God's dream of peace

Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

The prophecies in the second half of the Book of Isaiah came to an exile in Babylon.  He or she spoke to other Jews in exile, whose condition was a constant reminder of the horrors of war and starvation, of the destruction of Jerusalem and the bitter shame of captivity and deportation.  To these people their historical situation was not simply the result of failed policy.  It was not merely a national defeat.  It was a divine judgment.  The memory of horror, and the pang of loss, and the burden of oppression were constant reminders to these people of their collective sins.  They had squandered the blessings of God’s covenant with them; they had betrayed God with idolatrous worship, and injustice to each other, and violence toward their neighbors.

But the word of God to them, through the prophet, is that the memory of guilt will not decide their future —“the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind,” says God,  “for I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.”  In spite of their hopeless situation, God’s dream for them is not over.  If anything, it is coming more clearly into view.  God’s dream is of Jerusalem as a place of peace and safety and justice.  It is a vision of a community living life to the full, without fear or sorrow or want. 

These words must have seemed remote from the everyday experience of the people.  But that is what makes them like a sudden dawn breaking what felt like an endless night.  The vision of the prophet was like a dream, but it was a dream that awakened them from the slumber of numbness and despair.  It rang with a truth that ran counter to everything that they could have reasonably assumed from a practical assessment of their real life situation.  The vision of the new creation was a dream that could only have come from God.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke speaks to the turmoil of the second half of the first century.  It was the time of the Jews’ bloody revolt against Roman rule, of the Romans’ savage campaign of re-conquest and their destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple; it was the time of the first waves of official persecution of those who identified themselves with the name of Jesus Christ.  These verses remember a time when Jesus himself spoke of the fall of the temple, and of turmoil and trouble and suffering in the world.  They recall his words of warning about those who would prey on the fears and doubts that fill the air in such times, and put themselves forward as Messiahs, claiming the power to make God’s promises come true. 

And we hear a further warning to Jesus’ disciples, that they would be put forward, not as victors but as victims, as scapegoats and criminals.  Jesus tells them of the ironic twist of history by which their accusers will bring them before kings and governors, giving them their moment to testify.  It will be their part, in the confusion of a world that seems to be coming to an end, to speak the word of God; Jesus will put his own wisdom in their mouths, the words of judgment and promise that open the door to the new creation: “The kingdom of heaven has come near to you.”  “Love your enemies and bless those who curse you.”  “Those who are called great among you must be last of all and servant of all.”  “Have courage, for I have overcome the world.”    

I grew up with a rather dismissive opinion of President John F. Kennedy.  Once as a child I became fascinated with a book in the town library; a coffee-table book full of photographs, it was about his assassination and the days that followed, I went back to it again and again.  But somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that President Kennedy hadn’t really accomplished anything, and that if he hadn’t been young and handsome, and given a great speech at his inauguration, and died the way he did, he would be a minor figure in our history.  And I didn’t find any reason to fundamentally reconsider that opinion until very recently--just a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. 

My wife was out of town for the weekend, which meant that on Friday night I got to watch what I wanted on TV, and maybe because of the upcoming 50^th anniversary of his death, I selected a documentary on JFK.  In the course of the film they showed some footage of the speech that he gave to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 20, 1963.  In that speech President Kennedy hailed the signing of the first major nuclear arms-control treaty, the ban on atmospheric testing which he’d proposed two years before.  And he took the moment to insist that this should be the first step toward ending the Cold War, not a brief pause in its continuation.  While acknowledging profound differences between the superpowers, he laid out a clear path toward comprehensive disarmament, and an intention to follow it, “building,” as he put it, “the institutions of peace as we dismantle the engines of war.”  He made bold proposals for cooperation among nations, including the Soviet Union, in science and technology and economic and social development, and recommitted his support to the United Nations as the cornerstone of global security under the aegis of international law. 

Near the conclusion of the speech, he said the following: “But peace does not rest in charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. And if it is not there, then no act, no pact, no treaty, no organization can hope to preserve it without the support and the wholehearted commitment of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper; let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace, in the hearts and minds of all of our people. I believe that we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.”

The thing that was most stirring to me about these words was that I could see that he meant them.  The film shows President Kennedy leaving the podium after he had spoken, and making his way back to his seat.  And watching it I was transfixed by the way he lowered himself tenderly down into his chair, his body in evident pain, but even more I was moved by the expression on his face—humble, even a little shy, but luminous with wonder at the privilege of speaking such hope to a world in the grip of confusion and fear; it was the face of a man who has tasted peace in his own heart, and knows what the word really means.

We all know what happened next, and as we approach the 50^th anniversary of that terrible day, the most important questions are not the unanswered ones about his death, but the ones about memory.  Is it just a memory of shock and grief, of where you were when you heard the news?   Is it memory of the man, of glamor and charisma and glaring personal failings?  Or is it a memory of the vision, of words spoken at great political and personal risk, with the resolve do something about them?  Is it a memory of something more than a murder, something more even than a man, something about God’s dream for the world? 

That dream did not die in 1963 in Dallas, or in 1965 in Harlem, or in 1968 in Memphis or Los Angeles.  It did not die on September 11, 2001, because violence cannot kill God’s dream of life and peace for the world.  It rises again and again from the graves of its fallen witnesses and speaks in new voices and new visions, because it is God’s promise to all people for all time.  It is the new creation for which all things in heaven and earth were made.  That is the message we come to this place, week by week, to remember, to say aloud, and whisper in our hearts.  That is the hope we cherish here in large ways and in small, for nations at war and children in the hospital, for families in need and a planet at risk, for the unknown and unborn, and for the beloved dead.  It is the promise that gives power and purpose to our lives, because it is the dream that makes the world come true.  

Loving what gets left behind

My maternal grandmother died in 1985, and my grandpa remarried a few years later, at almost eighty years of age.  I liked my new step-grandmother right away, and over the years became very fond of her.  When I went back to college to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree so I could go to seminary, it was she and my grandpa footed the bill for my tuition.  So a few years later, after she and my grandpa had died, I was faced with a little dilemma.

It began when I took up regular practice of praying the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.   I would get to the point at the end of the service where one adds personal prayers, including prayers for the dead.  I would pray for my deceased grandparents on my father’s side. And when it came to my mother’s parents, Gertrude and Frank, I would naturally pray for them together, as they were together for the first 20 years of my life, as they were together for over fifty years of marriage.  But I would always think of my Step-grandma Mary Beth at the same time, but it didn’t feel right to mention her in the same breath as them, and it didn’t feel right not to.   It was a long time before my heart was completely settled on this point.  Strange as it sounds, it felt disloyal not to give Gertrude her pride of place, as my Grandma and as Frank’s wife.  But I also didn’t want to make Mary Beth a second-class citizen in my prayers.

This problem I had about how to pray for my Grandfather’s wives, says something about how I understood love.  I think most human beings start out as with the idea that there is only so much love to go around.  I can only love this person more by loving that person less.  And the same goes for those who love me.  If they love someone else more, there is that much less love available for me.  This is a very natural way for us to think about love, because of our experience as small children who were completely dependent for our very survival on our parents’ love.  And our parents were limited.  They only had so much to give.  We were attuned to every ebb and flow of their attention and affection, and when it was directed elsewhere, to their work, or to each other, or, God forbid, to our brothers and sisters, we couldn’t help but feel that there was less for us. 

We grow and enter adolescence and develop more resilience and a capacity to love ourselves, but we still need a lot of love and reassurance from the outside.  And that’s also about the time that it starts to really sink in for us that our parents are going to die, that there is going to come a day when there is nobody left in the world who is obliged to love us.  And so a powerful new need awakens, the desire to find someone in the world with whom we can create a new bond to take the place of the one we had with our father and mother, to have someone in the world who will love us and make life’s journey with us all the way to the end.  Along with that yearning for a mate comes the equally powerful desire to have offspring, so that when we leave this world, someone will remain behind to remember us, someone who will keep the names and the values, the physical features and the stories that we pass on to them alive.

Now this is obviously a simplistic and incomplete description of human development, but I think it helps us see ordinary human love, family love, as a way of coming to grips with and even overcoming death.  And that is a beautiful thing.  Once when I was a still a bachelor I was walking through the Mission District in San Francisco at rush hour and saw an older Chinese man coming down the sidewalk, with a lined face and gray hair, but a body that was still lean and tall and strong.  He was dressed in tradesman’s coveralls and in his arms he held a girl of three or four years of age.  He was carrying her diagonally across his body facing out, with one arm under her arm and around her chest, and the other hand under the crook of her knee, so her other leg swung free.  She was laughing and wriggling as he swung her from side to side, and on his face was a smile of pure joy.  The sight of them struck deep into my heart, and I understood, in a way I never had before what it means to play with your granddaughter and know that your love will live on in her long after you’re gone.

The Sadducees of the Gospels believed that this kind of love is enough.  They came from the upper classes, people who were prosperous and well-fed and had large families, and for them the hope that they would live on in their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children was enough.  If they thought of resurrection from the dead, they supposed it would have to be a kind of family reunion, where you picked up where you left off with your relationships on the other side of the grave.  They were also conservative people, who upheld a traditional interpretation of the laws of Moses, so they thought a lot about cases, and real-world practical implications.  When they argued against the resurrection, it was because of the legal problems it would create, problems like the case of the woman who married the seven brothers.  Better to be satisfied, they said, to love those who will love you in return, and let life take its course, and give death its due.

But Jesus doesn’t think about cases.  Jesus thinks about that woman who was married to the seven brothers, who watched each one of them die, and never did have a child.  And Jesus question about her resurrection is not “whose wife will she be?”  Jesus’ question is what is her hope?  It’s the same question he asks about widow of Nain, following the body of her only son out of town to the burying ground.  It’s the question he asks about all the mothers and fathers whose children are stricken with hunger, or mental illness, or disability or disease, and about the ones who could have given a child a loving home but were never blessed to have one, and the ones whose marriages were broken by death, or addiction, or divorce.  It’s the question he asks about all the mothers and fathers who sent sons off to war, who never returned, or who came back broken.  What is their hope?  What is their legacy? 

And for an answer Jesus also looks to Moses, but not to Moses the author of laws.  Jesus looks to Moses, the man who came face to face with the living God, who turned aside from tending his father-in-laws flock to behold a bush that burned but was not consumed.  Jesus felt the anguish, and the loneliness, and the hopelessness of those who had no answer to death, and he thought of Moses who heard the voice from the burning bush that said, “I am.  I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and I am your God.  And I have heard the affliction of my people.  Their cry has come to me and I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the bondage in which they are oppressed.”

It’s not that there is anything wrong with ordinary human love, with the love of husband and wife, and parent and child, and grandparent and grandchild.  But it doesn’t always work out the way we want it to, and anyway, even when it is enough for us, it is not enough for God.  It is not enough for God that we should love and die, and vanish like smoke.  God has more to give us than that.  In Jesus Christ God has given us the life that doesn’t need to find a work-around for death.  In Christ we are children of a parent whose love is not limited, who does not love the childless widow any less than the woman whose house is filled with grandchildren.  Christ is the bearer of the gift of that love and that life because it came to him first, and because he will be there to enjoy it with us at the last, and the gift is called resurrection.       

The Good, the Bad, and the Meaningful

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119:97-104
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

Not long ago I was driving my daughter home at the end of the day and I had the news playing on the car radio.  And I was just turning onto our street when Risa asked me from the back seat, “Daddy, why is the news always bad?  Why do they always talk about wars and people shooting each other and things like that?  Why don’t they ever have news about the good things that people do?”  Well, there were a lot of different ways I could have answered.  I could have given her a dose of cynicism about the media.  Or I could have said something jaded about human nature, and the fascination that violence and catastrophe seem to hold for us.   But she’s nine years old.  So what I did was to agree with her that it just doesn’t seem right that the news is always bad.  I said I thought she was right that there must be a different way to talk about what’s going on in the world, that there must be more to the story. 

Some of us at St. John’s have been taking part this year in a program of reading the Bible from cover to cover.  And along with this so-called “Bible Challenge” I’ve been reading books about the Bible, and also leading courses of study at the church on especially important pieces of the Bible.  So I’ve been reflecting on the Bible in recent months even more than I usually do.  And this week as I was reading the lectionary texts for this morning, and remembering that conversation with Risa about the news, it struck me that things haven’t really changed all that much since the Bible was written.  People often fault the scriptures because they contain so much violence and catastrophe and terror.  But it doesn’t seem to occur to them that this is still what the world is like, and it wasn’t any different in Bible times.  In some ways, it was worse.

The other thing we sometimes forget is that when the Bible was written there was nothing else in print.  The Bible was not shelved in a specialized section of the bookstore labeled “Inspirational.”  And there was no idea at that time of a dimension of human experience called “spirituality” or “religion,” that only had to do with lofty, uplifting, and comforting subjects.   In fact the Bible speaks out again and again against the notion that religion is somehow unconcerned with all the ugly and disturbing things that people think and do.  What the people who wrote the Bible said is that there is one world of human experience and knowledge, and the whole thing, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, belongs to God.

 Which sounds kind of reassuring until you start to think about all the stuff that happens, and what that says about God.  And the prophets and sages of ancient Israel knew they had to think about it.  They had to make room in their understanding of God’s sovereignty and holiness, for the bad news.  Their experience of God’s goodness and faithfulness had to allow somehow for the arrogance and greed of the rich and powerful, and the sufferings of the poor, for apostasy and injustice, and the devastation of their land by invading empires, and the wholesale slaughter of their people.  And when you read the Bible you start to see that they didn’t give themselves an easy out.  If you go to it looking for a simple explanation for why the world is the way it is, or a straightforward solution to its problems, you will be disappointed.  They are not there.

What you will find is a record of the thoughts and words and deeds of men and women seized by a profound awareness of God, an awareness that comes to bear on every aspect of human experience, from the most exalted states of religious vision, or worldly triumph, or erotic love, to the depths of physical agony, emotional abandonment, terror and despair.   It’s not always easy for us to see the value of this kind of faith.  We are powerfully conditioned by the modern mind, which only wants to allow meaning to that which can be explained.  But the truth is that most of our experience, and in particular that part that affects us most deeply, is inexplicable. 

We will never know why that particular sunset was different from all the others, or why we’ve never forgotten that particular meal.  We will never understand exactly why we fell in love with that person out of all the men and women in the world, or why that child came to be ours, or why we got sick, or that one had to die, or why people make such foolish choices, or rise up with murder in their hearts.  But the faith of the Bible is that in spite of the limits of our comprehension, everything that happens, every that is, every last bit of it, down to the hairs on your head, means something to God.

So when we talk, as we have been doing this month during our Stewardship Season, about the abundance that we share as a faith community, we might consider this: our greatest gift may be that here, in a world where wonder and reverence are melting away under the hot wind of shallow explanations, is a place where there is always more to the story.  St. John’s is like a little wilderness preserve, where we keep alive the possibility that everything means more than we know.  And the way we do this is we pray.  Praying is where we meet the limits of our understanding of why things happen the way they do, and we go beyond them into God. 

Prayer is more than asking God to solve our problems.  It is also asking God to make meaning of things that are beyond our comprehension.  That goes for the good things as well as the bad.  Every day we receive blessings that we did not obtain for ourselves and can’t say with assurance we deserve.  When we make prayers of thanksgiving we stop sleepwalking numbly through the miracle that is our lives.  Giving thanks, we make even the most ordinary day a journey of discovery, the discovery of meaning. 

And as for the bad news, the personal struggles and the mass suffering, to pray about it is to stop explaining it away.  It is to acknowledge that it affects us deeply, and is more than we can handle by ourselves.  We could come up with explanations, but they wouldn’t really satisfy.  And knowing that, in itself, is the first step toward taking responsibility.  I don’t mean so much “responsibility” as in “guilt.” Or as in, “it’s up to us to fix it.”  I mean respons-ability just like the word says—the ability to respond. 

Prayer is empowering, because it says that we are able to respond to what happens, no matter how incomprehensible it is, because we know the world is God’s.  That’s what gives us the confidence and the mandate to keep praying for peace in a nation in a state of endless war, to keep praying for healing, though the doctor says it is hopeless, to keep praying for justice when inequality and corruption are on the rise. 

It is this knowledge that world is God’s, that keeps us praying for the safety and dignity of women and girls, that keeps us praying for the survival of species, for sight for the blind, and liberty for the captives, and good news for the poor, and for the resurrection of the dead, and the coming of the Kingdom.  Sometimes it doesn’t seem like enough just to pray, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.  And I like to think that persistence in prayer makes it more likely, and maybe it happens more than we care to admit, that we will, from time-to-time, hear an answering voice in our hearts that says, “okay—here’s what we can do.”      

More than a family

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Psalm 66:1-11
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19

Last week my daughter and I went to see my parents at their new home on the Eastside of Madison, Wisconsin.  They’d just moved into a smaller house in town from a place in the country west of Madison, and were still unpacking, but they were settled in enough for me to see many of the old pictures and knickknacks and dishes, and books and record albums which I’ve known all my life.  It was comforting to see them, like meeting old friends, but there was also something sad about finding them in an unfamiliar house, quite possibly the last home my parents will ever have. 

This was supposed to be the move when they took their first big step toward “downsizing” their personal possessions.  But their old house sold much quicker than they had expected, and their moving sale had to be canceled because of bad weather.  In the end they ended up just taking it all to the new place where it was piled up in the garage and in a number of basement storage areas.  My brother Ben, who helped them with the move, told me in private about the thought that struck him as he carried box after box of books down the basement stairs—“and in a few years I’ll be carrying them out again.”  Maybe it’s just because I was fresh from the Estate and Stuff Sale here at St. John’s, but these same things that spoke to me of home and family tradition have also begun to ask questions about what meaning they will they have when my parents are gone, and whether anyone will want them.

Our possessions can help us feel at home, for a while, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that they are enough.  When the prophet Jeremiah writes to the people of Judah who have been carried off into exile in Babylon, he tells them that God’s will for them is to make a home for themselves there, to marry and have children, and plant gardens, and work and pray for the well-being of the foreign cities where they live.  But that isn’t the same as telling them to forget about Jerusalem.  It isn’t the same as telling them to assimilate into the cultural and religious ways of Babylon and to cease to be Jews.  They are to make the most of a bad situation, and live for the time being as comfortably as they can, but that isn’t the same as forgetting where their true home is, or their real purpose.

When Jesus encounters the ten lepers in today’s Gospel lesson from Luke, he is on the road, in the no-man’s land between Samaria and Galilee.  It is a place that no one would think of as home, the kind of place where you might expect to find people whose disease had made them unwanted in society.  And when Jesus sends them away to show themselves to the priests, and they head off, and find they are healed, only one of them comes back to the borderland to find Jesus.  Only one of them recognizes that it is not enough to be healed on the outside.  Only one understands that he’s been given a greater gift than merely to be made acceptable, and re-admitted to normal society.  Only one of the ten comes back, praising and giving thanks for a reconciled and renewed relationship with God.  And he is the foreigner, the Samaritan, the one who, from the conventional Jewish point of view, will never belong.

The kind of faith that these stories recommend to us is the faith that looks to God to provide for our immediate needs—for health, for nourishment, for a place to call home, and a measure of belonging and contentment.  But it is also a kind of faith that knows that such things are not enough for us.  The abundance of God’s grace and love for the whole world, made manifest in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, is a light that casts all other, more limited versions of goodness and well-being into shadow. 

That is why the great 20^th century theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about the grace that is really God’s grace—the grace that actually has the power to heal and to save us—that it is “costly grace.”  Not so much because we have to pay for it by giving up the ordinary comforts of home and family, worldly goods and social acceptance—though it is true that all of us have to surrender those things in the end.   It is costly because when we begin to have true faith and lasting hope in what God is really doing in this world, when the glory of new creation shines through the cracks of what is partial and broken, when we perceive within our own hearts the infinite care and patience with which Christ is fitting us for work, work that is ours alone, and at the same time shared with the whole communion of saints and angels; when, in short, we begin to know grace, those other goals and aspirations that we have for our lives just aren’t worth very much to us anymore.

One measure of the extent to which we have faith in God’s grace is our giving to the church.  For one thing, there is no way to calculate whether we’re getting a good return on our investment.  Every other organization, even charitable ones, has some kind of metric they can use to justify to you the impact that your giving is having—so many clients served or cases won or scholarships awarded.  And the church also does the kind of work that can be measured in that way.  But such works, as good and valuable as they are, are not the essence of what the church does.  That is something entirely different.

The essential work of the church, the work that nobody else can do, is to celebrate the Eucharist.  It is the culmination of all the work we do as individual Christians and as a community, which is why the fruits of our worldly work, in the form of an offering of money, are collected together and placed on the table.  And what happens is that all the productive energies of our lives, all the work that is represented in the bread and the wine and the money, our efforts to make good lives and secure and comfortable homes for ourselves and our families and prosperous communities for our neighbors, are all gathered together into a single act of thanksgiving.   The climax of this act, the expression of our highest hope and our deepest gratitude, is our prayer for the grace of the Holy Spirit to consecrate our work, by and to the work and the purposes of Jesus Christ.  And it is Christ who gives himself back to us, as Body and Blood, to consecrate us for the world’s transformation.

Only God’s grace can make this act of consecration happen, and only by grace will it yield its fruits in our lives.  But it does happen, and it does yield fruit, and I had an experience of that this week in Wisconsin.  My visit there wasn’t a homecoming, but then I wasn’t looking for home.   Being reunited with my parents and my three brothers didn’t restore the past, or heal old wounds or resolve old resentments.  But I didn’t need it to.  I will always love them, and they will always be my family, the people who made me who I am.  But as I watched my eldest brother locking horns with my Dad, as they have done so many times before, or stood listening to another long story from my mother about some acquaintance of hers I never met I was also grateful that I belong to something more than a family, something that makes me the person I am becoming. 

Sharing in the Body of Christ, making a regular practice of thanksgiving for the consecration of all human life by Jesus’ self-offering—somehow, without my even knowing how, this has changed me, so that I no longer am only a person in need of love and acceptance and belonging.   But I also and even mostly am a person who knows he has received these things in abundance.   And this means my primary work is giving thanks, and sharing the gifts of God with the people of God.