22 March 2015 -- 5th Sunday of Lent

5^th Sunday of Lent  — 22 March 2015

St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am

Jeremiah 31:31-34  |  Psalm 51:1-13  |  Hebrews 5:5-10  |  John 12:20-33

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

I’m assuming that most of you are aware of some things about the reading of Scripture:  The Gospels, and the rest of the New Testament, and the Bible as a whole.  (The “as a whole” is important!)  These are not simple newspaper articles.  They require some sophistication.  I don’t mean you have to get all academic and scholarly with the Bible; it’s often useful to do that, but sometimes it may also get in the way of hearing the Word of God.  What I am talking about is being careful to read the text.  Read the text.  And to be aware that the Gospel narratives, particularly, were not written by CNN reporters who were present onsite with cameras and sound recorders.  The Gospels were written, in the form we have them now, by Christians, followers of Jesus, some 35 to 65 years after the events, based not only upon their communities’ authentic memories, but also upon their own prayerful reflection on the meaning of those memories of the events.  I’m assuming that Mother Alice and other clergy have discussed and taught and preached about these kinds of things with you over the years.

One of the things you also will have noticed is that the four Gospels are not four identical, or even similar, books; they are not like birds on a wire.  Well, the first three Gospels are obviously related.  Each is distinctive, with material of its own, but obviously related.  They can easily be compared, or looked at side-by-side.  Which in Greek is to say “synoptic.”  But you know that, and the details are for another time.  The fourth Gospel, that “according to John” (although the author nowhere names himself – or herself!) covers a lot of the same material about the ministry of Jesus, but with a very different perspective.

For instance:  as we all recall, most of the accounts of Jesus’ ministry in the first three Gospels are brief straightforward stories.  (They’re not simple, and we keep discovering new dimensions in them all our lives, but they are generally short and to the point.)  Jesus tells a parable.  Jesus heals someone who is sick or disabled.  Jesus gives some short pithy instructions about life.  Jesus gives little pictures of the Kingdom of God.  In the Fourth Gospel, on the other hand, Jesus heals someone, or feeds the multitude – there’s not much parable-telling in this Gospel – and then follows that up with a long discourse on the meaning of it all.  And even after many many years of reading the Fourth Gospel over and over, I still find myself saying “What is he talking about?”

Okay, here’s what I think.  This is what I think, and you may disagree with me, and that’s all right, and Mother Alice may disagree with me, and that would be all right.  But I think that the Fourth Gospel is up to something quite different from what we see in the first three Gospels.  In the first three we see, basically, the writing down of stories passed along in the “Jesus Tradition.”  They may undergo some editing in the writing down of the Gospels, particularly as the local communities’ circumstances change over a generation or two – particularly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans – but these are basically traditional stories.  The Fourth Gospel, on the other hand, apparently knows all those traditional stories – I would say from the tradition itself; I don’t see any indication that the author knows any of the written Gospels.  But the Fourth Evangelist starts with one of the traditional stories, and then goes on to compose a long discourse, placed in the mouth of Jesus, about what those stories and events mean.  And I’m certainly not saying his interpretation is not right – but it’s the result of his, and his community’s, reflections on the meaning of the stories of the Jesus tradition.

Okay, so finally now we come to the Gospel reading today.  Jesus has just arrived in Jerusalem (following the so-called “Triumphal Entry” that we will celebrate next Sunday) and he’s in the Temple, and some “Greeks” approach him.  In this case, the Evangelist probably means people who were ethnically Gentiles – not necessarily from Greece but Greek-speaking – and may have been proselytes, that is, religious converts to Judaism, which explains why they were in Jerusalem for Passover.  (A slightly different word is used for Greek-speaking ethnic Jews who lived in the Diaspora outside of Judea and Galilee.)  Or perhaps these Greeks were “God-fearers,” Gentiles drawn to the moral and theological power of Judaism but unwilling to accept the full obligations of the Torah, the Jewish Law.  They approach Philip (who, being from Bethsaida, a mixed Gentile-Jewish town, probably speaks Greek, and he has a Greek name) and they tell him that they “wish to see Jesus.”  Not just look at him, but meet him, talk with him.  But also, in the Fourth Gospel, “to see” often connotes “to believe in,” and I can’t help but think the Evangelist has that in the back of his mind.

Anyway, we don’t know what happened with the Greeks after that; the Evangelist apparently doesn’t really care about them; he moves right on to the point he wants to make:  Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  All along throughout this Gospel Jesus has been saying, “My hour has not yet come.”  But with the coming of the Gentiles – the “other sheep that do not belong to this fold” but whom Jesus must now bring in [John 10:16] – with the coming of the Gentiles the  time for his glorification – that is, his crucifixion and resurrection – has now arrived.  (As the Pharisees had just said:  “Look, the world has gone after him!”  [John 12:19])

The Evangelist then goes on to draw on some sayings from the Jesus tradition that we already know and have seen in the other Gospels, though slightly differently phrased:  only if you give up your life will you gain your life;  if you would follow me, deny yourself and take up your cross.  Following Jesus means following Jesus where he goes, and where he goes is by way of Golgotha.  And then, reflecting similar words which Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane – an incident which the Fourth Gospel does not include in the Passion narrative – “Now my soul is troubled – I am deeply grieved, even to death.  Father, shall I ask you to save me from this hour that has now come?  But not my will but yours be done.  Father, glorify your name!” [Cf. Mark 14:34-36 & ||s.] 

And then the Evangelist shows us Jesus speaking in words which we and the tradition have known, or should have known, all along:  “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”  Well, yes, of course!  That’s exactly what we all thought the victory parade into the city was about!  God’s reign is being restored, the Romans are about to be driven out, and the Messiah is to be crowned as King!  But no:  Jesus goes on:   “‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”  Hoisted up from the earth on a Roman cross.  The judgment of this world, and the fulfilling of God’s Kingdom, turns out to be very different from what we had in mind.

The Gospel reading today I think in some ways foreshadows the two Gospel readings for next Sunday, Palm Sunday.  As you know, and perhaps anticipate with some dread! next Sunday’s service is longer than usual, and involves a radical and abrupt change in mood and tone, from the apparent triumph of the Entry into Jerusalem to the stark and somber account of the Crucifixion.  To quote as I often do a colleague from many years ago [the Rev. Charles Peek],  “It begins with a defeat that looks for all the world like a victory, and moves on to a victory that appears to everyone to be a defeat.” As we move toward the conclusion of Lent, through our Lord’s death (and ours) to his (and our) resurrection, may we renew our commitment to the good news of God’s Kingdom, a realm which is not about the love of power but the power of love. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

18 February 2015 -- Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday  — 18 February 2015

Trinity, Iowa City – 12:15 pm & 7:00 pm

Joel 2:1-2,12-17   |   Psalm 103 or 103:8-14  |  2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10  |  Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 

Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

In recent years there has been something of a new turn, at least in our society, about the way people talk about their faith journeys.  Part of this, I think, is related to the fact that over my lifetime (which is now getting to be quite a while!) the place of “church” in our society has shifted a bit.  It used to be taken for granted that most people were members of one or another church, even though their participation may have been pretty minimal, and even regular attendance was for many more a matter of social conformity than any deep commitment.  The fact that there seems to be less of that going around these days is perhaps not a bad thing, at least to the extent that it may represent a lessening of hypocrisy.  And what an increasing number of people are saying, according to studies by groups like the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, is that they would describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” 

I’m not sure exactly what that means.  Or rather, I suspect it may mean a number of different things to different people who say that of themselves.  (And probably still more different things to people who, sometimes rather snottily, say that about other people.)  Generally – very generally – it seems refer to people who may well believe in God – in a variety of understandings of who or what God is – and who may well pray, or meditate, or reflect on transcendent reality, and have a strong moral sense – but who do not participate in or claim affiliation with “organized religion.”

Maybe there are some of you who would say of yourselves that you think of yourself as “spiritual but not religious,” in some sense or other.  Please be assured that it is not my intent to beat up on you from the pulpit today.  (Or any other day.) 

On the contrary, I would like to suggest, on this first day of the season of Lent in which we traditionally ramp up our attention to such things as prayer and meditation, that Jesus himself might well be described as “spiritual but not religious.”  And in that way, as in so many others, a model for us who claim and strive to follow him.

Okay, what do I mean when I suggest that Jesus might be described as “spiritual but not religious”?  Well, first of all, in this context, the word “spiritual,” and that Jesus was “spiritual,” probably isn’t a matter for much argument, although I think it has much deeper implications than is sometimes assumed.  But “religious”?  Jesus not “religious”?  Well, of course it depends on what you mean by “religious,” but, yes, I’ve been saying all my ministry that Jesus really isn’t very “religious.”  At least not in the sense that we often mean by that word. 

Now of course, I hope obviously, Jesus prayed.  The gospels note this many times, and he gave a model prayer to his disciples and to us, and we will be praying it (again) a little later.  The Gospel today suggests that Jesus was in favor of fasting, at least in appropriate circumstances, although he also says that while he, the bridegroom, is with his followers it is not yet time to fast.  And to the extent that “fasting” has to do not just with self-denial but with self-sharing, we can recall how when faced with five thousand hearers Jesus directed his followers to share the food they had.  And although Jesus doesn’t seem to have had any money to give alms with, he was a model of Peter’s later statement to the disabled man in the Temple, “Silver and gold have I none, but what I have I give you” [Acts 3:6], as Jesus healed many of their diseases and infirmities.  Further, it is clear in the Gospels that Jesus was a regular in the synagogues of Galilee, where he preached and taught.  And healed, even on the Sabbath Day, which was actually very irreligious of him!  And Jesus had a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures, which he often quoted – and  sometimes controverted. And in the Temple Jesus was something of a troublemaker!

The unmistakably “religious” people in the Gospel narratives are, after all, the scribes and Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, whose religiosity was well blended with power politics.  We know what Jesus thought of their “religion.”  The Gospel today recounts one of the instances of that.  Not that Jesus is against almsgiving, prayer, and fasting – the classic Lenten disciplines.  But they aren’t about being “religious,” and certainly not about being seen as “religious.”  But I think they are, or can be, about being “spiritual.”

Jesus’ mission in this world was not about making us human beings more “religious.”  We were already plenty religious, thank you very much.  Jesus came to proclaim, and to enact, the Reign of God in human life in this world.  Not just a promise about the sweet by and by, about which Jesus says relatively little (although eternity is the Kingdom’s horizon), but to enable us be what God in creation intended us to be in the divine image and likeness.

And that, I think, is our vocation and destiny, a lifelong task and goal to which we may pay special attention in Lent:  to grow further into the fullness of humanity, into the image of the God who is Love, the God of Justice, into the vision of the God whose glory we are meant to be.  [Cf. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. IV.20.7.]  Let us go forward, then, in these coming weeks, not that we may be more “religious,” whatever that means, but that by the grace of God’s Holy Spirit we may become as human persons more loving, more just, more “spiritual” – more real.

4 January 2015 -- Christmas 2

2ND SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS  — 4 January 2015
St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am

Jeremiah 31:7-14   |  Psalm 84 or 84:1-8  |  Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a   |  Luke 2:41-52 

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.

We were visiting for Christmas with family in Tennessee, and last Sunday with them we attended an evangelical church.  The young youth pastor was preaching – he was quite good, by the way – and his text was this verse from the Gospel of St. Luke.  (Evangelical churches typically do not have a seasonal lectionary, as we do; they apparently just choose their sermon texts because they want to.  But in this case it was certainly appropriate.)  I wasn’t taking notes, and I certainly don’t want to seem to be plagiarizing from him, but his words did lead me to some reflections of my own on these verses.

I suspect we all have some images in our minds about what the various parts of the Christmas story were like.  We often get these from Christmas carols and hymns, or from the artwork on Christmas cards, or from the creche scenes we set up in our churches or our homes.  From the actual texts of the Gospels?  Often, not so much!

For instance, one of the depictions I have often seen is of Joseph leading the expectant Mary sitting on a donkey, trudging all alone across the Judean mountains to Bethlehem.  Actually, probably not.  I’ll bracket for the moment the whole business of Caesar Augustus’s decree for a tax census; but in the context of St. Luke’s story, presumably there were a whole bunch of people coming to Bethlehem to register.  After all, it had been a thousand years; every Jewish Tom, Dick, and Harry was a descendent of King David.  It was like being a descendant of the Kings of Ireland.  Or in my case, a descendant of King Robert the Bruce of Scotland.  (I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it makes a good story.)  Joseph and Mary in this story would not have been traveling all alone.  And let’s not beat up on the poor Bethlehem innkeeper.  Inns in the ancient world were not like Hampton Suites, or even like a Motel 6.  Ancient inns may have had an actually-not-very-private room or two for wealthy travelers, but everyone else slept as best they could in a common room that was also the bar and grill.  “No place in the inn” was not a “No Vacancy” sign, it just means that a saloon is no place to have a baby.  Being allowed to use the stable was a good deal for Mary and Joseph.  “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.”  Well, probably not.  It may be one of your favorite hymns, and it’s one of mine, but probably not.  Remember what Luke says about the shepherds when they came:  “They made known what had been told them about this child; all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.”  [Luke 2:17-18]  It doesn’t exactly imply a huge crowd, but evidently there were some other people there, and we would hope at least a couple of older women who could assist Mary as midwives.

The birth of Jesus, whatever it was like, was probably not a particularly private event.

Lives in ancient Israel, and lives in ancient anywhere else, and lives anywhere before modern times in Europe and North America, were not private.  Lives were lived in community, and in much of the world they still are.

Well.  In the story we hear today from St. Luke, when Jesus is twelve his parents take him with them to Jerusalem for the Passover, and evidently a good number of villagers from Nazareth and the surrounding area, neighbors, friends and relatives, are going together.  (Good judgment, right there!)  So when they all start back home after the festival, it doesn’t initially occur to Mary and Joseph to worry that Jesus isn’t with them.  (He probably hasn’t been with them the whole trip!  Kids then as now like to hang out together away from their parents!)  They finally find him still in the Temple, talking with the scribes and priests, possibly including some Pharisees, who were finding Jesus a very interesting young prodigy.  (Oh, if only they had known how “interesting” he would be twenty years later!)  But we know this story.  A point to note, I think, is that matters of faith were not private matters, as we tend to try to make our “personal religion.”  They were very much matters for community discussion.

Jesus was not much interested in “personal religion.”  Faith was not a private matter.

And the Gospel story today reminds us that “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” [Luke 2:52]  No matter how we phrase our understanding of the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him.…And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”  [John 1:1-3.14]  The statement “Jesus is God” is true, but it is not simplistically so.) – no matter how we phrase our understanding, we must remember and insist that Jesus really was a real human being.  He was an infant, and then a child, and he had to learn, and to grow up, and all these things were for him, as they were and are for us, processes that took place in the context of community and family.  Presumably Mary potty-trained him.  Joseph taught him how to use tools.  The local rabbi taught him the Scriptures.  Working with Joseph on construction across the valley at Sepphoris taught him about the political and economic realities of living in the shadow of the Roman Empire.

And so, when Jesus began his own ministry, this was his message:  “The time has come!  God’s Kingdom has come near!  Change your lives and the way we live with each other, and trust in this good news!” [Mark 1:15]  Jesus came not just to make us individually and privately religious, but to call us and empower us for life together as citizens of the Kingdom of God.

31 August 2014 -- Proper 17

Proper 17 / 12^th after Pentecost  — 31 August 2014

Trinity, Iowa City – 7:45 am

Track 2:  Jeremiah 15:15-21  |  Psalm 26:1-8  |  Romans 12:9-21  |  Matthew 16:21:28

[Jesus] turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!”

Last Sunday in the Gospel reading we heard how Jesus asked his disciples, “so – what do the people think about me?  Who do they say I am?”  And the disciples respond, “Well, a lot of ideas are floating around.  Some think you’re John the Baptist come back to life [John had just recently been executed by Herod Antipas], or the prophet Elijah returning, or Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.”  And Jesus then asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”  And Peter answered, “You are the Messiah!”  And then last week’s reading concludes, “[Jesus] sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.”

Well, what’s that all about?  As you may be aware, this reflects what New Testament scholars have often called “the messianic secret,” which is most obvious in St. Mark’s gospel but is also followed by Matthew and Luke.  (It doesn’t appear in St. John – rather the contrary – but John is following a different narrative strategy.  But that’s another sermon, or lecture series, for another day!)  And it still doesn’t answer the question, “‘Don’t tell anyone’? – What’s that all about?”

And today as we read and hear the next eight verses, perhaps we begin to get a clue.  Jesus tells his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem – the seat of power – and suffer and die at the hands of power – and on the third day be raised.  The Gospel continues, “Peter [the one who had just said, ‘You are the Messiah!’] took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord!  [More literally, the Greek means ‘Mercy on you!’]  This must never happen to you!’  But [Jesus] turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan!  You are a stumbling block [literally, ‘a scandal’] to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things [more literally, ‘you think not of God but of human beings’].”

“Get behind me, Satan!”  Well, that’s rude!  Come on, Lord, give the guy a break!  He just professed his faith in you as the Messiah! 

And that’s just the point.  Peter was wrong.  The reason Jesus ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah was that it wasn’t true.  At least not the way they would have meant it.

Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about the “messianic secret” but rather the “messianic denial.”

Well, yes.  You see, the problem was that nearly all the Jewish people in the late second-Temple period had a notion of what “the Messiah” meant.  There were some differences among their ideas, but they also had a lot in common.  And the disciples, including Peter, pretty obviously shared these ideas.  And they were all wrong.

And that’s the point Jesus is making with them.  “You do not know what you are saying!  So until you do, keep quiet!” 

“Get behind me, Satan!”?  Yes, exactly so.  Remember that after his baptism, when Jesus was in the desert on what we might call his retreat of discernment or his vision quest, Satan tempted him.  Not a temptation to abandon his vocation as Messiah, but temptations about what kind of Messiah to be:  temptations to be the kind of Messiah that everyone, yes, everyone, was expecting.  Magic.  Manipulation of public opinion.  Political-military power.  And Jesus said “No!”  But Satan didn’t give up, and now he returns in the mouth of Peter.

And this idea that the Messiah was to be a figure of earthly power—whether divinely or politically based – just wouldn’t go away, and it still won’t do away even today.  It has been speculated – a speculation, but I don’t think unreasonable – that the reason that Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus was because Jesus wasn’t being the kind of Messiah Judas had been hoping for, and by setting up his arrest Judas was trying to force Jesus’ hand.  And even after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, Cleopas and (presumably) Mrs. Cleopas, on their way home to Emmaus, told the stranger they met on the road about “how our chief priests and leaders handed [Jesus of Nazareth] over to be condemned to death and crucified him.  But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel [i.e., the Messiah.  But obviously not].”  [Luke 24:20-21] 

So now Jesus goes on to say to his disciples, in effect, “If you’re going to talk about me as the Messiah (the Anointed One; in Greek, of course, ho Christos, the Christ), then you need to get straight who God’s Anointed One really is.  So if you want to be my followers, you must deny yourselves” – Jesus isn’t talking about giving up chocolate for Lent!  “Denying yourself” is what you do publicly, maybe even in a courtroom, when you profess Jesus.  It is to put your life at risk before the powers of this world.  Peter, in the high priest’s courtyard, did not deny himself, he denied Jesus.  “Take up your cross” – this is not metaphorical.  In the first-century world, crosses were not symbols, much less decorations.  To take up the cross was to accept the condemnation of the powers of this world.  “And follow me” – we’re not going to Disney World, you know.  To follow Jesus is to follow him to Golgotha.

And to the Resurrection, certainly; but only first to, and by way of, Golgotha.

Many who claim to follow Jesus Christ appeal to their faith in their quest of power.  We did it in the fourth century, we did it in the middle ages, we did it in the Renaissance and in the Reformation, we’re still doing it today.  And I don’t just mean “those other folks,” I mean us as well.  And Jesus still says, “Get behind me, Satan!”

27 July 2014 -- Proper 12

Proper 12 / 7 Pentecost  — 27 July 2014

St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am

RCL1:  Genesis 29:15-28  |  Psalm 128  |  Romans 8:26-39  |  Matthew 13:31-33,44-52

(I love that line in the first reading, “When morning came, it was Leah!”  I wrote  a sermon about that that I kind of like!  Unfortunately, I have already preached it to you three years ago!)

 “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…like yeast…like treasure…like a merchant…like a net…”

When you hear the phrase “the kingdom of heaven,” what pops up in your mind?  Or “the kingdom of God”?  (The phrases have the same meaning.)

In recent years I think we’ve gotten a little more aware of what Jesus means, and doesn’t mean, when he talks about the kingdom of God (which he does all the time – that, after all, is his mission from the beginning:  to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God).  But I think there still lingers some baggage on the word “kingdom,” and on the phrase “kingdom of God,” that we acquired somewhere along the way and need to be aware of, so that it doesn’t distort our understanding of what Jesus is talking about.

First of all, for us a “kingdom” often is first of all a political entity, a geographical area, typically a nation-state, like “The United Kingdom.”  But in the ancient world, and in the world of the Bible, that’s not really what is meant by the Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic or Latin words that we translate “kingdom.”  A perhaps subtle but important distinction:  they carry the idea that we would call “kingship,” “reign,” “rule.”  Yes, it involves geographical extension, but it’s really about personal dominion. The kingdom of God is not a place, but a life in which God rules.  It is God’s kingship.

Well, what does the kingdom of heaven look like?  We all grew up with all sorts of pictures, many of which continue to appear in cartoons in the New Yorker,  where they are usually pretty funny.  Clouds, and angels playing harps, and streets paved with gold (well, that’s from the Revelation of St. John, who didn’t mean that any more literally than any of the other bizarre apocalyptic imagery he uses).  But in sum, I think we tend to think of the kingdom of heaven, God’s kingdom, as a very religious place.  (Which may explain why lots of folks really aren’t particularly interested in going there!) 

Well, anyway, Jesus tells little stories about what the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, is really like.  One of the things we notice, I hope, is that these are not particularly religious stories.  I think we need to remind ourselves, paying attention to what the Gospels actually say, that Jesus was not in fact very religious.  (The scribes and Pharisees were very religious.  Jesus gave them a hard time about it.  They gave him a hard time because he wasn’t.)  Occasionally there are religious figures in Jesus’ stories, but they are not usually the good guys.  The priest and the Levite who pass by on the other side.  The Pharisee in the Temple who reminds God about how religious he is.  The little stories that we hear in the Gospel today are very ordinary, day-to-day life, stories.  They tend to be a bit extravagant, as we’ll see, but they’re not particularly religious.  And my own suspicion, because of their extravagances, is that if we could actually hear them as Aramaic speakers we would realize that they are jokes.  Not that they’re not serious, but they’re amusing.  People hearing them probably laughed.  Maybe a little nervously, especially as they began to “get” them and to realize how much they actually challenge us and how we think about things.  Jesus was not a standup comedian, but I think he was a little like Mark Twain.

Today Jesus tells us, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…”  The smallest of all seeds, he says; well, not really; lots of seeds, especially flower seeds, are smaller; but compared with wheat seed, or barley seed, or olive pits, or acorns, or other agricultural seeds, they are pretty small.  But a mustard plant gets to be pretty good size, although “tree” is something of an exaggeration.  But this parable is not a lecture in botany.  The tree in which the birds come and nest is an image of a great kingdom that protects all its people.  [Ps 104; Ezekiel 17:23, 31:6; Daniel 4:12,21]  That’s how God’s kingdom is.  Unexpectedly extravagant.

Again:  “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast…”  Another extravagant tale:  three “measures” of flour is not three measuring cups, the Greek word means about ten gallons!  That’s a lot of bread!  And the text says the woman “hid” the yeast in the dough.  And in the morning she uncovers her (very large!) mixing bowl, and poof!  The kingdom of God works like that.  Undercover, unexpected, extravagant!

Again:  “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field…”  Does anyone notice that the guy in this episode is dishonest; at least in Roman law this would have been illegal?  After all, this treasure is not the finder’s to recover, it belongs to the field’s owner, and to buy it without telling the owner why you want it is a little crooked.  (In our modern world no investor or real-estate speculator would ever pull off something like that!  Oh, surely not!)  But that’s not the point.  The kingdom of God is worth giving up everything else in order to gain.  Unexpectedly extravagant.

And so also with the jewel merchant who finds the pearl of great price.  More extravagance!

And then Jesus shifts the tone a little.  “The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind.”  The kingdom gathers in everyone, with extravagantly open arms, and sorts them out only later.  Kind of like the Wheat and the Weeds.  And then there is added another instance of what a lot of us think is a later addition by the early Christians “explaining” with the bit about the angels what the parable means.  We saw the same kind of thing with the parables of the Sower and of the Wheat and Weeds in the last two weeks.  Like I said last Sunday, I don’t think Jesus ever “explains” his parables.  We either “get” them or we don’t.  The early Christians, compiling the Gospels from the original Jesus traditions, felt guilty because so often they didn’t get them at first, so they felt they had to explain them!  Not to say that this explanation is wrong, but I think Jesus himself left it up to us.

Then Jesus wraps up this set of stories:  “So do you get it?”  They answered, “Yes.”  Actually, at the time, probably not!  And Jesus concludes with a final parable:  If you do get it, you’re like somebody who lives not only by the tradition but also is open to radically new insights, because that’s what the kingdom is like.  The kingdom is not “up there.”  The kingdom is not off in the sweet by-and-by.  the kingdom is not “here!” or “there!” (as Jesus points out elsewhere [Luke 17.20-21]).  The kingdom is among us, within us, in our midst, suddenly, extravagantly, right when we least expect it, beginning here, beginning now.

20 July 2014 -- Proper 11

6^th after Pentecost / Proper 11 — 20 July 2014

St. Paul’s, Durant – 9:00 am

RCL1:  Gen 28:10-19a  |  Ps 139:1-12,23-24  |  Rom 8:12-25  |  Matt 13:24-30,26-43

Let both of them grow together until the harvest. [Matt 24:30]
The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now. [Romans 8:22]

I have never really been much of a gardener.  Oh, at various times I’ve grown some vegetables — tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, corn when I had room for it.  But it hasn’t really been “my thing.”  And in our present house, the shade trees in the back yard have made growing tomatoes virtually impossible.  Wendy is a bit more of a flower gardener, which she does very well.  Especially hostas, which love all the shade!  But I have found that, after many years of living in rectories, and then in rental housing, since we have ad our own houses I have a somewhat different attitude toward lawn and garden issues.  This ground is now mine!  And I take the presence of weeds as a personal insult.

Some weeds are pretty obvious.  In the lawn, for instance, dandelions show up pretty readily, and are relatively easily controlled, and so far I have been generally victorious in this battle.  Crabgrass is also fairly obvious but less easily controlled, and by the end of the summer the war is something of a stalemate.  Creeping charlie is always kind of a tossup, though I have made some progress.

Garden weeds are something else, especially in the spring if you are planting from seed.  It takes a while before you can be sure whether these little green sprouts are what you planted, or what The Enemy planted!  And so you have to exercise a bit of care.

What you don’t do, whether you’re growing flowers, or vegetables, or a field crop like wheat or corn, is let the weeds grow up with the crop until the harvest.  One, it makes the flowerbed look all ratty, and although aesthetics is not exactly the point of farming, there is something really lovely about an absolutely clean field of soybeans, and something tacky about a beanfield full of scraggly volunteer cornstalks and pigweed.  Two, and more important, weeds draw away moisture and nutrients that should be going to the crop.  (I see that herbicide-resistance is now bringing back the annual summer teenage task of walking beans!)

All of this was just as much true in the first century as it is today, and a Galilean farmer hearing Jesus tell this story that we call the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (or the Wheat and the Tares, though most of us wouldn’t recognize a tare if it grew in the middle of our geranium pot.  Actually, “tares” are probably darnel, a weed that looks a lot like young wheat) — a Galilean farmer hearing this story would have said, “Whattayou crazy?  You're a carpenter, obviously not a farmer!”  I think this is one of those stories that Jesus tells that we have “scripturalized” and tamed so that it no longer occurs to us how much it really runs counter to common sense.  Even the earliest Christians had trouble with this — if the consensus of New Testament scholars is right, and in this instance I think it is, the second half of today’s Gospel reading, in which Jesus is depicted as “explaining” the parable, is actually an addition by the church a generation or so later, who felt a need to come up with some plausible religious interpretation of what is actually a very difficult and troubling story.  (A lot of us think that Jesus never “explained” his parables.  Either we get them, or not.  Often not.)

And so we read this story as an allegory of the last judgment.  Well, I don’t think that’s wrong — part of the point of parables is to suggest a variety of interpretations — but I think that what the story is really about is (what we call) the problem of evil.  And what it says is not really what we want to hear.

We naturally and understandably assume that God is a God who fixes things for us.  (And there is a sense in which that’s true, though what God fixes is not so much “things” but us, if we will let God’s grace work in us.)  But I think that Jesus is suggesting to us in this story that God is not a “fix-it” kind of God.  At least not always right now.  Ultimately, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well (as the Lady Julian says).  But in the meantime God lets the weeds grow.  And furthermore, God has to let the weeds grow for our sake.  Pulling the weeds up now would destroy us too.  But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

(When I say God has to do something, of course I don’t mean that there are any external constraints that can compel God to do a thing or prevent God from doing another thing.  God is, after all, God!  But God is who God is, as God told Moses at the burning bush, and in that sense God cannot contravene God’s own nature.  God must be true to God’s own self.  And in relation to us, God’s creation, God must act consistently with the purpose and destiny of the creation.  I’ll come back and pick this up again too the next time around.)

We need to approach this issue with some care.  There are a lot of people out there, and maybe some of you in here, who have been hurt very badly in one way or another — themselves, or people they love — and they asked God to fix it, and God didn’t fix it, at least not the way they wanted, and so they are dealing with pain, or anger, or despair, or all three, and that’s all very real.  And it simply won’t do for us to say, “Well, that’s how the world is, that’s how God is, suck it up.”

Because that’s not what God says to us.  God says, “My grace is sufficient for you [2 Cor 12:9], if you will receive it and let it change you, let it change your life, and thus change your world.  I cannot just pull up the weeds for you.  But I can do this — I will do this — I have done this:  I will come and be with you, and I will bear on myself all that the world’s weeds can do, and I will live, and in the end I will gather you to me at harvest-home.”  And that is how we in God’s Name must be with those who hurt.  Not everything can be fixed, but we can be there to share the hurt.

Here’s the hard truth:  the necessary condition of the possibility of freedom is the possibility of evil.  In order for love to be possible, hatred must be permitted.  God could have created a universe of robots in which everything is precisely programmed.  And maybe in some alternate universe God did so.  But that’s not the universe we have been given to live in.  God created us in the divine image and likeness, to share in the work of building the world, to share with one another the love of God for us and to freely return in that love to God.  God does not make us grow, God lets us grow.

And the corollary is that God has to let the weeds grow too, else we would no longer be free, we could not be what God created us to be.  If God pulls the weeds, it destroys us as well.  So the weeds have to be allowed to grow too. 

But only for a time.  Not forever.

29 May 2014 -- Ascension Day

Ascension Day  — 29 May 2014

Trinity, Iowa City – 12:15 pm

Acts 1:1-11  |  Psalm 47 or 93  |  Ephesians 1:15-23  |  Luke 24:44-53

God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.  [Ephesians 1:20-21]

There’s a piece in the current Christian Century (some of you may be familiar with that magazine – it’s been around for a long time, and represents what I suppose we might call a progressive ecumenical mainstream viewpoint), and in this piece the author writes about how he and a committee were planning  a service of worship for Ascension Day, and the question arose as to whether the Paschal Candle should be extinguished after the reading of the Gospel.  They were Lutherans, so they didn’t have the Book of Common Prayer to tell them that no, the Paschal Candle continues to burn throughout the 50 days of Easter through the Day of Pentecost!  I won’t accuse any of you of being old enough to remember, as Fr. Hulme and I do, that we also back in the Olden Dayes used to put out the Paschal Candle after the reading of the Gospel on Ascension Day.  I recall as an acolyte responding “Praise be to thee, O Christ” after hearing St. Luke’s account of Jesus being carried up to heaven, taking the candle thingy, and extinguishing the flame.  “’Bye, Jesus!”

Which of course is exactly wrong, and why the Prayer Book now has it right.

(Some of you may recall one or another versions of my infamous “Toes” sermon for Ascension Day, but I promised I wouldn’t go there this year.  You’re welcome.)[1]

The Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ is a theme that runs throughout the New Testament.  Matthew and Mark certainly imply it, for instance when Jesus being interrogated by the high priest quotes Daniel 7 [Mt. 26:64; Mk 14:62].  In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus talks about his ascension to the Father, notably with Mary Magdalene after she discovers the empty tomb [Jn 20:17; cf. Jn 6:62], and in his long so-called “Farewell Discourse” to his disciples Jesus talks repeatedly about how he will go away and then come again [Jn 14 & 16, passim].  In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and the apostles speak to the Sanhedrin about how “God exalted Jesus at his right hand as Leader and Savior” [Ac 5:31], and later Stephen, witnessing before the Sanhedrin just before his stoning, cries out, “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man [Jesus] standing at the right hand of God!” [Ac 7:55-56].  St. Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, writes about “Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God” [Rom 8:34], and in Philippians he quotes what seems to be an early Christian hymn with the line “God also highly exalted him” [Phil 2:9].  In the Letter to the Colossians Paul (or whoever) writes, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” [Col 3:1], and in the Letter to the Ephesians that we heard in the Epistle today, “God put this power to work in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and seated him at is right hand in the heavenly places” [Eph 1:20], and again, “He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things” (Eph 4:10].  The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of how Jesus “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” [Heb 1:3]; he is the “one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens” [Heb 8:1].  The First Letter of Peter talks about “the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God” [1Pet 3:22].  But note that all of these many references are to the ascension of Jesus and his seat at the right hand of the Father as a present reality;  they may imply, but do not narrate, an event. 

The only descriptions of the ascension of Jesus as an event are by St. Luke, which we have just heard in the readings:  in the Gospel, and before that in the Acts of the Apostles.  And perhaps you have noticed that these two tellings are not quite the same story.  Luke does that.  For instance, he tells the story of the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus three times, two of them purportedly from Paul’s own mouth, but the three stories are almost but not quite identical.  Of course Luke is, or at least is acting as, among other things, a Hellenistic historian, and historians in the Greco-Roman Empire did not have the kind of detailed documentary research resources that modern historians are expected to use.  They saw their task to be to tell the meaning of the story as they understood it.  They knew that a historian is not simply a chronicler.  Another example of this is the Jewish historian Josephus, who tells the stories of Jewish history and of the war with Rome the way he wants us to remember them!

 This does not mean that the event of the Ascension of Jesus at Bethany or on the Mount of Olives or wherever did not actually occur.  I don’t know whether it did or not.  If it did, then I think Archbishop Michael Ramsey was right in suggesting that it was an “enacted parable.”  What did not happen is that Jesus “lifted off into orbit.”  Jesus “ascended” into Heaven (how else would we say it?); but Heaven is not “up there,” and we know that.  “Up there” is billions of light years of the vast expanse of interstellar space; and God is there too, but neither more nor less so than right here and now, and it’s the “right here and now” that should matter to us.  Yes, Jesus had to leave us, in a sense, because otherwise his location would have remained fixed in first-century Jerusalem and therefore he couldn’t be in twenty-first-century Iowa.  He has “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.”  

So the point of the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ is not that he has gone away – “’Bye, Jesus!” and snuff out the candle – but so that the Light of Christ may remain lit in us and among us in all places at all times.  It is St. Matthew who records the essence of what we celebrate this day:  “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age”  [Mt 28:20].

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[1] http://havestole.blogspot.com/2010/05/sermon-13-may-2010.html; http://havestole.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html; http://havestole.blogspot.com/1993_05_01_archive.html