12 June 2016 -- Proper 6 / 4th Pentecost

Proper 6 / 4^th after Pentecost  — 12 June 2016

St. Peter’s, Bettendorf – 9:00 am

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10,13-15  |  Psalm 32  |  Galatians 2:15-21  |  Luke 7:36-8:3

David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.”  And Nathan said to David, “Now the Lord has put away your sin.”

How many of you remember, perhaps in school, reading James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “The Creation”?  As some of us recall, it begins:

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.

It’s a really lovely poem, and if you don’t know it I encourage you to look it up.  The problem with it is that although it’s great poetry, it is not great theology.  ("Oh, no!  A religious Grinch!” you say!)  But here’s the thing:  God did not create the universe because God was lonely.  God was, is, never lonely.  (This all has to do with the doctrine of the Trinity, and I would investigate with you how that is, but when Meg gets back she would say, “Why are you still here?  And why is our congregation all asleep in the pews?”)

In truth, God made the world – God created the whole universe – not out of loneliness but as an outpouring of the Divine Love which is the essential nature of the Triune God.  God created us, and indeed the whole world – in order to share God’s love, to share being.

The Scripture readings this morning are about sin.  

We all probably remember the story of David and Bathsheba, which is where the first lesson comes from.  (If you’re not quite sure about the whole story, when you get home, look it up in Second Samuel chapters 11 & 12.  Do not get the “David and Bathsheba” movie from Netflix.  Nothing against Netflix, but the film, with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, is really pretty awful!)  David has an affair (“affair” may not really be quite the right word for this) with the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his generals.  Anyway, Bathsheba gets pregnant, in circumstances in which it will be obvious to her husband Uriah that he is not the father.  Oops.  So David covers this up by arranging for Uriah to get killed in battle.

Very nice, David.  “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”  “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”  “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”  “Thou shalt do no murder.”  For somebody who is supposed to be faithful to the Lord God of Israel, David, at the moment that’s not going too well for you, is it?  Which is exactly what the prophet Nathan tells him, trapping him with the moving story of the poor peasant with the ewe lamb.  “You are the man!”  Well, David repents, and the Lord forgives him (though not without consequences, and actually the Lord does not come out of this whole business with clean hands either. But that’s another sermon for another time).  The point is, God can forgive even heinous sin.  And David’s sin is pretty heinous.

In the Epistle this morning, Paul is writing to the Christians in the new churches in Galatia (what’s now the middle of Turkey), reminding them that we are justified, that is, brought into right relationship with God, not by adherence to the works of the Law (i.e the Law of Moses, but by extension any other law) but by God’s grace accepted in trust.  (This is also a major theme in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and it was the favorite theme of St. Paul for both St. Augustine and for Martin Luther; but it is not Paul’s only major theme!)  The bottom line is that we do not earn God’s favor by what we do, or say, or think, or believe (which is different from faith, but that’s another sermon…).  God loves us.  God created us so that we might share in his love.  And so God forgives.  But…  (Well, I’ll get to the “but” in a minute!)

In the Gospel today we hear a story about Jesus at a dinner party at a Pharisee’s house.  The Pharisees apparently loved to invite Jesus to dinner, so they could grill him and give him a generally bad time about some of the things he was saying and doing.  Jesus enjoyed going, because he would always beat them at their own game.  Anyway, at dinner a woman who was a known sinner (“sinner” can mean all sorts of ways of being not-observant of the Law of Moses, but in this case, yes, that may well be what kind of a sinner she was, or at least had been) – this woman comes in and washes Jesus’ feet with oil and her tears.  Well, the Pharisee gets all in a snit that Jesus would put up with such a scandalous thing, So Jesus tells the story of the creditor with two debtors.  You heard the story, and where it leads.  The bottom line once again:  God forgives.

(I might note, and I trust you already know this, that there is no basis whatsoever in the Gospel text for identifying this repentant apparently “fallen” woman with Mary Magdalene, who is named in the next, but unrelated, account that is also part of the Gospel reading this morning.)

I suspect that most of us know people who are afraid of God.  Maybe sometimes those people are us!

(An aside, to clarify:  The Scriptures, especially the Hebrew Scriptures, often speak of “the fear of the Lord,” as in, for instance, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  The Hebrew word here that we translate “fear” has the sense of “reverence,” not “being afraid” or “terrified,” for which Hebrew has different words.  In the Gospels the typical context of the Greek word for “fear” is “Do not be afraid!”  The kind of “fear” I’m talking here about is being scared of God.)  

Yeah, and maybe for some folks that’s appropriate, although often enough those who have good reason to be scared of God typically aren’t – they haven’t a clue!  But there is a very long tradition in popular spirituality – Christian and sometimes sort of semi-Christian – that “God is out to get us.”  We are afraid that when we come to judgment, or even still in this life, God is looking up our records and finding all kinds of stuff to hold against us.  We spend our lives looking over our shoulders heavenward – a spirituality of fear and guilt, often very unspecific guilt.  (Does this sound at all familiar?)

And even the mainstream Christian tradition is responsible for a lot of this.  Dante and other poets and Michelangelo and other artists of the Renaissance got a lot of mileage out of sinners being thrown into hell.  The other day I re-read the famous sermon by the eighteenth-century New England Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  A terrifying piece of work!  Yes, Edwards quotes a lot of Bible verses (and of course as Shakespeare’s Antonio reminds us, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” [The Merchant of Venice I.iii.99]), but after page after page of threatening people about how God is dangling them over the fires of hell, Edwards gets around in one final paragraph to urge them to flee the wrath to come by conversion to Jesus Christ.  But is the Kingdom of God well served by frightening people into repentance?  I don’t think so.

God loves us, and God created us to share in the divine Love.  God did not create us for condemnation.  “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” [John 3:17].

A couple of minutes ago I said “God forgives…but.”  Here’s the “but.”  God’s love for us is unconditional.  But part of that love is that God created us free.  (God created the whole universe free, but that’s another sermon, or lecture, or book, for another time!)  God created us free.  We are not God’s puppets.  You can’t love a puppet.  God will not compel us to accept the divine love or to share in the divine life.  If we choose to live all on our own rather than to share in God’s love, God will let us do that.  But with this warning:  It will not turn out well!  So we must not think that we can do anything we want, and God will just overlook it.  The problem with defying the will of God is not that it makes God angry (though I’m sure it makes God sad), but that it is ultimately destructive of ourselves, and of others, and of God’s world.

God loves us.  Do not be afraid.  Trust in God.  When we mess up – and we do mess up – even when we mess up really badly, like David – if we turn back to God, God will forgive us.  “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?” [Ezekiel 18:23]  

3 April 2016 - 2nd Sunday of Easter

2^nd Sunday of Easter — 3 April 2016

Christ Church, Burlington – 10:00 am

Acts 5:27-32 | Psalm 118:14-29 | Revelation 1:4-8 | John 20:19-31

But Thomas...was not with them when Jesus came...[And] he said to them, "Unless I... put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

“Doubting Thomas” has become a household word, something of the “patron saint of skepticism.”  Today, as this Gospel reading from St. John is proclaimed in the Church all over the world, as it has been on this Sunday for hundreds and hundreds of years, innumerable sermons are being preached on Doubt and Faith - some saying, I suppose, that doubt is a dreadfully wicked thing; others that doubt can be healthy, that we must not fear to be honest about our doubts and to explore them relentlessly, that we may come to a deeper faith.  If you’re expecting the first kind of sermon today, that doubt is a dreadfully wicked thing, then you’ve engaged the wrong supply priest; in fact, you’ve probably come to the wrong church; truth to tell, you’re a member of the wrong species and you’re living in the wrong universe!  On the other hand, if you’re expecting the second kind of sermon, about doubts being a potentially constructive moment in the deepening of our faith, that’s a lot better, but that isn’t the sermon you’re going to get this morning!

Because it's always seemed to me that poor old “doubting Thomas” is getting a bum rap.

Let's go back in the story a little bit.  Shortly before his last journey up to Jerusalem, Jesus heard of the illness of his friend Lazarus of Bethany.  You remember the story.  Jesus said, “Let’s go up to Judea again.”  (They were down in the Jordan valley at the time.)  The disciples began to moan and whine: “Master, the last time you were up at Jerusalem you laid all that ‘good shepherd’ stuff on them and they got so mad they tried to stone you to death for blasphemy!  You want to go back up there again so soon?”  It was Thomas who said to his fellow disciples, “We're going with him, even if it means we have to die with him!”  Whatever we say about Thomas, we can’t say that he wasn’t a man of loyalty, of bravery, of faithful commitment.  Not, I think, a skeptic by temperament.

Now, we know the whole story of the cross and the resurrection.  And so we are perhaps not quite so sensitive to what must really have been going on the minds of Jesus’ followers in the aftermath of their leader’s execution.  To them, the crucifixion of Jesus was a total disaster, utterly devastating to them.  All their expectations about the Kingdom of God which had been raised so high by all the truth Jesus spoke and the signs Jesus did, the power of his personality as the One who himself embodied the Reign of God – all these hopes are completely dashed, their expectations collapsed.  This man whom they had followed as God’s Messiah, God’s Chosen One, the Son of Man whom God would send to intervene on behalf of the Kingdom of Heaven, has now died as one accursed, abandoned by God.  They must have been immobilized.  Their entire world had come crashing down in ruins around them.  Their master and teacher and dearest friend – the one who had given meaning to their lives and color to their world as no one else ever had – had turned out to be either a fraud or a fool, either the perpetrator or else the pathetic victim of a viciously cruel hoax.  It was all an illusion.  He hadn’t been the Messiah after all.  He had died alone, forsaken by the God whom he claimed as his Father.  It was all over.  Everything was all over.

And perhaps Thomas as much as any of them – loyal Thomas, brave Thomas, Thomas-who-was-willing-to-go-and-die-with-him (but who at the last had run away, of course, like all the others) - this Thomas felt bitterly the devastation of his hopes and dreams, the desolation of the failure and fall and death of the one he had loved and called Master and Teacher.

And now they come to him with this cockamamie story about seeing Jesus alive again?  No!  No!  Do not do this!  Do not do this to me!  Do not do this to yourselves!  What do you think we are made of?  Are my hopes and dreams your toy, that you can spin up and down like a yo-yo, that you can bounce like a ball?  Do not bring me this story!  I will not set myself up again.  I will not risk myself like that again.  I will not believe – not unless I can see him myself, not unless I can touch those his dreadful wounds....

Thomas’ problem, it seems to me, is not so much that he is a skeptic who doubts what God can do, as it is that his heart is not quite big enough to accept what God will do.  It’s very easy and very fashionable to question whether people are really raised from the dead.  It’s hardly an everyday occurrence in this day and age.  It was hardly an everyday occurrence in the first century, either, and the disciples weren’t simpletons, after all.  But is all that really the issue for us in our lack of faith?  I wonder if we aren’t really very much like poor old “doubting Thomas” – but, like Thomas, it’s not any skeptical narrowness of mind but our untrusting narrowness of heart that’s the real issue.  Is the Resurrection of Jesus too incredible to be true?  Or it is really that the Resurrection is too good to be true?  We won’t accept it because we won’t believe that God cares about us and values us enough to go to such amazing lengths in order to restore us to the fullness of life.  We will not believe that we are really worth all that.

For if God raised Jesus from the dead, that means God can and will raise you and me from the dead, and he’ll start right now.  If Jesus is really raised, then newness of life for us is not just pious prattle easily dismissed, but a genuine possibility for my future, and yours – the Reign of God is true and real and we can live in it!  And that’s a hard thing to deal with, and it’s a lot easier for us to cop out by pretending an intellectual skepticism.  It’s a lot easier just to try to keep Jesus in the tomb.

But of course Jesus won’t stay in the tomb.  Even when we lock the doors, Jesus still comes into our midst.  Jesus still comes, saying “Peace be with you” – the true peace of new and eternal life, the shalom of the Reign of God.  Jesus comes to us.  Jesus comes now.  Our minds are open enough to recognize that God can do this, but are our hearts open enough to accept that God will do this?  Are our hearts open enough to accept the gift of life from the risen Jesus, our Lord and our God?

6 March 2016

4^th Sunday in Lent — 6 March 2016

Christ Church, Burlington – 10:00 am

Joshua 5:9-12  |  Psalm 32  |  2 Corinthians 5:16-21  |  Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32  

“We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, he was lost and has been found.”

The Gospel reading today is what we traditionally call “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” although some commentators, including me, would argue that that title is not quite on target.

You may have noticed, from the bulletin this morning or perhaps from your own memory of the 15^th chapter of St. Luke, that a number of verses are omitted from this reading this morning.  And perhaps you asked yourself, “I wonder why they left out these verses?” and perhaps “I wonder what the left out verses are?” and perhaps you know already!  But I’ll tell you!

First of all, of course, there’s the introduction, verses 1-3.  This sets up the context, which is important.  The scribes and the Pharisees are whining because Jesus hangs out with sinners.  Well, yes, they are sinners.  So are we all.  What kind of sinners are they?  It doesn’t say.  All kinds, I suppose.  The tax collectors of course may have been crooks, and certainly they were collaborators.  Apparently Jesus is still in Galilee at this point, so they would not be direct agents of Rome, but they are agents of the puppet regime of Herod Antipas, which wouldn’t be a whole lot better.  And “sinners” – well, at the very least that means that as Jews they were not very observant.  They worked on the Sabbath, they didn’t go to Synagogue, they didn’t keep the fasts.  Whatever.  The Pharisees are whining about this, and so Jesus is talking about them, to them.

And you may recall, the first parable Jesus tells them is the story of the Lost Sheep:  a shepherd has 100 sheep, loses one, and goes looking until he finds it; and when he finds it and brings it home he calls all his friends in to celebrate with him.  “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” [Luke 15:7]

The second parable is about the Lost Coin; a woman loses a coin (not an insignificant loss in that culture!) and turns the house upside down until she finds it.  And she calls in all her friends; and “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God.” [Luke 15:10]

And then next in Luke’s narrative is the story of the man who had two sons, which we hear this morning.  I think the stringing together of these three stories reflects Luke’s narrative strategy.  Whether Jesus actually told these three stories together in sequence is not particularly important.  Remember that Jesus’ ministry presumably lasted at least one and probably several years, and I don’t doubt that he told all his parables over and over in a variety of settings.  The Gospels are not strict chronological records, and they did not have CNN camera crews.  But the story of the man with two sons has similarities to the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin, even though it is also different in important ways.  It is not just the story of a lost son; it is the story of two lost sons.

The story of the younger son we can easily imagine.  We may even know a similar story from friends, or even family, or even our own history.  The boy goes off “to find himself” or whatever, and completely messes up his life, until he realizes that he needs to go home, no matter how humiliating that may be.  And of course his father sees him coming and runs out and embraces him in welcoming love.  And God is like that.  (This story isn’t really an allegory; Jesus didn’t use allegories, at least not strictly speaking, but the father in this story is like what and who God is.)  

Okay, so far this story is a lot like the first two stories of the finding of the lost and the rejoicing over their return.

But this story doesn’t stop there.  There’s the older son.  (And why do you suppose Jesus is telling this story to the scribes and Pharisees?)  And the older son is really ticked off!  He has been obedient, faithful – he has been scrupulously observant!  He never ran away from home!  He deserves better, he thinks.  He thinks he has earned his father’s favor.  And his father is not being fair!  

Well, no.  The father is not being fair.  God is not fair.  And we need to get over that.  And we need to realize that for that we should be profoundly grateful!  You see, the older brother is also lost, albeit in a different way.

Most of us, I think, are deeply concerned about justice, as well we should be.  Among the many things we say about God, and the Scriptures say about God, is that God is a God of justice.  But we assume that what we mean by “justice” must be the same as God’s justice, and that may not always be the case.  For us, “justice” means people should get what they deserve.  In the Gospel story today, the older son is very much concerned about what he deserves, which he thinks he’s not getting, while his little brother is getting what he does not deserve.  Father is not fair.  Father is not just.

And by that reckoning, God is not just either.  But God’s justice is not concerned with what we deserve, but with what we need.

We have a hard time wrapping our minds around that.

So did the older son.

And he is us.

The shepherd who found his lost sheep called in his friends to rejoice with him.  The woman who found her lost coin called in her friends to rejoice with her.  The father who received back his lost son killed the fatted calf and threw a party.  “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God.”  

But no joy in the presence of the older brother, who in his continued lostness does not realize that God’s justice is not about what we deserve, not about what we have earned, not about fairness but about forgiveness, with love and with life, new life, new creation.