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.

Prophets and Honor

Currently, our great Episcopal church is in the middle of its General Convention in Indianapolis.  The church is considering many issues that have divided us.  There are prophets in that place who are trying to be heard.  Will we listen to them, or will we simply continue to go on our way and speak nothing but platitudes to the country?  I hope not.  There is a great deal at stake,  certainly the least of these are the health and the future of our church and our nation.

Prophets are not held with honor.  We heard last week of Jesus going to his hometown of Nazareth and how the people there rejected what he had to say to them.  They chased him away and the gospel said that he could do no works of mercy in that town.  So he went to other places in Galilee and healed and told prophetic stories.  He was well received wherever he went, but in Nazareth, he had no credibility at all.

All that Amos the prophet was doing in Israel was telling the people what the Lord had told him, that the high places would be made desolate, that Israel would be laid waste, and that Jeroboam, the king would be put to the sword;  but Amaziah, a priest of Bethel told the king what Amos had been preaching, and then told Amos to go somewhere else with his prophesying.  But Amos told Amaziah that he was not a prophet at all, just a herder of sheep and a dresser of sycamore trees who had been raised up by the Lord and told to go and prophesy to Israel.

John the Baptist prophesied to Herod the king that it wasn’t lawful for him to have his brother’s wife, Herodias.  Herodias was furious with John and when an opportunity came, when Salome danced and when Herod was very pleased with her dancing, he told her to ask for anything and he would give it to her. Prompted by her mother,  she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter.  The startled Herod gave it to her as she asked, and thus perished the prophet who had troubled the king.

Prophets are not held in much honor, are they.  I remember when Martin Luther King was preaching around the country in the middle of the nascent civil right’s movement how the FBI and many others were horrified by what he was saying.  He was called a communist and was stalked by people who hated him, and when he was finally killed in Memphis, we discovered that it was a racist former Klan member who had shot him.  We weren’t surprised, even though the nation was horrified by that season of terror that we had experienced.  We don’t like prophets who trouble us.  We would be happier if they would either stay silent or go somewhere else.  What the former Klansman had done was to fulfill the will of many of the silent majority of Americans who had been very troubled by Martin Luther King’s words, and who wished that he would simply go away.

We don’t like prophets.  There are those who say that global warming is simply a made up fantasy and that the world will be just fine if we continue to pollute the planet.  There are others who tell us to leave the banks alone, that there is just too much regulation and that the banks will be just fine if we will ease up on our desire to have more rules.  There are those who want us to stop spending so much on government because we have a terrible deficit and that the solution to all of this is to cut taxes and spending, even though this will mean cutting needed funds to take care of the poor and the elderly.  It will mean taking stock of our priorities and arranging them in ways that will or will not honor human need in opposition to greed.  Part of the problem is that greed has enormous power.  Certainly the laws are tilted in that direction.  It is hard to move people who have a great deal of money.  There are those who say that preachers ought to shut up about politics, that these issues have no place in the pulpit.  Such a facile statement.  It just doesn’t fit with what God calls his preachers to do.

So how are we to respond?  The prophets continue to speak and we continue not to listen.  When the Lord finally creates the chaos that the prophets are telling us about, then we will blame them and each other.  That isn’t necessary.  It is not hard to simply listen and to hear the words that are put before us, and to ignore the voices in our heads of our greed that tries so very hard to undermine them.

The prayer that begins our service today asks our God to hear the prayers of his people,  and to grant that we may know and to understand the things that we ought to do and to give us the grace to faithfully accomplish them.   If we will only listen to that prayer, it would go a long way to moving us in the right direction.

Our History of Conflict

      I have bookshelves full of volumes that try to tell me how it is that we all ought to live our lives to the Glory of God and the establishment of God’s Kingdom.  There are books that try to interpret what Jesus said and did so that we can all bring into fruition the things that God has in mind for humankind.  I have always thought that Christianity tries to say much too much and doesn’t do enough.   Jesus made it all rather simple.  He taught his disciples, and us to obey the two commandments:

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

This certainly sounds simple enough.  Why is loving our neighbor such a terrible problem?  How did we get so far off track?

I’ve always been fascinated by the Crusades, those holy wars in the middle ages when Christian armies were sent to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim hordes.  There were a number of crusades and great destruction and loss of life involved.  The problem is that these were Christians, supposedly following the teaching of Christ who nevertheless involved themselves in killing lots of people because of their different religion and their occupation of the supposedly beloved city of Jerusalem.  The great warrior Saladin killed many crusaders at the Horns of Hittin, in a colossal battle and King Richard the first of England killed many Muslims in the city of Jerusalem.

This is only one moment in  the Christian abandonment of the simple teachings of Jesus.  Christian history is full of conflict.  Each of our denominations is a moment in time when we couldn’t agree and as a result separated from each other.  It continues today.  Our recent experience in the Diocese of Pittsburgh with the Anglican departure is only another in a long line of disruptions that are caused by our inability to love our God and to love one another.

It crosses over into our personal lives also.  We all have lines that we don’t want others to cross.  These can be political, racial, religious or any number of other places where we don’t want to tolerate difference.  I have listened to many conversations that have included comments and warnings about other people.  I have participated in these conversations sometimes and have said things that I am not proud of.  I know from living in the trenches that loving God and my neighbor is a wonderful concept that is very difficult to live out in my life.

I think that one of the reasons that we have Christian communities is so that we can practice our loving.  God drops all kinds of people into our midst.  They all have needs that we know nothing about.  When we are able to have conversation with them and to discover what their lives are about, we get somewhere with our loving.  And when we get somewhere with our loving, we can look back over our lives and see those moments when we have not been lovers at all.  Those for me are moments that require repentance and amendment.  Community can call that out of us and bring us into relationships that make our lives whole.  That, I believe, is why we are here, why we come to church each week and break bread together.  Thank God for our community.  It makes a profound difference in this world and it somewhat makes up for the multitude of sins in our Christian history.