Sometimes it takes a story

• Joshua 5:9-12
• 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
• Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
• Psalm 32

If someone were to ask you to explain yourself, to spell out what it is that makes you tick, or why you do the things you do, chances are you couldn’t do it.  You might fumble around for a while, trying to put into words the inner workings of your heart and mind, or to come up with nouns and adjectives that seem to describe your values and motivations.  But sooner or later what you’d probably do is tell a story.  Part of my job is to meet a lot of people, and to get to know them, and give them a chance to get to know me.  And while everyone is different, and the conversations we have as we are getting acquainted are all different, as people ask me questions about myself, to better understand where I’m coming from, I find that there are certain stories I tell over and over again. 

There’s the story of how I became a Zen monk and organic farmer, and my story of going from Zen monk to Episcopal Priest, and there’s the story of the rebirth of St. John’s, Petaluma, from the ashes of schism and how I came here to be the Rector.  I never tell these stories exactly the same way twice, and I never mind telling them again, because they are alive—they are stories that live in me, and I live in them.  And sometimes that’s what it takes to really come alive to the deeper truth about who we are, and the higher purpose for which we strive—sometimes it takes a story. 

So when some Pharisees and scribes were grumbling about Jesus, about the way he welcomed sinners and ate and drank with them, Jesus could have tried to explain to them in abstract terms about his own experience of the unconditional and gratuitous love of God.  He could have told them how he had come to give the last word about any idea or system of religion that seeks to put barriers around that love and control people’s access to it on the basis of human judgements about morality and justice.  He could have told them that he had come to identify himself completely with the people whom such conventional ideas and systems of religion had ruled out of bounds with respect to God, and to invite those people to feast with him at the inaugural dinner of a new creation, a world remade, where the only power is the grace of God, and love is the only law, where no one is excluded or estranged. 

I suppose that Jesus could have tried to explain himself in these terms, but no one would have had the foggiest idea what he was talking about.  You and I can talk this way because we have the advantage of being able to reflect on the whole arc of the gospel, and see the entire tapestry of Jesus’ words and actions that weave together to make it up.  Not only that, but the identity and mission of Jesus have had two thousand years to infiltrate and colonize our ideas about holiness and God.  Not that this process is complete, not by a long shot.  That is why we keep going back to the Gospel stories, day by day, week by week.  It’s why we keep placing ourselves imaginatively in the moments where people were seeing and hearing it all for the first time.  Because we know that the truth that Jesus was trying to get across in those moments, by saying and doing the things that he did, has yet to take full possession of us.

People sometimes complain that the teachings of Jesus and of Christianity in general are short on practical advice for the spiritual path.  There may be some lofty ethical principles to guide our behavior, in places like the Sermon on the Mount, but there is very little in the way of instruction on how to train oneself, and to surmount the psychological barriers to spiritual progress.  And I think that something like this is what got the goat of the scribes and Pharisees.  They were masters of the path, with a well-worked out system for what you had to do to get closer to God, and people respected them for it.  So it drove them crazy that Jesus didn’t show the slightest interest in being like them.  They could see that he was a person of extraordinary spiritual gifts, who could have been such an asset to their efforts to encourage and instruct the good and the faithful in the synagogues and in the temple.  He could have had the best and the brightest in the land as his disciples, and rallied up a real religious revival.  But instead he went around like a bum, squandering his talents on losers, on crazy people and prostitutes, on tax-collectors, lepers and Samaritans.

And when they grumble about it, he doesn’t have the decency to explain himself, but tells them another of his stupid stories.  It’s actually the third of three stories, the first two of which the lectionary left out, but they are all about losing something and finding it again, and a party to celebrate the finding.  So maybe Jesus really is explaining himself, and is simply on a mission of mercy to the outcasts and losers, to help them become upstanding citizens again.  Maybe his feasting with them is a celebration of their returning to the fold, and thanksgiving that one of the righteous men of Israel bothered to come looking for them.  This is a common enough interpretation.  It’s the sort of thing that has led generations of Christians to take up works of mercy to the marginal and poor, as if that were the preferred method to get right with God. 

    

Such charity often imagines that the lost will dutifully express their gratitude for being found, and show themselves deserving by cleaning up their act.  And at first it seems as if the story about the son who was lost and is found, meets these expectations.  After all, the younger son in the story is shame-faced, and is prepared be a hired hand on his old family farm.  But there’s a lingering question in our minds about repentant he really is, or whether he’s simply figured out that this what he needs to do to get his three square meals a day.  Because while most of us have been in the position of the younger son now and again, we can more readily identify with his older brother.  It's not that we’re mean, or unforgiving.  We wouldn’t demand that our brother be sent away to starve.  We just ask for a little respect for fair play, a little accountability, a little incentive for good behavior, and consequences for bad.

But it is the father in the story who sees the bigger picture, who understands what is really at stake, which is not a goat or a fatted calf, or which son is the favorite, or who stands to inherit the family farm—what is at stake is life and death.   “This son of mine was dead,” he says, “and is alive again!” And so the party begins.  Pondering this, we might say that Jesus went to the tax collectors and sinners, not because they were the people who needed the most help, but because they, unlike the upstanding scribes and Pharisees, were able to understand the deeper purpose of his mission.  Which was not to show screwed-up people how they could get back in favor with God, but to put to everyone the question—can the dead come back to life?

It’s a question only God can answer, but in the company of Jesus, the tax collectors and sinners find it possible to imagine that the answer to that question might be “yes.”  And that is the possibility that animates not just the story of the lost son, but the whole story of Jesus.  Because the gospel is about more than helping losers become winners again, or readjusting misfits to polite society.  It’s a story about one who goes looking for all that has been lost, from the foundation of the world.  To do that he must become the lost, the outcast, despised and forsaken.  He must go in search of us even to depths of the earth, to lie, the dead among the dead.  The story of Jesus is the story of one who lives, not for spiritual progress, or moral perfection, but for love for us, and for hope in what could come to him, and to us, in that place of absolute surrender.

Giving a drink is enough

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
Psalm 124
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50

In the 13^th century a religious movement arose in the towns of what is now Belgium and Holland, known as the Beguines.  The Beguines were women who started their own intentional Christian communities dedicated to prayer and service to the poor.  They did not take formal monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  They were celibate as long they remained beguines, but could leave the life at any time and get married, if they wished.   They were not part of a centralized religious order with an overall superior, but each of their houses was independent, with its own regulations.  And knowing what we do of church history we should not be surprised that a number of medieval popes accused the beguines of spreading heresy, and attempted to suppress them.  And in the 16^th century the Protestant Reformers took up where the popes left off. 

And in our country today, as well as in England, and Australia, and many other places, young Christians are carrying out innumerable experiments in new forms of religious practice, in alternative worship, and arts festivals, in café churches, dinner churches, and house churches and new monastic communities, in a diverse and decentralized phenomenon that is sometimes called the “Emergent Church.”  I would be lying if I claimed to represent this movement, but from what I’ve read and from those I’ve met who are part of it, I’m sympathetic with many of its aims and concerns.  I’m also not surprised that some Christian leaders have denounced the Emergent Church, or elements of it, as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a danger to the good order and doctrinal purity of the church.

After all, I’m an Episcopalian, so I’m not unfamiliar this sort of treatment, and maybe that’s why I’ve taken the liberty of referring to our congregation as an “emergent community” on the home page of our website.  This isn’t because I’m trying to cash in on a trendy brand; it’s because I feel there is a genuine open-endedness about what we’re trying to do here at St. John’s.  The schism that devastated this congregation almost nine years ago left us not only with the necessity of renewal, but with an opportunity to do more than try to recreate a church we remember from the past.  It’s given us the freedom to experiment with new forms of worship and new practices of leadership, to take risks, and make mistakes, and learn together how to live in authentic Christian community in the cultural context of today.

Of course, that cultural context is quite chaotic, rapidly changing, and some might say, dangerously ill.  So on our website homepage, where it says that we are an “emergent Christian community” it also says that we have been Petaluma’s congregation of The Episcopal Church since 1856.  And I like having those two seemingly contradictory ideas in the same sentence.   I think it gives a good snapshot of who we are, and where we hope we are going.  It says that we may not be bound by tradition, but neither are we rootless; we are grounded in a place and a history that we did not invent, but inherited from others.  It says we trust in the faithfulness of God’s promise to the church, because we’ve seen it in the continued existence of our community.  It says that when we try to discern who Christ is for us today and what he wants us to do, we aren’t starting from scratch; we are exercising an authority that has been handed down to us in an unbroken line of transmission from the first disciples of Jesus.

Now ordained clergy like me are fond of this last point, because we stand in a particular relation to that authority.  Sometimes we act as if it were our exclusive possession.  And bishops, priests, and deacons do have a special responsibility for maintaining the core tradition, but their role is borrowed, you might say, from the apostolic character of the whole people of God.  And all authority in the church is secondary to the authority of Christ himself, who is still shepherding his flock in the Holy Spirit, and teaching us in the scriptures.  Today, for instance, the Gospel of Mark reminds us that the biggest danger to the church is not that things will get out of control.  It’s not that people will make unauthorized use of the name of Jesus, or lead others astray with unconventional teachings or practices.  The greater danger is that the church’s leaders will abuse their authority.

Last week we heard how Jesus had observed his disciples arguing with each other on the road about which of them was greatest.  They were getting to be full of themselves, and to rival one another for honor and respect—maybe even for power.  So Jesus reminded them that leadership is really about responsibility.  It’s about putting your personal interest in the back seat to the interest of the group, and being in service to others.  It’s about being attentive to the real needs of the people who have entrusted themselves to your care, especially the ones who are most powerless.

In this passage Jesus uses strong language, to say the least, to warn his disciples of the consequences of betraying that trust—“it would be better for you,” he says, “if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” 

This is in response to John, who told Jesus about a stranger they met who was casting out demons in his name.  The disciples wanted to shut him down, because, as John put it, “he was not following us.”  It is kind of amazing to read in the gospels how early the characteristic problems of the church began to show up.  Because here we see already, in the apostolic community, anxiety about who has rightful ownership of Jesus. 

But could there be a more generous and inclusive view of how that ownership is shared than the one that Jesus gives next?—“Whoever,” he says, “is not against us is for us.”  It is incredible to hear this and then think about all the centuries of quarrels in the church about who is entitled to speak and act in the name of Christ, and about all the leaders who have appointed themselves as guardians of the gate, telling the faithful what they must do and believe to qualify for a share of heavenly reward.  All this, when Jesus’ own standard is that giving a cup of water to drink is enough. 

Jesus has an image for this kind of jealous and controlling behavior--picture a person innocently walking along, trusting that she has found a good path to follow.  Her eyes are looking far ahead; she is happy to be walking the path and hopeful about where it will take her.  And then someone slips a block of stone or wood in front of her feet, to make her stumble and fall. 

When I think about times in my life when I’ve tripped up someone else in my community, it has usually been when I’ve been insecure about my own belonging, and have tried to jockey for a better position by putting someone else in his place.  It’s been when I’ve pulled rank, and corrected someone or talked down to him, saying, without using so many words, that my discipleship is better than his. 

Being a priest makes me particularly susceptible to this kind of error, but from what I’ve seen, lay people are not immune.  It is an occupational hazard of aspiring to leadership in religious community.

But the irony is, of course, that in putting a stumbling block in front of someone else, it is we who stumble.  And here again Jesus draws on his most colorful vocabulary, to warn his disciples that when they become jealous of others’ free access to grace, they put their own at risk.  So whatever it is about us we think gives us the right to take down a brother or sister in the community, that superior quality is really a hindrance we’d be better off without.  If I think I have a magnificent vision of the future that’s way better than yours, I’d be better off tearing out my eye and throwing it away.  If I think I’m working harder and getting more done because I’m stronger than you are, it’s time to cut off an arm.  And if I think I’m running ahead in the race to win salvation, I’d better cut off a leg.  And if you imagine that you are going to escape the purifying fire of God’s judgment, or that someone else is going to be left out of the quickening flame of the Holy Spirit, well I’ve got Good News for you.