn apart by internal divisions and swallowed up by the more powerful nations around them. And these warnings came true—first the Assyrian army came and took the northern kingdom of Israel; later the Babylonian empire broke down the walls of Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, and carried the king of Judah and all the leading people of the nation away to Babylon. For prophets like Jeremiah there was no consolation in being right, for they went with the rest into exile.

But in that foreign land, many years later, came a new prophet and a new word from God:

“Comfort, O comfort my people,

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that she has served her term,

that her penalty is paid…”

The time of exile is coming to an end. It is time to come home.

But it will not be a nostalgic return to an idealized past. The prophet does not skip over the bitter lessons of loss, of human frailty, of the inevitability of change—“the people are grass,” he says, “The grass withers, the flower fades;

but the word of our God will stand forever.”

And that itself is the great sign of hope, that in the land of exile, amid strange people, without a temple or the material means to carry on their traditions, the God of Israel still speaks. His word to the ruins of Jerusalem is that it is God who is coming home on that highway through the desert. God will re-tell the story of a chosen people’s return to the land, God who will send Jerusalem up a high mountain as a herald of good news to shout in a loud voice “Here is your God!”

The Gospel according to Mark begins with an echo of this cry. We get a picture of John the Baptist that sums up the prophets and their message. His characteristics of clothing and diet are those of Elijah, the prophet who did not die but ascended into heaven, and was expected to return again at the right time. John’s symbolic actions re-enact the Exodus and the Exile, leading the people of Jerusalem out into the wilderness, to pass through the waters of the river Jordan into the promised land. And his word is a word of repentance, of turning back to God.

John’s baptism purifies the people so they can go back home and make a new start, but his message is also about preparing a way for the Lord, a path straight and level. As the last prophet of Israel, John is not satisfied to send the people home renewed; his whole object is to get them ready for the coming of God. God’s word of consolation in exile, the word of God that endures forever, is coming to make his home with them.

There are some who want to make Christianity a religion of nostalgia, a way to go back to a time of innocence, to a Norman Rockwell America, but I think that is a misplaced hope, and a misreading of the gospel. There is no going back. The grass withers, the flower fades, only the word of our God will stand forever. As Christians we have no sacred homeland to go back to, no temple in Jerusalem to rebuild. But because we believe that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the story of that event, the good news about that person, gives us a way to go, a straight and level road through the desert to a destination deeply familiar and yet at the same time unimagined and unknown.

So every year we go back to the beginning and start over, telling again the story of Jesus. In it we hear the echoes of the prophets of Israel, who pointed the way to his coming, and gave him a path to follow when he came. Every year we learn that it’s a story that was not finished at his death, but is always relearned and retold in the light of his resurrection. And through the spirit that came through him to the church, the spirit in which we were baptized, it is now our story, continually remembered and remade as it is retold in our lives. For Jesus cannot be our way to God, unless he is first God’s way to us, God’s word coming and abiding among us, and in us, and through us taking the whole creation home.

The pastures of compassion

2011-11-20T16:27:00.000-08:00

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Psalm 100
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

Where is all this going? All this organized activity, all this material and cultural production, all these institutions of education, government agencies, commercial enterprises, courts of law, military, medical, and religious organizations, in short everything that we call “the modern world” or “civilized society”—what is it all for? Suppose we say that its purpose is to establish a just, peaceful, and prosperous world order. Who gets to decide what is justice, what is peace, and prosperity? How can we tell whether we are getting closer to them or further away? And if it happens, as U.S. public opinion polls show, that a majority of our citizens believe that we are “on the wrong track”, what are the standards to guide us, how do we find the bearings for charting a better course?

It is a measure of the superficiality of most of what passes for politics in the world today that these questions are at the margins of the debate, if they enter it at all. But as Christians we have no choice but to ask them. When we acclaim, as in the collect prayer that began this liturgy, that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, we are giving him a political title. We are saying that there are answers to these questions about the ultimate end of human society, and the means to get there. We are saying that those answers are found in him.

The story that Matthew’s gospel gives us today tells us that entrance into Christ’s kingdom requires answers so radically different from the conventional wisdom, so unlike any that had ever been given before, that it represents a parting of the ways. Those for whom these answers are true, who make them central to their identity and action and sense of purpose, are going to be as different from everyone else as sheep are from goats.

We tend to think of standing before the throne of judgment as an individual act. But the Gospel is quite clear—The Son of Man will come to judge the nations. All of this is consistent with the idea of election found in the Hebrew scriptures—God chooses a holy nation. His covenant of salvation is with the entire people and he gives them the law to set them apart from the nations around them. Their greatness is not to be measured by the conventional standards of military conquests, or the pomp and splendor of their rulers, by magnificence of their palaces, fortresses, and cathedrals, or the cultural refinements of their elites. Their nation will be judged by its faithfulness to the God of creation and their scrupulous observance of the law.

But the Son of Man in the gospel goes further—he judges with no partiality at all. Israel is not mentioned in this passage, either with prejudice or approval. His standard of judgment has no more to do with religious purity or pious belief than with valor in battle or ethnic superiority. The Kingdom of which he is the Lord is not the successor of any existing political entity or cultural system, but is the inheritance of what was already present and active at the creation of the world. It is rooted in the wisdom through which God made all things and pronounced them good, and fashioned men and women in the image of God.

The Son of Man comes to judge the nations and his standard of judgment will be his own incarnation. He is that same man of flesh and blood, who was poor, who was without honor in his own home town, who ministered to the sick and the sinful and the demon-possessed, and who identified himself with them to the point of being condemned as a criminal dying on a cross.

On Wednesday a dozen or so of us from St. John’s went to breakfast at the Veteran’s Memorial Hall. We came at the invitation of the Committee on the Shelterless, or COTS, a local agency that provides food, shelter, and supportive services for homeless children and adults. The understood purpose of the gathering was to raise money, but my experience was that there was a spiritual purpose t0 it as well. John Records, COTS’ Executive Director, began the morning’s program by describing the daunting challenges of these time—a 40% increase in homelessness in Sonoma County in the last three years, Federal and State funding that is disappearing, possibly never to return, a waiting list for beds at the COTS shelter that stretches into the months.

But he also spoke of something that I think we all felt as we looked around us at the 600 other people crowded into that room, and that was hope. He spoke of a dark time in his own life, a time when he was close to giving up, and of the people whose love and caring helped him to find purpose in his life again. He spoke of the joy and the meaning he has found in becoming one of those people for others, one who offers hope. A few minutes later one of the COTS members came out, a man who became homeless after an auto accident that put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and he told similar kind of story. He spoke of his achievements of the last year, how he is now renting his own apartment and attending community college, and how he now serves as a mentor for newer members of the COTS program.

But the most extraordinary thing he said was that if he could go back and live his life over, and never have the accident that cost him the use of his legs and put him out on the street, he would not do it. He said that he wouldn’t change anything. His testimony was to a greater hope than “rehabilitation”, a hope that goes beyond becoming once again a “fully-functioning member of society.” It is a hope that I think all of us share, even if don’t think about it much, even if we are well and securely housed, gainfully employed, and meet the standard definition of “able-bodied.”

It is the hope that in the wisdom of God suffering is not a curse to be lifted but can be a strange kind of gift. Our wounds are also the openings through which compassion comes to us from others, and through which our compassion goes out to them. The places where we are broken are also the places where the barriers break that separate us from other people. The whole blessing of our humanity, which includes sorrow and anguish and death, is to hold out the hope of living in a world where we actually trust each other. It is to look for the triumph of a new kind of power that does not victimize the vulnerable, or ostracize the sick, or punish the erring. It is the hope for a new and redeemed humanity and for life in a just and holy nation.

God’s promise is to establish that kingdom, where He himself will be our shepherd. She has prepared it from the foundation of the world. It is present among us now, as the gift of Christ’s own flesh and blood. Not for us who are pious. Not for us who say “I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like other men” and “there but for the grace of God go I” but for us who say, “I thirst” and “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Not for us proud who confide in our own strength, but for us who are poor, who are meek, who mourn, who are merciful, who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

Jesus’ last words from the cross echo his first teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. And they remain the words on which the world’s salvation turns. Are we to go with the goats down into the maelstrom of never ending violence, cruelty, competition, exploitation of the earth and the poor? Or are we to go with the sheep, to feed on the pasture of God’s compassion, on God’s coming to be among us as one who suffers, as one who serves, the King of kings, and the Lord of lords?

Don't bury your precious gifts

2011-11-20T16:22:00.000-08:00

Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

We are coming close to the end. Two more Sundays and the church year is over. This ending coincides (at least in Northern Hemisphere) with the end of the solar year, and the descent of the earth into the darkness of winter. The lectionary, the cycle of scripture readings which for the last year has guided us in its meandering but logical course through the story of Jesus as it is told in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, now asks us to think about the end. The end--or is it the beginning?

In the Godly Play Sunday school room we teach a lesson called the Circle of the Church Year, and the material for the lesson is a circular calendar made of wood that looks kind of like a clock. And lying on top of the calendar around the face of the clock is a gold-colored cord. When we are about to tell the story we take that cord and ball it up inside of one fist. Then we begin by holding up the fist and pulling one end of the cord out very slowly. And we say that people sometimes speak of time as if it was a line. Time in a line. But then we point out that as the cord gets longer the part that was the first to come out of the fist is now the oldest part and there is a new newest part coming out all the time. Eventually we come to the end, which is the newest part of all. Then we ask the children, “do you know what the church did?” and then we tie the ends of the cord together to make a circle, so the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end.

The Christian hope is that every end is also a beginning, In Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, he reminds the church that what we wait and watch for is not nightfall, but day. It will come suddenly, like the onset of labor that says “ready or not, here comes the baby.” In Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus’ is walking out of the Jerusalem temple for the last time, and his ministry is at an end but for his anointing for burial, and a last Passover meal with his friends, and his suffering, and his death, his disciples choose that moment to ask him about the end of the world. He gives them a long answer, the last of the five great discourses in Matthew that began with the Sermon on the Mount. He foretells a time of trial, upheaval, of persecution for the church and suffering for all the earth, which he also likens to “birth pangs.” For the end will also be an advent, an arrival, a coming, a coming back, a coming to be with forever.

The other thing that Jesus says about this end that is also a beginning is also echoed by Paul —don’t bother trying to predict the time. It will come upon us suddenly like birth pangs, or like lightning that strikes in the east and lights up the sky as far as the west. You will know it when it happens, so those who announce it ahead of time are to be distrusted. That is what false prophets do. The anticipation of the end is not about getting there first. It is not about timing our sprint to the finish line. It is about living every day, every lifetime, in a state of readiness. It is about being fully alive, fully awake at all times to the possibility of God’s coming in the very next moment. And it’s about holding nothing back, because we know that tomorrow may never come.

Most of all it means living with only one fear. I think that’s a point that many people misunderstand. They think that the God who comes will be vengeful and violent and really, really, pissed off. And I would say that we can’t discount that image entirely. We are talking about coming face to face with a power of love and truth that is completely beyond our imagining. It will lay bare our illusions and pretensions and excuses and false idols utterly and forever. It will break once and for all the systems of thought and orders of power that oppress and destroy and make life not worth living. But there is a Christian twist on this idea of the end, which is, after all, found in many religions, and now even has its secular, materialistic version. And it is this—not only is the end also a beginning, but it will come to us with a shock of recognition. It will be a reunion, because the one who is coming at the end is one we’ve met before.

And in that sense, we do know what to expect and we do know how to prepare. We can be ready because Jesus of Nazareth showed us what it is like to live face to face with that power of truth and love. He’s already been through the birth pangs, already entered the new creation that waits to be born. And so if we really want to be ready, we have his words to live by, we have his pattern to follow.

In Matthew’s gospel Jesus’ career as a teacher ends with a set of three stories about how to live while we’re waiting for his return. The first one, the “Parable of the Wise and Foolish Maidens” is about staying awake and alert, keeping our wicks trimmed, and a supply of lamp oil ready to hand so that when the bridegroom comes we are ready to light his way into the feast. Today we heard the second of these stories, the so-called “Parable of the Talents.” The first thing to notice about this story is that before the master leaves he entrusts what he has to his slaves. And these are not insignificant amounts of money. Remember the slave who only received one talent? Well, he was getting the equivalent of 130 pounds of precious metal—gold or silver. It is not that surprising, then, that he was afraid of what might happen if he lost it. What if it was stolen? What if he was taken advantage of by confidence men? Rather than run that risk, he figures, let me bury the master’s treasure in a secret place that only I know about.

And if we fear the Lord who is coming, not in the sense of speechless awe at his glory, but by freezing up in dread of judgment and punishment, we are liable to make the same mistake. We can make “not screwing up” the focus of our relationship with God. You and I have been entrusted with invaluable and precious gifts us so that we might go into the public marketplace and invest them, put them at the disposal of others, trade with them, circulate them, put them to work, so that they are multiplied, and bring more honor, inspire more love, evoke more gratitude for the Lord who gave them to us and is coming back to gather all the world’s riches into the house of joy. Our one fear at his coming will be that we took the precious treasure we received, and because we were afraid to screw up, we hid it from the world.

To look truth and love in the face and know we did that--that, my beloved friends, is judgment. That is punishment. That is the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

We need to value our talents. Not for what they are worth in the eyes of other human beings; certainly not for what we can get for them in the way of power, and possessions, and prestige; but for how God will increase them if we trust him enough to put them to work, to put them in play, even to put them at risk, in God’s service.

What are the talents you have been given? Are you investing them in the world? The end is coming. What are you bringing to the celebration?

It's God's world

2011-10-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I start to worry about things. I worry about all the things that I have to do for my work. I worry about all the things that need to be done on my house. I worry about my family and my health and my finances. I worry about you, about the problems you’re having, if I know about them, or problems I imagine you might be having. I worry about the world and the nation and politics and the news. Sometimes this can go on for hours, running and re-running the same worries over and over again in my mind. And I’ve found over the years that the best antidote to this kind of worried mind is prayer.

I’ll repeat the Lord’s Prayer silently in my mind, and when I find I’ve lost my way two or three lines into it and have started thinking about the cracks in the brick walkway in front of our house, I’ll start again at the beginning. Or I’ll use the “Jesus Prayer”, silently saying “Lord Jesus Christ,” with my inbreath, and “have mercy on me” with my outbreath. And my breathing will get deeper, and I’ll let out a sigh or two, and I’ll start to relax, and pretty soon I’m asleep.

Sometimes, though, these kinds of prayer are not effective. The worry-wheel will just keep churning along, rolling over everything I try to put in its path. And on these occasions I have to get a little firm with myself. I remind myself of some words of wisdom that I came upon once but can’t remember where. What they said was how arrogant we are to think we can’t take a little break, even in the middle of the night, from managing our lives. The hours of night, and of sleep, are the time when we get to let go, and let God take care of everything.

I’ll remember this and then as each worried thought comes up I’ll give that thing, that person, that problem or situation over to God, entrusting it to God for the night. I’ll do this over and over, acknowledging that every particular thing in my life, and my life itself, belong ultimately to God, who can take better care of them than I can, and I will give them back to their rightful owner. And in this way I can gradually let go of the need to worry, and drift off to sleep.

There are lots of places in the Gospels where Jesus encourages us to trust God and not to be anxious about earthly things. The story we heard today is not really about that theme, but it does contain a pointed teaching that all those earthly things belong to God. When Jesus says, "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's,” he is not setting up two separate spheres of influence. He is not saying that there is one arena of life, the political and economic, where Caesar reigns supreme, and another, the “religious,” where God’s rights are paramount. Any devout Israelite, including the Pharisees’ disciples, would know Psalm 24, which extols the sovereign power of God, and begins with the words “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein.”

But the division into rival spheres is what is assumed by the question “is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”, and the ones who ask it hope to trap Jesus in the contested boundary region where the two spheres meet. If Jesus answers by saying “no, it is not,” his enemies will denounce him to the Romans as a teacher of rebellious sedition. If he says that it is lawful, they will discredit him before the Judean masses, who rankle under the rule of the idolatrous pagans. In short, while they flatter him as a sincere religious teacher, who cares more for God’s truth than pleasing people, they want to lure him into choosing which people to please. They are pressing him to take sides on a political question, as if one side or the other encompasses the position of God.

Some commentators make a big deal about the fact that Jesus has to ask the Pharisee’s disciples for the coin for the tax, as if he is somehow better than them and us because he doesn’t carry money. But I don’t think that’s the point. When he holds up the coin, and asks “whose picture is this, and whose title?” he does point out absurdity of opposing the Emperor on religious principle when you’re passing his image from hand to hand all day long. But he’s not saying the problem would be solved if we just didn’t use money. He is saying that Caesar has his place and we owe him his due. But he’s also reminding us that Caesar’s place is not eternal, and that Caesar also owes a debt, one he must someday repay. Because everything Caesar has, no less than everything we have, belongs to God.

It is to remember this that we have our stewardship season. There’s a reason why we take some time every year to ponder what we’re doing when we make a commitment to give to the church. Because it’s not about the hard sell, gradually wearing down every bit of resistance, until that final form is completed and returned. But then why make such a big deal about it. What about it is so important that we spend a month thinking about it, talking about it, and praying about it? I think the answer is that if we look carefully at our practice of giving to the church, it can teach us a profound truth, one that all the other contractual exchanges that we engage in every day try to conceal.

The other transactions that go on in the world all promise to give us something we don’t already have, to do something for us we can’t do for ourselves, or make us feel something we can’t feel any other way. And all those same promises come into play here, too. After all, this is not some separate sphere, as if when we come within the walls of this room we are now in “God’s world.” It’s all God’s world.

But there is something about our giving to the church that is unique. Because the essential truth about the transaction that happens here is that the church does not promise us anything we don’t already have. Or to put it another way, anything we receive from the church that is of the essence of what the church really is, comes to us purely by the gift of God. Here is a giving and receiving that is completely free. God does not need your giving, as if to supply some deficiency in him. Everything you give, your money, your time, your talent, your mind and heart and your life itself, already belongs to God. And every gift that God gives you, she gives in love, expecting nothing but love in return.

And so this mundane exercise of St. John’s annual pledge drive, which can feel ever so slightly tawdry, actually connects us with the sacred mystery at the heart of the church. The faith of Christ, who gave the whole world back to God on the cross, invites our giving. God’s giving Christ back to the world, in his resurrection, is everything we hope to receive. But for all the glory of that redeeming exchange, we don’t need to look askance at what we have to offer. As much or as little as it is, as tainted as it may be by the world’s sharp practice, our giving participates in that free transaction of love that is the true life of the world. Everything that is given for Christ’s sake belongs equally to God. And so do we.

Going to the wedding feast

2011-10-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Exodus 32:1-14
Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

In its essence this parable of the great feast is a likeable story, with the wry, subversive message of so many of Jesus’ parables. If we associate ourselves with the random and gratuitous guests who make it into the feast in the end, we feel quite nice about it. Or we would, if it weren’t for all the violence. Luke’s Gospel gives us the same story, only it’s not a king and there’s no wedding and no son. But there’s also no murdering or destroying or burning, or binding hand and foot, or weeping and gnashing of teeth. So what is Matthew up to?

One way of understanding the bloody mess that Matthew makes of this parable is as a struggle to understand how the coming of Jesus, which was meant to be the renewal and fulfillment of God’s saving acts in history through his people Israel, was met not just with indifference, but with violence. The community out of which this Gospel emerged likely had first-hand experience of that violence, which began with the murder of Jesus but did not end there. It did not end with the Jewish War of rebellion that came later, or when the armies of Rome recaptured Jerusalem, massacred the population, and burned the city to the ground, an event to which this text probably refers. The violence did not end when some Jews were forcibly expelled from the synagogue for their insistence on acclaiming Jesus as Messiah. And it did not end when the church moved from the persecuted margins to the center of power and began to use texts like this one to justify wave upon wave of violence against Jews.

It still goes on, the needless, absurd violence of history, when God’s only desire is to call us together into the wedding feast of his Son. And that, in some sense, is why we are here today. We come at God’s invitation to remember and to celebrate the promise that there is a meaning and purpose to human history deeper than the clash of religions and empires. In Christ we find that deep purpose of God, and when we come to his table we experience just a taste of his wedding feast, where all divisions and disagreements are forgotten and we are reconciled with God and one another in the abundance of mercy and love.

Sound nice, doesn’t it? So why, then, does Matthew have to go and spoil everything? Why, when we’d begun to relax and feel like the tension in the story is resolved, does he have to ratchet it back up again by putting in this bit about the man who got thrown out of the party for wearing the wrong clothes?

To answer that we have to understand another use of the rhetoric of violence in Matthew’s Gospel. You can actually see the same thing in lots of places in the Bible—like in the story of the golden calf that we also heard this morning. In these cases, this language is not a reference to literal, historic violence, but is meant to convey the power of emotion. It is a way of speaking of the intensity, and vulnerability, of God’s love. Anger, jealousy, vengeance are metaphorical ways of saying that here is a place where, if we’re not careful, we are liable to betray God’s trust. But it’s also a point about which God is not indifferent, not lukewarm, or just kind of interested.

Modern bible critics, especially feminist ones, have questioned the implied equation between love and violence in this kind of theological metaphor, but that’s a topic for another day. What I’m suggesting now is that this little episode of the man without the wedding garment is Matthew’s way of saying that God’s promise, what’s really going on in history, what we really should be orienting our lives toward, in spite of all the ambient craziness, is a wedding feast— and this promise really matters to God. We shouldn’t think that just because we were invited to the feast graciously and at random, we can just slide in for the free food and beer. It’s the king’s son we’re talking about here, and we need to show up with our best.

My cousin Joui, the San Francisco fashion designer, who got married in August, sent out wedding invitations that included instructions on what to wear. It was kind of a head-scratcher—as I recall there was something about “think Great Gatsby meets Bollywood”—but as near as any of us could figure out what she was really trying to say was “be creative.” Don’t just reach into the closet and pull out that suit you keep there for weddings and funerals. Have some fun. Make me happy and show up with some flair. Well, we stodgy older relatives kind of grumbled about it and rolled our eyes, but then we set to work on our costume because we knew it was important to her. And we did end up looking quite colorful, I must say. My eighty-year old dad took the prize by showing up at his niece’s wedding in drag. When we asked him why, he said that he went to the thrift store to try to find suitable attire, but nothing on the men’s rack fit the bill, while there was lots of glamorous ladies’ clothing just his size.

Today we kick off our annual pledge season at St. John’s. It’s a time when we celebrate the generosity of God in calling us all together into the banquet. We’re marking the occasion with a kind of party in the Parish Hall where we show off for one another about all the good work we’re doing and all the fun we’re having doing it. Over the course of the next four weeks we’ll be hearing from representatives of our congregation about what a difference it makes in their lives to respond generously to God’s invitation—to come to the wedding dressed to the nines. And we’ll have inserts in the bulletin each week that invite us to share in a reflection on the themes of abundance, gratitude, and generosity that is taking place across the Episcopal Church.

Those of us who planned this stewardship program want it to be a low-key and enjoyable affair. Whatever form your participation takes will be welcome, even if it comes off the ladies’ rack. But as much as we insist that giving to the church is good for our health (which it is), and that St. John’s is worthy of our support (which it is), and as careful as we are to keep the tone upbeat and encouraging and positive (which we should) there is still that little bit of tension that inevitably comes along with pledge season. At least there is for me. When I look into it and try to understand what that tension is about, I find that Matthew’s Gospel, that reliable guide to what is simultaneously so sublime and so challenging about the Christian life, has an answer.

The first explanation for that inevitable tension is that we can’t accept the invitation to the wedding feast without also thinking about all the things going on in the world that make us afraid and hinder our generosity. We can’t help it—we think about the wars and the economy and gas prices and how will I educate my kids and what about my retirement, and will the crops fail and what happens when the fish are all fished out of the sea? When we commit ourselves to give such and such an amount of our money and our time to St. John’s in the coming year, we have to push through all those anxieties and say, “God—I’m coming to your feast, because that’s the world that I believe in.” That’s not easy, it takes faith, and hope, and love, but it goes to very heart of what it means to follow Christ.

And the second reason why there’s always just a little tension around this pledging thing is that we can’t escape the nagging suspicion that it matters to God. There’s this little voice deep down, when I get my pledge statement and see how much I’ve given (or how little), or when I’m relaxing at the end of a long week of hard work, that says, “was that your best? Is that your wedding garment?” It’s not about being guilty, or feeling inadequate, or fearing God’s wrath. It’s not even about how much I love St. John’s Church, and want it to succeed. It’s about knowing how much God loves St. John’s Church. It’s about how deeply God yearns for us, here, to live in the kingdom. It’s about feeling in my heart how passionately God wants to use us to invite anyone who will come to the wedding feast of Christ the Son.

Change from the inside out

2011-09-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32

When I was the Associate Rector down at All Saints’, Carmel, one of my tasks was to be the person responsible for giving monetary assistance to the poor. The parish was known throughout the Monterey area as a place of last resort when the rent was late or the power was about to be shut off, or the luck had run out and you needed bus fare back to L.A. And the people of All Saints’ generously supported this ministry, so if I didn’t give very much to any one person, I could help quite a few of them.

One of the things that my clients would often do after I’d handed them a check and we were saying good-bye, was to ask when our services were on Sunday morning. I would give them the information and tell them that they’d be welcome any time but I knew they’d never come. I think that they knew it, too, so why did they ask? I guess it was because they wanted me to think well of them. They wanted me to know that they understood they bore some responsibility for the situation they were in. Their asking about church services was their way of telling me that they knew that they needed more than money to turn their lives around.

But, of course, it’s one thing to say this, and another to act on it. Of course I would have been glad to see them on a Sunday morning, but they didn’t need to prove anything to me. Maybe they were good people who were doing their best and had just been dealt a bad hand, and maybe their stories were a little more complicated than that. But that was not for me to judge. They needed help and All Saints’ Church could give them some, and I was satisfied with that. Whether they turned over a new leaf, and how religion figured into it, was really up to them.

Sometimes when people ask us a question they’re really trying to tell us something. When the Chief Priests and Elders come up to Jesus and ask him by what authority he is teaching and healing in the Temple, they’re really telling him that the authority to do such things belongs to them. It is their temple, and they’ll decide whether he belongs there. Now Jesus can hear what they’re really saying, so he asks them a question, “Sure--I’ll tell you about my authority, but first you have to tell me how you decide who’s worthy and who’s not. For example, what would you say about my friend John the Baptist?”

Their dithering in response reveals that the only authority these leaders understand is a superficial one. They are in power because people honor and defer to them. But we shouldn’t mistake this for some kind of rapport with the masses. They’ll pander to the people when it serves their own interests, but they don’t care about their deep needs. They aren’t really concerned about their dignity, their freedom, and their hope. And when a leader comes along who does have that concern, who understands that the people’s real, underlying problems are spiritual, and that any change that’s going to do any lasting good has to be a change of heart—when that kind of authority comes along, the Chief Priests and the elders oppose it. That’s what they did to John the Baptist and that’s what they’re doing to Jesus.

This story shows us the difference between two kinds of authority. One kind works from the top down, trying to get people to choose their side in a struggle against other people. The other kind works from the inside out, encouraging people to take free action, for the sake of what they know in their hearts to be true. One kind seeks first and foremost to get and keep power. The other is most concerned to know and to do the will of God. In his dialogue with the leaders in the temple, Jesus is trying to get the Chief Priests and the Elders to own that the authority that they care about is the first kind, the top down, get and keep power kind. Until they do, he and they really have nothing to talk about, because they are speaking two different languages.

There is a story, maybe apocryphal, about Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism, that on his deathbed he said, “I made a mistake. Without doubt, an oppressed multitude had to be liberated. But our method only provoked further oppression and atrocious massacres. My living nightmare is to find myself lost in an ocean of red with the blood of innumerable victims. It is too late now to alter the past, but what was needed to save Russia were ten Francis of Assisis.”

I love this story, whether it’s true or not, because of the idea that the ruthless, materialist revolutionary might look back at his mistakes and recognize that the world can only truly change from the inside out. We’ll hear a lot more about Francis of Assisi next week, but let me just say that he and Lenin had a lot in common. They were both brilliant public speakers and charismatic leaders. They both cared passionately for the poor. They both had a vision of universal human solidarity, transcending ethnic and national and cultural boundaries. But what Francis had that Lenin did not, unless he got it at the last hour, was a heart to do the will of God. Lenin organized the poor to serve in his army, to join his party, to follow his directives so he could liberate them. Francis gave away his worldly goods and went to live among the poor, caring for them with his own hands, so that through him, they might experience the liberating compassion of God.

In Matthew 3:14, John the Baptist tries to beg off of baptizing Jesus, saying “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus is adamant and so the one who is without sin receives the baptism of repentance, just as he will later receive the punishment of a criminal. When he does this he is doing what the chief priests and elders of the people will not do; he is renouncing any distinction between himself and the harlots and tax collectors who also came to be baptized. Jesus begins and ends his public career with acts of humility because his authority does not depend on whether people approve of him, but it is the authority that comes from within, from doing God’s will. This is the way that he showed his disciples to live, and the great saints are those, like St. Francis, who understood that it is not enough to pay lip-service to this way. True freedom, true happiness, true purpose and authority come from putting it into practice.

There is a temptation for us to put this way of life up on a pedestal and say that it’s all very well for them, but I’m just an ordinary, sinful, person. But that would be to reject Christ’s most precious gift, the gift of his own humility. He became like us in every way so that we could know that God goes to work through ordinary people like us, if we are willing to work with God. Christ’s revolution of love, the real transformation of the world, happens from the inside out, so it really doesn’t depend on external circumstances. It is grounded in God’s compassion and gracious favor towards all creation, so it can’t be thwarted by human failings or human judgment.

But it does depend on our decision, a decision we have to make for ourselves, a decision we have to make every day, which is the decision to give God the authority in our lives. It means getting up every morning and deciding to be about God’s business that day, to do God’s work, whatever our mood, whatever our circumstances, whether we feel like it or not. We may not even know what God’s will for us is that day, but if we are ready and willing to do it, we’ll find out. We may not know if we’re the right ones for the job, or if what we’re doing is really having an effect, but if it is God’s will, and we are willing, God is able to use what we give to get it done.

Laborers and Landowners

2011-09-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

We live in a time when the economy is at the top of everyone’s list of concerns. For some people, anxiety about the economy leads to passionate debates about policy. There is a war of words in politics and the media about who caused the current crisis, and what should be done to fix it. But for many others the concerns are more personal and immediate—will I keep my job? Will I get a job to replace the one I lost? Are my wages keeping pace with my bills? Do I owe more on my house than it’s worth? Will I be able to afford to educate my children? Will I be able to retire?

The bible says consistently that God has a stake in the game of human economies. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Jesus, the one we look to as God incarnate, has a lot to say about the economic conditions of our lives. But Jesus does not approach economics as social science or political theory. Instead, he tells stories about people, about a merchant who found a pearl of great price, about the master of a house who went away, leaving his servants with ten talents of silver, about a slave who begged and won forgiveness of his enormous debts, only to violently demand repayment from a two-bit debtor.

What’s surprising about these stories is the way that Jesus uses them to open up a deeper conversation with us about God. “If you really want to understand who God is,” he seems to be saying, “and what God does, you can’t limit your inquiry to your experiences in moments of solitary prayer, in the contemplation of nature, or in happy occasions with family and friends.” Jesus is in favor of these kinds of experiences, and refers them in his teaching. But he also wants us to look at the way people do business, at their economic relations, and to find out what God is doing there.

And so he says, “the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner hiring laborers for his vineyard.”

This story describes a scene that would have been well-known to Jesus’ listeners—men standing around the marketplace hoping to get hired so they can feed their families that day. It was an increasingly common sight in 1^st Century Galilee. This was an era of economic upheaval, when agrarian villages were giving way to an urban society based on international trade and integration into the cash economy of the Roman Empire. The infrastructure of this new order was paid for by increasing the burden of taxation on the peasant producers, sending more and more of them into debt. For many that debt became an inescapable downward spiral, ending with their property being added to vast, new, aristocratic estates, where the peasants went to work as slaves and landless day-laborers.

The ancient ideal of Israelite society was to be a nation of free and independent subsistence farmers and herders, living on their ancestral tribal lands. One common way of describing this ideal is found in Micah 4:4: “but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” But in Jesus’ time this dream was vanishing into a mythic past. The new symbol of basic economic security was the denarius, the silver coin with the palm leaves of the kings of Israel on one side, and the head of the Roman Emperor on the other. It was the customary daily wage for an unskilled laborer or a common soldier, and was worth about $20—in short, about enough to keep an average-sized household going for another day.

About fifteen years ago I started my own gardening business in San Francisco. For the most part I worked alone, but as my business got more established there were times when I needed help for a day or two. Later, I would get to know a couple of guys I liked to work with. I had their phone numbers and would arrange a place and a time to meet when I needed their services. But early on there were times when I drove down Cesar Chavez St. and picked up laborers off the corner. They’d spot my truck, the one with the tools strapped to the rack, a block away, and as I slowed to pull over six or eight men would surround me. I’d only be looking for one, or at most two, so there was always that tense moment of decision—whom would I choose? As often as not the choice would be made for me, and I’d end up with the first man to open the door and shove his way into the cab. And then we’d drive away, leaving the others standing on the corner, waiting for the next truck to come by.

That moment of making the hire is the one that Jesus’ parable plays over and over again. If the landowner is going to the vineyard to check on the progress of work, to assess the need for more laborers that day, we never hear about it. What we do hear about is his repeated visits to the marketplace to meet the men who stand there waiting to be hired.

We also learn nothing about where those latecomers have been. Why weren’t they in the marketplace at 6? Or at 9; or at noon? And the ones who still stood there at 5 o’clock—where had they been? Perhaps they had sick family members to care for; or maybe they still clung to a remnant of the family property and had chores to do there before they went out looking for paid work. Maybe they’d already finished a small job that day, but were hoping to earn a little more in the hours of daylight that remained.

In short, the story leaves out everything we would want to know if we were trying to make it a conventional lesson about the virtues of hard work or sound management principles. What matters to the landowner of the parable are not shrewd judgments about how many men to hire, and how much they should be paid. What matters is that there is an abundance of work to be done. The men are unemployed, so he hires them. Their families need to eat, so he pays enough to feed them.

You don’t need to have our ingrained Capitalist social ethic to see this as bad economic policy. I’m sure it would have struck Jesus’ audience the same way. You can’t do business like that. People will game the system. Where’s the incentive to work harder? Where’s the penalty for being lazy? And yet I think it must be obvious that Jesus is aiming for just that kind of reaction. He is deliberately calling our conventional economic wisdom into question.

Maybe we’ve become like the men of the first hour and are grumbling along with them. Maybe, like them, we have come to truly believe that the value of a human being is how much work you can get out of him for a denarius a day. Maybe we’ve also come to think of economic life as a competitive struggle for survival in which your gain can only come at my loss. Maybe like them we have come to believe that the market economy is a moral law unto itself, and so we are owed special rewards for being the first into the cab of the truck, while the losers deserve to starve.

If so, Jesus is asking us to take another look, and to consider economics from the perspective of God. The God of Jesus is a God of generous abundance, who miraculously fed his people in a deserted place with five loaves and two fishes, just as he gave them the heavenly manna in ancient times. But he is also a God of just enough. “Give us today our daily bread,” says the Lord’s Prayer, and the message is not just that we acknowledge our dependence on God to meet our material needs, but that we will be content to have them satisfied for now. After all, we have other important things to pray for, such as being forgiven our debts, as we forgive the debts of others.

Maybe the root causes of the crisis in the global economy are in our spiritual values. And maybe the solutions will come not from the policy measures of central banks and regulators and corporations, but from laborers and landowners who learn to put their economic relationships back into the right perspective. And what is that perspective? Well, it begins; the kingdom of heaven is like this…

If that one listens to you

2011-09-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

If you’ve ever been in a position of authority, say as a parent, or a teacher, a supervisor or even as a priest, you’ve probably had the experience of someone coming to talk to you about somebody else. And not in an appreciative way, to say “you know I just wanted to tell you that so-and-so is so kind, loving and generous, and has never done anything at all that I can object to, and this is so marvelous to me that I just had to come and talk to you about it.” I’m sure that happens, too, although, come to think of it, it’s hard for me to remember a specific instance. But I’m talking about those occasions when someone comes to talk to you about another person with, what do they call it?—“concern.” They’ll start out, “you know, I really like so-and-so—he’s always so cheerful, and is such a hard worker, and I really like that terrific thing that he does with…the stuff—so I don’t want you to think that I’m criticizing him—but…

And of course it’s what comes after the “but” that is what they really came to tell you about, and it is almost always because they feel offended in some way and are hoping that you will do something to control or correct or even punish that other person they’re complaining about. The implied message is clear: because they are having a problem, it is now supposed to be your problem, too, and your job is to solve it.

It shouldn’t really surprise us that this happens. Most of us are not fond of conflict and would rather not face it directly. We learned as children that when our big brothers are coming into our room and playing with our things and then going away and leaving a big mess for us to clean up, the easiest way to deal with it is to go tell Mom or Dad. And often enough, our parents decided that the easiest thing for them to do was to step in, decide who was in the wrong, and force a resolution, complete with a ceremonial apology (“now tell your little brother you’re sorry”), and a stern warning about the consequences of doing it again in the future.

And if that happens, it is enough to satisfy us. We aren’t particularly concerned that our older brothers now resent us as whiny little tattletales—we got our problem solved. This approach is reliable enough that we can be all grown up and still be approaching our adult conflicts in the same way.

But as ordinary and human as this approach to conflict is, it’s not innocent. It may bring relief to the one who accuses, but the accused often ends up feeling mistreated and resentful. It doesn’t bring about any deeper understanding of the hurt that took place, nor any true reconciliation. And so resentments will simmer away beneath the surface, only to break out again with greater force the next time a conflict occurs. This approach also creates and holds in place a distorted kind of authority, one that is not loved and respected for its wisdom, courage, compassion and justice, but one that is feared and flattered for its power to discipline, punish, and show favor.

Matthew is the only one of the four gospels where Jesus gives practical instruction about the nuts and bolts of living in the organization that will carry on his mission. The Jesus of Matthew’s gospel has really high hopes for his church. It is to be the new Israel, a city on a hill, the light of the world and the salt of the earth. It is given a Great Commission to go out to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. But as for its internal affairs, what Jesus wants to talk about is how to handle hurts and conflicts among its members.

It is really too bad that so many people think of the church as a place where people are nice to each other all the time, and nobody ever disagrees. Because the church is like any other community made up of human beings. It is a place where people are coming with their defects of character and their childhood wounds, as well as their deepest longings and loftiest aspirations. So it is a place where people make mistakes, where they have misunderstandings, and hurt each other, sometimes quite profoundly. What makes the church different, according to Matthew, is not that people don’t have fights, but that it is also a place where people do not hide from each other when they conflict, or try to get some authority to intervene on their side. It is a place where people learn to speak the truth to each other in love, and where they learn to listen, to take responsibility, and to be reconciled.

You may have noticed that Jesus’ instruction about dealing with the church member who has sinned against you has only one goal, and it is a modest one. His language may be reminiscent of a legal proceeding, but Jesus says nothing about reaching a verdict, or about a punishment to fit the crime. The aim, at each step of this escalating scale of confrontation is just to get that person to listen to you. “If the member listens to you”, he says, “you have regained that member.” Let’s think about that for just a moment: what kind of words would you have to say, that would win over the one who did you wrong, if he or she could only just really take them in?

Well they would have to be true words. They would have to be the simple truth about what was done, without exaggeration or accusation as to motive. And they would have to be heartfelt. When you can show me the hurt you feel, not as emotional drama, but in a way that is direct, and upright, and vulnerable, that has real power. And they would have to be loving words, spoken with appreciation for the relationship we share, and holding out hope to repair it.

Now maybe you’ve had the experience of being spoken to in this way by a spouse or a friend, and finding some well-defended place within you opening up to receive what is spoken. Maybe in that moment you saw your behavior toward that person in a new way, through their eyes, and recognized with a shock of dismay that something you had said or done dishonored the connection between you. Many of us can remember being on one side or the other of a conversation like this. Some of us may have even seen it happen in a group of three or four. But how many of us have ever belonged to a church where this could happen in the presence of everyone? What kind of church could place a wrongdoer in the middle of the assembly, say on a morning like this one, and speak to him in a way that is not intended to vilify or threaten, to convict or to punish, but only to open a place in his heart where he could really listen to what was being said? Can we imagine belonging to a community that had the trust, honesty, and compassion to deal with its problems in that way?

Yet that is the kind of place Jesus calls his church to be. He promises that in such a congregation we would learn an extraordinary freedom, where we could work things out without making rules for everything or relying on coercive authority. He says that in a community like this, founded on hard-won forgiveness, the prayers that are offered in harmony will have extraordinary power. He says that he himself will be among them, the living presence of the forgiving victim. In such a church, says Jesus, it will become possible to really love each other, and so to act together to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven.

Nothing but our bodies

2011-09-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28

In the last week, 381 people have been arrested at a sit-in in front of the White House. The two-week protest, which has been interrupted by Hurricane Irene, is to urge the President to block the construction of a 2,000 mile pipeline that would bring an oily slurry from the Tar Sands of Alberta to refineries in Texas. The demonstrators are opposed to the pipeline because its route passes through many ecologically-sensitive areas, and because of the destructive nature of the Tar Sands project itself, the largest industrial project in human history, which has strip-mined hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest and poisoned millions of acre-feet of fresh water. But their most serious concern is the impact of the project on the global climate. Tar Sands oil is one of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, producing up to 20% more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil. Proceeding with the extraction and consumption of this resource, warns Dr. James Hansen, the nation’s leading atmospheric scientist, means “game over” for any hope of stabilizing the earth’s climate.

And so people have been going to the White House to make a statement and risk arrest. Sometimes it happens that a need, an injustice, a threat to peace and order will take hold of our conscience and we realize that it is up to us to do something. Sometimes the proper channels, the approved grievance procedures are not enough. Sometimes we have to show up right where it’s happening and say, “this has to stop.” Bill McKibben, an author and professor and Methodist Sunday school teacher from Vermont, is a spokesperson for the organizers of the sit-in. In an interview after his release from prison on Monday, he described the political power and vast wealth of the interests lobbying for the construction of this pipeline. “We don’t have the money to compete with those guys,” McKibben said. “All we have, the only alternative currency we have, is our bodies. And that’s what we’re using.”

When Moses meets God in the burning bush, God tells him “I have heard the cry of the Israelites and seen how the Egyptians’ oppress them. I have come down to deliver them and to bring them out of that land.” That sounds pretty good to Moses. Moses knows all about that oppression, he cares deeply about it. He’s even killed a man trying to do something about it, which is why he’s on the lam out there in the desert. But then God tells Moses, “Now you go do it.” God’s wants to get involved in the Israelites situation, but it is Moses who has to go there, to stand before Pharaoh and do the talking. No wonder Moses protests.

And no wonder Peter protests when Jesus starts talking about going to Jerusalem. Peter is probably all for going to Jerusalem, but not yet. Not until they’ve gathered an army and trained themselves to fight. Not with nothing but their bodies. Not in order to die. Peter also probably wasn’t thinking about going to Jerusalem to confront the chief priests and the elders and the scribes of his people. He was probably thinking about the foreign occupiers, the real oppressors, the Romans, about how to throw them out, and of course he was thinking about how to do that and still be around when it was done, to mete out rough justice and settle old scores.

But Jesus was thinking about something else. He was thinking about Israel and Israel’s God. He was thinking about the Father in heaven whose children are the peace-makers. He was thinking about the kingdom of heaven, and how it belongs to the poor in spirit. He was thinking about the law and the prophets, and the light to the nations and the city on a hill. And he was thinking about the temple in Jerusalem, and how the worship of God had been reduced to an endless butchery of animals, and rigid enforcement of the rules of ritual purity. He was thinking of the elites in charge of the temple system and how they’d twisted a religion of justice and compassion into one of exclusion and control. He was thinking of how they collaborated with the Romans one moment and plotted violent insurrection against them the next, always seeking their own advantage, only concerned with their own survival.

Sometimes you have to go there yourself. Sometimes you have to go right there where it’s happening and do something to show that it’s not okay with you. Sometimes all you have to use is your body. We are so used to thinking of Jesus’ willing journey to death as a metaphysical bargain between him and God, that we have a hard time seeing it as a human choice, as an ethical response to a historical problem. But today’s story from Matthew reminds us that whatever spiritual benefit may come to us through Christ’s passion, it’s not something he did so that we wouldn’t have to do anything. He went to Jerusalem to carry his cross so that we would know how to carry ours.

But he also knew from the start that on the other side was resurrection. This is extremely important for us to remember. Because Jesus didn’t go to his death because he hated life, or found that the world wasn’t worth staying in. He went out of desire for real life, life in its fullness, which is getting involved in the love, compassion, and justice that are the life of God. "The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet," wrote Frederick Buechner. The mainspring of faithful action in the world is not duty, or guilt, but our joy in being alive. This joy that is not taken away from us when we allow ourselves to be summoned into the places of injustice, suffering, and need, because it is the joy of giving from an inexhaustible source. The teaching of Jesus is that we don’t really know how abundant that source is unless we are freely and joyfully willing to give away that little bit that we think of as ours. To put it another way, you don’t really know what it means to love life if there’s nothing you’re willing to die for.

The last time there was any kind of consensus in this country about what is worth dying for was in the fight against Fascism. We are proud to acknowledge the greatness of the generation that rose up to meet that challenge. But that was 70 years ago, and now there are threats to the survival of our country and our civilization more dangerous than Fascism. They’re not so easy to see, or so easy to defeat. Their causes are complex and it doesn’t help that one of the main causes is the way we all live every day, just going around minding our own business. It also doesn’t help that the crisis is slow in slow in coming. James Hansen first warned the U.S. about the danger of global warming in 1988, and yet people of my age or a little older might still be able to live out our days believing that he and 98 out of 100 of the world’s climate scientists are wrong. We might be able to keep pretending that all the huge wildfires and epic droughts, the killer heat spells and hurricanes and floods and tornados are a run of bad luck, and soon life will return to normal. But our children and grandchildren won’t have that luxury.

So we’ll just have to do what needs to be done, because we love our children, and we want to leave them a world that still has more beauty in it than dread. We want them to have a chance at something more than a grim and relentless struggle for survival. We want them to be able to choose self-sacrifice from the nobility of their souls, not have it forced on them by iron necessity. We love life, we have faith in the God of life, and his power to renew life and redeem it from fear, from selfish grasping, from death in all its guises. So we’ll pick up this cross, and I think we’ll find it’s really no heavier than the ones our ancestors had to bear.

We’ll go to where the world’s deep need calls us, now that it is the need of the world herself for our care and concern. Now we find that we must care for our mother earth as she has cared for us since life began, and there I think we will find a deep gladness, one so deep we scarcely have a language to describe it. We’ll follow the call of Christ to where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger, and there we’ll begin to gather up the shattered pieces of the kingdom.

Grounded in this new and different thing

2011-08-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

Exodus 1:8-2:10
Psalm 124
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Last Saturday I spoke at the wedding of my cousin Julie at a ridge-top ranch near Calistoga. She had called me a month or so ago and said that she and Andrew, her fiancée, had talked it over and decided that they wanted a touch of something traditional, even religious at their wedding and would I be willing to provide it. I said I would.. If it sounds a little vague, that’s because it was. A subsequent conversation a week or so before the wedding didn’t make it any clearer exactly what I was being asked to do. But I finally got more specific instructions at the rehearsal on Friday evening. Andrew and Julie’s “life coach”, named Kate, who was officiating, let me know that I was to give an invocation and prayer at the beginning of the ceremony, right after the entrance procession and her opening words of welcome.

So I composed something that I thought would be suitable for the occasion, and at the appointed time I made my way to the front of the assembly and offered it. It wasn’t a bad place to pray, with Mt. St. Helena filling the horizon behind me, and a flamboyantly-attired collection of my family, the groom’s family and assorted hipster bohemians from San Francisco baking in the sun before me. I did use the “G”-word, right up front, but I carefully avoided gendered pronouns and I left Jesus out of it. Basically I invited us all to become aware of God’s eternal loving presence, to give thanks for our blessings, and to pray for further blessings for my cousin and her husband. It was over in a little more than a minute and then I returned to my place.

If anybody took offense at what I said, they were polite enough not to say so to me. And several people told me they appreciated it. In particular, Kate, the life coach, thanked me for helping her get “grounded” as she put it, for the things she had to say, and the role she had to play. And I was especially touched on Monday when Andrew, the groom, came by with Julie to pick up their dog, which we’d been babysitting for the weekend. He told me that he hadn’t really anticipated what it was that I was going to bring to the ceremony, or how different it was going to be from what Kate had to say, until I got up there and started saying it. And he wanted me know that when I did what I did, he realized it was important, and that he would have missed it if it hadn’t been there.

In her words at the wedding Kate had many wise and meaningful things to say about Julie and Andrew and their relationship, about the importance of the assembly of family and friends that was there to witness and to offer support for their marriage. But all of it was on the human level. There would have been something incomplete about it without the acknowledgment that all of these good and praiseworthy things come to us from God and speak to us of who God is.

As I reflected on this experience this week I thought about how privileged I am to belong to a community where we get “grounded”, as Kate put it, every week, where the “something different” that Andrew talked about is at the center of everything we do. And I thought that this might be what Jesus means when he says in today’s reading from Matthew, “on this rock I will build my church.”

I could contribute that missing piece to Julie and Andrew’s wedding because I’ve learned a little about how to pray. I’ve come by what I know not by magic, but by regular and repetitive practice. If I know something about what it takes to help a group of strangers to become a community of blessing, it’s because I have participated regularly for many years in assemblies like this one here. And if I have a sense of trust and confidence in addressing myself to this “God” character it is because I have come again and again to hear what the Bible has to say about her and to be nourished at her table.

When Jesus asks his disciples “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” they answer him on the human level. “Well, some say this person, some say that one—but all agree that you are some kind of rerun of one of the great prophets of the past.” But when he asks “Who do you say that I am?” he’s asking them a different kind of question. And it is Peter who is able to give a different kind of answer, “You are the one we have waited for from the future, the one who is coming to make everything new. You can only be understood in relation to God’s own self.”

Now the point of the story is not that Peter was the contestant with the right answer, and so won the prize. What matters most is that Peter understood that Jesus wasn’t asking for a right answer, but a creative response. “Who do you say that I am” is a question for all of us. What we are being asked to do is not to repeat Peter’s answer because it is the “right” one, but to give our own answer, an answer that says “In you I recognize God. Whoever I thought God was, whoever I thought I was, you have shown me that there is something different going on.”

Each person comes to this question, “who do you think that I am?” by a different path. And we may not always even recognize our response as a faithful one. When I first came back to church in my late twenties it was the music and the communion that spoke to me, but much of the rest of it, the Creed, the confession, the scriptures, the congregation with its social events and its committees, was an obstacle. It took me a long time to appreciate that, while I had to answer the question for myself, I wasn’t doing it alone. It took me a while to understand that he “you” in the question “who do you think that I am?” is plural.

Peter may have been the first to give Jesus a truthful answer, but later on in the story, on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, he will deny him three times. It will take the witness of the women at the tomb, and Jesus’ forgiving presence in the resurrection community, for Peter’s answer to become rock-solid. It is for the sake of that resurrection community, against which the gates of Hades will never prevail, that God revealed to Peter that Jesus is the Christ. In the same way, any answer we would give is just an opinion about the past, unless it is fitted in some way into this thing we call “the church,” this new and different thing that someday will really be.

Knowing that we are founded on this rock give us the confidence to give our own answer to the question even if it is provisional, partial, and shot through with uncertainty. And we can do it in all kinds of circumstances, with all kinds of people, using all kinds of language. We find ourselves in situations all the time where talking to people about Jesus is not going to be helpful. But that does not mean that Christ is any less present.

We don’t worry too much about whether we have the answer exactly right, because the true, objective fullness of who Jesus is has yet to be revealed. But even with our imperfect faith we can proclaim that he is the Christ because we belong to the body in which God reveals it. It’s not an idea for us, not a doctrine we try to believe—it’s the ground on which we stand, whether we or not we feel it on any given day. Sometimes when I make my way along the communion rail putting pieces of bread in your hands and saying “the Body of Christ,” it is your faces, your hands, your postures of prayer that make these words true for me. And sometimes, for you, it is my saying them.

Miracles not meant for us

2011-08-23T16:53:00.000-07:00

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28
Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b
Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33

The closest thing I’ve ever experienced to the perilous sea-crossing that we hear about in today’s Gospel lesson happened one summer day when I was about 13 and my Dad and I borrowed a sailboat from a neighbor and sailed across Lake Champlain. It’s a long lake, and very deep, but not terribly wide at the place we crossed, maybe two or three miles. Anyway, we got over to the west side, to Essex, New York, where we tied up at the municipal pier and walked around a bit and got an ice cream cone, and then we started back. We’d gone about a third of the way when two things happened at the same time. First, the wind died. Second, out of the dense black cloud that seemingly formed in an instant over the mountains to the west came a deep roll of thunder.

The little sailboat didn’t have an outboard motor but there was a canoe paddle and so my father leaned over the side and paddled while I created a little propulsion with the rudder by pushing and pulling the tiller to and fro. We crawled along like that, with the sky getting darker and the thunder sounding closer, glancing up nervously from time to time at the tall aluminum mast and the sails that hung limply from it. After what seemed like a long time we saw a line of different colored water advancing toward us across the surface of the lake from the direction of the storm. It was wind and it hit us in an instant, filling the sails. The rain was right behind it, and we ran before that wind through a heavy downpour, all the way to the Vermont side. And when we got there Judy, the owner of the boat, and my mother were waiting for us on the beach with their hands on their hips. I’m not sure which was worse for my poor father, the sight of the storm behind us or the sight of those two women ahead. But we tried to play it off as if we’d never really been worried-- “What’s wrong?” “Why did you doubt?”

“Why did you doubt?” is Jesus’ question to Peter after his short-lived excursion walking on the sea. I used to read this as a veiled accusation, as if Jesus were disappointed with Peter for failing his test. But now I think it’s a question offered with compassion and affection. It is something that Jesus really wants Peter to think about. “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” But of course Peter could not sustain his total focus on getting to Jesus. Of course his mind wandered, his attention shifted, he saw the wind, and was frightened. Out there on the face of the water, with his friends and his boat left behind, even with the grace of the God incarnate flowing through him, it quite naturally occurred to him to think about the habitual object of his worry and preoccupation--himself. And when he did this, he sank. His heart is not pure, his will and consciousness not united completely moment after moment after moment with God. Jesus knows this about Peter. And he knows this about us. But does this mean that we have failed? Does this mean that we are doomed? I don’t think so. What is lacking in us shows up in this story but only to illuminate in greater relief what is present in Jesus, which is what the story is really about.

You see, Jesus did not test Peter by having him walk on the water. That was Peter’s idea to test Jesus. He showed himself as a man of little faith not when he got afraid and sank, but when he said to Jesus, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." Peter is not satisfied when Jesus says, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid," but demands that he prove it by giving him something—in this case a supernatural power he is not ready or able to use. And this is how it often is with us. We may feel like the disciples, like we’ve been rowing all night against the wind, and the waves are battering the boat, and we are beginning to fear that we aren’t going to make it. In such times we might turn to God for help, but very often what we hope and pray for is a miracle.

We assume that if there is a God, he would give us the thing we lack. It might be money, or the healing of a disease, or a new job, or even a new attitude of confidence and faith in ourselves, but whatever it is, we hope and pray that there is a God who will give us mastery over this situation that feels out of our control. But the truth is that there are some lakes we don’t get pulled out of. There are some problems that never get resolved. Maybe that husband never will quit drinking. Maybe that child never does come home. Maybe that illness isn’t going to get better. Maybe those times of prosperity aren’t coming back.

But does that mean we’ve failed? Does it mean that we weren’t faithful enough, didn’t want it badly enough, didn’t pray hard enough? No, it does not, because that wasn’t the test. The test of our faith is not whether we can get God to work a miracle for us. God works miracles for us every moment of every day. There are just some miracles that aren’t meant for us, as much as we might be sure that they are.

The real test of our faith is this—do we despair of God? I don’t mean do we get down sometimes, or do we have our bad days, or even go through long periods of doubt and darkness and grief—we do all these things, and Jesus knew all about them. But do we give up hope? Do we give in to our fear and imagine that God has abandoned us, or worse, that God is some kind of avenging ghost, stalking us angrily across the dark water? The message of the gospel is that even when things are at their worst, even when we’re far from land and the storm is raging, and we’ve been rowing all night and the dawn seems it will never come, even in times when it seems as if we are helpless and chaos will overwhelm us, Jesus Christ is still able. Jesus Christ can still find us, even in the stormy darkness, and in his presence there is hope and peace.

This accords well with what Paul is saying in Romans when he writes that the word of faith is not “who will go up to heaven to bring Christ down? Or who will go down to the dead to bring him up? But the word of faith is near you, on your lips and in your heart. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is a shame that this teaching, which is about the grace that gives us faith and restores our hope and is close by at all times, has been turned into another kind of test.

To say that Jesus is Lord is to say that he is Lord of Chaos and Creation, he is master of Life and Death, he is sovereign of Bliss and Suffering. And so to be “saved” is not to happy and upbeat at all times, or to never struggle, or to get everything you pray for. It is rather to know that even though we may not be perfectly aligned at all times with God’s will for our lives, and may even be in the dark about what that is, there is one who is, and does, and he will not lose track of us. It is to know that even though we cannot walk on water there is one who can, and will use even our floundering in the service of his great mission. It is to have confidence that however feeble and unsatisfactory our performance may sometimes be, he does not condemn us, but accepts whatever we can give and calls us to take heart, to keep going, to keep hoping for the completion and renewal of the whole creation that has already begun in him.