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.

Day of Pentecost [Year C] - May 19, 2013 (Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21)

 

Today is Pentecost, commonly called the “birthday” of the church, the day we remember how God’s Spirit was poured out on the apostles, but let’s go ahead and be honest about something: it is difficult to understand the power of the Holy Spirit, or even describe what the Spirit is. It’s the person of the Trinity that, at least I suspect for many of us, presents the biggest challenge to our intellect. God the Father and God the Son are, for the most part, easier to grasp, even if belief in them is weak at times. But God the Holy Spirit? It’s often depicted as a bird. A bird can be seen…maybe even photographed…but never tamed. Or look at the Spirit’s other metaphors in Scripture: fire and wind. Neither of those can be touched, much less held. They don’t really have substance or volume, yet their presence can always be felt. And while they can at times be harnessed and channeled, they can never be fully controlled. I mean, who can control the wind?

This is how God’s Holy Spirit seems to function: it is energy, able to go anywhere, able to touch anyone, and, most importantly, able to bring about change. It’s the side of God that we find the most unpredictable, especially when we get in the habit of trying to predict God. It’s the aspect of God’s nature that reminds us most of God’s inherent inaccessibility, especially when we get in the habit of trying to access God. The Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity who draws us in to the community of God’s people when we would rather make a name for ourselves.

The ' Little' Tower of Babel (Pieter Bruegel, 1564)

That, as it turns out, was the root problem at the Tower of Babel: humans wanted to make a name for themselves. The ancient Hebrews had this pre-historic tale tucked away in the early part of the book of Genesis that told about the time the human race tried its hardest to access God, to literally climb into the heavens to reach him. In direct defiance to God’s joyous command that they disperse after the flood and fill the earth, humans decide instead to band together and build a tower. Instead of fanning out with the Spirit’s power and trusting his promise wherever they went, humankind opts for clumping together in one place and, to symbolize their power, to build a tower up into the sky. It was all about making a name for themselves, rather than thankfully receiving the name God had given them.

Ozymandias?

The idea of “making a name for themselves” was as well-known technique in ancient architecture, which we know now from archaeology. The pyramid-like structures in Mesopotamia, where this tower story originated, were often constructed by the rulers who wished to be known forever. They would have the slaves inscribe the despots’ names in the brick and cylinder seals that were placed in the foundations of these towers. But like the toppled statue in Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” eventually the rulers would die and, like their temples, succumb to the sands of time. So much for making a name for themselves.

For ancient Israel, the story of what happened at the Tower of Babel helped explain several things, including the diversity of world languages and cultures, and the difficulties in human communication. Most of all, however, it illustrated how speech, as glorious a development as it was, was just another arena where sin could wreak its havoc. In other ancient religions’ pre-historic stories, diverse human languages came about, for example, as a result of a war between the gods in the cosmos. But for Israel and its one God—the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob—it was a result of human selfishness and pride and our desire to use whatever means necessary to reach God on our own terms.

Eventually the whole scheme is undone when God causes everyone to start speaking gibberish. What had begun as a plan to consolidate human strength becomes an accident of confusion. All that’s left of Babel today is the term “babble,” a word that means incoherent speech.

We are no less familiar with the gifts and challenges of speech in our day: words can build people up and words can break people down. Language has the power to bring us together, just as it has the ability to alienate. In fact, I you think about it, speech and language are in the same category as fire and wind. Words have energy and power, but no volume or substance. And no one can hold a word or really harness its power once it’s been spoken, can they? But, by golly, a word can bring about change, can’t it?

So, altogether it really fits that on the Day of Pentecost, as the disciples are, once again, gathered into one place, speech becomes a conduit or catalyst for the work of the Holy Spirit. There is fire and there is wind—the traditional hallmarks of the Spirit’s presence—but there is also speech…loads of it, in all kinds of languages! But this time there is no babbling. Instead, it’s intelligible. Each of the foreigners gathered there is able to understand what the disciples are talking about in their own native tongue.

In ancient times, humans had striven to ascend to God by their own might. In the life and death of Jesus and then again at Pentecost, God descends to us in our weakness. At Babel and at countless times throughout history, humans had formed bricks to construct a grand but lifeless monument that eventually goes unfinished. Here at Pentecost, God uses people as living stones and assembles a temple which will finish his work of creation. Long ago, people and their languages were scattered out of their desire to make a name for themselves, and I presume we are still scattering, even as I speak. Now, by God’s grace, we are also being gathered back up  through the only name we need ever to be concerned about: the name of the one who gives himself for the world.

Several years ago I was on on a trip to China with a group of seminarians where we witnessed to a Pentecost-like outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We had traveled to one of the most remote, interior locations in China. No roads were paved there, and some of the villages we visited still did not have electricity or running water. The churches in which we worshiped, which had been built decades before when the first missionaries had arrived, were very primitive and bore almost no resemblance to our grand buildings in the global west. We sat through hours of worship services spoken in tribal languages almost no one could translate accurately and which were accompanied by no organ or guitar or drum. We were served food that I couldn’t identify or name but which tasted, for the most part, fairly good.

our group in Yunnan Province, China (January 2000)

On the whole our group was feeling very tired and very foreign, as if God had, in fact, scattered us rich, Anglo-Saxon westerners to the end of the earth. I had started to focus on myself and my own fears and needs quite a bit during those long hours of incomprehensible worship in the un-air-conditioned heat when one little quartet—two middle-aged men and two middle-aged women—formed in the middle aisle and faced each other like a square. “What next strange custom am I going to have to endure now?” I remember thinking to myself. Then the leader of the group lifted his hand as if to direct a choir and when he dropped it, the four of them threw their heads back and began to sing, in perfect harmony,“Hal-lelujah! Hal-lelujah…!” Unbelieveably, and without a single hiccup, they then went on to finish the entire piece from Handel’s Messiah:

           

“And his name shall be cal-led, Wonderful Counselor! Almighty God!
The Everlasting Father! The Prince of Peace!”

 

Once again, there in that far-flung mud hut, we found ourselves drawn in by the name on earth that matters the most: the one who has been crucified and who is raised to bring all of God’s people into one communion. In spite of my boredom, in spite of my pride, in spite of my self-centeredness, the Spirit still managed to reach out and draw me in again. Like fire and wind, those words of gospel created a change in everyone who was there, and that same Holy Spirit desires to bring ever more into this God’s embrace, especially those who’ve never heard it before.

We look today at these young people on the front row, we look at their youthfulness and bright eyes, we look at these confirmands with their talents and their gifts just beginning to blossom and we are tempted to say: the world is yours, O child of God, go make a name for yourself! Of course, we want them to prosper, but if all they are to do is make a name for themselves, then it might end up turning out like Babel in the long run.

No, no, no. On this Pentecost, the Spirit teaches us to say to them—to say to everyone, in fact—don’t worry about your own name so much, but instead the name of the one who saves us.

Call on his name and go make his name known. Don’t waste too much energy building monuments that reach to the sky, that attempt to dominate the world or escape from it. Hold back on that desire to leave a mark that promotes your own self above all others’. Rather, build monuments of compassion and justice that have his name inscribed on every action, every prayer, and every word you speak. Those are the monuments that will last. Jesus himself says his disciples will be capable of greater works than he is. Ha-lle-lujah, my friends! Stand up, for God’s sake, and lend your voice to the quartet that draws the scattered world in.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Seventh Sunday of Easter [Year C] - May 12, 2013 (John 17:20-26)

 

In 2009 our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, decided to hold its triennial youth gathering in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans had hosted national Lutheran youth gatherings at least twice before, but in 2009 our denomination saw an opportunity to send 38,000 youth into the hurricane-devastated city to perform thousands of hours of community service. Epiphany sent 24 youth and four adult chaperones to that 2009 Gathering. The planners who organized all those service projects for all those youth groups decided it would be a great idea if all the youth wore the same colored t-shirt on the day they went out into the community to work. So, they gave us—all 38,000 of us—orange shirts to wear. On any given day during the three days of service projects, there were about 13,000 youth interspersed throughout the city doing some sort of service work all clad in orange.

Fast forward to last summer, when our denomination decided to return to New Orleans for another youth gathering and complete even more community service. It was the first time in the history of Lutheran youth gatherings where the same city had hosted twice in a row. This congregation sent 30 youth and eight adults to the 2012 Gathering. It was another very successful event, and yes, we all got another orange shirt to wear while we were working.

What I found most remarkable about the Gathering last summer, however, was the fact that the gift shops and souvenir kiosks in hotels and throughout the French Quarter (and even on Bourbon Street) had orange shirts for sale for us when we got there. Throughout the city, designed and produced specifically for us ahead of our arrival, were thousands of orange shirts of all kinds, usually with some reference to Lutheranism on it. The reason why dawned on me pretty quickly: the residents and merchants of New Orleans think Lutherans wear orange! Thanks to our visible witness throughout the city three years earlier, they associate Lutherans with orange t-shirts.

In fact, I didn’t even realize how strong that realization was until I got home. When we returned to Richmond from New Orleans this past summer, I happened to be wearing my orange shirt. I was tired and hungry after the long 22-hour bus ride, so before I got home I stopped at the Martin’s up on Staples Mill Road. As I was checking out—and I’m not making this up—the cashier who rang me up looked at my orange shirt with the word “New Orleans” on it and asked, “Are you Lutheran?” Shocked that our reputation had even reached Glen Allen, I said, “I am!” She responded, “My husband’s brother lives down there, and he said the city was overrun with a bunch of Lutheran kids wearing orange.” I still think someone from Clemson got on the planning team.

If only it were that easy, right?! If only Christian identity and mission were as simple as a t-shirt uniform. Unfortunately, Jesus never says that our identity as his followers will be associated with our clothing. He doesn’t even say that the world will recognize us as his disciples chiefly by the works of mercy we will do, or how many hurricane-ravaged cities we help rebuild. In the night before his crucifixion, as he prays to his Father for the sake of his disciples, Jesus doesn’t even seem to be the slightest bit concerned about how brightly our individual lights of faith may shine. Instead, Jesus prays that we may be one. Our unity and how we live out our common life will be the main way the world will know Jesus is from God the Father and come to believe in him: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

This is a foundation of Christian theology: that whatever God is, Jesus is somehow a part of it, somehow united with it. Jesus is not something separate and different from God. The two of them are one. They are a unit: wherever Jesus goes, God is also there. Jesus makes it clear that this miraculous relationship of one-ness is now also going to be given to the people who follow Jesus, the community he has claimed and called out with his mercy and forgiveness.

The church, the community of disciples, therefore, is not just some social service organization that goes about doing works of charity…although that is part of what we do. Nor it is it primarily some kind of educational institution that instructs its students on how to live from the Bible…although we do some of that, as well. Rather, the community that arises by the Spirit’s power out of the death and resurrection of Christ bears the very glory of God, and that glory is made known in our common life, our common faith, our common love for each other.

We must pause and reflect on this, because I think it’s very popular theology these days to talk a lot about how it is possible to see Christ in other individuals. We talk at length about ways that we glimpse God or God’s love in the lives of other people. There is nothing wrong with this expression of people’s faith, but we must not forget that Jesus—especially in John’s gospel—wants us to be far more aware of the ways God is made known not through individuals and individual’s actions, but through the life of the whole group.

There is an African proverb that goes, “If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, travel together.” It would seem from his prayer on the night before his death that Jesus is far more concerned about the distance his community of disciples will travel than its speed.

Yet what does it mean to be “one”? How strictly do we interpret Jesus’ prayer for unity? Does it mean we are always in agreement about everything? Does it mean we have no conflict, especially on major issues? Or does it just mean that Christians should promise not to go about killing each other? (I propose that would be one place to start!). What about all the dizzying array of different denominations and divisions that already exist among us, which are increasingly confusing and off-putting to the culture at large? There have been different interpretations of Jesus’ prayer for about as long as there has been the church—how exactly this unity is embodied and when we can be sure it’s been compromised.

One thing is certain, however, and we didn’t need Jesus to pray it for us to learn it. That is, our mission and the vitality of the gospel depend on it. In other words, how you and I relate to each other—how all of the groups of Christians relate to other groups of Christians—is going to have a direct effect on what other people think of God. Our unity will not sound and look like some large-scale version of the closing credits of The Waltons—“Goodnight John boy, Good night Mary Ellen”—but it should at least give the impression to the rest of the world that we somehow value each other, that we don’t routinely write each other off.

What is so striking to me about this portion of Jesus’ prayer is that he prays to God not just on behalf of his current followers, but also on behalf of those people in the world who have yet to believe in him. He prays on behalf of all those in future years who will hear the truth of the gospel and be opened to God’s grace through it. The mission of the church is tied directly to our unity. Notice how many times the word “sent” appears in these verses alone! We aren’t closed off in our unity: our life together becomes the chief way we interact with the world.

Think of it this way: the world is already riven by conflict and unhealthy ways of dealing with it, isn’t it? Why would a non-believer join up with a cause that doesn’t offer anything better at dealing with it? Salvation probably wouldn’t feel or look much different than what’s being offered by the world.

The glory of God is made known in the reconciliation of the cross, and if we, the people claimed by that cross, are not committed to living reconciled with one another, to embodying that forgiveness at least with our own pew-mates, then that glory of the cross will be diminished in our witness. Jesus’ death, after all, is about God’s willingness to go the distance—to travel as far as it takes—to have us to him.

It seems to be that Epiphany Church has a unique challenge and opportunity in the coming weeks and months to delve deeper into the life that is prayed for by Jesus. It is easy for a congregation to build its identity around its leadership, or its strongest ministries, or its clarity of theological confession, all of which are important. You have experienced thirty flourishing years of all of those. In fact, we could push it back even farther: the sixty-some-odd years of Epiphany’s life have all been graced with all kinds of growth. Now that you find yourselves in a transition and soon at the beginning stages of a call process to find a new pastor, it will be critical that you are committed to the words of this prayer. Jesus knows that it will be critical for your witness, your faith, and your identity as God’s children that you continue love and value one another, that you pay attention to those ties that bind, that you nurture instincts of patience and forbearance with one another.

quilts for Lutheran World Relief

For I would guess we’re all in this for the long haul…not just the search for a new senior pastor in this congregation, that is, but committed to walking with Christ for the length of your days with all the Christian followers on earth. As such, we’d probably rather be known for the distance we’ll traveling, and not the speed…

a distance symbolic of the path of the quilt behind your back to a village somewhere in south Asia…

a distance that reaches out in service to neighbors…

a distance that spans human hearts that are estranged by fear and mistrust…

a distance that involves passing the faith down to yet another generation, and the generation after that, and the generation after that…until Jesus, who is surely coming soon, returns.

May we be one, as God the Father and God the Son are one in love, in forgiveness, in word and deed.

And if you’re dying to wear a bunch of matching T-shirts as we do it, then I happen to know a place where we can get some.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.