"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Of Banquets and Airport Security



        When I imagine the calculating moves of the community leaders as they try to gain honor for themselves at the Sabbath meal in our reading from Luke’s Gospel, I think of Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced “Bouquet,” of course, on the old British comedy series, Keeping Up Appearances. I can see poor, ridiculous Hyacinth, dressed to the nines, weaving her way frantically through the crowds to place herself right next to the distinguished host. I can imagine her planning which of the important guests she will invite to her next elegant “candlelight supper,” angling frantically to get a return invitation from the most prominent guests. I can see her all-consuming desperation and the sorry tangle of misunderstandings and rejection that will follow her every manipulative move. I imagine Jesus watching the Pharisees’ posturing the way we watch Hyacinth’s foolishness on TV, frustrated and compassionate at the same time.
Scholars explain that, in the Greco-Roman world, the values of honor and shame ruled conduct and lives.[1] In a hierarchical, communal society, where one sat, and who one invited to one’s dinner party, were more than just matters of etiquette. They were calculations of life-giving importance. One’s very worth as a human being was determined by one’s place in the community. This honor-versus-shame system that rules the dinner guests’ lives in our parable is making them miserable, frantic, and foolish. Jesus’ remarks to the guests and host at the banquet are meant to free them from that system, if only for a transformative moment. He wants to break through their ingrained thought patterns, to shock them into a new way of thinking, to allow them to see themselves and the world the way it really is, the way God sees it.  
         First, Jesus pushes the guests’ foolishness to the extreme. “If you want to plot and scheme, here’s a scheme for you,” he says with irony. “Try sitting in the lowest places. Indeed, the host might make a big deal in front of everybody about inviting you to move up higher, and look how important you will seem in everyone’s eyes.” Just imagine Hyacinth naively agreeing with Jesus’ tongue-in-cheek remarks, excitedly going to take the worst seat, and waiting with growing dejection all evening for the host to come and invite her to move up, while we, her audience, begin to understand the futility of her schemes and the ridiculousness of the whole contrived system.
Then, in our reading, Jesus delivers his final blow to the system with his shocking inclusivity. Many Jews in Jesus’ day would have said that it was the shamed and outcast ones, the poor, the blind, the lame, and the crippled, who were specifically disqualified by God from the great divine banquet at the end of time.[2] By making them the honored guests, Jesus breaks open that belief with a blessing. He wants his listeners to understand that this framework by which everyone is living, this framework centered on human status, on “those who are in” and “those who are out,” is all wrong. God is the giver of all true gifts, and there are no outsiders with God. God invites us all to the only feast that matters, and we can participate in that feast only by throwing the doors wide open. In God’s eyes, there is no group or individual so full of “shame,” so excluded by society, that they are not welcome at God’s table.
          What are the pivotal values in our culture today, I wondered this week. What values absorb all of our attention? What are the frameworks that rule our lives, that make us frantic, that keep us from the love of God and neighbor? I believe that, rather than an honor-versus-shame-ruled culture, we have a security-versus-vulnerability-ruled culture right now in this country. We are frantic, as individuals and as a nation, to increase our security and to avoid vulnerability. Everything, from terrorist threats to global instability to the prevalence of crime to the volatile stock market, makes us afraid, and we clamor for man-made security. I know that I was taught as a child to value safety and security above all things—even above love. I grew up in a sturdy brick house with a burglar alarm on the streets of a city that was then named the “murder capital of the country.” I was carefully taught the life-or-death importance of locking doors, avoiding parking garages, not going out alone at night, and constantly looking over my shoulder. Security, to me, represented welcome protection from dangerous “others.” It was a necessity for keeping my beloved possessions and a powerful anecdote to feeling vulnerable and alone.
Now, as an adult, I was recently shocked to find that, in the airport, I am so accustomed to the constant reminders over the loudspeaker that “Security is at a high level,” that I don’t even notice them anymore. And packing my toiletries in Baggies, obediently taking off my shoes and jacket at metal detectors, and hauling my computer in and out of my carry-on bag have all become so familiar that they are second-nature to me. Think about it this week as you go about your business: In how much of our lives, without even realizing it, do we live for security and to avoid feeling vulnerable?
          If Jesus’ parable were addressed to us today, in our security-driven culture, I propose that it might go something like this:

On one occasion, Jesus was flying from Damascus to New York, and everyone in the airport was watching this controversial Palestinian closely. When Jesus noticed their fearful spying and whispering, he told them a parable. “If you really want to be safe, don’t just put your liquids in plastic bags and take off your shoes at the checkpoints. You need to start by taking off all of your clothes and standing naked before the security guard and before everyone else who is going to board the plane, so that everyone can see that you are innocent, and no one needs to feel vulnerable anymore. Also, you need to send your bags, even your carry-on bags, on another special plane, a plane just for baggage. That way, you can fly secure to your favorite destination. For all who wrap themselves up in clothing and luggage are vulnerable, and all who are naked and vulnerable will be secure.”
“And when you are in charge of boarding procedures for a plane, don’t try to check the identity of those who are getting on the plane with you to make sure that you will be safe. Let everybody on, beginning with foreigners and the people without passports. And you will be blessed because God invites us all into the Kingdom.”
          Do you hear the absurdity of his advice? Nakedness? A world without passports? Of course I am not literally suggesting that Jesus wants us to strip down in the airport or do away with airport security. But just as Jesus reminds his first century audiences how God’s love transcends their honor-versus-shame culture, he would remind us that our true security does not lie in our ability to remove all danger from our lives. True security lies in knowing that we all belong to God and that we depend, at all moments, on God’s grace alone. As God laments in our Old Testament lesson for today: “my people … have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”[3] In relying obsessively on our own systems and frameworks for life, blessing, and security, we ignore God’s constantly flowing fountain of living water, the abundant love that never dries up, that covers us all with life. True security, the kind that matters in the long run, can only be found in opening our arms to God--and to each other. It can only be found in relationship. We come from God and we are going to God, and in this security, we bend down to wash one another’s feet, like Jesus did, in relationships built on humility and love.
The call to relationship with God and with one another brings us back to the banquet hall, back to the feast of bread and wine, body and blood, back to the Eucharist that holds us in God’s secure and loving arms while making us vulnerable in love for one another. There is a good story about a mentally challenged young man who talks to his pastor about the feast of Eucharist:
“I ate in church today,” he exclaims with excitement.
“Do you know what that is called?” asks the pastor pedantically… “It is called communion. Do you know why we do that?”
“Yeah … but you tell me,” answers the young man.
“Jesus lived a very special life,” begins the pastor. “And he died on a cross ….”
“No! Not that,” interrupts the man. “Tell me the part about us ALL doing it … I ate with everyone else in church today …. Tell me the part about all of us doing that together.”[4]
The vulnerable understand. Even the incorrigible Hyacinth is forced to embrace both her vulnerability and her imperfect family at the end of each episode of her show. It is the acceptance of our vulnerability that will lead us into God’s Kingdom--our true security, our life, and our only salvation. Amen.



[1] Richard B. Vinson, Luke (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 2008)
[2] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1991), 227.
[3] Jeremiah 2:13
[4] William Gaventa, “Tell Me the Part About Us All Doing It All Together,” in Journal of Religion, Disability and Health 13:2009, 330.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Sabbath Freedom, Resurrection Hope



          Whenever we read the Ten Commandments in church during Lent and come to, “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy,” I feel like I say it a little louder than the other commandments. “Hear that, people,” I say to myself in my most prissy priestly inner voice, “That means that you are supposed to come to church! Ha! So there!” I know that I am wrong as soon as the thought enters my sinful head, but I don’t think that I am alone in short-changing not only my practice of Sabbath, but even my understanding of what it is.
          Normally, we tend to think of Sabbath-keeping as defined by the old Blue Laws, and as a bunch of things that we are not allowed to do. In Germany, where I lived for seven years, stores were still closed from Saturday afternoon through Monday morning, and people didn’t work on Sundays. Sunday was for church, followed by tea-drinking and cake-eating with friends or family, and a walk in the woods. It was wonderful! Unaware and uninvited at first, though, I remember as a newcomer being annoyed when my neighbors would chide me for the simple, quiet act of pulling up weeds in my front flower beds on Sunday afternoons:
          “It’s the Sabbath,” they would say. “You shouldn’t be doing yard work!” 
“It’s the only time that my husband is home to watch the kids! Mind your own business!” I would grumble resentfully to the roses, annoyed at such strict adherence to rules that weren’t my own. 
When thinking of the Sabbath, our imaginations are often full of the movies and novels that portray the stultifying Sundays of the past, where hours were spent sitting on hard benches in church and then in boring conversations about the weather, as people squirmed in their corsets in stuffy parlors. Or we tend to listen to the intricate lists of things that our Jewish brothers and sisters must avoid on the Sabbath (which, of course, is really Saturday, not Sunday) and we “tsk, tsk” about the legalism of it all. We look down our noses at the Pharisee in today’s Gospel, so law-bound that he would deny healing to a crippled woman, so afraid of losing control that he would stop a divine miracle. “Thank goodness that Jesus put an end to all of those silly little laws,” we gloat, as if we ourselves are not bound and gagged by our own rules. “Thank goodness for Christian freedom.”
         Freedom, however, is just as important in the Jewish understanding of Sabbath. In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet is speaking to the people of Israel after they have returned from Exile, as they are trying to reestablish themselves in their own land. Things are not going well. People are scrambling for meager resources, looking out for “number one.” God is telling them, through the prophet, that He will be with them, that all will be well. They do not need to hoard their resources. They need to give to the poor, to fix the broken structures of society. Fixing systemic evils like poverty and injustice is a big task, an overwhelming mandate. Yet, honoring the Sabbath, Isaiah points out, can be needed practice for putting one’s own economic interest aside, for giving up control and resting in God’s ways. Giving up making and spending money for one day each week can be, like the practice of tithing, an opening to God from which more substantial life-change can flow.
          It is no accident that the woman described in today’s reading from Luke is suffering from a disease that causes her to be bent over, as if by a mighty burden. We stoop from illness and age, but also from oppression. Work, worries, poverty, hopelessness, rejection, stress … they all cause us to bow our heads to the ground and to stoop our shoulders as we trudge through the realm of space. When we are bowed down, we cannot look up to God; we cannot look into the loving eyes of others. “Come to me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,” says Jesus in the old translation, “and I will refresh you.” Of course Jesus heals the bent woman on the Sabbath, for such healing is a deepening of Sabbath, rather than a transgression of it. By touching and healing the woman, Jesus is giving her the things that Sabbath is meant to give to us all: freedom, fullness of life, wholeness of body, and a welcome back into the strengthened community of her brothers and sisters. 
         Rabbi Abraham Heschel explains the true meaning of Sabbath best, I think. He describes our lives in this world as a kind of self-made bondage to the dimension of space. In the world of space, our lives are all about things: the acquisition of things, the care of things, the conquest of things. In our obsession with things, we forget about the equally present dimension of time. Time becomes only something that we expend to gain space, to enhance our power in the world of space.[1]  Time, however, should not be our enemy, for it is God’s realm. God is not a thing and is not restricted to the realm of space. According to Heschel, God comes to us in sacred moments in time, and the meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.The Sabbath is a “day to mend our tattered lives,” to fill them with good things and to delight our souls with pleasure, resting in God. When we live in time, in the Sabbath, we are contemporary with one another. It becomes possible to “repair the breach” and “restore streets to live in,” to use Isaiah’s language.
         During our last official meeting with the Nzundu’s, the Congolese family whom we helped sponsor through Kentucky Refugee Ministries this spring, Ortance expressed her desire to continue to visit us at St. Thomas, even though our sponsorship is over. She had found love and acceptance among us, her first friends in a frightening new country, and she wanted to keep in touch. But Ortance’s desire to visit us was frustrated, not just by distance and lack of a car--obstacles that she could perhaps have overcome--but by a far greater systemic burden. Her desire to visit us was frustrated by the lack of Sabbath in this country. Ortance, like some of you in our parish, has a job that requires her to work on Sundays. As a maid at a hotel, she does not have control over her schedule, and she desperately needs her job for her family to survive. She has no say in when she will work, no real choice in how she can provide for her children. She does not mind hard work, and she is grateful for her job, but she spoke to us with some indignation. In her home culture, she explained, no one works on Sundays. Sunday is a day to spend in worship, in time with family, in rejoicing and delight. It is a pause in the back-breaking grind of poverty, a breath of freedom in lives filled with hard work. “In America,” she pronounced, speaking to us in the voice of the prophet Isaiah, “there is no Sabbath. There is no time for God or for one another.” It is a voice that we should heed.
         Sabbath, then, is more than a private relief, more than a gift of individual freedom. The Sabbath to which Isaiah and Jesus both point is inseparable from the kind of healing justice that God wants for the whole world. For Christians, you know, our Sunday Sabbath was adopted because Sunday is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. Early Christians called Sunday the “eighth day,” the day beyond the bounds of creation, another way of framing Heschel’s mystery of the depths of time. Ancient baptismal fonts were often octagonal, a reminder of the “eighth day,” of the eternity that brings us together as the Body of Christ in Baptism. For Christians, Jesus brings both Sabbath freedom and wild resurrection hope to the whole world.
           Fifty years ago, at the March on Washington that we will commemorate on Wednesday, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also spoke of the realm of time, of the inbreaking of God’s presence in our lives: “We have  … come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” King cried. Sabbath, too, is filled with the "fierce urgency of now." “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children," King implored.[4] Did you read about the group of Louisvillians, all graduates of Male High School from the class of 1969, who recently decided to gather regularly to “mend long-unspoken racial wounds of their high school years,” to talk and to listen, to laugh and to smile together and to try to understand? Fifty years after meeting on separate sides of the racial divide, living lives in separate spaces, these men and women decided to take some time to eat and talk and share. The title of the front-page article in the paper reads: “Breaking Bread, Healing Wounds.”[5] Sounds a bit like Eucharist to me. Sounds a bit like Sabbath, too. Such is the Sabbath to which we are called.


[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel,  The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 3.
[2] Ibid, 5.
[3] Ibid. 10.
[4] http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf.
[5] Peter Smith, “Breaking Bread, Healing Wounds,” The Courier Journal, August 24, 2013.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Faith and Terror



Love and hope we understand, but faith….? For a word that we Christians use all the time, “faith” can be so easily misconstrued:
 “Jesus says that if you have faith, you can move mountains—and by the way, if the mountains don’t move, then your faith was inadequate,” we hear.
“Can I be a part of this church if my faith doesn’t stretch around all of the doctrines mentioned in the Creeds?” we wonder.
 “If I had faith, then I wouldn’t be afraid of dying, but I am terrified. God, please give me the faith not to be terrified,” we beg.
“Faith? What bunk. Faith is just a pair of rose-colored glasses dipped in our own power of positive thinking,” we hear.
What is Christian faith? It’s not a standard against which we are judged. It’s not a formula for getting what we want from God. It’s not merely an anecdote to fear. It’s not an uplifting Facebook meme. Faith is what takes us into the depths of things, what leads us into the heart of God. Faith calls to us because its very nature is to speak to the suffering and the hope that we all experience as part of living in this world. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a Nazi concentration camp, surrounded by suffering, surrounded by absurdity, surrounded by the seeming absence of our Loving God, and pleaded, “I don’t want to go through this affair without faith.”[1] In the same way, a young mother facing a terrible cancer diagnosis asked me just this week how God could do this to her, to her husband and children. Angry and confused by God’s seeming absence, she begged for peace, for the faith to go on. The Christians to whom the letter to the Hebrews was first addressed were also suffering persecution, searching for God’s presence, needing to find a sense of God’s plan beneath the seeming absurdities of their lives. They, too, needed faith. All of us, when we admit it, know deep down that we are, like Abraham in our second reading, “as good as dead.” Our lives are short. We are vulnerable. We are not in control. Suffering and hope wrestle in our hearts and bodies. We all long for the faith to see our way forward.
Richard Lischer has written a beautiful book about the death of his only son Adam from cancer. Lischer writes about a God who is “transcendently close,” so close to us “that we cannot see him, and so woven into the fiber of things that he remains hidden, like the key that is ‘lost’ in plain view.”[2] To find this God who is in all things, yet more than all things, who is weaving us and our world from within, we need eyes that can peer into the depths of our suffering. We need eyes that can see God in the human flesh of Jesus Christ, eyes that can see God’s presence in suffering and pain, eyes that can see God’s very being in the bread and wine that we take into ourselves in the Eucharist. Lischer learned to see that God as he watched his son die of cancer. He writes: “[W]e loved Adam’s flesh—the graceful body with its underlying sinewy strength, but also the small tumors on his side and his pale white head—because what his body was losing in mass it was gaining in transparency. The sacred presence had always been there, of course, as it is in each of us, like stars on a cloud-filled night, but we had never seen it so clearly as when he began to die.”[3]
The author of our lesson from Hebrews is writing, too, about this strange mystery of transparency, the peeling back of layers. In Hebrews, faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In Hebrews, though, faith is more than just seeing. Faith is not something that we have, but something that we live; it is the motivation to endure, even in the face of hardship and persecution. Clarence Jordan, in his “Cotton Patch Gospel,” translates our verses from Hebrews as follows: “Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds; it is betting your life on the unseen realities. It was by such faith that men of old were martyred. And by so relating our lives, we become aware that history is woven to God’s design so that the seeing event is a projection of the unseen intent.”[4] By defining our surroundings by the divine light that shines through them, we are living in a faith and a hope that allows us to act, ourselves, as a sign of Christ’s Kingdom, and we are transformed. Transformed in our response.
I was finishing up my sermon this week, happy with my interpretation of our epistle, when I flipped on the news, hearing once again about the newly aggravated terrorist threat throughout the world. I heard that Al-Qaeda has invented an explosive device that can be surgically implanted in the body of a willing suicide-bomber and thus brought easily on board a plane. And I thought, “Oh dear. Talk about power hidden inside the unseen depths. Talk about martyrs with the faith to obey God’s will no matter what. For it is indeed faith that is driving them to blow their bodies to bits for what they believe is God’s hidden plan for the world. Oh dear.” Our epistle even talks about abandoning this world for a “better homeland” in heaven. That is what those suicide bombers are doing. It is tempting to say that faith-turned-violent is a Muslim issue, that we Christians wouldn’t do such a thing. But that isn’t true. Christians have resorted to violence to bring about what they perceive to be God’s will time and time again. How do we keep our hope from becoming a violent one? How do we keep our conviction from becoming aberrent? How do we keep suffering from turning us toward vengeance?
According the author of Hebrews, what keeps us on track in our perceptions are the stories with which we frame our faith, the stories of the “great cloud” of witnesses who have preceded us. In chapters 11 and 12, the author of Hebrews points to witness upon witness to God’s hidden design, faithful witness upon faithful witness. Moreover, at the center of all of the stories of faithful witness, he points to the story of Jesus, “the perfecter of our faith … who endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus, who sees good in the souls of sinners, who advises us to give all that we have for treasure hidden in a field, and who teaches us to forgive our enemies, becomes the framework for our own lives. With the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as our framework, it is love and grace that must guide our lives and our testimony. A faith truly nourished in Christ will strengthen us to tend the sick, lavish time on the dying, lift up the poor and insignificant from the shadows, and speak truth even in places where it is held as foolishness.
When I was a timid teenager, my mother gave me a poster to hang in my room. It was a cartoon drawing of a stout little medieval knight, completely covered in armor from head to toe, including a metal helmet that covered his entire face. He was standing resolutely, sword drawn, in front of a huge green fire-breathing dragon. While large, the dragon was far from frightening, however. Her long-lashed googly-eyes looked down with demure affection at the knight. Above the cartoon, in gothic script, were the words, “Have Faith.” I remember getting some kind of encouraging boost from this poster, as I compared my fears to a goofy, googly-eyed dragon.
          Thinking about the cartoon in light of today’s lesson, however, I wonder if I might have found more authentic Christian consolation if I had read the poster differently. Both the dragon and the knight are vulnerable creatures. Their encounter opens them both up to possible harm. As they eye one another across the gulf which separates them, the armor-encased knight draws his sword, seeking a faith that will shore him up in battle, a faith that will protect him and make him the victor. The dragon, on the other hand, is seeking the faith to love, the faith to hold back her fire, just in case the little figure across from her might become her friend. Instead of identifying with the armor-covered knight, ready to engage a world that is only frightening in my imagination, what if I had identified with this dragon? According to the author of our epistle, faith looks down on a frightened man waving a sword and remembers the promise recorded in scripture of the lion lying down with the lamb. Faith looks down on a man hidden under a suit of armor and sees a vulnerable child of God.  As Christians, we don’t clad ourselves in protective armor or shield our eyes from what is around us. Instead, we look into the unseen depths for the God whose Love is witnessed in Creation and in Holy Scripture, and in that faith, we persevere. In that faith, we engage our world.


                [1] Cited in Richard Lischer, Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son (New York: Knopf, 2013), 230.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 231.
[4] Found in Edgar McKnight and Christopher Church, Hebrews-James (Smyth and Helwys, 2004), 261.