The Power of Christmas

      We had a wonderful Christmas.  Our daughters, and two of our grandchildren were here along with both of our great-grands.  Rosie cooked a ham, everyone brought something and we feasted.  It was the best Christmas gift we could have received.  We have a delightful family who gives love extravagantly.   I now have a picture of Samson, my great-grandson looking at a dessert that Jennifer brought to us.  It is the background on my computer and it reminds me of the wonder of this family.

  I spent Christmas eve at Calvary Church with its glorious music and awesome liturgy.  This is the second year that I have done this.  That place provides all of the pomp and glory that this season requires.  The choir, the brass and the harp all make the power of this night rise and shine.   The theology of the incarnation is full of incredible mystery and is difficult for most of us to comprehend.  The very idea of God coming to earth in human form eludes most of us.  It is the whole reason for this magnificent festival.  The very idea of God walking this earth in our shoes brings tears to my eyes as I even think about it.

This is why God understands what human life is all about.  This is not some white bearded God up on a cloud judgeing us from afar;  this is God who has known human being also, who has felt hunger, thirst, want and judgement, who knew the pain of loss and death and who can see through our eyes the frustrations of human life.  That is what makes the Christian experience so dynamic.  When we celebrate this feast of the Incarnation, we are celebrating the human face of God who knows us better than we know ourselves.

The first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John expresses the theology of the coming of God to earth in brilliant poetry.  If there was ever argument about including this Gospel in the New Testament, these verses refute it.  The elegance of the words are overpowering and give us the best reason to hope that I can ever imagine.  Our loving God gave himself for our salvation.  That is breathtaking and certainly true.  Despite the way that Christmas has devolved into a festival of craving material things, this is the best gift that any of us could possibly crave.  We are not judged by our failure to live up to the law, but by the Grace of our loving God, who wants us to belong to God more than he wants us to be perfect.  That, I think has become the cornerstone of my life.

I hope your Christmas was full of beauty and hope.  With all of the pain and turbulence in the world, it is a measure of God’s glory that we can reach out to each other and offer hopefulness.  God blesses us in all that we do.

Guns and Hope

All of our hearts are broken after the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut.  The killing of twenty small children by a gunman who possibly had Asberger’s syndrome is monstrous.  The simple availability to him of an assault rifle and lots of ammunition is a terrible indictment of this culture of ours where the second amendment to the Constitution is revered above all things.  The National Rifle Association has been able to defend with impunity their ridiculous stance that guns are appropriate in just about every situation.  The absurd idea that we ought to be able to buy as many guns as we want has led to trafficking in guns in almost unbelievable ways.  The proposal to allow people to buy only one gun a month is in itself absurd.  Twelve guns a year?  Good Lord, what is in our minds.

I don’t expect congress or the president, or anybody else to come up with an adequate solution to this terrible gun problem that plagues this country.  We don’t need a conversation about guns, we need action and we need it now.  We tolerate guns in our video games, guns in our movies, guns everywhere.  We subtly teach our children that guns are a reasonable part of our lives.  I don’t know any hunters who take assault rifles with them when they go to hunt deer.  That doesn’t even make any sense.  But we have allowed senselessness to inhabit this argument for far too long.  We are now reaping the wild wind that overarching gun ownership has brought us.  It isn’t enough for us to ban the sale of assault weapons.  There are enough of them already in people’s hands to continually cause events such as Newtown.  We need to get these weapons out of the hands of people who aren’t qualified to possess them.  No one outside of the military ought to have these weapons.  That seems to me to be just common sense.

We are in the last week of Advent.  We are waiting with anticipation for the birth of our Messiah, the one who will bring peace and hope to this world.  I am attracted to Mary’s beautiful Magnificat and the past tense that she uses in describing God’s work in the world to touch our lives.  She says:

He has shown the strength of his arm; 
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

In the birth of Jesus, our Messiah, we have the guarantee that God has adsorbed the intense hurt and pain of this world,  most of which is caused by ourselves.  I know that God’s tears have joined ours in our mourning over the precious lost lives in Newtown.  As we have caused this problem, it is up to us to find a way to solve it.  That is what God gave us minds and hearts to do.  God bless everyone touched by this horrible disaster, and God bless all of us as we find a solution.

Finding Christmas in a Difficult World

This is the last Sunday before the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world hits us on the 21st of December.  Frankly, I’m not particularly worried about it.  I really believe that this world that God created and saved will go right on.  Doomsday prophecies seem to be a part of our heritage.  Every couple of years or so, there is somebody claiming that the end of the world is approaching.  It never seems to occur, even though we don’t seem to understand that pumping endless supplies of CO2 into the atmosphere is not doing it any good and that climate change is much more than a theory, that it is upon us and that we may at this point be beyond salvation.  We’ll have to see about that.

In the meantime, we are in the middle of Advent and getting ready to celebrate the birth of our savior.  If you can ignore the commercialism all around us, this is a good time to quiet down and meditate on the goodness that also surrounds us.   Every week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishes a column dedicated to the kindness that is shown by people in the city.  They get letters about good things that people have done, such as returning lost wallets, helping children and the such.  It always makes me feel good to read these things.  I know that there is an innate goodness inside each of us that can transcend the badness that is so obvious.

When I had my prison ministry, I was always impressed with the way that the men in my group cared about each other, and the way that others in the prison population came to the fore when there was need.  That was not obvious to those outside the prison who held all inmates in disregard and who seemed to want increased not decreased sentences.  That is probably why our prisons are so full today.  We incarcerate one out of five people in this country.  That is one of the highest figures in the world.  We are on a par with China and Iran in this regard.

But Christmas is coming.  Once again we are reminded of God’s glorious love for all of humanity, particularly including those in prison and those in need.  Instead of our intense desire to gather more and more things around us, it would be better if we could focus our financial attention on those who live their lives without even the basic things that we all take for granted.

I know that if Christianity disappeared from the face of the earth, Christmas with all of its merchandising would go right on.  We long ago lost control of the theology behind it.  God’s love is a powerful part of the message of this season.  When we become calm and small and meditate on the real meaning of this time, we can see that the need of those around us is more than cards and baubles.  The need is certainly for food, shelter and care.  And more than that, the need is simply for kindness.  God blesses us richly when we provide it.  Do something nice for somebody today. You might get your name in the paper!

Finding Peace in a World of Conflict

      The English church has rejected the idea of consecrating women to be bishops.  This was because the vote was a few shy in the lay order after the bishops and the priests had voted for it.  They say that there will be a delay in this, but the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury says that he will consecrate a woman to be bishop during his tenure.  In the meantime, Presbyterians in Pittsburgh are splitting over doctrinal matters in the same way that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh did a few years ago.  It is really becoming more and more difficult for all of us to live with the contradictions of opinion that we all have.

I am also a bit surprised at how stunned the Republican party was after their defeat by President Obama in the presidential election.  They believed the polls and Fox news and got most of it wrong.

We live in a time when differences of opinion become fiscal cliffs or reasons for war, not peace.  We have a hard time finding compromise and accepting the profound differences that we all have with each other.  I suspect that it has always been like this, although it seems to me that we have in the past been better able to resolve our differences and to get along better with each other.

The problem is our common sin.  The idea that we get in our heads that we are the center of the universe and that only our opinions matter.  That has been going on throughout all of the human experience.  Over the ages, we have looked to God to solve this terrible problem, to somehow bring peace to a world where we are constantly the reason that there is no peace.

God has tried a number of times to get our attention, to help us to find ways to agree with each other and to stop our constant arguments.  God sent the Law to Moses, then the prophets to speak to us, and finally God came to us himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to show us in his humanity the way that God would have us to live.  Jesus healed, took care of the poor, lived with those who were called sinners and chastised the rich.  And for his efforts, he was crucified by all of us because we have the same trouble with God that we have with each other.  We love ourselves more than we love each other.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.  God brought Jesus from the grave in the miracle of the Resurrection. The followers of Jesus gathered together after this powerful event and became the church.  They worshipped God and continued the work that Jesus had begun.  The interesting thing is that the church over the centuries continued to argue and bicker just as they had before the church existed, even though the work of love continued.  During the season of Advent, our yearning is once again for the coming of the Lord to free us from ourselves and to make the world whole and peaceful.  That is certainly the Spirit of Christmas.  Somehow deep inside, we know that without the help of God we will always be unable to live the lives that God intended for us.

The way of peace, however is not for us to wait expectantly for God to come and fix us.  That has been tried.  The way of peace is for us, the Church, to live in the love that God provided for us in the teaching of Jesus.  To love God and to love each other above all things.  That is the only way that God’s will can be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.  It is up to us to make this world better.  And it is within our power.  Thank God for all of the love that has been lavished on humanity.  May we show our thanks by the way that we respond with our love for each other.

The Renewal of the World

       When I was in seminary, I worked one summer in Washington, D.C. out of a Lutheran church at  16th and V Street.  It was in the upper 14th street area that was burned by arson after the assassination of Martin Luther King.  The arson spread all the way to DuPont Circle, where St. Thomas Episcopal Church was torched.  It was a terrible time for the whole community and the devastation was evident as I walked the streets learning how to do pastoral ministry.

The poverty and the lack of proper housing was almost overwhelming.  I had one white family living on a street of mostly abandoned homes.  Social workers visited and tried to help.  The father stayed in his room most of the time and his wife and kids lived their lives trying to make do with whatever came their way.  The community developed a beautiful scheme to get food at the end of the month when the checks ran out.  They would take turns going to the relief agencies to get help.  They would then come back to the neighborhood with what they were able to obtain and share it.  It was remarkable to me the way that underneath all of the poverty, that community found a way to work.

The father lived in a sea of depression.  The pastor of the Lutheran church where I worked asked me one day what my plan was for him.  I told him that I wanted to get him to come out of the room, talk to me, somehow alleviate his depression and then set him on a path to getting a job.  The pastor was a remarkably wise man, who then said to me about my plan, “And finally by your grace, he will achieve everlasting life.”   That put in perspective for me the limits of my ministry and the probability of my success.  Ultimately, I don’t know what happened to that family.  I was there for the rest of the summer, but I left before there was any resolution to their problem.  As always, they taught me much more than I was able to provide for them.

I was reminded of all of this because of the reading from the Book of Jeremiah.  In the 33rd chapter, the prophet says:

                              The days are surely coming, says the LORD, 
                             when I will fulfill the promise I made to the
                              house of Israel and the house of Judah.  In
                              those days and at that time I will cause a 
                             righteous Branch to spring up for David; and
                             he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

  The people in those neighborhoods were certainly yearning for righteousness,   but they could find it nowhere.  Their lives were full of poverty and distress.  There was nobody to change what was so oppressive outside.

Change was what I thought I was there to do, but it wasn’t up to me.  Ultimately, the work to effect change came from many organizations that brought wholesome change to that neighborhood and brought many people out of poverty and brought hope where there was only despair.

My work in Washington was forty years ago.  The pain is still felt.  I saw an article yesterday that said that Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire who created such a stir when he was chosen because he is a gay man living with and married to his partner is planning after his retirement to go to D.C. to be Bishop in Residence at St. Thomas Church.  There is another chapter in the healing of the pain of the world that will begin.  I thank God for that and know that the renewal of the world can’t be far behind.

Quirks and Acceptance

     Thanksgiving is such a wonderful day.  It is filled with all of the relationships that have become a part of our lives.  As Rosie and I have gotten older, more and more people have joined our family.  We not only have our three beautiful daughters, but there are also our five grandchildren and now two great-grandchildren.  This is something that I never really thought I would experience.  Looking at those two young boys that our Alison has brought into this world gives me great pleasure.  I know that they will grow up and learn to appreciate all of these people who crowd around them and learn to love them, even with all of their quirks.

Quirks is what we are all about, really.  We all have rough edges that life sometimes sands down, but they are always with us.  What we need to do about our quirks is to forgive them, mostly.  That isn’t always easy.  We can become annoyed with each other over all kinds of things.

This past political campaign gave us ample opportunity to display our opinions, not all of which were shared by others.  How we coped with that is essential to our relationships.  Rosie has a good friend who is very conservative.  When they talked during the election, Rosie kept the conversation away from the politics as best she could.  When that didn’t always work, she would become a bit annoyed and wonder what she ought to do to change her friend’s attitudes.  The problem isn’t in changing her friend, it is in changing ourselves so that we can accommodate the opinions that we don’t share.  Now that the election is over, their conversations are a bit more comfortable.

My parents were strong Republicans, who disliked Franklin Roosevelt with a passion.  I grew up to take a different course and have a different opinion.  I know that my parents would probably not approve of my choices in elections, but that is not something that is going to make me change.  I know that the reason that we have elections is so that these differences that we all have can be somehow sorted out and that this society of ours can move forward.  That includes all of us, no matter what our political affiliations are.

I thank God not only for my family, but also for my friends, who also know my quirks and mostly accept them.  I don’t think that is always very easy.  I am self aware enough to know that I can be somewhat irritating with my opinions, which I don’t easily hide.  That can be a barrier sometimes.  In my ministry, I have mostly had people in my parish who accepted me, even when they disagreed with what I had to say.  I am thankful for that.

In the book of Daniel, there is a vision of the Ancient One on his throne with the appearance of “one like a human being” being presented to him.  The Ancient One gives this person dominion, glory and kingship over all of the peoples, nations and languages.  This is a powerful vision.  It predates the coming of the Christ, but is certainly descriptive of our Lord.

If all of us who live in this world are living under the vision and the command of the Ancient One, we are therefore unified under this “one like a human being”.  We have come to understand this as our Lord Jesus, our King and our savior.  Somehow that makes me feel rather small with my quirks.  I believe that these are known to my God and that I am accepted with them, just as are my friends and relatives with theirs.

The End of the World

Predictions of the end of the world aren’t new.  We have been hearing them for ages from people who ought to know better.  Certainly the world will come to an end.  The sun will flame out, become a red star and we will have no source of heat.  The oceans will dry up and the air will become unbreathable.  But that isn’t now, or even close to now.  Environmentalists are rightly concerned about the state of our earth, the melting of the polar icecap, the terrible pollution of our atmosphere, and if we do nothing about these things, there will be terrible consequences for this planet.  Already the temperatures seem to be rising and storms more frequent.  The devastation of the storm on the east coast over the past couple of weeks is certainly evidence that we can’t ignore the climate.

But it is one thing to be actively concerned about our environment and another thing entirely to predict the imminent end of the world.  But somehow, we are fascinated by the idea that something terrible is going to happen to all of us.  The Mayan Calendar ending on December 21 is an example of this.  Until we get to December 22, this won’t be put to rest.  So it becomes fodder for people who thrive on predicting disaster.

Jesus speaks to his disciples who are admiring the great temple.  He tells them that all of the stones in that building will be thrown down and not one stone will stand upon another.  They ask him privately when this will happen and he tells them to be careful not to be led astray, that there will be those who come and claim to be the leader, but not to follow them.  Nation will rise up against nation, he says, but these are the birth- pangs.

What follows from all of this is that God holds us all in the palm of his hand.  We need not fear whatever we see around us.  The birth that is coming is of God’s ultimate Kingdom in which we all will live in peace and harmony.  When will this happen?  It’s impossible to say, but certainly nations are still rising up against each other, there are earthquakes and other signs.   Just as Jesus said, the terrible signs are all around us.

The message is clear.  Our God loves this planet and all of us.  Despite what we do to one another, we will not lose that love and that care.  Jesus came to us to demonstrate with his life the love that completely resides in God.  Despite his crucifixion, and our rejection of Jesus, he rose from the dead to help us to know that we will rise also, no matter what the world looks like, our salvation is complete.

Money and Power

       Well, finally the election is over, we can find other things to obsess about.   I am particularly happy that I won’t have to use the mute button on my remote so often when campaign commercials come on.  They got to be rather annoying for all of us.

  I wonder what part religion played in this election.  There were people claiming all kinds of things.  The arguments over abortion and gay rights were two places where seeming  religious voices were raised and absolute claims were made.  I was struck by a full page ad that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a couple of times from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that seemed to be telling us what God wanted us to do about these issues.  I was struck by the ad because I have always admired Billy Graham and was sorry to see his name used un such a way for political purposes.  I suspect that his son Franklin was behind all of this.  Billy is 94 and Franklin was the one who spoke so harshly of Muslims at the ceremony in New York after the 9/11 tragedy.  At the time I thought that Billy would never have done this.

My hope is that this election  will unite this nation, not divide it.  Religion is one of those wonderful areas where we can be so easily divided.  We saw that in Pittsburgh over the last several years, but with our new bishop, we are on our way to a new day.

     The way that religion in this election used power was with money.  That is always suspect with me.  What we discovered in this election is that money can’t always buy power.  I’m glad of this, because it is the people without power who need their voices heard in this land.  The Citizen’s United verdict is not the ultimate law that we were afraid it was going to be.  I am heartened by this.  It just may be that our political system is on its way to holding ideas of greater value than money.  Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing.

In the twelfth chapter of Mark, Jesus seems to speak about money and power in an excellent way.  Jesus has been watching as people drop money into the treasury at the temple.  He saw rich people putting in large sums, but he was particularly taken by a poor widow who put in two copper coins worth about a penny.  His lesson for his disciples was that she put in more than the others because  this small mite was all that she had.  He said for them to beware of the scribes who like to walk around in their long robes and to have the best seats and the places of honor.  They devour widows houses and for the sake of appearances say long prayers.  They will have the worst condemnation.

It is easy to fall in love with money and to believe that the power that it brings is absolute.  According to this election, that isn’t necessarily so.  Thank God for that.  My hope is that we can listen as ideas are offered and to use them to unite us in God’s love for all of creation.

Loving our Neighbor

     We’ve just gone through a terribly complex storm that created much turmoil in the eastern part of our country.  There were floods in many cities, snow covered West Virginia and winds destroyed trees and homes in many places.  Some people called this thing the “Frankenstorm” to emphasize the horror of it.

What always intrigues me in this kind of situation is how those of us who are moderately or not at all inconvenienced respond to it.  Presently there are volunteers heading for the distressed areas and FEMA is providing aid that is very much needed and there are shelters being created to take care of those who have lost their homes.  What is wonderful about all of this is that there isn’t very much notice taken of who is being helped and who is not.  The question is simply what is the need, nothing else.   This is, for me a model of how we ought to behave in non-crisis times.  We seem to mobilize when the need presents itself, but otherwise, we continue on our way that segregates need from justice.

This political season seems to conjure up differences among us that sometimes either don’t exist, or are irrelevant.  The “47 percent” that were talked about as being moochers is only one example.  I think if I hear one more candidate tick off the five points of his plan, or describe himself as a “job creator,” I will consider throwing my television set out of my window.  We spend a lot of time dividing ourselves into communities that seem to be opposite one another in terms of need.

The storm throws all of that aside and lets us deal with each other in terms of human need.  The lesson that we need to learn from this is that we need to do this all of the time, not just in times of crisis.

In Mark’s Gospel, one of the scribes asked Jesus “which commandment is first of all?”  Jesus replied citing the great statement from Deuteronomy: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And then he added the familiar,  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  In our worship, we call this simple statement, “The summary of the Law”.  It is an easy description of how we need to treat each other from day to day, regardless of whatever crisis may threaten us.

Loving our neighbor as a person like ourselves is a creed that can be adopted by all of us.  I think that the time of crisis brings this out in us, but what a wonderful thing it would be if we simply learned to do this day to day.

Restoration and Hope

We had a tremendous resurrection in the diocese of Pittsburgh last Saturday when The Rev. Dorsey Winter Marsden McConnell was consecrated as the eighth diocesan bishop of Pittsburgh.   Resurrection, however doesn’t happen without a death.  For Jesus it was the terrible event of Calvary when he was crucified and died.  It was his resurrection three days later that we celebrate as Easter.  Last Saturday, it felt very much like an Easter experience when I watched that magnificent three hour service that brought us out of the gloom of depression and night into the brightness of a new day.  When we left Calvary Church, I felt that something wonderful had happened and that we were on a new path.

It all began, of course with the schism that was brought to us by our previous bishop, the now deposed Robert Duncan who took a majority of our parishes with him into what he described as The Anglican Church of North America, a loose confederation of churches that have felt alienated from the Episcopal Church from the days of the 1928 Prayer book, through the conflict around the ordination of women and ultimately women as bishops to the anger generated by Bishop Gene Robinson’s election as Bishop of New Hampshire and the inclusion of gay people not only in our parishes, but a members of our clergy.  We had some profound struggles around all of this.  The leadership of our diocese didn’t help us to get through the arguments and get on with our mission.  They instead intensified the arguments and created the final schism that took us far from each other.

It was fitting that the consecration on Saturday took place at Calvary church in Shadyside.  It was at their rector, Dr. Harold Lewis’ behest that a lawsuit was filed that secured the property of the Episcopal Diocese from being taken by the churches who chose to leave for the Anglican diocese.  Parenthetically, it is certainly notable that our provisional bishop, The Rt. Rev. Kenneth Price has always held out an olive branch to those who have left, offering to include them back into their old diocese at any time.  I think that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh has done wonders in terms of keeping the Gospel at the forefront of what we have done.

Restoration is the theme of the Book of Job.  In the final chapters, Job cries out to God for an answer to his question, Why me?  Why has all of this happened to me?  God never gives Job an answer to his question.  Job has endured not only the horrible things that have happened to him, the loss of his family and his wealth, but also the constant abuse by his friends who have told him over and over again that he must be a horrible sinner to have had all of these things put upon him by God.  At the end, Job confesses to God that he doesn’t understand anything of why these things have happened to him, but he prays for his friends.  And God does a wonderful thing:  God restores the fortunes of Job and gives him not only family but untold riches.  Restoration is what happens to Job.

Restoration is what has happened to the Diocese of Pittsburgh.  The God to whom we have been faithful through all of this turmoil has given us back our mission and our hope.  With Bishop McConnell, we will move forward and reclaim the mission that we had before all of the difficulties began.  Thank God for restoration and hope!

The Sanctity of the Vote

       There is a troubling article in this month’s Harper's.  It is written by Victoria Collier and it details how to steal an election electronically.  It is a story of how a couple of right leaning companies have gotten a virtual monopoly on election software and in close elections have the means to manipulate the vote count so that the side that they prefer wins.  I was horrified by what she says in this piece.  I am also in wonder why the mass media hasn’t picked up on this.  It is a good story in this close presidential race.  In the past, one of the companies, an Ohio firm, Diebold was implicated in some chicanery involving their then CEO Walden O’Dell promising publicly to “deliver” Ohio’s electoral votes to George W. Bush.  O’Dell stepped down before a class action suit was filed against his firm.

I think that my vote ought to be sacrosanct.  I don’t want somebody messing around with my vote or anyone else’s vote.  In this democracy, we have a right to select our leadership by legitimate voting that ought not to be subjected to anyone’s manipulation.  After reading Collier’s article, I’m not sure that my vote has any certainty at all.  We certainly need someone or some way to watch over this problem so that we don’t have an election that dissolves into uncertainty and chaos.  I am sure that if there is a very close contest, not only for the presidency, but also for senatorial and congressional races, there will be questions raised as to the ways that the votes were counted.  After the mess that we had with the Bush/Gore election in Florida and the “hanging chads”, we don’t need another episode of that.

But what can we do if no one takes notice?  With the extreme right making such a statement in our culture, there is a danger of not only the stealing of an election or two, but simply uncertainty of the outcome.  That will create a danger to our society that we simply don’t need.  With the gridlock in Congress, I don’t know how we can work this all out before the coming election.  I am frightened that what we are able to do at this moment in time just won’t be enough.

Camels and Needles

       This election season is concentrating on how our wealth is distributed.  It seems to me that there are those who think that the wealthy ought not only to keep what they have, but to radically increase it.  They ought to pay small taxes and use their riches primarily for themselves.  The logic behind this is that they are “job creators”, although there is scant evidence that lots of jobs have been created by them.  Job creators is a name that the rich have chosen for themselves to sound as if they are the creators of benefits for those who don’t prosper quite as well as they do.  It is a little less than a lie, it is only a gross exaggeration, but it has the effect of raising the rich to a level above the rest of us.  They are our benefactors.  We ought to place them on a pedestal and allow them all of the benefits that they have earned,  whether they have really earned them or not.

There seems to be a lot of concern on the part of God about what we do with our wealth.  We have another of those perplexing statements from Jesus in the Gospel of Mark:  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.  I think that I have heard that one all of my life.  I can remember kids in Sunday school cutting camels out of paper and somehow getting them through the eye of a large needle.  What Jesus is trying to say to the disciples is however, as it is categorically impossible for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, so it is also impossible for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

When I think about the Kingdom of God, my mind doesn’t automatically go to Heaven, where God constantly reigns.  I think of this planet where we live, where Jesus came to teach us, and where he gave his life for the salvation of all of us.  It is also here where the poor live constantly among us and where all of our wealth resides.  The words of Jesus about the Kingdom of God is about creating it here on earth; in the words of the Lord’s Prayer:  thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  That is the mission of Jesus, to create on earth the same powerful conditions that govern what goes on constantly around the throne of God.  We never quite get that straight because we become so focused on our wealth that we can conveniently ignore the poor who live all around us.

In Amos’ prophecy, he talks about what God will do to those who not only neglect the poor, but use them for their own gain.  He says:

                                    Therefore because you trample on the poor 
and take from them levies of grain, you have 
built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not 
live in them;  you have planted pleasant
vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.

  Quite an indictment by God and a warning to all of us about the use of our wealth for things other than what God has in mind.  We ignore it, of course,  enticed by what we can gather for ourselves from the bounty around us.

So what are we to do?  I know that our very existence depends on what we do for those who have nothing.  Caring for the poor needs to be the business not only of our churches and our communities, but of the whole nation.  None of us will really be rich until all of us are provided for.  That is what creating the Kingdom of God is all about.  Sops thrown to the poor to keep them quiet are not enough.  We need to focus all of our wealth on the care of all of us.  That is the only thing that really makes sense.

Partnership and Hope

      Rosie and I have been married for 57 years.  That is an awesome number when you think about it.  Fifty-seven years of marriage.  It hasn’t always been easy.  I think that I have given her more than enough reason to break it off at times.  She has put up  with me in a lot of different moods, not always pleasant.  And she has also put up with a lot of change.  We have moved some 27 times in all of those years, and downsized several times.  Our most recent move was from a beautiful home in Charleston, West Virginia back to Pittsburgh to a small condominium so that we could be close to our kids.  This has been a fantastic move.   We see our daughters often and we are enjoying our grandchildren and our two great-grandchildren.  We joined St. Brendan’s, a church that I had a hand is starting twenty-five years ago when I was the rector of Christ Church, North Hills.  They will celebrate their silver anniversary this month and I look forward to preaching at the service that will commemorate that on October 21.

But back to marriage.  In the Book of Genesis, God says, It is not good that the 
man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.  And God created Eve as a partner for Adam.  That partnership had its ups and downs.  The partnership that Rosie and I share is what has made our marriage work.  We have shared in the raising of our daughters and in the joy of watching our kids grow up and have children of their own.  There has also been grief and pain as we have buried our parents and lost uncles and aunts as age has taken them from us.

     Rosie has been with me through career change.  She found me at a radio station booth at the Indiana County fair and we had a career in radio and television for a number of years, then she was my partner when I went to seminary.  She worked outside the home to help us pay the bills with three kids and tuition and many other obligations.  When I look back on all of that, I have no idea how it worked out.  But she was the glue.  She is the one that made it happen.  We have been very fortunate.

When I became a parish priest, Rosie was a clergy wife.  That has its own dynamic.  The expectations of a parish for the wife of the rector is sometimes overwhelming.  She has carried it off with an expertise that I have always admired.  It isn’t an easy job.  There are always those who want to interfere in the household of the clergy.  She was a master of handling even the most difficult cases.  I have thanked God many, many times for the intelligence and the beauty that she has brought to this marriage and the help that she has been in our career together.

Over the course of my work in the Episcopal Church, I have done a number of weddings.  Sometimes, these have worked out very well.  Sometimes, not.  When I do a wedding, I always think of what Rosie and I offer as an example.  I know that the love that is present on the wedding day is powerful and can keep a couple together for a lifetime.

But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.   I have counseled a number of couples who have divorced.  I have helped them in their pain and have witnessed the turmoil that has been a part of their lives in the middle of trying to work out relationships that have been irretrievably broken.  The anguish of this is sometimes overwhelming to everyone involved..  I have seen in these moments though, that God’s love is also powerful.  I have watched people who have survived divorce and have created other relationships.  This is never easy, but these people are great examples to the rest of us as proof that brokenness can be overcome.  Forgiveness and hope surpass pain and destruction.  I have seen it work over and over again.

     The key to it all is community.  Together we can help each other survive with hope the pain and the joy that we all experience in this life.  May God bless us in our lives as we stay together and help each other in our fragile partnerships.   And when they are broken, may God bless us in finding hope again.

Getting Angry with God

       I love the anger at God that is reflected in the Eleventh chapter of the Book of Numbers.  The followers of Moses are sick and tired of the years in the desert and are hungry for what they used to have in Egypt.  Listen to what they say:  If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.

That about says it.  All of this stupid manna!  That’s all that we have.  Why did we come out here in the desert to put up with this ridiculous deprivation?  They complain to Moses and he gets tired of listening to them.  So Moses goes to God and asks him why God has put all of this on his shoulders.  Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child.  Moses is disgusted and wants some kind of an answer from God.

Have you ever felt like that?  Have you ever been so disgusted with your circumstances that you shook your fist at the skies and asked God to give you what you certainly didn’t have?

I have.  I remember visiting a woman in the last stages of cancer.  They had moved a hospital bed into her living room where I would see her.  She had a daughter who was about six months pregnant.  What her mother wanted above all things was to live to see her grandchild born.  But it didn’t work out that way.  She died when her daughter was eight months pregnant and she didn’t see the child born.  When she died, I was furious.  I remember after watching her die and spending some time with the family, I went out to my car, shook the steering wheel and yelled at God about what on earth was the problem.  “Would it have shaken creation to have her live a couple of months more so that she could have seen her grandchild born?"  I shouted at the skies and drove around town in a rage for about an hour.

Several months later, we baptized that new baby in the church.  I’ll never forget what happened.  When I moved toward the font to scoop up some water for the baptism, all of a sudden there was a warm glow in the church.  It seemed to me that a rich light was shining on all of us.  I know now that I was the only one who experienced this, but it certainly was not my imagination.  I know that it was the presence of that wonderful grandmother there at the baptism.  That for me was the answer to my angry prayer after the death.

God treats Moses the same way.  He doesn’t yell back at him.  He tells him to gather seventy elders and to have them take their place with him.  After he gathers them together and they go off by themselves, someone tells Moses that Eldad and Medad, who weren’t with the others were prophesying in the camp.  Joshua tells Moses to stop them.  Moses refuses to stop them saying to Joshua, would that all of my people were prophets!  So he let them go on.

In the Gospel of Mark,  John tells Jesus that they saw someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name and because he wasn’t a follower, they tried to stop him.  Jesus was eloquent.  He said:  Do not stop him;  For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

How wonderful it would be if we could learn to live like that.  To accept all of those who work in the name of God the same way.  To stop fighting among ourselves over who is the greatest and to simply do what God is asking us to do.  To love one another as God loves us.  God loves us.  That has been taught to me so many times.  What does it take for me to get the message?  What does it take for all of us to get it?  That is the essence of the religion that we all profess.  To show the light of the love of God into this world, and to do it constantly with gifts of mercy to those around us who need them.

Humility and Acceptance

      Humility is a remarkable virtue.  It isn’t one that most of us cultivate, but it is probably the most wonderful characteristic that we can possess.  The problem with humility is that it doesn’t draw any attention to itself.  Humble people tend to remain in the background.  They don’t get credit for much of anything.  Often they are shy and aren’t in the forefront of what is going on around them.  This, unfortunately isn’t what a lot of us want.

We all want some measure of attention.  We learned this when we were little children.  Brothers and sisters vie for their parents attention.  Here I am!  Look at me!  Even our pets do this.  We presently have custody of our granddaughter’s little dog.  She constantly is trying to get our attention.  She stands in front of us and wags her tail.  Often we have no idea what she wants.  We take her out, we feed her, we do what we think will make her happy, but there she is again a moment later, standing in front of us wagging her tail.  Frustrating sometimes, but certainly in keeping with the way all of us act from time to time.  While we are taught to be humble, we love attention.

It is interesting that the lesson from Jeremiah and the Psalm cry out for attention from God because of persecution.  The authors want God to stand against those who are trying to destroy them.  In these passages, it isn’t enough that the author is saved from the trouble, he also wants the persecutors to be destroyed.  That is probably the height of arrogance.  Destroy those who don’t believe in God.  Protect me from their terrible persecution.

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is trying to help his disciples understand what is going to happen to him.  He has told them about his own coming persecution.  He tells them that he will be arrested, crucified and that he will rise again.   This is the moment when Peter says to him, No, Lord, this must never happen to you!  Jesus told him at that moment to get behind me, Satan!

      Here, later in the Gospel, Jesus discovers that the disciples have been arguing among themselves about who is the greatest of them.  His answer to this is the essence of humility.  He puts a small child among them and says to them: Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.

Here is the answer to all of their arguing.  It is also useful for all of us to consider what it means for our own arrogance.  Do we think that we are better than others?  Or is it possible that God loves all of us dearly, and we are simply one of his children.  That is not something that we tend to think about a lot.  Often, we think that we are somehow set apart and better than others.

I’ve been somewhat amazed at the present turmoil in the Middle East that has been brought about by an ignorant video portraying the prophet Mohammad in very unflattering terms.  Many Muslims have seized this opportunity to attack the United States for what it believes is blasphemy against their religion.  Our response to all of this has been to denounce the video and worry that those who are attacking us don’t quite understand what is going on.  Perhaps we are the ones who don’t quite understand what is going on.

     Many of the people in the Middle East are somewhat tired of the efforts of the United States to control their countries.  We have spent a lot of money and the lives of our troops trying to bring what we call democracy to them.  Often, we don’t understand what that translates into for those people.  We have witnessed a remarkable event that we have called the “Arab Spring,” which has toppled dictators and sometimes installed radical Muslims in their place.  We aren’t always comfortable with how these things have turned out.  Instead of letting these people choose for themselves the kind of government that they want, we want to help them in their choice.  There is a lot of our own arrogance present in this kind of thinking.

Remember what Jesus is telling us.  Accepting a little child is tantamount to accepting him and the one who sent him.  We need to learn what our acceptance of them means.  It means giving them the benefit of the doubt and letting them grow into the mature people whom we can continue to love and respect.  As all of us with children know, that is sometimes difficult.  They don’t always behave the way that we would want them to behave.  Accepting them means accepting them and their behavior.  We need to let them grow, make mistakes and profit from them.  We don’t always need to call the shots.

      That is probably what we need to understand about the Middle East.   These countries are growing and developing themselves according to their own cultures.  Our own humility is what is at stake here.  Forcing results that only appeal to us is certainly not going to bring harmony to either us or them.  Accepting them is what we need to learn to do.  When we can do that, peace is the certain ultimate result.  No matter who benefits. We all will.

God's Forgiveness and Our Forgiveness

         For twenty-two years, I was a part-time chaplain at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh.  I had a group of six to eight men, all of whom had killed someone and who were spending the rest of their lives in prison.  In Pennsylvania, a life sentence is a life sentence.  They don’t let people out after twenty-five or thirty years as they do in a lot of other states.  All of the men in my group knew that and had settled in to their lot.  It wasn’t easy.  All of them carried the guilt of what they had done.  I had one man tell me over and over again when I would talk about forgiveness, “Listen, preacher, there are two people in the graveyard because of what I did.  God is never going to forgive that.”  That is the reality of how they all live every day.  Getting them to come to even a tiny understanding of what forgiveness meant was and remains a daunting job.

But forgiveness was theirs for the asking.  What I tried to help them all to comprehend was that forgiveness is the great gift that is given to all of us by the God who loves us all as God’s own children.  Do we make mistakes?  Certainly.  Is that the end of the story?  Hardly.

     At the moment there is a great argument raging in one of our Western Pennsylvania communities about a monument that has been erected to celebrate the Ten Commandments.  It is on public property and an organization protecting the First Amendment has raised a question about whether having the monument on public property violates the separation of church and state.

     A group of people in the community have rallied to “protect” the monument. They have had a march and a demonstration with signs and speeches that proclaim their love of God’s law.  I have wanted to ask those folks if they have kept all of those commandments;  or have they broken one or all of them.   Those men in my prison group had all broken at least one of the commandments, the one about not killing, and they were devastated for life.  All of us have that in common with them.  We have all broken the commandments.  The one thing that I know about the Ten Commandments that we all share is that we can’t keep them.  We break them over and over again.  But yet, we have a loving God who forgives us what we have done and makes us whole again, even after we have broken the law of laws.

Jesus had his disciples gathered together in Caesarea Philippi.  He asked them who people were saying that he was.  The disciples answered him that some say that he was John the Baptist, some Elijah or one of the prophets.  He then asked them, “Who do you say that I am.”  Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”  Jesus then told them not to tell anyone about him.  He went on to tell them that the Son of Man had to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, be killed and then after three days to rise again.  Peter took him aside and rebuked him.  That is when Jesus told Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!  You are setting your mind not on Divine things, but on human things.”

I would have been with Peter on this one.  How could any of them understood what Jesus was saying?  Which of us understands resurrection?  Which of us really understands forgiveness?  That is what the men in my prison group were all struggling with.  Those us us who are not incarcerated also struggle with it.  Forgiveness is not an easy concept to get our minds around.  But it is true.  We are all forgiven by our loving God of what we have done.  Our God longs to gather us all in his arms as the children that he created.  That doesn’t alter the consequences of what we have done.  We create chaos and we must live with it.  But God’s love is eternal.  That we can count on. And because of that we can forgive one another.  That is the greatest gift of all.

Caring for Rich and Poor Alike

     The suffragan bishop of the diocese died a number of years ago and the funeral was held in the Cathedral.  The place was filled with laypeople and clergy and the family sat in the front rows on the right side.  Everything went beautifully until communion time.  The family left their pews to go and receive the sacrament and a Pittsburgh street person came slowly down the aisle of the church, finally sitting in the now vacated pews that had been occupied by the family.  Two morning coated ushers quickly responded to this and told the man that he couldn’t sit there.  He obediently left the family pews and went across the aisle to the pews vacated by the clergy who had left them to go to the altar for communion.  Again the ushers told the man that he couldn’t sit there and that he would again have to leave.  He ambled down the aisle and finally found an empty pew left vacant between the clergy and the lay people behind them.  He slipped in there.

But the story wasn’t over.  Two clergy came down the aisle with communion for a disabled woman in the pew behind the man.  Again the ushers told him that he would have to move.  He continued his way down the aisle.  Somebody in my row asked, “who was that?”  Somebody answered quickly, “It is the Lord”.

I’ve always loved that story because it illustrates so elegantly what James is trying to say in his second chapter when he talks about how we treat the rich and the poor who come into our assemblies.  We certainly treat them differently, don’t we.  The ones with the gold rings get the good seats and we don’t quite know what to do with those with the dirty clothes.  This is in direct contradiction of what Jesus told us to do about those in need in this world.  In Mark’s gospel, there is the story of the Syrophoenician woman who had the ailing daughter.  She was denied by Jesus at first, when Jesus said that it wasn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs, she told him that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall to the floor.  Jesus heard her plea and healed her daughter, even though she wasn’t of his faith.  He also healed the decrepit deaf man who was brought to him.

With his life and his deeds, Jesus illustrated for us the way that we are to treat each other.  That wealth or poverty ought not to have any place in our decisions of who to help.   Need was the only criteria.

Once again a terrible storm has devastated the Gulf coast.  These are the same people whose homes were destroyed by Katrina a decade ago.  It is necessary for us to help them with everything that we have to make their lives better and their suffering less.  Their wealth or poverty ought not to figure in the decision.  The only thing that we should consider is the terrible need.

Thank God that we can provide help in these terrible times.  It is a mark of the worth of our people that we can do this.  

Keeping the Law

      My sister in law was once married to a Jewish man who kept the law as perfectly as anyone I have ever known.  I once sat with him in his kitchen and he explained to me the way that their plates and glasses were all arranged in separate cupboards so that they could adhere to the laws regulating milk and meat dishes, how they tried as hard as they could to do what the law required;  how it was a solemn duty that they had and how it helped their relationship with God.

While he was explaining all of this to me, there was a knock at the door and he left me to answer it.  I sat in the kitchen waiting for him to return and contemplated all of the things that he had said to me.  I thought about how humble he was and how devout he was in his faith.  He had really impressed me with what he had told me.

After a long time, I got worried about him.  I left the kitchen to see what was keeping him.  I found him on the front porch being confronted by a loud evangelical Christian who was telling him that being Jewish was certainly not an option as far as God was concerned.  When he saw me, he curtly asked me, “Well, are you also Jewish?”  I said  “yes, essentially”, which prompted a round of condemnation for me also.  With my seminary education, I began asking him about the New Testament, about what Jesus said about keeping the law rather than about being examples of the law.  I cited the passage from Mark where the Pharisees were confronted by Jesus about keeping the letter of the law but losing its real meaning.

We concluded that conversation with the missionary leaving the porch and rejoining his compatriots on the sidewalk.  I always have kept in my mind the probability that they put a chalk mark on the sidewalk to keep others of their team from confronting us.

Through it all, my brother in law was the picture of propriety.  He accepted that awful man on his porch with great hospitality and listened to what he had to say intently.  He wouldn’t have violated his welcome of that man for any reason whatsoever.   I think that he was even taken aback a bit by my arguing with him.

Jesus was always clear about what the law meant.  His disciples were chastised for gathering wheat on the Sabbath.  In Mark’s gospel, they are charged with not washing their hands before they ate.  All of these things were required by the law, which the religious establishment kept diligently.  What Jesus had a problem with was that the keeping of the law wasn’t the doing of the law.  He quotes Isaiah to them:

                                              This people honors me with their lips,
                                          but their hearts are far from me; in vain 
                                          do they worship me, teaching human
                                         precepts as doctrines.

He tells them:  You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.

And there you have it.  James is eloquent on this subject when he says simply: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. 

That for me has always been the essence of religion.  My brother in law certainly practiced it.  I hope that I do also.

The Meaning of Family

      We had a awful fright at our house a week ago.  Rosie woke me at 3:00 AM with terrible chest pains.  She was gasping for breath and was afraid that she was having a heart attack.  I gave her an aspirin and called 911.  A cop came a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance that transported her to Allegheny General Hospital.  I followed along, got her registered and we waited until the doctors did a diagnosis and she was admitted to the hospital so that they could do tests.  After all of the medical people did their work, we discovered that it wasn’t a heart attack at all, but a gastro-intestinal problem that caused the terrible pain.  We thought ourselves very fortunate.

A day or so after this happened, our kids were visiting and my oldest asked me why I didn’t call her at 3 AM to tell her what had happened.  She told me that she wants to take care of both of us when we need her and we need to share times like this.  All of our daughters agreed that this was so.  I apologized to them for not calling, but they really hit the nail on the head with their criticism.   Rosie and I are aging.  That isn’t something that we always want to acknowledge, but it is certainly true.  I also know that as a family, we need to include everyone in our experiences, good and bad.  They really want to be a part of our lives.  I am not doing them or us any favor by neglecting to tell them what is going on.  They need very much to share our experiences.   Our kids taught us something by their comments.  I won’t neglect to tell them ever again, even at three in the morning when something is going on.  They need to know.

So what does this thing “family” mean and how far does it extend?  You and I, gathered here before the altar ready to receive the body and blood of our Lord are all family.  We need each other in all that goes on in our lives.  We have an obligation to share our experiences with each other so that we can both help others and be helped ourselves.  Like Rosie and I with our daughters, sometimes we neglect to do this.  That doesn’t mean that it isn’t necessary.  One of the things that binds us together most tightly is the common sharing of experience.  Our prayer lists are more than opportunities for gossip, they are the asking of our compassion and our prayer to our God for what we need as individuals in this congregation.  In any moment in our lives, we are more than individuals, we are part of a family, part of a common tribe, part of a congregation that worships our God and cares for each other.  That is what was being built by the followers of Jesus in creating the church.

In those earliest days, immediately after the resurrection, the apostles were befuddled.  When Jesus came and appeared to them in the upper room when they thought that they were the next ones on the list to be arrested and killed, they didn’t know what to make of this appearance by their leader.  In John’s Gospel, in the sixth chapter, Jesus has a long dissertation on what he calls his body and blood.  He tells his followers than unless you eat of my body and drink of my blood you have no life in you.  When he says this, the gospel records that a number of his disciples were disgusted by this and stopped going about with him.  He asked the twelve if they wanted to desert him also, but they said: Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

So here are Jesus’ closest disciples, his twelve, who have just heard him talk about requiring them to eat  his flesh and drink his blood, who don’t quite understand what he is talking about, but they are stopped from deserting him because they don’t know where else they could go.  He has the words of eternal life.  That is the bottom line for them.   The crucifixion and the resurrection have not yet happened.  When all of this comes about, Jesus meaning for them becomes much clearer.  It has persisted through the ages and shortly, we will participate in this by receiving the body and blood of Jesus here at this altar in recognition not only of our faith, but of our commitment to each other as the family of God in this place.  This sacrament binds us together as Christians who love each other and promise to share our lives together in common.  That is what is means to be a church and what it means to be a part of a congregation.

One year at Christ Church, I had twenty-seven funerals.  Most of them were pillars of the church, people whom we couldn’t afford to lose, but lose them we did.  I grieved throughout that year for each of them and for the loss that these deaths meant to our common life.  I preached at each funeral, but I never cried.  After one of these services, late in the year, I was leaving the church and one of the altar guild members met me on the stairs.  She put her arm on my shoulder and said, “And how are you doing?”  I broke into tears at that moment and cried for all of those beautiful people whom we had lost.  That wonderful altar guild woman was expressing to me the whole concept of family, how we share our joy and our grief with each other as members of the Body of Christ.  I have never forgotten that moment.  It is a constant reminder to me of the need that we all have for each other all of the time.  In most of the moments of my life, I am like those apostles of Jesus.  I don’t understand much of it either, but I know my need for other people.  We are family.  We are Christians.  We are together.  Thank God for all of that.

The Bread from Heaven

       The wisdom of Solomon is legendary.  It’s hard to forget the story of the two women who came to him each wanting him to give each of them a disputed child.  It is a wonderful testimony to his wisdom.  He told them that he would cut the child in two and give each of them half of it.  This aroused the true mother to great grief and she relinquished her claim to the child.  Solomon then gave her the child because of her obvious love.   In First Kings, we get the story of the conversation that Solomon had with God about what he needed.  He didn’t ask for great riches, or anything for himself .  He asked for wisdom and God gave it to him.

      Wisdom is a remarkable gift.  Paul asks the Ephesians to live not as unwise people, but as wise, because the days are evil; so he tells them not to be foolish, but to understand what the will of the Lord is. It is certainly also necessary for us, like the Ephesians to live as wise people, because these also are evil days.  Read the newspaper or listen to television and you certainly get the sense that there is little cooperation among the politicians to remedy the things that are so desperately wrong in this society.  The rich will certainly get richer and the poor poorer.  That is almost a given.  Wisdom is of the greatest necessity to get us through these times.

Paying attention to the outcast, the poor, the neglected, the unemployed, the homeless is what you and I are called to do by our Lord Jesus.  Understanding the will of the Lord is what we are called to use our wisdom to determine.  The problem is, that goes against the grain of the desires of those who regulate our commerce and determine the rules of the culture in which we live.  Making our way through that maze requires the utmost wisdom.  It isn’t easy.  Being an advocate for the impoverished calls down the wrath of wealth on us.  When we talk about tax loopholes or anything that seems to call for the regulation of commerce, we can get into powerful trouble.  That is why Martin Luther King was chased all of his life by people of power.  I don’t really want to challenge any of them.  They can hurt me.

Jesus was speaking to power when he talked to what John’s Gospel calls “the Jews” about himself being the bread from God.  He said to them:   This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.   The powerful people disputed about this saying, “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  But Jesus told them that his flesh is the bread that comes down from heaven and that whoever eats of it will live forever.

We continue to talk about that to this day.  Every time that we celebrate the Eucharist, we create again that moment in Jesus’ life.  I don’t think for me that there is a more powerful moment in our liturgy than when I hold the bread of the Eucharist before you and say, “The body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven”.  If that is true, it binds us all together as one and also to the commandments that our Lord gave to us:  to love God and to love one another absolutely.  That sets the tone for how it is that we treat the poor and the outcast in our community and it sets the bounds for how it is that we use the wealth that we have been given by our God for the good of all of us.  Remembering that we are not the author of goodness is an important step to keep us in tune with the needs of those around us.  What our God has given to us, we need to use for the comfort of everyone.  As we do that, we increase the welfare of all. 

Killing and Our Inaction

     We had another mass killing this week, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin with a number of people killed and more wounded.  I wonder when we are going to do something to rein in the assault weapons that are so easily obtained by anyone who has a serious hatred and a desire to kill.  There is so much of it anymore.  People with a screw loose and a bigot’s heart roam free in this country and aim their hatred where they will.  Sometimes it is a Congresswoman speaking to her constituents, sometimes it is people in a crowded movie theater, and this time it is in a worship space for people whose worship is perhaps different from the norm in this society, but perfectly rational and certainly protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution.

How do we deal with the grief that comes from this, with the compassion to help the victims get on with their lives?  It doesn’t really help that the gunman perished along with his victims in the slaughter.  That only makes the picture more murky and difficult.  We would like to know what was motivating this man to do this terrible thing, but that will be forever out of our reach.

  Is this simply going to be another event that grabs our attention for a little while and then fades into the background as other things come along, or will it spur us to take some action not only for the victims of this slaughter, but for this country that has made guns a priority over rationality and justice.   Certainly it is not too much to ask our congress to put aside their allegiance to the National Rifle Association and pass some laws that make it possible to get rid of assault weapons, which are of no use whatsoever in hunting, but only have the use to which they have been put in these terrible encounters with the people who have been killed.  What on earth is the matter with us?

The story in Second Samuel about the death of Absalom and David’s grief over his death is a profound story.  David had told his commander Joab and his staff to “deal gently” with Absalom, but when Joab heard that Absalom had been found stuck in an oak tree, he not only struck him with a javelin, but his followers also struck him and he was killed.

When David heard of Absalom’s death, he was filled with deep grief, wept and cried:  O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!

The evil of Joab in defying David’s orders and killing Absalom is evident.  David’s grief is also more than understandable.  Which of us wouldn’t be stricken with grief under similar circumstances.

The killing of the Sikhs is a similar situation.  There are absolute laws against this, but evil people with manifest hatred ignore the laws and like Joab, march to their own drum.  Perhaps these terrible killings will inspire some kind of work to ease the grief of communities that face such evil and make all of our hearts respond to the needs not only of the victims, but of all of our people.  I know that God weeps with us over these tragedies and over our inability to cope with them.

The Voice of God and our Doubt

       In the early eighties, Rosie and I went to Israel with a number of friends.  We, traveled to Galilee and to Mount Tabor, which is the traditional site of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  At the mountain, our tour bus was met by a flock of taxicabs, all driven by Palestinians who took us by way of a twisty mountain road to the top.  We met other taxis coming down and the road didn’t seem to be wide enough for both of the cars.  We narrowly passed each of them.  I don’t think I have ever been as frightened in my life.

After this treacherous trip, we found ourselves in a glorious place.  There was a basilica there and a crowd of German tourists singing a familiar hymn inside.  Strangely, there was a low fog covering the top of the mountain and it reminded me very much of the story told in Luke’s gospel about the time that Jesus was on the mountain with his disciples and they were all shrouded in mist and Jesus shined in their presence.  They were terrified on this mountain also.  But out of the cloud came the voice of God which said This is my Son, my Beloved!  Listen to Him! That this happened is testified to by Saint Peter himself in his first letter when he recounts this story and reports what the voice said to them when they were with Jesus on the mountain.

I took a picture of the mist shrouding the basilica and it hung in my office for a number of years.  It always reminded me of the terror that I felt on our way up to the top of that mountain, and the mist that seems to surround all of the claims of religion.  It reminded me that we don’t know as much as we think we know and that our job as Christians is to trust in the God who gave us our lives and our salvation that what we have been told is true in the best sense of the word, even though the accountable proof of any of it seems to be rather scant.

     While we were in Israel, we found little concrete evidence that Jesus was ever there.  Years and years of people living in that country has covered up any trace of what investigators might call proof of much of anything.  We visited the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the memorial altar there to the crucifixion.  We went to Bethlehem and saw the silver star under the altar in the Church of the Nativity, but all of these places are approximate and nobody really knows where the actual sites really are.

The only real proof that I saw was in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher  at the altar depicting Golgotha, where a young nun stood weeping against a wall.  That was enough for me to understand the depth of the faith that she brought to that site and the profound understanding that she took away with her when she left.  We also were touched intensely by this whole trip and brought home with us a more mature faith in the Jesus whom we had not seen on the trip, but knew much better for our experience.

Isn’t that always the case?  We go to our churches every Sunday and say our prayers and receive the sacrament, but concrete evidence of the things that we believe and profess with our hearts is not always so obvious.  Like the disciples on the mountain, our faith is also shrouded in mist and we wait for the voice of God to help us to understand what it is that we have seen and what we believe.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  Evidence is difficult to pinpoint and is hard to talk about.   We share our faith experience in the context of a community because we all hold this faith in common and don’t demand proof from each other.  The real proof of our faith is in the way that we live our lives.

In another account of the Transfiguration, when Jesus along with Peter, James and John came down from the mountain, they found the rest of Jesus’ followers trying to heal a person and failing miserably.  Jesus touched the man and he was healed instantly.  Such is the nature of our faith.  The real proof comes with what we do with what we have been given.  When we follow our Lord’s teaching and do what he taught us, our faith is seen by others in a profound way.  That is what that nun taught me with her tears.  It was like the voice of God out of the mist telling me a truth that I could never have understood any other way.   May God always bless our doubts and our fears and give us those beautiful times when we  know with momentary certainty that what we believe with our hearts is the truth.

Loaves, Fishes and Mission

In our family, when a great holiday comes around, there are always plans for a big dinner with everyone seated around a table that is full of lots of good things.  Sometimes it is buffet style, sometimes there is a barbecue, but there is always a time when we wonder how with what we have, we are going to feed all of the people who are coming and the ones that show up at the last minute.  We used to say “family hold back,” but that has changed to “loaves and fishes,” a reminder of who it is who is really in charge of our feast.  I love this because somehow it always seems to work out.  There are enough buns or burgers or whatever we need to feed not only the guests but also the family who has no need to “hold back”.

The story of the feeding of the five thousand is probably the best known of the stories of Jesus’ ministry.  It is told five times in the four gospels and with that repeated telling is most likely authentic.   Each of the times that the story is told, there is a little nuance.  Here, in the Gospel of John, Jesus asks the disciples “Where are we to buy bread for all of these people to eat?”  It goes on to say that he did this to test them because he knew what he was going to do.  The response of Simon Peter’s brother Andrew, is to tell Jesus that there is a boy present with five barley loaves and two fishes, but he asks, "what is that among so many people."  Jesus asked the disciples to have the people sit down.  He took the loaves and the fishes, gave thanks and distributed them to the people and there was enough and more than enough.  The disciples gathered twelve basketsful of leftovers.  

This is a marvelously Eucharistic story.  Every week we take the loaves that you bring to the altar along with the pitcher of wine, give thanks, bless it and give it back to you and not only is it enough, but it also becomes the body and blood of Jesus to feed our bodies and our souls for the week ahead.  God touches our meager offering and makes it enough to satisfy our need.

It is also a story that we need to take to heart as a message to the church.  It always looks like what we need to do is eclipsed by the shortage of our means.  Some of this is because of the enormous demands our facilities make on our income.  Taking care of the church and its equipment, its utilities and its staff can eat up a large portion of our resource before we ever get started on our mission.

In all of my years as the rector of a large church it always seemed to me that mission, though stated as primary, really came in second when it came to the real estate and the staff.  We always seemed to be able to find money for our own needs, but when it came to mission, we were usually able to find ways to talk ourselves into diminishing what we paid into it when the other things that demanded our money cried louder.  We were always able to rationalize that somehow.  In all honesty, it is very difficult to keep mission in front of our eyes always when all of the other material things make their louder demands.  How are we going to explain to the electric company or the roofers or the people who repave our parking lots that we need to give our money to the poor and they will just have to wait.  On the other hand, it is easier to tell the poor to wait a bit longer while we take care of our own needs.

I think that the problem that we have is a matter of trust.  Trust that the faith that we all hold dear is up to the challenge of real life.  When Jesus told the people to sit down and he gave thanks for his meager resources, he distributed what he had and there were twelve baskets left over.  The reason that seems to us to be a miracle is that we don’t really believe that we can duplicate such a thing.  But we can.  All that we have to do is to put our mission first on our church’s agenda and we will discover that there is more than enough to take care of all of the demands that come upon us.  That probably sounds a bit naïve, but it isn’t.   When we call upon the faith that is reinforced weekly by this abundant Eucharist, we will discover how abundant God’s bounty really is.  Try it.  You won’t be disappointed.

Living Through Grief

     When my father died in 1968, I was 34 years old and I was devastated.  I was the oldest son and I had no idea what I was supposed to do.  Also, I was deeply in mourning for the father who had done so much to shape me.  He had been in decline for a couple of years, and when he died it was almost a blessing.  But that didn’t make my mourning any easier.  I kept a stiff upper lip, as the British say, and we all got through the funeral and we settled out my mother and what would happen to her.  We got her out of their apartment and settled in a place where she could live.  There were many things to deal with, as we all find after a death.   But I never cried during all of this.  There was too much to do, and I felt that it was my responsibility to get it all done.   A number of years later,  Rosie’s dad had to go to Houston for an operation on his heart.  During his recovery, an aneurism broke and he died.   I remember collapsing in Rosie’s arms and crying for her dad like I had never cried for mine.  I know that was my mourning displaced, and that my grief over my father was very real, and I also loved her dad.  It was a terrible time for us all.

I know that you have all had times like that also.  We grow up, we mature and in the proper course of this world, death strikes those whom we love, as it will eventually strike all of us.   It is never easy to handle.  We all know about mourning, and where grief takes us.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has just learned about the death of John the Baptist.  He needs very much to grieve over this terrible loss.  Herod has killed his best friend and his mentor.  It couldn’t have been easy news for him to hear.

To deal with all of this with his disciples, Jesus takes them away to what he calls a deserted place so that they can all rest awhile and also so that he can grieve.  But grieving was not to be allowed to him at this time.  Many people saw Jesus and his followers leave the location where they were and they followed them to their deserted place.  They surrounded Jesus and demanded from him teaching and healing.  The gospel says that Jesus had compassion on all of these people, and taught them many things.  Here the gospel is edited and we don’t hear the story of the feeding of the five thousand which comes next.  We’ll save that for another time.

Jesus and his disciples left that deserted place in a boat and went on over the lake to a town called Gennesaret, where they moored their boat.  Immediately the people on the shore recognized him and brought their sick to him to be healed.  Jesus, in his compassion healed everyone who was brought to him.

Did Jesus ever find time to grieve?  It doesn’t seem so.  The needs of the people who were around him took precedence over any of his needs.

This gospel speaks to me because it echoes my own experience with the death of  my father.  I had too much to do to take the time to properly grieve.  That is why I postponed my tears for another time.  I all hit me when Rosie’s dad died.  When I look back on it all, I know that it was the right thing for me to do.   The words of the 23rd psalm are helpful to me in all of this:

                                 Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
                                 I shall fear no evil;   for you are with me; your rod and
                                 Your staff, they comfort me.

The very idea that God walks with me through everything that I experience in this life is of tremendous significance.  I’m never alone, even in my grief.  It helps me to know that and it gives me a way to focus my life on the future not on the past and to reflect on the goodness that I have known from these people who have been with me in this life.  Thank God for all of them and for the love that I have known.