Red Shoes, Funny Shirt

You know what also happened this week?

I preached a sermon.  Which I was going to tell you about, before I got distracted, which has been known to happen to me.

Anyway, the sermon is here.  But before you read it, go and read the book of Jonah, as a favor to yourself.  GO.  READ IT NOW.  It’s only 4 chapters, and it is epic.

::taps foot.  checks watch::

September 18, 2011

Proper 20

Jonah 3:10–4:11,

Matthew 20:1-16

When I’m trying to find that initial spark of inspiration for a sermon, otherwise known as procrastinating, then I spend an inordinate of time on the Internet. And this week, it paid off. (hopefully). A friend retweeted a comment from a priest in Lexington KY, where he lamented that Monty Python had never seen fit to do a version of the book of Jonah, so that the humor of this book might be available to the masses.

He’s right– in a competition for most humorous book in the canon, Jonah might just win, over some stiff competition from some sections of Proverbs and Sirach. Jonah has it all– irony, puns, sarcasm, absurdity, and giant fish. It even has a heartwarming, life affirming message.

Sort of.

For some context, the reading we have from Jonah today is the very end of the book. And sort of the point of the whole thing. Because despite the children’s bible story depictions of Jonah getting eaten by a great whale, that bit is sort of incidental to the plot of the whole thing.

The out line of which is that Jonah is a prophet in Israel, minding his own prophet-business, when God appears, and asks him to go to Nineveh to preach to- and save- them. Jonah finds this to be the worst idea in the history of bad ideas, and flees in the opposite direction. God, annoyed by Jonah’s annoyance, sends a shipwreck, and a whale eats Jonah. Jonah then gets the message, is vomited up by the whale, heads to Nineveh, does his prophet job with aplomb, and they repent.

Hooray! Day saved!  Everyone should be happy!

But as we see in the reading, Jonah is again annoyed. And very much wishes that God would smite Nineveh with a giant smitey-thing. And so he goes to sulk, sitting up on a mountain overlooking the city.

The conversation which follows is perhaps my favorite in the Old Testament. And makes much more sense when you know that Nineveh isn’t in Israel. It’s not a Jewish city. It’s the capital of Assyria. And when this book was written, the Assyrian empire had just invaded and conquered half of the Promised Land. For the God of Israel to send a prophet to the very heart of that empire, the center of the enemy, to save them from destruction, because he LOVED THEM?! Yup, you’d hop on a ship to escape too.

So Jonah has a bit of a meltdown. Not only did he have to preach to these people who he really hates, who destroyed his home, and invaded his country, but now he doesn’t get to watch God destroy them in righteous anger. And it’s hot. And he’s angry. (the Hebrew word for hot is a synonym for angry– I told you there were puns.). This is not Jonah’s month at all.

So God messes with him a little bit.

God sends him a plant to shade him, then sends a worm to eat it. God sends a hot dry wind to make him more uncomfortable, so he really misses the plant, and get even more bent out of shape.

And then God points out the obvious: the plant wasn’t Jonah’s, the worm wasn’t Jonah’s, the weather wasn’t his– why on earth would Jonah think he had any right, or control, or say over what happened to any of that?

Much less all of Nineveh– an entire city.

Nineveh, just like the plant and just like Israel, and just like Jonah himself, belongs to God, and God can be as gracious as God wants with it– Jonah’s jealousy notwithstanding.

God’s love, God’s favor, after all, isn’t a pie, that we have to carefully divvy up amongst ourselves, lest we run short. God operates always out of abundance– God’s love is infinite and never-ending. God is not going to run out.

The fact that God cares for people we really dislike is not a sign that God cares for us any less– God, being a complex being beyond our human understanding, can in fact , and Should, in fact, be on both sides of a football game at once. If this ever stops being true, it’s probably a sign we’ve lost sight of what is actually God in the first place.

And that is not a problem that God has– that’s a problem that we tend to have. Like Jonah, and like the workers in the gospel, we get jealous. We get scared. We get insecure and need validation that we are right about God, and we will get some big reward, at the end for being right, and so everyone else should just give in and agree with us!

But that’s our fear talking, not God. If the first thing we believe in is a God of love and a God of graciousness, then we need to trust in that, to act like we believe it, and not be so shocked and panicked when God acts out of that love and grace.

Because a God of love and grace extends that love to the residents of a wayward Nineveh, and not just Jerusalem. A God of love and grace extends that grace to all the workers– lets everybody earn a day’s wage, even the people who show up late. A God of love and grace extends that grace and love even to us, loved beyond belief, and past our earning, past anything we could ever deserve.

So we, who have walked in love beyond our imagining since our creation, how can we be surprised when God acts exactly like who we have always known him to be towards everyone else in the world?

Amen.

This week was notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it marked the first week Canterbury ran the Sunday evening service at Epiphany.  (Actually, we’ve done this before on a trial basis, but now, it shall be permanent.  Hooray.)

And also, there was that significant anniversary that possibly you heard about in the news?

As a result, the students and I constructed an anniversary service for Sunday evening, at 5:30pm.  And I realized, as I was printing out my sermon, that ten years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, I had gone to a 5:30pm service that my Canterbury chaplain had assembled for us, in the immediate wake of the attacks.  And here I was, ten years later, preparing a service for my own students.

Some weird sort of poetry in that, I think.

Anyway, here’s what I said.

September 11, 2011

Propers for the Anniversary of a Disaster (Holy Women, Holy Men)

Jeremiah 32, Matthew 5:1-15

It started slowly, a few months ago, and its been growing until the past week or so, it’s been everywhere. No escape, everywhere you look– on the news, in the paper, on tv, on the news sites, looking back to ten years ago today. Retrospectives, documentaries. book releases, everyone reflecting. An endless drumbeat of remembrance. Where were you when you heard? Where were you when?

For many of us, this was our first big world-changing event. Some of us are so young we don’t even remember it clearly.  I grew up with my parents talking about where they were when JFK was shot– Mom coming home and finding the maid ironing with tears coming down her face. Dad held late in school, praying the rosary with the nuns.And for my brother and i, for my generation, for us, we had this. Not a cold day in November, and shots fired in Dallas, but a sunny day in September, and towers falling from the sky. Running back to the dorm from class in my first week of college. Asking my father if our cousin in the pentagon was safe. Carrying around iodine tablets for a year, in case of nuclear meltdown.

On days like today, it’s easy to get trapped back there–back in a time warp. To get sucked into where were you when? And to relive every moment of that day ten years ago, and swear that we will never forget and let the anger and the grief and the fear overwhelm us once again.

But Christ calls us to another way. Christians are people of hope, we are people who believe that God brings seeds of life and redemption out of even the worst sort of death and destruction, if God so chooses– we are resurrection people. So we can’t stay mired in the past, and just keep playing our stories. We have to do more.

The first reading we read was from the prophet Jeremiah, who preached and worked among the people of Israel in a very tumultuous time. The northern half of Israel had already been conquered by Assyria, and now Jeremiah prophesied that Babylon would soon overrun all of the southern part of Judea, including the city of Jerusalem. His whole career, this is what he preached– it did not make him popular. Or happy. He gets thrown in a well at one point.

But he’s right. Babylon comes. And in 586 bc, the first temple is destroyed. The reading we heard is a reaction to that, to the siege of the holy city. For a people who built their faith, quite literally, around the idea that God dwelt with them in this city, to see it destroyed was nothing less than catastrophic. But this is not where Jeremiah ends. As the Babylonians are laying siege to the city, Jeremiah buys a plot of land from his cousin. He negotiates the price, writes up the bill of sale and the land deed, makes three copies, and seals it in a jar, and buries it within the city walls.

It’s the last thing he does before the city falls to the babylonians, and he’s carried off, and everything is ransacked. It’s his last act as Jerusalem’s prophet, basically. And it seems to make no sense at all. Like the guy who spent the previous 32 chapters telling everyone they were doomed has suddenly flip flopped. But instead it’s the reverse. Jeremiah buries the jar as a promise. Not for him, but for those in the future– “thus says the Lord, the God of hosts, houses and fields and vineyards and shall again be bought in this land.” he says

43 Fields shall be bought in this land of which you are saying, It is a desolation, without human beings or animals; it has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans.”

It’s his own seed of resurrection–his own promise. That one day, though he won’t live to see it, God will act, and bring the Israelites home, and the destruction that they are living through won’t have the final word. It is an ultimate act of faith.

So the question for us, is not so much where were we then, but what have we done, what will we do? What have been our seeds of resurrection? In

the past ten years, what have we planted in the ground, what seeds of mercy, of peace, have we sown to spring forth in a better world?

Because that’s our job, as people of faith. We sow the seeds of a better world, a world where God dwells with his people. We heard the beatitudes read, as we’ve heard them hundreds of times before, and those things that Jesus tells us– blessed are the meek, the poor, the peacemakers, the merciful, the righteous, all those things, those are the seeds of resurrection, because when we do them, we make a promise to ourselves, and to those coming after us that the world won’t always look like this, and that new world? That’s the one we want to live in. The one that’s not torn by hatred, poverty, and age-old violence again and again. The one that God has worked to bring up out of the dust of our mistakes, because God’s goodness is ultimately defeated by nothing. Not even us.

That’s the world we sow, each time we listen to someone we disagree with. When we befriend someone different than us. When we forgive someone we’ve been angry with. When we take another’s suffering as seriously as we take our own. We are filling jars with resurrections and planting them in fertile soil. So that one day, God willing, we will have grown a world for the generations to come that will have no earth-stopping days left  in it.

Amen.

I was back in Holbrook on Sunday.  And while they are still a delightful, sweet, and welcoming, little congregation, let me give you all a primer on congregational politics.

Here is a church of roughly 15 people,  all over the age of 50, in a severely economically depressed and isolated town.

The congregation, being so small, is run, not by committees, but by the one or two strongest voices in the group.  A patriarch or matriarch as the case may be.  These individuals see the church aging, shrinking, and dwindling, and their town dying.

Conflict ensues with their pastor.  Their pastor decides to quit.  (It’s hard to effect transformation in a place with set-in ways this deep, and this few people.  Committees can change–a person has a harder time.)

When they call the Wider-Church-Structure (all the way in Phoenix, mind you), they are told that there’s no help coming.  Times are tough, no one can afford anything, and interim pastors are expensive.  They won’t be getting one.  And probably not a full-time pastor either.  Frustration builds.

And then, here comes this former pastor, who’s been away in Far Away Parts, doing God’s Own Work!  (They forgot how much they loved him-but he looks so nice now.)  And he tells them tales of growing foreign churches!  And places that aren’t aging/shrinking/fighting/starving for money.  And it sounds so very nice.

And he tells them that All This Can Be Theirs!

If they just do as he says, and vote to leave.

::thud::

This is the story out in Holbrook (as it is many places), because really?  Church splits have next to nothing to do with theology, or who hates who or guys in purple in New Hampshire.  I bet you money that this church will leave the denomination and it’s not because they’re hell-bent conservative.  They actually like my (pretty progressive) preaching quite a lot.

It’s because they had some ineffective leadership.   They’re feeling abandoned,  and now they’re scared.  For my money, pride was never the original sin.  Fear is.

Anyway, here is what I said in the sermon part.

Ordinary Time, Proper 18 Matthew 18: 15-20

When I was a kid, I read all the time. Anything I could get my hands on– history, fantasy, mysteries, classics, you name it. I’d read in class, at my brother’s sporting events, at the grocery store with my mother, in the car, whenever I could. Which was great– with one small problem. I half- learned a lot of words. And by that, I mean that I learned what words looked like on the page, and what they meant, but I had no idea what they sounded like out loud, how to pronounce them. No actual person of my acquaintance used words like those in my books, past a certain point. And this led to some problems. Like when I started saying “mel-ak-ony” instead of melancholy. Or “sub-tootle” instead of subtle. In my head, it made sense! That’s roughly how those words looked to me, and I had never heard anyone say them, that I could remember, so what did I know? It sounded right in my head. Sadly, I discovered early on thatjust because something sounds good inside my head, doesn’t mean the rest of the world is on board.

We require community. We require other people. Not just to correct our pronunciation, but to acquire language at all– remember that movie Nell? It’s part of the way that we become fully human.

And as Christians, we need other people as well. We need community in our life of faith– we can no more be solo Christians, devoid of a community to support and guide us and ground us than we can fly.

Because community is all about relationships, and what else but relationships teach us about God? Think about how you first learned about God, about Jesus– who first told you the story? Your parents? A trusted friend? Your brother, your sister? Our human relationships point us towards God, because in them, we see a glimpse of God’s love. After all, God is all about community! — God who came to be in relationship with us in Christ forever.

So it’s no surprise that today’s gospel sets up a section of Matthew about what it takes to live in community on earth. And more specifically, what do we should do when this community gets messy and frustrating. Jesus is nothing if not practical when it comes to advice giving.

If a member of the church sins against you, here’s the procedure, says Jesus. And he lays out what amounts to a mediation handbook for life in community– go and talk to the person in private, then with one or two others, then with the whole group. In other words, you keep trying, and if these steps do not work, then “let them be as a Gentile and a tax collector to you.”.

That’s a fascinating phrase–be as a Gentile and a tax collector! Especially here in Matthew’s gospel. Because while it sort of sounds like the newest in biblical insults, let’s remember that Jesus has just spent the entirety of the gospel up to this point telling his disciples to be kind, to be welcoming to who?

Gentiles and tax collectors.

Matthew himself was a tax collector. And Matthew was hardly shown the door.

In other words, he’s not saying, try three times to get along, then feel free to kick people out if they don’t do what you want them too. Christian community has to run deeper than that. He’s saying, if you try to find common ground, and it’s just not working,

Then you’ll probably need to let it go. Treat the person like any other beloved child of God, and give it up. Because if you bind it here, it will be bound in heaven. You hold onto it here, it will weigh on you forever, and nothing weighs as much as a lifelong grudge.

Now, let’s be very clear. There’s a difference here between forgiving and forgetting, for lack of a better term. If someone is abusive, if someone is ill or damaged to the point where they can’t stop themselves from hurting you, then forgiveness, then letting it go needs to be from a safe distance.

Notice what Jesus says here to his mainly still Jewish audience– He doesn’t say pretend nothing happened. Jesus says treat them like Gentiles, whom we love! And we welcome! But they’re still Gentiles– we don’t let them do the grocery shopping, because they’d bring home non- kosher bacon. Jesus says treat them like tax collectors, whom we welcome, and we pray with, but we don’t give them the common purse to keep, because they’d hand it off to Rome.

But when it all comes down, Jesus asks us to stay in community, despite our falling short and our hurting one another, as best as we can. Despite it’s messiness, despite our falling short , the community of faith that Jesus calls us to in the church is designed to handle all that.

All the messiness of our communities can endure, so long as we remember that what keeps us there. Because what binds us together as members of the Jesus- club, what keeps us in this most important of relationships here in the church, has nothing to do with how good we are, or how perfect we can be, or how many mistakes we avoid. What keeps us in that primary relationship with God, is God’s unfailing love for us through Christ. And if God abandons no one, throws no one out, then how in the world can we?

This week marks the beginning of school at NAU, so my students have returned.  Hooray!  I can tell this is the case, because they have been dropping by my office, tagging me on Twitter and Facebook, and convincing me to hike with them into the depths of lava caves (a perk of living on top of an active volcano.)

And because I am gifted with particularly hardy and brave students, two of them even accompanied me to Sedona on Sunday for Canterbury Sunday at the Episcopal church in Sedona.  (It is possible they were promised coffee–we did leave at 6:30am, after all.) When I go to these churches, explaining about college ministry, and its importance, and how the church needs to welcome and uphold people of all ages, it helps to point to actual young people and say, “Look!  19 year olds who can recite Eucharistic Prayer C from memory!  Don’t you want to give them power/money/an all access-pass to the annals of the church?”  Otherwise I have the sneaking suspicion that sometimes people don’t fully believe me when I describe my experiences working with Gen X/Millennials.  Despite being one myself.

Anyway, the day went extremely well.  Aside from my students, who are awesome, the president of my board is from that church, and one of his strengths is asking for financial support.  Oh, that I could clone him.  All in all, not a shabby way to spend the 28th anniversary of my baptism.  🙂

And here’s what I said in the sermon.

August 28, 2011

Ordinary Time, Proper 17

Romans 12: 9-21,

Matthew 16:21-28

Today is the forty-eighth anniversary of the March on Washington, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. And today, in DC, they were going to dedicate a new memorial to Rev. King—a giant statue memorializing his work and his life right on the National Mall, by the Tidal Basin. Then, a giant hurricane named Irene decided to strike the East Coast, because after an earthquake, a super-sized hurricane is just what they needed.

The memorial is a thirty-foot tall statue of the man, standing forward, carved out of granite, flanked behind the forward statue on either side by towering mounds of rock. The design is inspired by a line in the speech— From the mountain of despair, we will carve a stone of hope. So you walk forward into the monument through the towering walls of stone, etched with quotes from his sermons and writings, until you come up to the pillar of Dr. King, hewn from the same stone. Pretty awesome.It’s the first memorial on the mall for a non-president. And the first of an African-American.

But the monument is creating all sorts of controversy. Listening to the NPR story on this the other day, callers were complaining—he looks so angry! Why is he so big! Why are his arms crossed? Why isn’t he smiling? Why does he look so upset? He looks like an African strongman! Said one guy (that one probably takes the ‘bet you wish you had chosen a different phrase to say into a microphone, huh?’ prize).

I found it intriguing: here was a man who was unrelenting in his pursuit of justice and dignity for his people. He pursued it despite insults, threats to his mental, spiritual, and physical safety and an entire system of laws built around his subjugation. He was attacked by dogs, hit with sticks, bottles, rocks and fists, sent bomb threats, arrested repeatedly, stabbed, and finally shot and killed.

That sort of a life? That’s not a smiley life. You’ve got to have your brow furrowed to walk straight on into a firehose shooting at you. And yet, in popular imagination, Dr. King is so associated with love—love of neighbor, love of everyone, and we associate love with mildness and fuzziness, that the sight of the towering granite figure really confuses us. Because we think love should be happy!

So we’re a bit with Peter, in today’s gospel. Poor Peter, who was on such a roll last week! Jesus asks the disciples who he is and Peter says, “You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” Yes, great job, Peter. He had it all together, which was so rare for him, and he’s getting a new name, and getting the keys to the kingdom, and getting the power to bind and loose, and whatnot. So good!

And just as soon as he has it all figured out, he entirely blows it. Jesus has confirmed that he’s the Christ, and now he starts to break the second part of the news—he’s going to have to die. And Peter implodes. Nope, nope, nope, not gonna happen. And just as quickly he got it right, it goes south. Get behind me, Satan.

These two stories are the same story in Matthew—together they are the high point, the turning point in Matthew’s narrative. From here on, it’s a straight shot towards Jerusalem. No stopping, no passing go—to understand who Jesus is-truly- is to understand what that implies–that he’s going to die. The two are inseparable.

When I write sermons now, I like to pretend that my younger brother is reading over my shoulder. My brother has a habit of listening to every pronouncement I make and saying “So what?” “God loves you” “So what?” “Jesus died for you” “So what?”

It’s annoying when I have writer’s block, but in terms of writing an effective sermon, it’s useful.

This is not, however, a question that Peter asks. He arrives at the first right answer—Jesus is the Christ. He never asks, “So what?”

He is so content to stay with the glory of being right, of getting the answer right, that he doesn’t move on to what this means, either for Jesus, or for himself.

Jesus is the Christ, so what should the Christ do? Jesus is the Christ, so what should Peter do?

And when Jesus answers that question, Peter doesn’t enjoy the outcome. Jesus is the Christ, and living like the Christ is called to live, is going to end up somewhere Peter doesn’t want to be. It’s going to end inexorably in death. Living like the Christ is called to live, living out this kind of all encompassing love, in this world, will end in one way. Live out that kind of love; live out the implication of Jesus is Lord, and you will be living outside of what the world expects of you.

The world, as it is now, in its brokenness is not constructed for this sort of life: the world around us asks us to strive for smaller loyalties, smaller goals. It asks us to pay attention to ourselves, first and foremost, tells us that we are all islands, complete with trusty bootstraps that can be

pulled around and up, and the loyalties we should honor are the ones that come easy– all those people who look/think/feel/talk like us.

But Paul lays it out for us in Romans like a manifesto: love what is good, hate what is evil. So far as it depends on you, live in peace with everyone. Do good to those who persecute you. If your enemy is hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.

Nothing on that list that Paul gives us is passive. Nothing on that list is weak, or small. Living in the footsteps of Christ places us, necessarily, a step or two out of sync with the world as it is. Living out the depths of the love of Jesus means that we walk a bit off pace with the rest of the world. Because, we confess Jesus as Lord, and we owe our allegiance to God, and not to nations, or tribes, or money, or any other smaller loyalty or deity.

That’s the so what. That’s what it is right there– and that’s what’s so hard for Peter. Confess Jesus as Lord, and you have to pick up your cross, cross your arms to smaller gods, and walk to a whole new rhythm from now on.

That’s the life we are called to: that’s the love we are called to, we who confess Christ. We aren’t just called to words that we recite, we are called to a way of life. And though it means daily picking up our cross, and

following, it’s only this kind of life, and this kind of love that can wear down the mountains.

Amen.