Turning of the years

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

As some of you already know, my birthday is this week.  I’ll be turning fifty, which is one of those nice round numbers that lends itself to being thought of as a milestone.  It also makes for some easy computations.  For example, because I was ordained to the priesthood on my fortieth birthday, I will soon be able to say that I have spent one-fifth of my life as an Episcopal priest.  Or, since I came to Petaluma five years ago in August, I can already say that I have spent one-tenth of it in the service of St. John’s Church.  But, of course, the calculation that carries the most weight on an anniversary like this is the one that is impossible to make—the one that asks what proportion of my span of life remains to be spent.  I can’t know, but the odds are low, and diminishing quickly, that the answer is greater than one half.

When I was a child, or a young man, the time I have left seemed endless, because I couldn’t imagine it.  But now I know how long thirty years, or forty, or even fifty years is, because I’ve already lived it—and I know it’s not long.  So during this past year, as I have contemplated turning fifty, I have sometimes felt afraid: afraid of losing my social cachet, and my hair, and my mental and physical faculties; afraid of dying, certainly; but most of all afraid of running out of time, afraid that what remains of my life will run through my fingers as quickly and heedlessly as the life I have already spent.  My time is getting short, and at moments I am afraid I will come to the end of it with regret that I did not use it well.

But as my birthday’s gotten closer I’ve come to see that hidden in that fear there is a gift.   The fear itself is a gift, because it motivates me to ask some very important questions.  When I face the truth of my mortality, and do not look away, I cannot help but question the way I am living, the work that I’m doing, and the quality of my relationships, in the light of their ultimate significance.  How well am I lining up with my highest values?  What unfinished work can I still realistically hope to accomplish in the time that remains to me?  Am I creating the legacy I want to leave behind me when I’m gone?     

And within the fear of failing to live in a manner worthy of the best I hope to be, is the recognition that my time in this body, in this world, is a precious gift.  I did not create this life, I did not earn it, no one asked I deserved it, it just came to me, and along with it came all the other gifts, of love, nourishment, companionship, protection, teaching, solace, and support that have enabled me to carry it thus far.  When I appreciate the miracle of having had these fifty years to live the life that I’ve been blessed to have, I’m not so afraid anymore.  I’m grateful.  I am deeply thankful, and I aspire to make each day that’s added to the blessing I’ve received, my own modest way of saying “yes” to such unmerited abundance.

The Bible encourages us to think about the whole world in much the same way I’ve been thinking about my own fiftieth birthday.  We tend to assume that the world is going to go on and on pretty much the same as it is now for such a long time, it might as well be forever.  But one of the recurring themes in the Bible is that we need to keep in mind that it is going to end, maybe sooner than we think.  Maybe immediately.   

And if you take seriously passages like the one in Luke about how "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations” it is only natural to be afraid.  But making us afraid is not the intent behind these words.  The passage goes on to say “people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world;” so it does acknowledge that what it is talking about is frightening.   But its purpose in warning us about these things ahead of time is so that we will not cower in fear, ducking for cover, but so we will confidently raise our heads and look for what is coming after.

There was a brief time in the history of our own civilization when some of us, at least, could imagine we were building a world that would last forever.  The continuous advancement of science and technology, capitalism and industry, liberal democracy, and the so-called Rights of Man, would just go on and on and on until we arrived at an earthly paradise.  And yet, the fear of the sudden end, the abrupt and unexpected crash, has continued to haunt our civilization, even in circles where its religious basis is denied.  Nuclear war, asteroid collision, bird flu, global warming, fanatics with dirty bombs populate our nightmares, even as we continue to praise the magnificence of our dreams. 

But I think it is ridiculous to think that first-century followers of Jesus envisioned our moment in history, and issued warnings about our specific circumstances, but their timing was just two thousand years off.  There were signs enough in their own century that the world they lived in could not last.  Falsehood, injustice and violence so riddled its social, religious, and political order that it could not help but fall.  They saw that this was not simply true of the institutions that they knew--the Judean temple-state and the Greco-Roman Empire--but that any new power that might rise to take their place would share the same spirit and so meet the same fate.  

What the authors of the Bible understood is that we human beings keep trying to create an order in the world that will last forever, because this is how we cope with our fear of death.  We think that if we can be part of something greater than ourselves, a set of norms and symbols, of customs, laws, and institutions with their monuments and histories, if we can improve a little on this legacy and pass it down intact to succeeding generations at least we can feel like our lives meant something.   And if we have to cut some corners, and turn a blind eye to certain uncomfortable truths, and sacrifice some victims to maintain the present order of the world, we consider the price worth paying.  But the hard message of the Bible is that this effort is still futile, because the world you and I live in, and any other we could make, is coming to end. 

Because we cannot take the anxieties and aspirations of our mortal lives and make from them our own ultimate meaning.  It lies beyond them.  We cannot derive the transcendent values by which to steer an eternal course from the conventional wisdom of a world that is passing away—they come from somewhere else.  But here is what the Bible says that is heartening and liberating, beyond what we have any reason to expect—that help has come, and more is on the way.  We may already have one foot in the grave, but Christ has emptied the tomb of its power.  The world may be coming to an end, but at that end we’ll find the world’s true beginning.  Because God wants greater things for us than we know how to want for ourselves.

Which means that through all the troubles we encounter, in the face of all the things that cast a pall of fear and helplessness over our lives, we hold an unbreakable lifeline of hope.  And I don’t mean a passive, “well, maybe someday” kind of hope.  The hope that the writers of the New Testament urged on their communities was an active readiness, a way of living in expectation that God’s inconceivable deliverance is close at hand.  It is very close, closer than we think, liable to break into the world and transform everything we thought was impervious to change, or wouldn’t change for a long, long time.  The grace to know what, out of all the things the world has conditioned us to want, we really need, has come to us, is coming to us, will come to us, even as we hope for its coming.  And the true desire of the nations, which spells their doom and their deliverance, is God’s desire too.

Fear of faith

Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

Later this morning we are going to gather in the parish hall for our “Homecoming” lunch, to mark that summer vacations are over and our whole community is coming together again in this, our spiritual home.  And after lunch we are going to have a sort of fair in celebration of the work that we are coming together again to do.  Leaders and representatives of the many working groups that are active in the congregation will be there so we can recognize each other and share information and generally rev our engines for another year of worship and learning and service.  It should be a lot of fun and the thing that is most exciting about it for me, personally, is not just that it gives us a chance to see how many different kinds of ministry are being done, with how many different leaders, but that all of us together form one ministry.

I was thinking about that this week as I was reading today’s lesson from the Gospel of Mark, and it struck me that this story gives us a way to describe what that one ministry is, the ministry of St. John’s Petaluma, and of the church in general.  It gives us one idea, to sum it up, which is “discipleship.”  Whatever formal shape our different ministries take, in the parish organization or outreach programs in the community, or simply attending worship and saying our prayers and putting something in the offering plate, all of us are called to be disciples of Jesus.  This story is, in some ways, the essential passage in all the gospels about what discipleship means, and Jesus begins his instruction on the subject with two questions: first he asks his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" and then, after they have answered, “But who do you say that I am?”

Taken together, these questions imply that his disciples must know Jesus in a way other people don’t.  There are lots of opinions out there on the street about who he is, and that’s as true today as it ever was, but that’s different from the true knowledge that comes from intimate acquaintance.  So one way of understanding discipleship, and the ministry of the church, is that it is about telling the world something about Jesus that it doesn’t know.  That’s the approach that Peter takes, and he’s not the only one.  There are still a lot of people for whom discipleship means saying as loudly as possible that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, Our Lord and Savior, and so on, in hopes of getting everyone to agree.  But as far as Jesus is concerned, what we say about him is not that important.  In fact, he sternly orders his disciples not to say anything.  What does matter is to trust him enough to do what he does, and to follow him on the way of life that is really worth living. 

And that means making a journey.  We have to go through something.  And the thing we have to go through, says Jesus, is the cross.  Now in this passage he talks about the cross in two different ways.  First, as a fact that is going to happen to him.  In this way he makes clear that whatever else we think we mean when we say that he is the Messiah, it has to include that he suffered, and was rejected by the people who were supposed to know about God, and was killed, and on the third day was raised.  And all that’s true, but if we only think of the cross in these terms it can become just another opinion about Jesus. 

So he also talks about the cross symbolically, and the thing about symbols is that, unlike facts, you have to do something with them.  You have to dialogue with them and make your own decisions about what they mean for you.  When Jesus talks about the cross this way it is no longer a fact we can consider from a distance.  If we want to be his disciples, we have to pick it up, and put it on our shoulders and start walking. 

I’ll be honest with you—as many times as I’ve heard this saying, it still makes me afraid.  It makes it sound like being a disciple of Jesus means signing up for pain.  And I’m afraid of pain.  One of my earliest memories is of screaming and crying at the doctor’s office when my mother took me in for my shots, not from the pain of the injections, but from fear of them before they ever happened.   But what if this teaching is not about gritting our teeth and psyching ourselves up for an extra big helping of pain, so that we might gain some reward from it later?  What if it is about transforming our relationship to our pain that is already here?   What if it is about accepting it, and really looking deeply into it, rather than trying to push it away or blame it on others?  What if it is about taking up the suffering we already have, simply because we are human, and carrying it to God?  

That makes me afraid, too, but with a different kind of fear—not the fear of pain per se, but the fear that the Hebrew wisdom tradition calls the fear of the Lord: the fear of laying aside my conventional assumptions about the purpose of life, and what makes for happiness; the fear of losing the image of myself that I have constructed with such great care so as to be accepted and admired by the people around me; the fear of losing the things I’ve acquired with that image—possessions, position, and esteem. It is the fear of looking squarely at the face I try to hide from others, the vulnerable, aging, needy, sometimes deeply sad, often conflicted and confused face of the person that I also am.  And it’s the fear of knowing all that and still having to make the decision that no one can make for me, the decision I have to make again every day, sometimes under the pressure of great doubt—the decision to have faith.

Jesus invites us to become his disciples, and to make that decision, as he has, and to choose a life centered on God.   But with that choice the illusions of the false self are sacrificed, the attachment to the un-life is broken.  The promise of Jesus is that this is not only a process of dying; it is also rebirth.  From acceptance of our own suffering we become sensitive to the suffering of others.  We also become aware of how much of it, theirs and ours, is needless.  There is that which is the inevitable consequence of life in a mortal body in a world of continual change.  But there is also the great mass of suffering that is due to the misuse of human freedom.  There are the self-inflicted wounds of self-destructive vice, of fruitless anxiety, of revolt against that which cannot be changed, and of clinging to what cannot remain the same.  And there is the suffering we inflict on each other, in personal acts of cruelty, coldness, and abuse, and in systems of collective violence, exploitation, and injustice.

The knowledge of needless suffering inflicts its own kind of pain.  Perhaps the sharpest wound it gives is the vision of liberation.  Because to see how much suffering is needless is to see how much better everything could be.  It is to awaken the deep yearning for a better world, the burning desire to do better, to be better than we have before.  And that is also a cross to bear.  To act on that desire requires effort, against our natural inclination to drift with the tide of time.  It brings us into conflict with powerful enemies, the inner demons and the outer tyrants who are fearful and resistant to healing and change.     

And it means living with failure, with constant reminders that our capacities are limited, that even with heroic sacrifice we will always accomplish less than we imagine we could and less than the world so badly needs.  But Jesus, the crucified and risen, has a message for his disciples, a message for them to administer to everyone.  It is that failure of this kind is nothing to be ashamed of.  This desire is for something better for the world is not naïve, this effort to realize it is not wasted, this suffering for its sake is not futile, because God is faithful in ways we cannot be.  And in Christ, God shares the desire, shares in the effort, even shares the suffering. 

Mastering fear

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28 

“The fear of the Lord,” says today’s Psalm, “is the beginning of wisdom.”  But some of us might disagree.  Sure, wisdom might have something to do with God.  Seeking God, perhaps, or loving God, or knowing God—these we might accept as starting points for wisdom.  But fear?  We like to think that God is loving and good, compassionate and generous and forgiving, and indeed the Psalm describes a God like that.  So what is there to fear? 

It’s a good question, and I think that to find the answer we have to look at what “wisdom” is.  Because wisdom, if it really is wisdom, is not abstract or theoretical.  It is always applied.  Wisdom teaches us how to live, how to find our way through the real world, with skill, equanimity, and grace.  But if we’re going to be honest I think we have to admit that we find the real world to be a fearful place.  We might reject the notion that God is someone to fear, but that doesn’t mean we are not afraid. 

The truth is we live in a world haunted by fear.  News about the economy, just to take one example, is full of fearful language.  Wall Street has “jitters,” we read, or the Federal Reserve seeks to “calm investors’ fears.”  Sometimes it even has to intervene to stave off a full-blown “panic.”  On a more personal level, my wife is fond of reminiscing about her childhood and how she and the neighborhood kids would play together outside, in and out of each others’ houses, and up and down and around the block until they were all called home to dinner.  But in our neighborhood today, though we know there are children because we catch fleeting glimpses of them from time to time, they are not out playing in the street.   And if they were, we wouldn’t let our daughter join them, at least not without adult supervision.  “Times have changed,” we say, but what exactly it is that has changed is hard to put your finger on, except that we are more afraid than our parents were.

We are afraid of things that we do not understand and cannot control, but that gives them power over us.  It doesn’t really matter if the Ebola virus, or Islamist extremists, or home invasion robbers pose a real threat to our lives—the fear of them is enough—enough to make us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, or to not do what we otherwise would.  The fear is enough to curtail our freedom and destroy peace. 

It is when we consider this intersection of fear and power that I think we start to understand what the psalm is saying about wisdom.  Because the point is not that the God of Israel is a terrifying God, though he certainly can be when he means to, but that wisdom begins when we understand that in this world only God is to be feared, because only God has ultimate power.  We who do not fear God, and reject the very idea of fearing God, no longer believe in the power of God.  We might believe in a God who makes us feel better.  That is why we have such a need to for a “nice” God—but we don’t believe in a God with the power to save us from the things we most fear.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by walking into the synagogue at Capernaum on the Sabbath day with his four brand new disciples and beginning to teach.   Compared to the other gospels, Mark says very little about the content of his teaching.  He does summarize it right before today’s lesson, when he says,

“Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.””

That’s quite a message, but in the scene in the synagogue what is most important is the impact that the message has on Jesus’ audience.   They are astonished by its originality and by its power.  He speaks with authority, but it’s not the authority of being able to skillfully back up his arguments with quotations from scripture, which is what they are used to.  His teaching seems to come straight from the source of wisdom and truth.

Cynthia Bourgeault, whose book The Wisdom Jesus some folks at St. John’s are reading right now, speaks of the experience of hearing Jesus as a “recognition event.”  That is, his teaching isn’t about some religious beliefs or moral principles that exist “out there,” where you can hold them at arm’s length and turn them this way and that and decide what you think of them.  But it impacts people “in here,” in their own spiritual center, which stirs and comes alive, as if responding to a mother tongue once known but long-forgotten.  It is an experience of hearing the truth about oneself and about God, and recognizing what has always been known in the heart.

But the Gospel tells us there was one man in the synagogue that day whose spiritual center was not his own.  And while the others are moved by Jesus’ preaching, the spirit that has taken possession of this man recognizes Jesus’ person.  It sees who he really is.  It understands that his authority is not just a function of rhetorical genius or brilliance of insight, but of the identity and purpose given to him by God.  Jesus is on a mission, and his teaching is only one aspect of it; a mission to manifest the Kingdom of God, not only as a nice idea, but with power.  That kingdom is not going to come without a fight, and immediately, right from the start, the real enemies of God come out to do battle. 

I think it helps to understand what is at stake in this conflict if we consider why the Gospel refers to this antagonistic spirit as “unclean.”  In the Bible “clean” and “unclean,” are very important ideas, that do not mean what we might suppose.  They are not categories that pertain to hygiene, or to morality, but to religious worship.  They have to do with the way the ancient Hebrews perceived the world, and structured society, and lived their lives, so as to preserve the central place in all of it for God. 

And when they said that something was unclean it was not because they believed that it was hated by God, or outside of God.   God created everything that is, and pronounced that it is good.  But there are in our world objects and experiences that carry with them an intrinsic fascination and danger, things like blood, like the sleep and the death of the body, things like sex and childbirth. 

To the ancient Hebrew way of thinking, these things were unclean, not because they are “dirty” in some puritanical sense, but because they are powerful.  Someone or something that has been in contact with them needs to be made clean, to be purified by a religious act, to bring the numinous power of that contact back into its proper relationship with other things.  It needs to be realigned with the ordered world created by with God. 

And this was true not only of natural phenomena, and material things, but also of the spiritual world.  The Jews of Jesus’ time had a vivid sense of a world full of spirits, of unseen intelligences.  But some of these spirits refused their ordered place among the creatures of God.  Instead of worshiping before the heavenly throne, they preyed on human beings.  They fed on our fear, on our fascination with idols, with divination, sorcery, and human sacrifice, all our efforts to bend divine power to our control.  They sought to rival the angels, as if their power to dominate, to inflict insanity and sickness, to take possession of a person’s soul, were on a par with God’s power to heal, to bless, to give and preserve life.

Some people might say that modern materialistic science has made these ideas obsolete and irrelevant.  But what is at stake in Jesus’ conflict with the unclean spirit is not whether or not we believe in demons.  What is at stake is whether we believe there is anything more powerful than God.  Or let me put it a different way—of what in the world are you most afraid?  To what in the world do you turn to master the things that you fear?  How we answer those questions shows us where we still need to repent, and believe in the good news of God’s Kingdom.  It shows us where we still need Jesus to come in power.