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.  

           

               

Healing our Culture

            How do we begin to heal this culture of ours?  The horrible tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina can’t leave my mind.  The callousness of it stuns me.  A young white man walks into a historic black church, sits down for an hour next to the pastor of the church listening to the people as they speak in their bible study meeting.  After an hour, he says simply, “I have to kill some black people,” takes out his gun and shoots nine people dead, including several of the clergy who were present including the revered pastor of the church.  Immediately, there were voices of lament not only from the church involved, but from the community of Charleston and indeed from the whole nation.  The president said several times what a tragedy this has been and pointed to the constant presence of guns in our midst as one of the prime causes.

            It didn’t take long for other voices to come forth and to subtly suggest that the presence of the confederate flag on the pole in front of the state capitol was also a primary problem.  The focus shifted toward that direction with many people calling for the banning of the flying of the confederate flag in this country.  It is amazing to me how the gun manufacturing industry and their intense lobbyists are so adept at pointing fingers in other directions than their own as the cause of such brutality.  This week, the governor of South Carolina said that steps would be taken to remove the confederate flag from the pole in front of the capitol. The result of all of this is easily predictable.  We will lament the deaths of those dear people in Charleston for a time and then forget about it, just as we have forgotten about the kids at Sandy Hook and the people in the theater in Colorado and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford in Arizona.  In each of those instances, the over-supply of guns in our culture was pointed at as the main reason that these tragedies occurred, but that got shoved aside as time went on and we all got on with our lives.

            It is quite apparent that we have no power to change much of anything.  I would call for the repeal of the Second Amendment, but that would only bring the wrath of the National Rifle Association down on my head.  Their minions would tear me apart and prove that I had no right to speak in any regard about this subject.  Congress is certainly in no position to do anything at all to solve this crisis.  They can’t agree on much of anything these days.

            I was impressed by the gospel last week that told us about Jesus being asleep in the stern of the boat with his disciples while they were being battered by the winds and the waves in the middle of the lake.  They woke him and asked him if he didn’t care if they were perishing.  He asked them, “Where is your faith?”  He then quieted the winds and they were all saved. The apostles were amazed.

            This week, the gospel is about Jesus healing the daughter of Jairus and the woman who had had a lifetime of hemorrhages.  Both of these healings are portrayed as miracles.  I like to look at them as God’s constant presence in the middle of our turmoil.  Whether it is the storm of illness or the battering of the gun culture, God is present with us to do what we ourselves have no power to get done.  What Jesus does with Jairus’ daughter is to give her back her life when everyone around her said that she was dead.  He simply told her to get up, and to prove the point, he told her parents to give her something to eat.

            That is what we would like to do with what is happening in our culture.  We can’t bring back the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, or any of the other eight precious people who were killed with him by Dylann Roof, but we can begin to address the reality of what is going on around us.  The critical issue is that we are the only nation on earth where tragedies like this are occurring.  Yes, there are occasional stories of killings in other countries, but not on the scale of what is happening in the United States. 

            It is essential that we not soon forget what has happened.  We need to radically pressure our congress and our representatives to take seriously the over presence of guns in this culture and do something about it.  Nobody wants to limit legitimate hunting.  Nobody wants to take guns away from people who need them for legal recreational activity; but we certainly need to put limits on how guns are bought and sold on our streets and how they fall so easily into the hands of people who want to use them for crime.  Gos is with us in this struggle.  healing a sick culture is as necessary as raising Jairus' daughter.  If we really want to follow our Lord Jesus, we need to get on with the cure and make sure that our politicians understand what is really going on.  God will bless whatever we do.

                

Faith and Proof

            When I was diagnosed with a large menengioma on the left frontal lobe of my brain, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.  I went to a neurological surgery practice in Charleston, WV, where we were living at the time.  They looked at the MRI and scheduled surgery very quickly.  I remember going to the hospital, getting ready for the surgery and lying on the operating table waiting for it all to happen.  The only thought that went through my mind at that moment was that I had no idea what it was that was going to happen; but whatever it was, whether I lived or died, I was going to be all right.  That was a terrifying thought.  Rosie and my kids were in the waiting room with an enormous stake in this day.  They needed me and I needed them.  My certain desire was that I would live and be back with all of them.  All of a sudden, on that operating table a quiet calm came over me and my worry stopped.  I know that was God speaking to me about my condition.  As it turned out, they were able to completely remove the tumor and I went on with my life; not without a few complications, and if you talk to Rosie, it took a couple of years for me to really recover and get what we know as my personality back.  I had been very depressed and had no emotion at all, which is what happens when the frontal lobe of the brain is involved.  It was a kind of a natural lobotomy.  Waiting for the brain to expand back into the space left by the absent tumor took some time.

            God is with us in the time of trouble. That is something that became so vivid for me during that experience. In peaceful times, when all is going right, we don’t worry about where God happens to be.  We take care of things for ourselves; but when trouble comes, and we have no power to surmount what faces us, we need God to be with us, and we need to know that.  The only way that works is by the power of faith.  Faith can sound like a kind of a mystical word; one that doesn’t have much substance connected with it.  Having faith gets linked with having hope; kind of in the realm of maybe.  That isn’t what I mean at all.  Faith is a condition that doesn’t require proof.

        Proof is a word that gets connected to science and facts.  We like to look at facts because they substantiate the theories that we put forth to explain the world.  The problem with this is that much of what we have in this world is incapable of explanation.  Global warming is certainly with us.  Scientists have been warning us about this for a long time.  Politicians, who have particular axes to grind, want to dispute this phenomenon and make claims that scientific facts are not proof.  When we look at this issue devoid of politics, it becomes clearer that the world is indeed in trouble if we don’t do something about global warming.

            Faith has much in common with trust.  We don’t always have good answers to the things that we encounter in this world.  Faith is the quality that enables us to trust that there are answers for us that we are unable at the moment to see.  We have the story of Jesus and the disciples in the boat on the Sea of Galilee in the middle of a storm.  The disciples are frantically trying to keep the boat afloat while Jesus sleeps serenely in the stern.  The disciples awake him with the great comment: Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? Jesus woke up, rebuked the wind and told the sea to be still.  He then said to his men:  Why are you afraid?  Have you still no faith?  It was then that they were in awe of him.

            That is the essence of faith; the ability to believe, even when the world is turning upside down around you. That certainly isn’t easy.  It is a gift from God that comes to us when we desperately need it.

The Kingdom of God as a Mustard Seed

              I was reading this week that the Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh has been losing members.  There is nothing particularly new in this, the Episcopal Church           has also lost many members, most recently within the schism that we had with the representatives of Robert Duncan’s Anglican split. And the Roman Catholic Church is closing and merging parishes all over the place.  Christianity has had many of these kinds of events, but the church goes on.  It always will.  That is something that nobody can ever change.  Polls say that the “nones” are gaining in numbers.  Those are the people who say that they belong to no religion at all.  Polls are always interesting.  They take a very short view of the world.  It is tempting to take such a view of church history; that is to look only at our own time, but the reality is that the church that Our Lord planted with his disciples has had many ups and downs over the years.  Over the long haul, we are safe in the hands of the Holy Spirit, who directs our course, and always will.

            To look at Church History is illuminating.  The apostles built the church over the first few centuries by welcoming people into house churches, generally small, about thirty or forty people.  Slowly, through martyrdom and oppression, those numbers grew until in 325 AD, the emperor Constantine recognized Christianity as a legitimate religion and from that moment, the cross marched at the head of the Armies of Rome.  That was not really a good thing.  The faith began to be imposed by force, not by love. Much the way ISIS is imposing faith at the moment in the Middle East.  Many splits occurred in Christian religion, most notably the Reformation by Martin Luther and the many offshoots of that that has given Christianity the plethora of denominations that we have today.  This is not a history to be celebrated.  When I look at the political history of our faith, sometimes I am ashamed of what we have done in the name of the Lord.  Certainly the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition are instances of this, as are many of the ways that our faith has tried to conform to our culture. 

            The truth of what Jesus taught is certainly beautiful.  We are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul and mind, and we are also to love our neighbor as a person like ourselves.  That is the heart of the faith.  We stand and say the creed every Sunday, but the creed isn’t our religion, the creed is simply a statement of the things that we believe.  The real crux of our faith is really simple: It is Love.  How we act out our faith is what we have to say to the world.  Our words are one thing; our actions are another.  The essence of our religion is to follow Jesus, not just to believe a number of theological principles.  Following Jesus means the care of the people around us and above all things, taking care of those in need. 

            I love the parable that Jesus offered to his disciples to explain the Kingdom of God:

          With what can we compare the kingdom of God,

        or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed,

             which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all

             the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes

             the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that

             the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

           Notice two things about this parable: first, it happens naturally, it begins with a simple seed that grows into a large shrub, has large branches where the birds of the air can safely make their nests in its shade.  Second, it is really inconspicuous. It doesn’t draw attention to itself, except by its utility.  The birds of the air find it because it is useful.  It is what they need.  That is the essence of the Kingdom of God that is represented in the church.  When people don’t seem to need the church, it is probably because it isn’t very useful.  It is operating only to make itself larger.  That is where we go wrong so very often.  

             I don't think that our religion needs to be very complicated.  I saw this week that a mission that was serving the homeless burned in Washington, PA.  Almost immediately the community pitched in to take care of their need.  Our mission is simple.  We don't need to go around telling people what they have to believe; we need to go around seeing what people need and caring for them. When we do that, we will grow.  When we fail to do that, or when we tell people what it is that they have to believe, then we will get smaller.  May God keep us on the right track, following our Lord in all that he did for others.  When we do that, we will succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

                

The King that We Yearn For

            It looks like we are about to elect another president.  Hillary Clinton and a couple of others have signed up for the Democrats and too many to count have come forth for the Republicans.  It ought to be a fascinating campaign and election.  The only problem, it seems to me, is that somewhere along the line, truth will disappear and the debate will probably be more about personality and division than the reality of our life as a people. 

            The problem is that forces seemingly beyond our control have taken over the process.  Money appears to be in charge.  At the moment, the issue for all of the candidates is very clear: how much money can be raised to carry on a long arduous campaign that involves not only the primary but also the general election.  To do this, it is necessary to involve the big givers, the ones with large resources.  The problem with this is that these are also mostly the same people who want something for their donations.  Favors will be required.  We don’t look at that as closely as we need to.  It has corrupted our political process to the point that if nothing is done, we will watch while those with greed get their way and those with little resource are left on the side of the road to watch. 

            I mention this because of the words in the First book of Samuel, which is a call from the people of Israel for a king; one to rule over them and to provide what they hope will be justice. They were tired of Samuel and his children and wanted a ruler with power to be in charge.  Samuel took this request to the LORD, who told him that the people were rejecting God as their king and he instructed Samuel to warn the people that their new king would require many things of them: their sons and daughters to perform services, and many taxes for their fields.  The people were adamant about this and so Samuel took them to Gilgal where Saul was instituted as their king.  We all know how that turned out.  Saul waged wars against the nations around him, was finally pursued and eventually killed, and David and the nation went on.  It isn’t a good time in the history of Israel.  It is clear through the scriptures that the people are confused and want to have some kind of power.  They are not satisfied to have God and Samuel in charge.  They want someone in charge who will make them to be a great nation.  This is what God is warning them about. 

            In the Gospel, the Scribes come and confront Jesus about his healing and his teaching.  They claim that Satan is within him.  Jesus refutes this simply by asking if Satan can cast out Satan, and he then uses those great words that Lincoln also used during the Civil War: if a house is divided against itself, it cannot stand.  We know that to be true.  When I look at the political field in this country, those are the words that come immediately to mind.  We are certainly a house divided; the right and the left fume at each other constantly.  We can expect little agreement coming out of congress or out of those who oppose each other during the coming political contests.  They will fume and blame and charge each other with all sorts of things.  It won’t be very pretty.  So what are we supposed to do?  I think it is essential that we remember where our allegiance lies.  We are not people who are wedded to one particular president or king; or even necessarily to a particular political party.  We are a people whose allegiance is first of all to our God, who created us, loves us and wants only the best for each of us. 

            Our God is not impressed by wealth.  In the words of Psalm 138:

            Though the Lord be high, he cares for the lowly*

            He perceives the haughty from afar.

        Those are words that our political people need to listen to.  Ultimately, they are not in charge at all; God is.  We fail when we order our lives according to greed and ignore the needs of those who have nothing.  But that is the work of the church, to provide for all of those who have been left behind and to encourage our government to do the same.  May God bless us in this new political season, and bring us out in a place that favors the values of the Kingdom of God, no matter who it is who ultimate wins the election.