Homilies for Pentecost 7 - 11

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost

7 July 2002

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 11.25-30

What Would Jesus Do?

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11.28

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. “Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.” Watson ponders the heavens and then responds: “I see millions of stars, and if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life.” But Holmes says “No Watson, you idiot, someone stole our tent!”

There’s nothing like missing the obvious. As a student last week thought I was doing: seeing his bracelet inscribed WWJD, I told him I’m glad of his support for the worldwide Jewish diaspora. The last thing we want to do is miss the obvious when it comes to the good news of God coming to us in Jesus, and what it might mean to do as he would do. That’s how I think of this text from Matthew’s Gospel. We’re not getting a report on Jesus’ personality here: nothing in the Gospels suggests he was a diffident fellow so far as human psychology is concerned! Jesus is being explicit about the very character and purposes of God. The real nature of God, who he really is and insists on being for us, has been hidden but now at long last Jesus is revealing the amazing, world changing truth. Once we know Jesus, who God is becomes something we just can’t miss.

Jesus seamlessly moves from praying to God the Father where he is says that the only way to know the Father is by having him revealed by the Son, by Jesus, to speaking to the disciples, telling them exactly what God is like. God is not what he is supposed to be. He defies expectations about being powerful and choosy when it comes to people, piling on expectations and requirements. if we somehow discharge them perfectly, we’ll satisfy him. The God Jesus reveals calls the weary to himself, ready to free them of their loads. He is not looking to make demands on people, but to give them rest. He is not a God ready to lord it over us, making us do what he wants, but instead he is humble in heart, not exacting deference and obedience, but gently welcoming us and offering to make our burdens his own.

This is who God has always been. Before God became one of us just who he was wasn’t obvious. It took Jesus to make it plain, to make some cracks in the hard layers of stories we tell ourselves about what God is supposed to be like. Jesus in today’s text tells us what God is like, but already he has been making it obvious in everything he’s been doing. Jesus has gone about healing people left and right, paying no attention to who deserves this divine favor. He’s symbolically creating a new Israel out of the unprepared, the unknowing, and the undeserving. Above all, he has made his trademark his willingness to eat and drink with everyone, totally ignoring the issues – in his day crucial issues – of purity and impurity, of who is the sort of person a rabbi should break bread with and who is the sort of person that should be avoided at all costs. Jesus breaks all the rules about who’s in and who’s out, he gives himself to everyone. Anyone who has seen Jesus has seen God for what he is, the God who comes to us with the freedom of love.

With this God the question first and last is not what do I have to do for him, but what can I let him do for me? To all of us laboring under the burdens of the expectations others impose upon us and those we impose upon ourselves, to all of us carrying the weight of uncertainty and anxiety, of past and future failure, of guilt and anger, Jesus offers the utter generosity of God. God puts aside power and principle, justice and control to open a place of love for us.

What is it for us to find ourselves bound to him in that love, to share his burden and accept his yoke? Jesus said that his yoke is easy, his burden light. In contrast to all the false gods humans have devised with a view to justifying ourselves and controlling others there is with the God we meet in Jesus no quid pro quo, there is only his love that welcomes all comers. Still, to make that work of love one’s own can call us to give up on loyalties that are otherwise precious to us, and to do things that seem senseless from the perspective of ordinary thinking about God. It can be like carrying a cross.

Shusaku Endo’s great novel Silence tells the story of Sebastien Rodriguez, a Portuguese Jesuit who in 1643 comes to Japan as a missionary, intent on glorifying God by ministering to the small and persecuted Christian community there. He knows that Christianity, initially welcomed in Japan, has now been outlawed, and he has heard reports of the fearful tortures that await those apprehended by the rulers and who refuse to renounce their faith. On the arduous year long trip from Portugal to Japan Father Rodriguez has lots of time to wonder how he will bear up if he is called upon to be a martyr. He has heard rumors missionary priests who have under torture denied Christ. He is afraid, but he is confident that Christ will be with him even in that extremity, and he is hopeful that he will not end as those apostates he regards with a mixture of pity and contempt.

In due course Rodriguez reaches Japan, and after some time underground serving a secret community of Christians, he is betrayed and arrested. In prison, he expects to be tortured or killed, but Inoue, the Magistrate, has devised a far more effective weapon against the Christians. It is only the Japanese Christians, almost all of them poor peasants of a strong and simple faith, he tortures and kills. He does not physically harm the priest. Instead he tells Rodriguez that the terrible suffering of the Japanese Christians will immediately stop the moment he denies Christ. Night after night Rodriguez lays in his cell, listening to the pathetic screams of his fellow Christians, the flock he came so far to serve, as they are tormented and put to death. Inoue has devised a ritual for Christians to deny Christ: a picture of Jesus is put on the ground and the prisoner is invited to step on it. No pretense of sincerity, of a real loss of faith in Christ is required; what will save the Japanese Christians is the simple physical act of trampling on the face of Jesus. For weeks Rodriguez struggles. Again and again he asks himself why God is silent, why he does nothing to save the innocent who suffer so terribly. Does God not care? Is he really there? To comply is for him to lose everything he has been his whole life. It is to become a byword in his order, to be a traitor, to be held in contempt and seen as a Judas who tries to save himself by betraying Christ. He’ll be expelled from the order, the priesthood and excommunicated; he will be the scum of the Church, damned. He would much rather be tortured and killed himself.

The book’s climactic scene is stunning even if not unexpected: an anguished Rodrgiuez is brought to the place where the image of that beloved face lies on the ground. In the distance he hears the moans of Christians being tortured in the pit, the sound of a suffering only he can stop. All night he struggles while the interrogators urge him on: “It’s only a formality” Do it and we’ll stop the torture and the killing!” The thought comes to him, as it has before, that Christ would have trod on it if that’s what it took to save those he loved, but he has resisted this as a temptation, as an attempt to rationalize weakness and evade his duty to stand for Christ at all costs. At last

with saddened glance he stares intently at the man in the center of the picture, worn down and hollow with the constant trampling…The priest raised his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and dreams of man. How his foot aches! And then the Christ in the image speaks to the priest: “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.” The priest placed his foot on the image of Christ. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crowed. (Silence, New York: Taplinger, 1980, p. 171.)

Jesus calls us to come to him and to accept his yoke and his burden, to learn the way of the God he reveals. That way is not always as dark and paradoxical as the way along which Endo’s Father Rodriguez – who is, as a matter of fact, based upon an historical character – was called. Yet it assuredly will not cohere with much that seems secure and familiar, and it may well seem pointless, an empty gesture in a world given over to sin and death. Most of you will remember Loren Eisley’s little essay, “The Star Thrower.” Eisley once spent some time in a seaside town called Costabel where he would walk along the beach in the early mornings. Each day at sunrise he found people from the town combing the sand for starfish that had washed ashore during the night to kill them for some commercial purpose. But one morning Eisley happened to get up especially early and he discovered a lone figure on the beach. He too was gathering starfish but when he found one alive he would pick it up and throw it as far as he could to safety out beyond the breakers. As time went by Eisley found the man, who he named the “star thrower” at work every day, seven days a week, no matter the weather. Here, he thought, he saw something that contradicted the law of power and death at work in the world: the strong reached down to save, not to crush, the weak. And he wondered whether there is a star thrower at work in the universe, a God who contradicts death and whose nature is mercy.

Until we have seen and known the humble and gentle God who was in Christ, bringing rest to the weary and life to the dying, this can be at best a hope. But we can be grateful because we know that this God is real and has come in the flesh, making our weakness his own so as to lift us up and save us.

Amen.

Seventh Sunday in Pentecost

3 July 2005

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 11.25-30

Gentle and Humble in Heart

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11.28-30)

If you’re like me, you’re about as likely to remember last week’s Gospel lesson as “Car Talk’s” Tom Magliozzi is to remember last week’s ‘puzzler,’ and, when we hear what Jesus says today in Matthew 11, you might suspect he’s forgotten what he said in Chapter 10. There, sending his disciples out to proclaim the coming of God’s kingdom, Jesus warned them that they would be maligned and persecuted, betrayed and denounced, arrested, interrogated and killed. But now he says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (12.30). If being hated by everyone (10.22), flogged in synagogues (10.17), thrown in prison, and being put to death by your children (10.21) is what Jesus thinks of as an easy yoke, a light burden, we can only wonder what he’d consider a hard yoke, a heavy burden!

In fact, the longer we look at today’s passage in the context Mathew creates for it, the harder it is to understand Jesus’ words. In the passage I want to focus on, he describes himself as “gentle and humble in heart,” which doesn’t seem to fit very well with last week’s “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (10.34). It fits no better with the passage that comes right before today’s lesson (11.16-24). There Jesus threatens the towns which have not accepted him and welcomed the good news of the arrival of God’s kingdom, warning them that they face obliteration unless they repent: “On the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for you!” (11.24).

For that matter, it’s not obvious how to square Jesus’ description of himself as “gentle and humble in heart” with the portrayal in the Gospels of a character who lived rough, consorted with some pretty tough characters, spoke to huge crowds without benefit of a sound system, berated his followers, bluntly confronted the powerful and finally goaded them into killing him as a blaspheming insurrectionist. (I was once party to a discussion in which everyone went on at length describing a colleague, a sweet, unassuming, and diffident fellow beloved by all, as “Christ like;” at last, exasperated by the facile equation of being like Jesus with being nice, I asked when he was going to annoy us so much that we’d crucify him.)

I don’t think that when Jesus describes himself as humble and gentle that he’s telling us that he’s really a nice guy, after all. I think instead that he’s saying something absolutely crucial about the kingdom of God, but to get hold of it we need more context than the lectionary gives us. Earlier in the chapter from which today’s lesson comes Jesus is speaking to the crowds about John the Baptist. John is in prison, put there by Herod Antipas, king of a region that includes Galilee. Herod is a Jew, but he reigns at the pleasure of the Romans, and it is them, not Israel or Israel’s God he serves. John is in trouble with Herod because he spoke out against his current marital arrangements. Herod divorced his wife to marry the ex-wife of his stepbrother, a woman named Herodias. As it happened, she was also the daughter of another stepbrother and thus Herod’s niece. (A series based on these people probably will appear on the Fox network.) The purity code of first century Judaism prohibited neither divorce, nor marriage to a brother’s ex, nor to a niece, but apparently by managing to do all at once King Herod made the devout pretty queasy. And no doubt this was just the specific issue that had behind it a host of deeper reasons why this so inflamed the pious. (Replace Herod Antipas with Bill Clinton and Herodias with Monica Lewinsky: the sex thing was simply the last straw for those hated him anyway.) Herod and his hanky-panky was an obvious target for anyone concerned with the ritual purification and political liberation of Israel. This stooge of the Romans personified the outrage of the defiling bondage of God’s people to the pagan occupiers.

With that background, consider this notoriously unclear passage (verses 9 through 12 of Chapter 11.) Jesus says:

What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.” Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.

Commentators have come up with a variety of interpretations of what Jesus means here, but I want to suggest that when he speaks of those who attempt to take the kingdom of God by force, and to do it violence, he’s talking about those who thought they were doing God’s work by fomenting armed insurrection against the Roman occupation. So far as anyone knows, John was not a zealot; he did not instigate an insurgency against the empire or its client regimes. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Jesus, after honoring John, describing him as greater than a prophet, as the one who prepares the way for the Messiah himself, here decisively rejects John’s understanding of God and his kingdom. When he describes himself as gentle and humble, he’s saying he is radically different than John.

For, while John does not call upon the faithful to take up swords to drive out the oppressor and purify the land in preparation for the coming of God, he is not essentially different from those who do. Jesus was willing to be baptized by John, to endorse his call for the nation to repent and prepare itself for its long-delayed deliverance, but he will not accept John’s ultimate assumptions about the character and purposes of the God who comes to redeem Israel. John’s suicidal attack on Herod makes some kind of sense in religious, ethical, political terms; it makes sense for those who see Israel’s vocation as a matter of repairing and strengthening the wall of division that separates pure Israel from unclean gentile, and, within Israel, as a matter of more rigorously adhering to ritual purity and making outcasts of those who don’t. Herod, the Romans he serves, and the many within Israel who fall short of full fidelity to the torah, are the enemies of Israel, and of God.

Thus, the kingdom John envisions—and for which he dies—is completely at odds with the kingdom Jesus embodies. For the kingdom of Jesus is one in which Israel is not closed off, the pure and elect people over against the dirty and rejected gentiles, but open to them, giving itself for them, a chosen people of kings and priests, a light to the nations, welcoming them all and sundry into the limitless reign of a gracious God. Where John, and almost all his contemporaries, excluded, Jesus embraced. Where they condemned, Jesus forgave. They said repentance and baptism must come first, before acceptance. Jesus accepted indiscriminately, and pointed to repentance and baptism as signs of gratitude. They sought to restore Israel by keeping people out; Jesus threw open the doors and announced the unstinting grace of God. They sought justice, a plausible, but ultimately death-dealing, righteousness, but it is Jesus, eating and drinking with sinners, who is God’s improbable and risky righteousness made flesh. In Jesus God humbles himself on behalf of all who are weak and unworthy. Jesus decisively contrasts who he is with who John was: “I am gentle and humble in heart.”

What about that terrible warning to the towns that reject the good news of the coming kingdom? The trajectory of John’s attempt to “take the kingdom of heaven by force” is evident; he winds up with his head on a platter. The same fate awaits the nation as a whole if it persists in imagining it can overcome power with power, rather than with love, if it does not accept the good news, if it does not acknowledge Jesus as God’s anointed. Again and again Jesus warns Israel that it is on a doomed path, that it has reached a critical juncture where it can turn to God and be saved, or face judgment. Its hostile resistance to Rome can end only in disaster. Those who reject Jesus’ way of forgiveness and reconciliation can look forward only to destruction—a prophecy tragically fulfilled a generation later, when Israel rose in armed rebellion and the Romans responded with devastating force: the Temple demolished, Jerusalem ruined, the country laid waste.

Still, we’re left wondering how the way of Jesus can be easy, how the burden he asks us to bear can be light. As Jesus himself tells us, we can expect his good news of love and acceptance to encounter hate and rejection. We can expect his command for us to make peace with our enemies to evoke a violent response from those who can be satisfied with nothing but victory over them.

Beyond that, the truth is that for the likes of us nothing is so unnatural, so contrary to inclination, and in some ways so utterly unbelievable, as that good news. Inside each of us there’s a hairy, ranting John the Baptist; we’re all too willing to lose our heads for whatever moral or political or religious or whatever ideal we take as too dear to be trumped by God’s love. There is a sense in which the Christian faith is not difficult; it’s impossible. We will always, one way or another, cling to something other than the grace of God in Jesus to make ourselves whole and acceptable in our own eyes and God’s. And we will always be ready to see someone else as cut off from God’s grace.

His yoke is easy, his burden is light, not because of what we are able to do for him, not because we can do what he asks, but because he gives so much. His yoke is easy, his burden is light because he accepts us and our desperately inadequate efforts with unbounded grace. There’s an old story—its provenance is Sufi, not Christian, but we should always be on the lookout for fragments of the good news breaking through in unexpected places—about an old woman who dies and, as she approaches heaven, she worries that she may not be worthy to enter. She fears that her faith has been feeble, her piety inadequate, her good deeds paltry, her motives mixed. But suddenly she sees God, running to welcome her. Embracing her he says, “I made you so small and weak and flawed but you have done so much! I made the stars and planets to obey me. I made the angels and bright sprits to adore me. I made you, I made you to surprise me!” May we take up the burden and put on the yoke that Jesus gives us, confident not in ourselves, but in the endless grace that holds us secure.

Amen.

Ninth Sunday of Pentecost

10 August 2003

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

John 6.37-51

The Bread of Life

Driving through the rural South, you used to see them along the roadside, on handmade signs nailed to trees, in faded paint on collapsing tobacco sheds. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. The wages of sin is death. Old time Gospel messages often inscribed in archaic King James English, with serene disregard for the odds of the uninitiated unsaved making sense of them: Ye must be born again; I image some passing Californian puzzling over that one, wondering who this Chinese fellow Ye might be and why the necessity of his reincarnation is pronounced along Alabama’s highways. That opaque religious language probably seemed obvious to the Holy Rollers or the Two Seed in the Spirit Predestinarian Baptists or whoever they were who posted those roadside messages, so familiar that its strangeness no longer registered, except on the clueless passersby, for whom it was utterly weird.

There’s something of this in Jesus’ words in today’s lesson from the Gospel of John. We’re probably so used to them that we don’t hear the strangeness: I am the bread of life…the bread that comes down from heaven…the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. What does it mean for Jesus to be the bread that gives life? What is it to eat that bread? How to make these words meaningful for people today? For ourselves?

The people Jesus is speaking to find what he says weird and offensive: they begin to complain about him because he said “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” Further on in the chapter John reports that they “disputed among themselves, saying ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” I doubt that their real problem was with the metaphors, with wondering how Jesus could be bread, or with their hearing an invitation to cannibalism. We have no reason to suppose these people are so obtuse as to construe Jesus’ claims in some literalistic way. Instead, what for them is offensive and barely comprehensible is what Jesus is plainly saying: that he, personally and uniquely, is God’s provision for his people; that all God’s previous ways of nourishing and saving his people were incomplete or inadequate – “Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and died” – but now in giving them Jesus God is giving them salvation for keeps, eternal life: “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” No wonder they’re put off; Jesus is making huge claims about himself, claims that seem to threaten their identity as Jews.

Yet it’s not as though Jesus drops this news on them out of the blue. He has already done something to show them he is the bread of life. Here, as elsewhere, what Jesus says is a mirror of what he does; he enacts the good news as well as proclaiming it. Earlier in this chapter a crowd, eager to be healed, or to see others healed, has pursued him up the side of a mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee. There, with nothing but five barley loaves and two fish, Jesus miraculously feeds the crowd of thousands.

Commentary on the miracle of the loaves and fishes usually dwells on it as a sign of the superabundance of God’s provision. Out of the virtually nothing that we have to offer God Jesus produces more than enough for everyone. God’s generosity is overwhelming. However, there’s another aspect of the account that lies in what is unspoken but assumed in the narrative. Everyone concerned—Jesus, his disciples, the multitude—appears to take it for granted that sharing a meal is just what you do if you’re in the company of Jesus at mealtime. There’s no discussion of what one might have thought the sensible course of action: letting these people go home for dinner. The discussion Jesus has with Philip and Andrew does not concern whether they should provide a meal for everyone present, but how they can possibly do it, given the size of the crowd that has unexpectedly shown up.

As a Rabbi in first century Israel, Jesus is expected to be a good example, taking great care about whom he eats with, taking pains to avoid the intimacy of table fellowship with the impure or with sinners. Jesus becomes notorious for flouting this; recall the accusation: “he eats and drinks with drunkards and harlots, tax collectors and sinners!” Jesus was not simply careless in his eating habits; he deliberately makes his ministry a moveable feast, a traveling dinner party where everyone is welcome. The carefully delineated boundaries between the pure and the impure, between those whose way of life merits a place in God’s kingdom, a place at God’s table, and those who by rights should be sent away hungry are gleefully broken down. Whenever Jesus sat down to eat he was demonstrating the arrival of the kingdom of God. When Jesus is there, there’s a place for everyone at God’s table; there is acceptance and reconciliation for all comers.

What happens on the side of that mountain above the lake looks like this on a large scale. Jesus is having dinner with thousands of strangers, with no regard for who or what they are; chances are few of them were the sort of people Jesus ought to have been breaking bread with. Clueless and undeserving, they are welcome to partake in the life-giving meal of fellowship Jesus provides, to begin sharing in whatever rudimentary way they can in the divine life into which Jesus invites all of us.

Jesus does not just host the meal to which he invites all and sundry. The meal happens only because he gives himself. He is the bread that is broken and given away so all those invited to partake can live. “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

For us to eat the bread is to share in the life of Jesus, a life that gives itself for others. To eat the bread of life is to be transformed, to be forgiven and healed and drawn into the eternal life of God. We can talk about becoming like the God who was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. We can talk about being willing to make a place for others, even to live sacrificially for one another, but minimal honesty reminds us that this is mostly a matter of faith in God’s power to do his thing in and through us in his good time, despite ourselves. In 1866 Mark Twain, who later became infamous for his cynicism about the hypocrisy of Christians, went to Hawaii as a newspaper correspondent. He interviewed the king. The conversation turned to religion and the king assured Twain that his people understood the true meaning of the Christian sacrament. “We understand Christianity,” said the king. “We have eaten the missionaries.” We know that none of us can claim to have been much changed, much delivered from our selfishness, our fear and self-righteousness, our readiness to judge and condemn and exclude.

Each week we come to this rail and eat the bread, remembering Jesus who gives himself for us, acknowledging the present power of his resurrected life, symbolizing our commitment to joining our lives to his. I don’t know how it is for you, but for me it’s about forgetting and being reminded. Some of you have seen the film Memento. It’s about a man, Leonard Shelby, who has lost the ability to acquire new memories. Each night when he sleeps he completely forgets everything from the day before and each morning when he wakes up he struggles to decipher his own cryptic notes and messages from the previous day that he discovers scrawled on the mirror, on his hands, his arms. In a way that’s how it feels to me; forgetting who I am and being recalled to myself, needing once again to decipher the message, to taste the bread that comes down from heaven.

But sometimes, I think, we do see that life of Christ being formed among us. Unless you spent the last two weeks on a spelunking vacation, you probably noticed that the Episcopal Church got a lot of free publicity, thanks to our General Convention up in Minneapolis. The church is deeply divided on the issues that were voted on; in fact I know that even in our small congregation there are those of us who have strong convictions on opposing sides. The whole thing was in a lot of ways pretty embarrassing but I saw it in a different light when I read the homily Frank Griswold, our Presiding Bishop, gave at the communion service that brought the convention to a close. He noted that the media had often commented on the civility that characterized the proceedings. But the Presiding Bishop disagreed: it was not civility that was at work; it was love. Addressing the battered delegates he said, “Paradoxically, our differences writ large have stripped us of our facile civility” and left us with love, not a feeling but a matter of the will. “And the willingness of many of you who are deeply distressed by certain actions of the convention to stay, quite literally, at the table, is a profound act of love for which the community can be grateful.” Even – maybe especially – within the Church we find ourselves called to put aside things that matter a great deal to us and put up with – maybe even love – one another, sacrificing our inveterate inclination to judge and exclude, to be vindicated for being right. We find ourselves called to partake in the sacrificial bread and to share in the death and life of Jesus.

Frederick Buechner gives some good adviceon how to remind ourselves that life for us can only be the forgiveness and reconciliation offered by our crucified and resurrected Lord:

The next time you walk down the street, take a good look at every face you pass and in your mind say Christ died for thee. That girl. That slob. That phony. That crook. That saint. That damned fool. Christ died for thee. Take and eat this is remembrance that Christ died for thee (Wishful Thinking, p. 53).

I’ll conclude with some words from the sermon that Rowan Williams gave last February when he was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury:

The one great purpose of the Church’s existence is to share that bread of life; to hold open in its words and actions a place where we can be with Jesus and to be channels for his free, unanxious, utterly demanding, grown-up love. The Church exists to pass on the promise of Jesus – ‘You can live in the presence of God without fear; you can receive from his fullness and set others free from fear and guilt.’

Amen.

Ninth Sunday of Pentecost

1 August 2004

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 12.13-21

Grasping and Giving

Here’s this guy whose brother is bilking him out of his inheritance. He calls out to Jesus for help. What does he get? He gets told off. It doesn’t seem fair, the way Jesus reacts so quickly to this man’s plea with the warning about greed and the story of the rich fool. Is the man greedy? Only if he’s out to get more than he has a right to. But if so, why does he come to Jesus seeking arbitration? He’s not the greedy one; it’s his brother.

He’s just trying to get what he deserves. He anticipates Jesus pronouncing on his brother’s selfishness with devastating effect and setting things right. Instead, Jesus rebuffs him, pretty much calls him a fool, and suggests that he’s greedy too.

The fool part is easier to see… This is no casual encounter. Luke begins this chapter by describing a crowd of thousands, so many pressing in to get close to Jesus that people are getting trampled (12.1). We can imagine this man as he fights his way through the mob, shoves people aside, elbows his way to within earshot so he can shout to Jesus. Here’s his once in a lifetime chance to talk with Jesus. What does he do with it? All he can think of is his family’s financial squabbles and the fact that he’s not getting what’s his. He’s deaf to the life-giving words Jesus might have for him. So he is like the rich farmer in Jesus’ parable, fatally oblivious to the nature of the crucial moment before him, so blinded by concern for getting his due that he can’t see the reality right in front of him. So focused on what he thinks he needs to sustain his life that he misses the very source of life.

Jesus’ first words to him: “who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” are harsh, but crucial. We can imagine a response: “You’re supposed to be God’s messiah; that makes you judge and arbitrator over us! Justice, punishing the wicked, rewarding the good, setting things right, making everything come out right in the end, that’s what God is for!” Everyone takes it for granted that God’s main concern is precisely this sort of thing. If God isn’t going to make sure that justice is done, what good is he?! That’s what God is for. But the God made known in Jesus refuses the job. The aggrieved brother, like most of us most of the time, foolishly tries to cram God into the tiny box of his moral and religious expectations. There, before him, is what he doesn’t see: God himself, not God powerful and holy, dispenser of divine justice, fixing to kick some butt and whip people into line, but God in frail flesh, offering himself for all and sundry, the righteous and the wicked, the saints and the sinners, the bilkers and the bilked.

Why, though, does Jesus insinuate that the man is greedy? Jesus warns “Take care! Be on your guard against all forms of greed!” (12.15). Luke uses the word pleonexia; it’s translated greed, but the literal sense is grasping. The greedy person is the one who grabs for things; the image is of clutching at what doesn’t belong to you, selfishly grasping for more than your fair share, and as I said there seems no reason to accuse the man of this. But I think Jesus extends its meaning. He speaks as though it doesn’t much matter whether this obsession to get things aims at what belongs to someone else, or if we’re after something that’s rightfully ours. In a startling way Jesus seems to equate the quest for justice, for getting what we deserve, with greed, with injustice.

The man who accosted Jesus, demanding that he make his brother divide the inheritance, is driven by his frantic need to get what’s his. We all know that the desire to get what you have a right to can be as destructive, to yourself and everyone around you, as the desire to get what belongs to others. In fact sometimes the self-righteous conviction of being in the right, being the victim, makes it worse. Grievances grow to take over and poison our lives. Let justice be done though the heavens fall!

At a place I used to work a group of people decided that they had been treated unjustly by the new administration. The ostensible issue was that the president decided to have the interior of a certain building painted a certain color without consulting these folks, who had pretty much been in charge of things forever. These good and intelligent people, some I had known and respected for years, went to war, consumed with the need to punish those they felt had done them wrong. A fog of craziness descended. The normal standards of civilized behavior were abandoned. Nasty rumors and bizarre accusations proliferated. Lawsuits were filed. Friendships and careers went down the drain. The institution was irreparably damaged. Last I heard, years later, they were still at it, pursuing that president like poor, demented Inspector Javert pursuing Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris. Jesus warns against “all kinds of greed:” what kills is the frame of mind that insists on being vindicated at all costs, on getting one’s due no matter what. Beware all forms of greed, maybe especially greed for what you’re entitled to.

Here, I think, is where the parable itself comes in. What exactly is the rich man’s problem? A familiar interpretation is that he died unprepared, having paid attention only to getting rich, not to readying himself for eternity. But it’s not exactly clear that we should read it as about being foolishly unprepared, teaching us to focus on “spiritual,” as opposed to “worldly,” endeavors. It immediately follows Jesus’ admonition about avoiding greed, so we should expect the rich farmer somehow to exemplify the greed against which Jesus warns. But once again, it’s not initially obvious how his problem is greed in any conventional sense. What does he do wrong? Wasn’t he just being a good steward? Would it have been better if his crops rotted in the fields after he died? There’s no reason to think so. Did his planning ahead so as to take care of his excess produce somehow lead to his unexpected demise? There’s no reason to think that either. So what’s the point?

If the farmer’s not to let the superabundance of crops go to waste, what’s he going to do? He has to do something with the surplus. He had every right to hold on to it, to store it away. It was his stuff. But instead of packing the grain away into newly built barns, he could have given it away. After all, it’s not as though he did anything special to earn it: “the land produced abundantly”—it was a gift to him; he could have made it a gift to others, to those who needed it. But he does not respond in kind, giving as he has received. To the end he remains loyal to the world of taking, getting, of making sure to keep one’s own for oneself. He might have understood the surprising yield of his fields as a divine invitation into the life of God, into the ongoing pattern of gratefully receiving what you have not earned and joyfully giving away what’s yours. But he locks his soul, his true self, away from God and the life he freely gives as securely—and as fruitlessly—as he locks away his unneeded grain.

Our hands open to receive and to give, not clenched around what we fear to lose: there’s a deep yearning for this, a world of grace and giving rather than pleonexia. You might have seen the Kevin Spacey movie that came out a few years ago, Pass It Forward. It’s about a middle school boy who transforms the world by devising the “pay it forward plan:” do three people big favors and, when they express thanks and ask about how to pay you back, ask each instead to do favors for three more people, and to make the same request of those three. And so on and on. The pyramid scheme of generosity takes off exponentially and radically changes the world into a place where giving has taken the place of grasping. Poverty, war and hatred cease; everyone becomes generous and loving. When your old car breaks down, a total stranger helps push it out of the intersection and hands you the keys to his new Acura, suggesting a trade. Now this was a pretty schmaltzy piece of Hollywood inspiration. The critics dismissed it as mawkish drivel. Roger Ebert wasn’t cynical when in his review he pointed out the obvious: in the real world, altruism is less powerful than selfishness, greed, nepotism, xenophobia, tribalism and paranoia and that “pay it forward” was no more than a sweet and seductive fantasy, one that couldn’t even be sustained plausibly for the two hours of the movie. Just read the newspaper headlines. It’s not something that could get a purchase on the hard, grasping reality of this real world of ours.

Only one thing can save from the greed Jesus sees ensnaring us, and it’s not cheap or easy. It was infinitely costly: nothing short of God in Jesus, impoverished, powerless, and lost, giving up the rights and prerogatives of being God, God giving up himself to our greed and fear and foolishness. God giving himself away for us: that alone has the power to deliver us.

Amen.

11 Pentecost

August 2000 St. George’s Episcopal Church Le Mars, Iowa John 6.60-69

Jesus or Nothing!

“Lord, to whom can we go?”

A few weeks ago Karen and I were camping in the Big Horn range in Wyoming. The first night there we thought we heard the sound of rushing water in the distance. The next day we hiked a bit to investigate and discovered a lake nestled among the mountains, formed by a dam that obviously had been completed recently; that explained why the Tie Hack reservoir wasn’t on our map. The trail around the lake continued onto the concrete curve of the dam. The walkway on the top of the dam was broad and enclosed on both sides by reassuringly high parapets. We walked out onto it for several yards until we could clearly see the source of the sound we’d heard the night before: at the dam’s center was a spillway, maybe thirty feet wide; water from the lake was plunging over the brink, thousands of gallons a minute crashing down to the rocks hundreds of feet below. All this was a pretty impressive thing to come upon unexpectedly in the woods, and I eagerly proceeded toward the center of the dam. There, the concrete walkway stopped. To cross the spillway and continue to the other side you had to walk on an open steel gridwork. As you stepped out onto it you were suspended immediately above the brink, looking straight down past your feet at the point where the water hurled itself off into space and fell to the ground far below. Being a cautious fellow, I stopped and had a look before proceeding. The steel and concrete were new looking, no rust or loose pieces were apparent, the bolts fastening the walkway to the dam secure. It looked perfectly safe, so I walked out onto it to enjoy the view and the interesting sensation of hanging in space at the top of a waterfall. Had I been wrong about the trustworthiness of this piece of engineering, there’d be a more interesting story here, though I wouldn’t be the one telling it. I lingered a bit to take a picture straight down and continued on to the other side of the dam (alone, needless to say).

The traditional theological point to make here is about faith and trust, and I don’t want to disappoint you. As I stood on that walkway over the precipice what did I have to do to make sure it held me up? The answer of course is nothing. It’s not as though its holding me up was a joint effort of it and me; that I had immediately to lose forty pounds or quickly learn the art of levitation or start flapping my arms really fast. Even if I could have done those things, they’d have made not a bit of difference; they’d have been a complete waste of effort, so far as that walkway holding me went. On the other hand, if the walkway had been unreliable, if it had given way, any efforts on my part to remain safely suspended in mid-air would have been to no avail. Either way, anything I could do made no difference, so the only attitude that made sense was to trust, to put my faith in the engineers and their work.

We all know, or at least we’re supposed to know, that this is how it is with us and God. The eternal life we have with God is entirely a matter of faith, of putting our trust in Jesus. It’s not a reward for being a good person, or for being a regular churchgoer, or for anything we could do. Salvation is by grace through faith. Still, before getting to today’s text from John’s Gospel I’d like to fine tune the analogy. Note that faith is the one sensible response to the situation of being on the walkway, but this doesn’t mean that I needed to have faith in its ability to hold me for it to do so. As if it had a detector built into it so a trapdoor drops the untrusting to death in the torrent. I could have been supremely confident in its ability to keep me safe and just enjoyed being there. Or I could have been absolutely terrified, convinced I was about to drop into the abyss; I’d have been miserable. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the view nor gotten the picture, but I’d have been no less safe. My trust or lack of trust has no effect on the trustworthiness of the structure. Everything depends on it, nothing depends on me, not even on my faith in it. What counts for the thing’s efficacy is what it is, not what I do.

The same goes for salvation: what ultimately matters is who Jesus is, not our faith in him, his trustworthiness, not our trusting him. I think this is the core issue in the encounter portrayed in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus says, “I am the living bread...the one who eats it will live forever” and John writes that many of the people following Jesus respond by saying, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” They are offended and they leave him. Why were they offended; why did they find Jesus’ statement impossible to accept? I don’t think it has anything to do with them taking Jesus’ words literally, thinking he was advocating some sort of cannibalistic rite. I don’t think these were literal minded clods incapable of understanding metaphor; if anything, they were better at it than we are. Simple minded literalism is a product of modern times, not the ancient world.

Instead, I think what Jesus has been claiming over and over up to this point in John’s gospel is at last hitting home. These people have been following and listening to Jesus for quite awhile and at least some of them must have been conscientious seekers of God, not just curiosity seekers. They’d have seen Jesus as some sort of prophet and they’d have been waiting for him to deliver God’s word to them, to tell them what God wants them to do - and to stop doing - to get in God’s favor again, to get out from under the Roman heel, to receive salvation. But what becomes clear now is that Jesus doesn’t have anything like that for them. All he has for them is himself. No instructions on how to be righteous and earn salvation. He keeps telling them he is the righteousness of God; he is the salvation of Israel. They’re waiting for a word from God; what they get is Jesus’ wild assertion that he is God’s Word. “I am the living water. I am the bread that gives life.” What matters isn’t anything they ought to do; what matters is who he is. John expresses good Anglican theology here: it’s Jesus being who he is, God incarnate, God taking on our humanity, drawing our sin and suffering into himself, that saves us. No transaction, no deal, no quid pro quo, good works - or even faith - exchanged for God’s approval -- nothing but the utterly free gift, the self-sacrificing God who gives himself for the whole world. The single response that makes sense is faith: to trust in the God made flesh. Yet this is not what they want to hear: “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” As if to drive the point home, Jesus adds “No one can come to me unless it is granted by the father.” Just in case you wondered, all your efforts to get in good with God are pointless; not even your response to me depends on you. It’s no surprise they’ve had enough and take off.

Not everyone leaves. The twelve are still there. The gospel writers often portray the apostles as obtuse and faithless, but not here. In fact I think this is one of the most beautiful examples of Jesus’ followers responding to him in faith. The crowds have not understood Jesus; they are frustrated and disappointed with him; and he with them. As they abandon him Jesus turns to the twelve and asks, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answers “Lord, to whom can we go?” I don’t hear adoration or even enthusiasm in Peter’s response. I suspect that he’s not especially happy with Jesus at this point either. Jesus has confused and exasperated him too. But Peter’s words are a great confession of faith: for him it’s Jesus or nothing. Jesus is his only hope. His last chance. The only game in town. He can only trust Jesus, even if it’s a Jesus he isn’t altogether pleased with right now, a Jesus who hasn’t made much sense recently. He’s grasped the crucial fact, the fact of who Jesus is.

So it is with faith in this God revealed in Jesus. We don’t always feel happy about him and his ways. We don’t always understand what he’s doing. Why does he allow so much evil? Why doesn’t he make his existence obvious and his intentions clear? Why are so many of his followers such pains in the butt? But it’s him or nothing. Like Peter, once we’ve known him, we realize we have nowhere else to go. For us, as for Peter, what saves us isn’t the strength or clarity of our faith. That’s a good thing; we’d be without hope if our lives depended upon something as vacillating, as undependable, as our faith in Jesus. The great good news is that God is faithful, and he calls us to put our trust in him.

Amen.

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

September 25, 2019

Church of the Savior

Luke 13.10-17

The Bent Woman

I hope some of you are familiar with Minton Sparks, the southern storyteller whose brief tales describe her girlhood in rural Tennessee, where the Bible belt was cinched far too tight. Her story, “Epiphany,” is about a woman whose need, flagrantly expressed, disrupted the religious observances of the pious:

The cold snap, unseasonable weather, the wind howled and the sea billows rolled, just like the day that woman walked buck naked through the double doors to the high altar during services, then melted, a foul heap on the narthex floor. Deacons threw suitcoats on her private parts, the choir recoiled in harmony, children were sent from the sanctuary, Frances Underwood staggered and fell into a stack of haggard hymnals. Did the church floor have a trap door that opened up and swallowed her whole? In the midst of the fray, I heard someone say, “Worship’s no place for a misery of that magnitude!” Mama dragged me out the same door that poor woman burst through. When we reached the Chrysler I asked and she answered, a hint of Sunday school in her voice, “Let’s not talk about what just happened.”

Luke’s story in today’s reading also portrays a woman whose need disturbed good religious order. Luke is short on specifics. Where is the synagogue? Who is the woman and who is the leader who objects to Jesus healing her? We’re not even told what Jesus taught before the interruption or how the congregation responded to it. In his brief account we’re told twice that she had been crippled for 18 years, yet Luke is vague about what the woman does: “just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for 18 years.” I imagine her quietly slipping in the back door, hoping not to be noticed, too timid to beg Jesus to heal her; not making a dramatic entry like the naked woman in Tennessee. But Jesus sees her and calls her over. Her only response is to obey, to get within his reach. He pronounces her free and lays his hands on her. She stands up straight and praises God.

Jesus heals the bleeding and the blind, lepers and the lame, the paralyzed and the possessed. Each affliction is what it is in its own right, and each is an image of our overall need, of our forlorn and hopeless condition, mental, physical, social. The bent woman stands in—as best she can—for all of us. Being bent—crooked—is an Old Testament image of sin. It can be both physical, as in this woman’s case, or moral and spiritual; Scripture sees the whole of the human person as in need of being made straight. We are deformed, not what God intended us to be. St. Augustine describes our affections as disordered, our love bent in upon itself as we love ourselves more than our neighbors, and our neighbors more than God. Self-justifying, self-righteous, delusionally self-sufficient. Luther, picking up on this, in his Latin describes sinful humans as incurvitas in se, curled up in pride and fear, loveless, constricted, closed to one another and to God. Shut up from the true God, we contrive gods of our imaginations, gods we can placate and control with our religious works. “Man,” Luther wrote, “is so curved in upon himself that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods only for himself” (Works, Vol. 24, p. 345). As a writer for website Mockingbird says, we cannot pull ourselves out of the hole of our greedy, defensive egos.

More recently, in C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the innocent inhabitants of Perelandra, lacking words for sin or evil, call the nefarious Professor Weston the “bent man.” (When I was an undergraduate, my accident-prone roommate—his eye once fell out when an intramural baseball hit him in the head—somehow got his spine out of whack so the top of his body was sideways askew from his lower half. For the duration his friends, fans of Lewis, called him the bent man.) The repentant wicked endeavor to go straight. And bent, that is corrupt, cops are a staple of detective fiction. We can be unbent, opened up to the love of God, only by God himself. The bent woman who appears in the synagogue, like us, has just one hope: the call and touch of Jesus.

When the leader of the synagogue indignantly objects, Jesus refers to the woman as “a daughter of Abraham.” This narrows the focus to Israel, curled in upon itself, clinging to its exclusivity, scrupulously adhering to, and elaborating on, its Torah to safeguard its purity over against the gentiles and defend its identity as God’s people. After exile and now foreign occupation, this is understandable, but the elect nation in its passion for purity has gone deaf to God’s call to be a light to the nations, to represent the true God to the world. Not to hate and exclude, but to bear witness to, the Gentiles. It has contracted into itself; it has lost the meaning of the sabbath, forgetting for whom God made it, absurdly thinking it is too holy for God’s saving work, for making the crooked straight.

The synagogue leader’s response clearly rankles Jesus. In the next chapter, continuing on his way to Jerusalem, he stops on the sabbath at the house of a Pharisee. He sees a man with dropsy—probably swelling due to cardiac or renal failure. He asks, “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath or not?” There is no answer. In the silence, he lays hold of the man and heals him. In today’s lesson Jesus accuses, “Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass and lead it away to get water?” Now he changes the example from animals needing to be watered to one’s son or one’s ox falling into a pit on the sabbath: who would not immediately pull it—or him—out? Between these two sabbath healings, Jesus refers to his coming death: “It is necessary for me to journey on…because it is not allowed that a prophet perish outside Jerusalem (13.33). And he alludes to his vindicating resurrection: “You most surely will not see me till the time when you say ‘Blessed is the one coming in the name of the Lord’” (13.35). Recalling the use of the term pit in the Hebrew Scriptures for sheol, hell, death, separation from the people and abandonment by God, it’s not hard to suspect that Luke portrays Jesus looking ahead to his descent to the pit where, opening himself to the worst we can do him, he does God’s great sabbath work, the harrowing of all our hells, and on to his own resurrection, when the Father delivers him from death and, with him, all of us.

We cannot suppose that the blindness of the religious leader who castigated Jesus is less than universal. It’s easy to think we cannot be like those guys who would rather save their own asses than care about the afflicted woman. But faced with the mess and shame, the sheer inconvenience, of naked human need, and our helplessness before it, we feel like saying this is not the time, this is not the place, go away and come back some other day; better, go somewhere else. At least don’t come back until you are more presentable, properly clothed with the right beliefs and behaviors, free of doubt and disbelief, more ready to fit in, to join our club. Don’t interrupt the important things we do to make God approve of us. Leave our piety at peace: we’re not ready for this.

The God we meet in Jesus is always ready. He insists on breaking down our defenses. For he is the God who always reaches out to the other. God, willing not to be monolithic deity, never content in his absolute power and perfection, everlastingly chooses to be God the Father of the Son, and of the Spirit who in love unifies the three persons who are the one God. God is love. And, because God is God, God is not all there is. He creates those who are not God and opens himself up to us. Among us as the humble Jesus, he risks everything, even rejection, humiliation, and murder in God’s name, as he reaches down into creation’s depths for his bent but beloved creatures. No misery is of too great a magnitude for him to suffer himself, none too great for him to heal and redeem as he calls us to find our roles in his great, unscripted drama.

Amen.