Category Archives: Big Questions

Big Questions, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, March 9

Anybody else ever watch the TV show Alone? … 

It’s a reality competition show. Ten people with various survival skills are dropped into the wilderness, with limited equipment. They have to build shelter, and find their own food. They have special radios that they can use to “tap out” at any time – or they may get pulled out if their health becomes too poor. Whoever holds out the longest gets $250,000. 

I’m fascinated by the show because of what happens inside of people as they go through this ordeal. Some people just tough it out as long as they can by force of will. But a lot of people are driven to some profound self-reflection, by the isolation and the hardship. People who thought they could conquer Nature learn they have to cooperate with it. People who thought they could rely on their skills are forced to face their own limits. People who thought they were totally self-sufficient discover that they are profoundly lonely.

In today’s Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent, we see Jesus at the end of his Alone journey in the Judean wilderness – which is plenty harsh and lonely. And the Devil knows Jesus is vulnerable right now, and takes his shot. Let me say a quick word about who the Devil is, here. This is not the red guy with horns and a tail; that’s a much later image. In the Old Testament, the Devil has a role, a purpose, of testing the righteous, like Job – to see if their faith and piety and good deeds are only skin deep. That’s very much what’s happening here. 

As I said last week, the weird stuff in the Bible doesn’t especially bother me; but if you find it easier to imagine Jesus driven to self-reflection, Alone-style, I think this story works fine that way, too. 

Let me say a bit more about the third character in this story – the wilderness herself. There is a lot of literal wilderness in this part of the world – dry, rocky, hilly, and empty. 

The reason many ancient peoples of this region were pastoralists, keeping flocks of sheep and goats, is that a lot of this territory was lousy for farming. So, the importance of wilderness in the Bible begins from the geology and ecology of the region. 

And then on top of those realities, there are layers and layers of meaning that build up because of the kinds of things that happen in the wilderness. Abraham and Sarah leave a settled life in response to God’s call and set off into the wilderness. Hagar is driven into the wilderness to die, and instead meets God there. Jacob wrestles with an angel. Moses leads God’s people for forty years – struggling, starving, quarreling, but also, slowly, becoming a new people shaped by God’s purposes. David flees to the wilderness to escape King Saul’s rage, and eventually storms back from the wilderness, strengthened by its privations, to claim a throne. The prophet Isaiah dwells deeply with images of ruined cities, overgrown with weeds and overrun with wild animals – and with visions of wilderness redeemed, the desert blooming, rejoicing with flowers, as God returns to redeem God’s people and dwell among them. 

The wilderness is a deeply meaningful place, for the Biblical tradition. You don’t go there unless you have to. It’s a place of struggle and danger, a place where everything is stripped away, a place where you might die. And it is also a place where people encounter the Divine. A place of becoming, a place where people discover their purpose.

I think our Gospels have all of that in mind when they tell us that Jesus went to the wilderness, immediately after his baptism, to prepare for his public ministry, for the demanding three years that he spends in the public eye before he is arrested and executed. 

So. Jesus has been in the wilderness for forty days – not coincidentally, the same length as our season of Lent – and the Devil comes to tempt him. I’d like to talk about those temptations, one by one – what they meant for Jesus, and also what they might mean for us. Because we have wilderness seasons – individually, and together. Times of struggle, scarcity, and fear. Times when we’re not sure we have what it takes to get through, or what it’s going to cost us to survive. This season in our common life feels pretty wilderness-y for a lot of us, for a lot of reasons. So let’s think about what happens in the wilderness… 

Luke tells us, “Jesus ate nothing at all during those [forty] days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” For Jesus, the temptation here is pretty clear: to use his power to meet his own needs. We’re invited to understand that this is something Jesus could actually do. But if he starts down this road – a loaf of bread here, some more comfortable sandals there, maybe a convenient roadside inn with a hot tub after a long day’s journey – it could become a slippery slope! 

What’s the equivalent temptation for us, in our wilderness seasons? Years ago, a wise clergy friend told me that for pastors, people like me, our version of this temptation is to, like, tie a bow around the hard things, and try to make them meaningful and pretty. She said: It’s hard for us to accept that sometimes a stone is just a stone. I’m glad she named that; I think about it now and then. People become pastors because they want to help people find meaning, and it takes discipline not to rush to platitudes and superficial reassurances, to be able to sit with people when meaning or healing or resolution seems distant or impossible. 

There are versions of this temptation for non-pastors too. Maybe it’s the toxic positivity that rejects all difficult emotions. Maybe it’s the denial and avoidance of anything uncomfortable or scary. 

It’s tricky, because real blessings can emerge from difficult times. I feel gratitude and hope about our life together as a church, right now: the ways people here are stepping up to strengthen our care for one another and our neighbors, deepen our theological and Scriptural grounding, make sure our young folks feel fully accepted and loved. 

And: This is a really hard time for a lot of you, in many ways. A lot of folks are dealing with uncertainty and stress and risk that just flat out sucks. As your pastor, I need to be able to hold both the good things and the bad things. Some of these stones just are not going to turn into bread.

Luke writes, “Then the devil led Jesus up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

For Jesus, I think this temptation is about checking his motives – and abdicating responsibility. The Devil thinks that maybe Jesus is the kind of guy who’s just in it for the acclaim and the glory – and would be happy not to have to actually run things or do anything hard. So the Devil says: You can have the throne; just put me in charge. 

Jesus refuses. Because he’s not in it for glory, actually. And because he knows what happens when the Devil is in charge. The hard work ahead is his work, and he claims it. 

How would we scale this temptation down to our little, ordinary lives? I think we can also wrestle with the temptation to cede our responsibility, our agency – a word which hear means our our capacity to act, to do things that matter, even if they are small things that matter in small ways. I know a lot of folks are struggling with overwhelm: not knowing where to focus, what actions are worth the time and effort, how to balance ordinary life stuff with everything that is out of the ordinary right now.

If that’s your predicament – it is certainly mine at times – there’s a lot of good advice out there. Pick a thread and follow it. Act locally. Build and build on relationships you already have, places you’re already involved. Find people doing work that matters to you, and ask how you can help or support. There are so many ways we can invest in the world we want to live in, the world that aligns with God’s intentions as best we understand them. 

You may have heard the wonderful saying of Rabbi Tarfon, about the work of tikkun olam, repairing the world: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. (Though I like to remind us that sometimes caring for ourselves or our loved ones is the work before us for a while. Another wise sage, Lemony Snicket, writes, “It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.”) 

We need to be in ongoing dialogue with ourselves about what’s feasible and what’s appropriate for us. What is my work to do? 

If it would be helpful for us to convene some spaces of conversation where folks can wonder out loud about that stuff together, and share ideas, let me know; that could be fruitful. 

The important thing, I think, is to try not to get scared or overwhelmed or numbed into giving up our own authority, however local and limited it may be, and our agency, our capacity to act in the direction of our hopes. 

Luke writes, “Then the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'”

Note, friends, that the Devil is quoting Psalm 91, which is one of the psalms that says that if God loves you nothing bad will ever happen. The Psalms are sometimes wrong. 

What did this temptation mean for Jesus? I think Jesus knows from very early on that his path will lead him to death. I don’t think this temptation is about fearing death. It’s subtler than that. Jesus, as God temporarily confined to a human body, seems to have moments when he doesn’t know the plan, and struggles with exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, just like any of us. 

Here, the Devil is saying to Jesus, You’ve chosen a risky path. You sure must have a lot of confidence in the God you call Father, to believe that there’s some point to it all, that the Powers that Be won’t just crush you like a bug and your mission and message will be forgotten. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some assurance that God is actually on the job, here? To know you could really trust the Big Guy? Come on, just a little test; what could it hurt? 

But Jesus says: That’s stupid. I’m not going to put myself at risk for no good reason. I have work to do here. I have real risks to face – necessary risks. I admire Jesus’ clarity about his mission. And I wonder if, for a moment, this temptation got to him a little…  Wanting to know that it’s all going to be OK, somehow, despite everything, is so real. And that’s what the pinnacle-of-the-Temple temptation looks like, feels like, in my life: The desire to know that the people and things I love best are going to be all right. That God won’t let anything really bad happen to them. 

There’s a David Bowie song with the lyrics, “Give my children sunny smiles, give them moon and cloudless skies; I demand a better future, or I might just stop loving you.” I am almost certain Bowie wrote it as a prayer; I know it is when I sing along with it. I would very much like to be able to make some kind of deal with God, such that my dearest people, and my dearest church, will be safe, whatever else happens around us.

A side note that isn’t really a side note: Psalm 91, our psalm today, the one the Devil quotes, is one of the psalms used in Compline. When we started regular Zoom Compline during the first months of Covid lockdown, we found we had to edit out the verses of the psalm that say that even if ten thousand people die of plague all around you, God will keep YOU safe because God likes you best. It just didn’t sit well. 

I don’t think that’s the deal. It’s not the kind of world we live in. We’re not dolls in God’s dollhouse. Our agency, our responsibility, are real. We make choices. We shape the world. We can do real good; we can do real bad. When a lot of us work together, we can do BIG good and BIG bad. We’re able to inflict harm on one another, directly and indirectly, not because God wants to build our character through suffering, but because God made us free. I do believe God acts in the world, and in and through us, but that God chooses to make generous space for our freedom. 

When we talk about this in confirmation class – about how there can be a good and loving God and also a kind of messed-up world – I ask, Would it be good if parents were in total control of their children’s lives? Even good parents, who love their kids and mean well? Nobody has ever thought that that was a good idea. 

The 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich was once reflecting on sin and all the problems it causes in the world, grieving in her heart: All should have been well! Then in a vision she hears Jesus say to her tenderly: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. I believe the truth of that vision. I believe that all is held in Love; that far more can be mended than we know. But that’s in the long term, and the big picture; all shall be well doesn’t mean in this world, or this lifetime. 

Here and now, we don’t get to know that everything’s going to turn out all right. Jesus had to undertake his mission, live out his call, without the assurance that everything was going to be OK, in human terms. So do I. So do we. 

The point of this whole story – the wilderness story, the Jesus story, the full scope of the Bible, four thousand years of humanity grappling with the God we know in Jesus Christ – is that God is in it with us. We are not abandoned in the mess; we’re not alone in the dark. 

There will be wilderness times – individually, and together. Times of struggle, scarcity, and fear. Times when we’re not sure we have what it takes to get through, or what it’s going to cost us to survive. There are stones that will stubbornly remain stones. 

And yet. 

People have always found purpose in the wilderness. 

People have always met the Holy in the wilderness. 

And every so often, rarely, beautifully, the wilderness blooms. 

Big Questions, Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Nov. 10

There’s a strong theme that runs through our readings today. 

And that’s a little bit of a surprise, because these readings don’t belong together. 

The Gospel we just heard is the Gospel assigned for this Sunday. 

The Leviticus reading comes from the Our Money Story materials we’re using this season, in conjunction with our giving campaign. 

And the Ruth lesson was supposed to be last week – but we did All Saints on Sunday instead of the regular Sunday readings. So I bumped this reading forward because I love the book of Ruth!

So these are very assorted readings. But somehow they hang together better than the assigned readings often do. And the thread – or maybe it’s a rope! – that ties them together is the question of how we tend to the needs of the vulnerable. 

Leviticus is one of the books of the Torah, the Law, telling God’s people how to live as holy people of a holy God. Leviticus has some hard and weird stuff in it, and has kind of a bad reputation. But there’s also a lot in Leviticus about justice and mercy and ecological wholeness. 

The parts we heard today lay out the practice of gleaning. If you are growing food, whether it’s wheat or grapes or olives or whatever: at harvest time, you don’t have your workers take everything. You leave the corners of the field untouched; you leave some bunches of grapes on the vine. Then those who need it can come and harvest, too. That’s what gleaning is. 

The text goes on to talk about the year of Jubilee – how every fifty years, everybody’s supposed to get their ancestral land back, and you’re supposed to let the land rest, and just eat what grows naturally. And celebrate a year of human and ecological restoration. 

This week’s theme in the Our Money Story materials is reimagine. These passages invite reimagining our relationships with land, work, resources, neighbors, God. What if our bounty is meant for everybody? What if the land’s health matters more than what it can give us? What if there is enough? 

In the happy little accident of our readings this week, we get to see gleaning in practice in the book of Ruth. The book of Ruth begins with an ending – and not a happy one. Naomi loses her husband and sons. She has no grandchildren, and her daughters-in-law aren’t even Israelites; they are from Moab, a long-time neighbor and sometimes enemy of ancient Israel. This is the end – of Naomi’s family; of her happiness and hope; of her wellbeing, without male family members to provide for her. She decides to go home to Israel, even though there’s nothing for her there, either. But then… Ruth insists on going with her. Ruth pronounces this beautiful oath, by which she makes herself Naomi’s daughter, and a Jew. And so – a story begins, after all. 

But the women still have nothing and nobody, except apparently a place to stay, some rickety ancestral hut. So Ruth goes gleaning. “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain, behind someone in whose sight I may find favor.” Ruth and Naomi will fend off starvation, because at least some of the farmers and landowners of the region follow the laws of Leviticus, and leave some grain for the poor, at harvest time. 

Next week we’ll hear how Ruth’s story turns out. (It’s only four chapters long, if you want to just sit down and read it!) What I want us to notice right now is that within their time and place, in a starkly patriarchal society, these women are incredibly vulnerable. Naomi and Ruth are both widows, and within the Biblical world, widows are seen as one of the the most socially and economically vulnerable kinds of people, lacking male protection and provision, and without the ability to own land or wealth. They are at risk of desperate poverty; of starvation; of sexual assault. That’s why, again and again and again, the Hebrew Bible defines mercy, justice, and righteousness in terms of making provision for outsiders, orphans, and widows. 

Which brings us to the widow in our Gospel, giving two copper coins to the great Temple in Jerusalem, while Jesus watches. This story has too often been treated as the jumping-off point for a stewardship sermon, with this woman’s self-sacrificial generosity praised as an example for all of us – “Give till it hurts!” Now, listen! This church’s continued existence depends on y’all’s generosity. But I can’t preach that sermon. Jesus is angry, here. The Temple, as the religious headquarters of society, is supposed to be gathering donations from those who have enough, or more than enough, and using those gifts to make provision for those with little or nothing. Instead, Jesus accuses the religious leaders who hang around the Temple of “devouring widows’ houses.” The implication is that they’re preying on the lonely and desperate, perhaps telling them that if they just give a little more, then surely God will favor them and turn things around for them. 

Jesus’ words here do point to something important about how we measure gifts – or, in this season, pledges. In our fall pledge drive we always have goals to meet and bills to pay. But we also know that a $20 a month pledge from one household may be a bigger sacrifice than a $500 a month pledge from another household. And we honor all gifts, and the care and the hope they represent. 

But Jesus is not glad to see this woman give away the money she might otherwise have used to feed herself that day. If a church or faith community is encouraging someone to give to the point of not being able to care for themselves, that is spiritual abuse. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Mieke Vandersall writes, “Widows and the perennially dispossessed were to be cared for through safety nets…, yet the systems weren’t working and needed reimagining. This widow gives all that she has and the system fails her. What would it mean if Jesus tells this story to use her act of giving as a way to highlight the corruption of the economic system in power?… How can we reimagine systems of charity that… fail to provide true transformation and liberation?”

The through-line in these readings is the question of how societies or communities tend to the needs of the vulnerable. It’s one of the more consistent themes across the complexity and diversity of the Bible: God judges us on the basis of how we, together, care and provide for those at greatest risk. Sometimes God’s expectation of care is for a whole society or people, as with the laws of Leviticus. Sometimes it’s for the church at large, or for a specific local faith community. It’s a theme in many of the Epistles, letters to the first churches. How y’all doing at caring for one another, especially the most socially and economically vulnerable among your members? And as you have capacity, how y’all doing at extending care to the same kinds of folks in your wider community? … 

That’s been the work, beloveds; that will always be the work.  

It’s not all of the work; there’s other stuff too, like learning and living God’s story, and cultivating joy, and so on.

But it’s a core part of the work. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Always. 

This week we elected our next president.

There are a lot of big feelings in the room about that. 

And a lot of big fears. 

We wonder how, as this next chapter unfolds, our society will end up treating the most vulnerable. 

Some folks have justified fears of being forgotten.

Some folks have justified fears of being targeted. 

Some folks think it’ll be fine… maybe better than fine. 

Regardless: We are almost certainly facing big changes.

I’ve read and heard so much wisdom this week. And not passive “it is what it is” wisdom. Brave wisdom. Fierce wisdom. Kind wisdom. And one big theme – for those in deep distress, grief, and fear, and for those seeking to respond to them – one big theme has been: don’t rush. Take time. 

Take time to feel. To grieve. To lick your wounds. To rest, if you can rest. To do things that bring you back to yourself. To connect and reconnect, because community, mutual belonging, is going to keep being really important.

One of the voices that stuck with me this week is Ethan Tapper, an ecologist who has a book called How to Love a Forest. He was talking about resilience. Now, the word “resilience” has gotten used and overused in reference to marginalized communities. It sometimes gets used to shame or silence suffering or struggle. “Just be more resilient!” 

Resilience doesn’t mean that big changes or big challenges don’t affect you. Tapper says, “Resilience is not capitulation. It’s not just accepting whatever happens.” 

Rather, he says, “In ecosystems, resilience is… the ability of these systems and all the species that comprise them to respond to adversity.”

Being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t take damage or get knocked down for a while. It means that there’s capacity in the organism or the system to come back, somehow. To rebound and rebuild. Even if it takes time, to rest and gather strength. Even if the new looks different from the way things were before. 

And that got me thinking about our jack pine. You may know that we have a variety of conifers on our grounds, including some that don’t usually grow around here. One is a jackpine, which does OK here, but really prefers the western mountains. Jackpines are interesting because they are adapted for the inevitability of forest fires. They have cones that hold their seeds, like any other conifer. And some of their pinecones look pretty much like any other pinecone, like the pinecone that you’re imagining right now.

But some of their cones stay closed. All those little scales don’t open up. Here’s what that looks like. 

It looks a little like a dragon toe – or some kind of poop. It doesn’t smell like a poop, though. It smells like summer in a pine forest. 

START BASKETS GOING AROUND. TELL PEOPLE: take a cone and a bean. 

Why does the jackpine make these strange closed cones? Well: The jackpine has a deal with time and fire. Like a phoenix, jack pines are reborn through flame. These cones last a long time. They can lie for years on the forest floor. They will finally open when they’re exposed to heat. So when a fire tears through a forest – as it will – and kills most of the mature trees, those jackpine cones are ready. They open, and release their seeds. The soil is newly enriched by ash, and there’s plenty of sun, with the big trees gone. Jackpine seedlings become one of the first species that help a landscape recover after fire. Resilience lives in these weird little knobby cones. 

I knew this in theory but then I did it by accident, once. I had a batch of assorted pinecones from around our grounds for some craft project, and I put them in the oven on low heat for an hour, like you’re supposed to, to kill any bugs. And when I came back, the jackpine cones had opened. The hidden surfaces between the scales were the most beautiful dark reddish-brown. 

The Our Money Story materials offer us a little prayer practice, today. It goes with filling in the next circle of our circle prayer. You can see there are motifs of wheat and seeds, representing the crops left for gleaning, for sharing, and the bounty of Jubilee.

I’m supposed to give you two beans, a red one and a white one, to hold while we receive a prayer about reimagining. 

You’re supposed to give back the white bean, putting it in the offering plate – those will get added to our banner – and take home the red bean, as a reminder of our capacity to reimagine. Or maybe our capacity for resilience – those aren’t the same thing, but they definitely overlap. 

Instead of the red bean, I’m giving you jackpine cones. Our tree lost a branch this past summer, and I collected a bunch of cones from the branch at the time, not knowing what I would do with them. Turns out this is what I’m doing with them. 

Let’s take a moment now for an embodied prayer, holding your bean and your cone. Let us imagine what Jubilee could look like, in our community, our nation, our time. 

I’m inviting …. To lead us through the prayer from our Money Story materials, with a few minor edits! …  

Big Questions, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 13

From the introduction to Job by scholar and translator Robert Alter:
“The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon…” (That means it’s not like anything else in the Bible!)

… “Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers” – that means a lot of other Biblical texts assume that this is how things work, though there’s some grappling with it elsewhere too! – 

Alter again: That dissent is “compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward…” I’ll say more about that next week. Upshot: the world, the universe, were not created to serve humanity, we’re not the center of it all, as many other Biblical texts assume. (Alter, the Writings, p. 457) 

It’s a remarkable book in lots of ways! Who wrote it and when? … 

Part of the broad category of Wisdom literature in the Bible & across the the Ancient Near East. Texts from other cultures also struggling with why people suffer and what it all means, though Job has its own perspective. It’s Job’s friends that sound the most like other Wisdom literature texts, with their advice – “just turn from evil and do good” – while Job himself – and eventually God – push back. 

As is common in the wisdom literature, there’s very little here about Israel’s covenant history or the specific obligations of the Law. You could say that Job is a deeply faithful book but not a very religious book, per se, in that it’s not very interested in worship or practice. 

Dating: Linguistic evidence places it probably 500 years before the time of Jesus, give or take half a century or so. 

Beyond that: We know nothing about the author of the Book of Job. But Alter suspects – based on the quality of the poetry and the uniqueness of the voice – that this is one author, though the text has been altered and some portions were added later. 

Alter: “One should probably think of [this author] as a writer working alone— a bold dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel they couldn’t do without it, however vehement its swerve from the views of the biblical majority.” (458) 

What’s the relationship of all this poetry with the preface we heard last week? – in which God brags about how pious Job is, and Satan says, He only worships you because you’ve given him everything he wants; let me at him and we’ll see how long it takes for him to turn from you!… 

Alter notes the “palpable discrepancy” between the frame story and the core text. He thinks this is a much older folktale that this author uses to set the scene and get us into the meat of what he really wants to explore – the experience and meaning of suffering. 

Ultimately it’s easy to set the folktale aside because you don’t need it. You don’t need a pissing context between God and Satan to have someone lose their home, their family, everything except their life. People face that kind of agony all the time. 

The book of Job is remarkable because it explores the meaning of suffering though tens of thousands of words of incredible poetry. Alter: “Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct [both in vocabulary and images] from its biblical counterparts.”

Alter notes Job’s linguistic and metaphorical breadth and creativity – this author someone who’s really stretching the bounds of language in order to create incredibly rich expressive text. Think of Shakespeare, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

The book is also notable for its passages about nature, in some of Job’s speeches and especially in God’s response, which we’ll hear a tiny bit of next Sunday. This author is someone who paid close attention to the natural world, including the wild and frightening parts of it – not just a stroll through the garden. 

I’ve done a terrible thing in creating this script, by simplifying and clarifying the language. I did that because I wanted us to be able to easily hear and follow the debate about the meaning of Job’s suffering, which is often a little more elusive in the Biblical text. 

But go read some of the poetry of Job, sometime soon! 

Listen, now, to Job’s first few lines, in Alter’s translation: 

“Annul the day that I was born, 

And the night that said, “A man is conceived.” 

That day, let it be darkness. 

Let God above not seek it out, nor brightness shine upon it.

Let darkness, death’s shadow, foul it; 

Let a cloud-mass rest upon it; 

Let day-gloom dismay it. 

That night, let murk overtake it.

Let it not join in the days of the year, 

Let it not enter the number of months.

Let its twilight stars go dark. 

Let it hope for day in vain, 

And let it not see the eyelids of dawn.”  (3:2-9)

Alter says of Job’s poetry: “Anguish has rarely been given more powerful expression.” 

That amazing poetry isn’t for its own sake. It’s in the service of diving into the problem of theodicy. (Spell it) 

Theodicy: The problem of evil and suffering: how do we make sense of these things if we believe in a good God who is actively involved in the world? It is one of the big questions, and it’s the question at the heart of the book of Job. 

Job’s friends have lots of answers, but they’re not very satisfying. 

Working on the script: my attention drawn to the friend who tells Job, You just don’t know God. Questions his faith. 

But I think Job is the person with the strongest faith, here. 

With the friends, I almost wonder whether what they think is their faith in God, is actually a kind of naive belief in a clockwork universe where people get what they deserve. It doesn’t take a lot of sustained attention to reality to know that people don’t get what they deserve. But Job’s friends cling to this idea SO HARD: “You must have secret sins, because that’s the only possible explanation.” The thing about a moral universe like that – where everyone’s fortunes in life are determined by their behavior – is you don’t really need God to run it. You don’t even need AI; we were building computers that sophisticated by the 1960s. 

Job is the person here who sees reality most clearly. And Job is the person with the strongest faith, the deepest conviction that there is actually a God out there somewhere, even when he feels utterly betrayed and abandoned. The most familiar passage of Job for many folks comes from chapter 19. It’s used – without attribution – as one of the texts at the beginning of the funeral rite: “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, God will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold the Holy One, who is my friend and not a stranger.”

This is beautiful. It’s also a paraphrase of the Biblical text, making it substantially more hopeful and tender towards God. 

Job is not tender towards God. Job is furious at God. 

He denies God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s availability to humanity, period. And yet: Job is very, very sure that however distant and unresponsive God seems right now, God is. And he believes that he will, someday, get to see God with his own eyes. 

In working on this script, it was hard to end it, without resolution. 

We’re still in the middle of the book; there is more to come! But still, as a writer and as a pastor, I wanted to be able to offer some closure, some sense of grace and peace beginning to emerge. But one of the big messages of the Book of Job is, I think, that the point at which suffering resolves into meaning is often elusive. Sometimes terrible things stay terrible. No silver linings in sight. 

We know nothing about the author of the book of Job, but I wonder if we can reasonably guess that they had experienced great loss. And that this book is an expression of their conviction that God is present, even in the unthinkable. 

In November, I’ll invite folks to join me in a seasonal study group on prayer – what it is, what it can be. I’ve got a few things we might read and discuss: a lovely, light book by a friend that’s kind of an overview and introduction. A beautiful book about praying our way into Advent, with art and poetry. And I just ordered a brand new book called Rage Prayers. Sounds very promising! 

Job’s friends keep telling him to silence his rage prayers. That he can’t talk to God like that. But he can. We can. You can. Job refuses their rebukes, again and again – insists on his right to cry out to the Holy in anger and pain. One of the big gifts of this strange, difficult, beautiful book of the Bible is its utter conviction that prayer doesn’t have to be polite. That we can scream and weep and break things. That there’s nothing we can say or do that will make the Holy One turn away from us. 

God heard Job; God will hear you. 

Big Questions, Episcopal Church

Sermon, April 7

The second Sunday after Easter always brings us the story of the apostle Thomas – often known as Doubting Thomas. Honestly, it’s a little aggressive of the lectionary – it’s like it’s telling us all, “Didn’t find the Easter story convincing? Well, how about THIS?” 

I wish we didn’t have this text every single year – it gets hard to write a new sermon about it! But I do value this story. I like it that Thomas feels bold enough and safe enough to tell the other disciples, I’m sorry, I just can’t get there with you. I didn’t share your experience and what you’re telling me is more than I feel able to accept as real and true. 

I like it that this apparently doesn’t break their relationships; the other disciples don’t shun Thomas, Thomas doesn’t cut them off either. They’re all together, a week later, when the risen Jesus shows up a second time. And I like it that Jesus responds kindly to Thomas’s doubts. He doesn’t exclude or shame him for having questions, for needing to see for himself. Jesus offers him what he needs. 

John’s Jesus does say, Blessed are those who haven’t seen, and yet believe. And John concludes, These things are written so that you may come to believe… and through believing have life in his name. That all feels a little pressure-y, you know? I’d kind of like John – and John’s Jesus – to give us the latitude to have our own doubts and needs and hopes, on our path of faith, as Thomas does. 

It’s in that light that I want to share with you all some words from Bishop Matt Gunter. Bishop Matt is currently the interim assisting bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee – our regional church jurisdiction, which covers the southern third of Wisconsin. He is the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac, which covers the eastern half of the rest of the state; he’s served there since 2014. He’s also been the provisional bishop of the Diocese of Eau Claire, north and west of us, since late 2020. 

The three Episcopal dioceses in Wisconsin are currently quite far along in the process of exploring reunification – becoming one state-wide diocese, as it was 150 years ago. The hope is that this  reorganization will help us use our shared resources better, and structure ourselves for mission and ministry. EpiscoWisco camp, which I think at least eight St. Dunstan’s kids will attend in June, is a great example of the fruit this might bear. The Diocese of Milwaukee had become unable to sustain a camp program on our own, but the Diocese of Fond du Lac had a long-standing and lively camp program, and the past couple of years we’ve been invited to join in, and be part of that program that’s so important for our young people. 

Anyway. There will be a big vote on May 4, about whether the three dioceses should reunify. Your lay deputies to that convention are Shirley Laedlein, Val McAuliffe, Gail Jordan-Jones, and Isabelle Marceau. If the dioceses vote to reunify, then that decision has to be approved at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in June. At that point, Bishop Matt would become our bishop – not just our interim assisting bishop, which basically means we call him if we need something done that only a bishop can do, while a body called the Standing Committee actually runs the diocese; but our regular, official bishop. He has said that he would serve in that role for two to five years, while the new united diocese figures out who we are together and starts to explore what we need from our next bishop, so that we’re ready to undertake the significant work of a bishop search. 

I take the upcoming votes very seriously, and nobody knows the outcome. But I think most folks expect that we will move ahead. 

So, in anticipation that Bishop Matt may well become our next bishop, I’m going to introduce him to you a bit today. I first started to get to know him when we served on a legislative committee together for the last General Convention in 2022; I’ve continued to get to know him through clergy retreats and other events. 

I can tell you that he’s a serious-minded person, a deep thinker, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. On Easter Sunday he posted a photo on Facebook of a table covered with bells, at the cathedral in Fond du Lac, with a sign above it featuring a photo of himself, and the words “Bishop Matt wants YOU to take a bell!” I like that the cathedral staff feel that their relationship with him is playful enough to do that – and that he found it funny enough to share it. And even though Bishop Matt is not my bishop, yet, I have found him to be responsive and kind when I’ve reached out to him about a few things. He’s meeting via Zoom with our confirmation class this very afternoon. 

With that long introduction, I want to share some of a short essay Bishop Matt wrote several years ago about doubt, and the place of doubt in Christian life. Let it be noted that I am hereby feeding three birds with one scone: giving myself a bit of a break from writing a whole sermon, after Holy Week; introducing you to Bishop Matt; and offering some material relevant to Thomas and his hard-won faith. 

Bishop Matt begins by remembering a conversation with his daughter when she was in second grade. She asked him if he ever had “little floaty things in her head that said No.” For example, she said, “Like when I say to myself there is a God and the floaty things say, ‘No, there isn’t.’ Or I say, ‘God loves me,’ and they say, ‘No, he doesn’t.'”

Bishop Matt realized that his daughter was describing her early experiences of doubt… and hastened to assure her that he was very familiar with the “little floaty things that say No,” and had been since childhood. 

He writes, ‘At one time or another, most of us have wondered about the existence of God, or God’s goodness, or God’s love for us personally. And doubt is not limited to the theoretical… 

‘On a more practical level, it includes questioning whether the way of life revealed in Jesus Christ is really the way to our fullest life and deepest joy. Is the way of gentleness, love, and forgiveness really the way? Whether they are theoretical or practical, the questions are bound to arise. What do we do with the little floaty things that say “No”?’ 

Then he proceeds to offer some reflections on doubt. First of all, he says, “Do not be ashamed, embarrassed, or afraid of your doubts. They come with the territory and actually act as a spur to spiritual growth. Frederick Buechner calls doubts, ‘The ants in the pants of faith.’” I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what to make of that quotation – if I had ants in my pants, I’d probably take off the pants. But I do agree that doubts and questions can spur us to deeper seeking. 

Bishop Matt continues, “On the other hand, beware the snare of pride. It is easy to become self-satisfied for being so clever and sophisticated as to see all the difficulties with faith for ‘thinking people.’” Maybe you’ve run into this too – the person who thinks they’ve popped the illusory bubble of faith by pointing out, for example, the fact that children suffer. As if deeply intelligent, wise, and faithful people haven’t been grappling with understanding suffering in light of God’s goodness for literally thousands of years. 

Don’t be surprised by doubt, Bishop Matt advises. He says, “[Doubt] is part of the conversion process. The gospel is, after all, foolishness and a stumbling block. When the values and biases of the gospel conflict with the values and biases of this world into which we have been enculturated, there will be tension… 

That is true whether the prejudices are intellectual, moral, or theological. That tension leads to doubt. It also leads to a choice. Which biases am I going to live by?”

Let me give an example. The Litany of Repentance we prayed together in Lent invites us to repent of our “prejudice and contempt towards those who differ from us.” When I look at my life and my heart, I see those places where my inclination, undisciplined by my faith, is to look down on some person or group, or just not to care about them very much. Those are biases received from my society, and they are at odds with the values of my faith, which stubbornly insists that every human is beloved and worthy in God’s eyes – even if they think or do some laughable or despicable things. If I’m trying to follow Jesus, I have to commit to the hard work of seeing everyone’s worth. (Which is not the same thing as never telling someone that they’re wrong, setting boundaries or holding someone accountable.) 

So, yes – one of the friction points of faith is when it’s at odds with how we might live our lives without those convictions and commitments. That can be uncomfortable terrain, but it’s also important and fruitful.  

Bishop Matt goes on to suggest that we should be skeptical of our own skepticism. He writes, “We live in a skeptical age. It is quite easy –  and comfortable – to be a complacent skeptic. But, the bases of many doubts are also subject to doubt… Nothing that matters can be proven beyond a shadow of doubt. Truth can only be demonstrated by the living of it… Unless we are willing to doubt our doubts, our doubts can become merely excuses to avoid the implications of believing.”

Unless we are willing to doubt our doubts, our doubts can become merely excuses to avoid the implications of believing. 

And he continues: “Do not use doubt as an excuse not to follow Jesus or respond to the Spirit’s call. If I neglect to apply for a job because I doubt I will get it, I surely won’t. I can remain unchallenged and comfortable right where I am… 

Jesus calls us to follow just as he called the first disciples. We are left to choose whether we will or not. Thomas exemplifies this in chapter eleven of John’s gospel. When Jesus heads back toward Jerusalem to raise Lazarus, the disciples counsel him not to go because those who want to kill him are there. Jesus starts walking toward Jerusalem anyway. Thomas says to the others, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’ He had come to believe that following Jesus was the way to his deepest joy and was committed to following him and sharing his fate. The knowing often comes in the following.”

Let it be noted: That’s the same Thomas as in today’s Gospel! It makes a kind of sense that the depth and boldness of his commitment to Jesus in life, led to deep grief after his death – and to Thomas’ reluctance to believe too easily or quickly that Jesus had risen and returned. 

Bishop Matt observes that it’s important to recognize that “while faith has its difficulties, so do its opposites, unbelief and apathy. For example, the persistence of evil and suffering has been a perennial problem for those who believe in a loving God who desires our good. The problem is not solved, however, by removing God from the equation. The question is only changed to ‘If we are no more than the most recent byproduct of a cosmic accident, why do we care so much about the suffering of others?’ Or, even more problematic, ‘Why should we care?” Some people are starving. Others are tortured. If there is no God, and life is accidental anyway, why do I care so much? Why should I?’” 

Now, there are ways that people who don’t believe in God answer those questions. Many atheists are deeply ethical people. The point is that the existential questions remain, whether God is in the picture or not. 

Bishop Matt offers some suggestions about how to live with doubt. First of all, he says, “Talk to God about your doubts – even if it means starting your prayer with, ‘I’m not even sure I believe you are there . . .’ God is not afraid of your doubts or offended by your questions. After all, Jesus invited Thomas to examine and touch his wounds. [God] has promised [Their] love to you – no matter what. God would much rather have you spend time with [Them] asking hard questions than have you not spend time with [Them] at all.”

And in terms of spending time with God, he urges us to continue with “the discipline of regular prayer and worship… An intimate realization of God’s presence and love puts to rest a lot of the questions.” [I would say, it doesn’t necessarily put the questions to rest, but it can make them a little lighter to carry?] 

Bishop Matt: “Such a realization does not usually happen without some discipline and time on our part. We need to be trained to pay attention spiritually. As with physical discipline, it usually takes time to see the effects of spiritual discipline.”

By the way, our new Centering Prayer group continues to meet on Tuesday evenings at 7PM, if you’d like to try sitting in silence with others as one approach to practicing the presence of God. 

Bishop Matt urges us to remember “that the Church includes and has included many who have struggled with believing; you are not the first person to ask questions about the faith. It is helpful to find out, through reading or conversation, how others have answered – or learned to live with – particular questions.” 

Finally, he invites us to “recognize that there is mystery at the heart of it all. As Christians, we believe that God has spoken and acted definitively through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. But God has not seen fit to provide answers to our every question. And even the answers we’ve been given contain mystery….”

I don’t think Thomas, or the other disciples, left the room after meeting Jesus that day with a sense of having it all figured out. How it had happened, what it all meant, for them, for the world. When Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!”… he’s speaking in wonder, in awe. Even if and when we have such moments of deep connection with the Holy, we don’t walk away with everything sorted and settled in our minds – for good.  Doubts and questions are part of this path, part of choosing to try to follow Jesus in community. The best thing we can do is befriend our questions, invite them to pull up a chair and have a conversation. Because if there’s really a there there, then our doubts and uncertainties can’t hurt it. But they might lead us deeper – into reflection on self and world; into conversation with faith community, past and present; into empathy, courage, hope; into the presence of that holy Mystery that knows our names, welcomes us as we are, and loves us beyond measure. 

Big Questions, Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Sermon, March 10

Read the lectionary texts here! 

The story of the bronze serpent on a pole, from Numbers chapter 21, is one of those weird stories from the Bible that generally get left out of the Sunday morning lectionary, our calendar of assigned readings. BUT Jesus refers to it, in the single most famous passage from the Gospel of John – possibly from any of the Gospels. So here we are. 

What is going on in this story? Last week we heard God give Moses the Ten Commandments that were to guide the Israelites in their way of life as God’s people. LITERALLY number two was: You shall not make for yourself an idol – that is, an object that looks like an animal, that you then worship or treat as holy. I guess if God tells you to break a commandment, you break a commandment??

This text is old, but the story behind it is much older. We can speculate a little about what experiences might underlie the story. God’s people have fled from Egypt and are in the wilderness, perhaps somewhere on what we now call the Sinai Peninsula. They have a long way to go before coming to the fertile region on the Mediterranean coast where they will eventually settle. And while they’re on this long, long journey, they have a run-in with some poisonous snakes. 

I expect many of us have been stung by a bee or wasp at some point. Maybe a few have even been bitten by a snake. Generally in these cases there’s a disagreement about who belongs where. 

I’ve watched a couple of seasons of the reality show Alone, where people who think of themselves as having good survival skills are dropped off in deep wilderness with minimal supplies, and compete for who can hang on the longest before tapping out or being pulled out for medical reasons. 

Both seasons I’ve watched, the contestants are in serious bear country. And while – spoiler! – there hasn’t been a dangerous bear encounter, if there were – you couldn’t really blame the bear. The humans are the ones out of place, in that situation. 

The wilderness is, by definition, a wild place where people don’t usually go. Inhabited by wild creatures adapted to that environment – whether that’s far northern forest or the rocky desert of the Sinai. 

Remember the triangular covenant – the relationship between humans and the land, including its creatures, is tied up with the relationship between humans and God. So: It is not surprising that during this wilderness time, God’s people stumble into an area that some local snakes reasonably regard as THEIR territory. There’s a disruption here, an ecological dislocation, and it has consequences. 

The story could have been: The wilderness was really terrible; we were hungry and thirsty and hot and cold and tired and miserable; there’s clearly a REASON nobody lives out here. And then we came into a region with a lot of poisonous snakes, and they were NOT happy to see us, and it got even worse. 

Instead, the text makes sense of this experience through the lens of punishment. Maybe because the people are so unhappy, they assume these snakebites are proof of God’s anger at them. 

Why bad things happen is not a one-sermon question. 

But this story offers an opportunity to talk about a piece of it. 

The idea that the bad things that happen are God’s punishment for things we’ve done wrong sounds pretty awful and frightening. But it has a lasting appeal. 

It’s a strong theme in big chunks of the Old Testament – although there can be some real nuance to whether the various bad things that befall God’s people are described truly as punishments, or as the natural consequences of various bad choices. 

I’m not bold enough to say that significant parts of Old Testament theology are simply wrong to understand God as deliberately sending harm to God’s people as a punishment for their misdeeds. But I do think there’s a gradual shift within the Hebrew Bible towards understanding God’s purposes for humanity as redemptive rather than retributive. 

And it’s definitely hard to square the idea of divine punishment with what Jesus has to say about God – including right here in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Of course John’s Jesus goes on to say that those who don’t believe in him are judged – but the emphasis is on human choices, not divine retribution. Some people don’t want to follow Jesus because they don’t want to face, or change, their own harmful actions.

There are several times in the Gospels when people ask Jesus right out: Is this bad thing that happened, a punishment because somebody sinned? And Jesus says: That’s not how things work. 

Still: the idea of God punishing humanity has real staying power. It has an obvious appeal when we’re talking about our enemies or those with whom we disagree. Of course they had it coming, whatever “it” is! 

But it also has an appeal even for ourselves. 

The idea of punishment gives us an explanation for bad things that happen. I brought this on myself because I did X. And it gives us a sense of agency, of control. If this happened because of what I did, maybe I can make it stop happening, or prevent it from happening again, by what I do. 

A sense that there’s a reason for why this terrible thing is happening, and of agency or control, can feel really important when we’re facing big tragedies or struggles. I can definitely see the appeal, when the alternative is: Sometimes really bad stuff just happens, and there’s no good reason for it, and nothing you can do about it. 

As spiritual writer Annie Dillard puts it, “You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with God, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without God. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.”

There’s no opting out of the hurts and struggles and losses of life in this beautiful, broken world. I think often about a quotation from one of Sir Terry Pratchett’s books, A Hat Full of Sky. Speaking about a particular case of human suffering, the main character, Tiffany, says, “It shouldn’t be like this.” And an older, wiser character responds: “There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do.”

There isn’t a way things should be. There’s just what happens, and what we do. It’s not that Sir Terry didn’t have a sense of the good, the right, the just. He was a deeply thoughtful and compassionate person; his ethics shine through his goofy books, which is why so many people love them.

I think what he’s calling out here, in the voice of this character, is a tendency to spend our energy on outrage at the gap between what is and what we think should be. Instead of accepting what is, and focusing our energy on how to respond in a way that edges reality towards better. 

There’s an overlap here with contemplative spirituality. I preached a few weeks ago about my learning and new practices in that realm. “There’s just what happens, and what we do” is a call to attention, to listening to what is – and then discerning our response, from a place of clarity. 

This is probably not an everybody thing, but I also don’t think it’s just me: I do notice a real difference within myself when I shift my focus from arguing with the situation, whatever it may be, to accepting the situation and reflecting on my response. What is mine to do, here. 

There’s an overlap, too, with what some of us are reading in Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s book On Repentance and Repair. In the framework of the great Jewish thinker Maimonides, step one in the work of repentance is to acknowledge that you have caused harm. Ruttenberg points out that there’s also a step zero: coming to understand that you have caused harm. That can be a big journey in itself. It can demand open-hearted listening, deep emotional work, learning new perspectives, and more, to arrive at a place where you’re able to hear someone’s feedback or rebuke or invitation to amend something you have said or done. 

There’s a lot more to say about this book, but for now: The path onward isn’t arguing with the situation. It’s accepting the situation, and discerning what to do next.

Given this: what now? 

It is no picnic to live in this welter of colliding materials. To gaze unflinchingly on the wonder and ache of life in this world and know that purpose and meaning are shrouded in more mystery than we might prefer. To accept that humanity’s freedom and creation’s freedom and millennia of accumulated ideas and ways of being mean that we wake up each morning to an immensely complex muddle of fault and favor, consequence and possibility, inclination and choice, loss and belonging. 

Maybe it’s no coincidence that the church’s ancient posture of prayer is also, essentially, a shrug. 

The transactional, mechanistic mindset of punishment and reward makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t fix anything, and arguably makes some things worse, but it tells you where you stand. 

Maybe that’s why the Israelites kept the bronze snake. Much later, in the second book of the Kings of Israel, we hear that King Hezekiah undertook a big renovation of the Temple in Jerusalem. He had it repaired, and hauled out a bunch of junk, and re-established regular worship there. (2 Kings 18; 2 Chron 29). 

Among the things that were hauled out was the bronze serpent: “[Hezekiah] broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.” 

Nehushtan’s removal seems to have been part of a movement to  centralize religious practice at the Jerusalem temple and focus exclusively on Israel’s God, getting rid of other minor deities and cults. 

I find that interesting for its historical and anthropological aspects… but there’s also something here that makes deep sense spiritually and psychologically, if I may venture to speak outside my expertise! 

Keeping Nehushtan, worshipping Nehushtan, isn’t just worshiping a symbol of a time when God saved us. It’s holding on to a symbol of a time when we were really bad and God had to punish us. 

I can see how holding on to Nehushtan could appeal to a people trying to make sense of their history, the ups and downs, struggles and successes, in light of their understanding of themselves as God’s chosen people. 

I can also see how the things Nehushtan stands for could have an appeal for somebody at an individual level. 

There are lots of ways people may carry deep shame or a sense of deserving whatever hardship comes their way. People who’ve been scapegoated by a family system, people who’ve been treated in certain ways by a parent or partner, people who’ve been through particular kinds of suffering or struggle – may find a kind of safe haven in the idea that these things happened to them because they’re bad. The meaning and agency of the punishment paradigm can offer a kind of uncomfortable comfort. 

For folks marked by that kind of history, it can be real work to begin to take on board that you deserve grace and healing, and that a love worth having – human or holy – does not intentionally cause harm. 

I want to say one more thing about the bronze snake, our friend Nehushtan, and that’s to circle back to the analogy Jesus is making in our Gospel reading. When he talks about being lifted up like the serpent on the pole, he’s talking about his crucifixion – about the cross. 

A lot of Christianity tells the story of the cross in a way that’s actually pretty similar to the story about the snake. Humanity was and is a bunch of horrible, ungrateful wretches. So God sent the poisonous serpents of sin among us to chomp on us and make our lives even worse.

In order to appease God’s righteous anger, Jesus had to die on the cross. So we worship the cross, much like the bronze serpent. 

Christians wouldn’t say we worship the cross – rather, what it stands for – but that can be a fine line, let’s be honest! The cross is unarguably central to Christian symbolism and worship.

There are churches that really dwell on Jesus’ death on the cross as their core story, the place where they find meaning and truth.

There are churches that are really more comfortable with the empty tomb, the happy ending of Easter morning, and don’t want to think too much about the hard stuff before – or after. 

I like to think that at St. Dunstan’s, and in the Episcopal Church in general, we strike a pretty good balance of taking both Good Friday and Easter Sunday very seriously indeed. 

While the cross is perhaps less overwhelmingly central for us than for some other kinds of churches, it is central for us too. I mean – there it is. 

I would like the story of Nehushtan to lead us to reflect on what we think, what we feel, when we look at cross, or wear a cross, or sign the cross. 

Does the cross tell us that we are miserable wretches who only deserve God’s anger?

Does it remind us of moments when we have felt amazing grace? 

Does it tell us that we matter so much to God that God would pay any price to show us how beloved we are? 

Does it tell us that no matter the depths of pain, suffering, struggle, God is in it with us?

Does it tell us, in the words of Paul, that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength?

Does it tell us, in the words of Dr. King, that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality – that right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant? 

Does it tell us that love wins?

I invite us to wonder and notice together, as we turn towards the cross in these final weeks of Lent. Amen. 

Big Questions, Coronavirus, Sermons

Homily, March 22

Read the Gospel lesson here. 

Watch a video of the Gospel lesson, prepared for the Sunday school students, here. 

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, in order that he was born blind?” 

Before we really talk about this story, I want to pause and say that it’s important to note that in this story, blindness is clearly seen as a deficiency. This man’s blindness is there to be healed. 

We need to understand that in this context, there were really limited opportunities for anyone blind or otherwise disabled. For many, begging was the only option – a life, probably a short life, of poverty and dependence on the kindness of strangers. Today, many disabled folks would say that they’d prefer not to be seen as less-than, as people just waiting to be fixed. 

We used to have a member of this congregation who was blind. His name was Jerry. And once when we had this story about the blind man, I asked him: Does it bother you when the Bible talks about being blind like it’s a terrible thing? And he said, No, it doesn’t bother me. Being blind is just part of who I am. I met my wife because I was blind. I spent my life helping other blind people learn how to care for themselves. Being blind isn’t a burden for me, so I don’t mind how people talk about it. 

So, let’s just note that. 

But then let’s turn back to the disciples’ question. Rabbi, who sinned?…  It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about blindness, or dementia, or cancer, or infertility, or COVID-19. When we’re faced by something inexplicable – especially something that makes us frightened or sad – we look for a way to make sense of it, to understand why it’s happening. 

The disciples think – as many did at the time – that this physical misfortune must be somebody’s fault. A punishment for bad behavior. Did this guy mess up? If he brought this on himself, we don’t have to care… Or did the parents mess up? They usually do…

Jesus stops this logic in its tracks: Nobody sinned. This man’s blindness isn’t a clue about his or his parents’ behavior, purity or worthiness. That’s not how things work. 

Back in 2014, when I preached on this story, I walked through a lot of the ways people try to make sense of suffering, given our belief in a loving God. I’ve re-posted that sermon on our website and I invite you to read it, if you think that would be helpful. It’s pretty indebted to Francis Spufford’s chapter, from the book Unapologetic, about why bad stuff happens, because I think he does a good job of walking through the various explanations that we try on – the work they do, and their pitfalls. 

But in that sermon, I end up – as Spufford ends up – kind of saying that the question – why did this bad thing happen? – is a question that we move past. As Jesus moves past it, in our Gospel story: he doesn’t explain how congenital blindness fits into the created order. He just heals this man, and wanders off. 

Richard Swanson, a Biblical scholar to whom I often turn, wrote about this passage this week. And he, too, felt dissatisfied with how he’d handled it in previous years. 

He says, it’s not enough to just say the disciples’ question is misguided. 

Because while their framing is wrong – this man’s blindness is not due to anyone’s sin – their desire to understand isn’t wrong. Seeking causes is important. That’s how we’ve beaten the diseases we’ve beaten. That’s how we’ve dramatically reduced infant and child mortality within the past hundred years. How we beat back polio and measles and diphtheria. 

Asking why is part of how God made us, and it’s important. It’s one of our superpowers, as a species – our curiosity, our intelligence, our capacity for collaboration in pooling knowledge and developing solutions. 

Like many of our superpowers, we can take it in unhealthy and even hurtful directions. Like the folks who think this illness is a judgment on our nation or our world, a punishment for our collective sins. Like the folks spinning and circulating conspiracy theories, feeding our fear and mistrust of one another, when what we need most to survive this time is our connectedness. 

There is no tidy answer to the question of why there are things in Nature that can hurt us – earthquakes, hurricanes, broken genes, viruses. The best I can offer is a combination of a couple of ideas. First, Creation isn’t about us. The Scriptural tradition has known this for a long time; the strange, fierce nature poetry of the Book of Job says as much. The earth is not a garden to feed, tend, and protect us. We are not the center, the purpose, of it all. 

And second – a related but separate point – Creation, like humanity, is free, and dynamic, and alive. God isn’t controlling every tweak of viral DNA or creak of the tectonic plates, any more than God controls our every choice and action. God’s action as Creator is to make, and then to give us to ourselves – humans and oceans, bacteria and birds alike… 

That’s the best I can do, for the question of why a harmful virus can emerge. 

We’ll all have to ask God about it, when we get the chance. But there’s another great big category of Why that we can actively wonder about and grapple with. 

Swanson writes that in the face of our current crisis, “I do find myself asking “Who sinned…?” Just like the disciples, just like all people, I am driven to understand this situation and I want to understand how this novel virus works and how we can counteract it. And I want to know what we have done that has allowed it to spread so fast and so far.”

We can see the value of our human desire to ask Why, in the many good things that are happening right now. The virus’s DNA was sequenced really quickly. Scientists and medical professionals are exploring treatments to slow and mitigate the illness. And they’re working as fast as they can on potential vaccines – but vaccines take time to develop. Still, it gives me hope to know that literally, many of the smartest people in the world are working – working together – on beating the novel coronavirus right now. And we do have a head start; it’s not some alien, brand-new bug; we have dealt with other coronaviruses; there’s a lot they already know about this guy. Human curiosity, human intelligence, human collaboration will beat this bug. Eventually. 

But – and – some of the reasons it is so disruptive right now, why it has made many sick and will make many more sick, have to do with human actions too. 

I suspect there’s lots of blame to spread around, but certainly the slow pace of making widespread testing available in our country – something that could have been otherwise – is part of the landscape we’re living with now. We have to investigate all those causes too, eventually – to ask Why, and seek answers – so that we know how to respond better as a nation and world, next time. 

Our human impulse to question, to seek understanding, is driving us in addressing the human aspects of this moment, as well as the medical aspects. So many of us are asking:  What can we do to make the best of the situation we have? What choices and sacrifices can we make that will lead towards the least worst outcomes for everyone? What can we do to help those most affected – whether by illness or by the financial and logistical shocks of this situation? What can we do – down the road – to make sure this never happens again?

Swanson writes that the disciples’ question – “Who sinned?” – may be misguided, but the questions “of what we did wrong, of how we can design and maintain systems that will improve our response next time, those questions are basic to human nature. That is what we do. That is our real strength.”

There are no clear and satisfying answers to the things we’re all wondering right now.  But I’m finding hope and grace in these strange hard days nonetheless. 

In watching health care providers and scientists and public health professionals and political, civic, business and organizational leaders doing their absolute best to limit and mitigate the impact of this virus. In watching our collective readiness to do what we must, suffer what we must – and let’s not kid ourselves; this shelter-in-place life involves some suffering for ALL of us – for the good of those most at risk and our community as a whole. In seeing how much we are looking out for one another, checking in with one another, sharing with one another. 

I’m not trying to sugarcoat. Things are not OK and will not be OK for a while. But  the resilience, generosity, courage and grace I’m seeing day by day is sustaining me, and helping me remember that even in struggle, sickness, confusion, and loneliness, God sticks with us, and God made us to stick with each other. 

 

 

Read Swanson’s full commentary here: https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com

Big Questions, Sermons

Sermon from March 2014 – “Who sinned?…”

This sermon was composed and preached six years ago. I am re-posting it in case it is helpful to anyone else in these times. 

Read the Gospel lesson here. 

Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? It’s such a human question.  Why is this person suffering? Is it his fault? Can we blame the victim? You’d think we’d be over that, but it’s such an attractive idea that it keeps coming back – after all, if the person in pain brought the suffering on herself, then we don’t have to care, right?…

Well, if it’s not the victim’s fault, then whose is it? It must be somebody’s. Did the parents mess up? They usually do. Is Society at fault? The schools? Vaccines? Environmental pollutants? The President? God? … 

Suffering is the great problem of human existence, and oh, how we would like to be able to understand it, to explain it, once and for all.  If we can’t opt out of it, we would at least like to know what it means, why it happens. 

The 50-cent seminary word for this is Theodicy. Theodicy: the effort to explain why a loving God permits evil and suffering. If God is all-loving and all-powerful, then why do bad things happen? And especially, why do bad things happen to the innocent and the good? 

People of faith have tried out many, many explanations, whether trying to make sense of suffering far away or close to home. In his book Unapologetic – the one I keep telling you to read – Francis Spufford runs through some of the more popular theodicies, the ways people have tried to reconcile the reality of a cruel world with their experience of being cherished by a loving God. Spufford says, “Theodicies try to justify God by justifying the cruel world. They vary, but they have one thing in common: None of them quite work. None of them fare well enough against the challenge of experience… to let us lay the issue [of suffering] to rest,  to let us file it under ‘solved.’ Each tends to find some useful elements of truth to grip on to, but end up failing…by drawing a picture of the God of everything which is incompatible with love.” 

Explanation number one: People get what they have coming to them. Good things happen to good people. This illusion has a certain appeal if you lead a comfortable life, if you’ve never dealt with a serious crisis or loss, and if you can manage to disregard the extensive evidence, both in Scripture and in the voluminous text of human history, that innocent people – starting with infants and children – suffer and die ALL. THE. TIME. 

Living a good life, a just and ethical and loving life,  day by day and year by year – that is utterly and completely worth doing, for the well-being of your soul and of the world. But the world is not a gumball machine; dropping your good life like a quarter into the slot won’t get you the sweet sweet reward of easy living. It just doesn’t work that way. What looks like the simplest, cleanest, fairest explanation fails as soon as we hold it up to the harsh light of a single child’s suffering. 

Okay. So. We move on to other explanations. How about this one: We suffer because God is refining us.  Making us stronger, purer. Spufford says,  “The element of truth… here is that there are virtues which, quite genuinely, can only be developed by endurance. There truly are ways in which we need to experience bad things… in order to have selves which are strongly made.” 

We know this is true  because we have heard it affirmed by the only people with the authority to speak to it: people who have suffered greatly, and who say,  ‘I am who I am because of that suffering. I am braver, more compassionate, more thoughtful,  more focused, more faithful, because of what I have endured.’

But, Spufford notes, the idea that suffering might be distributed by God for pedagogical and character-building purposes cracks open and falls apart when we consider the distribution of suffering. Spufford writes,  “The ills of the world are not all neatly sized so that we can cope with them. It is not true that we are never tested beyond our power to endure.”

Suffering does not always help us grow, or make us noble. Sometimes it distorts and debases us. Sometimes it makes us into people who want others to suffer. Sometimes suffering makes us more;  just as often it makes us less. And sometimes, of course, it destroys us. When suffering does bring growth or deepening, I see that as evidence of divine grace at work, of God’s capacity and desire to bring good out of pain and loss. That doesn’t mean that God intends the suffering; only that, sometimes, God can redeem it. 

Here’s another one, Explanation Number Three: We suffer because God has a plan in which our suffering is necessary. The idea here is that God has some vast, profound, wise cosmic plan, and while we can’t see how this loss or that misfortune fits into that divine strategy, it’s only because our perspective is so limited. The helpful truth here is that God cannot be confined in time as we are; God’s perspective is unimaginably other than ours. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways not our ways. 

But again, if we understand God’s love as being at all similar to human love – then this explanation doesn’t carry us very far. I have a friend in another state who, years ago, suffered the miscarriage of a very-much-wanted pregnancy. Twin girls. She and her husband have three living children now, a houseful of noise and happiness. Does the loss she suffered make her a better parent now? Does she treasure her living children more, having suffered that loss? I don’t know. Maybe. Does that mean that God planned for her to lose those babies, knowing that eventually good things would come to her? … 

Spufford writes,  “If love is love, [if God’s love is like human love,] it can’t manipulate. It can’t treat those it loves as means to an end. Love is love because it sees the loved ones as ends in themselves, not tools or instruments to achieve some further goal. Suffering can’t be vindicated by a pay-off elsewhere.” 

How about this one? We suffer, but it doesn’t matter, because life is only a brief prelude to heaven. What you might call the pie-in-the-sky theodicy. Spufford deals with this one briskly:  “[This is] a comprehensive and instant fail, because whether or not you believe that heaven is real, this life certainly is, and so is the suffering it contains. …The only useful element [in this explanation] is a hope you can hang onto, that love with outlast trouble.” Beyond that, this explanation turns God into an emergency-room doctor who thinks it’s OK to take his time,  because you’ll get the morphine eventually.

The common element in all the explanations so far is that human suffering is in some way intended by God. Many Christians believe that, deeply; and I would never tell someone who finds comfort in the idea that there is a purpose for their suffering, that their mindset is theologically untenable. 

But it makes me worried, and sad, to see someone in pain who believes that pain is God’s intention, God’s desire. I can, I do believe in a God who brings good out of evil, wherever and whenever and however that is possible. I cannot believe in a God who intends evil, in order to break us down and break us open. 

Scripture teaches us to think of God as a parent, in order, I think, to teach us about God’s love through our own experiences of human love. Think of your own love for your child, your partner, your dear friend. When bad things happen, you support and comfort; you try to help them survive, and if possible, to learn from the experience, to grow and change. But you would never plan bad things for someone you love. To paraphrase Jesus, if even we, in our human limitations, know how to treat our children with love, then how much more so does God, our loving Parent. 

Which brings us to the explanations, the theodicies, in which suffering is NOT God’s intent. These explanations get more mysterious. More paradoxical. More slippery, perhaps. Perhaps less satisfying. There’s this one:  Suffering is the flip side of free will. God made us to be fully ourselves, wholly free, able to choose good and evil, so that we might choose relationship with God, instead of simply being dolls in God’s divine dollhouse.  

Again, our experiences of human love offer insight: We see those we love make bad choices, sometimes. We try to guide, encourage, support, comfort. But their choices are their own. Love does not coerce or manipulate. Does God watch us sometimes with the same thwarted tenderness we feel for one we love,  who is plainly taking a wrong turn? … 

But what, then, about suffering not caused by human choices? Earthquakes, plagues, typhoons, droughts? Leave aside global warming for a moment; these things have happened 

since long before humans began our complicated and destructive dance with our environment. The only possible answer is this: that the world is not entirely as God intended it to be. Perhaps, like us, Creation is free, to turn unfortunate corners, to make destructive choices. There are scientist-theologians who explore these possibilities and paradoxes. 

The important element of truth in this theodicy is the reminder that the creation is not the same as the creator. Spufford writes,  “God may sustain it all, God may be its bright backing, … but Creation is not God, it is in some utterly mysterious sense what happens where God isn’t.” 

It’s helpful to remember that… but, in truth, all of this only brings us back to the original question: Why does God permit suffering? Why doesn’t God fix the world, kick butt and take names, straighten the whole business out, once and for all? … 

How, then, do we deal with suffering? How do we deal with the heartbreaking contradiction between a loving God and a cruel world? How do we understand the unfairness of a child born blind, or whatever lack or grief or hurt troubles our hearts? Well… ultimately, we don’t. 

Spufford writes,  “[For many believers,] the question of suffering proves to be one of those questions which is replaced by other questions, rather than being answered. We move on from it without abolishing the mystery. … We don’t ask for a Creator who can explain himself. We ask for a friend in time of grief, a true judge in time of perplexity, a wider hope than we can manage in time of despair.”

In the face of those things that break us down, break us open, explanations don’t help much anyway – neither good ones nor bad ones ease our rage or sorrow. The only comfort that can really touch us is the comfort of feeling that we are loved. Spufford wraps up his survey of theodicies here: Given the cruel world,  it’s God’s love song we need most, to help us bear what we must; and, if we can, to go on loving.

But Spufford has one more thing to say. Every faith that trusts in a loving God deals with the problem of suffering. Each faith has its distinctive answers. Our distinctive answer, as Christians, is a person, and a story. He writes, “[As Christians,] we don’t say that God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem, but we have a story.” The story of God wearing a human face, sharing in human experience, human love, human pain.

In these weeks of Lent,  we prepare ourselves to tell that story again, to receive it in all its grueling beauty. Whatever suffering you carry, great or small, near or far, bring it with you as we walk together towards the cross, and towards what lies beyond. 

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense,  Faber and Faber, 2012. 

Big Questions, Current Events, Sermons, Spiritual Practices

Sermon, Jan. 12

Note: We read the entire 10th chapter of the Book of Acts this morning in worship. 

This story from the book of the Acts of the Apostles always brings to mind a favorite memory. One summer during my grad school years, several of my college friends and I rented a house on the beach in North Carolina for a few days, to hang out and reconnect. These were my church buddies, friends from the Episcopal campus community in my college town. Several of us had arrived and were settling in when my friends Jay and Spencer drove up. Jay rushed in and demanded to see a Bible immediately. (This was before Smartphones. Sometimes you just had to wonder about things for a while.) We found one and he looked up the tenth chapter of Acts. Meanwhile Spencer explained: In a Burger King along the way, they had seen several members of a church group, all wearing T-shirts that said in big letters across the back: ARISE.  KILL.  EAT. And a Scripture citation: Acts 10, verse 13. 

Now, ARISE, KILL, EAT, didn’t sound like any summary of the good news of God in Christ that we’d ever heard. And none of us knew the Book of Acts well enough to recognize the story from those few words. But you, of course, know what those words are about. They’re part of Peter’s vision – a message from God, a revelation that the categories that had bound Peter’s thinking and behavior in the past were passing away. (I still think it’s a weird thing to put on a T-shirt!) 

This story is sometimes named as the Conversion of Cornelius. But I think it’s really more about the conversion of Peter – Peter’s realization that the God made known in Jesus Christ shows no partiality. Partiality – a funny word; we don’t use it much. Somebody might say they’re partial to chocolate ice cream. Well: What Peter discovers in today’s Acts story is that God isn’t partial to any group of people over any other group. God doesn’t play favorites. God doesn’t like this one better than that one, just because of who or what they are. 

It’s a wonderful, profoundly important insight.  And what’s just as wonderful is that Peter has it. Peter was one of Jesus’ first disciples. We know him by the name Jesus gave him – the Rock – Peter in Greek, Cephas in Aramaic. We’ll hear that story next week, actually! In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus explains the nickname this way: “On this rock will I build my church.” It makes it sound like Peter is getting this nickname because he is so steady and solid. 

Well… maybe. We know Jesus could look right into people and see their hearts.

Peter’s original name, the one his parents gave him, was Simon, which means “hearing.” Maybe Jesus looked at Simon and thought, This one hears about as well as your average rock!… And he’s about as likely as a rock to change his mind. 

Now, pig-headed – rock-headed people have their uses. Someone who holds onto an idea or a vision with great determination and faithfulness can be just the right person to do something really hard, like starting a whole new religion, in the face of persecution. Peter did become one of the foundation stones of the Church. 

But walking with Jesus wasn’t always easy for someone like Simon Peter, who is not … nimble in his thinking, and takes a while to arrive at new understandings. The Gospels are full of stories about Peter being just a little slow on the uptake. He always thinks he’s got it – and he so rarely does. When Jesus talks about how hard it is for wealthy people to enter the kingdom of heaven, Peter’s the one who says, “We’re poor, Jesus! We left everything to follow you! So what are we gonna get?….” 

When Jesus appears to the disciples walking on the water, Peter’s the one who says, “Jesus, I want to walk on water too!” And of course he ends up getting soaked…  

When Jesus talks about his coming death on the cross,  Peter’s the one who says, “You’ve got to stop talking like this! You’re bringing everybody down!” Jesus has to rebuke him:  You’re seeing things from a human point of view, not God’s.

 

Peter is the only one of the male disciples brave enough to follow Jesus to the High Priest’s house after he is arrested. But he loses his courage, afraid to follow his friend to death, and denies knowing him – three times. When he and Jesus meet again, beside a lake, after everything, Jesus asks him three times: Do you love me? And tells him three times: Tend my sheep. 

Jesus knows his friend well. He knows it’s a good idea to hammer the point home. Maybe by the third repetition, it will get through Peter’s rocky head and settle into his big, loving, faithful heart. 

And Peter does tend Jesus’ sheep. He preaches Christ crucified and risen to the crowds, to the authorities, to anyone who will listen. He becomes a great and gifted leader. He goes to jail and suffers for his faith. Simon the Rock has got an idea in his hard head: Jesus called me to lead and protect his church. And I’m going to do it. 

One of the threats to Jesus’ church – to Peter’s church – is a fellow named Paul. Paul didn’t even know Jesus; he used to persecute Christians. Now he’s going around preaching to non-Jews, telling them they can become Christians without following all the religious practices of the Jewish people. Peter is not so sure about this. Jesus was a Jew, and all the disciples were faithful Jews. Peter fears that Paul is preaching cheap grace and wishy-washy warm fuzzy inclusion, and letting just ANYBODY in. 

Then something happens to Peter. We just heard the story. He has a vision of all kinds of animals – many of which are unclean and not to be eaten, in Jewish dietary law. Peter says, God, I will not eat these things; I am a faithful Jew; I have never eaten anything unclean! And a divine Voice says, What God has made clean, you must not call unclean. 

Then the messengers from Cornelius arrive – Peter follows them to Caesaria – Cornelius and his household gather to hear Peter’s preaching – and he begins with this new insight, this new revelation: I truly understand that God shows no partiality. EVERY person everywhere, no matter who or what they are, if they honor God and live with justice, they are acceptable to God. 

(A brief word on “acceptable”: It sounds kind of minimal, right? Like, just barely good enough. It really means something more like proper or appropriate. It’s used elsewhere for things like the acceptable sacrifice to God; the acceptable time for God’s action in the world. Acceptable, here, means: Just right for God.) 

In today’s story from the book of Acts, a big new idea has finally gotten through

the apostle Peter’s rocky head: The Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, isn’t just for Jews – it’s for everybody. God’s love isn’t just for this nation or that nation. What God has made clean, it’s not the business of the church or its leaders to call unclean. When God opens a door, it’s never our business to close it.

Today is the first Sunday in the church’s season of Epiphany. Epiphany means, Revelation. A light-bulb moment. A new understanding of faith, self, world. Our Epiphany lessons are full of big revelations: The revelation to the Magi, those eastern astrologers, that a great King was born in Judea. The revelation that Jesus is God’s beloved Son. This revelation to Peter: I truly understand that God shows no partiality. God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. 

Receiving a revelation is one thing. Living in that new way of seeing and being, is another. God shows no partiality – but humans are really good at it. We have a strong propensity to create us-es and them-s, insiders and outsiders, to draw lines and build walls. We use different standards to judge those whom we see as our kind of people, and those whom we see as other. There’s a lot of science that explores this tendency, and lots of history that illustrates it. 

And not just history, but headlines. Partiality is in the rhetoric of war: enemies and allies, winners and losers. We forget over and over again Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom: “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.” 

Partiality is in what lives we allow to matter to us – Iraqi, Canadian, Honduran, Puerto Rican (which is to say, American). It’s in the antagonisms and manipulations of the election cycle. Did you know we are much more likely to fall for false or manipulative news coverage that’s in line with our biases? We’re less critical and careful readers when we are reading positive stories about those we already like, or – more commonly – negative stories about those we don’t like. 

Partiality shows up in force at public hearings about workforce housing and school zoning – folks who think they’re just concerned about their property values; who don’t understand – or don’t want to understand – how residential segregation perpetuates racial and economic inequality. 

Partiality takes one of its most monstrous forms in resurgent anti-Semitism and emboldened white supremacy. 

I truly understand that God shows no partiality. God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. 

The heart of discipleship, of faithful living, is trying to live lives that reflect God as we have come to know God,through Jesus Christ and the witness of Scripture. God tells God’s people, right from the start: Be holy, as I am holy. Peter learns that part of God’s holiness is that God loves without boundaries. God’s welcome, God’s care, God’s call are for everybody. Therefore, as Christians, we are called beyond partiality. To be a people who do not call anyone unclean, profane, unworthy, or unimportant. 

What does it mean for you to grapple with that call, in this year, this season of the world? Maybe it means coming to the Saturday Book Group this week to discuss how to talk with people with whom we disagree; or to the Witnessing Whiteness series beginning in March, for white folks to explore what our whiteness means. Maybe it means trying to listen to why somebody else’s favorite candidate is their favorite. Maybe it means pausing to grieve far-away hurts and losses – letting them touch our hearts, even though it hurts. Maybe it means something as small as looking around at coffee hour or the Peace, this morning, for the people who are standing alone.

Being anti-partiality isn’t wishy-washy or weak. It’s bold and hard, and there is a lot of work to do. But if Peter, the Rock, could overcome his biases, and rejoice in finding God among those he’d seen as outsiders – then so can we. 

May the God who calls us to holiness, grant us wisdom and courage for the living of these days. Amen. 

Big Questions, Creation Care, Sermons

Sermon, Sept. 22

O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the air for food, the flesh of your faithful to the wild animals of the earth. (Ps 79:1-2)

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? (Jer 8: 21-22)

The book of the Prophet Jeremiah and Psalm 79 are texts of conquest and exile. 

Jeremiah was born around the year 626 before the birth of Jesus. The days of the great united Kingdom of Israel under King David were long past. The Assyrian Empire had conquered the northern region in 720. Judea, the territory around Jerusalem, remained nominally free, but fell under Assyria’s authority in 700, as part of their empire, forced to pay tribute and obey their rulers. When Assyria fell and Babylon arose, Judea got tangled up in a war between Babylon and Egypt, and then became part of Babylon’s growing empire. Judah revolted against Babylon, first in 598 and then again ten years later. Both times, Babylon won. And after the second revolt, in the year 587, they made sure there wouldn’t be a third one. The city walls were torn down, the great Temple burned. Most of the people of Jerusalem and Judea were killed or exiled. Those exiles, the survivors, struggling to build new lives in Babylon, had endured a decade of active military threat, and over a century of domination by external powers.  

The book of Jeremiah and Psalm 79 are  texts of trauma.

Trauma here refers both to shocking negative events that overwhelm one’s immediate capacity to cope, but also to the ways such events affect us for the short, medium and long term. These Biblical texts bear the marks of traumatizing violence, loss and displacement, as they tell the story of an event so pivotal in Jewish history that it is described in at least five different places in the Old Testament. 

The book of Jeremiah largely dates to the years before the conquest – the prophet is warning Judah and its leaders of their approaching doom, and begging them to change course. But Jeremiah’s prophetic mission extends into exile – and as his prophetic texts were gathered into a book during and after the exile, those ancient editors may have added their memories of devastation to the prophet’s oracles of warning. As for Psalm 79 – we think of the Psalms as coming from the time of David’s court, and some of them do; but others were written centuries later, like this one, which clearly describes the fall of Jerusalem – with a vividness that makes it hard to read. 

What does it mean to call these texts of trauma? What can we read from them, through that lens? First, it helps us understand this sometimes horrific imagery. One common after-effect of trauma is intense and intrusive memories, that may overwhelm the survivor at times. When our psalm speaks of blood poured out like water, or when Jeremiah speaks again and again about dead bodies scattered in the fields, food for carrion birds and wild animals, with no one left to bury them – I think that we are hearing the memories that haunt these survivors and shatter their sleep, even years afterwards. 

Understanding these as texts of trauma also helps make sense of the strong themes of guilt and shame. Excessive guilt is a common response to trauma. It’s actually a way to try and make sense of what happened, and why it happened, by assuming responsibility. As horrible as it is to think that a tragedy was my fault, it may be easier than thinking it was nobody’s fault. The book of Jeremiah spends a lot of time explaining the violence that has fallen upon Judah by describing their collective misdeeds and failures. The word “shame” appears 34 times in the book of Jeremiah, and the word “guilt” another 13 times. Just a few verses before today’s passage, the text says, “I will give their fields to conquerors, because from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely. They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall. (Jeremiah 8, selected verses)

Not only the idea of Judah’s guilt, but the idea of God’s punishment, are cognitive tools for making sense of disaster. Scholar Kathleen O’Connor has written about trauma in the book of Jeremiah. She argues that making God the agent in the devastation of Judah means that neither the gods of Babylon – nor random, cruel Fate – have triumphed. Even in conquest, even in exile, Judah remains, as always, under the authority of its God. 

Holding onto a sense of God’s presence and power was important because trauma can shake or shatter your worldview and sense of who you are. Clinical psychology and trauma scholar Amy Mezulis says that violent loss “breaks past that… barrier that most of us have that says ‘This isn’t how the world works’ or that life is sacred.” After trauma, the world may feel unpredictable and unsafe.  It may feel impossible to engage with normal life events, or imagine a future. Life may feel hopeless and overwhelming, long after the actual traumatic events are over. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician who can heal my people? 

And yet… Trauma does not get the last word.  With support, and love, and time, and luck, people can heal. People can grow. They will always carry the mark of what they have been through. But they may be able to integrate it into a new sense of self and  world. I’m in tender territory here, which some of you know far more intimately than I do, and I’m speaking with humility. But the literature suggests there can be good outcomes for people who come through significant traumas, whether individually or as a group. They may arrive – with support, love, time, and luck – at a  stronger sense of connection with loved ones and community; and at a new sense of meaning and purpose. We can see this happening late in the Book of Jeremiah, and other books of the post-Exile period. Watch for that in the weeks ahead!

The exiles lost SO much – but they survived, and their faith survived. They discovered that God was not left behind in the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple. They began to see that God’s presence and promise and plan were bigger than any one nation or people. Kathleen O’Connor calls the book of Jeremiah a “survival manual” for how to maintain life, faith, and hope, after profound loss. 

What will you do when the end comes? The prophet Jeremiah asks that chilling question in chapter 5. What are the gifts of these texts of trauma? What will you do when the end comes?

We live in a time of impending crisis. It has a name: the Anthropocene. The epoch in which human activity is massively altering the conditions of life on earth. It’s characterized by dramatic, short-term, localized crises; and the slow, stealthy global crisis of climate change we all share. We have always had hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards. But climate change makes those systems more intense and destructive, and less predictable – like the intense hurricane drowning Houston this week, or the deadly flooding in Wisconsin last August. 

At the same time, the long-term, large-scale impacts are becoming more visible, bit by bit, if we pause to notice. Dan Zak writes in the Washington Post, “There is no crisis, just an accumulation of curiosities and irritants. Your basement now floods every year instead of every five or 10 years. Your asthma has gotten worse. You grew up wearing a winter jacket under your Halloween costume in Buffalo, and now your kids don’t have to. The southern pine beetle that once made its home closer to the equator is now boring through trees on Long Island… We freak out, but go about our business. The problem is clear, but it has yet to consume us.”

I recently read a journalist who covers climate change, David Roberts, reflecting on how our nation might respond to future mass traumas. He reflects on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and concludes that in that case, in hindsight, we did not respond terribly well. We let our rage and need for revenge – our shared trauma – lead us into endless and senseless wars; into tolerating surveillance that chipped away at our privacy and civil rights; into a demagogic and scapegoating mode of political discourse. Roberts writes, “Climate change is, above all, going to manifest as a series of traumas — storms, heat waves, food shortages, mass migrations, [and so on.] …Our only hope is to react to trauma with grace, compassion, and solidarity. That’s what I would like to tell the [teenagers] of the world: you are going to be tested, again and again. Don’t be like your parents. Don’t be small; don’t retreat behind tribal walls; don’t wallow in rage and self-righteousness. Be better. You have to be, or we’re all [screwed].” 

Today’s Gospel parable is one of the more perplexing of its kind. But it does show us one thing to do when the end is coming, when you’re about to lose everything – job, status, income, way of life all at once. The dishonest manager doesn’t despair, and he doesn’t run. Instead, he tries to build relationships, so that he isn’t facing an insecure and diminished future alone. What will you do when the end comes? 

Being a church-going Christian means a lot of things. One is that we’re in a living relationship with an ancient text. If you’ve been coming for even a few weeks and paying even some attention, you carry around inside you stories and songs and laments and advice and poetry that range from 2 to 4000 years old. That gives us a somewhat unusual historical perspective. As I told a friend this week: if NOTHING else, the Bible shows you that God’s people have been through some stuff. Our faith ancestors survived traumatic loss and epochal change. They had to come through struggle to new understandings of God and world and self. Maybe we can, too. Maybe the poetry of grief and perseverance that they left for us can give us courage to face this season in the life of the world. 

Because, writes Kate Marvel for On Being, courage is what we need for the days and years ahead. “I have no hope,” she says, “that these changes can be reversed. We are inevitably sending our children to live on an unfamiliar planet. But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief. Even while resolving to limit the damage, we can mourn. And here, the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort: we are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale and inevitability, binds us into one, broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere. We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending….  [Because] here we are, together on a planet radiating ever more into space where there is no darkness, only light we cannot see.”

 

SOURCES

An overview of trauma: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/

On mass trauma: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencenews.org/article/what-we-know-how-mass-trauma-affects-mental-health/amp

Walter Brueggemann review Kathleen O’Connor’s book on Jeremiah: https://www.christiancentury.org/reviews/2012-04/jeremiah-kathleen-m-o-connor

Dan Zak on climate change: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/everything-is-not-going-to-be-okay-how-to-live-with-constant-reminders-that-the-earth-is-in-trouble/2019/01/24/9dd9d6e6-1e53-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html

David Roberts’ thread on 9/11 and climate crises: https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1171915448088256512

Kate Marvel for On Being: https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/

Big Questions, Sermons, Spiritual Practices, Stories

Sermon, August 4

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a story about a rich man who has so much grain he doesn’t know what to do with it. He has to think and think. And then he has an idea!  What’s his idea?…  (discuss) 

What else could he have done?…  (There was money in those days, but our whole system for turning stuff into money and then keeping the money wasn’t developed yet. There were things like banks but they weren’t as safe or reliable; a lot of people would just keep their money themselves, but there were a lot of problems with thieves, too. So, “sell it and have money instead” might not have been as good an option… Anyway, that’s not what Jesus is doing with this story. The man has more than enough; turning it into money and putting it in a bank is kinda just a more sophisticated way to build a bigger barn.) 

Why might he have not wanted to give it away? (Some ideas: It might encourage people to be dependent; Maybe they don’t deserve it; they should work for their own money; maybe he doesn’t know any poor people; maybe he’s afraid of the poor people he does know…) 

So the man decides to build bigger barns! To keep his surplus, and use it to enjoy himself. Good plan! But then… he dies! His death isn’t a punishment. It’s just a thing that happens: people die. Rich people, poor people. For this man, his wealth had become the whole meaning of his life.. but as they say: You can’t take it with you.

So, Jesus tells his friends, don’t be preoccupied by the things you think you need. There’s more to life than food, and more to the body than clothing. He points to the ravens: they don’t work in the fields, but they seem to find enough to eat. And to the lilies: they don’t spin or sew, but their clothing is more beautiful than anything any human could create. 

Jesus says, Don’t chase after stuff. Chase after the Kingdom – God’s kingdom of mercy and justice, righteousness and peace. Keep your focus on what matters, and other things will fall into place. 

Now, let it be noted that Jesus was prone to wandering the countryside with nothing but the clothes on his back. So his notion of having what you need might not line up with ours. But Jesus was not an ascetic. An ascetic is someone who practices severe self-discipline, abstaining from most material comforts – with minimal shelter or no shelter; very simple clothing – even intentionally uncomfortable clothing; and likewise very simple food, and often some fasting. 

Asceticism is found in many religious and spiritual traditions around the world. John the Baptist is one familiar example for Christians. He lived in the wilderness outside Jerusalem, wearing a camel hide instead of woven garments like most people of the time, and eating what he could scavenge, including wild honey and grasshoppers. 

That was not Jesus’ jam. During the three years of his public mission, he was dependent on the kindness of strangers. He definitely traveled light. But he would absolutely enjoy a good meal when it came his way. People complained about this. People said, “John the Baptist didn’t eat or drink, and we thought that was weird – but now this Jesus fellow seems like a glutton and a drunkard, who hangs around with tax collectors because they put on lavish feasts with money stolen from the rest of us!”  When a woman pours expensive oil over Jesus’ feet, an act of devotion, some of his own disciples complain – because it would have been better to sell the ointment and give it to the poor; we don’t need these bodily indulgences anyway! 

But Jesus, God made human, likes the world. He likes things like good food, good wine, and sweet-smelling oil. He doesn’t think that stuff is bad, inherently flawed or sinful. He does, however, think that we humans are prone to letting that stuff become far, far too important to us, letting it take over our days and our hearts. He asks questions about wealth: What are you doing with it? Who is it benefiting? Who’s it hurting? What would happen if you had less? And who’s in charge here, really – you or your money? You or your stuff? 

Your life does not consist in abundance of possessions. The Greek word translated “abundance” here really means “too much.” Excess. Overflow. Surplus. Superfluity. Like in the story: the man has more grain than his barns can hold. 

I have a friend in another state who sometimes helps families clear out people’s homes after a death. She was telling me recently about how heartbreaking it can be to see how much stuff people have just accumulated. Not to enjoy; just to have. One woman kept the tags on every garment in her closet until she wore them. She could see how much each item had cost, tally her personal worth in name-brand clothing. As Jesus says elsewhere, Wherever you keep your treasure, that’s where your heart will be, too. 

It’s understandable; we tell women that their appearance and wardrobe are a big part of how people will judge them. We also tell women that shopping is an acceptable way to handle stress, anger, or pain. We normalize it, make it cute, with words like “retail therapy” and “shopaholic.” 

It’s not just a lady thing; men are subject to the same forces, the same manipulation of our desires, though it may manifest in different ways. It’s also not a rich-people thing; some people who are wealthy are incredibly level-headed and generous with their resources, and some people who don’t have much are especially vulnerable to the pull of possessions. 

Now, at the risk of sounding like a presidential candidate in a debate: I am not anti-capitalist. Capitalism can absolutely be a force for good. But it is simply objective fact that capitalism works by continuing to generate desire. If we don’t keep buying stuff, the machine grinds to a halt. Marketing, commercials, ads, are an integral part of the thing. 

That word I mentioned earlier that means excess, surplus, more than enough –  one of the things advanced capitalism does is make it really hard to identify that point. Because “enough” might mean we stay home from the mall and close the Amazon window in our browser. So marketing is always one step ahead of our desires – if you outpace the proverbial Joneses, there will be someone wealthier to measure yourself against. 

In today’s lessons, both Gospel and Epistle warn against greed. Greed is an unpleasant word. None of us want to think of ourselves as greedy. For some reason we mostly use the word “greed” in relation to food, but Jesus, whom his critics called a glutton, doesn’t seem to have any harsh words for people who enjoy a good meal. His concern is for people whose desire for wealth and material things has grown beyond their control, started to run their lives. 

The Epistle, this passage from the letter to the church in Colossae, says something really smart about it. It says that greed is a kind of idolatry. Idolatry – the great sin of the Hebrew Bible. It means worshipping something other than God. Putting something else at the center of your life and your heart – which is a double error: turning away from God, and also trusting in a thing, an inanimate object, which does not care about you.

There are some wonderful, darkly ironic passages in the Hebrew Bible criticizing people who are literally practicing idolatry. The prophet Isaiah describes a man cutting down a tree; he takes the wood and uses half of it to make a fire, to bake bread and roast some meat; with the rest of it he fashions a statue of a god, and bows down to it and worships it, saying, “Save me, for you are my god!” Isaiah says, This man is deluded; he can’t save himself and say,  “Isn’t this object in my hand a lie?”  (Isaiah 44)  

This is one of the endemic diseases of capitalism: it is so, so easy to let things that are just things become the center of our lives, the focus of our attention. They can’t answer or prayers. They don’t care what happens to us. They don’t love us back. No, not even the really *nice* things. 

Managing, mastering, our material desires is hard. It was hard in Jesus’ time. I honestly believe it’s harder in ours. Keeping our relationships with money and stuff in line with our values and intentions is one of the fundamental daily disciplines for Christians under late capitalism. (One of the appeals of asceticism has always been that some people find it easier to opt out entirely, and own NOTHING, than to stay in the system and keep making ethical and balanced choices!) 

So, what’s the good news, Miranda? Because this sounds HARD and discouraging!

I find it to be good news that Jesus sees and names this disease that is endemic in our nation. That he says, keenly but kindly: You can’t let stuff run your life. He speaks into something that so many of us wrestle with, whether it’s a manageable matter of budgeting and priorities, or a true addiction. 

I think it’s good news that God has compassion on our struggles with our impulses and desires, our misplaced priorities.Hosea, the source of our first lesson today, is a complicated book; but this is a beautiful passage. God speaking through the prophet describes Godself as a mother, raising a child in love, nurturing them, pointing them in the right direction. But people, even people we love very much, don’t always make good choices… and sometimes make very bad ones indeed. But God says to God’s child, God’s people: I can’t forget you; I keep loving you; I keep longing for you to come back. My heart and my womb ache for you. Come home. You will always be welcome. 

And I think there’s good news in today’s Epistle, though we almost missed it. The assigned lesson for this Sunday actually stops at verse 11 – that verse about how there are no fundamental differences among us in Christ. That’s good, important stuff!

But the next paragraph is this beautiful word to the church about how to share our lives as people of faith. And it’s not in the Sunday lectionary! It’s a recommended text for weddings – we used it at ours – but this is not just advice for couples; in fact that feels like missing the point in a big way. The first Christians understood churches as households – a group of people in a long-term relationship of care, who celebrate and grieve, raise children and care for elders, deal with conflicts and discern next steps, all together, as a body. 

The stuff that’s hard about daily life, then or now – we’re not supposed to be able to figure it out and manage it, all on our own. We’re supposed to have a loving, trustworthy household of faith, to wonder together, to find our direction and encourage one another. To share stories and struggles, ideas and hopes, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved; to bear with one another, and forgive one another when forgiveness is needed; to teach and admonish one another, in wisdom and with love; and to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God, with gratitude in our hearts, as thankful people, who can look to the lilies and the ravens, and know deeply that what we need is here.