The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 15C] - August 18, 2013 (Luke 12:49-56 and Hebrews 11:29--12:2)

 

If you think about it, we talk a lot in the church about what a unifying figure Jesus is. We see him chiefly as someone whose love is a like wide circle, whose grace constantly extends to welcome more and more people. We admire how Jesus includes everyone, finding space in his community for the repulsive leper, the despised Samaritan, and even the uptight Pharisee—people we would probably exclude or despise, had we lived back then. Jesus even dies praying for forgiveness for the people who nail him to the cross. Jesus is all about unity, it seems, a unity grounded in the wonderful things Jesus brings to us—things like peace, and love, and joy.

In fact, during the Sundays of Advent many congregations often use an Advent wreath with four candles to symbolize some of the gifts that Jesus brings. As a child I learned that one candle, for example, was the “peace” candle, because the angels would sing at his birth of the wonderful peace on earth and goodwill toward humankind that would follow his reign on earth. The other candles were lit to represent joy, love, and hope, all fabulous and fantastic and friendly things we want from a unifying, all-embracing Jesus.

However, based on what Jesus himself says today in Luke’s gospel as he talks to his disciples about the expectations his kingdom has for the earth, we might need to re-think that Advent wreath this year. It sounds like we need to get rid of the peace candle and replace it with the division candle! “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Jesus asks, clearly fired up at his disciples. “No, I tell you, but rather division!” We may need to rename not just a candle, but maybe re-think the whole idea of candles, themselves, with their soft, glowing nature. Jesus says he comes to bring fire to earth! With that in mind, maybe the whole Advent wreath should just be torched as kindling on the altar!

The bottom line is that if we take Jesus at his words this morning, he doesn’t sound very unifying at all, and the fire of which he speaks isn’t very warm and fuzzy. This is not the side of Jesus we’re accustomed to, the one that normally gets lifted up. No, this is a side Jesus that lays waste to the airbrushed Jesus we often project for ourselves, the soft-edged Jesus that never really challenges us or asks any demands of us. By contrast, here we see a Jesus that might actually cause some real pain and division in our lives, a Jesus that might indeed bring about some hardship and conflict when we follow him.

In an interview this pastweek at the Edinburgh International Book festival, the retired Archbishop of the Church of England, Rowan Williams, said that American and British Christians who talk of being persecuted should “grow up” and not exaggerate what amounts to being “mildly uncomfortable.” Those words may offend us, but I think the fired up Jesus we see in this morning’s gospel would wholeheartedly agree with Archbishop Williams. Many Christians in Egypt, by contrast, can claim to know about persecution. Or Christians in Syria can, too, as well as some Muslims in Myanmar and in other places throughout the world.

Coptic orthodox Christians in Egypt protesting discriminatory policies

What followers of Jesus in places like that can tell us is that Jesus’ love places us on the edge of a kingdom that rubs rough against a broken creation. Church is not just a well-meaning social service organization that brings together people to perform service projects in the community, however effective those service projects may be. Neither is church a place where individuals “tank up” on inspiration for the week. Rather, church is a community where our relationships with other individuals take center stage, as broken and damaged as they may be. Jesus’ fellowship is a new family that can, in fact, cause us to fall out of favor occasionally with the rest of the world, even other family members, for the decisions we make and the stances we take. By the power of the cross, Jesus forms among us a new kind of family that rearranges us according to God’s love and forgiveness, not according to what gender or race or social status the world gives us.

For hundreds of years, women who entered convents, for example, to follow monastic orders and live in a religious community based on the teachings of Jesus were shunned and abandoned by their families as a result of their decision. For such a woman, following Jesus in this way brought disgrace to her family because, by taking a vow of chastity and poverty, she eliminated her family’s ability to use her through arranged marriage and child-bearing as a means of solidifying relationships with more powerful families. At a time when women were valued as little more than property or a tool for concentrating family wealth or maintaining blood lines, Jesus offered a new, life-giving alternative. But, in doing so, he set mother against daughter, and daughter against mother.

But there is danger in separating the personalities and purposes of Jesus, as if he is nice Jesus and then mean Jesus, unifying Jesus and dividing Jesus, soft-glow Advent candle Jesus and fired-up, frustrated Jesus. For the fired-up Jesus this morning is, indeed, the one over whose birth in Bethlehem the angels sang, “Peace on earth, good will toward humankind.” The difference is that we must form our notion of peace around him and his message and not some misbegotten form of peace that remains in our own hearts and makes us self-absorbed. The particular kind of peace that Jesus brings does involve division. It divides us from things that go against this kingdom—things like our sin, our attachment to racism, economic oppression, and environmental abuse, to name a few. Jesus comes to divide us from all that, to remove them from human community as well as from our own lives.

Can we stand for Jesus’ kingdom and at the same time be complacent about changing this world to look more like him? Can we pray “thy kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven” and at the same time stand in the way of justice in our own communities? Can we give thanks to God for the beauty and wonder of the gift of our lives, and not be concerned, in some way, about things like abortion, or the level of the prison population in our country? If this more complete picture of Jesus that we hear from in the gospel text causes us to take stock of our lives and scrutinize some of our choices, then it is doing what he’s supposed to. Jesus means to say he is not simply a dashboard decoration or a wall-hanging or pillow embroidery. The peculiar way Jesus unites people is divisive, in and of itself. But it is what saves us all.

To those who think Jesus comes simply to help us be spiritual and enlightened, Jesus says, “No!” To those who believe Jesus comes to help us achieve inner peace, Jesus says, “Nuh-uh!” To those of us who feel that Jesus’ message is simply about making life easier, making us feel happier, this Jesus says, “Nope! Think again!”

I recently returned from spending a week in Pittsburgh as a voting member of the Churchwide Assembly of our denomination the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Our denomination, like any church communion anywhere else, is very divided over many things. We heard heated debates this week on many of the topics with which we struggle—human sexuality, gun control, community violence…how properly to follow Roberts Rules of Order. We elected a woman bishop, a fact that many Christians around the world will have a hard time knowing what to do with. We passed a thorough social statement on criminal justice and what Christians can and should say about that issue in this country. And although there were decisions made that didn’t please everyone, although there are some who no doubt still feel the division there is some solace in the fact that we actually grappled prayerfully over these issues and others like them—that our faith is not just about lighting the subdued candle of an inner peace, but wondering how to burn towards the vision of a world where all relationships will be formed by the word of God and the love of Christ’s cross.

Because there will be a day, sisters and brothers, when we will realize that we have been fully cleansed in Jesus, when we realize we have been plunged into that grace, when we realize that we have, in fact, “laid aside every weight and sin that clings so closely,” and we will be fully united, totally one. There will be a place and time where nothing divisive—not even death—will lay claim to us.  He will have divided us from it and from within us forever.  We will stand and break bread with all those who have gone before us and who have felt the fire of his love,    the tax collectors and the Pharisees of every time and every age. We will receive what Jesus has given, in full.

And for that promise, for that glorious promise, my sisters and brothers, we may follow him now.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 13C] - August 4, 2013 (Luke 12:13-21)

 

I am not going to lie: it is awful challenging to come home from a week-long servant trip with thirteen youth and preach a sermon the next day. It is even more challenging to come home from a week-long servant trip with thirteen youth and preach a sermon on this passage from Luke about the parable of the rich fool.

It has nothing to do with the youth. Like usual, they were absolutely outstanding in terms of attitude and work ethic. And the challenge has little to do with the exhaustion I still bear in my body—we didn’t get much sleep at all, 60 some-odd people crammed like sardines into three large bunk rooms. The food was standard camp fare: somewhat filling but not terribly nutritious.


No, the reason why this sermon was even more challenging that it should have been is that after spending a week in Logan County, West Virginia, where more than a third of the population under 18 lives below the poverty line, I have started to feel like the rich fool with the bigger barns. After spending a week interacting on-site with at-risk youth whose only daily meal most likely came from the meager lunch in the program we were helping to run, I am starting to feel like someone who eats, drinks, and carries on pretty merrily on a regular basis. After all, I have a job…at the moment, at least. You contribute generously to my salary, health benefits, and a pension for retirement, and you added on a very lavish Christmas gift at the end of last year. I’m not necessarily affluent by most standards, but, then again, I am storing away something for my later years, a privilege that, I suspect, most people in this world don’t enjoy. And I don’t know the financial details of any of you—nor do I care to—but I imagine you’re in pretty much the same boat I am with regards to all this. We do store up all kinds of worldly treasures and can afford to eat and drink pretty much anything we want.

Furthermore, we care about equality in all things economic, and the initial question this person in the crowd asks Jesus about sharing the inheritance between sons seems absolutely legitimate to us. As a younger brother, the man simply thinks it’s fair that the family treasure should be divided among heirs equally instead of letting it all go to the first-born. After all, Jesus comes to re-distribute wealth, to liberate people from oppressive systems of commerce and economics, according to many believers and theologians. Doesn’t he at one point famously take a boy’s lunch of two fish and five loaves of bread and use it to feed five thousand hungry people (not counting women and children)? Why wouldn’t he care to dismantle an economic system that so obviously puts people at an unfair economic advantage just because they aren’t born first?

What was our youth group doing in West Virginia, after all, with all our school supply donations and trusty hammers and circular saws, if it wasn’t some sort of economic relief for the people we were supposedly serving? What were our Vacation Bible School children doing two weeks ago when they collected close to $1000 for people living in drought-stricken areas of Africa? Yes, this parable of the rich fool could make us a little uncomfortable this morning, I suspect, because despite all those wonderful examples of our generosity, they is still a small portion of what we have stored away.

However, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool to make everyone a little uncomfortable—to make everyone pay a little closer attention—because the warning in this text is never against affluence. The lesson is never against having things, per se. It is, rather, against greed. It is a warning about where we place our security and where we look for salvation, and anyone—be they rich or be they destitute—can fall into the trap of thinking that we alone are responsible for our own success and that we can work hard enough or manipulate money well enough to be safe and secure.

That is not a danger only for the wealthy, although I do suppose we are more susceptible to it. We have the option of building bigger barns, after all, of using our wealth to get what we want from people or from the political systems that govern us. But, in reality, greed is a trap for all people. This parable is really a lesson not about how we are supposed to use our wealth, but about how our wealth can use us! The things we possess end up possessing us. We can start thinking that the ledger books we balance should end up making us feel balanced. However, let us not forget that there is only One whose love balances us, there is only One whose Spirit truly possesses us.

Scrooge McDuck

Our life is never in our own hands, which is what this rich fool believes, as he amusingly discusses only with his own soul what he should do with all his crops. Notice he’s never called the rich “evil guy.”  He’s called the fool, a term that implies no thinking, a lack of consideration. He is a fool because, in speaking only with himself, he doesn’t really think through his actions of accumulating. He just selfishly—but even more mindlessly—gathers more.

If he is a fool, then I know that this congregation is populated by many who are wise. I heard, for example, of one mother among you who held a leadership position last year at one of our local elementary schools which, we shall say, is located in a fairly affluent area of Richmond. This mother was put in charge of organizing the yearly Christmas party for the school. Rather than thoughtlessly planning yet another party for the kids where they would accumulate more candy they didn’t really need to eat and make more crafts they didn’t really need to take home to clutter up the kitchen, this mom decided the Christmas party would be replaced by a donation drive to collect basic items for people who are served by a local shelter downtown.

The project, as you can imagine, did not catch on with immediate popularity. Kids and parents included thought they were going to miss another chance to be merry. However, as the project gathered steam, as the children learned somewhat to their shock that many people are deprived of some basic hygiene items. Thanks to the faith of this parent, the children and parents alike at the school learned that merriment can be found in giving. Lots of it, in fact. Whether it was explicitly stated or not, they got a good glimpse of what it means to be rich toward God—to be involved in God’s restoration of creation through the outpouring of their blessings—and they didn’t even have to go all the way to West Virginia to do it. Yes, this congregation is filled with people who are rich toward God and wise with wealth. (And now I know someone in particular to tap for a youth service trip in the future).

In the long run, what those elementary school students learned is the lesson that the man in the crowd received who is worried about the fairness of the distribution of his family inheritance: namely, the kingdom of God is not supremely concerned with economic fairness or everyone getting and having the same amount of stuff. Rather, it is about realizing that the future lies in God, not in the insurance we think we have in money. It is about the awareness that his grace is ultimately to shape the world, not some amount of money or goods in certain peoples’ hands.

Wealth, possessions, food, shelter—the things Luther said we can call our “daily bread”—all these things are certainly given by God, but our vocation as people who have been baptized is not to count our richness in them. Our richness is in the God who gives them, because it is God who has given even his Son for us. Because of Jesus, we know we have value to God, that we are God’s prized possessions. As the psalmist says this morning, “There is no price one can give God for our life.” As his own life is poured out, the barn doors of God’s goodness are flung wide open and the sheaves of love and mercy come tumbling down upon us.

This is where our true wealth lies: in the knowledge that we are created and redeemed by a loving God who wants us to be a part of his restoration of creation. And when we are truly wealthy in this way, we are empowered to tear down some of our barns and look into the eyes of those folks we encountered in West Virginia…into the eyes of those receiving our bags of hygiene items here in Richmond…into the eyes of those we encounter anywhere…and see past their lack of worldly things, past their need of what we have in excess, and not look at them as purely an object of our charity but instead see another one of God’s prized possessions looking back at us.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 11C] - July 21, 2013 (Luke 10:38-42)

 

As a pastor, I occasionally find myself on the receiving end of anger about things that are written in the Bible. I’m sure I’m not alone here; I suppose everyone who identifies themselves as a Christian these days must periodically answer people’s questions about what’s in the Bible, especially the controversial parts. I am used to hearing people express frustration, for example, about some of the more violent scenes in the Old Testament books and what that supposedly says about God’s nature. Several women, understandably irritated by some of the passages in Paul’s epistles, have me asked me to explain why some parts of the Bible seem to value women less than men. Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son, Isaac, in Genesis causes problems for a lot of folks, for they wonder how a loving God could even ask a follower to do something so brutal. I admit: the Bible is chock-full of some pretty provocative stories and passages that I have come to expect will rankle just about any thinking person.

It may surprise you, however, to hear that one of the angriest reactions and most intense lines of questioning I’ve ever dealt with when it comes to Bible stories was over this story about Mary and Martha. It came from Doris, one of the members in the first parish I served in Pittsburgh. Doris was a lifelong churchgoer. She sang in the choir. She volunteered in the office whenever help was needed. Now approaching 80, she had served on church Council several times, and at every church function Doris could be found in the kitchen preparing the food and staying late to clean the dishes. Doris was a workhorse, just like any number of dedicated volunteers that you can find in every congregation across the earth. In small congregations, they are often the backbone of just about everything, jacks-of-all-trades that silently and somewhat happily get stuff done.

"Christ in the House of Mary and Martha," Jan Vermeer (1655)

In any case, Doris was not pleased with this story where Martha is the one doing all the work and Mary is being lazy listening to Jesus. If that’s not bad enough, when Martha gently brings this to Jesus’ attention, by golly, he chastises her for it! Nope, that didn’t sit well with Doris. In fact, she told me once when it came up in a Bible study that she didn’t understand why God would let those words come from the mouth of her Lord Jesus, as that far as she was concerned that story could be left out of the Bible and we’d all be better for it.

Safe to say, I think Doris identified with Martha. Doris knows what it’s like to be abandoned in the church kitchen while everyone else enjoys the church program in the fellowship hall. I wonder how many of us do, too, in our own way. There are so many tasks to be done, especially in and around the church, and, all too often, it seems to get done by many of the same corps of Dorises, over and over again. There they are, running the old dishwasher, or folding the newsletters, or mowing the church lawn, or crunching the budget numbers, but it’s carefree Mary, raising nary a finger to help, who gets the nod of Jesus’ approval.

What’s more, in Jesus’ day, Martha would have been seen as performing the necessary tasks of hospitality, the sign that you valued your guest’s time and well-being above your own. In ancient Middle Eastern culture, taking care of houseguests and meeting their needs was the foremost indication of godliness. We think of hosting and waiting on guests in our as a something novelty, an out-of-the-ordinary event that might involve a trek to Williams-Sonoma if we have the time. But in an environment that was ultimately inhospitable, like theirs—desert-like and often war-torn, the roads patrolled by bandits and criminals—peoples’ homes were typically the only oasis of rest and safety. Hospitality to the stranger was a way of life that weaved culture together. Martha was simply doing what was required of her, tending carefully to the needs of her guest, who, after all, was God.

One important key, of course, to understanding just why Jesus favors Mary’s choice of sitting at his feet is that Martha, we are told, is distracted by her duties. She’s not just performing them, she is preoccupied with them. I’m not sure Doris was ever preoccupied with her many tasks of keeping the church running, but I suppose it could happen to any of us. The tasks of faith can become overwhelming, and pretty soon they become like busy-work, or, what’s worse, they become our identity. We end up doing a whole lot of running around, distracted by the amount of good that needs to be done in the world and not enough sitting still and listening to the word of God.

That, after all, is what Mary is doing. She is on the floor, his dusty feet a few inches from her face, eagerly receiving everything her rabbi says. When Jesus compares the part of listening to the part of doing, he is not saying that the duties of hospitality and service are not important. Rather, Jesus is making the point that, in the life of faith. these things are somehow secondary to hearing and receiving the words of the Lord. As good as those tasks are, constant attention to them can unwittingly pull us away from the one thing that we truly need, for it is in the Lord’s words and in his words only where we learn who and whose we are. The most important thing we can do as followers of Christ is remember what we’re supposed to be. I think that’s what’s happening between Mary and her Lord.

Some of you here may remember the song that the youth praise band sang in worship during last year’s Youth Sunday. They chose the song, “Remind Me Who I Am,” by the contemporary songwriter Jason Gray. The song is actually a hymn, a song with prayer-like words that is clearly directed to God. The simple refrain of the song goes like this:

“Tell me, once again, who I am to you.
Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you.”

When the youth group was practicing the song, some of the seniors had the idea to take the video for the song and adapt it for a worship setting. To do so, they had members of the youth group take large pieces of roughly-torn cardboard and write down a word on one side that describes how they often feel when they’re labeled by the world. Some of the words that were written down were “lonely,” “lost,” “inadequate,” “rejected,” “left out,” and so on. As the song was performed, members of the youth group walked out into the congregation carrying their cardboard labels. When they were summoned back by a Jesus figure, they slowly began turning those labels around to reveal their true identity: on the opposite side, in the same black marker, they had written the word “BELOVED.” This is an identity that each of us only learns when we spend time at the foot of Jesus: no matter what the world says about us or what name we give ourselves, we are beloved. In fact, Jesus dies in order to impart this identity to us.

This is the reason why Jesus says Mary has chosen the better part. We can work ourselves silly with the good works of faith, we can show the world all the good we do in service to the kingdom, we can impress others with our selfless ways of life, but we can and will be reminded of our identity only at the foot of the one who dies for us. We will only remember who and whose we really are when we spend time listening to his words, when we spend time letting his dusty feet get near our ears.

It’s still amazing to me that, despite all of this, the life of the church in this day and age can take on such a Martha feeling. In all the church’s fretting to be relevant, our running around trying to be cool, to be seen and heard as “applicable” and “important” in a post-modern world, we run the danger in the long run of just being pre-occupied. We find ourselves being pre-occupied with trendy social justice issues, pre-occupied with “making a difference” in our neighborhoods and communities.

I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read by now that say the way to attract young adults to the church is through service projects and hands-on faith-in-action activities. But that’s what Martha was doing. She was faith-in-action, constantly moving about, wanting to be the hands of God’s work. But before we can be effective hands for God, we need to have an ear to God. Taking a cue from Mary, perhaps the best thing the church could do in the midst of the world’s busy-ness is to be seen sitting down at the feet of the Risen One who has come to visit us—to be seen listening to what he has to say about us. We can then let our service and our good works flow from there.

I remember one time in seminary when I was waiting tables as a side job I went out with a bunch of my co-workers after hours. Most of the group had gone up to the bar, I think, to order more drinks, busy, I suppose you could say, with the night’s activities. I was left at the table with this one young woman in her twenties who knew I was studying to become a pastor. I don’t know whether it was out of a sense of guilt or just the only way she knew to make small talk with me, but she shared that she had grown up going to a Lutheran church but hadn’t really returned much since she’d gotten confirmed. There’s so much to do on the weekends, she said, “help give me the motivation to go back to worship.”

Her question, there in the midst of the smoky barroom, caught me off-guard. I am positive that my response was mush-mouthed and no help at all. I was probably worried about sounding judgmental or too churchy in my response. I might have tried to convince her of all the cool service things the church does for the world, but that would have seemed to sell it short. Looking back, there is any number of things I could have said, I guess, that would have wooed or coerced her back to worship.

But now, I think of a better response: If I could have, in that moment I would have simply introduced her to Doris and said, “Because you might turn out like this woman. Selfless, compassionate, willing to work, but also willing to listen. Doris, even in the rush of her service, knew that being with the other disciples at his feet gave her the opportunity to listen, the opportunity to savor the better part…and there and only there will anyone ever be reminded who they really are: BELOVED.”

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 10C] - July 14, 2013 (Luke 10:25-37)

 

Like almost any other child in any family, our younger daughter has earned several nicknames from her parents. One that she has had for a long time is “Little Counselor,” as in “Little Attorney,” or “Little Lawyer.” I’m not telling you this so that you can you can call her that—she probably wouldn’t appreciate that—but so that you know that one of the gifts she’s had ever since she learned to speak is the ability to make distinctions. Arguing with her has been and I imagine will continue to be a challenge for us because she can always find a way to be technically correct, or locate a loophole in our logic.

For example, a few years ago I had to attend an orientation conference for a youth mission trip down in South Carolina and since Melinda was off work I decided to take the whole family. We decided to take the church van, which the girls thought was a hoot. They’d never ridden in any other car before, much less a van. On the way back, the girls started arguing about something in the back seat and their voices started to get louder and louder until pretty soon they were yelling. Melinda turned around in her seat and told the girls to get quiet. “No yelling in the car, girls. Daddy’s trying to drive.”

Laura, without missing a beat, retorted, “It’s not a car. It’s a church van!”…as if that meant she didn’t really need to be quiet. She was two at the time. Nothing against any attorneys who are here…no, no, no, we are quite proud of her mind! And we know any good legal system depends on their careful attention to detail, their ability to draw distinctions and know definitions—but you can see the frustration Melinda and I are in for.

Trayvon Martin (Feb 5, 1995 - Feb 26, 2012)

It is only a fraction of the frustrations, I imagine, of those in the community of Sanford, Florida, today, at the news of an acquittal late last night in one of the most intensely-watched legal cases in the past decade. From its beginning, the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case had all the makings for a media spectacle and a chance for everyone to jump in with an “expert” opinion. All the favorite hot-button issues of race, class, age, gun rights, and drug use and law enforcement were involved. Like strands a sticky spiderweb that could entrap almost any reasonable man or woman, distinctions and definitions ran throughout the course of the whole ordeal.

We heard legal experts make distinctions, for example, about self-defense, distinctions about racial profiling…even attempts at distinctions about whose voice was heard on the 911 call. As a whole nation peered through their television screens to draw their own conclusions about whether justice was served or averted and what this means about our society today, it almost seems that the most basic injustice has been overlooked: that at the end of one foggy February night on the side of the road someone had been shot and left for dead, for reasons of self-defense or not. There’s no way to parse the tragedy out of that, no way to make any other distinction that will help us ignore or feel better about the terrible loss that has occurred or the violence which sadly occurs each day and night in many different neighborhoods in this country.

George Zimmerman

Jesus, as it turns out, tells a rather convoluted story about neighborhoods and violence and someone else being left for dead as a response to a lawyer’s attempt to make distinctions and test Jesus on a technicality. The first question the lawyer asks Jesus relates to eternal life and what someone must do to inherit it. Presumably the lawyer wants to hear Jesus’ knowledge of the Torah, the Jewish code of commandments. The Torah included a long list of laws, in fact, that could be interpreted and was interpreted many different ways. Jesus, like any good rabbi, turns the question back on the lawyer  by asking him what he finds written in the law and, more importantly, how he reads it.

The counselor responds with the two-fold statement on loving God and loving neighbor that we hear from Jesus himself at other times in the gospels: from the book of Deuteronomy, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind.” And from Leviticus: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Throughout Jesus’ life, those two commandments become linked together in  a way that lets us know love of God and love of neighbor are somehow vitally, inextricably linked, as if one cannot truly love God without also loving neighbor and vice versa. It makes me think of the truth that Catholic social worker Dorothy Day once imparted: “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

He Qi "The Good Samaritan"

Jesus seems pleased with the lawyer’s understanding of the law, but as a lifelong Lutheran and theological descendant of the Protestant Reformation, I want Jesus to cut to the chase and tell the man that there’s nothing he can do to inherit eternal life. After all, that’s what has been hammered into my head since the beginning of my life. It’s what Paul says throughout his letters in the New Testament. It’s what we learn as Lutherans from our own pastors and professors and Sunday over and over again: there’s no amount of following any of God’s rules and laws that can help us inherit eternal life. Rather, we receive it through God’s grace. It is given, not earned…no matter how clever we are at reading and interpreting it.

Thankfully for our sake, the lawyer is also not quite satisfied with Jesus’ response, either, because there is one more big distinction to make: namely, if Jesus agrees that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, then what exactly constitutes a neighbor? Is this a car or a church van we’re talking about? The law was actually a little vague on this point, and I guess the lawyer probably knows that. At several points in the Torah, “neighbor” is defined as anyone from the household of Israel, but in at least one other reference, “neighbor” is expanded to mean anyone who is found in your land, including foreigners and illegal aliens.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was steep and perilous.

Here is where the lie of questioning gets really tricky: which definition will Jesus choose? And if you’re thinking like the lawyer, then you know that the answer will help you figure out exactly who in this world you are expected to show compassion for, who you’re expected to serve and love. The answer to this question will help you pin down how to inherit eternal life.

As we all know by now, Jesus responds to the lawyer with the parable of the Good Samaritan, wherein a wounded and dying man is ignored by two of his own countrymen before receiving mercy from a complete stranger. Furthermore, the stranger happens to be a Samaritan, the group of people found most repulsive to the Jews. In modern usage, the term Good Samaritan has come to mean help from a by-stander, impromptu aid from someone not directly or intimately involved in the situation. However, that connotation blunts the original offensiveness of the parable Jesus tells. This story relates an interaction between two people who absolutely hate each other’s guts.

In Jesus’ time, it would have been hard to believe that a Samaritan would have ever stooped to help a Jew, and more importantly, no self-respecting Jew would have allowed a Samaritan to bind up his wounds, place him on a Samaritan’s donkey, and, on top of all that, pay for his recovery in an inn! No Jew would ever expect to receive mercy and salvation from that source. This Samaritan exhibits grace no one could fathom! A Jew would more achieve that kind of recovery on his own and from his own power—picking himself up off the road and somehow limping home—before he could expect to receive it from someone that unprecedented.

And as we hear the lawyer hear the story, we realize that maybe Jesus has answered the initial question directly after all, the question about how to receive eternal life: in the end, we aren’t able to achieve it ourselves, but we can receive it from a very unexpected, unprecedented source. In the end, the act of inheriting eternal life is not about distinctions we make or how critically we can think about theology or law or people on this earth. It is not about winning the argument or about thinking up new definitions that will get us off the hook. Rather, inheriting eternal life involves coming to the realization that we are really just a person stuck in a ditch, waiting for God’s mercy, dependent completely on someone’s compassion and love. And that rescue comes from the unlikely source of God himself, alien to this sinful earth, who stoops down in death on the cross to bind up our hearts and give us new life. God makes no distinctions about who we are and what we’re like. There is no loophole in his love, no effort to profile according to race or background or anything else. It’s just grace, and it saves us …Samaritan and Jew alike, Gentile, black, white, Hispanic, and any other distinction we like to think up.

Aime Morot "Le Bon Samaritain" (1881)

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Jesus asks the lawyer, and the lawyer is still so repulsed by the answer that he can’t even mention the word “Samaritan.” He just responds, “the one who showed mercy.” Jesus: Go and do likewise. Maybe, then,  that’s the final lesson of the parable Jesus is trying to make: namely, that this is actually what eternal life looks like. It looks less like figuring out who your neighbor is and more like learning what it means to be a neighbor. The vision of eternal life, in fact, is not some cloud of happiness in the sky far away, but our imitation of the Great Samaritan Christ here and now, walking along our deserted, descending roads of this tired planet, and taking on the wounds of those we meet…and having them take on ours. Eternal life means following not the restrictions of laws and religion which often prevent us from being involved, but following the road of compassion and love in this world and the next for we really only love God as much as we love the person we love the least.

It is good to be a little counselor every now and then—car or church van, you hash it out—but, the truth be told, when we start making too many distinctions, especially when it comes to people, we begin to lose sight of God’s unexpected grace, a grace that never, ever loses sight of us.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 7C] - June 23, 2013 (Luke 8:26-39 and Galatians 3:23-29)

 

There’s a lot that’s disturbing in this gospel story, isn’t there? It certainly is one of the more elaborate and dramatic displays of Jesus’ power in the entire New Testament. I think we could add disturbing to the list of descriptions for what happens. Jesus ventures into what is essentially foreign land—the country of the Gerasenes—across the border into the area where few of his own Jewish people live, and has a very wild encounter that involves a naked possessed man running at him from the tombs and then some pigs running down a hill into the water. A huge crowd shows up from the cities and the country…and then Jesus leaves.

One of the first things that I suspect disturbs us about this account is the demon-possessed man. Modern people don’t always know what to make of demon possession, and yet is comes up so often in the New Testament. To us it seems to be a feature of a long-distant time, an aspect of a culture that we view, rightly or wrongly, as more superstitious or less-educated than ours. We want to know more about this strange guy and what really is wrong with him. In fact, he disturbs our sensibilities as much as his demons do. We’d like to diagnose him on our terms, beyond what Luke or Matthew or Mark would have known, and somehow re-define Jesus’ interaction with him. Do we understand his condition as a medical one nowadays? Mental? Psychological? Then we wonder why we don’t seem to encounter as many demon possessions in our day—almost as if it’s a taboo subject for the modern church. It’s treated more or less as something for Hollywood’s horror movies to address.

Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac woodcut

For a long time, theologians and historians have looked at accounts like this one and argued that demon possessions were, in fact, more common in the time of Jesus because Satan and his minions, suspecting their downfall, were throwing everything they had at Jesus. This view is bolstered by the fact that as you read the gospels chronologically, demon possessions actually get less frequent. And it would stand that trajectory continues to this day. However we view these things then and now, the concept of having your soul possessed by something that is actively evil and beyond your control is disturbing.

Another thing that many of us I bet find disturbing is this part about all the pigs. I mean, what did the pigs do to deserve this, right? They’re just standing there, minding their own piggy business, and the next thing we know they’re taking off the cliff like lemmings. And what about the innocent pig farmer who loses his whole head of livestock? That disturbs us, too.

It reminds me of the story from Cairo, Egypt, several years ago when the world experienced the swine flu outbreak. Believing incorrectly that swine flu could jump directly from pigs to people and fearing that all pigs carried the virus, the predominantly Muslim government in Egypt ordered an immediate cull of all the pigs in the country—which were one of the economic mainstays of the Christian minority. It turned out to be a disaster for everyone because the pigs, as anyone who lives in Cairo should know, were the cities chief garbage disposal workers. It was a mess.  Trash piled up everywhere. Food was rotting in the streets. The government’s rash decision interrupted a serious status quo. In this story, Jesus seems to play some kind of similar role in the destruction of animals and property alike. Swine are dirty, filthy animals...a great place to stick everything we don’t want. Let these little piggies run wee-wee-wee into the Sea of Galilee and destroy the demons forever!

Egypt culls its pigs

Again, this story conflicts with some of our modern, sophisticated sensibilities, but we forget that as Lord of all creation, Jesus holds authority over the beasts of the field. We also get hung up on the fate of those poor little piggies over there—which would have been sacrificed eventually for food anyway—forgetting that right here before our eyes a human being has just been freed from a terrible condition.

However, our disgust and dismay over the demons and the pigs could cause us to overlook what is truly the most disturbing part of this story: the people of Gerasene reject Jesus. We should be disturbed that these people see the man finally clothed and in his right mind and they are afraid instead of thankful. We should find it disturbing that Jesus comes to release people from the horrible forces that enslave them and the people are seized with great fear instead of great joy! The people of Gerasene present us with this peculiar scenario where the possibility of life in Christ is frightening, rather than liberating, where the results of Christ’s grace are rejected and feared, rather received and enjoyed! Maybe those Gerasenes aren’t so different from modern people, after all. They, too, are more concerned about the pigs that went down the hill—and that Jesus might then send their whole economy downhill—than they are about the arrival of God’s kingdom!

I think the reason we find this so disturbing is because the Gerasenes’ reaction to Jesus can so often be ours. They aren’t the only ones who balk at the new world of freedom that Jesus’ love brings about. Like them, we just learn to cope with the demons we have. We feel it’s somehow safer that way. Rather than confronting and exorcising those harmful things with which we struggle, we ignore them or rationalize our behavior through them. And, like the Gerasenes, we get used to the people at the margins. We have a place for them in the tombs, don’t we? “Out of sight, out of mind.” Day in and day out, we grow very comfortable with this status quo, with a world that divides people into races and ethnic groups and genders, with systems that assigns labels based on abilities and disabilities. Anything that upsets that, even if that thing brings new life and new direction, is primarily seen as a threat, not a gift.

Yet that is precisely what Christ’s presence is about. Jesus arrives on the scene and immediately begins liberating people from captivity to sin. You can hunt through the New Testament and you won’t find one single story where Jesus binds someone up or leaves someone wounded. Everywhere he goes he overthrows the powers that harm God’s people. In fact, like in today’s lesson where Jesus ventures into foreign land, Jesus seems to go out of his way to make people whole, to free them for a life lived to God. Jesus’ defining moment will involve going out of his own way to die like a criminal in order to set us free from the power of death.

Haven’t you noticed how we even normalize death these days, as if it’s just another type of demon we just learn to make a place for, a feature of the status quo? We say it’s just part of the circle of life or come up with any number of coping mechanisms that actually help numb us to its awful reality. But Jesus did not come to help God’s people cope with death. He came to conquer it, and with that conquest give us access to a new kind of life that breaks the shackles of all that holds us back and frees us for a life of love and service and unity with all humankind.

This is precisely what the apostle Paul hammers home to the congregation in Galatia when we hears that they have started to re-introduce some of those shackles back into their community. Contrary to the freedom the gospel of Jesus had brought them, they have begun thinking of each other once again in terms of all these distinctions. But no, Paul tells them: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This community of Jesus’, where there are no distinctions and where people view each other in terms of their humanity and not in terms of their demons, interrupts the world’s status quo. It’s often such a radical interruption that even the church has great difficulty in modeling it. And yet the people of God are sent out into a world that often values swine more than people, that is quite comfortable letting people live in squalid places as long as they’re out of the view of everyone else. 

That, to me, is the last great disturbing feature of today’s reading: this man begs to follow Jesus, but Jesus sends him back into the midst of his scary country. Jesus commands him to return and declare rather than follow and learn as a disciple. And he goes, a missionary that goes to live this freedom with the hope some of that freedom in Christ will start to rub off in the country of the Gerasenes.

Stephen Ministry logo

Perhaps that is one way to view the Stephen Ministers we commission today. Theirs is a ministry of healing, but they come not as exorcists who come to drive out our demons of loneliness and fear, but instead like that healed demoniac who has experienced God’s grace himself. Clothed now in Christ, in their right mind, and sitting at the foot of Jesus, these brothers and sisters in our midst are sent into a world that is hurting in order to proclaim what God has done. Granted, our Stephen Ministers will be caring for the people in our congregation, people who are not rejecting Jesus, but people who, like all of us in some way, are bound by the shackles of grief or some other pain. Stephen Ministers go to announce in gentle and careful ways—often just by attentive listening—that wonderful release in Jesus’ name. They will come among us to interrupt us with God’s grace, to further ease us into this new reality brought about by Christ’s death and resurrection. And as they do it, they will help get rid of one of the greatest distinctions that still remains among the people of any church: namely, that there are those of us  here who have all our stuff together and those of us here who don’t. We’re all in the same category on that account, sitting at the foot of the one who puts our stuff back together.

Oh, there’s so much to be disturbed about, isn’t there, in this story? And yet, if you think about it, the people of God—whether they are officially commissioned as Stephen Ministers or not—end up being the disturbers of the world’s fake peace. The church often finds itself in the country of the Gerasenes. We want so badly to escape from these hostile surroundings and let Jesus take us elsewhere, but in the end, we are sent to make interruptions of grace in God’s name, pointing against all odds to the One who does set people free, pointing against all the world’s odds to a new status quo which may initially seem disturbing, but in reality is liberating and beautiful.

                         

 

Thanks be to God!

"The Exorcism of the Gerasene Demoniac" Sebastian Bourdon (1653)

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Holy Trinity [Year C] - May 26, 2013 (Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8)

 

 

I believe most of us would agree that there are certain things people are very careful in defining or describing. That is, there are certain topics or situations or scenarios that most people, most of the time, are meticulous about getting right whenever they talk about them. Two simple examples I can think of would be recipes or directions. You can’t share a birthday cake recipe, for example, by saying, “Well, just mix some sugar and some flour together with a little bit of salt and vanilla and bake it for a while.” You do that and the person won’t end up with a cake. With recipes, people are always conscious about communicating the details. The same goes for giving directions: in most cases, they need to be fairly precise, and so people are careful about how they communicate them. If someone wants to get to my house from church, I can’t just tell them, “I live northwest of here,” and expect they’d ever arrive at my house. It’s accurate…but I need to communicate more to be more helpful.

We also tend to be very mindful in the ways we talk about other people—how we describe them, how we identify them. I think specifically of how careful parents are when they speak about their children. They don’t take the task lightly. Even though they might accidently switch their names every once in a while when they’re talking to them to their face, parents always know exactly what their children are like, how they’re unique. My mother-in-law raised three children, and when they were little she used to say she could tell who had made a mess even if none of them claimed it. Even their messes had their names written all over them, she’d say. That’s how well she knew how to describe and define her kids.

three interlocking circles have long been used
as a symbol for the Holy Trinity

The doctrine of the Trinity arose out of the need to speak clearly and carefully about God. Early on, as the people of the church read the Scriptures and made sense of Jesus’ story, as people felt the need to explain how God and the risen Jesus were connected to each other, there came this need to talk about God in ways that were accurate and helpful and illuminating. As this thinking and speaking took place—which occurred even as the New Testament was coming together—it became clear that God’s true nature was somehow One and Three at the same time. People could talk about God as Father or as Son or as Spirit, but really they were all speaking about the same God. The Trinity was never meant to be something to be dogmatic, shoved down the throats of Christians by church leaders and priests. Neither was it something that had its own neat chapter, for example, in the Bible. People nowadays often get freaked out by that word “doctrine,” but really the Trinity was much like conveying a recipe or like giving directions or talking correctly about your child. While it is, of course, is difficult—maybe even risky—to try to explain a mystery, to put boundaries on something so utterly undefinable as God himself, those who have had an intimate relationship with this God, who have experienced God’s grace at points in their life, as well as those who feel distant from God have all recognized at some point the need to be attentive to the language used for God and about God. Therefore, the word “doctrine” should not upset us, especially in this instance.

ancient icons often depict the Trinity as the three visitors
in Genesis 18

The issue I find is that people of Christian faith often make one of two mistakes when it comes to speaking about God. Either we’re too intimidated by the task or we’re too casual about it. When we’re too intimidated by it, we end up thinking, “It’s too complex. What’s the point?” and we end up say nothing. When we’re too casual about it, we end up ascribing to God all kinds of traits and actions that should not really be ascribed to God. When we do attempt it, and when we’re thoughtful about it, we find that speaking about God as Trinity best helps us tell the story of God’s love and what that love is like. There are plenty of examples of how the Trinity helps do that, but for the sake of brevity, I am going to focus on just three today—one sermon, but a trinity of examples, if you will—that arise out of the texts we have.

 

1. God is a complete relationship in and of God’s self.

Because God is one and three at the same time, there is a community within God. God is the Father always giving love to the Son through this Spirit that exists between them. God the Father looks upon his Son in a never-ending Spirit of love and the Son is always looking back from wherever he is—from the manger, from the waters of the Jordan, from the cross, from this altar in the same never-ending Spirit of love. In fact, it is this relationship within God’s being that allows some New Testament writers to say that “God is love.” This relationship of love is at the heart of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between Them. But because God is this complete relationship, filled with love, God doesn’t really need the rest of us. That may come as a shock, but Psalm 8 says it very nicely: “When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”

Michaelangelo's "Creation of Adam"

God the Trinity is perfect and whole, filled with so much beauty and wisdom that it all eventually comes spilling out in the form of creation…a creation that includes “the birds of the air and the fish of the sea,” as the psalmist says. We could include so much more: atoms and the periodic element, cells and organisms, springtime flowers and birds, and birthday cakes and little children making messes, and dance recitals, and graduation ceremonies, beaches for summer trips. Existence is the first grace of the Triune God  given to us, his creatures. We will never grow tired of contemplating and exploring it all and giving thanks for it. It all comes so undeservedly.

 

2. God thinks the human race rocks.

Continuing with the words of Psalm 8: “What are human beings that you are mindful of them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.” The message in the lesson from Proverbs is much the same. Wisdom, the figure who is often associated with the second person of the Trinity, says,

           

“When he marked the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Proverbs 8:30-31).

 

"The Holy Trinity Palo della Convertite" Botticelli (1491-93)

In a world marked by so much sorrow and brokenness, where even our relationship with creation seems out-of-whack, where we are daily reminded how wretched we humans can be to each other, it is important to keep in mind that ultimately we are God’s delight, that God loved creating us and calls us “very good,” and that God has not stepped back in disgust from the world. In fact, God has done the opposite. God delights in us so much that part of God actually becomes human in order to include us in God’s love. And this person of the Trinity—fully God—undergoes the length of human experience in order to include us into God’s very life.

For those of Christian faith the gift of our existence on planet earth, as wonderful as it is, does not explain the full extent of God’s love for us. The fact that God rescues us from sin through the Son’s own sacrifice becomes the main demonstration of the Trinity’s love for us. Once again, it flows from God’s grace.

 

3. The life of faith is a life of giving.

Just like the Trinity is a never-ending circle of the Son giving himself back to the Father and the Father giving the Son to us, the Spirit moves us to give ourselves back to God. And by a life of giving I don’t just mean the offering plate. I mean the giving of our talents, giving of our lives to each other, giving our compassion to others in need, giving our forgiveness to those we’ve hurt, giving up the things that hold us back from following Jesus. When we think life is mainly about achieving, about receiving, about dominating, we are misled. Life in God—and, hence, the entirety of life God lays out for us—is about giving.

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul speaks of the “hope of sharing the glory of God.” That hope actually develops through a process of giving ourselves up, sometimes even in suffering. Through the Spirit, we share in the ongoing love of God and the mystery of this faith. Through God’s Spirit, we participate in the continual outpouring of love between the Father and the Son. Therefore, the more we withhold ourselves, the more we focus on taking and getting, the more we concentrate standing alone and making things all about us then the more we end up closing ourselves off  and missing out on the growth that comes from the life God has given us. This is especially true in our suffering, which, unfortunately for the time-being, is part of a holy life in a broken world. Because of the promises given in Jesus, we know that brokenness is being healed and an even more beautiful and complete life awaits us after death.

In the end, I suppose even our best language from our best theologians still falls far short of explaining or describing God. Some days, we often must fall back on the same expressions of awe and respect and fear that the Psalmist uses this morning at both the beginning and the closing of his hymn:“O LORD our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” God is majestic, that is true. But do you know what is even more awesome than his majesty and therefore more important to know? That this Lord may be called our Lord.  Through his own death and resurrection we belong to this God, the one who creates everything and redeems it all. This Father loves us.  He loves us in the name of the Son and through the power Spirit, world without end.

 

Amen.

 

           

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.