Tag: sermon

Being Right Isn’t Enough

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments
By Fczarnowski (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Fczarnowski (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Do you like to be right?  Of course you do.  Who doesn’t?  I don’t think there’s a person on this planet who, at least once in a while, doesn’t like to be the one with the right answer to a question or the solution to a problem.  It makes us feel important.  It makes us feel useful.  It makes us feel like our lives have a purpose, like maybe we can make a positive difference in this world.  It’s a good feeling.

But have you ever noticed that there are times when being right can go oh-so-wrong?  Being right might feel good but, like anything that causes good feelings, it can also be addictive.  Have you ever met someone who is chronically addicted to being right?  Have you ever been in an argument with someone who was right, who had a valid argument, but you didn’t want to concede the point because he or she was just being so mean about the whole thing?  I won’t ask for names, although I’m sure we all could list at least a few.  And if we’re really, really honest, I think we can all admit that there have been times (moments, in the very least) when each and every one of us has “chased that feeling” of being right a little too hard and run the risk of sacrificing something or someone that, in the long run, is far, far more important than our need to look good and be right.

Now, I should mention here that there are indeed times in life when conscience calls upon us to make certain sacrifices for the sake of what’s right in the face of great injustice.  Where would we be without those men and women who pledged “[their] lives, [their] fortunes, and [their] sacred honor” to the causes of justice and the common good?  It’s important to acknowledge that call.  But that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about that unhealthy, selfish, and compulsive need to be right (or at least appear to be right) at all times that only serves the cause of one’s own ego.  This is what I’m talking about.  This is the kind of addiction, like any addiction, that can cost people jobs, relationships, family, trust, goodwill, and (perhaps most ironic of all) credibility.

It may require a great deal of self-awareness to be able to do this, but I think we need to ask ourselves in those moments of heated debate, “Am I standing up for what’s right or for my need to be right?”  We need to ask ourselves this question because there is so much more to winning an argument than just being right.  How we argue and why we’re doing it is just as important as what we’re arguing about.

I’d like to turn your attention toward our Epistle lesson this morning, taken from St. Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.  Paul was writing to these Roman Christians to give them some pastoral advice about an issue that was very near and dear to his heart.  There was a conflict going on in that church and one party in that conflict was clearly in the right, as far as Paul was concerned.  The issue at hand was the inclusion of Gentiles (i.e. non-Jewish people) in the life and ministry of the Christian church.

This issue was the single greatest hot-button issue for first century Christians, just as the abolition of slavery, racial integration, the ordination of women, and marriage equality would also become hot-button issues for future generations.  There were those in the church who argued, citing the Bible and theological tradition as precedent, that Christianity itself was Jewish and therefore church membership should be limited to Jews alone.  “Jesus was Jewish,” they said, “all of his apostles were Jewish, therefore anyone seeking to follow Jesus should also agree to follow the commandments of the Jewish Torah (e.g. be circumcised, follow certain dietary restrictions, and celebrate certain rituals and holidays).”

Paul, on the other hand, was of a different opinion.  He believed that the Christian church was meant to be an international, multi-cultural community made up of people from “every tribe, language, people, and nation.”  He believed that the whole human race was meant to live as one family where the walls of division, distinction, and discrimination would be torn down and there would be “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.”

This was Paul’s opinion and, as history would have it, he was right.  Most scholars agree that it was this cosmopolitan character of the early church that allowed it to survive, spread so far and wide in the Roman Empire, and ultimately become one of the most important religious movements in the history of the human race.  So yes, Paul was right and he argued for his position in churches across southern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Middle East.  Most of the time, he had to speak up for the full-inclusion of Gentiles, disparaging any notion of second-class citizenship for non-Jews in the church, but not in Rome.  In Rome, he had the opposite problem.

You see, the Roman church agreed with Paul.  They took his multi-cultural message of inclusion to heart.  Jews and Gentiles worshiped together in the Roman church until the year 49 CE, when the emperor Claudius expelled all Jews from the city of Rome.  When they were allowed to return five years later, the Jewish Christians discovered that certain prejudicial, anti-Semitic attitudes had begun to spring up among their Gentile brothers and sisters.

In those years of Jewish absence, the Gentile Roman Christians got to thinking that maybe this was a sign that the Jews had been rejected as the chosen people, only to be replaced by Gentiles.  “After all,” they thought, “It was the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem that conspired to have Jesus the Messiah wrongly executed; it was Jewish synagogues that instigated so much rivalry, tension, and conflict in those cities where synagogues and churches co-existed; and it was Jewish Christians who were opposing Paul’s teaching and trying to force their culture on Gentile Christians.”  Maybe their number was up and their day was done?  Who needs those weird old traditions and stories anyway?  The Romans no doubt saw themselves as very enlightened and progressive for taking this stance.

This is where Paul comes in.  He wasn’t used to dealing with this kind of problem.  It was usually the Jewish people who were excluding the non-Jewish people, but in this case it was the other way around.  These Roman Christians were basically right in their theology; they agreed with Paul, but they took it too far by excluding their Jewish brothers and sisters instead.  Paul’s dream was for a church where everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, would be welcome as part of the family.  This kind of reverse-discrimination simply wouldn’t do.

So Paul tries to put the brakes on the situation.  He reminds the Romans that it’s not their place to judge others, just as Jewish Christians had no right to force their culture on Gentiles.  Moreover, Paul contended that the conflict between Jews and Christians was not a sign that Jews had been rejected as chosen people.  Paul highlighted the debt that Christianity owed to Judaism for its very existence.  He urged the Romans not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, especially when it came to the Jewish scriptures.  “Whatever was written in former days,” he said, “was written for our instruction.”  In other words, he’s saying that the writings of the Torah aren’t just a bunch of kooky old superstitions that don’t apply to people today.  Those writings are a chronicle of Israel’s ongoing spiritual development and the Christian church, according to Paul, stands in continuity with that movement.  In fact, Paul goes on to quote a verse of the Torah for them from the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 32, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with God’s people.”  Paul is saying that there is place for them in this tradition and there is a place for this tradition in them.  He’s not backpedaling on his stance of inclusion, but he’s sticking to his conviction that the church should be “a house of prayer for all nations,” Jews as well as Gentiles.

Paul goes on to tell them, “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”  And again, in this gloriously climactic verse that sums up his whole argument so beautifully, he says, “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

I love how, in those two verses, Paul connects the bridging of gap between Jews and Gentiles with the life and ministry of Jesus.  By crossing the divide between you, Paul says, you are living in a way that is consistent with what we believe about Jesus.

As you know, we are now in the season of Advent, when we prepare to celebrate what Christians have called the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ.  What this means to Christians is that, in the birth of Jesus, a gulf was crossed, a gap was bridged between time and eternity, between heaven and earth, between divinity and humanity.  And if Christ has crossed so great a divide to be near us, then who are we to refuse to cross those comparatively little divides that run between us and our fellow human beings?  That’s why Paul tells the Romans, “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you.”

The Roman Christians were in the wrong, even though they were on the right side of the issue.  Christianity isn’t about being right, it’s about being in right relationship with God, with your neighbors, with yourself, and with the earth.  It’s those relationships that matter most.

So, in this coming Christmas season, I want to invite you to work on those relationships.  As you gather together with friends, neighbors, and family whose opinions about politics or religion might irk you for one reason or another; as you sit down to dinner next to someone with whom you have been feuding for years; as you listen to those political pundits and op-ed columnists who make you want to throw the newspaper in the trash or chuck your remote at the TV screen, remember that it’s not about being right; it’s about being in right relationship with one another.  That’s the only thing that really matters and it’s the only present that Jesus wants from us this Christmas.

The Cross Was His Throne

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments
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By Mauricio García Vega (Mauricio García Vega) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

“This is the King of the Jews.”

That’s what the sign at the top of the cross read.  The irony was not lost on those who saw it, nor was it lost to history.  Kings were usually crowned while sitting on thrones, not hanging from crosses.  But this Jesus was a different kind of king.  For him, the cross was his throne.

In the ancient world, it would have been unthinkable for a cross to serve as a throne.  Crucifixion represented everything that was the opposite of kingship.  Kings were blessed but crucified people were cursed.  Kings were honored but crucified people were ridiculed.  Kings were dressed in flowing robes but crucified people were stripped naked.  Kings were beautiful but crucifixion was ugly.  Yet, in spite of this, unbelievably, the cross was his throne.

Crucifixion was not just any old punishment.  A criminal was not crucified for stealing bread or cheating on his taxes.  No, crucifixion was a special punishment reserved for a special kind of criminal.  The criminals crucified with Jesus were what we would now call terrorists.  They were insurrectionists, religious fanatics bent on a violent agenda to overthrow the Roman government.  If one wants to get a clear picture of just how radical it was for Jesus to forgive the sins of the criminal next to him, one should imagine that criminal as Osama bin Laden, because that’s who he most closely resembled.  It was rare for crucified people to be buried in that time because most of them were simply left there to rot: their bones picked clean by birds and eventually scattered across the landscape.  Their families were so ashamed that most would never again so much as speak the name of their crucified loved one.  Most crucified people were utterly lost to history, but not King Jesus.  No, for him, the cross was his throne.

When we look back at Jesus’ life as it is presented to us in the New Testament, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that this King of kings would reign from a cross, rather than a throne.  After all, how did he come into the world?  Did he come riding a white horse with banners unfurled and a terrible swift sword at his side?  Did he appear at Caesar’s palace in Rome saying, “Hey Caesar, I just want to let you know that your days are numbered!”?  Was he born into a wealthy family at the center of the halls of power?  No, he was born in a manger, in a stable, outside an overbooked motel, in a teeny little one-horse town, in a forgotten corner, in a troublesome province, in a distant part of the Roman Empire.  His parents were working-class peasants.  Our Christmas pageants and Nativity scenes have made the story of Jesus’ birth into a sweet, warm fairy tale, but the reality would have been quite different.  He was born in a barn.  Have you ever smelled a barn where animals are kept?  It doesn’t smell very good.  His mother placed him in a manger.  A manger is a place where pig slop went.  It probably wasn’t very sanitary either.  In today’s terms, Jesus’ mother would have given birth in a dumpster behind a Motel 6.  And the shepherds who visited him?  They weren’t very pretty either.  Shepherding was not considered an honorable profession in those days.  They would have been treated with the same indifference and contempt that truckers, janitors, garbage men, and McDonald’s drive-thru workers receive today.  So you see, from the very beginning of Jesus’ life, we can pick up hints that he would not be a king like other kings, so that we wouldn’t be surprised to discover in the end that the cross was his throne.

As he set out into his life’s work, Jesus continued to defy expectations for a respectable monarch.  He held court with tax collectors and sinners.  His royal advisors were fishermen, his treasurer was a thief, and his attendants were prostitutes.  They probably couldn’t have a royal cupbearer because the wine would have run out before the cup ever got to the king.  And they almost certainly didn’t have a court jester because, let’s face it: they were all court jesters in some way.  Based on the company he kept, it’s no surprise that the cross was his throne.

The upstanding citizens of the moral majority and the religious right in his day had nothing good to say about Jesus.  They were the self-proclaimed protectors of traditional family values and Jesus was the biggest threat to their agenda.  He called himself a rabbi, but they knew that no real rabbi would build such a rag-tag, permissive, tolerant, and inclusive community.  Jesus questioned their established theological dogmas.  He reinterpreted the Bible in ways that made them uncomfortable.  He seemed to have little respect for their traditions, so they had little respect for him.  Based on his relationship with the religious leaders of his day, we can see why the cross was his throne.

Finally, we come to the end of his life, the moment his followers had been waiting for, when all that he had been building toward came to its fulfillment.  He rode triumphantly into town on a donkey’s back in a staged fulfillment of a prophecy from the book of Zechariah.  He barged into the temple, flipping over tables, and sent the moneychangers packing.  He said he was about to clean up this town and make his Father’s house into a house of prayer for all nations once again.  His followers were understandably stoked at this new development.  They realized that this was the moment when the King of kings and Lord of lords, the long-awaited Messiah, would ascend his throne and establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.  But what they didn’t realize is that the cross was his throne.

On the day of his crucifixion, his royal robes were stained with his own blood, his crown was made of thorns, and the cross was his throne.

Above his head hung that awful, ironic sign, “This is the king of the Jews.”  From the outside, the whole scene seems like a horrible, macabre parody of kingship.  But here’s the thing: he really was a king.  For Christians, he is the King of kings.  In spite of (or perhaps because of) his unconventional life and ignominious death, Jesus has gone on to touch and inspire more people than any other single person in history.  For those of us who are his followers, who pledge our allegiance to his kingdom of heaven on earth, Jesus is our paradigm: his life provides us with the lens through which we interpret our lives.  As we make our way out into the world, we go as Christ’s ambassadors.  The way in which we represent him to the world should be consistent with the way he himself walked through the world.  And remember: the cross was his throne.

The king who reigns from the cross is fundamentally different from the king who reigns from a throne.  The kings of this world, the powers that be, force their will on others through bullets, bombs, bucks, and ballots.  Let me show you what I mean: when you dive around town, do you try to keep pretty close to the speed limit?  Do you do it because you love America?  Probably not.  Most of us drive the speed limit because we don’t want to get a ticket.  That’s the power of fear.  Private companies get you to buy their products by appealing to your sense of greed, lust, or vanity.  They promise you a better, longer, happier life, but they don’t really care about you.  They just want your money and they will tell you anything you want to hear in order to get it.  That’s advertising.  That’s the power of manipulation.  But Jesus is different.  He doesn’t depend on the power of fear or manipulation as his weapons because the cross is his throne.

Jesus rules the world from within through the power of love.  Love is amazing.  People will do things for the sake of love that they could never be forced into by law or the barrel of a gun.  Love gets new parents out of bed in the middle of the night for 3am feedings.  Love leads partners and spouses to sacrifice time, money, and energy for the sake of the relationship.  Love led Rev. Frank Schafer, a Methodist minister, to put his ordination credentials on the line when he officiated at his son’s wedding to another man, a crime for which he was tried and convicted by the United Methodist Church, just this past week.  Love led Mother Teresa to the streets of Calcutta to care for orphans.  Love led Rosa Parks to defy a racist law on a bus one evening in 1955.  Love led Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Oscar Romero to speak out against injustice at the cost of their own lives.  Love led King Jesus to the cross, and the cross was his throne.

The people all around Jesus at Calvary kept shouting, “Save yourself!  Save yourself!” but Jesus chose to save others instead.  Jesus could have ordered his followers to rise up and kill, but Jesus chose to die instead.  That’s the power of love.  It was love, not nails, that kept Jesus on the cross.  And that’s why the cross, which once signified shame and death, has become for us the symbol of faith, hope, and undying love.  From the cross, the Lord Jesus Christ reigns in our hearts by the power of love and so it is that the cross is his throne.

(Reblog) God Loves Chutzpah

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Jesus doesn’t need any more admirers — he needs disciples willing to get into some Gospel trouble on God’s behalf.”

Sermon by the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson at All Saints Church, Pasadena
Celebration of Ministries Sunday, September 22, 2013.
Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13.

For more about the work and witness of All Saints Church visit our website: http://www.allsaints-pas.org | Follow us on twitter @ASCpas

Crossing Chasms

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment
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‘The Poor Man Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Door’ by J.J. Tissot (circa 1890)

 

I’d like to say a few words this morning on the subject of chasms.

More specifically, I’d like to talk about crossing chasms.

People seem to have a kind of fascination with the crossing of chasms.  The wider, the better.  I saw this one guy on TV last year who walked on a tightrope across Niagara Falls.  He was like a slow-motion Evel Knievel.  People came out in droves to see him.  Personally, I think people like to put themselves in positions where they can be amazed at what the human mind and body can be capable of when they are put to good use.  In a physical sense, people like this guy broaden the horizon of what is possible for the rest of us.

Now, that’s not to say that we should all be trying circus tricks, but we like to know that it can be done, that it’s possible: because it’s that possibility that gives us hope.  I might never walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, but seeing somebody do it makes me wonder what I might be capable of in my life that I haven’t yet tried.

The crossing of chasms gives us hope for what might be possible.

I picked the subject of chasms because they factor rather highly in this morning’s reading from the gospel of Luke.  The story is well known.  It was a parable told by Jesus about an unnamed rich man and a poor man named Lazarus.  Jesus tells us that the rich man “dressed in purple and fine linen and… feasted sumptuously every day.”  Meanwhile, the poor man Lazarus was “covered with sores” and “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.”

Jesus said that Lazarus’ usual panhandling spot was right by this rich man’s front door, meaning that the rich man had to walk by him every single day on his way to work (or whatever it is that people of his stature do with their time).  Every day, he would walk by and see this man, this fellow child of God, living (not really), more like existing day to day in pain and poverty.  Lazarus was within reach and this rich man certainly had the means to make a difference, but he did nothing.

Later on, after the two men died, Jesus imagines Lazarus being “carried away by the angels to be with Abraham” while the rich man is being tormented in Hades, the mythical realm of the dead in Greek culture.  And then Jesus imagines a conversation taking place, not between the rich man and Lazarus, but between the rich man and Abraham, one of the founding fathers of the Jewish people.

The rich man cries out for help, but Abraham says, “No, I can’t help you.”  He says, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

I don’t think Jesus, in this story, is trying to scare us with threats of hellfire and damnation.  I think he’s trying to get our attention and draw it toward a reality that we all experience every day in this life.  The reality I’m speaking of is the chasm.

In the story, there is a chasm between the rich man and Lazarus.  Taken metaphorically, I believe this chasm was there between them while they were still alive.  The rich man walked by Lazarus every day, but he never looked at him, never reached out to him, and never really got close to him.  They were so separated (i.e. segregated) from one another so efficiently that there might as well have been a physical chasm between them.

When I look around this world we live in, I see chasms all around us.

I see chasms when I hear people say, “I don’t want my tax dollars going to pay for these poor people to get a free ride through life.”  People who talk like that don’t know what it’s like to wonder where their next meal is coming from, how they’re going to make rent this month, how they’re going to get to their appointment, or how they’re going to pay for their medication.  If they did, they might have more compassion for those who struggle economically.

I see chasms between nations when our country has a conflict with Syria or North Korea and somebody says, “Let’s just drop some bombs on ‘em.  That’ll fix it!”  That’s a chasm, right there.  How about when people in one country are dying young from starvation while people in another country are dying young from obesity?  That’s another chasm. 

What kinds chasms do you see in this world?

I see chasms between black and white, men and women, gay and straight, Christians and Muslims, just to name a few.

Sometimes, I see chasms running through the middle of families: partners or spouses sitting next to each other in a pew who haven’t kissed or barely spoken to each other all week, parents sitting down to dinner and looking across the table at that empty chair where someone should be sitting, but she’s not because somebody can’t find the strength to say, “I’m sorry” or “I forgive you.”

These are the chasms we live with.  Sometimes, they run between us so effectively that we are left feeling all alone, stranded on our own little island, out of reach and out of touch with everyone and everything.  As Abraham said to the rich man, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”

People are cut off (i.e. isolated) by the chasms (i.e. the broken relationships) that run between them.  What Jesus is trying to tell us in this parable is that we, as his followers, are called by God to use the time we are given on this earth to cross those chasms in whatever way we are able.

We are called to this because that’s exactly what God does.  The God of Love is a crosser of chasms.  Christians believe that God, in Christ, has crossed the great chasm between heaven and earth, between sin and forgiveness, between divinity and humanity.  This crossing is a grace, a gift given freely to all.  And if God has crossed such a great chasm to be near us, then who are we to refuse to cross the relatively small chasms that run between us?  To refuse to cross these little chasms is to deny who God is and what God has done for us in Christ.  We become like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, who refused to cross the chasm between Lazarus and himself.  And, in doing so, he cut himself off, not just from Lazarus, but also from Abraham.  Abraham: who symbolically embodied the essence of Jewish identity.  Abraham: the Exalted Ancestor.  Abraham: the friend of God.  Abraham: the father of the covenant.  In turning his back on Lazarus, the rich man turned his back on what it means to be Jewish.  He was cut off from the meaning of life.  He cut himself off from God.  He was in hell.

Hell, I believe, is not a place where an angry God sends people after they die.  Hell is a place that we make for ourselves in this life when we refuse to cross the chasms that run between us.  But the good news is that the God of Love is a crosser of chasms, even the chasm between heaven and hell.  Christians believe, as it says in the Apostles’ Creed, that Christ “descended into hell,” which is to say that God meets us where we are (even in hell).  In the Bible, Psalm 139 says (in the King James Version), “if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.”  Even in hell, God meets us.

Not only that, God refuses to let us stay in hell.  Christ said he came to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.  God in Christ is invading the hell we have made for ourselves on this planet and setting up a new regime.  God is here.  The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

And we are invited to be part of it.  You and I are God’s secret agents: infiltrating enemy territory, crossing impassable chasms by night, and sabotaging the dominion of hell in order to make way for the reign of heaven.  Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to make peace with your enemies, to welcome the outcast, to forgive the sinner, to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit those in prison, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to cross the chasms that run between us. 

This is a lifelong assignment.  There can be no retreat, no resignation.  I promise you that this world, all the powers of hell, and even the lesser impulses of your nature will fight against you in this, but we shall overcome. 

I believe that we shall overcome because our commander-in-chief, who started this operation (heaven’s invasion of earth), has promised to remain with us and see it through to its end, when: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” 

This is our calling, our destiny, and our hope.  I want you to go out from this church today and take part in it, in whatever way you are able.  And remember that I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Be blessed and be a blessing.

(Reblog) Syria: To Bomb or Not to Bomb

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Great words from a great man.

Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, Senior Minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma is absolutely my favorite preacher in the world.  His words on the situation in Syria are clear, direct, and enlightened.  I was just telling my wife today that I need to add a third item to my “restore faith in humanity” checklist.

1.  Watching Star Trek

2.  Listening to U2

and the new addition:

3.  Listening to Marlin Lavanhar preach

Possessed(?)

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
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Image by Florian Siebeck. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

As many of you already know, in the years immediately following my graduation from seminary, I worked as a counselor at the Addictions Crisis Center, which is part of the Rescue Mission of Utica.  This is a great program.  They serve as the “first line of defense” that people come to when they’re beginning their recovery from dependence on drugs or alcohol.  They offer food, shelter, medical care, treatment, and counseling to folks in the earliest stages of recovery.  Some of them would even show up on our doorstep still under the influence of whatever substance they had been using.  As one friend of mine put it, “Basically, [we] meet people on the worst day of their lives.”

One of the most interesting (and often frustrating) things about people in those first few days away from their substance of choice is their adamant (and sometimes violent) resistance to the treatment, which was usually their last, best hope for healing and recovery.  They would kick, scream, and test every rule and boundary of our program.  Their substance of choice had such a hold on them that they would fight the treatment process, even after they realized they had a problem and voluntarily checked themselves in to our facility. 

Working with them for two years gave me a new appreciation for the meaning of the term possessed.  My clients’ addictions, their compulsive, uncontrollable desire for drugs or alcohol had taken over their rational faculties so thoroughly that they perceived our attempts to heal them as an attack.  The addiction owned them in a manner of speaking and led many of them to do all kinds of destructive things to themselves and others.  Most people in our facility had sacrificed money, friends, jobs, houses, and relationships to appease the false gods of their addictions.  There are many things worth sacrificing for in this world, but I think we can all agree that recreational substances are not among them.

A lot of people in the general public, people who don’t struggle with addictions, wonder why these folks can’t just stop what they’re doing and make better choices.  What most people don’t understand is that it’s not a moral issue.  Addiction is not a choice; it is a disease.  The electro-chemical processes in the brain have literally been hot-wired and hijacked.  And just like an airplane hijacked by terrorists: it’s not going where the pilot (the rational, moral part of the brain) wants it to go.  They are not in control.  They are possessed and they need help.

This, in a metaphorical sense, is what I see going on in today’s New Testament reading.  There is no mention in the text of any addictive, mind-altering substances being used.  All we know about the Gerasene man that Jesus encounters is that he “had a demon”.

In pre-modern times, all kinds of things were blamed on the activity of demons (e.g. seizures, mental illness, socially unacceptable behavior, bad luck, other religions, etc.).  They didn’t have the kind of knowledge or diagnostic equipment we have today.  For example, we now know that a person with schizophrenia doesn’t need an exorcism from demons, she needs anti-psychotic medication in order to make the voices in her head go away.  That’s not to say that there isn’t some kind of spiritual element to people’s problems, but I think we have developed a more informed, nuanced, and holistic way of looking at things than our ancestors had.

When people come to me as a pastor, asking for exorcisms (and they do, believe it or not), my first question for them is always, “Have you seen your doctor?”  I often end up making referrals, doing short-term pastoral care, praying with, and visiting these people in distress.  I find that a combination of medication, counseling, and prayer tends to resolve the vast majority of cases where exorcism was initially requested.

I don’t tend to think of demons as beings or entities in their own right.  The image of monsters with horns and bat-wings that take over your mind is the stuff of horror movies.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the reality of the demonic.  I believe I encountered a kind of demonic possession every day when I was a substance abuse counselor.  The people I worked with were possessed by their compulsive need for a particular substance.  The things they did as a result of that compulsion were truly evil, you might even say demonic:  They lied, stole, neglected and abused children, some of them had even hurt or killed others.  Those who found recovery from their addictions often had to own up to and make amends for the horrible things they had done under the influence.

And the amazing thing is that, in spite of all this harm to self and others, they continue to refuse to let go of their addiction.  They cling to their substance of choice as if it were more precious than air.  Many of them would refuse treatment and walk out of our program.  The average recovering addict has to go through rehab four or five times before they finally get clean and sober for good.  Only about one out of every ten clients finds recovery.  The rest go back out, pick back up, and continue to use or drink, despite the consequences.  That’s what I call possessed.

The Gerasene man in today’s gospel reading was similarly resistant to Jesus’ efforts to heal him.  When Jesus commands the demonic spirits to leave the man alone, the man cries, “I beg you, do not torment me”.  Torment him?  Didn’t this guy realize that Jesus was trying to help him?  It was the demons that were tormenting him!  But then again, as we’ve already seen today: people sometimes prefer an old, familiar slavery to a new, unknown liberation.  Getting over that hump is often half the battle of recovery.

The good news is that this doesn’t seem to present a problem for Jesus.  He just keeps at it with this possessed man, this hopeless case, until he has sufficiently separated the person from the problem.  That’s a key difference between Jesus and the people of the Gerasene region.  They just tried to lock him up and forget about him, but Jesus went out to see and to save the man behind the madness.  I think our task, as followers of Jesus in the present-day, is to do the same with those outcasts in our society, those people our culture of achievement has given up on. 

Where God is concerned, there is no such thing as a hopeless case.

Now, it would be easy enough to leave things at that: the addict finds recovery, Jesus sweeps in and rescues the man from the demons, and everybody lives happily ever after.  But life is more complicated than that.

It would be so easy for us to sit here in our (semi)comfortable pews on Sunday and say prayers for those poor addicts down in Utica, never once taking the time to look hard at our own lives.  We tend to take notice of people addicted to drugs and alcohol because (A) those addictions are highly destructive and (B) they’re socially unacceptable.  But there are many other kinds of addictions out there as well, many of which don’t involve recreational chemicals of any kind.  In recent years, we’ve become more aware of behavioral addictions to things like sex, work, food, exercise, shopping, and gambling.  Scientific studies have shown that our brains can’t tell the chemical difference between these behaviors and drugs.  Either way, it’s a massive hit from a neurotransmitter chemical called dopamine that our brains get used to having and eventually come to depend on in order to feel normal.  The best single book I’ve ever read on this topic is Addiction and Grace by Gerald May.  I highly recommend reading it if you want to learn more about addiction from psychological, medical, and spiritual perspectives.

In addition to the aforementioned behaviors, I would go on to say that anything can be an addiction, depending on the place it holds in our lives.  Even good and healthy things like family, relationships, church, religion, country, and school can be addictive.  Whenever we let just one thing take over our whole field of consciousness for extended periods of time, we are in danger of becoming addicted or possessed in the way we’re using that language today.  Spiritually speaking, we are committing the sin of idolatry: worshiping false gods, serving a part of reality at the expense of the whole, or even treating a part as if it were the whole.  We can even be addicted to (possessed by) a certain way of thinking or way of doing things.  This last one especially applies to groups of people as much as individuals.

I find it interesting that, in today’s gospel reading, the demons themselves ask Jesus to let them stay in the area.  They ask to be sent into a herd of pigs that immediately goes berserk and destroys itself.  After that, the people of the Gerasene community approach Jesus and ask him to leave.  Why?  Because, according to the text of Luke’s gospel, “they were seized with a great fear.”

Isn’t that interesting?  When Jesus first tried to help the possessed man, the man cried out in terror, “I beg you, do not torment me”.  He was afraid of the very person who had come to help him.  Now, at the end of the story, that man is “clothed and in his right mind” while the rest of the so-called “normal” people in his community are suddenly terrified of Jesus the healer.

This is another aspect of this story that bears a striking and frankly eerie resemblance to my experience of working with people who have addictions.  More often than not, so often in fact that it became a predictable pattern, my clients would return home after completing treatment to discover that their families no longer know how to relate to them.  In the years while my clients were active in their addictions, their families adapted in order to learn how to function in a dysfunctional environment.  They were used to operating under the assumption that one member of the family would always be drunk, high, or absent.  This is what experts mean by the term co-dependency: one person in the family unit is chemically or behaviorally dependent while all the others are “dependent with” that person or “co-dependent”.  When the dependent person comes home clean and sober, ready to rejoin the family system, the family suddenly has to rethink their old patterns for relating to each other and learn new ones.  This process is difficult and scary because they think they have to maintain the old balance and fulfill their old roles in the dysfunctional family system in order to survive.  It’s not at all uncommon for families to go through stress or even break up when someone is in the early stages of recovery.

The solution is for family members to participate actively in their own recovery process alongside their loved one who is getting clean and sober.  Addiction is a family problem that requires a family solution.  That’s why support groups like Al-Anon exist: to help the co-dependents of alcoholic people with their own recovery

And the same goes for the rest of us in the broader community.  Participating in the work of building God’s kingdom on earth is not just about helping those poor, unfortunate souls who struggle with addiction.  It’s about facing our own addictions and co-dependencies (even the socially acceptable ones) so that Jesus can liberate us from our own demons and bring healing and wholeness to the entire community.

If we are open to that process taking place in us, if we can trust that Christ is here to help us and not to harm us (even when his healing presence feels scary and unfamiliar), then we can say that we are walking the path of faith toward the promised land of God’s kingdom of heaven on earth.

She Has A Name

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized3 Comments
Image
JESUS MAFA. Jesus absolves the pentitent sinner, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48384 [retrieved June 16, 2013].

When she walked into the party, they were sizing her up like a piece of meat.  She was that girl: the one with a reputation. 

They had all kinds of ideas about her.  Who knows if any of the rumors were actually true?  It didn’t matter.  Somebody had to occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder and it might as well be her.

Those religious folks, the upstanding citizens, made a good show of cutting her down in public.  They said people like her were the problem with society these days: no morals and values, no respect for the law. 

They said this world would be a better place without people like her.  But secretly, she knew: they needed people like her to exist.  Without the scumbags and lowlifes, who would they have to look down upon?  Their self-righteousness was built on appearances and comparisons.  They only seemed high and holy next to people like her because they did a better job of hiding their faults.  They put on a fancier show, that was all.

The problem was that everyone else in town accepted the reality of their show.  Heck, she almost accepted it herself.  That’s the problem with labels: when you hear them enough, you eventually start to believe them yourself.

Maybe I am worthless, she thought.  Maybe no one will ever love me.  Maybe this world would be better off without me in it.

That’s a pretty thick mental fog to get lost in.  It can lead to some pretty severe and irreversible rash decisions.  For all we know, she might have been on the verge of one such decision herself.

But then she met Jesus.

No, I don’t mean to say that she found religion, saw the light, or got born again.  That’s too easy.  Too cut and dry.  Besides, those folks in the “upright citizens’ brigade” love that stuff.  They eat it up like candy: the wayward sinner reforms her ways and comes back home where she belongs.  Classic redemption story.  Good propaganda.  It reinforces their assumptions about the world and makes them look like loving and gracious heroes to welcome someone so despicable as her.

But this Jesus guy was different.

They didn’t seem to like him very much either.  At first, he seemed like one of them: he was a religious teacher, people called him Rabbi, and he had a lot to say about God.  He knew the Bible pretty well too.  He was always quoting from it, but every time he did, all the religious folks in the crowd would get real red in the face and start clenching their jaws, like he had just said something to annoy them.  Didn’t they love that stuff?  Wasn’t the Bible kind of their “thing” after all?  Then why would they get so mad when Jesus recited parts of it in their presence?  I guess they didn’t like what he had to say about it.

Maybe he was making them uncomfortable.  After all, he was a rabbi, but he didn’t act like other rabbis.  For one thing, he hardly ever went to synagogue.  Most of the time, he was hanging out in the streets with folks who wouldn’t be caught dead in a synagogue on the Sabbath… people like her.

Nobody knows how it happened.  They just seemed to come from everywhere.  Jesus said it was God drawing them, but that didn’t even make any sense.  What would God have to do with people like them?  Still, something inside of her made her stick around on that first day.  She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was.  That same feeling kept her coming back around for as long as he was in town.

The things he had to say made sense to her.  He certainly knew the Bible but he didn’t throw it in her face.  He knew all about the Temple and its elaborate rituals, but he didn’t seem to care much about it.  He kept saying the day would come when “not one stone would be left on top of another” in that place.  He seemed pretty irreligious for a religious teacher.

He said, “The place where God lives is within you and around you.”  He spoke from the heart and didn’t bother with all of that fancy philosophy and theology that the other rabbis used.  When people asked Jesus about God, he usually pointed to whatever happened to be in his line of sight at the time:

“Do you see that woman baking bread?  That’s what God is like.  Do you see those crops growing in that field over there?  God is like that.  Do you see that farmer sowing seed, that woman sweeping out her house, or those merchants in the market?  God is like all of those.”

He even saw signs of God’s presence in the lilies of the field and the sparrows of the air.  That didn’t sound like any rabbi she had ever heard before.  What’s even weirder is that he didn’t seem to be bothered by all the freaks and misfits who kept gravitating toward him.  In fact, whenever zealous devotees came up to pledge their allegiance to him, Jesus kept turning them back to those very same freaks and misfits.  “These people are my family,” he would say, “Whatever you do for them, you do for me.”

Family? Did he mean her?  Nobody had ever talked to her like that before.  People called her a lot of things, but never “family.”  She hadn’t even spoken to her own family in years…

Why would anyone want her of all people in his family?

All the same, she kept coming back, drawn by that inexplicable something.  Who knows?  Maybe Jesus was right and it really was God that was drawing her?

She loved listening to him.  She loved the way he stuck it to those religious hypocrites, using their own Bibles against them.  She loved his stories and the way he looked at the world: finding God everywhere in it.  But most of all, she loved the way he looked at her.

Men often looked at her, but not like that.  They usually looked at her with some perverted combination of disgust and desire.  Regardless of whether or not the rumors about her were true (some were and some weren’t), they believed them all and treated her accordingly.  But Jesus called her family.  He saw what she was capable of, not just what she was (or what she represented to everyone else).  When he taught, his eyes would sometimes momentarily lock with hers, as if he was speaking directly to her.  She would swell with pride and sit up a little straighter, imagining that he really was talking to her. 

He wasn’t of course.  She was just a woman, and a bad one at that.  Women weren’t allowed to study under rabbis in that day.  Even socially respectable women would only be allowed to sit in and listen to his lectures.  But then why did he keep looking at her?  Why did his words make so much sense?  She was getting it!  Could it be possible that maybe (just maybe) he really was speaking to her?  I don’t know… but she kept coming back.

And something was happening inside of her.  She was looking at the world in a whole new way.  It was as if she had been blind all along and was really starting to see things clearly for the first time ever.  It was almost as if she had been some lame beggar by the roadside and Jesus was taking her hand, lifting her up onto her own two feet, and teaching her how to walk her own path.  For the first time in a long time, she felt like a person again, a real human being.  It felt like those cold, numb, dead spaces inside of her were coming alive again when she was around Jesus.  Who knew that was even possible?

Earlier that afternoon, she was hanging around town as usual and she heard some folks talking.  They said Jesus would be moving on tomorrow, headed to another town.  She felt her stomach jump with fright.  Leaving?  He was leaving?  To where?  Would he be back?  Was this the last chance she would ever have to see him and feel that amazing feeling?

She had lost track of time those last few days.  They seemed like an eternity to her.  She was so caught up in everything he was saying, everything that was going on, it didn’t occur to her that Jesus wouldn’t be staying there forever.  What was she supposed to do?

Something inside her heart told her she should do something, but she didn’t know what.  Shouldn’t there be some kind of religious ritual for thanking or blessing a rabbi who was leaving?  It seemed like there should be.  After all, those religious folks had prayers, and blessings, and rituals for just about every other occasion, why not this one?  But what would it be?  She wished there was someone she could ask, but certainly no other rabbi would ever give her the time of day, much less let her ask a question.  Besides, most of those blessings and rituals could only be performed by men.  She would only get to sit out and watch, if she was lucky.

But that didn’t sit right with her.  That didn’t do justice to the kind of person Jesus was.  She might not know the correct thing to do, but she had to do something.  It was getting late.  The sun was almost down.  There wasn’t time to plan anything elaborate.  Besides, she heard that Jesus already had plans.  He was invited to dinner at some big shot Pharisee’s house.  They would have all kinds of fancy food and entertainment there.  Nothing she could do would measure up to that.  They would never even let her in the door, anyway.  It was a hopeless cause… unless…

Nah, that’s too crazy… it would never work… but then again…

She had this jar.  It had been with her a long time.  Nobody knows how she got it.  It was the only thing she had that was worth anything.  It was filled with a very rare and expensive perfume, worth about as much as a full year’s salary for a working man.  Once upon a time, that jar of perfume was worth more than her life, but not anymore.  Jesus had showed her that she was worth so much more than that.  The dignity she had discovered through him made that jar seem cheap and worthless by comparison.

It was right then that she knew what she had to do.  Maybe she didn’t know the proper ritual for blessing a rabbi, but she would make one up to demonstrate to Jesus and everyone else what it was that he meant to her.

She went home, grabbed that jar, and made a bee-line for the house where Jesus was having dinner.  Her heart was pounding and her adrenaline was pumping as she got closer.  Right up to the front door she walked.  And right through.  The bouncer happened to look the other way for a second and so he didn’t notice her until she was already inside.  He shouted and tried to grab her, but it was too late.  She had already made it to the place where Jesus was sitting: reclining actually, with his feet stretched out behind him.

She looked down at those feet.  Just like everyone else’s, they were disgusting.  Without paved roads or organized sanitation, city streets in the ancient world were cesspools of filth.  A person’s feet would get caked with mud and excrement just from walking around.  Nobody liked to touch feet or wash them.  It was the worst job, even for a slave.  Feet were gross.

The woman looked down at Jesus’ feet.  Then she looked back at the jar in her hand.  After pausing for a second, she broke the jar open and dumped its precious contents onto Jesus’ feet.  The pungent smell of lavender filled the room.  She had never opened the jar before.  She always wondered what its contents might smell like.  Now she knew.  It was beautiful.  It reminded her of the way that Jesus made her feel inside.  Through him, she had come to be aware of her own inner beauty for the first time ever.  She was like that jar of perfume: broken open, poured out, precious, and beautiful.

As the weight of this truth hit home for her, she began to cry for joy.  Her tears dripped down off her cheeks, chin, and nose and onto Jesus’ feet.  Looking down, she realized the tears mixed with the jar’s contents were washing away the layer of filth left from the long, hard road.  She could see his beautiful, soft, brown skin showing through.  Bending down even further, she took each foot in her hands, undid her long, dark hair, and used it like a towel to wipe away those last remnants of slime, continuing to weep as she did it.  This felt right.  It was all she had: the only thing she could think of to do.

The host of the party was, predictably, indignant.  He pulled out all those nasty names and labels that people called her.  But somehow, those names didn’t phase her as she ran her fingers over Jesus’ smooth, clean, sweet-smelling feet.  In that moment, she was prepared to let him talk and say whatever he wanted, but Jesus wasn’t.  Jesus interrupted the Pharisee’s tirade with a single word: Simon.  That was his name, the Pharisee that is.  Jesus called him by name, not by his status or position.  “Simon,” he said, “I have something to say to you.”

You better believe that shut him up quick.  Jesus then told another story about debts being forgiven.  “Do you see this woman?”  Obviously, Simon didn’t.  All Simon saw was another sinner, another woman who didn’t know her place, another scumbag lowlife.  Simon didn’t really see her but Jesus saw her, so he asked Simon, “Do you see this woman?  I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.”  Did she just hear him right?  Did he just say forgiven?

Seeing the shock and confusion on her face, he said it again just to drive the point home.  He spoke her name… she didn’t even realize that he knew her name, but he called her by it.  She looked up and their eyes met again.  He repeated, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Forgiven.  She never thought she would hear that word spoken to her, but somehow she knew he was right.  That was what she had been feeling all along.  Forgiven.  Restored.  The shame and stigma washed away.

And Jesus wasn’t just making it happen for the first time either.  He was announcing a reality that had already come true.  She was already loved, forgiven, and clean.  Jesus’ words were only sealing the deal and making it real to her.  She was a person with a name and dignity, no matter how hard society might try to take that away from her.

Almost as soon as Jesus had said this, the room erupted into theological debate over who has the authority to announce such forgiveness.  The religious machinery was hard at work, already pumping out Bible verses and quoting rabbinical commentaries on the matter.

Jesus just rolled his eyes, shook his head, and looked back at her smiling.  And then, leaning down to whisper in her ear while the debate raged on around them, Jesus spoke her name again and said, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

This woman, whose name has been lost to history but was known to Jesus, was not the only one who experienced such wholeness at the feet of Jesus.  There were other women among his disciples as well.  We read about some of them this morning: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna.  They were an integral part of his ministry, contributing a vital part.  There were men too, of course.

And the amazing thing is that all of them together… all of us… from first century Palestine to twenty-first century New York, are still hearing in our hearts and proclaiming with our lives that same message of forgiveness that continues to resound through the halls of history:

“I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Be blessed and be a blessing!

Beginner’s Mind

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

This past week, it was my honor to offer the blessing at the Utica Observer-Dispatch’s Teen All-Stars Breakfast.  Distinguished high school seniors from our area were awarded for their good deeds, accomplishments, and acts of service to the community.  I was invited to participate in this event by Dave Dudajek, who I know through his daughter, Jaime Burgdoff (one of our congregants here in Boonville).

It was amazing to hear about these local teenagers and everything they’ve managed to do in high school.  My memories of high school mostly involve staying up late, watching B movies, and driving around town with friends when we had nothing better to do.  But these folks are already making an impact on their world in the name of what they believe is right.

At this event, Donna Donovan (president and publisher of the OD) gave an address where she talked about these students’ upcoming freshman year at college.  They would be challenged and inspired to grow in new directions and their horizons would be expanded far beyond what they could possibly imagine at this point.  She also told them that this would only be first of several “freshman years” they would experience throughout the rest of their lives.  Each new experience, journey, accomplishment, and challenge will lead them into yet another experience of being a wide-eyed and wet-behind-the-ears “freshman” who is just now figuring out who they are and what life is all about.

In Zen Buddhism, this is called “Beginner’s Mind”.  A person has Beginner’s Mind when she or he is absolutely open to each new moment, each new experience in life.  All of life, the whole universe even, becomes a teacher to a person who has Beginner’s Mind.  Each and every moment is the moment when Enlightenment might happen.

I think this is what Jesus meant when he used the word “repent”.  We associate that term with guilt and sorrow for one’s sins, but in the original Greek the word “repent” is metanoia (“change the way you think”).  When he says “Repent”, Jesus is inviting us to think differently and look at the world through a different set of eyes, open to what the Spirit of God might be saying and doing in any particular moment.  The kind of awareness and openness that metanoia entails corresponds quite closely with the Zen concept of Beginner’s Mind.

In today’s reading from the gospel of Luke, we can see Jesus issuing just such a call to repentance (metanoia, Beginner’s Mind) even though he never actually uses that particular term.

The story opens with a rare and unlikely character: a Roman Centurion.  He was a soldier in a hostile, occupying army.  Imagine that, instead of first century Judea, this story was taking place in Paris, France in 1941.  In that setting, this Roman Centurion would have been a Nazi Commander talking to a local priest.  The hostilities between nations would have created a barrier between these people that was almost impossible to overcome.  After that, there are also the barriers of race and religion.  These invading European pagans would have been offensive in the extreme to Jewish inhabitants of Judea.  The people of Judea, in turn, would have seemed backward and barbaric to the Roman Centurion, who was trained to think of himself as a great hero of the Empire: making the world safe for Roman order and peace.  There is no reason on earth why this Roman Centurion and these religious Jews should have any amicable contact whatsoever.

However, something seems to have already happened before Jesus ever set foot on the scene.  We learn that there is a private relationship between this Centurion and the Jews.  Seemingly insurmountable obstacles and prejudices had already been conquered.  The Centurion had become a benefactor of the Jewish people, even laying down the money to sponsor the building of their synagogue.  The Jewish leaders, in turn, had come to respect this one Centurion in spite of his being a Roman soldier.

The Jewish leaders probably thought of themselves as quite liberal and progressive for having made such a stretch in their worldview to include him.  When Jesus was passing through and the Centurion sent a request to him through the leaders, they took advantage of the opportunity to highlight what a good relationship had developed.  As Jesus was hearing the request, the leaders interjected, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.”

What a lovely moment of intercultural understanding and the power of respect to overcome differences in even the most hostile circumstances!  Too bad Jesus came along and felt the need to ruin it.

Jesus, you see, has this strange knack for cutting to the heart of a matter, turning things around, and getting you to see the world from an upside-down, inside-out perspective.  In this case, he does just that by answering the religious leaders’ inclusive magnanimity with a snide remark: “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

Did you get that?  Jesus said, “not even in Israel”.  Who are the Israelites?  They are!  Jesus is saying that this pagan foreigner actually has more faith than the religious leaders of his own people!  What would that be like in today’s terms?  Imagine if the President of the United States pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor on an Al Qaeda terrorist, saying that this soldier represented the very best in America.  People would be outraged!  They would take to the streets in protest!  They would call for the President to be impeached and tried for treason!  Well, that’s the same level of outrage that the Jewish elders would have felt when Jesus said that a Roman Centurion had more faith than any of them.  How dare he?!  Just who does this Jesus guy think he is, anyway?!

Well, here’s what Jesus is doing in this situation: he’s creating an opportunity for his compatriots to adopt a Beginner’s Mind.  He’s dropping a truth bomb on them so huge that it will hopefully shock them out of their preconceived notions about reality.  If they can stay with him in this moment and be open to what he is saying, they’ll find themselves looking at the world in a whole new way.

Up until now, they’ve had a very ego-centric view of themselves and their role as “God’s chosen people.”  To them, being “chosen” meant that they were endowed with a certain kind of special status that made them inherently superior to every other race, culture, and religion on the planet.  So, from their perspective, they really were being quite kind and generous in their endorsement of this Centurion as “worthy” to receive the benefits of Jesus’ healing ministry.

But Jesus saw right through their generosity and exposed it for what it really was: Arrogance.  Implicit in their charitable endorsement of the Centurion was the presumption that they themselves occupied the center stage in God’s unfolding drama in the world.  Sure, they were presenting a kinder, gentler form of religion in that moment, but it was still a very self-centered vision (no matter how open or welcoming it might appear to be). 

In reality, it’s not up to them to decide who is worthy or unworthy.  In reality, being “God’s chosen people” has less to do with status and more to do with being part of what God is doing in the world.  In reality, God’s work in the world extends far beyond the borders of any one nation, religion, race, or culture.

By highlighting the superior faith of the Roman Centurion, Jesus is drawing our attention to that reality.  Jesus is inviting us to repent in that metanoia sense of the term, to think outside the box, to cultivate a Beginner’s Mind, an open heart, and an expanded consciousness.  Like Donna Donovan said to the youth at the Teen All Stars Breakfast, it’s about engaging in a lifelong series of “freshman years” that challenge us and invite us to an ever greater sense of openness to life’s opportunities.

Here in the church, even when we’re being quite open, accepting, and progressive, it’s still quite easy to fall back into that ego-centric sense of superiority about being “God’s chosen people”.  It’s easy to think that it’s all about us and our church.  What Jesus wants to remind us of today is that it isn’t.  We are part of what God is doing in the world.  God’s mission includes us, but it’s also bigger than us, and it’s certainly not about us.

In order to participate in God’s larger mission, we have to move beyond the seductive idea of being a welcoming or even a growing church.  We have to look for a faith that’s greater than our own and ask ourselves, “What is God doing in the world at large and how can we be a part of it?”  And then our next task is to commit all of our resources to pursuing those ends, even if it costs us our very lives.

Where do you see God at work in the world at large?  Who are the “Roman Centurions” in your life, outsiders whose faith and participation in God’s mission might go unrecognized by established religious authorities?  How is God calling you to partner with these religious outsiders and participate in God’s larger mission?

These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves as a church and as individual Christians.  This is the mentality, the Beginner’s Mind, that we need to cultivate day by day so that we can be more open to what God is doing and more faithful followers of Jesus, whose great big love honors and embraces the faith of all people: Israelites, Centurions, and even Presbyterians.

God is a Relationship

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments
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Dorothy Day. Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

I hear a lot of folks talking lately about how the world isn’t what it used to be.  They’re worried about the decline of human society, the decay of public morals and values, and the emptying of mainline Protestant churches.  For many of these folks, these three series of events are related.  They say, “People just aren’t coming to church anymore, so society is going to pieces.”

A lot of people wonder why this is the case.  There are a lot of theories.  Some say it’s because of the cultural changes that happened during the 60s.  Some say that our country’s tolerance of religious diversity has left people in a state of moral and spiritual confusion.  Others say that our society’s addiction to busy-ness and constant entertainment has distracted people to the point where they just don’t even have time to think about church anymore.

Personally, I think some of these theories have valid points.  And I think the whole truth about the matter is probably bigger and more complex than any single theory can fully explain.  But there’s one theory that stands out to me more than the rest, if only because it’s the one I hear most often from people who don’t come to church.  And here it is (the number one reason most people give for not coming to church): “It’s hypocrisy of Christians who claim to believe that God is love but do not extend that love to other people.”

Isn’t that interesting?  When you actually go and ask people why they don’t come to church, they tell you: it’s not because of diversity, and it’s not because they’re too busy, and it’s not because of the 60s.  It’s because of Christians.  The author Brennan Manning once said, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, and then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle.  That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

As Christians, it seems that we don’t take our theology seriously enough.  We think we can love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength without loving our neighbors as ourselves, but Jesus calls FOUL on that play.  He says you can’t have one without the other.  If you try to separate them, you end up with something other than the God revealed in Jesus.

Central to our Christian faith is the belief that God is love.  Did you get that?  God is love.  Most people breeze right by it without thinking and end up with the wrong idea about who God is and how God works in the world.  What they tend to hear is “God is loving” (i.e. “God is basically a nice person”).  In other words, they think that the Old Man in the Sky (who made the world and controls everything that happens) is a nice guy.  But that’s not what the text says.  The text is taken from 1 John 4:16 and it says, “God is love.”

There’s a big difference between being loving and being love.  God is love itself.  God can be found in the dynamic interchange of energy between people who care about each other: family, friends, lovers, even enemies.  Wherever there is love, there is God.  In fact the full text of 1 John 4:16 reads, “God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”  The Creator of the universe is not separate from it.  God is not “out there,” floating on a cloud or in some alternate dimension.  No, God is right here.  As the apostle Paul says in Acts 17, “In [God] we live, and move, and have our being.”  God is within us and all around us, wherever love is found.  God is love.  God is a relationship.

Our ancestors in the early Christian church came up with an interesting way of expressing this truth.  They left us with a kind of puzzle that could never be solved.  And they called it the Trinity.  According to the doctrine of the Trinity, we Christians believe in only one God who eternally exists as three persons: traditionally called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  God is both three and one, one and three.  Each person in the God-head is co-equal and co-eternal with the others.  There is no hierarchy or pecking order among them.

The doctrine of the Trinity has always been controversial.  In ancient times, Jews and Muslims accused Christians of being polytheists.  In more recent years, people have identified the sexism inherent in using exclusively male terms to describe the Father and the Son.  In any age, the Trinity comes across as confusing.  Many have tried to solve the puzzle, but all have failed.  So, this morning, I won’t even try to offer an answer to its question.  We’re going to let the mystery stand and focus instead on the implications of that mystery for our lives as Christians.

And just what are those implications?  Well, according to the mystery of the Trinity, our one God exists in a state of relationship between three persons.  In other words, God is a relationship.  God exists, not as an individual entity, but as the dynamic exchange of perfect love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Because of this, it suddenly makes sense to say that “God is love.”  God is love because God is a relationship.  Wherever love and compassion are established on earth, God is present.  “God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”  That is the practical application of the theological doctrine of the Trinity.  That is where we begin to live what we believe and show ourselves to be either followers of Jesus or just another group of hypocrites.

The only way to faithfully testify to the presence of the Triune God in the world is through acts of love, not supposedly infallible announcements of dogma.  If God is a relationship, then we usher and invite people into greater spiritual awareness by being in relationship with them, regardless of whether or not they ever darken the door of our church.  Moreover, if God is a relationship, then we come close to God, not through dogma and rituals, but by intentionally engaging in relationships with the people and planet around us.

Jesus spoke about this very clearly in Matthew 25 when he said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”    Offering food to the hungry, clothes to the naked, shelter to the homeless, friendship to the lonely, and justice to the oppressed are not simply good deeds that improve the reputation of the church in the community, they are our best way to participate in relationship with the Triune God.  God is a relationship, so relationships are the places where God is most fully known and experienced.

There is no one I can think of in the last one hundred years who lived this Trinitarian theology more fully than Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist who opened homeless shelters and soup kitchens for the unemployed workers of New York City during the Great Depression.  So remarkable was this woman, she was not content to simply found and fund a charitable agency for the poor, she moved into the shelter and ate the donated food with her clients, who she simply regarded as friends.  In them, Dorothy Day was seeking and serving the Triune God.

She wrote in 1937:

Every morning about four hundred men come to Mott Street to be fed. The radio is cheerful, the smell of coffee is a good smell, the air of the morning is fresh and not too cold, but my heart bleeds as I pass the lines of men in front of the store which is our headquarters. The place is packed–not another man can get in–so they have to form in line. Always we have hated lines and now the breakfast which we serve, of cottage cheese and rye bread and coffee has brought about a line…

The [Pope] says that the masses are lost to the Church. We must reach them, we must speak to them and bring them to the love of God. The disciples didn’t know our Lord on that weary walk to Emmaus until He sat down and ate with them. ‘They knew Him in the breaking of bread.’ And how many loaves of bread are we breaking with our hungry fellows these days–‘ 3,500 or so this last month. Help us to do this work, help us to know each other in the breaking of bread! In knowing each other, in knowing the least of His children, we are knowing Him.

This morning, I want to urge you toward similar action in your own life.  I invite you to participate in the life of the Trinity, to get caught up in the infinite whirlwind of perfect love that flows between the persons.  In that Great Love, incarnated in the myriad little loves that surround us every day, may you find God: not the monolithic “Old Man in the Sky” but the dynamic energy of love that pulses through all creation.  And, through you, may others come to believe in the God who is love.  May they find that God here in our church as they enter into relationship with a community of Christians who really do live as if they believed that “God is love, and all who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”  May it be so.

The Arc of the Universe

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

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Click here to listen to this sermon at fpcboonville.org

They say growing up is hard to do.  And I think they’re right.  Because growing up involves change and kids generally like to have a regular, predictable routine.  I remember one time when life interrupted my routine and I had to adjust to a new way of doing things.  It happened at the beginning of fifth grade.  I was having a hard time adjusting to my new classroom, my new teacher, and more challenging homework assignments.

When I finally had all I thought I could handle, I made an appointment to see the school guidance counselor, Mr. Arnold.  I walked into his office with my mind made up.  I had a plan.  I thought I already knew the solution to my problem, so I told him: “Mr. Arnold, this fifth grade stuff is too hard.  I don’t like my teacher, I can’t keep up with the material, and I’m just not happy here.  I’m obviously not ready for this.  I think I just need to back to fourth grade.”

Well, you can imagine what Mr. Arnold’s response was.  When he finally stopped laughing, he told me in no uncertain terms that returning to the fourth grade was not an option.  Then he introduced me to a new word, one that I’ve carried with me ever since.  To be honest, I think he made it up, but it describes so well what I was doing by asking to go back to fourth grade.  Mr. Arnold’s word was awfulizing.  He said, “You’re awfulizing this situation, and no, you can’t go back to the fourth grade.”  And then he explained what he meant by that:  my ten-year-old self was choosing to see only the negative parts of fifth grade and blowing them out of all rational proportion until I convinced myself that the only solution was to go backwards and stay in my old comfort zone.  By awfulizing the situation, I was basically just giving in to despair and giving up on life.  I was refusing to trust that life had given me enough resilience and adaptability to rise up and meet this new challenge.

Despair can be a powerful sedative.  Awfulizing, while cathartic, is an addictive anesthetic that keeps us from feeling our growing pains.  The upside is that it numbs our pain, but the downside is that it stunts our growth.  Evolution only happens through struggle.  Life has to be pushed past its previously known limits in order to adapt to new environments.

This is never easy.  When it happens in the biosphere, there is always struggle and the imminent risk of failure and death.  When it happens in the struggle for social justice, people stand up against powerful and entrenched institutions, like oppressive regimes, unjust laws, multinational corporations, and long-held beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions.  Change only happens slowly and with great effort.  Activist movements often struggle for generations before they reap a harvest from their labors.  They endure persecution, ostracism, imprisonment, and death.  Many lose hope and give up the fight along the way, but those who persevere become the catalysts for our social and spiritual evolution.  For example, who could have guessed on the night of the Stonewall riots that, within a generation, several countries, the president of the United States, multiple states, and even a few religious institutions would recognize the right to marriage equality?

Change happens slowly, but it does indeed happen.  Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Not many know this, but Dr. King was actually adapting the words of the famous 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.  Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways… But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

These words have been a source of comfort and hope to many in the struggle for justice.  But the question arises, How do we know?  How can one be so sure that this universe is arranged in such a way that we can be sure that right will win out in the end?  Well, the short answer is that we don’t.  Philosophers are quick to point out the naturalistic fallacy, a rule (if you will) of critical thinking which states that one cannot derive an Ought from an Is.  In other words, you cannot logically draw a definitive conclusion about the way things should be based on the way things are.  Take, for example, the following popular label on food and drug products: Contains All Natural Ingredients.  We consumers are supposed to look at that and think that, because the ingredients are all natural, they must therefore be good for you.  But we know that’s not true.  You want to know what else is natural?  Arsenic, Plutonium, and Hydrochloric Acid.  These things contain all natural ingredients as well, but I wouldn’t want to put any of them inside my body!  Just because something is natural doesn’t necessarily make it good.

So, how then can Rev. Parker and Dr. King say that the arc of the universe “bends toward justice”?

Well, I think we can start by looking at the facts.  There are certain things we know about the universe that we would almost certainly label as good.  How about the fact that we are here?  We exist.  Most would accept that fact as both true and good.  How then did this favorable state of affairs come about?

Let me tell you a story: it takes place on a planet where a race of life forms has learned how to extract a vital resource from its environment.  The downside is that the extraction process gives off a toxic gas that poisons the atmosphere.  These life forms, with wanton disregard for anything other than their own immediate needs, willingly pollute the atmosphere of their planet for generation after generation until the air is saturated with poison.  Yet, even then they continued their pollution.  They kept going until the vast majority of life on their planet had been eradicated.

This sounds like a sad beginning to a dystopian science fiction story, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  There’s a lot more science than fiction in this story because it happened right here on our planet about 2.4 billion years ago in what scientists call the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE).  In the GOE, anaerobic cyanobacteria figured out how to extract hydrogen from water molecules.  The poisonous air pollution that resulted from this process was a toxic gas known as oxygen.  We don’t think of oxygen as pollution nowadays because we need it to live and breathe, but there was a time when it caused our planet’s first pollution crisis.  The fact that we are here now, breathing oxygen, is a testament to life’s amazing capacity to endure and adapt.

They say, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”  You could say that’s certainly true in our case, where we now depend on oxygen for our very survival.  We could say that one era’s pollution is another era’s air!

Life is amazing, isn’t it?  The universe has taken almost 14 billion years to produce the people sitting in this room right now.  You and I are sitting here as the end-result of billions of years of evolutionary success.  Of course, we can’t say that it was all good, but I think most of us would agree that something must have gone right along the way!  We’ve gone from single-celled organisms to fish, to dinosaurs, to mammals, to primates, to humans.  We are the heirs of a vast evolutionary inheritance passed down from generations of ancestors leading all the way back to the stars themselves, in whose furnaces the atoms of our bodies were forged.

We’ve come so far, across eons and light years, to sit together in this room today.  That’s quite a pilgrimage!  We’ve overcome so much strain and adversity.  The odds were (exponentially) against us ever getting here in the first place, but we beat the odds.  We are here.  We have overcome.  In the words of Dr. King, we have hewn “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” a precious jewel set into the ring of our being.  Our very existence on this planet is a testimony to hope.

Other ancestors have testified to this hope as well.  I’m thinking primarily of our predecessors in the liberal religious tradition: the Universalists.  They were the great prophets of hope.  They were the first to jettison doctrines of hellfire and damnation from their religion.  They refused to give up on anyone because they believed there is hope for all.  They taught that there is a place for everyone in this world and that all things will eventually come together for good.  Rev. John Murray, one of the founders of Universalism in America, once said, “You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men [and women]. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage.”

Liberal Universalist faith was founded on hope.  We are gathered here this morning as heirs of both the evolutionary and the Universalist legacies of hope.  We have more reason than most to draw strength and courage from this faith.

Sure, we can’t guarantee that any particular struggle for liberty or justice will immediately end in our favor.  No one can promise that.  But it seems, based on our scientific and religious history, that life itself can be trusted.  Life endures.  Life adapts.  Life overcomes.  This tendency seems to be woven into the fabric of the evolutionary process itself.  To put it in human terms, using symbolic language:

When we stand on the side of love, the universe stands with us.

“The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

This assertion, far from being a justification for fatalism and inaction, has the capacity to fill us with hope, strength, and courage.  When Desmond Tutu’s church in South Africa was once invaded and surrounded by a SWAT team during Sunday services, he stopped his sermon, calmly looked around, smiled, and said, “Since you have already lost, I would like to invite you to come and join the winning side.”  At this, the congregation erupted with joy and began dancing… right out into the street where more soldiers were waiting, weapons at the ready.  Not knowing what else to do, they stepped aside and let the dancers pass by unharmed.

Desmond Tutu’s faith that equality and justice would win out over evil in the end was the source of his amazing strength to keep going when the cause itself seemed hopeless.  His faith proved stronger and more enduring than the powers of Apartheid.  The strength of life itself flowed up and out through his heart, mind, and body as he committed his whole self to the evolution of the human spirit and society.

My hope this morning is that you and I might choose to trust life and embrace the faith of Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, and Theodore Parker.  May we come to know and feel the long, gentle arc of the universe, bending inexorably toward justice.  May we draw strength from this hope and rise again to meet the challenges of injustice, trusting that, no matter what happens, life will overcome.

May it be so.

Be blessed and be a blessing.