Category: Sermon

Not One Stone: Facing Mortality, Finding Meaning

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment
Wailing Wall and Dome of the Rock at the site where the Jerusalem temple once stood. Image by Peter Mulligan. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Click here to listen to this sermon on our church’s website

A middle aged man goes to see his doctor for a physical.  At the end of the examination, he asks, “Well Doc, do you think I’ll live to be a hundred years old?”

“Let’s see,” the doctor said, “do you smoke?”

“No,” the man said, “absolutely not.  Never.”

Doc: “OK then, do you drink?”

Man: “Not a single drop in my entire life.”

Doc: “Do you eat a lot of sugary or fatty foods?”

Man: “No way!  I’ve always been very careful about what I eat.”

Doc: “Do you drive very fast?”

Man: “Never!  I always drive 5 miles an hour below the speed limit, just to be sure.”

Doc: “I don’t quite know how to ask this one, but have you had a lot of girlfriends?”

Man: “Absolutely not.  I’m celibate and I’ve been celibate for my entire life.”

Doc: “Then why on earth would you want to live to be a hundred?!”

Why indeed.  You and I live in a culture that has mastered the art of denying death.  Everything from anti-aging cream to plastic surgery is designed to keep us from facing the reality of our own mortality.  Consumer advertising and commercial television keeps us distracted from thinking about death until we absolutely cannot avoid it anymore.  At that point, if we so choose, they can give us drugs that will “make us as comfortable as possible,” effectively tuning us out until our bodies stop functioning.  Our culture’s goal, it would seem, is to first ignore and finally numb the dying process so that we won’t ever have to come to grips with it.

Of course, the wisest among us don’t wait until that point to reflect upon their own mortality.  They find their own way to accept it and even make peace with it.  For these people, thinking about death doesn’t have to be something dark or morbid.  In fact, it can give their lives a sense of meaning and purpose.  People who know and accept the fact that they are going to die live with a conscious awareness that they have a finite amount of time on this earth and it’s up to them to make the most of it.

If you knew that you only had a week, month, or year to live, how would you choose to spend that time?  What do you want your life to stand for?  When other people look back at your life, what would you want them to remember about you?  These are the questions that a wise person asks in the face of mortality.

When we accept that this life will not last forever, we realize that it cannot be an end in itself.  Like the man in the joke, we have to ask ourselves: what’s the point of living to be a hundred years old if all you’re going to do is eat Brussels sprouts?  The truly wise among us realize that life cannot last forever, therefore the truly wise among us also realize that each life must be lived for something larger than itself.  Every mortal life, it seems, is a means to an end.

In spite of our culture’s death-denying attempts to distract or numb us, each of us has probably known, met, or heard about at least one person who made his or her mortal life meaningful by dedicating it to something larger than himself or herself.  We tend to respect or admire such people when we meet them.  Their examples might even inspire us to look more deeply at our own lives, face our mortality in new ways, and discover meaningful possibilities within us that we hadn’t noticed before.  It’s a beautiful thing when that happens.

However, it’s at this point that our cultural programming kicks back in and tends to shut us off toward the next step in our development.  Our culture is so individualistic that we don’t even think about the larger social bodies of which we are a part.  We tend to stop with ourselves and not notice how it is that an awareness of mortality applies to larger realities.

People are mortal.  We know that.  We accept that fact, at least theoretically, even if we choose to ignore it for our entire lives.  However, not many of us stop to think about other things that share our mortality.  These things might last much longer than we do, but they too will one day fade from existence.  Families are mortal.  Surnames and lineages come to an end through a lack of offspring.  Churches and other faith communities are mortal.  There comes a point when dwindling membership and a lack of funds causes an institution to close its doors.  The same thing is true of entire religions at large.  There are very few people on this planet who continue to worship the gods of Mount Olympus in the same way that they were worshiped by Greeks in centuries past.  Nations are mortal.  The Roman Empire was once the dominant superpower in the world, unlike anything else that had come before it.  Where is the great Roman Empire today?  Buried under the rubble of history and preserved in ruins frequented by tourists in Bermuda shorts.  Species are mortal.  Dinosaurs no longer roam the earth like they did 65 million years ago.  Finally, even the planets and stars are mortal.  One day, our very own sun will burn up all of its hydrogen fuel and explode into a violent supernova, momentarily becoming the brightest star in some distant sky.

If coming to grips with our own individual mortality is difficult, accepting the mortality of families, churches, species, and stars feels almost impossible.  Yet, the same truth applies to these larger mortal beings that first applied to mortal human beings: it is in facing mortality that we find meaning.

Let’s look at this idea in relation to this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel.  The story opens as Jesus and his disciples are leaving the great Jerusalem temple, the epicenter of Jewish worship in the first century CE.  Jesus, as usual, is walking away from yet another fight with the established religious leaders of his day.  In the previous chapter, chapter 12, you can read about Jesus butting heads with representatives from almost every major Jewish sect and community: Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and temple scribes.  The conflict between Jesus and the organized religion of his day had reached such a boiling point that Jesus, in his frustration, was about ready to give up on it.  When this morning’s passage opens with him leaving the temple, he’s not just out for a stroll, he’s right in the middle of storming out in a huff.

It’s at this point that Jesus’ disciples, in their usual tactless and somewhat dimwitted manner, decide to stop and admire the lovely architecture of this religious icon and national monument of Judaism.  They say of the temple, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”  Jesus is unimpressed.  He says, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

He’s talking about mortality of the temple: this central symbol of religious and national identity for the Jewish people.  They were under the impression that this sacred building would stand forever under divine protection.  For them, the temple was immortal.  It was an end in itself as a center of worship.  The idea had never occurred to them that it might not be there one day.

As it turns out, Jesus’ prediction was spot-on.  The Jerusalem temple, like any human being, was mortal.  It was eventually burned to the ground by the Romans during an uprising in the year 70 CE.  It was never rebuilt.  The site where it once stood is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, one of the most sacred places in Islamic religion.

The destruction of the temple was unthinkable to the average Jew, but to Jesus it was inevitable.  The wisdom of Jesus did not stop with an awareness of his own individual mortality, but extended to embrace the mortal and finite nature of all things.  Just as it was for individuals, so it is for temples, religions, countries, species, planets, and stars: to face mortality is to find meaning.

If our great struggle in life is limited to ensuring the continued existence of particular people, places, institutions, or things, then we have already doomed ourselves to failure.  Nothing lasts forever.  We need to accept that.  What Jesus said about the Jerusalem temple, we could say about anything: ““Do you see these? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”  All things are mortal.

The sooner we realize this truth, the sooner we can get on with the business of asking the really important questions about existence in reality.  Concerning our individual selves, we can ask: “What am I living for?  What will people remember about me when I’m gone?  What will be my lasting contribution to the world around me or the universe as a whole?  What is the meaning of my life?”

We can ask these same questions about our mortal families or this mortal country.  The day will come when the United States, like the Roman Empire, will only exist as a chapter in a history book.  Accepting the inevitability of this fact, we need to ask ourselves as Americans: “When that day comes, what will that chapter say?”

As Christians, we can also ask these same questions about our church, our denomination, and our religion as a whole.  We need to get over this ego-centric idea that God will protect and preserve us from our own collective mortality.  Just look at the way Christianity itself has changed over the last two thousand years.  We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that the Christianity we practice is identical in faith and form to the Christianity practiced by the Apostle Paul or St. Augustine of Hippo.  We identify ourselves as Presbyterians, but if John Knox and John Calvin (the founders of Presbyterianism) were sitting in this church right now, they would be horrified by much of what they would see.  Likewise, if a Christian from the year 2412 were to time travel into this sanctuary right now, that person’s faith would likely seem so foreign to us that we wouldn’t even want to call it ‘Christian’ at all.  Just as Paul and Calvin have shaped us, our faith will shape the future long after we are gone and the pressing crises of our era have ceased to be relevant concerns.  What will be our lasting contribution to that future?

Finally, as members of this church, I think we need to ask these questions about our mortal congregation.  This little church has been in Boonville for over two hundred years.  We take great pride in our history and our building.  Maintaining the integrity and beauty of this place is a chief concern for many people in this room.  But all of us together need to hear Jesus saying to us what he said about his own temple: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”  This place, this building, and this congregation are all mortal.  They will not last forever.  “All will be thrown down,” as Jesus said.  If our only motivation in coming here week after week is to keep the doors open and the lights on, then we’ve already failed.  We’re like the man in the joke at the beginning of this sermon: we have no reason to live for another hundred years.  Wise individuals live with a conscious awareness of their inevitable death and then adjust their lives accordingly, so as to make them as rich and meaningful as possible.  It is no different with wise churches.

This church will die eventually.  Whether it’s in ten years or another hundred years, it will happen.  We need to remember that.  We need to embrace that truth for ourselves so that we, as a church, can make the most of the time we’ve been given right now.  Knowing that this church will one day die and “not one stone will be left here upon another,” we need to ask ourselves, “Why are we here?  What is this church living for?  What will be our lasting contribution to the life of this community after our doors are closed and our lights shut off forever?  What is the meaning of our life together, as a church?”  Those are the real questions that we need to be asking, not just once for a special project or a mission study, but continually.  We need to set these questions before our eyes like a carrot dangling in front of a horse during a race.  These are the questions that need to drive us, propel us, or perhaps lure us forward into the future.

As we explore these questions within the conscious awareness of our church’s impending death (whenever that will happen), I believe we’ll start to see a slow-motion miracle in progress.  Even as we are facing and embracing death, I believe that we will also start to experience a kind of resurrection.  It’s been my experience and observation that the most vibrant, active, and growing churches are the ones who have found their reason for being, the meaning of their existence, outside themselves.  These churches are passionate about spiritual growth and community service.  Their members gather together, Sunday after Sunday, not to maintain what they have, but to seek what they desire.  There is a yearning deep within such people for “something more.”  They are hungry for silence, prayer, scripture, and sacrament.  They long to deepen their connection with the sacred mystery of divine love.  This love, in turn, leads them out, away from the church and into the streets of this community where love demands to be shared with hurting people through compassionate word and deed.  This is my vision of a church that faces mortality and finds meaning.  When the day comes that “not one stone will be left here upon another,” such a church will live on in a state of resurrection, even if our doors are closed, our lights shut off, and our roof caved in.  Even then, even if our church dies, it will live.

As a church, as individuals, as a country, and as a species, may we be people who live with a consciousness of death.  May we face mortality and find meaning.  In the midst of these piles of rubble, where stones have been thrown down from the broken remnants of our sacred temples, may we walk together the path of our own, continual, slow-motion resurrection, following in the footsteps of the Living Christ, the Risen One in our midst, the faithful friend who abides with us and guides us on our way.

Jesus Sat Down and Watched

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Jon Kabat-Zinn. Photo by Mari Smith. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Some weeks, when you’re writing sermons, you have to do a little extra research.  Usually, this involves a trip to library to find a particular biblical commentary or an article in a scholarly journal, but this week, my “extra research” involved digging around in old boxes of lost junk and VHS tapes in order to find a John Travolta movie.  The movie I was looking for is from 1996.  It’s called Michael and it stars Travolta as an angel sent from heaven to help two people find true love.

All in all, John Travolta plays a rather un-angelic angel.  He smokes cigarettes, curses like a sailor, and starts fights in bars.  He has wings, but no halo.  When someone asks him why he doesn’t fit the stereotypical angelic image, he simply responds, “I’m not that kind of angel.”  However, in spite of his rough appearance, Travolta’s Michael is the real deal.  He offers these occasional moments of insight and wisdom that just blow your mind.

One such moment comes when Michael confronts another character and indicates that he is aware that she has ulterior motives regarding a certain situation.  Stunned and thinking that he must have the ability to read minds, she asks him, “How could you possibly know that?”  His brilliant response: “I pay attention.”

Paying attention is almost always good advice, whether you’re an angel on a mission, a hunter in a tree stand, or driving a car.  It also happens to be, in my opinion, essential to a healthy spiritual life.  In fact, I don’t think it would be wrong at all to say that spirituality itself is mainly an exercise in paying attention.

There are those who would disagree with me on this.  They might say that spirituality is about “getting God into your life”.  While I can respect that metaphor, I don’t really see God as a person who walks around, into, and out of things.  For me, God is that ultimate reality in which we all “live, and move, and have our being” (as the apostle Paul says in the book of Acts).  That’s why I think spirituality is all about paying attention to the God who is already here: around you and within you, revealed in the stuff of everyday life.

I can see hints that Jesus himself perhaps thought of God in this way.  Whenever people asked him to describe his ideas about God or God’s vision for the destiny of the world, Jesus used metaphors from everyday life: a woman baking bread, a farmer sowing seed, crops growing, birds nesting, and parents loving their kids.  For Jesus, God was not an abstract philosophical concept, but an intimate and loving presence that knows us better than we know ourselves and “is closer to us than our own hearts” (Augustine).  In order to reflect this intimacy, Jesus most often referred to God as “Abba”, a Hebrew word that technically means “Father” but could more accurately be translated as “Daddy”.  Even today, little Israeli kids call their dads “Abba”.  Jesus’ preference for this term was meant to make a point: he saw God as his Father, but not in a specifically male or authoritative sense.  For Jesus, God as Father is “Abba”, “Daddy”: the intimate and affectionate presence of unconditional love and care in the universe.  And it is through the regular, everyday stuff of the universe that this presence is made known to us.  Therefore, according to Jesus, it’s important to pay attention to the little details and patterns of life.

If we know where to look, we can see Jesus leading by example in this regard all through the gospels.  We read about the times when he stepped away from the crowds in order to pray or meditate.  We can hear it in the sermon on the mount and in his many parables.  In today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ capacity for paying attention fuels his insight into human nature and empowers his criticism of the pious powers that be.  As usual, this passage opens with Jesus confronting educated religious leaders.  Most commentaries and sermons on this passage focus on Jesus as the social critic who exposes hypocrisy among the religious elite.  What I want to focus on today is the spiritual stance that allowed Jesus to become such an erudite critic of society.

The phrase that struck me as I was preparing for this sermon comes in verse 41: “[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.”  He sat down and watched.  You’d be amazed at how much you can learn by just sitting and watching.  In this world of high speed downloads from the information superhighway, most people are slowly losing their patience for the learning process.  We think education is just a matter of filling a person’s brain with pieces of data as quickly and efficiently as possible, but there’s something important that comes in the way we acquire and assimilate information.

When the famous scientist Jane Goodall was a little girl (about four years old), she wanted to know where chicken eggs came from, so she made her way into a chicken coop, sat down, and watched patiently for several hours on end.  Eventually, she got to see a chicken laying an egg.  As an adult, she made use of that same patience in the hills of Gombe, Tanzania, where she revolutionized the study of chimpanzees in the wild.  Her study method was the same as the one she used in the chicken coop as a kid: sit down and watch.

This time, it took her six months to get close enough for contact and real learning.  Most of the established scientists at that time criticized Goodall’s amateurish methods.  She named the chimps, rather than number them.  She preferred to pay attention to her test subjects in their natural environment, rather than take them back to a laboratory and analyze them.  Her fellow scientists were certain that such unorthodox methods could never yield real scientific results.  However, it was Goodall’s “sit down and watch” approach that changed the way we think about chimpanzees.  She was the first to observe their behavior in groups, their use of tools, their expressions of emotion, and their practice of organized warfare.  In time, she even won the acceptance of the chimpanzee tribe, simply by sitting and watching.  They eventually came to her and began interacting with her up-close on a voluntary basis.  Much of what we now know about these animals comes from Jane Goodall just sitting and watching, against the advice of other, more established scientists.

There was even a spiritual benefit to her sitting and watching discipline.  The relationship she nurtured with the natural world in Gombe shaped her relationship with the Divine.  Although she is not religious in any traditional sense, Jane Goodall has a very deep awareness of the same intimate presence that Jesus talked about.  She says, “I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I don’t know what to call it. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”

Jane Goodall’s practice of sitting and watching revolutionized her own spirituality and the study of chimpanzees.  In today’s gospel reading, Jesus’ similar practice of sitting and watching placed him exactly where he needed to be in order to gain a very specific insight into human nature and the subject of generosity.  He was in the right spot at the right time to notice something that everyone else had overlooked.  Loyal Jews were probably going in and out of the treasury all day, leaving their offerings for the priests and temple maintenance.  Well-known and wealthy sponsors were recognized for their substantial contributions.  On a purely practical level, their large donations mattered more than the many small donations that were often left anonymously.  Among the smallest of these small donations would have been the two copper coins left by a woman who had lost everything and was, by ancient standards, of little importance to anyone.  Jesus, sitting and watching, understood the significance of her gift.  When viewed in terms of actual numbers, her donation was trivial.  But when viewed in terms of percentages, it was huge.  Two pennies to her was a larger percentage of her income than two thousand dollars would have been to the super rich philanthropists whose contributions kept the temple running.  But Jesus, sitting and watching, was the only one in a position to notice and realize the significance of this woman’s gift.  Jesus paid attention.  He saw what no one else would see, therefore he knew what no one else could know.  After sitting and watching, he walked away with more insight about the nature of generosity than any of the hypocritical scribes and Torah scholars who worked there every day.  Sitting, watching, and paying attention provided Jesus with fuel for championing the cause of poor and outcast people.  Sitting, watching, and paying attention exposed the corruption and hypocrisy that lurked just below the surface of Jesus’ polite and religious society.  Sitting, watching, and paying attention allowed Jesus to see the hand of God at work in his life and the world at large.  His vision of what this world could and should be was shaped by the simple practice of sitting, watching, and paying attention.

One of my favorite contemporary teachers of the art of paying attention is a man named Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Dr. Kabat-Zinn is the person who first introduced the practice of eastern meditation to the practice of western medicine.  His word for “paying attention” is mindfulness.  He writes:

With our cell phones and wireless palm devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time, do business anywhere. But have you noticed that, in the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves? In the overall seduction, we can easily forget that our primary connection to life is through our own interiority — the experiencing of our own body and all our senses, including the mind, which allow us to touch and be touched by the world, and to act appropriately in response to it. And for that, we need moments that are not filled with anything, in which we do not jump to get in one more phone call or send one more e-mail, or plan one more event, or add to our to-do list, even if we can. Moments of reflection, of mulling, of thinking things over, of thoughtfulness.

What Jon Kabat-Zinn is asking is this: is there any regular time in your day when you set aside moments for just sitting and watching or paying attention?  Such moments can open you up to the kind of transformative insights that Jesus and Jane Goodall derived from their respective practices of mindfulness.  It may feel like time wasted, but it is really essential for productivity and creativity.  Even if it’s just a few minutes of quiet with your coffee before the kids get up, make use of it.  Don’t try to fill that space with radio, TV, or reading.  We get enough information coming into our heads all day.  Let this be a time for being not doing.  Although Jon Kabat-Zinn hesitates to use this term, I have no problem calling it spiritual.  Through the regular practice of paying attention, we are able to nurture our conscious connection with ourselves, with the world around us, and with God.

Try it sometime.  Just sit for a few minutes.  Watch.  Pay attention.  The insights you gain from this act of mindful observing may be about the world (like they were for Jesus), they might be about God, or they might be about yourself.  Given time and regular practice, you’ll begin to notice what other people pass by, just like Jesus did with the widow and her two coins.  If you let them, these insights of stillness have the capacity to transform you into a wiser, more aware, more peaceful, and more compassionate person.  In short, you become more Christ-like.  As people of faith, especially as those who identify as Christian, we need more of this kind of inner transformation in our lives.  We need to be more like Jesus.

Jon Kabat-Zinn sums up the importance of this task nicely in his own words:

It is the challenge of this era to stay sane in an increasingly insane world. How are we ever going to do it if we are continually caught up in the chatter of our own minds and the bewilderment of feeling lost or isolated or out of touch with what it all means and with who we really are when all the doing and accomplishing is sensed as being in some way empty, and we realize how short life is? Ultimately, it is only love that can give us insight into what is real and what is important. And so, a radical act of love makes sense—love for life and for the emergence of one’s truest self.

A Feast for All People

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

I grew up on the border between Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  These towns are both major international centers for medical research and educational advancement, but that’s not what they’re known for.  No, the main thing that Durham and Chapel Hill are known for is college basketball.  The college basketball rivalry between the Duke Blue Devils and the UNC Tarheels is one of epic proportions.  Every year, these teams battle each other with bitter ferocity.  No matter the outcome of the game, everyone knew to steer clear of Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill.  The next morning, it would be completely trashed.  Everyone in town had their team, whether they were interested in basketball or not.  You were either a Carolina fan or a Duke fan.  There was no two ways about it.  If we knew a family where one child went to Duke and the other went to UNC, we called it a broken home.  People in Durham and Chapel Hill go crazy over their college basketball.  Even at church, you could always tell when the NCAA Final Four was happening because the place would be empty.  I guess people know where their priorities lie.  It’s kind of crazy when you think about it: two towns divided and their streets trashed, all because one team managed to throw a ball through a hoop more often than the other team.  People divide themselves over the strangest little things.

As many of you know, this Tuesday is Election Day and we can expect a lot of divisive language around that subject as well.  Like many of you, I am looking forward to being rid of all the yard signs, the sloganeering, the attack ads, the mudslinging, and the propaganda trying to convince me that one candidate is a savior while the other one is a demon.  Election season makes me miss those good old days when TV commercials weren’t trying to save the country; they were just trying to get you to spend money you don’t have to buy junk you don’t need.

What bothers me about the rhetoric in these ads is the way it makes us seem so hostile and feel so divided against one another.  If one were to accept everything in these ads at face value, one might think that this country was on the brink of another Civil War.  But we know that’s not the case.  In spite of everything, a rare and remarkable thing will happen this Tuesday: people will line up peacefully and politely to cast their votes and shape the future of this country.  There will be no bombs or rifle fire.  The loser of this presidential election will not face execution.  The supporters of the losing party will not be rounded up, exiled from the country, or imprisoned in forced labor camps.  That isn’t going to happen here on Tuesday.  There are places in this world where such things do happen, even today.  Voting, in some countries, is an exercise in taking your life into your hands.  There are some countries where transitions in government happen only once a generation, when the incumbent president is either arrested or assassinated.  Thankfully, that doesn’t happen here.  We live in a place where political change happens frequently and peacefully.  So, I think we should be careful before using violent and slanderous labels like ‘cult leader and ‘socialist’ when we’re describing a candidate whose views we disagree with.  Jim Jones and David Koresh were cult leaders, Mitt Romney is not.  Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were socialists, Barack Obama is not.  Real cult leaders and socialists have slaughtered millions in the name of religion and ideology.  Neither of these candidates has done such a thing.  Therefore, it is morally offensive to call them these names.  Whatever your views and however you vote, do it with peace and goodwill in your heart.  Inoculate yourself against the toxin of incivility that poisons our public discourse.  However you vote, vote with love in your heart.  That’s what it means to vote as a Christian.

We human beings seem to have an innate tendency toward division and hostility.  It doesn’t just come out during election years and sporting events.  We divide ourselves over race, religion, gender, nationality, and beer preference.  It seems that there’s something inside each and every one of us that longs to belong to some kind of community.  As they say, “birds of a feather flock together,” so we often organize ourselves into small groups with others who look like us, talk like us, dress like us, think like us, vote like us, and worship like us.  We do this because we feel lost in the cosmos.  We perceive ourselves to be, in some sense, alone in this world.  Above all, we fear the ultimate loneliness of death, which threatens to inevitably swallow us up into dark oblivion.  That’s why, in our time here on earth, part of our survival instinct is a herd instinct.  We want to fight the darkness, death, and loneliness.  So we find some kind of object to rally around as groups: our family, race, sports team, religion, political party, or country.  Each group competes with the others to win, to survive in the great contest of existence.  On the one hand, we experience a great sense of purpose and solidarity from these groups, but on the other hand, they also form the basis for our hostility and hate toward one another.  We think we have to beat the best in order to be the best.  Subconsciously, our primal instincts are telling us that our very survival depends on the victory of our little group over its competitors.  If the others win, so we think, the darkness, death, and loneliness will conquer us all.

The fact that our species has evolved to think this way is understandable, but still wrong, in my opinion.  I think our fear of darkness, death, and loneliness has blinded us to a much deeper and much older truth about who we are and how it is that we’re connected to each other, to the universe, and ultimately to God.  I’d like to share with you what I believe about that truth.

Today, we are celebrating the Feast of All Saints.  This holiday has been celebrated by Christians for over 1,400 years as a festival to remember heroes of the faith from generations past.  In some churches, this remembrance has been limited to a special class of people who have been named “saints” by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  In churches like ours, we use the term “saint” more broadly.  Presbyterians have always believed that every person is a saint in his or her own way.  Of course, there are always those people who we remember with special fondness and admiration, but we don’t have to wait for some church committee to decide on their spiritual status in heaven.  Moreover, we include ourselves in that number.  Saints don’t have to be dead people.  The Communion of Saints contains all God’s people, living or dead, from every time, place, people, and language.  Most importantly of all, we are not admitted to the Communion of Saints because we’ve led some kind of spiritually or morally heroic life.  No, we believe that everyone is a saint by God’s grace and God’s grace alone.  Not a single one of us has earned our place in the Communion of Saints.  Each of us, from the greatest to the least, from the best to the worst, is a member of this worldwide family as a free gift.  This community, this family that transcends time and space, is the reality that we celebrate on the Feast of All Saints.  This, I believe, is the great and mysterious truth that shows us who we are and how it is that we’re connected to each other, to the universe, and to God.

In our first reading this morning, the prophet Isaiah envisions a time when “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”  Did you get that?  “A feast for all peoples”: an extravagant dinner party where everyone is invited and everyone belongs.  This is the vision in the prophet’s heart that he tells us comes from God.  This is God’s idea for the human race.  Another prophetic soul, writing almost a thousand years after Isaiah, wrote down another, similar vision.  We heard from this person in our second reading this morning: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”  A little later on, the seer of this vision describes this mystical city in greater detail.  He says, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”  Did you hear that?  “The nations will walk by its light… Its gates will never be shut… People will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations.”  Friends, this is just like Isaiah’s vision of the feast for all people.  I imagine this city as a multi-ethnic, international dance party.  The gifts and treasures of every tribe and culture are on display.  Billions gather for an abundant feast prepared by God.  In the streets you can hear Swedish and Swahili, you can see white folks and black folks, men and women, Republicans and Democrats, and yes, even Tarheel fans and Duke fans.  This is the true nature of our common humanity.  This is God’s goal for human history.  I see it as a prophetic snapshot of the Communion of Saints.

And there’s more.  There is another element found in each of this morning’s readings that factors very highly in this ultimate vision.  In Isaiah’s vision, the prophet says, “And [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.”  In our reading from the book of Revelation, it says, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.””  In both of these visions, as well as in our gospel reading where Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, the power of death is being undone by the power of love.  This vision of a city and a feast for all peoples is not some sentimental dream that’s meant to make us feel better, it is the truth that has a power even greater than death itself.  This is the truth in which we find ourselves.  In the Communion of Saints, we are bound to one another by the unbreakable power of God’s free grace.  Not even death can cut those ties.  And, for that matter, neither can any of these stupid and pointless divisions we make among ourselves and defend with such violence and hostility.  The unbreakable bond of grace exposes such foolishness for what it really is, because it’s completely unnecessary.  We team up and fight for “my family/team/party/country/religion” because we falsely believe the notion that fighting for survival will protect us from the darkness and loneliness of death, but we fail to realize that the thing we fear most has already been overcome by bond that can never be broken, a bond that unites us to our enemies and competitors.  By God’s free grace, we are all participants in the great Communion of Saints.  That is the great, liberating truth we celebrate today, on this Feast of All Saints.

If we could just realize and remember this truth more often, our perspective on this life would be transformed.  We could be unfazed and unimpressed by each new hostile attack and defensive reaction.  We could learn the art of letting go of what matters less so that we can hold on to what matters more.  We could be saints rather than survivors.

Sadly, this world, as it is, doesn’t make it easy for us to trust in the reality of this vision.  We need to be reminded of it, which is why we celebrate this holiday once a year, at the beginning of November.  We’re also reminded of this truth every time we celebrate the Eucharist, which we are doing this morning.  This sacramental feast is a foretaste of Isaiah’s great feast for all people.  Gathered around this Eucharistic table with us this morning, present but unseen, are people from every time and place, living and dead, who are bound together in the Communion of Saints by the unbreakable bonds of God’s free grace.  If we only had eyes to see, we would see them sharing this meal with us: Jesus, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Mary, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Irving Beal, Ruth Jones, Bob Brucker, Dick Mahaffy, and Matt Conway: all here, present but unseen, bound to us forever by a force more powerful than death itself: the grace and the love of God.

Your Faith Has Made You Well

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Malala Yousafzai. Image by Mohsin Ali. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Many of you, like me, have probably heard the news these past few weeks about this brave young woman from Pakistan: Malala Yousafzai.  Malala is a 14 year old who was shot on her school bus by a Taliban extremist because she had the audacity to go to school.  Remarkably, she survived this attack and is currently recovering in the United Kingdom with no signs of brain damage.  Her father commented that she has asked for her schoolbooks to be sent so that she can continue her studies while she recovers in hospital.

What’s even more amazing about Malala is that she, at age 14, has already made an international name for herself as an outspoken activist for education and women’s rights in her home country.  Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize.  At the age of 11, she began writing a blog for the BBC about life under Taliban rule which she used to propagate her views on women’s education.  Her current plan is to return home to Pakistan after she gets well and continue her activism, in spite of the risks.

People the world over have rightly expressed support and admiration for Malala.  Here is a young woman who has found within herself the strength to break the chains of oppression and inequality forged by the narrow views of religious extremists in her country.  That inner strength: the power to live free, even in the midst of bondage, is what I think of whenever I hear the word “faith”.  And that’s why I would not hesitate to say to Malala what Jesus says to Bartimaeus in today’s gospel reading: “Your faith has made you well.”

Before I go on, let me pause and unpack what I mean by that.  Obviously, Malala herself has not yet been “made well” in a physical sense after her attack.  However, that word in Greek, “made well”, is sozo and is often translated “heal” or “save”.  Older translations of this passage read, “Your faith has saved you.”  To the ancient Jews, the idea of “salvation” or “being saved” had a lot to do with liberation and “being set free”.  So, with that little bit of linguistic and cultural nuance in mind, it would not be much of a stretch at all to read this passage as: “Your faith has made you free.”  And that idea would most certainly apply to Malala right now.  Her resolve to live free, even in the midst of oppression, has made her free indeed, no matter what those others might say or do to keep her subservient or “in her place”.  Malala is free and there’s nothing the Taliban can do to change that.  So, I say to her, “Malala, your faith has made you well.”

The figure Bartimaeus in today’s gospel reading comes across as a person similar to Malala in several key respects.  First of all, Bartimaeus is a second-class citizen in the society where he lives.  When we first meet him, he is seated “by the roadside” as Jesus as his entourage pass by.  This is more than just a physical location.  It’s meant to tell us something.  Bartimaeus is a person who has been “sidelined” or “cast aside” by mainstream society.  Social scientists refer to this as being “marginalized” or “placed into the margins” of society’s consciousness.  Bartimaeus is a panhandler who, in a world without social services and safety nets, must depend on the kindness of strangers for his daily bread.  Can you imagine how belittling and dehumanizing it must have felt for him to have to be grateful and beholden to the well-off benefactors who tossed him a coin, maybe made a sarcastic comment, and then went home to families, servants, and stocked cupboards?  That’s the life of a panhandler.  Toss aside any romantic notions you might have about riding the rails from California to New York Island like Woody Guthrie.  The life of a panhandler, in ancient Judea or in contemporary America, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes).

The next thing we can see in the text is that Bartimaeus can’t see, he is blind.  His disability gives us what is most likely the primary reason for his status as a panhandler.  But the most overlooked indicator of his marginalized status is his name, or lack thereof.  The text tells us that he is “Bartimeaus, son of Timaeus”.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Maybe they just called him “Bart” for short?  But consider that in Aramaic, the language of first century Judea, the word for “son” is “bar”.  Bar Timaeus, Son of Timaeus.  So, if he is “Son of Timaeus, Son of Timaeus”, then he is literally a man with no name, no personal identity of his own.  Even as an adult, he is still just “Timaeus’ kid”.

Bartimaeus is marginalized because of his disability.  Malala Yousafzai is marginalized because of her gender.  Each, in his or her own way, knows what it’s like to be cast aside, sidelined, and granted second-class citizenship by the powerful.  But the more amazing thing is that each, in his or her own way, has also risen above the chains of marginalization and taken back that stolen human dignity.  We already heard about how Malala is doing it through her activism.  Let’s look at how Bartimaeus is doing it.

First of all, he calls out.  He’s not one of those polite panhandlers who just sits on the sidewalk with his hat out.  He yells at you as you go by.  If anything, this tactic makes you less likely to want to give him money, except that you’re so freaked out by it that you’ll give him almost anything just to keep from yelling.  And let’s take a look at what he’s yelling, exactly.  This is no generalized call for alms.  This guy knows exactly what is going on and is determined to get in on the action.  He yells, “Jesus!  Hey, Jesus!  Yeah, you!  Son of David!  Why don’t you come over here and have some mercy on me?!”  Now, in the text itself, he just says, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  This almost sounds like groveling at first glance, but let’s pull that dense phrase apart, piece by piece.  Bartimaeus calls Jesus by name and addresses him as the “Son of David”.  This was a messianic title.  The anointed one of Israel was said to be a king, descended from the line of old King David: the king who gave the Jewish people their main idea of what an ideal king should be.  It’s kind of the same thing as Abraham Lincoln being held up as the model of what an ideal president should be.  Furthermore, the phrase “have mercy on me” is not so much a plea as it is a call for a superior to do his or her duty.  By saying, “have mercy on me,” Bartimaeus is implying that Jesus owes him something.  So, if we were to put this in American terms, imagine the president’s motorcade making its way down a city street where a panhandler has his hat out.  As the president’s limo goes by, the panhandler shouts over the notes of Hail to the Chief, “Hey!  Mr. President!  If you’re so much like Abraham Lincoln, then why don’t come over here and give me my Emancipation Proclamation!  You owe me, man!”  That’s what this guy Bartimaeus is saying to Jesus as he walks by.

Now, the crowd around Bartimaeus, as we might expect in this situation, is shocked and offended.  They’re embarrassed for their city, that the Messiah would receive such uncivil treatment by the dregs of society here.  So, they’re telling him to “shut up” and maybe calling him names like “dirty hobo” or “lazy bum”.  They want him to keep his place and be grateful for what they choose to give him out of their surplus.  But Bartimaeus isn’t listening to them.  He’s still shouting.  In fact, he starts shouting even louder than before!  He shouts so loudly, in fact, that his verbal jabs reach the ears of their intended target, Jesus himself.  Jesus stops in his tracks, turns around, and calls Bartimaeus over.  Let’s imagine that again in present-day presidential imagery.  On CNN, we see the motorcade go by with the panhandler shouting so rudely and people shouting back at him.  Suddenly, the president’s limousine slows to a stop, the backseat window roles down, and one of the Secret Service agents runs over.  The Secret Service agent says something into his headset and takes a step back.  On our TVs at home, all we see is the president’s hand emerging through the car window, pointing directly to the noisy pan-handler, and gesturing for him to approach the car.  The panhandler does so, and there’s a remarkable change in his demeanor.  He never thought his cries would be heard, he just wanted to vent and get them off his chest while he had the opportunity.  After all, there might have been any number of so-called “Messiahs” coming through his town recently, each one promising peace and security to the Jews, but not a single one had ever done a single thing for a lousy bum like Bartimaeus.  But this Jesus guy suddenly seemed very different from the others, just by having the nerve to stop and call him over.

Let’s leave our presidential analogy and finish this story in its first century Judean setting.  Bartimaeus walks up to Jesus and Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”  In effect, he’s asking, “What is it that I am supposed to have owed you?”  Bartimaeus responds in a very different tone than the one in which he started.  He addresses Jesus respectfully as “my teacher” and then pours out the one deepest desire in his heart that had been there so long and yet seemed so impossible to obtain.  He didn’t want more money or higher social status.  He wanted to receive back the one thing that was taken away by his disability: his human dignity.  He wanted the opportunity to live and not just merely survive anymore.  He wanted to count as a real person again and not just an object by the side of the road.  “My teacher,” he said, “let me see again.”  And Jesus gives him exactly what he’s asking for.

But Jesus isn’t done surprising people, yet.  He’s still got another ace up his sleeve.  When the miracle is done, Jesus refuses to take credit for it, even though he was clearly the responsible party.  Jesus says to Bartimaeus, “Go; your faith has made you well.”  Jesus claims that Bartimaeus is the one who gets credit for this healing!  Where others saw only an offensive and disrespectful panhandler, Jesus saw in Bartimaeus the faith that has the power to change things: the power to bring healing, wholeness, and freedom in the coming kingdom of God.  Like Malala Yousafzai, Bartimaeus had the kind of inner strength that allowed him to live freely, even in the midst of oppression and marginalization.  He held onto his defiant hope, even in his apparently hopeless situation and so won for himself the prize that seemed so distant and unobtainable.  Many have said the same thing of Malala.

What about you?  Where do you experience your marginalization, your woundedness?  Where have you been sidelined, cast aside, or treated like a second-class citizen?  Obviously, none of us in this church has ever been a school-age girl in a third world country or a blind panhandler in first century Judea, but each and every one of us has a place where hurt, loss, rejection, and grief have dug their arrows deep into our hearts and left us bleeding internally.  Our polite, success-driven society teaches us to minimize, hide, or ignore these facts about our nature, but I believe that the gospel of Christ empowers us to face those hurts, show them, and use them for the healing of the world.  Without those wounds, we would not know what empathy is.  We would not know how to care for one another.  How would a little child know to bring a crying playmate a soft toy to hug if that first child had never needed comfort from a favorite teddy bear after falling and skinning a knee?  We all recognize pain because we have all experienced pain.  There is no way to go through this life without being hurt.  What each of us has to decide is whether we will hide our pain under a hardened bushel of social propriety and defensiveness or if we will let that pain shine like the light of a city on a hill.  Will we face the pain and let it become a fountain of empathy and compassion?  That’s the basic principle upon which all self-help support groups work: one person taking his or her experience of pain and putting it to use in helping others through their pain.  That’s the only way we humans can find meaning in the midst of so much meaningless suffering in this world: we have to pay attention to how that pain changes us.  Does it make us more gentle, more compassionate, more wise, more attentive to others?  If so, then we can say that our pain has meaning.  If not, then our pain is meaningless and no amount of explanation will ever answer the agonizing question, “Why did this have to happen to me?”

The last thing we hear from Bartimaeus in the gospel comes after he has received his sight.  The text says that he “followed [Jesus] on the way.”  That’s a remarkable ending.  Do remember where Bartimaeus was when we first met him?  He was “by the roadside.”  Where is he now?  He is “on the way.”  His experience has been transformed.  He’s no longer marginalized.  He’s included in the community.  He’s not an object anymore.  He’s a person now.  He’s “on the way.”  He probably has no idea where he’s going, but by golly, I bet it’ll be interesting!

Malala Yousafzai also has a future that has yet to be written.  No one knows what awaits her when she returns to Pakistan, but she has promised to continue in her fight for women’s education in her country.  She has taken her crude and raw experience of pain and marginalization and refined it into fuel for the engine of equality.  Thus, her suffering has meaning, no matter how senseless and meaningless its cause was.

What will you do with your pain?  Hide it under a bushel or let it shine?  Will it fuel your bitterness or your compassion?  Will you sit back and do what’s expected by our pain-phobic society or will you stand up, be bold, and find in yourself the faith that empowers you to live freely in the midst of oppression?  Find this, and you will hear Jesus saying to you also: “Your faith has made you well.”

Setting Out / Coming Home

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment
Image by Tevaprapas Makklay. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons on 10/14/2012

In the first pages of his classic book, Orthodoxy, the twentieth century British journalist G.K. Chesterton outlines the plot of a novel he would like to write:

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

I love this passage.  For me, it really captures what my own spiritual journey has been like: simultaneously setting out to explore places where I’ve never been before and returning home to the place where I’ve been all along.

This is one of the great paradoxes of spirituality.  Authentic spirituality is often characterized by paradox (i.e. truth in apparent contradiction).  Christian spirituality in particular is no stranger to paradox: we believe that Christ is both fully divine and fully human, God (as conceived in the Holy Trinity) is both three and one, the elements of Communion are both bread & wine and flesh & blood.  Paradox is the air in which we live and breathe.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we are able to conceive of the spiritual journey as both a setting out and a coming home.

We Christians have often made use of journey imagery as well, especially when it comes to our spirituality.  Just think about some of the classics of Christian religious literature: Dante’s Divine Comedy is a fantastical journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven.  John Bunyan’s allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, is the story of a journey.  Even in the Bible itself, the Christian life is described as “following Jesus” and those who walk this path are referred to as “followers of the Way”.  Keep that in mind when you hear the opening words of today’s gospel reading, which sets the scene for Christ’s encounter with the rich man as Jesus is “setting out on a journey”.  The setting for this story is the open road, where people are traveling together toward some other destination.

Where are they going?  The text doesn’t say explicitly.  The important fact seems to be that they are traveling.  However, I think we can understand this journey metaphorically as a symbol of the great spiritual journey.  If such is true, then the journey’s destination is implied no less than three times during this passage.  It’s described as: eternal life, the kingdom of God, and salvation.

At the beginning, the rich man asks Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Later on Jesus comments, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”  Finally, the disciples ask in desperation, “Then who can be saved?”

Eternal life, kingdom of God, and salvation: these three ideas are pretty common to discussions of Christianity.  Most of the time, people talk about them in reference to the ideas of immortality and life after death.  They would say that we receive salvation so that we can have eternal life in the kingdom of God (a.k.a. the kingdom of heaven).

The afterlife discussion is certainly an important one, but I’m not going to have it here.  I think these ideas have a much broader definition and a much deeper application than simply as speculative statements about what happens after human beings physically die.  I think the ideas of eternal life, the kingdom of God, and salvation have much more to do with the quality of life we have here and now in this world.

Eternal life, for instance, has less to do with length of days (i.e. life that lasts forever and ever) and more to do with the kind of life one is living.  In John’s gospel, Jesus talks about abundant life, which is a similar idea.  He’s talking about the life that’s really living and not just surviving or existing.  One can see why the rich man might have been interested in discussing this subject with Jesus.  After all, he was wealthy, successful, and religious.  By anyone’s account, this guy had it all and had it all together.  By all accounts, he was an icon of the ideal life for first century Jews.  However, this same successful guy knew deep down that he had not managed to silence that inner voice of uneasiness or fill the void of emptiness.  He knew that, in spite of his relative comfort and devout observance of tradition, he wasn’t yet living, he was still simply surviving and “getting by” (even though he seemed to be doing a better job at that than most of his peers).  The question he brings to Jesus was born out of intense existential anxiety and a hunger for real life.

We can also look at the deeper meaning of the kingdom of God.  God’s kingdom is not a place in heaven or on earth, but a way of being in the world.  In the words of biblical scholar Marcus Borg, the kingdom of God is God’s vision of what this world would be like if God were allowed to be in charge instead of the powers that be who currently run things.  According to Jesus, the kingdom of God is a state of affairs where “the last will be first and the first will be last.”  When God’s dream comes true, when God’s vision becomes a reality on this earth, relationships characterized by domination and exploitation are redefined and turned upside down.  Anyone who enters into this reality (this way of being in the world) no longer recognizes the artificial and hierarchical distinctions we humans construct along the lines of gender, race, and social class.  As the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “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.”  As the old social pecking order is dismantled in the kingdom of God, people begin to recognize one another as family, co-equal brothers and sisters: children of God.  With this end-result in mind, it makes sense then that Jesus would advise the rich man, “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”  Jesus was inviting the rich man to let go of these old status symbols and enter into this new way of being in the world that recognizes the drunken bum sleeping under a park bench as his brother.

Finally, let’s look at the other word that appears in this passage: salvation.  This word, more than any other, is most often used to describe one’s religious affiliation and presumed status in the afterlife.  Many folks say, “Hallelujah, I’ve been saved!”  Some ask, “Have you been saved?  Do you want to be saved?”  When we use this word in such a limited and narrow sense, we miss the deep nuance implied by its use elsewhere in the Bible.  Most often, the word saved refers to deliverance or liberation.  For Jewish people (including the apostle Paul and Jesus himself), the central story of salvation is the ancient legend of God, through Moses, liberating the Hebrew people from slavery and genocide in the land of Egypt.  In the New Testament, the Greek word Sozo (i.e. save) can also be translated as heal or make well.  So, when Jesus goes around healing people, the text literally says that he is saving them from their illnesses.  So, when Jesus challenges the rich man to let go of possessions, he is trying to set this man free for a life of real wholeness and well-being.  This is what it means to be saved or experience salvation.

So then, let me sum up our new and deeper definition of these three ideas: eternal life, kingdom of God, and salvation.  You and I are being set free so that we can experience a new way of being in the world that empowers us to really come alive instead of just surviving.

Eternal life, kingdom of God, salvation: that’s the destination, the end point, of the spiritual journey.  But as we said back at the beginning, the setting out is also a coming home.  We are only reconnecting with that which is deepest within each of us and has been all along.

This is why, I think, Jesus was able to look at this rich man and “love him”, as the text says.  I don’t think Jesus was all that intimidated by the rich man’s reticence to give up his earthly possessions.  Jesus didn’t fear for this man because he (Jesus) knew that the answers this man was searching for already existed inside him.  The text says that this man “went away” from Jesus, but it never says that Jesus stopped loving him.  It says that the rich man was “grieved” at Jesus’ words, but it never says that Jesus did likewise.  I like to imagine Jesus quietly smiling as the man walks away, trusting that “for God all things are possible” and slyly knowing that this man’s journey would one day lead him back to the place where he started: with himself.

The rich man in this story, with his life of material success and religious observance, knew an awful lot about having and doing, but very little about being.  He came to Jesus with the question, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He felt like he was “lacking” something, but he didn’t know what.  Jesus’ advice to this rich man involved a letting go of both having and doing in favor of just being.

It was obviously a letting go of having because Jesus advised him to give away what he owned.  Less obviously, it was also a letting go of doing because Jesus asked this person to complete an impossible task.  “For mortals it is impossible,” Jesus said, “but not for God; for God all things are possible.”  In order for the rich man to let go of having, he will also have to let go of doing.  He will have to just “let go and let God,” as they say.

You and I are no different.  Like the rich man in this story, we live in a society that trains us to identify ourselves by the things we have and the things we do.  We hold on to having and doing and so we forget all about being.  As a result, we are slaves to survival.  We need to be set free so that we can experience a new way of being in the world that empowers us to really come alive instead of just surviving.  We need to experience eternal life, the kingdom of God, and salvation.  We need to set aside time to just be, to adopt a regular posture of non-doing and non-having.  We need to allow our souls to embark on this incredible journey of simultaneously setting out and returning home.

Personally, I have found that the best way for me to adopt a posture of being and non-doing is by setting aside time for regular meditation practice.  I can’t say that I’ve fully entered into this peace of being as  of yet, but I do feel like this practice has been helpful to me in my journey.  Maybe it will be helpful to you as well.  There are no special chants or postures in meditation as I practice it.  I simply sit upright in a straight-back chair with my hands in my lap and my feet flat on the floor.  I let myself become still and quiet to the point where I begin to notice my own unconscious breathing.  I focus my attention on the rhythm of my abdomen as it expands and contracts with each breath.  Whenever my mind begins to wander, I calmly remind myself to focus on the breath.  If I have to do this a hundred times, so be it.  I just keep gently redirecting my attention back to my breathing.  I try to do this for about twenty minutes or so a day.  If you don’t think you have that kind of time or patience, try it for a shorter period.  As Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “Any practice is better than no practice.”  If five minutes a day is all you can manage, then go for it.  Given time, you just might find yourself longing and ready for more.

Just be.  Let go of having and doing.  Herein lies eternal life, the kingdom of God, and salvation.  This is the whole agenda.  It is the beginning and the end of your spiritual journey.  That which you seek is already within you.

To the Next Level

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

Mark 10:2-16

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

We’ve got a doozy of a gospel reading this week.  I call it one of our “damage control” passages because you almost want to apologize for it while you’re reading it.  I’m mean seriously: we have a rating system for movies, why not come up with one for the Bible?  The parable of the Good Samaritan would probably be rated PG-13 for mild violence.  The book of Judges would definitely be rated R for all the extreme blood n’ guts.  The Song of Solomon would be… um… well, let’s just say it would only be shown in “select theaters”.  Of course, the big problem I can see with that idea is that I can’t think of any sections of the Bible that would merit a G rating.

If I had to give today’s passage from Mark’s gospel a rating, I think I would have to go with either PG-13 or R because of ‘thematic material’.  This is one of those passages that are intended for ‘mature audiences only’.  Taking Jesus’ teachings about divorce at face-value can be dangerous, especially if you don’t have all the necessary background information at hand.

Unfortunately, Christians have been taking this passage at face-value and applying it indiscriminately for centuries.  This has led to a lot of people being hurt by or excluded from the church during one of those times in life when they needed fellowship, guidance, and support more than ever.  So, with that in mind, I’m going to begin this morning by stating very clearly what you’re not going to hear from me, today or ever, on the dual-subject of marriage and divorce.

First of all, I’m not going to tell you that, if you get a divorce, you’re going to hell.  I don’t believe that.  It’s not how I roll.  To borrow a hip-hop phrase from the early 90s: “Homie don’t play dat.”  Second, I’m not going to tell you that, if you get a divorce, you should be banned from receiving communion or serving the church in an ordained capacity as an elder, deacon, or pastor.  There was a time in Presbyterian history when that was the case.  In fact, it’s still the case in some denominations.  But we in this church developed an awareness during the last hundred years or so that life is complicated and so are relationships.  Our ancestors realized that an effective, Christ-like ministry is one that recognizes life’s complexities and leads with grace rather than judgment.  Third, I’m not going to tell you that, if you get a divorce, you can never begin another relationship or get remarried and expect that relationship to be healthy and blessed by God.  The God I believe in is the God of Plan B and second chances.  If that wasn’t who I believed God to be, then I wouldn’t (I couldn’t) be standing in this pulpit today.

Now, there are preachers out there who will tell you differently from what I just told you.  They would look at today’s gospel reading and say, “You see?  The Bible says right here that divorce is a sin and you can’t go against that without going against Jesus, so you might as well just tear it up and admit that you’re not a real Christian!”  If you’ve been told that before, even by a member of the clergy, I want you to know that you’ve been lied to.  Let me show you how.

First of all, we have to begin with the definition of that theologically load term: sin.  “Divorce is a sin,” or so they say.  The word sin, when used in this way, usually refers to a specific behavior or set of behaviors that supposedly angers God because it violates one of the moral rules laid out in the Bible.  The implication is that these behaviors (and only these behaviors) can be defined as sinful, therefore those who live their lives according to this list of rules are on God’s nice list while other people (i.e. most of us) are on God’s naughty list.

One of the most convenient things about this definition of sin is that those who talk about it in this way are often able to emphasize the so-called “sins” being committed by other people rather than their own.  Whenever you ask these folks about what’s wrong with the world, they can always answer: “It’s those people!  It’s those sinners!”

The list of sins identified is usually pretty limited in scope.  For example, people in our culture tend to spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on sins related to “the pelvic issues”: divorce, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, adultery, teen pregnancy, etc.  North Americans are fascinated by sex, although we don’t want to admit it.  You can find sermons and political ad campaigns on these sex-related topics all over the internet.  But think about this: when was the last time you heard a sermon on greed or gluttony?  When is the last time you heard about a church-sponsored, multi-million dollar, anti-gluttony lobbying campaign?  Celebrity sex-tapes make lots of money, but who would ever pay cash to download a video of Paris Hilton eating a bag of pork rinds?  We’re just not interested in that.  As a culture, we’re obsessed with sex.  We really want to know all about who is doing what with whom, even though sex itself is just as natural and just as prone to disorder as our appetite for food.  But people in this society tend to fixate on these “pelvic issues” because those “sins” are less socially acceptable than other behaviors.

I call this tendency in people “The Jerry Springer Phenomenon” (although I could probably also call it “The Jersey Shore Phenomenon”).  Jerry Springer and Jersey Shore are TV shows that people watch in order to feel better about themselves.  No matter how dysfunctional one’s life currently is, chances are that it’s not nearly as messed up as the people on the Jerry Springer Show.  It’s a convenient way to feel self-righteous and superior to other people.

Whenever Jesus encountered that kind of attitude, he called it hypocrisy.  He would often butt heads with a religious group known as the Pharisees.  These folks, like so many fans of Jersey Shore and the Jerry Springer Show, had a very precise definition of the word sin that they applied to people outside their religious in-group.  They were the guardians of morality and family values in their culture.  They were upstanding citizens who attended worship regularly and knew the Bible inside and out.  If anyone had a trustworthy definition of the word sin, it was them.

These Pharisees approached Jesus with a question on the topic of divorce.  Rather than genuinely seeking advice from Jesus, they just wanted to put him on the spot and figure out whether his definition of the word sin was as accurate and comprehensive as theirs.  But Jesus, as usual, is onto this little game of theirs and isn’t having any of it.  He takes their question and raises it “to the next level”, so to speak.

Let me show you what I mean:

The Pharisees come to Jesus with a question about the legality of divorce.  Jesus reframes the question by placing it within the much larger context of human and divine relationships.  He immediately starts talking about the story of Adam and Eve in the Torah.  He talks about who God is and what God is doing.  He takes this conversation about the technicalities of human relationships and turns it into a conversation about the meaning of human relationships.

Jesus is arguing here that the Pharisees, with their very precise and thought-out conception of morality, have essentially missed the point.  They thought they had this question of divorce already figured out.  They thought they already had all the right answers, but Jesus shows them that they haven’t even begun to ask the right questions.

Their definition of the word sin left them feeling pretty self-righteous and superior.  It allowed them to place the blame for all the world’s problems on the shoulders of “those other people” whose lives did not conform to socially acceptable norms.  But then Jesus comes along and hits them right between the eyes with some hard truth.  Even though all their legal ducks were in a row, he told them, they were still not free from the bondage of sin.  Jesus was working with a far broader and deeper definition of the word sin than the Pharisees were.

The word sin, I think, has surprisingly little to do with legal requirements and moral laws.  I think it has a whole lot to do with the quality of our relationships.  Sin is a tendency that exists within all of us, regardless of moral, legal, or religious status.  We all have an inner drive toward selfishness.  Therefore, none of us has any right to feel morally or spiritually superior to anyone else, no matter how socially unacceptable or dysfunctional others’ lives may appear to be.

When we try to identify the presence of sin in our relationships, it’s not enough to simply label some behaviors as “sins” while others are “okay”.  Even the most apparently righteous actions can be tainted with sin.  Just look at the Pharisees and you’ll see what I mean.  If you look at what they were doing from a legal standpoint, they came away looking squeaky clean all the time.  But if you look at how they were doing what they did, their self-righteous and judgmental hypocrisy becomes clear.  They came to Jesus with a loaded question about a legal contract but left with even bigger questions about the nature of human relationships.

With this broader and deeper understanding of sin in mind, I would like to revisit that initial question: is divorce a sin?  To begin with, I would have to say no, because that question assumes a very limited and narrow definition of the word sin that I doesn’t apply to the real world, where that kind of question is usually used to shame and exclude the very people who need friendship and support the most.

If, on the other hand, one were to ask me whether I think divorce is a product of human sinfulness (i.e. our inner tendency toward selfishness), then I would have to say yes, divorce can be and often is sinful, but even that depends on the relationship.  To give one extreme example: I can’t think of anyone who would dare to pass judgment on a mother who ends her marriage to an abusive partner in order to protect the safety of her children.  To be sure, human brokenness and sinfulness are involved in the situation itself, but we would have no right to pass judgment on that mother or accuse her of “committing a sin” just so we can feel morally superior to her.  That would be beyond cruel.

This way of defining sin has significance for all of our relationships, not just marriage and divorce.  Why don’t we take a look at the famous Ten Commandments as statements about the quality of our relationships (marital or otherwise)?

Here is a list of the last five commandments as they appear in the book of Exodus:

“You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.“

Instead of seeing these “thou shalt nots” as legal statements, let’s reframe them as questions that have to do with the quality of our relationships.  In your relationship with X…

  • Do you seek to give life to one another or suck it away?
  • Are you faithful to one another or does your heart belong to something/one else?
  • Do you willingly share your lives with one another, or do you simply take what you want from each other?
  • Do you speak the truth about to who you are to one another or do you maintain a façade for the sake of appearances?
  • Are you grateful to and for one another or are you constantly looking over your shoulder at how good everyone else has it?

As you honestly answer those questions, you’ll start to get a general sense of how healthy your relationships are or are not.  As I said before, this can be applied to all relationships, not just the ones between spouses or partners.  It works just as well for relationships between parents & children, bosses & employees, siblings, coworkers, friends, you name it.

You can even ask these questions about your relationship with yourself.  Who else do we try to hide from more?  I think there are a lot of people walking around this world right now in a state of being divorced from themselves.  They feel alone and exposed, hiding their deepest fears and covering up their insecurities, even as they’re looking into their own bathroom mirror.

At the heart of every moral question, as Jesus understands it, is a question about human relationships.  And the heart of every question about human relationships is the ultimate question about our relationship with God.

Far more important than particular legal questions about divorce is the question of human relationships, in whatever forms they may take.  We selfish and sinful people are all reaching out to connect with the whole, hoping that we will be able to discover through it the meaning of our existence.

As you go back out into the world this week, I want to encourage you to be mindful of how it is that you conduct your relationships with others.  Don’t get caught up in these squabbling debates about legalities, technicalities, and who is better than who.  Instead, do like Jesus did in today’s gospel reading and raise your own level of awareness in order to ask the harder questions about all your relationships.

May you find on that difficult journey a sustaining sense of connection and meaning in your life that draws you ever closer to the sacred source of all life: the living, loving God in whom we live, move, and have our being; the All in All from whom, through whom, and to whom all things come.

The Presence in the Absence

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon8 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes get a bit discouraged when I read the stories and poems of the Bible.  It seems that people back then had a much more immediate sense of God’s presence than we do today.  On almost every page, there are tales of visions, voices, angels, and miracles.  Meanwhile, even the most spiritually-inclined of us today have to rely on powers of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination when forming our ideas about who God is and how God relates to us.  It’s easy for us to feel left out when we read the Bible because most of us haven’t had the kind of direct and intense mystical experiences described in its pages.  After all, who here has ever walked on water or seen the ocean part in front of them?  My guess is that not many of us have.  If only there was someone in the Bible whose experience of God looked more like ours!  Well, as it turns out, there is just such a person: Esther.

This morning’s first reading comes to us from the book that bears her name.  As a matter of fact, this week is the only week in our church’s three-year lectionary cycle that makes use of the book of Esther, which means that I’ll have to give you a lot of back story in a short amount of time.

The story of Esther takes place during a rather dark period of Jewish history.  In 587 BCE, the kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonian Empire and its elite and aristocratic inhabitants were taken off into slavery, where they lived for the next several generations.  During this time, they struggled to preserve whatever tattered pieces of their culture and religion that they could.  A little while later, the Babylonians themselves were conquered by the Persians.

It is during the Persian occupation that the story of Esther is set.  It’s a story of struggle and survival in the midst of powerlessness.  Esther represents the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.  She was a Jew in a Persian culture, she was a woman, and she was an orphan.  In the ancient world, you really couldn’t get much lower on the social food chain than that.

Through a series of unlikely circumstances, Esther found herself being recruited into the personal harem of the Persian king.  This position would provide her with a modicum of security and comfort, but it came at the price of being an object of desire to be used by someone else.

As the story unfolds, Esther eventually becomes the king’s wife around the same time that a plot is being hatched to commit genocide against the Jewish people.  Due to her position as queen, Esther is in a unique position to save her people.  However, doing so would involve a great deal of personal risk to her.  In Persian culture, it was a capital offense to approach a king without being invited.  This particular king, Ahasuerus, had already demonstrated his willingness to deal harshly with any kind of insubordination, even from his wife.

Esther has a hard choice to make: she can keep silent and allow her people to die in order to save her own life, or she can risk her life in order to save the lives of her people.  It was her cousin and caretaker, a man named Mordecai, who gave her this advice: “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”

After hearing these words, Esther decides to take the risk.  Approaching the king unannounced, Esther pleads for her life and that of her fellow Jews.  The king has compassion on her and punishes Haman, the mastermind behind the genocide plot, but is too late to stop the plan from being carried out.  At the last minute, he makes provision for the Jews to defend themselves against their attackers.  The day is saved.

All in all, the book of Esther makes for a great story.  It’s full of intrigue on the one hand and irony on the other.  There are some outright hilarious moments as Haman, the villain, repeatedly sets himself up for failure and humiliation.  This is a story of underdogs winning out over powerful forces of hatred and evil.  Just like it happens in the movies, trust and faithfulness are enough to beat the odds.

There’s only one thing missing from the biblical story of Esther.  Its conspicuous absence sets this story apart from all others in the Bible.  Can you guess what it is?  It’s God.

God is never mentioned in the book of Esther.  Not even once.  This is so unusual for the Bible, where visions, voices, angels, and miracles abound.  All we see here are human beings, caught in a difficult situation, and trying to make the best of it.

I like that.  It gives me hope.  It reminds me of my own spiritual life, where I often have to ask hard questions and figure things out for myself.  It would be most convenient if I could get a visit from an angel every time I had a question or a problem, but that just doesn’t seem to be how God works in my life.  The God I believe in is one who encounters people on the journey of life and gives them the gifts of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination.  These are the God-given tools with which we all must chart our own course in life, trusting that the path we take will lead us home to our true selves and the Mystery of Being, which we call God.  There are no easy answers or quick fixes in this life.  There is only the journey and the hard choices we must make along the way.

For me, the book of Esther is a brilliant illustration of this principle in action.  God does not show up in any immediate way.  God’s presence is implied.  Mordecai expresses the divine trait of wisdom.  Esther embodies faith and courage.  In the end, the implication is that God has been present and active all along, even though the heavens have been silent and apparently empty.

In the book of Esther, God is the presence in the absence and the voice in the silence.  So it is, I think, in our lives.  Faith, for most of us, grows gradually as we learn to trust in that absent presence and silent voice.  We find God in ourselves and in the people around us.  We feel a tug in our hearts that leads us in the direction of faith, hope, and love.  Those who follow the leading of that tug discover for themselves where that mysterious road goes.

Just like Esther and Mordecai, we can’t tell where the road will take us or whether our efforts will be successful.  All we have in our possession are bits and pieces of some larger puzzle that may or may not be solved at some point in the future.  The best we can do is lay our individual puzzle pieces down onto the table and try to see where they fit into the larger picture of the whole as it gradually comes together.

If you’re here this morning and your experience of faith has largely been an experience of doubt, silence, and absence, I want to encourage you with Esther’s story.  You’re in good company.  Your experience of absence does not necessarily amount to an absence of experience.  God is present and active in your life, whether you realize it or not.

As you struggle along in life, trying to walk by your own inner lamp of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination, remember that you are not alone.  Others, like Esther and Mordecai, have gone this way before.  More importantly, there is one who walks with you, beside and within, who first gave light to your inner lamp and has promised to keep it burning through all eternity.

 

 

 

Let’s Talk About It

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon4 Comments

Martin Buber, author of ‘I and Thou’. Image is in the public domain.

Mark 9:30-37

Today, I would like to talk about it.  I’ve been thinking about it for a while.  Maybe it’s been on your mind too.  It goes without saying that I think it’s important.  In fact, it’s probably the kind of thing that we should have brought up sooner than we have.  What is it?  Well, I’ll tell you what it is.  In fact, I’m already telling you what it is.  I’m talking about it right now.  Do you get it?

It.

It is a big word.  It is not very long, but it has a lot of meaning packed into itself.  The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber says that there are two ways in which you can relate to a being in the world (i.e. a person, life form, thing, etc.): you can relate to any being as an It or as a You.

When we choose to relate to something (or someone) as an It, we objectify that being.  In other words, we treat it like an object to be used.  Objects have value.  They are worth something.  Their value is often based on their function (i.e. what they can do).  My car has value based on its ability to take me from point A to point B efficiently and comfortably.  We make use of objects as means to an end.  When a particular object has outlived its functionality, it is either fixed or thrown away and replaced.

When, on the other hand, we choose to relate to something (or someone) as a You, we personalize that being.  A person doesn’t have value or worth.  A person has dignity.  You can’t put a price on a person’s life.  A person is literally priceless.  A person is not an object to be used.  A person can never be used as a means to an end.  As the philosopher Immanuel Kant has famously said, each and every person is an end in himself (or herself).  When a person’s life or existence comes to an end, that person is mourned.  He or she can never be replaced.

I begin today by talking about the word it because of the place this word holds in this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel.  The scene begins as so many of them do, with the disciples competing, posturing, backbiting, one-upping, gossiping, and generally showing off amongst themselves.  “Who is the greatest?” they ask each other.  “Who among us is Jesus’ favorite?”  “Which one of us has the truest and best interpretation of Jesus’ teachings?”  When I read this, I think about our own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), as it is currently in the process of ripping itself in two over the issue of homosexuality.  Each side in this debate claims to have a monopoly on God’s truth and the only legitimate interpretation of Scripture.  Behind this bitter argument, I feel like I can still hear the echoes of Jesus’ disciples fight amongst themselves over who is the greatest.  As usual, the disciples’ self-centered argument blinds them from seeing what Jesus is showing them about God, themselves, and reality.  They can’t see the forest for the trees.

Cue Jesus.  How does Jesus respond to this latest display of religious ridiculousness?  He turns their idea of greatness on its head by saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  What happens next is even more interesting.  We the readers encounter that big-little word: It.  The text tells us that Jesus, “took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’”

Most of us will be familiar with this story of the child from Sunday school.  Many of us who grew up going to church remember singing songs like Jesus loves the little children of the world and looking at pictures of a kind and smiling Jesus, playing with children, holding them in his arms, and resting them on his knee.  We tend to filter these gospels scenes through our own idealized images of childhood as a time of innocence and playfulness.  In first century Palestine, they had no such illusions.  In that world, they had a 30% infant mortality rate.  Of those who survived, 30% were dead by the age of five and 60% by the age of fifteen.  For folks in that culture, childhood was a time of danger.  Children were vulnerable.  For parents, children were necessary but uncertain investments.  Children just didn’t matter to people in that society because they were little more than a drain on family resources until they reached young adulthood.

A child then, in that society, was no more than an It.  It was a vulnerable liability.  Jesus, when he wanted to turn his disciples’ preconceived notions of power and greatness upside down, held up a child as the symbol of the divine presence in their midst, not because he thought children were cute and innocent, but because he knew they were vulnerable.  Jesus looked past the It and saw the You in the ones who matter least.  Doing so, he taught his followers, is the key to seeing and serving God in this world.

Today, two thousand years later, it seems that we are still learning this lesson from Jesus.  We still have an innate tendency mistake a You for an It, to treat a person like an object.  How many times have we heard scorned lovers cry, “I feel so used” or “Such-and-such a person used me”?  How often do we hear powerful and successful people say things like “It is not my problem” or “It is not my responsibility” in relation to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society?  If we’re going to call ourselves Christians, if we want to take Jesus’ words seriously, then we have to agree with him that “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

This is the fundamental principle underlying all Christian ethics.  This is where the It becomes a You.  Martin Buber said, “In every You we address the eternal You”, which is God.  The Bible tells us in 1 John 4:16, “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”  Whenever we flawed and finite mortals find it in our little hearts to love in the slightest degree, we touch the very face of God.  In that moment when an It object becomes a You person in our eyes, the veil between heaven and earth is rent asunder and eternity comes pouring into our lives.  This is what Jesus had in mind when he taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Whenever we choose to love another in whatever small way we can, we make a little heaven on earth in that moment.

Another important word that Jesus mentions in this passage is ‘welcome’.  He says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”  This idea of welcoming has to do with the Middle Eastern customs of hospitality.  We North Americans have a very watered-down idea of what hospitality is all about.  We think it’s all about making polite small talk over coffee and setting out fresh towels with clean sheets.  Most of us tend to measure ourselves by the standard of “hostess-ness” set by Martha Stewart’s TV show.  But hospitality in the ancient world had little to do with Martha Stewart.  Remember that they had no cell phones or AAA service.  There wasn’t even a regular police force to keep people safe on the open road.  Strangers in a foreign city had no guarantee that their basic human rights would be respected by the citizens of that town.  This was a universal fear for all travelers.  As a result, their culture developed the custom of hospitality as a religious obligation, if not a legal one.  Hospitality, in this sense of the word, has to do with one’s duty to offer provision and protection to traveling strangers.  Welcoming someone meant that you were taking personal responsibility for that person’s life.  This is what Jesus meant when he said “welcome”.

When Jesus was first teaching this spiritual principle to his disciples, he used children as his example of overlooked and vulnerable people who often get treated as Its instead of Yous.  Who, in our society, would fit that description today?  It’s easy for us to see how elderly and permanently disabled people would count as overlooked and vulnerable.  Most folks would probably extend that definition to include combat veterans, laid off workers, and other examples of people who count as the “worthy” or “deserving” poor.  But what about those who our society labels as the “undeserving” poor?  I’m thinking of people like convicts, drug addicts, and panhandlers.  It’s easy to feel justified in treating them like Its instead of Yous because of the damage they have done to themselves and others.  However, Jesus doesn’t seem to make that kind of distinction in his ministry.  He listed prisoners among those who require care and compassion in God’s name.  He was infamous for extending hospitality toward self-destructive outcasts and rejects.  Whether they deserved it or not, Jesus treated each one of them like a You instead of an It.

How about yourself?  How do you fit into this grand scheme of deserving and undeserving people?  How often do you feel vulnerable or overlooked?  Where and when have you been treated like an It instead of a You?  My guess is that we do this to ourselves on a regular basis.  We objectify ourselves whenever we measure the quality of our lives against some outside standard of success, happiness, or beauty.  We treat ourselves like an It whenever we build our sense of value and self-worth on the basis of achievements or possessions.  All this really does in the end is feed our egos, which have nothing to do with who we really are.  If we could somehow learn to relate to ourselves as Yous instead of Its, we would be able accept ourselves for who we really are, complete with all our faults and flaws.  You could begin to embrace who you are and reclaim your inherent dignity as God’s child, made in God’s image, and a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Cultivating a You-relationship with others is not limited to human beings, either.  We can learn to see the earth itself, with all of its plants, animals, and ecosystems, as a personal You in its own right.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to buy into superstitious myths about fairies and tree spirits.  We can live as perfectly rational people and still treat the earth with dignity and respect as an end in itself.  In this way, all of nature can become a portal through which we come to glimpse the very face of God.

We don’t even need to stop there.  We can look around at all those things that we take for granted as Its because they don’t possess the quality life, as we know it.  We objectify them because they appear to be objects to us.  But have you ever had a piece of art affect you on a personal level?  Have you ever seen a painting, a film, or heard a poem or a piece of music that touched your life in a deep way?  Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and John Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme, have both done that for me.  These products of creative genius serve as windows into the soul of the artist.  They communicate something about the nature of what it means to be human.  In doing so, they also reveal something about the very heart of God.  We can learn to see that when we relate to these works of art as You.

This task is somewhat easier when we are talking about beautiful art produced by brilliant minds, but what about the more mundane expressions of human ingenuity that we encounter on a daily basis?  I mean, have you ever really looked at a power drill or thought about it with any seriousness?  Imagine the work that went into designing such a device.  Imagine the factory workers who manufactured it or the minimum wage employee at the hardware store who sold it to you.  When you consider these questions, even for a moment, and give thanks, you are encountering that power drill as a You instead of an It.  You are consciously holding that tool in a way that allows it to become a portal for you, through which the kingdom of heaven is able to invade earth and set up camp in your life.

This was the end-result that Jesus had in mind when he said, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”  Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.  Heaven is a way of seeing and being in the world where we “live, move, and have our being” in conscious awareness of the One “from whom, through whom, and to whom” all things come.  It was for this reason that Jesus interrupted his disciples’ ego-driven pursuit of power and greatness by drawing attention to that which is normally dismissed as forgettable and unimportant.  Jesus saw the You beyond the It in that child.  His hope was that his disciples might one day learn how to do the same, so that these overlooked and dismissed ones might find their dignity and claim their identity as open gates of heaven, through which the reality of eternity is made manifest in space and time.

 

 

 

Words of Wisdom

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
The Lamp of Wisdom: sculpture at Waterperry Gardens. Image by Vanderbilt Divinity Library.  Retrieved from http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54977 on September 16, 2012.

Church is probably going to feel like an Indiana Jones movie this morning because I’m taking you on a hunt for lost treasure!  We’re going to explore some dangerous and exciting new territory.  There’s bound to be risks aplenty.  The treasure we’re looking for doesn’t belong on a dusty old shelf in some museum; we’re going to put it to good use in our lives, where it can yield a return on our investment.

(OK, that opening was a bit gimmicky, but give me a break, I’ve got to start the sermon somewhere!)

What I’m interested in doing today is exploring one of the lost treasures of the Bible itself.  It sounds weird to hear someone talk about “lost treasures in the Bible”, right?  I mean, isn’t the whole thing right there for us to open and read anytime we like?  Of course it is!  However, there are certain parts of the Bible that have been passed by or ignored over the years.  This usually happens because these passages just don’t fit very well with the big ideas of the people in charge, so they get minimized and pushed aside while other passages take center stage.  Once this has happened for several generations or even a few centuries in a row, most people forget those passages are even there.  But that’s just the thing about the Bible: if you actually read it, it has a way of challenging the status quo and opening you up to new ideas that the powers-that-be might even call “heresy”.

This is exactly what happened with our Protestant ancestors, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  Once they actually got their hands on the Bible itself, it led them to challenge a thousand years of church tradition and authority.  Both of them were eventually excommunicated for preaching this crazy idea that regular people, not just priests and monks, should be able to read the Bible for themselves, in their own native language.  It’s just like Desmond Tutu said in God Has A Dream, the book our congregation read together last summer:

Oppressive and unjust governments should stop people from praying to God, should stop them from reading and meditating on the Bible, for these activities will constrain them to work for the establishment of God’s kingdom of justice, of peace, of laughter, of joy, of caring, of sharing, of reconciliation, of compassion.

This morning, as we open the pages of this dangerously subversive and revolutionary manifesto that we call “the Bible”, we’re going to be searching for a particularly fascinating “lost treasure” that has been hidden in plain sight for thousands of years.  This treasure that I’m talking about is actually a biblical character, like Jesus and Moses.  Her name is Wisdom.

To the ears of us North Americans, talking about Wisdom as a person sounds weird.  We’re used to thinking of Wisdom as a virtue or a concept, like intelligence or compassion.  Wisdom (so we think) is not a person, but a character quality possessed by those of our elders who have lived long and lived well.  We all aspire to be holders of Wisdom in our old age.

But that’s not how the Bible portrays Wisdom.  The Bible sees Wisdom as a person, not a concept.  In this morning’s Old Testament reading, taken from the book of Proverbs, Wisdom is portrayed as a bold and brave woman:

Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
I will make my words known to you.

There is so much to love about the scene that is being set here.  First of all, as I’ve already pointed out, Wisdom is portrayed as a person, a woman.  In Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, the word for Wisdom is Hochma.  In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for Wisdom is Sophia.  That’s where we get words like philosophy from.  Philosophy literally means “the Love of Wisdom”.  Sophia also happens to be a very familiar name for women in our culture.  Sarah and I actually considered naming our daughter Sophia, but then we found out that it was the single most popular name for baby girls in 2008, so we decided to name her something more unique to her.  So, for the remainder of this sermon, in order to emphasize the personal and feminine nature of Wisdom, as she is portrayed in the Bible, I will be referring to her by that Greek name: Sophia.

What kind of woman is Sophia?  We learn right away from this passage in Proverbs that she is both unconventional and courageous.  Proverbs says that she “cries out in the streets” and “raises her voice” at “the busiest corner”.  Imagine, if you will, the gender-segregated world of ancient Palestine.  In that culture, a woman’s traditional sphere of influence was limited to the home.  Proper women, so they said at the time, didn’t make their presence known in public, which was the domain of men.  If a woman needed something to get done outside of the home, she had to get it done through a man, like her husband, brother, or father.  There were only two kinds of women who would raise their voices on a busy street corner: prostitutes and desperate women who had suffered such an injustice that they had no other choice but to take matters into their own hands.  Either way, whenever a woman raised her voice in public, people were apt to think the worst.

So, I think it’s extremely significant that when we first meet Sophia, here in the book of Proverbs, she is crying out in the streets.  The fact that she is doing so in that culture meant that something had gone very, very wrong indeed: either something was wrong with her or something had gone wrong with the world.  Her willingness to speak up makes her the kind of person who is able to think outside the box and color outside the lines of what is socially acceptable.  She is this strong, creative, and dynamic presence who raises her voice in order to change things for the better.  In that way, the figure Sophia reminds me of pioneering women like Eleanor Roosevelt or the famous primatologist Jane Goodall.  Both of these women, in the fields of politics and science, respectively, made a lasting difference by trespassing over the borders of what was expected of them from society.  If we were to make a movie about Sophia, I think I would cast someone like Whoopi Goldberg or Kathy Bates in the lead role.

What can we learn about Sophia from looking elsewhere in the Bible?

In Proverbs 8, we meet her again.  Just like before, she is crying out in the street in defiance of public opinion.  She says:

To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
acquire intelligence, you who lack it…

…I have insight, I have strength.
By me kings reign,
and rulers decree what is just;
by me rulers rule,
and nobles, all who govern rightly.
I love those who love me,
and those who seek me diligently find me.

At this point in the poem, things start to get really interesting.  Up to now, we might still be able to dismiss Sophia as an impersonal concept, symbolically represented as a woman, but listen to what she says later in chapter 8:

Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth…

When [God] established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

This is most interesting.  Sophia, according to the ancient Hebrew sage who wrote this poem, holds a prominent place in cosmic scheme of things.  Somehow, God works through Sophia in creating and shaping the world.  The natural order we observe in the universe, according to this poem, is the direct result of God’s creative energy working with and through Sophia.  Earlier, she says, “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just”.  This means that the ideals of goodness and justice, far from being arbitrary cultural norms, are actually woven into the very fabric of the universe by Sophia herself.  In this sense, she can be compared to that which Chinese philosophers have referred to as the Tao, the fundamental organizing principle of the cosmos.

We can learn even more about the development of the idea of Sophia by looking at the books of the Apocrypha.  While these books, written by Hellenistic Jews in the centuries after the last Jewish prophet and the birth of Christ, were not accepted as sacred Scripture by the Protestant reformers, they are nonetheless helpful for demonstrating the developing thought patterns of the Jewish people in the years leading up to Jesus’ lifetime.  This passage, a meditation on Sophia, comes from chapter 7 of a book called The Wisdom of Solomon:

because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God,
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
She is more beautiful than the sun,
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be superior,
for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

What I find so fascinating about this passage is that the figure of Sophia is becoming more and more closely associated with God’s own self.  As we move into the New Testament, the apostle Paul refers to Christ as “the Wisdom of God” in his first letter to the Corinthians.  Decades later, someone writing in Paul’s name expanded on this association of Christ with Sophia in the epistle to the Colossians.  Listen for the similarity between this passage about Christ and the one we read earlier from Proverbs 8:

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.

It seems that the early Christians saw Christ as the earthly embodiment of Sophia herself.  More than anyone else in history, Jesus lived a life in harmony with this fundamental organizing principle of the universe.

How can it be then, that such an important figure as Sophia has become one of the “lost treasures” of the Bible?  The answer, I think, comes from the various kinds of cultural momentum and inertia that can be found in people of every place and time.  Christianity itself has grown up in a patriarchal society.  The sad fact is that women’s voices have not counted as much as men’s voices.  When it comes to the metaphors we use to describe God, Christians have embraced images of masculinity and power (e.g. Almighty Father, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, etc.) to the exclusion of more feminine images (e.g. Sophia raising her voice in the marketplace).  Nevertheless, our sacred Scriptures remind us that men and women are both equally made “in the image of God”.  The Bible also gives us several feminine metaphors for God apart from Sophia the Wisdom Woman.  Deuteronomy 32 describes God as an eagle teaching her young to fly.  Isaiah 49 describes God as a mother who could never forget her baby.  Women served as metaphors for God in more than one of Jesus’ parables.  One of my favorite images comes from the Hebrew root of the term that gets translated as “tender mercies”, a character quality that is often applied to God.  In Hebrew, the word for “tender mercies” is rachamim, which comes from the word rechem, which literally means “womb”.  When the Bible tells us that we are the recipients of God’s “tender mercy”, it means to say that we are being nurtured and loved as we grow within the very womb of God.  I like to tie this right back in to the image of Sophia as a metaphor for God.  When I think of God, I have little use for the image of an angry, powerful man with a long white beard who sits on a throne above the clouds, hurling thunderbolts of judgment down to the earth.  That kind of Deity sounds more like Zeus than Jesus.  When I think of God, I prefer to think of Sophia: that brave and beautiful woman who raises her voice for justice in the city streets and carries the earth like a baby on her hip.  That’s the God to whom I have given my heart.

This week, as you go out into the streets where you live, work, and play, I pray that your ears would be open to Sophia’s voice, calling out to you.  Whether you are walking along an autumn trail, sitting in a meeting, milking a cow, or ringing up a cash register, may you become aware in those moments of that same sacred presence that shaped and renews the cosmos.  Like Jesus, may you feel her creative energy pulsing through your veins and granting you the insight you need in order to live a life in total harmony with the universe itself.

“If I can learn, so can you”

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter

When I was serving as a priest in the Free Episcopal Church, my bishop had a wonderful saying that I continue to carry with me in life: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty.”  I love that.

I love that saying because it so beautifully messes with our society’s cultural assumptions about what it means to have faith.  To the modern mind, having faith means possessing absolute certainty about a set of ideas, even if you can’t prove those ideas to be true.  If faith really does equal certainty, then a person of faith would necessarily have to be like the character Horshack on the old sitcom, Welcome Back Kotter: “Oh! Oh! Oh!  I know the answer!”

If faith is all about certainty and knowing the answer, then the voice of faith becomes just one more voice, shouting above the noise of every other political ideology and commercial product that claims absolute certainty for itself about the answer to “life, the universe, and everything”.  If having faith really is just about being certain, then the church is just another Horshack, shouting from the back of the classroom: “Oh!  Oh!  Oh!  I know the answer!”

But I don’t believe that’s true.  I don’t believe that faith is just another voice, trying to shout over the crowd in the marketplace of ideas.  Furthermore, I don’t believe that faith has anything do with certainty at all.  If anything, I believe that absolute certainty is the exact opposite of faith.  If you’re absolutely certain about your faith, then there’s no stretch that your intuition or imagination has to make.  In order for faith to be authentic, our hearts have to be free to make that leap of trust into the unknown.  We have to come to that healthy and humble point of being able to honestly say, “I don’t know.”

The modern world doesn’t like those words: “I don’t know.”  The modern world wants certainty, but our ancestors in the pre-modern world (ancient and medieval) were much more comfortable with not knowing the answers when it comes to the mystery of existence.  Ancient theologians and philosophers taught their students that, if they truly wanted to understand the meaning of God, then they always had to keep their minds in motion.  Anytime they settled on an idea and claimed to have the final answer, they were told to keep looking, because any answer that a human being could fully understand was obviously not the whole truth about God.

Thomas Aquinas, a medieval theologian, claims to present five proofs of the existence of God.  But if you read his five arguments, you’ll walk away frustrated and disappointed because he brings his readers to the point of accepting the need for an explanation of the origins and orderliness of the universe, but then he just stops cold in his tracks.  Aquinas leaves his readers on the brink of a precipice, peering into the dark abyss of the unknown, wondering what might be out there.  He never actually goes so far as to prove, once and for all, that God exists.

This, it would seem, is the stance of faith for the ancient and pre-modern spiritual masters: the stance of openness and reverence toward the great mystery of existence in the universe.  This kind of faith is not a faith that claims to know all answers with absolute certainty.  This faith is a leap of faith, made by a mind in motion.  In today’s gospel reading, we can see that kind of faith in Jesus himself and in the Syrophoenician woman he meets in the city of Tyre.

At this point in the gospel story, Jesus is traveling through foreign territory.  As a Jew in the city of Tyre, he was “a stranger in a strange land”, a fish out of water for sure.  The text itself doesn’t say exactly what business brought Jesus to that city, but it does say that, for whatever reason, he was trying to lie low while he was there.  But, unfortunately for Jesus, word got out that he was in town and someone in need came to see him.

This woman was not Jewish.  She came from a different race and religion than Jesus.  On top of that, she was a woman speaking up for herself.  In the patriarchal world of the ancient Middle East, this was not the norm.  She may have been a widow with no surviving male relatives to act as her official mouthpiece in public.  Whatever the reason, the fact that she was making a scene remains the same.  A non-Jewish woman was confronting a Jewish man in public.  This would have been the scandal of the week in the city of Tyre.  If they’d had tabloids and paparazzi back then, this would have been on the front page.

But you see, she didn’t care about that.  She was desperate.  The text of Mark’s gospel tells us that her daughter had “an unclean spirit”, but it doesn’t tell us exactly what that means.  In the ancient world before the advent of modern medicine, mental and neurological illnesses like epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, and schizophrenia were often misdiagnosed as demonic possession.  This might have been one of those cases.  On the other hand, it’s not entirely inconceivable that there really was something happening to this little girl on a supernatural level.  Jesus and his fellow Jews in the first century CE would have had no problem whatsoever with that idea.

A first century Jew would have been especially unsurprised to hear of demonic activity in a city full of pagans, like Tyre.  “Of course she has an unclean spirit,” a typical Palestinian Jew would have said, “All these people in this city have unclean spirits, on account of their bowing down to false gods and idols!”

At first, Jesus seems to concur with that party line.  He refuses to help her because she is not Jewish.  He says to the woman, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  Dogs?  That’s a little harsh, even for Jesus.  No one would have blamed her for storming off, offended, but that’s not what she does.  This woman is desperate and she believes that Jesus is the only one who can help her.  Her love for her daughter leads her to stand up and ride roughshod over the sacred barriers that separated people of different genders, races, and religions in that society.  Here, at the end of her proverbial rope, she throws all caution to the wind and takes matters into her own hands.  I like to imagine that she got up off her knees, looked Jesus right in the eye, and put a finger in his face when she said, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

I wish the text of Mark’s gospel had described the look on Jesus’ face when she did that.  But we don’t get that luxury.  In the text, Jesus responds to her boldness by saying, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”  There is a TV movie on the life of Jesus that came out about 13 years ago.  This scene from today’s gospel reading appears in that film.  The screenwriter takes some liberties with the text and embellishes the point being made with additional dialogue from Jesus.  In the movie, Jesus turns around and says to his disciples, “This woman has taught me that my message is for [all people, not just the Jews].  If I can learn, so can you.”

I love that idea.  Jesus, far from being a distant and static object of worship, is an intimate and dynamic presence in our lives.  The Spirit of Christ grows within us as Christians in every generation are called to speak the truth in love to an ever-changing world.  The needs of the world today are different than they were two thousand years ago.  We are called to follow where Christ is leading us today, not where Christ led our ancestors five hundred years ago.  Let me give you one example: just a few decades ago, the idea of racial integration would have sounded ludicrous.  But today, none of us would want to worship in a church that had “Whites Only” printed on the marquee outside.  The fact that we would now find that offensive and unacceptable is a sign of the Holy Spirit working and growing within us, leading us into new levels of truth that our ancestors weren’t yet ready to hear.  What new truths is the Spirit leading you into today?  What ancient barriers of close-minded prejudice is Christ tearing down in this generation?  When our children and grandchildren grow up and look back at this era of history, will they be proud of us for taking risks and standing up for what we thought was right?  Will they see evidence of Christ growing in our hearts?

I certainly hope so.  I hope we leave them a legacy that they can run with.  I hope that same Spirit will grow in them and lead them to follow Christ in ways that make me feel uncomfortable.  I pray today that your faith in the growing Christ will lead you out of the static realms of certainty and across the established borders of this world and up to the brink of the precipice where you too can gaze with reverence and humility into the darkness of the unknown abyss, defying every humanly-constructed ideology, confessing with scandalous honesty the creed openness before the mystery of existence: “I don’t know the answer.”