How long is the leash?

Genesis 2:18-24
Mark 10:2-16

How we imagine God’s relationship to us has a lot to do with how we relate to one another. We have a puppy at our house, a nine-month old mongrel rescue dog named Shakti. And when I take Shakti for a walk, particularly if she has been inside all day, she pulls at the leash constantly, straining against it in her excitement and desire to run. Sometimes it seems that people imagine God is like someone walking a dog, and the dog is us. We run around, straining at the leash, and God is that firm hand at the other end that keeps us in check.

That’s the way that the Gospel depicts the Pharisees, and they relate to other people like dogs who need to be trained to walk on the leash. They are always asking themselves “How much slack does God give us?” which leads naturally to the question “How much should we give others?” and that is why they have such a problem with Jesus. They can’t figure him out because sometimes it seems like he wants a leash so short that the dog can’t even walk, and sometimes it seems like he’s letting everybody off leash, to run around and play. What they don’t understand is that for Jesus the whole leash thing is beside the point entirely.

For instance, in the story we hear this morning; they come to Jesus to test his legal opinion, to find out how long his leash is on the question of divorce. Characteristically, he answers with another question—“What did Moses command you?” So they proceed to describe the leash. What Jesus says next shows that as far as he is concerned, the question of “How much slack does God give us?” misreads who God actually is, and what human life is about.

The church has tended until recent times to take Jesus’ sayings on divorce as simply tightening the leash of the Pharisees. My mother tells of how, when she was a child, her father would, every once in a long while, take her with him on a Sunday morning (For some reason it was always her and never one of her brothers). Instead of going to the Methodist Church where they usually went to as a family, my mom and my grandpa would slip quietly into the back row of the Roman Catholic church in the little town in the Sierras where she grew up. She would sit there with her father in a state of bewilderment as he watched and listened to the priest say the Latin mass. And then they would get up and furtively depart when it was time for the people to come forward to a communion from which Grandpa, an Irish boy from St. Louis, was barred for having divorced his first wife.

While I think we have to be careful not to explain away the vehemence of Jesus’ statements in this passage, I don’t think that what my grandfather went through is what he had in mind. It is significant that he never directly contradicts the authority of Moses’ commandment; he does not propose a new law forbidding divorce. That is because the length of the leash is not what is stake when we are talking about the breaking up of a marriage. What is at stake is the basic wholeness for which we human beings were created by God—a wholeness that is realized in relationship.

Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees invokes the blessing that crowns all the gifts that God gave us at the very beginning. Having given us life, and a garden to dwell in full of trees bearing food, having bestowed on us the company of all the living creatures, bringing them to us to be named with the names we choose, God gave us an other—one so like us as to be like fashioned from the same substance, and at the same time not us. It is this gift from the God of blessing and creating that Jesus wants us to remember when we tire of one another or despair of loving each other. For if this is our God, and the whole life of Jesus is the demonstration that it is, then we have some hope of relating to one another in the same way.

The gift of the other is offered to us most intimately in our family lives, and we are to cherish it there, but the scope of God’s work of creating and blessing relationship does not end at the second chapter of Genesis. Neither are we to draw a line around our marriages or our immediate families and say, “Here and no further will my hope for belonging extend.” We should read today’s Gospel story in relation to that other one where Jesus’ mother and brothers come asking for him and he looks around at the motley crew of hangers on sitting with him and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Today we begin our Fall Pledge Campaign at All Saints, and our theme for the campaign is “Joyful, joyful we adore thee,” after hymn 376, which we will be singing from time to time over the next few months. The text of the hymn describes the love that binds all created beings to their source, and the words and music together express the joy that inspires them to return that gift with adoration and praise. The hymn concludes with a prayer that we might share in what systematic Christian theology calls the divine economy, that circulation of giving and receiving love between God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit that makes them one, and which we participate in by loving one another.

I invite you to consider making a pledge to support Christ’s church, wherever you find yourself in relation to its ministry, whether here or somewhere else, whether you are a long and faithful member or just finding your way back with a full load of doubts and questions. How much or how little you commit--ours is not a community with membership dues or a price of admission. Rather, what we extend to one another in this way is joyous participation in the faithfulness of a God who blesses relatedness, an investment in that economy of gifts that is God’s intended purpose for us in our original Creation.

Implied in our freedom to choose, to give what and where our hearts incline us, is that we also have the capacity to withhold our gifts, to be hard-hearted, closed-minded, and closed-fisted. Elsewhere in the bible this choosing is given a moral character—we have the power to bless or to curse, the responsibility for choosing life or choosing death. In any event, something we can never side-step is the element of risk that comes with the other. We do not make our worlds alone, we do not choose in a vacuum. There is always the possibility that we will give love that is not reciprocated, that our faithfulness will be met with others’ betrayal, that our blessing will run afoul of another’s curse.

But will I be the one to withhold? Am going to gauge the length of the leash before I start walking? Or will I wager what gifts I have with the trusting heart of a child? Maybe this is a good place as any for God to find me, if I take the risk of serving him here. Maybe this brother to my left and this sister to my right and that mother behind me hold the key to God’s will for me to do. Maybe my open heart for them is his joy in me, creating and blessing a world of unity and peace.

Salted with fire

A few weeks ago I was rushing around gathering the food and supplies I needed to go down to Big Sur for our annual parish campout, and I went to the grocery store in a big hurry and I bought some bread. The next day at the campground I made some sandwiches for lunch, but when I bit into the bread it just tasted wrong. I thought I knew what the problem was right away and a closer look at the label on the bread bag confirmed what I feared—it was salt-free bread. Without salt, bread just doesn’t taste right.

Now I hate to waste food, so I gritted my teeth and kept working my way through that loaf of bread, but within a couple of days it started to have this awful, chemical taste to it, and I had to compost the last few slices. What I was tasting was alcohol-- without salt in it to slow down the fermentation the bread quickly started to spoil.

This little misadventure of mine illustrates two important qualities of salt: first, it makes things taste good, and second, it is a preservative, it keeps food from spoiling. This would have been even better known to people of Jesus time than it is to us. In ancient times, of course, they didn’t have freezers or refrigerators or canning factories to preserve their food—so salt was something precious that you couldn’t live without.

There is a lot about today’s Gospel reading that is difficult to interpret, but I suggest that this story might help us understand what Jesus is saying about salt and salting, and blandness and flavor. That’s all well and good, you may say, but there are a lot of different metaphors mixed together in this passage—so what could Jesus mean when says that “everyone will be salted with fire?” That’s a good question, and nobody knows for sure what it means, but if salt is what seasons and preserves, then fire is what transforms and purifies.

It is important to remember that in this section of Mark’s gospel Jesus is trying to get his disciples to understand what kind of Messiah he is. No one doubts that the running conflict that Jesus has been having with the powers-that-be is going to intensify as he moves toward Jerusalem. In fact, it is becoming clear that this conflict is central to God’s purpose in anointing and sending him. But what is most radical and creative and saving about Jesus’ mission is not the conflict itself, but the means that he will use to win it— prophetic demonstration, self-denial, patient suffering, and death.

But every time Jesus tries to explain all this, his disciples come back with something that shows that they just don’t understand. In this week’s reading John reports that they had to stop someone from driving out demons in the name of Jesus because, as he says, “he wasn’t following us.” Like their argument from last week about which one of them is the greatest, this shows that the disciples still think that the mission of the Messiah is going to be another chapter in the tired old human story of ranking winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, instead of God’s definitive judgment on all of that.

“God’s judgment” is not a term that most people feel very comfortable with, but that’s because they imagine that it is like the kind of judgment that we human beings are inflicting on ourselves and one another all the time. And if God were the kind of judge that the disciples would like to be, deciding which one of us is the greatest, or who gets to do exorcisms in Jesus’ name and who doesn’t, there would be little to hope for in God’s justice. But what if God’s judgment has nothing to do with punishment, or establishing the pecking order, or settling scores? What if God’s judgment is the purifying fire of grace, the passionate love that does not ask whether we are worth saving, or whether we are qualified, but seeks only to remove the stumbling blocks we place in our way? What if God’s judgment is to give us life, reconcile us to one another, and bring us to the peace of knowing our complete dependence on a mercy that is infinite?.

If you are like me you wouldn’t mind having some justice like that for yourself, but God forbid that it should be handed out to everyone. There are a lot of people in the world that I like to tell myself are greedy, stupid, selfish, phony, or just not trying hard enough. It shouldn’t shock you to hear me say this—this is how we human beings think, and it doesn’t really matter if we call it “Original Sin” or “Sociobiology” or “Cultural Conditioning”—it is deep-seated, so much so that rooting it out is exceptionally difficult and painful for our egos to bear. Perhaps that is why Jesus likens it cutting off a foot, or tearing out an eye. To encounter a justice so impartial that it could allow itself to be falsely accused before it would accuse its accusers, to be spat on and abused rather than abuse its abusers, to be horribly murdered rather than murder its murderers, is to see all our impatient, self-righteous, petty judgments of others turned around on ourselves, a smoldering fire that is not quenched, a worm that never stops gnawing at our hearts.

To follow Jesus on the way of peace means to systematically acknowledge and continually repent of the false judgments that set us apart from and against the world. As I said, this can be painful—for years I clung to the idea that I was more intelligent and more virtuous than all those middle-class Americans with their wasteful petroleum-powered lifestyles and conspicuous consumption, but as I have grown in my desire to experience common ground with others in society, and especially to repair my relationships with my family of origin, and to get married and have a baby, I have had to compromise that sense of superiority slowly but surely out of existence. Along the way, of course, I got to see how thoroughly it was imbued with envy and resentment.

As we surrender bit by bit our claim to some special and singular favor from God, we become more able to feel wonder and gratitude at the things that we share with other people, and indeed with all the creations of God. We develop a deeper appreciation for the way that universal qualities come together in the unique combination that makes us the essential people that we are—not better, not worse, not more or less deserving of love and happiness—just different. That combination includes some elements we like and are proud of, and some we find it is always difficult to accept. And so we never stop hoping for the purifying fire of God’s loving judgment to work on us, to keep us soft and malleable, to help us be compassionate with others whose secret hurts and struggles we can never fully understand. This is what gives us our saltness. This is the “something essential” that pulls all the rest of the flavors of our existence together and makes us savory rather than bland. Throwing ourselves completely on the mercy of God’s perfect justice preserves us for greater and greater freedom from the consequences of our errors in judgment--and other people’s--even beyond the seeming indignity of death. Having this salt in ourselves is what enables us to forgo all the unquiet and unjust stalemates that are what so often pass for peace in this world, and to move toward the actual reality that Jesus died to bring about.

Follow the Leader

I gave this sermon at All Saints Church on September 13th. Audio of my sermons can be found at the All Saints website.

Jesus is on the road with his disciples and he asks them, “Who do people say that I am?”
This is the set-up question, and all the answers he gets reflect the opinion that he is somebody else, recycled—John the Baptist, Elijah, maybe one of the other prophets. People are thinking big things about Jesus, but they’re not showing a lot of imagination. But then comes the real question, the zinger—“But who do you say that I am?”
And of course this is the question they’ve been asking themselves now for some time. They were crossing the stormy sea in a small boat at night and woke him up and he rebuked the wind and told the waves, “Be quiet!” And the storm stopped, and they were seized by a terrible awe and asked one another, “Who is this, that even the wind and waves obey him?”

“Who do you say that I am?” For us who profess to be Christians there really is no more important question. And Mark’s gospel this morning is telling us that as long as there have been Christians, there have been people who have thought they knew the answer.
Peter thinks he knows the answer: “You are the anointed one, (Messiah in Hebrew, Christos in Greek). You are the Christ.”

Now, no place here or later in Mark’s Gospel is it made clear exactly what Peter means by that. Nor can historians of religion look at other documents from that time and say with certainty exactly who someone like Peter would have thought the Messiah would be or what he would do. But we can make an educated guess that what Peter had in mind was probably another recycled character from the past, in this case an ideal king, a new David. And in one sense he wasn’t that far off the mark. Jesus is a leader sent by God to liberate his people, purify their institutions, and renew their vision of the holy purpose for which they have been chosen out of all the nations. But, as Jesus’ answer to Peter quickly makes plain, he is not going to do this according to the expected script. He is, in fact, carrying out a mission that is unique and original, and turns the very idea of Israel’s Messiah on its head.

“Who do you say that I am?” How we answer that question is critically important, and it’s not a question like “Who won the World Series in 1958?” or “What is the specific gravity of table salt?” It’s a question that takes you deeply into the mystery of how God is at work in the world, and what is the ultimate purpose of our existence. It is a question you answer with your life.

Jesus answers his own question by living in the nearness of God’s kingdom. That means going to where the people are, including the people that have been written off as too bad, too sick, or too crazy, and making community there. He shows them that they are worthy and loved, heals them and forgives their sins, gives them something to eat, and invites them to turn their lives toward God. But Jesus’ mission is not a social program for the disadvantaged. The kingdom he proclaimed is not just for the poor, but for everyone. The road he is walking with his disciples in this story is the road to Jerusalem, where he will carry his message to the rulers of the people, and his invitation to them will be just the same. But Jesus already knows the rulers’ attachment to the old scripts of power struggle and scapegoating violence. He knows how narrow is the path of total trust in God’s wisdom, and how slippery is the slope that begins, “I’ll just cut a few corners now, but when I’m in charge I’ll set things straight.” He can see what’s coming, and he also knows the subtlety of the temptation to lose his nerve and start playing by their game—“Get behind me, Satan!”

But we’re not following that kind of leader. We’ve got a leader who isn’t ashamed to be humiliated and abused. We’ve got a leader who is willing to die. The powers-that-be always tend to read the old scripts in a way that keeps them on top; they resist the natural desire of every creature to embody God’s gift of life in community by recycling the same old dramas of exclusion and domination. But our leader offers us the way to change the whole equation. It is the way of faith that is willing to suffer for the sake of the truth, the way of hope that is as humble and patient as God, the way of love that will never give up, even on an enemy. The New Testament is all about this way of transforming the world. But the point that is most salient in today’s Gospel is that we have to choose. If our answer to the question is really going to be “You are the Christ!” we have to do things Jesus’ way. It may not mean that we’re going to face the kind of horror that he did, (and by the way, please don’t go trying to recycle that script) but our leader is nothing if not honest—we’re going to carry a cross.

It may just be the cross of giving a gift that can never really be repaid. Yesterday I represented all of us at the 30^th anniversary of the Big Sur Health Center. As some of you know, the Health Center building has been on the same property as our Santa Lucia campground and chapel for most of those thirty years and we have never asked for more than a dollar a year in rent. The first stop on my visit was to tour the Health Center where I enjoyed meeting the warm and dedicated staff and seeing their obvious pride in their small, bright, efficiency-apartment of a facility. Next I drove another mile or so to the party which was held under the redwoods at the Big Sur Grange. There I met the Health Center’s extended community of volunteers. It seems that half the residents of Big Sur have been on the board at one point or another. A local jazz singer and her trio were performing on the back of the Blaze Engineering flatbed, while members of the Volunteer Fire Brigade parked cars. Other volunteers served a barbeque lunch provided by the Ventana Inn, the Esalen Institute, and other local businesses. And everyone I talked to said the same thing, “We can’t thank All Saints enough for giving us a place to have our Health Center.”

What could I say except “we’re glad and proud that we can help?” We get an occasional benefit from the relationship—a couple of years ago the Health Center paid to put in a new water treatment system and we get to use the purified water at our campground. But the main reward we get is the health for our souls that comes from following our leader. I’ve never heard anyone at All Saints claim the Health Center as part of our mission, so it was interesting to talk to a former board president yesterday and hear her say, “Our mission is providing quality primary and urgent health care to all, regardless of their ability to pay—it’s really just like yours.”

“Who do you say that I am?” For us at All Saints the Big Sur Health Center is one part of living the answer to that question. When we extend ourselves for the sake of the mission of Jesus in the world, we get to see that he is already there. When we go off the script of self-concern and really engage with the need and suffering of the world we encounter the powerful and creative presence of love that Jesus called the Kingdom of God. In that nearness is the true reward of following Messiah—nothing less than life victorious over death.

Preaching Politics

I gave this sermon on August 23rd at All Saints Church, Carmel. The texts for the day's worship were:

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 Psalm 34:15-22 Ephesians 6:10-20 John 6:56-69

Today I’d like to preach a little bit about religion and politics. Now before you all heading for the exits let me just say that I’m not doing this because there are some hot-button political issues out there right now, in the church and the nation, and I’m really steamed about something and I’ve kept my opinions to myself just about long enough. That’s not what’s going on. Instead, I came to this topic because the lectionary readings kind of forced it on me. Let’s start with the collect of the day—

Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered

together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your

power among all peoples.

That, my friends, is a political prayer. Then there is this morning’s reading from Joshua. This is one of the nicer bits from Joshua, a book without a lot of nice bits, and yet we hear—

and the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land; therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.

Yes, I understand that the people are renouncing other Gods of other lands, and pledging their fealty to the God of the land of promise, who acted so mightily on their behalf. But we can’t obscure the nature of the blessing that is being celebrated—the violent seizure of territory in the course of a victorious Holy War.

When people get up to preach about religion and politics, they generally set out to use the scriptures of their particular tradition to prove that one side or another in a controversy of the day is the right one, and therefore that it is our religious duty as good Muslims, or Hindus, or Jews or what have you, to join the fight. If we are going to be honest with ourselves we have to admit that Christianity has lent itself infamously well to this type of enterprise over the years. As the commercial and military expansion of European empires engulfed the globe, the bible marched alongside the gun. And this isn’t a thing of the past. About three years ago, I accepted an invitation from a neighboring faith community to attend a National Day of Prayer gathering in Devendorf Park, here in downtown Carmel. It turned out that the accent was on the National rather than the Prayer. There were prayers for God to grant conquest of the Middle East to American troops, and the conversion of the regions Muslims to Christianity. Many of the prayers that were offered that day used what sounded to me like code words for common Right Wing political causes.

Now in the interest of full disclosure I have to say that when it comes to sectarian politics my own heart is right where it belongs—on the left. And my ilk are just as susceptible to turning religious language into political cant. Words like “peace” and “social justice” and “inclusion” can become little more than ciphers for a particular political ideology. It’s insidious, it’s been going for centuries and it still is happening all the time.

No wonder that Jesus, when he realized that the crowd was coming to make him king, disappeared into the mountains.

That part of the story alone should be enough to tip us off that the Sixth Chapter of John, which we’ve been dwelling in for the past month or more has something to do with politics. I don’t think it diminishes the spiritual significance of the gospel at all to say that part of the liberating work of Jesus is to set us free from politics, or at least the kind that ensnares us, that makes it easy for us to fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing the will of God when we are really serving some lesser master. The earliest Christians knew this kind of so-called “religious” language very well because they’d had it used against them, to single them out as “blasphemers” and “apostates” by Jews and as “atheists” and “enemies of the state” by agents of Rome. It would have been a temptation to fashion verbal weapons for a counterattack, and there were those even then who succumbed to that temptation, and were caught in the snare.

But faith in Jesus shows us a different way to go. It is not an escape from the world and its dilemmas and pressures into an ideal spiritual realm. A decision for Christ and the kingdom of God, means taking a stand, with real political risks and consequences. I say “political” because the words that Jesus has spoken about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, are, as we hear in the gospel, “spirit and life.” The spirit that Christ gives to those who have faith makes them come alive. It fills them with the power to face their fears, and the power to change their ways. It gives them the power to speak the truth, and the power to love people they don’t even know. It gives them the vision and hope to wager their lives on the total transformation of the social order in spite of all evidence that the powers that be are supreme and invincible. Spirit is power and life is power, and politics is about power.

Any genuine spiritual power that the church has comes from God. But this is not the God of Joshua, who takes what he wants by force and gives it to those he chooses. This is the God who calls those he chooses and gives them himself. As his members, we partake of the power of life that is the Spirit within and among us, not the power of some authority wielding the threat of death over us. For us to abide in Christ as active participants in institutional life of the world, with Christ abiding in us, is to renew the promise of politics itself, freeing it from the grip of empty slogans and entrenched positions. It is to be continually on the lookout for possibilities for hope, healing, and insight, rather than relentlessly probing the enemy for weakness. It is to be always listening for the hunger for meaning and belonging that underlies expressions of partisan aggression, and to offer the food of understanding. It is to resist evil with truth, and hatred with an unyielding kindness. To be in public like this is to confound the conventional division of Left from Right. Ironically, it is often also means inviting attack from the left and the right simultaneously. Jesus’ gift of himself to the world was so total that he willingly entered the trap of its politics, letting it close upon him, so that God’s redeeming work could happen even there.

Jesus’ willingness to suffering and die for the life of the world were his political platform, if you will, so it’s no wonder that a lot of people decided to jump off the bandwagon. You’ll notice that the Gospel gives no indication that Jesus tried to keep them from going. He doesn’t tell them they’re wrong, or that the ones who stayed are right. “No one can come to me,” he says, “unless it is granted her by my Father.” I suppose those of us who try to believe, with Peter, that Jesus is the Holy One, could take some elitist pride in our unmerited and gratuitous election. We could use as the grounds for organizing a “Christian” political party. But I love what Peter says when Jesus asks him if he’ll leave too. Not “you’ve got the best chance of winning” or “I think that of all the candidates, you will do the most to protect my interests.” No--Peter says, “Lord, you have the words of eternal life. To whom shall we go?” We should aspire to the same humility when we proclaim Jesus as the savior of the world. It’s not that we wouldn’t leave him if we could, and it’s not like we won’t betray him. It’s just that we understand how deep our predicament really is, and that we own that without the continual nourishment of God’s compassion and wisdom, all we’ve got is politics.