Homilies for Epiphany

Third Sunday In Epiphany

26 January 2003

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Mark 1.14-20

On A Mission From God

One of the great works of contemporary art -- though not, perhaps, in the same league as Waiting For Godot, (which Karen referred to last week) -- is the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Jake and Elwood Blues are trying to raise money to pay the back taxes on a Catholic school, but they hotly pursued by several police departments, neo-Nazis, angry creditors and a murderous jilted fiancé. On several occasions, when their plight looks most hopeless, Elwood -- played by Dan Ackroyd -- -- turns to his brother Jake – played by John Belushi --and with serene confidence says “They’ll never catch us. We’re on a mission from God!”

The brief text from Mark’s Gospel we have for today’s lesson portrays four men setting out on a mission from God. What are to make of this cryptic account of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples? The alacrity with which they drop everything and set off with Jesus suggests there’s a fuller story Mark doesn’t tell. One possibility, given that he sets the stage with “Now after John was arrested…” is that Simon and Andrew, and James and John, had been disciples of John the Baptist, and biding their time in the aftermath of his arrest, have returned to what they were doing before taking up with John. I wonder whether this doesn’t cast them as religiously intense young men, earnest seekers after righteousness and Israel’s Messiah, and thus doesn’t fit the way they’re portrayed as Mark’s Gospel unfolds. For the picture that emerges is of guys who are more or less clueless, who seem unable to get what Jesus is about, or to focus on why Jesus called them. It’s notable that the lesson that might have been hardest for them to learn if they were seriously pious Jews is the one lesson they seem to learn right away: for by the next chapter Jesus is getting complaints that his disciples do not fast and even break the Sabbath by plucking grain to eat as they walk through the fields.

My contrasting picture is of restless, unreliable, even irresponsible characters – we can’t miss the obvious fact that two of the brothers simply abandon their father in the boat, not what good sons do in that culture. What Jesus says when he calls the first two, Simon and Andrew: “Follow me and I will make you fish for people” gets demonstrated when Jesus calls the next two, John and James. Jesus isn’t being choosy. This isn’t retail fishing with poles and hooks, one fish at a time. It’s fishing wholesale: down goes the net and whatever happens to be there gets caught, the cod and the scrod, the good and the bad, the worthy and the worthless, indiscriminately, all together.

Jesus calls these men to follow him, to be with him, to take up his work in the world, but what they do doesn’t appear to amount to much. The disciples love being in the entourage of this wildly popular, mysterious wonderworker but they are pretty much worthless as disciples, as men meaningfully sharing in Jesus’ mission. They bring around the boat, or fetch a donkey, but mostly we see them misunderstanding Jesus, not grasping what he means or who he is, and getting in the way, even interfering with people who are trying to connect with Jesus. And of course when Jesus is arrested they take off, except for Simon – renamed Peter – but he ends up shabbily denying Jesus.

Considering the matter in ordinary terms, we have to say Jesus does a bad job of choosing disciples. But that misses the point of what it means for Jesus to call people to be his disciples. It’s not about what those he calls can do for him by being with him. We cannot, finally, regard Jesus as a moral or religious reformer, gathering followers ready and able to sign on for a project of changing things for the better. The point is that Jesus is with them. What matters is his healing, saving, life-giving presence, Jesus as Immanuel: God with us, where God for too long has been, to all appearances, absent. The disciples, the twelve he calls to symbolize the tribes of Israel, are called, not because of anything of value they can do, but to represent the fact that God at last is there on the ground, taking his people’s part. To hear this call is to be invited into God’s presence, the place God is at work in the world. The people he calls might misunderstand him, desert him, even get in his way, but he is there with them – for them – no matter what.

Today we hear and answer Jesus’ call to follow him, repenting and believing the good news, when we bear witness to his presence; the savior of all here with us, doing his work of saving people. Elisaveta Skobstova was a Russian intellectual and revolutionary. Elisaveta -- Liza -- was raised in the Orthodox Church, but in her teens her acute sense of the injustice and suffering of the world led her to atheism. As a young woman, she joined the Bolsheviks and engaged in revolutionary activity but in time she became convinced that Christ, not political theories, was the only hope of the oppressed and suffering masses. After the October 1917 revolution she barely avoided summary execution in St. Petersburg. She fled Russia and eventually made it to Paris with her husband and two daughters. In the harsh winter of 1926 the impoverished émigré family came down with influenza. The youngest child, five-year old Anastasia, got sicker and sicker, becoming thinner each day. She was diagnosed with meningitis. Liza stayed with her daughter day and night in the hospital as the child wasted away; after a month-long vigil, the child died. All but broken with grief, she came to know Jesus, the suffering Savior, beside her in her anguish. Afterwards, she wrote:

Into the black, yawning grave fly all hopes, plans, habits, calculations, and – above all – meaning: the meaning of life. Meaning has lost its meaning, and another incomprehensible Meaning has caused wings to grow on one’s back ...and I think that anyone who has had this experience of eternity, if only once; who has understood the way he is going, if only once; who has seen the One who goes before him, if only once -- such a person will find it hard to turn aside from this path: to him all comfort will seem ephemeral, all treasures valueless, all companions unnecessary, if among them he fails to see the One Companion, carrying his cross.

Every person of faith faces the ancient question why, if there is a God who is so good and so powerful, there is yet such evil in this world, such suffering. Philosophical and theological explanations run out, and we are left with no answer other than to point to Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, the crucified Savior, and to say that God suffers with those who suffer, that God takes on himself the evil of the world. In the Talmud, Rabbi ben Levi says: Where is the Messiah? Sitting at the gate of the city among the poor, covered in sores.

This is a great truth but left at that it is misleading. For we cannot suppose that it is our task simply to see God at work and talk about it. We are called to be where God in Christ works, and to do so by sharing in what he does, making his work our own. Look again to the witness of Jesus’ disciple Liza Skobstova: she heard the call to witness Christ’s saving work as a call to action. After the death of her child she devoted the rest of her life to caring for the needs of the homeless, the sick and the hungry in Paris, especially those of the Russian émigré community. She became a nun, took the name Maria, and started a shelter that welcomed all comers, offering bodily sustenance, worship in the Orthodox manner, and whatever else was needed. The tireless, more than slightly disreputable cigarette-smoking Russian nun was a fixture in 1930’s Paris, trying to be anywhere she saw need, anywhere she could bear witness to the life-giving Christ by acting on his behalf. She became known as Mother Maria of Paris. When the Second World War began, she refused the opportunity to leave the country. She stayed, and carried on her work during the Nazi occupation. Beginning in 1942, when the Nazis began to deport Jews, she readily issued spurious baptismal certificates – against the opposition of the Church authorities -- and recorded them in the parish register in the hope that this would save them from the Gestapo. She always said that if the Gestapo arrived, seeking Jews, she would show them her icon of the Mother of God. She wrote: “About every poor, hungry and imprisoned person the Savior says “I”: ‘I was hungry and thirsty, I was sick and in prison.’ To think that he puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need…I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated my sinews. It fills me with awe.”

Finally, in 1943, she and her colleagues were arrested. She was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Many survivors testified after the war to her many acts of generosity and encouragement to others, one said that amid the horrors of the camp “she radiated the peace of God and communicated it to us.” She was murdered on Good Friday, 1945. An unsubstantiated, but completely plausible, report indicates that she contrived to take the place of a frantic inmate scheduled for death, dying in her place. As she was sent to crematorium, the guns of the approaching Red Army were audible in the distance.

Christ was present to the hungry, the frightened, the dying wherever Maria for his sake was there for them.

Jesus suffered and died for us. We should hear this not as “instead of us,” for it is all too clear that we go on suffering and dying, but as “on our behalf.” Her suffered not to exempt us from suffering, but that our suffering might be like his, a redeeming suffering of self-giving love. In Jesus we have not substitution, but saving companionship (Fr. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, p. 109). Our mission is to hear and heed his call, to accept his companionship on our way and offer it to others, casting the net of God’s love wide and deep.

Amen.

Third Sunday After Epiphany

25 January 2004

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 4.14-21

What’s Your Law?

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Luke 4.21

One of the most interesting places on the Web is a site called “The Edge.” Every January its creator John Brockman poses a question and invites a long list of distinguished scientists, philosophers, writers, artists and other thinkers to post their responses. A couple of years ago the question was “What’s your question?” This year it is “What’s your law?” Brockman was after some rule, some principle to which you are uniquely attuned, some underlying pattern you rely on to make sense of the world, a maxim for your life. The responses so far range from the practical: If it feels good, don’t do it (that’s O'Donnell's Law of Academic Administration), to the possibly profound: Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it, to the paradoxical: Don't just do something. Stand there, and from the pessimistic: Everything leaks, and 93.78654% of statistics are useless, to the downright cynical: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

Answers to the query “What’s your law?” reveal a lot about who you are, how you see the world and what matters to you. Some of the answers Brockman elicited were intriguing or at least entertaining, but what struck me is the assumption that everyone has a law; there are no genuine antinomians among us; it’s a question of what law we live under, what laws we identify with, not whether we do.

Today’s reading from Nehemiah is about a law, a law all but lost yet suddenly restored. In the cataclysmic year 587 B.C. Israel was overrun by the Babylonians and their allies. Jerusalem was laid waste, the Temple destroyed, the elites killed or carried off into exile in Babylon. This looked like the end for Israel; the royal family disappears without explanation; the Ark of the Covenant, symbol of God’s presence with his people, vanishes, never to be seen again (despite what Steven Spielberg might say to the contrary). It looks as though little Israel’s Yahweh can’t compete with the gods of the gentiles, or – maybe worse – that he could but he’s finally really given up on poor, faithless Israel. Yet fifty years into the exile, beyond all hope, there’s an amazing turn of events. The Persian Empire swallows up the Babylonians, and the Persian ruler gives two captive Jews, Ezra and Nehemiah, authorization to go back to the land of promise, to bring the exiles home, to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple.

This is where today’s lesson comes in. Ezra assembles the returned exiles in Jerusalem and reads to them from the torah, the book of God’s law, the law they’ve lost track of in those years of exile, the law they’ve not been following very well, if at all. They respond the way I do, when I hear about laws I haven’t been paying attention to: whether they come from Washington, the Dean’s office, or the pulpit, they’re bad news, more irksome regulation, more ways to go wrong, to get in hot water, yet another revelation of the things done I ought not to have done and things left undone I ought to have done; one more occasion for frustration and regret. But Ezra tells the people: Do not mourn or weep! This law is good news! It’s time to party, to eat the fattening stuff and drink the sweet wine! The return of the law means that after all, despite decades of brute fact to the contrary, God is holding up his side of the covenant. God is faithful and his faithfulness overcomes the waywardness of his people. Again and again they fail to keep his law, but he fulfills it anyway.

Keep in mind what that law is. Its principal purpose was to form a people, to generate difference and create an identity; it marks boundaries identifying who is in, and who’s not in, the people of God. All those regulations, a strange mix of the moral and the medical, politics and religious ritual, rules about what to eat and what to wear, about what and when and how to do all sorts of things, many of no intrinsic significance, the little things that pervade daily life. This law is a constant reminder of who you are as a Jew, that you’re God’s child living in God’s world. To have this law restored is to recover your identity as the people who belong to a faithful God. It’s the sign that God still loves you, beyond all that’s fair or reasonable.

This is reflected in Ezra’s big concern with the condition of the walls and gates of Jerusalem. The chronicle of the post-exilic restoration that he leads makes much of the rebuilding of the city’s walls and the repair of its gates. The ceremonial reading of the torah recounted in today’s lesson takes place at one of the gates they’ve just finished rebuilding. Those walls and gates represent keeping the foreigners, the invaders, the gentiles who do not have the law, safely outside. The well-walled and gated city symbolizes an Israel secure in who it is, keeping God’s law and protected by him. Still, gates are inherently ambiguous items; they let people in as well as shutting people out.

And that brings us to today’s lesson from Luke’s gospel. The passage from Luke is, in his account, the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry; it’s parallel to the story in John about Jesus making the wine for the wedding. Jesus returns from his temptations in the wilderness and sets out on a tour of teaching in the synagogues of Galilee. He comes to the synagogue in his hometown and reads that marvelous passage from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Having heard the scripture, the congregation awaits the commentary, but Jesus sits down. Into the expectant silence he announces: Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. Those words that for generations had been about a hoped for future suddenly are about the present. Jesus makes his messianic claim: I am the anointed. God has at last acted. The deliverance of Israel is at hand.

It’s important not to construe this simply as the confirmation of a prediction. So far as we know from Luke’s story the miraculous events referred to in the Isaiah text have yet to occur. Jesus hasn’t healed anyone yet; the sick are still sick, the blind blind…so far all he’s done is teach in the synagogues. Yet this is enough. This is about a covenant being honored by one side even though the other party has repeatedly dishonored it. God has promised to be with his people, to redeem and restore in some ultimate way, in some way earlier restorations and deliverances – like the one recounted in Nehemiah –only foreshadowed. It is not anything Jesus has done that fulfills the promise. It is the sheer of fact of his being there, the sheer fact of his being who he is, his being God with us, that means God, even in the face of disloyalty, rebellion and disobedience, remains steadfast, true to his covenant. This is underscored by what Jesus does – really what he doesn’t do. He rolls up the scroll, hands it to the attendant and sits down, as though there is nothing more to do. He does not launch a program for an intensified commitment to keeping the law that will at last convince God Israel is worthy of deliverance. We’re past all that, the law is fulfilled; the terms of the covenant have been satisfied, not because people have complied – they haven’t – but because God wants us anyway. Jesus presents himself as God’s irrevocable decision to be with us, to accept humanity not as good enough – we’re not – but as well-enough loved.

Nor does Jesus rally the faithful for a war of liberation, for a triumphant purifying of the land so sorely contaminated by pagan Romans. Jesus’ reading of second Isaiah’s commentary on torah is a mirror image of Ezra’s reading of the law. Deliverance in Ezra’s day came by securing the walls, closing tight the gates, purifying the land, repenting from consorting with the gentile outsiders, doing everything necessary to ensure holy Israel’s separation from everyone else. But now Jesus the long-promised messiah throws open the gates: God’s love is at last poured out on everyone, Jew and gentile, pure and impure, those under the law and those outside it. Jesus goes on to act this out, healing, freeing, even sharing table fellowship with notorious failures at keeping God’s law. The unutterable strength and depth of God’s love remains to be revealed fully: years of misunderstanding, rejection, betrayal leading to abandonment and death lie ahead, but the fateful step is taken, God casts his lot with us, we can do our worst, we can reject him, but he is with us. The God who is in Christ, as William Countryman tells us, rejects our rejections, breaches our defenses, draws us out of our fortifications (Dirt, Greed and Sex, p. 267). It’s time, Jesus says, to put aside the law for what that law was always for: to make of human beings people who know the love of God. It’s time to open the gates and welcome the outlaws.

The risk Jesus takes here was, as the facts of course bear out, enormous. It is no surprise that in treating the torah not as eternal truth, but as an agreement whose terms are now unilaterally satisfied by God, Jesus arouses confusion, fear and murderous anger. Law imposes order on chaos, it delineates right from wrong, proper from improper, clean from dirty; it tells us what’s pure and impure, what’s natural and unnatural. It separates us from them. It tells us who we are in the world…take it away and there’s nothing, no Israel, no people of God on earth…or so it seems.

St. Paul was keenly aware of how Jesus demolishes our carefully defended identities, our convictions about what makes sense, our investment in distinguishing good from bad. In the Epistle to the Romans, his great sermon on law and grace, after characterizing the gentiles in ways with which pious Jews – and his Jewish Christian readers – will resonate, that is, as hopelessly beyond the pale of God’s life-giving torah, unclean, given to all sorts of excess beyond anything lawful or natural, he pulls the rug out from under his too confident readers. He moves on to speak of those unsavory gentiles – that’s us, folks – as a branch grafted, contrary to nature, onto the olive tree that is God’s people (11.24). God’s world-saving work in Jesus, his love even for gentiles, for the likes of us, is excessive, beyond propriety, lawless, unnatural. Even Paul, the great preacher of the gospel, never loses his sense of how crazy it is. He follows this description of the extremity of God’s behavior with the exclamation: “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable are his ways! (11.33).

So where does this leave us, so weirdly and improperly adopted into the people of God by a love that breaks the barriers, violates the laws? What’s our law? Do we even have one? We are, of course, beyond the torah of Israel, as we are beyond the religions, the moralities, the plausible programs people are constantly devising to create identities for themselves and to situate themselves on the right side of whatever god or gods they imagine. But that doesn’t mean we have no identity: we are people coming to know ourselves as beneficiaries of God’s forever surprising gift of himself in Jesus. God in Christ utterly rejects every possibility of relating to him on the basis of law, on the basis of anything other than pure gift. It’s on the basis of this – and this alone – that we can answer the question “What’s our law?” Karl Barth wrote:

if the essence of God as the God of man is His grace, then the essence of men as His people, that which is proper to and demanded of them in covenant with God, is simply their thanks….Thanks is the one all-embracing, but as such valid and inescapable, content of the law of the covenant imposed upon man….That he should be thankful is the righteousness which is demanded by him before God. (Church Dogmatics, IV.1, §57, pp. 42-3)

You and I – fellow gentiles – live under the law of thanks. Imagine: someone who loves you does something wonderful for you. She hopes you will respond with gratitude, not because she needs you to do something for her in return, not because she’s keeping score and wants her rights respected, but because she hopes you will act to strengthen the relationship, to more richly love her and know her love for you. She hopes you feel thankful and act on those feelings, but it’s in the nature of the thing that there’s no prescribed way to respond. It’s entirely up to you, you’re free; you can be totally ungrateful. Even that wouldn’t lessen her love for you a bit, but who wants to be an ingrate? In these matters the more creative and unpredictable the response the better. You want to surprise her. If there were a particular thing you had to do to show your thanks – “She sent me a present last Christmas so I have to send her one this year” – you’d be in the realm of law, of duty and reciprocity; you’d be outside the magical circle of gift and gratitude, love and grace. I’m thinking this is how it is with the law of our lives with God. The way here is not exactly easy. We’re freed from bondage to the law but precisely because of that we’re infinitely far from “anything goes.” The law of gratitude is, as often as not, complicated and demanding; it’s usually a lot easier to figure out what the rules are and do your duty. It’s harder to discern what makes sense in light of the good news of God in Christ. It’s often far from obvious where the path of thankfulness leads. But it is a path of joy and Jesus is with us.

Amen.

4th Sunday After Epiphany – Sexagesima

3 February 2002

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 5.1-12

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5. 3)

Get Poor Quick

“Of course, there were warnings. Like Caesar, Hayes ignored them. A lunatic had gotten into the fortune cookies in the Lotus House, the only Oriental restaurant in town. Suddenly, along with their checks, patrons began receiving, coiled like paper snakes, harsh predictions or dreadful instructions: ‘You will die of cancer.’ ‘ Someone close will betray you.’ ‘Sell all your stocks at once!’” Those who have already had the pleasure of Michael Malone’s marvelous comic novel Handling Sin will recognize its opening words and anticipate the events that precipitate its hero, Raleigh Hayes, into a series of confusing and painful adventures in which his lifetime of decent, responsible behavior does him no good at all and fate smiles upon the dissolute and irresponsible. Yet his trials are in the end revealed as the work of grace, the means of his salvation. Great good news can start out sounding like bad news. Or, as Stephen Mitchell says in his instructive little book, The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale For Consenting Adults, “What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.”

Matthew wants to make it clear that Jesus’ mission is connected to that of the wild prophet who announced his coming. In chapter four he uses the very same words he used to describe the Baptizer’s proclamation -- “Repent, for the kingdom of God has come near!” -- to describe Jesus’ ministry. Yet it’s immediately clear that there is a dramatic difference between John and Jesus. The words are the same, but the “near” is becoming “here.” For a few verses further along Matthew tells us that Jesus went throughout Galilee proclaiming the good news. Jesus doesn’t just announce that the kingdom is on its way; he enacts it, he makes God’s healing, saving rule a present reality: “they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.” Matthew introduces an implicit discontinuity by what he doesn’t say. Unlike John, Jesus doesn’t begin by talking about what’s wrong with people and what they’d better do about it; he simply gives them what they need. Before we even hear Jesus’ words announcing the blessedness that is ours because of God’s coming kingdom he is already at work, bringing it into being.

It’s no surprise that Jesus is suddenly wildly popular. Huge crowds form and start to follow him about. Seeing the crowds, Jesus heads up a mountain and sits down to speak, brining us to today’s lesson. This text, the “beatitudes,” is perhaps the most beautiful in the New Testament, and it is certainly among the texts most puzzled over through the years. What is Jesus doing here at the beginning of what has become known as the Sermon on the Mount?

We should resist the temptation to hear Jesus setting out some sort of moral teaching here: those who talk about the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount are missing the point. Those crowds did not stream out of the cities and towns and follow Jesus up the mountain to hear a lecture on morals. Let’s face it: ethics just isn’t that exciting. Trollope gets it exactly right when he says of Mrs. Thorne in Barchester Towers, “Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.” Like most of us, those folks had probably heard all they wanted to hear about what they ought to do, but those lessons, however worthy, have never filled their empty hearts. They’re not after moral instruction. Jesus is speaking to people that, one way or another, are in need. They’re hungry and they’re acting on the principle eloquently stated by Bertolt Brecht: Grub first, then ethics.

We can imagine John telling his listeners how wicked they are, how much trouble they’re in, how if they change their ways and they’re lucky they might escape the impending judgment, but we can’t imagine him telling them how happy they should be. That is exactly what Jesus does. Each time Jesus says, “blessed are…” he’s announcing that his hearers are happy. Or, if they are not happy yet, it can only be because they don’t know what’s happening. Matthew’s Greek term is the common word for “happy” in the first century; it had no special religious or ceremonial connotation.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit – Luke’s version shortens it to just “the poor,” but it’s the same idea: those with nothing to offer, the unworthy, the unqualified. There’s no notion here of the deserving and virtuous poor over against the successful but wicked rich. That was a world where being rich was a sign of one’s virtue and God’s favor. But that crowd gathered around Jesus would have been made up overwhelmingly of the “poor in spirit,” by people who have nothing that counts in this world and know it: whether it’s economic, political or religious clout they are the have nots. They are rich in nothing but need. They have nothing but whatever hunch or hope or desire drew them to Jesus. Empty handed and undeserving they are nonetheless blessed, for it is to them that Jesus gives the kingdom of heaven.

John’s demand for repentance to escape God’s wrath has been replaced with Jesus’ good news that should make happy those who have every reason not to be happy. What with John sounds like impending doom turns out, as Jesus takes center stage, to be simply the prelude to the great joy about to break out. As Karl Barth would have put it, here in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we see the NO of death and wrath finally and decisively subordinated to God’s YES. I think of John the Baptizer as speaking the last emphatic NO, the last word of God’s righteous judgment before he takes it all upon himself and proclaims the enduring, triumphant YES of grace.

This proclamation of the arrival of the kingdom and call for repentance that started out with John the Baptist sounding about as bad as anyone might have expected has been transformed into something that sounds too good to be true. It is something we can only take on faith, because we trust the one who promises.

As my ninth birthday approached, the thing I wanted most in the world was a 26" English bicycle with hand brakes and skinny tires. I had had enough of my klutzy old balloon- tired bike that was all too obviously a little kids’ bike. Parental hinting had given rise to large hopes and I awoke in eager expectation on my birthday. My parents called out “Happy Birthday” from their bedroom and told me to go down to the kitchen because my birthday present was waiting for me there. I ran downstairs and stood dumbfounded by the terrible truth: there was nothing in the kitchen that resembled a bicycle. No real presents at all, just a fancy, boxed birthday cake. It was obviously from the man in the church who owned a chain of bakeries and always had just such a cake delivered to each child in the congregation on their birthday. Abashed, I burst into tears and ran upstairs crying, disappointed, angry, the words “Happy Birthday” hollow and mocking in my ears, yet aiming myself for comfort at my parents, hurling myself onto their bed. As I did, a flash of blue caught my eye. I looked: there, through tear-blurred eyes, against the wall in my parents’ room, was an exquisite metallic blue English bicycle. To this day my parents think this was all really funny. (I realize that I probably got off easy and, if Connie and Steve had been my parents, the bike would have been in another county, or disassembled and baked into the cake…)

The moment I woke up that day, the basis for my birthday happiness had already arrived. My heart’s desire was already there, waiting to be enjoyed. I could have been happy, had I only trusted my mother and father who, after all, had all but promised me the bike. Maybe I could have just enjoyed my parents’ – I’m sure it was my father’s – little joke and run upstairs unperturbed, saying “OK, where is it really?” I don’t know, maybe that was a bit too much to expect of a sleepy nine-year old. But surely if I’d had a steadier view of what they were like, their underlying trustworthiness, their steadfast love, their keen desire to make me happy, I’d not have been fooled. I’d have been happy right from the start and avoided the tears, and the chagrin, of my disbelief.

Jesus, like John, preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” But what comes clear at last in Jesus is that true repentance lies in trusting that Jesus himself brings the kingdom into being, and that he calls us to join him in it, accepting and rejoicing in it as a fact, even if it is not yet seen. The Croatian theologian (now at Yale) Miroslav Volf, reflecting on the endless cycles of hate, violence and revenge that have plagued his and other Balkan peoples, reminds us that as Christians we must think of “genuine repentance not as a human possibility but as gift from God” (Exclusion and Embrace, p. 119). Our attempts at repentance are always profoundly shaped and tainted by our need to excuse and justify ourselves and to condemn others. The kingdom of God belongs only to those who at last have nothing and can do nothing but receive it as a gift. Repentance is at last no more than recognizing that only a God’s mercy can save us now.

The thing about a gift isn’t worrying about how to deserve it; that’s impossible; if you deserve it it’s not a gift. The only thing to worry about is for some crazy reason refusing it. Not answering the persistent doorbell, refusing to sign for it when the UPS man brings it to your door and, when he stubbornly leaves it on your doorstep anyway, letting it sit there in the snow, to silly to bring it in, open it up and be happy with it. May our merciful God save us from whatever fear or pride blinds us to our need for him. May he free us from the suspicion that leads us to think it’s too good to be true. May he instead grant us the gift of knowing our poverty, giving us grace to know ourselves as poor in spirit, and blessed because we are.

Amen.

Seventh Sunday in Epiphany

18 February 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church, Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 6.27-38

Forgiving God

Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6.31)

Today’s text comes from the beginning of Jesus’ teaching ministry. It’s part of a long talk Jesus gives, his first big public address. It begins with what have become known as the Beatitudes. We have an image of Jesus: this mild, hippie-like fellow making these fine but of course idealistic pronouncements: Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. A great moral teacher dispensing noble ideals and lofty, even if impractical, sentiments. It’s easy to forget that this is the man who picked a fight with his whole home town and almost got thrown off a cliff for it.

Even when he moves on, and his words take on a harder edge, we can miss how unsettling this sermon would have been, how at odds with the wisdom of the day: Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall mourn and weep. Some in that crowd would have heard Jesus’ words as a frontal assault on everything sacred. They’d have heard Jesus proposing a regime of moral chaos, one in which the sign of God’s blessing is made into its opposite and the mark of divine disfavor held up as the sign of blessing. A world in which it’s the deserving who are wretched and poor, the undeserving rich and happy. A world where there is no justice.

The rich and content would have been upset, but the not so well fixed would have heard Jesus’ words with satisfaction, taking them as a promise that God will ultimately see to it that justice is done, that the truly deserving - like them - get what’s coming to them, and the fat cats, who now have things so good, get what’s coming to them. Even though things aren’t fair now, God will make sure all’s fair in the end. There is justice after all.

But these hopes for a God who uses his might on the side of fairness and justice collapse when we get to the part of the sermon recorded in this morning’s lesson. Here too, I think it’s tempting to make Jesus say something morally and religiously sensible. Do to others as you would have them do to you (v. 31). It sounds, on a superficial reading, that Jesus here pronounces the “Golden Rule:” treat other people decently, the same way you would want them to treat you. Or put it negatively: don’t do to someone else something you’d object to if she did it to you. It’s reciprocity in human relations; it’s moral and reasonable. The first word in ethics.

Read this on the heels of the words that come before, though, and you get something very different, something at odds with anything we could call ethical. Jesus is talking about people who hate you, about people who curse and abuse you. He’s talking about that guy who smacks you and takes your belongings, who borrows your stuff and won’t give it back. How do people like that want to be treated? They’d like you to cooperate: turn the other check so they can take another shot! They’ve stolen your coat, they wouldn’t mind if you’d hand over your shirt too. They’ve borrowed a pile of money from you, and they’d just as soon you just forget about it, thank you. How would you like to be treated if you behaved like that? Would you like to be treated justly? Fairly? No way! You’d like to get away with it! So let them! Do to others as you would have them do to you!

Jesus isn’t preaching about reciprocity, fairness, justice; he’s talking about letting people get away with murder. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Golden Rule; he’s turning it on its head just as he’s turned upside down the all so plausible idea that the rich and successful are well off because God blesses them, and the idea that the poor and unfortunate are bad off because they’re getting what they deserve.

Jesus pushes the point home: Do not judge: give up caring or even thinking about who deserves what. Never condemn. Always forgive, no strings attached. Let people get away with things.

The meaning of Jesus’ words is visible from a different angle: he’s not, I think, trying to tell that crowd about the right way to live. He’s not laying out the first principles of some new “Christian ethic.” He’s describing the coming kingdom of God and what it means to become part of it. He’s trying to tell them what God is like, how God thinks and acts. It’s God who is struck and yet turns his cheek. It’s God who lends without stint and is never repaid. He’s expressing the attitude of the eternal living God toward needy, sinful humanity. He’s inviting us to become a part of his life of forgiving mercy, a life that overflows in joy.

What would it be like for us to relate to one another the same way God has chosen to relate to us? It would be this impossible life, this life where judgment itself has come under judgment and been done away with, the life where all is forgiven. No conditions, no penalties paid, no justice done; only the self-giving love of endless mercy. Take Jesus’ words seriously and you get a glimpse into the depths of what God is doing in Jesus. Dostoyevsky famously said that without God all things are possible; if there’s no God you can get away with anything. Dostoyevsky got it wrong. The God who comes to us in Jesus is the God with whom all things are possible. If this is the God there is then you can get away with anything. There is, at last, only forgiveness and mercy.

Taken neat, forgiveness is pretty appalling. We ought not to forget how much we tend to disapprove of it. Sometimes, it’s all but impossible to bear. The great Mississippi Baptist preacher, peace advocate and civil rights activist Will Campbell devoted himself to Christ’s gospel of reconciliation and forgiveness, but even he knew how hard it could be to agree with God about it. Back in the 1960s, a friend of his who was registering blacks to vote was murdered in cold blood by a southern deputy. Later Campell confessed that his convictions about grace and reconciliation were put to the test. He wrote, “the notion that a man could go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body...and that God would set him free is almost more than I could stand. But unless that is precisely the case, ...there is no Gospel, there is no Good News. Unless that is the truth, we have only bad news.”

Sometimes it’s the possibility of our own forgiveness that we can’t abide. The character Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed carries a load of pain and guilt so great that the very idea of his being forgiven offends his sensibilities. Phelan, a trolley mechanic out on strike, has thrown a stone that kills a scab. Back home, he’s drunk and needs to leave town quickly before the law catches up with him. In his haste, he drops - and kills - his infant son. He flees and his family never hears from him until, years later he returns to town and the novel’s story begins as he encounters the ghosts of his past and struggles against the possibility of forgiveness. He says: ''My guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing.''

The wild and risky mercy of God is hard to put up with for the likes of us, inveterate champions of justice and pursuers of justification, even to our own hurt. No doubt if there is a Hell it is populated entirely by those who will not forgive God for the indiscriminate forgiveness he lets loose upon an unsuspecting world.

Anne Lamott’s novel Crooked Little Heart is the story of Rosie, a 13 year old tennis player. She’s confused and awkward in school and in every other department of her teenage life but on the court she is all power and grace. Her parents and coaches tell her she has the potential to be a star. But Rosie carries a crushing burden: she cheats. When the referee is not looking she calls her opponents’ shots out when they are in fact in. Rosie is a very troubled, very typical adolescent. She’s trapped in a circle of pride, insecurity, fear, and panic that leads to more cheating, more guilt, more fear. No one knows her terrible secret except a mysterious, disreputable, vaguely threatening character named (of all things) Luther. It becomes at last too much to bear; Rosie confesses, anticipating nothing but contempt and loss of love. To her stepfather she says: “‘You don’t even get it James. You don’t get that I feel like I have to pay for this for my whole life.’ Rosie wanted to scream....but instead she crawled onto her mother’s lap and cried for awhile. ‘Rosie?’ said her mother, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in you, but whatever it is, you have paid. Okay? You are free and clear.’ Free and clear Rosie thought, and could have stood on the table to bellow, I have paid, I am free and clear.”

The currency Rosie pays to get free is not her own; it’s sheer gift. In reality, the only payment she can offer is the forgiveness her mother gives her. It’s the power of her mother’s unconditional love for her, a love that takes upon itself the fear, guilt and anger that has crippled Rosie. Nothing else suffices to enlarge and straighten her crooked little heart. There’s no other power in heaven or on earth that can make her free and clear.

There’s in us something that always says mercy and forgiveness are weaknesses, and that only a God who enforces the rules and insists on justice is strong enough to vanquish the forces of evil that prey upon us. We are incredibly inventive in devising ways to reject God’s rejection of justice in favor of mercy and in insisting that in the end everyone gets precisely what they deserve. But that’s not true. We find God in the scandalous Cross or not at all. God, if he was ever in it, has gotten out of the business of justice. God the enforcer of what’s right and fair does not exist. There is no power short of the forgiveness and mercy God pours forth in Jesus that can deliver us.

Does this mean that what we choose, the course you or I make for ourselves in life, the ways we treat one another, are unimportant? That this God who forgives us without conditions doesn’t care what we do, what becomes of us? Surely not. Some ways of living make sense in light of the good news of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness; others don’t. Some ways of life bear witness to, and rejoice in, God’s invincible mercy and love, others absurdly deny and delay it:

We should be grateful to God because he is gracious and merciful to us even when we are ungrateful.

We should be merciful to others because God is merciful to us even when we are merciless to others.

We should forgive as we are forgiven, not because our being forgiven is contingent on our doing so, but precisely because it isn’t. God’s great forgiveness and mercy is not frustrated by our hardness of heart.

There is no justice in the world. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Seventh Sunday in Epiphany

18 February 2001

St. George’s Episcopal Church, Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 6.27-38

Forgiving God

Do to others as you would have them do to you. (Luke 6.31)

Today’s text comes from the beginning of Jesus’ teaching ministry. It’s part of a long talk Jesus gives, his first big public address. It begins with what have become known as the Beatitudes. We have an image of Jesus: this mild, hippie-like fellow making these fine but of course idealistic pronouncements: Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. A great moral teacher dispensing noble ideals and lofty, even if impractical, sentiments. It’s easy to forget that this is the man who picked a fight with his whole home town and almost got thrown off a cliff for it.

Even when he moves on, and his words take on a harder edge, we can miss how unsettling this sermon would have been, how at odds with the wisdom of the day: Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall mourn and weep. Some in that crowd would have heard Jesus’ words as a frontal assault on everything sacred. They’d have heard Jesus proposing a regime of moral chaos, one in which the sign of God’s blessing is made into its opposite and the mark of divine disfavor held up as the sign of blessing. A world in which it’s the deserving who are wretched and poor, the undeserving rich and happy. A world where there is no justice.

The rich and content would have been upset, but the not so well fixed would have heard Jesus’ words with satisfaction, taking them as a promise that God will ultimately see to it that justice is done, that the truly deserving - like them - get what’s coming to them, and the fat cats, who now have things so good, get what’s coming to them. Even though things aren’t fair now, God will make sure all’s fair in the end. There is justice after all.

But these hopes for a God who uses his might on the side of fairness and justice collapse when we get to the part of the sermon recorded in this morning’s lesson. Here too, I think it’s tempting to make Jesus say something morally and religiously sensible. Do to others as you would have them do to you (v. 31). It sounds, on a superficial reading, that Jesus here pronounces the “Golden Rule:” treat other people decently, the same way you would want them to treat you. Or put it negatively: don’t do to someone else something you’d object to if she did it to you. It’s reciprocity in human relations; it’s moral and reasonable. The first word in ethics.

Read this on the heels of the words that come before, though, and you get something very different, something at odds with anything we could call ethical. Jesus is talking about people who hate you, about people who curse and abuse you. He’s talking about that guy who smacks you and takes your belongings, who borrows your stuff and won’t give it back. How do people like that want to be treated? They’d like you to cooperate: turn the other check so they can take another shot! They’ve stolen your coat, they wouldn’t mind if you’d hand over your shirt too. They’ve borrowed a pile of money from you, and they’d just as soon you just forget about it, thank you. How would you like to be treated if you behaved like that? Would you like to be treated justly? Fairly? No way! You’d like to get away with it! So let them! Do to others as you would have them do to you!

Jesus isn’t preaching about reciprocity, fairness, justice; he’s talking about letting people get away with murder. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Golden Rule; he’s turning it on its head just as he’s turned upside down the all so plausible idea that the rich and successful are well off because God blesses them, and the idea that the poor and unfortunate are bad off because they’re getting what they deserve.

Jesus pushes the point home: Do not judge: give up caring or even thinking about who deserves what. Never condemn. Always forgive, no strings attached. Let people get away with things.

The meaning of Jesus’ words is visible from a different angle: he’s not, I think, trying to tell that crowd about the right way to live. He’s not laying out the first principles of some new “Christian ethic.” He’s describing the coming kingdom of God and what it means to become part of it. He’s trying to tell them what God is like, how God thinks and acts. It’s God who is struck and yet turns his cheek. It’s God who lends without stint and is never repaid. He’s expressing the attitude of the eternal living God toward needy, sinful humanity. He’s inviting us to become a part of his life of forgiving mercy, a life that overflows in joy.

What would it be like for us to relate to one another the same way God has chosen to relate to us? It would be this impossible life, this life where judgment itself has come under judgment and been done away with, the life where all is forgiven. No conditions, no penalties paid, no justice done; only the self-giving love of endless mercy. Take Jesus’ words seriously and you get a glimpse into the depths of what God is doing in Jesus. Dostoyevsky famously said that without God all things are possible; if there’s no God you can get away with anything. Dostoyevsky got it wrong. The God who comes to us in Jesus is the God with whom all things are possible. If this is the God there is then you can get away with anything. There is, at last, only forgiveness and mercy.

Taken neat, forgiveness is pretty appalling. We ought not to forget how much we tend to disapprove of it. Sometimes, it’s all but impossible to bear. The great Mississippi Baptist preacher, peace advocate and civil rights activist Will Campbell devoted himself to Christ’s gospel of reconciliation and forgiveness, but even he knew how hard it could be to agree with God about it. Back in the 1960s, a friend of his who was registering blacks to vote was murdered in cold blood by a southern deputy. Later Campell confessed that his convictions about grace and reconciliation were put to the test. He wrote, “the notion that a man could go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body...and that God would set him free is almost more than I could stand. But unless that is precisely the case, ...there is no Gospel, there is no Good News. Unless that is the truth, we have only bad news.”

Sometimes it’s the possibility of our own forgiveness that we can’t abide. The character Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed carries a load of pain and guilt so great that the very idea of his being forgiven offends his sensibilities. Phelan, a trolley mechanic out on strike, has thrown a stone that kills a scab. Back home, he’s drunk and needs to leave town quickly before the law catches up with him. In his haste, he drops - and kills - his infant son. He flees and his family never hears from him until, years later he returns to town and the novel’s story begins as he encounters the ghosts of his past and struggles against the possibility of forgiveness. He says: ''My guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing.''

The wild and risky mercy of God is hard to put up with for the likes of us, inveterate champions of justice and pursuers of justification, even to our own hurt. No doubt if there is a Hell it is populated entirely by those who will not forgive God for the indiscriminate forgiveness he lets loose upon an unsuspecting world.

Anne Lamott’s novel Crooked Little Heart is the story of Rosie, a 13 year old tennis player. She’s confused and awkward in school and in every other department of her teenage life but on the court she is all power and grace. Her parents and coaches tell her she has the potential to be a star. But Rosie carries a crushing burden: she cheats. When the referee is not looking she calls her opponents’ shots out when they are in fact in. Rosie is a very troubled, very typical adolescent. She’s trapped in a circle of pride, insecurity, fear, and panic that leads to more cheating, more guilt, more fear. No one knows her terrible secret except a mysterious, disreputable, vaguely threatening character named (of all things) Luther. It becomes at last too much to bear; Rosie confesses, anticipating nothing but contempt and loss of love. To her stepfather she says: “‘You don’t even get it James. You don’t get that I feel like I have to pay for this for my whole life.’ Rosie wanted to scream....but instead she crawled onto her mother’s lap and cried for awhile. ‘Rosie?’ said her mother, ‘I don’t know what’s going on in you, but whatever it is, you have paid. Okay? You are free and clear.’ Free and clear Rosie thought, and could have stood on the table to bellow, I have paid, I am free and clear.”

The currency Rosie pays to get free is not her own; it’s sheer gift. In reality, the only payment she can offer is the forgiveness her mother gives her. It’s the power of her mother’s unconditional love for her, a love that takes upon itself the fear, guilt and anger that has crippled Rosie. Nothing else suffices to enlarge and straighten her crooked little heart. There’s no other power in heaven or on earth that can make her free and clear.

There’s in us something that always says mercy and forgiveness are weaknesses, and that only a God who enforces the rules and insists on justice is strong enough to vanquish the forces of evil that prey upon us. We are incredibly inventive in devising ways to reject God’s rejection of justice in favor of mercy and in insisting that in the end everyone gets precisely what they deserve. But that’s not true. We find God in the scandalous Cross or not at all. God, if he was ever in it, has gotten out of the business of justice. God the enforcer of what’s right and fair does not exist. There is no power short of the forgiveness and mercy God pours forth in Jesus that can deliver us.

Does this mean that what we choose, the course you or I make for ourselves in life, the ways we treat one another, are unimportant? That this God who forgives us without conditions doesn’t care what we do, what becomes of us? Surely not. Some ways of living make sense in light of the good news of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness; others don’t. Some ways of life bear witness to, and rejoice in, God’s invincible mercy and love, others absurdly deny and delay it.

We should be grateful to God because he is gracious and merciful to us even when we are ungrateful.

We should be merciful to others because God is merciful to us even when we are merciless to others.

We should forgive as we are forgiven, not because our being forgiven is contingent on our doing so, but precisely because it isn’t. God’s great forgiveness and mercy is not frustrated by our hardness of heart.

There is no justice in the world. Thanks be to God.

Amen.