You can't eat salt

Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12)
1 Corinthians 2:1-12, (13-16)
Matthew 5:13-20
Psalm 112:1-9, (10)

My science teacher in middle school used to take Wednesday off.  He would sit at his desk with his feet up and let us students use the class period to read, any book we wished, and one of us would bring in popcorn for the rest to snack on.  When my turn came to provide the snack, I spent some time on Tuesday night popping corn on the top of the stove, and as each batch was finished, I’d empty it into a large paper grocery bag.  Then I would add a little melted butter and some salt.  And I would close the bag and shake it a few times, to mix everything thoroughly, and add a little more butter, and a little more salt.

I’d never made such a large quantity of popcorn before, and I guess I misjudged how much salt it would take to properly season it.  Because the next day, after I’d passed my big bag around the science room and everyone had scooped out a pile onto a paper towel, I served some out for myself.  And when I put that first handful into my mouth, it was so salty I could hardly keep myself from spitting it out again.  I thought maybe it was just because mine came from the bottom of the bag, but a quick glance around the room showed that no one was eating it, and there were still a lot of popcorn on the paper towels.    My pride wouldn’t let me admit that I’d brought inedible popcorn to science class, so I kept munching away until I couldn’t force myself to take another kernel, and I still carry in my body the memory of the strange, headache-y, queasy feeling of eating far too much salt.

Salt is not food.  It enhances the flavors of food.  It keeps it from spoiling.  It is absolutely necessary for life, but by itself it is useless.  You can’t eat salt.   We ought to bear this in mind when we hear Jesus say to his disciples, “you are the salt of the earth.”  It is the same message in that other saying, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.”  It is the message that William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, summarized when he said, “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

Sometimes the church has acted as if the world existed for its benefit, and has bent worldly wealth and power to service of church leaders and institutions.  At other times we have tried to sever the connection entirely, and create a self-enclosed society, only concerned with its own other-worldly purposes, disinterested and unperturbed by the tensions and upheavals outside her sanctuaries.   But these sayings of Jesus make it plain that if we are going to be the renewed people of God that he sought to give birth to, then the rest of the world has to be at the very heart of who we are.  We are to dissolve into it, to transform it into something truly nourishing and delicious.  We are to light it up, so that its own true beauty and color and full dimensions can be seen. 

The paradox that we have to live with is that the world doesn’t necessarily want the salt or the light of the Gospel.  Remember that these sayings in Matthew come right after the part where Jesus says “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and utter all manner of evil against you on my account.”  And living for the sake of people who don’t see any benefit in what you have to offer is an uncomfortable position to be in.  So sometimes we make a case for ourselves in human terms.  We’ll justify our existence by claiming that we “transform lives,” and point to our members who have kicked the bottle, or worked out their marital problems, or gotten good jobs since they started coming to church.   Or we’ll talk about how we inspire social action that improves our communities, and point out our involvement in distributing food to the poor, or housing the homeless. 

But as important as these things are, trying to justify ourselves in these terms can obscure the heart of what we are about.  It conceals the truth that we have been given a vision of personal transformation that goes far beyond helping people get back to “normal” as social convention defines it.  It is to be silent about the deeper kind of social action, a new solidarity that heals the root structures of rivalry, indifference, and suspicion in human relations.       

We’re running up against this problem now as we organize for an event that we’re calling the Big Night Out.  This effort involves reaching out in a way that we haven’t before to people around Petaluma--friends, and friends of friends, and even complete strangers.  And we are inviting them to a charity event to raise funds for a good cause called St. John’s Episcopal Church.  As we do this, we are appealing to them by describing the benefits we provide, in terms we think they can understand.  We are talking to them about the restoration of this beautiful building, with its architectural distinction that lends so much character and value to the historic downtown area.  We are talking about our long relationship with COTS, which provides services to those who have lost their homes, or are in danger of losing them, and how we are sharing a quarter of the funds that we raise to support that work. 

And I think that this is a sensible approach to take.  But it is also important for us to be conscious of what it is we’re not saying.  It’s not that we’re inviting people to this event under false pretenses.  Its just that we don’t really expect them to understand.  We don’t know how to talk to them about what really makes St. John’s tick, or what value it really has to the community, because there is no way to do it without using the language of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  And that very thing that we are reticent about is the taste of the salt, without which it is not good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.  But we’re afraid that if we try to explain ourselves to people on those terms they will immediately stop listening, because they’ll think that we are “religious,” that outmoded and incomprehensible thing, and some hidden agenda to brainwash them and entice them into joining our cult.

It’s a quandary, and I have no better response to it than one I found last week in a little pamphlet put out by the Taizé community in France, which is the inspiration for our monthly service of chant and silence here at St. John’s: 

“But if the salt were to lose its saltiness…

It must be recognized that we Christians often obscure [the] message of Christ…

We are at a point in history when we need to revitalize this message of love and peace.  Will we do all we can so that, freed of misunderstandings, it can shine out in its original simplicity?  Can we, without imposing anything, journey alongside those who do not share our faith but who are searching for the truth with all their heart?

In our attempt to create new forms of solidarity and open up new ways of trust, there are, and there always will be trials.  At times they may seem to be overwhelming.  So what then should we do?  Is not our response to personal trials, and to those which other people endure, to love still more?”

We are reaching the point in the renewal of this congregation where we are starting to understand that we have been called together to do something for our neighbors.  But to find what that is, we have no choice but to meet them where they are.  And we are looking not so much for people we can help, as for conversation partners.  We are seeking not so much an effective rhetoric of persuasion, as a common language in which to begin to understand each other, and share our wonder and anguish about the things that matter most.  And we are waiting on the power of the Spirit to do what we can never accomplish by ourselves, to open minds, to soften hearts, to take down walls, to heal, and salt, and light our world.

From production to harvest

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

When I was farming, the work I liked best was the work of production; which is to say, the kinds of things people tend to think of when they think of farming—plowing, planting, watering, weeding, that labor where the focus is on the fertility of the soil and the growth and health of the crops.  Maybe it’s just because I’m an introvert, but I loved the solitary and contemplative quality of that work, the long hours alone on the tractor, the still, early mornings walking through the fields, opening and closing irrigation valves.  But inevitably, there came a turning point where the work would change, where the focus would be on sorting and weighing and packing and storing.  The attention of the farm would turn outward, to seek buyers, and negotiate prices, and schedule deliveries. 

That turning point was the harvest, when the crop, that was the fulfillment and culmination of all the months-long work of production, became the starting point for a whole new kind of work.  The harvest is what connected our needs with the needs of the city.  It was where the farm met the world of commerce, and the market that supplied it with all the things that it couldn’t produce for itself—seeds, fertilizers, tractor parts, diesel fuel.  The sale of the harvested crop is how we got the capital for a new cycle of production.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus sets his face for Jerusalem, and the climax of his mission.  He appoints seventy disciples to go, two by two, before him, to test the readiness of the people for the proclamation and demonstration of the kingdom of God.  And he impresses upon them the importance of the challenging work they are about to do, by likening it to the harvest.  “The harvest is plentiful,” he says, but the laborers are few.”  The work that Jesus does— his exorcisms and healings, his teaching of repentance and forgiveness and renewal, his invitation to outcasts and sinners to feast at the table of the kingdom—the work that he appoints these disciples to help to carry out, is a culmination and a fulfillment.   It is the harvest of all that Israel has learned about the authority and the wisdom and the justice, and goodness and compassion of God.

But the harvest to which Jesus sends the Seventy is also something new.  It is not just a turning point in their lives or even in the history of Israel--it is a turning point in the work of God.  It is God’s harvest.  “Pray to the Lord of the harvest,” says Jesus, “to send laborers into his harvest.”  It is the beginning of something new, so it requires laborers who are willing to try a new way of working that forms a new kind of community.  They are to travel empty-handed and depend on generosity of others.  They are to come as those who offer peace, who trust in the power of peace to turn strangers into friends.  They are to rely on the name of Jesus, and on the nearness of the kingdom of God.

And to show how profound this turning point is, what radically-new kinds of relationships will be called for, how the conventional wisdom about what it means to be God’s people must be discarded; Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem.  But when he gets there, the labor of the harvest will fall entirely on him.  It will get more and more concentrated and focused and intense until at last it is exhausted in the helplessness of the cross.    The body of Jesus, like a seed, will be laid in the tomb.  And it is there, where all the work of human production is swallowed up in the abyss of silence and stillness that is God, that the full abundance of the harvest will begin to be revealed.

I always knew, when I was farming, that the crops that we grew were for feeding people, but that remained kind of abstract for me as long as we were chiefly selling to restaurants and wholesale distributors.  I would walk down to the fields in pitch darkness and take boxes of produce from the refrigerator and load them on a flatbed truck and drive to San Francisco, and stack them at back doors and loading docks at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning.  But then we started doing more and more retail sales at farmers’ markets.  It was there that I got to see people’s faces light up when they saw the banner with the name of our farm.  I got to hear their murmurs of delight at the variety of textures and colors of the lettuces and potatoes.  They would ask questions about how to prepare the food, and tell me about who was coming to dinner, and I started to truly understand how the harvest of the farm was shared with the world, how it passed into the hands of strangers to become the stuff of family and community, far from the fields where it grew.

The harvest of the gospel spread in the 1^st Century world, where new urban communities were forming, made up of a cosmopolitan, highly mobile people, dislocated from their roots in the tribe and on the land.  They were people hungry for a deeper encounter with God than was offered by the smorgasbord of pagan cults and exotic mystery religions.   They were drawn to the religion of the Jews, to its moral seriousness and curious mix of mythic profundity and historical realism.  But they required a new way of being Israel, one that they could share with fellow citizens of this strange and unsettling new world.  And they found that way through the Apostles of Jesus the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, and the story of his life, and his cross and resurrection.  It was a story that awakened in them a spirit of faith, reverence, and devotion, and the power to lay aside old prejudices and superstitions and to live together in loving service to others, in a manner such as they had ever known before. 

And this context explains why Paul is so adamant that the gentiles in the church in Galatia should not undergo a formal conversion to Judaism.  It would be as if there were a field full of ripe grain, and you drove into it and started to plow.   Still, every generation of Christians seems to need to remember for itself not to keep toiling at the work of production when it’s time to bring in the harvest.  We still make the law of love a religion of rules, so we can tell for ourselves who’s in and who’s out.  We still seem to think that the Christian people are a tribe, with a homeland to defend, and enemies to vanquish.  We still want a God high above, whom we’ll meet when we’re dead, and not one who seeks us and speaks to us every moment, as close as breath, as plain as bread. 

But there’s no way to go back and fix our mistakes, and there’s no time to waste on regret, because the fields are still ripe with a plentiful harvest, and laborers are still far too few.  If you have a taste for the good things of the earth, and hate to see them go to waste; if you know abundance when you see it; if you desire nothing more than to share the gifts of God, and to celebrate with friends and strangers in the peace of the kingdom; then the Lord of the harvest still has a job for you.

The political is personal

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17
Psalm 127

Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

On Wednesday morning I watched a few video clips of election-night victory speeches, and speeches conceding defeat.  And the one that really moved me was given by Tammy Baldwin, the congressional representative from Madison, Wisconsin who became the first openly-gay person elected to the United States Senate.  I have two brothers who live in Madison, and I called one of them, my younger brother Gareth, to congratulate him on the historic moment.  And he thanked me and said, “Yeah, it’s really great.  But I have a hard time seeing it from the whole historic-achievement angle.  To me Tammy is that lady whose partner used to be on my softball team.” 

I’m reminded of that conversation this morning because the readings today tell us that while it may be true, as was popularly said in the 1960s and their aftermath, that the personal is political, the reverse is also true.   The political is personal.  Take the story of the extraordinary loyalty and friendship between Naomi, and Ruth, the wife of her deceased son.  Naomi and her husband seek refuge in Moab during a famine in Judah and her sons marry Moabite women.  Naomi’s husband dies, and then her sons die, and Naomi decides to return home, where the famine is ended.  She tries to leave her daughters-in-law behind, but Ruth refuses to stay or to look for another husband among the Moabites, and so the two of them go together, back to Naomi’s home town of Bethlehem.  The faithfulness of Ruth and the wiliness of Naomi enable them together to overcome loss and migration and economic insecurity, and at the end of the story we learn, almost as an afterthought, that this foreigner Ruth is the grandmother of the greatest of Israel’s kings.

In the story of Naomi and Ruth we see something of the vulnerability of widows in a patriarchal society like ancient Israel.  If Ruth had not had Naomi to guide her to the bed of her kinsman Boaz, and if Naomi had not had the youth and beauty of Ruth as an asset, things might have turned out much worse for them.  Indeed, in the Books of Moses “widows and orphans” appear again and again as a kind of shorthand for the most economically and socially precarious members of the community.  The very heart of the Torah, the very essence of the righteousness that is the Hebrews special vocation among the nations of the earth, and the true measure of their holiness that is like the holiness of their God, is that they care for widows and orphans.

Jesus has this tradition in mind when he walks into Herod the Great’s vast gold-plated shopping mall of a temple and starts turning over tables and knocking down chairs, calling it a “den of robbers.”  He is not interested in the religious rituals that are going on in the temple.  Its grandiose architecture doesn’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know about God.  This wonder of the ancient world doesn’t fill him with nationalistic pride in the power of Israel and its place among the nations.  He’s there to meet the people, to see for himself what is happening to them. 

When we catch up with him today he has been three days in the temple, teaching the crowd, refuting the priests and the scribes, parrying their verbal attacks, evading their rhetorical traps, exposing their hypocrisies, and now he is done.  He has shut up all his critics, and now he is making ready to leave the temple for the last time.  And his last stop is at the treasury.  A lot of words have been said but they really all come down to this--“All of these splendid buildings and ceremonial pageantry, all of the mountains of donated money and heaps of sacrificed animals, all of these priests and scribes living large on the name of the God of Israel, but the only person who really sacrificed, the only person who really gave everything for that God, was this little old lady.  Oh, and by the way, look at how little she had left to give.”

The Episcopal Church, and the church in general, has been the site of a bitter struggle in the last few decades, a struggle that has affected this congregation in a personal way.  Whatever other kind of struggle it has been, theological, moral, or spiritual, it is also political.  The main flash points have been the personal politics set in motion by the social movements of the 1960s—questions about women’s rights, and reproductive choice, and human sexuality.  For over a generation, the church has been consumed with battles over these issues.  And it has carried the fight into the public square, to the point that these battles have come to define the church, and the Christian faith, in the minds of our people.  

 But the general election last week gave a pretty good indication that the United States is moving on.  It’s not that the battles are over.  And it’s not that there aren’t still real moral dilemmas to hash out, or that electoral might makes right.  But it seems clear that for most Americans, and especially for the younger generations that are our nation’s future, sexual politics are no longer a compelling issue.  And I think this is also true for the Episcopal Church.  It took a generation.  There is still work to be done, especially the hard work of healing the battle-wounds.  Our church still encompasses a diversity of viewpoints on all kinds of political and moral issues, and that’s a good thing.  But we’re also ready to move on. 

We’re starting to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and look around at what’s happened to our churches during the generation we spent fighting about sex.  And while we’re at it, we’re asking what’s been happening to our neighborhoods?  And what’s happening to our schools, and our jobs?  What’s happening to the earth? What’s happening to the widows and the orphans? 

When Father Norm Cram and Betty and Joe Petrillo and some other folks decided in 2007 to continue the life of St. John’s Episcopal Church, and to fight to regain the property of this parish, it was a personal decision, but it was also a political one.  It was a campaign in the church’s long war over sexual politics.  But it was more than that.  We know and are proud of that story.  We always will be.  But we also need to move on. 

We need to start to put the renewal of St. John’s in the context of another political decision, one that was also deeply personal.  It’s a story that began at the Washington Hotel in 1856, when a group of people who were engaged in founding a new community on the banks of the Petaluma River, came together with the Book of Common Prayer in their hands.  They decided that the public life of this new town should be formed by the public worship of the Episcopal Church.  It’s a story that continued with the decision, a couple of years later, to purchase some land on this corner of 5^th and C, and to give that public worship a permanent address, a home in the neighborhood.  It’s a story that includes the 1890 decision to build this building, and the 1940s decision to tear down the old guild hall over there and the rectory over there and build the building that stands there now.    

Those decisions were political.  Underlying each of them was a vision not just for St. John’s Episcopal Church, but for Petaluma.  They were made with a sense for the way our particular take on the gospel of Jesus Christ forms people for life in community, and that it is something that needs to be shared.  So what is our vision for Petaluma now?  What might we contribute to the public life around us?  Well, we might remember the politics of Jesus, a politics that is personal.  That is to say, it is about human relationships and human needs.  It will be about breaking through ideological divisions and fostering new networks of common interest and mutual belonging.  It begins with simple questions—“What is going on in our neighborhood?  Who lives here?  Where do they work?  What do they need?  Where is new life stirring?  What is passing away?”  And maybe most important questions are, “How will we find out?” and “How do I talk to a stranger?” 

Outside religion

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39 

One of the things I hear a lot in my profession is some version of the statement: “I don’t come to church because I experience God in nature.”  And I’m not the only one who hears this--I was at an interfaith gathering of clergy recently, and one of the participants was talking about a prospective new member of her congregation, one of those most rare and highly prized of creatures, a young male who comes to church.  She told us that during a recent conversation with him he’d been explaining his resistance to getting more involved and used the “I find God in nature” line—in this case while scuba diving.  There was an outburst of groans and shaking of heads around the circle.  “How unique!” cried out another pastor sarcastically, “I’ve never heard that before.”

I knew how she felt, but I also wondered to myself if there might be some better way to respond.  Because the truth is, nature is a good place to find God.  Many of my own most profound experiences of holiness have come outside; outside the artificially-lit, socially-constructed human world.  Haven’t we all had our moments of awe at the beauty and intricacy of the wild creatures, the round of the seasons, the grandeur of the mountains, the sea, or the sky?  Haven’t they spoken to us of a greater wholeness, a majestic presence to which we are in some way related?  So why belittle those who testify to the power of such experiences to move them to reverence?  It seems to me that as religious men and women in a secular age we ought to be celebrating transcendence wherever it shows up in people’s lives.  In a time when the human race casts a long shadow over the future of the earth, we ought to be affirming the sacred meaning and value of our connection with nature.

And if we feel that such moments of solitary communion do not make for a complete religion, we ought to be able to do better than to just get grumpy.  We ought to be able to begin a conversation on the common ground of our own experiences of finding God outside. Maybe we could ask people to tell us what those moments have taught them and how they inform the way they live every day.  Maybe we could give an account of what we have learned from them, and how they fit into a larger pattern of religious faith and ethics and practice.  It may not always work, but it seems worth a try.

Because I have a hunch that even the most confirmed nature mystic has found from time to time that right at the heart of the experience of the magnificent sunset or the thundering waterfall is a uniquely sharp kind of loneliness.  In part it is the loneliness of realizing that there is no way to communicate the experience to others.  Any words you could say, or picture you could draw, or photograph you could take would be inadequate to convey what you perceived at that moment, even to a lover or an intimate friend.  And there is also the loneliness of realizing how out of accord our everyday lives are with the harmonious and sacred order of God’s creation.  We come back from that day-hike or that vacation in peaceful natural surroundings and find ourselves in the midst of noise, waste, haste, confusion, competition, and struggle.     

You don’t have to have an overly romantic and idealized view of nature, or an overly jaded view of human society to recognize that things are failing to connect up in some very important ways.  And that is one way of explaining what biblical religion is about.   Because the bible is very clear that the God who orders heaven and earth in beauty and harmony, and the God who acts in history to liberate, to redeem and restore humanity are the same God. 

That is what the passage we read from Isaiah today is arguing.  “Have you not known?” the prophet says, “Have you not heard?”  It is God “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in.”  It is God “who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”  It is God who numbers the stars and calls them by name, and it is God who gives “power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.” God is the creator and sustainer of humankind and does so along with, and through, the goodness of the natural order, which testifies to his wisdom and power.

If human society does not reflect the harmony of God’s creation, if the goods of the earth are not shared equally but are hoarded by some and denied to others, if carelessness and greed are making a world that is violent and ugly, toxic to life and menacing to the future, it can only be in the spirit of rebellion against God.  The harsh language of the bible that is so distasteful to our contemporary ears, and leads so many people to dismiss it as the work of weird fanatics, comes out of grief, horror, and anger at that rebellion and the destruction it has caused.  The bible does not let us rest easy about the consequences of a life out of harmony with God’s work and God’s will.  But it never despairs.  It never loses faith in God’s purpose for us, the purpose that was there at the beginning.  And it never loses hope that God is able, that God is active, that God is sending another spirit to heal the spirit of rebellion in our souls and recreate us, a spirit of truth, of wisdom, of holiness and peace.

The New Testament is the good news about that Spirit, as it breaks forth into the human world in the person of Jesus Christ.  We have been reading in the Gospel of Mark about the first day of his public ministry.   It was a Sabbath day, the day of the completion of creation, and he began it at the synagogue, teaching with authority and casting out an unclean spirit.  In the Jewish reckoning of time the day ends at sundown, and immediately when the Sabbath is over the residents of Capernaum go to work, bringing the sick and the demon-haunted to Jesus to be healed. 

We don’t learn when he finally goes to sleep, but he is up again in the darkness long before dawn.  He goes out alone to a deserted place, where we can imagine him standing and gazing up into the heavens and drinking in the immensity of the universe.  We can imagine him listening to the silent music of the stars and feeling his whole being vibrate with the same song.  We can imagine his heart uniting with them in joy and praise and love for the creator of all this wondrous beauty.  And in this moment he renews his will to go out and to preach to as many people as he possibly can that the same creator is coming now to act in their lives.   He knows himself again full of the Spirit of the one he loves as Father, and he steels his resolve to confront the spirit that condemns and excludes and dominates, that fears and hates, wherever it may be at work.

In Jesus we see that the solitary encounter with God in nature has the purpose of sending us back to the human community, to find God there.  That is where our real work is.  It is there that the language of religious tradition helps us make meaning of our private moments of religious experience (which are, after all, only moments).  Religious practice extends the influence of these experiences into the choices we make and the actions we take day after day after day.    The common ground of scripture, of liturgy, of applied ethics and mutual concern, gives us a starting point for community.  It gives us a place to stand together, and a place to hold each other accountable for what it is we claim to have learned about God when we went scuba diving, or backpacking, or made that spiritual retreat.  In place of a lonely epiphany that cannot be communicated, religion gives us the proclamation of the Gospel, the shared experience of God’s love for us all.