The Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 28C] - November 17, 2013 (Luke 21:5-19)

 

An important conversation occurred in the Martin household yesterday morning. It involved a certain holiday that is coming up (which will remain unnamed for the purposes of this sermon, but it rhymes with Miss-muss), and the need to make room for any possible new items that might arrive because of said holiday. My wife, expert at breaking hard news and broaching difficult subjects with our two young girls, took the lead. More specifically, it had to do with dismantling and removing one particularly large, bulky toy that hasn’t been played with in quite some time. It is the toy kitchen they received several Miss-musses ago that is occupying a large part of one wall in the playroom. Fearful of some possible sentimental attachment they might have to it, Melinda tread lightly, choosing wisely to accentuate the virtues of giving away things you don’t need any more and the benefits of making room for something better. That’s the real hope, of course: that something better might come, that the old could give way for the new. She and I braced ourselves for negative reactions, but they took it in stride and moved right along to the next thing they wanted to do.

Now comes my part: dismantling the thing and finding a new home for it. Several ideas were tossed around, and I suppose, given the fast-approaching arrival of that-holiday-that-will-go-unnamed, I’ll have to get on it pretty soon. Maybe one day they’ll come home and it just won’t be there anymore. For now, however, I want to walk in there with the two of them tagging along behind me, and gesture at it widely with my arm in the same dramatic manner Jesus probably uses this morning as he points to the Jerusalem temple: “You see this kitchen play set, girls, with its adorable miniature kitchen utensils and where you made countless make-believe casseroles? The days will come when not one painted piece of chipboard will be fastened to another! All will be torn down.”

You’re probably thinking it’s a good thing Melinda takes care of these conversations.

stones at the Temple mount in modern-day Jerusalem

Jesus, however, being a Middle Eastern man of his time, was prone to a little exaggeration and dramatic effect. He, too, wanted to have an important conversation about something and he wanted to make sure they got the point. It goes without saying that he was not pointing to some small wooden replica of something. He was talking about the temple that stood at the heart of Jerusalem, the very symbol of the faith of the Jewish people. The stones he would have been referring to were gargantuan. The addition that King Herod added in 19 B.C. contained bricks—if you could call them that—that were 44 feet by 11 feet and weighed 628 tons. It would have been unfathomable to topple them! Furthermore, for the ancient Israelites, the Temple was the place where God was thought to dwell on earth, the place where heaven touched earth. It had been there, in some form, for about a thousand years. It was unfathomable for God’s people to be God’s people without it! Yet, there Jesus stands, with his disciples tagging along behind him, boldly announcing to them and to all the other people who are in awe of the mighty building that it will be torn down.

The Temple is not the only thing whose foundations will be shattered. In a short sermon that probably strikes most modern ears as a little bit fanciful, like something out of a doomsday movie, Jesus goes on to explain that the dismantling of the Temple will be accompanied by all kinds of turmoil and strife. Earthquakes, famines, maybe even typhoons in the Pacific Ocean…indeed, the fabric of human society will torn as wars and riots sweep the land.



an artist's depiction of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70

The scene that Jesus describes is utterly terrifying, and yet he tells them not to fear.  At the same time, it doesn’t sound like they, as disciples, will be able to withdraw from the world and escape the terror, either, which is something that God’s people often try to do. Another thing that doesn’t sound possible is any sort of rapture, a fashionable but false theory some have developed where true believers are supposedly taken right up into heaven at some point in the future to be spared trials and tribulation below.

In fact, in the times Jesus is describing here, it sounds like the followers of Jesus need to be prepared to be singled out for who they are. They will be dragged before tribunals and brought before people of authority and be expected to give some sort of testimony. Come to think of it, the words of Imagine Dragons’ recent radio hit are strangely fitting to this scenario that Jesus describes:  “I’m breaking in, I’m shaping up, then checking out on the prison bus. This is it: the apocalypse…whoa!”

What Jesus’ listeners probably didn’t realize at the time is the very thing that we tried to tell our daughters about their kitchen: all of this—the Temple, the city, the human fabric of society as we know it—all of this will be torn down and something better will take its place. When the Temple would fall, about 30 years after this prediction, new life for God’s redeemed people would spring up in the form of a human community spread across the earth. They would be a new temple, of sorts, gathering in homes and villages. Raised up in the shadow of the cross, they would be a people enlivened by the power of God’s Spirit and empowered to testify to Jesus’ love.

"The Crucifixion" Max Ernst (1913)

Standing in the shadow of the glorious Jerusalem Temple that day, it would have been so hard to comprehend and appreciate that, but something better would come. On the other hand, in the midst of trial and testing, persecution and hardship, those promises sound better and more blessed by the minute. It’s what gives people hope to keep on moving, to keep on testifying, to keep on worshiping and praising God: all of this will be torn down and something better—something new, something truly permanent—will come take its place.

The same promise is echoed every time we gather as this temple of holy believers and take the bread and wine of the new covenant. There is forgiveness as we eat, and it is complete, but the meal we share is still but a foretaste of a better, more satisfying feast to come. It is the promise, most of all, that we glimpse as we look at the cross of Good Friday. We see him there, dragged before all the worldly authorities, mocked and persecuted by none other than you and me and our sinfulness, his very life dismantled like one bloody stone at a time. The clouds threaten and the skies grow dark. But something new and wonderful will come in its place, even though none of us expects it, none of us deserves it. In God’s good time, Easter morning will come.

There’s been a lot of devastation in the world this week. I’m thinking particularly of the apocalypse-level destruction in the Philippines as the people there sort through the aftermath of the most violent storm “in recorded history.” There’s been lots of devastation and loss, lots of questioning and anguish, but also a scenes of hope, images of old things giving way to new. One pastor made the rounds his morning blessing dead bodies wherever he could find them and gathering survivors for worship services amidst the rubble. Where they worshipped looked eerily like the scene Jesus promises in today’s reading: a gaping hole in the ceiling of the church let the rain fall through. The windows were blown out and winds snapped at the silver cross on top of the steeple, which was hanging upside down. “Despite what happened,” the pastor said, “we still believe in God. The church may have been destroyed, but our faith is intact…as believers, our faith has not been destroyed.”

And in other area of the battered city, a 21-year-old mother nurses a baby that was born just after the storm hit. As her family was swept out of their house by a wave of storm surge, she went into labor. The baby’s grandmother has still not been recovered, and neither the baby nor the mother is apparently quite out of the woods yet, but the baby has a name: Bea, named after the grandmother, a nod to the past, and Joy. Bea Joy. Joy amidst the rubble.

No one knows exactly when the world as we know it will come to an end, but it will. Not one piece of painted chipboard will remained fastened to another. Even astrophysicists tell us that despite its splendor, the universe is unsteady and unstable (like a giant Jerusalem Temple?) and will eventually collapse or expand or whatever it is universes do. Maybe one day we’ll come home and it just won’t be there anymore. Whatever God’s plan and timing is—whether that’s tomorrow or millennia from now—Jesus, the one who’s already been through hell, promises that we will be cared for. For today, our teachers for how to keep on despite the present turmoil are Filipino. The survivors of Typhoon Haiyan are an inspiration in never wearying to do what is right, even as calamity surrounds and threatens to overwhelm us. They are our inspiration to testify to God’s faithfulness and wait fervently for this new creation and to seek joy’s unlikely birth as we walk amidst our rubble.

Let us look to the cross, dangling there, with its savior barely hanging on, but still resounding with its hope. Let us think of the empty tomb, and remember to make way for something better. And let us give praise and thanksgiving and commit ourselves to performing the works of justice and peace of God’s coming kingdom…we, the new temple wherein God’s Spirit of life may dwell.

As we do this, maybe we can even begin singing along with Imagine Dragons but changing the words up just a little bit:

“We’re waking up, we feel it in our bones, enough to make our systems grow…
Welcome to the new age, to the new age…
welcome to God’s new age, to God’s new age…whooahhh…
God’s love is active, God’s love is active!”

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

All Saints Sunday [Year C] - November 3, 2013 (Luke 6:20-31)

"Last Judgment Mosaic: Saints in heaven." Torcello Cathedral (Venice)

 

No matter how many times I hear it, I'm always a bit surprised when I’m reminded that before the earliest Christians were gathering to worship and reflect upon certain life events of Jesus they were commemorating the lives—and deaths!—of the holy men and women they knew. From what we can tell, the church in its earliest days did not celebrate things like Easter or Maundy Thursday or the visit of the magi and certainly not Christmas. Those commemorations turned up, in various forms, later on. In its earliest days, however, we do know that the church was marking on the calendar the dates when certain noteworthy and distinguished men and women died.



Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. Martyred in A.D. 155

There are several reasons why the church was doing this right at the start. One reason is because everyone thought Jesus was going to return within their lifetime. There was no reason to draw major attention to things like the date of his birth or the date of his crucifixion on a yearly basis because much of that was fresh on people’s minds (although maybe not in as much detail as we have now) and also because they were in this state of anticipation, focused more on Jesus’ future than on his past.

Another reason why the early Christians were remembering these ordinary women and men of faith was because they saw in their lives significant, tangible hope—hope that their faith had not been lived in vain, hope that the things they did and the message they preached mattered to God and God’s kingdom. There was a little anxiety about the fact these people had died before Christ’s return. Would they be lost from God’s plan? And yet, the gospel of Jesus had taught them that their lives—and, just as powerfully, their deaths—were not meaningless in the ultimate scheme of the universe. The lives of these people had offered living laboratories of God’s grace for them, stained glass windows, if you will, through which the light of Christ could shine, and when they died—or, as was more common the case early on, were killed—the church wanted to remember them.

Perpetua and Felicity. Martyred March, 203

The calendar pretty quickly got filled up with these commemorations: Stephen, Polycarp, and Perpetua, just to name three. Once the Twelve apostles died, of course, they were placed on the calendar, too, and as each of those days rolled around each year, the faithful gave thanks for those people’s lives and the way they demonstrated God’s love. They’d say, “Let’s look today at the life of so-and-so. He wasn’t perfect, but he knew God loved him anyway, and we saw signs of God’s coming kingdom in the way he lived his life.”

It didn’t take long for the calendar to get filled up. Every day people were celebrating the lives of multiple people. By the sixth century, and maybe even earlier, the church finally chose a date and called it all saints day. It was one day to reflect on the lives of all those men and women who had gone before us, especially those we had lost most recently.

I think that the closest thing to a calendar of saints we have now in our culture is the Google Doodles. Those of you who use Google’s search engine or visit the Google homepage on a regular basis know what I’m talking about. On many days when you access their main site, you’ll notice they’ve taken their logo and created some cool form of interactive artwork that seeks to recognize the work of some person who was born on that day years ago. Typically it’s someone I’ve never heard of. Maybe some nineteenth century Frenchman who revolutionized hat-making or something like that.

Now, I have nothing against Google or their clever doodles, but it’s interesting to note that a multi-billion Internet giant who gathers and sells information about all of us now has such a strong hand in determining who in our culture is worth commemorating. If only the church could come up with doodles! When I see a doodle, it’s a reminder to me that the people of God still need to be diligent about remembering its faithful departed. It’s a reminder that these people are still a part of us, that we are a communion of saints. Like the theologian G.K. Chesterton once quipped, if someone asks you how large your church is, be sure to count the tombstones, too. At Epiphany we could add the columbarium niches. The church needs to take the time to realized how we’ve been blessed by our heritage of holy men and women—all of them, the dead as well as the living—because their lives have something to teach about the hope of God’s kingdom. Their lives have something to say about the great reversal that God is bringing about.

It is precisely that great reversal, that turnaround of the world’s way of doing things, that Jesus begins talking and teaching about at the beginning of his gospels. Nowhere are the elements of this turnaround more starkly laid out than in the gospel of Luke. As it turns out the things that the world typically values and lifts up as blessings are not what will be blessed and valued in God’s coming kingdom. At one point, Jesus looks up at his disciples and says, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for your is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you and exclude you...for that is what your ancestors did to the prophets.’

This kind of talk was earthshattering, and quite honestly didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Everyone was used to thinking that things like poverty and hunger and sorrow were occasions of God’s curses, not God’s blessings. But now Jesus is declaring that they are blessings now because in the coming kingdom those things will be exchanged for eternal abundance and happiness.

And, as if that wasn’t clear enough, Jesus adds four statements of woe. The things that we typically strive for now, things that we habitually cling to for hope—wealth, satisfaction of health and appetite, and giddy cheerfulness, fame and acclaim—these things will not last. They never do, and Jesus wants to make sure we understand that present security does not guarantee future comfort. The kingdom of God will not be based, for example, on earthly forms of wealth. Those who get too used to it now will have a great shock when it’s not there in eternity.

In fact, these three categories of things that Jesus attaches woe to are things that delude us into an evil individualism. When we have a lot of money and possessions, when we have wonderful health and a full belly, when we are just happy and satisfied all the time it is far easier to feel and become cut off from the needs of others.

Just look at the vision of discipleship that Jesus offers as he continues this sermon! There is a whole lot of sharing and interdependence and mutual love going on. If you have a possession, like a coat, and it is taken by another, you let go of it…and then toss in something extra to go with it. You pay attention to others who have needs, even giving to those who beg. You love enemies and do not be given to revenge. If these are descriptions of following Jesus now, then imagine what God’s eternal kingdom, when it arrives in full, will involve. It’s going to be an eternity which will involve a lot of dwelling together in true communion.

I read an article this week that suggested modern-day Christianity, especially in the United States, is marked by a pervasive sense of individualism, as if faith can be lived out between God and me, as if the local congregation is largely just a filling station where we tank up on spirituality for the week, and we just happen to be doing it at the same time with a bunch of other people. If contented individualism is our version of the faith, then Jesus might pronounce a “woe” on us, too. The saints remind us of our interconnectedness, that God, in the end, wants us together, and that that life may begin now. I certainly witnessed that spirit in this congregation recently as we suffered five deaths in the past four weeks. People came together consistently to help the families in their grieving and contributed resources for food. These were our saints.

A sense of togetherness and mutual support is not, however, the primary place to which that the poor and the hungry and the mourning point us. Ultimately Jesus knows these people are blessed because they are most prone to understand the blessing of the cross. Those who are down and out now, those who are painfully aware of their worldly shortcomings are far more apt to comprehend that God is their only hope. They are the ones who will run to the hope of the cross, that will see in it God’s vindication of the hungry, the beaten, the despised.

In the long run, then, the power of God’s kingdom will not be up to us and our ability to “pull it off.” The saints of God surely play a part in it, for sure. Aware of our sinfulness, you and I are transformed by God’s grace and begin to grow into that future, but, bottom line, it is not we who bring about this utter reversal of things. That is God’s doing, and even in the darkest, bleakest, most forlorn corners of this world God can bring blessing.

The Irish rock band, U2, has a lyric in one of their songs about democracy that says, “It’s a place that has to be believed to be seen.” It is a protest song, but, as it turns out, that line is a perfect description for this kingdom—this great reversal—that Jesus brings about on the cross and to which the saints point. To be seen, it must be believed, and to be believed, it must be yearned for. We yearn for a world where the poor are given good things and the rich and the greedy—even if that means us—learn to do with less. We hunger for a world where those who strive for peace are vindicated and the voices who speak honesty and truth are heard above all the others. We long for a time when every deed of hatred and hurt is returned with an even great deed of love and forgiveness. That place, that time, must be believed to be seen, and we all know people who sadly, have died, who by the grace of God, saw this place and attempted, with their lives, to communicate it to us. They knew it had arrived in Jesus…but was also yet quite here.

Come to think of it, these people of the church don’t really need Google doodles, because they’ve already managed to doodle all over our lives. They believed in that place of the great reversal and they saw it, and so they doodled all kinds of kindness and charity and love. And often those doodles became masterpieces as the Lord grabbed their hand and began to move the pen along with them. They doodled this beauty right on into eternity.

And so, from the beginning, the followership of Jesus has wanted to remember these important works scrawled across the millennia as they have waited for the full picture to appear. That’s what this day is called: all saints. All the doodlers. And that includes not just the dead, but the living.

So, then…pick up your pen! Look to your neighbor. Look to the world. And, for all you’re your worth, keep doodling. God will make it beautiful.

 

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

 

The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 24C] - October 20, 2013 (Luke 18:1-8 and Psalm 121)

 

Many people have been rather moved this week by this story out of Florida about the fifteen-year-old foster child who went to church last Sunday to appeal for a family to adopt him. Davion Only was essentially orphaned at birth, the identity of his father never known and his mother in prison on drug charges. After he got word that she died a couple of years ago, Davion gave up on his hope that she’d ever come rescue him and raise him has her child. Yet even after years of being bounced around in the state foster care system he did not give up his hope that he’d be adopted by some family, somewhere, who would love him forever and make him feel like he mattered. He cleaned up his act, brought his grades up at school, dropped his weight. After hearing somewhere that God might be able to help, last Sunday, at Davion’s request, his case worker got him all dressed up and took him to a local church. After the sermon, the pastor handed him the microphone and Davion made his pitch. “I’ll take anyone,” he said, “old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple, I don’t care. I know God hasn’t given up on me. So I’m not giving up either.”

Apparently people heard his plea: the adoption agency handling his case received over 10,000 offers to adopt Davion this week. Indeed, it appears Davion has sparked an interest in adoption in general. And it also looks like there will be a happy ending for him, although he can’t give up praying and hoping just yet. Mandatory wait periods and red tape mean that even if a family match is made immediately, it’ll still be months before they actually receive him.

Davion’s story makes me think of all of those who come to church as often as they can mainly to ask God for something that they need. Some of you people are here, perhaps, today, silently but persistently praying for vindication in some form. Pray on. There is something especially compelling, I think, about the pleas of Davion, the orphan, that is echoed in the parable today about the widow and the unjust judge. Both are stories of small, vulnerable, easily exploited people with the odds against them, going up against a system that seems cold, unfeeling, unable or unwilling to handle their needs. Plea after plea goes unanswered. It would become very easy to give up hope.

In the parable of the widow, Jesus sets up a classic, if not extreme, David-versus-Goliath scenario here. In ancient middle-eastern Society, widows were about as low on the totem pole as you could go. They had few rights and even fewer people to speak or advocate for their needs. They were often left to fend for themselves, especially if none of their late husband’s brothers wanted to take them in marriage so they'd have a place to live. That’s actually what the local judges and magistrates were for—to make sure these people didn’t completely fall through the cracks—but in the parable Jesus tells, even the system isn’t going to work in her favor. This widow has a dud judge. He cares neither what God nor other people think about him!

Yet the widow comes constantly. Maybe even every day. Sits in the outer office and thumbs through all the same magazines, asks the lady behind the glass window to put her on his daily planner. She begs and pleads and cries for attention, and he keeps turning a deaf ear, asking his assistant to erase all his voice mails each day, shuffling the paperwork around on his desk. It’s the utter nobody against The Man, the powerless weakling versus the colossal overlord. In any other situation, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. However, remember that Jesus’ is telling this parable. And, in his version of the story what little tiny power she does have at her disposal gives her victory. The judge finally realizes that she has the power to embarrass him if he doesn’t do something about what she wants. And so he relents.

Lots of parables are illustrations of what God is like, but this one is an extreme example of what God is not like. Jesus wants his disciples to know that God is absolutely not like that unjust, unfeeling judge who only listens when he realizes he is being shamed into doing so, like prayer is a competition of mental strength. Our Father in heaven, by contrast, responds quickly to those who pray for justice because they are his chosen ones, his beloved. I think Davion gets this. In fact, many people who are powerless, at the bottom of society seem to get this naturally, that God is still looking out for them in spite of their circumstances. Such faith is inspiring.

Yes, it is inspiring, but Jesus is telling his disciples this parable not so much because he wants them to have the type of faith that will take all their private needs and desires to God in prayer. While God certainly hears and cares about the prayers of our hearts, the things that we privately struggle and wrestle with, this parable is more about our collective struggle as workers in God’s kingdom. This parable is about inspiring us to continue in our Jesus-led effort to embody his love in our relationships and to give witness to his power. Jesus wants to build up the disciples’ faith and assure them that God will ultimately be victorious over the evil in the world. Despite what they—and we—observe regarding the brokenness of creation, they should still have confidence that God’s power is devoted toward the triumph of right, that, as Dr. Martin Luther King once said to inspire those in his movement in this country, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In fact, Jesus tells this parable immediately following a considerably blunt sermon about the approach of God’s kingdom and the Son of Man, the term Jesus uses to refer to himself in his second coming. He has a concern: will the opposition to his kingdom, though temporary, be too much for his disciples’ faith? Will the movement of compassion and righteousness he has begun keep going? Will its momentum stop because its opponents in the world—the opponents that lie even in our own hearts—are too fierce and worrisome?

 

Jesus’ concern has an edge to it: it causes me to ask whether my prayers and my immediate desires are really lined up with this long arc of justice that God has in mind or are they very immediate and personal just to me. God certainly hears both--and cares about both-- but the point about God’s utter faithfulness that is being made in this parable  is about those ultimate kingdom goals. God focuses us on the big picture…not just me and my small view on it.

The point when I finally began understanding the force of this parable—that edge where it asks me to pay mind to what I’m praying for within God’s big picture—was during my internship year in Cairo, Egypt. One of my duties at my internship parish there involved teaching music to the refugee children. The church I served ran the only school that was open to Sudanese and Somali refugee children in Egypt. Only native-born Egyptians are allowed to attend state schools in Egypt, so refugees have no formal way to educate their children.

I’m not much of a musician or a teacher, but I used old camp songs to teach and reinforce English-vocabulary with them. One of the songs I taught them was based on the psalm for today, Psalm 121

I lift my eyes up, up to the mountains
Where does my help come from?
My help comes from you, Maker of heaven, Creator of the earth.

 

One little girl, for example kept mispronouncing “Creator.” She’d say, “Cree-tor.” I would stop the song and explain what Creator meant and how to say it, how it was another word for our God. Well, a little farther into the song we eventually got to a line that contained the word “rescue”:

 

So I will wait for you
To come and rescue me
To come and give me life.

 

I thought: that might be kind of a hard word for this age, so I stopped and tried to explain the definition of rescue. The same little girl looked right back at me. “Oh, Pastor Phillip,” she said. “We know what ‘rescue’ means. We know rescue. We’re refugees. My people have been rescued from our country. We were rescued by this church.” Who was I to explain to them the meaning of rescue?

refugee children at St. Andrew's Church, Cairo, 2002

You see, the refugees I worked among were like the widow. They spent years relentlessly pounding on the gates of the United Nations, relentlessly pounding on the doors of all the American or Canadian embassies…all the powers-that-be who often refuse to recognize them as people with rights, who turn a deaf ear to their pleas and hopes for a better life. They know rescue. And although they’ve been turned down again and again and again, I don’t think I’ve ever met a group of people who, in spite of their circumstances, were more confident in the love and long-suffering care of their Creator and that that Creator’s kingdom was on its way. They had more faith in one little finger than I did in my whole body! The Spirit had given them the ability to distinguish their most basic personal and political needs tangled up, as they were, in a corrupt and broken system that worked against them from the kingdom of God that they knew was working for them.  While they pounded away at the doors of all kinds of dud judges, they never ceased in praying to God for vindication…and they were confident that ultimately they would persevere...that though things look very bleak on the afternoon of Good Friday, Easter morning will surely dawn.

It is in this same confidence that you undertake your own Easter efforts, hosting folks for CARITAS, serving the community through HHOPE, making meals for those in the congregation who are grieving, persisting in your personal efforts of peace and reconciliation in your relationships. Perhaps most significantly, in spite of your hurt and your worry you gather for worship with our brothers and sisters as often as you can, with a heart like that of Davion Only, crying out with each other in praise and thanksgiving that our Heavenly Father has not left us orphaned.

We worship and we wait and we cast our prayers to Him, in the end knowing that justice will be in our favor—that God will come through with 10,000 opportunities to love and serve and show our faith in the meantime.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 23C] - October 13, 2013 (Luke 17:11-19)

 

There is a Peanuts cartoon which features part of an ongoing conversation between Charlie Brown and his sassy younger sister Sally about the subject of writing “Thank You” notes for her Christmas presents. At one point Sally says to Charlie Brown, who is staring in the other direction at the TV, “Gramma is mad at me. She said it’s inexcusable to be six weeks late with a ‘Thank you’ note. I didn’t think six weeks was that long to a grandmother.”

What is your window of time? How quickly do you wait to receive an expression of thanks? After reading this morning’s gospel story about the ten lepers, one might reach the conclusion that, for Jesus, six weeks is way too long. Ten lepers approach him while he’s on the road to Jerusalem and cry out for mercy. Typically Jesus touches people in order to heal them, but in this instance all he does is “see” them. He then directs them to the priests, who have the authority to declare them formally clean and rid them of their outcast status. They all go running off, but on the way, one of them realizes he has already been healed and turns around to thank Jesus.

In the reaction that this provokes from Jesus we see a side of him we don’t usually see: a bit of disgruntlement, almost annoyance. “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” It’s as if those other nine—who, mind you, were doing exactly as he told them to do—didn’t get their thank you notes in the mail quickly enough. Maybe they thought they had a six-week time frame to work with. Maybe they didn’t realize they were healed as quickly as the one did. Whatever the case, the focus of the entire episode shifts from the healing, which was miraculous in and of itself, to the reaction of this one lone Samaritan…this one lone Samaritan who notices that he is already healed and wheels back around to respond to the person who did the healing.

What that one lone Samaritan does as he comes back to Jesus is more significant when we take a closer look. He does not just come back to drop a quick “Thank you” note like Sally might try to get by with. This guy goes a little over the top. To begin with, he walks back to Jesus shouting at the top of his lungs. As a leper, he would have been used to shouting because those with skin diseases thought to be contagious had to walk around shouting “I’m unclean!” in order to warn people away. But as he returns to Jesus, the man is no longer shouting about his uncleanliness. He’s shouting about God.

When I was on staff at a summer camp during college, one of our camp pastors would occasionally lead the Lord’s Prayer during worship by having us start out a whisper and then gradually getting louder with each line so by the time we were on the final line—“for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, FOREVER AND EVER…AMEN!”—we were shouting at the top of our lungs. At first I thought their idea to pray like that was a little strange, but once we began doing it, I found it kind of moving. It made me concentrate on the words a little more than I usually do and that resounding crescendo declaring God’s glory was powerful. But other than that instance, I was pretty sure I’d never shouted during worship.

It wasn’t until several years later that I learned that Lutherans think they shout in worship all the time. This is a Lutheran shout: “Amen” (unless you’re Matt Greenshields). However, each time I hear a baby or child make a loud noise during worship I’ve learned to think about it in terms of loud praise, as if they’re setting some example for the rest of us even if they don’t realize it.

The Samaritan comes back shouting praise to God for his healing and as soon as he gets to Jesus he does something even more strange to our sensibilities: he literally falls down on his face to thank Jesus. This is something else we don’t do in worship very often, either. We at Epiphany get close to it, though, when we kneel at the altar for communion. The ancient act of worshipping someone with your whole body, of showing them great honor and respect and placing yourself in a position of vulnerability relative to them, involved lying prostrate on the ground in front of them. Here, in the middle of the road to Jerusalem, this man lies down in the dust and the mud to give thanks to Jesus. That, too, seems a little over the top. The fact that a Samaritan—an essential outsider to Israel’s culture—would stoop to do this is even more surprising.

At first glance, this episode with the one lone Samaritan leper seems like nothing more than a lesson about thankfulness. The man sees that he is healed—meaning he realizes that he is transformed—and he naturally responds to give thanks. Good enough. But if we look a little deeper, we find a complete pattern or template for all worship—indeed for all our encounters with the living God.

Each week in our confirmation classes we address one or two questions that the confirmands have about faith and church. This week we dealt with two great, challenging questions. One student asked, “Why do we do that same routine every Sunday in church?” I’m sure I gave a long-winded answer about liturgy and Lutheran tradition that didn’t make any sense. What I could have said was that we’re just doing what the leper did. Our worship begins by asking Jesus to look at us with mercy, to recognize us in our helplessness. Whether we’re using the confession and forgiveness or singing “Lord, have mercy” that we use in Lent, or singing an entrance hymn that address God as our master in some way, we begin like the lepers do. We start by acknowledging our weakness and God’s greatness by saying out loud, “Lord, we bring nothing to you except our absolute need for your grace.”

After that, God’s Word does the healing. We move into listening to God’s grace in the Scriptures and, if I haven’t put you to sleep by that point, in the preaching. And here’s an important thing to consider: our healing, our being made new is not always readily apparent. Sometimes it is instantaneous and we realize it right then and there, but often it takes a while for the effect of this healing to sink in. Nevertheless, we are given time to respond, like the leper, in praise and thanksgiving. We do this, in part, by saying one of the church’s creeds as a statement of faith. We offer prayers of the assembly, including the names of those in our midst that are in need of healing. We give our offerings. And we share the Lord’s Supper.

Lastly, we are dismissed, just like the Samaritan leper. Dismissed to serve: that’s the last part of our “routine” each week. Just as Jesus tells the man to get up and go on his way because his faith has made him well, we are likewise told to Go in peace and serve the Lord. One final hymn helps set the tone for that, if it’s chosen thoughtfully. Our worship is based on nothing more and nothing less than what that one foreigner does. Indeed, all of our encounters with the risen and healing One really bear this pattern, especially when the Spirit moves us to realize that his grace as transformed us.

Interestingly, the other question asked by one of the confirmands this week was, “If people do not attend church services every week, are they going to hell?” Well, as a matter of fact, we learn to take attendance at seminary, too. In all honesty, my thought as I heard this question was, “My God, what message have I been sending?!” This certainty bears repeating: when we experience the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we come to understand there’s nothing we can do or not do that gains us eternal favor with God. Just as Jesus tells the leper, it is our faith, not our actions, that saves us. The other nine were certainly healed; Jesus didn’t take that away from them. So going to church all the time isn’t like getting our ticket stamped for heaven. 

However, there is something saving about a faith that returns to thank God, about acknowledging not just our own sinfulness, but also God’s glory. The story of the leper teaches us that our new life in Christ is not fully complete until we have somehow responded to God in praise and thanksgiving, until that shouting and crying we do comes full circle. Whereas once we shouted for mercy and love, now we have the opportunity to shout for praise and thanksgiving. I suppose that doesn’t have to happen at a church service, and I suppose that doesn’t have to happen every week. But when it does occur, it certainly helps us grow in faith.

I heard seminary professor and writer Dr. Mark Allen Powell speak one time about his own experience of growing up and attending worship with his family. He explained that when his mother would pile them all into the car on Sunday morning and they’d ask why they were essentially stopped what they were doing, she’s respond with the same answer, over and over: “because Jesus is worthy of our praise.” Sometimes she’d add, “six days a week God is good to us. And on Sundays we give thanks.”

Come to think of it, her response was really that of the leper’s. At its core, worship has less to do with being blessed by God or needing to be fed or getting to see the rest of God’s children and more to do with providing an outlet for us to respond to what God has already done. We need no other reason to be here other than Jesus is worthy of our praise and thanksgiving. On this day he overcame death and the grave. He healed us and continues to heal us with that message more than we ever will understand in this life. We have been called out of our exile and given forgiveness and hope. God has washed us in his grace and set us free and when we return to shout out or just use our Lutheran low voices this salvation really starts to take root in us.    When we think about all this, when we look down at ourselves, like the leper, and see the changes that take place in us, we realize the question quickly becomes less and less about how much we have to come worship…or how long a time frame is acceptable for returning thanks. Is it six weeks? Is every seventh day even often enough?

Rather, like the leper on that dusty road we realize the question is more like why in the world would we want to stay away? When we look at the ways God loves us, FOREVER AND EVER, AMEN!—how in the world could we ever hold back?

Our faith has saved us.

With that, we may go on our way.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 20C] - September 22, 2013 (Luke 16:1-13)

 

There is always something peculiar—something a little “off”—about each one of the parables Jesus tells. The parables we heard in our lessons last week about the lost sheep and the lost coin are peculiar because of the way the seeker reacts when the object is found. What kind of shepherd that you know throws a party for lost sheep? And who invites neighbors over after finding a lost coin? We could go through each every parable that Jesus tells in the gospels and figure out what makes it odd, but this parable really takes the cake. Depending on which version of the Bible you’re reading, it may bear the title of the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, or the Parable of the Unjust Steward or the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Regardless of which name you prefer for it, you have to admit it is one of the more complex and altogether strange stories that Jesus tells.

It’s hard to see at first why Jesus lifts up the actions of this rogue businessman as actions that are somehow worth imitating. First, he is accused of squandering someone else’s money, a charge we have to take seriously because he doesn’t defend himself. In other places—namely, the parable Jesus tells immediately before this one, the Parable of the Prodigal Son—people who squander property are not used as good examples. Secondly, when his job is put on the line, he does nothing to rectify the situation with his master. He doesn’t say, “Look. You’re correct. I repent. Let me work extra hard to make this right.” Lastly, he takes advantage of his master one final time by slashing the amounts people owe his master by significant margins! Caring nothing for the amount with which he was entrusted, he comes up with a plan that makes him sound selfish and self-centered. Carelessness, dishonesty, “me-first” thinking: it’s difficult to imagine how his actions could be seen as examples of living in God’s kingdom of righteousness. At yet, at the end, Jesus seems to use his behavior as a positive example for his disciples and other children of his light!

If you’re having a tough time understanding what is happening in this parable, you’re not alone. This parable has long stood as one of the most puzzling stories in the entire New Testament. Perhaps it might help if we were to re-tell the scenario of the Shrewd Manager with a contemporary feel:

The CEO of a national retail chain got wind that the franchise manager of one of his local stores had been grossly underperforming. The ledger sheets showed losses that might never be recouped made by consistently poor business judgment and lackluster marketing and advertising. The CEO calls the franchise manager on the phone and says that at year’s end he’s out of a job. He’ll be finding someone else to take over the store. The manager hangs up the phone and immediately starts to think about what he’s going to do to polish up his resume so that when the year is out and he is terminated he’ll be have something to show potential future employers. He remembers that people spend a lot more money at the holidays than at any other time of the year. So, even though it’s mid-September, he gets his store clerks to pull out all of the Christmas decorations and put them on the floor. Christmas trees, life-size snowmen, strings of twinkling lights…even though school has barely started, it may just work. People might grumble a bit (especially a few pastors who worry about the over-commercialization of Christmas) but deep inside they’ll be spurred to start their shopping.

And then the manager starts to think about the day after Thanksgiving: everyone’s sitting around, off-work, and with nothing to do. Why not open the stores even a little earlier this year and offer shoppers crazy discount offers? Sure, store security will be a mess. There’ll be people running all over each other for killer deals, but in the end it’ll win customers over.  And the fiscal year’s bottom line? In the black! The ledger books will look amazing, the brand’s name will be associated with clever marketing—it may even help him get back in his boss’s good graces. But if he has to apply for another job elsewhere, he’s now got a record that will more than get his foot in the door.

No matter where you stand on Christmas decorations in September or Black Friday extravaganzas, you have to admit they are clever methods to the real-world problem of being in the red. Those marketers and managers are brilliant. And no matter whether you find this manager’s business practices dishonest or unjust, you have to admit he is shrewd in dealing with his situation. That is, he senses the urgency of what he’s going through—that he is about to face a new reality of unemployment—and it causes his creativity to kick into gear. It causes him to begin thinking about creating a new future by putting himself in the debt of people who owe his master great amounts. By slashing their bills by up to a half, he creates a group of people who, in the way ancient middle eastern culture works, will now feel obliged to take care of him in some way.

Yes, an odd story, but Jesus tells it because he wants his disciples to understand that they are facing a new reality, too. That new reality is the life of discipleship in Jesus’ name. That new reality that God is turning the world upside down in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That which was lost has now been found. The last will be first. The poor will be satisfied and the rich sent away empty.

Whatever you may think these things mean for Jesus’ disciples, at least one thing should rise to mind: this is not a reality to be squandered mindlessly nor it is a vision of the future into which we just mindlessly coast. Just as the manager senses a change coming and reacts to it in a way that helps further his cause, so should Jesus’ followers sense an urgency about the moment…so should Jesus’ followers feel OK about using some worldly wisdom and human cleverness about advancing the cause of the gospel. We can ask ourselves in each moment: what does it mean for me or for us right now that Christ, who was crucified, is now risen and Lord of all? What does it mean for me in this moment that I am dead in sin—no future of which to speak—but yet Christ has claimed me and made me alive?

Like the manager in the parable, we are so often good at responding to our own personal crises with creativity and cleverness. The store manager who pushes Christmas shopping season a little forward each year is using what resources he’s been given to respond to his own call as salesman. Why not apply these skills to the life of faith? Why not become shrewd and resourceful with all that God has entrusted to us as if our livelihood depended on it?

There is a Youtube video thatmakes the rounds every now and then called, “What if Starbucks marketed like the church?” It is a parable that pokes fun at the way congregations often end up turning off more newcomers than they attract without realizing it. Today’s parable might be re-written as “What if the Church marketed like a Starbucks?” Look at what they’d done with the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Very shrewd. It’s everywhere! What if the church had the whole world believing they couldn’t get through their day without Jesus? Are there any other successful practices followed by the world—business or otherwise— that could help Jesus’ followers in their mission?

Speaking of urgency, I get the sense that there is a real urgency among many of you about the call of a new senior pastor for this congregation. There is an energy, a pulse of mission and purpose within many of your conversations, along with an anxious desire that things move along faster or in a different way. We can assure you that people are working diligently and thoughtfully as they tend to that process. But the question from the odd-parable teller today reaches a little farther: how are you as a congregation and as individuals of faith sensing a similar urgency about your mission in general? Can you bottle that urgency about your staffing situation and administer it somehow to the overall work of sharing the love of God in your daily life? Are you shrewdly using the resources you’ve already been given to adapt to a kingdom that is graciously turning this world on its head?

Whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much, and much is precisely what you’ve received in Jesus Christ. Forgiveness of sins…unconditional love…compassion, wisdom, courage, and other gifts of the Spirit…the communion and fellowship of other believers…life eternal…these are just a few of the true riches with which we may say we’ve been entrusted. It is this Lord who senses the value in our lives and whose death upon the cross slashes all of our debts so that we may be made truly rich.

For, to our surprise, it is not only the parables that are a little odd, but it is those who listen to them and are transformed by them.  In the end, it is not just the characters and lessons that are a little peculiar (this shepherd, that manager) but those who are brought in line with the God who brings dead things to life, those who are claimed by a God who always seeks out the lost and is overjoyed when they are found. These folk seem a little out of place at times…for their witness and their faith in God’s new reality. They are like, dare I say, Christmas decorations in the middle of a September world—or they are like the clever manager who shrewdly puts them there—signs that there is not just one master in this universe, but rather only one master worth serving.

It is the only master who gives himself as ransom for us all.

 

 

Thanks be to God!

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 17C] - September 1, 2013 (Luke 14:1, 7-14)

 

At our staff meeting this past week, our visitation pastor, Tom Bosserman, kindly requested that we remind the congregation that there is still time to sign-up to participate in one of the Epiphany Supper Clubs. This ministry of fellowship, which has been going on for several years now, for whatever reason has been attracting fewer and fewer participants in the last several go-rounds. The way the supper clubs work is relatively simple: Pastor Bosserman groups three or four couples or singles together and they arrange among themselves, via email, the dates that each couple or single will take turns hosting a meal for the others in the group. When Melinda and I first arrived at Epiphany about 4 ½ years ago, we signed up to be assigned to a Supper Club group and found it a wonderful way to get to know people in the congregation. I can still remember our first supper club group: we were with the Wakes, the Bridges, and the Cards. At first I worried whether we would fit in. We were the only family whose name wasn’t a common noun. But, of course, it turned out to be excellent.

The act of sitting around a table in someone else’s home, eating food that they have prepared from their own recipe books provides the opportunity to connect with people on a much deeper level than Sunday morning conversation does. You learn all kinds of interesting things—meaningful and funny family stories, shared interests and experiences—when you break bread with one another. They become, quite literally, your companions; in fact, that’s where the word companion comes from. “Companion” means, “break bread with,” and for ages that has been marker of one’s status and identity. To our knowledge, in Jesus’ day there were not individual place settings. To eat, people literally passed bread around the table and broke off a portion for themselves.

Who would you call a companion? Who will you let into your house and eat around your table? Who will you make time for in your busy schedule to clean the house and put a special pot roast in the oven? Only blood relatives? Close friends and neighbors? Maybe you could expand that to people with whom you worship who sit a few pews back from you?

Table companionship has always been a big deal. We can see that in the gospel stories about Jesus, including this story today which features him yet again as a guest in a prominent Pharisee’s house. Jesus raises a lot of eyebrows for his choice of table companions. Usually we think of Jesus as eating with the tax collectors and other riff-raff that no one wanted to be associated with, but in reality Jesus shared bread with everyone, and that also included the well-to-do.

You see, eating together in people’s homes was part of what bound the culture together in Jesus’ day. If Pastor Bosserman had been floating his idea of a supper club to them, he wouldn’t have had to send out any reminders for people to sign up because they were constantly hosting parties or dinners and coming up with guest lists. But they, however, were not necessarily looking for friendly conversation. Hosts were trying to accomplish something for themselves. In short, people displayed their social rank and perceived influence by having people over to their table for fellowship with the expectation that they would be invited back or repaid in some way. It was how people worked their way up in society, how they established social networks and kept undesirables at the bottom of things. Honor and dignity were traded back and forth through this system of table companionship and woe to the person whose invitation to dinner was not eventually reciprocated in some way!

In characteristic fashion, Jesus turns all this on its head. He sees the guests at the Pharisee’s table fully participating in another supper club of the self-important. And notice what he does: he tells the people who actually have power to use it by sitting down at the bottom seat. It will dismantle the whole system. His instructions echo the song that his mother sang at his conception, Jesus reminds his Pharisee host that God “has scattered the proud…and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:51-52). God’s kingdom does not operate by these rules of who is in and who is out, who gets to sit in positions of honor and who is down there by the kids’ table. Some scholars believe that the root word for Pharisee is “to separate,” and that is precisely what Pharisees were known for: separating the clean from the defiled, the places of honor from the places of disrepute, the true table companion from the outcast…the water fountains for this race, perchance, from the water fountains for that race.

We know, at heart, we still like to separate things and people—we still are apt to assign seats in our lives to people who eventually can do something for us, who can reflect onto our character something we might not be capable of generating for ourselves. I think that’s why Dr. Martin Luther King’s words from a half a century ago this week still captivate so many of us. While his dream does, like those of so many prophets, call us to a better vision of God’s creation, they also remind us of our own tendency to “Pharisee;” that is, to position ourselves among God’s other children according to honor and shame and to let our opinions of ourselves define us a little too much. A little self-esteem is OK, I suppose, but we are prone to take it a little too far in many cases.

In God’s kingdom, which begins in earnest at the foot of the cross, we receive our true esteem and the only sense of honor that will ever really matter. As he hangs there, we see the full extent of our pride and sinfulness—that our grab for the seats of honor, the seats at the front of the bus, the seats near those who can repay us in some way, only end up tearing all of us apart. But at the cross we also see that he is willing to use his power and stoop to the lowest position possible in order to share God’s bread with us. He is willing to suffer in order that we may be a companion at his table in his kingdom forever along with everyone else that somehow gets “Phariseed” out in this world because they really have no way of repaying us.

During the servant trip to West Virginia last month, the youth group was given the task one evening to host a free meal for anyone in the city who wanted to come. They made the food—grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, chicken and rice casserole, barbecue and various salads and side dishes—and, because the weather was so nice, spread it all out nicely on large tables under the early evening sunshine. The place where we were staying was on the side of a steep hill, an abandoned old school building whose property literally perched over the downtown of Logan. From the main courtyard where during the week we had played countless games of foursquare with the neighborhood children, and where we had set up this banquet, we could look down and see right into the streets of the town that the declining coal industries had left desolate years before. A patch of grass sloped off rather steeply from this courtyard area and stopped at a sharp drop-off that was bordered by a chained-link fence that had stopped a loose foursquare ball from bouncing all the way down to Main Street many times before.

When the youth had finally assembled all the items for the buffet line, I heard Rachel Bracken, one of our own youth, tell Matthew von Schmidt-Pauli to go down to that chain-link fence and shout out into the city “Free dinner for anyone who wants to come!” Matthew looked at her like she was crazy. I think we all just expected that people had already received the invitation. “Just go do it,” she ordered. I’ve learned that people listen to Rachel. Matthew obeyed.

I watched as he leaned over the fence and shouted out over the rooftops of the city. And then we watched as people began to “come up higher,” climbing the hill to form a line for the supper. They were the homeless of Logan. They were the neighborhood children of the Kids Club we had hosted all week. Some had brought their parents, but most were still alone. Many of the adults seemed alone and shy around us. They were in need of showers and cleaning up, an opportunity that was often offered to them on Thursday evenings, but was unavailable that particular time. Eventually there was some mixing and mingling and some integrated action on the foursquare court.

We were just there for one night on one week during one summer, but there is a congregation there who does that every Thursday evening throughout the year. They host a meal for the people who can’t pay for what they’re going to eat and who can’t really repay in any worldly way. But although those guests won’t repay us for what did that Thursday evening, don’t think we weren’t blessed. Don’t think it for a minute. We were blessed with companions who were kind and grateful and full of interesting stories and conversation. We were blessed with not having to feel we owed them anything or we were owed anything back. We were blessed the vision of a meal that Jesus promises, the meal at the end of all these meals we host and share in this life…the meal for which this bread and wine is a foretaste. We were blessed with the breaking down of Pharisee boundaries that constrict us so. And we were blessed with the persistence of Rachel and Matthew, who wanted to make sure that invitation got out, that the city knew there was a feast to be had.

I don’t know, maybe Pastor Bosserman could get Rachel and Matthew to advertise this next round of supper Club! Come to think of it, maybe the church and the Lord’s Table could use more Rachels who understand the value of what God has laid before us and will announce to a separated world that there is a feast to be had. No need to repay. It’s all taken care of: “This is my body. Given for you.” Outcasts—if you feel that term applies to you—may stand first in line. You’re companions now. There is a feast to be had.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.