Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Wealth, power and status do not belong in the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ve said this before and tonight’s Gospel is another example of this, particularly emphasizing status. Yet quite frankly, other than in a remembering to check your privilege sense, none of us here this evening have all that much status. And I expect that not many of us desire to seek it, though only God knows what’s in a person’s heart, so I’m not going to get into that. What I’m going to get into, what stood out to me in the Gospel as I read it this time, is what Jesus had to say about repayment or reward.

 

Before we get to what Jesus said, I want to make clear what Jesus did not say. “You’ll get your reward in heaven” is a concept that has been wielded as a weapon of religious abuse. Jesus never said, “Do nothing to defend yourself or better your situation because you will get your reward in heaven.” He never said, “God wants you to suffer hear on earth so you earn your reward in heaven” Nor did he say, “Love your neighbor instead of yourself.”

That last one reminds me of the saying, “there’s no such thing as altruism” which is usually followed by an example of how there is some selfish motivation behind helping anyone. So what? I mean, Jesus is not saying don’t be selfish in tonight’s Gospel. He’s actually suggesting a very selfish motivation. The question here isn’t do you want to be rewarded, the questions is what kind of a reward do you want to get? Not when do you want your reward, but rather do you want an earthly reward or a heavenly one?

Now I confess in my personal piety, I’ve fooled myself into thinking that I’ve rejected reward and punishment as motivations.  I must admit I’ve been rather self-righteous about it at times. What I’ve confused with reward and punishment in general, is the specific wielding of promises of Heaven and threats of Hell as ways to control people, or as a very twisted moral compass. There are moral arguments in the Bible, the Golden Rule is a moral argument for example, one rooted in empathy. “Do it or God will punish you” is not a moral argument, though.

So in rejecting Heaven and Hell as motivations (which in my case motivated me in the wrong direction, the more I worried about the afterlife, the worse my behavior was) I instead embraced “We love because God loved us first.” I sought out connecting to God’s love for me in prayer and meditation and reflection on the Gospels. This led to my actually falling in love with Christ. And while I don’t think I ever saw that as altruistic, I think I was blind to loving and being loved as a reward in and of itself.

Perhaps this is what Jesus was getting at when he said his yoke was easy and his burden light, despite the suffering that is inevitable in leading a Christian life; inevitable, by the way, not demanded. The first commandment love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength is its own reward.

Now I have said, but really had no right to say, that living out this love will inevitably lead to loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There is still effort and work to do to get there and so we need a second commandment to summarize the law. What I can say is that having felt the love of God, and spending time with that, actively seeing yourself through God’s eyes, it is much easier to see others as God sees them. We can transfer the feeling onto others. We cannot see into their hearts, but we can see the image of God in us all; even in those who cannot repay us for inviting them to our banquet, cannot repay us for our kindness, who in fact may be incapable of loving us back. 

It is true that Jesus refers to a future reward for this behavior, at the time of the resurrection, but I believe that the being blessed, the actual righteousness (as opposed to self-righteousness) is a present reward; the reward of loving and being loved by God. And certainly I look forward to the beatific vision, of seeing God “face to face” so to speak. But why deny yourself the reward of living in God’s love, of having a love affair with God here now as much as possible? For it is possible. Like any relationship it takes work. Prayer and meditation and reflection on the Gospels is work, but the rewards are great. And while they happen on earth, they are not earthly rewards.

We can make all the earthly changes we want, but without love, without God, as Paul has told us, it is empty and just a lot of noise.  Soon we will be participating in an enactment of the Heavenly Banquet. We will be feasting on God’s own self. We will be participating as the body of Christ. This all came about from God loving us so much that God became us, so that we are not just in the image of God, but God’s own flesh and blood. This is here now, both earthly and heavenly.

• Sirach 10:12-18 or Proverbs 25:6-7 and Psalm 112  • 
• Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16  • 
• Luke 14:1, 7-14

Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” said the Lord. And don’t we store up treasures on earth to the point that we’re making the earth inhabitable for ourselves. Tomorrow all our lives will be demanded of us. But that does not mean we shouldn’t eat drink and be merry, just not in the way we usually think of eating drinking and being merry.

Outside the context of the Bible, I’ve heard “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” used to mean a couple things: One is basically party like there’s no tomorrow, another is let’s celebrate now, while we have a respite before facing something rather gloomy. I’m not advocating it in either of those ways. I believe both of those ways betray a specifically American outlook on consumption. Consume with abandon, and consume to make ourselves feel better.

We consume to an alarming degree here in the U.S.  Some time ago, it was calculated that if the rest of the world consumed at the level we do here, it would take the resources of 5 and a half earths to fulfil the demand. We are using a criminal amount of our fair share of God’s bounty. I rather imagine this statistic is even higher now.

George Romero’s second “living dead movie,” Dawn of the Dead, is deliberate social commentary on consumerism. Most of the film takes place in a shopping mall. The living dead, who are commonly referred to as zombies in later films of this type, hover around a mall due to -as one character muses- “some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

The small band of folks who are not dead manage to hold up in the mall, thinking initially that it’s a great place to hold out in. All the mod cons are available to them, and they set up house. But soon the emptiness of an existence of pure consuming begins to dawn on our protagonists. One says, “I'm afraid. You're hypnotized by this place. All of you! You don't see that it's not a sanctuary, it's a prison!”

This movie came out in 1978, when Carter was president. This president became hated by many the next year, because he warned us that we were overconsuming and rationed gasoline. There was such a strong reaction against slowing our consumption that people flocked to Reagan’s unsustainable economic theories. And the mad consumption continued.

And one of the most frightening things about consumerism is how easily it absorbs any resistance to it. A while back I started hearing of a movement to simplify. Clearly some folks were reacting to our overconsumption and like the folks in the movie, saw it for the prison it is. Shortly after the people who were promoting this lifestyle got public attention, a magazine showed up in the supermarkets, called “Simplify.” The magazine was full of things you could BUY in order to simply your life. It’s insidious!

So, let us ask ourselves, where are we a little mad in our consumption? What are the earthly treasures we store? My weakness is books, yours of course may be entirely different, but let’s use books as an example. At the community we have 16 floor to ceiling bookcases full of books, plus a few smaller bookcases and boxes of books in the closet and down in the storage locker. We’re actually going to have library hours soon. And while I do believe books are good things and valuable, I know also that I horde them.

Now a great many of these books are religious books and I genuinely believe they help me to store treasure in heaven; they help me know and love Jesus better. And certainly while I need to cut down on my book consumption, I wouldn’t eliminate books entirely. The question is where is my treasure? In the books themselves, or in the knowledge they bring? Or even in the joy they bring? I’ve seen how joy can be contagious. When I’m sharing with joy about a story I read or say, a horror movie I watched, I’ve seen others find joy in my joy.

Which brings me back to enjoyment of earthly things and how that can be different than storing up treasures on earth. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” Which is a combination of two phrases in Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes is a rather gloomy cynical book, as we heard tonight. The first is the one that mentions being merry, “Therefore I praised joy, because there is nothing better for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful; this will accompany them in their toil through the limited days of life God gives them under the sun.”

You see the author of Ecclesiastes sees the emptiness in toil and labor for the production of abundance, what the rich man in Jesus’ story fails to see. The rich man sees eating, drinking and being merry as something to be done after abundance has been achieved. The author of Ecclesiastes sees it as taking joy in things. Joy in fact that carries over into the labor itself. This is a joy independent of results. Results are transitory, they do not last.

Paul in First Corinthians quotes the other saying from Ecclesiastes, the one without merry in it. He quotes it while talking to people who are doubting the resurrection of the dead. “If the dead are not raised,” Paul says (and here he quotes) “‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” The author of Ecclesiastes asserts that there is no joy in the land of the dead. Paul insists there is joy that abides, because Christ has proved the resurrection of the dead.

I personally cannot doubt the resurrection because Christ is always present for me in the breaking of the bread. Though I must admit, that assurance of the resurrection doesn’t always bring me joy, for we are now still toiling through the limited days of life God gives us under the sun. And as I’ve put forth rather strongly tonight, the world is a mess, and we keep making it worse. But I will tell you this, without joy we are our toil is vanity.

I’ve said before that I believe Hope is a virtue because it does not come easily. As Christians, we attach Hope to the implications of the resurrection. That Hope also includes a belief in the promised coming of the kingdom here on earth. And we should rejoice in that. But more than that, I believe in these dark times of trouble and despair, we have a responsibility to lift each other up. We are the body of Christ here now under the sun. In that way the resurrection is here now and present.  Let’s find our joy in each others company. Soon we will eat and drink God’s very self, let’s be merry doing so.

 The Texts:

• Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23 and Psalm 49:1-12  • 
• Colossians 3:1-11  • 
• Luke 12:13-21

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.

Reading: Luke 7:36-8:3

It’s grateful women Sunday!

The little bit of text that follows the story was often missing in the lectionaries previously, but it is not an unrelated passage. There was an entourage of Women who had been forgiven and cured by Jesus who took care of his needs on his journey. And while Jesus’ treatment of women is significant, I believe this story has more universal implications as well; perhaps surprising implications about the correlation of sin and love.

And yes, the women in these stories are all serving Jesus and one could read this as preserving the sexist status quo, but that the women are mentioned at all is significant. And in another version of this story, Jesus made sure this woman would be mentioned, as they often aren’t. Women are part of Jesus’ story and he wanted it that way.  

But before we get too caught up in the gender of the sinner in this story, let’s look at what Jesus is really trying to teach the Pharisee. It’s all too easy, especially knowing all Jesus says about the Pharisees in Matthew, to read this exchange as a reprimand. But on closer examination, it looks to me like Jesus is genuinely taking advantage of a teaching moment.

Notice that Jesus basically asks permission to speak in the first place. And perhaps all the things Jesus points out that Simon didn’t do, wasn’t what he expected Simon to do but were mentioned to illustrate all the above and beyond things the woman was doing. And while Jesus may be responding to what Simon is thinking, Simon did not say it aloud. He did not publically challenge Jesus; Simon was internally trying to discern if Jesus was really a prophet.

And so Jesus says what William James would prove through the “science of psychology” centuries later, that those who have fallen far, those who God has lifted from the mud pits of their lives, those who have had a crisis of faith, who have been lost and found again, their love and devotion reaches heights as high as how deep the depths are that they sunk to.  

What are the depths this woman sunk to? One of those “paraphrase” translations actually calls the sinful woman the “town harlot.” The assumption that her sin is sexual infuriated me, because there’s nothing in the text to suggest this, it’s pure misogyny and sexism. What else is a woman for right? To be absolutely sure there was nothing in the text, I even went to the original Greek. The word used for sin here implies sin out of one’s own agency, presumably to indicate it wasn’t biology (the sin of having your period) or parental (remember the debate about the blind man?)

But of course all of our choices are influenced if not determined by our circumstances. Yes, we have agency, but it’s limited. Circumstances matter to God. The Bible is full of stories of people doing sinful things in order to accomplish something that’s in the end God’s will; Rebekah tricking Jacob into blessing Isaac for example. In Matthew Jesus’ genealogy lists three women who transgressed in the name of the Lord, in many of these cases the woman’s very survival was at stake. In Biblical times a woman literally could not survive unless she was attached to a man, or unless she survived by unacceptable means. If even in our enlightened and “post-feminist” world women are consistently treated as less than people, how much more so was it the case in first century patriarchal Palestine?

We don’t know the specific circumstances of this sinful woman. We don’t know what she’s done. Jesus knows but in our story he never asks her to confess or repudiate what she’s done. He implies she’s already been forgiven, but He forgives her within the story. That’s a bit puzzling, but perhaps Jesus can tell I the love she’s displaying that her faith in Jesus’ forgiveness has already forgiven her. Jesus sees that she’s showing great love. In showing great love she is proving her repentance.

Because whatever our circumstances, however our choices are limited, however we justify our sins to ourselves, eventually you can reach a point where you can’t live with yourself, and any hope that you’re forgivable, even a small tiny hope that God can help you change can well up previously unimaginable love and gratitude.

Can you imagine yourself kissing Jesus feet, washing them with your tears, caressing them with your hair, down on the ground, behind Him? Can you imagine yourself abandoning yourself to such devotion? I certainly can, and I know many others who can as well. 

Maybe you’re actually lucky if you can’t imagine yourself in that position. Perhaps you haven’t been so lost, so devoid of hope that groveling at Jesus’ feet seems like a step up. I certainly would not wish the kind of life that implies on anyone. 

But for those of us who have lost to that degree and been found, who have been forgiven as much as the woman we read about tonight. We consider ourselves to be lucky; lucky to be newly alive, lucky to not have burned down quite everything in ourselves, lucky to be able to tend to Jesus with whatever resources we have left.

Or maybe, just maybe, the teaching moment opened Simon’s heart. We aren’t told how he responds. Maybe knowing that such love and devotion is possible, that such forgiveness is possible, moved him to empathy for the sinful woman. Maybe you don’t have to go to the depths to find that kind of love and devotion to Jesus. Maybe just witnessing it and opening your heart to it can get you on your knees weeping at Jesus feet, knowing the magnitude of what he’s done can mean for others.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t reconcile us all to God, he certainly did. None of us are free from sin. The plain truth is, though, that some of us sin more than others. And as far down as I have been, I can still find myself looking at others and wanting to cast the first stone. There’s a frighteningly remarkable human ability to have that kind of amnesia. And so, it’s not just for the sake of women this story needs to be told – though it does need to be told for that reason as well. It’s to remind those of us who have been her and those of us who can empathize with her –not pity her, mind you empathize with– to remind us of why we should be grateful to kiss Jesus’ feet.      

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Do not let your hearts be troubled. This is not an easy saying. My heart has been very troubled lately, some of it personal, some of it because of the Justice work I’ve been called to. Work I was called to with the same conviction that Paul was called to Macedonia. Justice work alone, however, will at best give peace the way the world does, and often it gives no peace at all. For our hearts to not be troubled, we need the peace that Christ gives, and that peace comes from loving Him as He has loved us.

The Holy Spirit sent to us in Christ’s name, we are told, will teach us, and instruct us in this love. This love will result in Christ and the Father dwelling within us – making a home within us.

There’s a lot about home in our readings today. Lydia, whose heart was opened by God, offers her home to Paul, fulfilling his vision. This reminds me of the old cliché, home is where the heart is. Like many if not all clichés, it doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Many people don’t have a home. In some cases this is literal. Notice that we don’t say houseless people, we say homeless people. In some cases, people have places to live, but that place only crushes their heart.

One of my favorite songs by Richard and Linda Thompson, who had recently converted to Sufism, speaks to this. From the refrain: “The world's no place when you're on your own. A heart needs a home.”

And so we come to one of those mystical feedback loops. For our hearts to not be troubled we need to make a home for out heart in Christ, who will make our heart his home in return.

I don’t think this can be done without deep prayer and meditation; the kind of deep prayer and meditation that makes us fertile ground for the Holy Spirit’s teachings. And sometimes these teachings come in the form of revelation. Revelations from God didn’t cease when the last book of the Bible was written.

No doubt you’ve heard that the Bible is difficult to fully understand without some knowledge of the historical/cultural context in which it was written. How much more so is it difficult to understand a vision given to a particular person in a particular place in that far away time and place and way of being?

I can tell you that the imagery of my visions was no entirely familiar to me; it was none the less particular to me. Visions are difficult enough to grasp even if you’re the person who had them.

And so in turning to Revelations, can only tell you what the imagery here sparks within my own self, fully admitting there’s no way to tell what it might have meant to John.

What stand out to me from our Revelations passage today is that there will be no Temple in the New Jerusalem, because the Temple is God. God will dwell in the New Jerusalem. And as Christ in our Gospel tells us God will dwell in us, it reminds me that our body is a temple.

And our bodies become temples in particular during the Eucharist. By literally consuming Christ’s body and blood in a reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice. And though Jesus told us we are not made clean or unclean by what we eat, but rather by what is in our hearts, I believe he meant we are not made clean or unclean by what we take into our mouths from the world. What we take into our mouths at the Eucharist is him.

One of my favorite prayers is the prayer of humble access. In the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the following phrase was removed: “that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood” I miss that line. And while I understand the objection to the notion that our bodies are sinful in and of themselves, that’s not how I interpret this line. Sin is a failure to love. And the total lack of love and compassion in the air these days is toxic, it poisons our bodies and they need to be cleansed by Christ’s love. We can’t get the love we need from this world, we can only get it from God. We need to love Christ and open ourselves to the transformation His love brings.

I also encourage you to go into it without a preconception of what that transformation will be. Paul went to Macedonia looking for a man and he found a woman. In Justice work, many have found that in perusing the Justice they feel most strongly in their hearts about, they find the work they need to do addresses and underlying cause or unexpected issue they feel they can address. But whether keeping Christ’s words looks like Justice work to you, or the teaching of the Spirit bring you to some other calling, acting out of the love of Christ is something this world will resist, that is certain.

God opened Lydia’s heart. I think sometimes when our hearts are troubled; we think that it’s all on us to open our hearts back up. I know many people who think they somehow have to have their spiritual sh*t together in order to even approach God. But that’s impossible since we can’t get it together without God.  I encourage you to not simply go through another Eucharist tonight, but to approach it with your heart, in whatever state your heart is in. Troubled or not, Christ is where your heart will find its home. 

• First reading
  • Acts 16:9-15
• Second reading
  • Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
• Gospel
  • John 14:23-29