Keeping Things More or Less Normal

        I went to the dentist this week.  I hate going to the dentist.  It is uncomfortable, and it takes a long time and I always feel like I have failed somehow in the care of my God given mouth.

This time, I needed a root canal to take care of some decay in one of my back teeth.  To do this, my dentist needed to remove my bridge, do the root canal and then make a temporary bridge which will be there for two weeks, when I will have to go back to the dentist so that he can continue with this work.  I spent last night worrying  about all of this, but today, with the first part of it mercifully over, I have relaxed and I think I see a light at the end of this particular dental tunnel.  I’m going to get my teeth back and things will be more or less normal.  That is a very good thing for me.  I need things to be more or less normal.

All of this sets my mind to thinking about healing and the way that we approach the darkness of illness.  I have been through a number of threatening crises.  My brain tumor a few years ago was a very scary time.  The small orange sized mesothelioma was on my left frontal lobe and had depressed it in what amounted to a natural lobotomy.  I had no passion for anything, no anger, no fear, no humor.  I was mildly depressed and I think that I was not much fun to live with.  The tumor was removed, I spent a year and a half recovering from the surgery and I am now back to more or less normal.  I know that my wife is pleased and I am overjoyed at the result that the skilled medical people were able to produce in me  She was a wonderful source of hope for me in that time.

That isn’t always how things go.  Sometimes the diagnoses are much more difficult and the outcome is not very good.  I have spent a lot of time with people and families who have had terrible medical outcomes, even though their prayers and our prayers rose to our God on their behalf.  I don’t understand why things work out the way that they do, but I know that the love of community does a great deal to heal the hurt that illness and death brings.   In the experience of my tumor,  I also had a lot of help from my church and from our children.  

I think that one of the prime reasons that we have parish churches is to be gathered together in community to care for each other.  I love the time in our liturgy when we offer prayers on behalf of those in our congregation who are sick, who have died or are bereaved.  I think that these moments bring us all together in community in a particular way.

We have had a number of funerals since we got  back to Pittsburgh.  Good friends, some from Christ Church and some blessed clergy have died and we have mourned.  I am always filled with hope at funerals.  There is certainly a life beyond this one and I know that these people whom we love but see no longer have found their way into the light and are embraced by the God whom we love.

In Mark’s gospel, in the first chapter, Jesus goes into the house of Peter and Andrew.  They find Peter’s mother-in-law in some distress because of her illness, and Jesus when he is told about it takes her hand, heals her and the Gospel says that she began to serve them.  That evening, the whole town brought their sick and infirm to Jesus so that they could be healed.  He did this and cast out many demons, although the Gospel says that he wouldn’t let the demons speak because they knew who he was.  That is amazing to me.  It is the demons who recognize Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God who had dominion over them.  The rest of us simply watch him work and keep wondering who he might be.  The demons know.

The next day, after prayer in a lonely place, Jesus takes his disciples into the other towns and healed and cast out demons.  This is what he said that he was sent to us to do.

  Our hope is that God will “swallow up death forever” as the prayer book so eloquently prays, but we also know that our mortal death is as certain as our life.  We will be mourned as we have mourned and our family and friends will be comforted by the hope presented in our parish communities.  Sometimes we don’t take our churches very seriously, but in the end, they are our sustenance, our life, and for keeping things more or less normal.  Gather in them eagerly  in the blessed hope of everlasting life and nourish each other each week in the hope and certainty of the resurrection.

Peace in Our Time

     We are going through a time of intense political controversy.  Candidates for president are telling us about everything that we want and need.  Certainly jobs, a better economy and then a number of things that seem to me to be simply political ends:  the repeal of health care, the elimination of abortion (or contraception in some cases) and the constriction of food stamps.   Sometimes I wonder where these people have been that they don’t see the deep need of the poor in this country who have so very little and  who are crying out in their need for their government to do something to ease their pain.

So what is it that we all need?  The collect for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany is pretty clear about what humans desperately want:

                           Almighty and everlasting God, you govern
                        all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully                                                      
                        hear the supplications of your people, and in our                 
                        time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our
                        Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
                        Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

     We want peace and we mean peace in our time.   This has been an eternal quest of the human race since we have been created.  But we constantly impose our will on others by the use of force.  We have been in a series of wars in our time, some of them inevitable like the Second World War, but Korea was controversial and so was Viet Nam.  What we did in Iraq is certainly up for question and Afghanistan has been the burial ground of empires from Alexander the Great through the Soviet Union to the United States today.  And now there are those who are advocating that we begin a war with Iran over its nuclear potential.  Here is a horrible threat to our peace, not the nuclear threat of Iran, but our hostility that pushes us into another war.  It seems to me that the loss of any life over such a cause must give us pause and make us wonder at our motivation.

I think that we need to put international affairs  and our national hubris aside in our quest for peace in our time and think of our own lives.  How we achieve our own peace is essential to our basic living.  I know that this above all things requires our relationships to be whole and constant.  We often forget that peace is something necessary for our soul’s comfort and that finding it involves God’s grace and forgiveness.  Peace isn’t necessarily about a lack of conflict.  This is the place that we have to start.

When I worked in Western Penitentiary, I had a group of men, all of whom had killed someone.  They were in prison for life.  In Pennsylvania, a life sentence means just that.  They had no prospects whatsoever of ever getting out of jail.  They stewed in their guilt and always wondered how on earth that God, or anyone could forgive their crimes.

What we worked toward in our group was that they could find enough comfort to talk to each other about what they had done and find that somehow in the telling there would be help.  That was an enormous task in the prison because one of the basic rules of the place is silence.  One never knows when a fellow inmate will come to the witness stand during any subsequent proceeding to tell the court what you said to him in prison that makes your guilt obvious.  So we had a lot of work to do.  It took years, but the group made a profound difference in a number of lives as the silence rule became of less importance than the relationships within the group.  

  When Jesus went into the synagogue in Capernaum, he met a man with an unclean spirit.  The spirit cried out to Jesus asking: What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.  Jesus’ response to this was simple:  Be silent, and come out of him!  And the spirit came out of the man and the onlookers were astonished.   Mark’s gospel goes on to say that Jesus fame spread throughout the surrounding area of Galilee.  What is interesting in this story is that the unclean spirits recognized Jesus and knew his power even when the religious leaders didn’t.  Here is an instance of God’s power unleashed on earth to provide peace.  Not peace for all of mankind, but peace for that man who was possessed of an unclean spirit.  There is no discussion of how the “unclean spirit” got into the man in the first place, only the story of its removal.  That is what I discovered in the prison.  Forgiveness is the issue, not the sin in the first place.

That is the same issue that we all deal with every day.  How do we find peace in the middle of all of the sins and the turmoil of our lives?  That is why we find community in our church and the nourishment of the sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord.  We receive absolution from our God for all that we have done and certain acceptance, just as we are.  That is intended to be a comfort and a healing, just as Jesus healed the man with the unclean spirit in the Capernaum synagogue, so we are also healed and forgiven so that we can get on with our lives in the certain peace of God.  That is peace in our time.

Our Reluctance to Obey

          I wasn’t a very good student in high school.  The teachers would give me assignments and I would put them off until the very last minute.  I would then cobble something together and turn it in.  More often than not, this got me a grade of C or lower.  Sometimes, I wouldn’t do the assignment at all and would suffer the consequences of that; a low grade on a test, or the wrath of the teacher and my mother.  It took me a long time to come to understand that doing what was assigned to me was a good path to take.  I suppose that if I had learned it a bit earlier, I might have done better in school.

       But I was a late maturing young man.  I wound up spending nineteen years in school, but that was after my service in the army grew me up and after a career in broadcasting, I went back to college and then to seminary.  I’m glad it turned out that way.  I think I learned some things outside of my schooling that have helped me in my ministry.  I have helped some immature young people because of my experience who identified with me and were willing to listen.  I have thanked God more than once for things that I learned on the street.

       Reluctance to do what we know we need to do is not limited to young people in school.  We all put things off things that we know we need to do because we want to maintain our level of comfort, or because we simply don’t care enough to occupy ourselves with issues that we can more comfortably ignore.  This is one of the reasons that our society is left with terrible problems that we are all capable of solving.  We recede into a place of comfort rather than push hard for the resolution of issues that trouble us all.  How many times have we walked by something that could easily be corrected, but for our own comfort kept silent or did nothing?

When we read about things like this in the paper, we get angry that “something” wasn’t done.  I remember the Kitty Genovese case in New York where a whole neighborhood was aware that she was being raped and murdered, but did nothing at all about it.  There, in that story are all of us when our need for comfort trumps our faith and we walk on and stay away from moments when our voice or our presence might have made a profound difference in the life of our community or its residents.  We can all think of times when we sat back and didn’t act and were appalled at the consequences.  I know in my own life that I have kept silent or stayed in the background a number of times when I might have made a great difference.  We have all been given gifts by our God for the betterment of our lives and the lives of those around is.  Not using those gifts is to keep God’s presence away from moments of consequence.

One of my favorite characters in the bible is Jonah.  He was called by God to go to Nineveh to tell them to get into line, stop their evil ways and obey God.  Jonah was very reluctant to do that.  He escaped by boat and God created a great storm to derail his reluctance.  The sailors threw him into the sea to escape the storm’s wrath and Jonah was swallowed by a great fish,  and then when he cried out in great distress, God caused Jonah to be spit up by the whale on the shore.  Again, God spoke to Jonah and told him to go to Nineveh.  Jonah went, preached imminent destruction to the people of that city, and the people responded.  They all repented.

God responded by himself repenting of the destruction that he had proposed.  That wasn’t enough for Jonah.  He became very self-righteous and wanted to see the light show that God had promised.  He sat sulking under a bush that God created to give him shade, argued with God and waited,  but God caused a worm to attack the bush and it died.  Jonah cried out to God and said that he wanted to die because he had lost the plant and was baking in the sun.  God confronted him about this and said to Jonah:

                                       You pity the plant, for which you did not labor,
nor did you make it grow, which came into being
in a night and perished in a night.  And should
I not pity Nineveh, that great city…?

Jonah was reluctant to do what God had asked him to do, but God was persistent in his requirement and Jonah ultimately had no choice.  But God had a choice when it came to the people of Nineveh after they repented of their evil.  There was no longer any need for destruction.   The reason for Jonah’s anger was his selfish need for his own entertainment and a lack of empathy for the people of Nineveh.

Not long after his baptism by John, Jesus went along the Sea of Galilee and began to choose his disciples.  He called Peter and Andrew, also James and John, the sons of Zebedee and they immediately left their nets and followed him.  I know that there must have been a look in his eye that compelled them, but the operative word in this story is immediately.  What we are told is that those four men went immediately with Jesus.  A great start to their discipleship, which for most of them ended with their deaths, but also with the spreading of the Gospel that is with us to this day.  What we all have in our lives is because of the willingness of those followers of Jesus to leave everything and to go with him.  Can we follow them, and without reluctance give of ourselves to do what we can for those whom we meet who are in great need?  This is the way that God’s Kingdom is made real in this world

How Can the World See our Faith?

As far as the Steelers are concerned, the season is over.  They lost to the Denver Broncos in overtime last Sunday.  They will now have plenty of time for all of their injured players to heal before next year’s professional football season.  The win for Denver highlighted the effective effort of Tim Tebow, the new quarterback for the Broncos, who has been followed around by the media because of what they call “Tebowing”, when Tim kneels in one knee and holds his hand to his head, apparently in prayer or thanksgiving to his Lord.  It is somewhat amazing that this grabs space in the media.  Do we all think that God cares who wins any football game or the super bowl?  If so, what does it mean when Troy Polamalu crosses himself numerous times in a game, also in response to his faith?  I suspect that we take this faith in athletics thing much too far.  God certainly cares about what goes on in human concourse, but I would think that our athletic wins and losses are rather low on God’s list of priorities.

So, what are God’s priorities?  It doesn’t take much perusal of scripture to discover that the poor and the outcast are first on God’s list.  It is always the welfare of the neediest who God wants us to be responsive to.  I have always loved the quiet faith of dedicated people who move into human need with vigor and do something about it.  Sister Ligouri at the Jubilee Soup Kitchen in Pittsburgh followed her faith into the hunger of many Pittsburghers who were fed in that place day by day.  She never trumpeted her accomplishments, although there were others who did.  She preferred to sit in the background and allow her work to be seen in those who benefited from it.

I also remember a quiet nurse whom I met frequently in one of our hospital intensive care units who cared for and comforted her patients with a remarkable skill that eased their pain and helped them whether it was to recovery or into their death.  She was also there for the families and friends of those who followed the patient into that ICU and who witnessed the results.  It wasn’t often easy for her to do any of this.  She had the help of her faith.  I never asked either her or Sister Ligouri about their religion, or about their theology.  I simply watched them act out their faith in the presence of great need.

This is the kind of faith that God celebrates in highest heaven.  I know that the saints who have done these things are held in great regard by God, whether they hold themselves in any regard at all.   I think also of the remarkable people who have gone to Kenya or to Haiti, or into Joplin, Missouri in the wake of famine, earthquakes or tornados that have made life nearly unbearable for many, many people and who have worked hard to bring resources to ease the suffering that they have found.  The media follows these things too, but our attention fades quickly and we get on to other things.

When I think about what it is that God wants to say to all of us, the first words of Psalm 139 occur to me:

LORD, you have searched me out and known me; * 
                                       you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.     

                                     You trace my journeys and my resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my ways.


                                   Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *
but you, O LORD, know it altogether.


                                   You press upon me behind and before *
and lay your hand upon me.


Such knowledge is too wonderful for me *
it is so high that I cannot attain to it.

God is constantly watching all of us.  God knows what we do and what we don’t do.  I think that is the meaning of the story in John’s Gospel when Philip tells Nathaniel about Jesus:

                              Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, "We have
                             found him about whom Moses in the law and also 
                            the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth."
                            Nathaniel said to him, "Can anything good come out 
                            of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see."

Nathaniel comes to Jesus and Jesus says  Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!  Nathaniel asks Jesus,  when did you get to know me? Jesus tells him, I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.  Nathaniel then confesses: Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!  Nathaniel recognizes the power of God to see us always in every moment and he knows that this power is present in Jesus.

This is what faith is all about.  It is knowing that our God is present in every moment, whether we know it or not, and that what we do is always valued by God when it is in the furtherance of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.  When we love each other, God is made known.  That is what we need to be about.

Hope for the New Year

        We have begun a new year.   It seems to me that the chief function of these celebrations is hope.  Hope that the new year will be peaceful, prosperous and helpful to all of us.  We wish each other well on New Year’s day, and for a moment, at least we look forward to a new twelve months with some kind of joyful, hopeful expectation.

This is an election year, 2012.  We will be inundated with campaign commercials for the whole of the year.  The political conventions will fill the summer and if you have no stomach for all of this, that is too bad.  It is going to happen anyway.  My profound hope is that through it all, God will be watching over us and our leadership will be given God’s grace somehow to be genuinely concerned about the
needs of the country and its people, instead of the special interests that seem always to clog up the system.

The book of Genesis begins in such a matter-of-fact way.  Simple, really in all of its complexity:

                   In the beginning when God created the heavens and
                the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered
                the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the 
                face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and 
                there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God  
                separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day,     
and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and
there was morning, the first day.   -Genesis 1: 1-5

Up to this point in God’s creation, all was well.  Humankind hadn’t yet been created.  There was no contention about who was the ruler, God was firmly in charge.  God was the light and the darkness, the content of the day itself.  There were not yet any arguments, no special interests, only light and darkness, which God called good.

Then humankind came along.  God created them, male and female, and he set them in the Garden of Eden, telling them to eat of every tree in the Garden except the tree that produced the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.  God did not want humankind contaminated with the kind of knowledge that only God can handle.

But we ate of the fruit anyway, knew that we were naked and we hid from God in the garden because we were ashamed.  When God came to visit, we were discovered in our hiding and thrown out of the garden.  That is when the world began to fall away from its maker and humankind began to think that we ourselves are god.

Many times, God tried to bring it all back.  But still the original creation was not restored.  The people went their own way, not keeping the commandments and creating terrible societies where the poor were not cared for and the rich prospered.  God sent prophets to preach to the people, but they killed the prophets and continued to do what they wanted.

Finally, God decided that only if he came to earth himself and demonstrated what he intended by his commandments and prophets could the people have some understanding of what creation was intended to be.

So we have the story of the Christ, born without a home in a lowly manger and living a life of poverty, yet with remarkable grace and peace that radiated from his person.  This is the Jesus who came to John the Baptist to be baptized in the Jordan river.  When he came up out of the water, the skies opened and a voice was heard by Jesus to say,  You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.  The word of God to his son who was God present on this earth in human form.

Well, so what?  Look around you and you still won’t see creation restored in the way that it was intended by God from the beginning.  The poor are still not really cared for and the rich still prosper.  As a matter of fact, it seems to be getting worse.

A lot of good things are mouthed by the politicians, trying to get our votes.  They talk as though they are on the side of  The American People .  I think if I hear one more of them from either party use that phrase, I will scream.  What the American people need is for politicians who honestly want this country to be a model to the world of what God’s creation was meant to be.  That means care for the poor, health care for all, the rich to be contained and for the riches of this nation to be shared by everyone.  We can stop trying to be the policemen of the world and let the world see to itself.  If we honestly place our faith in God, regardless of our religion, we will find all of the help that we need.  Jesus brought into the world the power of the Holy Spirit, that great empowering arm of God to give us the strength to do everything that God requires.  All that we need to do is to listen to the Spirit and we will know the way.

Again, the politicians mouth the words of faith.  They want us to think that they are faithful, deeply religious people.  They are fond of doctrinal issues like abortion and sexuality.  They condemn homosexuality in every form and want to deny abortion in every case.  They make it sound that if we got our doctrine straight, that is all that we need.  It doesn’t take much to see the fallacy of that.  What we need is leadership to move this nation in the way of God’s kingdom.  A Kingdom that includes everyone in this country, rich or poor, of whatever sexuality or condition and demonstrates love and peace for everyone.  That can’t happen if the only basis for political discourse is what we have before us.  We need our attention to be focused on those who are in dire need, and to care for them above all.  If we can figure out how to do this, we will find the Kingdom at our doorstep. Let the election take care of itself.  Reach deeply into your baptism, listen to the Spirit, and find your way back to God’s home.  Remember what Jesus told us about the commandments:

Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, 
soul and mind.  This is the first and greatest
                               commandment and the second is like unto it:  
                             Love your neighbor as a person like yourself.
On these two commandments hang all the law
                              and the prophets.  -Matthew 22: 37-40 

Could anything be more simple than that?