Sermon on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, 6 April 2014

“In the midst of life”

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

30 March 2014

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church

Santa Clara, California

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Psalm 130

Romans 8:6-11

St. John 11:1-45

INI

In the midst of life

There was a television show that I used to live for – I looked forward in advance of its screening every Sunday evening.  I didn’t latch on to it right away – I had to catch up for a season.  It was provocative, engaging, and apparently fodder for this sermon.  It always began with a death.  Someone in the midst of life, expecting tomorrow was somehow caught in the maws of death, and the remainder of the show pondered on the aftermath.  The name of the television show was “Six Feet Under”, and followed the fortunes and misfortunes of a family that ran a mortuary.  The death featured in the first moments of the program always rippled into the lives of the main characters, who lived in their own dance with death.  A father who had died earlier constantly breaks into the present time to comment on their trials.

Two of our readings this morning, three actually, if we look at the themes of the psalm, deal with death in the midst of life.  Ezekiel treats us to a vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, and we walk, slowly, with Jesus to Bethany to encounter the death of his friend, Lazarus.  We shall turn to these readings in a moment.  Let us first remind ourselves about death and life. 

When I was growing up, even as I matured as a young adult, death was something off in the future – something to be awaited, not something with which I needed to be concerned.  Death was at the end of things, and certainly not at the beginning of the show.  I learned a rude and difficult lesson later in my life.  In my 30s and 40s as I served as a priest at St. Francis Church in San Francisco, I saw a good third of my parish succumb to AIDS.  This was not unusual.  Other parishes had the same experience with even more dire numbers.  As I think about it, the effect of breast cancer and cancer in general in our time, all of us have had to come to terms with death earlier than we thought. 

I am reminded in these things of a good Luther hymn.  Let me read it to you:

In the midst of earthly life


Snares of death surround us;


Who shall help us in the strife


Lest the Foe confound us?


Thou only, Lord, Thou only!


We mourn that we have greatly erred,


That our sins Thy wrath have stirred.


Holy and righteous God!


Holy and mighty God!


Holy and all merciful Savior!


Eternal Lord God!


Save us lest we perish


In the bitter pangs of death.


Have mercy, O Lord!

This world that Luther describes in this hymn lays out for us the theological and liturgical scene that we will enter next Sunday as we move from Palms to Tomb.  And like the psalmist, we are called to watch:

 “My very being waits for the Lord,

more than one who watches for the morning.”

Death and what to make of it.

Our culture and time doesn’t like death.  We attempt to avoid it at great cost to ourselves.  Unlike the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures and those in the medieval period who were immersed in images of death, we try to blunt their effect.  No, I know about all those zombie moves, and the horrors of so many video games.  They are however not honest.  They don’t talk to us about our own death, they divert our attention by looking at the threat of death, or the death of others.  They don’t make us think and ponder our own end.

Ezekiel is a good example of the opposite.  In the ancient near east, death was just an invading army away.  His vision of the valley of dry bones is a remembrance of the fallen dead so common in the many wars in Mesopotamia and the Levant.  Dry bones would be seen lying in the wasteland – a grim memorial to the fallen soldiers of whatever army.  In this striking scene, God calls upon Ezekiel to see an exercise of God’s life engendering word.  “Prophesy to these bones,” God asks of the prophet.  What is prophesy but words, but breath, but the Spirit of God put upon the prophet.  Breath, spirit, word – these are all called to revivify the dried, desiccated bones.  For the bones are Israel, forsaken and forgetful of God.  After the armies of Assyria and Babylon have run over them nothing is left.  God proposes to blow new life into them.

Baptism into the death of Jesus Christ

I was invited to a Greek Orthodox baptism once.  The young girl, Helen – I shall never forget her name, came to the font naked.  She was slathered in the chrism oil until she shone in the light of the church.  And then, she was plunged into the font – deep into the waters – three times – Father – Son – Holy Spirit.  She came out sputtering, sudsed with water and oil, gleaming and alive.  Baptism was a real risk for her but she survived.  Could you drown in our font?  I suppose so, but it would take some doing.

The lectionary unpacks all the symbols we will need to use during Holy Week.  It is here that we must remember that we are “buried with Christ in baptism.”  So how do we do this remembering?  Who shall we emulate?  Jesus waits (like the disciples will wait) even when he hears the news of his ailing friend, Lazarus.  There is the anxious and observing audience: Pharisees who are wondering what this will all come to, Mary and Martha who have their own expectations, and the Disciples who again attempt to dissuade Jesus from going to do what he needs to do.  Finally, there is the confrontation with death – made certain by the smell of rotting flesh, “Lord there is already a stench for he has been dead for days.”  Interesting, one day beyond three.  Really dead.  To this death Jesus shouts, “Lazarus come out!”  And this is the victory that will cap our Holy Week.

So which person shall you be?  Shall you be the Pharisee who is not quite convinced and a little doubtful?  Shall you be a disciple who is afraid of the consequences of following Jesus even to death?  Shall you be Mary or Martha who gently chide the absent Jesus?  Shall you be Jesus, who when faced with the reality of his friends death, merely weeps? 

Or, shall we all, each of us, each and every one of us, be Lazarus, and with ears silenced by our own dying hear the words of Jesus, “Lazarus, come out!” And might we even be those who are bidden by Jesus to go to Lazarus and “unbind him, and let him go?”  Which shall we be?  As we walk through Holy Week we will find the answer.

SDG

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, 30 March 2014

“Who Sinned?”

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

30 March 2014

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church

Santa Clara, California

I Samuel 16:1-13

Psalm 23

Ephesians 5:8-14

St. John 9:1-41

INI

Living in the Past

I just finished reading a book for my book club.  It’s by an author, a Turkish man, whom I admire greatly.  The title of the book is Silent House, and the author is Orhan Pamuk.  I thought of one of the characters in this novel as I read the readings for today.  Her name is Fatma.  She came from a well-to-do Istanbul family and married a doctor.  Now, her husband having died several years ago, she hides away in a seaside mansion that is crumbling with time, awaiting the visit of her grand children.  Her attitude toward life can be seen in this brief passage from the book:

“No, I wouldn’t fall for a lie in the form of a serpent.  I never drank, except once.  I was overcome with curiosity.  When nobody at all was around.  A taste like salt, lemon, and poison on the tip of my tongue.  At that moment I was terrified.  I was sorry.  I rinsed my mouth out right away, I emptied out the glass and rinsed it over and over and I began to feel I would be dizzy.  I sat down so I wouldn’t fall on the floor, my God, I was afraid I would become an alcoholic like him, too, but nothing happened.  Then I understood and relaxed.  The devil couldn’t get near me.[1]

Fatma is greeted by a great deal of sin in her life.  She despises the degradations visited upon her by the excesses of her husband, who was banished from Imperial Service in the Ottoman Empire, and was sent to live in anyplace other than the capital.  There he works on an encyclopedia to bring the Turkey of the east and the Europe of the west into an intellectual understanding.  His wife, Fatma despises her dead husband, and now she is forced to live with her manservant, Recep, who is actually the illegitimate son of her husband.  Recep is a dwarf.

So you may be wondering what is the connection of this story.  The Gospel for today is about blindness, about living with assumptions that may be the cause of our own blindness.  Fatma lives in a blindness that doesn’t allow her to forgive her husband, even in death, nor to understand or know her grand children.  For Fatma, and for the Pharisees, the neighbors, and indeed even for the disciples there is an assumption that precedes their awareness of what is going on about them.  The assumption is that the times, the individuals who live around them, and specifically the man born blind are damaged because of their own sin, or perhaps of the sin of others.

I wonder if that is our own assumption as well.  When I drive on the freeway, my overarching assumption is that everyone else driving with me is a fool – a sinner ignorant of how one really ought to drive.  Like Fatima, I can become obsessed with the “sinfulness” of others.  I obligingly cast stones at them.  It is a habit that infects our society, where we assume that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is somehow manifesting sin.

Seeing the Mote in our Own Eye

Saint Paul sees a different point of view.  “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.”[2]  Notice that both the darkness and light are something that is not outside of us, but is rather our essence.  The real danger is that we are darkness, and in our darkness can only see the darkness in others.  The grace that Paul hopes to convince us of is that we are really light, reflecting the light of the grace that God has given us.

If you read Face Book you will be overwhelmed by the social media’s ability to allow us to cast stones, to see all as darkness, and to objectify that darkness in the lives, politics, and hearts of others.  That is the operating principal in the Gospel reading.  Neighbors and Pharisees and Disciples can only see the man’s blindness guised in his own fault, in his own sin.  They are stuck in such a perception and condemn him to be equally caught in its malaise. 

Jesus asks us to see the mote in our own eye, before noticing the speck in our sister’s eye.  Such an attitude might silence the bad talk that we have for the others who don’t agree with us.  What might our social discourse be like if we saw only light and goodness in the speech of others, or met that speech with our own light and goodness.

Fatma lives a life of disappointment.  Her very family does not meet her standards for living.  Thus they attempt to bring together all the disparate parts of a politicized and polarized Turkey without her wisdom.  They’re on their own – a realization of the sins of prior generations. This ought to sound familiar to us, as we view what goes on about us and assume only the worst.

Resources for healing

The psalmist has a good perspective, and one that may be lost on us because of our own intimate familiarity with the 23^rd psalm.

“You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;*

you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.[3]

Jesus brings healing into the midst of the relationship of the blind man and those about him.  The psalmist is aware of the healing nature of God’s grace even when it is provided in the midst of “those who trouble me.”  Who troubled Fatma?  It was her husband’s transgressions, and unbeknownst to her, her own inability to forgive him.  Who troubled the blind man?  It was any who only saw his defect and who avoided seeing his evident wholeness in God’s eyes.  And finally who is troubling you?  Whose sins are so great that you cannot forgive?  Who’s troubled life seems to invade your own sense of goodness and forgiveness?

In college, during the communion at the community Eucharist, I used to kneel there, not singing the hymn, ostensibly to pray – but really to look at those going to the communion rail.  What did I see in them?  Their grace?  Not always.  John was a classmate who troubled me, always wearing shabby clothing (his family was wealthy) always seeming to do things that disturbed others.  And there he was coming down from the altar having just partaken of the Body and Blood of Jesus.  Baptized as I was, fed as I was, forgiven as I was – my antipathy for him had to give way to some other attitude.

Jesus heals the blind man because of his faith, and surely does the same for us, for we are all blind to some extent.  We all seem to lack the ability to understand and perceive the grace that surrounds every human being.  Yet Jesus still stands in our midst urging us on.  Some come to the table that is spread in the presence of those who trouble you.  Receive the bread and wine, receive the body and blood.  But most of all receive the healing not only for yourself, but also for the world around you.

SDG

---

[1]    Pamuk, O. (2012), Silent House, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 16.

[2]    Ephesians 5:8

[3]    Psalm 23:5

The Third Sunday in Lent, 23 March 2014

“Testing“

The Third Sunday in Lent

23 March 2014

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church

Santa Clara, CA

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5:1-11

St. John 4:5-42

INI

As we read these texts this morning there is one overarching theme that at least links two of them, and that is the theme of water.  It’s an appropriate theme this season, as we look forward to the Great Vigil of Easter and the renewal of Baptismal Vows.  It is however a theme that I am going to set aside in favor of another.  The theme I should like to take on is one that has aspects in each one of our readings, and is one that I think relates to everyday living and life.  Just before I sat down to write this, a young woman from Ethiopia dropped by and wondered if I would pray for her.  She had a four-fold request.  First of all she was going to be taking her drivers test on the day following, was nervous, and asked if I would pray that she might have confidence.  Test 1.  Next she was concerned about her parents who still live in Ethiopia and are Orthodox.  The young woman was concerned that they were not “born again” and that they would not meet the test of Judgment Day.  Test 2.  She told the story of her two brothers who were in failing marriages and were in danger of loosing their children in the courts.  Test 3.  Finally, she had similar concerns for her sister who was married and fearful of loosing her husband.  Test 4.  If you have not guessed it by now, I’d like us to think about testing and being tested.

Testing the times

Following the conversation that Jesus has with the Samaritan woman, which was in reality a session of the one testing the other about how one ought to live a life of faith.  (The woman relied on her Samaritan standards or worship at Mt. Gerizim, and separation from the Jews.  And Jesus was meeting all of her arguments with either the standard Jewish response, or with a metaphor that seemed to go right over her head).  They each are testing one another.  Jesus wants to test her assumptions about life, and suspects that she is a bit of a cynic.  Why else would she have had five husbands – a true test of the Law about Marriage.  He also wants to test the depth of her knowledge of what she truly believe, that which she put trust in (just as we discussed last Sunday – how her faith was creditable, like the faith of Abraham and Sarah. 

The woman, on the other hand, much to John’s delight, is testing Jesus.  What does Jesus know?  How does he know it?  If he is a prophet – what kind?  Might he be the Messiah?  All of this is churned up in her mind as possibility. All of this is fascinating stuff, ripe for a theological gristmill.  Does it, however, meet the test of what we need for today.  That she, a Samaritan, could recognize in Jesus the traits of the Messiah sends us a message about the inclusion of outsiders in recognizing the true value of following Jesus.  That is only a first-stage learning for the day, however.  The disciples in their seemingly perpetual ignorance push the agenda even further.

They are upset.  Jesus is speaking in public with a woman – with a woman who has had multiple marriages.  Jesus didn’t understand the need for social convention.  He was “testing the times.”  What might they permit, and what might they condemn?  Jesus is pushing to the root, to the radix, and being the complete radical he wants the disciples to understand the connection.  He teaches them about the fields “ripe for harvesting.”  Who is the woman, the Samaritan, the Gentile, the outsider, the sinner – who is she but nothing less than the harvest that Jesus has come for?  Jesus tests the disciples to see if they can see the reality that stands behinds Jesus’ mission.  “Test the times,” Jesus says, “and see if they are ripe for harvest?”

Testing God (Exodus)

Sometimes, like Abraham and Sarah, God leads us out into the midst of a place and says to us, “Do my will – do it here!”  And we look around and wonder what that might be?  Israel was in the midst of her flight from Egypt, and she could think of nothing other than getting as far away as possible.  Trouble quickly sets in – a very ordinary and everyday trouble – thirst.  There is no water.  (We can understand this.)  Do they meet this challenge with invention and courage?  No.  They complain.  First they complain to Moses and then they complain to God.  They test God, as Moses puts it.  They test God’s wisdom in leading them there.

I understand this place used to be a farm.  Well, all of the places around here used to be a farm.  The question we need to ask, like Israel, is “Why are we here?”  That’s a bit different than “Why on earth did you put us here?”  Rather we need to explore what God expects us to meet here.  Maybe God wanted them to experience their thirst (and later their hunger) and to discover what they really thirsted and hungered for.  That is what the dialogue with the woman was all about.  What was Jesus’ thirst all about?  Why had the woman come to the well?  Why have you come here this morning?  The test is not for God – but rather the test is for us and our faith.  What will we do for all the spiritual thirst and hunger that is around us?  How will we know unless we go to the well and ask?

Testing ourselves (IInd Lesson)

Perhaps it is not God we need to test, or Jesus, or anyone other at all.  Perhaps it is ourselves that we need to test.  Paul writes to the Romans:

“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Paul knew a great deal about being tested, and he never ceases to relate its trials to his readers.  Here in this passage he highlights the positive development that comes from suffering.  Well, we need to be honest here.  It is not suffering that Paul speaks of here, but rather affliction – something affecting us from outside of us.  Is it God that afflicts us? (Such as the Israelites thought?)  And here the disciples enter the picture again preferring to connect affliction with past sins.  Afflictions are the result of some defect, so wrong act on our part.  Paul begs to differ.  Afflictions lead us to know our need of God. 

The ladder that he describes for us: afflictions (sufferings), endurance, character, and finally hope, are a description of our personal development in faith.  Where was Nicodemus on that ladder, or the woman at the well, or the disciples, or Mary, or Joseph, or you?  Where are you on that ladder, or can you be in multiple places?

Yes sometimes we are placed in the midst of afflictions – and we endure them, and that is what our faith is all about.  Just as Jesus endured both cross and grave, so we are invited to do the same – in our baptism.  Afflictions come and go, but the final results of enduring them, the character of self and the development of hope, endure forever.

Religion is not a magic striking of the rock.  It is rather the understanding of what we think ourselves to be and where we think ourselves to be and then matching that up with God’s will.  “Come unto me all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  We will always survive the test – that is the wonder of salvation.  What challenges us now is where do we go once we have drunk the living water and have left the well to go home?

SDG

The Second Sunday in Lent, 16 March 2014

“You shall be a Blessing”

The Second Sunday in Lent

16 March 2014

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church

Santa Clara, California

Genesis 12:1-4a

Psalm 121

Romans 3:1-17

St. John 3:1-17

INI

You shall be a blessing

I was walking down Bancroft Avenue in Berkeley one day when I encountered a bunch of teachers and their preschool students.  I smiled at them and went on my way.  From behind me, as I continued on to my office, I heard one of the teachers shout out, “Father, we need a blessing.”  You can’t wear a clerical collar and ignore this kind of request, so I turned back, and laying my hands on each of them blessed them.  Some weeks later, I was crossing Shattuck Avenue.  This is street second only to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley for encountering the unexpected.  I was in a cross walk.  Suddenly I heard, “Father, I really need a blessing.”  So I turned to face the man who had made the request, and there on the sidewalk I blessed him and talked with him.  Finally, we were at Il Fornaio, a restaurant in San Francisco.  After the meal, I went to the counter to buy some cookies, for which they were well known, and to pay our check.  The young woman stationed there looked up at me, looked at my collar and burst into tears.  “I am so unhappy,” she said, “I really could use a blessing and a prayer.”  And so it was, there by the cash register and the pastries, I prayed with her and comforted her.

“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

It is interesting to me, that had I not been wearing clerical garb, these individuals would not have asked me to bless them.  And I would have not known their need.  Abraham comes to us straight out of life.  He has a wife Sarah, and a nephew Lot, and lots of servants, and cattle.  This is a man of substance, who the Lord calls out of life and says,  “I will bless you, if you go to the place that I send you.”  But the final part of this transaction is the blessing part, where God promises to bless and to make Abraham a blessing as well.  It is no easy transaction, this promise and command that God proposes to Abraham.  It has both cost and risk.  It also has a future, and not just the future hoped for by the tribal peoples of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Their hope was the survival of a name, a family, and a tribe.  That will be Abraham’s hope and conundrum as well.  In the future it will appear as if there is no future for Abraham and Sarah’s family.  It will take a divine promise to accomplish that, and Sarah will laugh at the prospect.  But right now that is all behind them – for you see, in the Hebrew mindset the future was behind you, because you couldn’t see it yet.  By your side was the present, and in front of you was the past, which you could revisit and observe.  The future was unknown, and in the midst of that unknowing, God says, “Go from your country.”

Faith and Risk

We live in a culture that lives and indeed thrives with risk.  When I am flying on a plane, my mind will sometimes wander off to think about all of the thousands, if not tens of thousands of parts that need to function perfectly to keep me up in the air.  It’s a risk.  I guess that we could say that we are a society of faith.  Not the faith that was described to us by our parents; a faith in God, or in a book, or in a series of dogmatic assertions, but faith in something outside of ourselves. 

Jesus tries to get Nicodemus to understand that when he tells Nicodemus that he must be born “from above”.  Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus to say that he must be “born again,” and quickly sees the folly of such an assertion.  Jesus quickly corrects him – “You must be born from above”, and later “you must be born of water and the spirit.”  The common understanding of life and its causes are quickly brushed away by Jesus’ argument.  He wants Nicodemus to be open to something outside of himself, outside of his usual understanding of things.

Faith is risk.  It was certainly a risk for Abraham, which St. Paul thoroughly explores in the second lesson for today.  “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.”  Faith is to be persuaded that our relationship with God will ensure not only our own future, but also the future of those around us.  That was Abraham and Sarah’s hope – that the future would be ripe, full of promise, of benefit to future generations, and that their name would continue.  But did you get that one word?  Did you hear the word, “hope”? 

There are many Christians who would like to describe Christianity as a collection of certainties, of bankables and assurances.  Just as Abraham is asked to take a risk, to follow God into the unknown, so we, in following Jesus, follow after a similar risk and hope.  We do the same thing when we say the Creed, although we are led astray a bit with the culturally loaded English verb “to believe”.  The Latin verb “credo” involves issues of trust and taking someone at their word.  The core of the word is the notion of the heart, and the notion of placing something within that heart.  As any banker will tell you, “credit” a form of the same word, is a risk.

The Spirit and Living

We don’t know what happens immediately to Nicodemus.  He shows up again as a part of the Easter Narrative, but for now, John leaves him in sort of a stasis, suspended between what he knew as a faithful Jew, and what it was that Jesus was attempting to persuade him of.  We are, in many ways, in the same place.  Like Abraham, we may be asking, “where do I (we) go from here?”  What might be helpful is Jesus second comment to Nicodemus about being born of “water and the Spirit,” followed by a saying “The wind blows where it chooses.”  If there is something to grab onto here it is that notion of the “Spirit”.  It’s a good Hebrew word “ru’ah” and it means breath and life.  Jesus infers to Nicodemus that as God blew breath into the clay man Adam, and he becomes a living being; in a new sort of creation, the Spirit needs to re-breath us, so that we are living in a new way.

Why take the risk?  For Abraham it was about the future.  For us it is about living.  Remember the promise that is made to Abraham, “You will be a blessing?”  That is our promise as well – that is our task as well.  So as we are persuaded, as we believe, as we trust, as we have confidence in God, what do we do with that?  Do we rest in the comfort of the Spirit?  Or should we be stirred up?

Jesus makes a couple of comparisons at the end of the reading: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes (takes a risk with, trusts, is persuaded, has confidence in, places it in the heart) in him may have eternal life.  It is however, not just the life to come in which we are placed but also something more than that.  “You will be a blessing.”

On our sign out on Pruneridge Avenue I had the following comment put out there: “What are you taking on for Lent?”  It is the custom, you know, limiting ourselves during Lent – giving something up; chocolate, the gym, meat, smoking, alcohol, you name it.  That’s OK, but I think Jesus is really asking us to take a greater risk, something like that, which was taken on by Abraham and Sarah.  I think Jesus wants us to take on one another – not only those we know, but those who are strangers to us.  That’s what our house meetings and the IAF is all about.  It’s about understanding ourselves as both pilgrims (like Abraham and Sarah) and servants (like Paul).  As we do our community organizing we will hopefully find out what is expected of us by the community that surrounds us, and we will hopefully begin to understand what kind of person will be needed here, serving as rector. 

Water and the Spirit – that remembrance will help us understand who we are, and begin us on our path to do for others.  Touch the water as you leave and remember.  You’re walking with Abraham and Sarah now.

SDG