Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 7, 23 June 2013

 “Sent Away”

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 7

23 June 2013

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour

Mill Valley, California

Isaiah 65:1-9

Psalm 22:18-27

Galatians 3:23-29

St. Luke 8:26-39

INI

The Characters

We have an odd set of lessons that call us to attention this morning.  Each of them is demanding something of us, and now it is my job to attempt to give us something to chew on, to learn, as we get ourselves ready, spiritually, for another week.  First of all lets meet the characters in the Gospel – a brief description:

1.              Jesus – I guess to be honest we have to understand that we are meeting Luke’s Jesus, and his characterization of Jesus.  Luke has a program in his gospel that wants to call our attention to the poor, the lonely, “the little ones”, the dejected, and the rejected.  Perhaps we can see that in the parables that come immediately before this morning’s reading.  There is the parable of the sower in which only some of the wheat sprouts and produces fruit.  There is the parable of the Lamp in which Jesus calls us to set our lamps in a place that the world might see the light.  There is the reading about “The Family”, in which Jesus, when told that his family has come to visit him, redefines the family as “those who fear the Word of God and act on it.”  Finally there is the Jesus who calms the storm, and asks the disciples why they are fearful, and wonders where their faith is.

2.              There is the Demoniac – a possessed man.  What might we call him in our time – depressed, mentally ill, bi-polar, mightily conflicted?  We have so many labels in our time.  He is also not a Jew, and this distinction is important.

3.              There are the swineherds – also non-Jews, for Jews would not be keeping a herd of swine.  Thus they are twice condemned to the intolerance of the Hebrew reader.  They are also witnesses of the healing that Jesus does, and they are the ones who call the countryside (both city and farm) to notice. 

4.              Finally there are the people who are called by the witnesses (the swineherds) to meet Jesus and to see the result of his healing presence.  Their reaction is fear and they ask Jesus to leave.

The Other

The Rev. Mthr. Stephanie Spellers, a priest on staff at the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul in Boston, says this in her book, Radical Welcome, Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation.  She begins by describing our, your presence here at the Church of Our Savior:

“God has graciously, prodigally welcomed you, because it is in God’s very nature to seek you out and welcome you home when you feel the least worthy of embrace.”[1]

She begins her book on welcome, by describing how we have been welcomed here even in the midst of our darkest moments, when things have seem lost and out of control.  In the midst of the confusion of our lives, God still welcomes us here.  She does not, however, end at this point.  She takes it a step farther:

“Can you do likewise with others, entering solidarity with the outcast you find yourself least will or able to receive? Can you make room within yourself to receive the Other?”[2]

The Other?  What does she mean by the Other?  For Jesus in the healing story, the other was the Demoniac, the man possessed by demons, the non-Jew.  There are other Others in our readings for the day.  In the first lesson Isaiah describes two possible others, either an Israel that has forgotten God, and God’s ways, seeking after other gods and other spirits, or perhaps it is another other.  Perhaps it is the nation that did not know that it was not only called by God but created and cared for by God – a people under God’s care, but pursuing another course, not hearing God’s voice. 

In the Psalm, in verses preceding our psalm for this morning, the other becomes the psalmist himself – “But I am a worm, not a man, scorned by men, despised by the people.”  Here he pictures himself as the other, the outcast, whom no one wishes to approach.  It is doubly interesting in that this psalm is reading on Maundy Thursday as the altar is stripped for Good Friday.  The words of description are assigned to Jesus himself – he is the other.

I cannot describe the other for you – you know it better than I.  It is the one that you have difficulty in accepting, the one who moves beyond the boundaries of propriety that you have set for yourself, the one who leaves you cold and unconvinced.  Do you recognize her – do you recognize him?  Who is that for you?  It is important for us to know.  St. Paul challenges us in our disaffection with the other, as he says in the second lesson:

“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. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.”

So much for the other.  The characterization of the demoniac in the Gospel changes radically following the healing.  The people coming from both town and country discover him sitting at the feet of Jesus – the posture of a disciple.  Later, the man, now healed, asks to accompany Jesus, but Jesus “dismisses him”, “releases him”, or in our translation “sends him away.”  Although the Greek verb is not the same, the sentiment is there.  Jesus “sends him” just as Jesus will send the apostles – “the sent ones.”  This other is sent to tell the good news – of what happened to him.

Starting to Love

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”[3]

Wonderful things have happened to us in our lifetimes.  Perhaps they have not been as dramatic as what happened to the demoniac, or perhaps they were more striking.  If you have some extra time this week – time with a goodly component of quiet and self reflection, you might want to meditate on how God has taken your “otherness” away from you and accepted you into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Now we all have work today.  Jesus sends us away as well.  The Deacon will do it with the words, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”, and we will respond with “Thanks be to God.”  But what will happen then.  Who is the other in your life that needs to be welcomed, forgiven, loved, accepted?  Who is it that strikes fear in your heart, but is none-the-less welcomed by God?  Each of us knows, and the challenge to love them is as Sartre says: “an abyss”.  He calls upon us, and not as Christian, but rather as a human being, to have “energy, generosity, and blindness.”  Such values are easily married to a Christian point of view. 

So, may the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ give you the energy to embody and to speak the Gospel to the others around you.  May that same Spirit give you the generosity to share your own life in God, with them.  And finally, may the Spirit make you blind to their faults, their troubles, and to their separateness from you.  No Jew, no Greek, no slave, no free, no male, no female – can you join with Paul in adding new categories of human kind that Christ calls to be his own.

SDG

---

[1] Spellers, Stephanie, Radical Welcome, Embracing God, The Other, and the Spirit of Transformation, Church Publishing, New York, copyright 2006, page 39

[2]  Ibid.

[3] Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 6, 16 June 2013

“A Story”

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 6

16 June 2013

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour

Mill Valley, California

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10, 13-15

Psalm 32

Galatians 2:15-21                                                                                   

Luke 7:36-8:3                                                                                         

INI.

My father was a storyteller

As kids we loved nothing better than to literally sit at my father’s feet and ask him to tell us a story.  Rather than telling us one of the classic stories collected by the brothers Grimm, or collected in the Bible, or structured by the Greeks, he chose to tell a story of his own fabrication.  They were redolent of his growing up in South Eastern Colorado, and were full of mines, mountains, mountain ghosts (which he surely got from his singing of Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s poem Der Erlkönig) and other elements that combined his American-German upbringing with our then current living in New Mexico.  The story didn’t matter.  It was the connection that counted – our connection to him and to brief snippets of his story.

My father’s mother, my Großmama, told stories as well.  I remember this occasion quite vividly.  I sat with her in her new Denver apartment, awaiting the movers to bring furnishings from the house she and my Aunt Louise shared in another part of the city.  As we waited there, she told me stories.  She told stories about her youth, about her pastor father, and his waiting for a horse drawn carriage to take him in frock coat and top hat to preside at a funeral.  Unlike my father’s stories, her stories connected me in a rather concrete way to her own personal history and to my own.  In these stories she projected the values, and mores that had grown out of her Christian upbringing, that were important to her.  In her voice I saw and experienced these values – implicit in the sound of her voice.

I tell you these things because we have lost something in our culture that is related to the sound of our voices.  It is no accident that we think and talk about our God in terms of words – “And the word became flesh.”  It is equally important that we remember that this were originally not written words, chiseled into stone, or pressed into clay, or written on parchment.  They were spoken – they were remembered.

As I was struggling to retrieve and image that might prove helpful in grasping what I want to share with you this morning, I thought about the Navajo “Storyteller”.  Although produced for the tourist market in New Mexico and Arizona, the image, usually made of pottery, is of an older woman surrounded by tens of children as she tells her story.  The story imparts a sense of place, history, connection, and values.  We are a people of the written word, sometimes inscribed with ink upon a page, and lately written with pixels on a tablet’s screen.  Walter Ong, Jesuit, historian, philosopher and cultural critic reminds us of the importance of speech and a time before writing.

“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer.”

The sounds of the story and the chants of our story/song are the stuff of our liturgy, and the voice of our prayer.  So on this father’s day we will look at the stories of two prophets.

Nathan was a storyteller

He was also a prophet, both a call and an office that required him to speak God’s word to a specific moment or time.  Unlike our mistaken notion of prophecy as being a kind of fortune-telling, the prophets were actually storytellers, telling God’s story to God’s people.  Nathan had a tough assignment.  The king, David, had committed a great sin in stealing his neighbor’s wife, Bathsheba, and then sending her husband, Uriah, to the front, into the heat of battle, to be killed.  We know this story – but Nathan tells another story.

Nathans story is about a rich man and a poor man, and about a visitor who comes to visit the rich man.  He tells that the rich man, who had many lambs, could not bear to part with one of his own, but steals the poor man’s lamb and serves it to his guest.  Nathan’s story is David’s story, and in it David recognizes his guilt in taking Bathsheba and in killing Uriah.  Nathan’s story accuses and probes deeply into the soul.  It is powerful stuff.  It convicts.

Jesus is a storyteller

We know about the stories of Jesus, often-called parables – because their words arch around the truth that needs to be told.  Sometimes Jesus’ stories were told to convince others of a difficult truth.  In the Gospel which we just heard Jesus wants to counter the stigma that Simon, his host, seeks to assign to the woman, “who was a sinner” who is anointing the feet of Jesus.  It is a case of guilt by association.  Simon thinks of Jesus, “If this man were really a prophet, he would know what kind of woman this is.”  Jesus counters with a story that does not condemn or convict such as the story of Nathan, but rather points out the forgiveness of God.  The essentials of Jesus’ story are two debtors; one owed a lot, one owed a little.  Both are forgiven.  Jesus asks, “Who will love the one who forgave the debt more?”  Simon is forced by the story to see the woman’s faith and righteousness.

Our own story

We tell our stories here – in a formal kind of way.  To whom do you tell your stories?  Hopefully you tell your stories, featuring your failures and your successes, your missing the mark, and your forgiveness, hopefully you tell these to your children, or your wife, husband, or partner.  You tell them because you need to hear them again – you need to both speak and hear your story of faith.  Last Wednesday, after Eucharist, several of us sat around the table and told stories about faith, about others, about ourselves.  It is what God has called us to do.  If you have any concerns about the vitality of this place, then this must be a place informed by God’s story to us, and our story to one another.  The people who live around us should be aware of our message – of our story, and we need to be yearning to hear and understand theirs.

You will be surprised in telling your story of faith.  Not doing it, you will think it difficult and embarrassing.  Telling it you will find connection with yourself, with your God, and with your neighbor.  Remember that commandment – the summary of the law?  “Love the Lord your God with all your might, and love your neighbor – as you love yourself.”  This is the essence of our story.  It is a story that we need to be comfortable in telling, for it has good news for our communities, our families, our friends, and our enemies. 

Now, what were you saying?

SDG

Proper 5 - 9 June 2013

“Raised for What”

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

9 June 2013

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour

Mill Valley, California

I Kings 17:17-24

Psalm 30

Galatians 1:11-24

St. Luke 7:11-17

INI

I just want to know why?

As we continue to get to know one another, you will soon realize that I love movies, and that they often make their way into my preaching.  One favorite scene of mine will help us; I think, to not only understand the readings for this day, but to inculcate them into our lives.  I am thinking of the scene in “Steel Magnolias” following the burial of Sallie Field’s “daughter”

I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm FINE! I can jog all the way to Texas and back, but my daughter can't!! She never could!! Oh, God. I'm so mad, I don't know what to do!! I wanna know why! I wanna know WHY Shelby's life is over!! I wanna know HOW that baby will EVER know how wonderful his mother was. Will he EVER know what she went THROUGH for him?

Oh, God, I wanna know whyyyy! Whhhyyyyy?! Lord, I wish I could understand. No! No! No! It's not supposed to happen this way. I'm supposed to go first. I've always been ready to go first. I-I don't think I can take this. I-I don't think I can take this. I just wanna hit somebody til they feel as bad as I do! I JUST WANNA HIT SOMETHING! I WANNA HIT IT HARD!

I never fail to catch this scene because it embraces all of the emotions that come to us with the death of a friend, or a child, or someone we don’t even know.  Like Sally, we want to know why.  It is poignant for me this weekend, especially, following two funerals yesterday, one a priest, Fr. James Swearingen at The Church of the Advent, and the other an actress and friend, Barbara Oliver, founder of the Aurora Theater in Berkeley and a member of Saint Mark’s Church. 

It comes closer to us all with the death of Evan Ferrin, and Ada White this last week.  We too join with others as we wonder “why?”  We join in a procession, along with the Widow of Nain, who in laying her dead son to rest, wondered about her own future in her community.  Also with us in this procession of death is the Widow of Zarephath, who wondered about the death of her son as well.  With them we make our way out of town, out of a community of friends, out of “normal” society and go to a place to return the gift of our dead friends to the embrace of the earth.  We don’t walk alone, others walk with us to share in our sorrow, or walk with us in their own pain and distress. 

Common amongst us all in this procession are the questions that reside in the back of our minds.  Why?  The widow of Nain is quiet, resigned, and perhaps numb with her imposed reality.  Zarephath, however, is not.  She is seething with anger.  She comments to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!"  Like the disciples of Jesus, and most of those in the ancient near east, she saw death as the result of her own, or her son’s sin.  Death was the result of some unseen and unknown fault.  That is the silent momentum of the procession that goes to the countryside to bury the dead.  What have I done to cause this? Why is God dealing in death?

Dancing!

You have turned my wailing into dancing; you have put off my sack-cloth and clothed me with joy.  (Psalm 30:12)

This is a scene of contrasts.  In the Gospel we have the procession bewailing the death of the young Man.  This procession of sorrow is met with a procession of joy that is coming from the joys that accompanied the healing of the centurion’s slave.  Jesus and his friends are filled with life and fresh beginnings.  Not only has the slave from last Sunday’s gospel been saved and healed, but the centurion has been given new life as well.  Given the gift of great faith, he follows in the procession, not in a literal way, but in the manner of belief and belonging.  What will follow his joy will be a new life, new behaviors, and a new way in which the world will see him.

In the midst of the joy in the Jesus procession comes the reality of the people coming from the village of Nain.  The joy of Jesus is met with the sorrow of Nain.  It is an emotional confrontation that does not go unnoticed by Jesus.  “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’"  Jesus calls her out of her sorrow; indeed he calls all who were accompanying her out of their sorrow as well.  He calls us out of our sorrow.   If we follow Jesus in his living we soon see that he was constantly encountering death.  This was not only the promise of his own death, but the kind of death known in the lives of those who sought him out for healing.  It was not just the loss of breath, but also the loss of life itself that troubled Jesus.

In the story of the son of the widow of Zarephath, we have two words that describe the son’s situation.  One Hebrew word describes the breath of just living, the air that we take into our lungs.  That was what was missing when the mother asks Elijah to intervene.  When Elijah finishes his prayers and exercises with the son, the son’s condition changes.  Now he is filled with nephesh the breath of life that is blown into us by God’s Spirit.

The Lucan Beatitudes can give help us here in seeing ordinary life from Spirit-blown life.  Jesus addresses six human conditions in the Sermon on the plain: Poverty, Hunger, Sorrow, Wealth, Satisfaction, and a good reputation.  All of these are, in their own way, death. Unlike Matthew, Luke does not spiritualize these conditions.  Poverty is not poverty of spirit, but poverty – a lack of what might be necessary for life.  However, into each of these realities, Jesus sends the spirit of life.  Into poverty, those who can give and help are sent.  Into Hunger, those who can give the gift of bread are sent.  Into sorrow, those with a comforting breast and heart are sent.  Into wealth, those with needs are sent.  Into satisfaction those with anxiety and discomfort are sent.  To counter the good reputation, those who need a good word are sent.  The blessings and curses of Luke are met by each other – blessings for the curses, and curses for those blessed beyond their own need.

The sons are raised through the prophetic actions of Elijah, and those of Jesus.  Both wish to place God in these situations of death, and show God to be the Giver of Life.  What then shall we do?

Coming and Going

In the Baptismal Liturgy that I remember from my childhood, these words were said as the candidate was anointed with oil and the sign of the cross, just as we did last Sunday to Hutton and Devon.  The cross was drawn in oil, as the priest said:

The LORD will guard your coming and going both now and forever. (Psalm 121:8)

We come and go from this place frequently.  Sometimes we are in the procession of Jesus – full of the spirit of joy and of healing.  Sometimes we are in the procession that is defined by death and sorrow.  It depends.  God is with us in both, with a hand of healing, and a hand of guidance.  Whatever our situation, God is there, alive in our own baptismal grace.  We belong, and we have heard the word, and now it is time to behave, to act, to show forth to others what has born us up in joy, or out of our sorrow.

Last Sunday, at the baptism, we made some promises.  We recited our own covenant with the God that walks with us.  And in doing that we moved beyond belief into a life of action and mission.  Here’s what I asked:

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord? 


Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? 


Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Here is where we are all raised, like the son of Nain, or the boy of Zarephath.  Here is where Jesus picks us up, and where the Spirit blows a new nephesh into our lungs, and points us into the direction of what we have been called to be and do.  Out of the teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread, and out of our prayers comes the ability to address death in our world.  Like Elijah we are asked to confront evil, serve as an example of the Gospel, serve all sorts and conditions of people, respecting them in their own life and status before God.

This is what will blow a new creation into our world.  If the world seems lonely and predictable in its difficulties and sorrows, walk with a joyful Jesus and say to all that confronts us, “Young man, I say to you rise.”  You know who these young men and women are, these people who are pressed on by death, who need the joy of your heart and the gift of your own healing.  You know them. 

After Jesus’ words to him, the young man spoke.  I wonder what he said.  I wonder what you will say when you realize that Jesus raises you as well from death into life.  I wonder what those around you will say when they see the new life that is in you.  Speak and share. Like Elijah we are called to do in our world, and in our doing, life will be both given and shared.

SDG