Mary, the Mother of God,

  

            For far too long, women have been excluded from all or part of public life.  It wasn’t until 1920 that they were allowed to vote.  Hillary Clinton was the first woman nominated to run for the Presidency and that wasn’t until 2016.  It has been a long time for these people to wait to have access to the power that runs this country.  Yes, we have some representatives and senators from the female gender and even a few governors; but largely, it is men who run the country, make the laws and determine our course in the international world.

            Even in the world of religion there have been some profound changes.  The woman deacon who read the gospel at my ordination to the priesthood told me that it was the last time that she would do that.  I believe that it probably was because she was ordained to the priesthood in 1976, the first year that women were allowed to be priests in the Episcopal church.

            I have a sense that much is changing.  The #metoo movement has sparked commentary and argument across the spectrum of politics and it is obvious that women are not going to simply retire into the background and be quiet.  It is necessary to have conversation about the things that are troubling this country and all that crosses the lines of gender.  Things are never going to be the same as they always have been.  That is a positive outcome of all of this turmoil. 

            Mary, the mother of Jesus was a remarkable woman.  She endured the pain and the ostracism that carrying Jesus to term entailed.  She had Joseph as a companion on this journey, but it was a difficult trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where her baby was born in a stable because as the story is told, there was no room for them in the inn. 

            When the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her that she had been chosen by God to be the mother of the Lord, she didn’t argue with him.  Instead, she replied with the Magnificat, a glorious song that proclaimed the greatness of God and spoke of the favor that she knew had been given to her.  Her song offers the mission of Jesus even before his birth.  In this beautiful song, she says about God:  He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.  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.

            Mary’s greatness is also told to us in the second stanza of the Rosary, when it is said: Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.  Mother of God indeed.  Certainly that is true because we know that Jesus was God incarnate on this earth.  It is because of Jesus that we know that God understands what it means to be human and to know all of the limitations and difficulty that human being entails. 

            Thank God for Mary.  Thank God for all of our mothers and the women who have helped to create a world where goodness happens every day.  I hope that out of all of this trouble and difficulty that is being experienced in the present time, that their strength will be allowed to serve this world in more leadership roles and to help us to be the people that God intended us to be from the moment of creation. May God bless you and may you have a very merry Christmas! 

            

Ministry in a Changing World

                         Time marches on.  I have noticed that all of the World War II veterans are now in their nineties.  That should not be surprising, but I remember that war.  I heard the notice of the attack on Pearl Harbor on our radio in our living room when I was eight years old.  I have grown up with those memories.  We have moved into another era as things have changed in this country.  That isn’t a bad thing, it is just different.  We need to constantly look at what our work must be in a changing time. 

            Jesus came into our world as a newborn in Bethlehem and lived for thirty some years.  His ministry from the time that he was baptized by John in the Jordan until his crucifixion lasted about three years.  In that time, he offered healing, comfort and care to the people whom he met throughout Israel and even into some of the surrounding territories.  After his death and subsequent resurrection and his ascension into heaven, his apostles created small house churches that met constantly to celebrate their common ministry that they inherited from their Lord and to create communities that acted in concert to keep these ministries working.  Those house churches became the model for later Christians as they worked to carry on the ministry that Jesus taught to all of us by his life.

            The prophet Isaiah spoke of God’s purpose for humankind in the 61^st chapter of his prophecy when he said: He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed; to bind up the broken-hearted; to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to comfort all who mourn. That is the ministry that Jesus took for his own during his life and has passed on to what has become the Christian church afterwards.  Christianity is composed of a number of denominations, each with their own view of what their worship and ministry means.  We ought not to confuse ministry with our prayer books.  We can cooperate in our ministry while we worship in our own singular ways. 

            What we share with those original disciples of Jesus is our common community that we call our churches.  They are the means by which ministry can be moved into our neighborhoods.  There are many homeless, people in poverty and those who have lost friends or members of their families to death, or are suffering in many other ways around us.  Our job is to make their worlds brighter by our presence and our caring.  When we do this, we are doing God’s will as expressed by Isaiah in his insightful prophecy. 

            We are living in a turbulent world with changing politics all around us.  In this unsettled time, our ministry is more and more important.  When we can lift up those who are hurting and give hope to those who are fearful, we are making a profound difference in this world.  That is why ministry is so important.  God will bless us richly as we do this work. 

           

           

Avoiding Retirement

           I’ve retired four times.  That may sound silly or ridiculous, but it is certainly true.  In 1972, I retired from the television station that I had been working for because they ran out of money and they couldn’t pay me anymore.  I then went to seminary, became an Episcopal priest and started another career entirely.  I was the rector of two churches in Pittsburgh and loved every minute of it.  When I reached the age of 65 in 1999, I retired from my parish and went to live at a little resort community in West Virginia with my beautiful wife.  After two years of playing golf and reading, I got bored, called the West Virginia bishop and asked him if he had any work.  He told me that there were some parishes that were in need of an interim rector, but they were all in the southern part of the state.  I was eager to get back to work, so I agreed to consider these places.  Over the next several years, I served three parishes near Charleston as their interim rector, having a good time at each one and paving the way for each of them to do something with their future. 

After recovering from a menengioma while I continued to work, in 2010, our kids called and said that it was a four-hour trip to Charleston and they wondered when we were going to think about coming home.  We heard that plea from them, I again retired from the parish that I was working at, we sold our Charleston house and moved back to Pittsburgh. 

I still wasn’t done.  The bishop of Pittsburgh told me that there was a parish in need of someone to be a permanent supply priest for them.  I agreed to do this and spent the next year and a half serving that parish each Sunday and getting to know a parish full of excellent people.  The time came when I finally decided that retirement from this work was the thing for me to do, so for the fourth time, I retired.  I am probably still not done.  There is a shortage of clergy in this diocese and I am sure that there will be times that I will be asked to take a Sunday or two somewhere.  I will be happy to do that, and I will continue to write my blog every week.

Retirement is something that many people look forward to; they sometimes go to Florida or someplace else with a warm climate and they relax, do some of the things that they never had time for while they were working.  Pensions and Social Security help them pay the bills.  I tried this when we went to the West Virginia resort community.  We enjoyed it, but it still left a hole in my life, a hole that I needed to fill with the work that I had been doing.  Retiring is also something that has emerged in this generation as a stage of life that we can aspire to.  I think that if that is so, we need to discover some things that we can do that benefit those around us in our time to ourselves. 

When I look at the biblical people who speak to us in the lessons that we hear each week in church, retirement doesn’t seem to be a condition that many of them take up.  I think of Isaiah, who offered his prophecy to the people of Israel as a statement of life. His intention was to warn and to comfort his people as they lived lives that sometimes included a lot of misery. I have always loved the words that begin the second part of the book of the prophet Isaiah, the words that also make up one of the most moving arias in the Messiah.  Isaiah is getting us ready for the coming of God into the world.  He speaks to the people of Israel to give them comfort and hope:

                                      Comfort, O comfort my people,
                                                              says your God.

                                                          Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
                                                              and cry to her

                                                          that she has served her term,
                                                              that her penalty is paid,

                                                          that she has received from                                                                                                                   the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

        What beautiful words the prophet has for all of the people who are listening to him.
  These words come from a deep faith and a commitment to the work that Isaiah has been given

 to do.  His work offered promise and the blessing of God to all of the people and are the 

foundation of our season of Advent where we wait for the coming of our Lord Jesus into the 

world.

       I’m glad that I am still working and managing to avoid complete retirement.  I know that 

theLord still has work for me to do in this world and I am eager to do it.  I thank God for all of 

the things that I have been able to do and thepeople whom I have worked with.  This has been

 a blessing to me beyond any expectation. 

       

            

Listening and Learning

             

            I’ve always wondered about the argument about Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays as a greeting at this time of the year.  I know that Christians want to celebrate the birth of Jesus in this season, but it seems to me that Happy Holidays is really an inclusive term to offer good wishes to people who don’t necessarily celebrate Christmas.  It certainly isn’t an attempt to create a “war on Christmas” as some political people try to say. 

            If there was a war on Christians it was certainly waged during the days of the Inquisition, when proper belief was demanded and those who deviated were severely punished.  It was also waged when the Puritans came to America to avoid persecution in England and then began persecuting everyone when they got to this continent.  I’m not surprised by some of these “wars”, they come from the idea that somebody’s ideas are the only correct ones and that those who deviate from them just have to be wrong.  This has been the basis for discrimination since the world was founded. 

            The cure for this, it seems to me, is that we need to listen more and talk less.  When we listen, we learn.  That is increasingly important in a time when certainty seems to be in vogue and those who don’t agree with the prevailing ideas are told that they are wrong.  Certainty is very common in our politically charged world.  It has been made more so since our political parties have drawn away from each other in an attempt to gather power.  The keeping of gathered power seems to account for more and more outrageous claims of whatever they project “truth” to be.  There is less and less listening going on in the halls of power these days and an excess of talking.  Finding solutions requires people listening to each other to find compromises that really help people in their lives.  The final stage of not listening is an autocracy that simply dictates what will happen and fails to take into account the negative effects that their proposed actions will create. 

        In the Old Testament, Isaiah is talking about a time of crisis, when the people have gone on their own way and have become lost in this world.

                      Isaiah says:

                                               We have all become like one who is unclean,
                                                  and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.

                                              We all fade like a leaf,
                                                  and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

                                              There is no one who calls on your name,
                                                  or attempts to take hold of you;

                                               For you have hidden your face from us,
                                                  and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity

             The prophet calls upon God to come down, to make the mountains quake and to make the world new again so that the people who have strayed can again be happy.  This is a great cry here at the beginning of the Advent season as we wait for the coming of Jesus again with our own hopes that our Lord will help us to make the world right again after all of our certainty has faded and our sins that have erupted because of it have overwhelmed us.  Isaiah’s cry to God can mirror our own yearning for justice and hope in this world where so much seems to have gone astray. 

            That, for me, is the power of this wonderful season leading up to Christmas.  Our desire is for God’s hope for humankind to be restored and for us all to live together in the harmony that our Lord wants for us all.  As we once again wait for the birth of our Lord Jesus at the great moment of Christmas, let us try to listen better to each other and to learn rather than dictate our certainty in this world.  God bless us as we work together on helping our God to renew our culture and our lives.

Finding Our True Religion

   

            We live in a time of great turmoil.  There are arguments going on all around us.  These are not only political arguments that separate us, even our religious organizations are having trouble staying together.  This is a time when churches are losing members, small churches are foundering and some of them are closing.  There is an obvious struggle in many churches to stay viable.  I’ve been almost astounded to watch the Roman Catholic church merging parishes and closing others.  This has created agony among many people of faith who have looked to their churches as places of community where they knew their neighbors and found their friends. 

            It is necessary that we get all of this sorted out.  To help people of faith gather together in places where they can feel secure and practice their faith with some certainty that the institution in which they worship and know their neighbors will continue to flourish and be able to support them in their work and the ministry that they are anxious to continue to work.

            After Jesus’ resurrection, the apostles founded small churches in their homes.  These congregations were composed of 40-50 people all of whom wanted to celebrate the new life that had been given to them by their Lord.  These were joyful communities who did a lot of good in the world around them.  Care for the poor and the outcast was primary in the life of these newly created Christians.  This was probably the primary command of Jesus during his ministry: to love one another as we have been loved by our God and to take care of the need that we find around us with all of our resources.  I can’t imagine a better cure for the turmoil that I see in our society than this: to keep our eyes open for those in need and to do what we can to make them comfortable.  This is the mission that our God has set before us. 

            Look at Jesus ministry.  He constantly went out of his way to cure, to lift up and to help those who were in terrible need.  He even learned to go outside the bounds of belief to do this.  I think of the woman that he met on the road to Tyre and Sidon who had a sick daughter who asked him for a cure.  He told her that it wasn’t right to give the food on the table to the dogs.  She answered him by saying that the dogs eat the crumbs that fall to the ground.  Jesus immediately knew what he had to do and told her that her belief was remarkable and that her daughter was immediately healed.  Jesus was here for all of us.  His love and concern for our welfare extended to the whole world.  We are the inheritors of this mission.  What is necessary for all of us is to look around us to find those who are in need and to care for them.  When we do that, we follow our Lord’s instructions and create the kind of world that God intended from the beginning.

            It isn’t easy to do this.  We have to keep our faith and our religious life intact and to continue to follow our Lord’s teaching, wherever it leads.  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers that they enter into his Kingdom when they fed him when he was hungry, gave him water when he was thirsty, welcomed him when he was a stranger, gave him clothing when he was naked and visited him when he was in prison.  They asked him when they had done any of these things and he told them the wonderful truth: When you did this for the least of those who are members of my family, you did it for me.  As we know, the members of his family are all of the people on this earth.  When we care for each other, we care for our Lord.  I can’t imagine a more perfect religion.   

               

                     

Living With Compassion

             

            I’ve never been particularly fond of the parable of the servants who were each given a sum of money by their master.  Two of them invested the money and doubled it and received the praise of their master when he returned.  The third one was afraid and buried his money and then gave it back to the master when he came back.  The master rewarded the ones who doubled their money and punished the servant who only returned what he had been given. 

            The reason that I don’t like this story is because it seems to me to be devoid of compassion, which I think is the quality that Jesus brought to all of us by his life and ministry.  I would rather have had the master take the frightened servant aside and thank him for giving back his money and sharing with him some possible ways that he could have used the small amount that he had been given to make a difference in the world.  That would have been preferable to seeing the poor man get punished.  

            Compassion isn’t always easy.  Sometimes we are frightened by misery.  When we see large groups of people who don’t have enough to eat or places to live, we sometimes are tempted to retreat from it and wonder if somebody else can do something to help them.  Our role in taking care of each other is the essence of compassion.  Once when we were on our meals-on-wheels route, a woman came to us and asked if we could give her a dollar.  She wanted to buy a hot chocolate and didn’t have the money to do that.  I gave her five dollars and watched the tears well up in her eyes.  She said that her house had burned down and that she was trying to find a place to live.  She left us and went to get her hot chocolate.  I certainly didn’t do much to help her, but those tears of hers after getting a small amount of money stayed with me.  She certainly needed more help than I could give her at that moment, and she was only one of a number of people on the street who are left behind by the rest of us.

            Finding ways that we can reach out to those in need is the essence of our religion.  God created us, loves us and asks us to love one another.  That isn’t something that is just said, it is what our creator wants of us all.  There is more than enough wealth in this world to take care of all of us.  The fact that it accumulates with those who are wealthy isn’t new.  It has been going on since the world was created.  Jesus came to teach us how to care for each other and to spread the wealth around so that we can all be cared for.  One of the best pieces of art that I think that I have ever seen is a sketch of Jesus sitting at the base of a lamppost with his arms around two obviously homeless people who are leaning on him.  That sketch says it all.  Jesus caring for those in need and asking us to join him in that effort.  Compassion is a great gift that we have been given by our Lord.  Let us not forget to use it.

Helping Others

            We have heard Moses give us the Ten Commandments, Jesus offered the beatitudes and in Matthew’s gospel, he tells us about the bridesmaids who were waiting for the bridegroom.  They all had lamps, some of them had oil for the lamps and some didn’t.  When the bridegroom arrived suddenly, those with oil were able to light their lamps and accompany him.  The others were out of luck and couldn’t do much of anything at all.

            Jesus uses this parable to tell us that we need to be ready—not necessarily for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, or for Jesus’ second coming, but simply ready in our lives for what is going on around us.  I think of this when I am at the store, or walking around downtown, or simply driving on the roads around town. We never know what we are likely to encounter when we are living our lives.  Sometimes it is a beggar on the street; sometimes it is somebody in serious trouble who needs our help.  What this parable is telling us is to be ready to do whatever it is that is needed to help people in their lives. 

            Our local paper had a column every week called Random Acts of Kindness, where people tell stories about how strangers helped them out of some kind of trouble.  They always do this to show their appreciation for what random strangers have done to help them.  Often, they don’t know the names of the people who have helped, they just are pleased that somebody cared at a moment in time when they needed help.  I suspect that a lot of the help that is provided to people on a day to day basis goes largely unreported and just anonymously helps whoever needs it.  I think that is what God has in mind for all of us as we live our lives.

            Families are one place where help is often provided.  We are more familiar with each other’s needs in our families.  For people whom we don’t know at all, we need to be able to see the sometimes subtle signs that help is needed.  When we are able to do that, the Kingdom of Heaven comes a little nearer.  I think that is what Jesus is trying to teach us not only with his parables, but with his life.

                  

Let Mercy Rule

            There have been so many tragedies recently.  All of the storms that plagued the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas not to mention Ireland and the British Isles; the earthquake in Mexico and the terrible fires in California that have left so many people without homes and possessions.  We had the horrible shooting in Las Vegas that killed so many people who were simply attending a country music performance; the terrorist driving a truck into the bike lane in New York, killing eight people and injuring a number of others, and the shooting at the church at Sutherland Springs, Texas that killed 26 people. The grieving over all of this has taken us over as a nation and has caused such pain in so many lives.  It is as if we have embarked on a new era, an era of hatred and misery enhanced by egotism and people who just don’t care about law and order and want to create chaos wherever they are.  This is also applicable to the natural disasters that we are seeing since we don’t seem to care about climate change and continue to permit inordinate pollution of our atmosphere.

               In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus begins his sermon on the mount by telling his apostles the beatitudes.  These are great phrases that really sum up the expectations that God has for all of us. One of them reads: blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.  Mercy isn’t an easy thing to either give or receive.  Often when we pass a beggar on the street, we do just that:  pass them.  We ignore their signs, their position on the street, frequently sitting down against a post, dressed in shabby clothes and all of the things that tell us of their difficult position in life.  We don’t really think of mercy in these moments, we think only of getting on with what we are doing. 

            Mercy is a two-way street.  I love the verse that goes:

                       

                                                Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat

                                                Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat.

                                                If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do

                                                If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you!

Here is mercy coming back from the beggar.  We really don’t think of that most of the time either, we are still set on doing what we are about.  But this is the reality of mercy.  It is the interaction that we have with each other, caring for each other, paying attention to our needs, and being aware of the condition that each of us are in.  It is fairly easy to do this with our friends and our relatives, but when it comes to strangers, it is a bit more difficult.  I know that our Lord wants us to care for each other, to be merciful and loving to each other.  When we do this we lessen the amount of stress and hatred in this world and make it less likely that events such as we are seeing in the news will keep happening.  Love one another as I have loved you, said Jesus to all of us when he expressed the commandments of God.  That is our mission as the children of God.  God loves every one of us.  Let us try as hard as we can to love one another.

           

           

                

Love Triumphs

             

            There is a great verse in the hymn Amazing Grace that says:

                        When we’ve been there ten thousand years/bright shining as the sun;

                        We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise/than when we’d first begun.

            That to me is an excellent way to describe the relationship that we have with our God and this world.  We all grow up, grow older and live out our lives doing what we can with our faith.  Sometimes we don’t do very well with our loving.  We neglect people who are in need and marginalize others.  There is a constant argument going on in our society about how those who are in categories that we have created ought to live.  If you are African American, gay, female, Muslim, Latino or Native American you will certainly encounter barriers that might prevent you from living your life in full.  Periodically, we come up with ways to bridge these barriers, but the rhetoric that emerges from the argument is always hurtful and demonstrates how hard it is for us to love one another as our God has loved us. 

            That commandment to love, is the foundation of all scripture.  When Jesus was asked what is the most important commandment, this is the one that he offers to the Pharisees who have asked him the question.  He offers it in good faith because it is true and is the basis for all of the rest of Holy Scripture.  If we can’t love one another, not much else is really possible.

            What gets in the way is our narcissism, our ego centered attitude toward others that comes from our desire to get our own way in most things.  When we can put this aside and care for others and their needs, love has an honest chance to work.

            We live in a time when hate has erupted in almost incredible ways.  A man shoots a large number of people in a crowd watching a country music festival in Las Vegas and we can’t find any reason why he would do this.  The social media platform called Twitter is increasing being used to call people names and pump out false information to the country.  The label fake news is used over and over again to deflect claims of real truth in some of the reporting that is going on in this country.  It is harder and harder to know what is true and what is false in what we are reading and hearing every day in our media reporting and the political response that we receive to it.  There is a design to this.  The deflection of  reporting on real events by those in charge is a way to make us all pay attention to other things rather than what is being said.  Deflection is a great strategy to keep us from looking deeper into the events that are being reported.

            The only answer to hate is love.  That is why Jesus made it the most important commandment; and the one that brings us all closer to God.  Without love, hate triumphs and this world loses a great deal of meaning and hope.  We have a mission to spread love in this world and to defeat the forces of hate.

The Face of God

            I’ve always been leery of preachers who want to show me the face of God.  The ones who know so very well what God looks like.  When you look a little closer, their god looks a lot like what they want you to believe.  I think of people like the ones from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas who love to picket veteran’s funerals with signs that say hateful things.  Their god is not one of love, but of hate and condemnation.

            They, of course aren’t new at this.  During the inquisition, many people were executed for beliefs that were contrary to what the church at the time professed.  In recent times, many African-Americans were lynched in this country simply for being black and free, contrary to the ethos of slavery that existed in many people’s minds.  When I consider these things, it makes me wonder why it is that people want to attribute to our God these things that they believe that are so contrary to what God taught to all of us through Jesus’ ministry and through the works of the church through the centuries when it wasn’t trying to contradict the Word of God.

            Up on Mount Sinai, God gave to Moses the Ten Commandments, God’s word spelled out so that people could understand it.  These were the ways that God wanted humanity to behave.  They are simple rules that we all understand and really don’t want to argue with.  Yes, it is hard to keep them. We all covet, bear false witness, fail to honor our father and mother and to have no other gods before the God who loves us all. 

           

            I spent a number of years with prisoners in the penitentiary who all had committed murder and were paying for that with life sentences.  They had broken one of the most significant of the commandments.  We spent a lot of time talking about that and trying to find ways that they could find forgiveness.  I always thought, while I was doing that, how much we all need to find forgiveness for the commandments that we have broken.  I notice that God doesn’t ascribe any particular importance to any of these commandments.  They are all important to be followed if we are going to do the will of our God.  When we break them, as we all have, we need to find forgiveness and get ourselves back to the place where God’s Love surrounds us.

            After Moses received the commandments, Moses asked God to show him more so that he could describe the person who gave him the commandments.  God told him that he would show to Moses his Glory, but God’s face he could not see.  Moses was tucked into a crevice in the mountain while God passed by.  Moses could see God’s back, but not God’s face because as God said, “to see my face is to die.”

            I know that God was trying to help Moses to understand the depth of God’s glory and the strength and power behind the issuance of the commandments.  It was simply moments later that God told Moses that his people down at the base of Sinai had constructed a golden calf that they were worshipping, and that Moses needed to put a stop to that. 

            It is certainly fascinating the way that we lift up our own prejudices in our worship life.  Like the Westboro people, we want the whole world to come to our way of thinking.  In Matthew’s gospel, the Pharisees seek to trap Jesus, so they ask him a subtle question:  Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?  Jesus recognizes the trap and asks them for the coin which they use to pay the taxes.  They show him a denarius, which has the face of the emperor on it.  Whose face is this? asks Jesus. When they reply, the emperor’s, Jesus says to them, then give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor and to God the things that are God’s. This quieted the Pharisees and they left Jesus.  An amazing exchange.  We need always to remember that all that we have and are belongs to God and to create another authority and declare that it is superior is always wrong. We live in a time when hatred is showing up all over the place.  God is Love and Love is how we defeat hatred.  When we remember that, our God is blessedly served.

             

What Does Love Mean?

            In the movie, The Ten Commandments, Aaron, played by Edward G. Robinson, urges the Hebrew people at the foot of Mount Sinai to build a golden calf while they are waiting for Moses, played by Charleton Heston to come down from the top of the mountain, where he had gone at the command of God.  God sees all of this and tells Moses that his people are doing a bad thing and that he needs to go down and to stop them.  Moses does this and the people are indeed stunned at their leader’s anger.  

            That story has always puzzled me a bit.  Those Hebrews have been freed from their slavery in Egypt and have been in the desert for a while coming to terms with it.  They are a bit confused as to what circumstances they are in and what is coming next.  Other than a “promised land” that seems to them to be a bit vague, they have no sense of what the future holds.  With Moses away for a while, his brother Aaron takes charge and offers a rationale for their condition.  He asks for all of the gold that these people have as earrings, rings and such, and fashions a molded golden calf from it and tells the people that this calf is the god who has brought them out of Egypt and invites them to worship this newly created symbol.  God is of course furious and sends Moses to break it all up. 

            I’m not surprised at all at the Hebrew’s confusion.  How are they to know what God has in mind for them.  Moses is at that moment receiving the rules of behavior for his flock, rules that they don’t even know about yet.  Aaron is simply giving them an answer for their confusion. 

            I am equally puzzled by Jesus’ parable of the king who was having a wedding banquet to which nobody was coming.  There was no understanding here, either by the king or by the subjects.  The people who were invited killed the slaves who invited them and the king sent his troops to kill them.  Eventually, the king sent his slaves to invite anyone whom they saw in the streets and soon the banquet hall was filled with guests.  The king comes in, sees one man who has no wedding robe, asks him how he got in without being properly dressed, orders him to be bound hands and feet and thrown into outer darkness.  He ends the story with the curious words, many are called but few are chosen.  Why is Jesus telling this parable?  What is he trying to get us to understand?

            In both of these stories, God is expecting some kind of understood behavior from those who worship their creator.  In talk after talk during his lifetime and his ministry,  Jesus tells us that the most important thing that we can do is to love one another.  The primary commandment is to Love the Lord our God with all of your hearts, mind and souls and to love our neighbor as a person like yourselves.  Jesus went on to say that on this primary commandment hangs all of the law and the prophets.

            I think what is going on in these stories is that God is assuming that love will be the foundation on which these people build their lives.  The creation of the golden calf is contrary to that and denies the existence of the God who created the world and all of the people who have been freed.  In the parable that Jesus tells, the king, who is God has invited all of the people to come to the wedding banquet and is astonished that one man has no wedding clothes.  The wedding clothes stand for the essence of love.  That is why the man is thrown out of the banquet.  It isn’t easy to understand, which is why at first these stories confuse me.  Knowing that the God whom we all worship is the God of Love helps me to comprehend what is being said.  If only we all could love one another, this world would be a place of peace and comfort, just like the Kingdom of Heaven.  That is what our creator, and his Son, our Lord have in mind for us.

            What makes all of this come together for me is that shortly after all of this was said comes the confrontation with the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes and Jesus’ arrest, condemnation and crucifixion.  God’s ultimate answer to this horrible treatment of Jesus is to create the Resurrection three days later and give us all the gift of eternal life as a result.  What more can we ask of the God who loves us so completely?  Our response is simple; we need to embrace Love as our guiding star and focus on taking care of each other. 

           

           

            

Tragedy and Blame

     There have been a lot of horrible tragedies in the last few weeks.  The devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico that crippled that island.  The earthquake in Mexico that killed so many people and destroyed countless buildings and homes.  The fires in California that has caused so much displacement; and just this past week the horrible mass shooting in Las Vegas by a strange man that killed 59 people including himself and wounded nearly 500 more.  There is no answer for this terrible shooting, no motive, no way to understand what was in the shooters mind.  We can only wonder and grieve.   

            In the wake of these awful things, there has been a tendency to add blame to the list of tragedies.  The mayor of San Juan has cried out for more help from the United States and has received criticism from the President.  Mr. Trump went on to tell us what a wonderful job that he has done to deal with what that island needed. He minimized the lack of timeliness in the efforts to help the people of Puerto Rico and took credit for a “tremendous job”.  

            When we look at the Las Vegas shooting, it is easy to find blame.  We certainly want to blame the shooter.  That is our first instinct; but there is a deeper place to look. We really need to find fault with ourselves.  We have created a gun culture in this country.  The Second Amendment to the Constitution speaks of being certain that we permit guns to be in the hands of our militia so that we can all be safe.  In recent years, that amendment’s words have been stretched and interpreted to permit anyone at all to possess a gun, even semi-automatic guns that only have one purpose, to kill people.  I remember NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre saying “what we need to take care of a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” With the probability that the shooter in Las Vegas had some mental issues and the fact that he was high in a hotel and certainly unavailable to anyone with a gun, I know that Mr. LaPierre’s comment has no meaning.  In addition, I’ve never been able to understand how a hunter would take an AK-47 into the woods to harvest a deer for the table, let alone one that has been modified to shoot like a machine gun.  That makes no sense at all.  If we want to assess blame for mass killings, the place to look in inside ourselves. 

            In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he speaks to them of his qualifications for receiving the love of God:  He was circumcised, is a Hebrew, a Pharisee, a persecutor of the church and blameless as to righteousness under the law. Yet he goes on to say that whatever gains that he has because of all of this, he has come to regard as loss because of the presence of Christ among us. Paul is eloquent in speaking about the presence of Jesus Christ in this world as the basis for all of us to be loved and understood by God.  It is not because of what it is that we have achieved, but what has been done for us by our Lord Jesus.  He says that he wants to know Christ completely, his sufferings and his death that he may obtain resurrection from death.  That is a powerful statement from a man who had achieved the highest rank among his fellow Hebrews.  He held the coats of the people who stoned Stephen, the first martyr.  He was on his way to Damascus to further persecute Christians when he was knocked to the ground, blinded and turned into a Christian himself.  Paul was not above assessing blame.  He blamed the Corinthian Christians for fighting among themselves; but this passage from Philippians reaches deep into his heart to show us his true religion.  He holds the Love of God as his highest goal, not perfection in his own life.  That is a lesson that we all need to hear in these difficult times if we are going to ever find resolution. 

            Whatever we decide to do about guns is important.  Blame is not helpful to a solution, it only complicates things.  Let’s lash out at the problem and find a way to get our gun problem in control.  It is possible if we can come together.       

The Depth of God's Love

   

            When we visited the Middle East, we were taken to a remarkable site in southern Jordan called Petra.  This was the home of a tribe of Arabs called the Nabataeans who raided the caravans of merchants who were going from Sheba to Israel.  It is a place with elaborate carvings on the mountains of Corinthian columns as the entry doors to tombs.  It has a long history.  It is also supposedly the place where Moses struck the rock and produced water for his hungry people when they had been in the desert for a long time without water. We rode down into the place on the backs of donkeys and saw the beauty of Petra from the beginning.  It was great to see such a place and it gave me a sense that God is continually present in this world, even when we aren’t very aware of that presence.

            One of the things that amazed me at Petra was the Kodak signs that adorned some of the tables of the people trying to sell things to the tourists.  Petra is one of the most popular tourist sites in Jordan and the local residents make some money selling souvenirs to the people who visit.  Petra also was a place with an elaborate water system, which helped the original residents of the place to fill their needs, which reflects Moses ability to strike the rock and receive water for the use of his people who were very thirsty.

            Our guide for this trip was Nancy Lapp, a retired archeologist who explored many sites all over the Middle East with her husband Paul.  She taught us a great deal about the places that we visited and about the religion that we all professed.  I thank God to this day that we had that trip and that we learned so much from visiting those remarkable places described in scripture that we read about all the time.

            Even though I had had a seminary education, being in the geographical presence of the places described in scripture had great meaning for me.  To travel from Galilee to Jerusalem and to see Nazareth and Bethlehem made a great difference for my education.  I was able to better understand what was said in the gospels and in Paul’s letters because of these travels. 

            Jesus came to us to teach us the extreme love of God.  He spent his time with us contradicting the religious leaders who constantly argued with him.  He told a great parable to show them the extreme of their religion.  He offered the story of the vineyard owner who had two sons.  He asked the first to go and to work in the vineyard and he refused, but later changed his mind and went.  The second son said that he would go and work, but didn’t go.  Jesus asked the leaders which of the sons obeyed the will of the father.  They correctly said that it was the first son.  Jesus said to them that the tax collectors and the prostitutes will go into the kingdom of heaven before them because John came full of righteousness and told them about God and they didn’t believe him; but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him.  Jesus went on to say that even when you saw it, you didn’t change your minds and believe him. 

            Jesus was telling these leaders about the difficulty that so many humans have with understanding the reality of the Kingdom of God.  This was certainly proved out in the arrest, condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus for again telling all of them the reality of what God has in mind for humanity.  God bless us when we believe and know that Jesus’ teaching was real for all of us in this world, and what our God wants for us all is our presence beside him in his Kingdom.

            Going to the Middle East helped me with this.  I was able to see the vastness of God’s work in this world and appreciate how deeply humanity has been loved through the ages.                       

Living In Love

         

            When I got out of the army, I tried to go back to the radio station where I had been working before I was drafted.  They didn’t only want a disc jockey, they also wanted me to be an engineer so that they could easily fulfil the Federal Communication Commission’s requirement for every station to have qualified engineers as well as announcers on their staff.  I would have had to go to a special school for several weeks and get a certificate.  I didn’t want to do this, so I told Rosie that I was going to apply to a television station for employment as an announcer.  She told me that they better pay me more than the radio station had paid me.  I went off to audition.  Fortunately, I got the job and came back and told her of my fortune and of the considerable increase in salary that accompanied it.  I loved that work.  It was back before the days of teleprompters, so I had to memorize all of the commercials; and I learned to do the weather there. 

            Working has always been important to me.  I have enjoyed all of the careers that I have chosen.    When the last TV station that employed me went bankrupt in the early seventies, I spoke to the bishop of Pittsburgh about being an Episcopal priest.  He was enthusiastic about that and made sure that I was enrolled in Virginia Seminary that September.  I did well in the seminary, graduated and was ordained.  I have loved this profession, serving a number of churches and meeting some of the best people that I could ever have known. 

            In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is trying to describe the Kingdom of Heaven to his listeners. He tells them that it is like a landowner who goes out in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.  He agrees with them on a daily wage.  He then goes out several more times and hires more laborers each time.  At the end of the day, he pays them all the same wage that he agreed to pay those who were hired first.  The early workers were upset and complained that they ought to be paid more.  The landowner pointed out to them that they had agreed when they were hired to be paid what they received.  He told them that he ought to be able to do as he pleased with his own money.  He finished this comment by saying the last shall be first and the first will be last.

This is Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of Heaven, not the economy in which we live.  That is important for us to know.  There are a lot of inequities in the world in which we live. Jesus is telling us that those inequities will disappear when we come into his kingdom, even if we don’t think that it is fair that the least who are among us are treated as we are. 

            That is a beautiful description of God’s kingdom, where love is the predominant feature.  It is love that we are taught needs to be the foundation of our world also.  When we love, we learn to forgive and to accept our differences.  Ultimately this results in our learning from each other, not constantly arguing.  If we can learn this, wars will cease and our economies will prosper and all of us will live lives that make much more sense that then ones that we are living now.  That is what Jesus is trying to teach to both his apostles and the crowds that come to hear him.  He gathered up all of the hatred in the world, went to Jerusalem and presented himself to the authorities, who arrested him, handed him over to Pilate who ordered him to be whipped and crucified.  God’s response to this incredible demonstration of hatred was the incredible love of Jesus’ resurrection.  That is the message that we need to hold in our hearts as the essence of our religion.  To learn to love above all things is the way of life that our God gives us.  When we learn this, our world will drastically change.

               

Revelation Violence or Resurrection Love

           

            There are some people in this country, and probably all over the world who want to take the Book of Revelation literally.  They want us to understand that a great apocalypse is coming and coming soon.  That the skies will open and God’s army, led by Jesus will descend and kill all of those who are not born again.  Mostly these are very conservative evangelical Christians who believe all of this.  It is disturbing to me because they leave the essentials of the Christian faith behind them when they preach these things.  There are a lot of examples of violence in the scriptures.  God frequently helps the Hebrews destroy the Philistines.  The destruction of Pharaoh’s army as the separated Red Sea closed around them as the Hebrew’s fled from Egypt is another example.  But things changed when Jesus came among us.  The issue no longer was violence, but forgiveness.  That is what Jesus taught all of his life.

            I spent twenty-two years working as a part time chaplain at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh.  I saw a lot of men who had done some very bad things.  Some of them seemed to be almost lost because of their crimes.  We talked constantly about forgiveness.  This was a welcome subject, but very few of them believed that forgiveness for them was even a remote possibility.  One old man, who had come to prison in his mid-seventies would always tug my sleeve at the end of a group session that talked about forgiveness and would say to me, “listen preacher, there are two people in the graveyard because of what I did.  God is never going to forgive that!”  One day a year or so later, I saw his eyes light up when we were again talking about forgiveness.  He, all of a sudden understood that we were talking about him.  His life changed drastically after that.  He was living in the hospital and would be wheeled out and across the yard when we had group.  When he got to the yard, he would be swamped by other inmates who wanted to be near him because there was a light around him that was undeniable.

            Forgiveness is the theme of the passage from the 14^th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans and the 18^th chapter of Matthew’s gospel.  Paul talks about the constant problem that we have with judgement.  He asks why we judge one another when we are all accountable to God.  He says that in the end, God will judge all of us.  In Matthew’s gospel, Peter asks Jesus how many time he is supposed to forgive, could it be as many as seven times?  Jesus answers him that it should not be just seven times, but seventy times seven.  Jesus is saying essentially that forgiveness needs to be endless in our lives with each other.  The most revealing story of forgiveness is when Jesus met Peter and the other disciples on the shore of the sea of Galilee after his resurrection.  He was cooking fish over a fire.  He asked Peter, “do you love me?”  Peter answered, “yes Lord, you know that I love you”.  Jesus asked Peter this question three times, the number of times that Peter had denied Jesus at the time of his arrest before the crucifixion.  The effect of this encounter was to forgive Peter for his denials.  If Jesus could do this for Peter, how wonderful it would be if we could do this for each other. This is God’s desire for all of humanity, to be willing to forgive those who have hurt and sinned against us.  Peace would be the result of this.

            None of this sits very well with the Revelation preachers.  They want us to stay away from those who are not born again and remember the great apocalypse that is about to descend on humanity.  With the threat of North Korea and its nuclear capacity, this is sometimes easy to imagine.  I believe, however in a God who loves humanity and will do everything necessary to keep us alive, despite even our worst desires.  The proof of God’s love is that he gave his only begotten son, Jesus, to come to us, to die for us and to be raised from the dead as a gift to us all to show us that forgiveness is the one constant that we can count on from our God. 

           

           

                            

Moving Beyond What Divides Us

 We have two monstrous hurricanes hitting our country as I write this.  One has hit Texas and another one has hit the west coast of Florida.  Harvey has done unimaginable destruction to the Houston area of Texas.  Hurricane Irma is currently causing destruction in Florida and wherever it will go from there.  There are uncounted people affected by these storms.  Houses have been destroyed, people’s lives have been put on hold as rescuers work hard to save people from the high water and get them to safety.  We all know that we should help these people in their distress; money is being donated to a number of organizations that are doing everything in their power to help the affected people. 

            What I notice about all of this is that people are being helped regardless of their beliefs.  Nobody is asking any questions about who people voted for, what issues they support or if they have any same sex marriages in their families.  Nobody cares about any of these things, which makes me wonder how terribly important they are in the wider scheme of things.  What is important here is that we take care of one another.  That means putting the “issues” aside, the things that seem to drive our politics; and working only for what is important:  the welfare of the people in front of us.

            These aren’t the only destructive problems facing us today.  There are massive fires in our Western states that threaten many houses with destruction with many lives being upset.  Here, firefighters from all over are working hard to put out the fires and to help those who are affected find relief.  Again, issues are not important, only the welfare of those affected.

            Rosie and I had some experience with this kind of destruction.  In March of 1993, a monstrous winter storm that put three feet of snow all over the east coast and generated winds in excess of 100 miles per hour that destroyed the beach house that we had had in North Carolina for over fifteen years.  It was a terrible moment in our lives and I can understand how the people who are losing their primary residences feel about these storms.  In a strange way, these things are a blessing for all of us.  They get our attention away from the issues that divide us and focus our concern on the needs that these dear people have.  I know that this is what love is all about. 

            St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, tells his readers: Owe no one anything, except to love one another. He lists the commandments, stealing, adultery, murder, coveting; and tells them that all of the commandments are summed up in the great words, Love your neighbor as yourself.  He makes it clear that love does no harm to anyone, but is the fulfilling of the law.  That is what our Lord wants us to do for all of these people who are in distress, not only from the storms and fires, but in all of the ways that this world creates misery.  Our job is not to judge, but to help.  That is the essence of our faith.

            In a letter to the editor in our local paper, a woman was chastising her church for leaning too much toward what she called “liberal beliefs” and getting away from the teaching of the church.  She was talking about churches that provide a place for same sex marriages, allow people to have an abortion if it is absolutely necessary; and making an effort to include everyone in their communities. She didn’t approve of any of this. She wanted the rules to be obeyed.   When I read the stories about Jesus, they all seem to be of a man doing his ministry and taking care of people, regardless of their background.  He healed the Centurian’s servant and the Syrophonecian woman’s child.  He did all of this because of his primary ministry, which was to love and to care for the people whom he met. Whatever issues that were current in those communities were not his concern.  It was the welfare of the people.  Caring for each other is the mission of the church.  We need to always put our pettiness aside and focus on the need that is around us.