Homeland security

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
Psalm 14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

With the end of the Soviet Union, on Christmas Day, 1991, many in the world heaved a sigh of relief.   Here in the United States, it felt as though a great threat had been lifted, and there was hope that a new, peaceful, world might emerge.  The internet and the globalization of finance and commerce would tie everyone together, and we were going to lead the way.  Other nations would look to our expertise in business and technology; they would adopt our democratic institutions and norms.   Our military would intervene here and there as needed, to reign in the occasional dictator who got too big for his britches, or restore order where civil conflict raged out of control.  But we would have no rivals.  Here in North America, surrounded as always by our oceans, and friendly neighbors newly integrated with us into a single market, we would prosper and live without fear, at least where foreign enemies were concerned. 

This was the dream that came to an end on September 11^th, 2001.  On that day a new word rose the top of the lexicon of American political speech, the word “homeland.” Though the word itself wasn’t new, national leaders started saying it frequently, and using it in a different kind of way.  And every time we heard it, it was a reminder of the fear of that terrifying day.  Because even if we did not lose friends or family members on September 11, many of us lost something else.  We lost the belief that massive political violence against innocent civilians was something that could only happen far away.  Even those of us who lived relatively secure lives, and generally felt protected in our homes, and workplaces, and the streets of our towns, lost our sense of invulnerability.  

I was one of those people.  I was eating breakfast in the kitchen of the apartment I had just moved into with Meg in Emeryville, when the radio said that hijacked planes had hit the Towers and the Pentagon.  And I felt an great sense of dread.  I didn’t know what it would mean for the future, but I knew that it wouldn’t be good.  Like someone in a dream, I put my tools in the truck and drove off to a gardening job, but at lunch I had to quit and go home with flu-like symptoms.  The news had literally made me sick. 

The human body and spirit are resilient, and I got better in a couple of days.  But it’s hard to say that collectively we’ve made a full recovery.  After fifteen years of “War on Terror”, we still feel vulnerable than ever, and it’s clear that Muslim extremism is not the only threat: economic anemia, simmering racial tension, and egregious inequality, rampant gun violence, and the unmistakable onset of climate change call us to profound soul-searching about what it really takes to make a homeland, let alone a world, that is truly secure.

It’s a spiritual crisis, not unlike the one that Jeremiah talked about in the 7^th century BCE.  The mighty Assyrian Empire had long ago dismembered the northern kingdom of Israel, but the southern kingdom of Judah remained defiant.  Although the Assyrian army invaded Judah twice, it failed both times to capture Jerusalem.   And then, quite unexpectedly, over a few short years in the 620s and 610s, the power of Assyria melted away.  Suddenly Judah enjoyed a degree of national independence it had not known for over a hundred years.  Her kings took back some territory, the priests and scribes made some religious reforms, and the court prophets began to say that the tide of history had turned, that Israel’s God was pleased with her again, and the peace and security of the days of David and Solomon would return.

But Jeremiah saw something different.  He saw that the modest religious reforms had not brought the nation back to its covenant with God.  They did not cease practices, like human sacrifice, derived from foreign cults.  He saw that the people did not carry out the social justice commanded in the law.  Jeremiah cried out in pain and anger at the apostasy of Judah, and said it was the pain and the anger of God.  Far from thinking that God was about to restore Israel’s greatness, he saw a wave of destruction coming from the north.   

Jeremiah lamented for his poor people, because God had already made a judgment against them that could not be revoked.  And in Jeremiah’s vision, the consequence of Judah’s evil doings would be worse than military defeat.  It will be worse than the loss of the homeland.  “I looked on the earth,” he says, “and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.”  This is a vision of the undoing of the creation of the world.

History proved Jeremiah right about destruction from the north.  A new empire rose out of the ruins of Assyria, and in a few short years that empire would take Jerusalem, destroy the temple of Solomon, and carry the last king of David’s line away in chains to Babylon.  And in the loss and trauma of exile the prophets and sages of Israel began to re-think what it would mean to come home.  Some Jews would indeed eventually go back and repair the walls of the holy city, and build a second temple, bigger than the first.  But the hope of restoring Israel as a national entity would from then on always be in tension with hope of a different kind. 

This new hope sprang from a vision of renewal, not merely of Jerusalem, but of the whole of creation.  Israel began to receive a new vocation for herself, that of leading all humanity home.  Cut off from their land, they found that in repentance and prayer, in justice, compassion, and love they could still take life from the spirit of God.   And in that spirit they found the grace not just to maintain their faith, and survive as a community—they found the source of true security, abundance, and peace.  

  

Every Sunday in church we have an altar call.  It is not an invitation to individuals to come forward and confess their personal sinfulness and need to be saved.   It’s not a celebration of individual repentance and return to the community of God’s elect.  At least, that’s not the main focus.  What we do is invite everyone to come to the altar together.  After we all confess our sinfulness together, we gather at the altar in thanksgiving for what God has done for all of us to bring us home. 

This celebration continues the feasting that Jesus did, when he came to seek the lost sheep of Israel, and sat at table with tax collectors and sinners.  Nowhere in the gospels does it say how many of those sinners changed their ways.  From scattered hints we know that many of them did, but as Jesus himself says, even one is enough to make the angels in heaven rejoice.  And that is what our celebration is about: that God cares enough about that one lost sheep to send Jesus to go and find it.  That one lost coin matters enough to God to light the lamp, and sweep the house, and look under the sofa cushions until she finds it.

Jesus calls us sinners all together for a feast to celebrate the love of that God, and this inclusivity leaves it open for each of us to ask ourselves “am I that one?” “Am I the one for whom Jesus left the other ninety-nine behind to come and find?  Am I the one he is carrying home on his shoulders?”  But it also means we can look at the sinner beside us at the altar rail and wonder, “or is it him?”  “Is she the one?”  That open possibility is what makes this feast a sign of the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like a great net thrown into the sea, that catches every kind of fish, the good and the bad.  It is like a field of wheat, in which someone came and sowed some noxious weeds, and the weeds grew up with the wheat so there was no way to pull them out.  And this makes God’s Kingdom a mixed-up kind of homeland, a place where we have to be vulnerable.  It’s not a place we can hunker down behind the walls of our judgements of others, or an exclusive club, where only the people who think and act and look like us belong.  It’s a place where security and health are gifts of the spirit of repentance and forgiveness, the spirit of always being able to begin again.    

            

On the move, at the door.

2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Friday afternoon at 3:30 I had a rendezvous here at the church with two older guys from Indiana named Ron and Dan.  They drove a twenty-foot box van full of sleeping bags and duffels and bicycle repair equipment into the parking lot behind Cram Hall, and they wore matching t-shirts with a logo that said DeCycles West Coast 2016.  According to the email I got in April requesting to stay overnight at our church, DeCycles (like “disciples”—get it?) is an ecumenical Christian youth program, sponsored by churches, businesses, service organizations and individuals in Indiana, that has been taking teenagers on summer bicycle trips since 1969, and giving them the opportunity to practice kindness, caring, service, and other principles of a Christ-centered life.   This year’s group is riding down the coast from Seattle to Los Angeles and Ron and Dan were the advance men, who go to the overnight site ahead of the pack of riders, to get the lay of the land. 

I showed them the parish hall, the library and the nursery as potential sleeping areas, the kitchen and the bathrooms, the courtyard and the supply closet, and we discussed the deployment of chairs and tables, and dining arrangements, and where to lock up seventy-five bicycles.  They asked me for the passcode for the wireless network, assuring me that only selected adults would be using it.  While I was at it, I gave them my cell phone number, in case anything came up after I left.  We finished the tour, and they’d asked me all the questions they could think of, and no one else had arrived so I invited them to see the church. 

Needless to say, they were greatly impressed, especially with the front door and the stained-glass windows, and Dan kept lamenting that the craft of making such beautiful things seems to be passing away.  We were just coming out, when another, smaller truck pulled up, with the DeCycles logo on the side of the cargo box.  Ron directed the driver to parking lot, and another smiling older man got out, and a woman named Liz with a charming accent I soon found out was Welsh.  This truck was loaded with cooking gear and food.  Liz was in charge of meals, and I led her inside to the kitchen, and when she saw our refrigerator, she practically squealed with delight. 

It was just about this time that the first wave of what would eventually be 60 bicycle riders, aged 13 to 20, and 15 adult staff, all in matching black and white DeCycles West Coast 2016 jerseys, rounded the corner from 5^th street onto C, looking for their vans.  And for the next hour or so I stood around, answering questions, giving directions, solving problems, and watching with amusement as order gradually emerged from chaos.  Kids rolled the serving carts from kitchen down the wheelchair ramp to the food van and brought them back, piled with ice chests.  Someone else found the fans in the chair storage closet and set them up at either end of the hall.  Bowls of trail mix appeared on the coffee hour food table, and on the other table where we serve the drinks, I piled the letters and care packages that the mailman had been dropping off in my office all week. 

At one point Ron had to ask me where the supply closet was again—in all the confusion, he’d forgotten where that was.  One young man asked me if there was Wi-Fi available, and I told him there was, but that only the adults would be using it.  “That’s cool,” he said, as if both the question and the answer were of complete indifference to him.  “It’s like a three-ring circus,” Liz cracked to me at one point, “with no ringmaster,” and I laughed, because she had it about right.   Still, by the time two-thirds or so of the kids pedaled off again to the Petaluma Swim Center for the showers and the pool, and the others rolled out their sleeping bags and lay down for a rest, they’d sorted out who was sleeping where, and how they would lock up the bikes for the night, and what would be for dinner.  And when I dropped by the church yesterday afternoon, there was a window open in the men’s bathroom, and a garbage barrel that is usually in the kitchen in the parish hall—but other than that, there was no sign that they’d ever been here.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of how Jesus sent his twelve disciples out, to heal and cast out demons, and announce the Kingdom of God.  But only Luke tells about a “second wave” of 70 or 72 (the ancient manuscripts differ) whom Jesus sends out later on the same kind of mission.  Luke is also the only one who says that Jesus sent them on ahead, like Ron and Dan, to the places where he himself was about to go.  Luke gives other details about the ministry of Jesus as he makes his way through Galilee and Samaria and Judea that are not found in the other gospels.  A few weeks ago, for instance, we heard about the women, like Mary Magdalene, who went along with the other disciples, and provided for their material needs.  And, unlike Mark and Matthew, Luke ties his episodes loosely together into a single story of continuous and purposeful movement.  They are encounters and teachings that happen on the road to Jerusalem.

Luke’s version also describes a movement in another sense of the word.  All the gospels speak about the twelve men who form the inner circle around Jesus, who are his conversation partners, and foils for his teachings, who do what he tells them, and follow where he goes.  They also speak of a much larger group of followers, known only as “the crowd.”  The size and composition of this group is left undefined, but one has the impression that the crowd shrinks and swells as new people are drawn to Jesus by need or curiosity, and others decide they’ve seen enough, or have better things to do, and drift away.  But only Luke describes a second, larger circle of committed disciples, like the women I referred to a moment ago, or the seventy-two Rons and Dans Jesus sends out in advance of his journey.  If we believe Luke, Jesus was not just drifting, with his little company of twelve, from one random encounter to another, but was methodically and purposefully building a movement.      

This fits with Luke’s over-arching purpose as an evangelist.  He (or she) is also the author of the book of Acts, which tells how this movement continued and spread and became The Church.  When we say “the church” we think of something firmly established, with deep foundations of doctrine and tradition that change only slowly, if they ever change at all.  But experiences like my encounter with the DeCycles, and stories like the one from Luke today, remind us that at its heart the church is less an institution than what it was at the beginning—a movement.  The new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Reverend Michael Curry, is fond of point out this fact, calling us to membership in the “Jesus Movement” as the defining core of who we are. 

Luke says this movement signals the beginning of the end for the powers of evil and death, and the beginning of the new creation of the kingdom of God.  But the movement is not itself the kingdom; rather, it exists to point to it, to spread the news that it is coming near.  This communication cannot take place in a casual encounter on the road—the gospel doesn’t fit on a bumper-sticker or a tri-fold brochure.  Neither does it spread by armies on the march or demonstrations in the streets.  It moves, instead, by the formation of new relationships that begin with a greeting at the door.  The news of the kingdom travels through the world through countless risky overtures of peace, and equally vulnerable responses of hospitality.  Everyone in this room today, from the person who is here for the very first time to the one who’s been here for sixty years, had at one point to walk up to that big arched door that impressed Ron from Indiana so much, and come in, hoping to find the desire for Christ’s peace she carried in her heart in some way reciprocated.  And I hope it was, and is, and will be, because that’s how we know we’re still part of the Jesus movement.

Sharing the Wealth

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

A few months ago my wife was balancing the checkbook and asked me if I’d remembered to deliver a payment on our pledge to the church, because it hadn’t been cashed yet.  And I had to confess to her that it had gotten lost in my wallet for a couple of weeks, but only a day or two before I’d spotted it there among the receipts and scraps of notepaper, and had turned it in to the Treasurer.  My daughter happened to overhear our conversation and she piped up at that point with a question: “Why do you give money to the church,” she asked—“Aren’t they just going to give it back to you?”  I wish I could tell you that we sat down then and there and had a long conversation about it, because it was a golden opportunity to explore with her what money is about, and what we are doing when we give it away.  But there was something going on that morning that we had to get on to, so I tossed off a quick answer, and to tell you the truth I can’t even remember what I said.

That’s the way it often is with the conversations we have in the church about money.   We know we have to do it, so we set aside a brief period, usually in the fall, to talk about our money and how we use what God has entrusted to us.  But it is not like we take the time to sit down and have a deep conversation about it.  It’s a topic that makes us uncomfortable.  So when we do bring it up, we find it safer not to talk about ourselves.  We don’t really want to talk about our own relationship with money, and how it impacts our other relationships, especially our relationship with God.

So instead, we often talk about the institutional needs of the church instead.  We can talk about the budget, and personnel expenses, about upkeep for the physical plant and the cost of administrative operations.   And what we often end up with is something like a fundraising campaign, not unlike what your favorite public radio station does.  We interrupt our regular religious programming with messages about how important this church is, and all the benefits that come along with membership, and how we can’t keep doing what we’re doing without your financial support.   And all of that is true, as far as it goes, but it can leave out the most important thing, which is to talk not about what the church needs, but about what we need.   If we did that, we’d be continuing a conversation that Jesus started. 

Jesus liked to talk to about money.  He brought it up all the time, when other people thought they were talking about religion.  In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark we hear about a man who came to Jesus to ask him a religious question.  He was a devout man, sincere and respectful, and had been meticulous all his life in keeping the commandments of the law, and yet he saw that all this was not enough.  He perceived the limits of his human life, and imagined that beyond those limits there was fullness of life, without which all he had done was empty.  And hoping there might be just one more thing he needs can still to bring that life within his grasp, he comes and kneels before Jesus.

Jesus’ answer to the man is that he doesn’t need one more thing—he needs fewer.  The life that he seeks is not a thing we can take hold of and add to our store of possessions.  It is not the final rung, on a ladder of individual achievements.  Life in the kingdom of God is something one enters by leaving everything else behind.  Jesus doesn’t judge the man because he is unable to find the way in—he loves him.  But he is also sad for him, because he sees that he depends on his wealth in a way that prevents him from depending on God.  His many possession lead him to believe he possesses himself, and so he cannot let go and trust that he belongs to God.  And just in case we might be thinking that he is speaking only to this man, and his particular case, Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “Children, how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

This is one of those sayings of Jesus that cuts deep, that seem to sever the path of following him from the normal pursuit of human happiness.   And so this section of the gospel ends with Peter, once again, speaking up and saying what is on everyone’s mind.  “We have left everything and followed you,” he says, and we can complete his sentence for him, “so aren’t we, at least, assured of salvation?”  The words of promise and encouragement that Jesus says next seem to me to be the early churches’ answer to that question.    Here is testimony that the call to give up everything for the sake of the gospel is not just a disruptive demand, to break family ties and renounce worldly gain.  It is also an invitation to join a movement.

The decision to follow Jesus is not a retreat into an otherworldly spiritual path, away from the life of everyday community, where people have to work to get by and get along.  It is a choice to enter new relationships, with Jesus and with the others who have put their trust in him.  And in the experience of the disciple of Peter who wrote the Gospel of Mark, shedding their worldly goods did not leave them as beggars wandering the streets, abandoned and alone.  It led them into a painstakingly difficult, but immeasurably rewarding new life, the life of the church. 

The New Testament ideal of the church is a community that suffers persecution with Christ, and joins in his renunciation of privilege, including the privilege of private wealth.  But that suffering and that renunciation make possible an extraordinary solidarity, an abundance of trust in the providence of God and just and intimate belonging to each other.  In the book of Acts and the letters of Paul we see again and again how fragile that solidarity is, how ready the early Christians were to turn back to the familiar security of their own separate property and their conventional gradations of privilege.  But though they acknowledge the instability of the situation, the apostles’ continually insist on the grace of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, to keep the church together. 

It is that grace and that power that enables them to keep Jesus’ own radical ethic of sacrificial generosity and mutual forgiveness.  And it is the experience of unity and love that flows from this shared discipleship, more than any public ministry of good works, more than any sacred ritual or confessional statement, which puts the stamp of the Messiah on their community.  In the same way today, our faith in Christ, expressed as belonging to each other, brings us into the church, not as members of an organization, but as priests of a sacrament.  We share our lives with each other, and so we share in the priesthood of Christ, who shared his life with us.  And this makes our community a sacrament of the Kingdom of abundance and peace, and as with all sacraments this one requires a material substance, which is our money and other tangible gifts we agree to share in common.  

Our giving to the church is essential to the priesthood that we share.  As the parish priest, I have a particular role to play in this, as in other areas in which I stand in for the community.  When I anoint the sick, or give alms to the poor, or commit someone’s body to the earth, I do so in the name of the whole church.  I stand in for the church when I pronounce God’s forgiveness at the general confession, and when I stand at the altar, offering the great prayer of thanksgiving, and breaking the bread on behalf of us all. 

And I like to think that it’s the same when I cash my paycheck.  I don’t excuse myself from our shared priesthood of giving money to the church, but I do have a special relationship to it, because my family and I are the only ones here who depend on it for the food on our table and the clothes on our backs.  But perhaps in this, too, I stand in for the rest of you, for the dependence we all share on the generosity of others, for the need we all have to belong to each other, and supply one another’s needs in the name of Christ, for the desire in all of us to give away everything that holds us back from the life without limit that only comes by the grace of God.