Our Possessions and our Responsiblity to Others

            We lost our little dog Gracie recently.  She had been declining for some time; we took her to the vet several times and gave her the medication that was prescribed.  Last Saturday night, she was unable to move her back legs, she lay on the floor panting, obviously in pain.  We looked at her and knew that we couldn’t simply let her lie there; that we had to do something about it.  We called the veterinarian and took her there.  We held her as they gave her an injection that put her to sleep.  It was a hard thing for us to do, we loved her dearly; but it was necessary.  Suffering is not something that I wanted for that little dog.  We owed her that much.

            Most of us have had moments like that in our lives; times when we have had to let go of those whom we loved.  Generally we have no choice in the matter.  Both Rosie and I have lost our parents and our grandparents and our uncles and aunts.  A dear friend of ours lost his daughter also recently..  Life is beautiful, but it has an end date.  We all know that.  It is necessary to live our lives with that in mind.

            Jesus was asked by a man to tell his brother to share his inheritance with him.  Jesus replied with a statement that said that he should take care and not let his life be ruled by his possessions.  He followed that with a parable about a rich man whose land produced in abundance.  He said:  What shall I do?  I shall pull down my barns and build larger ones so that I can store my crops.  God said to him, you Fool!  This night your life will be required of you.  We need to be very careful.  Our lives are not about our things and the wealth that we have accumulated.  We live our lives in the sight of God, with all of the ways that our God has given us to live.  We are asked to take care of one another; to love each other and our neighbor with the same Love that God has lavished on us.  Our possessions are simply tools to be used in the living of our lives and the exercise of that love.

            When I look around this world, I don’t see much of that being done.  I see great divisions in our political parties; all of them trying to accumulate the wealth that they need to meet their needs.  I hear terrible things coming out of the mouths of these leaders and I worry where their anger will take us.  This nation needs to have deep concern for those who are poor, outcast, without means to take care of themselves.  We can’t simply build bigger barns to store our wealth.  We need to use the great resources that we have been given by our God to take care of God’s people who are in need.

            I am discouraged by our current political situation.  We can make jokes about Donald Trump’s wild statements or about Hilary Clinton’s baggage; but ultimately we need to decide what is right for the good of this country and beyond that for the good of the world.  We are not the only ones who live here.  There are countless refugees from places where there is great distress; there are many immigrants who have come to our country who want nothing more than to live healthy lives.  I know that God loves all of these people and demands from us that we open our eyes to see the hurt and the devastation around us. 

            It is not necessary that we live lives of fear.  Those who wish us ill are certainly not a majority and with the help of our God can be managed.  We will find ways to do that.  We need to curb the anger that exists among us, pitting people of color against our police, and people of means against those who are poor so that we can all move ahead together.  Whatever we need to do that well is what our government needs to provide.  Shouting damning statements back and forth is certainly not the answer.  It was great to see the police and the black lives matter group gathered in Dallas to mourn the lives of the officers who died and to support each other in their common grief.  That is the way forward.

            We will bury the ashes of our little dog and cry our tears of grief and then we will get on with our lives and try to make those lives of ours count in the greater plan that our God has for this universe.  Let us continue to love and comfort each other and be the angels that God intends us to be for the good of the earth.

Policing and Race

           

            My grandson wants to be a policeman.  He has wanted this for a long time.  He found a course of study in his high school that taught the students how to do police work and he excelled in it.  Since then, he has tried to find jobs as a security guard until the time would come for him to join a real police department.  He is a good kid.  We have always loved him and he shows to me every indication that a career as a police officer would be an excellent choice for him.

            On the sides of police cars all over the country are the words  To Protect and Serve. Those words are an attempt to convey the mission of the police force to the community.  The idea is to be a force that keeps order in our towns and  protects  the citizens  from any threat.  I think that in the last decade or so, this excellent mission has been somewhat compromised by the increase in force given to our police and by the inherent racism that also exists in our society.  This was never intentional.  The increase in force started with the STAT teams who began to arm themselves and to behave as military forces.  They were equipped by surplus defense department equipment.  There is hardly a big city police department that doesn’t have STAT teams and several armored cars or other pieces of large style military equipment.

             The racist streak that permeates all of our society comes with a long history.  We enslaved African Americans from the start in this nation.  Their economic value was seen early in the South as plantations grew up, raised their crops and used slaves as their workers.  The Civil War brought an end to some of the effects of slavery, but the practice continued long after the war and is still with us today.  African Americans serve frequently in lower paying jobs and live in parts of our cities that white people don’t often frequent.  It isn’t hard to find examples of this; every city has its ghettos. 

            This has produced an “us and them” mindset in our culture.  When the Black Lives Matter movement started, many white people didn’t quite understand what was being said.  The counter argument: All Lives Matter was certainly true, but missed the point.  The problem was that African American people felt that they were often targeted by police because of their race.  Ferguson, Missouri was the beginning of an understanding that there was something terribly wrong with the way that police officers were approaching people of color.  The killing of Michael Brown in that community by officer Darren Wilson triggered a protest that was felt all over the country.  Subsequently the white police officer involved in that killing was exonerated, which brought more protests.  This has happened over and over again in our culture.  Whenever there is a police shooting of an African American, there is a protest, followed by an exoneration; recently, this predictable protesting grew into horror after two police killings in two nights in Baton Rouge and in St. Paul provided an excuse for a former army veteran to kill five police officers and to wound a number of others in Dallas, Texas who at that time were supervising a Black Lives Matter protest.  These three horrible events need to be clearly seen as an indictment of all of us for the way that we act toward one another.  We need desperately to find a way to help our police and our citizens of whatever race to get along and to see the “Protect and Serve” words as truly meaningful for everyone in our communities.

            I was impressed by the way that the Pittsburgh Police department accompanied those who were protesting in the streets of this city.  There was no animosity, only a spirit of protection for those involved in the parade and the protest.  That is a model that ought to be held up for all of us in this society as a way for our police departments to act out their mission. Certainly, this is what the Dallas police were trying to do.

            My hope is that my grandson will be able to enter a police department where those words Protect and Serve are deeply meaningful to the members of his team.  They are wonderful words and mean a great deal to our society.  We certainly need protection and we need competent police to serve us with their skills. 

What do we do about Orlando?

           

             When I think about what went on in Orlando, those words from Galatians come to mind:  There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; all are one in Christ Jesus.  I’m sure if he lived in this time, Paul might have added straight or gay and black or white  to that list.  The point of all of it is to take the things that divide us, the categories that we are locked into and make them irrelevant.  All of us are one in Christ Jesus.  That is the point of what Paul is talking about.

            We have spent this week worrying about our divisions.  Are we being besieged by Muslim terrorists?  Is it all right to have gay bars in our cities?  How can we keep our people safe when there is so much worry about what separates us from each other?  There have been renewed calls for gun legislation, which is unlikely to happen.  There has been political finger pointing about who is responsible for all of this.  None of it has been at all helpful.  We still have our divisions and we still have all of the hatred lying out there waiting for an opportunity to make itself known.  What we need to understand is that it isn’t a Muslim insurrection that is causing all of this; it is our inability to accept and understand the ways that we are divided and to minister to the divisions in the same way that we care for everyone else.

            When I served as the interim rector of St. James parish in Charleston, WV for almost two years about fifteen years ago, I found myself at the head of a primarily African American parish that had more people with doctorates than any parish where I have ever served.  These were also people who cared very much about their community and who were all involved in programs that had to do with the welfare of people beyond their walls.  I was deeply impressed with the energy that this congregation put forth as a result of their faith and their determination that everyone in the community mattered to them.  They taught me a lot about the way that community matters to all of us and how essential it is that we take part in doing what we can to improve the lives of everyone in it.  Atonement reminds me of St. James.  You now have a nine week program to provide lunches for the young students next door.  This is what community means.

            In Paul’s time, there were incredible divisions in his community.  There were religious arguments, great fear of the Romans who governed the whole of the country.  There were even divisions among the Christians.  Whether Paul was accepted as one of Jesus’ apostles was up for grabs.  That question was never adequately settled.  Paul became the foremost ambassador of the message of Jesus, even though he never met him.  His insights to the Galatians about our divisions are very helpful when we consider what needs to be done in our own age to bring us together and minimize the things that separate us.

            So what do we do about it?  There have been many gatherings of people to pray for the people of Orlando and what they have experienced; I have seen many postings on Facebook and in my mail from people lamenting this horrible deed.  Blood drives have produced many pints of blood that has been made available to those working with the injured in Orlando.  We are reacting as we always do to tragic events of this nature, and all of it is very helpful.   Our legislators need to act and to find some unity in what they do.  This needs to happen as quickly as possible to avoid any more tragedies.

            Above all, we all need to keep this nation and the people who have suffered loss in our prayers.  Do that faithfully every day.  When Elijah went south to avoid the wrath of Jezebel, he found himself in a cave on Mount Horeb, the mountain of God.  He called out to God to speak to him.  There was a terrible wind, but God was not in the wind; there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake; there was a large fire, but God was not in the fire.  Then Elijah heard what has been called a still small voice.  It was God speaking comfort to Elijah.  God didn’t tell him to stop and hide; he told him to return to his work and to head for the wilderness of Damascus where he can be of some use.

            I think that is how God speaks to us; in a still, small voice, a voice of comfort and help in our times of distress.  Listen for that voice and do what it says.  Keep your prayers strong and keep those who have suffered in your hearts and minds.  It will make an incredible difference. Love and comfort are what God requires of us.  It is how we overcome our divisions and repair what has been so tragically done.

The Holy Spirit as Feminine

             In 1991 on our sabbatical, we spent a month in England touring and enjoying the great history and geography of that country.  On Trinity Sunday that year, we were in Coventry, the place where Lady Godiva had her great ride.  We were at the great Cathedral where the second or third priest on their staff preached an excellent sermon on the Trinity.  That has been my experience in ministry.  Clergy avoid  talking about the Trinity if they can  .  It is much too complicated to explain.  Is it three gods, or what?  What are we talking about here? So they generally pass the sermon on to a lesser member of their staff.  I loved what that priest said in his sermon, but I loved the architecture of the place even more.  Coventry Cathedral was bombed by the Germans in November of 1940.  The wreckage of the old church stands beside the beautiful new building. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the then Dean of the Cathedral went through the wreckage, they found a cross made of the burned pieces of lumber that formed the roof of the church.  That cross now stands in the ruined sanctuary of the burned church.

              What they have done to commemorate the history of the place is remarkable.  Over the altar in the new Cathedral is a massive hanging of the risen Christ on a throne holding a scepter.  The seated savior looks out over the crowd of parishioners through an etched glass window onto the wreckage of the old cathedral.  The etchings on the window are all of the saints of the church, the apostles, and many others who have died in the propagation of our faith.  It is a great theological statement about how Christianity has struggled in this world to bring hope and reconciliation in a world full of terror and destruction.  I think that Coventry Cathedral is one of the great buildings of Christianity. 

            But they didn’t just build a building.  They also created an organization called the Community of the Cross of Nails.  It is a group dedicated to reconciliation and the bringing of hope to places in the world where it is lacking.  They have done a lot to bring together people in England and Germany who experienced horror and destruction during World War II.  Dresden was also bombed by the Allies toward the end of the war.  Coventry has reached out to them to provide words of friendship and the two cities have joined together in some hopeful projects to bring a sense of forgiveness and hope to the residents of their cities. They also have reached out to Japan and other places destroyed by war to bring hope and change to them. This is silent Christian work that means a great deal to the world, even though it doesn’t get much publicity.

            I think that is the essence of what Christianity is supposed to be about.  All around us are places where turmoil and disaster have overwhelmed many people.  Like the people of Coventry, we need to reach out to these people and offer the ministry of the Christ to them. It is too easy to simply condemn the turmoil in the many places in the world where it devastates people.  It is much better to reach out and to help. 

            But let’s get back to the Trinity.  In the scripture from the Book of Proverbs that was read a few moments ago, the writer speaks of Wisdom as the foundation on which God brought all of creation into being.  She is the pronoun used to describe Wisdom, This is the undergirding of the Holy Spirit.  Wisdom tells us that She was here when all of the world was created. That She was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always and rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the Human race.  I notice the fact that the Holy Spirit is described to us in feminine terms.  This gives us Jesus, the male portion of God and the Holy Spirit the female side of God.  That ought to tell us what our Creator thinks about the relationship that we all ought to have with each other.  All of our genders are necessary in the ongoing maintenance of this great creation,. If that isn’t obvious to us, we are in great trouble.  I can’t understand all of the gender bashing that seems to go on in this society.  We need to love one another.  That is Jesus commandment; and it seems to me that setting one gender against another is a rather stupid way of doing that.

            I want to honor the Trinity.  I want to recognize that all of God is active in this world.  The keeping of female Wisdom at the top of the deity is a very good idea. I’m impressed that the Roman Catholic Church is beginning to investigate the possibility of the ordination of women.  The Pope thinks that perhaps some of them could be deacons.  I’m glad to hear that.  The ordination of women in the Episcopal Church has been a great gift. My first associate rector at Christ Church was Pat Carnahan.  She headed up the establishment of St. Brendan’s in Franklin Park and was their first rector, She is a great priest who built a great congregation.

              When I look around this parish, I see women doing a lot of the thinking.  The leaders of our vestry and the movers and shakers in this place are our women.  The men help immensely, but the women make many of   the decisions.  Leaning on their wisdom is essential for us to fulfill our mission. We are fortunate to have all of our talented people.  They are a gift to us and to the world around us. 

The Inconvenience of Temptation

            When I was in my second year at seminary, our daughter needed to go to her high school for an event.  The night was a Wednesday and the seminary always had a midweek service on that night.  I wasn’t able to go, so my daughter and I got in the car and I drove her to her high school. I wasn’t particularly happy about that.  I really wanted to go to the service. On the way to the high school, we passed the seminary chapel where the service was in progress.  They were reciting the creed.  I heard them saying: We believe in God, the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord.  All of a sudden, I understood the implication of those words and I felt immediately connected to that congregation.  The “we” included me and my daughter and my wife and all of us who although not attending that service, were a part of the faith.  I have always remembered that moment as a time of connection, a connection of my God to my life. My reluctance to take my daughter where she needed to go disappeared and I was again connected to my family, my seminary and my life.

            Life happens, as they say.  We need to do what is required of us, even if it is sometimes inconvenient.  Jesus returned from the Jordan River where he had been baptized by John the Baptist and was immediately led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil for forty days.  This wasn’t particularly convenient for him.  Listening to the devil and his temptations must have been a harrowing experience.  But it was a very human experience.  You and I are tempted constantly.  Sometimes we give in to those temptations and fall into sin.  That also isn’t particularly convenient for us because sin has consequences.  We also don’t always like the consequences.  This season of Lent is a time for us to take stock of our lives and try to get back in tune with what our God has in mind for us. 

            The thing about Jesus’ temptations is that they were all things that he needed very much.  The devil knew that he was hungry, so he suggested to Jesus that he use his power to turn some of the stones into bread so that he could eat.  Jesus told him: One does not live by bread alone.

He then took our Lord to the top of a mountain and showed him all of the cities of the world.  He told Jesus that all of these would he give to him, if only Jesus would worship him.  Jesus answered him: Worship the Lord your God and serve only him. The last temptation was to take Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and suggest that he throw himself down from the height and then quoted Psalm 91 to him: that God would put angels in charge over him lest he strike his foot against a stone. Jesus said to him: Do not put the Lord your God to the test. The scripture says, having finished his tests, the devil departed from him until an opportune time.

            Nicholas Kazantzakis used this moment in Jesus life as the inspiration for a book called The Last Temptation of Christ which was made into a great movie.  In this story, Jesus is on the cross and is visited by a small girl who suggests that he can come down from the cross and live a normal life.  Jesus almost in a trance because of the pain of the cross agrees, goes back to Bethany where he marries Mary, has some children and begins to live normally.  He encounters Paul who says to Jesus, I really didn’t need you.  I could have done everything by myself.  All of a sudden, Jesus wakes up, back on the cross, still in pain, but knowing that his destiny is to be exactly where he is.  He suffers his death for all of humankind and after three days, he rises from the tomb and provides for all of us the proof of eternal life that God has promised to us all.

            That is what this season of Lent is all about.  We are not the Son of God.  We are not immune from the temptations that come our way.  What we do have is God’s promise to us to forgive our sins and to receive us back, even when we have strayed.  That is the certainty that we can always rely on, even when we have reached the bottom.  Jesus came to us not to make us perfect, but to help us in our humanity.  That is what we all so desperately need.  

Transfiguration as a Preview

            The story of the transfiguration of Jesus is a very special story.  Some scholars believe that it is a misplaced resurrection story; but it is placed in Luke’s Gospel as a prefiguring of the glorious time in Jerusalem when Jesus rises again.  He has told his disciples several times that this would take place, but like you and me, they had a very hard time believing it.

           Jesus took Peter, James and John up on the mountain to pray.  While he was praying, a cloud came over them, Jesus face shone brightly and all of a sudden Moses and Elijah were standing with him.  Peter babbled something about building houses, but Jesus ignored this.  Then a voice of God from the cloud spoke and said: This is my beloved Son, listen to him! Nothing more was said.  The disciples and Jesus came down from the mountain to find a crowd of people at the bottom with a man who wanted his son to be healed.  The other disciples had been trying to effect the healing, without any results.  Jesus rebuked the demon that was possessing the son and the young man was healed.  He then was given back to his father. The passage ends with the statement that  All were astounded at the greatness of God.

            The mountain of the Transfiguration is supposedly Mount Tabor in Galilee.  Rosie and I went to that mountain back in 1983 on a tour of the Holy Land.  We were taken up the mountain by a team of wild Palestinian taxi drivers who drove like madmen up a narrow road where we thought we would probably never survive.  Several times, other taxis passed us on the way down while we were on our way up.

            When we arrived at the top, we discovered a peaceful place with a lovely temple that existed.  A German tour group was inside the temple singing hymns.  Strangely, there was a mist covering the top of the mountain that certainly reminded us of the story of the Transfiguration.  It was a holy moment at the top of that mountain.

            What I believe about the Transfiguration is that it was a holy time for those three special apostles to see the Risen Christ in all of his Glory before the time that was coming in Jerusalem that would include the crucifixion of their Lord.  It was a moment for those three to see the Glory of their Lord on full display before the time of his death.  It makes real for me the remarkable truth of the mysterious resurrection of Jesus, something that you and I have never seen, and along with it the promise of eternal life.

            I think that we need to know this because our lives all end in death and we need some certainty about eternal life.  When I have stood in church aisles at a funeral I have always wished that I could preside at a resurrection for the sake of the families involved.  The pain is often almost overwhelming and we need a glimmer of hope in that moment. I think that is what the Transfiguration was supposed to be for those prominent apostles.  Peter never really got the message.  His fear drove him to deny his Lord after the crucifixion; but Peter came around and became one of the great bearers of the truth of Jesus and his love after the resurrection was made real to him.  It was Peter who was specifically forgiven by Jesus for his denials on the shore of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus asked him three times if he loved him and Peter replied each of those times that he loved him.  That is when Jesus told him to feed my sheep. 

            That is the role of the church today.  To acknowledge the truth of the resurrection of Jesus and the certainty of eternal life, our job is to take care of the multitudes among us who have little or nothing.  To take care of the people whom we encounter in our daily lives.  Like Jesus at the bottom of the mountain, when he found the young man who needed to be healed when his disciples were unable to do it, he responded with love and compassion.  He didn’t ask if the young man deserved to be healed, he simply did what needed to be done.  Jesus had a heart full of love for those whom he met. 

            Being sure that our love is on display when we walk through our daily lives is what our Lord asks of us.  We simply need to care. When we do that, we prove to the world the truth of God’s love even in the face of disaster.  God is present in this world in the profound love that we show to each other and to all of those whom the world seems not to love and are excluded.  They are not excluded by God and we need to help them to understand that.

Change, Conflict and Love

            In the late seventies, when I had been the rector of St. Philip’s in Moon Township for only a short time, the prayer book was changed.  When I got to the parish, they had never tried any of the various revisions that had been provided; the green book, the zebra book, so I took them through the whole process in a year’s time.  Finally, after the new book was accepted and we had purchased our copies, one Saturday, we took the old 1928 prayer books out of the pews and distributed the new books.

            The next day was Sunday and we used the new prayer books for the first time.  After the service, one woman came to me at the door of the church as she was leaving, pounded my chest with her clenched fists and said to me: “you have ruined this church!: I could have argued with her and given her all of the reasons why the prayer book needed to be changed, but somehow, with God’s grace, I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I reached out my arms and I held her for a few moments while she cried.  I certainly understood her feelings.  She thought that she had been betrayed by her church.  She was blaming me because I was the only visible person with authority that she could see.  She continued to come to church.  We didn’t lose her.  I was glad that I was able to show her some compassion in her time of trouble.

            When Jesus went to Nazareth, it was after he had healed people in Capernaum, the people in his hometown expected that he would do the same things there.  He read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, told them that in their hearing the prophecies had been fulfilled.  He then went on to tell them that he knew that they expected him to do the same things that he had done in Capernaum.  He then said that a prophet has no standing is his home town.  The people then tried to throw Jesus over a cliff and that failed.  Jesus simply walked away.  That is a simple story with a great truth.  We don’t honor our local prophets in quite the same way that we honor those who come from afar.  But it was worse than that for Jesus.  The people of Nazareth saw him only as the son of a carpenter, one of the lowly folk.  Here was the Son of God among his own people and not treated in quite the way that he imagined that he ought to be accepted.

            We have also had a strange incidence of this in the past couple of weeks.  The Primates of the Anglican Communion, meeting in Canterbury, England have decided that the Episcopal Church ought to be excluded from denominational decision making for a period of three years because our General Convention has approved allowing its clergy to officiate at same sex weddings.  This has been a boiling issue for a long time.  In 1976, when the church approved the ordination of women, the Anglican Communion also went bananas and some threatened to throw us out of the denomination.  When Katherine Jefferts Schori was elected Presiding Bishop of the church nine years ago, we were again under fire for permitting such a thing.  Unfortunately, it is mostly the African bishops who are heading up the protests against what we are doing in this country. 

            There is certainly nothing new here.  Change always produces conflict.  We saw that in the Reformation when Luther posted his 96 theses on the church in Wittenburg; we have seen it countless times in our own communion when differences of opinion have brought us to great argument.  We certainly saw it in Pittsburgh when Mr. Duncan took a number of our churches with him when he left the Episcopal Church over what he termed our lack of a conservative position on the many issues that confront us. 

            Paul also faced conflict when he preached to the churches that he founded.  I think that his most eloquent statement is what we heard this morning in the reading from First Corinthians, chapter 13.  This is Paul’s statement about the meaning of love and what it means to us to show love in every instance.  He says that even if he has faith enough to move mountains, gives away all of his possessions and even gives away his body, if he doesn’t have love, it means nothing.  That is the word that we need to hear in the middle of all of the conflicts that we experience, particularly in this election time.  We fail miserably if we fail to love in the middle of our disagreements.  When we can keep this in mind, we will make the right choices and do the right things.  Our God is with us in the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus.