Pride and Humility

            Pride and humility are opposites and we can have great difficulty when pride takes over.  It is important in our lives to be humble and not to trumpet what we do and are too strongly.   Humility is a necessary part of being Christian.  It is certainly essential if we are going to attract others into our family.  Jesus told a wonderful parable about humility when he went to the Pharisee’s house for dinner.  He told them:

           

                                When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet

                              do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more                                                 distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the

                              host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give

                              this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start

                              to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit

                              down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may

                              say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored

                              in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who

                              exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble

                              themselves will be exalted.

            Part of our problem is that we are afraid if we “sit in the lowest place” that no host will come to tell us to “come up higher”; but that is a product of our pride.  When we are living in humility, we won’t even think about where it is that we are sitting.  When we are able to put ourselves in the place of the poor, the outcast, the lame and the blind, who Jesus tells us to invite to our dinners, sitting in the lowest place is the best thing that we can do. 

            This is a story that Jesus tells his followers to give them a style of living that will be attractive to everyone who watches.  Unfortunately, it isn’t the style that Christianity has often adopted.  Instead, we have become sometimes overly prideful and want to compete with each other to attract people to our churches.  That is certainly a human characteristic, but it isn’t a very attractive one.   

            I have been in worship services, where I felt very much out of place because the behavior of the people in the congregation made it clear that their way of worship was the only approved method.  My lack of comfort would have driven me away if it hadn’t been necessary for me to be present in those places because of my work.  I don’t feel that way anymore because our worship services have been made more comfortable and I don’t feel anymore that I am not welcome.  That is probably the most important thing that we are doing in our worship services.  It reflects the way that we live with each other.  Humility needs to be paramount if we are going to make people comfortable and attract them to our communities. 

            The essence of the Gospel is to bring it to those who have nothing.  That is why we are here.  The poor and the outcast are our place of mission and when we focus on their needs, we are doing everything that God wants us to do.  How we worship is less important than who we minister to; what hope we bring to those who have none.  That is what this church of ours was created to do.  We bless our Lord when we do it, and that is the only possible source of our pride.

How I Learned to Be a Priest

             I went to a wonderful seminary.  At Virginia Seminary, I was taught by excellent professors who understood the Old and New Testaments, who spoke Hebrew and Greek as well as English and who taught me the subtleties of theology.  I listened sometimes with awe to their lectures and at the end of it, understood a great deal about our religion.  In Church history, I heard about the conflicts that troubled us from the beginning and the way that we handled our work in the world.  I came to understand how difficult it was to talk about the Lord Jesus to a world that was always in the middle of pain and suffering, yet that was the audience to whom we were sent.  It troubles me that the church’s riches have accumulated over the centuries and the mission to those who are in trouble has seemed to diminish.  God has been with us in all of this and continues to stretch all of us to be servants to those who are impoverished and to those who are enamored of their wealth.  Both of these groups have a great need of God’s presence in their lives.  The poor need to know God’s love simply for sustenance and the rich because they are worshipping the wrong God.

            I finished seminary, was ordained to the priesthood and began my ministry.  It didn’t take me long to discover that while seminary had taught me theology, biblical studies, church history, and lots of other things, they neglected to teach me how to be a priest.  That was what I was taught by my parishes. The people of God taught me more than I ever learned in seminary.  God was with me through all of this.  If I thought that I was perfected in seminary, it soon became obvious to me that I wasn’t.  I needed to learn what my people stood ready to teach me.  And they did.  Through their pain and their conflicts, I came to understand the difficulties that life brings to every one of us.  I visited people in hospitals, saw families in crisis, began a long ministry in Western Penitentiary, did counseling with people who were sometimes overwhelmed by life.  And came to know God’s presence in all of this, working through me to help people make sense of what was going on around them, even when what was going on was extremely difficult.     

                I am touched by Jeremiah’s prophecy when God says:  Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. God has a mission for Jeremiah, even before he was born.  God had a reason for creating him.  There was a message that God wanted to be sent.  Jeremiah was to be a “prophet to the nations”.  I feel a kinship with Jeremiah.  I know that God has been a part of my life since my birth.  God always had a plan for me, even when I rejected any part of it.  I was constantly led and nourished, particularly when I had no comprehension of what it was that I was supposed to do.  God brought me back to it over and over again.  God has a plan for all of us.  God’s presence has been with us from our beginning and we need always to remember that.  When we lose our way, we need to rely on God to get us back on track.

            Jesus, in Luke’s Gospel is described as teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath when a crippled woman comes before him.  Jesus has compassion for her, lays on his hands and he heals her.  She stands up straight and began to praise God.  But the leader of the synagogue is outraged by this.  “You have six days to do this kind of work,” he tells Jesus, “but you can’t do this on the Sabbath day.”  Jesus responds to the synagogue leader by calling him a hypocrite and talking about how people tend to their animals on the Sabbath when that is needed.  “Why can’t I also heal on the Sabbath?” he asks.  Rules!  We impose rules to keep us all straight.  The only problem with this is that the rules sometimes contradict our mission. 

            We need always to be straight about what it is that we are trying to do.  Our mission is to bring the Word of God to people who need it very much.  Who these people are has already been defined for us: to take care of the poor and the outcast and those without hope.  That is about as clear as God can make it.  It is what Jesus did, and was doing in this Gospel passage.  It is why we are here, and why God led me through seminary, through the learning in my parishes and why I am here today.  May God continue to bless us as we get on with this work.

Our Curious Problem with Religion

           I’ve never liked certainty.  I’ve discovered that when I am the most certain, it is probably when I am the most wrong.  All around us we have certain people, and this country seems to be getting more so every day.  It is the reason that politics is so disrupted, that congress can’t seem to get anything at all done; and that our religion seems to be more and more engaged in who is right about issues that none of us can prove. 

            The Westboro Baptist church near Topeka, Kansas seems to have all of the answers about what is wrong with this country and how God is visiting all kinds of wrath on us about our behavior, mostly about sexuality.  Somehow they have appointed themselves the judges of all of us and are God’s designated rulers who will straighten us all out and get us to their own certain conclusions.  They aren’t the only ones.  We have recently had our own bouts of certainty in this diocese with a split of congregations that was really unseemly.  Certain Anglicans formed their own parishes apart from the rest of us and consigned the legitimate diocese of Pittsburgh to what they believed to be hell.  It was a terrible time for all of us, but I believe that we have come through it a bit bruised, but still solid, and able to move forward with our Lord and to continue to be the servants of the Gospel that we have all been called to be.

            These kinds of battles have been going on since the beginnings of Christianity.  Since Roman emperor Constantine proclaimed Christianity a valid religion in 325 AD, the cross has been marching at the front of armies.  We have imposed our faith on many numbers of people who had no other choice other than death at our hands.  Our history is certainly not something that I would hold up as a wonderful example of what God has in mind for humanity.  As a matter of fact, a close inspection produces the opposite opinion.  When I look at the inquisition and the crusades, the horror of the way that we have used God’s Word to get our own way in so many instances, the wonder is that God has not simply swept us all away and started over again.  Many Christians use the word “conversion” to speak about our mission to other people.  I wonder about that.  Why are we converting people who possibly have answers at least as good as our own?

            All of our denominational lines are moments when we kicked each other out of our churches and started over again.  We celebrate our identities as Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists or Baptists, and we love to proclaim the tenets of our faith to each other, mostly to point out how those other people are wrong and we are right.  But when we do that, we mostly tell the world that we are the ones who have it all backwards.  We even keep out Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and every other religion; even though every one of them has truths to tell us that would benefit our lives.

            In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells the crowds:

             “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

                Those are words of prediction that have certainly proved true.  We have taken Jesus’ words of hope and twisted them into doctrine that is so rigid that it is almost impossible to love our neighbor as a person like ourselves. 

            The curious thing is that Jesus never intended to start a religion.  His mission was to bring the Love of God to everyone.  To show us by his life the incredible grace that God wanted for every person in creation.  That is exactly what Jesus did.  It was the rest of us who made a religion out of it and began the process of excluding others from our circle.  That is where the problem lies. 

            We need to hear the lesson that we are provided for by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews which is speaking about all of the saints who have laid down their lives that the Word of God could change the way that humans interact:

            Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us… 

            That is our heritage and it has nothing to do with religion.  It has everything to do with faith and the way that we orient our lives to following the Word that we have been given by our Lord.  To love one another the way that He loved us.

God's Unexpected Presence

           When God makes promises, they always seem to come at a time of impossibility.  Abraham was without progeny, his heir as described in the Genesis account was Eliezer of Damascus and he had no hope of children because Sarah was barren.  God took Abraham outside, told him to look at the sky and told him that his progeny would be as many as the stars in the sky.  Abraham believed God and eventually Isaac was born.

            Of course that isn’t all to the story of Isaac’s birth.  When the three men came to Abraham with this promise, Sarah hid behind a curtain in their home and laughed.  She denied that she was laughing, but when Isaac was finally born, he was given his name, Isaac, because the name means laughter.  That is a great story and it is on one level a mocking of our doubt that God can indeed fulfill outrageous promises. 

            Abraham’s progeny have certainly numbered as many as the stars in the sky.  Here in the middle of the season of Pentecost, we are again reminded of the truth of the promises of God and what they mean for our own lives.

            I have been given remarkable gifts by my Lord.  But these gifts came at a price.   I grew up in the Episcopal Church, sang in the choir, was an acolyte and was very much involved in the youth program at my church.  When I was eighteen, I was at Penn State hoping for a career as a forester.  I had completed a year at Mont Alto, which was at that time the Penn State Forestry School.    When I got to the Penn State main campus, instead of getting into my studies and completing the work that would have sent me into a forestry career, I discovered the beer parties at the fraternity houses on campus and instead of forestry, I majored in carousing.  After a semester of this, Penn State had enough of me and suggested that I find another place to get an education.  My father came to State College and pleaded with my advisor, but the advisor was certainly right and I left State College, and my forestry career.   

            One Saturday morning, after I had been home for a while, my father was cooking breakfast in the kitchen and invited me to come and to help him.  In the process of this, he asked me what I planned to do.  I told him that I would probably get a job and see what I could make of myself.  He then asked me a devastating question:  “Great, where are you going to live?”  All of a sudden it came to me that this was a dividing line.  I needed to get on with my own life and be responsible for myself.  I couldn’t continue to depend on my parents for everything.  I left that kitchen with a much different attitude than I had had before.

            What I did was take a course in radio broadcasting that a great man named George Heid was offering in Pittsburgh and then get a job in Indiana, PA with a small radio station and begin a twenty year career in radio and television broadcasting.  I eventually wound up in Johnstown, PA working for Channel Six, where I did the weather, then I became the program director of a small station in town that was trying to do what Ted Turner did in Atlanta, by creating a station that would have a great presence on satellite television.  This didn’t work out very well and the whole thing went bankrupt.   While I was in Johnstown, I had gone back to school at the University of Pittsburgh.  So when my job evaporated, I talked to my rector about the possibility of entering the priesthood.  My church background came to the fore.  I talked to my bishop, Robert Appleyard and that fall, I entered Virginia Seminary to begin my preparation.  My career has been wonderful.  I had a great job as the rector of Christ Church, North Hills, and would do it again if my age hadn’t caught up with me.  I continue to love to preach at places like Redeemer and I know what a remarkable gift I have been given by my Lord out of the impossibility that I created for myself in the idiotic way that I pursued my original education in forestry.  God never gave up on me, but instead led and directed me in the way that I have gone. 

            Jesus’ instruction to his disciples is to live lives of expectation; to keep their lamps lit in expectation of the gifts that God would lavish on them.  He told them to sell their     belongings and give it all away; to store up for themselves possessions in heaven where nothing can take them away, and to trust in the promises of God to give them the Kingdom.  It isn’t always easy to do this.  We become enamored of our possessions and want to have more.  It is easy to lose sight of why we are here, why we are followers of the Christ and what it is that God expects of his followers.  Like Abraham, we are asked to continue to exist in the impossibility that seems to be what our faith requires, and to trust in the great Grace of our God to get us through.

Managing Our Money

            There is an ad from Publisher’s Clearing House offering $5000 a week forever.  What they mean is that they will pay you $5000 a week for all of your life and then you can designate another person to receive $5000 a week for all of their life.  That sounds like quite a deal.  It raises for me again the problem of wealth and what it does to human life.  I can hardly imagine what such wealth given to a baby upon my death would mean for them.  Wealth is, of course, neutral.  It can be used in wonderful or terrible ways.  Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have done wonderful things with their money and have made charity a cornerstone of their lives.  Others haven’t reacted this way to money.  The great temptation is to lift up the self as the owner of the wealth and to look down on those who have less.  This is the great problem that confronts our society these days. 

            Someone occasionally raises the question in a wonderful way:  “Wouldn’t it be great if the soup kitchens and the food pantries would be adequately funded and the Defense Department had to have bake sales to fund its work?”  Well, we know that will never happen, but it puts into perspective the problem that we have in this society with our wealth.  We spend it as a people on the things that protect us and leave the poor to mostly fend for themselves. 

            Rosie and I do Meals on Wheels every week.  Recently the “Sequester” has cut funding for this extremely important service and the routes have all been cut back and some of the clients assigned to the county who are only able to deliver meals three days a week.  This means that for two days, excluding weekends, there is nobody to check on the recipients of these meals.  There was one ninety some year old lady on our route who I had to sometimes look for all over her house to be sure she wasn’t lying somewhere immobile.  This, for me, was the main reason that I was coming to her house every day.  This is a terrible state of affairs.  We are only a small program, but this illustrates the great difficulty that we have with our resources as a nation.  Why can’t we take care of the impoverished among us and just let the wealthy fend for themselves?  It seems to me that this is what we are called to do as the people of God. 

            The wonderful words of Psalm 49: 9-11 seem to cry out to me: 

For we see that the wise die also;
like the dull and stupid they perish *
and leave their wealth to those who come after them.

Their graves shall be their homes for ever,
their dwelling places from generation to generation, *
though they call the lands after their own names.

Even though honored, they cannot live forever; *
they are like the beasts that perish.

            I once knew two rich women who were sisters of a member of my parish.  When they died, I did their funerals.  Each of them was buried in a heavy mahogany casket that cost a great deal of money.  Their wealth followed them into the ground.  It was a terrible shame to see this happen.  They had no sense whatsoever that their wealth could do some good for people beyond their own lives.

             In some sense, we all live like this.  Jesus told us to love one another as we are loved.  That is a very simple commandment, but it had a great deal to do with how we manage our money.  It isn’t hard to remember the poor, as long as we understand that we are just like them.  With our help, their poverty can be eased and their lives made much better.  It really doesn’t hurt us at all to do this.  It just takes a little bit more than winning the Publisher’s Clearing House lottery.

Constant Prayer

            Prayers are always on our lips.  We pray before our meals, pray before meetings, offer prayers constantly during our worship.  Our prayers are cries to our God because of our needs, our worries, our guilt.  The prayers that we offer come from our heart and are given to God because of our incredible need not only to have our prayers answered, but to somehow know that God is indeed in charge of this incredibly complex world. 

            My own prayer life fluctuates.  Sometimes I have no problem whatsoever offering prayer not only for my own needs and the needs of my family, but for the many other people who I know who are in crisis or are sick or are at some kind of a moment of decision in their lives.  My prayers for them are that God will touch them with his Love and help them through whatever is messing up their lives.  Other times, because of my own difficulties, my prayer life flags and I wander through my life needing, sometimes desperately wanting somehow an outside force to help me to get through the brambles that hold me back from real joy.  This is when I know that I depend on the prayers of others to get me through. 

            Jesus disciples also had problems with their prayers.  In Luke’s gospel, they ask Jesus to “teach us to pray as John taught his disciples”.  Jesus responds with the elegant formula that we call the Lord’s Prayer that has been a part of our worship tradition from the beginning.  I love this prayer because of its completeness.  It acknowledges God as holy and asks for the coming of the Kingdom, for the providence of our daily food and the forgiveness of our sins with the marvelous caveat that this be based on the way that we forgive each other.  That’s a tough hurdle to get over, but it is certainly a firm part of our belief system.  Jesus then goes on to talk to them about the persistence of prayer with the story of the man who bothers his neighbor over and over again because a friend has come and he has nothing to give him.  Jesus says that the persistent prayer will bear fruit, the man will provide what you need because you are a pain in the neck.  If this is an allusion to the nature of God, it is a wonderful comedy, but it is a useful reminder that the constancy of our prayer is necessary to having the prayer answered.

            Lots of people have stories that speak to this, how their persistent prayer has brought healing, jobs, other good things.  But there are many other people who have also prayed constantly and have not been rewarded with answers.  I don’t have a resolution to this except to again listen to what Jesus told his disciples.  Keep at it.  Prayer is necessary.  It not only asks God for what we need, but it keeps us connected with each other.  Sometimes that is the most wonderful thing that comes out of prayer.  Loving our neighbors as people like ourselves brings our prayers into focus.  We all need each other, including our prayers.  They are the essence of community. 

The Mission of the Church

            We live in a curious time.  Our congress can’t pass simple legislation, neither can our state legislature.  Roads and bridges are decaying, transportation is in decline.   Politics seems to drive everything.  When the Republican Party was defeated in our last election, it seems that they resolved not to allow the Democrats to have any victories at all.  So nothing gets done, not even simple budget proposals that everyone supports.  The farm bill has been trimmed of all of the food stamp sections that have been there for a long time.  The effect of all of this is to hurt the poor to the benefit of the rich.  But what else is new?  We have been doing this kind of thing for a long time.  When the Republican nominee made his speech speaking of the “47 percent,” the people in need, who drain the resources of the country, many people were horrified at the callousness of the comment.  But this has been reflected in the policies that his party has pursued. 

            Care for the poor and the outcast is firmly ingrained in the Gospel.  We are commanded to take care of those who have nothing.  It isn’t our job to judge them and investigate why they are in poverty.  Their poverty speaks for itself.  Our mission is to do what we can to alleviate their suffering.  That isn’t easy.  We are the fortunate ones who have been blessed with many resources.  That puts us in a position to really help those who have very little.  But our focus remains on ourselves.  Even in our religious decisions, we favor the rich over the poor.  Our windows, dedicated to those who have provided them, and the plaques on our walls that celebrate the donors of wealth tell us where our hearts lie.  Our problem is with our outreach budgets that are the first place that we cut when money becomes scarce.  It is more important to fix up our buildings and maintain our worship space and staff than it is to take care of those who are in need. 

            This is true not only in this country, but in most of the world.  The majestic cathedrals of Europe were built by people who needed to work, who found in that work a meaning for their lives.  But in this age, those cathedrals are often falling apart and the money that is contributed to the benefit of the church is going to rebuild and refurnish these massive churches rather than being used to further the mission of the church.  The mission of the church becomes secondary to the buildings and the staffs that show the church to the world.  Our religious discussions center around issues such as sexuality and abortion and whether women may be ordained, and stay away from the most meaningful things that we can talk about: the needs of those whom we meet on our path.

            In his prophecy, Amos the “dresser of Sycamore trees and herder of sheep” tells the people of Israel who are rich, that God will destroy their wealth and that they will find that God’s wrath is impossible to take.  He tells them that the word of God will be impossible to find.  He says that the time is coming when God will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread or water, but a famine of hearing the word of God.  He tells them that they shall wander from sea to sea looking for it, but that they shall not find it.

            This is a terrible prophecy against people whom Amos accuses of bringing ruin to the poor of the land, buying the poor for silver and selling the needy for a pair of sandals.  His point is to show up the incredible difference between rich and poor in that society.  These are the people who are in charge of the wealth of the land, to whom the poor look for help in their great need.  But the rich are spending it on themselves and dismissing the poor as worthless.

            I don’t think that there is much difference between us and them.  We are still looking out mainly for ourselves.  We have a terrible problem doing really good things for the poor.  It tears us apart when we try.  Our hearts rush to judgment and our purse strings stay closed.  I’m not happy to say this.  

            In the north of England, in Yorkshire is a place called Fountains Abbey.  It was built by Cistercian monks who were trying to bring the Gospel to the people in that area.  The whole place was built by the poor peasants of the area who earned their living by their work.  It is a ruin now, torn apart by the religious wars around the time of Henry VIII.  A mile and a half down the road is Ripon Cathedral, a fading church that is a fair representation of the reality of the Church of England.  When we wandered through Fountains Abbey, I found a remarkable peace that I have a hard time describing.  God is in that place, and was in that place for all of its existence.  In Ripon Cathedral, I saw only the trappings of church; the vestments, the candles, the wall hangings, but not the mission.  It seems to me that both Fountains and Ripon are ruins.  One just doesn’t know it yet.  

            It worries me that our churches are heading in the same direction.  The Gospel is the issue.  How is it preached to this world?  When people look at our churches, what do they see?  Are we caring for ourselves, or for those around us?  If it is mostly for ourselves, I think that one of these days the Word of God will be hard to find and our magnificent buildings will fall down around us.  May God bless us as we look for mission and find significant ways to provide care for those who are in need, and who are loved so dearly by the one who created them.  Our true calling is to do no less.