Earth Day

RCL Year B, 3 Easter

We’re in the great 50 days of Easter, a whole season where Sunday after Sunday we hear story after story of Jesus resurrected, Jesus alive and appearing to his amazed disciples. Every one of the stories is just about the same as every other one: there the disciples are, doing their own thing, preoccupied, and suddenly, boom, there’s Jesus, who’s just walked through a locked door or otherwise shown up where he shouldn’t be. And the disciples are scared, and Jesus tells them not to be, and then he does something to prove he is who they think he is, truly there in the flesh. And then he tells them to spread the word, and then he goes away.

Easter is one long season of Jesus coming and going, until the ascension 40 days later when Jesus at last leaves his bodily form behind for good. Over and over again he keeps checking in, making sure his followers have gotten the point and gotten the news, and every time telling them to go and tell it to others – and then, his time up, he leaves, and his followers are left behind. And this time, unlike they did when they were with Jesus before his death, the disciples really do seem to get the point. And they do what he tells them to – they spread the word, they themselves preach and teach and heal just like he did, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and the community of faith begins to grow like wildfire.

Jesus offers them the gift: resurrection. Life instead of death. And then he says, here’s what I want you to do with it: make sure everybody knows about it. Give my life to everyone.

We’re going to be exploring the Christian idea of stewardship in this season of comings and goings. Stewardship is a churchy word that sometimes just means ‘pledge.’ But I’m using it in the fuller sense of the word: being stewards, being caretakers and servants, of all that God gives us. As one writer puts it, ‘Stewardship is… ALL that we do, with ALL that we have, ALL the time. Stewardship is discipleship; it is a complete reorientation of our lives toward God, who calls us through Jesus Christ.  Stewardship is… everything I do after I say, “I believe.”’ That’s a pretty broad understanding of stewardship. But it acknowledges first and foremost that all that we have is not really ours. It’s God’s. Our selves, our souls and bodies, our resources, our world, all belong to God first. We are simply to take care of them – and let the great goodness and love of God shine out through all of them.

It’s an Easter idea. The disciples after the resurrection were given astoundingly good news. When everything went wrong for them, suddenly, and repeatedly, they were shown that everything was better than they could even imagine – where they expected death, there was life. It was a gift that Jesus wanted them to share with others. They were stewards of the resurrection, of life abundant – a pretty sacred charge. In the Acts reading today, Peter and John, two of Jesus’ dearest disciples, heal a man lame from birth, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. The man walks and everyone stares, and Peter teaches all who will listen that the God of life has done this. And thousands of them believe. Peter and John are good stewards of the resurrection life they have been given; when they share the gift, God can heal and open hearts.

We’re beginning our Easter theme of stewardship today with Earth Day, a day when we are encouraged to stop and consider our use of and care for the earth and the environment. 40-some years ago a US senator named Gaylord Nelson organized a national teach-in on April 22 about what was happening to the environment, and it brought together lots of different causes and concerns into what became the environmental movement. Right away religious people realized that this was something we needed to be part of. For Christians and Jews especially, the story of creation, of God giving humanity the care of everything that God had made, contrasted sharply with the pollution of water and ai[...]

RCL Year B, Easter Day

 

So off went the women with this marvelous message: Jesus is risen from the dead, he’s going ahead of you, you will see him! And they told no one, for they were afraid. And that’s the end of Mark’s gospel, the shortest, possibly the oldest, of the four gospels. There’s the empty tomb, but there’s no Jesus. And nothing further is said to explain what happens next.

It’s such an odd ending that people later tried to add different endings to it, to clean it up and make it sound better. You’ll find them if you look in your Bible, two different endings tacked on to the end of the gospel of Mark. The endings try to finish the story a little better – to bring Jesus in for a resurrection appearance, for one thing. And also to get the disciples back on board to go out and preach the good news, giving them another shot at being friends and disciples after completely deserting Jesus at the cross. But that’s not how the original reads. The gospel of Mark begins 16 chapters earlier with the line: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ And then it ends 16 chapters later with, ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’

Well, of course, someone must have said something.  Someone heard it from someone and wrote it down and that’s why we have it to read aloud today. Something like resurrection doesn’t stay secret very well. But even so, Mark the gospel writer leaves the ending open in his story. He does it on purpose: his gospel, the 16 chapter-long book, is the beginning of the good news about Jesus. But everyone in that beginning part fails to share the good news. So now it’s up to us in chapter 17, those who read or hear the gospel, to do something ourselves. The story goes on.

That’s not how we usually approach scripture texts, of course. There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘I love to tell the story…the old, old story of Jesus and his love.’ It’s a lovely old hymn with a wonderful old sentiment. And Easter and all of the events that lead up to it are an old, old story, from 2000-plus years ago, a different culture and a different place. We peer back through the mists of time, we read these ancient documents, and there’s this story of once upon a time, this gospel about someone named Jesus. Between him and us there are all these years of tradition and ritual and hymnody, not to mention a sea change in culture and technology and worldview. When we hear the story, it’s easy to see it as past: that was then, this is now. The story was written, the story ended, and now we can decide from a safe distance whether we believe it or not, and what difference it makes to us anyway.

But if the story isn’t really finished yet – if there’s still something to be done, some imperative to be followed – well, then, that makes it quite different for us who sit here listening. Then the old, old story isn’t old at all – we’re in it.

In my last parish in New York, we had a lively Sunday School teacher named Roz Keller, who was always finding inventive ways to engage her kids with the Bible stories. The fruits of her class’ labor were often posted in the hallways of the Parish House for all to see – letters written to Mary on the birth of Jesus, newspaper front-page headlines about Jesus’ miracles. One year she had the kids make posters about the resurrection. One of them caught everyone’s eye, posted there above the drinking fountain. It was by 4th grader Emma Thompson. ‘Goodbye Jesus,’ it read in large capital letters. There was a drawing of a coffin beneath that. But then at the bottom of the poster, written in multicolored markers, were these words: ‘Oh, wait! There He is across the street!’

I have a copy of this poster up in my office by my desk, because it reminds me of the real truth of the story: Jesus is alive and running around right now, right across the street. The good news is as fresh and vibrant as that. It’s not just something curious that was reported many years ago in a culture far,[...]

RCL Year B, 5 Lent

All season long, we’ve been talking about covenant. Our scriptures tell us of our relationship with God, seen through the long history of covenants between God and us. God created us good in the beginning, but we went the other way instead. God despaired of our improving ourselves, so God promised through Noah to love us anyway. Then God started a people with Abraham, a people to be a blessing to all humanity and a reminder of how to live. God made the terms clearer through Moses, giving a law that showed this people how to live. But the people rebelled against this way, and hurt each other. And things got much, much worse.

So today, God gives up. This covenant is broken, says the prophet Jeremiah in today’s first reading.  The people have never been able to keep their side of the agreement. In a human relationship, this would be the part where one person walks away from the other, saying, you’re never going to change. I can’t do this any more.

But that’s not what God says. God says, you’re never going to change. So I’ll do it for you. Never mind about all that that happened. We’ll start over again now.

In the Lenten adult ed series we spent a session talking about forgiveness and reconciliation. I brought in some ideas from a secular book on forgiveness, one by Fred Luskin of Stanford called Forgive for Good. The book makes the point that forgiveness is something we can choose to do or not, but that when we do forgive, we’re able to let go of the hurt and victim status and be happier again. To explain further, Luskin clarifies what forgiveness is not: It is not condoning hurtful actions and saying that they’re ok. It is not about repairing relationship with the offender. It does not set aside seeking justice for the harm done. And it does not mean that we forget what happened. This takes away a lot of the baggage we have around forgiveness. Maybe we think we should forgive right away but we just can’t? well, Luskin points out, forgiveness is a process and it takes time. Or perhaps we don’t want to forgive because that will tell the person who hurt us that it’s ok to do that. Well, as Luskin says, we may never reconcile with the person or talk to them at all – forgiveness is just about what we do in our own hearts. Maybe we don’t want to forgive because we don’t want this to happen to us again – we don’t want to forget. But Luskin says, forgiveness is not the same as forgetting. Every wound leaves a scar, after all, even once it’s healed. Forgiveness is good for us to do for us – whether we ever communicate it to the other person, whether the relationship is reconciled and healed, is a different matter altogether from our own choosing to forgive and release the pain in our own selves.

It’s a very sane book, and I think it does help us human beings along a great deal in our attempts at forgiveness. But that carefully limited sphere Luskin defines as forgiveness is quite different from what Jeremiah tells us God has done for us. ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts…they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.’ My people can’t keep the covenant I keep trying to have with them. So I’ll do their part for them, because I forgive them and I’ve forgotten all of that. In this marriage, even though one partner is utterly unable to keep the marriage vows and respond with any kind of care and consideration for the other, the other partner will do the whole work of the marriage, and will forgive and forget everything the unfaithful spouse does to them. Never mind, this spouse will say. I love you anyway. What you did doesn’t matter – I’ve already forgotten it. Nothing further will come of it, and our relationship is healed again. Let’s move on.

Last week I pointed out that sometimes our understanding of God’s deal with us is so skewed that it looks like an abusive marriage: God loves us[...]

RCL Year B, 4 Lent

Things in the world of covenant relationship have gotten a little darker with today’s reading. You could say Genesis is a long love story between God and God’s people – not all of it rosy, of course, but overall it’s about God’s desire and love for us: our creation, the rainbow promise of Noah, the long friendship with Abraham and his descendants, the blessing-out-of-suffering that is the theme of the Joseph stories. Exodus continues this story of love, with God freeing his people from the slavery in Egypt. But if all of that’s the love story and the happy honeymoon, then the book of Numbers is the account of the marital troubles. It’s one long wandering in the desert from start to finish, and everyone behaves pretty badly with each other all along the way. All is not well in the relationship between God and God’s people. So now we get more of a picture of what happens when things go wrong with the covenant relationship.

Today’s story begins with the Israelites grumbling.  The king of Edom has prohibited them from going through his land on their way into Canaan, so they must go the long way around. They’re so close to the Promised Land, and yet still so far. They’ve survived for 40 years on manna and a few quail, but now the prospect of better, more succulent food in Canaan makes them sick of what they’ve got. They’ve had numerous rebellions against God already, including one over water (but Moses struck the rock and it gushed out), one about clericalism (the ones arguing against having priests were destroyed – keep that in mind, all of you), one about who the real God is (remember the golden calf story?) and one over whether they would ever enter the Promised Land at all. Moses has to keep God from wiping them all out over that one – but not before God swears that none of the generation who came out of Egypt will make it into the Promised Land, only those born along the way in the wilderness. If that’s true, some of those who started in Egypt and are still on the trip must be nearing their time, since the journey to Canaan seems to be coming to an end.

And indeed, this time God responds to the people’s complaints and lack of trust by sending poisonous snakes to bite them all. Those bitten by the snakes die. The people immediately repent of their lack of trust, of God and of Moses, and beg Moses for help. When Moses prays and intercedes for the people, God gives the cure – look at the image of the serpent and live. And they do. But God doesn’t take away the snakes.

So we haven’t really talked yet about this side of God. God did something like this in the days of Noah, but then with the rainbow he promised never to destroy the earth again. Up until Moses going up Mount Sinai and bringing back the Law, God has been quite merciful, except with Israel’s enemies. But the difference is that now God’s people are themselves bound by the covenant. The first covenants with Noah and with Abraham were really one-way promises, God promising to forebear with humanity’s foibles and to multiply the people of Israel. But the covenant made with Israel through Moses demands a response from Israel, that they would follow the commandments, love and trust and honor God, and care for each other in peace. Every time they rise up and revolt, refusing to believe God’s promise of freedom and abundance in the land to come, refusing to trust God and Moses’ leadership, God responds with anger. God’s anger comes out in an explosion of some kind, there’s repentance on the part of the people and relenting on the part of God, and they move on again. But the relationship is never entirely healed – Moses and Aaron and all the people who came out of Egypt with them don’t get to see the Promised Land, and all that history of anger and punishment becomes a part of the story, a scar that doesn’t go away.

The biggest scar of all, however, is on our theology. The story of God and Israel through their long history together is told as one of caus[...]

RCL Year B, 3 Lent

 

I started off my Lenten preaching two weeks ago talking about covenant, and the relationship we have with God and with each other. Our Old Testament texts through Lent all deal with covenant, from Noah to Abraham, Moses and on from there. It’s a great opportunity for talking about relationship, a chance for us in this season to explore together what it means to be in relationship with God.

So far we’ve heard God’s side of the relationship. With the promise made to Noah after the flood, God pledged to love us no matter what, to be faithful to us even despite our unfaithfulness back. It’s an awesome gift of truly unconditional love, love that sees us clearly and truthfully and yet embraces us all the same. It’s hard for many of us to take that kind of love in. Last week the reading was about God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, that they would be the ancestors of a great nation and that God would be the God of all those people, the people Israel. It is again an unconditional covenant, not requiring anything in return from the people.

Today, however, we hear a further refining of the covenant, if you will. Now the covenant is being made with Israel through Moses, and our response is required. The Exodus reading today is about what is expected of us in this covenant relationship, in the Ten Commandments. We have all of us heard these commandments before, in church and out of it – there are those who want to post them in state capitols, and consider them to be so universal that all people should understand the laws they give. They do give the essence of the Law, the Torah, but the commandments are not in themselves a legal code or a set of rules. Instead, they set forth the terms of the relationship between God and God’s people, beginning with and focusing on our understanding of who God is, and ending with the basic requirements for functioning human society.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: how many of you memorized the Ten Commandments? How many of you could recite them right now? It might be a little tricky – and not just because your memory is failing. It’s like trying to name the 12 apostles – it’s hard to do, because the names of the apostles vary in the different gospels that list them. The Ten Commandments are named in a section of 20 verses of Exodus – but pinpointing exactly how those 20 verses break down into 10 commandments is a little vague. Jews see it one way, Catholics & Lutherans see it another way, the rest of us see it still a third way. The first commandment might be, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ Or it might be that plus ‘you shall have no other gods before me.’ The second commandment might be, ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol.’ Or that might be part of the first commandment. The last commandment might be, ‘You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.’ Or that might be two commandments, the first, ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s house’; and the second, ‘or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.’ So this set of commandments that Jews & Christians see as common to all of us, well, they’re not quite as universally agreed upon as we thought. It’s amazing that any ecumenical dialogue ever happens, when you think about it. There are so many things large and small to disagree over.

I don’t know if there’s much point to be made out of that, but it does perhaps gesture toward how we have a tendency to take scripture and turn it into our personal set of rules. You could in a very broad way read the Ten Commandments as rules to live by, mostly in reference to what not to do. Thou shalt…thou shalt not. But when you look at them more closely, that interpretation breaks down. The Jewish tradition has the first commandment as simply, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery. That’s not a commandment at all: it’s a statement from God of his identity and history with his pe[...]

RCL Year B, 1 Lent

Well, Lent has begun. It is a season of renewal and penitence, a season when we are encouraged to look more closely at our lives, to readdress our balance of time and energy, to focus more intently on our relationship to God and to each other. Often we use Lent as a time for each of us individually to work on our connection with God, but historically it is meant as a season for the whole community of the church. In the ‘invitation to Lent’ in the Ash Wednesday service we hear that in this season those preparing for baptism, for initiation into the community, intensified their readiness for baptism at Easter. And in this season those who had been ‘separated from the community because of notorious sins’ – whose actions had hurt the community, and thus they had been excommunicated for a time – were welcomed back into the body of Christ. In other words, Lent is a time for welcoming and welcoming back, growing and deepening our bonds with one another and with God.

On Ash Wednesday I encouraged you to look at this season as a time to work on relationship. Whatever disciplines you’re taking on or things you’re giving up, my suggestion is that you let the focus be on clearing the space and time to be in real loving relationship with other people – those in your own home and those you don’t know – and with God. Too often we can focus on weight loss or Bible reading or limiting our time on Facebook as if those are ends in themselves, Lent just another chance for self-improvement and self-focus. Instead, I encourage you to clear away what truly gets in the way of relationship and love, to focus your intention on doing what builds and grows love.

And luckily, one way of getting that message is to be attentive to the Bible readings we’re hearing in church. In our readings throughout this season we get to hear a lot about God’s love for us, especially in the form of covenants God makes with God’s people. A covenant is an agreement – like a contract but more than a contract. It is an establishing of relationship and the terms of that relationship. It’s a word and a concept used pretty heavily in scripture, particularly in the Hebrew scriptures: the people of Israel are people of the covenant, in a binding relationship with God based on commitment one to the other. God commits to be Israel’s god, and Israel commits to be God’s people. As Christians we understand the grace of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the new covenant with humanity: the relationship is now founded on different terms than it was before. But each form the covenant takes throughout scripture attests to God’s love for us.

Today we heard in the reading from Genesis about the first covenant, God’s promise made to Noah after the flood. The flood story is one that we tell so often in Sunday School that we can forget its deeper, darker import. It’s not just a story about an ark and some animals and a rainbow. It’s a story of God deciding on a new way of relating to us messed-up human beings. For the flood happens because God is grieved at the evil and wickedness of the people he has made – God suffers and sorrows over what has become of his beautiful creation, and so God determines to make a new start. God wipes out all but a remnant of that creation and starts again, and sets the rainbow as a promise that things will be different this time. It’s a frightening story, the idea that God could become so disgusted with us that God would simply want to wipe us out. But that’s not the whole story either. God doesn’t completely start over, make a whole new earth and creation – God preserves a part of the old to start with again, the same old spoiled creation the earth had before. And with the rainbow, God promises to limit Godself, never again to destroy the whole earth. Instead, God promises to live with the compromised and sinful and yet still beautiful mess that his perfect creation has evolved into. The rainbow is there not as a sign to us of this, but as a [...]

RCL Year B, 5 Epiphany

A few weeks ago I preached on vocation and call, about listening for what God wants us to do and keeping tabs on our own attempts to run away from it. Last week I talked about pilgrimage, our pilgrimage together at ECA as we seek out God’s call to us in this time and place. Today’s readings I think again point us in the direction of call and doing what God is asking of us – and they also illustrate the flexibility of how such a call might be answered.

In the season of Epiphany we get to hear stories of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, as he starts his preaching and teaching and calls disciples and gathers crowds around him. In the gospel of Mark especially we hear how quickly Jesus becomes known as a healer and exorcist, curing people from their diseases and freeing them from the oppression of demons and evil spirits. This ministry is a crowd-pleaser, you could say: everybody loves a miracle worker, and especially one who comes to make things better for you personally. People are thrilled about Jesus and they will do anything to get closer to him, because they hope to gain so much in his presence. There’s a kind of feeding frenzy in the story today: Jesus comes to Capernaum and visits the home of his new disciple Simon Peter. While there he cures Peter’s mother-in-law, and before sundown, the word has spread so far that the whole city is gathered at the door. Jesus does a lot of healing, and he casts out a lot of demons, and at some point he slips away and takes off to be by himself for a while and pray. But before long his new disciples find him. Everyone is searching for you, Jesus! they say. Yes, I’ll bet they are. Because Jesus may have healed a lot of people but there are more, still more, and the crowds are still coming and clamoring for his attention. But instead of going back to do more healings, Jesus tells his friends, Let’s go. I need to go proclaim the kingdom of God. That’s what I came here to do. And off he goes, and he manages to do some more preaching – and, by the way, some more casting out of demons too.

I think that time alone in prayer is a turning point for Jesus. I imagine him tired, overwhelmed by the crowds coming to him, trying to understand what this power is that he has and what he is supposed to do with it. And what he does is go away, regroup, and pray. Somewhere in that prayer he understands his mission again, so that when the crowds come calling, he’s able to say, this is what I’m supposed to do – not so much of that.

Compare that to the letter from Paul to the Corinthians today. He’s telling them just what he’s done in order to preach the gospel: I’ve made myself a slave to people, doing what they want me to do. I’ve been super-Jewish to Jews who were looking for that; I’ve eaten bacon with Gentiles who wanted that. I’ve hung out in bars to attract the party people, I’ve gone to the library to get the nerdy folks to listen, I’ve tried out for football to get the jocks to hear me, I’ve done everything in order to get other people, whoever they are, to hear my message. It’s all for the sake of the gospel. I’ll do anything, as long as it might win somebody over to the message of Christ. He’s trying to tell the Corinthians to get off their high horses and look out for other people, to stop being so smug and stuck in their ways and to reach out more to others who aren’t just like them. But like Paul often does, he goes to extremes to make his point.

So we’re kind of getting two different messages here, aren’t we? In the gospel, Jesus realizes he’s overextending himself in the wrong direction, and pulls back to regroup. He prays and gets in touch again with his true vocation, and starts out anew to spend more of his time that way. But in the epistle, Paul seems to extol the virtues of overextending himself, doing anything and everything he can in order to pursue his vocation and mission. Just what is it we’re supposed to do, exactly?

Well, really I think they’re different[...]

ECA Annual Meeting: 29 January 2012

Today is our Annual Meeting, a chance for us to look at the last year of our life together. Now that was a compelling gospel reading we just heard. But as much as I’d like to talk to you all about exorcism, I just can’t make it fit well into what I want to say about our last year together at ECA. Instead, I’ve been increasingly tugged by what our Bishop has set as the theme for the diocese for this year, Walking the Way. It’s such an apt metaphor for our life together that I want to adopt it as our theme as well. We’re on a pilgrimage together, and we’ve walked the first several miles together. Now we pause to see where we’ve been – and we get to look at where we go next.

Pilgrimage is an ancient metaphor for the Christian faith. The early Christians didn’t call themselves Christians – they called themselves People of the Way. Jesus talks in the gospel of John about how he is the Way, and his whole ministry can be seen as walking along on it – first through Galilee, gathering disciples, preaching and teaching, feeding people and healing them – and then on into Jerusalem and his journey toward the cross.  Early on in the life of the church, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to walk the stones Jesus walked, became a significant part of people’s piety. We have the travelogue from a woman named Egeria who did just that in the late 4th century, and on through the Middle Ages it was not unusual for people with the resources to do so to travel to the Holy Land. For those who could not travel there, and for everyone once it became too dangerous to do so, labyrinths and the Stations of the Cross became easier alternatives. By walking simply from icon to icon, pictures of Jesus’ journey towards death, the believer could be a pilgrim just like those who actually traveled all the way to Jerusalem. And local holy sites became important places to visit also, like Lourdes or Santiago de Compostela. In Britain alone there were numerous places for pilgrimage, places like Lindisfarne, the Holy Island off the English coast near Durham, Walsingham, a shrine to the Virgin Mary in Norfolk, and scores of other places where people had visions of God or experiences of prayer and miracles. By traveling there the Christian experienced God in new ways, returning home with a deeper sense of faith and a new understanding of God.

I’ve been to many of these places myself as a pilgrim. I got to go to the Holy Land about 7 years ago on a tour that took us to many of the main holy places connected with Jesus’ life and death. I went to Holy Island, Lindisfarne, many years before that with Harry Temple, whom some of you knew. I went to Walsingham while I was studying at Oxford, and to a cave in Scotland where the 5th century Celtic saint Ninian is said to have gone to pray, and to a holy well in Wales that is said to have healing powers. Some of these places are a little silly or tacky or over-commercialized; some of these places commemorate events or miracles of dubious authenticity; but despite their limitations, each one of these places reeks of prayer. In each one of them people have gathered for centuries, traveling miles and miles and arriving sometimes broken and exhausted, praying to God and experiencing God vividly. The presence of God is strong in places like this – sometimes so strong it took my breath away when I least expected it.

It’s not only in what are known of as holy places that God shows up, of course. God can turn up wherever God wants to. There is something about traveling, however, about walking and journeying as a pilgrim, that opens you more to what God might be saying. When I walk, especially when I walk a long ways, like on a backpacking trip, my brain quiets down, I listen more, I’m more aware of the wind in the trees and the thoughts in my own mind. And I’m more aware of and open to the people I travel with, as well – companions who journey together learn about each other in new ways, things they wo[...]

RCL Year B, 3 Epiphany

Last week I talked about call, how God speaks to us in ways great and small and invites us to follow, sometimes into unknown and scary places. We learn to hear and recognize God’s voice over time, and we shape our lives into how God would have them be. God calls each of us – and as I’ve said before, the greatest quote about that is the one from Frederick Buechner, that our vocation, where God is calling us, is where our own deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.

Well, all of that is true. But today I want to talk about the opposite entirely – when what we really want to say to God is NO. Because more often than not, our response to God is to run the other way – at least for a while.

When I was going through the ordination discernment process as a young adult, I was simultaneously debating whether to return to Europe to live (I’d spent my junior year abroad in France and part of me wished I’d stayed there). When my parish discernment committee would press me too hard on questions I didn’t want to answer, our group code for ‘leave me alone’ was ‘Kate wants to go to Europe now.’ One of my mentors along the way, a successful rector of a large church, told me that his secret escape fantasy, what he would do if he left the priesthood, was to become a greenskeeper for a golf course. Another priest friend on the verge of retirement confided that he wanted to work in a baseball stadium – and indeed, once he retired, he did just that. My escapism shifted away from Europe some time ago, but now I sometimes longingly imagine life as a park ranger.

Now, tell me it’s not just clergy who have these kinds of escape fantasies. Are there some of you who know what I’m talking about? ‘If my life had turned out differently, I’d be a…’ or ‘I’d go live in…’ maybe I could still do it! Yes, ok, some of you know. When things aren’t quite how we want them to be, or in those idle hours when we wonder ‘what if?’ then it’s fun to indulge in these visions. It’s one thing to think about it; it’s another thing altogether when we act on them, of course.

The readings we have today are all about responding ‘yes’ to call. But they’re also about responding with a ‘no,’ or at least the possibility of that. I’m thinking especially of the first one from Jonah. We heard just a part of Jonah’s story today, but of course Jonah is the one who ends up in the belly of the whale, really the big fish, for three days. God has called him as a prophet to go to the city of Israel’s enemies, the Assyrian city of Nineveh, to tell them that Yahweh the God of Israel will destroy them if they don’t repent. Jonah hears this and immediately takes off in the opposite direction, to Tarshish, ‘away from the presence of the Lord.’ This results in God rousing a great storm, which gets Jonah thrown off his ship and swallowed by the fish, where he prays to God for help. The fish spits him out safe and sound. And then God shows up again and tells him again to go to Nineveh – same call, same message. This time Jonah goes, the people of Nineveh hear and repent, and God changes his mind. Jonah is upset at this, since he was really hoping to see the horrible Assyrians destroyed by God. He and God have another fight along these lines, and God rebukes him. God’s mercy is greater than Jonah can take, and Jonah doesn’t really seem to come to terms with this in the end.

So Jonah at first says no to God and tries to escape. When that doesn’t work, he grudgingly says yes, but for the wrong reasons – he goes to Nineveh to watch its downfall, not to help God save its people.  As a prophet of Israel, Jonah behaves pretty poorly. It’s the people of Nineveh who are the ones who respond to God, not him – one of those surprise twists the Old Testament throws at us from time to time. The problem for Jonah is his lack of vision – he knows the Assyrians to be the oppressors of Israel, a dominating empire of cruel force with Nineveh its mighty city. Jonah is not a mighty prophet, a[...]

RCL Year B, 2 Epiphany

Today in our scriptures we got to hear two different stories of people at the very beginning of their relationships with God, two tales of people being called to and drawn by a God they don’t yet know.  First, the prophet Samuel, just coming into his own as a young boy; the other, the skeptic Nathanael, who becomes a disciple of Jesus. I want to start with these stories, for both of them tell us something of how God calls us, and how we respond.

In the first, Samuel is a boy serving in the ancient place of worship at Shiloh, living out the commitment his mother Hannah has made on his behalf. Samuel comes from a heritage of faith:  his mother Hannah had a long relationship with God, praying year after year for a child. When she finally receives word through the priest Eli that her petition will be heard, she promises the child to God. She follows through after Samuel is weaned and brings him to the priests. So Samuel has been living near the altar of God since the very beginning of his life, but he does not yet know all that this might entail for him; the story tells us that ‘he did not know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.’ When God speaks to him and calls him in the wee hours of the morning, Samuel does not recognize his voice – he doesn’t yet know it to recognize it.  And yet God is calling him all the same, to be a prophet to all of Israel, and to begin with delivering some hard news to his mentor and father figure Eli.

In the gospel, it is Nathanael who hears the call.  We don’t know his back-story, but Jesus calls him an Israelite in whom there is no deceit – Nathanael clearly comes out of the Jewish tradition of study of the law and prophets, a strong heritage of faith. And he’s also skeptical about this new guy his friend Philip wants him to meet – can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip just tells him to come and see, and Nathanael does so – and he is startled to find that this unknown rabbi knows about him already, and seems to be expecting to meet him.  From this time on Nathanael becomes one of Jesus’ disciples, a witness to the Messiah.

These two people, Samuel and Nathanael, are both ordinary individuals and larger than life characters – Samuel is the great prophet of legendary history, who goes on to anoint first Saul and then David as king of Israel, and is himself the type for all great prophets to come. But in this story, he is just a boy who hears God calling.  Likewise, in the gospel of John, some think that Nathanael is the representation of all Jews who come to Jesus as the Messiah. That bit from Jesus about an Israelite with no deceit in him refers to the ancestor Jacob, the one who is given the name Israel but who is a well-known trickster in the old stories. Nathanael has been under the fig tree, Jesus says, the symbol in rabbinical literature for the place where one studies the Torah.  But in this story, Nathanael is also simply a Galilean who hears Jesus’ call.

Today we can pair these two stories with a third story of call. Today, January 15, is the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., the great leader of the civil rights movement in this country. He was a powerful figure in the history of this country, a larger than life character whose birthday we mark with a national holiday every year. But in 1955 when he was first called into leadership, he was just a young preacher of 26, fresh out of graduate school and in his first church, an unknown newcomer in the city of Montgomery, Alabama.  Son and grandson of preachers, he was asked to do something larger, to lead the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.  At the beginning, King was an ordinary person who heard a call into something new and very scary – and yet he did so, praying and feeling the presence of God as he began to live into this new level of leadership.

It is easy to focus on the larger than life parts of all three of these characters, to [...]