Sermon Prep, Pentecost X

Colossians 3:1-11

Luke 12:13-21

A parishioner remarked “this is the time to discuss planned giving.”

I may, to shake it up a bit, begin with discussing why I love money.  I’ll declare I’m pretty rich – which I am, compared to most people in the world.  Just not compared to my neighbors.  And then my retirement plan.

There’s a bit more than simply “greed is bad” going on here.  Is it “greed is bad” and “you might die tomorrow”?  I remember tha bumper sticker:  whoever dies with the most toys wins.

Do I get political?  Billionaires who have died this year have been able to create little monarchies because they’ve been able to avoid paying taxes.

Richard Layard notes the limites of happiness.  Building a bigger barn won’t do it.

Catherine Caimano preaches a very good sermon, but I might try to make the challenges more severe.    there’s no way to get around the apocalyptic depth of the message.

Are we being encouraged to look busy?  To prepare for death?  Or Is Jesus implying, “don’t save up to party in the future!  Party now!”  Has the world so fallen apart, that our hands are the emergency rescue team for the earth?  And can we do it?   Should we?  Must we?

It is not an anti-abundance message, I suspect.  It is a challenge to acquisitiveness for its own sake.   Such tendencies are built on the foundation of our anxieties as we compare ourselves to others.   Why must we compare our lives so when the only judge we need to know is Jesus Christ?

Gawain de Leeuw4 Comments

Pentecost

Fifty days after Easter, the spirit gave the apostles the power to speak in the languages of all the peoples.

It is a reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel. In that story, we tried to become like Gods by building a tower to the heavens. We were cursed to misunderstand and mistranslate. We would be caught in perpetual confusion, a consequence of our audacity. The source of violence in human culture was named: pride and misunderstanding – competition with the Gods for power.

Yet in this week’s reading, the spirit brings people together. Language to understand and comprehend rather than divide. The most holy work, in this case, is one of translation. And translation requires charity, because no translation is ever perfect.

Our age, however, has so compressed time and space that comprehension becomes very challenging: in part because there is too much to comprehend; and our words move exceptionally fast. Add that the same youtube video seen by people of two completely different cultures may be translated completely differently.

What characteristics do we need to handle our contemporary problems of “translation?”

First: we should remember that church – or any institution – should be an adventure. Charting new territories is fun and rewarding. Safety, quick solutions, and fads just postpone the inevitable.

Second – Tenacity: keeping attentive to the different ways we can improve. It means, also, plotting out small steps. A big vision is very useful, but it is also to map our small successes along the way. tenacity is how one learns a language – we are willing to keep speaking, even if we make a mistake. We listen carefully so that we can be sure we understand.

Last: listening. It is perhaps most true that the apostles were not just speaking in the language of the people, they were listening to the world.

There are immense difficulties here at St. Barts. And yet, there are also great opportunities. Let it be an adventure; and may we be both steadfast and resilient in the days ahead.

Blessings,

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Keeping the Word

Yesterday Jesus said in the Gospel (John 14:23) that “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”  It’s one of those conditional statements that bugs me.  If you don’t love Jesus you won’t, but if you do you will.

When I think of promises, I also think of contracts and laws.  Contracts as in written agreements with the power of force; laws as in cosmic natural laws such as gravity.  Law makes the world ordered; as do promises.  They allow us to plan, to have expectations.  We have subconscious promises, ones we don’t articulate, but are present in our assumptions and habits.

We can see all sorts of ways people break promises.  People leave their marriages.  Governments lie about war.  Police are on the take, extorting criminals rather than turning them in (I just saw the movie Serpico).  Churches can’t extricate the criminals within their orders.

Often people’s words do not fit their actions.  Perhaps that’s the truly religious person:  one who’s words always match their actions.  And maybe that’s why truly religious people are silent.

Some philosophers have argued that hypocrisy is wherever you look for it.  It’s the nature of public life that our public proclamations don’t match our private lives.  A male politician might be great about supporting women’s issues, but be vile to their spouses.  Johnson was a racist, but the president who did the most to change institutionalized racism.

And the brokenness we experience in the natural world happen when different cosmic laws engage.  When someone falls to their death, we wish, perhaps, that gravity might not take hold.  But then, what would happen if we could not rely on such certainty.

Perhaps the point here is that we make promises not denying that they get broken, but in spite of them.  We are given, because we have faith in God’s deep promise – that we know through his cross and resurrection – the power to continue building trust, to continuing uttering words, to continue acting, even though our everyday confidence is a little less arrogant, a little more modest, and little more humble.  We might find ourselves in positions where we do break our promises.  But if we love one another, if we maintain our honesty, if we do not flee from the consequences, and if we accept our flaws with generosity, and trust that we can each do better, we may still taste how God continues to have confidence in us.

In the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan makes a promise to the Witch.  But the altar is broken due to the deeper promise, one based on sacrifice, which is known in the world.  By raising it, God reveals his trump card.  We can trust in Jesus.

But what does this obscure code mean?  I suspect it means something like this:  we don’t give up.  We don’t give up on one another.  We don’t give up on our families; we don’t give up on our communities; we don’t give up on our governments or our churches.  In spite of our diminished expectations we find ways to move, to act, with the confidence we have.   Whatever promises are broken shall always be trumped by the promise we believe God has made in us.  And when our words match our actions, it may not merely be silence, but also the expression of our vitality; the simple witness that He Is.

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Good Friday Sermon

“Father. Can you help me?  My mother is dying and I don’t feel anything.    I’m trying to figure out why.  Perhaps she used the rod a few too many times; she wasn’t a very nice person.  But I often get a dulled sense when I think about how her life will end.  I appreciate that she had several jobs, trying to raise us a single mom, but I still think it could have been different.  How should I feel?

“Father.   I used  to be active at that church.  The priest came over for dinner every year.  He was our family friend.  But now I am so ashamed.  I don’t know what to believe.  I’m angry and betrayed.   I didn’t know.  And I thought he was a good priest.  How can I deal with my anger?

“Father.  Tell me this.   Why is it that all those suicide bombers are religious?   I just have such a problem with that.   How can people do such things in the name of faith?” Continue reading “Good Friday Sermon” →

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Easter!

Have you ever had a big goal for yourself? Perhaps its writing a novel, painting your house, or jumping out of an airplane? Or learning to play Satie or Chopin on the piano? Become debt free?

About 17 years ago I decided someday I would train and race a triathlon. I didn’t know when. But someday I would. In 2007 I realized that dream. I finished last in my age group, but I finished. I decided to take that journey again, so I’m training for one in July.

I think that it took a long time because deep down, I didn’t believe I could. I wonder if I was afraid of failing.

This Sunday, like most “low Sundays” is when we read about “Doubting Thomas.” I imagine Mr. Thomas as the reserved, skeptical pessimist who always knows all the facts. He’s the person you turn to when you need an honest opinion, the reasons not to take a desired course of action. He’s practical. He’s smart. But he’s not enthusiastic or idealistic.

But Thomas, though he doubted, was not afraid. There are always good reasons to know all the facts, to be realistic, to understand that actions have consequences. But finally, he stood up and recognized what he needed to.

We face “doubting Thomases” in our own life all the time. We have tons of reasons not to take risks, demand the best, or think big. After all, we’ve got phones to answer, laundry to do and twitters to tweet. Our daily distractions inhibit us from asking ourselves, what orients our life? What is the one grand thing that will give us meaning, that directs us to attempt what seems impossible?

The other evening, one of our parishioners boldly prayed for World Peace. I thought that this was quite audacious. It reminds me of the concept “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (pronounced BEE-hag). In our personal life it might be getting rid of all our debt; it might be cleaning out our house so that it is free of clutter; it might be just being able to sell everything and take that trip to Antarctica. It could be changing the lives of young people in our community.

Or it could mean a change for our church: that our parish seek to become the premier place for innovative, justice oriented Christian worship in the Northeast! Perhaps that we seek to be a place of best practices – not merely seek to survive. It could mean that we strive to have the most powerful, eclectic music program in the region. But it is these sort of goals- those beyond our reach, those that require 10-30 years of work – that can give us a sense of mission and calling.

Now I know you have doubts. Of course you do. Some big goals might be a bit beyond our reach. I’m not going to win a world-series ring, or become an olympic swimmer, or the chief neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins. St. Barts isn’t seeking to replace the Vatican.

But I submit to you, that the resurrection is our time to consider what our big hairy and audacious goal is for St. Barts. I know you will have doubts. Living them out might get hairy. But I will tell you – if we truly want it, it lies before us.

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Sermon for a Vigil to Witness the Lives of Undocumented Workers

The other day a congregational pastor friend and I hosted a dinner for our softball team.  It was our first year as a team and we decided to celebrate with a pig roast.  We decided to roast a whole pig in part for amusement, but also for the more serious reason of shortening the distance from farm to table.

We didn’t hunt the pig down, of course.  The closest thing to hunting we do is going to the grocery store, and I generally leave my spear and hunting cap at home.   Although we did cut the meat directly from the pig, I’m sure we missed something by not slaughtering the pig ourselves.

One of the blessings of our commercial economy, and its sophisticated system of coordination, is that we can get lots of what we want for very little.  We don’t spend a lot on food; we have many objects which make our life comfortable for cheap.  But the system is so complex that all the little agreements and exchanges that bring things into our lives and food onto our table become invisible.   A child knows that milk comes from a store; they are less likely to know that it came from Bessie, who lives on an Amish Farm or in an industrial dairy farm.

All along the way are persons and agreements that are rendered invisible and easy to ignore.   It makes it easy for products to get made, to be sold, and to buy.   We don’t think about how products become the things we buy, perhaps because we’re busy and careless, our lives are fragmented and we don’t have time to see.

Some of us, in the midst of having to pay attention to everything all the time – might even enjoy invisibility.   But invisibility is often the first step to  diminishing the humanity of another person, implicitly indicating they are unnecessary even though our entire system requires the work of people we have not seen and do not know.  They are, in many ways, offering their lives to us.

So we have this vigil.  Let us recognize here, this small gathering, that we don’t know how we’ll transform policy or  the souls of the farmers who employ our friends.  But as we light these candles and bear witness her we are simply saying:  we see you.  You are not invisible to us.   When Jesus is crucified the church demands us to look:  do you see Him?  Look.  Just look.    This is what was required for the sake of your peace.  Let it not be invisible any more.  Let it be seen and known by you.

As the church we are called to see what had once been invisible; a system where we are all willing participants, complicit and cooperative, in violence.  But we do not end there.  Elaine  Scarry writes that the body under torture is voiceless.  The  pain cannot truly be known by another person.  Through the constant imposition of pain, and the tortured becomes separated from his or her own physicality, dissembled and diminished.

And our responsibility as a church is to offer that voice.

We may not get it right.  We may not have the perfect policy answer.  We tread with great humility in the atriums of power that can impose their will for the sake of either profit or justice.   But we can say something.  And through this voice,  we reassemble the body, and it looks a lot like a body with whom we should be familiar.

We may not always know what to say.  Perhaps we just begin with a gesture – pointing to what had once been invisible.  Or may be just say “I am.”  The first step of becoming visible.  “I am.  I exist.  I am how food gets on your table.  I am here.”   This is the voice of the voiceless.

It may give us life as well.  It is as the Father says to us, “I am.  Here.  With You.”  This is what we say this evening.   “I am.  Here.  With You.”  It may not alter the world in its entirety – that, perhaps, is for God.  But we by seeing them, by hearing them; by giving them a voice, we offer a little  space, breathings space, the possibility of salvation.  “I am. Here.” they say.  And as the Father says, as the Son says also, “I see you.  I am here.  With you.”

Amen

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Palm Sunday

This Sunday we celebrate two important stories: the parade of Jesus into Jerusalem, and the passion. The passion isn’t about Jesus’ carnal desires, which are the object of literary speculation, but about his Suffering. The root of the word “passion” is “to suffer.”

Like the dangers of falling in love.

According to scripture Jesus marched in on a donkey. People were shouting and cheering. They thought it would be an end to empire; that miracles would suddenly become commonplace; that the world would be turned upside down. Little did they know how they would be disappointed.

Whether parading for the Yankees, balloons shaped like people, the Irish, or balloons shaped like the Yankees or the Irish, parades lift the spirit. We get to be a little proud. We wear fancy clothes (Or perhaps, as in Brazilian Mardigras, we wear fewer clothes), and we strut and preen or watch those who like to strut and preen. We witness the pride of all those people who like to show off.

It’s one way of celebrating togetherness.

Jesus’ parade, however, is a little different than most parades. First of all, Jesus isn’t exactly royalty. The mount isn’t a clydesdale, its an ass. We’ve all seen parades where people are on trucks; imagine parading on a small thirty year old Raleigh three speed (although I’m sure you can put a few flowers on the basket).

In short, Jesus’ parade seems more like a parade of fools than an imperial parade. Although it doesn’t seem that the crowd quite gets the shift, the notion of triumph is radically trained. It is not merely about status, but a ironic twist upon status. Jesus is busy giving a wave to all his fans thinking, There is more to life than just being on top…. or its the beginning of the end, which is just another beginning.

The second half of the service this Sunday will be the passion: its the central story of the faith. It is not, however, just an intellectual exercise; nor is it meant to be a series of mere facts. The story is about you: being in character in this drama that includes Jesus.

This is one of the reasons we assign people parts in the liturgy. People take the role of Judas, of Peter, of the servants. Although we hope that those who take the role of Judas don’t get too into the character, the hope is that we can understand how at any time we can take such a role. It is the root of making choices: to see how we play in our own personal dramas. And yes, I get to play the part of the HIgh Priest.

I really don’t like it when priests play Jesus.

We change the roles up a bit: but this is a drama where you have a part. You witness the life of Jesus Christ. You shout it out to crucify him, because that is, sadly what you’d probably do. That is the warning for each of us.

The idea that this week is central to humanity’s story is to presume we do not interpret our lives as if they are propositional statements, as if the art that is our lives is reduced to mathematical propositions about the universe.

This week is a time to look at how we live what we believe. incomprehensibly, When people use the word “faith” it seems that we are insistent about knowing exactly the content of one’s “belief system.”

But there are some days, darkly cynical days, that if someone asked me about my “belief system” I want to offer a big guffaw: “Ha! beliefs? I wish I could say that I knew one thing for all time forever.”

What we can say is this: “let me tell you a story.”

You would be one of the characters.

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The Flood, Easter and Anger Managment

In scripture, one idea that returns over and over is that of “covenant.” The myth is like so: God punishes humanity for its sin, sees what he has done, and promises never to punish humanity ever again, and makes a covenant with all life. The symbol of that covenant is the rainbow.

Although I’m sure we all breath a sigh of relief that God has made such a promise to protect all life, I still find the story a little disturbing. I find destroying an entire civilization a bit… a little extreme, perhaps over the top, and – if I may say so – a little psychotic. And then He wants to apologize?

It is as if that we’re being told, “Look God’s peaceful now. He used to be violent. Aren’t we glad he changed?” I am. Although there are times where I wonder if people (or God), really change. Should I be looking over my shoulder to see if God has it in for me? Isn’t God changeless?

So why is it that God gets really angry at his children? He threatens punishment, even though scripture also says he is, most of the time, slow to anger.

Let’s first admit that this anthropomorphic soldier God is useful to a point. It’s not absolutely useful, but it provides a little object for the imagination. We can be thankful that a former soldier God wants to become a peacemaker. I think of the great Indian King Ashoka, who after seeing the rivers of bodies and blood that he was responsible for, gave up all war and built his kingdom for the sake of peace and prosperity for all his people. We don’t need to end the story with God being a man on a chariot. God is fundamentally a peacemaker. It may seem, on our worst days, that God has it in for us. But our trust is that he wants us to thrive.

It might be that we had not learned from the story of Cain and Abel. They had competed for God’s attention. God chose a favorite. And Abel was killed. What does this say? Violence is a consequence of believing that we have to compete for God’s attention.

We don’t. There may be people who prosper more than we do, who seem to have the abundance of God’s blessings; but we are still expected to care for each other. It was a violent society that the scriptures say God wanted to cleanse.

To me our current financial mess (What’s next? Our Pensions?), looks a lot like a world-wide deluge. Might our civilization crumble if credit disappears? Our promises in the future, based upon the immaterial photons of light, the LED screens that represented the great wealth we thought we had, now gone.

The cash we thought was there was a ghost. We built castles with it; we asked it to fund our universities; we even played poker with it and took its money. And now, it has vanished, and the pundits hope that the ghosts will once again return.

But there is one road to salvation – and that is trust. The rainbow that the scriptures tell us that God gave is the Lord saying, “trust me.” If you think trust makes no sense, you would be absolutely right. There are few good reasons to trust: nobody wants to open their books; they won’t take risks to hire; they won’t expand. People do not trust each other’s accounting; they withdraw and withold from each other. They’ve been burned, and they won’t get burned again. And with that the whole economy can come crushing down. They are justified in their suspicion, and with that, the flood begins, and we will all be drowning.

What happened during the flood? A violent world was destroyed, and replaced with a new differentiation of animals, a new tribal system that brought peace and order.

The scriptures, however, give some clues as to what this might mean. In Peter “a few, that is eight persons, were saved through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you.” We have all been touched by the flood, but through this, we are brought up and out and another stage of peace will come before us.

We are reminded that trusting one another means we are responsible for each other; that we invest in each other; that we empower one another. And it makes little sense – our instinct is to flee, to demand our own needs get satisfied first, to wait for others to save us.

There is a brighter future on the horizon, that will come out of being baptized in the current disaster. We might not see it now. but as the deluge begins, it is our trust in each other, that web of relationships that God has invited us into, that will lift us up and sustain us in these coming days. Peter indicates that even the righteous, the ark itself, was baptized by the flood. But this was just a prelude for what we will see.

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Being a Good Ancestor

I was thinking about the phrase Samantha Power used in a commencement speech: “Be a good ancestor.” This phrase is wonderfully suggestive. It implies that we have some agency, some responsibility, an ability to make considered, deliberate choices – in spite of our normal familiar, habitual acts – that can change the world.

What we call the church’s traditions are our attempts to be good ancestors. We want people to seek peace; to break bread with our neighbors; to see through other people’s eyes. Of course, sometimes our tribal patterns run counter to our traditions. And every religion has several traditions at work, some of them contradictory.

Granted, I don’t think there are always clear answers to what makes being a “good ancestor.” Often, I think that the best we can hope for is that good decisions for us now will lay the foundation for future generations. As we are often broken, we make mistakes, and have everyday failures, being a “good ancestor” doesn’t mean being a perfect ancestor. It may just mean what Jesus implied throughout his ministry: don’t be deceptive in your practices; don’t worry so much about the future; recognize that God’s love does not require lifestyles that are costly for our relationships or for the planet. The love that God has imbued within creation is enough for us to live at peace with one another.

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Indoctrination

Most of the time, when people think of what churches do, they think “indoctrination.” It makes sense. Churches have schools, offer education and preach a particular story. I don’t think it is the primary role of the church, but it is one role that churches have had.

And indoctrination is not all bad: some people do need to be reminded that they should do unto others good things. It’s a shortcut to thinking – a way of training one’s instincts for the good.

I want to suggest, however, that churches are primarily about something different: churches do relationships. (They also enchant the world, but that’s another essay).

“Relationship” happens before rules. Connecting happens before doctrine. It is from experiencing relationships that the church has had with all those people who have been in the church (and outside), that the church created doctrine. Sometimes its rules don’t make much sense, but they made sense at some time.

Doctrine is not the end point of the faithful person. It is not our purpose. Our purpose is more about connecting people with each other – and through those relationships we begin to see what God looks like. Our first encounter with God is usually through the encounter of other persons. Like our children; or our parents; or our friends and spouses. And sometimes our enemies.

In England they recently agreed to consecrate women bishops. It’s a remarkable change for Catholic Christianity – one that England’s sister churches throughout the globe have already experienced. And the reason for the change is that the church’s experience and relationshp with women has changed. The challenge still continues: how do we maintain relationships with people who think differently about the consecration of women? Personally, I find that there is even a question about the merits of women’s ordination itself to be a bit strange, but there are many world views, of which I’m not familiar that have their own internal logic.

From our relationships that we begin to understand the church’s mission. How do we, as a community, become a place for healing, joy, peace and fortitude? We need to know where people are hurting; where they have conflict; and when they are weak. I suggest that this includes most of us at some point.

I imagine that in Westchester people have different sorts of anxieties. Money is a pretty central; raising children in the midst of affluence and unregulated desire; environmental challenges. Many families are trying to sort through the immense changes that the culture is experiencing. How do we become the place that serves them?

This is part of a greater strategy to discern our mission. Recently I asked someone who had been a member of the church for about 40 years what he thought the mission was. He had just suggested closing the church down. And he couldn’t give me an answer. I don’t think this is unusual.

I do think, however, that there is a purpose and a reason for our community: but discerning it comes from maintaining and fostering connections with each other. From those connections we can begin to formulate the way this church can be a place of strength and love for any person who walks through our doors.

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