The Patience of a Saint

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

There’s an expression you don’t hear so much anymore that goes, “So-and-so or such-and-such would try the patience of a saint.”  I don’t know who coined that phrase, but it must have been a chaperone at sixth-grade science camp.  That’s how my wife Meg and I spent the first half of last week—chasing 11 and 12 year-olds, trying to keep them in their assigned groups, and move them to their appointed destinations, trying to get them to remember their backpacks, and to wait their turns, and to listen to the naturalists, to stay on the trail, and to go to the bathroom before the next activity was scheduled to begin, to eat the food on their plates, and clear them away when they were done, to separate the garbage from the compostables, and to stop running, stop pushing, stop throwing rocks at the raccoon, to stop talking and go to sleep.

I think I raised my voice at children more in the last week than I have in all my previous years combined.  It gave me no pleasure, but was simply what had to be done.  I daresay that being in loco parentis 23-hours-a-day for seven sixth-grade boys who didn’t know him from Adam, even the proverbial saint would have done the same.  And while I found it useful to let my temper flare from time to time, I only truly lost it once—I was out in the forest with a class who were building lairs for animals with downed wood and other things they found lying around, and when the kids were finished, and had shown the rest what each of their small groups had made, the naturalist told them to dismantle their creations.  A boy named Wyatt decided to carry this order out by smashing his to pieces with a club, and he sent a stick hurtling like a javelin at my head.  Thankfully, it missed me, but not before it scared me enough to yell “Stop that, you idiot!”

I felt badly about that, and probably should have apologized, because aside from that moment, Wyatt wasn’t any more disruptive than many of the other kids on the trip, and was less so than some.  And though it’s tempting to make sweeping judgments about the decline of civilization, I don’t think that I and my friends were all that different when we were in sixth grade.  12-year-old boys can be counted on to make a continuous series of poor decisions.  Left unchecked, they would quickly have turned Alliance Redwoods Camp into a living hell.  So we chaperones had to intervene constantly and forcefully, not merely for the sake of proving our dominance, but on the strength of our moral authority.  Because we had the wisdom of experience and the bigger perspective on the purpose of being there.  We understood what was in their best interest, and what would benefit the larger group, in a way that the children did not.

And we held out the hope, naively perhaps, that if they could set aside their habitual attitude of defiance and disinterest, could restrain their impulse to make foolery of everything, and focus their wandering minds long enough to take in, even just for a minute, what the adults at camp were trying to give them, even the most troublemaking kids might catch a glimpse of that bigger picture.  Perhaps the vastness of the night sky, or the silence of the forest, or the encounter with non-human creatures would make an impact somehow.  Just maybe they would come away from camp with a new appreciation for the world that lies outside the closed doors of their houses and apartments, a world not captured on TV, or in video games, out beyond where the pavement ends.  Maybe they would have a new curiosity about the workings of that world, and their relationship to it, or a new concern about the consequences of their choices for its health and survival.

Maybe, but probably not.  Because, realistically, how much difference can a couple of days make in the life of a child?  There were brief moments with each of the boys in my group when I like to think I met them kindness, understanding, and respect.  But a moment is not a relationship.  It does not go very far toward building a sense of self-worth in a child who is accustomed to neglect or abuse; it will not convince him of the goodness and integrity of the grown-up world, if what he is used to seeing is poverty, oppression, gross materialism, and violence.  And while the methods of crowd control we chaperones used at camp may have been well-intentioned, if you looked at our behavior objectively, it would not have been all that different if its purpose had been to break those children’s spirits, to teach them to be docile and to obey.

I claimed the moral authority to loudly and sternly tell those children what to do, on the premise that as an adult, I have their best interests at heart, and know better than they do what is good for them.  But some of those children already have good reason to know that that’s not always the case.  And all of them, sooner or later, will have to come to terms with the fact that the world of adults is not exactly what it claims to be.  For example, if we honestly evaluated our lives in terms of the values of the Alliance Redwoods Camp, of understanding respect for the ecosystem of which we are a part, and careful stewardship of its future, of courage to take risks, and teamwork to support one another in surmounting new challenges, how well would we really be doing?  When we look around at the world we have made, does it appear that we truly have the big perspective on our purpose for being here?  Can we really say we understand what is in our own best interest, or have chosen what will benefit the whole?      

Today we celebrate with joy that there are men and women who have achieved that perspective, and lived their lives according to that understanding.  We call them “saints” and venerate them, because we recognize that attaining the full maturity of which human beings are capable is not something we can take for granted, but is really quite rare.  We honor the saints for their patience, which is more than merely the capacity to tolerate the exasperating behavior of others.  It is their hope that if we could set aside our habitual defiance and disinterest, and restrain our mockery and cynicism, if we could still our wandering minds and focus on what they are trying to tell us, we also could see what they see and know what they know. 

Their influence endures after their lives are spent, because it does not coerce us to obedience, but awakens us to the subtle allure of life centered in God.  And though the saints hope all things for us, they do not set themselves above us, but choose us for their company.  They do not claim to have earned patience or any other virtues, by their own efforts, but only to have received from God the grace to carry out their appointed tasks.  And very often those tasks are entirely ordinary.  As a matter of fact, the saintliest people I have met in my life have in common an exemplary ordinariness.  To know them is to encounter pure and single-minded devotion not to achieving holiness, or acquiring supernatural gifts, but to being whole-heartedly and transparently themselves.

To know a saint is to see with crystal clarity the utter uniqueness of any human person.  It is also to look into the fathomless depths where all of us are one.  The saints are women and men just like you and I, and in them we see the glory we mistakenly believe to be beyond our reach.  It is the glory that Christ won for us in living the human life of Jesus, Son of Mary of Nazareth, and dying his human death.  His saints hold this glory in trust for us and all humanity, just as adults hold the world in trust for the children.  And the scriptures have a beautiful image for the way it will be when their patience is finally rewarded, and we all enter together into our inheritance.  It is an image of God coming close, embracing us with understanding and compassion, like a father, or a mother, wiping away our tears.  And what could be more ordinary and more universal than that gesture—a parent wiping away the tears of a child? 

 

Rejoice always and again rejoice

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”  Rejoicing is the great theme of Paul’s Letter to the Church in Philippi.  But this is not the forced and superficial rejoicing that pretends that everything is sunshiny and rosy all the time.  It’s not the hollow joy of being in denial about what is difficult in life.  This is a letter from a man in prison, a man who does not know whether his captors will permit him to live or condemn him to die.  But in spite of that, Paul rejoices, because of what he calls “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  

Faith in Christ is that pearl of great price for which Paul declares himself happy to suffer the loss of everything.  But his faith is also a promise, a promise that becoming like Christ—in humility and perseverance, in suffering for the sake of the Gospel, in patient trust in the goodness and the justice of God—even to the point of being like Christ in his death, brings with it the promise of being like Christ in his resurrection.  So Paul rejoices, and while he doesn’t tell the church in Philippi to ignore or avoid the realities of struggle and suffering, he does tell them not to worry about it.

“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice,” writes Paul; “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”  Now I’m like a lot of people in that I tend to worry about things.  Most of them I have no control over whatsoever, but still I dwell on them.  Every once in a while I will add something new to the list of things to worry about, and from time to time I will take something off the list, or at least put it away in the file marked “Not actively worrying about for now.”   But mostly they are the same things that I worry about over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after year. 

It’s a habit, and habits are hard to break, but I have been trying to learn a new habit, and it is exactly the one that Paul recommends to his friends in Philippi.  When I find myself worrying about money, or the prospects for the church, or how I’m doing at my job, about my parents, my brothers, or my wife, about my daughter’s future, or the future of the human race and life on Earth, it makes all the difference in the world if I turn that worry into a prayer.  This immediately shifts my focus from the bad thing I’m afraid of to the good thing I hope for.  It changes the context of the issue from my own weakness and anxiety, to the strength and the peace that are in God.

 

The joy of Paul is confidence in that strength and that peace which surpasses all understanding.  It is also a rejoicing in unity.  Today’s passage begins with a plea to a couple of the women in the congregation at Philippi to work out their differences, and to be “of the same mind in the Lord.”   This also is a recurring theme in the letter.   In fact this is the one thing that Paul asks of the Philippians, something that they can do for him so that the joy that he has in them will be complete—to be of “the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord” with one another.  And again, this unity to which he urges them is not just a sharing in happiness and good fortune.  It is also sharing in suffering and struggle.  The challenges they face together, says Paul, are a gift from God, for in this way they share in the struggle and sufferings of Christ himself. 

Driving back down from Oregon on Thursday, my family and I passed through the fields of Glenn and Colusa Counties, which were teeming with combines, threshing and harvesting rice.  This is the time of year when the long labors of spring and summer bear fruit, and it is also the season to gather in the spiritual harvest of the year, and of years and of lifetimes.  Over the next couple of months the Sunday gospel lessons are teachings from the final week of Jesus’ life.  They are parables and dialogues that ask us with redoubled urgency to consider what, when all is said and done, is of ultimate value.  And this is a season centered on the great Feast of All the Saints, when we rejoice in and hope for God’s harvest of history, with those men and women who, like Paul, counted themselves fortunate to live and die with Christ, and were transformed by him into lights to the world in their generations.   

 

So it is fitting that this is also the time when we observe our annual Stewardship Season at St. John’s.  Because when we talk about Stewardship in the church we are not turning aside from spiritual matters with a wink and a nudge to address the real financial “bottom line” of our life together.  But before the coming of new year at Advent, before we begin preparing again to celebrate the Incarnation of God in Christ, we set aside a season for rejoicing in the Christ that abides and bears fruit in us.  We take time to consider the harvest of blessings that is our life together and to recommit ourselves to this community of saints. 

And if we treat this as more than a perfunctory exercise, it is not without its suffering and struggle, for there are no areas of our lives more fraught with frustration and anxiety, with our moral dilemmas and mortal limitations, than our time and our money.  But while each of us might wrestle in the privacy of our own families and our own consciences with difficult reckonings of how much we have, and what we can afford to spare, and where our gifts are needed most, still we rejoice.  We rejoice because we are of the same mind, making these hard choices together.  We all pray together for God to supply our needs, and for the faith and discernment to make an offering that says something about the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.

This year our Stewardship packets contain a new way to rejoice in our life together in the body of Christ.  In addition to the form where you can estimate your 2015 giving of time, talent, and treasure to St. John’s, you will also have the option of completing what I’ve decided to call a Mission Pledge.  This is a confidential card which you can choose to share with me, or to keep entirely between yourself and God.  Its purpose is for you to identify at least one, and as many as four, areas of your life outside of church that you would like to offer on this altar for the coming year, to be consecrated to Christ’s mission in the world.

It can be something public, your job or some civic or social service work that you do.  Or it can be private, a creative discipline or spiritual practice, a significant relationship or family responsibility.  The communion that Christ renews with you when you kneel at this altar—where in your life do you hope it will bear fruit?  Into which of your efforts and struggles will you invite Christ to enter, to make them part his redeeming work?  Which of your worries would you like to turn into prayers and supplications for strength and peace?  Your Mission Pledge is an invitation to ask and answer these questions.  It is your opportunity to take stock of your spiritual challenges and rejoice in them as precious gifts, and then, uniting with your brothers and sisters at St. John’s in a single act of thanksgiving, to make them known to God.

Holding the world in balance.

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

This morning’s gospel lesson is one of those passages that people who say that every word in the scriptures is to be understood and applied in its plain and literal sense never seem to quote.  Maybe it’s because, like us, they know that, in relative terms they are rich, well-fed, and highly thought-of.  Taken as practical advice for living, these words seem assured to leave us broken, bruised, and naked.  Indeed, by themselves, out of context, they have been shown to be deadly—applied as rules, they have instructed women to stay married and subservient to abusive and controlling drunks; they have told enslaved peoples to submit without revolt to their exploitation.  So while they express the highest moral truth, and absolutely mean what they say, I think I am not off base in saying that these are words of poetry.   And the work of poetry is making connections, making things whole that our ordinary, limited mind has broken apart. 

These words affirm that the imagination of God holds the world in balance.  They tell us that there is always another side to the story we tell ourselves about the lives we are leading and the worlds we inhabit.  These are words that speak to us when times are hard, reminding us that life itself is a gift worth celebrating.   They trouble us when everything seems flush and rosy, reminding us that nothing in this world lasts.  They urge us to see through our anxieties about other people, about how they might mistreat or humiliate us, abuse us or rip us off, and see that they can never deprive us of our freedom to meet them on terms of respect.  When we choose to believe that other people are like us, sharing our weakness and our dignity, we find new possibilities in the experience of what unites us, even with those who are mired in denial. 

This freedom to act on the truth is the nonviolent power that Jesus wielded.  His teachings are not abstract rules from on high, but they have real meaning because they were lived.  He refuses to let his enemies, trapped in inhumanity by their fear and blindness, to define his own course of action and spur him to retaliation in kind.   Grounded in the imagination of God, he keeps offering them the whole truth about himself and them, which is also known by the name of “love.”  

Jesus speaks from the imagination of God and people can hear and see the power of God because they can see and hear him.  Again, it’s like poetry, which is able to sing of the invisible because it breathes with what is sensed and thought and felt.  We do not want to be poor, or grieving, or hungry, we do not want to be struck, or robbed, or defamed.  We are afraid of these things, and of what we imagine what they would be like for us.  But because Jesus spoke these words, and because he lived them, our fear is balanced by a totally new possibility—a joy that is not diminished by other peoples’ injustice.  Because he himself was naked, broke, and bruised, and showed that no one really has the power to destroy us or separate us from God, we have come to trust Him more than our terror of loss or dreams of happiness.  And instead of a dreaming of a place on the right side of a world permanently divided into poor and rich, weeping and laughing, hungry and satisfied, we learn to hope and work and sacrifice for a world of one united people—God’s people. 

I got a call this week from a friend of mine who is the Associate Rector at a large Episcopal Church in a wealthy suburb in the Diocese of California.  His parish had applied for a zoning variance so they could regularly host a vanload of homeless men as part of a rotating shelter program shared with some 15 other congregations in their area.  He was calling me for moral support because these plans had touched off a violent storm of protest in the community.  Neighbors of the church have been sending alarmist emails around town about plunging property values and the imminent prospect of unsupervised mentally-ill drug-addicted sex-offenders wandering their tree-lined streets.  Legal action has been threatened, and the Rector and vestry are weighing whether or not to pull their application.  Incidentally, the same thing happened last year, and they were hoping that emotions might have cooled off enough that they could get it done on the second try, but no such luck. 

It is tempting to see this situation in terms of good guys and villains, loving compassionate Christians vs. hard-hearted elitist haters, and to want to marshal the forces of good for a decisive victory.  But I think the approach that my friend and his church are taking is closer to the New Testament vision of holiness, which is to stay in the painful heart of the conflict.  Members of their congregation have been converted to their need to do this ministry by their experience of serving the clients of this program at other churches and synagogues.  Their imagination has expanded beyond their fears and stereotypes by meeting real homeless people.  Similarly, they have not sought to meet the resistance to their plans with superior force, but to keep opening the door to actual face-to-face encounter with the aggrieved neighbors, looking for the opportunities for actual communication.  This kind of patient, vulnerable, when necessary even suffering, witness has always characterized the truly great saints of the church.  It speaks of hope that is grounded in the imagination of God, that sees beyond the tragedy of human divisions, conflicts, and contradictions to the divine comedy of Christ, the sacrificial victim enthroned above every rule and dominion.

This truth that is love, that sees and speaks the world whole, is the enduring power that orders and sustains the universe.  It is the power that Jesus refers to as “The Kingdom of God.” When the prophet Daniel sees a terrifying vision of monstrous beasts, each more terrible than the last, arising from the sea to dominate the world, he turns to an attendant in the court of heaven who explains: these are the empires of the earth that rise and then fall prey to another, “but the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever—for ever and ever.”   This is the kingdom that already is, already ruling in the lives of those who live not for the praise and worship of empires, but for the glory of God.  But it is also the kingdom that is coming, the kingdom of the Son of Man.  This Son of Man is Everyman, the common representative of what it really means to be human.  But he is also what comes next, the one who shows us what we will be when the imagination of God is enfleshed in us completely, with love, and will, and power.  To follow him is to journey deeply into the fear and longing that are at the heart of the space between ourselves and others.   To trust him is to find there, in those very particular spaces, the wisdom to bring everyone together at last, the revelation of an end to misery and violence and injustice, and the power to do something about it.