Let it be done

Genesis 45:1-15

Psalm 133

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

I began last week with a nasty cold that kept me on the couch most of Monday and Tuesday.  Now, when I get sick I always find myself wondering what I did or didn’t do to make myself vulnerable.  I suppose there really are nasty bugs that cruise through the population around me from time to time.  My daughter got sick a couple of days before me.  But my wife never did, and that’s enough to make me wonder whether there’s more to it than a random encounter with a microbe. 

A couple of months ago, I came down with the flu on the first day of summer vacation. So why did it happen that day and not the day or the week before?  Did my immune system hold on and hold on until I finally made it to vacation, and only when I could afford to, allow me to collapse?  Maybe this week was like that.  Maybe my body was looking at the calendar and thinking about how intense the schedule will be from Labor Day until Christmas and decided that now was the time to get in a couple more days on the couch before the end of summer.

Wednesday morning I was still coughing and blowing my nose, but I decided to go back to work.  Now, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am in the right place, doing work for which I am perfectly suited, and you can’t ask for more than that.  I love my job, but it can feel from time to time that there’s just too much to do, especially when physically I’m less than 100%.  So anyway, I arrived at my office and was somewhat dejectedly looking at the mountain of work on my desk and trying to decide where to start digging, when I opened an email from one of our members.  And attached to the email was a little excerpt from an article by Katherine Woodward Thomas, writing in the latest issue of Parabola magazine, and I’d like to quote it for you:

I find that the moments when we most need to be connected to a force and field of life greater than ourselves, are the very ones when we are apt to shut down and withhold prayer. As we often forget to breathe in a time of disappointment and despair, so too do we forget to pray, as if to say to God, “If you are not going to play on my terms, then I am just going to take all of my marbles and go home.”

The holiest moments of our lives are when we make the choice to turn towards life, rather than away… To say a prayer that aligns us with all that is good, loving, beautiful and true in the midst of the rubble and the despair, and rather than ask God to make this better for us, to declare instead who we will be in the face of it.

It is in this sacred instant that we awaken to ourselves as the generators of life and love, and begin to understand prayer as the holy act of co-creation.

I read this and it prompted me to stop and close the laptop and to pray.  And maybe it was because we are in this season of discernment, and one of the things on my to-do list is to spend some time pondering my own vocation as a priest and possible Rector of this congregation; but in any case I found myself remembering a time over four years ago when I was considering whether to come here to Petaluma in the first place.  I was beginning to sense that it was the right thing, but I was also scared about being in charge of a congregation for the first time, and about the risks and challenges of this particular situation.  On a warm spring afternoon I took a long walk to discharge some of the stress, and I was just kind of laying it all out before God as honestly as I could, and got to the place where I was ready to say yes--but under one condition. 

I said, “God, I’ll do this, as long as we both know that I can’t do it.  If we both understand that this is beyond what I can do, and it’s going to be up to you to make it work, then I can say yes.”  Last Wednesday morning I remembered that moment and it occurred to me that one reason I got run down and got sick was that I had forgotten that I can’t do this job.  There is simply no way a single human being could visit every person, read every book, pray every prayer, attend every meeting, follow up on every email, accept every invitation, and pursue every opportunity for ministry that he or she would need to in order to do this job perfectly.  But there are times I forget that renewing this congregation is Christ’s job, and all I’m really supposed to do is be the person in the room who trusts that he’s doing it, and it’s going to be alright.  I forget and think it is up to me, and the responsibility starts to feel like a burden instead of a privilege, and I begin to worry that things are slipping through the cracks and that the whole thing might spin out of control, and I forget to pray. 

In the gospel lesson today Jesus meets a woman who is out of his control.  He’s left Galilee for a while and gone out to the coast, to Gentile territory.  He’s there to get out of sight of the authorities, and lay low for a while, so he’s none too pleased when one of the locals starts following him, shouting “have mercy on me; heal my daughter.”  His mission isn’t supposed to include these people, and if she keeps this up, she’ll draw a crowd and pretty soon they’ll all be following him, asking him to heal this person, and cast demons out of that one.  And when she calls him “Lord, Son of David,” it’s an unpleasant reminder of what he came there to get away from, what is becoming more apparent by the day—that the movement that he started back home, to renew the spirit of his people, and restore their faith in the loving-kindness of their God, isn’t just religious, it’s political.

So he ignores her in hopes that she’ll shut up and go away.  But she persists in following and shouting, and when Jesus and his disciples stop to try to figure out what to do she catches up, and comes and kneels at his feet.  He tries to explain that his mandate does not extend to people like her, and as he so often does, he uses a metaphor related to eating, “It is not fair,” he says, “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But if she is offended because Jesus prefers his own people, or if she is insulted at being compared to a dog, she doesn’t give any sign of it.  In fact, she accepts it, and yet declares who she is in the face of it.  She takes what Jesus gives her and makes her own play on his words— “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” 

And in that moment Jesus snaps out of seeing her in terms of her nationality.  He stops seeing her as a problem it is not his job to solve.  Suddenly he sees a person who believes God, in his God, the same God who can feed five thousand men (and their women and children) with seven loaves of bread.  Surely such abundant goodness and miraculous love can spare a few crumbs for this little dog at his feet, and her afflicted daughter.  It seems that in that moment Jesus remembered who was really in charge of his mission, and however unorthodox, or risky, or inconvenient it might be, it wasn’t his place to stand in the way of this woman’s prayer.  “Let it be done for you as you wish,” he says, and again he stretches a little more, opens a little wider, to accept the pleas of another suffering child of God. 

“Let it be done,” because being a generator of life and love doesn’t stop at the border.  “Let it be done” doesn’t concede anything to fear or hate.  It doesn’t involve strain, or worry about whether it’s working.  It’s no more and no less than a prayer— “Let it be done.”

Fruit that will last

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

Last Sunday a man entered our 8 o’clock service about half-way through and walked without any hesitation right up the center aisle and took a seat in the front pew, right over here.  Needless to say, that’s unusual behavior for a Sunday visitor.  But he seemed comfortable here, coming forward to receive communion as if it were his long-standing habit.  And at the end of the service, when I invited anyone who wished to come forward for a special prayer of blessing, he stood up.  Without looking for further encouragement, or making any preliminaries, he said his name was Richard and he asked us to pray for him.  He said he was out of work and had been for a long time, and had been looking and looking everywhere for a job without success.  He said that he wasn’t going to give up, but that he’d sold everything he had of any value and that it was beginning to look like he and his family were going to have to give up their home and start living in their car.  And he asked if we would please pray for him because he really needed our prayers.

So, of course, we did.  It was the least we could do.  Someone brought him over to the Parish Hall and gave him a cup of good coffee and something to eat.  I could have offered him a little money, but he didn’t ask for that, and in fact he told me in the line at the back after church that he was tired of asking for hand outs.  What he really needs is a job.  He wants to work and support his family and preserve what remains of his dignity.  And he came here, because he wanted us to know that, and to pray for him.  

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve been praying for Richard and his family this week.  Of course, I’ve been wishing we could have done more for him.  Praying for Richard has made me ask familiar questions of myself.  It’s made me ask what can be done for all the people who need jobs.  What kinds of assumptions lead a society to discard people like Richard without remorse or concern for the consequences?  I’ve been asking whether I’ve done enough to challenge those assumptions, whether I’ve allowed myself to be a little too comfortable, whether I’ve played it a little too safe. 

This week I read an interview with the retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard.  A highly-decorated Vietnam combat veteran, Bishop Packard was arrested along with 15 other members of Veterans for Peace, during an Occupy protest on May 1^st in New York City.  The comments he made in the interview spoke to the questions I’ve been asking myself: “The spirit is calling us now into the streets, calling us to reject the old institutional orders. There is no going back. You can’t sit anymore in churches listening to stodgy liturgies. They put you to sleep. Most of these churches are museums with floorshows…Those in the church may be good-hearted and even well-meaning, but they are ignoring the urgent, beckoning call to engage with the world. It is only outside the church that you will find the spirit of God and Christ.”  

There was a time in my life when I would have rejoiced to read these words.  “Yes!” I would have said; “Bishop George Packard tells it like it is!”  I can still hear the truth in what he is saying, and I can’t ignore the example of his courageous actions.  But the example that spoke to me even more powerfully this week was that of Richard.  I think of the courage that he had, to walk in to a strange church, full of people he didn’t know, to walk right up the aisle during the service to take a seat in the front row.  I think of how, when the opportunity arose, he took his stand.  He didn’t condemn us for being too comfortable.  He didn’t try to guilt-trip us into giving him money.  He just told us his story, simply and humbly, without milking it for sentiment, or using it to make some larger point.  He trusted us to give him a hearing, and he asked us for our prayers.

 

In his own way, Richard took a stand.  He took a stand for himself, and for the hard truth of his situation.  He laid down the stigma of failure and desperation, and he rose up in the Spirit of truth, and by his actions he said, “I am worthy of love and concern.  I also belong to God’s family.  Your prayers matter, and they matter to me.”  And that was a gift to us.  It was a testimony to us of the love that Christ has for us, in our failures, in our desperation.  It was a reminder of how Christ came to us as a poor man, asking only that we receive each other as his friends.  We may be too comfortable with that friendship.  We may be afraid to follow him, to go out and do something about the besetting evils of the world.  Maybe we just don’t know where to begin.  But that world seeks us out, like Richard did, to invite us deeper into friendship with Christ.  And it is not a random coincidence, not something to be taken for granted, that Richard felt safe here to take his stand.

We may be comfortable here, but comfort is at the heart of the Gospel.  Jesus knew the risks involved in telling the truth to a world entranced with false hopes and empty values.  On the night before he died for that truth, he spoke words of comfort to his disciples.  He assured them that his love for them would not die with him, because it was God’s love for the world.  He promised them that if they kept faith with him, and loved each other as he had, they would find him in themselves.  And more than that, the world— the same world that threatened to destroy them, the world that filled them with fear and confusion—would reveal itself to them as his dwelling place, the abode of God’s love.  He sent them into that hostile world in the power of his love to bring forth fruit, fruit that will last. 

      

And so while I agree with Bishop Packard that “outside the church you will find the spirit of God and Christ,” I don’t think that is the only place to find it.  It would, indeed, be a cold kind of comfort if we prayed for Richard and took no interest in the conditions that put him in that fix.  But although what Richard really needs is a job, he also needs an open door, where they will listen to his story and give him a place in the communion of prayer.  He knew where to look for that door, and when he came, it was open.  More than ever, the world needs places where people can lay down their daily struggle for survival or success, and appear to each other to ask for the friendship of Christ, to listen to the voice of the spirit, and to abide in the love of God.

The First Letter of John says that “everyone who loves the parent loves the child.”  On this Mother’s Day, the scriptures remind us of the love that God has for every one of her children, and that if we love God our Mother, we need to love each other for her sake.  That love means continual, defiant resistance to the powers that enslave and destroy the children of God.  It also means dwelling together in the peace and joy of her beloved Son, holding open a space in the world where love and truth can abide.  We don’t have to choose between the church and the world—in fact, we don’t get to choose between them.  We were chosen to hold the world responsible for the commandment of our friend Jesus, to love one another as he loves.  And we were chosen together, to make our life together a real and visible sign of that love, an open door through which people come in to find God, through which people go out to find God. 

Freedom isn't free--it's love

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
 Song of Solomon 2:8-13

Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I think it’s a remarkable thing that we date the birth of our nation not by the final victory in the War of Independence, but from the signing of a document that was written when that war was still young, and the outcome was seriously in doubt.  We don’t set off fireworks on the anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution or take a long weekend to celebrate the inauguration of the first President, but we do for the signing of a piece of paper that establishes no permanent institutions, or any laws.  The Declaration of Independence is a complaint, a cry for justice, and at its heart is a deeply personal sense of betrayal.

Contrary to what you might think, the Declaration doesn’t have anything bad to say about the institution of monarchy per se.  It doesn’t lay out a plan for republican government.   It doesn’t even really say a whole lot about what used to be called “the rights of man.”  What is does do is describe a King of England who has broken faith with his American subjects.  It lists in great detail the things which a just sovereign would have done that this King has refused to do.  It enumerates all the things he has done that show callous indifference to the well-being of the American colonies.  It is a description of a relationship that has failed.

It is hard for us to estimate the personal anguish that those men would have had to work through to sign that paper.  They were English, after all.  As it had been for generations of their forebears, the supreme symbol  of that Englishness, the language and laws, the culture and customs, was the sacred person of the king.  Loyalty to the king was a keystone of their sense of piety and personal honor.   It was only out of the most profound sense of injury that they would have given that up.   

And it is easy to forget that when they said “all men are created equal” they were not putting forward an abstract principle.   They were saying that in the eyes of God, commoners are the equal of kings— and not just any commoners but they themselves.   Those 56 men in that hot room in Philadelphia were addressing the King of England as another man, one who had done them wrong.   And by the simple act of signing a paper, they took that king’s divine right, the sacred power of the sovereign state, into their own hands, the hands of tobacco planters and printers, merchants, preachers, and lawyers. No wonder they ended the Declaration with these words: “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”  They’d just kicked the props out from under the only world they knew; divine Providence and one another were all they had left.

 The Bible is full of such moments, turning points in history that are, also crises of personal decision, fraught with personal risk.  The epic story of Abraham and his descendants begins a new chapter in God’s dealings with humankind through the ups and downs of a single family.  When we pick up the story this week, that family is at yet another crossroads.  Sarah has died, and Abraham is very old.  It is time for the covenant with the one God to pass on to the next generation.  But the next generation is their son, Isaac.  The promise of the covenant is of descendants as numerous as the stars in the desert sky, and all they’ve got is Isaac.   If the story is going to continue, it’s going to have to become a love story.

Abraham sends his servant back to Mesopotamia to look for a wife for his son.  The servant is faithful, and God guides him to just the right place at just the right time.  Still, it is up to Rebekah to say the right words, to show herself generous and forthright and kind.   And when she has given the servant a drink, and drawn water for his camels, and he has come to her fathers’ house and explained his errand, it is still up to her whether she will go along with the plan.  Not for the last time in the Bible, the fate of the salvation story waits on the consent of a young woman.

In the biblical worldview, to be human is to be faced with real choices, but they don’t happen in a vacuum.  Rebekah’s entrance into this story is scripted by divine Providence even down to the words she will say to Abraham’s servant at the spring.  It is a part that is written perfectly for her character.  Nevertheless, everything depends on her willingness to play it.  She has a real choice to make.

The bible tells us that our freedom and responsibility are real, but our lives are an ensemble performance.   Rebekah has to make her choice, but it is shaped by the choices Abraham has made, and the servant, and her brother, and her father.  And she is saying yes to a husband she has never met.  She is taking a risk, and this story will not be complete until Isaac plays his part, says yes to her, and takes her into his mother’s tent and loves her.  In choosing love, Isaac and Rebekah are saying yes to their lives’ fulfillment, and at the same time they are keeping faith with God.   Their marriage serves God’s providential purpose for the covenant family who will be their offspring.

Loving relationships, whether family relationships or friendships, have this quality of divine providence about them.  They are not necessarily what we would have chosen for ourselves if we had sat down and written out a prescription for our ideal.  But they have a mysterious way of enticing us towards those critical decisions that make a real difference for ourselves and for the world.  Which is not always easy.  Most of would rather do almost anything than change.  But the divine grace we call Love is the one thing that can overcome the hardest resistance.   When I think of the really fateful choices that I’ve had to make in my life, it’s love for others and the love of others that has gotten me off the dime. 

When I was eighteen years old I faced the decision of whether or not to register for the draft.  If I did, I felt, I would be acquiescing to a resurgent militarism that I felt was a threat to the moral, economic, and physical survival of my country.   If I did not, I would forfeit the federally-funded grants and loans that kept me in the elite private East-coast college I was attending.  I agonized over this decision, but in the end I refused to register, and dropped out of college, a choice that, for good or ill, made me the person I am today. 

The turning point in my being able to do this came one night when I started to think of all my friends and schoolmates from high school and college, all the other young men I knew, and I understood deeply that none of them could make the choice I was about to make.   Not because they might not have wanted to, not because they were less noble or virtuous than me in any way, but simply because the circumstances of their lives were different.  This was a decision that I could make, alone of all the people I knew, and so I had to make it.

The way of Jesus offers us a burden, but it’s a burden we can bear.  It is the burden of knowing ourselves so deeply connected to others, that we can live out our own unique individual story.  It is the burden of making the difficult choices that only we can make, but the rest of knowing that our responsibility is not total, and the wisdom of God orders all things.  It is the burden of helping put on a party where every imaginable kind of weirdo and disreputable character is invited, and the relief of finding your name on the guest list.   It is the burden of love, which carries with it every kind of risk and disappointment and loss, but it is also the lightness of being loved with a tender ferocity that will not let us say no.