Sermon -- 25 May 2008

PROPER 3 / 2 AFTER PENTECOST — 25 May 2008
St. Michael’s, Mount Pleasant — 9:00 am

Isaiah 49:8-16a Psalm 131 1Cor 4:1-5 Matt 6:24-34

“You cannot serve God and wealth.”

I assume that most of you noticed that Easter came very early this year. As a consequence, of course, Pentecost also came very early, as did Trinity Sunday. What you may not have noticed (and to be honest, why should you?) is that today, when we move on to the remaining Sundays of the year, the “Sundays after Pentecost,” the summer-and-fall “green season,” we begin in the Sunday Lectionary with “Proper 3.” This is the earliest numbered Proper that we can use on Sundays after Pentecost. We haven’t used Proper 3 in Year A since 1979. We won’t use it again in Year A until 2035. However, today’s scripture readings are not quite that rare, because, as you may know (and if you don’t know this, please do not feel guilty, because, to be honest, why should you?), the readings for Proper 3 are a duplication of the readings for the 8th Sunday after Epiphany. The reason that’s okay is that since the 8th Sunday after Epiphany comes only when Easter is very late, it cannot happen that Epiphany 8 and Proper 3 ever occur in the same year. In fact, in the average year, when Easter occurs somewhere in the middle of the range of possible dates, neither Epiphany 8 nor Proper 3 will occur. Specifically, Epiphany 8 in Year A last occurred in 1984, will occur again in three years in 2011, and then not again until 2038. The upshot of all this is that we do not hear this Sunday Gospel reading from the sixth chapter of St. Matthew very often. Certainly not once every three years, as is the case with most of the readings from Matthew. It’s more like once every ten years.

At this point you are undoubtedly saying to yourselves, “Of all the sermons that Fr. Moorhead has preached in this parish over the years when he has supplied here, so far this has to be by far the most boring.” And of course you’re probably right. My point, however, is that the Gospel today comes from that portion of St. Matthew that we call “The Sermon on the Mount,” which is well known, and the part about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field may be one of the most popular passages. It’s odd that we don’t read it on Sunday more often. After all, is not the Sermon on the Mount one of the great expressions of Christian ideals?

No, it is not. There is nothing idealistic about the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is never idealistic. Jesus is a blunt and hard realist. Jesus tells us how it really is. And if what Jesus says doesn’t always sound realistic to us, that’s because we are the ones who don’t know what’s real. Jesus does know what’s real, and he tells us. But we prefer to live in our own fantasies and call them reality. And then we wonder why our lives are empty.

“You cannot serve God and wealth.” I suspect for many of us our initial reaction is, “Well, no fear!” Of course, we overlook the fact that by the standards of most of the rest of the world, even the most economically modest of us is filthy rich. (But that’s another sermon for another day!) We probably remember the older translations of the Bible in which this saying was rendered “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Well, that was safe. Most of us weren’t quite sure what “mammon” was and so we didn’t think we had any, and so we must not have been tempted to serve it. Yes, “mammon” is the word here in the original Greek text, but it’s not really a Greek word but a transliteration of the Aramaic word mamôn, which can mean “wealth” or “riches,” but more generally just means “property,” without any specifically negative connotations. It means “possessions.” It means “our stuff.”

Well, none of us thinks that we have chosen to serve mammon instead of God. But when Jesus starts talking about my stuff, then he’s gone off preaching and started meddling! The real choice of what we serve is not disclosed by what we tell ourselves. Each one of us is a most persuasive con artist — to ourselves. Our real choice of what we serve is shown by what in fact we do. Where do we really put our time, our talent, our treasure? We can espouse all the lofty ideals we want, but where do we really stack the chips? What are the things that we don’t quite get to because we’re “too busy”? When do we find ourselves saying, “Yes, but first.…”? How much of ourselves are we really giving to God and God’s Kingdom — and I don’t just mean “the church,” I mean God’s people, God’s world, our families, our friends, the people we don’t like or even know but who need us? “Yes, but.…” “Yes, but what?”

“Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” One of the themes that seems to be floating around in this country these days — especially on TV — and not just in our country — is what is called “Prosperity Gospel.” If you serve God, God will bless you — with material prosperity. Strive first for the kingdom, and you’ll have all the food and drink and clothing you want! Well, maybe. I seem to recall Jesus saying, “Take up your cross and follow me.” The promise is resurrection: new life, real life, eternal life. But resurrection comes only by the way of the cross. Before we can be born anew we have to die — die to getting and having and possessing. And that is a real death. In our society, we measure value quantitatively — I am what I have. My net worth is given by a balance sheet of financial assets and liabilities. We are so accustomed to everything we really need, if not quite everything we want, that we find it hard to believe that in the end none of it really matters. Not even food and drink and clothing. None of our stuff really matters, in the end. We say, “You can’t take it with you!” and we laugh about it. But that’s true. It really doesn’t matter what we have or don’t have, because in the end we have nothing anyway — nothing but our own selves before God. And what kind of selves will we be?

Jesus does not promise to make us rich. In fact, he rather clearly suggests that being rich is not all that desirable. Jesus promises to make us free. Jesus promises to make us alive, really alive, eternally alive, not just in the sweet by and by, but now, if we will choose life, if we really will be free from having-or-not-having, and strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And from the perspective of life — real, full, true, eternal life — what else in there that really matters?




Memorial Day — BCP page 839

O Judge of the nations, we remember before you with grateful
hearts the men and women of our country who in the day of
decision ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy. Grant
that we may not rest until all the people of this land share the
benefits of true freedom and gladly accept its disciplines. This
we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sermon -- 4 May 2008

7th of Easter — 4 May 2008
Trinity, Iowa City — 8:45 & 11:00

Acts 1:6-14 Ps 68:1-10,33-36 1Peter 4:12-14;5:6-11 John 17:1-11

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?!!! :-)”

[Pounding forehead] “Some of you have been with me for years! You stayed together even after I was killed, until I came to be with you anew. And we have all been together for the last forty days, and we’ve been talking about the kingdom of God, and I have promised that you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit! And you are still asking, ‘Hey, is now the time when you are finally going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’ Do You Still Not Get It?!”

Well, actually, that’s not what Jesus said. (Though I suspect he may have thought it!) What he said was, “It isn’t for you to know either the scheduled moments or the appropriate times (the chronous or the kairous, it says in Greek) that the Father has determined by his own authority. But when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, you will receive power [not the power to rule over others, but the strength in yourselves to be and to do], and you will be my witnesses (we don’t know how Jesus said that in Aramaic; the Greek word is “martyrs,” but it’s not clear that the word had yet acquired its subsequent connotation of “witnessing even to the point of suffering and death”)…you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem…”

[“Okay, well, here we are! Jerusalem is right across the valley there!”]

“…and in all of Judea…”

[“Well, yes, sure, let’s do the whole province!”]

“…and Samaria…]

[“What? Even down to Samaria?! Do we really have to go to Samaria?”]

“…and to the very ends of the earth.”

Whoo-hoo!

So much for just restoring the kingdom to Israel!

We are Jesus’ witnesses. Whether we like it or not, our lives are visible testimonies to the redeeming, healing, unifying power of Jesus Christ in this fallen, broken, alienated world.

Part of what’s involved in being Jesus’ witnesses surely is paying some attention to exactly what witness we’re giving. Some of that has to do with language—what we say about Jesus. But who and what is this Jesus? The Divine Logos, the Word who was in the beginning with God and who was and is God, did not become flesh in order to be an object of religion. Jesus did not found a personality cult. The point of the Gospel is not Jesus but the Reign of God. The so-called liberal protestant Biblical scholars of a few generations ago were much too simplistic when they opposed the Gospel preached by Jesus to an alleged Gospel about Jesus preached by Paul and the early Church. But the person of Jesus is inseparable from the Gospel of the Reign of God, because it is in the person of Jesus, not only in his preaching and teaching and healing but in his death and resurrection, that the Reign of God is not only proclaimed and demonstrated but inaugurated, implemented, opened to us. But those old scholars were right about this: the point of the Gospel is not Jesus, but the Reign of God.

In the first reading this morning, the angels (I guess that’s what they were) chide the disciples: “Yo, Galileans, what are you guys doing just standing around staring at the sky?” What kind of witness do we bear when we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus? I think the Ascension of Jesus is important as an aspect of the Resurrection, and it’s good that we celebrate it liturgically, but the point is not to stand around staring into the sky watching Jesus lift off. That’s not what it’s about. What is it about? Part of it, anyway, I think, is just that Jesus is removing himself from the center of attention; just as he said to Mary Magdalene on Easter morning, “Do not hang on to me,” so now he is sending his followers out to bear witness for his cause, which is the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God, the Reign of God — the whole rich and diverse treasure which God wills to share with the creation — peace, and love, and joy, and truth, and goodness, and beauty, and justice, and integrity, and wholeness. This Kingdom is not a geographical region or a political order or a power structure like an earthly kingdom but a whole new state of affairs, a new realm, a new context of life.

How do we bear witness to the Reign of God (which is what being witnesses to Jesus means)? We bear witness by living within God’s Reign ourselves. (Ay, there’s the rub!) Not just by being religious, but by being holy, which is a very different (and very much more difficult) thing: bearing witness to wholeness within a broken world — even from within our own brokenness bearing witness to wholeness that a broken world may share with us in our hope. Being persons in whom the Reign of God can be seen, and seen as credible, and seen as possible.

“You will be my witnesses.” Yes, we will. Yes, we are. For good or for ill, we will be his witnesses. Future indicative; now realized in the present; simple fact. We are his witnesses. But also future indicative, now realized in the present, simple fact: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you”; and therefore we will be able, therefore we are able, to be his witnesses—in Iowa City, and Coralville and in all Johnson County, and to the ends of the earth.

Sermon -- 30 March 2008

2 of Easter—30 March 2008
St. John’s, Keokuk — 10:00

Acts 3:2:14a,22-32 Ps 16 1 Peter 1:3-9 John 20:19-31

Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands . . . I will not believe.”

“[The White Queen said to Alice,] Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’

“‘I ca’n’t believe that!’ said Alice.

“‘Ca’n’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’

“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

(From Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll.)

The apostle Thomas is not good at believing impossible things. One of the impossible things he can’t believe is that dead people come back to life and visit their friends. (Yes, even in the first century they knew that was impossible!) So Thomas doubts. And at this point we can have a certain amount of sympathy with Thomas.

But there are other reasons why we doubt, besides skepticism about things we think are impossible, and some of them are probably more important in the basic issues of life. Maybe some of them were what was really behind Thomas’ doubting. Maybe some of them are what is behind our own doubting.

Sometimes we doubt out of fear. We doubt that “Proposition A” is true, because if “Proposition A” is true, then that has consequences that affect the way we live our lives; and we are afraid of those consequences and afraid of the effect they will have on our lives. So we deal with our fear of the consequence by doubting the antecedent.

Maybe sometimes it isn’t so much fear as stubbornness. We don’t want to change the way we live our lives, and so we refuse to face up to any claim that would involve changing. We close our eyes. We stop our ears. We try to drown it out by running our own mouths. We distract ourselves. We change the subject. We ridicule. We go into denial. We doubt.

And maybe sometimes it’s neither fear nor even just simple stubbornness. Sometimes maybe it’s conscious, willful, self-centered, self-satisfied pride. We just ain’t gonna believe because we just ain’t gonna let anything but ourselves be at the center of our little worlds. Nothing and nobody is gonna define my reality for me but me! Our doubting is an act of defiance. Here we’re getting into the realm of the sin against the Holy Spirit; it’s a good way to go to hell.

I don’t know where Thomas was in this picture. I think not in the last category, defiance, nor even in the second, stubbornness. Perhaps in the first, fear. I don’t know where you are; I’m not even sure where I am.

But they are all stages in faithlessness, and faithlessness is the issue which Jesus addresses when Thomas finally sees him. “Do not doubt, but believe. . . . Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” (The English translations usually fumble this verse, which in Greek plays on the word that we translate “faith” or “belief.” “Do not be an unbeliever, but a believer,” reflects the play on words; “Do not be faithless, but faithful” is much more on target. Mé ginou apistos alla pistos, the text says.) (Don’t let it be said that the sermons in this church aren’t multi-cultural!)

“Faith” is not the willingness to believe six impossible things before breakfast. “Faith” has to do with trust, it has to do with being willing to be open to, being willing to accept, being willing to receive, the life-giving power of the Risen Christ. It has to do with being willing to let go of our fears, our stubbornness, our pride. It has to do with being willing to let our lives be changed. If we are not willing to let God raise our lives through Jesus Christ, I’m not sure it matters a whole lot whether we believe that God raised Jesus or not. If we are willing to receive the power of new life through Jesus Christ, then his resurrection is indubitable; we’ve experienced it ourselves.

In the Gospel today Jesus says to his disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” and he gives them power over the brokenness of human life. And that’s really the text and the issue in the Gospel for today. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Jesus gives us the power to live within the Reign of God; he gives us the power to proclaim God’s Reign to others; he gives us the power to enact the Reign of God in this world. Jesus not only gives us the power, he gives us the commission, the mandate, to do so. And that, I think, is where we really start doing our serious doubting.

This applies to each of us personally, individually, but it also applies to all of us corporately as the Church, and to you as a congregation—especially now as you reflect on your challenges and opportunities as a worshipping and ministering community. “Receive the Holy Spirit” for the work of the Reign of God in this place: that’s a promise, that’s a promise that’s already been delivered on. Will we accept it, will we receive it, will we believe it, will we let ourselves be transformed by it? Will we trust God? Or will we let our fears, our stubbornness, maybe even our damnable pride keep us among the doubters? You in this parish, and all of us throughout the church, we can be what God calls us to be; we can do what God calls us to do. We don’t need anything we haven’t already received. “Receive the Holy Spirit … Do not be faithless, but faithful.… Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Sermon -- 9 March 2008

5 LENT—9 March 2008
St. Mark’s, Maquoketa—10:00

Ezekiel 37:1-14 Psalm 130 Romans 8:6-11 John 11:1-45

“I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live!”

Long, long ago (though not in a galaxy far far away, but just on the other side of our own planet!), God called Abraham to leave his home and father in Mesopotamia and to go to a new land, where, God promised, he would become the ancestor of nations. And, in faith, Abraham went. And his family prospered and multiplied in the land of Canaan.

Yet famine drove his descendents south into Egypt, where they were eventually reduced to slavery. But God liberated them from their bondage, with great signs and wonders, and God gave them the Torah, the holy Law, to teach them how to live, and God promised, “You will be my people and I will be your God.” And God brought them back to their own land.

Again they flourished; and from among them God raised up a shepherd boy to be king. And God promised David, “Your dynasty shall reign forever over my people Israel.” And David’s son Solomon, the next king, built a great temple, where the Name of the Lord God of Israel might dwell, at Jerusalem in the midst of God’s people.

[Pause] And now that temple lies in smoldering ruins. The land lies desolate and abandoned, pillaged by the heathen Babylonians. And the People of God languish in exile. “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” The promises have all come to naught. God has forgotten us. If indeed God is even there. All is lost.

But God has not forgotten; and in far-off Babylon God speaks to the priest Ezekiel: “Mortal, Ben-Adam, Humanchild, can these bones live?” And Ezekiel says, “You know, Lord God.” And God says, “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.”

In the Gospel today we see another of Jesus’ signs. Now, Jesus’ miracles are never just “wonders” to astound the onlookers, they are always signs which point to the breaking in of the Reign of God; they are effective signs which themselves inaugurate the breaking in of the Reign of God. In the case of the raising of Lazarus, we see and experience the glory and power of God, and that it is God’s will and purpose, indeed, God’s very nature, to give new life to God’s people. If Jesus were concerned only for Lazarus and for Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha, he could have arrived in time to save Lazarus from death. Jesus makes rather a point of not arriving in time, actually, and is reproached for it by Martha and Mary. But God had a more important vocation for Lazarus—to be someone in whom the glory of God would be shown forth.

The raising of Lazarus was not an ultimate resurrection—that is, Lazarus was resuscitated and restored to his previous state of life, but later on in due course he would die again. But it was a real raising from a real death—Jesus waited until he had been dead four days—so that everyone would understand that Lazarus was really dead. The Gospel, the good news, is not just that God can rescue us in the nick of time, but that the power of God can reverse a final situation. Lazarus was dead—stinking dead—and Jesus called him out of his grave. And Lazarus came out.

And that’s the Gospel. That’s the Good News. God raises the dead. The Gospel is not just about some sort of personal immortality in which our souls survive somehow in some sort of afterlife. The Good News is not that somehow everything will be patched up. It is not that we can go back to some Good Old Days. It is not just that we can escape this vale of tears, or somehow get through it with minimal damage. There is no such promise. God’s promise is that we, and this whole vale of tears with us, our whole valley of dry bones, will in Christ become a new creation, raised and brought to fulfillment. This new creation, this new life, is fully accomplished only at the consummation of the ages, but it begins in us now. We do not escape death (in any of the many ways the power of death intrudes and encroaches upon our lives)—but we pass over from death to new life, risen life, through the death-conquering Passover of Jesus. The power of sin and death and hell is not escaped, it is not avoided; it is finally and forever broken. And although the fullness of the realization of this victory is not yet, the beginning and the promise and the effective sign of it are already. God can raise us from the dead now.

As we think about this in terms of our common life and mission as Christians in the world, and as you think about this as your Christian parish community in this place in the world, let us think on this: When Jesus called, “Lazarus, come out of there!” ol’ Lazarus could presumably have just lain there and replied, “Oh, no thanks, it’s okay, I’m comfortable this way, this is how we’ve always done it, so if you don’t mind I’ll just lie here and stink.” But he didn’t. Lazarus came out of there.

This Lent—as indeed always—Jesus is calling to us: “Come out of there!”

“I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live!”

Sermon -- 2 March 2008

4th Sunday in Lent — 2 March 2008
St. John’s, Keokuk — 10:00

1Sam 16:1-13 Ps 23 Eph 5:8-14 John 9:1-41

“Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

This text, from today’s Epistle, the Letter to the Ephesians, seems to be a line from an early Christian hymn that St. Paul is quoting. And it’s a very apt summary of the good news, the Gospel. “Once you were darkness,” the apostle says; “but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.”

There’s something almost inevitable about the symbolism of light and darkness. There’s nothing esoteric about this symbolism — it’s very immediate. We use it all the time. Darkness is a symbol for ignorance, for instance, and light for knowledge. “I’m completely in the dark about this,” we say; “let’s shed some light on the problem.” But light and darkness are also symbols of moral value — goodness and evil, truth and falsehood, reality and nothingness. This is familiar to us, too — remember the old western movies where the villains all wore black hats and the good guys wore white hats and rode white horses?

The New Testament makes much use of the symbolism of light and darkness — especially the Gospel according to St. John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.…In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”[1] So St. John’s Gospel begins. And John explains further: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.…And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil love the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”[2] And Jesus himself proclaims, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”[3]

We see this in action in the dramatic healing and subsequent encounter with the Pharisees that is related in the Gospel for today. Jesus heals a man who has been born blind. An unheard-of thing! But we need to bear in mind that Jesus does not heal the man to create awe and wonder among the onlookers. Jesus never performs stunts of that kind — that’s not what his miracles are about. Nor does Jesus do it simply out of compassion for the blind man, although certainly Jesus does have compassion for him and is concerned that he be made whole. The miracles of Jesus are always signs — that is, they point beyond themselves, they are indicators of the Reign of God. They are signals that God’s Reign is breaking in, and they tell us what that Kingdom and its King are like. So it is that Jesus points out at the beginning: “Look, this man’s blindness is not a punishment for his sins, or his parents’ sins, or anybody else’s sins. God doesn’t do that kind of thing!” That’s worth repeating: “God doesn’t do that kind of thing!” “But this man’s blindness is an occasion in which God’s great love and power can be shown.”[4] For the Reign of God is a realm in which people find healing, wholeness — God wants us to see — really to see — and to be filled with the light of the Kingdom of God.

The healing of the blind man provokes a big squabble with the Pharisees — that sect of Jews who were very devout and very committed to the Law of God — so much so that they had gotten the notion that they had some exclusive franchise on being devout and committed to the Law of God. And they were all out of joint because this healing wasn’t done according to the Rules. For one thing, it was done on the Sabbath Day, when you were forbidden to work. And for another, this Jesus had no credentials as a healer. He wasn’t licensed. He wasn’t ordained. He wasn’t a Pharisee. The Pharisees were so concerned about their own system of religious rules that they could not, would not, see the power of God even when it was right in front of their eyes. The Pharisees are the blind ones. And Jesus then: “My coming into the world is a judgment — that those who cannot see may be given sight, and that those who claim that they see may be shown to be blind.”[5] In what ways are we choosing to remain blind? What are our favorite little systems that keep us from seeing what God is doing right in front of our eyes?

God wants us to see. God wants us to know the truth about God and about ourselves, and to be filled with God’s truth, God’s life, real life forever in God’s kingdom. but we cannot receive God’s light if we continue to try to walk by our own light. Only as we recognize our own blindness can God open our eyes. Only as we admit that we are dead can God raise us to newness and fullness of life.

It’s significant that in the early days of the Church, Baptism was often spoken of as “enlightenment” or “illumination.” That’s what Jesus Christ is to be for us — illumination, the healing of our blindness, the opening of our eyes to the glory of the Reign of God. Jesus Christ is the Light of the World. By him we see and can walk the highway of the Kingdom of God into fullness of life. But we must turn away from darkness, and receive God’s gift of learning to look, and to see, and to live.

[1] John 1:1,4-5.
[2] John 3:17,19-21.
[3] John 8:12.
[4] John 9:3, my translation/paraphrase.
[5] John 9:39, my translation.

Sermon -- 24 February 2008

3 Lent—24 February 2008
St John’s, Keokuk — 10:00

Exodus 17:1-7 Psalm 95 Romans 5:1-11 John 4:5-42

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

Suppose that one day you are dusting off some old decorative bottle that you picked up at a garage sale somewhere, and suddenly there’s a billow of smoke, out of which appears a genie who says, “O Master O Mistress, your wish is my command! You are granted three wishes!” What would you wish for?

The “genie in the magic lamp who grants your three wishes” seems to be a universal part of our common cultural heritage, and keeps showing up over and over. Remember the old TV series with Larry Hagman as the astronaut and Barbara Eden as Jeannie who lived in a bottle? (Thanks to Nick at Night and TVLand, I can talk about old TV shows to young people and they still know what I’m talking about!) A number of years back, the Walt Disney folks got Robin Williams on board and did very well with a genie! I also recall a TV commercial in which this Indiana Jones type fellow discovers an antique lamp, which he rubs, and the genie pops out and grants him three wishes. First the fellow wishes for great wealth, and is immediately surrounded by piles of gold and jewels. Then he wishes for the adulation of women, and is immediately surrounded by a harem. Finally he wishes for long life, and the genie with a smirk turns him into the Energizer Bunny. So be careful with your wishes! You might get them!

There’s something about this “genie in the magic lamp who will grant your three wishes” that really hooks us. I suspect that this fantasy is not too uncommon, at least among children. As adults we realize that too much of that kind of really off-the-wall fantasizing probably isn’t too healthy (don’t we?!)—it tends to sap our sense of responsibility for our own lives—but we can at least remember those childhood dreams, and after all it’s also not healthy to get too far out of touch with our childhood. And we have our own grown-up modern version of the genie-in-the-bottle fantasy, anyway. It’s called the Iowa Lottery.

So what would you wish for? Maybe a million dollars. That’s straightforward! And there’s lots of very constructive worthwhile things that you, or I, could do with a million dollars! (The word for the day is “tithe”!) I remember that when I was a child I fantasized a wish for 20/20 vision. (I’ve worn glasses since I was seven, and it got to be a drag fairly early on, and it just gets worse!) But then, I also remember that when I was in college in the early sixties, the Air Force had a heavy recruiting campaign on for reserve officers who would agree to take flight training—ROTC had too many desk jockeys and not enough pilots—and at the time I said to myself, gee, I love to fly; if I had good eyes I’d take them up on that. And I probably would have. That would have put me on active duty just in time to fly B-52s over Hanoi. (With great respect to the men who did that, many of whom did not come back and some of whom came back only after many years in prison camps, I don’t mind passing on that opportunity.) So be careful about your wishes! You might get them! On the whole, our wishes—even our most fantastic and extravagant wishes—tend to be petty, narrow, shortsighted, and not really very imaginative after all.

I was put in mind of all this by the Scripture readings today—readings which remind me also of the Prayer Book’s Collect for the first Sunday in October, in which we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve.”

Look at the Old Testament Lesson. The people of Israel have escaped from Egypt, principally through God’s mighty intervention on their behalf at the Red Sea; and now, free at last, they are trekking across the Sinai wilderness toward their ancestral homeland. And what are they wishing for? Water. Well, sure, they need water. But considering what they’ve just been through, you’d think they’d have a little more faith and trust than that. The Reign of God and of God’s Righteousness were still singing in the air, and here the Israelites are, already, whining, “What shall we eat? What shall we drink?” No wonder God was ticked! (The Psalm today is an expression of how ticked God was. Made ‘em keep wandering in the wilderness until all the whiners had died off.) And maybe this event was in Jesus’ mind when he said, don’t be so anxious about stuff like that.

The Gospel today shows us the Samaritan woman at the well. A well-known story from St. John, who likes to tell long stories about Jesus—we’ll get a couple more of his in the next two weeks. John tells longer stories than Matthew and Mark and Luke do! Anyway, here’s Jesus promising the poor woman the water of eternal life, and all she can think of is not having to make so many trips to this darn well. If she could have had her wish, she would have settled for indoor plumbing. Jesus was offering a whole lot more than indoor plumbing!

What do we really want from God? (Be honest, but be mature—no silly stuff.) What do we really want from God? Me, I’ve got a pretty good sense of what I deserve (maybe not a good enough sense of what I deserve, but at least an inkling), and my desperate hope is that God will give me a break!

But what does St. Paul say today? “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” While we were yet sinners—petty, nasty, obnoxious, and altogether undeserving—Christ died for us. Our vision—even for ourselves—is so narrow! And God’s love for us is so broad—so far beyond anything we might ever wish for ourselves, so far exceeding anything we can even desire for ourselves, much less deserve! Like the Israelites, we sit in the desert and whine about being thirsty, and nag at God to save our lives; God says, “Save your lives? I’m going to transform your lives!” Like the Samaritan woman, we’d like indoor plumbing; God offers us a spring of water gushing up to eternal life! We want God to give us a break. God wants to give us an Easter!

Sermon -- 17 February 2008

2 Lent — 17 February 2008

RCL: Gen 12:1-4a Ps 121 Romans 4:1-5,13-17 John 3:1-17

What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.

“Like father, like son!” A familiar remark? How often do we condemn with faint excuse-making: “Well, what do you expect? I mean, look at the family he comes from!” Kind of a snotty thing to say, and certainly not universally valid — good strong families sometimes produce very strange children, and wonderful people sometimes come from quite peculiar backgrounds — our children are not entirely either our accomplishment or our fault! But as a general observation “Like mother, like daughter” does have some force. Our families do have a lot to do with the kind of people we are. After all, Jesus himself said, “Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.…Thus you will know them by their fruits.”[i] To understand the present, and certainly to have any vision of the future, we must see and understand our roots in the past. We must know where we’ve come from. Thus the critical important of history as a subject for human knowledge. As has often been observed, those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it. (And there may be a special circle of purgatory reserved for those schoolteachers who have made “history” dull! — a dry shell of lists of dates and places — which is mere chronicle, not real history at all. Real history is fascinating, because it’s a story — our own story, and it tells us who we are.)

But doesn’t all this suggest that our lives are in fact predetermined — that we are prisoners of our family background, our heredity, our environment, and our own past, and that our lives are simply the playing out of a script that has already been written for us? The answer to that is No — but a qualified No. Our backgrounds have a lot to do with who we are, but they don’t have everything to do with who we are. Despite all the formative influences upon us, at our core we are free: we have the capacity to make our own choices and decisions. We can choose how and where to commit our lives.

But in making that choice, by ourselves all we have to go with is our heredity, our environment, and our own past. We are free, but on our own there really aren’t all that many options! And so, however free we may be in theory, in actual practice, the way it works out in real life, we really are very much products of our families, our towns, our friends, our schools, our culture and its communications media — we are in fact to a remarkable and perhaps even dismaying extent conditioned by our heredity and our environment and our history.

Or, as Jesus said, “What is born of the flesh is — flesh.”

We are what we are. By ourselves that’s all we are, and all we can be.

But we are not by ourselves. We are not on our own. What is born of the flesh can only be flesh, but what is born of the Spirit is spirit. We are indeed formed by our heredity, our environment, and our past, but we are free, and what makes our freedom meaningful, what opens us up to the future instead of trapping us in the closed circle of the same old same old, is the presence to us of the grace of God. That is to say, in the power of God’s own gracious presence to us, we can have a whole new start, in which the determining power of the past is broken. We can be converted. That is the essence of spirit — openness to the new, to the beyond, to the transcendent, to the absolute, to the infinite, to God.

There are various ways we can talk about the reality of the offer of this new start, this breaking out of the determinisms of our own past nature. St. Paul, for instance, especially in his letter to the Romans, talks about “justification by grace through faith.” (This is what he’s getting at in the Epistle today, in his typically abstruse way!) Jesus, on the other hand, tends to use images that are more homey, if no less profound: “You must be born from above.” The word translated “from above” (in Greek, anóthen, if you care!) has the sense of “from the top,” “top to bottom,” not just “again a second time” (though that’s what Nicodemus hears) but “all over again from the beginning.” You must be born anew. You must be reborn. Of water and Spirit.

The immediate reference — which the first hearers and readers of John’s Gospel were expected to recognize immediately, and we too are expected to recognize and we usually do! — the immediate reference is to Baptism: the sacrament of new birth in which the water is the outward and visible sign of the inward reality of the Spirit. In the first centuries of the life of the community of the followers of Jesus Christ, set in the socio-politico-cultural context of the hostile pagan Greco-Roman Empire, admission into the Christian community, the Church, through baptism really was an experience of a whole new birth into a whole new world, the installation of a whole new “operating system,” entrance into the Kingdom of God. This really was new life, liberation from a closed world of stagnation, oppression even to slavery, and despair. In the world we inhabit — a world superficially Christianized, though certainly no more than that — our experience of Baptism is not as dramatic, but our need for it is as great, and the contrast between the old life of mere human flesh and new life in the Spirit is just as profound, if perhaps not as obvious.

But Baptism is a sacrament. It is not magic. And the ultimate reference to which today’s Gospel and the Sacrament of Baptism point is the birth from above, the birth anew, the birth all over again, wrought in us by God the Holy Spirit — what St. Paul calls “new creation” for those who are in Christ.[ii]

In the grace and power of that new birth we are delivered from the shackles of heredity and environment, prisoners of our past, flesh producing only flesh, free only for a Hobson’s choice of our own self-conditioned selves. We are brought forth into the freedom of the Reign of God, in which the gift of an eternally open future is ours for the claiming.

[i] Matt. 7:17,20.
[ii] 2 Cor. 5:17; cf. Gal. 6:15.