A dream partly come true

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

The first time I ever set eyes on Petaluma I was farming down in Marin County.  Part of my work was to make a trip every month or two up to Harmony Farm Supply, outside Sebastopol, where I’d buy fertilizers and irrigation parts and tools.  And on one of these trips I was nearing Novato when the traffic report on the radio said that a tanker truck had tipped over on 101 just south of Petaluma, and the freeway was closed in both directions.  Any sensible person would have turned around and gone home, but instead, I headed west, out into the country, to try my luck on the back roads.  I didn’t have a map, just a good sense of direction, and somehow, by a long and roundabout way, I found myself at the junction of Gravenstein Highway and Stony Point Road, a place that I recognized. 

In the process I got a nice tour of the countryside to the south and west of here, and my first glimpse of downtown Petaluma.  It was a time in my life, my mid-twenties, when I was thinking a lot about my future, and the uncertain prospects for society-at-large.  And I thought the best thing I could do, for myself and for the world, was to be a farmer.   I liked to dream about finding a place somewhere to settle down with some friends and family, and get back to the land.  And I remember thinking on that particular day that I was glad to know about Petaluma, that this was a place I’d like to come back to sometime, that it might even be the right place to stake my claim.

So here I am, only somewhere along the line I went off on a different kind of journey, so I’m not a farmer living and working on my agrarian commune out on Chileno Valley Road.   I’m an Episcopal priest, living in a tract house in a subdivision near Casa Grande High School.  It’s funny how nothing happens the way we expect, even when our dreams partly come true.  And how, when we get to where we thought we are going, we find it’s not the place we thought we’d find.  

These experiences, the expectation that turns up the unexpected, and the  journey to a destination you don’t really know, appear in the scripture readings this morning as images of the life of faith.  Jesus tells his disciples to be always on the alert, always ready for action, because the thing you’re waiting for is going to come when you least expect it.  And the author of the letter to the Hebrews holds up the example of Abraham, who wandered off in search of a land he’d never seen, following a promise to a place he’d never really call his own.

Both of these examples are about receiving a gift from God.  It is a gift that is gratuitous, that depends solely on God’s will to give, but it also depends on human faith; it is our willingness to receive the gift that makes all the difference.  It is the gift that makes faith possible, and it is the faith that makes the gift real.  For Abraham the gift is the promise of a homeland, and of descendants “as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore,” but its his faith that sets his feet on the road.  

The faith that Jesus commends to his disciples is also founded on God’s gift—“Do not be afraid, little flock,” he says, “for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  But this kingdom is not a place on the earth, it’s not a homeland you can journey to.  It’s a kingdom that comes upon us, that catches us by surprise.  Jesus’ teaching career begins with his appearance, as if from nowhere, announcing that “the Kingdom of God has come near.”  His parables point to the unexpected signs of the kingdom in everyday happenings and ordinary things.   And today we hear the surprising news that this kingdom is given to us, and that having it, we have nothing to fear.  God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom is the promise of a treasure more worthwhile than the things we thought were valuable, an invisible treasure nothing on earth can take away.  

These words rang true for the disciples of Jesus because he said them.  And that was perhaps the most surprising thing of all.  All their lives they had heard about the power and the goodness of God.  All their lives they had heard about the Spirit of God that anointed the prophets, putting words of truth in their mouths and power to heal in their hands.  All their lives they had heard how God had promised a homeland to his people, a place where they could dwell in safety and plenty, where he himself would be their shepherd and their righteous king.   

And they may have believed in the old stories; they may have hoped and prayed fervently for such things to be revealed in their own day.  But they probably didn’t expect that they actually would.  They didn’t expect that they would have first-hand experience of the presence of God and the power of the Spirit.  They didn’t expect to be called irresistibly away from their homes and their former occupations to be sent wandering through the towns and the villages on a mission to heal and forgive.  They didn’t expect to find that when they did, they did not go hungry, but their needs were all supplied.  The disciples of Jesus didn’t expect to see lives transformed, the broken fragments of society made whole, or to see and to know, in a land seething with violence and oppression, the peace and justice of the Kingdom of God.  And they certainly didn’t expect that all this could flow from one person, a person like them, a carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee. 

When I had my dream of a little place in the country, it was, at the most basic level, a dream of peace.  It was a dream of building a private little homeland, where I could be safe.  Surrounded by people I know and trust, and supplying my own needs, I could live in minimal dependence on the world of stock market bubbles and nuclear meltdowns, Mexican drug gangs and government surveillance.  But instead I ended up here, with all of you, squarely planted in the middle of that world.   I ended up giving my life, not to building myself a separate little homeland of safety and peace, but to our shared project of showing the turbulent world the kingdom that God is building there. 

My job here may look at times like it’s about building up our institution, so it’s stable and secure.  But my real work is to take risks, to encourage us all to take the risks, of receiving the gift of God that is Jesus Christ.  It’s a gift that we receive on behalf of the whole world, and that is a risky proposition, because it’s a gift the world isn’t sure it wants to have.  We’re not so sure we want it ourselves, when hear things like, “sell your possessions, and give alms.”   This is not the charter for our Rummage Sale, but words that put us at risk, the risk of admitting that all we can really count on is our relationships, and no one is a stranger in the kingdom.  

The world remains deeply ambivalent about such words, unsure whether Jesus is the master of the house or a thief come to break in and steal the things we prize.  That is why it is mostly content to leave him where it saw him last, hanging on the cross.  But we persist in praying for the kingdom that is still to come.  We insist on acting as if Jesus has a future.  And that means staying awake, of being alert and on the lookout for the unexpected.  It means remaining hopeful, not just of finding our own private homeland of safety and peace, but of meeting a person, the truly human being.  He may come at midnight, or just before dawn, like the master of the house returning from a wedding feast, or like a thief coming to break in, but either way, the point is to be ready, because we won’t want to miss him when he comes.

Good questions

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15

Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

What is the purpose of religion, anyway?  Where is this God we are always talking about?  How do we know that God cares about us?  And how do we go to where God is?  How can we get what God has to give?  What does God want us to do?

This is a line of questioning that the world in which we live has pretty much abandoned.  It has decided that there are other, more pressing problems, problems mostly having to do with money and the things that money will buy.  Next month, the citizens of the United States of America will choose between candidates for President.  And the nominees of the two most powerful parties tell us that we face a fateful choice, between two fundamentally different approaches to the nation’s problems.  But the truth is that they agree perfectly on many of the most fundamental things.  They may differ as to who is entitled to more money, and who should be content with less.  They may disagree about how much money the government should take, or how much it should spend, but neither would think for a moment to publicly question the assumption that the whole purpose of our life in society, insofar as we can talk anymore about any shared and universal values, is to get money.

But these politicians aren’t working in a vacuum.  They are speaking on our behalf, and nobody challenges them to speak or think differently, because they are only saying what leaders in business, in the media, in academia, and the arts, and more than a few leaders in religion have also said.  There is really only one place left in society where you can consistently find a different worldview, one that proceeds on the basis of an entirely different set of assumptions, and that is here.  In a church, or a synagogue, a mosque, or an ashram.  We arrive here every Sunday, thoroughly conditioned by the values of a materialistic society, and if it were left up to us, we might just come together and sing some pretty songs, and hear some positive uplifting words that help us relax a little and feel a touch of grace.  And we would draw strength from one another to go out of here to resume our pursuit of money and the things that money can buy. 

But instead we do something kind of strange.  We invite a visitor into our midst every week and we listen to his voice.  It is sometimes comforting, but often it is disturbing.  It keeps us unsettled and unsure of ourselves.  It keeps us wondering if there isn’t something else going on in the world, something nobody is talking about, but that we really should be paying attention to.  We don’t always like what that voice says, but we take turns being its mouthpiece and when we’ve done speaking we say “the Word of the Lord,” and everyone says “Thanks be to God!” whether they feel like it or not.

This morning as we listen to this voice we hear it asking difficult questions, the kinds of questions with which I began my sermon.  They are the kind of questions that we are not supposed to ask, either because we’ve accepted the popular premise that God is irrelevant, or because we’ve identified as religious, which popularly means we’re not supposed to entertain any doubts.  But the readings raise a lot of doubts.  Job says, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling.”  He describes himself as like a man blundering about in a pitch-black night or a dense fog.  He turns this way and that, but God is nowhere to be found.  And at the same time Job senses that God sees him, naked and alone, and that thought brings terror, and the longing to be covered and to hide the darkness.

The Letter to the Hebrews says the word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword, cutting through all pretense and ambivalence and laying the human heart open to the eyes of the one with whom all must ultimately settle accounts.  And that must be what it was like for that nice fellow in the Gospel of Mark, the one who spoke to Jesus so politely and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life.  You can see his enthusiasm mounting as Jesus rattles off the commandments, and he says, “I have kept them all since I was young.”  But then Jesus, looking at him with that long, loving, penetrating gaze, speaks the word that sends him away crushed: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

Eternal life is not another possession to be added to our hoard.  It isn’t something Jesus can just pass on to us, like a family heirloom.  He prefers to talk about it as a space you have to enter.  You have to leave behind the place where you are.  You have to leave everything you have there, and move over into another place, the kingdom of God.  From the outside, it doesn’t look like anything.  Most people don’t even believe that it’s real.  But from the inside, it is the so-called “real world,” the world of money and the things that money can buy, that seems like a strange, surreal dream.  It’s not that that world is bad—actually it was all made by God, who loves it.  It just doesn’t mean what we think it does, and the things in it that we think matter the most really don’t matter very much at all. 

The church is that funny place in that world where the kingdom of God keeps showing up as a topic of conversation.  It doesn’t mean we’ve moved there.  Even in the church we care a little more than we ought to about money and the things that money can buy.  But we keep inviting the living word of God into our midst, to cut through our cravings and our confusion, to lay us open to deeper inspection.   We ask for eternal life for ourselves, and the incarnate word points us toward our neighbor who is poor.  But even though we can’t avoid the little problem of our disobedience, we keep holding open the questions that the world keeps wanting to close once and for all.

 And we also make a very big deal about things that the world considers worthless, things that speak to us of the goodness that is God’s alone—some water and oil on a baby’s head; prayers for peace, for the sick and the dead; a morsel of bread and a sip of wine.  Week by week, year by year, we carry on our conversation about the hard questions, we share our little worthless things, in community, and by-and-by something strange and kind of wonderful can happen.  Those hard, possibly irrelevant questions—Where is God?  Does God love us?  How do we get to where God is?  How can we receive what God has to give?  What does God want to do?—by some kind of economics that world can’t begin to understand, these questions start to find their own answers. 

They are answers that are not given so much as they are lived.  Maybe they come down from above, and maybe they come out from within, and maybe it’s a little bit of both, and the best thing about them is that they take us deeper into the questions, so that the questions themselves overflow with grace, like water from an inexhaustible spring.