Keeping the Law

      My sister in law was once married to a Jewish man who kept the law as perfectly as anyone I have ever known.  I once sat with him in his kitchen and he explained to me the way that their plates and glasses were all arranged in separate cupboards so that they could adhere to the laws regulating milk and meat dishes, how they tried as hard as they could to do what the law required;  how it was a solemn duty that they had and how it helped their relationship with God.

While he was explaining all of this to me, there was a knock at the door and he left me to answer it.  I sat in the kitchen waiting for him to return and contemplated all of the things that he had said to me.  I thought about how humble he was and how devout he was in his faith.  He had really impressed me with what he had told me.

After a long time, I got worried about him.  I left the kitchen to see what was keeping him.  I found him on the front porch being confronted by a loud evangelical Christian who was telling him that being Jewish was certainly not an option as far as God was concerned.  When he saw me, he curtly asked me, “Well, are you also Jewish?”  I said  “yes, essentially”, which prompted a round of condemnation for me also.  With my seminary education, I began asking him about the New Testament, about what Jesus said about keeping the law rather than about being examples of the law.  I cited the passage from Mark where the Pharisees were confronted by Jesus about keeping the letter of the law but losing its real meaning.

We concluded that conversation with the missionary leaving the porch and rejoining his compatriots on the sidewalk.  I always have kept in my mind the probability that they put a chalk mark on the sidewalk to keep others of their team from confronting us.

Through it all, my brother in law was the picture of propriety.  He accepted that awful man on his porch with great hospitality and listened to what he had to say intently.  He wouldn’t have violated his welcome of that man for any reason whatsoever.   I think that he was even taken aback a bit by my arguing with him.

Jesus was always clear about what the law meant.  His disciples were chastised for gathering wheat on the Sabbath.  In Mark’s gospel, they are charged with not washing their hands before they ate.  All of these things were required by the law, which the religious establishment kept diligently.  What Jesus had a problem with was that the keeping of the law wasn’t the doing of the law.  He quotes Isaiah to them:

                                              This people honors me with their lips,
                                          but their hearts are far from me; in vain 
                                          do they worship me, teaching human
                                         precepts as doctrines.

He tells them:  You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.

And there you have it.  James is eloquent on this subject when he says simply: Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. 

That for me has always been the essence of religion.  My brother in law certainly practiced it.  I hope that I do also.

The Meaning of Family

      We had a awful fright at our house a week ago.  Rosie woke me at 3:00 AM with terrible chest pains.  She was gasping for breath and was afraid that she was having a heart attack.  I gave her an aspirin and called 911.  A cop came a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance that transported her to Allegheny General Hospital.  I followed along, got her registered and we waited until the doctors did a diagnosis and she was admitted to the hospital so that they could do tests.  After all of the medical people did their work, we discovered that it wasn’t a heart attack at all, but a gastro-intestinal problem that caused the terrible pain.  We thought ourselves very fortunate.

A day or so after this happened, our kids were visiting and my oldest asked me why I didn’t call her at 3 AM to tell her what had happened.  She told me that she wants to take care of both of us when we need her and we need to share times like this.  All of our daughters agreed that this was so.  I apologized to them for not calling, but they really hit the nail on the head with their criticism.   Rosie and I are aging.  That isn’t something that we always want to acknowledge, but it is certainly true.  I also know that as a family, we need to include everyone in our experiences, good and bad.  They really want to be a part of our lives.  I am not doing them or us any favor by neglecting to tell them what is going on.  They need very much to share our experiences.   Our kids taught us something by their comments.  I won’t neglect to tell them ever again, even at three in the morning when something is going on.  They need to know.

So what does this thing “family” mean and how far does it extend?  You and I, gathered here before the altar ready to receive the body and blood of our Lord are all family.  We need each other in all that goes on in our lives.  We have an obligation to share our experiences with each other so that we can both help others and be helped ourselves.  Like Rosie and I with our daughters, sometimes we neglect to do this.  That doesn’t mean that it isn’t necessary.  One of the things that binds us together most tightly is the common sharing of experience.  Our prayer lists are more than opportunities for gossip, they are the asking of our compassion and our prayer to our God for what we need as individuals in this congregation.  In any moment in our lives, we are more than individuals, we are part of a family, part of a common tribe, part of a congregation that worships our God and cares for each other.  That is what was being built by the followers of Jesus in creating the church.

In those earliest days, immediately after the resurrection, the apostles were befuddled.  When Jesus came and appeared to them in the upper room when they thought that they were the next ones on the list to be arrested and killed, they didn’t know what to make of this appearance by their leader.  In John’s Gospel, in the sixth chapter, Jesus has a long dissertation on what he calls his body and blood.  He tells his followers than unless you eat of my body and drink of my blood you have no life in you.  When he says this, the gospel records that a number of his disciples were disgusted by this and stopped going about with him.  He asked the twelve if they wanted to desert him also, but they said: Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

So here are Jesus’ closest disciples, his twelve, who have just heard him talk about requiring them to eat  his flesh and drink his blood, who don’t quite understand what he is talking about, but they are stopped from deserting him because they don’t know where else they could go.  He has the words of eternal life.  That is the bottom line for them.   The crucifixion and the resurrection have not yet happened.  When all of this comes about, Jesus meaning for them becomes much clearer.  It has persisted through the ages and shortly, we will participate in this by receiving the body and blood of Jesus here at this altar in recognition not only of our faith, but of our commitment to each other as the family of God in this place.  This sacrament binds us together as Christians who love each other and promise to share our lives together in common.  That is what is means to be a church and what it means to be a part of a congregation.

One year at Christ Church, I had twenty-seven funerals.  Most of them were pillars of the church, people whom we couldn’t afford to lose, but lose them we did.  I grieved throughout that year for each of them and for the loss that these deaths meant to our common life.  I preached at each funeral, but I never cried.  After one of these services, late in the year, I was leaving the church and one of the altar guild members met me on the stairs.  She put her arm on my shoulder and said, “And how are you doing?”  I broke into tears at that moment and cried for all of those beautiful people whom we had lost.  That wonderful altar guild woman was expressing to me the whole concept of family, how we share our joy and our grief with each other as members of the Body of Christ.  I have never forgotten that moment.  It is a constant reminder to me of the need that we all have for each other all of the time.  In most of the moments of my life, I am like those apostles of Jesus.  I don’t understand much of it either, but I know my need for other people.  We are family.  We are Christians.  We are together.  Thank God for all of that.

The Bread from Heaven

       The wisdom of Solomon is legendary.  It’s hard to forget the story of the two women who came to him each wanting him to give each of them a disputed child.  It is a wonderful testimony to his wisdom.  He told them that he would cut the child in two and give each of them half of it.  This aroused the true mother to great grief and she relinquished her claim to the child.  Solomon then gave her the child because of her obvious love.   In First Kings, we get the story of the conversation that Solomon had with God about what he needed.  He didn’t ask for great riches, or anything for himself .  He asked for wisdom and God gave it to him.

      Wisdom is a remarkable gift.  Paul asks the Ephesians to live not as unwise people, but as wise, because the days are evil; so he tells them not to be foolish, but to understand what the will of the Lord is. It is certainly also necessary for us, like the Ephesians to live as wise people, because these also are evil days.  Read the newspaper or listen to television and you certainly get the sense that there is little cooperation among the politicians to remedy the things that are so desperately wrong in this society.  The rich will certainly get richer and the poor poorer.  That is almost a given.  Wisdom is of the greatest necessity to get us through these times.

Paying attention to the outcast, the poor, the neglected, the unemployed, the homeless is what you and I are called to do by our Lord Jesus.  Understanding the will of the Lord is what we are called to use our wisdom to determine.  The problem is, that goes against the grain of the desires of those who regulate our commerce and determine the rules of the culture in which we live.  Making our way through that maze requires the utmost wisdom.  It isn’t easy.  Being an advocate for the impoverished calls down the wrath of wealth on us.  When we talk about tax loopholes or anything that seems to call for the regulation of commerce, we can get into powerful trouble.  That is why Martin Luther King was chased all of his life by people of power.  I don’t really want to challenge any of them.  They can hurt me.

Jesus was speaking to power when he talked to what John’s Gospel calls “the Jews” about himself being the bread from God.  He said to them:   This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.   The powerful people disputed about this saying, “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  But Jesus told them that his flesh is the bread that comes down from heaven and that whoever eats of it will live forever.

We continue to talk about that to this day.  Every time that we celebrate the Eucharist, we create again that moment in Jesus’ life.  I don’t think for me that there is a more powerful moment in our liturgy than when I hold the bread of the Eucharist before you and say, “The body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven”.  If that is true, it binds us all together as one and also to the commandments that our Lord gave to us:  to love God and to love one another absolutely.  That sets the tone for how it is that we treat the poor and the outcast in our community and it sets the bounds for how it is that we use the wealth that we have been given by our God for the good of all of us.  Remembering that we are not the author of goodness is an important step to keep us in tune with the needs of those around us.  What our God has given to us, we need to use for the comfort of everyone.  As we do that, we increase the welfare of all. 

Killing and Our Inaction

     We had another mass killing this week, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin with a number of people killed and more wounded.  I wonder when we are going to do something to rein in the assault weapons that are so easily obtained by anyone who has a serious hatred and a desire to kill.  There is so much of it anymore.  People with a screw loose and a bigot’s heart roam free in this country and aim their hatred where they will.  Sometimes it is a Congresswoman speaking to her constituents, sometimes it is people in a crowded movie theater, and this time it is in a worship space for people whose worship is perhaps different from the norm in this society, but perfectly rational and certainly protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution.

How do we deal with the grief that comes from this, with the compassion to help the victims get on with their lives?  It doesn’t really help that the gunman perished along with his victims in the slaughter.  That only makes the picture more murky and difficult.  We would like to know what was motivating this man to do this terrible thing, but that will be forever out of our reach.

  Is this simply going to be another event that grabs our attention for a little while and then fades into the background as other things come along, or will it spur us to take some action not only for the victims of this slaughter, but for this country that has made guns a priority over rationality and justice.   Certainly it is not too much to ask our congress to put aside their allegiance to the National Rifle Association and pass some laws that make it possible to get rid of assault weapons, which are of no use whatsoever in hunting, but only have the use to which they have been put in these terrible encounters with the people who have been killed.  What on earth is the matter with us?

The story in Second Samuel about the death of Absalom and David’s grief over his death is a profound story.  David had told his commander Joab and his staff to “deal gently” with Absalom, but when Joab heard that Absalom had been found stuck in an oak tree, he not only struck him with a javelin, but his followers also struck him and he was killed.

When David heard of Absalom’s death, he was filled with deep grief, wept and cried:  O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!

The evil of Joab in defying David’s orders and killing Absalom is evident.  David’s grief is also more than understandable.  Which of us wouldn’t be stricken with grief under similar circumstances.

The killing of the Sikhs is a similar situation.  There are absolute laws against this, but evil people with manifest hatred ignore the laws and like Joab, march to their own drum.  Perhaps these terrible killings will inspire some kind of work to ease the grief of communities that face such evil and make all of our hearts respond to the needs not only of the victims, but of all of our people.  I know that God weeps with us over these tragedies and over our inability to cope with them.

The Voice of God and our Doubt

       In the early eighties, Rosie and I went to Israel with a number of friends.  We, traveled to Galilee and to Mount Tabor, which is the traditional site of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  At the mountain, our tour bus was met by a flock of taxicabs, all driven by Palestinians who took us by way of a twisty mountain road to the top.  We met other taxis coming down and the road didn’t seem to be wide enough for both of the cars.  We narrowly passed each of them.  I don’t think I have ever been as frightened in my life.

After this treacherous trip, we found ourselves in a glorious place.  There was a basilica there and a crowd of German tourists singing a familiar hymn inside.  Strangely, there was a low fog covering the top of the mountain and it reminded me very much of the story told in Luke’s gospel about the time that Jesus was on the mountain with his disciples and they were all shrouded in mist and Jesus shined in their presence.  They were terrified on this mountain also.  But out of the cloud came the voice of God which said This is my Son, my Beloved!  Listen to Him! That this happened is testified to by Saint Peter himself in his first letter when he recounts this story and reports what the voice said to them when they were with Jesus on the mountain.

I took a picture of the mist shrouding the basilica and it hung in my office for a number of years.  It always reminded me of the terror that I felt on our way up to the top of that mountain, and the mist that seems to surround all of the claims of religion.  It reminded me that we don’t know as much as we think we know and that our job as Christians is to trust in the God who gave us our lives and our salvation that what we have been told is true in the best sense of the word, even though the accountable proof of any of it seems to be rather scant.

     While we were in Israel, we found little concrete evidence that Jesus was ever there.  Years and years of people living in that country has covered up any trace of what investigators might call proof of much of anything.  We visited the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the memorial altar there to the crucifixion.  We went to Bethlehem and saw the silver star under the altar in the Church of the Nativity, but all of these places are approximate and nobody really knows where the actual sites really are.

The only real proof that I saw was in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher  at the altar depicting Golgotha, where a young nun stood weeping against a wall.  That was enough for me to understand the depth of the faith that she brought to that site and the profound understanding that she took away with her when she left.  We also were touched intensely by this whole trip and brought home with us a more mature faith in the Jesus whom we had not seen on the trip, but knew much better for our experience.

Isn’t that always the case?  We go to our churches every Sunday and say our prayers and receive the sacrament, but concrete evidence of the things that we believe and profess with our hearts is not always so obvious.  Like the disciples on the mountain, our faith is also shrouded in mist and we wait for the voice of God to help us to understand what it is that we have seen and what we believe.

There’s nothing wrong with that.  Evidence is difficult to pinpoint and is hard to talk about.   We share our faith experience in the context of a community because we all hold this faith in common and don’t demand proof from each other.  The real proof of our faith is in the way that we live our lives.

In another account of the Transfiguration, when Jesus along with Peter, James and John came down from the mountain, they found the rest of Jesus’ followers trying to heal a person and failing miserably.  Jesus touched the man and he was healed instantly.  Such is the nature of our faith.  The real proof comes with what we do with what we have been given.  When we follow our Lord’s teaching and do what he taught us, our faith is seen by others in a profound way.  That is what that nun taught me with her tears.  It was like the voice of God out of the mist telling me a truth that I could never have understood any other way.   May God always bless our doubts and our fears and give us those beautiful times when we  know with momentary certainty that what we believe with our hearts is the truth.

Loaves, Fishes and Mission

In our family, when a great holiday comes around, there are always plans for a big dinner with everyone seated around a table that is full of lots of good things.  Sometimes it is buffet style, sometimes there is a barbecue, but there is always a time when we wonder how with what we have, we are going to feed all of the people who are coming and the ones that show up at the last minute.  We used to say “family hold back,” but that has changed to “loaves and fishes,” a reminder of who it is who is really in charge of our feast.  I love this because somehow it always seems to work out.  There are enough buns or burgers or whatever we need to feed not only the guests but also the family who has no need to “hold back”.

The story of the feeding of the five thousand is probably the best known of the stories of Jesus’ ministry.  It is told five times in the four gospels and with that repeated telling is most likely authentic.   Each of the times that the story is told, there is a little nuance.  Here, in the Gospel of John, Jesus asks the disciples “Where are we to buy bread for all of these people to eat?”  It goes on to say that he did this to test them because he knew what he was going to do.  The response of Simon Peter’s brother Andrew, is to tell Jesus that there is a boy present with five barley loaves and two fishes, but he asks, "what is that among so many people."  Jesus asked the disciples to have the people sit down.  He took the loaves and the fishes, gave thanks and distributed them to the people and there was enough and more than enough.  The disciples gathered twelve basketsful of leftovers.  

This is a marvelously Eucharistic story.  Every week we take the loaves that you bring to the altar along with the pitcher of wine, give thanks, bless it and give it back to you and not only is it enough, but it also becomes the body and blood of Jesus to feed our bodies and our souls for the week ahead.  God touches our meager offering and makes it enough to satisfy our need.

It is also a story that we need to take to heart as a message to the church.  It always looks like what we need to do is eclipsed by the shortage of our means.  Some of this is because of the enormous demands our facilities make on our income.  Taking care of the church and its equipment, its utilities and its staff can eat up a large portion of our resource before we ever get started on our mission.

In all of my years as the rector of a large church it always seemed to me that mission, though stated as primary, really came in second when it came to the real estate and the staff.  We always seemed to be able to find money for our own needs, but when it came to mission, we were usually able to find ways to talk ourselves into diminishing what we paid into it when the other things that demanded our money cried louder.  We were always able to rationalize that somehow.  In all honesty, it is very difficult to keep mission in front of our eyes always when all of the other material things make their louder demands.  How are we going to explain to the electric company or the roofers or the people who repave our parking lots that we need to give our money to the poor and they will just have to wait.  On the other hand, it is easier to tell the poor to wait a bit longer while we take care of our own needs.

I think that the problem that we have is a matter of trust.  Trust that the faith that we all hold dear is up to the challenge of real life.  When Jesus told the people to sit down and he gave thanks for his meager resources, he distributed what he had and there were twelve baskets left over.  The reason that seems to us to be a miracle is that we don’t really believe that we can duplicate such a thing.  But we can.  All that we have to do is to put our mission first on our church’s agenda and we will discover that there is more than enough to take care of all of the demands that come upon us.  That probably sounds a bit naïve, but it isn’t.   When we call upon the faith that is reinforced weekly by this abundant Eucharist, we will discover how abundant God’s bounty really is.  Try it.  You won’t be disappointed.

Living Through Grief

     When my father died in 1968, I was 34 years old and I was devastated.  I was the oldest son and I had no idea what I was supposed to do.  Also, I was deeply in mourning for the father who had done so much to shape me.  He had been in decline for a couple of years, and when he died it was almost a blessing.  But that didn’t make my mourning any easier.  I kept a stiff upper lip, as the British say, and we all got through the funeral and we settled out my mother and what would happen to her.  We got her out of their apartment and settled in a place where she could live.  There were many things to deal with, as we all find after a death.   But I never cried during all of this.  There was too much to do, and I felt that it was my responsibility to get it all done.   A number of years later,  Rosie’s dad had to go to Houston for an operation on his heart.  During his recovery, an aneurism broke and he died.   I remember collapsing in Rosie’s arms and crying for her dad like I had never cried for mine.  I know that was my mourning displaced, and that my grief over my father was very real, and I also loved her dad.  It was a terrible time for us all.

I know that you have all had times like that also.  We grow up, we mature and in the proper course of this world, death strikes those whom we love, as it will eventually strike all of us.   It is never easy to handle.  We all know about mourning, and where grief takes us.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has just learned about the death of John the Baptist.  He needs very much to grieve over this terrible loss.  Herod has killed his best friend and his mentor.  It couldn’t have been easy news for him to hear.

To deal with all of this with his disciples, Jesus takes them away to what he calls a deserted place so that they can all rest awhile and also so that he can grieve.  But grieving was not to be allowed to him at this time.  Many people saw Jesus and his followers leave the location where they were and they followed them to their deserted place.  They surrounded Jesus and demanded from him teaching and healing.  The gospel says that Jesus had compassion on all of these people, and taught them many things.  Here the gospel is edited and we don’t hear the story of the feeding of the five thousand which comes next.  We’ll save that for another time.

Jesus and his disciples left that deserted place in a boat and went on over the lake to a town called Gennesaret, where they moored their boat.  Immediately the people on the shore recognized him and brought their sick to him to be healed.  Jesus, in his compassion healed everyone who was brought to him.

Did Jesus ever find time to grieve?  It doesn’t seem so.  The needs of the people who were around him took precedence over any of his needs.

This gospel speaks to me because it echoes my own experience with the death of  my father.  I had too much to do to take the time to properly grieve.  That is why I postponed my tears for another time.  I all hit me when Rosie’s dad died.  When I look back on it all, I know that it was the right thing for me to do.   The words of the 23rd psalm are helpful to me in all of this:

                                 Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
                                 I shall fear no evil;   for you are with me; your rod and
                                 Your staff, they comfort me.

The very idea that God walks with me through everything that I experience in this life is of tremendous significance.  I’m never alone, even in my grief.  It helps me to know that and it gives me a way to focus my life on the future not on the past and to reflect on the goodness that I have known from these people who have been with me in this life.  Thank God for all of them and for the love that I have known.