Signs of the time

Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56

Last week we welcomed a visitor at our Wednesday noon service, a young woman with numerous piercings, and dyed red streaks in her dark hair.  Her right forearm was in a cast, but you could see the outer edge of the tattoo underneath it.  She remained behind in the church after the service was over, and when the others had gone, we had a chat.  She told me she was visiting friends from out of town, and had walked by St. John’s earlier that morning and seen the service time listed on our sign.  “I haven’t been to the Eucharist since…” she said, trailing off at the end of the sentence as if she couldn’t remember.  I asked if she was an Episcopalian and she said she was, and in fact her a priest.

“My dad and I get along fine,” she said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked, “but I’m kind of allergic to parishes.”  “There are lots of great parishes around,”  she added hastily, and then she told me that she worked as the chaplain to the High School grades at a private Episcopal school.  “Schools are a like whole different world,” she said, “but parishes…” and again she left me to understand what she meant by what she didn’t say. 

This conversation is a pretty good illustration of the generation gap in the Episcopal Church.   With each decade that passes, the number of young Americans who want to be a part of our congregations gets smaller.  Our Wednesday visitor, who is faithful enough to the tradition of her father to work a spiritual guide to youth under the auspices of an Episcopal school, is also “allergic to parishes.”  She desires the Eucharist enough to come to church, but she chooses a tiny mid-week service in a town far from home, where there is no danger of belonging, or even being recognized.  And I know hers is no isolated case—I hear from many of you about your children and grandchildren who have a strong hunger for religious experience, and desire to lead moral and purposeful lives, but who do not look for guidance in these things at church.

This generation gap seems to threaten the very survival of our churches, but before we start panicking, or blaming ourselves, or our children, or trying desperate measures of one kind or another to lure younger people to our door, we might want to remember that this kind of division has been around from the beginning.  If the words of the Gospel of Luke that we heard this morning are to be believed, Jesus’ intended something like this.  “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” he asks.  “No, but rather division!”  But he is not talking about war between nations, or power struggles between parties, or even a contest between religions for the allegiance of souls.  He is talking about division at the most personal intimate level, within households, within families.  And the relationships that he specifically names as zones of conflict are inter-generational ones: father and son, mother and daughter, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

If the division that Jesus brings to the earth hits home in the family, and the faultline is between generations, than the thing that is at stake must be tradition.  His teaching questions the assumption that the values and customs and world-views handed down from the past necessarily ought to determine the future.  Tradition must no longer be an infallible guide of the right thing to do, but has become a sphere of negotiation and conflict, where freedom and inspiration have something to say, and what matters is reading the signs of the time.     And if this is, in fact, at least some of what this passage is saying, it would be consistent with the general picture of Jesus that we find in the gospels--a man who continually disrupts people’s  expectations of what a religious teacher is supposed to be like; one who’s bitterest enemies are the guardians of tradition.

But we have to be careful not to project our modern biases onto this picture, and conclude that Jesus is against tradition, which is always bad, and in favor of innovation, which is always good. We need to realize that Jesus opposes tradition with tradition, the self-critical tradition of the prophets that runs through the Hebrew scriptures right alongside the self-justifying traditions of Israel’s special and exclusive chosenness.   The counter-tradition of the prophets is a voice of division, continually calling the people, and especially their rulers, to change.  The prophets imagine new meanings for traditional language, turning images of prosperity and contentment, such as Israel as the fertile vineyard of God, into accusations of hypocrisy and judgments of doom.   They speak on for a God who identifies with the weak and the marginal, who cries out with them for justice, and suffers agony in the betrayal that is their oppression.  Jesus is the embodiment of this tradition. It is this God he reveals in person on the cross.

It’s worth noting that when Jesus talks about the household divided two against three and three against two, he doesn’t take sides.  He doesn’t back the father against the son, or the daughter against the mother, or the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law.  Jesus did not come to settle our family quarrels.  But he does seem to want us to have them.  Every generation has to work out for itself what from the past has outlived its usefulness, and what is worthy of preserving because it stills holds true.  There are ways to shirk this responsibility.  We can fall into fundamentalism, rejecting everything new as a threat to the perfect order established in tradition.  Or we can capitulate to the cult of the new, valuing only what feels fresh and exciting and trending upward now.  

Or we can follow Jesus into the place of division, where we have the kind of conversations that are hardest to have.  They are hard because they demand that we be really honest about what we believe and what we value and what we want, not just in terms of superficial things like taste and fashion and opinion, but about the deep things that really matter, things like faith and work, and life and death, and suffering, and love.   These conversations are also hard because they show us the limits of our individuality.  The generations that came before us wrestled with the same doubts and questions and difficulties that we do.  And it will be up to the generations that come after us to make what they can of our world, because we are leaving it behind.   Negotiating these things inevitably involves conflict, and a certain amount of heartbreak, because no two people and no two generations will see the world exactly the same, even when they are members of the same family.

In the three years that I’ve been at St. John’s, the biggest fights we’ve had have been about designing a new logo for our church.  In the course of these conflicts we’ve learned how hard it really is to interpret the signs of the time.  What kind of picture can we draw to represent our commitment to the continuity of historic tradition, and at the same time our hope for growth and renewal in the spirit of what God is doing now?  This has been our challenge, and at times we’ve found ourselves on opposing sides of the divide of continuity and change.  And if there have been moments when our disagreements have gotten pretty hot, that shouldn’t surprise us.  Jesus said he came to earth to start a fire.   

It is a fire that burns away the traditions that we cling to for their own sake, simply because they are our traditions and we are afraid to let them go.  It is a fire that consumes our delusions of inventing a future that is all ours, and not a continuation of a shared past.  This present moment on the earth belongs to all of us, the dying and the being born, and everyone between.  And yet somehow we must choose our future together.  This means being humble in the face of the mystery of our oneness and our diversity.  But it also means not shying away from the conversations that show us the signs of the time on the other sides of our divides.  This requires a mind as pure and labile and vital as fire, a heart seared with suffering and radiant with love.   It’s not easy work.  It’s never fun to have our family squabbles, but this is the work of the Church, to continually, attentively, faithfully seek the mind of Christ, that is never exactly new, and never gets old.

 

Mother's Little Helper

Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Growing up in a family of four boys, I guess it was inevitable that one of us would have to be “Mother’s little helper,” and for whatever reason, I got the part.  Every evening, when the call came from the kitchen for a volunteer to set the table, I was that “volunteer.”  I was the one who learned to grind flour and bake the weekly bread.  I was the one who tried and failed to apprentice at the sewing machine.  The summer that my mother decided to market the surplus produce of her large and bountiful vegetable garden, I was the one anointed to spend my vacation as the proprietor of the road-side stand. 

Those early imprints are deep and lasting, as I discovered when I left home.  No matter how far from my mother I got, no matter where I went, or in whose company I found myself, I always seemed to be one of those who stood up when there was work to be done.  I was one you could count on to take responsibility for the thankless chores of keeping the house tidy, and the kitchen clean, and the people fed.  Which would have been admirable, I suppose, if I’d always done it with a loving and generous heart.

But this is where the story of Mary and Martha has a bite.  Because, like Martha, I wasn’t always happy to serve.  Sometimes I felt like I’d been saddled with an unfair and unwanted burden.  Sometimes I did the work because it made me feel less anxious, and sometimes I did it because it made me feel superior, and all the while I’d be looking sidelong with envy and resentment at those who seemed to have no guilty conscience about sitting idly, just enjoying themselves, and “going with the flow.”

This story has a bite of psychological truth, and it goes even deeper than I’ve already said.  Because if all Martha wants is a little help, why doesn’t she just go to her sister and ask for it?  Why does she create what Family Systems theorists call a “relationship triangle,” she dragging Jesus into her little drama, trying to guilt-trip him into taking her side?  Why does she ask him to judge between her and her sister, and to find Mary in the wrong, and chastise her for being lazy, like a disapproving dad? 

Needless to say, Jesus  doesn’t take the bait.  He knows Martha needs help, but not the kind of help she thinks she needs.  Martha needs to learn to let go, and it’s a lesson Mary can help her with, because she’s learning it from Jesus.

It’s not that there isn’t work to be done.  From the very beginning, the mission of Jesus has involved work—and not just the work of teaching and preaching and praying, but also the work of serving.  There has been bread to be baked, and tables to be set, and dishes to be washed.   And from the very beginning, Christians have looked around at the world and seen work to be done—widows and orphans going hungry, and sick people and prisoners lonely and in need of care and friendship.  They have looked around and seen justice denied, and peace forsaken.

And they have remembered the example of Jesus, and the self-sacrifice of his life and his cross.  They have remembered his teachings about self-denial and selfless service, like the parable of the Good Samaritan that comes immediately before this story in the Gospel of Luke, and they have gone to work.  But the story of Mary and Martha suggests that from the very beginning the work of Christians has also been a source of temptation.  Self-sacrifice, self-denial, and selfless service can easily become self-righteousness, just another yardstick by which we judge ourselves against each other, and against the world.  

Jesus knows this about us, and his reply to Martha lays bare the heart of the matter.  Because Martha’s real problem is not that her sister is lazy and won’t help with the housework.  Martha’s problem is that her heart is full of anxiety and can never come to rest.   Martha is anxious about the “many things” and lets them pull her in every direction because deep down she knows that none of them can ever give her what she really needs. 

So what is this only one thing that Martha, like the rest of us, truly needs?  Jesus doesn’t say, but he gives us some clues.  The first clue comes when he says that Mary has chosen the “better part.”  The way I read this, if Mary has chosen her part, then so must have Martha.  In other words, Martha thinks she doesn’t have a choice, that the “many things” absolutely must get done, and that if she is the one who must do them, but Jesus is questioning that.  Maybe these chores that Martha thinks are so all-important really aren’t.  What would happen if they didn’t get done until tomorrow, or not at all?  And why does Martha have to do them?  Maybe if she just left them alone, someone else would decide to get up and help.  But Martha will never know, because she keeps choosing to deny her own freedom and responsibility for the choices she has made.

A second clue about the only thing that is truly needed is what Jesus says about the part that Mary has chosen.  I don’t know exactly what he means when he says that it’s “better,” but I can accept as self-evident that he’s right.  But the thing that he says about it that I’ve always found really interesting is that “it will not be taken away from her.”  And this makes sense to me when I thought about as a teaching to Martha about the deeper reason she is so anxious about all those “many things” that have to get done.  Because any feeling of well-being, or self-worth, or inner peace that depends on getting all the work done isn’t going to last.  The work is never done.  You clean up the kitchen after dinner and the next thing you know it’s time to cook breakfast.  You feed one hungry family and five more appear at the door.  You fix the hole in the ozone layer, only to find out about the greenhouse effect.

Which is not to say that there’s no point in working.  But it does mean that the real importance of the work we do doesn’t derive from the results we achieve.  Thinking that way is a recipe for anxiety and distraction.  The real importance of what we do comes from who we are when we’re doing it.  And sometimes we learn best who that is when we aren’t doing much of anything at all, when we are just sitting there at the feet of Jesus.  Who we really are (which is the same as who we really want to be)—that is all we really need.  The author of the Letter to the Colossians calls it “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations,” and goes on to say that God has made known to us the “riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” 

Nobody knows what words Mary heard when she sat at the foot of Jesus.  It’s not important—she heard the one Word that matters, the one Word we all need to hear, the Word of God about the riches of the glory of the mystery of Who she is, and Who she wants to be.  And I guess this is the better part of everything we do, the part that won’t be taken away.  Having this faith that Christ is in us and in others, having this hope of the glory that is yet to be revealed, we can do anything, or nothing.  It’s all pretty much the same.  It’s nothing to worry about, nothing to feel superior or inferior to others for.  It’s just a part we choose, because God speaks, and because we stop, for a moment, to listen.