RCL Year B, Baptism of Our Lord

Jesus came to John and was baptized by him in the river Jordan. And Jesus came up out of the water and the Spirit descended on him and he heard a voice saying, You are my Son, the beloved – with you I am well pleased. And so he began his ministry in Galilee.

So what did you hear when you were baptized?

Many of us, I’d guess, were baptized as infants. We probably don’t remember hearing anything at all, unless our family had some story to tell about it. Were any of you baptized when you were older, so that you do remember it? Of course, maybe some of you haven’t been baptized yet – if so, let’s talk. But have you, at your baptism, or at some other time, have you heard that voice, telling you that you are loved?

Every night that I put my kids to bed, I trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads and say, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever – words from our baptismal service. Sometimes Frances asks me why I’m doing that. So you’ll remember that God loves you, I say. What does being marked as Christ’s own forever mean? she persists. It means that God always loves you and will never forget you, I tell her.

Do you know that? Have you heard that? So many of us stumble along without that sense of God’s love, doing the right thing just because. Or doing more or less the right thing, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience us too much. Maybe sometimes doing the wrong thing. But we may have forgotten why we should even try. Or we may have never really heard it.

Our readings today talk a lot about the workings of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and what it’s like to receive that Spirit. We heard from the very beginning of the creation story in Genesis of the Spirit moving over the deep – the breath of God, the wind, the ruach, brooding and hovering over the waters of chaos. God spoke and there was light, and order began to form out of the chaos: day and night, a time of light and a time of darkness. Then we heard in Psalm 29 about the power of God’s voice, mightier than storms and stronger than anything on this earth. In Acts Paul helps the Ephesians know and receive the Holy Spirit with their baptism, and they begin to speak in tongues and prophesy. And Jesus has the Spirit descend on him like a dove as he is baptized, and again the powerful voice of God speaks the news that he is beloved. The Spirit, the part of God that acts in us and upon us and all around us, does many things: it creates out of chaos; it acts with power; it brings out gifts in us we didn’t know we had; it tells us we are God’s beloved.

There was an experience some had in the days of the charismatic renewal movement in the Episcopal Church called ‘being baptized by the Holy Spirit.’ The experience was a little different for each person, and yet somehow the same as well. In some moment of readiness and openness, whether because the person directly asked God for the gift or was somehow moved in worship or prayer, a feeling of energy and warmth suddenly came upon them and pervaded them. Sometimes it made them speak in tongues or faint away or show some other outward sign; sometimes it just happened inside. Unfortunately some in the charismatic movement took it as a sign of distinction, an experience that divided you permanently from others who had not had the experience. Those who hadn’t had this baptism of the Holy Spirit wondered why they were left out. And perhaps not everyone understood then or now that this is something people in all times and places have had, though they might call it by different names – religious ecstasy is not unique to a particular form of Christianity.  But before all the human misunderstanding, this experience came and comes upon people as a sense of God’s presence, something deeply personal and profound beyond explanation. It is not an experience of the intellect and doesn’t hold up well to systematic theology. But an experience like that does, at least for a moment, show you[...]

In T.S. Eliot’s book of poems about cats, there’s one called ‘The Naming of Cats.’ Eliot says every cat has three names: the everyday name the family uses, like James or George; the particular, dignified name like Quaxo or Coricopat that the cat can be proud of; and one other:

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,

And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover–

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Name, of Jesus that is, the feast day that falls on New Year’s Day in the church calendar. It’s 8 days after Christmas, which means it’s 8 days after the day of Jesus’ birth, the traditional day for circumcising a Jewish boy and giving him his name.  In some ways we don’t really get the importance of this in our culture. We think a lot about what to name our kids, whether it’s a family name or something from a book or something we make up, and we sometimes comment on how a person’s name suits them, or doesn’t suit them. Some of my Jewish friends made a point of picking a name for their children that began with the same letter as an ancestor’s name – the more traditional way is to name with the same name as the ancestor – but they also were careful not to say the child’s name before she or he was born, just as they refused baby showers before the baby was born. Something about keeping the child a secret from evil spirits.

But beyond that, we don’t think a lot about names and naming. There are cultures where your name means who you really are – you don’t tell strangers your name, only family.  Your name is secret, because knowing a person’s name gives you power over them, something you don’t want potential enemies to have. In the stories in the Bible, the name of a person is always somehow connected to and descriptive of that person’s essence and personality. That’s why people have their names changed in stories where some radical shift happens to them – like Abram becoming Abraham, or Saul becoming Paul. Something of this is bound up with God’s Name – God tells Abraham in the encounter at the burning bush that his name is I Am, or Yahweh, a name that is written only in consonants (the four letters are called the Tetragrammaton) and never said aloud by an observant Jew. It’s interesting that God is willing to tell us his name, but we’re reluctant to use it.

So here we are today learning again the name of Jesus, a name that means ‘God saves.’ The essence of who Jesus is, in other words, is to show us that God saves. The name doesn’t tell us how this happens, but Jesus’ life does. Right from the very start we see how God saves: Ordinary working people, shepherds, are the ones to get the news about Jesus’ coming. They find him in the form of a baby, vulnerable, loving, loyal, forgiving. At the end of his life, this Jesus gives up his life for the world, emptying himself and taking the form of a slave, as our epistle reading today says. And in between we hear of a Jesus who welcomes all to table, who calls the powerful to account, who heals the sick, who blesses children. This is who Jesus is; this is how God saves. God saves through weakness and vulnerability; God saves in gathering in the lost and caring for the unloved; God saves through loving us. It’s very different from the idea that we picked up somewhere that God’s name shouldn’t be spoken, that God is too holy, too other than us to allow us to claim his name for ourselves. I wonder what it is that led us down that path, but I wonder if it isn’t partly to give ourselves an easy out.

Because if we claim Jesus’ name – God saves, through servant humility and love – if we pray ‘in Jesus’ name’ and ask[...]

For my birthday last Sunday, my family took me to the best Christmas pageant ever – well, the best one until ours next week, of course.  It’s a Mexican pageant play that is put on every year at the mission church in San Juan Bautista by a theater company called El Teatro Campesino. At Christmastime they do one of two plays, alternating year by year – one about the Virgin of Guadalupe and one, what we saw this year, called La Pastorela. It’s the story of the shepherds trying to go see the Christ child and their struggles in getting there.  For the devil and all his minions don’t want them to make it, and try to prevent them every which way; while the angels of heaven try to guide them to Bethlehem and protect them from the devils. It’s full of music and dancing and it’s funny and profound all at the same time, and I absolutely love it.

So I have to tell you the story of the play. The shepherds are sleeping when the Christ child is born, but one of them, a shepherd girl named Gila, awakens to hear the angels’ song. She rouses the rest of her friends, and off they start to see the child. Soon they’re met by an old hermit, a monk who has been living alone for 20 years awaiting the coming of the Messiah. He has seen a vision that the holy child has been born, and that Lucifer knows of the birth and is mustering his forces against the child. Terrified and excited, the hermit races out to find someone who can tell him whether the child really is born. The shepherds confirm his vision and so they travel together, following the angels’ light to Bethlehem.

But the devil has other plans, and soon they are beset by all kinds of temptations. Booze, pride, gluttony, lust, greed, all are offered to the shepherds in various forms – but with only some success, because the angels appear over and over again to refocus the shepherds and remind them of their destination. So Lucifer sharpens his tactics. The old hermit is assailed with the idea that all his time praying has been in vain, that God never wanted his sacrifice and he’d better just go find a nice girl and settle down. The girl he has in mind very quickly disabuses him of that idea. But worst of all, Lucifer himself appears before them carrying a cross, telling them of the tragic life Jesus will lead when he grows up.  Acting out Jesus’ arrest and torture and death, Lucifer cries out at the last, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ‘Why should you follow him?’ Lucifer asks. ‘His way is the way of suffering. Follow me and you will have all you desire.’ So, despairing and lost, the shepherds finally follow the devils off to hell – until Gila, the shepherd girl who heard the angels’ song, prays for help one more time, and St Michael and all the angels appear to battle Lucifer and his devils for the souls of humankind. The angels beat back the devils with God’s help, and at last the shepherds come to the manger to worship the baby Jesus.

So why do I love it – besides the wonderful music and the costumes and the fun of the whole event? Because the story it tells is so true. There are so many things that tempt the shepherds off the path of the angels, just as there are so many ways for us to lose our focus. Think of how many priorities we all have besides, and maybe hold higher than, following Jesus. Other more tangible goals are so attractive – success, the esteem of others, the perfect life our neighbors will envy, so on and so on. And even if we know better, if we try to keep ourselves on track and make our home in God, we are not immune from the ultimate temptation that faced the hermit and the shepherds in the end: the temptation of despair. It’s pretty easy just to let it all go and join the rat race around us instead of fighting against it. What good does it do to live differently, after all? It only brings more suffering, especially if things are going well for us in this world. When we’ve got a good job and secure investments and perfect health and nice teeth, why should we[...]

RCL Year B, 2 Advent

 

We get to have a couple of weeks of gospel stories about John the Baptist, and I am thrilled. I have an ever-increasing love and respect for John.  When I was younger I found him off-putting – I think I just thought he was weird, out there eating locusts and all of that.  So I never set out to learn more about him exactly.  But over time I picked up a little bit here and there.  And I got older and crankier, and grew more disenchanted with the culture around us, and I started going into the wilderness more myself.  And more and more, I find John fascinating.

We don’t really know that much about John.  But we can make guesses about him based on what we read in the gospels and what we know of his times.  Luke tells us that John was the long-desired son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, an older righteous couple.  Zechariah was a priest of the temple, of the order of Abijah, and Elizabeth was a descendant of Aaron herself, so John came from pretty good stock.  As priest, Zechariah’s duty was to take his turn in the house of the Lord fulfilling the rituals proscribed by Aaron – so he was there when he received word from God that John would be born, a prophet to go before the Lord to prepare his way.  So John began his life in Jerusalem, a son of the elite priestly class. But Luke tells us that ‘he became strong in spirit and was in the wilderness’ – perhaps in his adolescence he was orphaned, given that his parents were older, and somehow wound up in the wilderness. One theory is that he went to live with the Essenes, the community who created the Dead Sea Scrolls, who had removed themselves from Jerusalem to avoid the spiritual contamination of the Roman occupation. That may be where he picked up the practice of baptism, since the Essenes took purifying baths as part of their rituals.

But somewhere along the way, John became the strong, clear-minded figure we meet in today’s gospel and in the other gospels as well – still in the wilderness, but now attracting enormous crowds who heed his call to repentance. As one of my clergy colleagues put it, John was a rock star.  Look at how Mark writes it: ‘people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him.’ Wow.  This says that John must have been extremely charismatic and attractive, not the weird scary person I used to think he was. But it also says that there was a hunger, a deep intense hunger on the part of the people. They were living under brutal occupation, and they were hungry.  The revolt in Jerusalem that brought down the rage of Rome on their city happened in 69-70 AD – not too much longer after this, remember.  The people were looking for a leader, they were spiritually needy, and John appeared. He could do anything with this crowd – they would follow him anywhere.

But look at what he says: ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.’  He could have taken the power the people gave him, but instead he pointed elsewhere. These are the words of a man of integrity – he knows who he is and who he is not, and he is utterly honest with himself and others about that. He doesn’t know when the Messiah will come or what he will look like – but he believes the Messiah will appear, and he knows he is not it.

My colleague’s mention of John as a rock star reminded me of a U2 concert I went to several years ago.  It was a great show, I love their music, the whole thing was uplifting and amazing.  But what impressed me most of all was the lead singer, Bono himself, out there in front with thousands of screaming fans in front of him. He had us all in his hand – he could have done anything with us. It was near mass hysteria in that arena. But what he did was change the words of one of their greatest songs and sing instead, Alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia. It was like in a moment he took all of our attention on him and focused it towards God instead[...]

Here’s my warning to you:  the season of Advent puts me in an existential frame of mind.  The scripture readings, the short days, the insane pace of the world around us, all of it gives me pause.  This time of year can be the best of times and the worst of times all at once – and sometimes the worst gets the best of me.

And one of the more dispiriting images I saw in the last few days was a photo on the front page of the NY Times of tents, people camping out on Thanksgiving Day in front of BestBuy.  They were waiting to be first in line for the Black Friday sales beginning at midnight.  Meanwhile at Walmart in Los Angeles, beginning their Black Friday at 10pm on Thanksgiving Day, a woman used pepper spray on her fellow shoppers in order to be first to get the deals.

It is amazing, when you think about it, that we have a Thanksgiving Day on our American calendar at all.  A day of gratitude for our blessings, a day meant for nothing more than time with family and friends and giving thanks?  Why waste time on that when instead we can just kick-start our overdrive into intense consumerism – the consumerism that we pretend is festive and loving, our welcome of the Christ child.  These are the days that make me think of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills – what could be is so tarnished and marred by what is, but no one else really seems to care.  Welcome to the season of anticipation – and welcome to another attempt to reclaim what that anticipation is really for.

For today we begin the season of waiting and preparation – not Christmas yet, but Advent, the time when we focus on preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ.  Like all of the great symbols of the church, Advent means many things.  We wait and pray along with Mary, expecting the birth of the Christ Child, the incarnation of God among us. We wait and pray for Christ to come again to us, wiping away the darkness and bringing about the ultimate Reign of God on earth.  And yes, we wait and prepare for Christmas, for fellowship and feasting and gifts to be shared.  There’s even a hint of the old waiting for the winter solstice, waiting for the light to come back into the dark, cold world.  All of these things tie up together at this time of year, and bring with them a whole range of emotions.

We wait in hope and anticipation, and we wait in dread and fear of disappointment.  We hope for joy and loveliness at Christmas, but perhaps we fear that the holidays may not be everything we hoped they would be.  Maybe things are different this year, the money’s tighter, or someone is missing.  We hope for good things in the coming year, but we might dread what further disasters and economic crises it might bring.  Add in the second-coming layer to it all, and we might just acknowledge the more existential fear that we will be found wanting when Christ comes again in judgment.  And maybe too, some of us might fear that this Christianity stuff might be terribly deluded, that there really is nothing ultimately that we wait for, that the poor stuff of this world is really all there is. No wonder some decide to opt out and look for something easier – a god that demands less, perhaps, like the artificial pleasures of consumer delight.

The good news, in some ways, is that we are not the first to face into the themes of this season with mixed feelings.  Our readings are full of mixed feelings today.

The reading from Isaiah began it all with dread and hope, the song of a people who have every reason to despair and yet continue to hope.  Their nation has been destroyed, they have gone into exile for generations and now they have returned to find nothing the same.  Where are you, God? the author writes, We remember what you did for us, all those mighty deeds of old, but you do not do them anymore.  And look, see how much we are in need of your help. We are overcome by our enemies, we are drowning in our sins.  We have failed you, we know, and you have every reason to be angry with us, but[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 29

 

And with that gospel reading, we wind up our church year.  This is the last Sunday in the year on the church calendar, and the last Sunday of readings from Matthew’s gospel – next week we begin with the gospel of Mark and stay with that more or less for the whole year.  In case you didn’t notice, there’s a lot in Matthew’s gospel that ends with something like, ‘do this or else’… a lot about ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ So we finish today with the big ‘or else’:  a depiction of the final judgment, with the Son of Man like a king upon his throne – and yet also like a shepherd, separating the sheep from the goats.  All who are accursed will be thrown into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, while the righteous will go into eternal life.

Just to bring the point home, the Old Testament reading from Ezekiel includes a sorting by the shepherd also – between the fat sheep and the thin sheep.  The fat sheep are in trouble, because the only way they’ve gotten fat is by pushing the thin sheep away from the food, and butting at them with their horns.  The fat and strong are that way through ill-gotten means, and God the good shepherd is going to serve them with justice – and nourish and care for the lost and weak.

So if you’re a fat sheep or a goat, you’ve got problems.  If you’re a sheep, especially a thin sheep, you’re ok.  Hey, we might say.  This isn’t the Good Shepherd I learned about in Sunday School!  The good shepherd is supposed to be taking care of all of us, and watching over us.  All this sorting and justice and eternal punishment doesn’t seem to fit into that. What do we do with this?

I suppose you could say that the shepherd is an image that goes both ways, just as the image of Christ as king, or God as loving parent, goes both ways.  God does care for us and love us.  But God also allows us to choose how we will live our lives.  We’re free to choose to do what Jesus taught us, to love our neighbor as ourselves.  We are also free to live as if that doesn’t matter; to mistreat other people and live for ourselves alone. Most of us do some of both at different times in our lives.  But as a good shepherd with his sheep, or as a good king with his people, or as a parent with her children, God is too bound up with us not to care about what we do.  What we do affects other people, and so what we do affects God, and one way or another, God requires some kind of reckoning from us, an accounting for how we’ve lived and what choices we’ve made.  Sometimes we picture this as a dramatic once-for-all ending like today’s gospel, where everyone gets sorted out and some get punished for all eternity; sometimes we picture this as each of us coming face to face with Jesus and reviewing with him how what we did affected other people.  C.S. Lewis once described purgatory and judgment as simply having to live our lives over again, seeing what our actions did to other people.  We might even picture this reckoning as an immediate one, the consequences of our actions made obvious by the person we’re doing them to.  We don’t know exactly what will happen, and we tend not to want to think about it very much.  Sometimes, though, the scriptures won’t let us escape it.

Look again at today’s gospel.  The sorting out is very clear – there are those who are righteous, and those who are not.  But the criteria for the sorting is also very clear, and it’s also quite simple.  Did you feed the hungry; did you give drink to the thirsty; did you welcome the stranger; did you clothe the naked; did you take care of the sick; did you visit those in prison?  If you did, even to one of the least of these, you did it to Jesus also.  The righteous seem as surprised to hear it as the accursed are – you can almost hear them asking, what? is that all it takes?  There’s nothing, you might notice, about believing a particular doctrine, or being part of a particular faith or church; there’s nothing about praying or not [...]

RCL Year A, Proper 28

 

So, the parable of the talents.  A few weeks ago my folks were visiting and my father buttonholed me on this very parable and what in the world it means.  Their church had been using Luke’s version of the parable in a stewardship study and Dad found the interpretation they gave problematic.  It didn’t help that Luke’s version includes a side story about a king whose people don’t want him to rule over them, and the king responding by slaughtering the people.  That kind of thing really complicates the picture of the gospel of love.  I didn’t have a very good answer for my dad.

The problem is, of course, is that there are two different ways of understanding the parable for today.  Well, three.  Probably more.  I’m only going to explore two, however, because the other one is problematic.  What might be the usual interpretation has it that the parable of the talents is about making more of ourselves and our gifts and skills.  The landowner is God and we’re the slaves, and God wants us to invest well and turn a profit while he’s away.  If we don’t, we’ll lose what we’ve been given and it will be granted to others instead.  Be all that you can be, or else.

The problem is, that interpretation fits suspiciously into our modern American values, the part of our culture that has a capitalist be-all-you-can-be philosophy.  Invest and make more; live up to your full potential and be rewarded.  That might be the culture we live in now, but it is pretty different from the one Jesus lived in.  And I’m not convinced that earning interest on the investment is God’s intention for us exactly.  For one thing, earning interest at all is contrary to Levitical law – it was called usury.  And it was against the law because to earn interest meant that you were extracting more money from the poor – the Torah is very careful about issues of wealth disparity.  In the thinking of the Law, the poor were poor, and the rich were rich, because the rich were exploiting the poor.  Affirming that system, even metaphorically, seems pretty unlikely for a Jewish Messiah.

But even if we set that interpretation aside, we still have two more, at least.  We tend to automatically think that parables about a landowner and his servants are about God and us.  But perhaps in this case, the landowner is not God.  Look at how the third servant describes him – a harsh man, reaping where he did not sow.  This landowner is rapacious, one who makes a profit wherever he can, off of whomever he can make it.  Not my image of God, certainly.  And this landowner is wealthy beyond belief:  A talent would be about twenty years’ wages for a laborer – so 10 talents, given to the first slave, would be 200 years’ wages…which then is doubled by the slave’s investment.  The money in question is astronomical. And the landowner clearly expects to get richer while he’s away, assuming his slaves will continue his ‘legacy’ – continue his business, take risks to make a profit, and follow his example of wheeling & dealing.  Perhaps this isn’t a parable about God or God’s ways at all – perhaps it’s about the ways of the world, and how hard it is to be Jesus’ followers – the world reaps where it does not sow, and the rich are rich because they steal from the poor.  The first two slaves go along with that system.  The third slave is the honorable one because he doesn’t do that, and he pays for it.

On the other hand.  The parable tells of the landowner going away and then coming back to see what’s happened in his absence.  It comes directly after the wise and foolish bridesmaids, which is also a story about someone being away and returning, and that someone, the bridegroom, does seem to mean Jesus.  And right afterward Jesus goes on to talk about the coming, or the return, of the Son of Man.  So a story about someone going away and what happens when he returns does seem in context to be about, well, Jesus, and his coming death and resurrection.  In which case it is in[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 27

Happy Birthday, ECA!  On All Saints Day, 1967, ECA founding members formally applied for mission status in the Diocese of California, the diocese we were part of at the time.  Today we remember the saints of 44 years ago who founded this congregation – and we celebrate ourselves, the community of saints gathered here, and those yet to come.  The Sunday After All Saints is a chance to remember all the saints, all those who have gone before, all the great heroes of the faith, all the people who make the church what it is and what it will be.

We could be using the readings for All Saints Day today, but the gospel reading for that is the Beatitudes, something that we’ve had already this year (though it’s tempting to do what our Sunday School is focusing on as well!).  So I went with this Sunday’s readings instead, keeping us in the continuity of the story of Jesus and his confrontations with the elders of the people.  Now in that story it’s moving closer to Jesus’ arrest and trial, Jesus’ end times, and he is speaking more about the end times for all of us.  The end times in question, however, have a great deal to do with how we live now.

So today we get another parable.  And with parables, we can sometimes wonder which character is meant to be us.  So please answer:  are you a wise virgin or a foolish virgin? Or are you c) none of the above?

Well, you don’t really have to answer here.  But this is decidedly one of those parables where you are supposed to locate yourself in one camp or another:  are you ready for the bridegroom’s coming, or not; are you wise, or foolish; are you in the in-group, or the out-group; will you be saved, or not.  There’s not a lot of Anglican wiggle room in there – you can’t answer ‘both-and’ to this one.  It’s either one way or the other, it seems.  There are ten bridesmaids, some of whom planned ahead with extra oil for their lamps, and some of whom did not.  And those who did not have enough oil to wait for the late-arriving bridegroom ask the others for help, and are refused.  And then those foolish bridesmaids are locked out of the party when they return from buying more oil for their lamps.

This parable has always reminded me of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  In that story, the ants work all summer long gathering food and the grasshoppers play all summer long.  When winter comes and the grasshoppers are starving, they beg the ants for some food.  The ants refuse, sounding self-righteous and snotty, and say, ‘You should have been working over the summer, lazybones.  This is your own fault!’  Rather the same response the wise bridesmaids give the foolish ones.  The ant and grasshopper story, of course, extols the virtues of hard work, that each one of us needs to pull our own weight and not be lazy and rely on others to take care of us.  There are consequences for our behavior.

Jesus’ parable gives a picture of consequences as well.  The bridesmaids, of course, are the followers of Christ, and Christ is the bridegroom.  The bridegroom takes a while in coming to the feast – the first-century Christians realized that Jesus wasn’t coming back immediately like they’d originally understood, but that it might take a while.  The oil for the lamps symbolizes our readiness for salvation: sufficient good works, right living, faithfulness.  The commentaries take pains to point out that the wise bridesmaids refuse to offer extra oil to their unprepared friends not because of a lack of charity, but simply because readiness for the kingdom isn’t something you can just pass on to another who needs it – we each have our own path to follow and choices to make.  All the same, they still sound pretty snotty to me.

I think that the story of the ant and grasshopper has infected this parable about the wise and foolish bridesmaids.  The American virtues of hard work, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, personal responsibility – they’re part of our idea of salvation.  You could s[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 26

 

Well, this is an awkward text for a priest in vestments to preach on.  It’s always a little embarrassing to realize that Jesus is talking about you, and not in a flattering kind of way.  I was reading this text with other clergy this week and one man noted that he’d had the ‘call no one Father’ text quoted at him several times in his ministry – then he looked at me, and said, ‘but I suppose you haven’t had a problem with that.’  No, it’s true, so perhaps I can take myself out of this picture – after all, the image Jesus’ words conjure up in my head is certainly one of particular self-important male clergy I know of, and thank goodness I’m not like that.

And then I read again, ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled – and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’  Whoops.  Perhaps I’d better pay attention after all.

Jesus is talking to religious leaders, so we could hear this as a gospel against clericalism – against clergy taking all the power in the church.  As those of you taking my Episcopal Basics classes know, the American Episcopal church has never truly been very clericalist – and it is even less so (officially) since the 1979 BCP.  The structure of the church is democratic, like the American government, and from the earliest colonial days lay people have had a great deal of authority and leadership in the church.   The whole tide of liturgical renewal – what happened in the Catholic Church with Vatican II and in our church with our 1979 Prayer Book – was toward increasing lay participation and leadership in worship as well.  This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of bishops and clergy who lord it over others, or plenty of lay people who give those clergy too much power to do so – but as a whole, it’s not bad.  So taking Jesus’ words purely literally, the Episcopal Church has done better than some at maintaining some equality and balance of power between its different orders.

But the leaders Jesus talks to aren’t just religious – they have power and influence in the political world as well.  Looking outside the church at the greater culture around us too, we see things haven’t always worked out equally.  As our economy reels closer to collapse, it’s becoming more and more obvious that things have become grossly unequal in our country, in power and in resources.  Six weeks ago people began the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now spread to 1768 cities, according to the organizers.   Close to home, that protest got very ugly in Oakland this last week, which has drawn more attention to the protesters and to the cities where they are protesting.  There are a wide range of causes all gathered together in this movement, but one common thread is the attempt to give voice to the frustration many feel that things have become grossly unfair in our country.  As this has grown, some analysts have noted that the Tea Party supporters have also been outraged about the disparity of wealth and power – each group is very different demographically, and holds different entities accountable for this problem, but there’s at least one common point in their protest.  Groups to the right and the left of the mainstream are agreeing that something is not right in this country.  On Tuesday the Congressional Budget Office released a report on trends in the distribution of household income from 1979 to 2007.  Over those nearly 30 years the top 1% of earners increased their income by 275%, while the middle class increased income by 40% and the poor by 18%.  In other words, people’s sense of things isn’t off at all.  In clear ways, the exalted have exalted themselves way above the rest of us.  There’s a reason a lot of people, people on the extremes of the political spectrum and many of us in the middle, are angry.  We know what’s fair, and we were raised with the idea that our democratic system ought to be fair, and things clearly are not fair now.

So when is it they get made fair again?  Wh[...]

RCL Year A, Proper 25

 

We’re hearing in these few weeks about a series of confrontations between Jesus and the leaders of the Jewish people – Jesus has told scathing parables on the Pharisees and Sadducees and others, pointing out their faults and failings, and they have responded with tests designed to trip him up and undermine his credibility with the people.  One commentator called this section of Matthew’s gospel ‘Reality Show Jesus’ – the persistent attempt to humiliate Jesus coupled with his perfect answers back.  You can hear the crowd going huh! huh! huh! go Jesus!  Today he silences his adversaries so well that no one dares ask him any more questions.  Which isn’t necessarily good news for Jesus – now they will start to seek his death instead.

But what Jesus says today isn’t just a chance for us to be spectators at the tennis match. He offers a challenge to us as well.  Love God and love your neighbor.  It sounds so simple.  And yet we fail at both so regularly.

Jesus is asked to name the one greatest commandment, and he seemingly answers with two.  Both are quotes from the Old Testament, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus.  Love God with all your heart and mind and strength – and the second is like it – love your neighbor as yourself.  Sometimes we like to tack on a third, about loving yourself.  But, well, I don’t think that’s part of Jesus’ point – this is not a commandment about our self-esteem.  What Jesus is getting at is the idea that these two commandments are really one commandment – you can’t love God without loving your neighbor, and you can’t love your neighbor without loving God.  (Parenthesis:  Stop worrying about yourself.)  The first letter of John makes this same point later:  ‘Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.’

Anyone here ever hated somebody else?  OK, if not that, then anybody ever felt uncharitable feelings toward somebody else?  Well, whoops.  Guess this incriminates all of us, doesn’t it?

Well, there’s good news and bad here for us.  Jesus isn’t talking about our feelings, per se.  His emphasis isn’t on what we think of other people or how warm our hearts are toward them.  He’s talking instead about actions, about whether we care for others’ needs.  Whether we feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty and look out for each other’s children; whether we maintain relationship and put the wellbeing of the other person as a priority.  Whether we tell the truth about other people and insist that others do as well.  If we do all those things, then we are loving our neighbor – and we are loving God as well.  Good news to realize that we don’t have to adore each other all the time – but tough news to hear that we have to look out for each other all the same.

On the other hand, it’s nice to realize that we don’t have to conjure up warm enthusiastic feelings about God all the time either.  For some people, God remains a distant idea, not a close companion – maybe because of early teachings we imbibed as a child, or for lots of other reasons.  And for many of us, there are times when we feel terribly angry at God for allowing something bad to happen – we might not admit feeling angry, but we do all the same.  For others of us, even if we are consistent with our prayer and spiritual practice, sometimes it can start to feel dry and lifeless, even boring.  We can feel guilty about this, like we’re not loving God the way we should.  Hearing that loving God is really about caring for and serving others, and staying faithful in our intentions and practice with God, can be something of a relief.  But it does place an expectation on our behavior, even if not on our feelings: it means we do have to serve and care for and be faithful to others and God – something we’re not always so consistent about.

A few years ago, after Mother Teresa died, her spiritual director published her writings.  Many of these were letters that Mother Teresa had no intention [...]