Coming home to a new place

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

In the summer of 1994 I left the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County and moved into The City.  I found a job with a landscaper in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, just south of the Mission District, and a room in a house with a couple of other bachelors just up the street from the company yard.  Having checked those two items, job and house, off my list, I moved on to a third.  I got out the yellow pages and looked up “Churches—Episcopal” for one in my zip code.  That Sunday morning I left my new house and walked down Bernal Hill, across Cesar Chavez St. and up 26^th to Fair Oaks, where I arrived at Holy Innocents Episcopal Church just before the 10 o’clock service.  I went in and sat down and looked around at the interior of that lovely building, designed by Ernest Coxhead, the architect of this structure.  And the organist came in and began playing his prelude, something by Johann Sebastian Bach, and I burst into tears.  I felt I had come home. 

Today’s story from Luke is one of a number of parables in the gospels that have to do with the celebration that happens when something that was lost is found again.  In the other stories in this genre, like the one about the woman who loses a silver coin, or the one about the shepherd whose sheep goes astray, it is pretty easy to say what it was that got lost.  But today’s parable is a little more complex than those. 

To be sure, the father lost his younger son when he took his share of his inheritance and went away to a far-off country and squandered it on loose living.  But the son also lost something.  He lost sight of who he was, and what was important in his life.  He went off after a kind of freedom that inflates the value of a false self and its restless desires.  And in the process he lost connection with the one person in the world who really loved him.  Until that finally that moment arrived when, as the story says, he came to himself.  And then he had to lose that false self.  He had to give up his illusion of independence, and swallow his pride, and go back to his father and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.”

Still, I imagine that, even then, he felt just a little trace of pride in his confession of how far he’d fallen.  He planned his speech carefully and when he saw his father he delivered it exactly as he’d prepared, and he probably figured that when his father heard how terrible he felt, and how low he was willing to stoop in order to have a place in the household again, his father would give him what he asked.   But the son had to lose even that satisfaction.  He had to accept a homecoming that wasn’t on his terms, that had nothing to do with the depth of his remorse, or how convincing his performance of guilt was.  He had to surrender even that to his father, who loved him completely, and was simply overjoyed to have him back.

This story describes coming home as a surprise, the surprise of rediscovering something that you used to take for granted and didn’t really value.  When I sat down in Holy Innocents Church and heard Bach on the organ I was remembering something about my own childhood and ancestral roots and the sources of my religious imagination and how I had first discovered beauty and meaning and transcendence.  It was something about who I was, deep down, and how I was related to the world, something I didn’t value and appreciate before. 

Coming home is one of the great metaphors for the life of faith.  But today’s readings remind us that when we come home, the place we are coming to is not the place we left.  When the generations that the Israelites spent enslaved in Egypt are finally over, and the 40 years they spent wandering in the wilderness are also over at last, they come home to the land of Canaan.  The people celebrate their homecoming by completing the circle, and eating the Passover meal that they first ate the night that Pharaoh let them go.  But they make their unleavened bread with the grain of the land of Canaan.  It is the land of their ancestors, and the land of their own future—their promised home. And not one of them has ever been there before. 

When the congregation of St. John’s Episcopal Church came back into this building after two-and-a-half years of exile, many if not most of the people who were here to celebrate that joyful homecoming had never worshipped here before.  This congregation has grown since then, and perhaps many of us who have come in the last few years have experienced being here as a kind of homecoming.  But each one of us comes with a different memory of home.  Each one of us has a different story of losing and getting lost, finding and being found.  We are drawn together to seek a common vision and a shared experience of home, but the home that we are building is a place we’ve never been before.  It’s continually changing, as people come and go, as relationships change and grow, and love enlarges and transforms our understanding of what coming home really means. 

You’ll remember that in the Gospel story the father lost something, and the younger son lost something too.  But so did the older son.  He lost the capacity to love and to value his brother, and we never learn whether he got that back.  The story ends with the words and actions of his father hanging there like a question mark.  To understand why that is, we need to remember that Jesus tells this parable to some Pharisees and scribes who were grumbling because he welcomed sinners and ate with them.   Jesus is asking the grumblers if they have lost have lost the ability to see those sinners as brothers and sisters, who are worthy of love, and who just want to come home.   

In his 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul says that to be “in Christ,” means that “we no longer regard anyone from a human point of view.”  To be “in Christ” is to come to ourselves as God knows us, in the embrace of an overflowing, reconciling love.  It is to be the guest of honor at a feast that you cannot disqualify yourself from, no matter how willfully and thoughtlessly and eagerly you have strayed.  It is to receive a welcome that cannot earned, by any amount of feeling sorry or humble yourself or promising to start over again at the bottom rung of the ladder.   It is to be given a new life, for no other reason than because Jesus Christ gives his life for us, and God accepts the gift as if it came from us.

To come home to Jesus is to come to oneself in a place where the love of God embraces everyone as equally lost and equally found.  It is to find oneself in a world where self-serving judgments about who deserves a rightful share of the world’s goods and who doesn’t, who has earned a place of respect in the human family, and who hasn’t, whose life is worth saving, and whose isn’t, no longer apply.  The world we used to find so alluring, the world of the false self, and the false freedom, and the inflated sense of independence, the world of exile and alienation and meaninglessness, becomes a place of transformation, a world on the way home.  And our lives find a new focus and new purpose, as we become partners in that transformation. 

Coming home to Jesus is creating something new, a place where forgiveness and reconciliation and belonging are a gift that belongs to everyone.  It is to be a guest but also a host, at the homecoming feast of the whole world.   

Toward Tomorrow

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 63:1-8
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

In the summer of 1978 my mother went off to a summer camp to play Renaissance music, so my dad and my three brothers and I left our home in Vermont and went on a road trip to Boston.  One of our stops along the way was the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst, where they were having an event called the Toward Tomorrow Fair.  It was a kind of trade show, featuring alternative energy and other forms of what was being called at the time “appropriate technology.”  I remember walking onto the grounds and being amazed at the sight of a large oval wind turbine, kind of like an egg-beater, spinning around and around on a vertical axis next to the duck pond.  There were displays about composting toilets and solar food dryers, backyard fish farming and geodesic domes, and the basic premise seemed to be that this was the near future.  The folks at the fair were confident that the recent Arab Oil embargo, and the population bomb, and all the problems associated with big, hard, industrial technology meant that the future would need to be local, versatile, efficient, soft and small. 

And they weren’t alone.  A month after the Toward Tomorrow Fair, the Bishops of the world-wide Anglican Communion came together for The Lambeth Conference.   Every ten years the Archbishop of Canterbury invites them over for three weeks of prayer and worship and conversation.  Each conference passes resolutions on matters of common interest and concern, and in 1978 they approved a total of 37 resolutions on topics ranging from Women in the Priesthood to An Association of French-speaking Dioceses.  But the only one I’ve read is Resolution One, entitled Today’s World.  In it the bishops say that they have found “a new dimension of unity in our intense concern for the future wellbeing of all [human]kind.”  They write of the choices that we face, of the promise of advance in human well-being, on the one hand, and on the other of the “real possibilities of catastrophic disaster if present attitudes and the expectations of individuals do not swiftly change.”

The resolution goes on to list 11 areas where change is needed.  Number 5 includes this statement:

We must direct our efforts to the achievement of a kind of society where the economy is not based on waste, but on stewardship, not on consumerism but on conservation, one concerned not only with work but with the right use of leisure. We may need to contemplate a paradox: an increasing use of appropriate technology, while returning, where possible, to many of the values of pre-industrial society. In some places this can include home industries, the local market, the fishing village, and the small farm.

That was 35 years ago, half a human lifetime.  That’s long enough ago that we can’t think of that summer as contemporary—it is part of the past.  And if the Toward Tomorrow Fair and the Lambeth Conference of 1978 are part of our history, we have to decide how to remember them, and whether they should be remembered at all.   What will we make of that historical moment?  Was it an opportunity that we missed, and is lost forever?  Was it an early warning of lessons that it’s still not too late to learn?  Or was it an irrelevant sidetrack of history, a case of drawing the wrong conclusions from events, that it is better to forget?

The Apostle Paul raises similar questions about the uses of history.  In his 2^nd Letter to the church in Corinth he recounts the familiar story of the Exodus, which was the great defining event of history for the Jewish people.  But, for Paul, there is more than one kind of lesson to learn from this story.  On the one hand are God’s awesome deeds of deliverance on behalf of our ancestors.  There is the cloud that sheltered them and led them through the sea.  There is the miracle of the food that God gave them in the wilderness, and the water that sprang from the rock to supply their thirst.  These wonders, says Paul, should remind you of your own redemption from sin and death by the grace of Christ in Holy Baptism.  On the other hand, he goes on to say, the Exodus was also a trial of our ancestors’ faithfulness, and most of them were found guilty.  The question Paul presses on the Corinthians is, how will you use this history?  Will you let it instruct you on how to live in the freedom that your own baptism has given you?  Will you learn its lessons and apply them to the trials of your own present circumstances?

When people tell Jesus about a big, newsworthy current event, an atrocity of the kind that would dominate the airwaves for days, if not weeks, in our own world, it’s not clear what kind of response they’re looking for.  Whatever the case, Jesus cautions them not to draw the wrong conclusions.  He counters with another example of sensational headline-grabbing news, a disaster of what is often called today “crumbling infrastructure.”  It seems that, like today, people in ancient times tried to draw moral lessons from these kinds of events.  And Jesus isn’t arguing against moral lessons.  But, as still happens, the moral lessons that people drew were for other people. 

If you think about a recent atrocity like the Newtown massacre, or a disaster like the breaching of the levees in New Orleans, the public policy proposals and legal remedies and preventative measures that we put forward generally are directed toward somebody else.  But Jesus points us in a different direction.  When you hear about those kinds of calamities, he says, think about yourself.  Any one of us could fall victim to something like that, anytime.  Every one of us is implicated in the sufferings of the world, whether we feel like we deserve it or not.  We are all in the same boat, and that boat is as unsinkable as the Titanic.  So when you hear about some crime or disaster happening somewhere else, to some other people, the only really important question, the only morally responsible question, is “How must I change my life?”         

Which can feel pretty bleak, even for the 3^rd Sunday in Lent.  So I like what Luke does with the parable of the fig tree.  Elsewhere in gospels when we hear about a tree that doesn’t bear fruit, the jig is already up for that tree.  But in this version there’s that nice gardener, with his wheelbarrow of manure.  The overall lesson seems to be that if the world really operated according to a consistent moral law, we’d have been done for already.  But, thanks to that gardener, and God’s grace, there’s still hope.  

Now, a stay of execution is not the same thing as a pardon.  It’s been 35 years since the Toward Tomorrow Fair and the world is using more oil than ever.  Big, hard industrial technology has found fossil fuels we didn’t know we had, or could ever use.  So now we face a kind of challenge they weren’t thinking about in 1978.  Now we have to choose to leave oil in the ground, because now we know that if we burn it all up, the earth that we know and love will burn up with it.   It’s a huge test of our capacity to change, not just our technology, but our values.  But St. Paul reminds us that being tested is nothing new:  “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone,” he writes.  But he adds, “God is faithful and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

When our ancestors faced the test of ending racial segregation, or defeating Fascism, or gaining women’s suffrage, when they were being tested by slavery, or persecution, they must have wished that someone else would take that test for them.  Their challenges must have seemed every bit as daunting and unprecedented as the problems we face today.  Their solutions won’t work for our problems, but we can learn from their courage, and from their mistakes.  And there’s still hope.  God is still faithful.  But we have to take the test.  It’s our turn to look the world square in the face and to let it press us to the question, “How must I change my life?”   

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.”    

Mexican Football

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

In the 2011 NFC championship, the final game before last year’s Super Bowl, a second-year wide receiver named Kyle Williams was fielding punts for the San Francisco 49ers.  In the 4^th quarter of the game, with the 49ers leading by 3 points, Williams made a critical mistake, failing to catch a punt, but allowing it to bounce off his knee, at which point it became anybody’s ball.  A New York Giants player fell on it, and New York scored a touchdown a few plays later, going ahead 17-14. 

The 49ers came back to kick a field goal, tying the game, and sending it into overtime, and with 9 minutes left in the overtime period, the 49ers forced the Giants to punt.  Kyle Williams fielded the ball at the 20-yard line and returned it about 4 yards before a member of the punt coverage team punched it out of his grasp.  A Giants player recovered the fumble, and their placekicker scored the game-winning field goal, sending New York to the Super Bowl, and San Francisco in defeat.  

Following the game, Kyle Williams’ Twitter account was flooded with hateful messages from disappointed fans.  "I hope you, youre [sic] wife, kids and family die," said one.  Another read “HOPE U RUN n2 A BULLET DA WAY U RAN INTO DAT BALL…”  Ugly sentiments like these are other side of the coin of the adulation that star athletes receive from their fans.  We identify with their exploits as if they were our own, as if our own honor and prestige were at stake when they take the field.  When they are victorious, we feel vindicated for all the years we had to watch the colors of our once-proud franchise worn by inferior teams.  And for some 49ers fans, the sting of coming so close to the ultimate prize, and then losing, was a personal disgrace.  And taking it so personally, they looked for someone to blame.

Something like this happens in the story of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth.  When he reads from the prophet Isaiah about how he has been anointed by the Spirit to proclaim good news to the poor, and release to the captives, to let the oppressed go free, and then he sits down and says "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," the people of Nazareth start to taste victory.  They start to imagine vindication for all the humiliations they have endured--the heavy taxation and usurious debt, the encroachment of foreign aristocrats and occupying armies on their land.  They know Jesus, and so they imagine that when he sets out to right these wrongs, their needs will be uppermost in his mind. 

They ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” and there are other places in the Gospels where this question is asked with a kind of a sneer.  But in this context, the people of Nazareth say it with wonderment and just a hint of self-satisfaction.   They are impressed by the gracious words that come from Jesus’ mouth, because they think they belong to them.  They’ve heard rumors of the powerful and inspiring sermons he’s been giving in the neighboring towns, and now he’s come home and they’ve seen and heard him for themselves.  No doubt the great and powerful deeds that will follow on these words will be to their particular advantage.  

We discover that is what they are thinking because Jesus knows them.  He knows them better than they know themselves, and he provokes them to reveal how shallow and self-serving their faith in him is.  They want him to be their prophet, and so he tells them stories about the great prophets of old, of Elijah and Elisha, who acted in obedience to the purpose of God, not in order to be the home-town hero.   In times when Israel suffered famine and foreign hegemony, those great prophets performed miracles on behalf, not of their neighbors, or any of their own people, but of foreigners.   And when Jesus tells these, the fond hopes of the Nazarenes are dashed, and as quickly as they embraced Jesus as the instrument of their victory, their admiration turns to a murderous hatred.

There are a couple of taquerías here in town where I like to eat burritos, and one of the things I like best about these places is watching Mexican soccer.  Now, I am a sucker for sports on TV.  If I had a TV that was compatible with digital technology, and it was hooked up to a network that carried sports, and if I had control of the channel selection in my house, all of which are extremely big “ifs”, sports is mostly what I would watch.  And as much as I enjoy watching televised sports, I find Mexican soccer to be a uniquely satisfying form of entertainment. 

There are several reasons for this.  First of all, there are no commercials.  In a soccer game, play never stops, so there’s no way to fit them in.  Secondly, watching five minutes is just as good as watching an hour.  There’s no feeling of “if I leave now I might miss something exciting,” because nothing exciting ever happens.  The teams rarely if ever score.  They just play soccer. 

Finally, I like watching Mexican soccer because I don’t have to choose sides.  I have no need to root for the guys in the blue stripes over the guys in the solid green jerseys because I know nothing about either team, and there’s a wonderful freedom in this.  I know that somewhere in Mexico a stadium is full of tens of thousands of people who care passionately, and hundreds of thousands more are glued to their TVs, and maybe even here in this restaurant there’s a guy over across the room getting sweaty and clenching his fingers and feeling his stomach tense up in his gut the way I know I’m going to feel during those short breaks between the commercials this afternoon, and yet I’m blissfully oblivious to it all. 

I just eat my burrito, watching some guys who love to play soccer doing what they do best, and enjoying the beauty of the game.  When I finish eating and leave the restaurant, they are still at it, and for all I know it will go on for eternity.  I’ll get to heaven and blue stripes and green jerseys will be there, playing soccer, still tied at one goal apiece.

Now I’m sure most Christian preachers in America today would agree that we should root for the gospel of Jesus Christ as if it were our home town team, playing in the Super Bowl.  There are probably more than a few sermons being preached on that theme today, right here in the Bay Area and in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland.  And I’m sure those preachers are right, and that they are preaching better sermons than this one.  But for all the value that we place on our religion, and for all our culture of passion and fervor, for all our emotional investment in excellence and victory and vindication, I wonder sometimes if we might be closer to the mark if we embraced the gospel more like Mexican soccer.  In the 13^th Chapter of his 1^st Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul seems to be suggesting something like that when he writes about Christian love. 

Love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things, love that never ends, is a love that is profoundly disinterested in particular outcomes.  It does not set out with a personal investment in how we ought to be transformed by love, but only with the hope that we can love, and the faith that transformation happens.  Such love does not press its advantages, or trade on its own importance, and so it does not turn to hate when it is delayed or defeated.    

When Jesus says that “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” he is not seeking fans for his team.  He is inviting us to join him in celebrating the freedom of life in the Spirit.  He is urging us to put aside our partiality concerning God’s work in the world.  He is telling us to let go of our self-centered, childish anxieties about when it will happen and what we will become and to trust that love is bringing everything to completion, and to look for the ways it is happening now.