Asking the hard questions

The Liturgy of the Palms
Luke 19:28-40
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
The Liturgy of the Word
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 22:14-23:56

I don’t know about you, but I have questions about the stories we just heard.  I have questions about Jesus riding into Jerusalem and the crowd that waved their branches and laid their cloaks down in the road ahead of him, shouting “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”  And I have questions about the other story, the one about the crowd that dragged him before Pontius Pilate shouting “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”  I don’t know what Jesus was expecting to happen after coming into Jerusalem like that.  If we can believe the gospel accounts, he knew things were going to play out just the way they did.  But, if he knew he was going to be killed, why did he go?

The centuries have produced a variety of answers to that question.  Mostly they are theological interpretations of his death.   Jesus went to Jerusalem, the theologians say, in order to die.  And they offer explanations of what it was that his death accomplished, and why it was only in dying that he could finish the work God sent him to do.    These theories of The Atonement—about how Jesus paid the penalty for our sin, or how in dying he overthrew the powers of death, or how he gave for all time a perfect example of self-sacrificing love—these theories are meant as answers, but they only raise more questions— important questions, worthy of careful study and reflection, but that can also seem kind of remote from you and me and the decisions that we have to make every day about how to live our lives.

But there is something about the way we tell the stories this morning, how we act them out, or put them on, if you will, that suggests that they are meant to relate to us.  They ask questions that we are supposed to answer.  And some of these questions are hard.  But I think that on the human and historical level that’s what Jesus rode into Jerusalem to do—to ask hard questions.  The first thing he does when he gets there is to go into the temple and make a scene, driving out those who are selling there, and calling the place a “den of robbers.”  It is a confrontation, the action of someone who means to be reckoned with.  But it is not the first strike in a battle to take control; it is the opening statement in a conversation.  Jesus isn’t there to fight, he’s there to talk, and it seems like what he most wants to talk about is the temple, and the people who are in charge of it. 

The temple in Jerusalem was like the Vatican, Washington, D.C., and the New York Stock Exchange all rolled into one.   It was the institution that dominated Jesus’ world, the center around which the political, economic, social, and religious map of the life of every Jew was drawn.  And as Jesus went around in Galilee, driving out evil spirits, healing the sick, preaching good news to the poor, ministering with compassion to people who were like sheep without a shepherd, he ran into the local representatives of the temple.  They challenged his authority to do the things he did and they questioned the way that he did them.  And he confronted them about their hypocrisy, and their failure to practice what they preached, and challenged them to renew the essential spirit of their religion.  But this conflict was a stalemate, and it only intensified, until it was inevitable that Jesus would carry the argument to its source.

Jesus didn’t go to the temple to seize power—he went there to talk.  But he wanted to talk about the things that the elite at the temple didn’t want to talk about.  It’s true that they came to him with questions, which he answered with questions of his own, and after one or two of Jesus’ questions they shut their mouths and went away.  And that was because they weren’t really interested in dialogue.  When the chief priests and the scribes sent their spies, as he is teaching in the temple, to ask him “Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?” they weren’t actually interested in having a conversation about the economic arrangements in an imperialistic world system.  They weren’t asking to talk about the relation between the sovereignty of the Emperor and the sovereignty of God, and which is more deserving of our allegiance.  They were simply bandying words, trying to get him to incriminate himself, and when he tried to lead them into a real exploration of the truth, they had nothing to say.

By the time that Jesus was standing before the high priest himself, he had nothing more to say, either, because it was clear by then that there was no hope of having a real conversation.  Maybe the gospel writers are right, and he knew all along that this was how things were going to go.  Maybe he had no expectation that the temple elite were going to listen to what he had to say.  Maybe he knew perfectly well that they would never open their lives, to an honest examination, let alone consider going in a different direction.  But that’s the thing about knowing the truth—about being committed to the God whose Spirit is truth.  You can’t just sit idly by while the nation you love is poisoned with a never-ending diet of lies.  You have to speak up; you have to ask questions about what is really going on.

On this Passion Sunday, Jesus challenges us again to make our churches places where the hard questions are asked, and where real conversations can happen.   It’s interesting how many of the gospel stories about Jesus’ arguments with his enemies take place while he is worshipping with them in the synagogue, or in their houses having dinner.  If Christian churches can’t hold open a space where people can talk about the hard questions without the stridency of entrenched ideological positions, where else will we find that space?  Can this church be a place where we talk to each other about the things that matter without asking ourselves “is this person a Liberal or a Conservative?” but rather, “What are her values and concerns?  What beliefs and experiences have shaped her understanding of the world?  What can she teach me?”

Jesus rode to certain death because he trusted that love is the truth, and truth only becomes truth when it is communicated.  The truth is something that lives between us, in the space where we touch each other.  Jesus learned about this from God, and so he trusted that God would use him for the truth, even if the only way he could tell it was to die.  So one of the benefits of his death and passion is that we, too, can risk the truth.  We can venture into the space between us where no one is completely guilty, because no one is entirely innocent.  We can sustain a conversation about the hard questions, because Jesus showed us that if we can’t talk honestly about power, our justice is a lie, and if we can’t talk openly about war, our peace is a lie, and if we are afraid to talk about evil, our goodness is a lie. 

And to live a lie is to die every day, a slow, painful, meaningless death.  But as he is dying, Jesus turns to the repentant thief, the one who in the agony of crucifixion finally admits the truth about himself, and he says “today you will be with me in Paradise.”

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?” 

Only God is God

Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22

On Friday I decided to go surfing.  I hadn’t had a day off in a couple of weeks and I needed some play time, to cleanse my mind and renew my sense of well-being.  I got up before 6:00 to work a little on this sermon, and I wrote a couple of emails.  Then I made breakfast for the family, did some stretches, and put the board on the car, before dropping my daughter off at school, and heading out to Dillon Beach.  I was out in the water before I remembered that I’d meant to call the church office and leave a message for the volunteer receptionist saying I wasn’t coming in.

 

So, a couple of hours later, the first thing I did once I’d changed out of my wetsuit was to telephone the office to check in.  It turned out that Frances Frazier, who was on duty, was having quite a morning.  Someone had jammed the handle on one of the women’s toilets on Thursday night so it never stopped flushing.  The constant flow proved to be more than the sewer drain could handle and the water had started running out onto the floor.  The floor drain backed up too, so Frances arrived that morning to find water pooling in the little entryway outside the bathroom and soaking the carpet.

So she’d called Clif Hill, the Junior Warden, and he was on the scene, as were the Dolcini family, father and sons, plumbers.  But I felt badly that I’d been out of touch.  I had an extra half hour or so before I was due to pick Risa up from school, so I said I’d stop by on my way back into town.   But I really needn’t have.  Clif gave me a full report, and it was clear that he was giving the plumbers all the direction they needed.  He’d also contacted a water cleanup and restoration service they were on their way to try to salvage the carpet.  I helped Frances find the number for our insurance agent, so I guess that was helpful, but she made the call and filed the claim.  And after that there was really no reason for me to be there.   Still it was hard for me to leave.

One of the occupational hazards of being a minister is to think that you’re indispensible.  You care about everything that happens to everyone, and you want to be there when you’re needed.  If something bad happens, it’s your responsibility to do something, even if it is only to be there to listen and say some encouraging words or maybe pray.  And in a small church like this one, when you’re the only paid person on the staff, it’s hard not to feel like that responsibility applies even to the plumbing. 

And the truth is, most of the time, I don’t mind.  It feels good to be helpful.  I like to feel like I’m someone people can count on when the chips are down.  I like feeling like the work I do matters.  I like to feel like a good person, and if I’m going to be completely honest, I have to say I like it when other people think I’m a good person too.

But sometimes I can’t be there.  Sometimes I’m not needed.  Sometimes I’m going to disappoint people.  I don’t know that Frances and Clif were disappointed with me on Friday, so the fact that I was worried that they were is a pretty good indication that I’d fallen into a trap.  It is a common enough trap to fall into.  I think most of us do it from time to time in one way or another, but those of us who are drawn to work in what is sometimes called the “helping professions” may be more prone to it than most.  It is the trap of being overly identified with our image of ourselves as the helper, the good person, the one you can count on.  I’m not saying isn’t rewarding to serve others.  I’m not saying “don’t call me if you need something.”  What I’m saying is that we all have our limitations, and when we start to forget that, we’re in trouble.

Will that in mind, I’m finding the reading from the gospel of John this morning kind of comforting.  Because Jesus in this story is not being helpful, at least not in the usual sense of the word.  He is a rebel, a trouble-maker, a public nuisance.  He walks into the holiest place in the world, at one of the holiest times of the year, when it’s full of thousands of pious pilgrims, and starts wreaking havoc.  He starts a stampede of cows and sheep.  He turns over tables and dumps out jars of money.   He tells the helpful people, the ones who furnishes the pilgrims with the things they need to please God, to get their things out of there, to stop what they’re doing.  This is behavior that is more than disappointing.  It’s shocking.  It’s outrageous.  This is not how a religious leader is supposed to behave.

But for just this reason Jesus’ action is supremely helpful.  Because its purpose is to remind us that only God is God.  The temple is not God.  The sacrifices are not God.  The church is not God, not the liturgy, not the priest, not even the bible.  Our good deeds, and good reputations, our selfless service, and noble intentions, none of this is God either.  It is not that any of these things are bad, but that we need to hold them lightly, and keep them in their right place.

The first of the Ten Commandments says  “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt…you shall have no other Gods before me.” And the second says not to make an idol in the image of any created thing and worship that.  Now we might be tempted to skip over these to get on to the more practical items, but there’s a reason why the list starts there.

We might think that those commandments apply to other people, people who are not of our religion, for instance.  But if we are really sincere about a relationship with the living God, those commandments are for us.  What they are saying is that God is passionately committed to having a relationship with us.  And the kind of relationship that God wants to have is one that sets us free.  Which sounds kind of nice, but the truth is that that kind of freedom is not always easy to accept.  Walking purely in faith, not clinging to surrogates and substitutes, depending on nothing but the living God, the real God, the only God who is actually God, is a very vulnerable place to be.

 

It is no coincidence that Jesus’ demonstration in the temple involves setting the sacrificial animals free.  The basic idea of sacrifice is that a debt of life must be paid in order to receive life-giving blessings.  But I think Jesus in the temple is saying that the God who must be bargained with in this way is not really God.  The real God is not for sale.  Neither is he collecting on his debts.  The real God only has one purpose, which is of his very nature—to give life.  For us to receive that gift in its fullness, we have to give up trying to buy what is being offered for free.

Which is another way of thinking about Lent.  The real purpose of Lenten discipline is not to give up certain things so we will get other things in return.  The real purpose is to relax our grip on the things that stand in for God in our lives.  These might not be things we usually think of as vices.  In human hands anything can become a bargaining-chip, even our virtues.  There is a lot about us that is good.  There is a lot we can do on this earth to help each other.  But anything you or I can do by ourselves is paltry compared to what we can do together.  And only God, the real God, the only god who is God, is completely dependable.  Only God is the source of life.

Change from the inside out

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32

When I was the Associate Rector down at All Saints’, Carmel, one of my tasks was to be the person responsible for giving monetary assistance to the poor.   The parish was known throughout the Monterey area as a place of last resort when the rent was late or the power  was about to be shut off, or the luck had run out and you needed bus fare back to L.A.  And the people of All Saints’ generously supported this ministry, so if I didn’t give very much to any one person, I could help quite a few of them. 

One of the things that my clients would often do after I’d handed them a check and we were saying good-bye, was to ask when our services were on Sunday morning.   I would give them the information and tell them that they’d be welcome any time but I knew they’d never come.   I think that they knew it, too, so why did they ask?   I guess it was because they wanted me to think well of them.   They wanted me to know that they understood they bore some responsibility for the situation they were in.  Their asking about church services was their way of telling me that they knew that they needed more than money to turn their lives around. 

But, of course, it’s one thing to say this, and another to act on it.    Of course I would have been glad to see them on a Sunday morning, but they didn’t need to prove anything to me.  Maybe they were  good  people  who  were  doing  their  best  and had  just been dealt a  bad  hand, and maybe their  stories were  a little more complicated than that.   But that was not for me to judge.  They needed help and All Saints’ Church could give them some, and I was satisfied with that.  Whether they turned over a new leaf, and how religion figured into it, was really up to them.

Sometimes when people ask us a question they’re really trying to tell us something.   When the Chief Priests and Elders come up to Jesus and ask him by what authority he is teaching and healing in the Temple, they’re really telling him that the authority to do such things belongs to them.  It is their temple, and they’ll decide whether he belongs there.  Now Jesus can hear what they’re really saying, so he asks them a question, “Sure--I’ll tell you about my authority, but first you have to tell me how you decide who’s worthy and who’s not.  For example, what would you say about my friend John the Baptist?”

Their dithering in response reveals that the only authority these leaders understand is a superficial one.  They are in power because people honor and defer to them.   But we shouldn’t mistake this for some kind of rapport with the masses.  They’ll pander to the people when it serves their own interests, but they don’t care about their deep needs.  They aren’t really concerned about their dignity, their freedom, and their hope.  And when a leader comes along  who does  have  that concern, who understands that the  people’s  real,  underlying problems are  spiritual, and that any change  that’s going to do any lasting good has to be a change of heart—when that  kind of authority comes  along, the Chief Priests and  the elders oppose it.  That’s what they did to John the Baptist and that’s what they’re doing to Jesus.  

This story shows us the difference between two kinds of authority.   One kind works from the top down, trying to get people to choose their side in a struggle against other people.  The other kind works from the inside out, encouraging people to take free action, for the sake of what they know in their hearts to be true.  One kind seeks first and foremost to get and keep power.  The other is most concerned to know and to do the will of God.   In his dialogue with the leaders in the temple, Jesus is trying to get the Chief Priests and the Elders to own that the authority that they care about is the first kind, the top down, get and keep power kind.   Until they do, he and they really have nothing to talk about, because they are speaking two different languages.

There is a story, maybe apocryphal, about Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism, that on his deathbed he said, “I made a mistake. Without doubt, an oppressed multitude had to be liberated. But our method only provoked further oppression and atrocious massacres. My living nightmare is to find myself lost in an ocean of red with the blood of innumerable victims. It is too late now to alter the past, but what was needed to save Russia were ten Francis of Assisis.”  

I love this story, whether it’s true or not, because of the idea that the ruthless, materialist revolutionary might look back at his mistakes and recognize that the world can only truly change from the inside out.   We’ll hear a lot more about Francis of Assisi next week, but let me just say that he and Lenin had a lot in common.  They were both brilliant public speakers and charismatic leaders.  They both cared passionately for the poor.  They both had a vision of universal human solidarity, transcending ethnic and national and cultural boundaries.   But what Francis had that Lenin did not, unless he got it at the last hour, was a heart to do the will of God.   Lenin organized the poor to serve in his army, to join his party, to follow his directives so he could liberate them.  Francis gave away his worldly goods and went to live among the poor, caring for them with his own hands, so that through him, they might experience the liberating compassion of God.

In Matthew 3:14, John the Baptist tries to beg off of baptizing Jesus, saying “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”   But Jesus is  adamant  and so the one  who is without sin receives the baptism of repentance, just as he will later receive the punishment of a criminal.  When  he  does this he is doing what the chief priests  and elders of the  people  will  not do; he is renouncing any distinction between himself  and  the  harlots and  tax collectors who also came to be baptized.  Jesus begins and ends his public career with acts of humility because his authority does not depend on whether people approve of him, but it is the authority that comes from within, from doing God’s will.    This is the way that he showed his disciples to live, and the great saints are those, like St. Francis, who understood that it is not enough to pay lip-service to this way.   True freedom, true happiness, true purpose and authority come from putting it into practice.

There is a temptation for us to put this way of life up on a pedestal and say that it’s all very well for them, but I’m just an ordinary, sinful, person.   But that would be to reject Christ’s most precious gift, the gift of his own humility.  He became like us in every way so that we could know that God goes to work through ordinary people like us, if we are willing to work with God.   Christ’s revolution of love, the real transformation of the world, happens from the inside out, so it really doesn’t depend on external circumstances.   It is grounded in God’s compassion and gracious favor towards all creation, so it can’t be thwarted by human failings or human judgment.   

But it does depend on our decision, a decision we have to make for ourselves, a decision we have to make every day, which is the decision to give God the authority in our lives.   It means getting up every morning and deciding to be about God’s business that day, to do God’s work, whatever our mood, whatever our circumstances, whether we feel like it or not.  We may not even know what God’s will for us is that day, but if we are ready and willing to do it, we’ll find out.  We may not know if we’re the right ones for the job, or if what we’re doing is really having an effect, but if it is God’s will, and we are willing, God is able to use what we give to get it done.