Enough is enough

Lamentations 1:1-6
Lamentations 3:19-26
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

It is with a great sense of relief that I can stand here before you this morning and say “soccer season is almost over.”  Not that I haven’t enjoyed taking my daughter to the practices and watching the games, or that I’m not proud of her and of her teammates for the hard work they have put in and the improvement they have made over the last couple of months.  But it has been a big commitment of my time.  For some reason it has worked out that all of the practices and most of the games have been on evenings when my wife works, so it has mostly fallen to me to be the chauffeur and the cheerleader.   There have been days when Meg has dropped Risa off at my office at 4:00, where she’s watched TV on the computer until 5:00, at which time I’ve helped her get into her soccer gear and delivered her to the practice field at 5:30, gone home to make a salad, picked up a pizza, returned to get Risa at 6:30, swung by for the baby sitter, dropped the two of them off at home, stuffed some pizza in my mouth and returned here to the church for a two-hour vestry meeting at 7 o’clock.  I’m sure many of you know what that’s like.

So when you and I wish we had more faith and a stronger relationship with God, when we imagine our lives more abundant with the grace of Christ, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we want our names recorded in the church’s calendar of saints.  We’re not necessarily asking to be missionaries or martyrs, or miracle-workers, or leaders of great movements of religious renewal.  We might just be asking for the faith to get through soccer season.  We might be praying for the faith to get through the loss of a job, or the death of a parent, or a diagnosis of cancer.  Maybe we did start out with dreams of a doing something really important and impressive for God, and instead we found that the ordinary trials of life ask us for more faith than we think we’ve got, and we wish we had more.

When the disciples of Jesus him to increase their faith, the Gospel of Luke doesn’t tell us exactly why, but from the answer Jesus gives them, you can guess that they want to be more like him.  They want something like his spiritual greatness, or at least his miracle-working power, and they think that the reason why they don’t have it is that they don’t have enough faith.  This attitude is still common today.  The world is full of people who say, “if only I had more faith,” meaning “if only I believed in God harder,” or “if only I had more positive thoughts,” or “if only I wasn’t so afraid;” and then you can complete the sentence with any number of counter-factual results—“I wouldn’t have gotten sick,” or “I could have changed my ex-husband” or “I would have the glamorous, successful life I was supposed to have.”

Now this may seem kind of insensitive, and go against the grain of our habit of taking everything that Jesus said extremely seriously at face value, but Jesus turns this idea of what faith is into a joke.  If anyone in this room found that they suddenly the faith to obtain their heart’s desire, would he or she really use it for something as silly and pointless as uprooting a mulberry tree and planting it in the ocean?  Again, for Jesus, the notion that if we only had more faith we could be something that we are not, and make our should-haves, and would-haves, and could-haves come true, is a joke. 

But at the same time Jesus says something important about faith—something positive.  And to illustrate his point he refers to his old friend the mustard seed.   Now there can’t be a lot of faith in something as tiny and insignificant as a little round mustard seed.  But a little teensy-weensy amount of faith is all it needs.  All it needs is enough faith to sprout.  And then God goes to work.  God gives rain and dew for the moisture it needs.  God gives the soil to anchor its roots and feed it with nutrients.  God gives it sunshine and carbon-dioxide from the air so its little leaves can make food.   And the mustard seedling has the faith to receive what God gives, not trying to be something that it’s not, but just growing, a little more every day, until somehow, miraculously, that tiny mustard seed becomes a large shrub, twice the height of a man, in a single season.

We imagine from reading the Gospels that Jesus could do anything.  Maybe he could have uprooted a mulberry tree and planted it in the ocean—if he’d wanted to.  But we don’t really know, because although he did do amazing things like walk across the stormy lake and feed five thousand people with a few loaves and a few fish, he only did those things because that was what God wanted him to do in that moment.  He never did them to promote himself or to test the limits of his power.  He did them to show the greatness of God, and to help people. 

Faith is the radical act of surrendering one’s life to the will and the purpose of God, and with faith we can do incredible things, because it is God who does them.   And just a little faith is enough, because what God gives is enough.  Instead of asking why God didn’t give her something bigger and better, the faithful person says, “thank you.”   “Thank you, God, for your gifts.  Now—how can I use these gifts to serve you?”

The fall Stewardship Season begins today at St. John’s, and the theme we’ve chosen for this year’s program is “Sharing in Abundance.”  This is taken from a passage in 2^nd Corinthians where Paul urges the church at Corinth to have faith that God is able to provide them with abundant blessings.  What that means in practical terms is that each of them can trust that they will have enough, not only for their own needs, but that they will also be able to share in the good works that all of them are doing together.  This passage, like the gospel today, speaks to the truth that, to be really happy, to have full human lives we need something more than the bare necessities of survival.  And we need something more than to accumulate a surplus in the form of money in the bank and closets full of clothes and garages stuffed with knick-knacks and toys. 

We have a need, not a passing whim, but a core spiritual need, to be of service.  We need to have a share, a part to play, in doing something good, something good that’s bigger than we could do by ourselves.  So when we talk about “abundance” in connection with Christian stewardship, what we are saying first of all is that we are committed to being a community that serves, that seeks to be faithful to the will and purpose of God and to gather together the gifts we have received and put them to work for the good of others.  And we are also saying that every one of us is blessed with enough to contribute something important to that work.   We may not end up revered as martyrs of the faith.  We may not be called on to spend our very life’s blood in God’s service.  And maybe we will.  But in any case, God is able to give us enough, and more than enough, to make a difference.

  

The visitation

Micah 5:2-5a
Canticle 3 or 15
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-45

One night last week, after our daughter had fallen asleep, my wife Meg and I went out into our hot tub.  The previous owners threw it in at the last minute when we bought the house a couple of years ago, and the hot tub has become a frequent part of our relaxation ritual at the end of the day.  It was a cold, starry night and I was submerged up to my neck, gazing up at the sky, when I saw something streaking across it in our direction.  For half a moment I thought it was a shooting star, but then I saw it was a bird, and no sooner had I taken that thought than it came swooping down upon us.  It stalled in the air above us, not five feet from our faces, for a couple of beats of its wings, and then shot noiselessly over us into the night.  An owl, I’m pretty sure, out hunting.   

In the moments that followed I found myself wondering what a Native American or one of my ancestors in ancient Britain, or indeed a member of any traditional society might have made of this nocturnal visitation.  Not just as a random phenomenon of animal behavior but as a message from the world of spirit.   This is a way of wondering about the world that is lost to us, that sounds kind of silly and new-agey to our skeptical and materialistic ears.  But maybe the approach of Christmas gives us permission to open our hearts and minds a little to perceive the miraculous in the ordinary.  And what could be more ordinary, and the same time more miraculous, than pregnancy, and the anticipated birth of a child? 

The Hebrew scriptures are full of stories of women who conceive unexpectedly and against the odds.  These pregnancies are not random biological phenomena, but messages from the world of spirit, signs that God still lives, that God still acts to save his people.    The movement of a fetus in its mother’s womb is an ordinary miracle, a moment of joy and wonder at the presence of the unknown that is a universal human experience.  But in the Gospel of Luke, when Elizabeth feels the fetus leap in her womb at the sound of Mary’s voice, she is filled by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that brings good news of God and God’s workings in the world. 

Elizabeth understands that she has received a message from her unborn child, who knows what no one could know except by the Spirit—that her young cousin Mary, also improbably pregnant, bears the promised Lord of his people.  And in the Spirit Elizabeth blesses Mary, knowing by a leap of faith what she otherwise could not have known.  For Mary’s greeting is the echo of another voice, the greeting of the angel Gabriel who brought the Spirit’s news to her, saying “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you.”  Mary is blessed not just because she has conceived a child, but because of her faith, because she has believed that what was spoken to her by the messenger of God would be fulfilled.

And then it Mary’s turn to speak, or rather, to prophesy.  For Mary now sings talks about who God is and what God is doing.  She speaks of these things in the past tense, because for the person who believes, what God wills is already done.  Mary’s song is about the love, and the faithfulness, and the generosity of God who is only doing what was promised.  And the promise is not only for her alone.  Her song is a message from the Spirit What Mary knows, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is that that through her, through the child she will bear, God is fulfilling his promise to Israel, and through Israel to all humankind.  Her child is the one whom God has always promised to be.  Her child will do what God has always promised to do, and that what God does is to set us free. 

The Magnificat of Mary evokes other inspired songs of victory by other women—women of the Hebrew scriptures, women like Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, and the warrior Deborah from the book of Judges, and Miriam, the sister of Moses, who sings and dances with the women of Israel on the other side of the Red Sea.  Their songs are songs of survival.  Not just the biological survival of the family, the tribe, or the race, but the survival of God’s mission in the world.   

Israel is a people with a particular responsibility to live the justice of God, to make it manifest in the world so all the nations can see.  She is a poor people, a marginal people, scratching out a living on some marginal land in the borderlands between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia.   Israel is a people that knows what it is to be poor, to be enslaved, to be invaded and occupied and dispersed among the nations.  But she is a people that wills to survive, that must survive, for the sake of her special responsibility for God’s mission in the world.   

Mary and Elizabeth enter into a conspiracy on behalf of God’s justice—“Con-spiracy”—from “spire” meaning “breath” and “con” meaning “together”—and the breath they breathe together is the Spirit of God.  Theirs is the story of two ordinary women, actually two marginal women, one older and thought to be infertile, the other, young and scandalously unwed.  But these two women experience a visitation that makes their meeting a conspiracy of the Holy Spirit.  They will pass this conspiracy on to their sons— John, called the Baptist, and Jesus, called the Christ, and so they will ensure the survival of God’s mission of liberating justice in the world.  In fact, they will bring it to fulfillment, in the sense that what God wills is already done.  And that conspiracy of John and Jesus has indeed survived, extraordinarily and improbably survived.  It has spread like a great wind over the whole world.  It has even come to Petaluma, California.  It has survived even the end of a long cycle of the Mayan Calendar, and now stands on the threshold of the year 2013 since it began.

It is this contagious conspiracy of freedom and justice that we hope to catch anew this Christmas.  On the fourth Sunday of Advent, in the wake of the slaughter of the innocents at Newtown, we are asked to remember that, among many other things, the gospel conspiracy means this—that every child is, so to speak, an owl in the night.  Every child is a visitor from the spiritual world, bearing the seed of a holy purpose and a divine identity.  That this is especially true for the sons of Mary and Elizabeth should not blind us to the truth that each one of us is a child of God. 

Every one of our children comes into the world bearing gifts, gifts that are for all of us, and for those who come after us, who will carry on the work of God when we are no longer in the world.  This is the true of measure of justice, and the very heart of our responsibility as adult human beings, to ensure that every child gets to give those gifts, and to have them received.  This is as true for the children who are fair to middling, as the world accounts talent and promise, as for the exceptionally gifted.  It is as true for the disabled, and those born in poverty, and those whose lives will be spent in obscurity, as for those marked with a great destiny.  For it is not our place to judge the worth of any human being, but only to open our hearts and wonder, “What is the message?—what gift does this child of God bring?”

You didn't have to be there

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 104: 25-35,37
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Of the 50 to 60 million inhabitants of the Roman Empire, a tiny elite, perhaps one-half of one percent, owned some 80 percent of the wealth.  Nearly every scrap of writing that remains to us from those days, the novels, the poetry, the plays, the works of history and philosophy and rhetoric, was written by members of that elite.  It was written for members of that elite.  It speaks from their worldview.  It addresses their concerns.  We have a pretty good idea from the surviving literature about how the one-half of one percent lived, what they ate, how they spent their time.   We know many of their names. 

Contrast this with the peasants, the small shopkeepers, the artisans and laborers, the miners and sailors and soldiers and slaves who made up the remaining ninety-nine and one-half percent of the Empire’s population.  They didn’t write books, and the people who did write them were not really interested in their lives.  Their names aren’t carved on stones in the ruins of ancient cities.  We know next to nothing about them, so that when a distinguished historian recently published a book describing what we can say about them from the available evidence, he gave it the title Invisible Romans.

But there is one work of ancient literature  that is by members of the ninety-nine and one-half percent.  This book, really a collection of books, is about ordinary people.  Thanks to these writings we know some of their names, some details about how they lived, and what they cared about.  We know about them because certain experiences that they had were so significant that they decided everyone should know about them.  They organized themselves into resilient and mobile little groups, dedicated to giving testimony to what they had witnessed.  Eventually these testimonies were written down, so that they could be carried from place to place and passed down through the years in something like their original form.  Stories by ordinary people, about ordinary people, intended, by and large, for ordinary people, that by one of history’s great miracles have come down to us.

I am talking, of course, about the New Testament.  And today, on this day of Pentecost, we whose very existence as a people called “Christians” is owed to those ordinary people, celebrate the miracle that gave us birth.  This miracle has two parts.  The first part is the way in which Jesus’ disciples discovered that they were now responsible for his mission.  Not only responsible, but willing and able and empowered by God to carry it out.  That is the transformation that we celebrate in the fifty days after Easter—that this little  group of ordinary, invisible people made the journey from running away in fear on the night of Jesus’ arrest to bravely carrying on the work that he started. 

The second part of the miracle is that when these people stood up to talk about God’s mighty acts of liberation, redeeming the whole world through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, people actually listened.  Some of them actually got it—as improbable as this message was, as unlikely as the messengers were, it got through to them in a completely surprising way. 

You’ve probably had the experience where you are trying to tell your spouse or a friend about something that happened to you earlier in the day that was particularly affecting, or hilariously funny, something that for whatever reason you really want to share with another person.  So you try to describe it with all the significant details, and then you get to the climax, the moment that had the real emotional impact, and the person you’re talking to just kind of looks at you with a blank expression.  Maybe they force a little laugh just to be nice, and say something like “wow—sounds pretty funny,” or “that must have been really cool,” but you know that they just didn’t “get it” in the way that you hoped you would.  So you say “I guess you had to be there.”   

Well the miraculous thing about Pentecost is that these ordinary people, Simon Peter, for instance, Son of Jonah, started talking about extraordinary things, amazing, mysterious, mystical experiences of what they had learned from Jesus and how he came to them after he died, and breathed his peace into them and sent them out on a mission of healing and forgiveness to the whole world; and you know, it turned out that you didn’t have to be there.  You didn’t have to be there to believe that what these people were saying about Jesus was true.  You didn’t have to be there to feel like this was the best news you’d heard in a long time, maybe ever, and that it was meant for you. 

You didn’t have to be there to feel like someone was speaking to what you’d always secretly suspected about God and about yourself, but never dared to let yourself believe— that God loves you and everyone else in this world like a Father or a Mother, and that you aren’t an invisible person at all, but are heaven’s messenger, gifted with a high and noble purpose.  And just because you hadn’t been there didn’t mean you were left out of that purpose—it was not too late to join, and everyone was welcome, no matter if you were an important person or not, no matter what background you came from, there was a place for you in the brother- and sister-hood of the Messiah Jesus.

The apostles looked at these miracles, the way they had come to accept the mission of Jesus for their own, and the way all different kinds of people were actually taken with their message, and they knew that only God could do this.   That’s what God the Holy Spirit does, she communicates.  She connects.  She enters into the space between people and removes the barriers to love and trust and truth.  That’s why we invoke the Holy Spirit whenever we perform a sacramental act.   We know that only God can make the bread and wine really communicate the living body of the Lord to us.  Only God can really make the baptismal water go all the way in, and cleanse us inside and out for new life in Christ.  Only God can really make two people married, one flesh as Christ and the church are one.  So we ask God the Holy Spirit to come, and the message of Pentecost that she is not ashamed to be here, no matter how ordinary the company.  The church was created and is most alive today when it includes all kinds of people, and embraces all kinds of differences among them.

Take Brandon and Briana, and their baby Dallas, who are being baptized here today.  They are ordinary people.  Briana’s nineteen, and Brandon just graduated from High School last week.  They are not married.  It is not certain whether they ever will be.  And yet they come here today, as they have been coming for the last year or so, seeking God’s blessing for their family and their lives.  They could go a lot of places to hear people tell them where they’ve gone wrong or what they should be doing differently, but in the grace of the Holy Spirit we say to them here, “What an adorable baby!”  They could go a lot of places to hear that they’d be welcome just as soon as they got married.   In the grace of the H0ly Spirit we say, “You have to make your own decisions, but remember—with God nothing is impossible. What can we do to help?” 

Mainly we’re just grateful that they’ve decided to throw their lot in with Jesus.  They are exactly the kind of people he chose carry on his mission in the world.  Just look at us!  You didn’t have to be there.  You don’t have to have it all together.  You don’t have to be one of the one-half of one percent.  You just need faith in the Holy Spirit within you, who called you into this work and is giving you the gifts to carry it out.  And you need faith in the Holy Spirit outside you who is hidden in the world, ready, waiting, eager to respond to what you have to say.  

I choose--be clean

2 Kings 5:1-14
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45
Psalm 30

When I was living at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in the early ‘90s there was a zen student named Dean who was dying of AIDS.  He rented a house down the road at Muir Beach but he would come up every day to practice in the meditation hall.  One day he asked if he could volunteer to work in the kitchen.  The woman who was the kitchen supervisor didn’t want to allow it.  “We all use knives,” she said—“What if he cuts himself?”  One of the residents who was a medical doctor met with to her and reassured her she could keep everyone safe from Dean.  She told her about sanitary procedures to follow if anyone cut themselves in the kitchen, and offered to do a training for the whole kitchen crew.  

But the problems that Dean’s request to work in the kitchen raised weren’t just practical, medical medical.  Ultimately, the supervisor was able to allow him to work there.  But getting to that point involved a real emotional struggle, because his disease stirred up fears that were out of proportion to the real risks involved.  Modern biological and medical science offers rational explanations for why people get sick, and straightforward mechanistic cures for disease.  But in spite of that, some illnesses arouse dread in us in ways that bleed far outside the simple straight lines of cause-and-effect.   

HIV/AIDS has lost some of the aura of menace that it had when the story I just told occurred.  So we can forget about the stigma of shame, the sense of moral guilt, and the fear of contagion that it used to bring along with it.   Some people said it was a divinely ordained, punishing scourge for sexual sin.  Some people said it was a government conspiracy, genetically-engineered from a monkey virus by the CIA.  The President of South Africa said it didn’t exist, and was a great hoax perpetrated by rich countries and multinational pharmaceutical corporations.  These are radically-different interpretations of the meaning of the same disease, but all of them show us that AIDS had a symbolic significance that went far beyond its description as a bio-medical phenomenon.  Looking into what people thought about AIDS, you could learn something about where they thought disorder and evil in the world comes from.   

The ancient Israelites had a highly developed sense of purity and pollution.  The first five books of the Hebrew bible, the Torah, lays out an elaborate code of dietary, ethical, and ritual laws.  These rules were, it was believed, given by God to his chosen people to preserve them from defilement and enable them to be holy as God is holy.  Among the things that cause pollution is any one of a number of skin diseases that our translations call “leprosy.”  The thirteenth chapter of Leviticus contains detailed instructions to the priests of Israel concerning how they are to diagnose a so-called “leper.”  The purpose of the diagnosis is not to effect a cure, but to protect others from the leper’s uncleanness.  One who is pronounced a leper is expelled, made to dwell in isolation, away from the rest of the people—not to prevent the spread of disease, but to protect the group from the pollution that the disease represents.    

This is important for our understanding of today’s story from the Gospel of Mark.  The trusting vulnerability of the leper, the compassion of Jesus—these things are affecting and easy to grasp. But our English translation glosses over something important that comes through more clearly in the Greek text— Jesus is not just merciful in this episode, he is also angry.  He doesn’t just “sternly warn” the man he has just cleansed, he harshly rebukes him.  He doesn’t “send him away,” he “casts him out.”   Our translation has Jesus telling him to go bring the prescribed offering to the priest “as a testimony to them,” but these words could as well be translated “as an accusation against them.”

It is significant that in this story the healing effect of Jesus’ touch is referred to repeatedly not in terms of the resolution of the man’s symptoms or the cure of disease.  Instead, Mark repeatedly uses forms of the word that means “to cleanse, to make clean.”   Jesus is not curing a skin disease.  He is casting out the impurity, the uncleanness, that comes along with it.  He is harshly rebuking social and religious isolation.  He is accusing the socially-constructed boundaries that put human beings in categories of impurity and pollution and keep them there, that cut them off from the wholeness that is God’s will for them.  

In this story Mark also sets another piece in place for the coming conflict with the religious authorities.  It tells us that the site of the struggle, the place of the confrontation, will be the body of Jesus.  Remember that in his compassion Jesus reaches out and touches the leper.  According to the purity code, this act makes Jesus himself unclean.  But there is nothing in the gospel to indicate that he gives that a second thought.  And in the chapters that follow he will transgress the boundaries of the purity code again and again.  He will be touched by a woman with a hemorrhage.  He will touch a corpse.  He will cross over into Gentile territory not once but twice.   But Jesus will not show the least concern about catching the contagion of impurity.  Instead, he will cross these boundaries to spread the spirit of holiness and health to the outcast, the excluded, the unclean.  His body will be the sign of the contagious kingdom of God’s loving compassion.

The other thing about this story, of course, is that it is about discipleship.  Mark doesn’t intend for us to sit on the sidelines, feeling smug because we don’t ostracize people with skin problems.  This story is a challenge to us to take a good look at our own social norms and ask ourselves who threatens our sense of purity.  Who are the people we think of as dirty?  How are we responding to them with compassion?  Do we will to pronounce them clean?  Last week our Buildings and Grounds Committee Chair mentioned to me that it is becoming clearer and clearer to him that our first priority for our Parish Hall refurbishing project has to be to provide an accessible entrance and bathroom.  I think he’s right.  There are legal and liability reasons for taking this on, but even more important is our call to break down barriers of exclusion.  When our hospitality extends only to those who can walk unaided, we are not offering the world a very effective witness to compassion of Christ. 

But this kind of compassion is relatively easy to extend.  Disability advocates, like advocates for people with HIV/AIDS, have made great progress in changing social norms and breaking down the boundaries of their exclusion.  But there are other boundaries that are more costly for us to reach across.  There is still a purity map in our society, and some people are trying to draw the lines thicker and darker.  Laws to drive homeless people out of our towns and cities, laws to isolate undocumented immigrants and expel them from our country, law-enforcement that criminalizes members of ethnic and religious minorities—these things are on the rise, and they are not driven by rational social policy but by the fear of impurity. 

As the body of Christ, we are called to confront that fear with compassion.  We are called to reach across the barriers of exclusion and touch the untouchable.  This may be the hardest work of Christian discipleship, because it involves personal risk.  It risks taking on ourselves the stigma of the unclean, of being seen by others as “not normal.”  But is the only path to knowing ourselves as completely whole.  Because as long as we believe that God’s love leaves some people out, there is always the possibility that we are among the unloved.  As long as we are afraid of being tainted, not by the intentions in our hearts, but by something external that we cannot control, we will not be free.  The mission of Jesus was to overcome that fear, to reach across the boundary of our sense of vulnerability, and to say to us, and to everyone—“I will.  Be clean.”