Saturday, July 23, 2011

Living Lives that Matter (July 24 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 17, July 24 2011, St. Albans
Readings:  Gen 29:15-28; Ps 105:1-11; Rom 8:26-39; Mt 13:31-33,44-52

Those of you who were here last week might recall that we took two of our readings, the story of Jacob, and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and weeds, and we put them together and found that we needed both of them to tell the story of how God responds to our human situation.  So I thought we’d try the same thing again this week, this time with the reading from Romans and with the gospel from Matthew.  Two very different texts.  Two very different agendas.  

In the epistle to the Romans, Paul’s intent is to provide us with a bedrock of security.  His words are meant to be profoundly orienting and stabilizing.  Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven, on the other hand, are intended to have just the opposite effect.  They are meant to be profoundly disorienting and destabilizing.  Think about it for a moment.  When is the last time any of you went out and sold everything you own, so that you could spend it all on a pearl, whatever that pearl might represent for you.  Can you even imagine doing such a thing?

But let’s start with Paul.  Paul’s readers lived in a world where there were great concerns about security.  We can relate to that.  Certainly people in Norway are concerned about security in the wake of the tragic events of the last few days.  Certainly people in the horn of Africa are worried about security, in their case, food security, as a result of the drought and famine in that part of the world.  Security has been big news for us too over the last 10 years, especially since the events of 9/11.  We as a society spend billions of dollars on security every year.  We spend those dollars to protect ourselves against terrorism, against crime, to fight wars, to patrol our borders, to make air travel safe – I could go on and on.

Why do we do it?  Well, we do it because there are threats and we have fears, and whether our fears are justified or unjustified isn’t my concern at the moment.  But as a society, we do have fears, and we try to beef up our security because we don’t want to feel afraid, we don’t want to feel insecure.  Why?  Well one reason is that when we feel insecure, life changes.  We stop doing things.  We travel less, we stay home.  We avoid risk, we play it safe.  We become prone to anxiety. We cling to our jobs.  We become suspicious of others.  In a whole variety of different ways, we are constrained, one could even say, diminished.  We need to feel secure in order to flourish, both as a society and as individuals.

For me, some of the best illustrations of the effects of security and insecurity come from the world of sports.  If you’ve ever coached sports, you will know that one of the most important roles of a coach is to build up the confidence of your athletes.  To give them a sense of security in their own and the team’s ability, whether it’s through repeated practice or positive reinforcement.  Of course, at the elite levels, it’s not just the coaches who do this.  Elite athletes have whole retinues of sports psychologists whose role is to deal with the insecurities and anxieties that the athletes may have, and in their place to build up confidence and give the athlete a strong sense of security. 

Why is this so important?  Well it’s important because you can’t perform at your highest level without being confident and secure.  An athlete who lacks these qualities will be afraid of making a mistake, will worry too much about the competition, will be tense and anxious, will make excuses, and just won’t be able to play his or her game at the highest level.

But security isn’t just important for athletes.  For all of us, for all of us to live boldly, to live lives that matter, to be the people that we were created to be, we all need a rock-solid foundation of security.

Psychologists will tell us that in order for humans to flourish, we need to feel that we are both loved and lovable, and we need to feel that we belong, that we are connected to something bigger than ourselves.

There are many things in our lives that can challenge these, the foundations of our security.  Family problems, loss of loved ones, criticism, abandonment, failure, guilt, conflict, and we could go on.  Our primal fear, far greater than our fears at the societal level, is that somehow we will be separated from those who love us.  And when that fear translates into insecurity, how do we live?

We play it safe.  We worry about what others think.  We’re afraid of making a mistake.  We expend energy in self-justification.  We seek security in the wrong places.

Paul knows all this.  He knows it, because he’s experienced it.  Paul had his own crisis, the moment when he became aware of his guilt, lost his sight and felt totally abandoned and unworthy of love.  And yet, in that moment of weakness, in that moment when he knew he needed something, but probably didn’t know or couldn’t articulate what it was, he became aware of the Spirit of God, the Spirit that helps us in our weakness, the Spirit that in those moments when we don’t even know what to ask for, intercedes for us, and assures us that we are loved, and that nothing, nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God.

This is the untouchable, unshakeable, absolute, rock-solid foundation of security that we need, and Paul wants to communicate this first to his readers in Rome and by extension to us.

Who or what will separate us from the love of God?  Nothing.  No one. Nada.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor divorce, nor loss, nor addiction, nor abandonment, nor the judgement of others, nor our own guilt, nor anything we do or don’t do, nor illness, nor failure, nor any power, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, which was shown to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is our rock-solid foundation of security, the foundation that allows us to go out and to flourish, to live boldly, to live passionately, to be at the top of our game, to live lives that matter.

We need this rock-solid foundation to be the people that God created us to be and to do the things that God is calling us to do.

That’s the message of our reading from Romans. 

Now let’s put that into conversation with our gospel readings, with all these images and parables of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus gives us.

When I put them together, I find that there is a kind of irony.  And the irony is this:  one of the reasons we need the rock solid foundation of God’s love that Paul writes about in Romans is precisely because the encounter with God can be profoundly disorienting, something that pushes us beyond our usual way of doing things.

Did it ever occur to you that the people in these kingdom of heaven parables are acting a little strange?

Mustard.  Mustard in Jesus part of the world was basically a weed.  It was one of those invasive plants that keeps spreading and spreading, and is hard to eradicate, a bit like dandelions or mint.  You’d have to be crazy to plant it in your field, most farmers were trying to eradicate it – but that’s what someone does, and eventually it becomes a place where birds can make their nest.

Yeast.  Yeast was undesirable in Jesus world, a corrupting influence, something you had to cleanse your house of each year at the passover.  Yeast is a fungus, and the yeast that the woman took was not from a nice clean jar in the fridge, but was likely a lump of rotting bread or fruit.  What does she do?  She hides it.  Our translation says she mixes it, but the original greek actually says she hides it.  She tries to hide this small rotting lump in three measures of flour, a huge amount of flour.  What happens?  She ends up with enough bread to feed a hundred people.

The one who finds the treasure, the merchant who finds the pearl of great value.  Both end up selling everything they had to buy that one thing.  Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.  Imagine the reaction from their spouses when they got home that night and explained that they were going to have to leave their house because they had just sold it.

None of the people that we encounter in these kingdom of heaven parables seem to be acting in accordance with the usual rules, the conventional wisdom.  They’re pushing the boundaries, taking chances, acting boldly.  It’s all a bit absurd – though not as absurd as marching into the capital city, defying the authorities and ending up nailed to a cross.

There’s lots that could be said about these parables.  But one thing that we can perhaps say is that the encounter with God, life lived in relationship with God, can be profoundly disorienting.  It can call us to live in ways that are surprising, in ways that go beyond our comfort zone, in ways that risk failure, in ways that may be looked down upon.
  
That’s not easy.  But no matter where our journey with God takes us, no matter how absurd life gets, no matter the surprises that the kingdom of heaven may have in store for us, we have that rock-solid foundation that gives us our security.  Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God. 

So go for it.  Act boldly.  Live lives that matter.  Be the people that God created you to be.

Amen.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

A Story of Grace (Pentecost 5, July 17 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 16, July 17 2011, St. Albans
Readings:  Gen 28:10-19a; Ps 139:1-11, 22-23;Rom 8:12-25; Mt 13:24-30, 36-43

You’ve heard the question before.  If God is a good God, and this same God is the creator of the universe, and more specifically of this earth and of humanity, then how is it that there is not only good in our world, but also a lot of bad mixed in?

It’s not a new question.  It’s an old, old question. It’s a question that was on the minds of the crowds that followed Jesus, people who lived in an occupied state, oppressed by military rulers.  It’s also a question that preoccupied Jesus disciples, as they became aware of the growing, threatening opposition that was building towards Jesus and themselves as his followers.  Evil, and the presence of evildoers was no mere academic question.

And so Jesus tells them the parable of the wheat and the weeds, how someone had sowed good seed in his field, but while everyone was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and so when the plants came up the wheat and the weeds were all mixed up together.  The slaves of the householder ask if they should remove the weeds, but they are told no; all will be looked after at the time of harvest, when the weeds will be gathered and burned and the wheat brought into the barn.

You’ve got to admit, it’s a neat little story, a parable which together with its allegorical interpretation first explains the existence and persistence of evil in our world, and then provides an ultimate resolution with the destruction of evil in the end.

So why does this little parable bug me so much?

Ok, there’s the bit about the devil, which I always have a hard time wrapping my 21st century head around.  But, if I prefer to think in terms of free will, and the bad choices that humans make and how these bad choices have throughout history created systemic structures of sin and oppression that are passed down through the generations and generate evil in the world, and how we can personify all this and call it the devil if we like, well then I’m ok with that bit.

I don’t like to see justice delayed, but I can understand the lesson in the parable that it’s not our job to eliminate those who do evil, that we are in no position to do so and that our attempt to do so would cause harm.

The bit about gathering the weeds and throwing them into the furnace of fire also makes me a bit uneasy.  Nothing wrong with that, I think it’s meant to make us feel a bit uneasy.  I won’t try to deal with the notion of “hell” today, but I will on another occasion, and for those of you that are curious, I’ve posted my “hell” sermon on my blog and you can go there and take a look.

The dualism of the parable bugs me a bit too, the notion that there are “good” people and “bad” people.  But, it doesn’t take too many readings to realize that the parable can also be symbolic of the entanglement that takes place within particular individuals, that is, within me are found both wheat and weeds, all tangled up.

No, it’s not anything that’s in it that bugs me about this parable.  It’s what’s not in it.  There seems to be something missing.

Fortunately, for me at least, the piece that seems to be missing from the parable of the wheat and the weeds in our gospel reading this morning shows up for us in our Old Testament lesson.

You see, Jacob is a weed.  Maybe you remember his story.  Jacob is the younger of the twin brothers born to Isaac and Rebekah and he is a swindling, lying, ambitious, greedy manipulator who by the time today’s story begins is in deep conflict with his father and brother.  Jacob is a weed.  He swindled his brother Esau out of his birthright by trading it for a bowl of stew, and he tricked his elderly and blind father into giving him the blessing which was due to the older brother Esau.  Jacob is a weed, and Esau has vowed to take justice into his own hands and uproot the weed, to murder his brother Jacob.

Tipped off by his mother, Jacob runs for his life.  He leaves home, for the first time, and heads off on a long, dangerous journey across the desert.  He is a fugitive in exile, with nowhere to lay his head.  And so when the sun goes down, Jacob simply stops for the night where he is, and lies on the ground, taking a stone for his pillow.
  
And as he sleeps he has a dream in which he sees a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and angels ascending and descending.  And Yahweh himself appears, and he speaks to Jacob.  He repeats for Jacob the three great promises made to his forebears, Abraham and Isaac:  the promise that he will give the land, the promise of a multitude of offspring, and the promise that all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through Jacob and his offspring.  And then Yahweh makes two more promises that are specific to Jacob and his particular situation at that very moment.  To the one who is alone and endangered, Yahweh says “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go”.  And to the same one who is going into exile, Yahweh promises “I will bring you back to this land.”

You see, access to the divine is not something that is reserved for the wheat.  God saw something in Jacob that Isaac and Esau could not see.  Despite Jacob’s apparent weediness, God sees the person that he created him to be.  In Jacob, in that lying, manipulating, swindler, God saw someone who could be a blessing to all the peoples of the world.  The story of Jacob is a story of grace.

How do we respond to an experience of the divine?  How do we respond when God sees through our weediness and calls us to be the person God created us to be?  How do we respond to an encounter with grace?  Jacob’s response is perhaps instructive for us.

The first thing that Jacob does when he awakes from his sleep is that he recognizes and names his experience.  He doesn’t say “Wow I just had a weird dream.”  No, he says “the Lord is in this place.”

The second thing that Jacob does is to feel and honour and express his sense of awe and wonder.  “How awesome is this place,” he says.  Wonder is perhaps the most sacred of emotions.  It is the emotion that alerts us that we are in the presence of God.  Allow yourself to experience and cherish and respond to those encounters that inspire you with awe and wonder.

The third thing that Jacob does is to mark the significance of his experience of God.  This is a transformative moment in his life, and it is deserving of a marker.  Jacob takes the stone, his ebenezer, and sets it up as a pillar and pours oil on top of it.  It becomes a visible mark of an interior transformation.

And finally, Jacob makes a commitment.  Jacob engages with his experience by vowing a vow, that Yahweh will be his God, and that Jacob will honour him.

All of us are on a journey.  There are times when we, like Jacob, may feel vulnerable, or alone, or in exile.  Perhaps we feel a bit more like a weed than wheat.  But as in Jacob’s case, access to the divine is not reserved for the wheat, nor is it even reserved for those who are seeking God.  God is near and like Jacob, we too need to be awakened to God’s surprising presence.  And when we are, it is helpful to recognize and name our experience, to cherish the awe and wonder of it, to mark it and to engage with it.  For if we can do these things, we too will be transformed by the encounter with grace.

Jacob’s story is story of grace.

Now, back to the parable of the wheat and the weeds.

That piece that seemed to be missing for me in the parable of the wheat and the weeds is grace.  The amazing notion that our God is the God of wheat and weeds, and that in his love he can reach out to the weeds, and actually transform them into wheat. 

Let me finish with a few words from the song ‘Grace’ by U2.

What once was hurt 
What once was friction 
What left a mark 
No longer stings... 
Because Grace makes beauty 
Out of ugly things 

Grace finds beauty in everything.

Amen. 

No Condemnation (Pentecost 4, July 10 2011)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 15, July 10 2011, St. Albans
Readings:  Gen 25.19-34; Ps 119.105-112; Rom 8:1-11; Mat 13:1-9, 18-23


Out in Carp, I think it was on the sixth line, there’s a farm which straddles both sides of the road.  And earlier this year, in late May, a bit later than usual because of all the rain, I was watching as the farmer was doing his seeding.  He was riding a big tractor with a seeder on the back, going up and down his field on the left hand side of the road.  When that side was done, he drove up onto a dirt path which led onto the sixth line, crossed the paved road and began seeding on the other side.  And I noticed that as he drove up onto the road, he must have flipped some sort of control switch, because the seeder stopped sowing the seed as the tractor crossed the road.

Nothing surprising about that.  Why would any farmer want to waste valuable seed on a paved road?  In fact, if you did see a farmer driving his tractor along a paved road and seeding it, you just might think that was the craziest farmer you’d ever seen!  What a waste we’d think to ourselves.  There’d probably be a few whispers around Carp about how poor old Farmer Jones is playing a few cards short of a full deck.

Rebekah, in our first reading this morning, would have known exactly what it was like to have people whispering all around her.  There’s an important detail in the story of Isaac and Rebekah and the birth of their children, Esau and Jacob, that’s easy to miss, a tiny detail that alerts us to years and years of failure, shame and frustration. 

Did anyone catch it?  How old was Isaac when he and Rebekah married?  Right, 40 years old.  And how old was he when Esau and Jacob were born?  He was 60 years old.  And in-between, during those twenty long years, Rebekah was barren.  Infertile, unable to bear children. 

Now, a little cultural context here.  Barrenness in the time of Rebekah and Isaac was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.  It was a source of great shame.  It was a sentence of death, for only through the birth of the next generation could life continue.  It was the principle reason why women were cast aside in favour of new wives or concubines.  The one who was barren was believed to have been cursed by God.  Every month for twenty years when her period came, more than two hundred times, Rebekah would feel in a physical, visceral way that she had failed, that she stood condemned, and that she had disappointed her husband Isaac.  For twenty years.

We have a different cultural context.  We no longer see infertility as something visited upon us by God.  And for all we know it may have been Isaac who had a low sperm count.

But we can still relate to Rebekah’s sense of shame and embarrassment and failure.  None of us wants to be condemned, whether justly for something we have done or failed to do, or injustly for something we may have had no control over.  And yet this is something we all have to deal with.  Think of all the talk in our own society about self-worth and self-improvement  In the year 2006, in the United States alone, the market for self-improvement, that is books, cd’s, twelve-step programs and the like, was worth over $9 billion.  Much of this speaks, I think to some sort of underlying anxiety.  We too are dealing with stuff.

Back in Paul’s day, the self-help business had a particular name.  It was called the Law.  The psalm that we read together this morning celebrates the law.  God’s law, the psalmist says, is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path.  It provides us with a structure and a sense of direction to guide us through the daily activities and moral pitfalls of our lives.

And yet Paul, the pharisee, the scholar and practitioner of the Law par excellence, Paul has realized that the law is not enough to save him from condemnation.  Paul, who wanted nothing more than to follow God’s law, found that his zeal for the law actually resulted in him persecuting Jesus, the one sent by God to fulfill the law.  Paul knew what it was to experience shame.  In our reading from Romans last Sunday Paul tells us  that even when he knows what is right, even when he knows what he should do, what he wants to do, he isn’t able to do it.  And so the law actually becomes for him a source of shame and failure and frustration.

Many of us, perhaps all of us, have to deal with these things in our lives.  Many of us feel condemned, perhaps by God, perhaps by others, perhaps by ourselves.  Sure we put on a brave face most of the time.  Of course we manage to push it aside.  Sure we’ve heard it said over and over again at church that we’re forgiven.  But perhaps the 19th century American poet Henry David Thoreau was right when he observed that most people lead lives of quiet desperation.  Perhaps it’s regret over some missed opportunity, or a disappointment that we can’t seem to let go of.  Maybe it’s a sadness that comes from brokenness in our relationships.  Maybe it’s guilt from a past wrong done to another, or a difficulty getting over a wrong done to us.  Maybe it’s frustration with something that’s happened to us that was outside of our control.

Who knows?  After all, we don’t talk much about those things that are hurtful to us, often we don’t even admit them to ourselves.  But these things do manifest themselves, in behaviours, in relationships, in our self-justifications, in our masks and in a vague sense of dis-ease about our own self worth.

This is what we deal with.  This is what Rebekah had to deal with.  This what the Romans who received Paul’s letter were dealing with.  And this is what Paul had to deal with, and he wrestled with it more than most, and he experienced his own sense of shame acutely, and he has spent seven chapters writing about this the human condition and his own frustration with it, all in an attempt to bring us to today’s reading, to the climax of Paul’s thinking and faith, to the most important sentence he ever wrote:

Romans Chapter 8 Verse 1.  “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.  All of that stuff that we deal with, or push down inside and don’t deal with, none of that matters to God.  There is no condemnation, all is overcome.  Why?  Because God loves us, because God holds nothing against us, because God loves us enough to forgive us, to celebrate us as we are, to restore us and welcome us into God’s embrace the way a parent embraces a child.

How do we know?  Because God sent his Son.  Jesus came to show us this.  To show us through the cross just how much God already loves us, and to show us through his resurrection how powerful that love is, more powerful than heights or depths or anything else in all of creation, more powerful than the human condemnation which put Jesus on the cross, more powerful even than our own sense of shame, or failure, or self-condemnation.  The limitations, the shame, the contradictions, the despair of our human condition is overcome by the love of God, and God sent his Son so that we would know it, now, today.
  
This is easy to say, but it’s hard to really take in.  Sometimes I'm told that when I start talking about God’s love in my sermons, people have all heard it so many times before that they all they hear is blah blah blah blah.

Perhaps it’s like the seed that falls on the asphalt road, a seed that just bounces a few times before the birds come to eat it.

So I want to try something this morning.  I have something that I’d like you to do. I’d like each of you to take a piece of paper and a pencil.  Our greeters will bring some around for you if you don’t have pencil and paper already.

On that piece of paper, I want you to write down the one thing that you feel worst about.  The one regret, or misdeed or misfortune that causes you feelings of embarrassment or pain.  The one part of your life that threatens condemnation.  I want you to write it down, in private.  No one else will read it.  And then I want each of you to come up to the front, put your piece of paper into this paper shredder, and as you do so, say to yourself,

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.

[People write something on their piece of paper, then come forward and put it in the shredder]

Now you are free.  Whatever was written on that piece of paper is gone, gone in the eyes of God.  Any power over you that that thing had is also gone, shredded by God’s love. 

For me the parable of the sower tells us that God sows his love in the most unlikely places, not just on the good soil, but on the rocks, amongst the thorns, on the path. On the good stuff in our lives and on the stuff that’s not so good.  And God’s love is what sets us free, free from the fear of failure, free from fear of regret, free from fear of condemnation, free to be the people that God created us to be.

The complete quotation from Thoreau which I referred to previously, goes like this:

“Most people lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Our desperation is no more.  May we go out from this place today, singing our song.

Amen.