Inwardly Digesting Jesus.

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and with the comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

The prayer I just read comes from Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Prayer book tradition.  Those are the words from 1549.  We read this Collect, the prayer we pray at the beginning of the service, toward the end of November, but when I read today’s Gospel, today’s very strange Gospel with an invitation eat Jesus, to eat his flesh, this prayer came to mind.  I remember the words of this prayer from being a little kid serving as an acolyte at church services, because the image is so strong.  Let us “inwardly digest” the scriptures, “inwardly digest” them?  As a little kid, that struck me as odd.  It put in mind the image of Ezekiel eating the scroll.  That we would ask God to help us “inwardly digest” our scriptures struck me as odd.

Kids can be quite literal, and I was a very literal little child.  When I was three or four years old, my mother left me in the car with a cake she had baked for my grandfather’s birthday.  She just needed to run into the house for a moment, having left something behind on the kitchen counter.  Everything would have been fine, except that before she went into the house she told me the kind of cake she had baked.  The cake, it turned out, was a pineapple upside down cake.  By the time she returned to the car, I had turned the upside down cake right side up.  My mother has never baked that kind of cake again.
So as a very literal minded child, this image of “inwardly digesting” was strange. The image is powerful, but to get past the “weird,” we have to grow up a bit.   To hear Jesus tell us that we must “eat his flesh” if we are to have “life within us, we have to see the scripture as more than literal.

In the early days of Christianity, rumors spread through the Roman Empire that Christians were cannibals.  Think about it, they claimed to gather each week to eat the flesh and drink the blood of their savior.  These rumors, based on a loose misinterpretation of John chapter six, fanned the flames of persecution against the early church.
John 6, this chapter we find ourselves so deep in this week, the chapter we have been reading all month at Saint John’s, is not LITERALLY about flesh, or even about bread.  This is an extended mixed metaphor, and if you are having a hard time following what Jesus is saying, take heart, you are in good company with your priests, and with our seminary professors.  Even the disciples, in the next few verses will say “This teaching is difficult.”
BUT, the invitation, however strange, is profound.  Jesus invites us to eat his flesh, to inwardly digest HIM.  Jesus OFFERS his flesh for the life of the world.  Jesus offers his life to us, that we might have life.  The words are gruesome, there’s no way around how gruesome the words are, but at their heart is a profound offer, an offer of life, an offer of sustenance.  I believe our world desperately needs the sustenance of Christ, needs to learn to inwardly digest this message of self-offering, of self-surrender.

This has been a summer of violence.  This week just down the street from St. John’s Church, at 8th and G a gunman tried to charge into the offices of the Family Research Council.  Nine blocks from where we sit right now, a gunman yelled at a security guard, “I don’t agree with your politics” before opening fire.  Thankfully he was stopped.  But in Aurora Colorado, near where I grew up and in a house of worship, not unlike this one, belonging to a Sikh community in Oak Creek Wisconsin the violence had incredibly tragic results.  This summer our flags have spent too much time at half-mast.
What have we inwardly digested, as a society?  I think we have to ask this question.  When attackers fill their packs with neo-nazi music or Chik-Fil-A sandwiches to make a point with violence, something is terribly wrong in our society.  We have taken in a message of hatred and division, we have inwardly digested an acceptance of violence.  Our society has digested a level of division and hatred that is causing major problems for our social health.  Hatred is not a neatly partisan issue, as the events of this summer show.

I wish the answer to these terrible events was simpler.   I wish I could stand up here and tell you that passing a particular piece of legislation would solve this crisis.  I wish solving hate and violence was that easy.
Jesus also lived in a culture of violence.  The Pax Romana was hardly peaceful for the peasants subject to the rule of the Romans.  Massacres in Palestine under the Roman Empire were commonplace.  Jesus himself would be caught up in the violence, labeled a threat to peace, and executed.
In the midst of this violence what did Jesus do?  He ate with people.  Jesus ate with ALL the wrong people.  Jesus ate with Jews and Romans, women and men, tax-collectors, prostitutes, little children, and samaritans.  Jesus ate with people he disagreed with.  Jesus dined with Roman soldiers and pharisees.  What would that look like today?  What would it look like for the House and Senate leadership to come together for a potluck?  What if in response to the attack in downtown Washington this week, the leadership of the LGBT Center of Washington and the Family Research Council sat down for dinner?

This is why we come here each week.  At St. John’s Church, we do not agree about everything.  We are from different parties, and backgrounds, and we just do not agree.  But we come, we gather around this table.  We received Jesus, and we practice his radical table fellowship each week.  To borrow a phrase from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, we participate in “solidarities not of our own choosing.”  We come to break bread together, and to eat with people we don’t agree with, that we might learn the grace, forgiveness, and peace of Christ.

There is an old Cherokee legend about a Grandfather teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he says to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.“
The story is about what we choose, in this world, to inwardly digest.  Do we feed on the anger and hatred and violence of the world, or do we choose the love and forgiveness of Christ?
Six years ago this October another massacre occurred in Lancaster County Pennsylvania.  A gunman walked into an Amish schoolhouse.  The news from this story, more than the others, was not dominated by the gunman, but by the Amish community.  Members of that Amish community, from the moment the news broke of the shootings, sought to forgive the gunman.  They visited his widow.  Members of the Amish leadership attended the funeral of the killer.  Around the country, around the world, people were moved by the example of the Amish, a people who had inwardly digested Jesus’ command to love their enemy, had inwardly digested the idea of forgiveness.
The gift Solomon receives from God in our story this morning could describe the Amish Christians of Lancaster county.  Our translation (and it will come as no surprise to many of you that I have quibbles with our translation) but our translation has Solomon asking for an “understanding mind,” and that’s a nice thing to ask for, but that is not what actually in the Bible.  The Hebrew actually has Solomon ask for a “listening heart.”  A “listening heart” is what Solomon receives from God, the gift that helps him discern right from wrong.  I think “listening hearts” well describes the Amish Community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.  This gift comes from years of taking in a message which is counter-cultural, inwardly digesting the forgiveness and love of Jesus.  This isn’t easy in a society dense with hate and division. Listening hearts are the root of wisdom, and the product of a lot of inner work, a lot of inwardly digesting the Word of God, the message of Jesus.

Jesus tells that we will know those who eat his flesh because they will have “life within them.”  Six years ago we watched with awe the amount of life there was in that little Amish community.  How can our stories witness to that kind of life?  How can the life of Christ be known in our lives?

We have before us a complicated Gospel this morning, a Gospel proclaimed in a world with few easy answers.  But at its heart is an invitation to receive the life of Christ, to inwardly digest the Word of God, and to be transformed.

Jesus and Stranahan’s a sermon for July 28

 

I was home in Colorado recently, and while there I took a tour of Stranahan’s Whisky distillery.  Stranahan’s is a Scotch style American whisky, a very fine whisky.  At the end of the tour, they let you sample the product, and then in a stroke of marketing genius AFTER you have sampled the product you are invited to make purchases in the gift shop.  As our tour guide sold us what seemed like very reasonably priced fine whisky, she shared some advice from the owner and founder.
The tour guide said that the folks at Stranahan’s would never pretend to tell you how to enjoy your whisky, but, and this is apparently a direct quote from the founder, “if you mix Coke with this fine whisky, you make the baby Jesus cry.”

If you mix that fine of a whisky with Coke, with anything really, you dilute the taste.  You lose the flavor of the whisky.
Don’t miss it, there is a theological point being made here,  Don’t mix your fine whisky with Coke.  It’s theological, and I promise, it has something to do with our Gospel today.  

We really have about three Sundays worth of Gospel text today, but don’t worry we are going to spend the next five weeks in chapter six of John’s Gospel, so there will be time for me and Gini to get to almost all of the finer points.  Today I want to focus on the transition that occurs between the two narratives: between the bread and the walking on water.  Immediately after Jesus performs the miracle of the loaves and fishes, what happens?  He has to run away because the people want to SIEZE him and make him king.  “This is the prophet we have been waiting for!” they say.  They are ready to seize Jesus, to grasp ahold of him.  The word “seize” is the same as Paul uses in his letter to the Philippians.  He tells us, “Equality with God is not something to be grasped.”  Jesus knows this, and avoids the grasping.
Jesus’ time was full of expectation for a coming messiah.  There were many candidates running around Palestine, and there were militias ready to get behind one of them to try and replace the Roman governor.  You know this if you’ve read any biblical history, or if you’ve scene Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian.”  The time of Jesus was the time of expectation of the coming savior of the Jewish people from the Roman imperial oppression.  So the people hear in Jesus, the see in Jesus, what THEY WANT TO SEE.

The expectations are dangerous.  The people here are ready to try an install Jesus as King with armed rebellion, so Jesus takes off.  This story about Jesus seems so long ago, but we know something of the reality of those who would seize God for their agenda.  We have survived the terrorism of some who claim God is diluted in their own prejudice.
If you watched the opening ceremonies on Friday night, you missed something.  Here in the United States, NBC decided NOT to air the final portion of the ceremony, just before the parade of nations.  The last act was a memorial to those who died in the London Underground attacks just after UK was announced as host for the 2012 Olympics.  If you haven’t seen the memorial, google it later.  I found it online, and I was amazed.  It is mostly a modern dance piece, which wasn’t what amazed me.  I have to confess, I don’t really get modern dance.  What amazed me was the singing of a hymn.  In response to a terror attack, a religiously motivated terror attack by a group of people who claim a dangerously deluded vision of God, the London Opening Ceremonies planners asked us to listen to a hymn.  One verse:

Click here to see the missing tribute from the Olympic Opening Ceremonies

3. I need thy presence every passing hour;
what but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who like thyself my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, O abide with me.

What a way to counter spin, to counter the claims of those use God for their own agenda of terror.  The planners of those opening ceremonies offered a old vision of the God who abides, the God of hope.  This is important.  Rather than avoiding the danger of religion altogether, they addressed specifically the dangerous vision of those who would hijack God for their own ends.  The hymn has another vision of God, not one set to our own agenda.  

Our world needs this God.  Jesus needs followers who are not ready to seize him and make him king.  After the crowds have dispersed, Jesus comes looking for the disciples.  By this point they’ve gotten in a boat, and, not surprisingly for this crew, things aren’t going so well.  Then they see Jesus, walking across the water.  Do not be afraid, he tells them, and suddenly they find themselves on the other side of the sea.
If anything is clear from the Gospels, Jesus doesn’t leave things where they are.  Jesus doesn’t leave people where they are.  When people encounter the real Jesus, undiluted Jesus, their lives change, and not necessarily in the way they were expecting them to change.  A bunch of fishermen go around proclaiming God’s justice.  People walk away healed.  Women are sent back to preach to their communities.
Can we let go of our agendas?  We have a world that desperately needs an undiluted Jesus, a Lord who comes to heal, to feed, and to save us from drowning.

 

David, Salome, and Dancing with God

At the heart of today’s readings are two dances, two VERY different stories about dance.  We have David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, and we have Salome (who Mark mistakenly calls Herodias, which is her mother’s name.  We know her name was Salome from Josephus, a Jewish historian of the time.)  Salome dances before her stepfather-uncle. The family sexual dynamics in this story are pretty wild.  Reading the commentary on the story of Herod Antipas, Herodias, and Salome is a bit like reading the transcript of “Real Housewives of Galilee.”  I am going to skip the sleaze for now.  I want to focus on the dance.  Today before us we have David’s dance of praise and Salome’s dance of seduction.  I think these dances have something incredibly important to teach us today.  The dances teach us about our bodies.

Dancing is about the most bodily thing you can do.  How we dance teaches us about how we are in our bodies.  When was the last time you danced?  I expect for some of us, it has been awhile.  We have before us today two VERY bodily texts, scandalously bodily.  David uses his body to praise the Lord.  Salome uses her body as well.  The results are less graceful.
If we are going to talk about bodies, right off the bat we have to acknowledge a fundamental inequality present in these stories themselves.  I’m sure I don’t have to point the inequality out to you, but bear with me.  I am speaking positively about David’s dance.  David is a man.  Salome’s dance, her body, is used for immoral purposes.  Salome is a woman.  We have a problem.  I mean that, collectively.  Our culture historically, biblically, has cultivated a suspicion toward women’s bodies.  The bible reflects that suspicion, because the Bible was woven from the fabric of culture.  But the Bible does more than that, because we have woven so much of our culture with the stories of the Bible.  The Bible perpetuates a misogynistic view of women’s bodies.  We need to acknowledge the Bible’s complicity, if we are to work against the prejudice.

On the whole, women struggle far more with body image than men.  You can see this clearly if you go to the gym.  On the whole, men at the gym spend a lot longer looking at themselves in the mirror, don’t they?  The men are staring at their bicep as they make that curl.  You’ve all seen that guy, who walks up to the mirror after every set on every weight and checks to see how much prettier his workout is making him.  Women, on the whole, don’t act that way.  Most of the women I know look for the treadmills that DON’T face the mirrors.  On the whole, women struggle more with body image.  Our culture makes body image harder for women.  That is not to say there are not men who are struggling with body image.  After all we live in the days of “Magic Mike.”

So it is unfortunate, if not surprising, that today’s dances line up the way they do.  But if we take the gender of the dancer off the table (just for the moment), what is the difference between David and Salome?  I think the juxtaposition of these two stories has something very important to teach us about the body, about the body’s proper use and maintenance.

      The second story, the story of Salome, teaches us a bit about the power of a visually appealing body in our culture.  I think it is fitting that we discuss “body image.”  Because “image” is used another way.  We talk about “body image.”  We also talk about “graven images.”  I do not think, for our culture, they are far apart.  Think about how much we display a certain type of body.  We hang banners all over our cities displaying a certain kind of body, a body that very very few of us have the time and the genetic type to produce.  We hold up an image of the body, a body image, a graven image.  We worship six pack abs in this country.  We idolize them.
How many of our work-out routines are designed to tone or flatten?  How many of our diets are meant to target specific kinds of flab?  We have stopped asking ourselves “what will make us healthy?” in favor of asking “what will make me look good?”  “What will make me fit that mold?”  This is the dance of Salome.  This is the dance of body-image.  This is a dance we know very very well.  This is a dance many of us are tired from dancing.  We are tired of dancing this dance.
There’s another dance.  As David brings the ark of the Lord into Jerusalem, he starts feeling the rhythm.  He dances, not to please those around him, but because he is fearfully and wonderfully MADE.  He dances because he knows, deep in his muscles and sinews, that God has created him for this moment.  David dances not to please others with the image of his body, but to celebrate the God who made his body.  He dances because God gave him the ability to dance, and that gift is worth celebrating.

You see David’s dance would have us believe that our body, in whatever state it is in, is a beautiful gift from God.  I know, that is hard to believe in a world tapping its feet to Salome’s rhythm.  David’s dance celebrates God because God created our bodies, without regard to how perfectly God’s creation fits into our image of perfection.  David’s dance uses the human body to celebrate the God who created that body.  How do we learn to dance David’s dance?

Me, my sister, and Baga (and Bach the labrador in the door)

What I know of David’s dance, I learned from my grandmother.  Now she never directly referenced this story, but my grandmother knew David’s dance.  I called my grandmother Baga.  I was probably just over a year old when I put the two syllables together, and the name stuck.  Baga even eventually had a license plate.  My grandmother was proud to be my, and my siblings and cousins’ Baga.  What you need to know about Baga, for the sake of the story, was that she lived with Rheumatoid Arthritis.  By the time I was born, the RA was pretty advanced.  Baga was my only living grandparent for the majority of my life.  My father’s parents died in an accident when he was young.  My granddad, Baga’s husband, died when I was five.  Baga was a pretty constant presence.

Elizabeth P. Lanning, Baga’s real name, was fiercely independent.  She lived on her own, with Rheumatoid arthritis, until about a year before she died.  She drove up until the last year or two.  My grandmother had a stick with a hook on it so that she could pull up the zipper on her blouse.  All of the doorknobs in her house had handles.  She had a large button phone.  She got my uncle to put a clothespin around the ignition of her car, so that once she put the key in (step one), she could then use both hands to turn the ignition (step 2), before taking the car out of park to drive (step 3).  It took Baga a lot of conscious steps to do things with her body that you and I do unconsciously.  Baga accepted her body, with its limitations.  And she pushed her body.  She did all the exercises she could .  She stretched and worked, and kept pushing herself.  She knew she would never have a “perfect body,” but she was not going to give up on having the healthiest body she could.

That is how she taught me David’s dance.  My grandmother, though her physical movement was tedious, though I’m sure she was often in a lot of pain, though she was in and out of the hospital to have joints replaced, never complained.  I do not remember her complaining, or wincing in pain.  When she had to ask for help, which was not very often, she did it gracefully.  She gave thanks, every day, for the parts of her body that worked.

She had a great love for food, and wine, and beer.  My grandmother taught me to pour a beer, long before I was old enough to drink.  It was one of the few things she needed help with.  She could maneuver a beer bottle over a glass, but she couldn’t simultaneously tilt the glass to get just the right amount of foam.  She wanted to enjoy her beer with the proper head of foam so she asked for help from her scrawny teenage grandson.

What grace I have in David’s dance, in the dance of accepting and loving, and praising God for the body I have been given, I learned from Baga.   My grandmother laughed through the parts of her body that were hard to bear.  She laughed, and I think there is an invitation to laugh at our bodies.  Bodies are funny.  They make all kinds of weird noises.  If we can learn to laugh at our bodies, laugh with our bodies, we might just laugh ourselves into dancing.  We might work out and eat better to feed OUR body, the body we have been given, rather than trying to make it fit some mold.  The next time we dance, maybe, just maybe, we can dance like no one is watching.  We can dance to celebrate that we are wonderfully and fearfully made, by a God who wants us to dance, not to please some image of what we should look like.  We dance because God made us with bodies that are right for dancing.

Faith and the American Dream

Today Jesus sets the bar pretty high, don’t you think?  That last sentence is really the clincher: “Be perfect, you know, like God is perfect.”
Really Jesus?  You wonder how he thought the disciples would respond:  “Oh, oh, now I get it.  Be perfect, like God, that’s where we were going wrong.  Thanks Jesus.”

Now, I’m being tongue in cheek here.  I think part of the problem I have with this Gospel is a problem of translation.  You see “perfect” in English misses part of the sense of the word in Greek, which is telos, telos.  If you’ve studied Aristotle, you’ve heard that word telos.  It means perfection, yes, but it is more directional.  To engage in seeking teleological perfection is to journey with purpose, to move toward a point at the horizon which is perfection, knowing that in life we will not reach the goal.

This week I want to posit that to be a Christian and to be an American, is to go on a journey, to chase a dream.  In this sense, the image at the heart of the reading from Hebrews has always captured my imagination.  Abraham stands outside his tent under the stars of the desert night.  God promises him and Sarah that they will have descendants “as many as the stars of the heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand.”  Abraham has faith in this dream, the writer of Hebrews tells us.  Abraham has faith in God’s dream.  He set out from his homeland, not knowing where he was going.  He lived in tents.  The author Hebrews wants you to hear this: Abraham camped out.  His dwelling was temporary.  Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob: they were a people on the move, chasing a dream.

My family has a bit of a running gag when we travel.  The joke centers around the GPS systems in rental cars.  Before we set off we play around with the various options of the navigation system.  My sister take charge when it comes to the voice that will be guiding us.  There are typically a few options of genders and accents.  After a bad experience in New Orleans, my sister is convinced that the British lady gets you lost.  So we are guided by an American.  The real joy of GPS in a city you don’t know, for our family, comes when you reach you destination.  As we get close to where we are going my mom says, “wait for it….wait for it” until we hear the GPS announce “You have arrived.”  
“You have arrived.”  We love the sense that sentence conveys.  You’ve made it.  You’ve found a place of comfort and privilege.  You’re in.  “You have arrived” used to speak of a certain level of access in society.  When you receive the right invitations to the right parties you know that “you have arrived.”  So it is reassuring when the small electronic voice tells you that indeed, you have arrived.  Even if you’ve only found the local Chipotle.  I think Americans today are very concerned about “arriving.”  We want to “achieve” the American Dream, to “arrive.”  We have some loose understanding of what “arrival” will look like that involves a good job, a good partner, maybe a labrador, and 2.5 kids.  You know, white picket fences.  But then, when we have that fence, the job, the dog, the spouse, and the kids, the voice doesn’t come telling us “you have arrived.”  See, there is a lot of dissatisfaction with what we’ve come to think of as, “The American Dream,” and I think it is because a lot of us have dreamed a dream that is too small.
See, if in the letter of Hebrews Abraham and Sarah had a GPS, they would never hear “You have arrived.”  Instead we hear that they “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”  Faith, in the mind of the author of Hebrews, is the animating force which allows us to live by a dream, to journey toward a dream.  It takes faith to dream a dream so big you know you will never see it fulfilled.  It takes faith to live toward a dream you will never fully realize.  
It took faith, 236 years ago, for a group of freshly minted “Americans” in what was then an agrarian backwater of the world, to declare their independence from the British Sovereign.  The founders had a dream.  They were convinced that God did not send tyrants to rule over them.  The founders believed that all men, today we would amend their statement.  “All people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  That word “pursuit” is a word that describes Abraham well, and hopefully continues to describe our American project well.
I think the founders of our nation understood what it was to dream a great dream, to dream a dream that was bigger than themselves.  I think whatever progress our nation has made in this world, it owes in part to the depth of the founders dream.  A point of personal privilege, for me it really is kind of amazing to spend today in James Madison’s church.  In the three years that I’ve been at St. John’s, I have always been away this week.  As I prepared to preach I thought a great deal about that founding generation.  Madison, the great architect of the separation of Church and State, helped build a parish while the White House was still in ruins.  So worshiping here, at St. John’s, carries for me a special sense of inheritance.  We are the inheritors of the freedoms of our founders.  Their dream is still worth celebrating.

Make no mistake, while some have experienced as the American dream, others have lived a nightmare.  While the generation of founders outlined new freedom for themselves, they denied that freedom to the enslaved African Americans who worked their plantations.  Think about that.  The architects of freedom owned people.  Still today our agricultural and service industries are reliant upon the labor of 12 million undocumented immigrants.  Each year the US government allows only 5,000 visas for this kind of work.  Because we deny so many of these laborers a legal a permit to work and live in the United States, they are paid below minimum wage and work without recourse to regulations which protect workers’ health and safety.  The dissonance between the so-called American dream and what many have experienced as the American reality is not easy to resolve.  I struggle to resolve that dissonance.  

I want to read you a couple of short paragraphs from a poet whose career began here in Washington.  I want to share these lines, because for me they speak to the depth of the dream, why it is worth talking of the American dream.  When he was first published, this poet was working as an African-american busboy at the “whites only” Wardman Park hotel.  The poet’s name was Langston Hughes.  His poem, “Let America Be America Again,” is from 1935.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!  

That is the power of a great dream, a dream bigger than the first dreamers, a dream so big that it can be picked up generations later, by the son of people whose freedom was denied by the original dreamer.

There are signs of life like this for the American dream all over our world.  The dream is no respecter of national borders.  When I was in college, I was often in theology classes with a man named Daniel.  Daniel was one of the most articulate and patient students I ever met.  Daniel was also one of the “Lost Boys,” the orphans of war in the Sudan who walked hundreds of miles across the Sudanese desert to escape war in refugee camps.  He received a visa, and he came to America with a dream that he would be educated.  Daniel is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Mathematics at the University of California.  Try and tell Daniel that the American dream is dead.

When I lived in Honduras I met two young boys with really interesting names.  To understand why their names were so fascinating, you have to understand the phonetics of the Spanish language.  You see in Spanish, each vowel only ever makes one sound.  The letter “U” always sounds like “oo.”  “A” always produces the sound “ah.”  “I” is always “ee” and so on.  In Honduras, in the rural village of Talanga, I met a boy named “Usmail.”  Spelled out his name is written “U.S. Mail.”  He was named for the letters that came with remittance checks from his father, probably and undocumented worker.  His mother named her child in thanksgiving for the source of income that provided shelter, food, and medical care for her family.  The other boy I met in the capital, Tegucigalpa.  His name was “Usaid,”  US AID.
I tell these stories because I think they represent the state of the American Dream today.  For America’s sake, the dream can never fully be realized.  If it is realized, than the dream is too small.  No one person’s success realizes the dream when others are suffering.  We work, with faith, toward the dream: faith in our Creator who both endows us with rights and charges us to safeguard the rights of others.  We know that in our lifetimes, we will never fully realize the promises of that dream, but we hope that “from a distance we can see and greet” the dream’s fulfillment.
We pause this week to celebrate the dream of America, to remind us that the American dream is not easy.   The American dream really has little to do with whitewashed picket fences.  The American dream is really not to pull into Chipotle and hear “you have arrived.”  Those dreams are too small.  Our God is the god of a journey.  The journey isn’t easy, and the idea of travelling constantly toward a dream we will never see fulfilled may seem daunting.  But take courage, for as Catherine of Siena said, we follow a savior who did not say “I am the arrival point,” but “I am the way” and “all the way to heaven is heaven itself.  To dream a great dream is to take a journey bigger than any one of us.  To chase the American dream means that until the day we die we persistently pursue happiness, and life, and liberty for all of God’s creatures.  So, this week, as we watch those fireworks, as we are filled with the awe that is the American dream, let us ask ourselves: Where is the American dream leading us today?

 

Vines and Roots

Luis asked me to preach today, and when I saw the Gospel reading I thought really?  The parish wine expert is not going to tackle “I am the true vine?”

I have learned a lot in my time so far as an Assistant at St. John’s…important life skills like: good wine does not come in a box, or from Trader Joe’s, but I can’t pretend to know much yet about wine.  I’ll leave the fruit of the vine to the experts for now.

Instead I want to talk about roots.

Where are your roots?  I ask the question because of a word that appears in our reading from John’s Gospel and in the Letter from John : abide…abide.  Jesus says, “Abide in me.”  In the midst of this very agricultural imagery about the vine and the branches, I think it’s fair to the greek of the Gospel to play with our translation a bit, to translate “meinein,” Jesus’ word, not simply as abide in me, or remain in me, but “be rooted in me.”

Where are your roots?

My parents still live in the house where I grew up.  Some of my earliest memories of that place are of the two big blue spruce trees out front.  They were tall when we arrived, and they were still growing pretty rapidly.  We used to hang Christmas lights on them each year.  I remember when I was little, my dad used to do this with a neighbor.  With a ladder and a broom stick they were able to get the lights to the top of the tree.

Unfortunately, by the time I was big enough to help decorate, the trees had gotten much taller.  My father, who subscribes to the life philosophy that “anything can be solved with bailing wire and duct tape” had cobbled together an extension of the broom handle involving several lengths of PVC pipe.  When I was big enough I had to hoist the whole contraption up into the air.  We were able to get the lights up there, but I remember sitting in school the following day, my upper body so sore I couldn’t lift my arms above my shoulders.  By the time I went to college, my dad had given up on putting lights up on the Blue Spruce.  He moved on to hanging lights on a much smaller tree in the front yard.

This winter, my mom sent me some really disturbing pictures over email.  Colorado had very little snow this season, but they did experience powerful wind storms.  Both of those huge Spruce trees came down.  Luckily they both landed on our driveway.  They could have done some serious damage to the house.  We came to find out that the trees toppled because of the way they were planted.   Whoever put in those trees never  removed the plastic sheeting around their roots.  The trees grew up, but their roots did not grow out.  They were so top heavy that they were just waiting to fall.

Roots are important.  Roots are critical.

Where are your roots?

Often when we talk about “roots” we talk about family.  Maybe for some of you, “getting back to you roots” still means returning to the family home whether that is in Bethesda or central Texas.

For others of us, “getting back to your roots” is more complicated.  Some of us have become rooted not so much in particular piece of family real estate, but in the geography of collected friendships.  I suspect that many of us are grounded as much by our friendships as by family.  When I go home to Colorado in a few weeks, I’ll spend at least as much time with my friends from high school as I do with my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Those friends know me better than just about anyone, visiting with them grounds me, it brings me back to my roots.

Roots are important to cultivate and nurture.  Relationships take time and care.  Having a friendship, or a romantic relationship, that you can sink roots into, draw nourishment from, takes hard work and regular watering.  For my friends that watering is almost literal.  It usually takes the form of great conversations over beers.  And I need to be sure to tend to those friendships to keep the roots viable.

But these friendships and family bonds are not the only roots we grow.  We root ourselves in our careers, in our hobbies.  How many of us think of ourselves as “lawyers” or as “tennis players?” When you’ve spent time developing your skills, you can draw in a great deal of meaning from your work or your play.

We live in a society that hopes to develop other roots in us as well.  Some of us are rooted Apple users or Chevy drivers.  Companies spend a lot of money hoping we sink our roots into their products, identify with a brand.  This is not all bad.

Healthy vines have a whole root system.  If you’ve ever transplanted a living plant, you’ve seen how many different tendrils stretch out under the earth.  We need a lot of roots to keep us healthy.  We need checks and balances.  If we try to draw too much out of one root, even the big ones like a career, a marriage partner, or a best friend, we can find ourselves and our relationships feeling a little drained.  I know that has been my experience.

I say that if we draw from one root, we will be drained.  There is one exception.  I think that exception is what the Gospel today is all about.  Abide in me Jesus says, be rooted in me.  Draw your sustenance, your sense of meaning and purpose.  Draw your capacity to love and receive love from me.  Be rooted in me, be rooted in my words.

These words from John’s Gospel come from the 15th chapter, toward the end of the story.  This is a part of a long section we call the “Farewell Dialogue.”  Jesus speaks with his followers about life after he is gone.  “Abide in me” is not just nice advice, it is a survival strategy.  John’s Gospel was written as the first persecutions against the Christian community are arising.  Christians are being removed from synagogues and are suspected of treason by the Romans.

Abide in me.  Be rooted in me.  Have you ever heard of a taproot?  If you’ve ever eaten a carrot, you’ve seen a taproot.  A plant that grows a taproot develops a root system, but the system is based in one single huge deep root.  Have you ever pulled up carrots?  Have you ever tried to yank out dandelions?  Taproots are strong.

You have a taproot. Our faith teaches us that we are made in the image and likeness of the one who creates us.  Jesus says “Abide in me, as I abide in you.”  Jesus already abides.  We are already, all of us, rooted in God.  Jesus’ words, “abide in me, remain in me, be rooted in me” tell us to draw on the nutrients of that taproot.  Draw your sustenance from me, Jesus says.  In a world that seeks to define you based on wealth and status, receive your sense of value from Jesus.  In a world that judges you based on image and intelligence, draw your sense of self from me, Jesus says.

Roots grow stronger when they are used, when they are drawn on.  How do you draw on Jesus, on God?  Maybe participating in the Eucharist connects you to your rootedness in Christ.  Maybe a walk out in God’s creation helps.  Perhaps you find yourself aware of God’s presence when you are out working for justice, or helping your neighbor.  Maybe you draw on the love of God when you are at a dinner surrounded by family and friends.  How do you draw on that taproot?

All those years we spent decorating the visible branches of our spruce trees, we had no idea about the health of their roots.  It strikes me that the health of those trees depended so much on things we couldn’t see.  We spent so much time and effort caring for what was above ground, but the health of trees, like our health, depends on caring for the roots, caring for the things unseen.  So I leave you with a question:

How do you nurture and deepen your roots?

How do you root yourself more and more deeply in the love of God?

Jesus and the right use of anger: a sermon for Lent III

Today’s Gospel is a bit uncomfortable, especially if you grew up listening to stories about Jesus in Sunday School.  When I went to Sunday School, Jesus was always presented as this mellow guy with long flowing hair, in sandals and a nice white robe, telling stories.  Jesus loved the little children.  He was always holding lambs. That’s not the Jesus we encounter today.  Today, Jesus is angry.

I was talking to my mother earlier this week, as I was preparing to preach.  Many of you know my mother is also an Episcopal priest.  She laughed as I talked through some of my sermon preparation.  She said that she was glad she didn’t have to preach this week, especially because at her church in Denver she would spend most of this week preparing for the Church’s annual silent auction.  It seems her parish spent this week setting up money-changing stalls, in the Sanctuary of the Church…My mom was glad to let the rector preach on Jesus overturning tables in the temple the next day.

This isn’t an easy story for us.  Jesus is angry.  Our story today is probably the biggest outburst of Jesus’ anger in the Gospels.  But overall Jesus was not the beatifically peaceful storyteller of my Sunday-school education.  Jesus of Nazareth went around Palestine calling the Pharisees a “brood of vipers,” hurling epithets at Herod, “that fox.”  and telling Peter, “get behind me Satan.”  Jesus had a temper.  Today we read about the incident in the temple where Jesus drives out the animals and sends the moneychangers’ coins cascading onto the cobblestones.

Giotto's expulsion of the Money Changer

I think we like to avoid this angry Jesus because our society has such issues with anger.  Overall, we do not handle our anger well.
Our society also likes to suppress anger until our anger bursts out in inappropriate ways.  For me, these bursts of anger usually occur when I’m faced with driving around Washington DC’s taxis.  Taxi drivers in this town are probably the most usual recipients of my angry words.  I’ll grant you, the taxi drivers in this town merit some righteous wrath, but the other day I was driving with a friend in the car and I sort of forgot she was there.  Suddenly I realized what I was saying and became very embarrassed of the volume of my voice and my words.

I am still learning how to handle my anger.  I suspect I am not the only one here who struggles with the emotion.  I think overall as a society we’re not very good at handling anger.    We really don’t we do not handle anger well, but we need to learn to, because I believe anger is a gift of God.  We are supposed to get angry.  Anger is the emotion of change.  When we get angry, we get up and do something.  We work to change the situation.

Have you seen that bumper sticker:  “If you’re not angry, you are not paying attention?”   Our world is not as it is meant to be.  Our world is not what God means the world to be, and we ought to be upset.  I do not think we are nearly angry enough.  I don’t think I’m nearly angry enough.

A little over a week ago, I was out on a street corner in Chinatown with the Washington Interfaith Network.  We were outside of a breakfast meeting, being held between city council members and firms who are receiving massive subsidies to build hotels and condos in the District.

We were there to remind the city leaders of their promise to support affordable housing in the district.  There are 26 thousand families on the waiting list for affordable housing.  Last year, the city cut $18 million out of the city budget for affordable housing, a year that ended with a huge budget surplus for the city.  We were there to remind city officials, in front of reporters and daily commuters, of their promises to ALSO support those who struggled to make ends meet.  We did not get far on that street corner.  There was a write up in the Washington Post, but no new promises were made.

The problem on the street corner: we were too nice.  When the leaders of the gathering came together after the protest, we decided that our group was not nearly upset enough.  In front of the cameras and the officials, we were too timid, not angry enough.  If the Washington Interfaith Network wants to create change, we are going to have to get angry.  We are going to have to really open eyes of our city, and to do so, we’re going to have to use anger.

Jesus used anger.  The verb object arrangement is really key in that sentence:  Jesus used anger.  Jesus had control over his anger.  Jesus’ anger did not have control of him.  Jesus was not overreacting.  Jesus’ anger was direct, channelled.  He used his anger to create change.  Jesus was upset at the state of the temple.  He was frustrated by the expression of religion.  A spiritual reality had been diluted into an economic exchange, and Jesus was not going to be nice about it.  

The incident works because it is a bit of a surprise.  Jesus has a temper, but it’s not a short one.  There is a balance to Jesus‘ anger.  He does not go on to rush up the steps of the temple and continue shouting.  He does not charge the palace gates.  He clears the temple square, and the moment is over.  He begins teaching.  You’ve seen anger managed like this, used like this, if you’ve ever seen really good parenting.  In their most artful moments, good parents allow their children to see they are upset, but they do not fly off the handle.

I believe God wants us to use our anger.  God gives us anger in order to create change in our lives and in our world.  So often we misdirect the gift.  Anger is meant to help us put an end to injustice.  Anger is a gift to motivate us to fight for the causes and the people worth fighting for.  We need to learn to use that gift.  Learning to manage and use the gift of anger is a life’s work, but if we are going to walk in the way of Jesus, we are going to have to learn to use our anger, the way Jesus did.

How?  The disciples give us a practical clue in this lesson.  When faced with the angry Jesus, they remember a psalm, a very angry psalm.  A lot of the psalms are angry, specifically they are angry with God.  “How long O Lord?” must be one of the most prevalent questions in the book.  Anger is a tough emotion to manage, and we would to well to bring more of our anger to God.  I think a lot of our prayers are too timid.  We are too nice when we pray.  Our prayers sound an awful lot like that old Monty Python sketch where John Cleese is dressed up as a priest leading services in an English church.  He begins the prayer, “Oh God you are so big, so unimaginably huge…”  Our prayers are too ethereal.  The psalms are gritty.  The psalms are full of anger AT God.  The psalmist believes God can handle our anger.

I think we could all use some more psalm reading.  Praying to God, “Why O Lord, do you allow me to suffer?”  “Why, O God, is our world so broken?”  I think there is ancient spiritual wisdom there in those prayers.  I think it would be better if we brought God more of our anger, rather than letting our anger go on family members, or co-workers, or DC cab drivers.  Who knows, maybe if we give God our anger, God can show us how to use it.

Demons and Georgetown… a sermon for Epiphany IV

The heart of today’s Gospel concerns Jesus’ casting out a demon.  I’ll be honest: I was tempted to tiptoe around the exorcism.  Exorcism is tricky to preach on, especially for Episcopalians.  We don’t generally go in for that exorcism business, especially not at a place like St. John’s Lafayette Square.  Exorcism, we all know it is part of the tradition, we all know that it was a part of Jesus’ own ministry.  But in the Episcopal Church, we sort of treat Jesus’ exorcism ministry as if it were part of his “college years.”  As in, “well I tried it back in college, but that was college.”  We sort of like to pretend it didn’t happen.

So I was tempted to ignore the exorcism, to talk about Jesus who is “teaching as one who has authority.”  But something funny happened on the way to the pulpit.  Some of you know that I spent part of this week moving into an apartment that St. John’s has in Georgetown.  Suddenly I was a priest in Georgetown, which didn’t strike me until I was walking across the Pennsylvania Street Bridge on Wednesday night.  I overheard a group of tourists

The Exorcist Steps at 36th and M in Georgetown

holding a map and chatting as they made their way into Georgetown.  I couldn’t make out any of what they were saying, I think they were speaking Korean, but I definitely heard “The Exorcist” which was followed by more Korean and some nodding.  They were on their way to the iconic stairs that the priest character is thrown down at the end of the movie.  Suddenly I thought, if I am going to be a priest who lives in Georgetown, I am have to figure out what I think of exorcism.  I haven’t yet had any nightmares about getting thrown down stairs.

So my geographical existential crisis aside, what is all of this about exorcism?  As very over-educated Episcopalians, as Christians who believe firmly in reason and scientific inquiry, what are we to do with demons?  For the past several hundred years, we have tried to rationalize the demons away.  We like to read this story like any of the other healing stories of Jesus.  The modern interpretation of demon possession would have this man suffering simultaneously with multiple personality disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome, and epilepsy.  We have diagnosis for this guy, and today we would have several medications.  For some reason, we are comfortable with Jesus the healer.  Jesus whose healing powers are constrained to what can now be accomplished with the help of a good pharmacist.  So we want to dismiss the demons as a first century way of describing what we know now to be neurological disorder.
But the demons don’t stay away.  The demons don’t stay away.  They are all over our society today, all over.  Our world is full of demons.  (LONG PAUSE).  Have you seen the Vampire Diaries, True Blood, or The Twilight Series?  Vampires are everywhere.  The Walking Dead, an HBO show about Zombies is breaking all-time cable viewing records.  The demons are legion these days.  We, as a post-enlightenment society don’t believe in evil spirits, but we want to watch them on TV.
Sociologists are studying this absolute rage in magical fiction, the rise of the walking dead on our televisions.  They believe we have arrived at a turning point in our cultural understanding of truth.  As we move from Modernism to Postmodernism, serious cultural philosophers are talking about the sensed need for what they call “re-enchantment.”  All of these Zombies, Vampires, and witches and wizards (think Harry Potter), all of the desire and money our society seems to be willing to pay out for magical fiction.  The experts think we are longing for something magical missing in our radically scientific and rational explanations of reality.  If in the Modern era, science won the day and the world of the spirit was dismissed as superstition, in the Post-modern era people are hungry for something Science can’t provide.
So I think we need to look again at this story of exorcism, we need to not gloss over this somewhat uncomfortable narrative.  Christians are spiritual people.  We believe there are parts of reality our science can never fully grasp.  Episcopalians are usually very careful about what we ascribe to those areas, and I am with you.  I know Luis will be glad to hear I am not planning to open a ministry center for exorcism as part of the upcoming work of our pastoral care committee.

I am skeptical about a great deal of what Christians have said and done, over our history, about demons.  I’ll tell you why.  For a lot of our history Christians who were in the business of exorcising demons were quick to point out the demons in others.  If we start thinking demons are real, we can become convinced pretty quickly we know who has one.  I am sure several members of our youth ministry would offer their brother or sister up for exorcism.  We might do the same with our bosses or that one particular neighbor.  But looking for demons in others tends to lead to abuse.  The Church’s least Christian moments have been witch-hunts.  I think the Church has had enough of that kind of demon-hunting.
The harder work, the harder work, is to look at ourselves, to examine our own inner spiritual territory.  The moments where I have thought “there is something to this idea of ‘possession,’” have been when I am least proud of my behavior.  I’ll think about something I have said in a long argument with my sister or brother and think, “that didn’t even sound like me.”  Have you ever had a moment like that, when you were so overcome by an irrational anger or fear that you hear what you are saying and think “Am I even saying these words?  Who is this?”  There are moments in our lives when we are overcome, where we do not behave as ourselves.

There is something supernatural to evil.  I think we could talk about demons, about evil forces at play in our world today.  I think we even have names for some of those demons: greed, sexism, homophobia, classism, and ethno-centrism to name a few.  I think racism is one of the most powerful demonic forces out there, a force that seems to grab hold of human beings and cause them to act in inhuman ways.  You know that line from “The Usual Suspects:”  “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist?”  That is about how I feel when I hear the words “I’m not a racist.”  Just last month I was up in New York City with my dad.  One strangely warm December night after dinner we were on a corner, waiting for a cab.  After a long wait, we hailed one, but we had been waiting behind another guy, and so we tried to give him the cab.  As he reached for the door, the cabby sped off.  The young man we had tried to pass the cab to was black.

I stood on that corner, waiting for another taxi, and just stewing in righteous anger, but then I thought about earlier that week when I was stopped at a traffic light in Columbia Heights.  On the sidewalk next to me was a group of African American teenagers, and I hit my door-lock button.  It aint just New York cabbies.  I think that racism, that old demon, grabs ahold of all human beings sometimes.  These days it happens subtly, quietly.  We have come a long way, but to fool ourselves into thinking that racism is over, or that homophobia is a thing of the past, that misogyny is a remnant of less enlightened times is to allow these demons to run unchecked in our society, and, more importantly, in ourselves.

Do I think that there is some sort of supernatural power to these evils?  Perhaps.  I can’t find any other satisfactory explanation for why human beings would treat one another as less than human.  So yeah, I think there is something really supernatural, something demonic, some evil power out there in the world.

More than that, so much more than that, am I convinced that there is a supernatural power out there for good.  I believe it is a real possibility for human beings to come under the influence of evil.  But I have also seen real evidence of people who were possessed by what Abraham Lincoln called “The better angels of our nature.”  I am convinced that God is out there in the world working.  I am convinced that the supernatural power of God is love, and I have seen that love at work in the world.

When I look at the work that people like Sharron Dinney are doing at the Kwasa center, our partners in South Africa.  When I see people like Sharron who dedicate their lives to overcoming the boundaries of race and class, to helping children who otherwise would go hungry be fed and educated, I am convinced.  For any of you who haven’t met The Very Rev. Sharron Dinney, you will have the chance this Spring when our friends from Kwasa come visit us at St. John’s.  In the short time I met her, I can only describe Sharon as overflowing.  There is something about her that just overflows with God’s love.

God’s work in our world is not confined Sharron.  I see it all the time here at St. John’s.  One of our new parents recently said, “I am just amazed how much I love my child.”  Just amazed.  We can be possessed by love, amazed by the supernatural power of love coursing through us.  I see God’s work of love possessing a number of folks we have here caring for elderly parents or giving up vacation time to continue to re-build New Orleans or even simply taking flowers to a homebound parishioner.  Call me un-rational, but I am convinced that God is at work all over our church, all over our city, all over our world.

Our job is one of listening, and discerning the voices.  The more time we spend in prayer alone and together, in reading scripture, in breaking bread with one another in Jesus’ name, the more capacity we have for figuring out which voice belongs to God and which are the other voices clamoring for our attention.  The more we are exposed to God’s love, to God’s vision for a community shaped by love, the more we are aware of the forces which oppose God’s kingdom from breaking through in our own lives.

In the Gospel we hear today that Jesus is the one with “authority.”  What we learn from the Gospel is a simple truth.   God’s love wins over the supernatural powers of hate.  Jesus can cast out demons.  Desmond Tutu, facing a society plagued by the demons of racism, put it this way:

Goodness is stronger than evil;
love is stronger than hate;
light is stronger than darkness;
life is stronger than death.I think we need to take the demons seriously, and not just because I don’t want to end up at the bottom of the stairs on 36th Street in Georgetown.  I think we need to be on guard against all the evil powers of this world, all those forces that would deny the goodness of God’s creation, but I think our best defense is a good offense.  We need to let God re-enchant our world.  We need to be open to seeing God’s love breaking through in our everyday lives.  Sometimes we have to abandon all our rationality and just let God love us and love others through us.

 If God’s love possesses us, the demons don’t stand a chance.  AMEN

Wisemen and Mad Men (an Epiphany sermon).

What star do you follow?  What road do you walk?

The story of the three wise men that we have today from Matthew, is strange.  Three nameless travelers follow a star to kneel before the child Jesus.  There is no way around the strangeness.  We variously have called these characters “the wise men,” or the “three kings,” or the “magi (the magicians).”  The last title is closest to the original.

In Matthew’s Gospel three strange visitors “appear” in Jerusalem.  The details of their visit are shadowy, we know they come from the East.  We know they have status.  These magicians must also be astrologers, for they have noticed a new star in their Western horizon and have followed its appearance.  Somehow though, they got a bit lost along the way…
The three magicians, seemingly used to government contracting, head to the royal authority in the region.  Herod the Great, Herod I, ruled as a client king for Rome in Jerusalem, and these three men come knocking on the halls of power.  They seem to know that a king has been born, which makes, Herod who is perfectly happy reigning as king, currently reigning as king, very nervous.  New candidates tend to make incumbents nervous.  Herod checking in with his own paid consultants, identifies Bethlehem as the city of coming anointed one, the Messiah’s portended birthplace.

You might notice I keep referring to the Magi, the wise men, the three kings, as “consultants.”  Maybe this is because I find myself living in a town where it seems more people contract or consult for the government than actually work in the government.  Probably though, I have just been watching too much of the Television show MadMen.  Now do not despair.  I worked for awhile trying to get a joke that brought together the titles “Wisemen” and “MadMen”, but it never quite worked.  So I will spare you.

But the past few months I have been captivated by the TV show MadMen, and luckily I can now stream the first several seasons.  If you don’t know MadMen, it is a primetime TV drama that centers around consultants, specifically a Madison Avenue Advertising agency Adman: Don Draper.  MadMen’s drama plays out in the usual ways: Don trips through seedy romantic relationships. The plot develops around campaigns for big name clients.  The whole show is saturated with the glamour of New York.  The twist of MadMen is that, unlike most of our TV shows which are set in the modern day, Don does not work on today’s Madison Avenue.  The MadMen universe is set in the 1960s, and the thrust, the energy of the show is a sort of “my-how-times-have-changed” effect.

Often this is played for a comedy.  As regularly as possible we hear what people earn in salary: $40 week is middle class pay.  But that is okay because apartments rent in Manhattan for a couple hundred dollars a month, and a cup of coffee costs a nickel. (My how times have changed).  Pregnant women regularly swill cocktails and smoke.  Everyone smokes.  (My how times have changed).
Other “my-how-times-have-changed” moments play around questions of justice.  Every man in the office works behind a door, and every woman, save one plucky Peggy Olsen, works in front of a door.  All the women do is answer phones, type, get drinks for the men.  The one black man in the office operates the elevator.  No one picks up on the clues that the art director is gay, not even his wife.

Part of the “my-how-times-have-changed” thrust of MadMen is that here, in the advertising offices that the fictional MadMen office represents, a major revolution took place.  You see the times they were a-changin’ in the 1960s on Madison Avenue, and in many ways the people that worked there, they helped those times change.  Regularly on MadMen the advertising agents consider how the new fields of psychology and sociology can help them sell their product.  They seek to push consumers to see how purchasing a product or service is in their “self-interest.”  Don Draper convinces Lucky Strike cigarettes that they do not need to produce the “best cigarettes” or the healthiest cigarettes, or have better filters.  They need to catch the sense of pleasure that the consumer has in imagining herself satisfied by purchasing and using the product.  “Luckies are toasted.”  (All cigarettes at the time were “toasted” but something about the word brings images of satisfaction to the consumer.)

The admen of Madmen were busy in the 60s, as they are busy today, polishing a star.  “Follow this star, the star of self-interest.  Buy the product. Consume the service.  You will be satisfied.”  This is the message of advertising.  Madison avenue still wants you to follow that star.  It is a very old star, perhaps one of the oldest, the star of self-interest and consumption.  The star of self-image.

Lest we think this was only a problem in the time of MadMen, we have an article that my mother sent me about the religious neural impulses caused by iPads.  My mom and I are Apple devotees, and so when scientists began

claiming that Apple’s iPad advertising caused the same neurons to fire in the brains of Apple consumers as icons and religious images caused in the brain pathways of religious followers, we were not that surprised.  The image of the satisfied consumer, the star of self image can exert powerful influence.
I wonder if that star, that old star, is what distracted the magi, the wise men, on their road to see the Christ child.  These mystical consultants were used to working with kings.  I wonder if the star above Herod’s palace in Jerusalem appeared more familiar that night.  That star had led them before to influence, to comfort and power.  I wonder if that star caused the detour to Herod’s throne-room.

Something about where that old star had led them, it did not seem right.  The magi are wise enough to know that when they have arrived at Herod’s palace, they have not really arrived.  My family always laughs at those GPS systems that come in rental cars, the ones that tell you, “you have arrived.”  Somehow you know you really haven’t.  Something nags at the magi.  Another star beckons.
Following the Star of Jesus the Messiah takes them to an unexpected place.  They kneel not in a throne room, but in a much humbler home.  Their opulent gifts seem out of place in the ramshackle Bethlehem dwelling.  But something happens to the wise men, as they kneel before the baby under that unexpected star.  Some change is wrought.  Though Herod has asked them to return to his palace, to share the location of the competing candidate, they choose to return “by another road.”

These strange men are, in Matthew’s Gospel, the first converts.  I debated using that word “convert.”  There is another sermon to be preached about the magi, Matthew, and interfaith dialogue, because these pagan astronomers do not walk away reciting the Nicene Creed.  They might do something like that in John’s Gospel, but Matthew is content that their conversion be a conversion of life.  Their religious ideology to us is unknown, but encountering God in Christ caused them to live differently.  They walk away by another road.

In Matthew’s Gospel, These strange characters are the first to choose to live differently in response to Jesus.  Their decision asks us to choose as well.  Faced with whole constellations of distracting stars, in a world that pursues money, fame, image, and power, those of us who consider ourselves people of faith, consider ourselves Christians, are tasked with searching out a different star.That Bethlehem star, as it did for the wise men, still leads to ramshackle tenements.  Our God confounds human wisdom by choosing to dwell among the least, the lost, and the left out.  Following the star led a young woman from Albania to become a nun in Calcutta, to find Christ among the lepers.  Following that star led a young black preacher from Atlanta to march in the streets of the American South and to tell America that he had a dream.   The star does not lead power and influence, to money and fame.  But those who follow that star, the star that arose over Bethlehem so many years ago, will find their lives changed by love.  The Epiphany star leads us to the Christ who came to our world for love.

How Can this Be? Mary and Advent IV

The final Sunday of Advent, in the gospel we hear from St. Luke, we learn Farrelly brothers had it, at least partially, right: there IS Something about Mary.

I don’t know if you have heard about a billboard that was put up by St. Matthew’s Anglican Church this Advent in Auckland, New Zealand.  The billboard has received a lot of international attention.  In many ways the billboard portrait of Mary fits our traditional picture.  Mary is surrounded with just enough flowing green and red robe to evoke the Renaissance paintings.  She is blonde, and has that certain otherworldly glow.  In many ways the billboard is like all of the other images we have of Mary.  But this billboard is different.  Mary’s eyes are scared and she covers her mouth with one hand.  In the other hand, she holds a home pregnancy test, with two little blue lines.

The image had caused no small amount of ire from traditionalists, but the vicar of St. Matthew’s defends the work, as an invitation, an invitation to reconsider the story of Mary, the story we hear today.

From what we know, Mary was young: 12 to 14.  Mary was still unmarried, though things were going well with Joe, the carpenter.  Mary was poor.  This was an inopportune time to find out she was pregnant.  Luke’s version, written 90-100 years after the fact, probably, I am guessing, improves on the situation.  The Gospel writer wasn’t there, recording the conversation verbatim.  St. Luke was not writing history, the way we think of history.  Luke’s genre was Gospel, “Good News,” so we should not be surprised if he has cleaned the story up a bit.  It should surprise no one in Washington to hear that the news, even the Good News, always comes with a little bit of spin.

When you read the Bible, I really encourage you to take your time.  Any student of the Bible, like any student of literature, or history, or psychology knows that you have to listen as much for what is NOT said, as for what is said.  Today’s Gospel story, the story of Mary, is a great example.  If you want the full story, you have to pause and listen for what is being said between the lines:

And the angel came to her and said “Greetings favored one!  The Lord is with you.”  But she was much perplexed by his words, and wondered what sort of greeting this might be.

PAUSE

Remember, Mary is 12 or 13.  How many 12 or 13 year old girls do you know?  How seriously do they take greetings?  How seriously do they take ANYTHING?  I used to work summer camps largely with early teenagers.  Twelve and thirteen year old girls have a great deal of perplexity, a great deal of wonder, and they come with a great deal of eye-rolling.

But what the Angel tells her next is the frightening part.  The billboard has her fear right.  She will conceive and bear a son.  Mary’s question: “How Can this be?”

PAUSE

Don’t mistake it, this story in many ways is a story of loss.  The angel’s announcement, the awareness of her unplanned pregnancy, it changes the game.  Mary had it planned out.  She would marry Joseph.  They would by that condo in Nazareth; he made pretty good money after all.  Maybe in a couple of years they would have a couple of kids.  The schools were pretty good in the neighborhood.  I’m reading in between the lines here, but you have to a bit.  Mary would have had plans for her life.  She was a bride-to-be.  Mary, had some plans.  And Mary had to lay those plans down.  There was a moment, even if it was only a moment, recorded even by Luke, when the Incarnation did not seem like good news to Mary.

Mary’s question is so often our question when faced with loss: “How can this be?”

“How can this be?” is the question of parents who hear their child has been born with severe autism.

“How can this be?”  is the question of the worker who is “downsized” after twenty years service to a business.

“How can this be?” is the question of the high school senior who had always planned to go to her dream college, and receives a letter that begins “we regret to inform you.”

“How can this be?” is a very human question, the question so many of us ask when we face loss in our lives.

BUT the story does not end there.

The story does not end with loss.  In fact, the loss is only a moment, an important moment, a game-changing moment, but only a moment.  The words of the Angel ring true.  “Nothing is impossible with God.”  If you take anything home this Advent.  If you take anything home from church ever, let it be the words of the angel: “nothing is impossible with God.”

Still I wonder how long it took Mary to respond.  It only takes until the next sentence in Luke’s Gospel, but I doubt it was ACTUALLY that instantaneous.  The loss of a dream takes time to accept.  I wonder how many minutes, days, weeks, even months, it took Mary.  I wonder how long it took Mary to utter her line, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

The Good News, for us, is that Mary does utter her line.  Mary becomes a paradigm for Christians facing the loss of their dreams.  Mary is known, especially in the Eastern Church, as the God-bearer, the Theotokos.  Mary reminds us to bear with God, to bear with God even through the pain of loss.  Mary becomes the paradigm of looking for God’s good news, even when your own life is not going as planned.  The image of Mary on that billboard in New Zealand invites us to see this side of Mary, an important side for all of us who share the human condition, a condition that often comes with the frustration of our dreams, the perplexity of grief and loss.

Next week we will celebrate the birth of Christ, the one who comes into the world, but that celebration would be impossible without Mary’s acceptance, without Mary’s decision to bear with God through the confusing and frustrating.

I want to finish this sermon by reading a few lines from a poem by John of the Cross, who I think captures Mary and Advent so well:

If you want

the Virgin will come walking down the road

pregnant with the holy,

and say,

“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,

my time is so close.”

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us

is the midwife of God, each of us.

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is

His beloved servant

never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking

down the street pregnant

with Light and sing …

 If you want.

May God be with you as God was with Mary.  May God help you bear through the difficulties of life.  May God be with you as you prepare for God’s coming into your life.  Amen.

Grasping and Kenosis Sermon from August 25

         Take out your bulletins, and if you have a pen or a pencil, there may be some in your pews, I want you to find a particular word in the reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians.  It is about halfway through our reading, just after the page turn.  The word you are looking for is “exploited.”  I want you to cross that word out.
This is a dangerous thing to ask you to do, I know, so let me explain.  The last thing I want you to do is to call our rector Luis on Tuesday morning, the day he gets back from Tennessee to say, “While you were away Mike started re-writing the Bible.”  I am asking you to cross out this particular word, because I think this is a BAD translation.  In fact of all of the errors in the New Revised Standard Version, our usual translation in the Episcopal Church, this one may irk me the most.  So cross it out.  And write in the margin a different word: “Grasped.”  Then Paul’s words read “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be GRASPED.”

I quibble with words, because words are important.  Exploitation is bad to, but in this teaching, Paul wants us to avoid this GRASPING.  The word we’ve just re-translated from Greek is harpadzo, it is the root for our word “Harpy,” those mythical creatures with great grasping claws.  The imagery the word conjures is strong, and sadly, a significant part of so many lives.  Grasping, always grasping.

You can read grasping in both of our other lessons this morning.  Jesus is before the elders and the priests in the temple, and they are grasping.  Jesus, and John the Baptist before him, have challenged their authority.  The priests and elders are heavily invested in representing God.  That’s their schtick, and these two country bumpkins, John and Jesus, are unwelcome competition.  John, at this point, has already been taken care of: Herod has beheaded him.  The temple authorities are now grasping after Jesus, and for now, with his clever stories he eludes their grasp for control.

Moses’ grasping at the waters of Meribah is a bit more subtle.  We can understand why wandering in the desert without water could make the Israelites grumpy.  What we don’t read in this text is what this incident means for Moses.  This is one of those moments in scripture where you know there is more to the story, more to the tradition then ended up on the page.  In Deuteronomy chapter 32 we hear of the death of Moses.  He is standing on Mount Horeb, he can see the promised land, but he is not permitted to enter because he “broke faith” at Meribah.  Moses plea, his grasping for God’s help in response to the people’s grumbling and murmuring, is a bigger deal than it seems on our page.  But, according to tradition, Moses grasped too much here, and thus he never enters the promised land.

Grasping proves problematic for the prophets and priests, and it iss problematic today.   There is a growing sense that everything that happens on the hill has to do with election cycles, with political games, with maintaining or achieving office, with grasping.  At my most cynical, I can think this town, Washington, is full of a bunch of Ron Burgandy’s, the Will Farrell character in Anchorman: folks that run around declaring, “I’m kind of a big deal.  People know me.”

We see grasping for power in this town.  We see grasping for money on Wall Street.  We watch grasping for fame on reality TV.  This is a culture infused with grasping.  Grasping, it seems, is a way of life: in our postmodern culture seeks to define us by what we can purchase, the items and services that fall within our economic grasp.

I’ll tell you the one that gets me: the next Apple product.  I can’t tell you how often I check my cell phone contract so that I know the DAY I will be eligible to upgrade to the latest iPhone.  I know there are some other Apple junkies out there.

But there is danger, danger in this cultural obsession with grasping.  If we give in to the scripts, if we become defined by our title, position, car, street address, we are in great danger of missing the point of it all.  And we all do it.  We all have moments where the grasping energy washes over us.

But there is another word for us in Paul’s letter, a better word, a word that is even well translated by the NRSV.  That word, in Greek is “Kenosis” or in the translation “emptied himself.”  There is a tension in Paul’s letter between “grasping” and “emptying oneself.”  Paul sees life basically as a tension between those two options: constant grasping, or constant self emptying.

This is the remedy for all that grasping, it is the incredibly counter-intuitive counter-cultural mind of Christ that Paul hopes will be in us.  Kenosis, self emptying, is not easy.  Self-emptying is not well rewarded with money, influence, or prestige.  All of those things we are taught to grasp after, taught will make us successful and happy, they do not come from self-emptying.  Yet Paul wishes self-emptying upon us.

Henri Nouwen captured this sense of kenosis, this sense of the self-emptying Christian way for our times perhaps better than anyone I know.  He called the Christian path a journey of “downward mobility.”  Those very words are so counter to our culture: “downward mobility.”  I am sure many of you are familiar with Nouwen’s work, but for those who are not:  Henri Nouwen was a famous Roman Catholic priest and professor of theology at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale.  He left his high profile position as one of the sought after theologians in the Ivy League because, though he had reached the apex of his field, he did not feel fulfilled.

Nouwen went on a sojourn through Latin America, thinking he would give his life in service to the poor, but he could not force a sense of call in the slums of South America.  When he returned to the US, he remembered invitation to come live at the L’Arche community a very strange living situation set up by Roman Catholic priests and lay people.  Able-bodied and disabled people share life together, spending time in meals and at prayer, living side by side.  The group started in France and has grown into an international organization.  We actually have a couple of L’Arche houses here in the DC Metro area.

Henri spoke and wrote often of his first months with the folks at L’Arche.  He spoke of his time with Adam, a young man who was so disabled that he could not speak, or get himself out of bed, bathe himself, dress himself.  Henri wrote about how terrified he was during his first weeks with Adam, how frightened he was that at any moment while Henri was trying to lift or dress the fully grown man, he might errupt in an epileptic seizure.  He talked about the patience required to sit with Adam over the course of the hour it would take him to eat his meals.  Nouwen wrote about how it got easier, about how eventually the anxiety faded, the need to get everything right fell away.

I want to read you a couple of quotes from a speech Henri Nouwen gave, where he talks about Adam:

“Adam taught me a lot about God’s love in a very concrete way. First of all, he taught me that being is more important than doing, that God wants me to be with God and not to do all sorts of things to prove that I’m valuable. My whole life had been doing, doing, doing, so people would finally recognize that I was okay. I’m such a driven person who wants to do thousands and thousands of things so that I can somehow finally show that I’m a worthwhile being. People say, “Henri, you’re okay.” Here I was with Adam and Adam said, “I don’t care what you do as long as you will be with me.” It wasn’t easy just to be with Adam. It isn’t easy to simply be with a person without accomplishing much.”

After months with Adam Nouwen wrote of a particular moment when he “suddenly realized that Adam was not just a disabled person, less human than me or other people. He was a fully human being, so fully human that God even chose him to become the instrument of God’s love. He was so vulnerable, so weak, so empty, that he became just heart, the heart where God wanted to dwell, where God wanted to stay and where God wanted to speak to those who came close to God’s vulnerable heart. Adam was a full human being, not half human or less human. I discovered that. Suddenly I understood what I had heard in Latin America about the preferential option for the poor. Indeed, God loves the poor and God loves Adam very specially. God wanted to dwell in his broken person so that God could speak from that vulnerability into the world of strength, and call people to become vulnerable.”

That is Kenosis, that is self-emptying.  Henri Nouwen learned it from Adam, and shared it with us.

Now, I am not declaring that to know God, to have the mind of Christ, you have to give up your job and move to L’Arche or Latin America.  That may not be your call, but I do not want to exclude the possibility either. God needs self emptying doctors, self emptying lawyer, self emptying janitors and teachers and stay at home moms.

What I can say is that I think some of the best teachers we have for the spiritual life are those who are excluded from the grasping of our world.  I hope you have had some teachers.  I hope you have caught glimpses, perhaps even practiced this self-emptying way.  If you need a teacher, let’s talk.  I can introduce you to some children in Anacostia at Ferebee hope, or some folks who sleep out on the streets of Washington.  You might even go visit L’Arche up in Adams Morgan.  I am with Paul, in my limited experience I think that this self-emptying leads us to the mind, and to the heart of Christ.  All our grasping won’t get us there.  We have to let go.