sermons 2009

March 21

            The psalmist writes, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.”  I’ve always found that mysteriously poignant.  It sounds like it was almost too good to be true, too good to be believed.  When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion and ended our exile, it felt like we must be dreaming; the line between wish and reality had blurred, or the sides had suddenly switched or something.  “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”  They pinched themselves, knew they were awake, and rejoiced.  Somehow reality flipped over and those who had gone out weeping, bearing the seeds for sowing, came home with shouts of joy and a rich harvest.
            In the story from John’s gospel, Mary is the one who can hold those two realities together at the same time, the weeping and the rejoicing.  What has happened?  Martha and Mary’s brother Lazarus had died and been dead long enough for the rot to be smelled.  Then Jesus raised him from death, restored life to him, and it was a fabulous miracle.  Now they’re having a dinner party, which is totally what we would do under those circumstances, Jesus and Lazarus sitting across from each other and toasting each other and telling stories.
            But Lazarus’ death and entombment is not far in the background; this has recently been a house of mourning.  Mary’s heightened awareness of how near death lurks and how fast everything can turn sour pushes her past simple joy at the presence of her brother and her friend.  She is like those who dream, and she perceives the reality behind the present happy moment.  Death is still at hand, still potent, and Jesus himself is consciously and steadily drawing close to death.  Mary takes a pound of costly perfume, pours it over his feet with the abandon of limitless love, and then wipes it away with her own hair, not even a towel, but her own hair; what she has poured out is a physical expression of the love and sorrow she bears for Jesus, and the house is filled with the fragrance of her mingled grief and joy.
            Judas has to be the reductionist, the guy who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  He immediately reproves Mary, pointing out how much money she just wasted on Jesus that could have been used to buy food and shelter for the poor.  Which it could have, but it’s like the difference between a meal and a sacrament—the material stuff of her gift is not the point.  “Leave her alone,” Jesus says, understanding entirely that she understands where he’s headed.  “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.”
            In her joy and sorrow, Mary is like those who dream, knowing about loss and death but somehow also convinced there is something to celebrate.  For us I think it’s often easier to believe in the loss and death.  We see how far we are from happily ever after, and how unlikely our dreams are to be fulfilled.  Our own plans fail to work out, and we are stymied by leaks in the basement, a stubborn spouse, a shortfall at the end of the month.  That feels like reality. 
            Conversely there’s the experience of the disciples on the mountaintop when Jesus was transfigured, who were so dazed and dazzled by the glory of his appearance that they wanted to stay there forever, just drink in the beatific vision and never go back to the grubby plains where the hungry crowd waited.  We understand very well why they couldn’t stay on the mountaintop and why the gritty, needy crowds had a claim on them that could not be denied.  That’s reality too.  But Mary has a sharpened perception of reality, sharper than ours or the disciples on the mountaintop, and she can see both realities simultaneously, the impending death and the triumphant feast of the kingdom.  Which is what that outpoured perfume expresses.
            The insight of Mary is that evil does not neutralize good, but it sharpens good.  And good doesn’t eliminate evil exactly, but it out-waits evil—it can co-exist as long as necessary until evil gets tired and goes away.  Maybe the closest familiar experience we have of this is the funeral dinner.  Do you ever think how sort of illogical it is to have a funeral dinner?  Who wants to eat?  Who wants to have a party?  Somehow we do.  A funeral is a time when we feel terribly sad, and nobody really has a remedy or a fix.  This is not a project where some kind of improvement could take place.  We can’t make it better.  But we intuit that together we still have access to something good and life-giving, so we set up the tables and chairs and break bread together, not for any purpose but because it’s what you do.  And in that first hour after the funeral, and then afterwards in days and weeks and months, we carve out the space in which life will blossom again, not the same, but life nevertheless, given by God.  The funeral dinner is our template or our ritual for holding joy and sorrow together.
            There are others, though, and often it’s art that shows us how to hold these together simultaneously.  Here’s a picture of a Serbian refugee who lost his home in Croatia when Yugoslavia broke up in the mid 1990s.  He lost his home, his job, everything.  But he is an artist, and he creates these sculptures from pieces of wood that he finds.  If you can see the detail, you see that every sculpture has a face, carved really with love—they are faces you would respect, faces of solid, strong people.  The sculptor has lost everything, but he still sees beauty and gives it expression in his art.
            There’s another picture I couldn’t copy, of two girls sitting together at a table going through photographs.  One is African-American and the other is Afghani, and they were participants in a project to take pictures of their respective cities to share with the other country.  I thought the comment of one of the American youths was very interesting; he said, "You think everything you see around here is so bland and dull, because their pictures are so exotic and simple. But then I realized they are not different at all. They want to see the beauty over here."  One of the Afghan girls said she thought America had more beautiful, exciting, wonderful places,” but then immediately she added that she wanted people to view Afghanistan as beautiful too, not only to picture war and terrorism and fighting.  She said, “There is culture and friends and family.”  Again, the photographers looked at what they thought was bland and dull, and then saw the beauty in it AND saw the beauty in the other photographers’ city.  So now they do not think that the reality is only ugly or frightening, but they know it is also lovely and warm and filled with friends and family. 
            How do you make art in the midst of loss and uncertainty?  How can Jesus enjoy a dinner party on his way to the cross?  And how does it work that Mary can simultaneously anoint him for his death and for his reign as victorious king?  Mary Hinkle Shore says that the best dancing is done on the devil’s dance floor because perfect love casts out fear.  Richard Lischer, a professor at Duke Divinity School, writes of such a dance:
"Our friend had already done two full courses of chemotherapy and through it all had somehow managed to complete a doctoral dissertation at U. Va. She had done it. To celebrate she and her husband rented a VFW hall, hired a band, and threw one of the biggest parties I've ever seen for the whole church and half the community. Two days before graduation her doctors confirmed that the cancer was back. The experimental treatments would begin the day after graduation. Only a few of us knew it, and my guess is we would have limped through the ceremony and canceled the party.
"But she had the party. And I tell you I have never heard the gospel of God's Yes preached more powerfully than I saw it danced on the floor of the VFW. An outsider would have seen only the vintage 1960s, arthritic gyrations that we were all doing, but this was a woman of faith and she danced her Yes in the grip of the No. And that's the way we do it. The best celebrating is done in the face of the enemy, the best dancing on the devil's dance floor.
"You can't always separate the Yes from the No but at least one person has done it definitively. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, we trust that there is this distinction, and that it holds true for us."
Richard Lischer, sermon on 2 Cor. 1:15-22, privately printed.  http://maryhinkle.typepad.com/pilgrim_preaching/2004/03/are_we_having_f.html
            There you go.  There we are, still in the streets of exile, seeing visions of restoration, feeling like those who dream.  There we are, watching death come like a slow-motion train wreck, but sensing the promise beyond the crash.  Tragedy cannot be avoided . . . but it can be danced through, partied through, loved through; and that’s what Mary shows us.

March 14

            Isn’t Jesus’ parable today just the best?  Honestly, if I had to choose just one parable to represent what Jesus shows us about God, it would be this one.  There is so much here for us: the shallow, impetuous son doing dumb things and regretting them—we’ve been there.  The resentful older son, trudging dutifully through his chores and wishing his undeserving younger brother would go back to that far country—we’ve been there too.  And the father, welcoming his boy with open arms, giving a party, completely missing the chance to deliver the lecture: “Your mother and I have been sick with worry . . . you go upstairs and think about what you’ve done . . . what in the world were you thinking, haven’t I told you time and again about those friends of yours?”  Actually it’s not a bad lecture, and maybe more of us have delivered it than have given the party, but anyway, it’s a powerful story, just spilling over with grace and welcome.
            On close examination, some problems do emerge.  Is the younger son truly sorry?  Or has he just done a cost-benefit analysis and decided to take his chances with Dad?  He doesn’t actually express remorse for what he has done; he analyzes the relative situations of his father’s servants and himself, and formulates a humble speech calculated to get him a place on staff.  So you can’t be sure this is a high-quality repentance.  What about this big party?  Did nobody remember the poor older son out there sweating in the field?  Apparently not, because it wasn’t until he took a break and got close to the house that he heard music and dancing.  The party was well underway, and nobody thought, “Gosh, where’s Joe?  Let’s go tell him to break off early.”  That’s suspiciously cold.  And then there is the older son’s response to the glad tidings, which are after all pretty earth-shaking—he doesn’t seem to have any brotherly feeling at all.  “This son of yours,” he calls him.  I don’t blame him for being ticked off at being forgotten, but this is his brother; you’d think he’d have some good feelings about him coming back.  So this profound story of grace and welcome is located in a dysfunctional family, and it actually doesn’t fix the family.  It just takes place in the family.
            This is a very familiar dysfunction.  We’ve seen the younger brother supplanting the older brother before, when God liked Abel’s offerings better than Cain’s, when Jacob stole Esau’s birthright, when the prophet Samuel looked at all of Jesse’s sons and chose the youngest one, David, to anoint as king of Israel.  This is a time-honored theme, and it’s never really the older brother’s fault.  Cain shouldn’t have killed Abel, but he wasn’t going to until God started playing favorites.  Esau shouldn’t have sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, but Jacob shouldn’t have tried to buy it, either.  It’s really not fair.
            There’s a change to the theme in this story, though.  The younger brother doesn’t supplant the older brother.  He doesn’t take away what is rightfully his.  They both win.  Had you noticed that?  The younger brother gets to come back and live as his father’s son again.  But the father says to his eldest son, “all that is mine is yours.”  Nobody loses; everybody wins.  Dad wins too; for whatever reason, he wants both sons, and now he’s got them.
            So we could draw some conclusions about how worthwhile it is to repent when you’ve wandered far from home, because you are assured of a warm welcome back.  Or we could talk about the discomfort of the elder brother, and how we shouldn’t be self-righteous about our own fine work ethic and general reliability.  But I want to talk about God’s creativity in finding third ways where only two were apparent.
            The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who’s sort of the founder of process theology, said that “either/or” schemes prevent us from understanding the world.  If you think either I benefit or you benefit, you have misunderstood the way the universe works.  Actually, Whitehead said, the dynamic of the universe is one in which seemingly incompatible elements—mutually exclusive elements, perhaps—are brought together into a higher unity.  This is called “creative transformation.”  Doing quality control, and making sure I wasn’t saying something stupid, I went and scanned some process theology references to creative transformation, and I am here to tell you that there is some ugly language out there on it.  Try this: “My emphasis is upon what Whitehead called nonconformal propositions, namely, a subject/predicate statement that does not conform to present fact, but suggests a possible future version of a fact with respect to some particular subject or subjects.”  http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2474
            I think we can get the gist of this without actually plowing through too much philosophical language, though, by remembering the African-American expression that “God makes a way where there is no way.”  That’s really what creative transformation is.  It’s the irresistible force meeting the immovable object—a no-win situation—and neither one loses but a third thing happens that nobody had thought of.  God makes a way where there is no way—but it almost requires this kind of standoff, this collision of mutually exclusive conditions, for God’s creativity to act.
            Kate Wolfe-Jensen, a writer and artist who has had multiple sclerosis for over 25 years, says that those "natural shocks that flesh is heir to are monsters with whom we can dance, instead of horrors that will stop us.”  She wrote a blog for a while called “Dancing with Monsters,” in which she confided the details of her dance.  She spends—or spent—her life dancing with monsters, taking inspiration from Henri Matisse who, when he became too infirm to paint, took to papercutting instead.  She wrote in her blog about not being able to paint well with her right hand any more because her right side was weak and shaky, so she created the banners for Lent and Easter with her left hand, and the crudeness of the images is part of their power. 
            She also writes, “Sometimes when I’m painting, I make a mistake. . . . The two kinds of mistakes I experience while painting help me understand what happens in "real life." Sometimes I make a mistake. I consciously take action. It seems like a good idea at the time, but it turns out not to be. I regret it. I wish it could be undone. Other times, outside influences affect me in unexpected ways and "mistakes are made."
            “I thought I might write about Overcoming Mistakes, but I didn't like the image of triumph it conjured. I wanted a word with more accommodation built into it.”  Do you hear that?  She didn’t want to triumph over her mistakes.  She wanted to find accommodation with them.  Mistakes are part of life.  She neither overcomes her mistakes nor is overcome by them; she finds a way to make room for them without being dominated by them.
            After lots of this kind of musing on creativity and illness, her last posts turned to climate change, and characteristically, she suggests that we neither pretend it’s not happening OR despair of saving the earth.  She says that when she first was diagnosed with MS she jogged. “Then I did yoga. I learned tai chi. When I could no longer walk, I exercised in the pool. Now, I use a strap stand to hold me up while I use light arm weights. Physical therapists tell me that doing what I could do helped delay the progression of the disease. I have no idea if that is true (and--shh--neither do they).
            “Here is what is true for me: exercising brings me closer to my body. I am more aware of its ups and downs. I have more compassion for it. Exercising gives me hope. There are days I do better with the weights and can imagine I am getting stronger. That little swoop of joy is worth the gurgling sadness of the bad days.
            “Maybe it is too late to stop all the effects of global warming. In doing what we can, though, we may draw closer to our planet home. We may find new ways to work together as a species. We may join in swoops of joy over every environmental triumph.”
            And then she advises, Keep playing, even though you're losing.
            I don’t know this woman, though I liked her blog.  But she was writing about God’s way of creative transformation, of making a way where there was no way.  She was not stuck in a zero-sum kind of thinking; she lived with the assumption that there was always another way, a life-giving way.  That’s what the story of the man who had two sons tells us.  When the family is made up of unrepentant sinners, free riders, wastrels, and self-righteous drudges who want to limit access to the goodies, God steps in and makes it a family, exactly the family God has always wanted.  And we find to our surprise that we are.

March 7

            What an interesting juxtaposition of texts we have today.  From Isaiah’s Book of Comfort, this beautiful passage like a mother calling her children home for dinner, “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!”  It’s a gracious invitation to enjoy the bounty of God.  Turn away from “that which does not satisfy,” the junk food that’s so tempting and convenient, and receive from God all you need and more of what’s really good.
            Then in the gospel lesson we have Jesus reflecting on the precariousness of life, the way death can come so arbitrarily and without warning, and this chilling parable of the fig tree.  In the parable, the man complains to his gardener the tree is completely unproductive and should be cut down.  Why should it be wasting the soil? he asks.  The gardener agrees, but suggests he give it one more year, with some fertilizer, and then if it doesn’t bear, yes, it should be cut down.  There’s an assumption of scarcity in that parable that I just don’t like.  It reminds me of my ethics students, who are inclined to make a lot of decisions based on the assumption that there’s no way to meet everyone’s needs so the least deserving should just go without, and their favorite assessment of who’s least deserving seems to be prisoners.  If these students are ever put in charge of criminal justice in Iowa, you better hope you don’t get a traffic ticket because there will be strict rations of bread and water, and if you break your leg, maybe an aspirin or two.  With this parable, Jesus seems quite a bit less gracious than God in Isaiah; he’s saying, If you’re not productive, out you go.”
            But let’s step back a bit and remember that everything Jesus says is within the context of his proclamation of God’s reign.  What he is really about is inviting people, graciously, into the reign of God, which is indeed right here at hand if only we could see that.  In that light, I suggest to you that the parable of the fig tree, which says that unproductivity is sinful, tells us that we are not using the capabilities we have to see God’s reign.  We’re not accepting the invitation to take nourishment, but persisting like automata to do what we’ve always done and wonder why we are still thirsty and hungry. 
            Jacob Needleman, in his book “What Is God?” tells about the Buddhist belief that only human beings have the possibility to escape from the great universal wheel of illusion—the meaningless circle of repetition that we go through because we are investing ourselves in things that aren’t real.  They illustrate this point with the image of a turtle swimming submerged in the great ocean, surfacing only once in a hundred years.  We are told also to imagine an ox yoke floating somewhere on the surface of that ocean.  What are the chances that when the turtle surfaces, his head will emerge right through the center of that ox yoke?  That is how rare it is to have been born as a human being.
            So one day in downtown San Francisco, with thousands of people rushing by or crowded together, Needleman asked his Tibetan Buddhist friend, Lobsang Lhalungpa, “Why does Buddhism say it is so rare to be born as a human being?  Look at all these people rushing around us—here and everywhere!  It does not seem rare at all!”  At first Lobsang only smiled.  Needleman repeated his question more insistently, and this time Lobsang looked sober, almost stern.  He raised his hand halfway out toward the crowds.  “How many human beings do you see?”  he asked.
            The point, of course, is that all the people rushing around heedlessly and without attention are not fully human beings.  They are not aware; they are not, perhaps, conscious that the reign of God is in their midst.  It is rare for a human being to be born, as rare as a turtle surfacing into an ox yoke in the middle of the ocean.
            Quakers might be the closest kind of Christians to Buddhists.  While the rest of us take Lent to be a time to be recalled to awareness, to be recalled away from barrenness to creativity, Quakers traditionally believe that the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ should be remembered each day of the year, not just on particular days. Many Friends believe that it is hypocritical to fast during Lent and then eat excessively during the rest of the year, so they choose to live simply all year.  And good for them, I think, but gosh, if the landowner came right now to see how I was producing, I’d be in big trouble.  If God is the landowner of the parable, and Christians living each day in remembrance of Christ is the fruit God seeks, I can’t imagine that God gets a lot of hits.  We do try, especially on Sabbath days and during holy seasons, but the parable does not indicate that the landowner only visits on weekends and holidays.  And we know ourselves how often we come to the end of the day and realize that we ate nothing but junk all day; we spent our money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy.  And now the day’s gone by, another day in which we were not fully human.
            There is in the parable, however, this gardener, the guy who sees very clearly what the landowner sees but also sees in the fig tree the potential for more.  And this is the mercy of God, perhaps even Jesus.  “Let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.”  The mercy of God knows that there’s something worth cultivating even in a barren-looking plant, the flame of divinity in the most earthbound person. 
            One commentator I read said that she spends Lent trying to cultivate in herself a practice that will make her more alive and aware all the rest of the year.  That seems like a good way to look at it, and a good way to carry through the agricultural metaphor.  Put manure on your roots now so that the rest of the year you’ll be the tree you were meant to be. 
            I understand that in Grand Canyon National Park the humidity is so low that they post signs that say, “Stop!  Drink water!  You are thirsty, whether you realize it or not!”  I would like to have one of those signs for my desk, if there really is such a thing.  Maybe I could rig it up to hit me on the head periodically.  Honestly.
            Seeking God doesn’t require skill, intelligence, wisdom, enlightenment or any other desirable thing.  It requires thirst.  It requires hunger.  It requires that we come to awareness, however foggily, that we are thirsty and hungry.  That’s all.  It requires that we turn away from that which does not satisfy, and ask for something that does.  It requires that we look at ourselves spinning our wheels and say, “God, please get me unstuck.”  I think it requires us perhaps to stop working and start playing, to loosen ourselves up so that we’re a little more receptive to God’s surprises.  Isaiah also says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  My suspicion is that the gardener is already digging around out roots and putting manure down.  The call to repentance is actually a call to welcome redemption, because in a hundred different ways we are being stirred up and prepared to receive new life.  As the cold earth begins to stir here in Iowa in March, may our claylike hearts begin to feel a prickling and strange new life as well.
Let us pray:
Banquet-Lord, you have brought to your table some hungry, thirsty people. We praise you for baptizing us and for feeding us Holy Communion. Continue to prune us to bear more fruit. God of Love, provide for us according to your will.  Amen.

Feb. 28

            Jesus is a master at reframing situations.  In today’s story he is in another small town, surrounded by the usual bunch of grimy peasants with bad teeth, and some Pharisees come and tell him that he’s in trouble with the men in suits.  “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.”  It’s an asymmetrical conflict, to say the least—Herod is a representative of Roman imperial power and Jesus is a bug under his sandal.  But Jesus reframes the threat as part of a master plan in which Herod is only a pawn: “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’”  It’s like Jesus has to remind Herod not to jump the gun; it’s not time yet, and Jesus knows exactly when it will be time.  Herod thinks he’s a big-time threat to an insignificant peasant, but Jesus corrects the impression: Herod is a bit player in a much bigger drama, and the playwright is God, not Rome.
            Then Jesus dismisses the thought of Herod and says this very poignant thing about the people to whom he’s going.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”  He is fully aware that people are hostile to him, but instead of being hostile back, he grieves for them the way a mother grieves for her wayward children whom she wants to protect.  The scholar N. T. Wright evokes a powerful image of the aftermath of a barnyard fire, when the charred body of a hen is found, with live chicks sheltered under her wing.  This is what Jesus foresees for himself, and he sees those who oppose him not as deadly threats but as chicks to be protected.  But at the moment, they are “scurrying off in the opposite direction, taking no notice of the smoke and flames indicating the approach of danger, nor of the urgent warnings of the one who alone could give them safety.”
            How would it be, how would it affect our Lent, if we took the opportunity to lament the most unlikely people?  How would it be if one of our Lenten disciplines were to lament on behalf of the unjust?  To lament on behalf of faceless bureaucrats and calculating politicians, lazy journalists and bean-counting administrators?  What would it be like if we lamented our own collusion and confusion and vulnerability to the banal evils that we live with?
            Tom told me about a confusingly frustrating conversation he had with another Urbandale church member a few months ago.  The Urbandale church is part of the Interfaith Hospitality Network, in which churches take turns providing overnight shelter and meals for homeless families.  While it was Urbandale’s week, a burglary took place right in the church’s neighborhood, at the same time that one of the guests was out and unaccounted for.  The man Tom talked to was the church member who had been on duty at the time, after the police had investigated and said that the homeless guest was no longer a suspect.  Our church friend was resisting that conclusion.  He insisted pretty vehemently that the guy was probably guilty, and what was striking to Tom was his vehemence despite the police decision. 
            By itself that’s not much of an incident, but it took place in a series of conversations in which Tom got the chilling impression that church members regarded the homeless families as sort of a species apart, not quite worthy of compassion and generosity.  It was very nebulous, and I don’t want to overstate it—it was things like people trying to cut corners on the food they served because you wouldn’t waste good ingredients on these people.  Just an accumulation of actions and comments that suggested an unconscious marginalization of the homeless people, an assumption that if you looked into their eyes, you would not see the eyes of Christ.
            So Tom was frustrated and confused, and as we were talking, it hit me: all these church people live in a toxic environment.  24/7, they’re living in a culture that never expects to see the eyes of Christ in the face of another person, a culture where money is not a tool but a master, where you don’t give a donation without getting a receipt and you always have a plan for limiting your liability.  No wonder they have a little trouble believing that a homeless man isn’t a criminal.  No wonder they worry about protecting the carpet in the nursery from damage by wayward homeless children.  It’s a testament to the power of the Gospel that it could penetrate far enough for them to volunteer to open their church building, even with all the conditions they put on it.  This is not a Christ-friendly culture in which we are living, and it’s no surprise that people who work in corporate America, for whom the rules work a lot of the time, have trouble getting past some of the dominant culture’s framing of the situation!  These are good people, living in a house of mirrors and somehow still managing to do the right thing a lot of the time.
            That’s how I think Jesus sees us—good and lovable people, easily confused.  He longs to gather us under his protection but we just don’t get it.  We embrace death and believe that we are embracing life.
            Jesus calls Herod a fox.  He’s cunning and he’s self-interested, and he has lots of sharp teeth.  How does one little mother hen protect her brood against a fox?  It’s an asymmetric battle, isn’t it?  The hen doesn’t have a chance, not against the hungry fox, and not with her own mis-guided chicks tootling around the barnyard heedlessly.  That’s how Jesus sees the situation, and still he heads straight into it because if he doesn’t face the fox, it will surely get the chicks.  And here’s what we know: in the cosmic battle where the power of tooth and fang are put up against the power of a 3-pound hen who loves her chicks, God bets the farm on the hen.  God bets the farm on the hen.
            God bets the farm on the hen.  Recently I read a paper on microphilanthropy, which is what we do when we lend to Kiva.  In this paper, they compared two scenarios.  In scenario A, a donor gives a million-dollar gift to a philanthropic organization, which is used build wells, build capacity in developing world, build a wing in a hospital, or support a local symphony.  Good deal, but that’s pretty much the whole story.  In scenario B, a million people give $1 gifts.  These people may be of ordinary means, or even below the poverty level.  One gift may purchase 50 vitamin A tablets, which restore the sight of 50 young children in Southeast Asia.  Another might buy two oral rehydration solution doses which save the lives of two babies in Africa.  Another might help fund a Women’s’ Empowerment Program circle in Nepal, which teaches the donor the amazing power of savings and literacy.  Because we have electronic technology to handle what would once have been forbidding administrative costs, the one million single-dollar gifts do not cost too much to administrate. 
            One outcome of scenario B is that now a million donors and a million recipients are connected.  A study I read from UC Berkeley showed that people who have received a gift tend to be more generous than those who have not, because they feel lucky and grateful and blessed. So the recipients of these gifts are now more generous.   How about the donors?   Imagine a thank you message appearing in a donor’s email one morning.  The previous day, she gave $1 to Southeast Asia students who were blinded by a vitamin A deficiency.   The e-mail includes a video clip of a dozen girls that could now see as a result of her gift.
This simple interaction – a gift of one dollar offering sight to 50-blinded children – would likely change the lives of all concerned.  The children can now see, and the donor looks at the world very differently.  She might look at a discarded soda bottle’s refund value and see it as sight for 5 children in Thailand.  She might see waste paper as a precious classroom material far away from her home.  She might see the world as filled with the potential to be a better place than the violence, distrust, and negativity portrayed on the television screen. http://www.givingspace.org/papers/microphilanthropy.htm
The opportunity to give is transformative.  And the act of giving is contagious.  In fact, compassion and generosity are contagious.  One big giant sweep of the barnyard is pretty devastating, but it cannot stamp out a million or a thousand or 35 individual acts of connection and kindness, and those individual acts have such a transformative power that they multiply exponentially.  Imagine now the church of Jesus Christ as a big fluffed-up brooding hen, offering warmth and shelter to all kinds of chicks—orphans, runts, maybe some ducks or kittens.  The church of Christ planting herself between the foxes of this world and the fragile-boned chicks, offering herself up to be eaten before she will sacrifice one of her brood. 
I do lament the toxicity that distorts our perception of who we are and who others are.  But it is so clear that what Jesus is about, what that mother hen is about, is so much more powerful than the fear and hard-heartedness that exists around us, that we shouldn’t waste too much time lamenting.  By the grace of God we have received much, and there are connections to be made and multiplication of gifts to take place.  Thanks be to God!
God of the covenant,
in the glory of the cross
your Son embraced the power of death
and broke its hold over your people.
In this time of repentance,
draw all people to yourself,
that we who confess Jesus as Lord
may put aside the deeds of death
and accept the life of your kingdom. Amen.

Feb. 21

            As we discussed in Sunday School today, the story of Jonah can supply a metaphor for our lives.  We can get trapped, swallowed by a giant fish, stuck somewhere dark and deep, and either we don’t know how to get out or we aren’t sure we want to get out; we’re not sure the alternative is going to be better.  Jonah tried to run away from God because God wanted him to do something that seemed crazy to him, but you can’t run away from God, and he ended up in the belly of the fish.  He couldn’t get out of the fish either by himself, and finally he prayed, saying, “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me for ever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God. . . . Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”  And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.  And Jonah trotted off and grudgingly did what God had asked him to do, not getting it at all but at least he was unstuck.
            A couple of weeks ago was the annual TED conference, an acronym that stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.  At their annual conferences, they gather influential thinkers and doers from around the world who are challenged to give “the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes—and they have a LOT of speakers.  Marianne Pearle wrote, “Chris Anderson, TED's curator, opened this year's conference entitled "What the World Needs Now" with a bold and sad statement. He said his rage is that things are simply not changing, or changing so little. Enraging it is, considering we know what's wrong and, for the most part, we also know how to fix it.
            “The remainder of the conference was there to prove it. A string of brilliant experts in all matters summarized ideas and propositions in sessions that lasted 18 minutes each. On the Internet, I was told that millions of people in about 75 countries were listening to the talks. Everyone was Twittering, texting and Facebooking, in a feast of technology-driven communication. We all learned about poverty and how to help in a way that resources won't be wasted; we learned about the 27 million that are still enslaved today and that it would only take $10.8 billion to rescue them -- that's the equivalent of what Americans spend on chips and pretzels annually. And by the way, we also learned that young Americans are dying of obesity eating chips and pretzels among other delicacies. We learned that we have about 20 years before the climate change becomes an irreversible environmental disaster. We were told that we spend more than 3 billion hours weekly playing online games because they allow us to feel like optimistic and useful super heroes. Or that nuclear threat is as real as ever but it's just not making headline news for some obscure reason linked to the end of the Cold War. We learned that life is complex and that humans are reluctant to face complexity.”
            She says, “Information is available and so are solutions.  . . . With so much knowledge, we still don't know better.  If the world is not changing could it be because people are not changing?”  God, yes.
            I sit down to get some work done, and first I have to check my favorite websites.  Then I rearrange the pens in the pen holder.  I open the relevant document and remember that I need to close the heat register in the next room.  An email comes in and I answer it, then go to the DMACC website to see if I have more email.  Do I know what I am doing?  Yes I do.  Do I know that’s no way to get work done?  Yes I do.  But I continue to do it, distractable and anxious.
            Even more important, I caught myself the other day blaming myself for things going badly for someone else because I had skipped praying for that person that day.  How grandiose is that?  What breath-taking messianic pretensions does that reveal! And what does it say about God? that God doesn’t care about this person unless I remember to lift her up?  That in fact her destiny lies with me and my prayers rather than with God?  What in the world do I think I’m doing when I pray?  Brothers and sisters, I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells in me.
            I know in my head the prescription for this particular malady.  Back off, let God be God, attune yourself instead to the unanticipated signs of God’s grace that appear along my way.  But I don’t really know how to practice that for more than a few seconds at a time.  In real life, on the ground, I’m either in control or I am disengaged entirely, forgetting for days at a time that I am really in God’s hands.  Wretched woman that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?
            That’s our dilemma.  We fall into habits of behavior, habits of thinking, patterns of hopping from one unacceptable resting place to another unacceptable resting place, and we can really keep it up indefinitely.  There may never be a moment in my life when I just have to resolve this issue of how to stay open to God without imagining myself to be in control; I could do this for decades, as I already have.  But here is the wisdom of the church year: Lent forces the moment upon us.  Lent is the time to reckon with our stuckness and our craziness and our aversion to change.  For forty days and forty nights we have no more important task than to take a good hard look at ourselves and remember the Lord, as Jonah did from inside the fish’s belly.  It’s time.  Now.
            Where are you stuck?  What gnaws at you, that you can’t get rid of?  If it were something so simple as material self-indulgence, you could just skip your daily luxuries, set aside the money to give away, and you’d have your Lenten discipline all sewed up.  But for a lot of us, our craziness is a lot more subtle, a lot more dug in and embedded and hard to pick out.  Who will rescue us from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
            That’s what Paul says.  He absolutely nails the problem, gets it spot on, asks the big question (who will rescue us?) and then answers it: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”  Vital though it is that we recognize when we’ve gotten trapped in the belly of the fish, ain’t nobody going to get us out except the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.  We have to keep turning to God.
            I really have only one piece of advice, and that’s to pray in whatever way works best, whether it’s singing or making art or contemplating scripture verses.  Pray.  Take it to the Lord in prayer.  As Paul also says in the letter to the Romans, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”  And that’s the best I can do; it’s not original and it’s not explicit, but it’s what I got.  Fortunately for us all, we also have Anne Lamott to guide us, a woman whose example of openness to God is a continuing revelation for me:
            Right now it is Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday, which is the day that John the Baptist baptized Jesus, after which Jesus walked in the desert for 40 days mulling things over. So during Lent one is supposed to mull things over just like Jesus did.
            Catholics are big on giving things up for Lent, but we Protestants mostly just mull. So I personally get to mull over my craziness and my pathological self-justification and my profound lack of willingness to forgive.
            As I said to an audience in Indianapolis, I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness. And someone later asked me, "What kind of Christian are you?" and I said, "I'm the other kind."
            So during this Lenten season, I have to deal with all the rage I feel against Republicans. http://www.salon1999.com/09/columns/cintra1.htmlI asked my friend the priest if it was a problem for Jesus that I hated the Republicans and he said, Oh no, Jesus hates them too. But I thought that despite what this holy man of God said I should take a look at my incredible anger at the Grand Old Party, as I believe it is called.
            Unfortunately, by this incredible coincidence  right before Lent I wrote a review of the new thriller by Pat Robertson, and in it I said that Pat was perhaps just a wee bit rigid and maybe he had not listened to the Dylan classic "With God On Our Side" enough times.
            The review came out and Lent began and I was asking Jesus to help me see that it's madness to have such overt hostility to Republicans, and I was praying to Jesus to make me more like Him, welcoming all beings, even Pat Buchanan. Because that is the truth: Jesus welcomes Pat Buchanan in exactly the same way that he welcomes my tiny princess self, even though Pat Buchanan is batshit crazy.
            So then the phone calls began. I appear to have gotten on some right-wing Christian telephone hate list and my phone number is being faxed all over the country and these women call up and say, "You don't know me, and I guess you think you have a funny tongue inside that mouth of yours, and I guess maybe the devil does too, and I think that all I need to say is that I will see you  at the throne of judgment."
            And the voice is so warm and friendly, it's like one of those flight attendants you get when you fly out of Atlanta, and she's asking me if I would like some orange juice and by the way I was going to rot before the throne of judgment. All the callers mentioned that throne, I think they may have had a script, and one time it was a man's voice and for a while I thought it was my brother Steve trying to make me laugh, and when I realized it wasn't I also realized that I couldn't find the portable phone, which my son Sam had put in a box for what were no doubt very good reasons of his own, so I was looking like a madwoman all over the house as this voice kept coming from my answering machine filled with contemptuous rage and hatred, and I noticed dimly that it exactly matched the contemptuous rage and hatred that I was feeling.
            I finally found the phone and hung it up and stood there in the bedroom and realized that there was no difference between my callers and me, that we were both trapped by rage and judgment and profound lack of willingness to forgive.
            And it was at that moment that Lent actually started for me, and once again I became so relieved that I have a Savior.   http://www.salon1999.com/09/departments/lamott1.html
            Let us pray. 
God of deliverance and freedom,
you taught the people of Israel
to acknowledge that all things
come from your bountiful hand.
Deepen our faith
so that we may resist temptation
and, in the midst of trial,
proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord,
now and for ever. Amen.

Feb. 14

            On the mountaintop, the three disciples with Jesus saw him transfigured.  They saw his face shining and his clothes dazzling white, and he was standing with Moses and Elijah, speaking with them about his departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.  They saw their friend and teacher shining with the glory of God, in the company of two great men of God, talking about an event which had not yet come to pass but which was of cosmic importance.  And what they saw was not an illusion or a distortion, but a more accurate vision of what they usually saw in day-to-day life.  They saw the truth, which was that Jesus was filled with the glory of God, that he embodied the glory of God.
            And let me offer a thought about Moses and Elijah that just came to my attention recently.  Apparently the thinking in Lakota society is that society is a spiral.  At the outside are those too young to know many stories, too recently born to have experienced much.  This outside of the spiral is not quite real.  Young people have the potential of reality, but they haven’t wound their way into it very far.  A couple turns in are their parents, who are older, who know more stories—they are a little more real.  Deeper still into the spiral are the elders, who have gone around the circle of the years many times and know more stories and are much more real.  And way deep in the spiral are the stories older than the oldest person alive; they possess the deepest degree of reality.
            If you think about it that way, Moses and Elijah are not insubstantial, fleeting appearances but the most solid and real characters on the mountaintop.  The disciples are seeing a huge epiphany, almost more reality than human beings can bear.  Luke says that they were weighed down with sleep, and perhaps that sleepiness was a defense mechanism against all that reality.  They were just too young and too inexperienced to stand up to the full epiphany.
            Be that as it may, the epiphany ends and the men return down from the mountain, where a great crowd meets them, badgering for healings and interventions.  A man appeals to Jesus on behalf of his son, who has seizures, and says, “I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”  And Jesus responds rather brusquely, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you?  Bring your son here.”  And he heals the boy.
            I was puzzled by Jesus’ curt response to the father when I read the story this time.  Does he really deserve such harsh words, just for asking for help for his child?  But then I decided that maybe Jesus is first talking about his disciples, who had failed to cast out the boy’s demon.  “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you?”  Maybe he’s impatient and disgusted with them because even after the epiphany on the mountaintop, they are ineffective in bringing God’s kingdom into actuality.
            In the particular situation, a man whose son is seized by a spirit is in danger of being ostracized by the whole community.  The boy will not be able to marry, and if he is the only son, that’s the end of the family line, which means they lose their land and their place in the village.  So the extended family is imperiled by this child’s infirmity, and curing the boy also restores the future of the family.  It seems that the cure that Jesus effects is not so much about ending the child’s suffering as it is about restoring wholeness to the village, if you will—circumventing a tear in the social fabric by putting the boy back into the equation.  The disciples had not felt themselves equal to doing that, or maybe they hadn’t seen the larger implications.  Maybe they just thought, “Oh, I don’t know how to do exorcisms,” when what they should have done was address the rip in the social fabric.  In any case, Jesus thought that they ought to be able to handle this kind of thing, and he’s disappointed and frustrated with them for failing.
            Now, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today, he says that all of us, with unveiled faces, see the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.  This I would not believe if Paul didn’t tell me.  I tend to identify more with the sleepy disciples as I screen out what is too real for me.  But that’s what Paul says.  He says that we have been given the same vision as the disciples, a vision of the real glory of God, and we are called to share that glory as they were called.  But what if we choke as the disciples do, and don’t use the epiphany we’ve been given?
            Let me remind you of a story that I’m sure some people have heard before, that helps with this. 
There was a famous monastery which once had been full of monks and visitors seeking spiritual guidance. But the monastery had fallen on dry years when their spirituality level was very low. Few pilgrims came to seek guidance, and few young people gave themselves to become monks. At last, there was only a handful of elderly monks going about their work, their prayer, their study with heavy hearts. The only time their spirit seemed to lift was when the word went out that the rabbi was walking in the woods. You see, in the woods near the monastery, there was a small hut that this rabbi had constructed as a place of retreat, and he came from time to time to fast and pray. And when the monks in the monastery knew he was fasting and praying, they felt supported by his prayer.
One day, the abbot of the monastery, hearing that the rabbi was walking in the woods, decided to go see him. And when he reached the little hut, there was the rabbi standing in the doorway with his arms outstretched, as if he had been standing there for sometime to welcome the abbot, who had given no notice of his visit. They greeted one another, and then went in the simple hut where there was a table with a book of scripture opened on the table. They sat there, silently prayed, and then the abbot began to weep. He poured out his concern for the monastery and for the spiritual health of the monks. Finally, the rabbi said, 'You seek a teaching from me and I have one for you. It is a teaching which I will say to you and then I will never repeat. When you share this teaching with the monks, you are to say it once and then never to repeat it. The teaching is this. Listen carefully. "The Messiah is among you."
Well, when the abbot heard that teaching, he thanked the rabbi. He went back to the monastery to gather the monks and to tell them the teaching of the rabbi. He told him, as he was instructed, that he would say the teaching once, and then they were to talk about it no more. "Listen carefully," he said. "The teaching is this: One of us is the Messiah." It wasn't exactly what the rabbi had said, but they began to look at one another in a whole new light. Is Brother John the messiah? Or Father James? Am I the messiah?
In the days to come, as they went about their prayer life and their work and their study of scripture, they began to treat one another in a whole new light. Each one of them might be the messiah, and this new treatment of one another, this new sense of expectation, was noted by the few pilgrims who came. And soon the word spread. What a spirit of concern and compassion and expectation can be felt at the monastery!
Young people began to offer themselves in service. Pilgrims began to come in great number, all because they looked at each other as people of worth.  (Francis Dorff, “The Rabbi’s Gift”)
            The story of Jesus’ healing of the boy with seizures after his transfiguration tells us that God is on site, deeply involved with human life, and involved in a way that mends and renews the communities on which we depend.  The story of the rabbi’s gift reminds us that although we are fully capable of forgetting that fundamental reality, it is a reality, and it becomes powerfully evident when we give it a tiny chance.  The messiah is among us. The glory of God is among us.  We ourselves can shine with the glory of the Lord as we see the glory of God in others.
Lord Jesus Christ, we join the disciples and all at your shining revelation of yourself as divine on the mountain top. Shine in our lives we pray that we may see clearly your true nature and the true worth of each human being. We long to reflect your glory in our words and actions, so that those around us may see you and each other in a new light. All this we pray in your holy name. Amen.

January 17

            You all know who Fred Rogers was, right?  The neighbor to all children on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”  He’s a special idol of mine and, as Deb once said to me, he was an evolved human being.  One time he was asked to speak to the National Press Club, which is accustomed to getting big-time government heavyweights and luminaries to speak, and some members of the press joked to each other that with Mr. Rogers at the podium, they were probably in for a “light lunch.”  However, when Fred Rogers stood up to speak, he said that he knew the room was filled with many of the best reporters in America, people who were at the top of their very demanding and competitive field.  So he took out a stop watch, and he said that he was going to keep two minutes of silence.  He invited everybody in the room to remember people in their past—parents, teachers, coaches, friends, neighbors—who had made it possible for them to accomplish so much.  And then he stood there, looking at his watch and saying nothing.  The room grew quiet as the seconds ticked away, but the reporter said that before Fred Rogers tucked away his watch, one could hear all around the room people sniffling as they were moved by the memories of those who had made sacrifices on their behalf, who had behaved graciously and generously to them, who had given them many gifts.  (Tom Long, Testimony)  In the middle of a busy day, busy and important people suddenly experienced the reality of a graciousness bigger than they were.
            In the story of the wedding at Cana, John wants to show us a “sign” of Jesus.  What’s a sign?  For John it’s not a miracle—it’s not a paranormal or supernatural event that accomplishes something that is much to be desired.  That’s what the miracles are in the other gospels; they’re healings and feedings and so forth because there was a pressing need.  In John there are healings and feedings too, but not to answer human need.  These “signs” are to reveal who Jesus is, and what kind of God has sent him.  So at the wedding at Cana, Jesus does his first sign and reveals his glory, and what is the sign?  He changes water into wine.
            He didn’t change drinking water into wine, though.  He didn’t take one drink and make it better.  This was water contained in the big stone jars used for the rites of purification.  It was washing water, and faithful people used it to make themselves fit to approach God.  You had to bathe yourself in a ritual way in order to be able to make a sacrifice to God or to be included in various religious functions.  Now the jars are full of wine; how can anybody wash themselves and get pure enough to go to the Temple?  They can’t anymore.  They will have to drink up the wine first.
            If this is a sign that reveals Jesus’ glory, then the meaning of the sign must be that it’s time to stop preparing for holiness—purifying ourselves--and start celebrating holiness—drinking the wine.  It’s time to stop anticipating and planning and getting in shape for something yet to come, and just go ahead and embrace the glory of gifts given to us right now.  This is a sign, in fact, that right here and right now we are in the midst of holiness, in the midst of graciousness far bigger than ourselves, and it is a very, very good thing!
            John is telling us that the glory of God is available right now, that we don’t have to wait any more.  That must mean that the ordinary stuff of our lives, when viewed in just the right light, actually glow with the Holy Spirit.  I think that’s what he’s saying.  Thomas Long of Candler School of Theology has written a book called Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, in which he urges us Christians to talk to each other about how God acts in our daily lives.  He says, “My parents did not wear their religion on their sleeves; they wove it into the fabric of their everyday garments. . . . God talk was all bound up with homework talk, cut-the-grass talk, Cub Scout talk, and supper table talk.  They probably didn’t know it, but they were good . . . theologians of the reality of God in the ordinary events of life, teaching me that the gifts of everyday life are the means of grace.”
            He goes on to think specifically about his childhood Sunday School teachers.  “One of my teachers, a former standout high school baseball player, so despaired of holding our attention that he punctuated a lesson on Moses and the burning bush with instructions on how to throw a curve ball.  But they did it.  They stood up there in front of often distracted children and talked about God.  They dragged their weekday-weary bodies, their sometimes halting knowledge of the Bible, their own struggles with doubt, and their clearly evident humanity into spare Sunday School classrooms and dared to talk to other people’s children as best they could about the Christian faith.
            “I look back now and realize how much what they did mattered, how much what they said continues to nourish what I believe and what I do with my life.  Some people might point out that these people were not close to being Bible scholars—some of them had not even graduated from high school—and scoff at their lack of knowledge and their capacity for misinformation.  Some others might sniff at their primitive pedagogy—their crinkled lesson books, their almost comical attempts to make cutout paper sheep stick to flannel boards, and their often futile struggles to instruct restless nine year-olds—and call it a waste of time.  I don’t.  I call it courage.  I call it love.”
            What touches me about Long’s recounting of his Sunday School experience is exactly that courage and love of his teachers.  They did not wait until they had been enlightened or properly educated to start testifying to the amazingness of God, to start the spiritual formation of their younger sisters and brothers.  They plunged into it with what they had, and behold, it was very good, it was abundantly good.  What they had was plenty.
            Or here’s another example, and forgive me for the long quotes.  Again this is from Tom Long, talking about being in a church group in which people were testifying about times in their lives when God was close and real.  One young woman, a daughter of the church, said that she was baptized in their sanctuary and that her father was very proud of that moment.  When she was a little girl, he would often tell her of the Sunday that she was baptized.
He would describe the baptismal dress that she wore, he would remember what hymns were sung and what the minister had said in the sermon, and he always ended the story by clapping his hands together and exclaiming, “Oh, sweetheart, the Holy Spirit was in the church that day!”
            She then said that as a child, she would go to worship on Sunday with her parents and would wonder, “Where is the Holy Spirit in this church?”  She would look at the brass organ pipes, at the rafters in the ceiling, and at the stained-glass windows, and she would wonder, “Is that where the Holy Spirit is in this church?”
            Then she paused for a moment, and everybody in the room leaned forward to hear what she would say next.  “As many of you know,” she continued, “I lost both of my parents to cancer in the same week, a terrible week, last winter.  During that awful week, on a dark Wednesday afternoon, I was driving home from visiting my parents in the hospital, and I was passing by the church.  I felt an intense need to pray, and so I came into the church and sat in one of the back pews and began to pray.  The church was dark, and in the shadows, I prayed and poured out my grief to God, and cried from the bottom of my heart.  A member of the church,” and here she named her, “was in the kitchen preparing a meal for a church meeting, and she saw me praying and knew what was happening in my life.  She took off her apron, came and sat beside me in the pew, held my hand, and prayed with me.  It was then,” the young woman said, “that I knew where the Holy Spirit was in this church.

Where was the glory of God revealed?  In the simple companion-like gesture of a church lady out of the kitchen.  She knew what was going on in this young woman’s life, and it mattered to her too, so she took off her apron and prayed with her, and the glory of God was revealed.
Sometimes if we are very lucky we have these mystical, mountaintop experiences in which we know that God is present.  Sometimes we have to go away just so that we can shut out the distractions that splinter our attention and wear down our souls.  But when the mountaintop experiences are over, or haven’t come, and when we’re back in the mundane world, the glory of God is still very much with us, in abundance—not set aside for a special moment but embedded in the non-special moments when the present moment is enough for us.  Remember that every month we appropriate that gift of wine that Jesus offered so abundantly; we take some for our table and we share it among ourselves because the glory of God is revealed, and it is time to celebrate.
O God of steadfast love,
at the wedding in Cana
your Son Jesus turned water into wine,
delighting all who were there.
Transform our hearts by your Spirit,
that we may use our varied gifts
to show forth the light of your love
as one body in Christ.  Amen.

January 10

            This is the season of Epiphany, in which all our scripture readings show how God was revealed to us in what Jesus said and did.  The first Epiphany reading is about Jesus’ baptism, when we may reasonably expect to see God giving a stamp of approval to Jesus, kind of authorizing him publicly to go around doing God’s work.  And I suppose that’s what today’s reading does.  But boy, it does it in a funny way, a way that says a whole lot more about what God’s work is in this world.
We start with feverish anticipation: “the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah.”  Why were they so charged with anticipation?  Because they were hoping for the messiah, because things were so bad for them, they just knew the way they were living was not God’s intention for them.  They knew God must be designing to deliver them somehow, and when John came calling the religious authorities a brood of vipers and telling the Roman soldiers to stop taking more than they needed from people, they thought that fearlessness and audacity sounded an awful lot like the prophets God had sent before, and maybe the time of deliverance had come.
But John said no, he was just a forerunner of the messiah, and if you think John speaks roughly just wait till you hear the Messiah himself.  He is more powerful than John; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, and if you are more chaff than wheat, he will burn you up.  At this point in the story the lectionary committee took out the next three verses, presumably so that we could focus on the baptism of Jesus, but I’m going to put them right back in.  So John has just clarified his position vis-à-vis the messiah and warned that the messiah’s coming will be no picnic.  Here’s the next three verses:
So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.  But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John in prison.
And then the lectionary committee picks up the text again: Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Notice: if John is the person who baptized Jesus, then Luke has just flashed forward briefly to tell us that John was imprisoned by Herod—and then Luke finishes the story, not actually recounting the baptism itself, but moving on to “when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying.”  This flash forward to John’s imprisonment, which ended with his execution, casts a shadow over all the baptisms, those of the people and of Jesus.  They were baptized by a dead man walking, but Jesus did not even pause; he moved ahead to prayer before entering into the 40 days of temptation in the wilderness, and it is as he prays that God calls him the Beloved. 
There’s no baptism per se in this story.  There is before the baptism and after the baptism, that’s all.  And in between there’s Luke’s footnote that John got picked up and taken out of commission.  There’s all this inchoate hope and expectation, there’s God’s endorsement of Jesus as beloved and Son, and hanging over it all is deadly danger. 
One of my favorite commentators, Sarah Dylan Breuer, writes that “On some level, I think that we all know that the world as our worldly powers have ordered it is not working, is not giving the human family abundant life as we were created and still ache for.”  Her work at the time of writing was with a wealthy Episcopal congregation, but she says, “There are a great many people in our culture who are by most measures wealthy, but who are tremendously economically insecure -- in a house that cost far more than they could comfortably afford, but that seemed necessary to buy given how good the schools in that neighborhood were in contrast to the terrible state of public schools in poorer neighborhoods not so far away. They are one paycheck away from disaster, and they know it; if one person in the family gets sick, if there's some unforeseen disaster in a single industry, if the wrong person gets elected or promoted or one rotten stroke of luck, it feels like everything will be ruined. The adults and children feel it almost equally, even if neither ever names or talks about it. And then there are the other kinds of disasters that our culture threatens us with seemingly at every turn. Perhaps it's more a function of child and adolescent literacy than of anything else, but I'm not convinced that's it -- I have never seen more cultural artifacts of anxiety from the young of any culture I've studied than I have when listening to the voices of young people in affluent communities today.” 
It’s easy to sort out the good guys and the bad guys in first-century Palestine because we’re at such a distance from them.  We can see clearly what was wrong with the Roman Empire and the Jewish religious authorities.  It’s a lot harder when it’s our own culture, to separate the good guys from the bad guys, but the kind of dis-ease that Sarah Dylan Breuer describes in her affluent congregation is simply another facet of the dis-ease of those who can’t find work, who can’t get medical treatment, who can’t provide their children with a secure future.  Things are not as they should be, and when we push back, we feel very much at risk.
This, she says, is part of the Good News of Jesus’ baptism and our own.  “If some part of you believes that the world as it is on the front page of the newspaper is not the world as it was meant to be, you're not crazy and you're not just a starry-eyed idealist; you are feeling God's call in baptism. If some part of you wants something more than the chance to achieve enough to feel pressured to achieve more or to defend what you thought you won, you're not just greedy or lazy or odd; you're feeling God's call in baptism. And if you feel at times that the world and the life you're aching for is more than you could bring into being by your own achievement, even if you wanted it only for yourself and those you care about (and who can restrict caring to just a few?), you haven't run into the thing that makes the dream impossible; you just might be hearing the call of baptism.”  Richard Swanson says that baptism is an act of faith and resistance, that it’s a gift from God that connects us with promises too big to fit into the world as presently constituted. 
Jesus begins his public life by plunging into the same waters with “all the people,” the broken and hurting and hopeful, longing for God’s powerful works of reconciliation and mercy and justice.  With those overwhelmed by problems too intractable to solve but too thorny to live with.  With those sick and tired of being sick and tired.  With those bewildered but still hopeful.  Jesus allied himself with those who were claiming the promises of God that are too big to fit into the world as presently constituted.  And when they all had been baptized together, then the Holy Spirit descended like a dove, and God made it plain that their hopes were in line with God’s intentions, and that they were not alone or without hope.  “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
This story is about Jesus’ baptism, but Luke makes it about all our baptisms by emphasizing Jesus’ solidarity with “all the people” in that action.  This is a ratification of our belonging to God whose promises will change the world.  It is an assurance that the words of Isaiah are for us: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”  We, like Jesus, have a mission and a purpose embedded in the way God has composed each one of us, and our missions are inextricably bound up with fulfilling the divine promises that will change the world. 
God of grace and glory,
you call us with your voice of flame
to be your people, faithful and courageous.
As your beloved Son
embraced his mission in the waters of baptism,
inspire us with the fire of your Spirit
to join in his transforming work.
We ask this in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

January 3 2010 

           This is formally the second Sunday after Christmas, but it also happens to be the first Sunday after New Year’s, and so a good bit of our orientation lately has been on looking back and looking forward, starting again on lifelong projects like weight loss or healthier habits or learning Sanskrit or cleaning the basement.  That same sense of new possibility is reflected in the reading from Jeremiah this morning, a part of his book that is called the Book of Consolation because it departs from his usual condemnation of the people and his prophecies of doom to proclaim that God is going to end the people’s exile, gather up those who have been scattered, lead them home by brooks of water, and bless them with grain and wine and oil and livestock so that their lives will become like a watered garden.
Now, this is interesting in a couple of ways.  First, behind all the rhetoric and imagery of redemption and abundance is an emphasis on community.  God is at work here to create a people out of no people—they had been scattered, they had been diluted by exile, and they had been diverted and almost /deracinated/ by their own practices of baal worship and all the ways that they had conformed themselves to the dominant cultures of the Assyrians or Babylonians.  Maybe they were the descendants of God’s people, and maybe they knew a few of the old stories, but in practice they were no longer a people. 
But here God is going to gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, including all the blind and lame and weak, and make them a great company.  “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.”  They will no longer be individuals with a common heritage, but a people, given a purpose and a mission that only a people can carry out.  It’s a great gift; it’s also a great responsibility.  They are being re-formed as a nation.
The second interesting thing is the claim Jeremiah is making for God versus the baals of the land which had so contributed to the people’s downfall.  Even though this is a very exuberant passage, and promises poetically that nobody in the restored community will ever languish again, this isn’t a literal promise of the kingdom of heaven on earth.  It’s a soaring poetic expression of God’s intentions, but not an almanac prediction of the future, as if God were a particularly superior baal who could ensure abundant water and good crops long-term.  The baals were all about fertility and rain and the basic logistics of agriculture, and that’s why you worshiped them, but YHWH is about bigger things—joy and hope and new beginnings.  In fact there may be—and were—years of drought and hard times, but always and forever under the umbrella of God’s gracious and trustworthy promises of future.
So the metaphors of abundant water and crops operate on the level of the fatness to be eaten and enjoyed, but also on the level of theology—that the source of all good things is God not baal, in good times and in bad.  Everything that the people have and will have comes from YHWH only.  It is a powerful call to recognize God in the events now unfolding before them.
So isn’t that perfect, on the cusp of a new year, for us?  A reminder that God is in all events unfolding before us, a reminder that God alone is the source of all good things, a promise that we too are being made a people.  And it’s even more apt, when you think how much our faith community resembles the scattered and forlorn people of Israel. 
Christianity as it is popularly understood in this country is almost a foreign religion.  It is so mixed up with civil religion and the prosperity gospel and sentimentality that some days I want to invent a new name for our religion, just so people won’t think that’s who we are.  Christianity these days is triumphalist and narrowly focused on an individual’s salvation from an elaborately conceived hell, with God imagined as general, judge and king.  Christians feel free to say with a straight face things like, “Jesus didn’t preach social justice; he was talking about justice within the church,” and “Godliness causes prosperity.”  Seriously.  They do.  I’ve heard them.  Only because I have inklings of my own profound fallenness can I still include such people in my definition of Christian.  It is absolutely crazy.
But even that corrupted version of Christianity has lost tremendous influence in our culture, and is clearly on the way out.  People don’t find it compelling, and they don’t necessarily have anything better, but they don’t see it offering anything to make their lives more meaningful.  So increasing numbers of people are simply absenting themselves from the church.  That’s why I say that our faith community is a scattered and forlorn bunch, not really a community any more.
Douglas John Hall, who teaches theology at McGill University in Montreal, wrote the following points on this topic:

	Under the Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius in the fourth century CE, Christianity underwent a great shift. Christianity, the faith, evolved into the imperial church. A shift in the reverse direction is occurring today. "Christianity has arrived at the end of its sojourn as the official, or established, religion of the Western world."
	Christian churches are gradually being pushed to the edges of society; they are being disestablished. The process cannot be reversed.
	"The decline and humiliation of Christendom in the West is...a process. It is not a matter of sudden death."
	Most denominations are living in a delusion: that we are still living in a basically Christian civilization, as if Christianity is the "official religion of the official culture."
	Christianity may return to its original, first century form, "the disciple community described by the Scriptures."

Excerpts from: Douglas Hall, "The end of Christendom and the future of Christianity," Trinity (1997) at: http://www.christianism.com/
Douglas John Hall says that we still want to tell the story of the church as a success story—and it’s not.  I don’t know about you, but I find that very promising.  It’s not particularly good news for my pension fund or for missionaries who depend on the annual offerings of congregations all over the US, coordinated by a central office, to pay their salaries.  It’s not very good news when I covet the respect of politicians or princes of industry, who would ask my advice and wisdom if they knew I existed, I’m sure.  But it probably is very good news for those who trust the promises of God more than they trust the stock exchange or the job market, for those who are always looking to see what God is doing here and now, and for those who simply want to live in the light rather than in the darkness.  One more time, Douglas John Hall:
“CHRISTIANITY HAS ARRIVED AT THE END OF ITS SOJOURN AS THE OFFICIAL, OR ESTABLISHED, RELIGION OF THE WESTERN WORLD. The churches resist coming to terms with this ending because it seems so dismal a thing. But in Christian thinking, endings can also be beginnings; and if we are courageous enough to enter into this ending thoughtfully and intentionally, we will discover a beginning that may surprise us. The end of Christendom could be the beginning of something more nearly like the church—the disciple community described by the Scriptures and treasured throughout the ages by prophetic minorities."
I am setting aside the thorny problem of denominationalism and all the important functions that denominational offices serve that shouldn’t be sneered at as we celebrate the new era of a diminished Christianity.  I’m setting it aside because I just have no idea what to do or say about it.  But let me say this: if the institutional church is decimated, it doesn’t do one single thing to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  That light still shines in the darkness, whether there remains an infrastructure or not.
If the end of Christendom could be the beginning of the disciple community described by the scriptures, what would it look like?  In part it would look like people incarnating love—so that love is not a feeling or an ideal, but a concrete activity: helping someone write a resume, showing up at the statehouse to call for an end to 400% interest at payday lenders, gathering craft supplies for the teenagers who go to the Center and want to make stuff.  It’s lots of concrete, specific actions, proactive and reactive, embodying Christ because the church is the Body of Christ, and because Christ embodied God.  “No one has ever seen God,” John reminds us.  “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”  And how has the Son made God known?  By doing love.
But in part the beginning of the disciple community would also be looking for the ways that God is creating a people where there was no people, so that we can be part of it.  Where is God finding the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, to join us together?  Who is it absolutely unthinkable that we should ever be God’s people with?  Conservative Muslims, flaky New Agers, Hindus who have no interest in our sacred narrative?  Maybe.  The other thing that all the pundits say about the decline of the church is that there is no decline in the search for meaning and the desire for experience of the sacred.  That manifests itself in what is disparagingly called cafeteria religion, where it’s said that people pick and choose what they like—but I would argue that people appropriate what seems true and ignore what seems to be not true.  They do it in an unsophisticated way sometimes, but who can blame them?  People yearn for direct experience of God.  Somehow the people with whom we are going to join in the as-yet unthinkable disciple community will be those who don’t know and don’t care about theological distinctions but hunger for the sacred. 
It’s unwise to speculate too far.  All I can say today is what Jeremiah says, that God is redeeming scattered, lost individuals and making us into a people, and what Paul says in Ephesians, that God’s lplan for the fullness of time is to gather up all things to Godself.  And what John says in his first chapter, that the light came into the darkness, received not by his own people who should have recognized him, but to anybody who would receive him.  And from his fullness we have received grace upon grace, and we will receive grace upon grace.

Light of life, you came in flesh,
born into human pain and joy,
and gave us power to be your children.
Grant us faith, O Christ, to see your presence among us,
so that all of creation may sing new songs of gladness
and walk in the way of peace. Amen.