Isn't It Ironic? (September 2, 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Proper 22, Sept 2 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Prov 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Ps 125; James 1:17-27; Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Isn’t it ironic?

I am struck by the irony of today’s readings.  Jesus in today’s gospel condemns the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees.  Hypocrisy is one of the few things that Jesus condemns in such forceful terms in the gospels.  He refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery.  He doesn’t condemn tax-collectors.  He won’t condemn the various people considered as impure and sinners by his society, the foreigners, those who don’t wash their hands, the lepers, and so on.  But he does in today’s gospel condemn the hypocrites, those who honour God with their lips, but whose hearts are far from him.

Flash forward a couple of thousand years.  A recent poll of young adults conducted by the Barna Group in the United States asked them what they thought of present day Christianity.  Of those who didn’t consider themselves Christians, 85% thought that present-day Christianity is hypocritical.  Among young adults who were Christians, 50% agreed. Are you surprised?  The one thing that Jesus was willing to condemn is the very characteristic that people, even our own people, use to describe us.  Isn’t it ironic?

Yeah but – I can hear the objections now.  Yeah but that poll was an American poll, not a Canadian poll.  (We don’t really have the same problem here in Canada.) Yeah but when they talk about Christians being hypocritical, they’re really talking about – and now fill in your own blank.  They’re talking about fundamentalists.  They’re talking about rich Christians.  They’re talking about Evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, go ahead fill in the blank, let’s move that accusation of hypocrisy to where it really belongs.

We even do the same thing when we read the scriptures.  We become like cheerleaders, cheering Jesus on as he rips into the scribes and Pharisees.  You go, Jesus, you tell them.  We’re on your side, we hate hypocrites too.  Except that Jesus doesn’t see the scribes and Pharisees as the source of the problem.  Sure, they’re an example of the problem.  But the source of the problem, the root cause of hypocrisy and other sinfulness, the source of evil intentions according to Jesus, is the human heart.  And last time I checked, everyone here at church this morning had a human heart.  

Now, just to clarify a bit, the heart here doesn’t symbolize feelings and sentiment as it might on a Hallmark greeting card.  No, in Jesus’ culture, the heart was understood as the seat of rationality and willfulness in the human being.  There is a universal human problem, Jesus is telling us, and it is this:  that evil intentions arise out of the reasoned and willful choices and actions of human beings.  Isn’t it ironic that the more we try to shift the blame to others, the more we implicate ourselves as part of the problem. 

I find more irony in our reading from the letter of James this morning.  James would have thrived in the age of Twitter, because most of his best phrases come through in less than 140 characters.  And one of the best is the one that we heard this morning: 

“Be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”  Now, did anyone catch the irony in this one?  We live in an age where the primary expression of what it means to be a practicing Christian is to go to church.  And what do we do at church?  Well for the most part, we sit.  And we listen.  And we hear the word.  Isn’t it ironic?

“Be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”  What James is telling us is that going to church is one of the least important things we do as Christians.  Sunday is not the most important day of the Christian week.  In fact, if this one hour that we spend in church on Sundays doesn’t impact what we do the other 167 hours of the week, then we’re deceiving ourselves by being here.  Some might say, we’re hypocrites.

I think that there’s some resonance around this idea, I think we’re starting to get it.  Not too long ago, we put up a photo on our Facebook page that said “Don’t go to church; be the church”.  It quickly had the most hits of anything we put up as people shared it with each other.  I think that’s because we’re starting to get it.  There’s no point going to church one hour a week if that doesn’t help us to be the church 24/7, in our homes, in our families, in our schools and in our workplaces.  On our web site we say the following:

“Our community is made up of imperfect people seeking ways of being the church in a world that has every right to question the value of going to church.”

You see, our vocation, our work, our doing of the word, 99% of that is going to take place outside the doors of this building.  It’s not that coming here on a Sunday morning has no value, it does.  But the main value of what we do on a Sunday morning is that it shapes, serves and supports what we do as followers of Jesus during the rest of the week.  We want to move from being hearers who forget what we hear on Sundays to doers who act all week in accordance with what they hear on Sundays.  We want to move from being what Jesus describes as “people who honour God with their lips but their hearts are far from him” to being the sort of people that James describes, people who’s 'religion is this:  to care for those who are vulnerable and in need.'

And, by the way, don’t you think that this would be a good way to respond to both Jesus’ and our society’s concern about hypocrisy?

We have to re-think church. And as part of this re-thinking, church on a Sunday morning becomes more like a vocational counseling and training centre, getting us ready to go out and do our work.  We come here and we gather together, we support one another, we encounter God, we share our stories, we are forgiven, we are blessed, we are called, we are nourished and we are sent out to do our work.  That work doesn’t have to be heroic.  Maybe somebody here will save the world; most of us will do our jobs with integrity, treat people with dignity, serve those whom we encounter, give out smiles and hugs and kind words.  

That’s how we do our work; that’s also how God does God’s work.  Because as James says in another of his tweets, “every generous act of giving is from above”. Whenever we act in generosity, God is with us, acting through us to build God’s kingdom in the world. 

I’m going to stop talking.  You’ve heard enough.  Go and do something.

Amen.

Scandalized Yet? (August 26 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Proper 21, Aug 26 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  1 Kgs 8:22-30,41-43; Ps 84; Eph 6:10-20; Jn 6:56-69

For the past month we’ve been working our way through the sixth chapter of the gospel of John on Sunday mornings, beginning with the feeding of thousands, hearing Jesus surprising claim “I am the bread of life”, and concluding with the final verses which you just heard in today’s gospel.  I’d like to thank to Matt, Peter and Jonathan who have preached for us the past few weeks and shared their insights on this remarkable text. 

I say that this Chapter 6, this “bread of life” discourse, is a remarkable text because there’s a dramatic transition that takes place in this story.  Did you notice it?  At the beginning, there are crowds of thousands – by the end we’re left with the Twelve.  At the beginning, the people are so enthralled with Jesus that they want take him and make him king.  By the end, they complain, they are scandalized, they turn away and leave him.  What happened?  Did Jesus do something wrong?  Did he say the wrong thing? What did he say that turned them off like that?

Everything seemed to start so well.  Crowds flocked to see Jesus, thousands followed him, and when the crowd got hungry, Jesus accepted a small child’s offering of a few loaves and fish and somehow he fed the crowd until all were satisfied, not only meeting their physical needs, but as Matt pointed out, he gave them hope, by overturning their basic understanding of the world as a place of scarcity, and holding out the hope of abundance.  This must be a prophet, the crowd exclaims, the prophet that we’ve been waiting for.  Let’s make him king, and then we’ll always have bread to eat.

Now I get this.  When you’re hungry, there’s nothing more important than getting something to eat. Jesus gets this too.  Time after time in the gospels we’re told that Jesus has compassion for those with physical needs. But Jesus also wants to move us beyond our physical needs.  This feeding, John tells us, was a sign.  But sign of what?  A sign of something more than just the satisfaction of physical hunger. 

I remember when I was in high school we read the book Animal Farm by George Orwell, his satirical take on Communism.  Is it still on the reading list at high schools these days?  I don’t know.  But I remember after we’d read about the pigs Snowball and Napoleon and the horse Boxer and the rest of the animals, just in case we hadn’t figured it out, the teacher got up at the front of the classroom and said, “Look I just want you to know.  Animal Farm isn’t about farming”.

Well when Jesus stands up at the front of the synagogue the next day to address the crowds who are still hungry and are still looking for more bread, Jesus says, “Look I just want to know, it’s not about loaves of bread.”

And then, blow by blow, he proceeds to push the crowd out of its comfort zone.

“Don’t work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life which only I can give you.”

Questions begin, grumbling starts.  Obviously we’re not getting any free food today.  So what’s he talking about?

“You want the bread that only God can give, the bread that gives life to the world?  I am the bread of life.  I am the bread which comes down from heaven.”

Muttering and complaining.  Who does he think he is?  What sort of a claim is he making?

“The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life; those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”

By this time even Jesus disciples, his closest friends, the ones who have been traveling with him for months, even they’re getting spooked.  “This teaching is difficult,” they complain to each other, “who can accept it?”  They’re offended, they’re scandalized.

And this is where I want us to pause for a moment.  Do you find this teaching difficult?  Do we understand why the crowd was offended?  Are you scandalized by what Jesus has said?

Because if we don’t get why everyone was scandalized by this, we might as well go back to eating bread.  Cause this stuff is meant to scandalize us, it’s meant to shake us out of our complacency.

(walk up to Mary)

“Mary, I want you to eat my flesh and drink my blood, so that you will live in me and I will live in you.”

How did that feel to all of you?  I tell you what, to me it felt totally creepy, and if I was to do say that in all seriousness instead of as an illustration, I expect that Mary and a whole bunch of you would probably leave and never come back.

But that’s what Jesus does say in all seriousness.  This is a difficult, scandalous, offensive teaching.

It’s scandalous, because as Jonathan reminded us last week, the literal sense of eating flesh is simply disgusting.  Jesus clearly doesn’t mean these words literally, but he is trying to shake us up.

It’s offensive to the crowds, again because as Jonathan reminded us last week, the whole notion of drinking blood goes against all the Jewish dietary laws.

It’s shocking because of the claim Jesus is making.  The crowd was happy enough to recognize Jesus as a prophet, even “the prophet”.  But Jesus is claiming more.  He’s claiming to be greater than Moses, the one who fed the people with manna in the wilderness.  He’s claiming to be the Son of Man, the one prophesied in the book of Daniel who would inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth.  He is claiming to be the one who has come down from heaven, the one through whom heaven and earth are linked.  He is taking on the divine name of “I am”.

This claim in itself is enough to get Jesus killed, in fact the charge brought against him at his crucifixion was blasphemy, the claim that he was indeed the son of God.

So by this point I think we can get why many in the crowd were shocked by what Jesus had to say, why even his own disciples found this to be a difficult teaching.

But what about us?  How do we react to all this? Is there anything difficult here for us?  So far, maybe not. We can get past the literal unpleasantness of crunching Jesus’ flesh, we’re not troubled by Jewish dietary laws and chances are if you’re here on a Sunday morning you’ve already come to terms with claims about the divinity of Jesus.

But let me keep pushing!

Jesus says, “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”

Is it my imagination, or do I hear in these words a remarkable suggestion, even a demand of intimacy?  Eating, taking something into my own self, having it become who I am, taking the flesh of Jesus into me so that he can live in me and I can live in him?  This is a radical invitation to intimacy, so radical that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it.  I mean, I’ve gotten used to the notion of Jesus as a prophet, calling for justice.  I’m comfortable with the idea of Jesus as a teacher, providing guidance for my life.  I’ve come to see Jesus as the Son of God, the one sent by God, the one who reveals what God is like, the one who is God himself.  And it’s relatively easy to think of God as God up there or out there, the one that I can pray to when I feel like it, the God who is like a divine therapist in the sky when I’ve got a problem, the one I can ask for my daily bread.  But the idea that God is near, that God wants a relationship with me that is so close, so intimate that Jesus uses this language of eating and drinking and living in me, that does seem to be a difficult teaching.  Am I ready for this?  Are you?

And then, to make things even more difficult, I swear that in all this talk about eating flesh and drinking blood, I hear overtones of self-giving, of sacrifice, of suffering and even death.  Yes, there is the promise of life, of real life, abundant life, eternal life.  But to get there, certainly there is at least a hint here that it may not be easy.  And of course, as the story of Jesus plays out and heads towards the cross, we’ll know that we were right to hear these hints, and that the teaching about drawing into this close, intimate relationship with the one who endures such suffering, is indeed a difficult one.

At the very least I think it’s safe to say that Jesus has managed to shock us out of our preoccupation with loaves of bread and direct our gaze to what he would call the things of the spirit: what it means to live abundantly, what it means to be loving and self-giving, how we fulfill our needs for belonging and connection, what it means to live in the presence of the God revealed in Jesus, how we go about creating lives of meaning and purpose in response.

  

None of this teaching is easy; much of it is difficult, even scandalous.

Because of this, many of Jesus disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.  So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?”

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Amen.

Rest (Connecting What with Why). (July 22, 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Proper 17, July 22, 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  2 Sam 7:1-14a; Ps 89:20-37; Ephesians 2:11-22; Mk 6:30-34, 53-56

Rest (Connecting What with Why)

Sometimes when I’m looking over the Scripture readings for the coming Sunday there’s a verse that just kind of leaps out and grabs me.  This week was one of those weeks.  And the verse that did it was this one:

Jesus said to them:  “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

If you recall, Jesus had sent the apostles out in pairs to travel through the countryside of Galilee, healing and teaching and proclaiming God’s kingdom wherever people would receive them.  They’d gone out with no cash, no food, and no change of clothes.  They’d traveled dusty roads, they’d slept in the streets, they’d missed meals.  They’d healed the sick, they’d taught crowds.  And now they were back, probably exhausted by what appears to have been a successful mission.

And the first thing that Jesus says to them when he sees them is this:  “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

The Heart and Stroke foundation released a survey a few months ago that found that an overwhelming majority of Canadians are choosing to not eat a healthy diet and avoid regular exercise because they are too busy.

Another survey just this past week done by UCLA looked at American families and concluded that the typical American family is so consumed with working, buying stuff, self improvement and generally “getting ahead” that they actually spend very little time together enjoying the things that they’re supposedly working for.

I’ve found that when I ask people about their lives, the most frequent response I get is “I’ve been really busy.”   Sometimes it’s said almost as if it’s a badge of honour.  And I’m as guilty as anyone else.

Do you think that when Jesus spoke to his apostles, he might just as well have been talking to us?

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile”

Many of us live busy lives, hectic lives, over-scheduled lives.  We need to rest.  We need to rest for the obvious reasons, because we become physically and mentally tired.  Sometimes we even burn-out.  But I think there’s more to it than that.

We need to rest because if we don’t, then all those things that keep us busy, all the work we do, all the events we schedule, all the things we worry about, all of what we do can become disconnected from why we’re doing it.  Without rest, the what becomes disconnected from the why.

I think Jesus knew this.  Jesus was after all a busy guy.   He was someone with a strong sense of vocation, with a keen awareness of his mission.  He was in demand, he was swarmed by crowds, sometimes he didn’t even have time to eat or drink.  But we’re told over and over again in the gospels that Jesus made a point of withdrawing from the crowds, and of going to a deserted place, to rest and to pray.  To spend time with God.

Because these moments of rest that we need, these “Sabbath” moments, are certainly meant to refresh and renew us, to restore our energy and our health.  But they are also meant to provide us with the opportunity to reconnect with God, to pray, to give thanks, to unload in God’s presence.  To recover our sense of purpose and priorities, of values and vocation.  To re-connect the what of our lives to the why.

We used to call this Sabbath, this idea that we need to have times of intentional rest.  The Sabbath was one of God’s gifts to humanity.  The teaching on the Sabbath was one of what we now call the ten commandments:  “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.  Six days you shall labour, but the seventh day you shall not do any work”

But we’ve forgotten that the sabbath is much more of a gift than a commandment.  For the most part we simply ignore it, but if we do think about it at all, we think about it as an obligation, as another rule that we have to follow, another thing that we have to do like going to church.

But do you remember who Moses was talking to when he gave them this teaching?  He was talking to a bunch of slaves, slaves who had been forced to work harder and harder and longer and longer by the Egyptian Pharoahs.  This commandment to rest one day a week wouldn’t have been heard by those slaves as an obligation.  It would have been heard as something too good to be true, a gift beyond their wildest imaginations.  We get to rest?  There’s a day when no one is going to make us work?  Praise God! would have been their instant reaction.

We too need to hear this teaching as a gift.  For even though we were never forced into slavery by others, for many of us our slavery is the most insidious form of all, a slavery that is self-constructed and self-imposed.  We have become slaves to our illusions about what constitutes success.  We have become slaves to the expectations of others.  We have become slaves to a culture that tells us that we always need more to be happy.  We have become slaves to our own confusion about our self- worth and to our forgetfulness about where our identity comes from.

We have become slaves to the what of our lives because we have been disconnected from the why.

There is much more that we could talk about in the readings this morning other than this one little verse.  We talk about King David and the mixed motives that made him want to build God a house, and how God responds by saying that God is the one who will build a house.  Or we could continue the gospel story, and marvel at the way that when all these people race around the shore of the lake to get to the deserted spot before Jesus and the disciples, wrecking their plans for a little rest, Jesus responds not with anger and frustration, but with compassion.

We could talk about those things.  But I’d rather not.  Instead I’d rather offer you this gift.  Why don’t we take the next few minutes and simply rest a while.

(If you're reading this, please take a few minutes to rest)

Amen.

(with thanks to www.workingpreacher.org, a great weekly source for insights about the lectionary readings)

Accept or Reject (July 8 2012)

Homily Yr B Proper 14, July 8 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  2 Sam 5:1-5, 9-10; Ps 48; 2 Cor 12:2-10; Mk 6:1-13

Our readings this morning may seem to be an odd collection at first glance.  The Old Testament reading is about David finally, after seven and a half years, being accepted as King of Israel.  The New Testament reading from 2 Corinthians has Paul telling us of an amazing vision and spiritual experience.  And the gospel which we just heard is the story of Jesus’ less than spectacular return to his hometown of Nazareth.  At first glance, these stories don’t seem to have a lot in common.  But there is one theme  that I do find in each of these readings and that is the theme of acceptance and rejection, and so that’s the theme that I’d like to explore with you a little bit this morning.

 

All of us encounter moments and face decisions of acceptance and rejection every day of our lives.  Some are trivial.  The alarm clock goes off in the morning.  Do you accept the instructions that you pre-programmed for yourself and get up, or do you reject them and go back to sleep?  Probably not a big deal most of the time.  But some moments of acceptance and rejection are much more profound.  When you discover over the course of your marriage that your spouse is not the person you thought he or she was, is your response acceptance or rejection? 

On what basis do we make such judgments or decisions?  Are our responses of acceptance or rejection, of people, of ideas, of circumstances, are they even well thought out decisions, or are they more like gut reactions?  Does our faith enter into any of this, or is that just reserved for Sunday mornings?

One of the reasons that I think it’s worth reflecting on these things is because they say a lot about who we are.  That’s ironic in a way, because we think that the focus is on the thing or person or idea that we’re evaluating.  But when we accept or reject something or someone, in the end that says much more about us than anything else.

I think that Mark the gospel writer understood this.  That’s why he’s structured his gospel, the one we’ve been reading off and on for most of this year, he’s structured it so that the key question that keeps surfacing for his readers is that of “Who do you think Jesus is?”  Mark is constantly encouraging us to respond to Jesus, to answer that question for ourselves.  Because when we do respond, when we accept or reject Jesus, when we make judgements about Jesus, we learn something about ourselves, and we become part of the story, ready to go on our own journey.

In our Old Testament text, today’s reading comes seven years after the death of Saul, the first king of Israel.  After Saul’s death, David had been proclaimed as King of his own tribe of Judah, but the northern tribes of Israel had followed Abner, one of Saul’s military commanders, and they had installed one of Saul’s sons, Ishbaal as king.  A long war followed between David’s and Ishbaal’s armies, during which David’s forces became stronger and stronger, and Ishbaal’s became weaker.  Finally, after seven years of rejecting David, the leaders of the northern tribes come to David at Hebron in the reading we heard today and accept him as their King, and David goes on to be the King of all the tribes of Israel for thirty-three more years.

So why is it that the response of the northern tribes to David changes from one of rejection to acceptance?  Their words say that they want David as king because the Lord had told David that he was to be shepherd of Israel and because David had been a great army leader under Saul.  But they had known these things before, during the seven years that they had rejected David.  The reason they are accepting him now seems to be a bit more basic:  David is a winner, he has military power and the northern tribes realize that it is in their own-self interest to align with the one who has the power.

In our New Testament reading of 2 Corinthians we find ourselves in the middle of Paul’s response to the church at Corinth about a power struggle that has broken out there.  Paul is the apostle who founded the Christian community at Corinth and first told them the good news of Jesus, and since then has served as their spiritual guide, through periodic visits and correspondence.  But it seems that others who call themselves apostles have infiltrated the community and discredited Paul, calling on the community to reject Paul and his teaching and to endorse their leadership.  These so-called apostles claim to have better credentials than Paul.  They are more authentically Jewish, they have a much more extensive list of achievements, and they have had superior spiritual visions and revelations which bolster their credentials.  In short, they claim to have a better C.V. than Paul, and as a result they’ve been able to displace him in the eyes of at least some in the community.

And so Paul responds to the challenge in the reading we just heard.  Even though it’s foolish to be arguing on the basis of our C.V’s and past credentials, he writes, let me answer my critics.  And he goes on to give an account of his Jewish roots, of his missionary work and the suffering and persecution he has endured as a result, and in today’s reading, of the vision and revelation that he experienced 14 years previously.  If I wanted to boast about these things, I could, says Paul.  But it is more important for you to make your response based not on past accomplishments but on what you see in me and hear from me.  Accept or reject me not based on my CV, but on whether my actions and my words are a proclamation of the kingdom of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

In today’s gospel, Jesus returns to his hometown.  You will recall that Jesus has been traveling around the region of Galilee, teaching, healing.  He has demonstrated his power over the forces of evil, over illness, over nature and even over death.  Crowds of people flock to see him.  But when he gets back home and begins to teach in the local synagogue, all of a sudden he encounters a different reaction.  Cynicism.  Skepticism.  Jealousy.  Rejection.

Instead of learning from his teaching, they wonder where he got it from.  Instead of believing that his power is from God, they question why he’s able to do these things.  They actually seem to talk themselves out of a response of faith.  After all, we know this man, they say.  He’s a nothing, a carpenter, one of the landless people, the lowest class.  He’s the son of Mary, we can’t even say for sure who his father is, apparently his birth was a bit of a scandal and people still whisper about it in the village.  Who does he think he is, teaching in the synagogue like someone important when in reality he’s no different than his brothers and sisters who live here with us?

And so they take offence at him.  They reject him and they have no faith.  Instead of accepting Jesus, they try to cut him down to size.  Instead of celebrating the wisdom that God has given him, they try to bring him down to their level.  Anyone surprised by any of this?  We shouldn’t be, because we do it all the time.  How often do we try to make ourselves feel better by putting down other people?  How often do we harbour resentments and jealousy when people who are just like us all of a sudden become successful.  Our response of acceptance or rejection has very little to do with what we are accepting or rejecting and a lot more to do with our own wounds and insecurities deep inside us.

We learn a lot about ourselves from the things, ideas and people that we accept or reject.  And sometimes, like in these three stories, the picture we get of humanity isn’t very pretty.  We can be self-seeking, trying to align ourselves with the winning side.  We can be seduced by power or by fame.  Our jealousies and insecurities can be more powerful than our search for truth or for what is right.  Our fears and our scepticism can win out over our faith and our beliefs.

But that doesn’t have to be the case.  Immediately following his rejection in his hometown, Jesus turns to the twelve followers that he has gathered about him.  Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to go out to all the villages, to heal the sick and to proclaim the kingdom of God.  Take nothing with you, give up your financial security, leave home and friends and learn to trust God for your needs.  This is your mission if you choose to accept it.  And the twelve do accept, and head out on their journey.

As we listen to these stories, as we read the gospel of Mark each week, we’re confronted over and over again with the same question:  Who is this Jesus?  Some will reject him.  Others accept him, and their lives are changed.  How do you respond?

Amen.

A Story of Touch (July 1 2012)

Homily:  Yr A P13, July 1 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  2 Sam 1:1, 7-27; Ps 72:1-8; 2 Cor 8:7-15; Mk 5:21-43

You might be forgiven for thinking that today’s gospel is meant to teach us that Jesus is a great healer.  After all, in the passage that we just heard from the gospel of Mark, we have the story of not one, but two miraculous healings.  But I don’t think that Mark’s purpose in telling these stories is to prove that Jesus is a powerful healer.  You see, by this point in Mark’s gospel we already know that.  By this time in his ministry Jesus has already performed hundreds if not thousands of healings.  Mark has already given us the details of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, and the leper, and the paralyzed man, and the man with the withered hand and the mad guy from across the lake, and many more.  If we’ve been paying attention to the story at all so far, we know that Jesus is a great healer.  The crowd knows that Jesus is a great healer, that’s why there’s a crowd.  Jairus and the woman with the hemorrhage know that Jesus is a great healer, that’s why when they’re desperate he’s their last hope, that’s why they come to him and throw themselves at his feet.

No, Mark must have another reason for telling us this story.   Did you notice how carefully he crafts today’s passage, sandwiching the story of the woman with the hemorrhage in between the two parts of the story of Jairus and his daughter, linking them, drawing out the symmetries between the 12 year old and the one who has suffered for twelve years, between the one who is affectionately called “little daughter” by her father and the one who is affectionately called “daughter” by Jesus.

There’s lots of interesting stuff here for theologians to work with and they have, just check the commentaries.  But I want to tell you a story that was told to me this past May by John Bell at a homiletics conference in Atlanta.  John Bell is a member of the Iona community in Scotland, and he’s probably best known for his hymns and music.  One day he was invited to a church, and was asked to lead a bible study, and it turned out that the passage that they were looking at was the same one that we read today as our gospel.  So John asked the people at the study what they thought of this story and whether it reminded them of any experiences that they may have had.  Several people shared some thoughts, and then an older woman began to speak.  It turned out that a long time ago, in her youth, she had been a medical missionary in Africa.  And she told the group about how one time when she was stationed in a remote area, she’d been called into a village because a young girl had died.

  

When she arrived in the village, she heard the sounds of people mourning, and was met by the girl’s parents who took her to where the girl was lying.  When the woman examined the girl it turned out that she was not dead, but rather in a coma.  And as woman spoke with the family and villagers, she gradually tried to piece together what had happened.  This was a tribe in which the loss of blood was taboo, and someone  who was bleeding had to be separated from others, and there was a lot of fear associated with all of this.  And this little girl had just had her first period, and was bleeding, and she didn’t know about menstruation because no one had told her.  And the taboo around blood and the fear and the separation anxiety it had provoked in this girl had been so traumatic that it had overwhelmed her, and she had fallen into a self-induced coma, from which, thankfully, she recovered.

When the old medical missionary had finished telling her story, John Bell asked her, in light of her experience, what stood out for her in the gospel passage.  And she replied without hesitation that the most important thing for her was that when Jesus went into where the 12 year old girl was, he took her by the hand.  Because touch can be an amazingly powerful thing, especially for one who is untouchable.

Today’s gospel is about healing, but even more so, it is about touch.

Jairus falls at Jesus feet and begs him repeatedly “come and lay your hands on my daughter, so that she may be made well and live.”

The woman with the hemorrhage forces her way through the crowd and comes up behind Jesus, thinking to herself, “If I but touch his clothes I will be made well.”  And she touches his cloak, and immediately she is healed of her disease.

Jesus turns about in the crowd and says “who touched me?”

And Jesus goes into where the child lays, takes her by the hand and says “Talitha cum” which means little girl, get up.”  And immediately she gets up and begins to walk about.

What is it that’s so powerful about touch in these stories?

For those who are the untouchables, for the parts of each one of us that are untouchable, touch may be the most powerful thing of all. 

For the young girl who is having her first period in a culture which treats such things as taboo, and forbids contact, the fear of losing the touch of another human may be overwhelming when the bleeding starts.

For the woman who’s bleeding never stops, who is described in the greek text as “gushing with blood”, a woman who will never know the touch of a man, who will never be able to have children, who lives alone on the margins of society, who has endured twelve years of this and spent every penny she had, the touch of another loving human must seem too much to hope for.

Touch I suppose is something we take for granted until we lose it.  And then the consequences can be devastating.  You don’t have to take my word for it.  You can ask people right here who were made to feel untouchable in the 80’s and 90’s when AIDS struck, giving rise to powerful fears and prejudices and taboos, right here in Ottawa.  These people know what it’s like when others are afraid to touch you.

Jesus went into where the child was and touched her.  In so doing he made himself unclean, because in Jesus day that’s what happened when you touched a dead body.  The woman with the hemorrhage broke the law when she touched Jesus.  She was unclean and her touch made Jesus unclean.  That’s why she trembled with fear when Jesus turned around and said “Who touched my clothes?”

Now we don’t have the same notions of pure and impure, clean and unclean, that existed in Jesus day.  But we still have our taboos, we have our fears and prejudices, we have our ways of dividing people into right and wrong, good and bad.  And within us, each one of us has our own dark place, our place of embarrassment or shame, the bit of us that we don’t dare reveal to anyone else. 

Today’s gospel is saying that God isn’t too good to go there.  We don’t have to hide stuff from Jesus.  Like the woman, we can tell him the whole truth, the whole, risky, messy, embarrassing, scandalous truth, and there is nothing we can say, there is nothing we can do, there is nothing about us that will stop Jesus from touching us, even if the whole world thinks we are untouchable.

  

Jesus comes to us where we are, as we are, in our muck and in our glory, and touches us.  Nothing will stop him.  He will break down social barriers, overcome taboos, ignore our rules, violate laws, become unclean, associate with riff-raff, make himself vulnerable, and do whatever it takes to touch us, make us well and give us life.

Come and lay your hands on my little daughter so that she may made well and live.

Amen.

How Would You Prepare? (John the Baptist, June 24 2012)

Homily:  Birth of John the Baptist, June 24^th 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  Is 40:1-11; Ps 85:7-13; Acts 13:14b-26; Lk 1:57-80

How would you prepare?

In the days of King Herod, right around the beginning of what we call the Common Era, there was a priest named Zechariah, who was married to a woman named Elizabeth.  They were good people, but they were sad and were even scorned by those around them because they hadn’t been able to have children, and now it was too late because they were getting old.  One day when it was Zechariah’s turn to be on duty in the sanctuary of the temple an angel appeared to him, and he was terrified.  But the angel said, “Don’t be afraid.  You and Elizabeth will have a son, and you will name him John.  God is coming, and your son John will be sent to prepare the way of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s coming.”

And Zechariah said, “Yeah right.”  And he lost his voice for the next nine months.

Now, despite Zechariah’s skepticism, it turns out the angel was indeed right.  A few days later, Elizabeth conceived a child.  And nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy.  And the whole family and all the neighbours celebrated with Zechariah and Elizabeth, that is, until eight days later when it was time to name the boy.  You see, pretty much everyone was agreed that since this was likely to be old Zechariah’s only son, they should follow tradition and name the boy Zechariah after his father.  But Elizabeth, for some strange reason, wanted to name the boy John.

“But nobody in your family has that name,” replied all the relatives in exasperation at Elizabeth’s stubbornness.

They turned to Zechariah to settle the matter.  And Zechariah, remembering the words the angel had spoken to him, wrote on a tablet, “His name will be John”.  And suddenly his voice returned and he began praising God.  And now everyone was afraid, and rumours started spreading throughout the village and the surrounding hill country, and everyone started asking “What is so special about this boy?  What will this child become?”

And Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit began to prophesy:

“And you, child, you, John, will be called the prophet of the Most High

 for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the forgiveness of their sins. 

By the tender mercy of our God,

the dawn from on high will break upon us. 

To give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

and to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

And the child John grew and became strong in the spirit.

And I can imagine that when he was a bit older, John went to his mother and father to ask them a question.

“Hey mom, dad.  Why is it that everyone else seems to be named after someone in their family, but my name is John even though nobody else in our family is named John?”

And perhaps his parents responded,

“John, I guess it’s about time you knew.  You were given to us by the Lord and it is God who named you John.  God is coming, just like the prophets said he would.  And you have been chosen to prepare the way of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s arrival.”

Now I want you to imagine yourselves in the sandals of young John at that very moment.  Suppose someone was to walk up to you and tell you that God is coming, soon, really soon, and that your purpose in life, the very reason for which you were born is to prepare the way of the Lord, to get people ready for God’s arrival.

What would you do?  How would you prepare?  What would you say to people?  If you had to choose something, what would be the single most important thing that you would focus on?

These aren’t rhetorical questions.  You should find pencils in the pews in front of you, and you can use the empty pages in the booklet to write down your thoughts.  How would you prepare the way of the Lord?  Take a few minutes to write down some thoughts, and then you can turn and compare notes with the people sitting around you.  What would your first priority be when it comes to getting people ready for God’s arrival?

If we accomplished nothing else with this exercise, I’m sure we all have a lot more sympathy for John than we did a few minutes ago.  When John was told that God was coming and that he’d been chosen to prepare the way and get people ready, I wouldn’t have been surprised if his reaction had been “you’ve got to be kidding”.

It’s not like John had a lot more information than we do.  He didn’t know what God’s coming would look like.  He didn’t know that God was coming in the particular person of Jesus of Nazareth.  He just knew that his job was to get people ready.

So how did he go about that?  How would you go about that?  How would we get people ready for God to come?  Any ideas that came out of your reflections?

  

We might have all sorts of ideas.  We might encourage people to go to church (in John’s day the temple and synagogue).  We might teach people about what God is like.  We might exhort people to live lives of justice, to live ethically.  We might encourage people to spend more time in prayer, to get to know God.

I imagine that John thought about all these things and more. 

But it seems that, perhaps inspired by the power of the Spirit, John the Baptist made one thing his priority.  And that one thing was forgiveness.

When it came time for John to prepare the way of the Lord, he went into the region around the Jordan River proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 

John’s priority was forgiveness.  His way to get people ready for God was to teach them about, and help them experience, and give them a ritual, for forgiveness.

Now most of us know from our own experience that forgiveness is hard.  Forgiveness is complicated.  But forgiveness is essential if we are to have good relationships with God and with each other.

John isn’t the only one who makes forgiveness a priority.   Jesus also makes forgiveness a priority.  In fact, it was one of the first things that got Jesus in trouble with the authorities.  And in the prayer that he taught us, the one that we say together every Sunday, Jesus tells us that in order for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven, we need to forgive others in the same way that God forgives us.

That sounds like a challenge.  Forgiving others isn’t easy.  Accepting and really understanding that God has forgiven us isn’t easy.  Even forgiving ourselves isn’t easy, in fact that might be the hardest one of all.  It seems that we have a natural inclination for “tit for tat”.  It seems that the idea that people should get what they deserve is deeply engrained in our psyche and in our societies.  It seems that we like to hold grudges in our back pockets, just in case we ever need to take them out and use them.

But John invites us into something new.

I think that the reason that John makes forgiveness a priority is that he’s inviting us into a new way of living, in order to get us ready for the coming of God into our lives. 

A way of living, a way of being, a way of relating, that Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

It’s a way that requires repentance. It requires us to change our way of doing things, in fact, it requires that we change ourselves.  It requires that we turn toward God and towards each other, and let go of those things that burden our relationships, things like guilt and resentment and keeping score and anger and fear and so on.  And not just to let go of them, but to lift them off each other.  The Hebrew word for forgiveness that John would have used has exactly this sense. To lift up.  To remove someone’s burden.

Know that you are forgiven, and learn to forgive others, so that we can all experience a new way of living.  That’s how we prepare the way of the Lord.

Amen.

Sane or Insane? (June 10, 2012)

Homily:  Yr B Proper 10, June 10 2012, St. Albans

Readings:  1 Sam 8:4-20; Ps 130; 2 Cor 4.13-5.1; Mk 3:20-35

Sane or Insane?

Not too long ago, while I was at seminary preparing for ordination, I did an internship at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, the psychiatric hospital we have here in town.  The hospital provided an orientation session for the new interns.  And one of the things they told us about was the Ontario Mental Health Act, and how individuals can be apprehended and admitted involuntarily to a psychiatric facility.  One of the ways for this to happen is for someone, perhaps a family member, to give evidence about an individual’s behaviour and the risk it presents to a Justice of the Peace, and then the judge fills out what’s called a Form 2.  At the Royal Ottawa, the jargon for this was that the patient had been “formed”.

Well if the Ontario Mental Health Act had been around in Israel two thousand years ago, in today’s gospel, Jesus would have been formed.  His family would have gone to a judge, had Jesus formed and then taken away to a psychiatric facility.  In our reading we heard that when Jesus arrives back home, his family tries to seize him because they think that he’s out of his mind.  Crazy.  Insane.  They think Jesus has lost touch with reality and that as a result he’s become a danger to himself and to those around him.  And it wasn’t just his family that thought so. So did the authorities, the ones who had traveled all the way from Jerusalem to find out what was going on.

Why did they think he was crazy?  Well, it was because Jesus had declared that the long promised arrival of God’s rule on earth was happening now, at this very moment, in and through Jesus himself.  “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand” was the cry with which he launched his mission.  He took upon himself the title of “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel, the title of the one who would manifest God’s power and win God’s victory in the cosmic battle that had been foretold.  Now, these things of themselves weren’t unimaginable to a first century Jew.  The Jewish people had been expecting a Messiah.  But Jesus didn’t behave as the Messiah was expected to behave.  He sided with the enemy.  He forgave sins.  He violated the sabbath and dietary laws.  He partied with the wrong people, tax collectors and sinners.  He provoked conflict with those who considered themselves to be “good” Jews.  And because of these things, they conspired to destroy him.

So do you blame his family for thinking he was insane?  For thinking that he was out of touch with reality and a danger to himself and others.  If he was your son or brother, wouldn’t you have had him committed for his own good?

Sometimes, there’s a fine line between sanity and insanity.

Let me tell you a story.

If there had been in the 19^th century such things as iPods, MuchMusic, Grammy Awards and Super Bowl half-time shows, you can be assured that the concert pianist Franz Liszt would have been all over them.   Long before the Beatles and Elvis, Liszt toured all over Europe, performing to enthusiastic sold-out crowds, causing ladies to swoon and shock their husbands by taking off their scarves and tossing them on the stage.  He was the superstar of the Romantic piano, modernity’s first rock star.

But then something strange happened to Franz Liszt.  At the height of his popularity, he had, well you’ll have to decide how to describe it.  A psychotic breakdown.  A spiritual awakening.  A deep religious conversion experience.  Whatever it was he began to take the Christian faith very seriously, and began to pattern his own life after the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  As for his vast fortune, he gave it away.  He began to give free piano lessons to the impoverished children of his town.  One day when he was traveling, Liszt went into a hotel and the hotel manager recognized him, and with a grand flourish gave him the key to the Royal Suite, compliments of the Hotel.  Liszt took the key and gave it to his valet, and said, perhaps there’s something else for me, maybe in the servant’s quarters.

People all over Europe started whispering “something terrible has gone wrong with Franz Liszt”.

When he died in 1886, there was found on his piano an unfinished composition of sacred music.  And in one section of the music there was scrawled in Liszt’s own hand, De Profundis, the title of Psalm 130 which we read together this morning, “out of the depths I cry to thee O God, hear the voice of my supplication, if you would mark the iniquities no one could stand, but there is forgiveness with you.”

The section begins with clashing chords, jarring melody and disjointed harmonies that gradually work themselves out into a gentle melody of great beauty and serenity, almost as if Liszt has found a way on his piano to play himself from great chaos to shalom.

Shortly before his death, Liszt’s son-in-law heard him working on this strange composition through the thin walls of the family residence.  Liszt’s son-in-law was Richard Wagner, himself a great composer, whose heroic music and anti-semitic writings would later be appropriated by Nazi Germany in the 20^th century.  And when Wagner heard the jagged melodies of De Profundis, he turned to his wife and said “Cosima, I think your father is insane.”

Sane or insane?  It’s a good question.  Which one is sane, Richard Wagner spewing out anti-semitisms, or the broken down Franz Liszt giving away his money to the poor and trying to play his way from Chaos to Shalom?

Who is sane and who is insane?

The one thing they all agreed on in the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus was insane.

Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God on earth by fighting and defeating the forces and power of evil, by opposing and overcoming all that robs humanity of the abundant life that God intends for us.

Now before I go on, I want to say a brief word about evil, because sometimes when we read these ancient texts with their exorcisms and demon possessions, we start to get a bit hung up.

Evil exists.  This we know.  This world is not the way God intended it to be.  Much is wrong, things have departed from God’s intentions.  We call this evil.  We can identify it in the world around us.  We can see it in human history, in the big events of wars and genocides and in individual instances of abuse and violence.  Some of us may not like to use the word evil and we can use other words if we like, but whatever we call it, it exists.

However the way we talk about evil is culturally conditioned.  The worldview of Jesus time pre-supposed that there were spirits, and that the power of evil manifested itself as the will of demons, the principle one of which was known as satan.  In our own time, in our post-enlightenment, post-modern culture, we tend to talk about evil in other ways.  We use the insights of psychiatry.  We talk about “mob mentality”.  We talk about corruption.  We talk about systemic injustice.

It doesn’t matter how we understand evil and talk about it.  But what we have to see in order to understand the gospel of Mark is that Jesus saw himself as the one who had to defeat evil in order that God’s kingdom might be established and that humanity might be saved from oppression.  That’s why Jesus casts out demons, and liberates those who are oppressed.  That’s why Jesus talks about tying up the strong man and plundering his property.  These are signs of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom.

But what happens in a world where evil is disguised as sanity?   Where it’s embedded in habits and customs and conventional wisdom?   Where hatred between ethnic groups has been normalized and accepted as praiseworthy, as it was in Jesus world and sometimes our own?  Where the Temple system which oppresses the poor by forcing them to pay for taxes and sacrificial animals is thought to be the will of God?  Where purity laws which segregate and condemn people are part of the religious infrastructure?

In a world where evil is disguised as sanity, the one who fights evil will be called insane.

We’ve seen this throughout history.

When Mahatma Ghandi began his long march to the ocean to make salt, people thought he was crazy.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, everyone  thought she was out of her mind.  But in truth, she was the one who spoke sanity to a world which had gone insane.  And that world of racial segregation started to crumble when she exposed it for what it was.

We live in a world where far too often, evil is disguised as sanity, and is embedded into our laws, and markets and social systems.

We live in a world where if we were to reduce military spending by just a few per cent a year, we would have the resources to eliminate diseases such as malaria which claim millions of lives annually.

We live in a world where we have drugs that cost little to manufacture and could save millions lives, but we can’t get them where they’re needed because that would infringe on patents.

We live in a world of credit cards, which reward people who are wealthy with free travel, but for those who are poor and use them out of desperation, we charge them 20% interest, money which pays for our travel rewards.

Is that sanity or insanity?

Jesus came into this world to announce God’s kingdom, to defeat evil, to fight against oppression, to confront and overcome injustice and to bring peace and healing.  He did it in a way that shattered expectations, broke the rules, turned social systems upside down and revealed a God that we had never imagined.

No wonder they thought he was out of his mind.

Amen.

(with thanks to Dr. Thomas Long, who told us the story of Franz Liszt at Homiletics 2011 in Minneapolis)