Tag: Jesus

A Sermon About A Sermon

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I imagine there must have been some excitement in the air that morning as people entered the synagogue, dressed in their Saturday best.  Perhaps some of the regulars were shuffling to find a new place to sit, since their usual seats were taken by the folks who normally only show up at Yom Kippur and Passover.  But they came to synagogue that morning because they heard the news about the new guest preacher.  One of their own, a local son, was returning to Nazareth for the first time since he began to make a name for himself in the region of Galilee.

Many of them remembered Jesus as a small boy, running around and playing with his friends while the adults made small-talk after the service.  Now, at age thirty, he was beginning to garner a reputation as an itinerant rabbi, a teacher of the Torah.  There were even some astonishing reports of unexplained, mystical healings associated with his visits.  If even a few of these rumors were true, then surely he was about to save the best for them, the people of his hometown, the very ones with whom he had grown up and lived.

They were good-hearted, hard-working, small-town folk who came together Sabbath after Sabbath to honor their Jewish heritage and listen to the wisdom of the Torah.  They knew Jesus and he knew them.  They were the ones who taught Jesus those old stories of Moses and the prophets.  Now, Jesus was the one who would preserve that history and pass it on to yet another generation, as it had been passed down to them by their ancestors in that very same synagogue.  This was a very big day indeed.

The service itself, like every Shabbat service, featured the singing of the old psalms, praying prayers, and of course reciting the ancient Shema, Israel’s oldest creed: “Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai alone.”  This faith formed the core of their tradition, preserved and passed on from generation to generation.  And now, they were proud to welcome one of their own, Jesus, as the newest defender of the faith and guardian of the tradition.

After a reading from the Torah, there was usually another reading from one of the prophets.  That week, it came from the book of Isaiah.  Jesus read out loud: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Heads around the room were nodding in agreement as the old familiar words washed over them for the umpteenth time in their lives.  They knew the story behind the words as well:

The prophet was writing to a community of Jews who had just returned from multiple generations of slavery in Babylon and Persia.  It was in that place and time of tribulation that their religion had taken the shape it now held for them.  They had come to believe that their God, Adonai of Israel, was the one true deity and all others were mere pretenders to heaven’s throne.  In Babylon, alienated from the land of their ancestors and the Jerusalem temple where sacrifices were made daily, their Jewish ancestors had turned their attention to prayer and the study of the Torah in synagogues under the tutelage of learned rabbis.  As strangers in a strange land, their ancestors had proudly struggled under oppression to preserve their faith and culture.  The very existence of this synagogue in the small town of Nazareth was a testimony to their success.

Finally, after three generations of Jewish children had grown up under a Babylonian whip, the Persians invaded and conquered Babylon.  These more open-minded Persians allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild, so long as they promised to remain loyal and subservient to the Empire.  The prophet writing in this section of the book of Isaiah directed his words toward these newly returned exiles.  They were faced with the task of rebuilding their country from the ground up.  How would they even start?  What values and ideals would shape this new society?

This particular prophet, writing in the name of another ancient seer, Isaiah of Jerusalem, who had lived and died centuries before, reminded the people of the ancient tradition of the year of Jubilee, a special holiday that came only once every fifty years.  In this year, every debt would be forgiven and every slave set free.  The land and the people would rest and then emerge with a fresh start, a new lease on life.  The onset of this holiday was certainly “good news to the poor” for it brought release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed, and forgiveness to the debtors.  It was a fresh start.  The future was suddenly wide open.  Liberated by the pronouncement of divine forgiveness, a new generation of people was free to rebuild the world anew.  This is why they called it “the year of the Lord’s favor.”  It seemed to them like heaven itself was smiling.

Back in the Nazarene synagogue, the old men heard these ancient words with tears in their eyes and smiles under their beards.  God had been faithful, their people had survived, rebuilt, and passed on their heritage to another generation of Jews.  And now, here was Jesus, the carpenter’s son, the little kid who used to play in their streets, now grown up tall, ordained as a rabbi, and preaching his first sermon in his hometown.  The people survived.  Their tradition lived on.  God be praised!

Jesus finished his reading, rolled the scroll back up, and handed it back to the attendant.  Then he sat down in the rabbi’s chair, which is what they used back then instead of a pulpit, and began to preach.  He gave them the main point of his sermon with his opening remark: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Wait… what did he just say?  Fulfilled?  Didn’t he mean to say Honored, or Remembered, or Preserved?  What does he mean by ‘Fulfilled’?  If those ancient words were being ‘fulfilled’ ‘today’, it would mean that the story of our people is not yet over.  It would mean that the journey home to freedom is not yet finished.  It would mean that the task of rebuilding a new community is up to us, not our ancestors.

Even more importantly, it would mean that the year of Jubilee is now.  All debts are off and all slaves are free.  A fresh start for us, not just a bunch of people who lived once upon a time.

Jesus brought their tradition to life by showing it to be unfinished.  A new world was being brought to birth by the age-old values of forgiveness and freedom.  The same Spirit that animated the ancient prophets like a fire shut up in their bones was ready to set hearts on fire in that synagogue.

By appealing to this passage, Jesus deftly drew from multiple layers of tradition in order to make his point.  Present, prophet, and Torah each represented different strands woven into a single tapestry in this sermon.  Jesus appealed to the very deepest parts of who they were and what they valued as loyal, faithful Jews.  He called them toward their higher calling through a fuller vision of who they were.  He opened their eyes to the presence of a dynamic reality that is still unfolding, still working in their lives in order to bring fulfillment to the prophet’s ancient vision.  Like any good preacher, Jesus brought the past into the present in order to shape the future.  He opened their minds to possibilities that boggled their imaginations.  He showed them a vision of what this world could be like if it were remade along the lines of these Jubilee values instead of the exacting cruelty of the loan shark and the slave driver.

Jesus introduced the people of his home synagogue to a living tradition, a prophetic tradition that reveres the memory of the past by trusting the promise of the future.  Jesus invited his neighbors to follow the trajectory of the prophets rather than standing by their writings.

I believe that same invitation is now extended to us, the people sitting in this church today.  We too can best honor the heritage left by our forebears by tracing the trajectory of their lives, rather than dogmatically hanging on their every word.  To quote the Buddhist poet Matsuo Basho: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”

Like those members of the Nazarene synagogue, we have our own tradition that we would like to preserve.  Beginning with Jesus, we might follow our tradition through the likes of the apostle Paul, Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, and Karl Barth.  Each of these voices (as well as many others) is worth paying attention to.  But it is always a dangerous thing to make an idol of history.  None of these voices carries the last word in matters of faith and ethics.  Every generation of believers is still responsible, as heirs of the tradition, for continuing to interpret spiritual truth (as we understand it) in its day.

Our church tradition has a slogan that reflects this conviction: Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.  “The church is reformed and always to be reformed.”

The Reformation never ends.  The story is not yet over.  The Christian faith begs to be interpreted and applied in our day, just as it was in Calvin’s and Paul’s.  Our interpretations will not match theirs exactly.  John Calvin, for example, would shudder to learn that we now ordain women to preach in the very churches he founded.

There are some who argue that we have departed from “the faith once delivered to the saints” because of these and others of our practices that differ from our forebears.  I say that we are not heretics but pioneers, reformers, maybe even prophets.  Our task is not to blindly adhere to the words written on a page, but to critically follow the trajectory of the values expressed in those words.  Following the image of the Jubilee that Jesus used: what does it mean to forgive debts and liberate slaves in 2013?  Following Paul and Calvin, what does it mean for us to be reformers of church and society today?

As we stretch our minds to answer these questions, we continue the living tradition that was handed down to us from our ancestors.  We honor our history by moving it forward, trusting in the guiding light of the Spirit to lead us home to the One from whom all blessings flow.

Getting Ahead of Jesus

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized3 Comments
Image
The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese (1562). Public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s face it:

Parents just don’t understand.

I’m only 32, so it wasn’t all that long ago that I was a teenager bemoaning this very fact to my friends at school.  All through those years, my elders kept on telling me, “You’ll understand when you have kids of your own.”

Well, you know what?  I do have kids of my own now and guess what:

Parents still don’t understand!

For the life of me, I cannot comprehend even a fraction of what goes on in my four year old daughter’s mind.  I admit that I’m still pretty new to the parenting game, but somehow, I get the impression that me not understanding her is only going to get worse as she gets older.

She has this incredibly vibrant and active imagination that can create entire worlds with their own cast of characters and plotlines.  Once in a while, she’ll poke her head out of her fantasy play world and update us on what everybody in there is doing.  Naturally, she just assumes that we’ve been in there with her all along and therefore know exactly what she’s talking about.  We don’t, of course.  But whatever she’s telling us is obviously important to her, so my wife and I usually just nod, smile, and say, “Okay!”

Parents just don’t understand.

But, as a parent, there certainly are things that you do understand.

For instance, there are things we know about our kids that no one else will ever know (with the possible exception of their future partners/spouses).  Sometimes, we know them even better than they know themselves.  We know what they’re capable of, even if they don’t.

I imagine that such was the case between Jesus and his mother as well.  On one occasion, around the time that Jesus began his ministry, he and his mother attended a wedding together in a tiny little village called Cana.  This village was so small and remote, in fact, that archaeologists today aren’t entirely sure where it was located.  During the celebration, the unthinkable happened: the host family ran out of wine.

If that happened at a wedding today, we would probably say something like, “Gosh!  That’s a bummer!” but then quickly get back to entertaining ourselves in other ways.  Generally speaking, we would get over it.  But in the ancient world, where social capital was just as valuable as money, this would have been a supreme humiliation.  The family’s reputation would be ruined for all time.  They would never live it down in the eyes of the community.  The shadow of this event would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

With that in mind, you might be able to imagine the very real concern in Jesus’ mother’s voice when she tells him, “They have no wine.”  At this point in the story, it’s not entirely clear what Jesus’ mother was trying to accomplish by telling Jesus this.  According to the narrative text in John’s gospel, Jesus had never done anything particularly amazing or miraculous before this point.  Even Jesus himself seems standoffish and dismissive when his mother first approaches him.  He says, “Woman (which was a term of respect back then, like ma’am or madam is today), what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”

Now, I just wish that the narrator had described the look on her face in that moment.  In my imagination, I see her with her head cocked to one side and her hands on her hips, looking her son right in the eye.  Then, without another word, she turns around, grabs a panicked staff member as he rushes by, and almost shoves him in Jesus’ direction, saying, “Do whatever he tells you.”  Jesus, visibly annoyed, clenches his jaw and furrows his brow at his mother.  She simply raises her eyebrows and walks back to the party, smiling knowingly.

Jesus says it isn’t time yet, but his mother knows: it’s time.  It’s time for Jesus to become the person he was always meant to be.  It’s time for the potential hidden in his life to break out into the open.  He may not have even seen it in himself, but his mother saw it.  And in order to actualize that potential, she had to get ahead of Jesus.  She had to take that leap of faith and push him into something that even Jesus didn’t think he was ready for.

What happens next is the famous incident of Jesus miraculously turning water into wine.  According to the narrator of the text, it was Jesus’ first miracle… and it never would have happened if his mother hadn’t pushed him into it.

Now, this whole scene might strike some of us as strange.  We’re used to thinking of Jesus as our guru: the all-knowing, all-wise Son of God.  He teaches and people listen.  After all, he’s Jesus Christ, right?  But in this story, he’s the one being pushed.  The situation feels a little upside down.

To be honest, the more I think about this disturbing idea, the more I like it.  In a metaphorical sense, it’s almost as if Jesus’ mother is reaching out across two thousand years of time just to mess with our heads.  But if you let yourself sit with this ironic image of Jesus being pushed into his first miracle, some interesting thoughts start to develop.

Here’s what struck me about this story: Jesus’ mother is getting ahead of Jesus.

When I think about some of the most heroic people in history, I can’t escape the observation that most of them had to push back against the forces of cultural inertia in order to achieve greatness.  In a sense, they too were getting ahead of Jesus, so long as we understand “Jesus” as a cultural icon whose name is invoked by the powerful in order to legitimate the social status quo.

For example: 150 years ago, a large number of preachers invoked the name of Jesus and even quoted the Bible in order to justify the practice of slavery in this country.  And you know what?  They were right… technically speaking.  Numerous passages in both the Old and New Testaments talk about slavery as an accepted part of life.  Pro-slavery advocates had the text of the Bible on their side.

Nevertheless, abolitionist movements, beginning with the Quakers in the 1600s, gradually built up steam and generated support among the people.  They argued that the ownership of another human being as property violates the spirit of Christianity, even though it’s not expressly forbidden in the text of the Bible.

We take this line of reasoning for granted in the 21st century, but it was still a hotly contested issue in the 19th century.  It was not socially advantageous to be an abolitionist in those days.  Those who called out in the name of conscience were often beaten back by well-respected citizens carrying Bibles.  These early heroes of freedom and equality, like Jesus’ mother in the story of the wedding at Cana, had to get ahead of Jesus in order to stand up for what is truly right and good: not the historical person named Jesus of Nazareth or the Spirit of the risen Christ that lived in their hearts, but the image of Jesus that was constructed and corrupted by the prejudice of the slave-owners.

When I talk about “getting ahead of Jesus”, I mean to say that people need to challenge their ideas about Jesus, not Jesus himself.  We need to cultivate enough self-awareness to question our own assumptions about reality.  When well-dressed and well-paid preachers go on TV, quote the Bible, and use it to justify the exclusion of gay & lesbian people, we to get ahead of that Jesus.  When someone sends you an email with a painting of Jesus wrapped in an American flag and carrying an assault rifle, you need to get ahead of that Jesus.  When politicians use Christian rhetoric to turn our diverse society into a religiously monolithic nation, we need to get ahead of that Jesus.

Whenever we take a controversial stand for what we believe is right, there will always be people who can quote the Bible against us.  On the surface, many of these folks will appear to be more knowledgeable and more dedicated believers than some of us, but I’m telling you now that you don’t have to buy into their ideas.  The real measure of your faith is not the church you attend, the Bible you read, or the check you write.  The real measure of your faith is the life you live.

When people call you a hell-bound heretic, just remember Jesus’ mother, who made a miracle happen by getting ahead of Jesus.  Remember the abolitionists and Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow.  They all got ahead of Jesus, going beyond the text of the Bible in order to honor the spirit of the Bible and so they worked their own kind of miracle: a living miracle of freedom and equality that has yet to be completed in our day.

It falls to us to keep this miracle going, to question our own assumptions and challenge deeply-established injustice, to get ahead of our ideas about Jesus and come to know, love, and follow the real Jesus, the Jesus whose Spirit lives within us, working miracles in us and through us that we cannot even begin to imagine.

The Power of Love

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

How do you know when you’re on a bad first date?

  • When you’ve been waiting at the restaurant for half an hour and she still hasn’t shown up yet.
  • When she pulls out a newspaper and starts reading it.
  • When she pulls out a cell phone and says, “Let me call my husband…”

Each and every one of these things happened to me at one point or another when I was still single.  Looking back, they’re kind of funny, but they didn’t seem so at the time (especially the last one).

There is something especially deflating about a first date that does not go well.  It takes the wind out of your sails in a way that few things can.  You put on your best clothes and your best behavior in an attempt to ultimately convince another person that you are worth loving.  When it doesn’t work out like you had hoped, it’s hard not to take that personally.  Your self-esteem usually needs some time to recover.

This doesn’t just happen in the dating world either.  Job interviews can be just as brutal in their own way.  You’re putting yourself out there, your future is on the line, but nobody wants to take a chance on you.  That kind of rejection stings to the core and leaves a mark on the surface.

Rejection is probably the most disempowering and disheartening experience a human being can go through.  It hits us right where we live and makes us feel like we aren’t worth anything.  No matter how old we are or how successful we appear to be in life, each and every one of us carries inside of us the pain of past rejection and the fear of future rejection.

This is true of everyone: from the washed-up wino under a bridge to the pop-star princess on TV.  I remember learning this as a teenager when I overheard a conversation one day with a girl who I thought was the prettiest and most popular girl in school.  She was telling someone how she would sometimes just sit in front of her mirror at home and cry because she felt so ugly.  I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  I thought for sure that this girl, of all people, must know what it’s like to be beautiful and loved by everyone, but I was wrong.  The pain and fear of rejection is universal among humans.

Saddest of all are those who experienced rejection so many times that they start to really believe that they’re not worthy of love or happiness in life.  These folks have started to internalize that message of rejection.  They think that’s who they are.  They think that’s what they deserve.  They think they’re nothing and that their lives are worth nothing.  So they treat themselves and others accordingly.

Personally, I can’t help but wonder whether this kind of broken heart might lie behind some of the many incidents of mass murder and random violence that have become so epidemic in our society?  If so, then I would humbly suggest that an effort to include the outcasts and befriend the loners might be more effective in preventing violence than our repeated (and unsuccessful) efforts to “watch out for those maniacs” or “keep an eye on those weirdoes.”  Internalized rejection is disempowering and dehumanizing to people.  There eventually comes a tipping-point when a rejected person becomes the kind of monster that others have made them out to be.

Rejection is powerful, but then again so is love.  Knowing that even one person cares is sometimes enough to make all the difference in the world.  It can even save a life.

I’ve seen what love can do in my life.  Having already mentioned some of my bad experiences in dating, I’d like to share one good one.  This single, ongoing good experience has been enough in my life to outweigh all those other bad dating experiences put together.  I’ve been married to an amazing woman for eight years.  We have laughed together, cried together, encouraged each other, and challenged each other.  Loving her and being loved by her has changed the way I live in this world.  I carry myself differently, I see myself differently, and even though Sarah and I might set each other off sometimes, we usually manage to somehow bring out the best in each other.  That’s what love can do.  That’s the power of love.

Jesus understood that power.  He had experienced it directly, in an ultimate sense.  When he was about thirty years old, he got involved with a radical movement started by his cousin, John.  Cousin John, who we all now know as John the Baptist, was a kind of revival preacher who lived a simple life in the desert and made extensive use of a Jewish practice known as tevilah (ritual washing).  Tevilah was (and still is) used for all kinds of religious and sanitary reasons in traditional Judaism.  John used it as a ritual sign of for Jews who wanted to recommit their lives to following the Torah.  John intuited that big changes were on the way for his people and he wanted them to be spiritually ready.

Jesus himself appears to have been attracted to John’s renewal movement.  Like many of his peers, he participated in the tevilah ritual (which our Bibles have conveniently translated baptism, from the Greek word for “immersion”).  But then something happened to Jesus that didn’t seem to happen to the others.  Luke tells us,

“Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.””

This ritual washing seems to have been a significant spiritual experience for Jesus.  It was the catalyst that set the rest of his life in motion.  This is the point where Jesus’ work of healing and teaching really gets started.  In a sense, Jesus’ baptism was the moment when he was ordained and commissioned to his ministry.

The part of this story that really stands out to me is the voice from heaven.  This voice says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  This message is addressed directly to Jesus himself.  The voice calls him “Beloved,” which I take to be significant.

I think about those times in my own life when I faced a scary challenge and my wife said to me, “I love you, sweetheart.  I have faith in you and, no matter what happens, I promise we’ll get through this together.”  I can tell you that, when I hear that from her, I find an inner strength I didn’t know I had.  Love is empowering, no matter where it comes from.  Spouses and partners can affect each other in that way.  We can do the same as friends, family, parents, teachers, and bosses.  We encourage each other.  Have you ever thought about that word?  Encourage.  It comes from the Latin en (into) and cor (heart).  We “put heart/strength into” one another.  When Jesus was baptized and heard that voice from the sky saying “You are my Son, the Beloved,” I believe he was being en-couraged: the very heart of who he was and what he would do was being put into him at that moment.  I believe it was then that Jesus discovered the depths of inner strength that would allow him to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and speak such bold words of truth to power.  Whatever else we might believe about him, we can say that Jesus was a person who felt himself to be empowered by the ultimate Love that springs up from the very heart of reality: the sacred energy that we Christians name God or Holy Spirit.

The same Spirit that empowered Jesus also lives in us.  The same energetic force that catalyzed the Big Bang also animates our brains and bodies.  The flame that burns in a hundred million stars is also shut up in our bones, sparking our creativity and setting our hearts on fire to imagine what might be possible.  After 13.75 billion years of preparation, fine tuning, and evolution, the universe has finally given birth to us: you and me.  We have been gifted with unprecedented knowledge, opportunity, resources, and power to shape the future of the world.  Life itself has placed these gifts into our hands as if to say, “You are my beloved sons and daughters.  I made you, I love you, and I believe in you.”  No less than Jesus, you and I are empowered people.

We call it a miracle when we read about Jesus feeding 5,000 people with loaves and fishes, but we have that power too.  According to the World Food Programme, one dollar will feed four children for a day in a developing country.  This means that we could feed 5,000 people for only $1,250.  Even our little country church could manage that much miracle.  On Christmas Eve 2011, our congregation answered a cry for help from Thea Bowman House, an affordable daycare center in Utica whose funding was being slashed by the county government.  Closure seemed imminent.  This would have forced dozens of parents to leave the workforce and go on welfare because they couldn’t afford full-time daycare without assistance.  People from our church raised $1,000 that Christmas Eve and sent it to that program.  I ran into their director several months later, who told me that, thanks in part to our contribution, they managed to weather the storm without closing their doors.  What’s even more amazing is that they did it without having to drop services to a single family.  I call that a miracle!

We call it a miracle when we read about Jesus healing the sick, but we have that power too.  Our congregation recently finished paying off a $4,500 pledge to Presbyterian Homes & Services in New Hartford to help build the new Parkinson’s Residence.  We’ve been told that this program is the first of its kind and will lead the nation in the fight against Parkinson’s disease with state-of-the-art technology.  Just a few weeks ago, at our most recent Christmas Eve service, our little congregation took up a special collection of $1,420 that was sent to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) to help with the cleanup effort in New York and New Jersey after the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy.  Immediately after the storm, PDA set up emergency shelters and food distribution sites for the victims.  Since then, PDA has continued to work with churches and send down teams of volunteers to help with the long-term cleanup and recovery.  I call that a miracle too.

These are your miracles.  This is the power of what Love can do.  It causes us to think outside the box and reach deep down inside to find resources of strength and generosity we didn’t even know we had.  It’s true that the sharp sting of rejection and the dull ache of loneliness can be felt in all corners of this hurting world, but the caress of love can be felt as well.  The same Spirit that empowered Jesus’ ministry inspires ours as well.  The same voice from the heavens that spoke to Jesus still whispers in our hearts, calling us beloved children.  I pray that our lives will continue to echo the sound of that loving voice to this lonely world, saying to it: “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Be blessed and be a blessing!

And I just couldn’t resist adding this video to the blog post:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkAVfsw5xSQ%5D

The Glory Around You

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1910)
Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1910)

There are two ways of not seeing something.  One way is for the object in question to be so far away that our eyes can’t distinguish it from the surrounding environment.  This is what happens when we try to look for distant stars and galaxies with the naked eye.  We can squint as hard as we like but, without the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, we still won’t be able to see the millions of galaxies that surround us in every direction.  They’re just too far away.

The other way of not seeing something is for the object in question to be so close up that there’s no way for us to see all of it at once.  Such is the case with our own galaxy.  We are part of it.  It’s all around us.  If someone were to ask you where our galaxy is, you wouldn’t be wrong at all to say, “it’s right here” without pointing to anything in particular.

When it comes to thinking about invisible things like the reality of God, most modern philosophers have argued for the first option: God, if there is a God, is simply too distant from our everyday reality to be seen or experienced directly.  From one point of view, this was a most useful idea.  It helped modern thinkers to move beyond the old mythical and superstitious ideas about God as “the old man in the sky” inherited from their ancient and medieval ancestors.  This was a good thing.  It needed to happen, especially once science began to debunk so many of the old superstitions.  In place of “the old man in the sky,” modern people began to think of God as a kind of cosmic clockmaker: a rational mind which was responsible for the machine-like order we observe in creation.  The Creator, according to this way of thinking, designed the laws of nature, built the universe, set it in motion, and then sat back to run under its own steam.  Compared to ancient mythologies, this idea of God seems very plausible, rational, and consistent with the discoveries of science.

On the other hand, this way of thinking has also made God seem more remote and distant from the concerns of everyday life.  God, according to the modern mind, doesn’t exist in this universe.  Some would say that God doesn’t even care about us or creation.  “The clockmaker may have got everything started,” so they say, “but hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”  The clockmaker idea of God might be more rational and less superstitious than “the old man in the sky,” but it doesn’t inspire our hearts toward worship and devotion.  The clockmaker God is little more than a mental concept that can be either accepted or rejected without consequence.  It didn’t take long for modern philosophers to dismiss the clockmaker concept itself as irrelevant and unnecessary.  Like the distant galaxies, such a God was simply too far away to be seen or experienced by human beings.

In recent years, those of us who still feel drawn toward worship have come to realize that both the “old man in the sky” and the “clockmaker” ideas of God are wholly inadequate.  Neither one captures the essence of what we mean when we use the word “God.”  In contrast to the modern thinkers who say that God is too far away to be seen, we say that God is close: so close, in fact, as to be all around us… too close and too big to be fully seen and understood by any one person.  The Bible tells us that we “live, and move, and have our being” in God.  God is like our own Milky Way galaxy: if someone were to ask, “Where is God?” it makes perfect sense to say, “Right here!  All around us!  We exist in God!”

For me, this idea of God being all around us, too close to be fully seen, is expressed most beautifully in the story of Christmas.  That story begins in a fairly mundane way: with regular, working class people being pushed around by the powers that be.  This has been the story of humankind in every age of history.  In this case, the Roman emperor wanted an accurate count of the population in occupied territories for tax purposes, so people Mary and Joseph were shuffled around like cattle and treated like animals to the extent that they even ended up sleeping and giving birth in a stable like animals.  Likewise, we see shepherds working the night shift.  Two thousand years of nostalgia and Christmas pageants have romanticized the shepherding profession, but it was a despised and disgusting job in the first century.  No one liked shepherds, no one trusted them, and everyone saw them as little better than the animals they tended.  Yet, it was to this band of ragamuffins that the angels came.  No outsider or passer-by could have known that the pathetic, mundane scene playing itself out before them was one of the most significant and miraculous moments in all of human history.  Even the key players themselves were shocked and amazed as “the glory of the Lord shone around them” and the heavens themselves seemed to break out in song.

The God that Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds encountered that night was neither “the old man in the sky” nor “the clockmaker.”  Theirs was an incarnate deity who “took on flesh and dwelt among” them.  They experienced this God in “the glory” that “shone around them.”  Contrary to the conclusions of modern philosophers, their God was too close to be seen, not too far away.

God is here.  God is all around us.  I can’t point to one place, or time, or thing and say “this and this alone is God” because the God I believe in can’t be so easily contained or limited.  We “live, and move, and have our being” in God, whose glory can be seen, shining all around us, if only we have the eyes to see it.  Like so many mystics and sages before us, we can see the glory of God shining in the wonders of creation, in the discoveries of scientists, in the guidance of teachers, in the healing of medical professionals, in the courage of those who risk their lives for others, and in the compassion of those who help the suffering.

The glory of the Lord is shining around us tonight, no less than it did for those shepherds on the first Christmas Eve, if only we have eyes to see it.  The poet Girard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and St. Augustine of Hippo reminded us that “God is closer to us than our own hearts.”

The task of the believer in all this is to take these momentary flashes of glory and learn to see them, not as random, isolated events, but as parts of a whole, individual threads in a great tapestry, woven through the ages.  That’s what Mary, the mother of Jesus, was doing that night when it says in the text that she “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”  She didn’t let her moment of glory just pass her by, she grabbed hold of it and kept it with her.

In the same way, if we want to become the kind of people who can see the glory of God shining around us, then we need to start paying attention.  We need to find those little moments of joy, wonder, peace, and compassion in a day and remember them.  Maybe for you it’s the silvery beauty of snow on tree branches or the golden light of an Adirondack sunset.  Maybe it’s as insignificant as someone generously giving you the right of way instead of cutting you off in traffic.  Wherever you see these little moments of glory, don’t let them escape before you give thanks for them.  If you find it helpful for you, try keeping a daily journal of thanksgiving where you keep a record of these little happenings.  Develop this into a habit and I think you might be surprised at how easy it eventually becomes for you to call these moments to mind.  If that journal idea isn’t exactly your style, don’t worry about it.  Find whatever works for you, but find something.  Don’t let this life pass you by without seeing the glory around you.  Like Mary did: treasure these things and ponder them in your heart.  As you do this, may the glory of the incarnate mystery of God in whom we “live, and move, and have our being,” shine around you and become ever more real to you.

A New Way of Being: Redefining Power

On By J. Barrett LeeIn SermonLeave a comment
Ecce Homo, Antonio Ciseri (1871).

There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless:

You can be trapped in the McDonald’s drive thru at rush hour, with a long line of cars in front of and behind you, and then realize after you order that you left your wallet at home.   You can start telling an off-color joke to a friend or sibling, only to have your boss or your mom enter the conversation and ask you to continue with what you were just saying.  You can propose to your significant other on the jumbo-tron at an NBA game, only to have that person say “no” in front of 10,000 people.

On a more serious note (not that rejected marriage proposals aren’t serious):

You can walk the hallways of your school in fear, watching your back for that bully who somehow always manages to find you anyway.  You can cut every luxury and non-essential expense from your budget, only to realize that you still have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries for a week, because you’re hourly-wage job won’t allow you to do both.  You can struggle for years to break a bad habit or overcome an addiction without much success.

There are lots of ways to feel or be powerless.

There is no such thing as absolute power.  Every single person on this planet, up to and including the president of the United States, experiences powerlessness in some way or another.  Officially or unofficially, everyone answers to someone.

In spite of this fact, or perhaps because of it, people everywhere are constantly trying to step over one another in an attempt to be top dog of whatever hill they happen to be climbing at the moment.  In a social system where power comes in limited quantities, people try to take whatever they can for themselves, believing (rightly or wrongly) that with power comes security.  So they grab whatever power they can get and use it to their own advantage.  Powerful people fight one another for more power.  People with this mentality tend to use phrases like, “It’s a dog eat dog world out there.  It’s survival of the fittest.  Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.  No one is looking out for you.  You’re on your own.”

Compassionate and kind-hearted folks tend to wince at this kind of cynical talk.  We don’t want to believe the world really works that way, but when we look at the facts, we have to admit that the world often does seem to work that way.  What makes cynicism so enticing as a philosophy of life is its apparent realism in the face of difficult circumstances.  Is this who we really are?  Is this all we are?  Or is there another way of being, of being of being alive, and of being human?

This morning’s gospel reading sets us down right into the middle of a particularly intense competition for power in the ancient Middle East.  The religious authorities of Judea were engaged in an ongoing cold war with the occupying Roman government.  Each side, through their official representatives, vied for the loyalty and obedience of the people.  On the particular day in question, their conflict revolved around a common nuisance: Jesus of Nazareth, the latest in a series of so-called Messiahs who promised peace, liberation, and yes: power to the people of Judea.  Each one would rise up, gather an army of zealous insurgents, try to overthrow the Roman occupation by terrorist campaign, and eventually fail.  The religious authorities, on the other hand, had learned different ways of dealing with the occupation.  Some, like the Pharisees, sought to empower Judean society by a return to traditional morals and values.  In time, so they thought, God would intervene on their behalf to free them from foreign rule.  Other groups, like the Sadducees, learned how to manipulate the strings of the political system from the inside.

Members of these last two groups saw Jesus as “just another self-appointed Messiah with his army of zealots.”  As such, he was just another temporary nuisance and a threat to their power that had to be dealt with.  So they brought him to Pontius Pilate, Rome’s appointed governor over the perpetually unstable and troublesome province of Judea.

Pilate, for his part, didn’t care about who Jesus was or the content of his message, nor did he care about the Pharisees and Sadducees with their incessant squabbling and competing strategies for survival.  The only thing Pontius Pilate cared about was maintaining order and loyalty to the Empire.  If this Jesus really was claiming to be the anointed one who would liberate the Judean people from Roman rule by military force, then Pilate would have to deal with him swiftly, in the name of maintaining civil order.

Jesus, for his part, was powerless: caught between multiple groups who were competing for power on a national stage.  To the outside observer, he appeared to be a failed revolutionary: his closest followers had denied, betrayed, and abandoned him at the moment of truth.  His own people had arrested him and handed him over for crucifixion, a punishment reserved for terrorists.  Pilate’s job, in this situation, was to figure out whether Jesus really was a terrorist or not.

This morning’s gospel reading opens as Pilate begins his examination of Jesus.  By all accounts, Jesus is helpless, powerless.  He has been reduced to the status of a pawn in chess game between multiple powerful parties.  The scene plays out as one would expect: Jesus is examined, cross-examined, tossed back and forth, and eventually executed, not because he was found guilty, but because Pilate could find no other way to regain control of a volatile situation.

But, when we look at the conversation between Jesus and Pilate in detail, a different picture emerges.  The author of John’s gospel tells this story through the eyes of a Christian, writing decades after the events of Jesus’ crucifixion took place.  As John tells this story, the positions of power are actually reversed.  It is not Pilate who is interrogating Jesus, but Jesus who is questioning Pilate.  Jesus makes no apology, confesses no crime, and concedes no ground.  Reading this story is actually confusing to the modern reader because it seems like Jesus and Pilate are talking about two different things.  In fact, they are.  They’re not so much talking to each other as much as talking past each other.  Pontius Pilate obviously doesn’t understand what this Jesus guy is all about and Jesus obviously doesn’t care about Pilate’s need to maintain order.  Their conversation goes around and around but never really gets anywhere.

At one point Jesus says to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.”  Pilate, thinking he’s finally found his opportunity, pounces and says, “So you are a king?”  But Jesus wriggles away from his trap and returns the proverbial tennis ball back into Pilate’s court.  “You say that I am a king.”  Jesus says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  Their bizarre dialogue ends with an unanswered question in Pilate’s witty retort, “What is truth?”

Pilate never gets an answer to his question, presumably because he would never be able to understand any answer that Jesus gave him.  In the language of John’s gospel, Pilate exists in “darkness”, quite apart from the “light” that Jesus offers.  Pilate is an “unenlightened” being.  The 21st century spiritual teacher and Catholic priest Richard Rohr would say that Pilate was “operating at earlier stage of consciousness” than Jesus was.  Pilate was operating out of what Rohr would call a “tribal consciousness” wherein an individual is preoccupied by identifying with a particular group in conflict with all other groups.  Competition and power are primary concerns for those who see the world through an “us vs. them” ideology like Pilate had.  Jesus on the other hand, according to Richard Rohr, was operating out of a much higher, non-dualistic consciousness.  He was not caught up in the petty us/them struggles of the world as Pilate knew it.  In the eyes of Jesus, all people and all things are one in God.  This is why Jesus was able to say to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world.”  I don’t think Jesus ever meant for us to think that he came from some far-off, magical kingdom in the sky where everyone is happy and sits around on clouds, playing harps all day.  That is the stuff of fairy tales and story books.  Nevertheless, Jesus’ kingdom is a reality and it truly is “not from this world” in the sense that it includes all people, all creation, and all other kingdoms in its wide, wide embrace.

As a king, the “king of kings” in fact, Jesus redefines power.  In place of domination, Jesus holds up service as the ideal.  He said to his disciples, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as this human being came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  At the Last Supper, we see Jesus leading by example in this regard as the Servant King.  He gets up from the table, wraps a towel around his waist, and proceeds to wash his disciples’ feet.  This was a task typically assigned to the lowest, most despicable slave.  No one in his or her right mind would volunteer for this job, but Jesus told his disciples that this is what being a king, a leader was all about.  Humble service, for Jesus, is one of the marks of true power.

In a similar vein, Jesus’ kingdom is “not of this world” because he rules by compassion and mercy rather than by violence and judgment.  Forgiveness, according to Jesus, is the most powerful act any person can ever commit, whether king or peasant.  Victory is not achieved when your enemy is defeated.  Victory is won, according to Jesus, when your enemy becomes your friend.

Obviously, Jesus’ ideas seem “out of this world”.  They were incomprehensible to Pontius Pilate.  They were foreign to the Judean religious authorities.  They still sound bizarre to our ears in the 21st century.  We’re still operating out of a lower level of consciousness where our competitive, tribal concerns keep us from seeing the big picture, the whole of reality in which we live, move, and have our being.

When it comes to Jesus’ kingdom, we’re simply not there yet.  We might not ever get there in this lifetime.  But we, as those who claim to be Christians, who claim to follow Jesus, have an obligation and a responsibility to take Jesus’ words and Jesus’ life seriously.  What Jesus is offering Pilate (and us, by extension) in today’s gospel reading is a new of being, of being alive, and of being human in this world.

Something inside each of us cries out for this.  Even though we tend to give in to the temptation toward cynicism, even though we tend to trust in the power of warfare, weapons, and bombs to make a better world, even though we tend to seek power rather than service, there is nevertheless a deep longing within our souls for a world and a life where we will not have to live in fear and mistrust.  Something inside each of us knows that this is not how the world was meant to be.

Something about Jesus awoke this longing within people.  In some way that we still don’t fully understand, he embodied, even incarnated this alternative way of being in the world.  In Jesus, the longing took on flesh and showed us what it could do if it was given the chance to run free over the face of the earth.

I have seen moments and known people in whom the Spirit of Christ does run free and raises them up above that immature, ego-centric tribal consciousness.  I remember one such person who made an impact on my life when I was in high school.  His name is Phil.  He was a grad student and one of the leaders of a youth group I attended.  Through him, I discovered another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.

Phil was the first person I ever knew outside of my family who made me feel accepted for who I am.  He spent time with me, mostly just goofing off and hanging around.  He didn’t care that I wasn’t popular or influential in school.  He didn’t preach to me.  He didn’t have any kind of religious sales pitch for getting me to sign on the dotted line as a Christian.  He just seemed to care.  During my freshman year, when I was going through a hard time and even contemplating suicide, Phil was the one I trusted enough to open up to.  He wasn’t a pastor or a therapist, but he knew how to love people like Jesus did and that’s what made the biggest impact on me.

Over time, I gradually came to see something in Phil.  Looking back, I think I would call it the Spirit of Christ.  And that, more than any sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, is what made me want to live as a Christian.  I had been going to church ever since I was a baby, but I never had any desire to make that spiritual path my own.  After my experience of seeing Christ in Phil, I wanted to follow Jesus too.  Since that time, almost seventeen ago, I’ve been through several crises of faith and endured many seasons of doubt, but I keep on going back to the Christ I saw in Phil: Jesus who is the friend of the friendless, the one who welcomes the outcasts, the one who “eats with tax collectors and sinners”, the one who lives above and beyond this world’s sick systems driven by competition and lust for power, the one who offers me an alternative way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world.

Each and every one of us is called to be a ‘Phil’ to someone, somewhere, at sometime.  None of us is perfect, so we’ll each do it in our own small, temporary, imperfect, and partial way.  But when the moment comes and the Spirit moves us, will we have the faith to set aside our twisted hunger for power and competition?  Will we take up the mantle of compassion, humility, mercy, and service when it is needed?  Will we allow Christ live again in us, so that someone else might hear and respond to the call of that same Spirit in his or her own way?  If that hunger in our hearts for a different world, a better world, is true and not just an illusion, if this world’s sick system of power-hungry competition is not finally an expression of all that we truly are, if there is another way of being, of being alive, and of being human in the world, then it is absolutely imperative that we open our hearts and minds to this Jesus, so that Christ can live again in us, continuing in our community today the same ministry he started in Palestine two thousand years ago.  May it be so, even here, even now.

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.

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.

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.”