Love in an Impossible Society

            The great astro-physicist Neal DeGrasse Tyson speaks with passion about the universe.  He says that when he goes outdoors, he automatically looks up into the heavens to see the stars and the sky as a reminder to him of the smallness of the earth and  ourselves here in the vastness of the universe.  He uses a photograph taken when our astronauts orbited the moon of the earth in the distance, a blue orb set in space.  He asks his audience that if we are this small and such a tiny blip on the screen of the universe; then why can’t we get along with each other? Why do we create wars and misery on this earth? This isn’t a theological question.  It is asked by an astro-physicist and it is a wonderfully valid question for all of us to consider with all of the turmoil in the world.

            And then I look at the wonderful collect for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, which reads:

               Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your

              Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your

              help; protect and govern it always by your goodness; through

              Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the

              Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

            The church sometimes seems to be among the worst places for turmoil.  When we were in Jerusalem at the magnificent Church of the Resurrection, where the tomb of Jesus is guarded by Orthodox priests and the Armenians worship downstairs, the Catholics are a sideshow and there are no Protestants at all; I wonder what it is that we are doing as Christians to show the world anything at all about decency and order.  In Bethlehem at one point the monks and the priests were fighting in the street at Christmas time about how the proper commemoration of the great feast ought to be celebrated.  We look like morons when we do things like this. 

            In recent years, the Diocese of Pittsburgh has split over some issues surrounding the Anglican versus the Episcopal Church.  Dioceses all over the country are divided over this kind of thing.  Again, we look like fools.  How on earth can we talk about Iran and Israel and ISIS versus the rest of the world when we can’t even keep our own house in any kind of decent order?

            Humans are a curious breed. The image of the Wisconsin dentist killing a beloved lion in Africa has claimed the front pages recently.  It is hard for me to understand the absolute selfishness and egotism that brings a man to pay a lot of money to “guides” to lead him to kill a lion that has become attractive to the people of Zimbabwe.  He claims not to know how loved the lion was, but that is irrelevant.  Lions and elephants are a species in decline.  Killing any of them for “sport” is obnoxious.  So is killing unarmed African Americans by police for minimal reasons.  When I look at what is going on around us, I wonder how it is that we can claim any high ground for ourselves in such a society.  What are we becoming?  Justice is certainly needed, but so is love.

             The way forward with all of this, of course is to pay attention to what our Lord taught us.  The simplicity of Jesus' teaching is compelling.  He told us to love one another; and then he went out to show us what that meant by feeding and healing all of those who came across his path and then sending his disciples out to do the same thing.  There are no requirements to receive this kind of love; we simply just have to need it.  I know the Jesus love for the Wisconsin dentist is full and true; also his love for the policeman who killed the black driver who didn't have a front license plate. My ministry in the penitentiary taught me that there are no limits whatsoever to God's love for us.  It extends from the best to the worst of us and is intended to create harmony and peace on this earth.

                 

Grace, Forgiveness and Freedom

            If perfection is what you crave, don’t go near a Christian church.  The wonderful thing about Christianity is the whole notion of forgiveness.  Forgiveness means freedom and it is one of the great promises that God gives to all of us.  It is easy to forget that.  We love to be self-righteous and point our fingers at those who don’t measure up.  In this political climate, everyone is being blamed for something.  The poor are called “lazy” and “takers” and are pointed to as the reason for a decline in the economy because they take so much resource from the government.  The rich are called greedy and are pointed to as the reason that the one percent have it all and the rest of us have nothing.  Finger pointing gets to be an art. The problem is that after the finger pointing, not much is done.

            I have always loved the story of David and Bathsheba.  It points out in the strongest terms how God can use even the most sinful of persons to accomplish God’s agenda.  David, the King, walking on the roof of his palace sees beautiful Bathsheba bathing on the roof of the house next door.  He sends to invite her to come to the palace, which she does and David lays with her and she conceives a child.  When David discovers this, he sends for Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, who is fighting the Ammonites with Joab.  Uriah comes home, David tries to get him to go home and sleep with his wife, but Uriah declines, saying that all of his fellow soldiers are not home, but sleeping in tents.  After a couple of days of this, David sends Uriah back to the war with a message for Joab commanding him to put Uriah in the front of the fighting and then to fall back so that Uriah will be killed.  This is done.

            The part that follows this story is the time that Nathan the prophet comes to David to accuse him.  Nathan tells David a story about a man who had only a young ewe lamb whom he loved like a child.  His master had a lot of sheep but when a stranger came to visit, the master took his servant’s lamb, had it killed and served it to the stranger for dinner.  David heard this story and said: that man should die.  Nathan immediately pointed his finger at David and said: you are the man and then recounted David’s sins with Bathsheba and Uriah.  David got the point quickly.  The story that is told about David is that after his encounter with Nathan, he went back to his room and wrote Psalm 51, that incredibly powerful confessing psalm that we use on Ash Wednesday when we present ourselves before our God as the sinners that we all know that we are.

      The beautiful part of this story is the fact that as a forgiven sinner of the worst kind, an adulterer with Bathsheba and a murderer of Uriah, David still is the one to lead God’s people through difficult times and pave the way for his son Solomon, whose mother was Bathsheba, to build the temple and create a wonderful time for his people.

            There is a more modern story similar to the one about David. John Newman was a British slave trader who one day watched the slaves leaving his ship in America and those who had died carted away.  He was struck with the horror of it and what he had done.   Later he became an Anglican priest in England and wrote the marvelous hymn Amazing Grace, which told the story of his life and how he had been redeemed.

            The Grace of God is an incredible gift to humanity.  That we can all be loved and accepted for who we are, despite the things that we have done is the message that this church has for everyone.  We are the refuge from the judgement and the nonsense that fills the rest of the world.  Our mission is to help the people around us to know how much that they are loved by the God who made us all, and how this grace gives us freedom.

            If you want proof of that, look at the ministry of Jesus among the people in the towns and villages through which he passed.  Look at the context of his life.  He had just lost his friend John the Baptist, his cousin, to the treachery of Herod who had had him beheaded and destroyed.  Above all things, he wanted to get away for a while simply to grieve, but the crowds wouldn’t let him. They followed him relentlessly because they needed his healing touch.  The Gospel story tells us that he took his disciples across the Sea of Galilee but the crowds followed him.  He saw them coming up the mountain and asked Phillip where they were going to get enough food to feed them all.  Thomas told him that there was a young man who had five loaves and two small fishes, but that was hardly enough to take care of the five thousand in the crowd.  Jesus took what he had, blessed it and broke it and told his disciples to distribute it to the crowd.  There were twelve baskets left over.  Some say that there was one basket for each of the tribes of Israel.  When the people saw this miracle, they tried to seize Jesus to make him their King, but he fled up the mountain to get away from them. 

            Notice that there isn’t any requirement laid down by Jesus about who can get the food and who can’t.  There is no mention of those who are good and those who are bad.  Everyone in the crowd is accepted and fed.  Jesus overlooked every sin that those people had committed and simply responded to their need.

            That is why acceptance at our altar of everyone who comes to it is essential.  We give the sacrament to all of you, everyone who comes.  We spend some time confessing our sins and receiving forgiveness.  Look at David's sins or John Newman's.  Are your sins worse than theirs?  David was cleansed and sent by God to be the leader of his people.  John Newman became a priest.  We are cleansed, fed and sent into this world with the message that God loves us all.  When you find those out there who don't understand that, help them to see it.  The way to do that is to love them the way that you find them, whether you agree with them or not.  That might even help our politics.  

                 

Our Homeless Lord

            Where did Jesus live?  I know, he lived in Nazareth with Mary and Joseph when he was a kid, but later, during his ministry, where was his home?  He stayed with Mary, Martha and Lazarus in their home in Bethany for a short visit; he visited Peter’s home in Capernaum and healed Peter’s mother-in-law, but during the three years of his ministry, where was his home?

            It seems to me that he didn’t really have a home.  He spent his time with the poor and the outcast and more or less lived with them.  That is certainly what he told his disciples to do when he sent them out. He very carefully told them not to take much of anything with them, but to live out of the goodness of the people whom they met on the way.  He told them that if they weren’t received in a particular place to shake the dust off their shoes and to move on. 

            For a while, that is how the church lived also.  They met in various homes, sometimes as many as forty people; they sang hymns, prayed and took care of those who were in need.  Their economy was basically communistic.  They pooled their resources and used those assets to take care of not only each other, but also those who were in need in their community.  It didn’t take long, though for the church to lose its focus on need and begin to pay more attention to its own needs.  This is when corruption began to take hold in religion.  It had been there all along, it just began to take over.  The church began to build buildings and isolate itself from the rest of society.  Then, after Constantine recognized Christianity as the state religion, Christians began to compel others to become Christian by threats and sometimes even torture.  There were people who continued to practice the religion that Jesus gave to us; but mostly, we had a church of compulsion.  There was a wonderful eruption of monastic movements.  Francis of Assisi and his followers went back to the model that Jesus gave to his disciples and began taking care of the poor first and letting the rich take care of themselves. 

            Later, when the great cathedrals were being built, the church provided for the poor by giving them ample work to do and providing a way for them to take care of themselves and their families by building the churches.  That lasted for a long time until the political forces began to repress religion and take over their buildings and their ministries.  We had  the Reformation and the Council of Trent, Roman Catholicism’s response to Martin Luther, and then a lot of wars between the various denominations.  So where are we today?  We have a plethora of denominations, of separate religions and sometimes it seems that they are all at war with each other.  ISIS uses threats and force to make people become some variety of Muslim.  Jews and Muslims and Christians fight over the territory that was the Holy Land.  We don’t really look very good when it comes to trying to show the world what God looks like.

            I spent over twenty years as a part-time chaplain in a penitentiary.  It was a voluntary job, I got no pay for it.  I had eight men in my group that met once a week.  All of them had killed someone and what they all wanted even more than food and sleep was forgiveness.  But how was that ever going to happen?  One of the men got a letter from the family of the woman whom he had killed telling him that they wanted to come and see him.  He wrote back to them and told them to come.  When the day of the visit arrived, he went reluctantly to the visiting room to see them.  The girl’s father said to him: “we have come to forgive you.  It is time for us to bury our daughter and to get on with our lives.”  He was stunned by this, but came back to the group and broke into tears.  It was a beautiful moment.  He remained in prison, but he had a gift that very few of his fellow inmates had.  Forgiveness is freedom; freedom for the family who offered it, and freedom for the inmate who received it.  That, I think is the essence of what Jesus taught us about church. 

            Jesus spent most of his life homeless.  He walked among the poor, healed them and made sure that the people whom he met had what they needed.  His disciples did the same thing.  After Jesus death and resurrection, they did their best to take care of the people in the community who were without even meager resources.  I know that we are called to the same ministry.  What often restricts us is our focus on ourselves.  We have to pay for our buildings, our clergy and all of the structure that we have built around our mission.  That’s not to say that those things are unnecessary, but sometimes we let them take us over.  I like to keep Jesus and his disciples in mind and think about how they were able to go about their work and take care of the people around them.  I know that it wasn’t easy, but it worked primarily because they put the needs that they found first and themselves last.  That is certainly what the Gospels tell us, and when we really do it we find that success multiplies.

             If Jesus was essentially homeless, then among the homeless is where we will find him and his incomparable love  When we find our Lord among the poor, we also find our mission.

                

Symbols are Not Necessarily Innocent

            There has been a lot of conversation recently about what to do with the battle flag of the Confederacy. It has been at the top of a flagpole in Colombia, South Carolina for years and many people want it to come down. This concern was sparked by the murder of the nine people in Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina and the picture of the alleged man who did the killing, Dylann Roof with the flag beside him. All of a sudden the nature of the racist symbolism contained in the flag became a focus of attention.

            Certainly the flag is a symbol of the division that we had in this country from the beginning between states that permitted slavery and those who didn’t. It is impossible to say that the Civil War was fought for any other reason than the abolition of slavery. When Harriet Beecher Stowe visited Abraham Lincoln in Washington, he is supposed to have said to her:  “So you are the little lady who started this terrible war.” The division that we have had in this nation has persisted long after the war was over. North and South have been politically and culturally divided for a very long time. The demand to get rid of the Confederate battle flag is a rather belated cry for unity in this country; for a time when the radical divisions that we obviously have can be re-united and we can have a generous peace. A peace that never happened as a result of the Civil War, or with what we savagely did as a nation to the Southern States after the war that was called “reconstruction,” to make the people in the rest of the country feel better. We also still haven’t seen real peace after the civil rights arguments of the sixties. Martin Luther King was killed because of our racial divide. We are still looking for peace. Symbols are important.            

            The story in Second Samuel about David bringing the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem to be housed in the Tent of Meeting is a wonderful example of bringing symbols together to unite a country. The Tent of Meeting was built by Moses in the desert to be a place of worship and conversation with God. When the Ten Commandments were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, the tablets on which they were inscribed were placed in a great box called the Ark of the Covenant, which was carried wherever the Hebrew people went.  When the tribes came into the land of Canaan, they brought both of these symbols with them.  Eventually, the nation split into two separate peoples: the people of Israel, who were the ten tribes in the North, and the two tribes, Judah and Simeon who became the people of Judah in the South. David was attempting to unite these two groups of tribes into one solid nation by bringing all twelve tribes together with their capital as the city of Jerusalem. That is the significance of the bringing the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem to be housed in the Tent of Meeting.    

            It didn’t stay that way for very long. The tribes eventually split again; even today, East and West Jerusalem are contested places by the Jewish people and the Palestinians.  Will there ever be unity?     

            Unity is something that is greatly desired by God for all people. We are the ones who split apart from each other because of our races, our politics or other things that make it hard for us to talk to each other. When I was the interim rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Charleston, West Virginia, I found myself at the head of a great black church in the diocese; one that had been established many years before. It was an education for me to live among those dear people and to preach to them. I had more PhD holders in that congregation than I have ever had since, because many of them were professors at West Virginia State College, which had been established to be a place where African American people could find education. I learned a lot from them about the differences that we have as a people and what it means to be black in an essentially white society. 

            How to find some unity in the midst of all of this division is what we need to do.  We can’t do it by casting blame and trying to punish those who are divided from us. We need instead to learn to listen and to respond somehow to the hopes and the dreams that are cherished by those who live apart from us. Martin Luther King said that “eleven o’clock Sunday Morning is the most segregated moment of our week,” meaning that our churches are the places where we are the most divided. I know that is true. Mother Emmanuel Church is a black church in a white community.     

            At the 78^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which concluded this past week, we elected Michael Curry as our new presiding Bishop. Bishop Curry has been the bishop of North Carolina. He is an African American and is a dynamic preacher. I think that he is just what we need in this country to begin to heal the wounds that have persisted through the Civil Rights era, and the current division between the police and the black community. I have listened to Bishop Curry preach and I know that what he says is what we need to hear.

            Symbols were important in Jesus' time also. King Herod saw John the Baptist as a symbol of his sin. John had pointed out to him that he was guilty of adultery. Herod wanted to get rid of him. So when Salome danced her dance and was promised any reward, she asked her mother what she should ask for and Herodias told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, which Herod reluctantly supplied. That is what we do with symbols. When I think of the Confederate battle flag and Dylann Roof, it occurs to me that this symbol is certainly not neutral, not without consequence. Getting rid of it says something about our racial priorities and we need to consider that carefully. Our hearts go out to the people of that parish in South Carolina. We want for them peace and unity. It is good that the person who did that crime is in custody. We can do more. Honoring unity by taking the symbol of the pain down from the flagpole is a necessary thing to do in this time of crisis. May God bless what we do in His name.

                            

The Times, They are Changing

            This has been an incredible week for change.  The Supreme Court has ruled that same sex marriage is legal in all of the states of the union, overturning bans in a number of them.  There has been a great outcry against this from people in the conservative camp who look at this as simply another attempt by liberals to make our nation into a socialist country.  The Orthodox churches have denounced this decision as have many in the Roman Catholic Church.  Many others however have embraced this ruling as a source of goodness in this time of conflict and argument.

            Donald Trump has raged against Mexicans who have come across our border, labeling them rapists, and as a result a number of companies have refused to sponsor his Miss Universe pageant.  His power simply doesn’t extend as far as he would wish.  There are consequences for strong opinions, as most of us have discovered someplace in our lives. 

            The Episcopal Church is meeting in Salt Lake City in their 78^th General Convention.  They have elected Michael Curry, the African American bishop of North Carolina to be the Presiding Bishop for the next nine years.  The election was on the first ballot, a unique event in the history of the Episcopal Church.  Bishop Curry is well known as a dynamic preacher and an advocate for people who have no voice.  He follows Katherine Jefferts Schori, the first woman elected to that post.  It certainly appears that this church of ours is looking toward the future and attempting to be a voice in a culture that is diverse and demanding. 

            Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth to preach in the synagogue and wasn’t taken particularly seriously.  “Who is this man?  Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Joseph?  Don’t we know his brothers?”  Jesus was dismissed almost out of hand as being too familiar.  The Gospel says that he was able to cure a few people, but he says those great words that I have heard quoted over and over again: Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.  Familiarity breeds contempt is another way of putting this.  

            Jesus sent his disciples out to do their work, advising them to take nothing with them for their journey and to simply rely on the people whom they met.  They did this to great advantage and  indeed they are still our models for what ministry needs to look like in this world.

            I hope that this church of ours will always continue to use that same model.  Times change and so the church needs to change with them.  Staying in the same place leaves those behind who are tormented.  We have left slavery behind, we have left the oppression of women behind.  We continue in this world to look for the downtrodden and to lift them up.  That is what Jesus told his disciples to do, and the job remains.  We can continue to find ways to keep the church the same and unchanging, or we can do what needs to be done and be the inclusive body that our Lord intended us to be from the beginning.  The choice is critical, and it us up to us.