The ultimate goal

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62

When I was farming, near Muir Beach in Marin County, in my twenties, we had two tractors.  The Big tractor was for primary tillage.  In the spring, as soon as the ground was dry enough to work, I would hitch up the hammer-flail mower, and drive out into the chest-high stand of winter cover crops and mow it down.  I’d wait forty-eight hours for that green manure to dry, and then I’d plow it under with the disc plow.  Then I’d hitch up the chisel plow, to break up the subsoil, and rip the fields first one way and then crossways, like a checkerboard; and then I’d finish off with a lighting disking, with the ring-roller on behind, so that each of the fields, one, two, two-and-a-half acres, would be one smooth surface, like a bed sheet tucked in tight from one windbreak to the next.

Then we’d turn to the small tractor, a lightweight crop-tending machine, and start marking lines, shaping up beds for vegetable crops, or furrows for potatoes.  The goal was to make the first straight and then keep them straight and keep them parallel, because everything that came after, the planting, and laying out irrigation pipe, the cultivating, and fertilizing, and harvesting, all was done between the lines that the small tractor made on the freshly plowed ground.  I think it was in my second year on the farm that I became something of a specialist in bedding-up with the small tractor, because I knew the secret to making straight lines.  The secret was to not look back, and not look to the side. 

I would get the bedder lined up square on the three-point hitch and tighten up the chains on both sides, and I’d adjust the top bar so the spades got just the right amount of bite, and I’d set the front tires where I knew they needed to be and then I would pick a point at the far end of the field, and start driving.  And I would keep my eyes fixed on that point, not looking back, and not looking to the side, but just drive toward my mark until I got there and then I’d lift up the rear hydraulics and swing the tractor around and see my straight line.  I’d put my right front tire in the track I’d just made and sight down the center axis of the tractor and pick a point on far end of the field where I’d come from and start driving, and just keep going like that until the whole field was done.

I think about that experience every time I hear this story from the Gospel of Luke about Jesus setting his face for Jerusalem, not letting himself be distracted by the stubbornness of the Samaritans or the foolishness of his disciples.  I think about the words that Jesus says about how the man who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not worthy of the Kingdom of God.   Jesus seems to be saying “my goal is the ultimate goal, and I’m going to go all the way there.  If you want to come with me, you need to set your eyes on that goal, and start walking, and to keep going toward it in a straight line.

Now, there’s nothing explicitly religious about the idea that we should have a goal for our lives, and be single-minded and focused in going after it.  On any given weekend in airport hotels and convention centers all around the world motivational speakers and professional coaches are charging people good money to tell them just that.  Where the religion comes in is with the faith that the only goal that is truly ultimate, that is really worthy of giving one’s whole-hearted devotion and single-minded focus to pursuing, is the goal for our lives that is in the heart and mind of God.  

Only the gift of God’s purpose for our lives is precisely suited to bringing forth the nobler powers that are latent in our created natures, and expressing them, transforming us into the persons we most want to be in our heart of hearts.  Only God’s goal for us is entrancing and fascinating enough to hold our attention and keep calling us back through all the wrong turns, and changes of perception, and reversals of fortune and course corrections, and swings of emotion that happen to us along the way, calling us again and again to consent to pursuing that which lies beyond ourselves, transcending our limited conceptions of what it is we truly want and need.

That’s what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Galatians when he speaks of the struggle between “flesh” and “spirit.”  We have to be careful here not to make the mistake of thinking that Paul is denigrating the body, as if religious life were about sacrificing the body, with it its needs and pleasures and limitations on the altar of some escape into a purely mental, spiritual, disembodied realm.  That’s not what Paul means here.  What he is talking about is the inner conflict, the daily struggle that we go through in the painstaking process of learning what it is that we truly desire.   “The desires of the flesh” is Paul’s symbolic shorthand for our maddening efforts to satisfy our ultimate longings by craving and clinging to things that never can.  And Paul knows, as Jesus knows, that the key to untangling the knot of all that frustrated desire is love. 

I just came back from a couple of weeks of vacation.  It was such a refreshing change of pace—I had to do a little work, preaching and celebrating liturgies on Sundays, but the rest of the time I was free to simply enjoy the beauty of the Sierra Nevada, and read, and catch up on my sleep, and most of all to catch up with my family.  When Meg and Risa and I get to spend long stretches of unhurried, un-stressed time together we remember how much we like each other, and love to be in each other’s company. 

And so as we get ready to begin our fourth year here at St. John’s, I’m not just thinking about my professional goals, or my goals for the parish, but also about the goal of making room in my family life for more of that kind of time.  And I’m sure this pertains to the ultimate purpose of my life.  After all, how can I preach about God’s gift of unmerited grace and unconditional love in Christ, and about the Spirit’s gifts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, if I’m not taking the time to share those gifts with the people I’m closest to.

Because it’s not like Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem because he wanted to die.  He did it out of love for God and for his disciples, and the desire to dispel forever their misplaced hope that any kind of political or military messiah could ever really set them free.  And Paul didn’t set out on his missionary journeys, in the course of which he met with floggings, and imprisonments, shipwrecks, hunger, sleepless nights, and every kind of humiliation and hardship, because he enjoyed suffering.  He did it out of love for the Lord, who, in spite of Paul’s being his sworn enemy, revealed to him the glory of his resurrection, and gave him the grace of an apostle to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles.

As we seek for the ultimate goal of our lives, for what alone will make us truly happy and truly set us free, our only guide is love—the love we have for each other, for our families and friends, for our neighbors, for our fellow Petalumans, and Californians, and Americans, for our fellow human beings and fellow creatures on this earth, and our love for the creator of them all.  Love is what will lead us on the straight and narrow way through our tangled forest of misbegotten desires and all the lies and hurt and violence that people do to each other because of them.   And love, one and the same eternal and all-encompassing love, is the goal of the journey, that calls to each and every one of us in a voice that is uniquely our own.   

Hero and servant

1 Kings 18:20-21, (22-29), 30-39

Psalm 96

Galatians 1:1-12

Luke 7:1-10

Today’s we read the first of several stories we’ll be hearing over the coming weeks about the prophet Elijah.  Elijah is a kind of folk-hero, and these stories are a lot like fairy tales.  I guess every tribe and nation has stories about larger-than-life heroes of the past, except the difference between Elijah and someone like Paul Bunyan, or Hercules, is that he does his exceptional feats, not by virtue of super-human size or strength, but because he speaks and does the will of God. 

When Elijah engages in spiritual combat with the prophets of  the Canaanite god Baal, Elijah, the last prophet of Israel’s, stands by the altar that he has rebuilt from it ruins and prays, “"O LORD, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding.”  And miraculous fire comes down from the sky and consumes Elijah’s sacrifice, in spite of the fact that it is completely drenched with water.  And so we see that the Elijah’s God really is God, and that Elijah is doing his will.  He isn’t the type of a great warrior or a noble king, or even a wise teacher—he’s not really even the main character in his own story.  That honor goes to the Lord, the God of Israel.  The Bible gives us terrific stories about Elijah, but they are only part of the greater and more important story of God and God’s people.

The centurion in today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke was captivated by that great story.  And here again there is an extraordinary miracle—the healing of a young slave that occurs at a distance, without Jesus ever touching or even seeing him.  But, like in the Elijah story, the miracle is not the main point.  Instead, the main point is the faith of the centurion in the God of Israel.  He has learned about the faithfulness, and goodness, and compassion of this God, and for his sake he has built a house where the Jews of Capernaum can come together and hear the scriptures that tell his story.  And now he has heard of Jesus, who comes like one of the prophets in the story, doing the will of God, bestowing healing and reconciliation and forgiveness, and rekindling the flame of love for God in the hearts of the people.  For the centurion, the news of the coming of Jesus awakens an impossible hope—the faith that the promises of life and blessing and redemption that God gives to Israel through the prophets also apply to him.

The centurion believes in Jesus, because he understands what it means to have authority.  Jesus, like him, is one who receives his power from higher up, and that is what gives authority to his commands.  When the centurion tells his soldiers or his slaves to do something, they do it, because when he speaks it is as if the emperor were speaking.  And he sees that the word that Jesus speaks has an even greater power than that, the power of God.

In this way, the comparison that the centurion makes between his authority and that of Jesus is also a contrast.  According to the imperial ideology of Rome, the emperor was God.  The chain of command of which the centurion is a low-ranking member is supposed to go all the way to the top.  It is supposed to connect him to the ultimate authority that governs the world.  But the centurion knows better.  He knows that there is no one in his chain of command that can give life at the threshold of death.  He can’t order his slave to get better, and it won’t do him any good to appeal to his higher-ups.  He has to go to someone who is under the authority of the real source of healing, and who really has the power to save.  He understands that the God of the Hebrew scriptures is that source, and that Jesus of Nazareth is his servant.

One implication of Jesus’ response to the centurion’s faith is that Gentiles are no longer excluded from the blessings of Israel’s covenant with God.  This was one of the radical messages of the Gospel, and it still has power for us today.   It helps us guard continually against an exclusive notion of our own membership in God’s elect.  But for the most part we have long put behind us the idea that, as Gentiles, we have no part in the covenant.  It’s not something we worry about, so that part of the Gospel message doesn’t really mean good news. 

But this other message that the centurion gives us, this radical contrast between his authority and the authority of Jesus still packs a real punch.  That’s because we live in a time when everyone is worried about whose authority you can trust.  Whatever institution you look at—Government, business, the universities, the military, the churches, the press—you see signs of deep demoralization, corruption, retrenchment, and anxiety about the future.  Even Mother Earth—the original symbol of permanence, and solidity, and inexhaustible abundance—now seems unable to hold up her own. 

Memorial Day morning I was having breakfast with some friends and friends of friends;  people my age, blessed with fine educations, beautiful children, good health, and prosperity.  So it was a little surprising to hear one of them speak matter-of-factly about the imminent extinction of the human race.  It wasn’t surprising because I haven’t thought about it myself—I used to worry about far more than was good for me.  It was surprising because it reminded me of how my feelings about all that have changed.  As the rest of us around the table made the case for hope, sharing ideas about what it will take to save the world, I could see clearly what a difference faith makes.  It’s not that I don’t see the predicament we’re in, or that I think it’s going to be easy to turn things around, but that I can imagine the possibility that we are living but one chapter in a much greater story, and that the author of the story is God.

It’s what Paul wrote about in his letter to the Galatians: “the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”  Now we would be missing the point if we thought that the authority of the servant of God depends on having a revelation like the one Paul had on the road to Damascus.  Or that it depends on witnessing Elijah’s supernatural bonfire, or Jesus’ miraculous healings.  Paul’s point is that when he had his revelation, he woke up to see that God was writing a whole new chapter in the story, and that he was to play a part.  Having a part to play in the story gave him authority, an authority that didn’t depend on any human chain of command.

The example of Paul, like that of Elijah, like that of Jesus reminds us just how much one servant of God can do.  But one can’t do the will of God if one doesn’t know what it is.  And you can’t know what it is if you don’t desire it, and actively seek it.   This is why St. John’s vestry has been studying the art of discernment, learning to ground our decision-making in prayerful listening and conscious intention to seek the mind of Christ.  It is why we are a congregation that reads the Bible, not in order to know how the story ends, but because you can’t write a new chapter if you don’t know how the story begins.  It is why we sing chants and hymns and say public prayers, why we sit together in silence, why we do Godly Play, why we visit the sick and lonely, and feed the hungry, why we break the bread and drink the wine.  We do these things because they nourish our faith, the faith to live our lives with authority, the authority of servants of the real ruler of the world.

Where are the churches?

I was talking with one of our members recently about St. John’s mission to the wider community and she told me about a letter in one of the local papers from an Occupy activist who had been protesting the eviction of low-income tenants from the Petaluma Hotel by its new owner.  The author raised a question that had pricked her conscience—“Where are the churches?”  Why weren’t members of Petaluma congregations acting on the biblical moral imperative of defending the poor?

It’s a good question, one that I take personally to heart, and it reminds me of a man I met seven or eight years ago on vacation with my family.  My brother had let slip to some of the other guests at the resort that I was a priest, and this fellow caught me by myself a little later and took the opportunity to vent his frustration with the churches for not stopping the invasion of Iraq.  I didn’t bother pointing out to him all the fruitless efforts that millions of Christians had made to do just that.  Instead, I asked him when he had last been to church.  He said he left the church in disgust when his Roman Catholic priest had failed to take a stand against the Vietnam War, which would have placed it thirty years in the past.

In a way the question “where are the churches?” is an underhanded compliment.  It implies the recognition that the churches are unique institutions, and ought to be the moral conscience of society.  But how can the church take responsibility for being the conscience of a town, or of a nation, when the people of the town won’t take responsibility for the church?  There seems to be an assumption underlying these complaints that the churches are sitting on large reserves of social and political capital and their members are just too lazy or complacent to put it into play.  But the churches I’m familiar with, at least, are comprised of people who care deeply about the common good and want to make a difference in the world, and who are, indeed, giving generously and working hard to do what they can.  But these churches are also half-empty, and struggling to survive.

Someone might accuse us of devoting too much energy to carrying on our worship services and maintaining our organizations, energy that could otherwise be spent on social action.  And that accusation carries weight with us, not because it comes from Occupy activists, but because it comes from the Hebrew prophets.  What makes people who have not been to church in thirty years still look to us with hope for a more just and peaceful world, are the transcendent demands of God.  We may perceive those demands imperfectly, we may fall far short in our obedience, but we, with the other churches, synagogues, temples and mosques, are the only places in society where they are publicly spoken, where they are given a hearing and meditated on, studied and honored. 

And that alone requires work.   God’s demands and instructions do not come to us as a series of easily-diagrammed steps, or pre-digested principles.  We inherit them in the form of traditions, biblical, cultural, liturgical, that are interwoven with the complex life and history of a great, and not always completely-functional, family.  It is not easy to understand what this inheritance is, let alone sort through it for the precious treasures that meet the urgent need of our own day.  To find those gifts, and hold them up, and pass them around the community, so that they can transform our fragmented, individualistic existence into the life of a single body acting in wisdom and compassion—this is a long, slow, labor of love. 

We have a responsibility for the gifts that we have inherited that prevents us from spending ourselves too impetuously or carelessly.  We have a grave responsibility to pass these gifts on to the next generation, in the midst of social and cultural currents that are antithetical to that process.    We have the responsibility of honoring and caring for our elders, and the sick and differently-abled and poor in our own midst.  We have the responsibility of nourishing our community with beauty and joy, so that life is more than grim struggle.  Most of all, we have the responsibility of worship, of embodied, collective praise of the transcendent mystery that alone can make all our other work good, and enduring, and free.

People who don’t know about these gifts don’t value them, so it is understandable that they look for some other proof of the churches’ social purpose.   They will point to the example of Jesus, and hold us to it, as a universal standard that they have as much right to claim as we do.  And they are right to do so.   But while the gospels narrate many dramatic episodes in the ministry of Jesus, and quotations of things he said, they give us almost no descriptive information about how he lived his life, generally speaking.  There is one notable exception to this, and it is found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 4, verse 16, where we read, “When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom.”

Where are the churches?  In the yellow pages.  On the internet.  Ours has a tower and a steeple, which makes it easy to spot.  It’s been on the same corner for over 150 years, which suggests that it’s doing something right.  Where are the churches?--Where are you?

The dream of the Spirit

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17

One evening in January, 1988 I was on a dilapidated barge chugging south just off the eastern shore of Lake Nicaragua.  It was a part of the country with no paved roads, where the vast lake served as the main artery of transportation.  Our volunteer construction team had hired the barge, a rusting hulk with a wheezing, reeking diesel motor, to help us gather materials for the houses we had gone there to build.  I’d spent much of the day in a dim, windowless warehouse, picking through piles of cement paper in sacks, pulling out the ones that hadn’t been turned into bricks by rain leaking through the roof, and loading them into wheelbarrows.  Nicaraguans then wheeled the cement down the street and out to the end of a rickety pier, where they lowered it into the canoe that ferried it out to the barge. 

When the cement was shipped, we rode on a flatbed truck to the outskirts of the village where some Swedes had set up a sawmill.  We loaded the truck with lumber and drove back to the pier, where we moved it, board-by-board, out to the barge, in the same laborious manner.  It was late afternoon by the time we had put out from San Miguelito, and we had gone less than half of the ten or twelve miles back to our work site in Morillo when a belt broke on the engine.  The pilot cut the motor and we drifted for a while in anxious silence, as he struggled to tie a length of rope tightly enough around the flywheel to serve as a temporary replacement.  Amazingly, it worked, and as the sun sank behind the twin volcanoes of the Isle of Omotepe, we got under way once again.

It seemed to be a rule of life in Nicaragua that any vehicle on land or water that had space on deck or in the cargo bed was required to take on passengers, and a spontaneous party broke out among them in celebration of the ingenuity of our captain and the beauty of the evening.  In the prow where I was sitting, a man in a floppy wide-brimmed hat of faded army green and matching shirt pulled a half-pint bottle of cheap white rum out of his bag and offered it to me with a smile.  I took a swig and handed it back.  He pointed to a golden pearl of light high above in the darkening sky.  Calling Spanish “basic” would have been doing it too much credit, but I’d had enough Latin that I understood “la diosa del amor”—the goddess of love.  So we drank again to Venus, and from there we made our best effort at carrying on a conversation.  As was often the case in my time in Nicaragua, the topic came around to the question of why my country was attacking his.  I did what I could to explain my understanding of Cold War geopolitics, and he looked me intently in the eye and said, “They say we are Communists, but we are not.  We are Christians.”

I think of that man and our conversation this morning because today is Pentecost.  Today is a celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit that came to the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth on Pentecost Day.  What makes that gift the enduring life-force of the Church is not the memory of an ecstatic experience, a sound like a rush of wind and a vision of tongues of fire.    Neither is it the miraculous ability to speak to a crowd of people from every land in their native languages.  If you’re like me, these things have never happened to you, but this is still our story.  Because the sound is just the means to gather the crowd, and the flames are just the sign of the authority to speak, and the languages are just a means to deliver a message.  And it’s the message that is the real gift of Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit is what empowers us to speak and to hear a message, and the message is not very different from the one that man gave me on the barge in Nicaragua.  “Language is not a barrier, to us being able to understand each other.  Neither is nationality, or politics.  We live on the same Earth, under the same stars.  We ought to be able to trust each other and live in peace.”  And the second part of the man’s message is also the message of the Holy Spirit—“the means to this peace, the bond of this brotherhood, is Christ.”   

Sometimes when people talk about reuniting the human race, they seem to have a dream of getting everybody to speak the same language, or believe the same doctrine, and line up behind the same centralized plan.   But this is the project of the tower of Babel.  It is the dream of the empire and the totalitarian state.   At its heart is the fear of death and disorder, and a spirit of rivalry, even rivalry with God.  But the Holy Spirit at Pentecost has a different kind of dream.  The tongues of flame are distributed around the circle of the disciples, where each one receives his or her own anointing with the authority to teach.  The Spirit does not teach those Jews from all over the world to speak the same language; but it teaches the apostles to speak the variety of languages that make a multicultural community.  And Peter interprets the event to the crowd in terms of Joel’s dream of the Spirit poured out on all flesh, so that sons and daughters, young men and old, and even slaves, have the power to speak the truth about God. 

 

The Gospel of John says plainly that God will send us this Spirit of truth.  But it is not a philosophical truth.  It is not something esoteric or abstract or otherworldly, but it is a truth that is available to everyone, because it is revealed to all in the life of Jesus.  The message of the Gospel, the message that is kindled into flame at Pentecost, is that the truth about God is a human truth.  It is manifest in human words and human works.  They are words of forgiveness, and reconciliation, and peace.  They are works of healing, and feeding, and setting free, of seeking, and saving, and serving even unto death. 

To say the same kind of words, and do the same kind of works, requires no special knowledge, and no higher authority than the life and death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  No matter who we are or where we come from we can understand this story.  We can grasp what kind of person Jesus is.  And if we love him, says the Gospel, and model our own actions upon his, and pray to become like him in our own peculiar way, we have the Spirit of truth.  The Spirit that was on him, that anointed him to speak good news to the poor, and recovery of sight to the blind, and release to the captive, to let the oppressed go free, and the coming of the year of God’s favor, is also with us and in us.  And as bearers of this message, we are all members of one body, no matter what language we speak, or what country we come from, no matter how the architects of Babel might try to keep us apart.   

Today we begin the story again at the beginning, with the water where Jesus was baptized with the Holy Spirit.  Today we welcome another companion into his way of freedom and truth, in the person of little Mackenzie Anne.  And we pray that the Holy Spirit will give her grace to recognize the power of the gift she has been given, that from this modest beginning, she may be able to go all the way, and lead others to the abode of heavenly peace.  Beginning again where the apostles began, gathering on Sunday to pray and to remember Jesus, may this congregation be empowered to hear and to speak the message of the Holy Spirit in the languages of our own day.  From this modest beginning, may the truth about God’s reconciling love for every human being lead us to become that royal priesthood of every family, language, people and nation that the Spirit intends us to be.