Living sacrifice

Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

The character of Job in the Bible is a good man.  He does what is right and reveres God.  But in spite of this, or rather because of it, he is crushed; afflicted with terrible suffering.  His livestock and his servants are killed or carried off by marauders, his children perish, and he contracts an agonizing skin disease.  And all this God allows Satan to do to him, to see whether Job will reject God.  Job’s three friends come to comfort him, or at least that’s how they see it, although what they mostly try to do is to convince him that he must have done something to deserve his terrible fate. 

But Job insists that he will not confess his wrongdoing, because he has none.  He will not plead for forgiveness, because he’s done nothing that requires it.  The more his friends tell him that he is a stubborn fool, that he must have done something to anger God, the more Job insists on his innocence.  And he demands his day in court, to stand face to face with God, and to plead his case to the almighty Judge.  In the end he gets what he wants—sort of.  In the passage that we read this morning, God breaks his silence, and speaks to Job out of the heart of a storm.

But God doesn’t talk to Job about his innocence or guilt.  He doesn’t address the question of whether Job deserves what he got, or why he should suffer so much if he doesn’t.   Instead, God cross-examines him.  “What do you know,” God asks Job, “of the creation of the world, of the mysteries of its intricate order, or the sources of its power?  Who do you suppose is the master of its elements, who sustains the lives of its creatures?”  And God isn’t really expecting an answer because he knows that Job has nothing to say.  In contemplating the creation, Job can only stand in awe and admit how puny his knowledge is.  In the face of the immensity of the world, who is he to question its creator and source?  What does he know of the ways of God, or of God’s justice, that he accuses God?

In the modern period, many people came to think that the argument in the Book of Job had lost its power.  We are no longer in awe of the forces of nature, they said, because science has discovered how they work.  We may not have been there at the foundation of the world, but we might as well have been, because now we know what happened.  With each piece we add to our knowledge, the thinking went, a little more of the “mystery of existence” is shown to be no mystery at all, and the less room there is in the world for God.  We don’t need an answer from God, like Job did, about suffering, because we can remove the causes of suffering with our technological prowess.  We don’t need justice from God, like Job did, because our political parties and nation states with their laws and ideologies, their education and welfare systems, will eliminate injustice.

But, though many still refuse to admit it, that project has long been unraveling.  100 years ago last month, on one battlefield in France, the wondrous new techniques of poison gas and aerial bombing made their first appearance on the world stage.   A young poet named Robert Graves was in that battle, and the memoir he wrote about it is as good an epitaph as one could want for the supreme self-satisfaction of the Victorian age—Goodbye to All That.   

By now, in 2015, we have to ask whether the quintessential modern achievement is lasting peace or never-ending war, shared prosperity or extreme inequality, universal enlightenment or total surveillance.  Is it a cornucopia of abundance, or a world made barren, so exhausted and polluted that the survival of civilization is in doubt?  The expansion of human knowledge of the material workings of the universe has only brought into sharper relief our ignorance about what holds it all together, and how to be in it as servants and celebrants of life, rather than captives of death.   

Some people still try to make the case that our modern scientific knowledge puts us on a different plane from people of the past, such as the ones who wrote the Book of Job.  They do this by making a distinction between the knowledge itself and the uses to which it is put.  But the Bible would answer that the human being is one.  We are one creature, and our knowledge is one.  A mind splintered into fragments is mentally ill, and what we know is not separate from what we feel, or what we suffer, what we love or what we hope, what we will or what we do.  So if we use our science to create a world of illusion, or to despoil, pollute, and kill, it is proof that our science is incomplete.  For all its impressive achievements, we still don’t really know who, or where, or how we are.

Thankfully, we have another source of knowledge, the revelation of the glory of God.  That revelation says that God’s glory fills heaven and earth, so it must be possible to investigate the world, as science does, and to use that knowledge to alter it, but to do so with humility, in a spirit of reverence and prayer.  It is very common nowadays to hear people say that the beauty and grandeur of nature is where they have their most powerful experience of God.   As far as I’m concerned, those people are not wrong.   But here again we have to ask if we are looking with a splintered mind, because to contemplate the whole of nature in today’s world is to witness a vast and deepening tragedy.  It is to worship in a temple that we are destroying.  If we are going to do more than just think that nature is holy—if we are going to act like it—we have to find our way back to encounters with God like the ones recorded in the Bible.  We need experiences of God that change the way we live.    

And for that, we need a revelation of the glory of God in human life; not only in the transcendent power of the thunderstorm and the singing of the morning stars, but in human persons, in human community.  We need an experience of God that unites what our knowledge has splintered: to seek the true glory of woman and man, not only in the rulers and great men, but in the powerless and poor.  We need to find glory not only in achieving our goals and satisfying our desires, but also in grief, in failure and disappointment.  We need to know glory not only in the people we love, but also in the people we hate, and the people who hate us.  And to have this kind of experience we need to learn to see the God’s glory not only on the outside, but also on the inside, even in the ignorance and waywardness of our own hearts.        

The New Testament says that God has revealed this glory in Jesus Christ.  His is the fullness of the Glory of God, because in him God’s glory fills even what we consider empty—of meaning and beauty and grace.  There is a word that means to take what is profane and make it sacred by offering it to God.  That word is “sacrifice.”  And what Jesus sacrifices is his life.  Every aspect of his human life, from humble birth to ignominious death, is sacred, because he offers it to God, in thanksgiving to the giver of the gift. 

Sacrifice is the work of priests, and God raised Jesus’ human life from death and gave it to us, so that we might share in his priesthood, and reveal the glory of God in our lives of sacrifice.  We are priests of the new covenant in Jesus when we take what is profane, what is ordinary and earthly and human—bread and wine, flesh and blood, time and money, and offer it to God in thankfulness, in unity with Christ.  And God makes it holy— we don’t know how. 

We call our offering “stewardship,” because the things we are offer are gifts we have received.  But we are stewards, the Bible says, of mysteries.  We come to church to sacrifice our lives, to offer them to God so God can make them holy, and use them for the new creation of the world.  But how this happens is a mystery.  In church we see Christ, but only in part, in symbols of word and sacrament that hint at the all-encompassing glory that fills even the darkest corners of our lives.  Here the Holy Spirit gives us just a little taste of what we will know and who we will be when we see him face to face.     

Unconventional wisdom

Proverbs 31:10-31
Psalm 1

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37

Wednesday morning my wife Meg’s car wouldn’t start.  I won’t go through all the details, but on Wednesday night, after a full day of bicycling to work and shuffling our other car on trips to and from school and to the store and to a soccer game, after three visits from Triple A that left us with no solution, only a statement that the battery they sold us last year was not the problem and a “drain was detected,” and we shouldn’t call them anymore, I finished washing the dishes and went to find Meg.  She was folding laundry.  We commiserated with each other about how stressful car problems can be.  Neither of us is particularly mechanical, so when something more serious than a flat tire goes wrong with the car, we are both kind of powerless.   Meg said, “I realized I was feeling helpless, so I thought it might make me feel better to take on a task I could handle.  I decided I could do something about that pile of clean laundry.”

That struck me as a wise thing to have done.  It’s something that the ideal wife depicted in today’s lesson from the Book of Proverbs might have said.   The theme of Proverbs is wisdom, and the wisdom that it offers begins with the acknowledgement of God, and so we might imagine it is something mystical or esoteric.  But it’s not.  It’s practical.  It is wisdom that applies to daily life and worldly affairs.  It is related to the idea of creation, for it is through Wisdom that God did his work in fashioning the world.  The ordered structure of the universe, and its natural and moral laws, are the domain of wisdom.  The one who learns wisdom carries on God’s work of establishing a good world, a world of beauty and justice, prosperity and culture.  And the one who fears God knows that the commandments of wisdom are the cornerstone of the good life.  It is wisdom that gives the necessary temperament to seek such a life, and wisdom who directs the effort, and who blesses the results.  One who lives such a life becomes a blessing for others.

There is a lot to admire in this picture.  But we also have to acknowledge that this kind of wisdom is pretty conventional.  And conventional wisdom hasn’t really changed a whole lot in 2,500 years.  If you were to ask a random sample of Americans today “what are the personal qualities that lead to a good life,” they probably would come up with a list of characteristics not too different from we see in this ideal wife in Proverbs--industriousness, self-reliance, an entrepreneurial spirit; strength, generosity, piety and kindness; selflessly providing for the needs of her family and promoting its social prominence; earning the esteem of her children and her neighbors.

And it is just because conventional wisdom is so consistent across cultures and through time that the wisdom of the New Testament is so strange.  When the Letter of James talks about wisdom it is not so interested in how obedience to God’s laws leads worldly happiness.  Rather it sees wisdom as what enables a person to resist the seductions of evil that corrupt even our most honorable motivations.  There is awareness here that the pursuit of happiness as the world counts happiness can easily become a trap.   Self-discipline and self-reliance can lead to self-aggrandizement.   The pursuit of virtue can lead to hypocrisy, the desire for excellence to rivalry and envy.   Success in one’s life and fortunes can lead to disdain for those who are less able or less fortunate.  The idea that God’s wisdom is the foundation of the good life can lead those whose lives are manifestly good to believe that they are specially blessed by God, and that those whose lives appear less so are God-forsaken.   True wisdom, according to the book of James, is that close acquaintance with God that keeps us humble and gentle in heart, and rejects any desire for worldly goods that would lead us to fight with each other to get them.

So what lies behind this critical difference, this exception to the conventional wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, the conventional wisdom that still prevails in the world we live in today?  If we were scholars of the history of religion we could trace some complex process of development.  But I think that there is one simple explanation that is sufficient.  There is one event that had the power to shake the conventional wisdom of ancient times to its foundations, and it has not lost that power even today.  I am speaking, of course, of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It has been frequently taught in Christian tradition that “the Jews” were responsible for the murder of Jesus, but this is of course a libel and a falsehood.  It was not “the Jews” but some Jews, who were instigators and accessories to a crime committed by some Romans.  And the point I’m making is that the particular Jews that rejected Jesus, who accused him of blasphemy and insurrection and handed him over to be killed, were the chief priests, the scribes and the elders.  They were the urbane and cultivated people, the socially-prominent people, the well-educated and pious people, the people who, by the conventional wisdom of theirs and every age, are best-qualified to determine what is lawful, what is wise, what is politically feasible, and in the national interest, and what is not.   It was these people, people who could have read the description in Chapter 31 of the Book of Proverbs and thought proudly of their own wives and their own families, who rejected and killed the Messiah of God.   

But it was not some particular defect of their religion, or their class, or even their character that led them to do it.   They were only defending the prerogatives of wisdom as they knew it.  Jesus foresaw the conflict, knew it was inevitable, because he understood the power of conventional wisdom that made it impossible for them to change course, or to see him for what he was.  He saw that power at work among his own disciples, as they argued with each other on the road about which one of them was greater.  And he countered with a teaching that redefines worldly achievement as unconditional, selfless service.  It’s a teaching that still makes us squirm when we hear it today: "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all."

 And then he gave them a different way to think about how the wisdom of God shows up in the world.  In place of the all-powerful Creator, the master-builder of the universe who with wisdom established the foundations of the earth, spread out the dome of the heavens, and gave to us his people a perfect and eternal law, Jesus shows his disciples a child.  “Welcome a child,” he says, “and you welcome me, and not only me, but the one who sent me.” A child.  The most vulnerable and least powerful of persons.  A being who depends entirely on the love and protection of others.  One who knows nothing of social status or the distinctions of greater and lesser honor.  One whose needs are simple –love, food, warmth, companionship, play.  One whose gifts are simple—openness, affection, spontaneity, hope, and joy.  Welcome such a one, and you make room in the world for God. 

This wisdom of Jesus is still an available alternative to the usual way of trying to be happy.  A different way of seeking the good life is still waiting to be tried, kind of like that pile of laundry in the other room, waiting to be folded, as we fuss and fret and worry about fixing the car.  It’s true that that this way leaves you open to getting hurt, or being taken advantage of by all the serious people going about their serious business of  getting ahead in the world.   But there are worse things than getting hurt.  And there are better things than being one of the few who gets the things everyone else thinks that they want.  Or so says Jesus, but what did he know?

I can work with that

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14

Ephesians 3:14-21

John 6:1-21

Leftover night

The week before last I was on vacation with my wife’s family.  We have rented the same two houses at the North Carolina shore for the past eight or nine years and every night we all get together at the bigger of the two for dinner.  Meg and I cook dinner one night, and her sister and her husband cook dinner another night, and so on, and it is a very satisfactory arrangement.  Nobody has to do too much cooking, but we can each focus on the one meal we are responsible for, and we all eat very well indeed.  There is just one problem-- we have enough conjugal units, if you pardon the expression, for five nights’ dinners.  But what to do about that sixth night, Friday night? 

The obvious thing to do would be to eat the leftovers and the unused food, of which there is always a lot, and which otherwise has to be transported all the way back home (arriving much the worse for wear) or thrown into the garbage.   Every year we run into this problem and every year someone suggests the obvious solution and every year someone loses their nerve in the end and runs out for pizza or barbeque or something and we end up with even more food than we had before.  Every year, that is, until this one.  This year we finally just emptied the refrigerators and put all the food out on the counters in the big house and rubbed elbows in the kitchen for an hour or so, taking turns at the microwave until everyone was fed.  At the end of which, we congratulated ourselves and asked “why didn’t we do this before?”

Not the right question

Sometimes "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?" is not the right question.  Jesus knows that it’s not the right question when he asks it of Philip in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, but Philip doesn’t know that, and that’s why Jesus asks it.  And when Philip protests that "Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little," it’s not clear whether he’s contesting the implied premise in the question, that “these people are hungry and it’s up to us to see they get fed,”  or whether he’s pointing out the practical difficulties in carrying it out.  Either way, he’s taken the bait, and he’s stuck.  

Just then up pops Andrew and the boy with the five barley loaves and two fish.  But where did they come from?  Surely Andrew wasn’t going through the crowd, demanding to see people’s food.  He can only have known that the boy has them because he come forward and offered them.  The boy doesn’t look at his five loaves and two fish and ask, as Andrew does, “What are they among so many people?"  He just knows that the people are hungry.  He has a little more food than he needs, and he trusts that Jesus will know how to put his surplus to the best use.

Celebrating what there is

And he’s right.  That kind of trust, that generosity, that simple willingness to respond to a situation of need is something that Jesus can work with.  And what is his work?  It is the work of celebrating what there is, of giving thanks to God for the five loaves and the two fish, and for the generosity of the child who brought them forward.  Jesus gives thanks--eucharistei, as the Greek has it, which is of course where our word “eucharist” comes from, and he breaks the bread and he passes it around to the hungry crowd.

When we gather for the Eucharist, we continue Jesus’ work of celebrating what there is.  We aren’t worrying for the moment about our personal finances.  We aren’t wondering if there will be enough cookies at coffee hour—not yet.  We aren’t thinking about what it’s going to cost to put a new roof on the church.  We are just thankful to God for what is here.  We aren’t anxious because there aren’t 100 people in church this morning, we are thankful for the thirty or forty who are.  We are thankful to be among them, thankful for the gifts that each of them brought to share, thankful for their faith, for their friendship, for the gift of their stories and their prayers and their presence in our lives.  And, of course, we are thankful for Jesus.

New and different bread

When I first came to St. John’s somebody asked me if we could use home-made bread for communion in place of the mass-produced wafers, and I said “sure—why not?”  So we’ve been using it more or less every Sunday since.  There were some people who didn’t like the bread at first, and some who still don’t, which is fine—I understand and respect that.   

And some of those who didn’t like the new bread at first were children— some of them even refused to take it.  But then it began to dawn on these children that actually the new bread tastes pretty good.  And gradually their attitude changed, so that now sometimes when I’m distributing the bread at the altar rail I’ll see them looking at each other’s hands to see who got the bigger piece.  Some of them will even (and I have to confess that my own daughter is one of the worst offenders in this regard), hold out their hands and look up at me imploringly as I’m coming toward them with the bread, and whisper “big piece, big piece.”  And who can really blame them?  Who doesn’t want a big piece of God?  Don’t we all want a big piece of health, a big piece of life, a big piece of peace, and joy, and love?

Only a little piece

But I think spiritual maturity comes when we no longer need to look over at our neighbor’s hand to see how big her piece is.  The Eucharist has a lot to teach us about this.  We don’t complain because we’re only getting a little piece of bread and a little sip of wine, because it is still the body and blood of Christ.  The whole person of Christ, the whole life of the Trinity, the whole incarnation and teaching and death and resurrection and ascension, his whole gift of the Holy Spirit and promise to come again to fulfill God’s loving purpose for creation; it is all present in that little crumb, that tiny sip.  The fact that we go away from the table hungry only tells us that we are now part of the Christ story and it is up to us to go out and help to tell the rest of it.   

In Jesus’ own time it wasn’t always clear that his life was worth much.  Certainly there were some people who didn’t think it was worth anything at all, and in the end it was sold cheap.  But the very heart of Jesus’ teaching to his disciples was that when we start counting the relative value of a life, even of our own, we are lost.  Because life is not something to be priced.  It is not to be hoarded, and it cannot be sold at a profit.  Every life belongs to God, and so each one is of the same ultimate value.  But we can only comprehend life’s true magnificence, the true breadth and length and height and depth of it, when it is given away.  Spent.  Down to the last penny.  Jesus understood this and he spent his life lavishly for the love of this world and we who live in it, and when it was gone it didn’t seem like it had really amounted to much.  Not at first.  Just one young man’s life; one body; some words, a few deeds; a bitter and pointless death.

God can work with that

But history shows that God doesn’t need much.  God says “five loaves and two fish?—I can work with that.  The life and death of Jesus of Nazareth?—I can work with that.  A little piece of bread, a tiny sip of wine, Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter and Philip and Andrew, and Julian of Norwich and Francis of Assisi, and you and me?—I can work with that.  St. John’s Episcopal Church in Petaluma?—sure, why not?  God doesn’t say “why isn’t there more?” or “what am I supposed to do with that?” God says, “thank you.  Thank you for being here.  Thank you for coming forward with what you have.  What tasty looking loaves!  What fresh, tender fish!  Thank you—that will do nicely for all my hungry guests.  

Change from the inside out

Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16
Philippians 2:1-13
Matthew 21:23-32

When I was the Associate Rector down at All Saints’, Carmel, one of my tasks was to be the person responsible for giving monetary assistance to the poor.   The parish was known throughout the Monterey area as a place of last resort when the rent was late or the power  was about to be shut off, or the luck had run out and you needed bus fare back to L.A.  And the people of All Saints’ generously supported this ministry, so if I didn’t give very much to any one person, I could help quite a few of them. 

One of the things that my clients would often do after I’d handed them a check and we were saying good-bye, was to ask when our services were on Sunday morning.   I would give them the information and tell them that they’d be welcome any time but I knew they’d never come.   I think that they knew it, too, so why did they ask?   I guess it was because they wanted me to think well of them.   They wanted me to know that they understood they bore some responsibility for the situation they were in.  Their asking about church services was their way of telling me that they knew that they needed more than money to turn their lives around. 

But, of course, it’s one thing to say this, and another to act on it.    Of course I would have been glad to see them on a Sunday morning, but they didn’t need to prove anything to me.  Maybe they were  good  people  who  were  doing  their  best  and had  just been dealt a  bad  hand, and maybe their  stories were  a little more complicated than that.   But that was not for me to judge.  They needed help and All Saints’ Church could give them some, and I was satisfied with that.  Whether they turned over a new leaf, and how religion figured into it, was really up to them.

Sometimes when people ask us a question they’re really trying to tell us something.   When the Chief Priests and Elders come up to Jesus and ask him by what authority he is teaching and healing in the Temple, they’re really telling him that the authority to do such things belongs to them.  It is their temple, and they’ll decide whether he belongs there.  Now Jesus can hear what they’re really saying, so he asks them a question, “Sure--I’ll tell you about my authority, but first you have to tell me how you decide who’s worthy and who’s not.  For example, what would you say about my friend John the Baptist?”

Their dithering in response reveals that the only authority these leaders understand is a superficial one.  They are in power because people honor and defer to them.   But we shouldn’t mistake this for some kind of rapport with the masses.  They’ll pander to the people when it serves their own interests, but they don’t care about their deep needs.  They aren’t really concerned about their dignity, their freedom, and their hope.  And when a leader comes along  who does  have  that concern, who understands that the  people’s  real,  underlying problems are  spiritual, and that any change  that’s going to do any lasting good has to be a change of heart—when that  kind of authority comes  along, the Chief Priests and  the elders oppose it.  That’s what they did to John the Baptist and that’s what they’re doing to Jesus.  

This story shows us the difference between two kinds of authority.   One kind works from the top down, trying to get people to choose their side in a struggle against other people.  The other kind works from the inside out, encouraging people to take free action, for the sake of what they know in their hearts to be true.  One kind seeks first and foremost to get and keep power.  The other is most concerned to know and to do the will of God.   In his dialogue with the leaders in the temple, Jesus is trying to get the Chief Priests and the Elders to own that the authority that they care about is the first kind, the top down, get and keep power kind.   Until they do, he and they really have nothing to talk about, because they are speaking two different languages.

There is a story, maybe apocryphal, about Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism, that on his deathbed he said, “I made a mistake. Without doubt, an oppressed multitude had to be liberated. But our method only provoked further oppression and atrocious massacres. My living nightmare is to find myself lost in an ocean of red with the blood of innumerable victims. It is too late now to alter the past, but what was needed to save Russia were ten Francis of Assisis.”  

I love this story, whether it’s true or not, because of the idea that the ruthless, materialist revolutionary might look back at his mistakes and recognize that the world can only truly change from the inside out.   We’ll hear a lot more about Francis of Assisi next week, but let me just say that he and Lenin had a lot in common.  They were both brilliant public speakers and charismatic leaders.  They both cared passionately for the poor.  They both had a vision of universal human solidarity, transcending ethnic and national and cultural boundaries.   But what Francis had that Lenin did not, unless he got it at the last hour, was a heart to do the will of God.   Lenin organized the poor to serve in his army, to join his party, to follow his directives so he could liberate them.  Francis gave away his worldly goods and went to live among the poor, caring for them with his own hands, so that through him, they might experience the liberating compassion of God.

In Matthew 3:14, John the Baptist tries to beg off of baptizing Jesus, saying “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”   But Jesus is  adamant  and so the one  who is without sin receives the baptism of repentance, just as he will later receive the punishment of a criminal.  When  he  does this he is doing what the chief priests  and elders of the  people  will  not do; he is renouncing any distinction between himself  and  the  harlots and  tax collectors who also came to be baptized.  Jesus begins and ends his public career with acts of humility because his authority does not depend on whether people approve of him, but it is the authority that comes from within, from doing God’s will.    This is the way that he showed his disciples to live, and the great saints are those, like St. Francis, who understood that it is not enough to pay lip-service to this way.   True freedom, true happiness, true purpose and authority come from putting it into practice.

There is a temptation for us to put this way of life up on a pedestal and say that it’s all very well for them, but I’m just an ordinary, sinful, person.   But that would be to reject Christ’s most precious gift, the gift of his own humility.  He became like us in every way so that we could know that God goes to work through ordinary people like us, if we are willing to work with God.   Christ’s revolution of love, the real transformation of the world, happens from the inside out, so it really doesn’t depend on external circumstances.   It is grounded in God’s compassion and gracious favor towards all creation, so it can’t be thwarted by human failings or human judgment.   

But it does depend on our decision, a decision we have to make for ourselves, a decision we have to make every day, which is the decision to give God the authority in our lives.   It means getting up every morning and deciding to be about God’s business that day, to do God’s work, whatever our mood, whatever our circumstances, whether we feel like it or not.  We may not even know what God’s will for us is that day, but if we are ready and willing to do it, we’ll find out.  We may not know if we’re the right ones for the job, or if what we’re doing is really having an effect, but if it is God’s will, and we are willing, God is able to use what we give to get it done.