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.

Don't be afraid

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35 

One of the requirements for my ordination to the priesthood was that I spend the summer after my first year in seminary doing hands-on pastoral work in some kind of institutional setting, like a prison or a hospital.  I found a placement in Spiritual Care Services at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco.  The first couple of days were spent in orientation meetings with the supervisor and three other new interns.   We learned about the structure of the program, and which departments we’d been assigned to, and where they were, and met some of the staff..  We had trainings about infection control, and safety protocols.  And then the inevitable moment, that I’d been dreading since I first applied for the program, came, the morning when we left our little Spiritual Care Services office and went off to the various waiting rooms and treatment rooms where we had been assigned, to start making contact with patients and their families. 

Going up to strangers to offer them something they probably won’t want has never been my strong suit.  When they had those fundraisers for the high school band where we were supposed to go door-to-door to sell chocolate turtles or Christmas candles I would be one of those who would guiltily turn in five dollars and an order form with only the first line filled in, with my parents’ name and address.  So the prospect of walking into a room of men waiting for radiation treatment for prostate cancer and saying “Hi, I’m Daniel with Spiritual Care Services—how’s everybody doing this morning?”—well, didn’t exactly fill me joy.  The truth is, I was terrified.    But there I was, walking through the main lobby of the hospital, heading to the elevator for the first stop of what I knew was going to be a long day, and an even longer summer, of dealing with my fear.

And it came to me at that moment that I was only going to make things harder for myself if I pretended that I was not afraid, or if I thought those fears were going to go away.  I was just going to have to accept that fear would be companion that morning, and all summer long.  There, walking along beside me, would my old friend Fear, and I would do best to acknowledge him and to try to keep him calm and go on doing what I had to do as best I could.     

In the 15^th Chapter of Genesis, the word of the Lord comes to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."

How often do these words recur in the Bible—“do not be afraid”?  When you hear them, brace yourself.  Someone’s life is about to be turned upside down.  It seems that whenever God decides to do something really big, something that changes forever the way that people see things and think about the world, something that sets the course of history off in a new and different direction, God first finds a human partner.  God finds someone like Abram, or like Moses, someone like Isaiah or Jeremiah, or Mary.  God chooses a partner and comes to them as a voice or in a vision, or through a messenger like Gabriel.  And the first thing God says is, “don’t be afraid.”

So, why is this always the first thing that God says to the one he has chosen— “Don’t be afraid?”   

Well, the obvious reason is that hearing the word of God, or having a vision of God’s glory, or receiving a visitation from God’s messenger, is scary.  God says “don’t be afraid” because she can see that the person that she’s speaking to is terrified, and needs some reassurance.   But maybe there’s another reason.  Maybe when people hear the word of God for the first time, it shifts their consciousness into a bigger perspective.  Maybe the encounter with God expands their awareness so they suddenly realize that they have been living their whole lives in fear.   Fear has been their usual state, and they didn’t even know it until God came to them and showed them that the things they were afraid of were actually pretty insignificant compared to the things that God was doing, through them, and for them, and through them for the world.

Lent is a season when Christians have traditionally fasted and simplified their lives and denied themselves certain pleasures and creature comforts.  But despite what people sometimes think, the purpose of this discipline is not to punish ourselves for our being greedy and self-indulgent.  No, we change our habits and let go of comforts because our habits and comforts cover up our fears and anxieties.  We have organized our lives to maintain the illusion that we are in control of our fears, but our fears have ended up controlling us.  We have filled our days with distractions so that we can avoid feeling our fear, but we have ended up feeling numb and empty instead.  In Lent, we choose to face our fears, and feel and know how they have imprisoned us. 

Today’s Gospel lesson shows us Jesus as one who has compassion for those who live in fear, even as he disregards the mounting danger to himself.   He is making his way to Jerusalem with a vision of a mother bird, gathering her chicks in safety under the protection of her wings.  And at the same time he knows that setting people free from fear is a threat to men like Herod, that fox, men whose grip of terror over the chicks is the key to their own power.  The disciplines of Lent bring us a little closer to the stark realities of life as Jesus faced them, as millions of our brothers and sisters face them every day—hunger, deprivation, oppression, and terror. 

We do this in imitation of Christ, who chose solidarity with the poor and fearful over the prerogatives of power.  And we do it because it puts us in touch with our highest needs and desires.   Above our desire for safety for ourselves, comfort for ourselves, satisfaction for ourselves, is the longing to live in a world where these things are abundantly available to everyone. 

And when we view the world from that height we also find relief from our most profound fear.  Which is the fear that we will come to the end of our lives and know that our time on earth was wasted, because everything we did we did for ourselves.  We risked nothing, and hid from danger, and played no part in the great adventure of God’s salvation of the world.  We played it safe and so we spent our lives without ever really knowing Jesus Christ.  We never knew him because we were afraid to meet him in that place where our individual lives, so vulnerable, so fragile and insecure, connect with the great life that lives in all things.  We never knew the joy that persists in the midst of suffering, or the justice that triumphs over evil, or the life that rises from the tomb, and all because we were afraid: afraid to endure suffering; afraid to confront evil; afraid to die. 

But in Christ God enters into our condition of fearfulness and redeems it, not by violently eliminating every threat, but by strengthening our hearts to do our work.  The example and the spirit of Jesus gives us courage to keep going, to keep pursuing peace, and wholeness, and freedom for everyone, in defiance of the dangers, in spite of our fears.  We aren’t all going to be great heroes.  Not everyone is called to martyrdom.  But everyone who has felt, even for a moment, the mothering love of God, that yearning to gather us together in the shelter of her wings, has also felt the desire to gather and to shelter and to love.  And the way to be faithful to that desire, the way to stay firmly on the path of transformation in Christ, is to keep going through the places in your life where know you most need to hear these words—“Don’t be afraid.”    

We say God speaks

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21

Twenty-one years ago I was living in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains near Big Sur.  My job at the time was called Jisha, which means I was the abbot’s attendant.  Actually he had two attendants.  There was Jim, who was his personal attendant, who made his bed and his tea and did his mending, and that sort of thing.  And there was me--his ceremonial attendant.  I was the guy who lit sticks of incense and handed them to him to offer at the altar during the daily services of chanting and prostrations.   I was the person the other students talked to when they wanted to meet with him for guidance in their religious practice.  When he gave a dharma talk, a sermon, I was the guy who waited until he had taken his seat on the platform in the meditation hall and then placed the little stand for his notes in front of him. 

So I was kind of like the character in today’s story from the Gospel of Luke, the attendant in the synagogue, who hands Jesus the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and takes it back from him when he is finished reading.  And one of the privileges of having that position was that I got more one-on-one time with the teacher than the other students did.  And one time, when we were back in his cabin after a morning sermon on Buddhist teaching I remarked that the things that he had talked about reminded me of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  He said he wasn’t familiar with it, but that he’d like to see it.  I didn’t have many personal possessions at the monastery, but one of them was my bible, a Revised Standard Version bound in brown fake leather and inscribed by the pastor of my childhood church in Indiana, who presented it to me upon completing the fourth grade.  (My daughter Risa has it now.)

So I bookmarked Ecclesiastes and lent my bible to the abbot, and he liked it enough that he recommended it to some of the other students, and my bible changed hands several times over the next few days.  And then the abbot asked me to read it in the meditation hall.  So about midway through his next sermon he said a few words of introduction and then nodded to me and I pulled out my bible and started reading the Book of Ecclesiastes:

 The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
   vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
   at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
   but the earth remains for ever.  

Etcetera.

To this day, I’m not sure why the Zen master asked me to do that.   Maybe he wanted to show us that he was teaching a wisdom that is universal.  Maybe he hoped that the strange and yet familiar words of the Bible would get through to us in a way that his own words did not.  Maybe he was playing the trickster, and wanted to unsettle his students, many of whom were ex-Catholics or ex-Jews. Zen masters do like to do that sort of thing.  Maybe he identified with the figure of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, the one who goes by the name of Solomon the King.  Maybe it was all of the above.

But it is one thing to read a passage of scripture, or have it read, in order to enhance the authority of your preaching.  That’s something that teachers of many religious traditions do, as a matter of course.  And it is a different thing to read a passage of scripture, as Jesus does in this morning’s scene in the synagogue at Nazareth, and to say, “this scripture is me.”  But that’s what he does.  When Jesus finishes reading and sits down, every eye in the synagogue is fixed on him.  It is such a powerful moment.  We can almost feel the intensity of their concentration.  We can almost hear the silence, the people holding their breath to hear what he will say.   And that is because he has not merely quoted scripture.  He has brought it to life in their hearing, and it has been for them a religious experience. 

Not a compelling religious argument, backed up with solid scriptural proofs.  Not a fresh new interpretation of a familiar text, but a direct experience of the Holy One speaking those ancient words as if for the first time:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

When Jesus speaks those words from the prophet Isaiah, they are more true than they have ever been before, and for that moment everybody in the synagogue knows it.

  

That must be one of the ways that the community of the Gospel of Luke experienced the Holy Spirit.  When they gathered for prayer, and someone read the scriptures, sometimes the Spirit made those words come alive in their ears.  The voice of the reader became the voice of Jesus, and words were no longer just words, they were the Truth of all truth, the Wisdom of all wisdom, pouring into their hearts, into their community, through his grace.  And in those moments the promises of God in the scriptures, promises of forgiveness and healing, of restoration and consolation and liberation, came true.  

There are a lot of churches around that identify themselves as Bible-centered, or Bible-based.  I’m not sure what that means to them, but I know what it means to me.  To me, being a biblical church means that when we come together as a community we read the Bible, not to prove something by it, but to hear what it has to say.  And we make a ritual of it.  We read and hear it together as an act of corporate worship, to make a public demonstration of our faith that God speaks.  In our liturgy we act out our belief that the living God gives us the gift of a living Word.  

The Bible is not the only way that this happens for us.  “The heavens declare the glory of God,” says the psalm, “One day tells its tale to another, and one night imparts knowledge to another.” God is always speaking, day and night.  The words of God, like the sun, light up the ends of the world.   And we can go for a quiet walk outside under the stars, or at sunset, and have our own intuitive experience of hearing the words of God.  Everyone has received a word like this at some time or other, even if they didn’t recognize it for what it was. 

But the hard part, the sad part, is that it is so difficult to translate our private religious experiences into the common language of human relationships.  It is even harder to make them the basis for a diverse community.  In solitude we hear God speak to us of beauty, of unity, and justice, and peace.  And then we have to make breakfast for our families, and go to work, or to school.  We get out on the freeway, or go to a City Council meeting, or turn on the nightly news, and the voice of God is drowned out by a clamor of noise and a Babel of voices competing for our attention, and none of them in harmony with the others.

The Holy Scriptures also speak with diverse voices, voices as diverse as the law of Moses and the love poetry of the Song of Songs, the story of David and the prophecy of Amos and the philosophical meditations of Ecclesiastes.  And yet they have this in common—that for going on three thousand years a community has gathered to hear them and listen for God, speaking.  These voices have formed people of different tribes and diverse gifts into a single family with a common history, with a shared starting point for conversations about values, and meaning, and hope.  When Jesus sought words to describe his mission, the work for which he was anointed with the Holy Spirit as the Christ, he turned to the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.  Or was that Luke the Evangelist, looking for words to describe Jesus?  Or is it us, here in Petaluma in 2013, looking for words to describe the purpose that calls us together, the Spirit that anoints our common life?  In the end it does not matter—all are true, because it is God who is speaking those words.

Good questions

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15

Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

What is the purpose of religion, anyway?  Where is this God we are always talking about?  How do we know that God cares about us?  And how do we go to where God is?  How can we get what God has to give?  What does God want us to do?

This is a line of questioning that the world in which we live has pretty much abandoned.  It has decided that there are other, more pressing problems, problems mostly having to do with money and the things that money will buy.  Next month, the citizens of the United States of America will choose between candidates for President.  And the nominees of the two most powerful parties tell us that we face a fateful choice, between two fundamentally different approaches to the nation’s problems.  But the truth is that they agree perfectly on many of the most fundamental things.  They may differ as to who is entitled to more money, and who should be content with less.  They may disagree about how much money the government should take, or how much it should spend, but neither would think for a moment to publicly question the assumption that the whole purpose of our life in society, insofar as we can talk anymore about any shared and universal values, is to get money.

But these politicians aren’t working in a vacuum.  They are speaking on our behalf, and nobody challenges them to speak or think differently, because they are only saying what leaders in business, in the media, in academia, and the arts, and more than a few leaders in religion have also said.  There is really only one place left in society where you can consistently find a different worldview, one that proceeds on the basis of an entirely different set of assumptions, and that is here.  In a church, or a synagogue, a mosque, or an ashram.  We arrive here every Sunday, thoroughly conditioned by the values of a materialistic society, and if it were left up to us, we might just come together and sing some pretty songs, and hear some positive uplifting words that help us relax a little and feel a touch of grace.  And we would draw strength from one another to go out of here to resume our pursuit of money and the things that money can buy. 

But instead we do something kind of strange.  We invite a visitor into our midst every week and we listen to his voice.  It is sometimes comforting, but often it is disturbing.  It keeps us unsettled and unsure of ourselves.  It keeps us wondering if there isn’t something else going on in the world, something nobody is talking about, but that we really should be paying attention to.  We don’t always like what that voice says, but we take turns being its mouthpiece and when we’ve done speaking we say “the Word of the Lord,” and everyone says “Thanks be to God!” whether they feel like it or not.

This morning as we listen to this voice we hear it asking difficult questions, the kinds of questions with which I began my sermon.  They are the kind of questions that we are not supposed to ask, either because we’ve accepted the popular premise that God is irrelevant, or because we’ve identified as religious, which popularly means we’re not supposed to entertain any doubts.  But the readings raise a lot of doubts.  Job says, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling.”  He describes himself as like a man blundering about in a pitch-black night or a dense fog.  He turns this way and that, but God is nowhere to be found.  And at the same time Job senses that God sees him, naked and alone, and that thought brings terror, and the longing to be covered and to hide the darkness.

The Letter to the Hebrews says the word of God is sharper than a two-edged sword, cutting through all pretense and ambivalence and laying the human heart open to the eyes of the one with whom all must ultimately settle accounts.  And that must be what it was like for that nice fellow in the Gospel of Mark, the one who spoke to Jesus so politely and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life.  You can see his enthusiasm mounting as Jesus rattles off the commandments, and he says, “I have kept them all since I was young.”  But then Jesus, looking at him with that long, loving, penetrating gaze, speaks the word that sends him away crushed: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

Eternal life is not another possession to be added to our hoard.  It isn’t something Jesus can just pass on to us, like a family heirloom.  He prefers to talk about it as a space you have to enter.  You have to leave behind the place where you are.  You have to leave everything you have there, and move over into another place, the kingdom of God.  From the outside, it doesn’t look like anything.  Most people don’t even believe that it’s real.  But from the inside, it is the so-called “real world,” the world of money and the things that money can buy, that seems like a strange, surreal dream.  It’s not that that world is bad—actually it was all made by God, who loves it.  It just doesn’t mean what we think it does, and the things in it that we think matter the most really don’t matter very much at all. 

The church is that funny place in that world where the kingdom of God keeps showing up as a topic of conversation.  It doesn’t mean we’ve moved there.  Even in the church we care a little more than we ought to about money and the things that money can buy.  But we keep inviting the living word of God into our midst, to cut through our cravings and our confusion, to lay us open to deeper inspection.   We ask for eternal life for ourselves, and the incarnate word points us toward our neighbor who is poor.  But even though we can’t avoid the little problem of our disobedience, we keep holding open the questions that the world keeps wanting to close once and for all.

 And we also make a very big deal about things that the world considers worthless, things that speak to us of the goodness that is God’s alone—some water and oil on a baby’s head; prayers for peace, for the sick and the dead; a morsel of bread and a sip of wine.  Week by week, year by year, we carry on our conversation about the hard questions, we share our little worthless things, in community, and by-and-by something strange and kind of wonderful can happen.  Those hard, possibly irrelevant questions—Where is God?  Does God love us?  How do we get to where God is?  How can we receive what God has to give?  What does God want to do?—by some kind of economics that world can’t begin to understand, these questions start to find their own answers. 

They are answers that are not given so much as they are lived.  Maybe they come down from above, and maybe they come out from within, and maybe it’s a little bit of both, and the best thing about them is that they take us deeper into the questions, so that the questions themselves overflow with grace, like water from an inexhaustible spring.