Liberation Theology, Wealth and the Words of Jesus

18 Pentecost, C p 20, September 22, 2013  

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1  Psalm  79:1-9

1 Timothy 2:1-7   Luke 16:1-13

Lectionary Link

     Perhaps you have heard the phrase “liberation theology” in the media.  Liberation Theology is more generally associated with the Roman Catholic Church and liberation theologians did not have the favor of the two previous popes but there is some indication that Pope Francis, being from South America, the seed bed of Liberation Theology, is bringing the themes of liberation theology back into public view.  Pope Francis is indeed raising eyebrows by suggesting that Roman Catholics not make side issues the main issues and by suggesting that poverty and social justice are more important issues of the Gospel.

  What is Liberation Theology and why has it been controversial?  The controversy of Liberation Theology is due to the fact that theologians borrowed the social theory of Karl Marx to analyze wealth and poverty in society.  Since Marx was an atheist and his theory morphed into State Communism, some have disapproved of any use of Marx’s social analysis.  In Marx’s social analysis, the public propaganda and even the laws of a society function best for the advantage of persons with wealth and power.  The public beliefs statements are called ideology and ideologies were seen by Marx as the justifying reasons that are given for the wealthy to maintain and expand their wealth.

  Roman Catholic priests and religious in Latin America found themselves working among the poor .  They found that the laws worked against the poor.  They found even unhealthy alliance in places between the church hierarchy and the people with political power, the dictators.  When the compromise of church hierarchy with dictators supported the suppression of the poor, those who worked with the poor wanted to expose these conditions.  The liberation theologians did not believe that the church practices could be used to take the side of the wealthy against the poor.  In their theology, they agreed that all theology was ideology on behalf of some group with power.  So they asked the question what is the preferred ideology?  They answered, “The safe and preferred ideology is the ideology of Jesus Christ, and his teaching was overwhelmingly on behalf of the poor.”  Liberation theologians chose to read the Gospel as the infallible teaching of Jesus Christ on behalf of the poor.  And the Gospel of Luke is perhaps the favorite Gospel of liberation theology since there are poignant teaching upon wealth and poverty.  The writer of the Gospel of Luke was also the writer of the Acts of the Apostles and he depicts some of the early communities as living communally; holding all things in common.

  The punch line of the appointed Gospel for today is: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”  One can seek to know in an intuitive way the conditions in which the Lucan Gospel writer was writing.    One could cite the separation from the synagogues of early Christian communities.  Separation within families for loyalty to synagogue or to the Jesus Movement had attending socio-economic consequences.  Many people who were used to flesh and blood family support had to accept their new Christian communities as their extended families.  They had to choose to leave wealth and inheritance.  The writer of Luke is recalling the poverty life style of Jesus to give members of the community support in their choice to continue with the Christian community.

  And as I said before, Gospel writings are context specific, that is, their most telling significance was in their original settings.  The details of their setting cannot be absolutized or literalized to any future setting, including ours.  If we dismiss the literal significance of the Gospel, we do not dismiss the inspired meanings that derive from the Gospel situations but with our appreciation of Gospel meaning we add to that a request for God’s grace to help us apply the corresponding and relevant meanings in our own situation, here and now.

  You cannot serve God and wealth.  That may be true but does that make God totally opposed to any notion of wealth?  How can the wealth of this world be re-appraise as the gifts of God to us to be used for Gospel outcomes?  It need not be a matter of serving God or wealth but how do we make our wealth, our gifts, serve God and divine purposes in our world.  How do we make earthly treasure into heavenly treasure?  This is alchemy of our Christian faith today.  How do we make the wealth of our lives serve higher purposes for our own benefit and for the benefit of the people in our world?

  This is the stewardship question of our lives.  The parable about the dishonest manager is a parable about the adage, “Possession is nine tenth of the law.”  Even though the manager knew for whom he worked, he treated his boss’s assets as his own and used them for his own selfish purposes.  This “apparent absent boss” who trusted his manager so much that he did not do regular audits of his holdings eventually caught the manager red-handed, and the clever manager quickly prepared for  his firing by doing favors to creditors to ensure him future employment.  Jesus wished that people who could be such expert at greed would convert that energy to be equally diligent in their stewardship excellence for God.

  Today, we can come here and pretend that Gospels have salutary teachings about wealth and being wealthy.  We can come here and make saints out of poor people assuming that they do not have problems with wealth and money.  The reason poor people do not have problem with wealth is only because they don’t have as much practice but in their own way poor people also have problem with wealth and money.  We could even use the Gospel to insist that only true Christians are monastic persons adopting the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Or we can accept ourselves as belonging to God and that all of our belongings also belong to God.  We can accept ourselves as gifted people, as wealthy people but as those who are charged with using our wealth in the service of love and justice.

  Today, we can accept the wisdom of the right relationship to wealth as being generosity.  Generosity is expressed in our lives as bubbling with gratitude and such esteem that we believe that we have something to give to the people and situations of our lives.  Faith is expressed as generosity in our relationship to wealth.

  There are many worthy recipients for our generosity in this world.  Our generosity has many forms of wealth: our time, our talent, our treasure in many places of deployment.  At St. John’s we hope that you believe enough in our mission and what we are trying to do to build a vibrant Gospel community to deploy your generosity for our mission and ministry here.  Our needs change and our needs are real and we hope to inspire generosity because we depend so much upon generosity for our ministry.

  You cannot serve God and wealth.  Are you worried about the words of Jesus making you feel guilty about wealth?  We need not feel guilty about wealth if we convert wealth to heavenly treasure through the practice of generosity and gratitude  for the wonderful gifts of God.  The practice of generosity is the most liberating theology of all.  Amen.

Being Lost as Being Valued

17 Pentecost, Cp19, September 15, 2013

Exodus 32:7-14   Psalm 51:1-11

1 Timothy 1:12-17  Luke 15:1-10

Lectionary Link

   It is said that necessity is the mother of invention and there was a great human need:  The need to convince men that they needed to stop and ask for directions.  As men it is humiliating to admit that we are lost and so it is great blow to our ego to have to admit that and ask for direction and take the advice of our spouse to pull over and ask for direction.  And so now we have voice navigation through GPS devices in our phones and automobiles.  And irony of ironies, we men take directional advice from Siri and other women’s voices that give us directional advice and so women do have  the last laugh on the “lost” men of their lives. It is obvious that the parables that Jesus told about the lost cannot apply to men, since men never believe they are lost and now a woman’s comforting voice in a navigational system can help them maintain the illusion..

  The parables of Jesus about “being lost” provides us with a metaphor to give us some insights about the human condition.

  There is on the grand scale of things the mystical value of being lost.  When one stops for a moment and looks in the sky or at the oceans or at the mountains, one can compare oneself with the grandeur of the encompassing environment of Plenitude and in the humble moment of acknowledging the perspective of all things, one can feel lost in this Plenitude.

  Where do I fit in this vastness or as the Psalmist pondered, “What is man and woman that you are mindful of us.”  Indeed we can feel lost in the Plenitude of all.

  But being lost also has more poignantly felt contextual meaning.    “Being lost” is both bad and good news.

  The bad news about being lost is the sense of disorientation.  It means that nothing seems familiar.  It means that while you are lost, there is no one present to help you.  Being lost takes you away from the care of those who can help you.

  The good side about being lost is that if one is lost, by definition it means that the one who is lost is valuable to the one to whom one belongs.  Being lost means that you are valued and it means that someone is making the effort to seek you out.

  When Jesus came he found the emergency rescue services of the religious establishment to be completely lacking.  There were lots of people in Palestine who were not on the religious radar.  The message of the temple and synagogue was not accessible to lots of people. The religious leader regarded all of these people as being unacceptable to their religious message and Jesus believed that their attitude was a misrepresentation of God.  If these forgotten people were lost, the religious leaders did not know or care.

  Jesus said that these forgotten people were lost and they were worthy of rescue.  Why?  Because they were God’s creation and they were made in the image of God and so they were very valuable to God.  It is the responsibility of any who claims to represents God’s plan on earth to seek out all people who need to know that God loves and cares for them.

  So Jesus offered a resounding critique of the religious establishment.  And certainly that critique is still valid for all people of faith today who neglect the lost.  People of faith are supposed to understand the heart of God.  And the heart of God is to care for everyone.  And those who are lost from reach of care are to be sought out because they are valuable to God.  And if the lost are valuable to God, then they should be valuable to us as well.

  Our inability or unwillingness to recognize the lost is perhaps our greatest sin.  When we look at the puritanical sensitivities of our country, we find that sins that pertain to sexual behavior tend to be the only sins that people recognize today, while the scandal of poverty, illiteracy, injustice, illness and hunger seem to thrive without notice.  There are many people lost in our world in many ways and yet there is blindness or unwillingness of leaders to respond to the lost of our world.

   The message of Jesus was rather straight forward in his time:  God cares for the lost.  And his message is also this:  If we claim to be people of faith, we need to be people who seek out the lost ones, the ones who are valued by God and the ones who have fallen through the cracks of significant human care.

  We should be thankful about what Jesus shows us about the priorities of God.

  First, even in our lives of privilege, we too can feel at times lost.  Lost in loneliness or lost in a situation of loss or crises.  There are many times in our lives that we wish that we could know that God cares for us.  And in those times, the care could come from someone if they only knew about our dilemma.

  The parables of Jesus use the lost and found metaphor for the Christian mission of search and rescue.  But it is also a reminder that we too are often lost in a significant problem or dilemma of life when we need to be found by someone who cares.  Sometimes we find ourselves in need of being befriended by the right person who can get through to us and make us feel like we belong.

  Lost and found is a metaphor for life.  There are many people in life who at any given time are lost.  And there are many people who have the ability to be in the search mode.

  And the truth of it all is God is not going to directly intervene in getting to those who are lost.  God wants to inspire us to a sensitivity to look for the lost and the needy and let them know that they are valuable.  Why would God have so much faith in humanity to leave it up to us to fulfill the search and rescue mission in life that is needed to bring dignity of living to all people?

  God has faith in humanity because God values human freedom.  God has given us enough resources in our world to care for one another. We need to have the insights from our relationship to God to understand what our roles are to be in this lost and found dynamic of life.

  If you are feeling lost, I hope and pray that God will use someone to find you in the way in which you need to be found to affirm to you God’s love and care for you.

  There is another aspect of being lost that is addressed in the parables of Jesus in its specific context.  The tax collectors and sinners were people who obviously knew they needed to change their lives.  They went to Jesus for help and the religious leaders criticized Jesus for having anything to do with them.  So, in the thinking of Jesus, these lost people were valuable to God because they were seeking to change their lives.  The religious leaders were not seeking to change their lives; they were acting as though they had arrived at such a plain of perfection that they could judge the obvious sinners.  Through out the Gospels, Jesus is shown to be one who does not care what a person’s condition is, as long as a person is on the path of repentance or seeking to become better.  A person who is willing to repent is the one whom Jesus is seeking.

  Being lost and found is a metaphor for our lives.  Hopefully, life is showing us that we need to repent and in our efforts to repent, we need God to find us with grace and mercy.  And if we have found grace and mercy for our lives, let us be those who help God find those who feel lost from God’s love and mercy and from human care.  With God’s help you and I can become part of the search and rescue mission that God always wants to do in this world.  Amen.

Dying to Our Older Versions of Life

16 Pentecost, Cp18, September 8, 2013

Deuteronomy 30:15-20   Psalm 1

Philemon 1-20 Luke 14:25-33

Lectionary Link

   Let’s see if I want to follow Jesus and be his disciple what do I have to do?  Hate my father, hate my mother, hate my children, hate my brother, hate my sister, hate my life itself, actively seek capital punishment and sell all my possessions.

  How do we continue to read this in church and profess that the Gospels have family values?  It seems that we prefer Jesus to be all love and sweetness; how is it that word "hate" comes out of his mouth?  How can we hate our mother and father and still keep one of the 10 commandments to honor our father and mother?  How do we honor anyone by hating them?  Why do we not censor the reading of such within the church?  We don’t like to read publicly some of the most gruesome tidbits in the Hebrew Scripture but how is it that we can read these words of Jesus?  Should we censor the reading of the words of Jesus if they seem literally problematic?

  Many famous Christian saints have held that the most favored reading of the Gospel is the “plain reading,” the reading which is most literal.  However there are some words of the Bible that force us to read in different ways if we want to maintain our own value systems at all.

  With the enigmatic words of Jesus we scratch our heads and say that something must be missing.  These are words which are looking for a particular context to give them intuitive meaning.

  What we can say about the Jesus movement is that it was eventually divisive.  The Jesus School of Judaism became a different and separate religion.  And as we know from our own day, there is very little passion hotter than religious passions.  We are aware of lots of comments from Bible-believing public figures which make us wonder often if we are not threatened for a return to the dark ages of anti-intellectualism.

  The church did become separate from the synagogue for a variety of reasons.  The success of the Christian movement in the Gentile population and the adoption of Christian practices for Gentiles meant that the traditions of Judaism were threatened.  As a response the Jewish community began to excommunicate the followers of Jesus from the synagogue; they did not want to lose their traditions. Jewish families were caught up in this process of the separation of the Christian movement from the synagogue.  Prominent Jews became proponents of the mission to the Gentiles including both Paul and Peter.  Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 and so if one’s religion made one a rebel against Roman rule and Emperor worship there was even more at stake.  The political and religious times of the formative times of the Gospel writings were very unsettling.  We need to understand that the writings came from times of stress for the people who were seeking to understand their experience of the risen Christ within some very difficult times.

   Christ as an oracle within particular communities in the post-resurrection church was channeled by preachers who were presiding over people who had to make decision about leaving the families of their birth because of their new commitment to the risen Christ.  It was not an easy decision; their families probably thought that they were being traitors to the Jewish traditions.  They probably thought that they were being misled by charlatan preaching.  Followers of the teachings of Jesus probably were being threatened with being shunned and disinherited.  You can see how the selling of possessions is juxtaposed with this incredible family division.  A person had to worry about his or her financial future if one was going to cut ties with one’s family.  Having possessions and remaining loyal to one’s family went hand in hand.

  I wish I could tell you that the history of families, religious movements, social movements and countries were all peaceful and seamless.  The evidence of life is different.  We may regard ourselves to be religiously tolerant Americans and so we cannot understand the passion of religious difference or can we?  When someone child’s converts to another religion, parent’s often want to snatch their children to deprogram them and get them back into the “correct” religious fold.   We don’t like to hear the word “hate” used; it is a word that should be used for things that are truly despicable.  We are horrified by a certain church that pickets funerals of soldiers with “God hates” signs of all sorts.  Hate is a very strong word in our time.

  So how are you and I going to read these hard words attributed to Jesus?  We can read them as intended for one specific circumstance in history; some things do not bear to be repeated.  Some words never need to be applicable again.  All of the Bible does not have to have future one to one exact application; many of the words can simply remain the historical record of a single event in the history of a particular group of people.

  In another way of reading, I would like to think that the Gospels were spiritual manuals and probably not meant originally for general reading.  They were like enigmatic Zen koans or riddles; they were to be read with a spiritual teacher to reveal the inner meanings that arose when one’s character came to the time of insight.

  The operative phrase for me in this Gospel has to do with “hating life itself.”  Rather than being the unwitting promotion of suicide, this notion of life is not physical life, it is psuche or “soul-life” or psychological life.  Psuche is the Greek word from which we get the word psychology.

  Education and repentance is based upon not getting “stuck” in any version of life.  I live by Phil’s version of life at anytime.  Phil’s version of life is my psuche life.  Education is based upon being willing to let go of any version of life to take on another version of life.  So I am always in need of new versions of life for everyone and everything, including God and Jesus.  I need to hate or detest my yesterday’s version in order to be open to new versions.  I need to sell everything;  I need to give up any final investment of anything as a permanent possession so that I might take on new possessions.  This Gospel invites us to discontent with old versions so that we might be creative and inventive and find new ways.

  We need to die to old versions even of the important people in our lives otherwise we may let them have a power over us to determine our lives in ways in which we don’t want them to.

  If the risen Christ is going to have any significant meaning for you and me, it cannot be poetry with no evocative relevant meaning in our lives today.  Who is the Risen Christ?  What does it mean to say that you and I are in Christ?  Did these phrases only have relevance for the early Christians?  What do they mean for us now?

  The risen Christ and being in Christ for me now means the experience of the vision of myself surpassing myself in a future state.  And to get to that surpassing person I am going to have to pass through many versions of how I see everyone and everything, including myself.  So there’s a whole lot of living and dying through successive states or versions of my life.

  You and I are going to go through many versions of our lives whether we want to or not.  Our physical bodies and the constant changes in life will force different versions.  By trying to keep a particular version will mean that sometimes we assume we’re still looking through binoculars at the Grand Canyon when the Grand Canyon is no longer in front of us.  So we cannot make the right judgments in our situation because we’re still seeing through the favorite memory of a different view of life.

  The radical words of Jesus today invite us to this incredible life of repentance and education that we are involved in.  It is not boring; it is life and death.  We are dying to old versions of our lives like a snake getting rid of its skin, so that we might love new life and always answer the call to the beckoning surpassing life that is before us. 

  Our physical lives are constantly being changed; let us accept that our soul life, our psuche life is also being changed.  The Gospels use death and life as metaphors to trace this constant process of taking on new versions.  I hope you find new versions of your soul life today.  But don’t hold onto them; let them go because there are more versions to come.  Amen.

Topography; the Value of Places

15  Pentecost, Cp17, September 1, 2013

Jeremiah 2:4-13 Ps. 112

Heb.13:1-8        Luke 14:1, 7-14

 Lectionary Link

  In the appointed Gospel for today, we have read an account of Rabbi Jesus making some comments about human behavior at a party. He finds that the behavior at a party exposes some underlying motives and values that often determine human behavior.  Motives and values are a manifestation of desire.   Desire is the deep projecting energy of life that brings us to be attached to the things of our lives.  Projected Desire creates hierarchies of values, stated very simply as I like, I prefer this more than that.  I prefer to eat rather than to starve; this is one of the most basic hierarchy of values.  But it gets more complicated and elaborate than that: some prefer to get merely a piece of bread and a cup of soup or some prefer to have Beluga Caviar on Melba toast with Champagne.  Desire can get differentiated in many layers of values.

  A major value in life is found in the hierarchy of desire expressing where we want to be.  Making the scene, having the best seat to be able to hob nob with the people of money, power and influence; this is the value of place that Jesus was addressing.  Jesus noted that the party goers wanted the best seats in the house so they could be seen to be in places of honor and be associated with important people.  They wanted to be in the best place to schmooze; to connect and promote their cause or personage with the people who matter the most in society.

  Life in society and our lives in particular involve very intricate interactions in systems of topographical value.  Real Estate agents can tell you about the value of places; beach homes on Malibu; why do people want to be there? Such  high demand drives up the prices so that only a few can afford to be there.

  People want to be in front row seats, corporate boxes at sports and entertainment events.  Herein is an expression of the value of place, the value of topography.  Desire is projected upon preferred places because the kind of activities and events which occur in a place.  We value places for the activities and for the people who inhabit a place.

  Look at how we have words of value for places.  A place of value is often called a Mecca, after the Islamic holy place.  We have words that imply a pejorative judgment upon places, “the wrong side of the tracks,” slums, Skid Row and Ghetto.   We have terms of value that place negative judgments upon places that are avoided or segregated by certain people.  We may say that such places has undesirable people or people who frighten us; such places become for us places to avoid.  We cannot promote our influence and power in life by going to such places.

  You may say that I am reading too much into this party seating debate by Jesus of Nazareth but the wisdom of Jesus is that in the ordinary daily interaction he found that we live out the basic values of our lives and so when we zoom out from mere favored party seats to all of the topography of our lives, we can begin to see the values that are assigned, unwittingly to the places of our lives.

  Why are we here, not just in general but why are we in any particular place?  Why we here in this place now?  Obviously the preferred seats in an Episcopal Church are middle to back; front pews are avoided as if the preacher were going to do some major slobbering or ask for money.  Are we here because it helps our political resumes as the “in place” to be seen?  Probably not.

 The words of Jesus ask us to do a values review in uncovering the attachment to the places of our lives.  In doing so, we should also uncover the values we have placed upon the places which we avoid.  Do we avoid them because they have no value to our lives?  Do we avoid them because we want to avoid the people who inhabit such places?  In our survey of the values we put on places we can also note our patterns of segregation.

  Jesus invited people to challenge their patterns of segregation by switching places and sharing spaces.  If we have a party we should invite people on the “D” list or those who would truly benefit from the hospitality that we have to offer them.  Jesus invites us integrate through an open hospitality.  Trading places begins with the imagination of faith as we try to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and “feel with them.”  Can we come to value the places of other people so that we value their lives in a different way to act with love, empathy and compassion?  The practice of the faith of the Risen Christ means that we build bridges to connect segregated spaces of people caused by pride, class-ism  racism, and any form of prejudice that divides people and causes them to devalue each other to the point of “extreme avoidance” or suppression or persecution.

  How can we address the problems that we might find in the way in which we value space?  The founding philosophy of our country states that we endowed with certain dignity because of the way in which we have been created. St.Paul said that each person has a body and each body is a location; each body is a place and it is a favored place because it is a temple of the Holy Spirit of God.  God desires and favor each of us as a favored place of the divine presence.  If we accept this incredible favor for ourselves and for other people then we acknowledge the starting point of the dignity of life of all people in all places.  This starting place of the omnipresence of God means there is a profound equality of persons and places in the eyes of God.  This starting place is where we go to evaluate all of our values concerning the values of people and places.  The Psalmist ask, “Where can I can I go from your presence, O God?”  The answer, “No where.”  Jesus was the presence of God in the worst place of life; death upon the Cross.  The divine presence even in death became known to us as the promise of eternal life.

  What Jesus was trying to say is that we all belong together.  The way in which we practice belonging together is by continually building bridges of connection.  To those who are neglected we give recognition; we say, “come up higher, don’t let anything hinder you from human fellowship and human well-being.”

  Today, we are here to remind ourselves that God’s hospitality to us has called us to higher dignity.  We come here to realize our bodies as a location of the presence of Christ as we partake of the bread and wine of Eucharist.  We accept this invitation to “come up higher come to the place of highest power and influence in accepting our bodies as the dwelling place of God’s presence.”  But in accepting this marvelous hospitality of God for ourselves, we also are to be evangelists of the hospitality of God to all.  We are to go forth and invite everyone to the wonderful hospitality of God who is willing to be known to be the God of all and in all.

  Let us do a review today of our values that we have for places; let us examine any unhealthy segregation that we wittingly or unwittingly practice.  Let us be thankful that Christ does not segregate Himself from our bodies as a temple of divine dwelling.  And let us go forth to offer the profound invitation of Christ as we say to all who need to hear it said to them in a personal way, “My friend, come up higher.  Come close to the Good News of God’s Love.  Amen.

The Sabbath Principle; Holy Time towards Love, Mercy and Justice

14 Pentecost, Cp16,August 25, 2013   

Jer. 1:4-10   Psalm 71:1-6

Hebrews 12:18-19,22-29  Luke 13:10-17

Lectionary Link

 In the history of time, the history of a religious Sabbath has been wide and varied in observance and practice.  Perhaps some remember the practice of the so called “blue laws” where certain items could not be sold on the Lord’s Day.  I remember in Texas the irony of not being able to buy a baby’s bottle from a grocery store on Sunday but buying beer was permitted.  The logic of such blue laws was sometimes inscrutable, or perhaps it merely depended upon the lobbyists who could exert the most influence upon those writing the laws.

  We could look at the rules of Sabbath as being used to force the society to give a place for religious institutions.  The Sabbath rules have been influential to maintain the religious perspective in societies.  We can observe today how in the United States the Sabbath is no longer an obligation which is given as much legal and social support as it has been given in the past.  With the proliferation of team sports for youth, worship times are facing stiff competition for participation in the form of attendance.  If given a choice, youth sports is seen as more vital for a child’s immediate well-being than attending a religious service.

  In the Gospels, Jesus is often presented as being in conflict with religious leaders regarding the practice of the Sabbath.  In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Humanity is not made for the Sabbath; Sabbath is made for humanity.”  This would suggest to us that the notion of Sabbath has a degree of flexibility to it in how it is understood and practiced by humanity.

  If the Sabbath is practiced as being incompatible with health, safety and justice, then the Sabbath may actually lose its spiritual value.  Jesus was confronting people who were making the Sabbath legalistically impractical for human life.

  What would we say if fire personnel refused to put out fires on Sunday?  Or police refused to fight crime on Sunday?  Or doctors and nurses refused to care for patients and handle emergencies on Sunday?  We would say the practice of Sabbath is of no value if it actually hinders health, safety and welfare.

  If I practice racial discrimination and prejudice, but say, “Well, I do go to church every Sunday,” what good does going to church do me?  Well, I might say, “At least it keeps me from murder and that’s worth something, isn’t it.”

  It reminds one of the commercial where the accidental amateur is pretending to be a surgeon and when asked if he is a doctor, he replies, “No, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

  Are you kind, and love your neighbor as yourself?  No, but I did go to church last Sunday.  Just going to church does not stand in as a substitute for practicing love and justice.

  The religious leaders were upset that Jesus healed a woman on the Sabbath.  Such healing was regarded as work to them and so he was violating the Sabbath.  Jesus pointed out their selective and inconsistent thinking about the Sabbath.  If they watered their livestock on the Sabbath, why would they object to someone being made well on the Sabbath?

  Jesus confronted their motive for how they practiced the Sabbath.

  It might be beneficial for us to consider some reflections upon the Sabbath.   In the history of humanity, we have a history of how time can be differentiated by the various activities that we do during the passing of time.  Our bodies dictate how we have to spend some of our time; we get tired and we have to sleep.  In fact, sleep time or rest time takes up more than a third of all of the time of our lives.  Our bodies tell us we must eat and drink and do other activities for body maintenance.  And we must designate time for eating and drinking and doing body maintenance.

  The rest of the use of our waking time might be called discretionary time; most of our discretionary time gets accounted for in the division of labor standards set by our cultural setting for people at different ages of life.  We divide discretionary time into work and play.  A major calling in life for each person is to discover how best to use discretionary time to achieve what one regards to be most important in life.

  In the history of humanity one can find a special category of designated time for the gods or for the One God of Israel, or for the Trinitarian God of Christianity.  Time for the divine has been found in perhaps every culture.  In the biblical tradition we find that God spends six out of seven days of the divine time creating but on one day, God rests from creation.  From this ancient story of God resting after creation, we can find the justification for rest.  After all if God rests, we cannot be any better than God and we should rest too.

  So then tabernacle, temple, synagogue, church and mosque become the institutional places to express the religious rest time that is called worship.  Worship time may not really be the rest of sleep.  It is the rest of doing something towards the horizon of human experience so that we may be able to endure human experience.

  Institutional religions can literalize and legalize Sabbath rest and worship to a list of do’s and dont’s.  But to literalize a Sabbath rest only invites exceptions.  Someone must feed the babies and the children; someone must take care of the farm animals.  There are many expressions of human need that do not come to a halt just because it is the Sabbath or because it is Sunday.  On Monday in the grocery store, I am often asked by the cashier if I enjoyed my Sunday day off.  To which I reply, “I worked.”  And certainly the religious leaders of the synagogue knew that they had to work at teaching and prayer on the Sabbath.

  The Gospel invitation of Jesus is for us to be authentic about the Sabbath principle without being literal or legalistic about any particular practice of the Sabbath.

  To be authentic about the Sabbath principle, we need to ask ourselves some questions?  Does my practice of the Sabbath promote the actual practice of justice, love and mercy in my life?  Does my practice of the Sabbath help me to overcome my prejudices in life?

  Yes, I do like to see as many people in church on Sunday  as I can even if for the selfish purpose of soothing the preacher’s insecurity about his ministry being relevant to enough people to keep the Episcopal Church parish enterprise alive and well.

  But it could be today we need to express authenticity in the Sabbath principle in a variety of ways.  I would like to persuade us to give 24 hours a week in a God-ward direction in our lives as a way to deliver us from the pride of mere humanism.  Of that twenty four hours, eight hours are given as sleep.  So you get religious Sabbath credit for holy sleep.  Go and ahead designate at least one night of sleep as worship to God.  So that leaves you 16 hours to spread out in a movable and cumulative way through the other 112 hours of being awake.  16 hours can be woven into your schedule; yes you can include Sunday worship, private prayers and meditation, Bible reading, devotional reading, spontaneous prayers, prayers during commuting, prayers during a walk or work out, prayers while playing golf, works of outreach and mercy.

  Find at least sixteen waking hours a week to work on love, mercy and justice for yourself and for others.  When we seek God, we are seeking to rest from pride of mere human work and accept the accompanying source of grace from somewhere else, even from the one whom we address as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  We literally try to rest from our egos so that we are receptive and open to change in our lives toward authentic love, justice and mercy.

  If you and I are honest we could spend sixteen hours a week in giving thanksgiving for the gift of our lives as we know them.

  So today, let us embrace the Sabbath principle; we reach toward God in resting from both human pride and failure.  We ask for grace to practice in a more excellent way, justice, love and mercy.  And when we fail in willful ways, we don’t excuse ourselves by saying, “afterall, I did go to church on Sunday;” rather we humbly ask that all of our Sabbath time will help us accept forgiveness for failure at love and justice, and recommit ourselves to being better at love and justice tomorrow than we are today.

  The Gospel of Jesus Christ invites us to integrate the Sabbath principle into our lives and to make our Sabbbath time authentic with the practice of love, mercy and justice.  Amen.

Holy, Wholly Negligible as a Metaphor

    In human experience we may grapple with trying to conceive of greatness in terms of quantity and we use the word “infinity” to refer to an impossible quantity.

    We perhaps use infinity as metaphorical attribute of God.  We may use infinity to refer to space, time and matter as a way of measuring the limits of human experience.

   The notion of infinity would present us with what is impossible to know.  If an infinite number of things are in relationship with each other, how would it be possible to know fully cause and effect relationships?  How could we gauge the effect of the flapping of butterfly wings on weather patterns?  We might say that the effect would be trivial, negligible or insignificant or unable to be registered in our methods of perception.  But what is the totally negligible effect of all of the events for which we have no access in measuring the sum total of all untraceable events?

    It could be that the intuitions about God have to do with human beings feeling very small in the face of what we cannot experience; we sense the effect of an infinite number of negligible and so we might indeed confess God as the Holy Negligible, or the effect of the infinite number events that we call insignificant because we cannot register in knowable ways their direct or collateral effect upon us.

     In the face of what we cannot know, in the face of the great negligible, humanity has had to tell stories to give purpose and meaning and science has been one of the stories of coming to meaning and purpose.

    Historically, we can note that when we did not travel very far in the world, we had people telling stories about travels in purgatory or the afterlife, in a place in the sky called heaven.  Such places were regarded to be knowable places in human experience.  So, persons  in medieval Europe knew how to get through purgatory, but they did know not know the existence of Tokyo or how to get there.  As knowledge has grown and the earth become to be discovered as a globe and gotten smaller through travel, there has been less concern about purgatory and the afterlife.

    As we have conquered more of the negligible, the nature of speculation about the unknown has been more along the lines of science fiction.

  Modern science has not ended the negligible; it has seemingly changed how we define and approach the negligible.  Modern science has not removed the negligible; it has but cleared up some of the immediate fog of the negligible.  But we are still small because the more area of the negligible that has been discovered, the more we have come to appreciate vastness and plenitude; the more we have come to appreciate the microscopic and the nanoscopic.

We are less certain about details of heaven and purgatory today, even while we can appreciate the meaning of interior and creative parallel world and its relevance to our external world.        
 As people of science we are elated with discoveries that become technological products, there remains tentativeness about any discovery or products because the once seeming negligible has been exposed to be not insignificant.  In the discovery process we view the negligible afresh but now standing on the pedestal of the latest discovery. 

  We as people of faith can embrace  tentativeness of our lives because of the sum total of the negligible that we encounter at any time.  This could help us be humble about presuming to use the poetry of our revelations as causative absolute agents of the world as it is.  Rather our Biblical metaphorical poetry should teach us respect for God as Holy, Wholly Negligible.

We Become the Words that Form Us; A Baptismal Sermon on Prevenient Grace

13 Pentecost, Cp15,August 18, 2013

Jeremiah 23:23-29  Psalm 82

Hebrews 12:1 – 14  Luke 12:49-56

  Everyone take a deep breath?  Why do we breathe?  We need oxygen to live.  We take it into our lungs and it goes into our blood and carried throughout our body.  So air becomes us when we breathe.

  Why do we eat and drink?  We need food and drink to run our bodies just like a car needs gas to run.

  When we eat and drink, food and water become us.  So if you’ve eaten lots of pizza, how come you don’t look like a pizza? 

  Well, pizza gets changed into energy; pizza has sugar, fats, carbohydrates and protein and these are the kinds of fuel that we need to make our bodies healthy.

  So we become our breath and we become our food and drink.

  Do you know what else we become?

  We become our words.

  We don’t eat or drink words.  We don’t breathe words but we do hear words and we read words.

  And words go inside us  and they make and they form us.  We become words.  Words educate us and teach us.  Words take over our bodies because our bodies speak a language through our actions.  If I hit you with my fist, what is my body saying to you?  If I hug you or smile at you what is my body saying to you?

  Today, we are baptizing Hailey and we are promising to help form her life by the words that we give to her.  The words that we give to Hailey will become her.  So it is very important that we give Hailey our very best words because we want to help her become the very best person that she can become.

  What good words are we giving to Hailey today?  First we are telling her that God loves her and cares for her and so we are going to love and care for her too.  We are telling her that God forgives her so that she does not have to be perfect from the start of her life.  We are telling her that God has given her some very special gifts that she can develop and when she finds her gifts she will help make us better.  We are telling her that her life has special meaning and purpose.  We are telling her that she has freedom and that she can choose many wonderful things in life.

  Hailey can not understand all words yet but she can already understand the body language of the people who care for her.  She can see their smiles; she can feel their touch; she can know that people who love her are giving her food and bathing her and protecting her.  Hailey is already receiving the good body language of the people in her life.

  So do you see how Hailey is becoming the words that she comes to hear and take in?

  You and I are the words that we take in.  We need to take in good words so that we give out good words to Hailey and to each other so that we help each other perform the best body language of all.  The language of love and care for each other.

  So this is what we’re doing today.  We are promising to give Hailey and each other the best words in life.  Why?  Because we become the words of our lives and we want to become the very best words of life.  And we become the very best words in life when practice love and kindness and care.

  Let us say together: Hailey, we give you our very best words today.

We give you love.  We give you kindness.  We give you care.  Welcome to the family of Christ.  Amen.