"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.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Trusting when the Promise lies dying



         

Genesis 22:1-14


Psalm 13


Romans 6:12-23

Matthew 10:40-42




Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.



           After years in the discernment process for the priesthood, I had been made a postulant by the Commission on Ministry, and I had been accepted to seminary. After running from an insistent call to ministry for half my life, I had finally made my peace with God and accepted that call. I thought that I finally knew God’s special plan for my life. My teacher colleagues constantly told me how much they admired me for giving up my teaching career and going back to school to follow my “true calling.” I was giddily in love with God—and pretty proud of myself, as well. I was finally getting an A+ in discipleship. Or so I thought.
          One ordinary afternoon I came home from school and flipped on the answering machine. “There is a problem with your mammogram,” I heard my doctor say, with concern in his voice. “We’re going to need to do some more tests.”
          Four of my teaching colleagues had just been diagnosed with breast cancer that year—a very unusual statistic—and we used to joke, without laughing, that there must be “something in the water” at school. So I was afraid. Very afraid. When all the “more tests” still looked suspicious, they scheduled me for a biopsy, and I became furious with God.
“Why should God pick on me now?” I fumed. I had already given myself over to God and accepted his call. I had prayed “thy will be done.” For goodness’ sake, I had offered up my comfortable old life. I had upturned my children’s lives. I was willing to spend my savings to go to seminary. I was willing to confront my fears and my shyness to do the kinds of scary things that priests have to do. But, O God, I was NOT willing to have you yank away your promise! How could you lead me on like this? How could you give me hope that I could still answer my call, when you were just going to slap me down with cancer at the last minute? They won’t ordain me if I’m sick! I ranted, and I raved at God. I pouted. I despaired. I held up to God all of those dreams of myself as a priest, and I smashed them one by one at God’s feet.
          We’ve all seen it, if we haven’t experienced it ourselves yet:  God giving with one hand and then taking away with the other. It doesn’t make sense. It is, in fact, absurd.  Our Loving God promising us life abundant and then taking away the promise for reasons that we cannot know or understand:
the middle-aged bride who finally finds her soul-mate, only to watch him fall ill and die;
the childless couple whose prayers for a child are finally answered—until the mother dies in childbirth;
the faithful little parish who finally finds just the right rector to make their church grow only to have God snatch him away in a fatal car crash;
the faith-filled mother who is told by God that her Son will save the world, yet must watch him suffer and die as a criminal on a Roman cross;
the disciples who glimpse the dawning of the Kingdom of God—until their leader is killed and they are left huddling in a locked room, afraid for their lives;
an entire people who is chosen by God to be a light to all the nations of the world and yet is instead scattered, persecuted, and murdered by the millions in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany;
and yes, a father who is told that his descendents will be as numerous as the grains of sand in the desert, and then is told by God to take his only son and to slaughter him on top of a mountain.
          The story of the Binding of Isaac is a terrible, frightening one. Its talk of child sacrifice and of a God who seems to encourage 9/11-like terrorism makes us recoil, holding the story away from our modern-day lives like a dangerous and offensive relic. But the relevance of the story to our lives lies precisely in the horror of it. Its horror pierces the heart of our own challenge as faithful people in a world, and with a God, that sometimes makes no sense. Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis says it best:
          “This story of Abraham and God and Isaac is the place you go when you are out beyond anything you thought could or would happen, beyond anything you imagined God would ever ask of you, when the most sensible thing to do might be to deny that God exists at all, or deny that God cares at all, or to deny that God has any power at all. That would be sensible, except you can’t do it, because you are so deep into relationship with God that to deny all that would be to deny your own heart and soul and mind.”[1]
          Abraham’s obedience in this story isn’t the blind, fanatical obedience of the suicide bomber. It isn’t the rule-bound obedience of the soldier. It isn’t the servile obedience of a dog trailing its owner for a treat. Abraham’s obedience in this story is a result of a long and loving relationship. It is the trust that comes after a life-time of knowing and following and wrestling with a God, who, despite all of the ups and downs of Abraham’s 100-plus years, has always been present. Ellen Davis quotes the twentieth-century rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, a student of the Holocaust, in his understanding of Abraham. Berkovits imagines Abraham walking with God to Moriah, meat cleaver in hand, and Isaac by his side, and praying, “In this situation I do not understand you. Your behavior violates our covenant; still, I trust you because it is you, because it is you and me, because it is us.”[2]
Throughout his terrible ordeal, God keeps calling to Abraham, and Abraham continues to answer with that Hebrew word that we translate, “Here I am” but that really means, “I am yours: open, listening, alert to you.” Abraham, in the darkness of his trial, trusts that his God can see what he cannot. When Isaac asks his father where the sheep is for the offering, Abraham answers, in the Hebrew, “God will see to the sheep for the offering.” Somehow, God sees. Even though Abraham does not see until the very last second, the second before he brings the cleaver down on his son, he trusts that God sees. “On the mount of the Lord there is sight,” he later names the place of his testing, his trust vindicated.[3]
          There is a woodcut by the artist Margaret Adams Parker that gives us an image of this loving relationship hidden beneath the horror of our story. On a black background, dark as night, you see Isaac, etched in white, a small child curled up on his side and bound hands and feet upon an altar of sticks. He looks peacefully asleep and totally vulnerable, totally trusting. Above him, you see Abraham bending over his son, the sharp cleaver in one hand behind his back--yet holding out the other hand in tender blessing over his child’s head like a parent about to kiss his sleeping child goodnight. And above Abraham, hovering just over the grieving father’s head, you see the Angel of the Lord, looking down with loving concern, holding open arms protectively over Abraham—and Isaac—on all sides.[4] In the darkest of nights, God’s Love for Abraham never falters.
When our promises seem to disappear before our eyes, do we, like Abraham, trust God to see, or do we claim to see just fine on our own?  In the midst of my anger with God all those years ago, I had a dream. In my dream, the x-ray of my chest revealed a tiny glowing cross, instead of the expected lump. When I woke up from that dream, my chest felt warm, and my anger with God gone. It was strange. Somehow, I knew that God had etched that cross on my breast—not to cure a cancer—but to remind me that I belonged to Christ, whatever the outcome. In that cross, I remembered God’s trusting love in sending his only Son to earth to suffer and die. I remembered Jesus’ trusting love as he hung from the Cross, forgiving us all. And I remembered that it is God’s trusting love that the disciples watched rise from the tomb with Jesus on Easter morning. It is the trusting love that binds us to God in Jesus Christ still today—the trusting love that God asks from us in return in today’s Epistle. From that night on, as I awaited the biopsy results, I was no longer afraid. It turns out that I didn’t even have cancer. There was nothing to cure—no need for a miraculous ram to appear in the bushes for me. For that, I am indeed thankful. But my scare and temper-tantrum with God taught me a lesson in real trust. I learned what it really means to pray a discipleship prayer that I had been praying for years, yet without understanding:
“I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt; rank me with whom thou wilt … Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee ... Let me be full, let me be empty … Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it.”[5] Amen.
 http://www.faithandleadership.com/sites/default/files/feature_images/Abraham-and-Isaac_m.jpg


[1] Ellen F. Davis, “Radical Trust.” Faith and Leadership, July 26, 2011. Found at: http://www.faithandleadership.com/sermons/ellen-f-davis-radical-trust. My sermon is very indebted to Davis’ interpretation of this text and follows much of her outline.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Translation from Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses, (New York: WW Norton, 2004), 110f.
[4] Davis, ibid.
[5] “Watchnight Covenant Service for New Years’ Eve Day 2003,” given to me by the Rev. Georgine Buckwalter.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Violence, Loyalties, and God's Kingdom



        
 Proper 7

Genesis 21:8-21

Psalm86:1-10,16-17

Romans 6:1b-11

Matthew 10:24-39





O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving­kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen


         I once flew on Pakistan Airways between Paris and New York. What fascinated me on that trip was watching the young fathers rush frantically back and forth between their multiple families during the long flight. While the women ate, braided their hair, and chatted together, the fathers roamed the plane, first holding one wife’s fussy baby and then spooning cereal into the mouth of his second wife’s toddler.  I’m sure that the women did their share of parenting, too, but by the time we reached New York, I could definitely tell that the fathers looked the worse for the wear. Being busy with child care is one thing, but what would these fathers have done, I wondered, if the plane had started to go down, and they could only save one family? How would they choose?
I thought about that scene as I read today’s first lesson. Poor Abraham, caught between two families and two women, forced to choose between two sons whom he loves, told by none other than Almighty God to listen to Sarah’s cruel voice.  How can he cast his first-born son Ishmael and Ishmael’s mother Hagar out into the desert alone? Yet how can he ignore Sarah’s fear that young Isaac might someday be disinherited or mistreated by his older half-brother, should she die and leave him unprotected? How his heart must have ached as he got up and, obeying God, handed Hagar a morsel of bread and a jug of water and placed their beloved baby on her back, thinking that he would never see either of them again. He must have felt the same kind of horror that he would feel later, holding a knife over the heart of his other son Isaac, bound as a sacrifice to God.
“But wait!” some of you might argue. Why feel sorry for Abraham? Isn’t Hagar the pitiful one who ends up nearly dying of thirst in the desert? Isn’t she the foreign slave who is used and abused? Isn’t she the one who ends up in such despair that she casts her baby away under a bush so that she won’t have to see or hear him die? Yes, I do get upset with our text over what happens to Hagar and Ishmael. But my deepest sympathies are with Abraham today. As I listen to the news, I often feel caught, too, in the impossible trap of having to choose between baby Ishmael and sweet, laughing Isaac.
You see, Isaac, as you know, is the inheritor of God’s covenant with Israel and a father of the Jewish people. You may not know, though, that the “great nation” descended from Ishmael--that nomadic nation born in the wilderness of Paran--is the Arab nation. You may not know that Muslims still visit what they believe is the saving well of water from which Hagar drinks. They find it in the sacred city of Mecca. Muslims, Jews and Christians—a family still torn asunder.  Ever since Sarah felt as if she had to protect her own little family, no matter what the cost, tribal loyalties rule with violence in our common Holy Land.
Loving God, how many Arab babies died in the desert when Christian Crusaders drove them from their homes? What about the Muslim grandfather from Iraq, arriving in Louisville after years as a refugee in the no-man’s-land of the Syrian desert, who told me how he was driven out as a little boy from Palestine into Iraq, asking me wistfully what his native country looks like? What about the little Arab boy who dashes from his home in the West Bank into the desert night as Israeli bulldozers come crashing through his bedroom walls? What about the little Jewish girl who enters the desert of life without her parents when Palestinian suicide bombers kill her mother and father in the market square? What about the Arab Christian family at KRM, driven from their home into the desert by Muslims in Syria? And what about, O God, all of the Muslim and Christian Iraqi women and children who are now being driven from their homes into the desert sands by Arab tribalism and fundamentalist ISIS troops? Troops who menacingly post all over the Internet, “We are coming, Baghdad.”[1]
Why do you let this happen, God? What do you expect of me, as an American Christian who stands, like Abraham, amidst and within a cruel and violent struggle for survival? Where do my loyalties lie? Which child do I save? Which child do I banish? It seems as if there is no good answer that will bring peace. Jesus, what is a peace-loving Christian to do?
Checking with Jesus is always a good idea, of course-- but good grief, Jesus, you are not much help in today’s Gospel!
"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth [he answers, cryptically;] I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
Seriously?! What kind of Good News is this? Does even Jesus incite and subject us to constant violence? Was he standing there egging on his Father when God told Abraham to pack little Ishmael up and send him out to die? Muslim scholar Reza Aslan, in his best-selling book The Zealot argues on the basis of verses like ours that Jesus is indeed a violent Revolutionary, inciting his followers to rebel against Rome and to establish God’s Kingdom with the sword.
I, however, disagree. To attribute these words to Jesus in a literal way goes against the Jesus we see in the rest of the Gospels: against the Jesus who tells the disciples to put away their swords when the Roman soldiers come to arrest him; against the Jesus who tells the violent crowds that “he who is without sin should throw the first stone;” against the Jesus who tells us to “love our enemies.” Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas holds what I believe is the best interpretation of today’s difficult reading.  Instead of telling his disciples to pick up the sword, says Hauerwas, Jesus is warning them that they live in a violent world, and that if they are going to follow a crucified Lord, they need to be prepared to lose their own lives to the same violent powers that kill Jesus. The sword that Jesus brings is the cross. The cross comes to the disciple, not to some enemy out there somewhere. The kind of family loyalties that cause Sarah to banish Hagar have no place in the Kingdom in which God loves every human being, declares Jesus. Christians have no business putting tribal loyalties, national loyalties, family loyalties above the call to follow Jesus, loving each of our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus’ words to his disciples were meant to train them–and the church that followed–for faithful and patient endurance, just as Jesus demonstrated in his own life and death.[2]
While I want to relate to Abraham, it’s interesting that the grace in the story comes not to Abraham in his tough choices, but to Hagar, the outcast. Hagar, the object of violence, is given the grace to see God in the midst of her violent world. God hears little Ishmael’s pitiful and thirsty cries underneath that bush in the desert, and God comes to his frantic mother. “Have no fear,” God whispers to her. And God opens Hagar’s eyes so that she can see water in the desert. God helps her to hear the crazy promise that God will make a great nation even from one who has been cast out to die. Hagar and Ishmael live when, by the grace of God, they are able to see through scarcity into abundance. They are able to see water in the desert. They are able to hear promise as they sit alone on the sand. They are able to trade their fear for trust in God’s loving care. I can almost hear Jesus whispering to her, and to us: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Today we hear a difficult Gospel. The temptation to live into the world’s closed tribal and nationalistic systems is great. The temptation to live and die in fear that someone else is going to get what I need, someone else is going to hurt my interests, is a powerful one. Our lessons today remind us that in God, resources are not limited. God brings water in the desert and life from a cross. In God, Love is not rationed. Inheritance is boundless. In God’s Kingdom, the Pakistani fathers on that airplane would not have to choose which child to save in a crash—because everyone would risk his or her own life to save the stranger’s child sitting nearby.      


[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27912569
[2] Found at “Slouching Towards Emmaus,” http://neoprimitive.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/not-peace-but-a-sword-reading-matthew-10-24-38-with-stanley-hauerwas/

Saturday, June 14, 2014

On Messy Playrooms and Trinitarian Discipleship






Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Canticle 2 or 13
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20


Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.


As a “neat-freak” mom, I took pride in how my children’s toys were placed on well-organized shelves in their rooms. I taught my kids from a young age how to clean up every night, putting each puzzle back in its place and every Lego back in its bin. The whines of clean-up time were well-worth the deep satisfaction that I felt afterwards as I looked at the orderly rooms, secure in the thought that we would be ready to start a new day, calm and uncluttered. What got me in a tizzy was what I knew would happen after any of my young children had a great play-date at our house. Their friends didn’t seem to have learned the “clean-up lessons” that my children had. Since I had three children under the age of eight, an afternoon spent indoors with an additional 2 or 3 friends resulted in a house that looked like a tornado had passed through: the floors covered in blocks, dress-ups scattered throughout the house, toy kitchen utensils dumped from their bins, puzzle pieces and Playmobile figures mixed up together like scrambled eggs. Come supper time, my children were rosy with happiness from a fun afternoon, but I was aghast and completely undone over the mess.
I confess these old feelings to you today on Trinity Sunday because I think that our ideal for God, the Church, and the Christian life tends to be like my ideal for an ordered house: organized, unified, and straightforward. And the Trinity is the play-date that brings life and leaves a mess. Most of our theological concepts have neat shelves in the Bible. We know where to find them, and we know where to return them when we’re through playing with them. If you want to look at incarnation, you turn to the stories of Jesus’ birth. If you want to look at freedom, you turn to the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. If you want to look at forgiveness, you turn to the parable of the Prodigal Son. You take down the neat packages of scripture from their shelves and you apply them to your life and you put them back and go to bed all warm and cozy, ready to take action …. sometime … in the morning.
But the Trinity isn’t directly explained in the Bible. Oh, we have passages like we read today that talk about the Spirit of God, or that mention the Father and the Son and the Spirit in the same few verses. But these verses don’t talk about the three being one. They don’t name the Trinity or really even describe what the Trinity is. That’s because we know about the Trinity from our experience of God in the life and death of Jesus and in our own personal glimpses of God’s spirit in our lives. We then read that experience back into the Bible. We believe in the Trinity because we know that God isn’t like a static playroom full of toys sitting neatly on shelves. God is like the creating, loving, imagining energy of children absorbed in the give-and-take of relationship. God is full of movement and vigor. God is outpouring and in-taking. God is messy and continuous connection—unity in the multiplicity of relationship.
Professor David Lose talks about a “Trinitarian congregation” as a way of acknowledging this “backwards” way that we have to approach the Trinity itself. Instead of trying to see how one God is three persons, he says, look how one faithful Christian community is
Called and sent by the Holy Spirit
To bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed
For the sake of the world God the Father created and loves so much.[1]
Yes, Christians are called to be in community with one another, to rejoice and worship and play together with God with the gusto of messy three-year-olds. We are called to be a place where people can look in and see the movement and creation and love that characterize our God.  As a community, we can energize one another when individual spirits lag; we can carry one another in hard times; we can speak together in faith when as individuals we retreat in doubt; we can hold out common hands for causes and for people that alone we would not have the courage to support. You cannot be a disciple all by yourself. Christians need Trinitarian Community.
And yet I would like to add to the Trinitarian complexity of Lose’s image. We are in God’s image not just as a parish community. Our individual witness matters, as well. Like the Trinity, we are a paradoxical mixture of unity and multiplicity. God calls us to Christian life not just as a church. God calls each of us to be a disciple in our weekday lives, to be an individual follower of Christ, to show forth Christ’s life in our words and deeds, to go out, as Jesus commands us today in Matthew, to preach the Good News to the ends of the earth.
There was a blog making the Internet rounds this week titled, “Maybe We Should Stop ‘Doing Outreach?’”[2] Robin posted it on our St. Thomas webpage. The article asks us to consider outreach not just as church programs but as individual lives connecting with neighbors every day. At St. Thomas our designated plate offerings each month are outreach. The way we let community members use our buildings for ESL classes is outreach. Our Reading Camp and tutoring programs for Zachary Taylor Elementary are outreach. This kind of outreach represents our parish in action. It is orderly, easy to quantify, and soothing for people like me who like to line up everything on shelves. It is outreach “for” other people. We collect money for the poor. We cook food for the hungry. We go on a mission trip in order to build homes for the homeless.
But there is another messier kind of “outreach.” It happens whenever one of you helps a neighbor or a colleague in the name of Jesus. Every time you invite a new acquaintance to come to St. Thomas for a service or to help at Reading Camp. Every time you stand up alone and vulnerable for justice in our community or are brave enough to hold up a sign of protest. Every time you take a Healing Blanket to your sick colleague or teacher. Every time you stop and spend some time to pray with someone in need. This kind of outreach isn’t “for” people, it is “with” people. Author Sara Miles claims that “with” is the most important word in the Bible. Jesus is “Emanuel—God With Us.” The Trinity is God with God.  Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “I am with you always.” Miles writes: “If we model ourselves [on the Trinity] it changes everything. Our lives as Christians must mean being with others the way God is with us. With, not for.”[3] Outreach “with” others involves give and take on an individual level. It involves being vulnerable. It involves finding out every day what the person in front of us needs and then responding to that need in love. It involves scattering our toys all over the neighborhood.
Last Thanksgiving, my daughter attended a “friendsgiving” potluck with some of her young adult single friends, none of whom could go home for the holiday. Stretching her legs after eating a big meal, she was roaming the empty holiday streets of San Francisco and came across a beggar on the sidewalk. Wanting to reach out to the beggar in the Thanksgiving spirit, she ran back to her friends’ house and loaded a plate full of left-over food and brought it to the disheveled beggar. Up until that point, she was doing “for” him. But then something made her sit down next to him on the sidewalk while he ate. She talked with him and listened to his tragic story. As their time drew to an end, the beggar began to weep. “It has been years since I have eaten a meal with anyone,” he sighed. “It means more to me than you can imagine.” Such is the power of “with,” the power of the Trinity.
With a Triune God who is moving, messy connection, what makes us think that we can keep everything on the shelves of our Churches or our Christian lives, doling out love in orderly fashion? What makes us think we have to have our act together before we can serve? That we have to have an outreach committee before we can help our neighbors? That we have to deal with our doubts before we can share the Good News of Christ? Aren’t all of these hesitations really just excuses?
As we reflect this summer about what kind of outreach we are called to do at St. Thomas, let’s not just think about what “somebody else” can do in the name of the parish as a whole. Let’s think about what our own lives as disciples would look like if each one of us were to enter God’s messy world of “with.” What would it look like for you to dump your box of treasures out all over the floor in generosity? What would it look like for you to shed your fear and your dignity around the community in which you live, like my kids shed their dress-up costumes? What would it look like to be the disciple of a Triune God?


[1] David Lose, “Trinitarian Congregations,” found at http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3254.
[2] “Maybe we should stop ‘doing outreach’” found on 6/10/14 at http://www.frcathie.org/?p=63.
[3] Sara Miles, “The Most Important Word in the Bible,” Found on 7/24/13 at http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/mission/the_most_important_word_in_the.php?utm_s...