Malcolm Young's Blog

My Other Posts

2012-04-27T18:18:00.003-07:00

My blogger website is mostly an historical archive now... I think the sermons published even earlier on the Christ Church website must be gone now.

My sermons now can be found on my website www.malcolmcyoung.com

I write some pieces on: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reverend-dr-malcolm-clemens-young/

Calming the Storms

2006-06-25T16:35:00.000-07:00

M15

Job 38:1-11
Ps. 107:1-3,23-32
2 Cor. 6:1-13
Mk. 4:35-41

“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea” (Ps. 107).

It was exactly like a bad dream of a dinner party in which you in which you couldn’t stop yourself from saying something thoughtless and insensitive. This morning I preached about suffering at the 8:00 a.m. service. I looked out at my friends there and almost everyone in the room had lost a spouse or child or parent in the last few years. My first story was about a man who committed suicide and none of us could recover from it.

In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her experience after her husband’s death and her daughter’s fatal illness. Like C.S. Lewis she describes the way that grief isolates us and destroys language. Grief creates distance and this morning at 8:00 a.m. we were lost in it.

Sometimes people ask me how I manage to handle the suffering I face in ministry. Often I do not handle it well. Harold Brumbaum our former rector and I have talked about how difficult it is as priests to fully empathize with people who are suffering without being overcome by it. Our readings today provide a way of talking about personal pain and Christianity.

1. Avoiding suffering. The physical act of preaching can be exhausting. I have it easy. I preach very short sermons, to a small, attentive and forgiving congregation. And I have a microphone. Still, watching and adjusting to your responses, thinking of the right word, planning what is coming next takes a lot of energy. Imagine what it was like for eighteenth century preachers like John Wesley. In his diary he guessed that he traveled 8,000 miles and preached 5,000 sermons every year.

After a similarly punishing schedule of sermons and healings Jesus feels physically and mentally exhausted. I love the way that the Bible puts it, “leaving the crowd behind him, they took him with them, just as he was.” When I first was ordained this last clause was a mystery to me. Now I think it means that he simply never had the chance to rest. Despite the dangers of a building storm Jesus falls asleep in the stern.

I remember surfing at Kanaha on the Northshore of Maui when winter waves higher than our house were draining a razor sharp reef. A set would come in and I would frantically paddle up these mountains hoping that I could just reach the top before the wave broke. There is nothing like this kind of experience to remind us how completely God’s hand sustains our fragile life. I’ve never been tempted to sleep at a moment like this.

But seasoned sailors guided the helm of Jesus’ boat. He trusted the expertise of these fishermen. He put his life in their hands. I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had not been with them.

I imagine that they would have used all their skills, made good decisions and somehow pulled through. Instead Jesus’ very presence on the boat gave them an odd kind of permission to panic. Rather than relying on their own inner strength and expertise they immediately look to Jesus to take their problems away. Jesus says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” I don’t think he says this to be cruel but to make explicit the temptation that we all feel to wallow in dependence when God calls us to exercise courage.

Parents constantly have to decide when it is appropriate to help their children and when to let them work out their problems on their own. A half dozen times a day Micah or Melia ask for help with something that they should do themselves. Sometimes it is hard to discern if and how to intervene.

When I was a child, three neighborhood bullies were working me over when my mother walked by on the sidewalk. As she went by she said that dinner was ready. The moment she turned the corner the boys continued humiliating me. I went home in tears because she hadn’t helped. She explained that she did help me by giving me the excuse to go home with her right then. She knew that by intervening more forcefully it would only have made everything worse during the next time they confronted me.

Our own personal security is a central organizing principle of this community. Too often secular suburban life teaches us to deal with suffering by avoiding it. The sad fact in this time and place is that sometimes when things go wrong people stay away from you as if your pain were somehow contagious. As human beings God made us to survive suffering. Walking with Jesus means having the strength of Jesus and facing pain in the way that he did, that is, with some measure of confidence in God’s love.

2. Sources of Fear. At birth a child is afraid of two things: falling and loud noises. Everything else that you fear is something that you learned to fear. Mostly you are afraid because the world taught you to be. Try listing the things that you fear most. At the top of that list are probably noble worries about people you love. Further down are some of the fears we have difficulty admitting to ourselves.

One of our deepest fears, in this ultra-capitalist culture, is the fear of failing. In so many ways we define what is good as success. Performance then becomes the way we define, identify and group people. Where we live, how live, what we do and most importantly how we regard ourselves and others arise out of our worship of success.

From college, I remember bumper stickers that said “Berkeley Engineering.” Maybe I didn’t get it but I thought that they implied, “it is not enough to be bragging about being smarter than all the people who didn’t get into Berkeley. I’m smarter than all the other non-engineers here too.” Perhaps I thought this because I was just insecure myself.

Of all the organizations that you belong to the church is one of the few places that doesn’t have grouping people according to their success at the heart of its mission. Yet even here I cannot stop evaluating our performance in thoroughly world terms.

If somehow through magic our worship of success could be deleted from our character, we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. Would you have chosen the same major, career, friends, spouse or home? Imagine who you would become if fear of failure no longer motivated you.

The apostle Paul shows us what it might be like to replace our obsession with personal success with a passion for God’s Kingdom. Sometimes, I think that is why he is so hard to understand. To friends in Corinth he writes, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Instead of referring to the world, he sees his life in relation to God’s Kingdom.

You too could have nothing and possess everything. Like Paul you could be a person transformed by freedom from fear. You too could see that Jesus’ failure as a Messiah, that is as a kind of first century global dictator, represents a huge success for the human race. Because of his crucifixion we see failure as “both real and not final.” To put it in Rowan Williams words, “resurrection is the transaction in human beings that brings about the sense of a selfhood [that is] given not achieved.”

3. The Promise of Jesus. Christianity is not just a religion of ancient texts. In the catacombs and in early house churches we have images too. One of the most powerful examples of these are pictures which depict the church as a kind of boat awash in the storms of this life. Although we will all suffer, some of us will face tragedy far beyond failure, exceeding what we think we can bear. It threatens to obliterate our identity and even our existence.

For Christians this sometimes feels like we have fallen out of the boat of faith. One of the greatest blessings for me is that I get to witness how Christians reach out to brothers and sisters who waves have washed overboard. As Christians we never need to face our tragedies alone. We are never strangers to the world or to each other as the body of Christ.

In a very practical way, prayer helps me when the suffering seems overwhelming. I pray at all different hours of the day. I lift up all my concerns to God. When I cannot control my response to sadness, when my thoughts are thinking me, the Jesus Prayer gives me a deep peace in my heart. It is simple, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” After years of slowly repeating this prayer, it calms me and I feel the strength of Christ.

The church and prayer can help us but so can our faith. Death always has a certain kind of hold on our house. We pray for everyone at Christ Church who has died. Recently though our six-year-old son Micah has been very afraid of death. He asks when we, his parents, will die. Most of my answers have to be that we do not know what will happen to us or when. But most of the people who I have been with at death were by that time ready for it.

When I was a little boy like him I was afraid of shaving, of driving a car, of having children and adult responsibilities. But by the time I was old enough I was ready for all of these things. I expect that dying will be like that too for most of us. If we are not ready, God will help us to prepare. Just in the same way that we have faith in God to care for us every day, we have faith that he will continue to love us after we have died. In terrible tragedy faith may not be enough but it can help.

In conclusion, I hope this morning to remind us that we are equipped to handle suffering, that our life doesn’t have to be organized around the principle of avoiding pain. Second, I pray that your faith in Jesus will give you freedom in a society distorted by its fear of failure. Finally, when you face real tragedy I hope that the church, your habit of prayer and faith will draw you near to the Christ who says to all creation, “Peace, be still.”

_____________
John Wesley, The Heart of John Wesley’s Journal. Ed. Percy Livingstone Paker and Augustine Birrell (NY: Flemming H. Revell, Co., 1903), 392, 97.
Rowan Williams “Resurrection and Peace,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 273, 271.

Advice for Graduates

2006-06-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

M13

1 Sam. 15:34-16:13
Ps. 20
2 Cor. 5:6-10, 14-17
Mk. 4:26-34

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away see, everything has become new” (2 Cor. 5)!

Our first years at Christ Church were marked by an invisible anxiety. I arrived here without having written a single word of my dissertation. I secretly wondered if I would ever finish. After spending every summer constantly writing the faculty approved my work in the fall of 2004. Heidi and I were so excited about going back to the Harvard Commence exercises. We had never both been away from the children. Some of our friends thought that it would be a weekend of romance.

They could not have been more wrong. To save money and because I had always wondered what it would be like, we stayed at a monastery on the Charles River – in separate cells, without air conditioning, eating meals with the monks in silence. I have wonderful childhood memories of Cambridge and everything was beautiful. But still our high expectations for our time there meant that we almost couldn’t help but be disappointed.

Almost all graduations fail to live up to our expectations. At their heart is a moment abstracted from both the past and from the future. In that time we regard what has happened with nostalgia and imagine the infinite possibilities of the future. At that time we want to be reminded that we are creatures of both earth and heaven, that we are more than a collection of nerve impulses or the product of our historical circumstances. But we are not.

During Bishop Swing’s Maundy Thursday sermon to the clergy he spoke about how even at Episcopal High Schools our youth are not taught about holiness or the depth of the human soul. In this season of graduations we all can bear witness to the higher life that we experience in God. You may be called to do this and I want to share with you three pieces of advice to graduates in this time between past and future.

1. Not Conformed. The Apostle Paul wrote a series of letters to a congregation he had never visited in Rome. His advice to them is simple “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2). The world will distort who we are in order to sell us things and to manipulate our political judgments. It will shamelessly exploit our fears, faults, prejudices, our sense of superiority and our sexual desires in order to influence us. Billions of dollars will be spent each year and the most advanced technologies will be used to get your attention and to change who you are.

Advertisers will try to convince you that you can only be loved for your perfection. But Paul wants us to know that God calls to us in our brokenness. The novelist Harry Crew said, “Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”

One example of this in my life was a kid in my Junior High School confirmation class named Mike Franti. Mike’s birth father was African American and his mother was white. Our neighbors in this mostly white town had adopted him as a baby. On his way to being six foot six inches, in every way he stood out.

Back in those days most people only saw Mike as a basketball player and he did win an athletic scholarship to USF. But there was far more to him. He loved music. When I went to college in the Bay Area I saw posters for his band on telephone poles. Now all these years later Michael is part rock star, part poet, part hip hop artist and a major prophet. His band Spearhead is recognized around the world.

Michael’s music is impossible to characterize. It didn’t exist when we were kids. Instead of writing songs about love and breaking-up he sings about prison reform, racism, AIDS and peace. He criticizes the violence of Gangsta Rap and the death penalty. Michael is the one who said, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.” Twenty thousand people attend his Power to the Peaceful festival each year in San Francisco. Michael’s success comes from being most truly himself, letting his rough edges leave a mark on society.

The apostle Paul says, “if anyone is in Christ - there is a new creation: everything old has passed away” (2 Cor. 5). Our work as Christians begins as we discover the absolutely unique way that God will transform the world through us. You are unlike anyone in history or who will ever be. No one has been called to precisely your ministry except you.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury describes every Christian alive as part of a global interpretation of the Bible (“billions of diverse Son-like, Father-directed lives… a vast living exegesis of the Bible”). If you want to understand what the Bible means look first at these people. Each is unique, each one transformed by God not conformed by the world.

2. A second piece of advice for graduates is, “learn to do it yourself.” My friend received a toolkit when she graduated from high school. She still uses it, but it is even more important as a symbol that she is the one who ultimately has responsibility for her life. It is important to acknowledge and benefit from the advice of experts. Doctors, plumbers, lawyers, engineers and priests can help you. But this expertise must be balanced against the passion of your interest. The high school guidance counselor may know a lot about different colleges, but you are the one who actually has to live your life. You are the one who decides what kind of person you will be and how to use your energies. God gives us freedom and it is tragically possible to waste our life.

It is important to take responsibility for your philosophical, religious and political ideas. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was probably the most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks. More important than all of his philosophical ideas, indeed perhaps the source of them, was his motto – Dare to think for yourself. Don’t leave it up to others to decide what you believe about God or to tell you what is in the Bible. Look at it yourself and form your own opinion.

Above all don’t let someone else be in charge of your prayer life. Don’t expect priests to “do” church for you. Make daily prayer a habit. Pray in the car, as you walk, in waiting rooms, before everyone wakes up or after they all go to sleep. Pray with your children. Pray when your faith feels strong and when God seems distant to you. Prayer is important when you take on the adventure of learning to do things for yourself.

3. My last advice is to pay attention to the little things. Who you are and what really matters arise out of small things. 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was compressed into a tiny spot so infinitesimally small that it had no dimensions at all. It wasn’t in space because space didn’t exist yet. In less than a minute the universe was a million billion miles across creating space and growing. Within three minutes, in the ten billion degree heat, 98% of the matter in the universe was created. My point is that everything started small.

Jesus says that the kingdom of God “is like a mustard seed… the smallest of all the seeds on earth…when it grows up [it] becomes the greatest of all shrubs…” (Mk. 4). Jesus repeats this point in various ways, but even a small amount of faith can generate extraordinary results. Perhaps you are thinking that this is an easy thing for the Son of God to say but it is also exactly how Jesus acted.

Every week for me is filled with tremendous disappointment. All the boundless possibility I feel on Monday with its to do lists is inevitably is frustrated. I can’t help all the poor people, visit everyone in the hospital, talk to all the lonely people or minister to all who need it. I don’t even make a dent in the suffering that I see. Who gets helped and who is passed by seems maddeningly unsystematic. I constantly regret not having done enough. My whole life of ministry is filled with a few small things.

For years this bothered me until I began to realize that this was not so different from Jesus’ own ministry. In the twenty-first century we set goals like the total eradication of polio or the elimination of poverty around the globe. Yesterday, there was an article in the New York Times about Jimmy Wales, a man my age who started Wikipedia and changed how we know about the world.

Jesus did not work like this. He healed a few people, cast out some demons. He talked to a few others about the love that God has for us. But Jesus did not go on television. He didn’t go to Rome or Corinth. In his life he wasn’t internationally recognized as an authority on religious matters. He simply did not act on that scale. He worked quietly in the obscure countryside with the people who just happened to be around him.

Jesus helped in small things. He taught a small number of people that the kingdom of God is a tiny seed within us, that only a little faith could result in extraordinary things. In doing this he changed the world.

I believe that it is the little things we do every day that matter most. I had only been a priest for about a year when a member of my church came up to me and told me that he was having an affair. He told me that his wife didn’t know it but that she was really a lesbian and that she didn’t satisfy him sexually. Since then dozens of people have told me about their extra-marital affairs.

Over all these years, I can’t help but think that by the time they have come to me it is too late. My experience leads me to believe that these large infidelities only follow from small, every day betrayals. We all have a thousand little opportunities each day to show our love or disrespect for our friends and family. John Lennon says, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” These little things that you teach your children and practice yourself are life.

In conclusion, through God do not be conformed by the world, take responsibility for yourself and live conscious of the little things.

Let us pray: “Give us grace o Lord, to work while it is day fulfilling diligently and patiently whatever duty thou appointest us, doing small things in the day of small things and great labours if thou summon us to any. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.”
_______________________________________
Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor June 7, 2006. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/06/05/index.html
In review by Jason Byassee, The Christian Century, June 13, 2006, 36ff.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), 9-10.
Katie Hafner, “Growing Wikipedia Changes its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy,” New York Times, 17 June 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=7f2dcfa9db8cc0ef&hp&ex=1150603200&adxnnl=0&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1150556959-kVQHxMQlrpjr1rugd/Q9Ig
Christina Rossetti wrote this prayer. This last section was influenced by Martha Sterne, “A Day of Small Things,” Day 1, 18 June 2006. http://www.day1.net/

What is the Spirit?

2006-06-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

M12

Acts 2:1-21
Ps. 104:25-35,37
Rom. 8:22-27
Jn. 15:26-7, 16:4b-15

“No, this is what was spoke through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will send my Spirit upon all flesh…” (Acts 2).

Today we celebrate one of the four most important feasts of the year – Pentecost. It is the birthday of the church when we remember how the spirit descended upon the apostles. We wear red as a symbol of the Holy Spirit’s love and to represent the tongues of fire that were signs of its presence.

This morning I want to think with you about a question that is easy to articulate and difficult to answer. What is the spirit? Part of what makes this a difficult question is that we share this word and this idea with people outside and inside the church who misunderstand it. We know what Pentecost means because the group of people who use this word is restricted to a relatively small group who have largely shared values. But everyone uses the word spirit and spiritual to describe anything from cheerleading squads to business strategies to a sense of our own interior depth. Fortunately our readings give us strong direction in this question.

1. Imagine the birth of the church, when there was only a small group of scared people who had already shared everything together, who had sacrificed their families and work, who had found miraculous new life in Jesus. Their friend entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and only a few days later was executed as a political and religious criminal. These first followers felt no security. They had no plan, only a shared sense of disappointment.

Suddenly the spirit came down on them like fire and filled them. When they spoke, others heard their own native language. Even in our time we recognize that it is a miracle when we meet someone who really understands us. The puritan Jonathan Edwards emphasized that it is God’s nature to communicate (“God is a communicative being”). God has something to say to every person, to every living being. To us, God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.” This does not mean all ministers, or all Episcopalians or all Christians but all of living reality will show the presence of God.

Other very different depictions of the spirit and the church exist. One example is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which sold 40 million copies and recently came out as a movie. To summarize the story very briefly a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon and a French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work together to solve mysteries related to the murder of the Louvre Museum curator. These involve secret religious societies, codes in famous paintings and buildings and ultimately the search for the holy grail. The institutional church seems fiendishly intent on subverting any effort to discover the truth.

The novel is fun to read and it may make some people more curious about God. But there are two kinds of problems with it. The first concerns facts. The Christian Century magazine uses the word “truthiness” to account for the appeal of The Da Vinci Code. Truthiness describes the way that people insist what they want or feel to be true should be treated as true. Politicians and public figures constantly do this. This isn’t totally different than recent scandals around the question of how true a memoir must be to make it nonfiction. Brown’s novel fits in perfectly with this cultural climate.

We like to feel that we are learning something even as we read a novel and this is what The Da Vinci Code implicitly promises. The book cover describes the novel as “intricately layered with remarkable research and detail.” Immediately following the title page Brown includes something that looks like a dictionary entry which says, “Fact:… All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

According to the novel “the greatest cover-up in human history” was that, “not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father… Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel… that bore the bloodline of Jesus Christ” (249). Also I should let you know that, “Walt Disney made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations” (261). Biblical scholars may sometimes say odd things but they have to offer some support for their findings and no one I have heard of has made suggestions like these.

Crazy statements and treating Christ as some kind of last name rather than as a messianic title made me completely distracted as I read this book. Being a serious student of religion and reading The Da Vinci Code is like someone who knows about baseball reading a novel about how the Chicago White Sox won the 1967 world series… by strategically running the bases the wrong way round.

The second problem with The Da Vinci code has more to do with the spirit of its depiction of Christianity rather than particular facts. Secret rituals, hidden symbols, bloodlines and magical powers are not at the heart of Christian faith and practice. As I said earlier, God is a communicative being. God pours out the Holy Spirit on all flesh. Christians have always made their claims in public where their ideas can be confirmed or rejected. Jesus says his followers will be distinguished by what they do in public not by secret beliefs. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that says, “God wants spiritual fruits not religious nuts.” The fruit of the spirit is love.

2. The second thing that scripture reminds us about the spirit concerns its connection to prayer. The apostle Paul suffered for his faith. Through prayer the spirit gave him great strength. In a letter to his friends he writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8). This week I met another Paul who helped me to understand this.

It all started with a magic carpet ride. On Wednesday night I flew with Will Price over the snow-covered Rockies to Montana in a small plane for one day of fly-fishing on the Blackfoot River. Growing up I played a lot of sports and worked outside in lumberyards, doing landscaping and out in the fields. In college I continued with sports and lived in a residence hall with 200 men. Although since my ordination I am almost never in all-male environments, I miss this. I enjoy spending time with men like our fishing guide Paul.

Paul is a powerful man in his sixties. He’s intelligent and strong, with a beard and piercing eyes that cut right through the surface of things. He tells the truth simply and humorously without exaggeration. You could depend on him in an emergency.

We pulled our boat out for lunch twenty yards away from a nest with two immature bald eagles and their mother. Will’s father was talking about the way that our failures can more powerfully shape our character than our successes. This led Paul to express his own regrets about his divorce from his wife of forty-one years. He also talked about marrying a woman who had never been married before and who was four years older than himself. “This time I am doing things differently,” Paul said. “My wife and I begin each day looking each other in the eyes and praying.”

If you pray you will become acquainted with the spirit. You’ll know yourself better too. Prayer is when I begin to be honest with myself about what I really want. I face my weaknesses and the narrowness of my vision. And the spirit takes our badly articulated prayers and “with sighs too deep for words,” makes God’s love known to us.

3. My last observation about the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus. This is the hardest part to explain. At the Last Supper Jesus reassures his disciples that even though he will die he will never abandon them. The Greek word that he uses for spirit is paraclete. The dictionary says that this is literally the person you call to for help - like a doctor if you have chest pains or a lawyer if you find yourself in jail or a river guide if you are drowning. Jesus says, this “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment… he will guide you for he will not speak on his own…” (Jn. 15).

Earlier I approvingly quoted a Montana bumper sticker about religious nuts and spiritual fruits. The one thing that bothers me is the way that it suggests an opposition between bad institutional religion and good private spirituality. I want to say something about my friends who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

I think what they mean by this is an inner experience of depth, a “true self,” an authentic self free of all the roles we play, a self independent of how others perceive us. For them this is what spirituality is and because this idea is very powerful in our age Christians begin to mistake this idea of spirituality for the Holy Spirit.

The archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams believes that this idea of the self comes out of a fantasy of perfect communication. We imagine “an ideal other,” “a listener to whom I am making perfect sense,” a sympathetic hearer who always gives us the benefit of the doubt and understands our often less-than-clear good intentions. Williams says that the problem with this is that the world is not filled with people who understand us perfectly.

One may go further and note that often we do not even understand ourselves very well. We lie to ourselves in order to justify our bad intentions. A private spirituality based on the idea of a true self may be a very deeply seated way of avoiding how God is drawing us to the holy.

When I am in an argument with my wife Heidi and I find myself saying, “that’s just the way that I am,” I know that I am on shaky ground. The spirit is not a deeply interior matter of being stubbornly true to yourself. The spirit works through other people, through all flesh. Our spouses and neighbors and colleagues and church family are the way that the spirit brings the world to God. They are the way that the “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin” (Jn. 15).

In conclusion, the late Roman Catholic professor Ralph Kiefer used to say, “The Bible is not the Word of God. The Word of God is what God says to the church when the Bible is being read.” Real people, not words on a page are the way that God calls to you.

This church has no secrets. It exists in and is constituted by the Holy Spirit revealing itself in all flesh. Like my friend Paul, in our weakness the spirit calls us into new strength through prayer “too deep for words.” The spirit working in others “proves the world wrong about sin,” not through an ideal imaginary true self but in the real people in our lives. On this Pentecost morning, I invite you to celebrate God’s spirit in all of us together.
____________________
The American Dialect Society named the word “truthiness” as the word of the year in 2005. Although Stephen Colbert reinvented the word as part of his political satire, this idea has been around since the nineteenth century. Rodney Clapp, “Dan Brown’s Truthiness: The Appeal of the Da Vinci Code,” The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, 22. See also Wikipedia “Truthiness” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness. In this last source Colbert in character says, "The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for 'truthy' dating back to the 1800s....'The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all,' Stephen Colbert said Thursday. 'You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.’”
Page numbers from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (NY: Doubleday, 2005).
“paraklesis” in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1958)
Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 239-241.
Richard Fabian from an unpublished lecture delivered at Sewanee on St. Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco

Abiding in California

2006-05-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

M11

Acts 8:26-40
Ps. 22:24-30
1 Jn. 4:7-21
Jn. 15:1-8

“Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15).

Between heaven and earth suspended on updrafts above the redwood forests and just below the chaparral of Mount Tamalpais hovers a red-tailed hawk. This keen-eyed hunter seems oblivious to this magnificent setting, to the skyscrapers of the financial district and the massive tanker slipping out through the Golden Gate past Seal Rock and Ocean Beach. Great bridges and cities seem so insignificant in comparison to Mount Diablo, the expansive Bay, the ancient forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the infinite Pacific Ocean.

On Friday night we celebrated a friend’s sixty-fifth birthday at the West Point Inn on Mt. Tam, accessible only by a two-mile hike, seventeen hundred feet above sea level. The huge city, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country, seems so quiet up there (where the wingspan of a swallow at sunset seems larger than Sutro Tower in the distance). I sat there on the porch of that historic building and gave thanks to God that we live here together. I tried to understand what it means to make this place my home, what it means to abide here.

Abide is a thoroughly archaic word, eight of seventeen uses in the Oxford English Dictionary are obsolete. We never use it. We don’t say that people abide together before marriage. We don’t ask new acquaintances where they abide. I suspect that Christianity is the only thing keeping this word alive. Abiding represents a central idea in the gospel of John from the first chapter when John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus where he abides (Jn. 1:38) to the last supper when Jesus tells his own disciples to abide in his love. Jesus promises quite simply, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (Jn. 15). What does it mean to abide in Christ?

Understanding what it means to be a Californian helps us to see the challenges that we face as we try to abide in Christ. I want to begin by thinking about three elements of abiding in California.

1. Fiction. I hope that by this time all of you recognize that California is more than a place. Even if you don’t claim it, it is part of your identity. Even if you don’t recognize it, its stories are yours. Its stories are you.

From the beginning California was a fictional place. In 1510 the Spanish writer Garci Ordonez de Montalvo wrote a bestselling novel (Las Sergas de Esplandian) about the siege of Constantinople. There at the battle was a race of Amazons under the command of Queen Calafia. They were from a place he invented. It was located “on the right hand of the Indies… very close to the Terrestrial Paradise. It was rich in gold and gems. He called it California.

The dominant stories of California share in common a hope for surprising and unexpected success. The fictional wealth of El Dorado motivated the Spanish explorers who discovered California. Gold rush dreams led to a population explosion and sudden statehood. The entrepreneurial story of changing the world and accumulating wealth and power along the way still exercises a powerful claim on our imagination. I don’t know how many, but this week more people moved here to become a star.

2. Conflict. California is not just a fiction. It is not just a dream or a hope. It is also a shared history of conflict. Some scholars have suggested that one third of all Native Americans in the continental United States lived in California before European contact. This population was almost completely wiped out in a way that highlights the difference between how the mission system operated in Mexico and here.

By the 1920’s there were more Latinos living in Los Angeles than any other American city. Millions of these Americans with their American born children were forcibly repatriated to Mexico during the 1930’s by a program which historians rightly call ethnic cleansing. The persecution of Japanese Americans didn’t begin during World War II when 110,000 of them who were locked up behind barbed wire in remote relocation camps (227). In the early years of the twentieth century the White California movement, which included the most powerful politicians and business leaders in the state, worked to segregate public schools and to prevent Japanese from even owning land (223).

Our history includes vigilante terror campaigns against non-white populations. It consists of large landowners in combination with law enforcement officials brutalizing the laborers and farm workers who were essential to California’s prosperity. Racism, exploitation and conflict are part of who we are as we abide in this place.

3. Technology. Our orientation to science and technology also sets us apart. By the mid 1920’s fifty thousand commuters were passing through the San Francisco Ferry Building each day making it the busiest terminal in the world except for Charing Cross station in London (186). This need combined with technology and boldness led to the construction of a trestle bridge at Dumbarton point and then to the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges. During the same period one third of all the country’s air traffic was operating out of fifty landing fields in greater Los Angeles (255). In many respects California inventors and companies made the airplane a California technology. Indeed, we are not the first generation here to depend for our livelihoods, recreation and for that matter our water on the most advanced technologies of our day. We forget that the transcontinental railroad was an engineering miracle.

These technologies build on each other. The Pelton Turbine made hydraulic gold mining possible and washed away whole mountain slopes in the Sierra’s. This same technology vastly increased the production of hydroelectricity. This in turn made it cost effective to work with aircraft aluminum in Southern California. Pioneering work on vacuum tubes was done here in the 1920’s. In the 1930’s California led the world in atom-smashing. Then in the 1950’s it was semiconductors. This led to a leading role in the personal computer revolution and now the Internet. California is modern, always influenced by ever-receding dreams of becoming a technological utopia.

We abide here. Different regions in California place a different emphasis on these three elements but the shared fictions, our history of conflict and orientation toward technology define us as a people.

Jesus is right. If we only abided in California we would be lost. I suspect that we already know this. We are just as acquainted with the California nightmare as with the California dream. I believe that abiding in Jesus fundamentally changes our experience of the fiction, the conflict and technology. Because of him we can have lasting hope. The promise that we receive at our baptism is that California can never completely own us because we belong to our God.

Jesus describes this relationship by using the image of the grape vine. His primary point is that without our connection to God we cannot accomplish anything. Our success will always arise out of our relationship to God through the church. Secondly he says that the defining feature of our connection to God is the productivity of our lives. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” We are defined as Christians by our connection to Jesus through the church and by the fruits of our lives, not by what we believe as individuals.

An image of this that sustains me is the altar guild. No one here at Christ Church serves on the altar guild in order to be famous or rich. Each of these women spends a lot of time with Jesus and each other. They attend to the most meticulous details of our worship services together. They spend hundreds of hours each year dedicated to God’s glory making this church beautiful. When I was a child, my mother served on the altar guild and I would go with her to set up the weekday service. In the quiet of that silent church in the presence of those dedicated women, I felt the presence of God.

I have hinted at this. It is hard for us as Californians to understand abiding because it means really settling down, being present through thick and thin. The women of Christ Church’s altar guild have done this. But others of you know what it is like too. Those of you who really abide with your spouse realize that loving does not mean maintaining a certain mood. Contrary to what you see on TV, love is primarily a gift and a task, only secondarily is it a feeling.

In conclusion, our story of hope differs from that of other Californians. We do not put our trust in a twenty-first century Gold Rush. We are not first of all entrepreneurs or aspiring stars. Instead we believe that Jesus invites us into a community that will change the world and he gives us the power to do this. As Christian Californians we recognize our share in the history of conflict that surrounds and penetrates us while having faith that God can make us agents of reconciliation. We understand that technology is a kind of power but also that God is love and it is love that makes us whole.

I want to leave you with one final picture of what it means to abide in Christ. Last week I visited with a friend for what is likely to be the last time. Brian Thompson has accomplished a great deal in his life. I think he owned a bus company. Growing up he loved trains and as an adult he collected them. In fact all of you have seen these vehicles in Hollywood movies. This interest along with his unmatched passion for California history led him to start the railroad museum in Sacramento.

But above all Brian abides in Christ. These days his wife has Alzheimer’s disease and he is dying of cancer. He amazes the doctors not just by surviving beyond any of their expectations, but by living. Brian continues to live joyfully as a Christian fully connected to the body of Christ and because of this he I see him bearing fruit to the very end. As our last conversation wore down he said, “Malcolm you’ve got to tell them this. You never realize the depth of your faith until the chips are down.”

Brian’s confidence shows me the gift of the spirit. I still see him in my imagination, like the hawk flying over the ridges of Tamalpais, Brian is surrounded by beauty somewhere between California and heaven.

_____________________

Kevin Starr, California: A History (NY: Modern Library, 2005), 5. Page numbers in text refer to this book.
If I chose a fourth element that is essential to our identity as Californians it would be our orientation to our natural environment. This physical setting has a huge influence on how we see ourselves.

Disbelieving for Joy

2006-05-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

M10

Acts 3:12-19
Ps. 4
1 Jn. 3:1-7
Lk. 24:36b-48

“And while they still disbelieved for joy, and wondered… he opened their minds to understand the scriptures…” Luke 24

I learned this week that three million Americans believe that aliens visit this planet in UFO’s. At the same time there are 2.2 million Episcopalians. This leads me to ask, what are the aliens doing that we are not doing?

It is so easy to find fault with the church, to criticize our failed good intentions or our constant struggle just to get organized. We haven’t done that much to feed hungry people or to advocate for the poor. Furthermore, we don’t handle the holy well. Sometimes we priests come to God with a false kind of professionalism a pompous dignity that keeps the radically transformative work of the spirit at arm’s lengths.

Other times we probably look more like a circus act, forgetting that our microphones are on, missing cues, saying the wrong things, interrupting each other and talking too fast. Sometimes we present you with unsingable hymns and jump around the prayer book as if we were administering a wacky intelligence test. The truth is that for most people church can at times be boring. There should be a disclaimer in the bulletin that says you should not operate heavy machinery while participating in worship.

When I was a child I thought that in Jesus’ time things were different, but the closer I read the scriptures the more human the disciples seem. When they see the risen Christ they don’t conclude that God’s kingdom is breaking into the world. They are startled and frightened. They don’t believe. They disagree. Because some of them think he is a kind of ghost, he invites them to see and touch him. Even then they still disbelieved for joy and wondered. Jesus goes to the absurd length of showing them that he can eat broiled fish.

Then he teaches them. The Bible says that he opens “their minds to understand the scriptures.” In this life and in resurrected life Jesus looks deeply into their souls. He sees what they most long for. He understands the part of them that stands between them and true joy. He shows them how their relationships can be healed, how God can restore their lives. Imagine someone who knows you so well that he or she can heal your soul. Imagine being part of a group of people who are on fire with the Holy Spirit.

What would it take for us to believe? Or more importantly what can we do to help others to have their lives transformed by Jesus? We accomplish both these tasks when we become better at telling our stories and at listening for connections between our lives and those of the people around us. The German thinker Max Weber described modern life in an industrial society as an “iron cage.” I believe that one of the effects of our hectic times is that it suppresses our stories, even the stories of our salvation.

Last night at a family party I had the blessed opportunity to spend a few hours with Melia’s godfather Mario who is a law professor at Miami University. I told him that as a citizen I was alarmed that the number of people incarcerated in this county has quadrupled in only twenty years. If our Gross Domestic Product or the population of San Francisco, or the size of our own family or unemployment rates or any almost any other figure like these had changed so dramatically in such a short time, I would want to know what caused it.

I asked, “Is the legal profession taking concerted action to address this serious problem.” It amazes me that he said, “No.” I asked him about the causes of this phenomenon. He said that mandatory sentencing rules, heavy prison terms for relatively minor drug crimes, increasing poverty all have contributed to this, along with a far more retributive approach to justice that is not at all concerned with rehabilitating prisoners. In Europe many nations simply address the drug problem differently. In Europe there is less violence associated with property crime than here and this also reduces prison terms.

Mario talked about the experience of going through the court system. Police in this country are allowed to lie, to say that they have witnesses to your actions when they don’t, to say that they will arrest your family when they can’t. In one famous case police told an unusually dim-witted suspect that the fax machine was a lie detector and convicted him on the basis of this confession.

Mario told me that the purpose of this is to force a suspect to fit into categories, into preconceived stories that this system uses to simplify the process of administering justice. In that world the details of your story are erased and your identity gets compressed so that you are merely an African American involved in urban drug culture, or a suburban white-collar criminal, or an Islamic terrorist.

He told me that if your crime is especially heinous they will listen more carefully to the details of your story and if you have a lot of money to hire legal experts they will too.

Millie Simpson was an elderly African American domestic servant who lived in Newark, New Jersey and commuted out to the wealthy suburbs by bus. She had an old car in her driveway that she never drove. One day an acquaintance took the car without asking and was involved in a hit and run accident. A witness identified her license plate and she was brought before the court. The first judge was only interested in her plea. After hearing that she claimed not to be driving the car, the judge entered her plea as not guilty.

The next judge interrupted Simpson when she tried to explain what happened. Even though her public defender was out of the room and he didn’t see any evidence, he ruled that she was guilty and sentenced her to a fine, community service and revoked her license. Because of the community service Simpson could no longer work after hours for one of her suburban clients. They needed her so badly that they hired a lawyer who went before the same judge and had the previous sentence dismissed. Simpson was quoted as saying, “I couldn’t understand what [the judge] was saying… I didn’t know what he was talking about.” Simpson's employer, however, had a different comment on Simpson's legal experiences: "[T]his was 'the typical story of American racism. To get justice, the poor black woman needs a rich white lady."

This is not an exception. Mario’s point was that part of the problem is that institutionally and through culture our criminal justice system and society in general suppress our individual stories.

I sometimes think that it is unfortunate that you did not know me before I became a priest. Mostly this means that you are in the habit of thinking that I am different than you. I sometimes wonder how this affects the way that we talk about Jesus together. At my class reunion last summer, although the people who really knew me expected it, most of my old friends from high school were surprised to learn that I had been ordained. Many of them learn only about Christianity from television dramas. Few of us have had much experience with younger clergy.

After the Vietnam War the leaders of my home diocese thought that there were too many priests. They stopped ordaining people who were in their twenties. They told young people to go and have another career and then come back to the church with their wisdom. There are many great second career priests. But this policy effectively told the world that the spirituality, the faith stories, of young people was less important.

I grew up in a community of people who firmly believed otherwise. St. Martin’s Episcopal church in Davis included me as a teenager in adult Christian education programs. They insisted that I serve as an acolyte and gave me the responsibility of teaching Sunday School for younger kids. When I expressed an interest in being ordained they supported me through the process and cut through the red tape that could have held me back. Most of all they always listened to my story and saw its connection to the Bible.

Jesus is not present in a general way. The Holy Spirit is not vague. These are the tangible ways that I saw God at work in the world. When my friends or I needed help, when I was tempted to go astray, God was saving me through the church.

I bring this up because I feel Jesus more and more present at Christ Church every day. In the holiness of the Lent that we shared together, through our ministry at Ventana School and Rebuilding Together, in the care we show to sick and suffering people, God is here. At the retreat last week four year old Melia Young and Lynn Saunders painted a picture together and what was most beautiful about that picture was that as they did it they shared their stories.

In a world which suppresses the unique stories of individuals, we are finding our voice. I want to ask you to do more to tell your story about God’s grace to people who have not yet discovered Christ Church. This is not to tell them that the way they see the world is wrong, but to let them know there is a place where their stories can be faithfully heard. Invite your friends to church. We are ready to receive them.

Someone once asked a French poet, “if the Louvre Museum were burning and you could only choose one work of art which one would you save?” He replied, “I would choose the fire.” In your life and your calling as a child of God be free to choose the fire. Allow yourself to be the way that God transforms the world. Let go of the stories that others tell about you which imprison or control your life-giving spirit. Let the risen Christ appear to you and appear in you, even when you are confused or afraid. Then we shall “be called children of God” and “when he appears we will be like him” (1 John 3).
___________________________

The first example and the concluding one about the Louvre Museum came from the presentations that various bishop candidates made during this week. The first came from Bonnie Perry quoting Jonathan Jensen. The second was from Marc Andrus.
Mario Lamont Barnes, “Black Women’s Stories and the Criminal Law: Restating the Power of Narrative,” 39 U.C. DAVIS L. REV.

The Lost Gospel

2006-04-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

M9

Acts 10:34-43
Ps. 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Cor. 15:1-11
Mk. 16:1-8

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain”
1 Corinthians 15.

On a rainy day last week I met my friend Cliff in a Berkeley coffee shop. In our conversation, Cliff described himself as “kind of a loser” back when we were in high school. It seems pretty obvious to me that now he is a loser for Christ. Cliff is my friend who is a congregational minister and who was recently released after serving a prison term for trespassing during a protest of the School of the America’s in Georgia. With a passionate voice he reminded me that the prison system in this country has expanded fourfold over the last twenty-five years. In our free society we use incarceration to solve many problems that other countries address differently.

Cliff believes that the Christian churches should be sending missionaries into prisons, not as chaplains who work for the system and carry keys so that they can lock up when the guards are off, but as fellow prisoners. Recently Cliff was invited to preach at the First Waldensian Church of New York City. Don’t look it up when you visit. After surviving eight hundred years of persecution in Europe, this congregation of immigrants refused to merge with the Presbyterian church back in the 1920’s. Now they have no building and gather only once a year on the Sunday closest to February 17th and reminisce about Pastor Janavel from their wheelchairs. Whether it is to people who have lost their freedom or elderly immigrants who have lost their culture my friend Cliff ministers to people who have lost something important. He cares for losers.

I guess this makes us all eligible for Cliff’s attention. We are all in the process of losing something. What we are losing can never be replaced. The public has lost its sense of security. Nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere along with climate change could lead to the extinction of everything we know.

But there is also private loss. Look around this room. The people sitting next to you have lost fortunes, friends, husbands, wives and children. Perhaps you yourself are losing the job that defines your identity. Maybe you learned from a note on the kitchen table that your spouse was leaving you. If you pause to think about it, your children’s childhood is quickly slipping away. Others of you have lost your health and soon will lose your life.

The losses I am talking about are not trivial. Imagine the woman who crosses the street with her daughter every day to go to her mailbox. One day she hesitates to pull a few weeds out of her garden. Her little girl waits for permission before going across the street for the mail. She gets a few bills out of the box and asks if it is safe to cross again. Her mother glances up and says yes. But a car she didn’t see kills the small child. Without some kind of miracle this mother will never be able to forgive herself, she will never be whole. If you think it is difficult to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, try believing that losers like us can have hope.

In Jesus I have been blessed beyond imagining and found strength in the face of my losses. I know what it feels like to have hope, to be saved by him. For millions of others around the globe faith is the experience of finding oneself in the person of Jesus Christ. Although what we have lost can never be restored, we find our lives transformed in him.

So much about Jesus has been lost in history. It seems like a small miracle to discover something new. This is exactly what happened last week when the National Geographic society announced that it had found a Coptic translation of the Gospel of Judas originally written some time before the year 180 A.D.

News accounts about this fall into two categories. The manuscript was discovered during the 1970’s in a cave by Egyptian farmers. The first kind of newspaper article focuses on the greed of the antiquities dealers who took so long to bring it before the public. This kind of article asks ethical questions, whether this is a looted artifact and about the responsibility to share archaeological findings with all scholars.

The second type of article stirs up theological controversy. These writers interpret the text to mean that Judas did not betray Jesus as churches usually teach, but rather that he was under Jesus’ secret orders in going to the police. The most frequently quoted line from the Gospel of Judas is obscure without the context. It has Jesus saying to Judas, “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Newspapers ask what the account of Jesus’ crucifixion would mean if none of his friends so blatantly betrayed him. Others simply reject the usefulness of this text out of hand. Officials at the Vatican condemn the Gospel of Judas as contrary to Christian doctrine.

But what does this ancient manuscript mean to us as people who continue to lose what cannot be replaced but who still find hope in Jesus? For me this description of Jesus written more than a century after his death gives a clearer picture of God’s church right now. Most importantly it serves as a reminder that Christians have never completely agreed on who Jesus is.

It doesn’t take more than a few sentences for anyone who has studied biblical history to recognize that the Gospel of Judas was written by Gnostic Christians. The Greek word gnosis means wisdom and these Gnostics saw themselves as Christians. They knew that what most separated them from the orthodox church was their belief in secret teachings about an all-encompassing battle between the material world and the spiritual one.

The animating idea behind the Gospel of Judas is that the disciples of Jesus never understood his true teachings and the church they founded is irrecoverably corrupt. Orthodox Christians regard Judas as a betrayer. According to this text he was the only one to really understand Jesus. In the Gospel of Judas Jesus says, “[L]et any one of you who is [strong enough] among human beings bring out the perfect human and stand before my face.” And only “Judas Iscariot… was able to stand before him.”

Reading this text is like leafing through the books in the Rosicrucian Library at the Egyptian museum in San Jose which is a kind of new age bookstore on steroids. Like those authors, this writer seems so confident in his intentional obscurity. It seems deliberately unclear in order to create an aura of mystery. This recovered gospel includes a lengthy account of Judas’ secret vision. Jesus teaches him about the “enlightened divine Self-Generated,” about the angels appointed to control the “aeons and the heavens” and about the other angels who rule over “chaos and the [underworld].”

Orthodox Christians rejected Gnostic teachings about Jesus from the very early days of the church. The whole reason I knew about the existence of a Gospel of Judas was that orthodox Christians such as Irenaeus (130-202) mention it.

I think that they were right to exclude texts like this for use in worship for two reasons. Apart from being unclear and its one-dimensional portrayal of Jesus, The Gospel of Judas makes it seem as if some people really are special, perfect even, immune from the losses that define our humanity. According to the Gnostic picture of the world only the wisest, most intelligent people can attain true faith. This effectively reproduces earthly hierarchies in heaven. The orthodox church was right to resist the power grab that lies behind pictures of religion as a form of secret knowledge.

Second, I believe in the incarnation. That is another way of saying that I believe in a God who creates the world and is still involved in it. Jesus was a real person with real earthly needs, desires and sufferings. But Jesus is also still here. The church is the body of Christ at work in the world.

In summary, the Gospel of Judas increases my appreciation for the vivid stories about a human Jesus in the Bible and its promise that God’s love always exceeds our tribal instincts and is really part of our world. Discovering the Gospel of Judas reminds me that we can never own Jesus, our historical connection will always be a question for us.

An example from today’s readings makes this clear. Most scholars that I know are pretty certain that we do not have the ending that the author of Mark’s gospel wrote. The gospel concludes with these words about the women who discovered the empty tomb, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Experts who study the Bible believe that a scribe at some point supplied a longer ending using words, a style and a theology that were alien to Mark. You should look at the text yourself. The longer ending sounds completely different from the rest of the gospel even when you read it in English.

This probably isn’t common knowledge because this kind of thinking upsets some people. A modern church that condemns the Gospel of Judas as heresy, or an ancient sect that claims that what really matter is a secret knowledge for spiritual elites, or for that matter an atheist who regards religion as merely a belief about God all fundamentally get it wrong.

Beliefs about Jesus will come and go. But ultimately what you believe isn’t what really matters. The spirit of God is not something that we can own like a possession. Our job as Jesus’ followers is not to convince everyone else that their ideas are wrong.

Instead the life of faith is the process of being transformed by Jesus. It means beginning to pray like he prays, to love what he loves. It means having the same kind of relationship with God and other people that he had. It means beginning to be defined by our hope that God gives life even in death rather than identifying ourselves with our fear of loss.

In conclusion, not so long ago Midwest farmers at the first sign of a blizzard would run a rope from the back door to the barn. They all had heard stories of people who had lost sight of home in a whiteout and frozen to death in their own backyards. Our modern blizzards, our public disasters and our private despair leave us in danger of losing our very selves. But like my friend Cliff we are beginning to be losers for Christ. The Bible, the church and our prayers together teach us about Jesus and he connects this home on earth to our home in God.
______________________
I don’t know what names the kids call each other these days, but when I was in high school “loser” was one of the words they used. We probably didn’t think about this word too much. Our classmates used it to describe my friends who hung out smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. What is a loser?
It isn’t the opposite of being a winner because that wasn’t an adjective we used to describe people. Maybe it was someone who didn’t have complete control over how others perceived him or who just didn’t care about what others thought really mattered. On the other hand perhaps the word only says something about the person who uses it.
February 17 is the anniversary of the Edict of Emancipation.
I read this in a sermon preparing for 5 Lent.
“How the Gospel of Judas Emerged,” New York Times, 4/13/2006.
John Noble Wilford and Laurie Goodstein, “In Ancient Document Judas Minus the Betrayal,” New York Times, 4/7/2006. More recently both themes are addressed together. Peter Steinfels, “A Debate Flares on Betrayal,” New York Times, 4/15/06.
“Papal Preacher Blasts Da Vinci Code, Judas Gospel, ”Reuters 4/14/2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-pope-davinci.html.

Giving Your Life

2006-04-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

M8

Jer. 31:31-4
Ps 51:1-13
Heb. 5:5-10
Jn. 12:20-33

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” John 12.

This poem is called “Ask Me,” by William Stafford (1914-1993):
“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”

Is what you have done your life? What difference have those who love you and hate you made?

Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12). He puts into question what it means to live or die. He makes us less certain what our life really is. I believe that it takes someone with the power of Jesus to dispel our most persistent illusions. Some fantasies can be so widespread within a culture that it can take generations to understand the truth.

Between the years 1570 and 1630 Western Europeans burned between thirty and fifty thousand people to death as witches (only a comparatively tiny number of heretics were burned during this same period). In Trier, Germany 368 witches were burned in twenty-two villages over only a six-year period. In two of these villages the persecution did not stop until there was only one woman left.

Amazingly enough during the preceding so-called Dark Ages there was little or no witch persecution and canon law even specified that “whoever believes in witches is an infidel and pagan” and “unchristian.” Then in the fifteenth century these convictions changed. A professor at the University of the Sorbonne wrote in 1601 that the existence of witches could be disbelieved only by those of unsound mind.”

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary features of this cultural hysteria is that historians can find no evidence to suggest that ritual devil worship actually happened in Western Europe. The historian Margaret Miles convincingly writes that, “Witchcraft seems to have been neither a religion nor an organization, but a massive collective fantasy.”

Why did this happen? The recent invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate thousands of pamphlets which included details about what witches did and how they were punished. These broadsheets told people that witches caused disease, impotence, accidents and crop failures. Because more than eighty percent of the people who were burned to death were women, misogyny probably was a contributing factor in the persecutions. Historians also believe that a connection existed between the use of judicial torture and the intensity of this hysteria. England was the only country that did not use torture for either crime or witchcraft and persecution was less a part of life there.

But these reasons cannot explain the deep anxiety in the mind of that generation. I wonder what behavior we take completely for granted but that may seem equally baffling to future historians. What is our massive collective fantasy? What fears inform our actions and what do they tell us about our life and our commitments? (I wonder which of our attitudes concerning drugs, children, terrorism, healthcare, immigration, globalization, incarceration, work, etc. will make sense to another generation).

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus became famous as a defense witness in court trials of people who were accused of sexual abuse on the basis of repressed memories. She points out that there is no scientific evidence that what we call repression really exists. Scientists study various kinds of amnesia closely. Some people may forget what happened in a traumatic traffic accident, but they are conscious that a memory is missing. Those who believe in repression claim that we can have no sensation of having forgotten some of the memories that are most important to who we are. They also seem to overestimate the reliability of our memory.

On August 18, 1967 at Boston’s Fenway Park Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was at the plate facing California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. On the first pitch Hamilton threw a fastball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face. Conigliaro never completely recovered from his injury. He left baseball in 1975 and died at the age of forty-five. That moment changed Jack Hamilton forever too.

In 1990 when Conigliaro died, Hamilton gave an interview with the New York Times in which he recalled what happened that day. “I’ve had to live with it,” He said,”I think about it a lot. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in the batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” Hamilton remembers visiting him in the hospital that afternoon. He also remembers wondering whether he should return to Fenway for the next series of games that season.

Although Hamilton probably thought about this day many times his recollections were almost completely wrong. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning but in the fourth. The score was not 2-1 but 0-0. Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter but the sixth. It wasn’t even a day game so Hamilton couldn’t have visited him in the hospital that afternoon, and there were no other games in Boston that year for him to wonder about whether or not he should go back there.

It should come as no surprise to us that our memories are unreliable, that we can get important details wrong. A cognitive psychologist asked forty-four students the question, “How did you first hear the news of the space ship Challenger explosion.” He asked them the morning after the explosion and then two and a half years later. Although they described the memories as vivid during this second interview, none of their memories were completely accurate and one third of their memories were what the researcher called “wildly inaccurate.” Many of these students couldn’t believe that their revised memories were wrong. “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” said one student, “but I still remember everything the way I told you [just now]. I can’t help it.”

Not only can we be completely wrong about past events, we can remember things that never even happened. Psychologists have studied the ways that false memories can be inadvertently and intentionally implanted in someone else’s mind. One student did this by asking his fourteen-year-old younger brother to write a paragraph each day on four events that he described. Three of the events actually happened as part of the family’s history and one was a fictitious story about being lost at a mall. By the end of the week the younger brother could describe details about something that never happened.

Earlier I mentioned Elizabeth Loftus as a psychologist who studies memory. She is not an uncontroversial figure. Some people absolutely hate her. It may be partly because they believe she defends criminals, but even this is not enough to explain the vehemence of their response to her work. I have a theory. I think that it is partly because her research undermines some deeply held assumptions about who we think we are.

In modern times there are so many subtle ways of not believing in God. One of them is to understand ourselves as a kind of videotape that summarizes our past, to think that in a significant sense we are our memories. If this is the implicit picture that someone has of himself, a psychologist’s claims that the tape is unreliable can seem like an attack on his identity.

For me this way of understanding our selves is in contrast with the Bible. According to Christian tradition we do not have an existence that is independent of God. Who we are does not derive from who we were. Our life is not something that came about accidentally because of the lust or love of two other human beings a long time ago. We don’t earn our life. Instead we constantly derive our life from God. Who we are is a gift from God that we receive every day.

In the Old Testament God speaks to us. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31). Our existence is a constant expression of God’s love. At the deepest level of who we are is not a memory but God.

I’m having a hard time saying it, but what this means is that you are fundamentally safe. You do not need to worry about losing your job, your spouse, your health, the respect of the other kids in school. The self that you are is not something that you achieve through some kind of work. It is not something that comes into existence because of what you think. This self is safe from the world

Perhaps what Jesus means is that the part of ourselves we are so afraid of losing isn’t really us anyway. When the Greeks come, they want the same thing that I do. They tell Philip that they want to see Jesus. He says to them, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

The novelist Ernest Hemmingway writes about a father in Spain who wanted to be reconciled to his runaway son. The father takes out an advertisement in the Madrid paper El Liberal. It says, “Paco, meet me noon on Tuesday at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven! Love, Papa.” Paco was a common name in those days. When the father showed up he found eight hundred young men looking for their fathers.

The way that Jesus speaks through the Bible is like this. Right here we have a whole church full of Pacos, of children returning to their father. We are not our memories, our thoughts or even our actions. Like California pitcher Jack Hamilton and the witch hunters of the sixteenth century we will make minor mistakes and some terrible life-changing ones.

But none of this changes the truth. You can ask me if what I have done is my life or about the influence of people who have loved and hated me. But that is not what I am. We are children of God who Jesus calls to return. And one day he will lift us all up into the fullness of divine joy.
___________________
Published in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (NY: McGraw Hill, 2004), 530.
Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 296-7.
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchem, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 75.
Ibid., 91-2.
Ibid., 97-8.
Thomas Tewell, “The Things We Dare Not Remember,” Thirty Good Minutes, 16 November 2003. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/tewell_4707.htm

Lifting Up Serpents

2006-03-30T15:12:00.000-08:00

M7

Num. 21:4-9
Ps 107:1-3,17-22
Eph. 2:1-10
Jn. 3:14-21

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life” John 3:14.

Look around you. Imagine that you are the people of Israel, because in a way you are. You left slavery in Egypt with sore backs and calloused hands. Beatings and hard labor made your joints so sore that you thought you could never escape the Pharaoh’s army. When the Red Sea swallowed up the finest warriors in the world, you wrote songs of celebration.

Fresh from this victory, breathing the clean air of freedom and with a new lightness in their steps the people of Israel passed quickly through the desert to the edge of the promised land. Before going into this land of Canaan you choose twelve people: Rachel Wagner, Alan Sarles, Laura Barker, Robert Pescosolido, Jim Snell, Maryetta Shriver, Clare Ledwith, Gloria Wing, Paula Matosian, Bob Stanfield, Paul Kojola and Bill Bien. You send them as spies to survey the land.

They arrive at harvest time and spend forty days traveling in secret through a place of overwhelming beauty. The twelve agree completely about the richness of this land of milk and honey. They cannot help but notice the severe contrast between it and the desert they just passed through. At the same time, ten of the spies (I won’t say who) have also noticed that the people who already live there seem stronger and larger than us (Numbers 13).

Two of the spies want to follow God’s command and find a place to live in the promised land. They make their case but the overwhelming majority of us are so afraid to go that we threaten to stone them to death. And so we all return to the desert for forty years, where each of the spies dies, except for the two who did not rebel against God.

Even though WE chose it, the harshness of desert life makes us complain about God. We say that he should have left us in Egypt. We seem to despise our own freedom. Nothing seems quite right to us although we probably grumble about our food the most. There is a kind of poison in our community and we will not be won over to God. So God sends poisonous snakes which kill our friends and our children. Imagine many of us dying, the rest of us bitten and waiting to die.

But again God sees our suffering and has mercy on us. He instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent on a high pole. The people who look at it will live. So Moses walks deliberately around our camp tents. He calls each of us out by name so that we can look and be saved. Moses cannot change the fact that we have been bitten. He cannot remove the poison, but through him God can make us live (Numbers 21).

We are the people of Israel. The same poison runs thick in our veins also.

In one summer month both of my grandfather’s sons moved to California. I’ll never forget the day we said goodbye, my hippie uncle telling my conservative father that he would meet us in the promised land. He was right. We live in the land of milk and honey, in these green hills between the richest agricultural valley in the world and the vast mystery of the Pacific Ocean.

At this time of year, in this mild climate, the wildflowers covering these hills seem like signs of God’s continuing grace. According to any measure from objective industrial productivity to the subjective beauty of our sunsets, California is rich.

We would notice this more if it we did not have the poison. All of us experience its effects in slightly different ways. We have conflict with people who we are supposed to love. We worry about the future. We have a vague sense that something is not right, that we are not keeping up, or living up to our potential. We also see signs that frighten us: this country’s steeply rising debt and our own, increasing healthcare costs, the declining quality of education, global climate change along with our political leaders’ vague threats of terrorism. Personally we feel vulnerable, that somehow we haven’t done enough to protect ourselves.

Alan Watts, a former Episcopal priest and teacher of Zen Buddhism points out that we will never be satisfied if our happiness depends on material things or on other people’s opinion of us. I have read Alan Watts’ books. I recognize this wisdom. At the same time I feel wounded by knowing that this was too hard for him and that he died young of alcoholism.

Watts never wrote openly about his own struggles with alcohol, but in a touching aside he writes anonymously about what seems to be his own experience. “In very many cases [the alcoholic] knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not being drunk is worse. It gives him “horrors” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.”

If anyone should be immune from this poison, the symptoms of which include our basic sense of insecurity, it should be graduates of Harvard Divinity School. They should be both intelligent and spiritual. Last June I heard Professor Kim Patton give the sermon at graduation. She addressed students applying to jobs and doctoral programs who were concerned about “gaps” in their resumes. She said, “Like the wider American culture, Harvard lionizes the loner, the brilliant individual who has won some high-level game of musical chairs where 150 players contend for 8 seats and the music is by Mahler.” She reassures them that, “[t]he gaps on the resumes are the abysses into which we fall from time to time, and in the process, fall into the hands of the living God…”

The bad news is that everyone has the poison, we all just show different symptoms of the same disease. I pray about this because I believe that this poison leads many to misunderstand one of the most important things that Jesus ever said. This verse is a famous one. At football games people hold up signs that say “John 3:16.” In it Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Unfortunately a vast majority of Christians in this country interpret these words to mean that if you are not in their Jesus club, God will condemn you to eternal death. For them, unless you say certain words or think certain thoughts about Jesus, in the way that they do, you are what they call “unsaved.” This is not a biblical word so you may have trouble understanding it. But if you spend time with Christians like this you hear it all the time. They talk about their “saved” friends and their “unsaved” friends. And then the complicated world filled with our own poison suddenly seems a lot safer and simpler to them.

“Saved” Christians may not tell you this, but the context of Jesus’ remarks matter. Jesus is talking to Nicodemus a kind of first century theology professor who came to him secretly in the night. Nicodemus wants to know who Jesus is. And because like us both of them are people of Israel, Jesus answers by referring to a story about the time when the people of Israel chose to wander in the desert rather than follow God’s instructions.

Jesus says, “[j]ust as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…” Unless you remember the story of Moses curing his snake-bitten people with the bronze snake pole, this can be one of Jesus’ most perplexing statements.

Even after reading both stories this might justifiably leave you lost. This is a prophetic symbol, in other words it is a sign to let you know what God is about to do before it is too late. We’re all familiar with symbols like this. We encounter them in secular contexts all the time. For instance, in the movie Titanic, we see the officers on the bridge drinking a cup of hot coffee on a cold night peering out into the fog. The camera pans all the way down the ship, as some ice floats by while the audience hears cellos make a low shimmering sound.

In ancient times people believed that when you saw something, a part of you went out from your eyes and touched the world. It sounds odd when Jesus compares being crucified to being lifted up like Moses’ bronze snake. But Nicodemus probably understood what Jesus means. Seeing the bronze snake could not take away the poison but it could restore life. In the same way, if we can be touched by a God who suffers on the cross, we can have life too. This does not mean that all the poison in the world instantly disappears. But Jesus does make it possible to survive, to really be alive again.

This is the central mystery and challenge of Christianity: letting go of a picture of a god who miraculously adjusts the world to meet the demands of our ego and embracing the real Jesus who suffers for you and with you and in you, who through you brings love into the world.

It is hard to keep an image of Jesus suffering on the cross at the center of our life. We want to substitute that picture with the Messiah king who uses overwhelming power to justify us and bring the kind of peace we want. But in the end it is the suffering Christ who can save us.

I wish I could speak at greater length about this, because I have seen so many miracles happen through Jesus’ love. Sometimes amazing grace comes out of terrible suffering.

Fred Craddock is one of the most distinguished preachers of our time. He tells the story about God’s persistence in calling his father. He says, “When the pastor used to come from my mother’s church to call on him, my father would say, “You don’t care about me. I know how churches are. You want another pledge… Isn’t that the whole point of church?”… My nervous mother would run into the kitchen crying for fear somebody’s feelings were hurt… I guess I heard it a thousand times.”

“One time he didn’t say it. He was at the Veteran’s Hospital. He was down to 74 pounds. They had taken out his throat, put in a metal tube, and said, “Mr. Craddock, you should have come in earlier. But this cancer is awfully far advanced. We’ll give radium, but we don’t know.” I went in to see him. In every window [were] potted plants and flowers. Everywhere there was place to set them – potted plants and flowers… There was by his bed a stack of cards. And I want to tell you, every card, every blossom, every potted plant [came] from groups, Sunday School classes, women’s groups, youth groups… of my mother’s church – every one of them.”

“My father saw me reading them. He could not speak, but he took a Kleenex box and wrote something on the side from Shakespeare’s Hamlet… He wrote…, “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.” I said, “What is your story, Daddy? And he wrote, “I was wrong.”

Look around you. Imagine that you are people of Jesus, because you are. In your veins you have the same poison that is killing others all around you. But somewhere in your heart God has revealed his suffering for you. In our shared Eucharist his love becomes eternal life in you.
_____________

This part of The Wisdom of Insecurity is quoted in Monica Furlong, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2001), 150.
Kimberly C. Patton, “When the Wounded Emerge as Healers,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter 2006, 57
This whole paragraph comes from a conversation with Rick Fabian who is preparing this material for a lecture at Sewanee on the open table.
Cited in Jim Fitzgerald’s sermon, “Serpents, Penguins and Crosses,” Preacher’s Magazine Lent/Easter 2006. http://www.preachersmagazine.org/webmar26.htm

Divine Gifts

2006-03-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

M6

Gen. 17:1-7, 15-6
Ps 22:22-30
Rom. 4:13-25
Mk. 8:31-8

“Indeed what can they give in return for their life?” Mark 1

Once there was a young shoemaker so down on his luck that he only had enough leather to make one pair of shoes. By the time he finished cutting the leather, it was time for him to go to bed. He left the pieces on his workbench planning to sew them into shoes the next day. In the night two naked elves come and build the shoes. The shoemaker is astonished by what he discovers. He has never seen such perfectly stitched shoes.

The first customer who enters his shop recognizes the amazing workmanship and buys the shoes with so much money that the shoemaker is able to get enough leather to build two pairs of shoes. Again he cuts the leather and goes to bed. In the morning he finds two absolutely perfect pairs. The shoes sell for such a high price that he is able to buy enough leather for four pairs of shoes. Over time the shoemaker attains tremendous success.

Before Christmas, he and his wife start wondering who is making these extraordinary shoes. So they leave a candle burning in the shop and hide while the elves do their work. The next day his wife says, “there must be some way for us to thank these little men who have made us so rich. They look cold. I’m going to sew them warm clothes. Why don’t you make them some little shoes?”

When the clothes are finished the shoemaker and his wife leave out the small suits and shoes, and hide themselves again. The elves are delighted to find the clothes. They put them on and sing, “Looking cool and smooth, we’re out the door / We will not build shoes anymore!” They dance a jig around the room and leave forever. But by this time the shoemaker has learned this fine craftsmanship himself and continues to prosper.

I want to give this story a little more time to sink in before I come back to it. This week Heidi and I were working in the kitchen when a song by Marvin Gaye came on the radio. I said, “Do you remember when we used to listen to that album?” and we shared a moment of awkward silence.

Thirteen years ago after visiting our families in the West over Christmas, we returned to our Boston apartment in zero degree weather. The first thing I noticed as the cab cruised up to our apartment was the black ash in the high snowdrifts. A man was boarding up our place with sheets of plywood. “Heidi we’re going to be okay, but we may still need the cab,” I said. That night our home had burned. The water that put out the fire had frozen as it ran down our walls and all of our rugs were under three inches of dirty ice. Pretty much everything we owned was destroyed, all Heidi’s clothes, my books and our Marvin Gaye album.

Not too long after this I served a church in which a third of the parish lost everything in the Oakland Fire. These kinds of catastrophes remind us that what we are to ourselves is fluid. Things do not just belong to you, to a certain extent they are you. Memory isn’t something that just happens in your head. Many of the memories that define our identity are embedded in objects like photographs, art, a particular church pew, even your spouse’s favorite coffee mug or a collection of record albums. Anyone who has lost someone they love realizes this. Physical objects extend our memory, they give us the power to listen or speak to distant selves.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) in Nicomachean Ethics tried to describe what freedom means to human beings. He starts with a definition of individual happiness. He points out that this depends on the well-being of others. Not only does this make suffering unavoidable it implies that in some sense our self includes others, that it is distributed beyond our body in this way too. Who we are does not just depend on individuals it also depends on groups of people: republicans, Giants fans, Americans, Roman Catholics, Vietnamese immigrants, Los Altans and Rotarians.

If the self includes our things, other people and our sense of group identity, what we are will always be a deeply spiritual question for us. In today’s gospel Peter isn’t thinking of this when he confronts Jesus. What Peter believes he is makes Jesus’ teaching completely unsettling for him.

It is a mistake to project our own political identities back on ancient peoples. What we mean by Jewish today is not exactly how Peter understood himself. As a person suffering under the Roman occupation he grew up in a society which prayed for a great ethnic, political and religious leader called the Messiah. The Messiah would lead his people in military campaigns that would atone for their all of their humiliations.

This picture of a Messiah is so powerful that we still have it with us today. My son Micah found a Christian fundamentalist comic book at Christ Church about “the Lion of Judah.” This heavily muscled Jesus wears a knight’s armor and rides a huge black stallion. He protects people from evil by the exercise of overwhelming force. Our “shock and awe” images of Christ as the King invariably refer back to this sort of picture.

But when Peter evokes this tempting image of great force on our side, Jesus rebukes him. Jesus redefines what we mean by Messiah and this changes who we are. If God does not just destroy our enemies but suffers for us, this changes everything. Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mk. 8).

Jesus criticizes what we think of as our life, as our self. We are often wrong in what we think is most authentically ours or us. Jesus points out this truth by saying that we actually lose our life when we try most fervently to protect it. In many respects this already seems obvious to us.

This summer my friend Mark was out at night in the North Beach district of San Francisco when he ran into Jay, another old friend. At first Mark barely recognized Jay. He had a beard and his hair was tangled. You could see Jay’s toes sticking out of his shoes and his clothes looked old and worn. Mark has always been one of my most generous friends and he immediately invited him to stay at his house for a few days. Jay smelled terrible and Mark’s girlfriend didn’t like having a homeless heroin addict in her apartment. Jay grew up in a town just like Los Altos but somewhere along the line he had lost himself.

We all know so many examples of people who are losing their lives in order to gain something else. Because we are here in Silicon Valley we especially see people who have given themselves over completely to a business idea or a new technology. This culture affects every aspect of our life here from the way we raise children to city planning. John Calvin (1509-1564) wrote about this in a different way saying that the human mind is a “factory of idols” (Inst.). As creatures made to worship we persist in venerating the wrong things.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes about what he calls the “consumerization” of the church. He asserts that too often these days the church merely assimilates the worldly values of our culture into its doctrines and practices. He worries that we treat faith as merely a matter of “personal style.” To address this, he believes Christians need to keep God’s eventual judgment at the center of their faith. Although fundamentalists talk about salvation as a matter of simply believing in Jesus (in the way that they do), Williams reminds us that in the Bible Jesus tells stories about judgment based not on our system of belief but on our actions in helping people who are in need. This is how God separates the sheep from the goats.

I too believe in the judgment of God, but for me this is not something that only happens in a distant future. Jesus overthrows the idea of a messiah as world dictator and the one whose primary relation to us has mostly to do with judgment. What is far more central to Christianity is our experience of life and faith as a gift. God gives us life and Christ gives us a life that transcends fear. The problem is that both of these can be difficult for us to receive.

Because we live in an age dominated by the global economy we do not understand gifts very well and this makes it harder for us to love God. Twentieth century anthropologists who study societies in history and around the globe identify certain characteristics of gift exchange that differentiates it from barter or trade.

By now most people know where the term “Indian giver” comes from. Imagine it is 1638 and an Englishman is visiting the lodge of a Pequot Indian. The host shares a pipe of tobacco to make his guest feel welcome and then offers him the pipe that it has been smoked in. This peace pipe has circulated among the Pequots for generations. The Englishman recognizes its value puts it on his mantelpiece to save as a family heirloom.

Later, a different group of Pequots visit the Englishman’s house and he is surprised by their expectation that they will smoke together and that he will give them the pipe. They are angry that he is taking something out of circulation, something that should be shared. He is hurt to realize that some gifts aren’t privately owned in the way he imagined and come with certain expectations.

According to anthropologists, what makes given objects and sold products different is that we do not get a gift through our own efforts. Gifts also create communities and relationships. Gifts that are removed from circulation cease to be gifts. It is in exactly this sense that I understand Jesus who says, “For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Our life and the salvation we find in Jesus cease to exist when we stop giving it away.

A very strange thing happened to me last night. After being too busy to write a sermon all week I left an outline on my desk. When I woke up, I discovered a whole sermon carefully typed into my computer. Those naked men started it with the familiar story of the “Shoemaker and the Elves.” This parable has been used many times to describe the experience of creating art.

A mentor takes time to pass on the skill of composing music or drawing or ceramic tile work. At first the learner is in no position to repay anyone. It takes time to receive the gift. Eventually, although the student’s art is influenced by the master, it becomes individual and unique. Then for this gift to have value it must be practiced and passed on.

I don’t mean to equate God with a naked elf but I believe that Christianity is like this. It is learning to receive a gift by beginning to give ourselves. It is saving the one thing that is truly ours by giving it away. So we give not out of fear that God will judge us but because we are made in the image of a God who pours himself into the world and gives himself away.
_________________
This version is heavily based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 48.
Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of the World,” On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 3.
This work originated in Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift which I cannot find on my shelves right now. For this summary see Ibid., xiv.

Voices from Heaven

2006-03-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

M5

Gen. 9:8-17
Ps 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mk. 1:9-15

“And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased…” Mark 1

I know for sure only that it was ordinary time and that angels were there. Colored light on a summer afternoon streamed through stained glass windows in patterns on the floor. The people in the world who most loved me handed me back and forth. Then my grandfather held me in his large hands and looked into my eyes (in the way I have come to be blessed by the newly baptized myself). Then he poured water on my forehead and God’s song entered my heart.

I have to be honest with you. There have been times when I have not heard that song. There have been periods in my life when I could only hear the demands of my own ego, times when my anxieties and fears made me not listen to this song. I have done things that have made me not want to believe in God or at least that made me try to forget God’s justice. Like you perhaps there have been moments when I have been so tempted by despair that this melody sounds infinitely distant. Tragedy with my lack of faith has made me forget that in every place God brings forth the new.

But that song has never left me. It makes me more likely to notice what is good and beautiful. It gives me confidence and a sense of purpose. The greatest things I accomplish in my life arise out of that song. I have been blessed by my godparents and by other Christians who fill in for them. They have learned this song so well that when I am lost they help me to find my place in the music.

Today’s gospel has haunted me this whole week. Using the simplest Greek words Mark has compressed lifetimes of symbolic meaning into only five short sentences. What is heaven, repentance, belief, the dove, baptism or Satan? What does the father’s voice sound like? What does the spirit look like? Was Jesus surprised? What does it mean to fulfill time or that the kingdom is at hand? How can Jesus be tempted and why is it in a wilderness with wild animals and angels? How did he feel when he learned that his cousin John had been arrested? What does Jesus’ proclamation of the good news have to do with us?

The song, your hopes at baptism and this story all concern what makes us spiritual beings. And this has a real effect as we decide who we are trying to become. Many people do not believe in the spiritual life or that at baptism God puts a song into our hearts.

I wonder if Thomas Midgley, Jr. believed in this song. Midgley has the dubious distinction of being the single living organism that has had the most destructive influence on the global environment. In the 1920’s refrigerators killed people because they used toxic gases. Midgley worked to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive and safe to breathe. He brought the world chlorofluorocarbons or CFC’s. Overnight CFC’s came to be used in thousands of different products from aerosol sprays to car air conditioners.

It took fifty years to realize that CFC’s were completely destroying the ozone layer of the earth’s protective atmosphere. We only now understand the fragility of the processes that sustain life on this planet. If the ozone that we depend on was distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere this layer would only be one eighth of an inch thick. The problem is that one pound of CFC’s destroys seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. At the time of his death we didn’t understand this, but Midgley did comprehend the dangers of his other invention.

God must see some amazing connections and coincidences in the human carnival. One of the most extraordinary is that the same person who invented CFC’s also brought us the idea of adding lead to gasoline. Because the dangers of lead were already well known this was a controversial move from the very beginning (that was why they called the gasoline additive ethyl rather than lead).

In human beings lead lasts forever. Lead that you swallow or breathe is not excreted but becomes more and more concentrated in your bones and blood. It is a neurotoxin. Symptoms of overexposure include blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer and convulsions. In acute forms it produces terrifying hallucinations and madness.

Immediately after its introduction, workers in lead gasoline additive plants started suffering from lead poisoning. In only five consecutive production days at one plant five workers died and another thirty-five were permanently afflicted with brain damage. When employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions a company official disingenuously told reporters that, “These men probably went insane from working too hard.”

For forty years the only scientific studies on the effects of lead on human beings were funded by manufacturers of lead additives. Perhaps this is part of the reason we failed to realize what we were doing. Before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere. Since then quantities of lead in our air have sky-rocketed. Almost ninety percent of it came from automobile tailpipes. When lead was removed from all gasoline in 1986 lead blood levels in America fell by 80 percent. But because lead lasts forever most of us still have 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago.

The inventor of ethyl additives Thomas Midgley did understand the effect of lead. He himself had been poisoned only a few months before he gave a demonstration of lead’s safety at a press conference. He poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held a beaker of it up to his nose for sixty seconds claiming that he could repeat this daily without any harm. The truth was that Midgley recognized the danger of his invention and stayed away from it when reporters weren’t around.

If you don’t believe in the song that God puts into your heart at baptism it makes it a lot harder to hear your conscience. I try to imagine what led Midgley to lie so blatantly in order to cover up the danger of a compound that he was about to introduce into the tissues of every animal on the planet. Perhaps he feared being called a failure. Maybe like all of us, he just wanted people to admire him. We do this all the time. We become gods to our self.

One of the most famous teachers at Harvard Divinity School was Henri Nouwen. He gave up the prestige of academic and public life to live with and care for mentally disabled people at L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto. He once said that many of the people he lived with there heard voices. These voices said, “If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving.” I hear that voice and I wonder if Thomas Midgley did too. Nouwen goes on to describe the spiritual life as a process of gradually learning to listen to the voice that says instead, “You are my Beloved.” This is the song and the promise given to us at baptism.

The Buddha in his teaching draws our attention to this phenomenon. He believed that we would be happier if we acted as if we did not have a self that needed to be pampered, protected and asserted. He reasoned that without an overriding consciousness of the self we would no longer hate or feel greed or be anxious about our status and survival.

He called this state of nonattachment, nirvana. Nirvana means literally “blowing out,” like a candle after supper. It signifies the extinction of the ego, total freedom from the self that is the source of all unhappiness.

I might be inclined to more fully believe this if I didn’t hear the song first given to me at baptism. That music whispers to me that I do not need to extinguish my self, but that I don’t need to protect it either. Everything I have, everything I am, comes as a gift from God. That gift becomes real when I give out of that life to others.

On Friday our children Micah and Melia and I were leaving Cooper Park when they saw a woman struggling painfully with crutches. Our daughter asked her at great length what had happened. And after she finished explaining, I could see that my children wanted so badly to help her. Our son spoke right up and told her that I was a priest and could give her a blessing.

It was an amazing moment for me. I love what I do. I feel awed and humbled in that moment when I pronounce a blessing. Somewhere along the line our children have learned what this means to me.

But this calling from God does not come to me alone. All of us through baptism receive the song that will change the world. The barrier separating you from heaven is torn away. God’s spirit dwells in you. You are the location where God happens to other people.

In conclusion, I have tried to express what this song means to me and the way that ignoring or hearing it changes our lives and the world. When it comes to this music all of us are part Thomas Midgley, part Buddha, part Henri Nouwen, part Micah Young. I believe that listening to this song and living it is what Jesus means when he calls us to repent.

If you dare, I invite you to shut your eyes and imagine the song that God put into your heart. It is not loud because it is intimate, in the deepest part of you. It sounds like this: “You are perfectly loved as my beloved child. You belong to me, and I belong to you. I give everything to save you and draw you to myself. You will be safe. Trust this gift that you are to the world.” Amen.
_____________

Although this idea comes from a google search of Midgley, the rest comes from Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), Chapter 10.
“The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow… by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.” Ibid., 159.
Henri Nouwen, “The Life of the Beloved,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1991. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/nouwen_3502.htm
Karen Armstrong, “Is Immortality Important?” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 1 (December 2006), p. 24.
This arises out of Henri Nouwen’s “The Life of the Beloved.”

Good to Be Here

2006-03-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

M4

1 Kings 19:9-18
Ps 27
2 Peter 1:16-19(20-1)
Mk. 9:2-9

It Is Good for Us to Be Here
“Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here…” Mark 9

It is good for us to be here! It is good to be with the Stirling sisters who have missed only a handful of Sundays here over six decades (the bars they gave for Sunday School attendance would be a mile long for each of them), with Helen Connolly who has never just walked past me but has given me a hug on my best days and my worst. It is good to be with the Old Testament prophet Fritz Schneider, with our self-effacing bishop Dick Millard and Debra Ting who has the most holy smile I can imagine. It is good to be in the place where you can find the infectious laughter both of June Barlow and Patrick Brown and little Jimmy Snell.

On any given Sunday most of us here, along with a little boredom, discover a glimpse of what is holy. But every week one or two of us has the lid ripped right off, God lifts the veil and we see him face to face. This is not a slick or polished church. We make a lot of mistakes. We ring a huge bell in your ear if you are a minute late. Perhaps this makes it seem even more remarkable how often the holy overwhelms us here.

When Jesus goes up to the mountaintop to pray with his three closest friends it happens there too. Jesus is transfigured before them in a dazzling white glow. The unbearable glory and light behind everything in the universe appears. The chronology of ordinary time is broken open. Suddenly the two men who for readers of the Bible have most indisputably seen God, Elijah and Moses, appear before them. Then Jesus’ most bold friend Peter says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” The author then speaks up to defend Peter writing, “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

Most biblical interpreters seem to pretty much agree on two things about Peter. First, he betrayed his friend and teacher Jesus in the final hour. Second, that in the face of the sudden appearance of the holy, Peter couldn’t help but say something stupid. In defense of Peter, I think all of us have been guilty of talking too much when we should have let a moment speak for itself. The scholars forget that one remarkable thing about being human is that sometimes when we say, “it is good for us to be here,” we actually make the moment better. Somehow being with someone and saying, “this surf is great,” feels better than enjoying it alone. I imagine this may be true of our mountaintop experiences too.

Every year the beauty of spring in California takes me by surprise. I can’t help but remember that spring when Heidi and I fell in love. You’ve all probably heard the story too many times. Heidi was a delightfully perky college student with a yellow daisy behind her ear. I was an always over-dressed, overly-serious university administrator. I sent her love poems over the campus mail system.

But dating me never was easy. That spring I invited Heidi to walk with me from UC Irvine’s campus over the hills to her aunt’s house in Laguna Beach. It’s about ten miles as the crow flies. The problem is that we’re not crows. I had walked about a quarter of the way there myself, but there are no real trails, so I wasn’t completely sure where to go.

At the halfway point we came to a barbed wire fence. On the other side, there in the middle of nowhere, stood a mean-looking bull. Heidi doesn’t even like suspicious dogs but there was no way to go around. Our plan was to have me jump the fence in front of it and distract the animal while Heidi walked quickly behind him over to the next ridge. The bull made a few menacing gestures but we got by it.

Within an hour as the adrenaline trailed off, we reached the top of the mountain. Surrounded by acres of wildflowers and rich grasses, alone on top of the world we seemed so far above the distant desert, the suburban sprawl and the infinite blue Pacific. The air was so clear we could see snow on the mountains beyond L.A. and our whole future seemed spread out before us. We felt God blessing us and in that moment something of who we are today came into being. The holiness we experienced there will always be part of my soul. It was good for us to be there.

I know that there are places in your life where it was good to be, when God’s glory flashed before you and left you speechless. You have enriched my life by telling me about your moments of transfiguration. Many of us in such an instant have been changed forever by God. These stories become so central to how we understand ourselves, it is almost hard to realize how many others have had these mystical experiences too.

One of my favorite writers, the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) collected dozens and dozens of mountaintop experiences in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. He writes, “there are moments of sentimental and mystical experience… that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination when they come…” James believed that scientists should not ignore these transformative experiences. He reports that even people who do not believe in God can have them.

I want to give an example of what James means. He quotes a Swiss person who wrote the following on a hiking trip. “I was in perfect health… I can best describe the condition I was in by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God – I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it – as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life… I felt his reply.”

The Bible reports on this experience too. The prophet Elijah was running for his life and hiding out from the king’s army in a cave. God didn’t appear to him in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in a sound of sheer silence. Like Elijah God has called to you. Like Elijah God has a purpose for you and it will probably be clearest in the moments when he seems most near to you.

Christianity involves more than the joy that we experience when God comes to us on the mountaintop. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. This Wednesday we enter the holy season of Lent. Six weeks later on the last Sunday of Lent we read a story very much like the one we have today. Jesus goes off again with Peter, James and John to pray in Gethsemane on the night he is arrested. He says, “I am deeply grieved” and asks them to stay awake with him, but they cannot. These two stories share in common the prayer, the holy mystery of God’s actions, the scared friends at a loss for what to say.

These two stories are like bookends which contain Lent. We as Christians live both out of these stories and between them. We know the enlightening joy of being transfigured by God and the darkness of Gethsemane. This week I stayed with a friend during an examination after doctors discovered that she had cancer. I learned that a man I love will have to have surgery a fifth time because all the other efforts to cure him have failed. I talked with a couple I know going through the wasteland of divorce.

I know that darkness has touched you this week too. Maybe you feel lonely or vulnerable or you worry about the future. Perhaps you feel betrayed or see no way to be reconciled to someone who you are supposed to love. We are all well-acquainted with darkness.

This is hard to explain but our relation to the darkness is part of what defines us as Christians. Other religions and philosophies of life seem mostly to avoid the darkness. Their gods seem distant and pure, uninvolved or oblivious to the pain of the world. But this is not the way of the Christ. Jesus chooses to be betrayed and humiliated. He chooses to suffer terrible pain all for the sake of love. In fact, as Christians we believe that there is something about this world that can only be cured by the self-sacrifice of God.

The Gospel of John frequently describes the crucifixion of Jesus as his glorification. For us Jesus transforms the darkness of failure and suffering and despair. The light of his transfiguration and our own transformation always remind us that the darkness will not overcome us. But his example does not just transform our experience of death and suffering.

Through him we experience the light in a new way too. Those mountaintop experiences when we have seen God face to face become more than just a comfort to us. They provide us with the peace and confidence to take the risks and make the sacrifices demanded by love.

By now everyone has probably heard the old preacher’s story about the abbot of an Egyptian monastery. A visitor asks him, “Do you believe in miracles?” The monk pauses and replies, “It depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people say it is a miracle when God does what the people want him to do. We say it is a miracle when the people do what God wants them to do.”

In conclusion, I pray that you will have a holy Lent, that you will visit the mountaintop and create the space in your life that will make it possible to hear God’s call to you. I pray that you will discover within yourself the glory and joy of transfiguration along with the power that love’s sacrifices demand. I am grateful that we share each other’s company in our travels as we pass through the valleys of darkness and the mountaintops of clear light. I feel thankful that Jesus is our guide. Like Heidi and I on top of Signal Hill we get a glimpse of the future of God’s kingdom when we gather together. It is good for us to be here!

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 in Writings 1902-1910 (NY: Library of America, 1987), 23.
Ibid., 68.
For this comparison I am indebted to the more articulate Rowan Williams, “Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, March 2, 2003. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2003/030302.html

Connections We Cannot Make

2006-02-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

M3

2 Kings 4:8-37
Ps 142
1 Cor. 9:16-23
Mk. 1:29-39

I love my friend David like a brother. Last week we were driving in a car together. He told me that in the last five years something had happened to his faith. He said, “Malcolm, I’m not sure I believe it anymore.” “What don’t you believe?” I asked. “Any of it,” he replied, “heaven, a god who made the world and sees what we do and cares about us. I’m not sure that the world has any meaning at all. If there was a god, why is there so much suffering?”

In our Old Testament reading a Shunamite woman has such absolute faith in God that when her only child dies she tells no one, not even the boy’s father. She believes with such conviction that God will restore her son and God does. My friend David asks, what happens when the child does not come back to life?

This week I felt the presence of God and it scared me. It happened during a bible study with my friend Sheila. As we read this story I was trembling as I remembered visiting her daughter in the hospital less than four years ago. Like the Shunamite woman Sheila had also trusted God and asked for help. But this daughter, whom she loved more than life itself, never recovered. This week there was a heavy silence in the room and we wondered what Sheila would say. For me she is a kind of saint. Through these terrible years she has continued to bring so much love into this church. So why do David and Sheila draw such different conclusions about the relation between God and tragedy?

I think it is because they have very different pictures of Christianity. My friend David seems to believe that Christianity offers a reason for why everything happens. He talks as if its primary purpose is to defend God’s actions, as if the idea of heaven serves only to justify the bad things that happen here on earth. For him God is either all-powerful or he simply does not exist. Perhaps David imagines God moving us around like a cosmic chess player. Maybe he imagines God’s act of creation as one of choosing from an infinite number of possible worlds, one without mosquitoes, one without email spam and another without cancer.

David seems to see suffering and pleasure almost in an absolute sense as if it were possible simply to measure the amount of each, to put them on the scale and see which was greater. In his eyes suffering outweighs the good. Because of this he cannot accept God.

The primary difference between David and Sheila is that David is trying to work out answers alone (or from what we hear about God outside the church). Sheila on the other hand is part of a community of people who are sharing their experiences, trying to love God and to heal the world.

The god who controls everything like a cosmic puppeteer is the god of some ancient Greek philosophers. It is emphatically not the God of the Bible. From the very beginning, Christians have regarded death not as necessary for a greater good but as God’s enemy. In the book of John Jesus says about his crucifixion, “Now is the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (Jn. 12:31-2).

Suffering, evil and pain are not the work of God although at times they are the occasion in which we see God’s grace. The Bible inspires us to heal suffering whether we encounter it in poverty, loneliness, racism, psychological disease, violence or even in arguments which suggest that our lives have no meaning. The story of Jesus is about how God desires to heal us so badly that he will suffer terrible pain and betrayal in order to have a relationship with us.

Human beings are tormented not just by what we have loved and lost, or by the pain that we have suffered or witnessed. The real issue is the pain that we are responsible for both in ourselves and in others. The real question is do we contribute to the world’s joy. On this earth we do not experience suffering or joy in absolute quantities. Our actions and our consciousness magnify them.

When my son Micah was one year old, I took him to an exhibit of photographs by Edward Weston (1886-1958) who lived in Carmel during the first half of the twentieth century. At the time we lived in Boston and it was a miserable winter day with gray skies and freezing rain falling onto dirty snow. The trees had no leaves. There was nothing green outside at all.

As he slept in the stroller I wandered through the exhibit. There were so many beautiful pictures of California. At first I felt a little homesick. Weston had photographs from Monterrey of pines, cypress bark, rocks and beautifully shaped sand dunes. But he also had more surprising pictures: close ups of the twisting skin of peppers that looked sensual like a human body. He showed the geometrical perfection of an artichoke that had been cut in half. The strangest images of all were pictures of a toilet that made it look breathtakingly beautiful. When we left the exhibit the world was transformed for me. That whole afternoon I could look at very ordinary things and see great beauty. Our life can be like this, it opens up to deeper levels when we pay attention.

The seven-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater was on his way to the contest that could give him his next championship. As the plane taxied down the runway he kept sending text messages on his cell phone. The passenger next to him told him that it would interfere with the plane’s electronic systems. Slater felt tempted to be a punk and swear at the man, but he didn’t. Instead he turned his phone off and they had a long conversation together. Afterwards, Slater realized that this change in attitude was a turning point for him and even contributed to his victory. Loving better helped him become a better surfer.

In our lives we can choose to see beauty and bring love into the world or we can deny them. We can take the suffering that we feel and make other people suffer too. So why do we fail to see? Why do we experience and cause suffering? Why does God often seem so distant from us?

In today’s reading the apostle Paul writes, “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” I used to think that this meant that Paul was a fake, that he pretended to be something that he wasn’t, as if he were trying to fit into a high school clique in which he did not belong. But since then I have come to see this in an entirely different way.

People who do not believe in Christ see differences between people as irreconcilable, that the difference between Palestinians and Israelis, black people and white people, skaters and jocks, parents and teenagers, are the most important things about us. I think that what Paul means is that in Christ we do not have to be cut off from each other, we do not have to continue to harm or be harmed by each other. God invites us into a new kind of life that will give us power over suffering. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury says, “God is in the connections that we cannot make.”

Christian de Cherge (1937-1996) was a Trappist monk in Algeria who dedicated his whole life to building bridges between Christians and Muslims. In 1993 when Islamic radicals grew in power he and his fellow monks had the chance to flee the country. Instead they chose to risk their lives so that they could continue their work. Three years later de Cherge was beheaded by militants.

He left behind a letter to his family in which he expressed his fears that his death would be used to condemn the people of Islam whom he loved. In it he writes, “Obviously, my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve or idealistic… But such people should know that my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able – if God pleases – to see the children of Islam as He sees them illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences. I give thanks to God for this life, completely mine yet completely theirs [also] to God who wanted it for joy against… all odds… And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves if it pleases God, our common Father…”

The twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich argued that sin is not a particular immoral act like killing or stealing. Instead sin affects all of us all the time as the state of disconnection which he calls estrangement. We are cut off from the God who we were created to intimately know. We feel isolated from each other. Like porcupines on a cold winter night we huddle together for warmth and poke each other with our sharp spines all at the same time.

Perhaps the most important thing that Tillich ever wrote was a short sermon called “You are Accepted.” His point was that, in the words of the Bible, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 8:39). We cannot earn God’s love by being good or by believing in him. God loves us no matter what we have done and no matter who we are. After Tillich’s death his family found a copy of this sermon in his desk in which he had written a dedication, “to ME.”

In conclusion, I think that many of us at times feel tempted to believe in a god whose power is greater than his love. But whether it is through a photographer of toilets or a champion surfer God shows us many ways to bring more beauty and love into the world. Jesus, the crucified and the Holy One of God, with his children such as Christian de Cherge and Paul Tillich struggle together against suffering and death. The God of infinite connection is with us and invites us to share in joy.

During bible study this week, I told my friend Sheila that I especially wanted this sermon to speak to teenagers. And this woman who lost her daughter said, “above all tell them that God loves them and that this love can lift them up even in the darkest moments of their lives.”

Hitler Youth

2006-01-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

M1, D1

Isa. 42:1-9
Ps. 89:1-29
Acts 10:34-8
Mk. 1:7-11

Jordan Day
“See the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” Isaiah 42

My first church secretary Marianne was a Hitler Youth. I don’t mean this pejoratively or metaphorically, although she really could be a bulldog to callers trying to sell me copying machines or Sunday School curricula. Marianne grew up during the 1930’s in Germany and thoroughly enjoyed the campouts and singing and camaraderie with other Hitler Youth. The Hitler Youth she talked about and the one you read about in the encyclopedia (“a paramilitary organization… [that] served as a recruiting ground for new storm troopers”) sound entirely different.

Marianne lost both her parents in World War Two. I will never forget the frightening stories she told me about being an orphan in post-war Germany. What you sensed she was leaving out made the stories even more terrifying. I’ve been thinking so much about Marianne this week as I read Hans Erich Nossack’s book Der Untergang written three months after the Battle of Hamburg.

Nossack tries to write about an experience that simply cannot be expressed, about memories that are too difficult to recall. On July 27, 1943 in the midst of 8 continuous days of bombing, Allied forces trapped fire fighters in the city center while detonating incendiary bombs on the periphery of the city. This created a Feuersturm, a firestorm with 150 mile per hour winds and 1500 degree Fahrenheit temperatures which burned up 8 square miles of the city. Street asphalt burst into flame, tens of thousands of people were incinerated or asphyxiated in bomb shelters. In that week sixty thousand people were killed and one million people lost everything they owned.

We are used to seeing images of horror on our television screens. The remarkable thing about Nossack’s account is how different it seems from news coverage of Iraq or from a normal crime drama. Nossack writes about the interior experience, the alienation and shock that despite the terrible situation does not seem discontinuous with normal life.

He poignantly describes the abyss separating those who lost everything and those who could help them, why even a generous hand can tire of giving and why it is even more difficult to receive (20). He writes, “Who could blame the helpers for being disappointed when they [realized] that what they offered [clothes, shelter and food]… basically didn’t make any difference at all” (20).

A refugee would walk through a strange room, “touch an object, hold it and look at it absently. The host would follow him with his eyes and expect a statement like: We too once had something like this… But instead… the unspoken question would fill the room: What is the use of still having such things” (20). “Those who were known to have experienced unimaginably frightful hours, who had run through fire with their clothes burning, stumbling over charred corpses… in whose arms a child had suffocated; who had seen their house collapse right after their father or husband had gone inside… why didn’t they cry and lament? And why this indifferent tone of voice when they spoke of what they had left behind…” (21).

“So it came to pass that people who lived together in the same house and ate at the same table breathed the air of completely separate worlds. They tried to reach out to each other but their hands did not meet. They spoke the same language, but what they meant by their words were completely different realities” (22).

This terrible divide between people who showed by their actions that life goes on and those who cast doubt on the meaning of life made each individual an island. It might seem odd to you but writing in the heat of the moment, Nossack focused less on the loss of life and property than the annihilation of self that he saw in these isolated survivors.

This week I have also been reading another book. At first the two seemed like total opposites. A classmate from high school named Franz Wisner recently sold the film rights of his book Honeymoon with My Brother for something like a million dollars.

Franz begins by telling how his long-term girlfriend left him a few days before a lavishly planned wedding at Sea Ranch. In the aftermath of this total disaster he and his brother decided to go on the honeymoon - together. Traveling suited them and they visited 53 countries over the course of two years.

The book shows me the ways people both change and remain the same over time. It helps me to better understand feelings that I could not articulate about people I used to know. Sony Films is probably more interested in it because Franz was the press secretary for former governor Pete Wilson and they see potential for the story as a buddy film.

I think Franz tries to show that this experience changed him from being a political manipulator to a person who recognizes what really matters, that through his travels he became someone capable of really being close to another person. But I don’t know if he succeeds.

Visiting another high school friend in the Czech Republic Franz meets Jana “an aspiring singer and model.” He writes, “She wore a black miniskirt that barely covered the tops of her stately legs, a snug mocha-colored sweater… She was gorgeous" (102). Franz describes Jana’s underwear and the joy of sex with her (I’ll spare you the details). But then he devotes the next page to how boring she was afterwards and how he couldn’t get her to leave until he faked his own departure from the city. In Franz’s stories people only seem to have importance in proportion to their usefulness to him.

On the surface this book about a wealthy clever, often cynical Californian traveling the world with his brother could hardly seem more different from the refugees who lost everything in the firebombing of Hamburg. But both books left me with the same kind of sadness, the loneliness of disconnection. In Nossack’s words they are both about “people who lived together… and… breathed the air of completely separate worlds.”

The people in Hamburg did not know who they were because losing everything made them question their existence. My classmate seems similarly isolated because, strangely enough, it takes a lot of energy to have everything. I guess the problem with having everything is that even then there is still always more.

There is a kind of darkness that engulfs us when, for whatever reason, we cease to see beyond ourselves. Every one of us knows this feeling. Today the church celebrates the first Sunday of Epiphany. The word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphano which means to shine. On this day we give thanks for the light that God shines in us and that the darkness around us cannot extinguish it.

In Bulgaria they call Epiphany, Jordan Day because that was the river in which Jesus was baptized. In some cities there, after the Epiphany church service, the priest takes the statue of Jesus in a procession out of the church and through the city. When they arrive at the river, they break a hole in the ice and drop the statue into the depths. The young men of the city make larger holes, strip down to their swimming trunks and dive in. Deep under the ice and water, without air, sound or light they grope around until one of them finds the statue and brings it up.

These young men must really love Jesus or the fame associated with finding him. I love this image of looking for Jesus in a world of darkness. We all do this. I am grateful that Jesus is not that hard to find.

At Christ Church we find Jesus together. To use Nossack’s words we reach for each other and our hands touch. We speak the same language. We use words that refer to the same experiences. Church growth experts recommend that churches segregate the congregation. They claim that programs and church services should keep younger people and older people apart so that they don’t bother each other.

But we as a community have made a conscious choice. We decided that we would be one body in Christ, that we would either succeed or fail together, that we would do our best to make room for everybody. Although it seemed impossible at the time, we have met with remarkable success.

But this isn’t always easy. A few weeks ago a small group of older people were wondering how they could help make coffee hour easier to host. One or two of the ladies thought that they should ask parents to rein in their children so that they don’t devour all the snacks before the service is over. Other older ladies hoped that they themselves could provide coffee hour snacks for kids so that this wouldn’t be necessary.

When a few moms realized that some older women were prepared to make food for their children every single Sunday, these young ladies immediately began an email conversation about how they could make coffee hour better for both younger people and older people.

I am not naïve. I realize that a very small number of people see the glass as half empty and that it is human nature to distrust people who are different from ourselves. The remarkable thing to me is the extent to which we as a community get it. Jesus is with us. We are doing out best to embody his teaching of unconditional love.

The light God shines is the light of this community. Ultimately we see it because this is a place where you are accepted. If you are married or divorced or single or gay you are accepted here. If you are an inconsiderate younger person or a cranky older person, you will find love here. If you are not sure that you believe, if you think that you are unforgivable this can be a place where God is present for you. You are accepted here if you are a refugee who has lost everything or if by every measure you seem to have it all.

When my secretary Marianne lay dying of emphysema in her hospital bed, she was part of a church that even accepted former Hitler Youth. I spent many hours visiting her in those days and one of her greatest gifts to me was this Epiphany prayer from her childhood written in German.

Lord, let me hunger now and then,
Because being always full makes us dull and sluggish
And struggle moves us to strength.
Hang the crown of glory
Higher among the stars…
And let the light of Epiphany shine brightly in our hearts and our actions
That seeking Jesus we will find him.
Amen.
________________________

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth.
Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943. Tr. Joel Agee (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Franz Wisner, Honeymoon with My Brother: A Memoir (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
From Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, 61.

Seeing the Apocalypse

2006-01-02T14:32:00.000-08:00

L31

Isa. 64:1-9a
Ps. 80:1-7
1 Cor. 1:1-9
Mk. 13: (24-32) 33-7

Your eyes do not collect sense data and then simply download it to your brain. Scientists now understand that this is a feedback system. To see these flowers, sense data enters a lower part of the brain called the primary visual cortex which determines the shape of the flowers. A higher region then recognizes their colors. Then an even higher part of the brain decides what kind of flowers these are and accesses other facts that you already know about flowers.

Scientists point out that there are ten times as many nerve fibers carrying information from the higher to the lower regions of the brain as in the opposite direction. What you already know is a large part of what makes it possible for you to see new things. The way that the brain works from the top down also explains why placebos like sugar pills or nocebos such as witch doctor curses have actual physiological effects.

It shows how hypnotism works to some degree in eighty percent of the adult population. Psychologists have long been aware of what they call the Stroop Effect. Researchers will show a subject cards with color words printed on them. The only problem is that the color of the ink does not match the word described (for instance, the word purple will be printed in green ink). If you can read the word this causes a measurable delay in recognizing the color.

10-15% of adults are highly hypnotizable and 20% are resistant to hypnosis. Scientists have hypnotized people in this first group to experience the printed word as gibberish. Afterwards when tested they showed no hesitation in recognizing the colors of the ink. They were in effect immune to the Stroop Effect. By working on their higher mind scientists changed the way they physiologically perceived the world.

This is one way that prayer and meditation, religious or philosophical beliefs affect our experience of the world. The awareness of this effect that prior beliefs have on perception is part of what people call postmodernism. People who describe themselves as postmodern often emphasize that this is an age of competing world pictures. They are less likely to propose what they call “grand narratives” (other than postmodernism) for understanding human experience, knowledge and history.

This month in a lecture at Harvard College the writer Salman Rushdie (1947- ) spoke about some of the challenges that novelists face in this cultural situation. He compared our time with nineteenth century Britain. Jane Austen’s novels do not include supernatural elements or radical shifts in perspective. (These novels focus so intensely on local life that they barely even mention the Napoleonic Wars which were happening at the time.) In that era there were few South Asians or Africans in Britain so there was more of a consensus on how the world was.

Rushdie says that this type of realism, “depended on the writer and reader having a shared description of what the world was like, a shared worldview. But today, reality is highly contested. There's a real debate about the simple nature of what is the case, and in that context, the realism of the 19th century novel is not workable. It seems like a fiction."

I think that reality has always been contested. However today we are more likely to accept a broader range of possible pictures of the world. In part this is because of a new respect for the limits of scientific knowledge and the technology and cultural exchange that exposes us to more people with values that differ from our own.

Sermons from my childhood justified Christian faith in a world of encroaching secularism. They proved that faith in God is reasonable. In many respects the situation today is more complicated. As Christians we need to know more than why our faith is compatible with modern knowledge. But we also have to understand how we differ from Christian fundamentalists. Nowhere is Christian reality more “contested” than when it comes to apocalypticism, to biblical prophecies depicting the end of time. This morning I want to explore where these ideas come from and their influence on how Christians understand their place in a complex modern world.

1. The Bible should really be regarded as a library of books with many different authors who wrote at different times rather than as a single genre. I wince when I hear “the Bible says” (especially when I say it). Authors in the Bible at times have conflicting points of view, they use different kinds of literary genres to reach very different audiences in different historical and cultural contexts.

The Bible isn’t chiefly about prophecies concerning the end of the world. However, there is a biblical genre called apocalyptic which uses colorful symbols and allegory to describe mystical visions of future conflict. These accounts rely on the idea that God works on a massive historical scale and that through symbols a reader can discern the specific details of God’s project.

In today’s gospel Jesus himself says, “about that day or hour [when the world ends] no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk. 13). Despite this Christians have presumed to know quite a bit about the end. Mostly they cite the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation and today’s chapter from Mark.

The book of Ezekiel comes out of the experience of Israel in the sixth century B.C. war between Babylon and Egypt. Political leaders forced to take sides in the conflict and were defeated by the Babylonians and exiled. Daniel’s book forecasts the future defeat of all Israel’s enemies as they invade the holy land. It describes the stench of dead bodies which it took seven months to bury.

The book of Daniel has had a far greater effect on the ultimate shape of this genre. This was written in the second century B.C. and addresses the political situation after Alexander the Great’s world empire had been divided into massive kingdoms. In this situation the king in Syria plundered the temple in Jerusalem, appointed his own Greek-influenced priests and established Greek cultural practices (like the gymnasium) in Israel. By the year 167 B.C. Antiochus more openly tried to destroy Judaism by forcing Jews to take part in pagan rituals and by setting up a statue of Zeus in the Temple.

Daniel’s book describes prophecies of these events that Daniel made during the much earlier reign of king Nebuchadnezzar. The king dreams of a statue with a gold head, chest and arms of silver, stomach and upper legs of brass, legs of iron and feet of clay. A stone shatters the feet and grows to dominate the world. Daniel explains that the statue represents kingdoms, each with less glory. The stone represents a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. Daniel also has dreams of beasts with human features combined with those of lions, leopards and eagles with lots of horns arising out of the sea. These too are kingdoms but Daniel’s description of this prophecy is more complicated and less clear. Ultimately he prophecies that the temple shall be cleansed of its desecration and God’s kingdom established after a terrible battle at the “time of the end.”

A man named John wrote the New Testament Book of Revelation during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D.) from exile off the coast of Asia minor. After letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, John describes eighteen wildly symbolic visions. These include terrifying disasters, plagues and warfare. The sea turns to blood, water is poisoned, horrifying locusts attack. People are forced to worship a beast with seven heads and ten horns. Kings who have fornicated with the Whore of Babylon wage war against the Lamb of God. Then Satan is defeated and sealed in a pit for a thousand years – the millennium. During this time Christ reigns on earth until he destroys Satan permanently in a final battle. Then God judges all the people who ever lived. Revelation ends with an image of eternal life in the New Jerusalem.

2. I believe that all these authors use symbolic language to describe their own historical situations. For John Babylon is the Roman Empire which demands total allegiance and crushes Christian dissent. Millions of Americans strongly disagree with this view. Although apocalyptic literature in the Bible has been applied to historical figures and events ranging from the fall of Rome through the Protestant Reformation to the recent invasion of Iraq, this way of seeing the world has particularly taken hold in America.

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) was a premillenialist who believed that his was the age before Christ’s reign of a thousand years. He was a dispensationalist. This meant that he thought God deals differently with humanity in each age. One age of prophesied events ended with Jesus’ crucifixion. The next would begin with the rapture when true believers would rise up in the air to meet Jesus. After that, those left behind would face the seven year rule of the Antichrist and the Apostate Church during what he called the Tribulation. Then there would be the Battle of Armageddon, the millennium and the final defeat of Satan.

Probably no other belief so clearly distinguishes biblical fundamentalists from other Christians than this prophecy culture which coalesced in the last two hundred years. This kind of fundamentalist is deeply interested in the state of Israel because of Daniel’s concern with desecration of the temple in Jerusalem as a sign of the end time. For a century they believed that the northern invaders of Israel mentioned in the Old Testament referred to Russia. In the twentieth century they regarded the invention of nuclear weapons as a clear sign of how the world would soon be destroyed.

The belief in a coming Antichrist who would rule the world created a paranoid fear of centralization and authoritarianism. This is why American fundamentalists feel so suspicious of organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union. It is why computerized banking, the Internet and bar codes seem like such clear signs that the rapture is near. Rock bands that embed satanic symbolism in their music and war in the Middle East only add to this fear that everything is coming apart.

Your eyes do not collect sense data and then simply download it to your brain. What you believe shapes what you see and know. In a democracy with the most powerful military in history a fervent, overly-confident apocalypticism has an effect on world history. These modern prophecies of the endtime demonstrate a remarkable simplicity, an extreme confidence in the ability of human beings to understand the way that God works in history. At the same time this prophetic view of the world makes human action for the sake of justice or the environment or to end poverty or any other true goodness seem largely futile. It functions to make the believer feel both superior to others and at the same time ultimately not responsible.

Christians like you and me also face the same sense of alienation in the face of a complex often dehumanizing society. But the people who I know in this church believe in a larger God. This God does not speak in code. He wants all people to understand his will for them, that we become his partners when we love kindness, do justice and act mercifully. Science is no threat to our God. The more we learn about ourselves, our planet and the universe the better capable we are to understand God. God loves us enough to take care of us. But ultimately the way he acts, the way he brings peace and healing is mysterious.
_____________________
Eighty to eighty-five percent of children under the age of twelve are even more susceptible to hypnosis. Sandra Blakeslee, “This is Your Brain Under Hypnosis,” New York Times, 11-22-2005.
Ken Gewertz, “Challenges of a Modern Story-Teller: Rushdie Speaks about the Novel, the Real World and the Difference between the Two,” Harvard University Gazette 11-10-2005 (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/11.10/09-rushdie.html).
Other apocalyptic works include: II Enoch, IV Ezra, II Baruch, III Baruch. See NT era works like the Apocalypse of Peter. Biblical books also include sections that make use of this genre: I and II Thessalonians, I Corinthians, II Peter, I and II John.
This sermon has been deeply shaped by Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 87.

Playing in Traffic

2005-12-27T14:39:00.000-08:00

L33

Isa. 9:2-4, 6-7
Ps. 96:1-4,11-2
Titus 2:11-14
Lk. 2:1-14 (15-20)

Two weeks ago I was paddling a surfboard over warm blue green waters at an outer reef off Maui’s north shore, oblivious to the danger I was in. No, I understood the risk, but the beauty of the scene made me ignore it. The island looked so small in the distance as heavy winds and a sizeable swell bore down from the north, but that wasn’t the problem.

It was the traffic. Brightly colored windsurfing rigs that looked so beautiful from our family’s house eight miles away were everywhere. Windsurfers raced past me from all directions with only a few feet to spare. They were using waves the size of my house as ramps. They launched themselves doing mid-air flips and didn’t seem too conscious of the fact that they couldn’t see the other side of the wave where they hoped to land.

If this were not enough, the reef is right at the border of kite surfing territory. These daredevils are even more spectacular. Pulled by giant kites attached to sixty-foot lines they jump off waves and are held aloft twenty feet in air as they travel through the sky. There were so many people at this remote place, it seemed impossible that they weren’t constantly running over each other, tangling their lines and masts and sails.

I floated by a giant sea turtle. I told him, “this isn’t a safe place for you.” Then I realized that he is a smaller target with a hard shell and he travels mostly underwater. I remembered that our bishop once described me as someone, “who likes to play in traffic.” I didn’t know whether that was a criticism or a compliment, but now I know it is true.

This is why I love living in Santa Clara Valley so much. At some level everybody here likes to play in traffic. If you grow up here and don’t like to play in traffic you move out along with everyone else who tires of the intensity of this life. Perhaps realizing this will help me come to terms with the fact that my closest friends seem to be constantly moving out to Washington, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina and New England.

We are the ones who are left, people who like to play in traffic (and those who love them). We’re competitive, pragmatic, realistic but visionary, grounded and hopeful. We’re attracted to challenge and the myth of the entrepreneur. We care about making a difference. We’re not afraid of change. We are curious. We have little time for abstractions or nostalgia. At the same time we play too hard and drive too fast. (Have you ever noticed that the only people who drive below the speed limit here are doing so because they’re dialing their cell phone or sending an email message. I wrote this while driving along El Camino Real). We’re impatient and hurried. In fact under most circumstances by now a voice inside you would be telling me to get to my point.

But tonight is Christmas. Now that the rushing has stopped perhaps even we can hear the angels sing. Tonight we gather as friends who have time to talk about eternity.

Did you know that only half of this country believes in evolution? In other regions they argue about whether we should teach evolution or intelligent design in school. In Silicon Valley we don’t have too much time for that issue. We accept the idea of natural selection occurring through genetically inherited variation that increases the survivability or reproducibility of individuals. It makes sense scientifically. But this doesn’t stop me from wondering why it is so hard for some Christians to accept this.

Perhaps it is because natural selection makes human beings seem less special than before. Maybe this picture of the world makes it harder to imagine how something formed by all the accidents and chances of this life could have a place in the eternity which is God. I have a hunch that the idea of evolution leads some people to question their own immortality.

You probably already realize that I don’t see a necessary conflict between believing in God and evolution. This has led me to wonder what it would take to bring these two kinds of people together. Since it’s Christmas Eve and we have time on our hands let’s try a thought experiment. First imagine a sign that proved definitively that there was no God. Since any kind of message like this would have to come from someone, or something which seemed godlike to us, this is hard to picture. I guess not believing in God is a kind of faith too.

What about a sign that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a God? What if George Crane and the scientists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center discovered a particle which when smashed in a certain way sprayed particles that said, “God exists.” Better yet imagine a kind of celestial crop circle, that the stars in Orion, the Pleiades and the neighboring constellations all spelled out the same message for everyone to read.

That first night people would turn off their televisions and stream out of their homes to see this heavenly message – “God Exists.” A man about to commit suicide would see this and change his mind. A woman who lost her childhood faith would decide that she could believe again. An elderly person who trusted Jesus all her life, but was now dying of cancer might find great hope in the message. For a while at least crime would drop and people would promise to reform their lives.

Our church was pretty full after September 11th, imagine how crowded churches would be after this. We would fill the Shark Tank, PacBell Stadium and Candlestick Park. The largest public gathering places would be sponsored by churches instead of technology companies. Imagine how smug all those intelligent design advocates would be (they’d be even worse than Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). Pastors of megachurches would be all over television. Of course the scientists would still repeat their correct assertions that the evidence overwhelmingly supports a theory of evolution.

But what if this continued night after night, year after year? God could even do it in different languages, with exploding nebulae to make the point more colorful. I don’t mean to sound cynical on Christmas but my guess is that it wouldn’t take long before we all went back to business as usual.

My point is that the kind of distant God that the intelligent design crowd hope for, and that the over-zealous scientists deny, is the same. It is a God that over the long run doesn’t make very much of a difference. If God is that far away, he just does not matter. We don’t need proof that God exists, what we crave is an experience of God.

God may not write “I exist” in stars, but I believe that we experience God, that we know more about God than we usually realize. God speaks to us more often than we are ready to listen.

This might sound crazy but over the years I’ve learned something about where I am likely to find God. I know that if I go to Rancho San Antonio or to Hidden Villa for an afternoon walk that I will experience something that will lift me out of myself and into the holy. I don’t know what it will be, maybe the deer grazing on the lower pastures, or the way the path is framed by an ancient coast live oak or the smell of the Bay Tree leaves in winter or the lights of the city spread out below me as I look out from the upper ridge. But I meet God there.

You are my Silicon Valley neighbors so you might be saying to yourselves, “That’s subjective, you are just one person.” Every week and tonight, together as a whole community we experience God’s presence in Holy Communion. I know that usually it is hard for God to get through to most of us. But sometimes we even pay enough attention to realize what it means to ourselves and to the people next to us. A man sitting a few pews ahead of me ahs been meeting God at church for nine decades, others are just beginning to learn the good news of Jesus Christ.

People who don’t even believe in God hear God. When an elderly person comes on a bus a little voice speaks in the deepest part of us and tells us to give up our seat. That voice tries to interrupt our dishonesty. When your children are part of a group of kids who are teasing one of the Spanish speaking children you can bet they hear the voice of God telling them not to go along with the bullying.

Often this voice of God does not tell us what we want to hear. I don’t talk about him too much, but I deeply admire my father. He had a long career working for the state. When he was in his fifties his boss left and my father took over that position in a long-term interim capacity. I think he was relieved when the new boss arrived. Initially they worked well together. But it wasn’t long before the boss began making cutting and rude remarks about a woman on their team. He seemed to enjoy humiliating her in front of everyone. My father surely didn’t choose it, but he began to hear that voice of God. He stood up for her and was cruelly punished for doing so. He retired before he was ready and felt disgraced.

But this is Christmas, the holy feast of the incarnation, the season when we celebrate the intimacy of God. There have been times in the history of Christianity when there was no Christmas. In the earliest years the church was so severely persecuted by the Roman Empire that we focused mostly on the resurrection of Jesus. In the fourth century, some people inspired by Greek philosophy declared that Jesus was pure spirit, that he had never been born. Christmas was instituted in response to assert the mystery of Jesus’ humanity.

Then again in the sixteenth century puritans felt so strongly about the overwhelming power of God that they banned Christmas as superstition. This struggle between the god of the philosophers and the god of our experience will always be with us. Like the intelligent design enthusiasts and the overzealous biologists there will always be people whose picture of God is too big and too precise to fit into our lives.

Brothers and sisters, my friends who like to play in traffic, it is such a blessing for me to be with you on this holy night. You are busy and I am grateful for the gift of this time together. As risk-takers you can have faith in the challenging proposition that God is nearer to us than our next breath, or in St. Augustine’s words, nearer to us than ourselves. As people who are not afraid of change, I pray that you will welcome the transforming power of Jesus. As pragmatic individualists I pray that you will embrace the power that you find in God’s presence. If we can slow down enough to listen I am confident that God will be born in our hearts again and again and again.

Russian Literature and the Cross

2005-06-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

K31

Jer. 23:1-6
Canticle 16
Col. 1:11-20
Lk. 23:33-43

Russian Literature and the Cross
“He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son… for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1).

At the foot of the cross we face the greatest mystery of our existence. On the one hand we see a man convicted of political crimes, helplessly executed among criminals by the state. After the horrors of the twentieth century we all can believe this.

At the same time, I also believe that this man Jesus is the image of the invisible God. I believe that he is the firstborn of creation, the head of the church, the author of our salvation. I believe that all things were created for him and through him, that in him all things hold together. I know that he will rescue us from the power of darkness.

The cross is the point where suffering and omnipotence meet. It is hard to believe these two things, this man and this God, at the same time. Please do not think that I believe because I am less informed about the reasons why this should be impossible. My belief is not a sign that I am weaker or less intelligent than you. In fact, I cannot be separated from you. I come from the same place. I struggle with the same doubts. I have heard the same stories that you did as I grew up. Like the thief executed with Jesus and like you I have cried out to God, “Save us,” and I have felt denied.

I have been thinking about how my faith in Christ lies at the heart of my interest in Russian literature. I asked many of you about this. Some of you appreciate the way that Russian literature can encourage deep thinking even about disturbing things, that it leads to more human reflection than the journalism we usually read. Others love the commitment to social change that that they read in it. One of you went so far as to describe Russian literature as a non-narcotic, as the opposite of the hazy unreality on TV.

The Russian literature that I read faces the most difficult questions of what it means to be a modern person. What does the world tell you? What are you? Who are you created to be? At its most basic level the Christianity that I believe in addresses these three questions also. This morning I want to talk about these questions using examples from Russia.

1. What the world tells us. Leo Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilych (1886) begins with an external, objective account of Ilych’s death. When his colleagues in the state court system hear the news, each of them privately speculates on how this event might advance their own career.

The next chapters seem like a resume. They describe the important details of Ilych’s life from his earliest childhood. He enjoys being a bachelor. He goes to law school, marries a beautiful woman. He works his way up with political savvy through the court system. He overextends himself (just as we do today in America). His house looks like the homes of other middle class people who are pretending to be richer than they really are. He worries about his financial situation. He fights constantly and bitterly with his wife. One senses an overwhelming isolation in his life. There seems to be nothing more to him than nagging worries and irritation with other people.

Ilych comes to realize this as he dies slowly from something that has gone wrong with his appendix or kidneys. In his heart Ilych keeps hearing a voice asking, “What do you want?” At first he answers, “To be well and not to suffer.” The voice replies, “As you lived before, well and pleasantly?” This presents him with a dilemma. On the one hand he knows he was not happy struggling to maintain his middle class lifestyle, but on the other hand he has no regrets about his life either. For a while he keeps repeating, “I did everything right.” I jumped through all the right hoops. I am a success.

Only hours before his death, Ilych stops dying and for the first time ever he starts living. He asks his family to forgive him and suddenly he feels free from fear. Tolstoy writes, “In place of death there was light.” Ilych says to himself, “What joy… Death is finished, it is no more.” This is what we say on Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Resurrection.

The world tells us that we can be happy with what we buy and our career promotions, with the power that these things give us over other people. Father Zossima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov (1879-1880) says that modern people interpret freedom as the “multiplication and rapid satisfaction of our desires.” He warns that these desires distort us and warp us so that we come to live only for our own envy. We lust after luxury instead of seeking joy in God’s love.

2. What we are. As twenty-first century Americans, this may be the most difficult part to understand. We do not know ourselves and this is dangerous. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn distinguished himself in combat against the Nazis in WW II. He made the worst mistake of his life when he criticized the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin (1879-1959) in letters to a close friend.

For this he was arrested, humiliated, beaten and tortured. In 1945 a secret committee sentenced him to serve for eight years in brutal Soviet labor camps. Solzhenitsyn witnessed Stalin’s efforts to kill and arrest all of those who had been exposed to conditions outside of the Soviet Union. This included the arrest of thousands of Russian POW’s and the arbitrary repression of ordinary citizens.

His almost two thousand-page book The Gulag Archipelago tells the stories of people in pain. Prisoners are stuffed into pipes, jammed into prison cells that are so crowded that their feet can’t touch the ground. They are transported in boxcars, starved and worked to death. He must refer to “latrine bucket” several hundred times and to at least a hundred different forms of torture. Hundreds of thousands of people are shot.

Solzhenitsyn has seen the worst evil imaginable. He has every reason to dismiss the guards and state security agents as inhuman. Instead he does something remarkable.

He recognizes that he himself could be guilty of the same crimes. “If only there were evil people,” he writes, “and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

This is a remarkable insight for us in a nation that most often describes evil as something that is foreign. It is important for us to remember as we prosecute war thousands of miles away from home. Solzhenitsyn has a message for a nation that holds more than six hundred foreign citizens (including a thirteen year old) in prolonged, indefinite detention without either charge or trial. People who represent you and me use torture as a means to suppress dissent.

Perhaps a sense that evil is external to us may help to understand why of the 8,750,000 people incarcerated around the globe, the US accounts for 22% of them. The number of people incarcerated per 100,000 is 105 in Canada, 150 in Mexico. Here 700 per 100,000 are in prison or jail (the incarceration rate for African American males is 4,848 per 100,000). The US leads the world in executing childhood offenders (and the mentally ill).

Who are we? We are part of evil or it is part of us. Solzhenitsyn writes, “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good [or natural].” “Ideology… gives evil its… justification.” “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality.”

3. The world tells us that we will be happy with possessions and power. When we know ourselves best we recognize that evil is not outside of us. My last question is, “what are we created to be?” I won’t keep you in suspense, I believe that we are made to be with God, that we are loved by God and closest to ourselves when we share that love. From my earlier comments you might think that The Gulag Archipelago is chiefly a pessimistic book. It is not.

Solzhenitsyn writes that in these extreme situations owning things makes prisoners worry about their possessions being taken away. He describes men falling asleep with both arms around tattered suitcases. This leads to another terrible tragedy. The prisoner can choose to waste the very life that he is desperately trying to preserve. He can be blind to the blessing that comes from God. Solzhenitsyn writes, “Look around you – there are people around you. Maybe one day you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him questions.” Solzhenitsyn came to love these people. He discovered that Christ was in them.

And this is the remarkable thing. Maybe it is something that you already know. Love is stronger than pain. Christ is present where there is suffering.

Most of you know that I once was a chaplain at a children’s hospital. I saw so much suffering there, but it did not keep the parents away. Parents would sleep in uncomfortable chairs. They would miss weeks of work. If you asked the children, “why do your parents spend so much time here?” They would say, “My Mommy and Daddy don’t want me to be alone.”

God feels this way about you. God will not abandon us when we are frightened or in pain. Jesus promises that this is true and in my experience it is.

Here we are, facing the mystery of the cross. The power and glory of Jesus reach beyond our imagination, from the beginning of time to its end. His strength is not to grant us immunity to suffering because that is not what we really need. Instead Jesus rescues us from darkness by giving us himself.

Jesus is not another possession that you can buy but which will ultimately leave you unsatisfied. We understand him best when we recognize the evil that divides our own heart, and turn to the love that makes us whole. Amen.

Difficult Truth

2005-06-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

C11
Jer. 20:7-13
Ps. 69:7-10, 16-18
Romans 5:15b-19
Matt. 10 [16-23] 24-33

The beat-up Mercedes-Benz stolen from Western Europe swerved to avoid potholes as it clattered over the immense desert wastes of Kazakstan. It stopped by the shores of a large lake. Before my brother could even get out of his seat, the energy ministers of this formerly Soviet nation in Asia were streaking from the car stark naked into the water and splashing each other. For my brother Andrew, a mechanical engineer at the World Bank, this is just another day on the job.

As we enjoy our leisurely summer schedules, he is touring around the eighth largest country in the world through the base of the Himalayas at altitudes 25% higher than the Alps. These unpopulated wastes are farther away from the ocean than any land on earth. The passes so familiar to Genghis Khan have not changed at all since his hordes rode through this wild terrain. Yurts, the tents in which the nomadic sheep-herders live today have also changed very little through the centuries. Traveling with high-ranking government ministers Andrew will soon be writing a report on the energy potential of these newly formed countries.

Unfortunately for my brother, the ministry officials have friends everywhere. The ritual is the same in every town and every district. Still dusty from the road, the travelers are invited by the headman into a long room with a large table groaning from the weight of food. If you are hungry this may sound to you like a good thing. But that could be because you do not yet know that every meal in Kazakstan or Kirgistan is exactly the same: Plates and plates of greasy meat cut from rangy, strong-tasting sheep, with acrid camel's milk (which my brother says tastes gamy, a little like how one might imagine paint-thinner might taste) and ten large bottles of vodka.

Before arriving to the village the members of the World Bank team have already been pleading with each other. Each hopes that someone else will be the "most honored guest." During the meal, the most honored guest will be presented with a sheep's head. He makes toasts and distributes the ears to the youngest person at the table, the eyes to other special guests and the brains to everyone. Remember, this is a land in which there is no such thing as a menu. Breakfast, lunch and dinner is always the same.

The technical experts at the World Bank are expected to show their respect by eating and drinking as much as the local shepherds who settle disputes through sheep-eating contests. Being that sick and drunk is bad enough for an ordinary American. But my brother, true to his California roots, is a strict vegetarian.

At home during Thanksgiving and Christmas Andrew suffers hours of teasing. In Asia he worried that his culinary standards may cause an international incident. Before beginning the first of these great feasts Andrew wondered whether he should tell the truth about his vegetarianism or if should he go along with the crowd. How could he show his respect for his hosts without eating the food they had prepared for him?

We have all had to tell difficult truths. Perhaps you have had to tell a friend that she shouldn't marry her fiancée. Maybe you were the one who had to break the news of death or illness to family members. You could be the one who knows about corruption on the job. Perhaps in exposing this dishonesty you will be risking your career. Maybe you have to explain to an older person that they can no longer live alone without special care. Perhaps you have to tell a younger person that he doesn't have enough experience for the job.

Today's lessons are about suffering for the sake of truth. They tell us about the fear which grips us in our recognition that after we speak everything may be forever changed. All that Christ says to us quietly in the dark we must proclaim from the housetops. If that great Greek philosopher Aristotle is correct and man is indeed a political animal, then this truth telling goes against our deepest nature. Articulating the painful truths simply is not politic.

Indeed today's gospel is doubly difficult. First, one could easily misunderstand the individual sentences spoken by Jesus. Initially they sound discontinuous, fragmentary and we can scarcely help taking them out of context. For instance, Jesus says, "a disciple is not above the teacher..., it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher..." This does not mean that we should be seeking to figure out the minimum requirements for discipleship or that we do not have to be completely like Christ. Jesus says these words to warn us that as we speak up for him, we should not be surprised if we are abused as he was. "If they have called the master... [Satan] how much more will they malign those of his household."

We are all here because in some sense each of us has been touched by God. We, like the prophet Jeremiah feel something of "the burning fire shut up in... [our] bones." The second problem for us, is that even when we recognize the necessity of suffering for Christ, we do not know how to tell our stories to others. We can scarcely find the words to articulate our faith in our own interior deliberations. Many of us do not feel confident enough to speak about salvation to even our closest friends. The sexual taboos of the Victorians have been shattered. But in their place we have constructed religious taboos which leave us with the persistent sense that talk about religion is not appropriate in polite or even impolite society. This taboo separates us from our creator, from the source of all life and love. It makes us strangers to our very selves.

Perhaps somewhere deep within us we recognize the need for help. In that quiet interior place we might remember that Christ saves but many of us have lost a sense for how that salvation is lived out from day to day.

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We inhabit a world of dreams, of indistinct visions and distorted illusions. We see our lives as if through a lacy curtain. We know the unclear shapes beyond ourselves only as uncertain shadows of light and darkness. At times a cool wind will blow the curtain aside and we will have a brief glimpse of naked truth. At other times the darkness of a moonless and misty night will make understanding any true pattern in our life hopeless.

But most of the time we do not even look toward the window of reality. Instead, our imagination plays reel after reel of a film that has been going almost since the day we were born. These movies run by our imagination are the story of our lives. Each one of us plays the star in this fantasy. Our cameras remain carefully focused on ourselves, other characters hover indistinctly at the periphery. We each play the lead, the victim and hero of our own tragedies and comedies.

This movie running nearly continuously makes today's gospel difficult to hear. At any given moment it is tempting to hear God's word and to write it into the screenplay of our selfish fantasy. We want to take the holy land and turn it into another setting for our self-justification, to make God's prophets into minor characters in our drama about ourselves. The longer we play these films about ourselves, the more difficult it is to hear or see anything beyond them. Seeing the world only through the tiny lens of our ego, our small-minded self-interest, turns all of our experience into distortion. It isolates us more profoundly than the two foot thick wall of a prison cell.

Friday I was listening to a radio program extolling the miraculous benefits of skepticism as the basis for all knowledge. One commentator went into a lengthy diatribe describing all religious life as merely a marketing scam to enrich religious professionals. He adamantly argued that people all over the world have been brainwashed to believe in God. If only we could be so fortunate. If only we could be reminded of the greater reality that is not ourselves. In truth our ego has been trained from an early age to have no interest beyond the bounds of our self.

The simple truth is that we need to be saved from our very selves. Christ asserts that we are, "not [to] fear those who can kill the body; [but] rather [to] fear him who can destroy soul and body in hell." Deep within you, lying close at hand is the power of egotistical damnation. In our loveless selfishness we are the jailers of our selves. John Milton frequently repeats this theme in "Paradise Lost." When Satan alights in Eden he despairs at the contrast between the beauty of that place and his own degradation. He says, "... which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep still threat'ning to devour me opens wide..." (Bk IV, 74). Those who love only themselves carry hell wherever they go. Those whose love reaches beyond their self carry heaven with them. As Jesus says, "those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (John 12:25).

The free gift of grace which Christ gives to each of us is love, the very key sufficient to open up the iron gate of our selfishness. There are a million ways to express this truth and you will all find your own way. But when each of you goes out to tell the world this truth you will suffer. By telling the truth you will suffer the consequences paid by anyone who reminds us that our world is too small. Christ's message to us today is that we really only have two alternatives before us (and both of them are bad): First, you can tell the truth and suffer for it or second, you can conceal the truth from others and yourself thereby losing everything.

I would like to close with a story that I hope will make this conversation less abstract. In my preparation for this sermon, I asked someone from St. Clement's to read the text and she told me this story. Last fall I was visiting her family's house and on my way out the door. After I left, a UC Berkeley science professor who was the most recent arrival turned to her and said, "what's that guy's story anyway." The hostess responded, "he's a priest." At this the good professor blew up saying, "What is he doing walking around like that [I wasn't wearing clerical clothes]. They're always sneaking up on people, dressing up like normal guys." And then he began to realize... "he's not your priest, is he?"

Our dear hostess was caught off guard and hedged saying that I was a friend and that otherwise I would not have been invited into the family home. Unfortunately for her though, the professor had already gotten started he had caught the scent and was determined to finish. He then proceeded to say, "I always thought that you were strong and sure of yourself, now it turns out that you're a wimp." After resorting to name-calling he talked about not having a mind of one's own, and brought out all of the worn-out arguments which suggest that God only exists as some sort of cosmic crutch for people who are short on the strong character that one needs to face reality.

These are the fields in which Christ sends us out to labor. This is the sort of all-encompassing egotism that cannot see anything beyond one's own self and which threatens anyone subject to our human condition. This is the reason why we come together in a religious community that constantly reminds us that we are not the center of the universe. And together we take one enormous step over the abyss. Leaving behind the illusions of our selfish desire we take our place with Christ, with each other and all creation.