Fifteenth Tuesday after Pentecost, Proper 17: Temples in Flesh

Lessons: Psalm 26, 28; 1 Kings 8:65-9:9; James 2:14-26; Mark 14:66-72.

Doors of the Cathedral Umbria, Italy; the Corporal Works Of Mercy.

Building Temples seems a rather wonderful way to honor God.  Every society expressing some form of faith has built them.  They are among the wonders of architecture that are preserved all around the globe, either in their entirety or in their ruins.  Solomon had built the first Temple in Jerusalem as a sign of a now domesticated faith and culture.  A fortified capital with the center of worship at its highest point seemed a worthy aim and we are told it was acceptable to God. The Temple was a place of promise where prayers would be heard and responded to.  There was but one condition.  It is stated as a promise to Solomon and yet it is a promise to Israel.

“If you will walk before me, … with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my ordinances, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever.” I Kings 9:4-5

If you fail at this and turn to other gods, all will lay desolate is the promise also.  We know the history of failure.  In fact we all house it to some degree.

The wonder of Christ is that we also know that God comes more personally and we also house redemption, forgiveness and new possibility.  This is our faith as Christians.  We are each temples of sorts able to offer worthy worship to God from some clear aspect of our being.  The early Christian community had to come to grips with what this might be like and we read of this in the Epistle of James.

 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?... But someone will say, 'You have faith and I have works.' Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith… For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.  James 2:14, 18, 26

The author defines these works that show faith alive as rather simple acts that reflect God’s care back into life.  On the one hand they are actions like feeding the hungry, clothing and housing the poor.  On the other, he shows Abraham willing to sacrifice the promise of a linage based on some idea that this was required of him.  This was reckoned as righteousness, added to his account of faithful actions even, as he was stopped from doing harm.  God's intervention comes as a more merciful action in correcting Abraham.

The value of these works is not that they win us God’s approval as much as it is that they show in us God’s heart/mind and Spirit.  They work within to make us more caring, more whole, more connected to the one quality that lasts and gives life.  Call that love, call it compassion, show it in forgiveness, show it by actions of care that listen to life. By such energy we are enlarged.  Sometimes we touch a core we did not know was ours, forgot we had.  That core is God’s most holy temple made not with human hands and made of flesh joined with Spirit.

For my money, the reason for the Church is to school us in compassion and help us tap and organize its energy for good.  Our value to the larger world is this organizing and enlivening principle.  We mark society not so much by what we forbid which is easy, but by what we engage together to create in our society that reflects God’s care acted upon.  This is the liveliness of faith.

So the next time you find yourself going to some place negative, stop. Center yourself and ask.  What work can I now give myself to that is made of actions of compassion?  Your healing may be here.

“For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.”  James 2: 26

The fifteenth Sunday after pentecost: Love wins in mercy shown

Sermon preached at St. Paul's Cary 9-1-2013

Lessons: Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81:1, 10-16, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, Luke 14:1,7-14 

The seven works of mercy, 1580

Growing up we all had an assigned place at the table, all 6 of us.  Mom and Dad had the opposite ends.  My sister and I sat on either side of Mom; my brothers, on either side of Dad. There was always grace.  Since Dad was the enforcer of manners, there was an advantage to being away from him.  Each infringement was met with the backside of a fork on the knuckles.  So I rather liked my more distant place. Just the same we all became young people with very good table etiquette in time.

My favorite tables belonged to my grandmothers.  There was always grace. The food was ample and Southern and very good, three to six vegetables. There was always rice and gravy.  You could sit in a new configuration and I was always near Granddad. But I knew better than to sit at the head or the foot of the table. Those places belonged to my grandparents, always an adult to Grandmother’s right and a child to my Grandfather’s right, the places of honor.  We had good enough manners and Dad’s fork was used only from plate to mouth.

Tables are not just about eating.  They define hierarchy. They create social community providing time to converse, to catch up on shared life.  The very act of eating is filled with care.  Someone’s work bought the food, or garden provided it, often considerable thought had gone into what is prepared or shared, guests were often welcomed and made to feel at home.

Jesus seems to feel the same way about tables.  He is so often a guest at someone’s table, like today when he is having a Sabbath meal in the home of a Pharisee.  He is being watched closely as if his manners were not good enough. We skip over his first possible offense when he heals a man with Dropsy, a swelling of the limbs from accumulated water.  He does have the manners to ask whether his host thinks this is lawful to do on the Sabbath.  There is silence, so Jesus takes that as assent and says essentially, “If you can pull an ox out of a ditch on the Sabbath, why not heal.”

Then Jesus gets a little meddlesome. He takes note where people seat themselves.  I guess there were no place cards.  Clearly there are those who take the more honored places.  Perhaps this is a frequently gathered group and people know where they belong.  Just the same Jesus begins to teach that it is far better to take a lower seat and be invited to take a more prestigious place than to be asked to step down a notch.

In my last parish there were a fair number of Nigerians and Ghanaians.  At a wedding or special celebration they always had a high table where the chiefs or more elevated people of their community or of the occasion would be seated.  As a priest invited often to say grace, I would be seated there.  But never did I presume to go there.  Following Jesus’ advice I would sit near a door until I was invited higher.  It was all very carefully choreographed.  One by one we were offered our place.  Only once in 15 years was I seated too high and humbly asked to move down two seats.  I never understood the hierarchy but I did understand the embarrassment of my host or the Master of Ceremony. 

But Jesus is not really concerned with the etiquette of seating order.  He is concerned with whether we are lost struggling to be self important.  The sign of letting this self importance go is taking a lower place.  Imagine how this might look at UNC-Chapel Hill game or a Duke game.  Those in the plush seats with arms would drift upward in the stadium and those in the nose bleed seats would be invited lower.  Not very likely is it?

Yet when former President Jimmy Carter began to build with Habitat for Humanity we understood this to be a significant image.  One who once stood at the pinnacle of American political power, then taking up a hammer and saw did much to draw our attention to those who can be aided in gaining a home.  It raised the question, if a former president can be so humble, can’t we?  The remarkable thing is you do not just build a home for a family; you build it with a family.  You muck in together and become peers.

Or when your children and adult advisors go on a youth mission trip to Appalachia to repair homes of the desperately poor, they learn, we learn, what it is to step down a seat.  Those trips are only in part about building/repairing houses.  They are equally about building awareness and making a difference.  And the stories we hear on their return are of what it is to see how poor another’s life is and how blessed your life is. These are the vital lessons of Jesus.

Humility as Jesus sees it, as the Christian faith understands it, is the practice of seeing others in their need and responding, but more than responding. It is somehow about becoming one with them.  Thus Jesus takes this gathering at supper a step further.  He essentially says, “I know the custom is you invite family to the table or friends or those with social influence and power.  You hope to maintain or gain something. But God’s reign looks like this: ‘invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’”

We don’t do that much do we?  It can be frightening or socially awkward.  And yet when we do remember the poor, when we contribute to the food bank, when we help at a soup kitchen, when we aid the women’s shelter, when we aid in holiday gifts to those in need, when we help with Habitat for Humanity, we are on the right track. We are opening ourselves to others, focusing on another’s need, responding tangibly.

And that is what was so wrong in Raleigh this week with the decision to enforce an ordinance long overlooked that requires a permit to feed the hungry in a city park.  Love Wins Ministries has been feeding the homeless and/ or hungry for years in Moore Square. They do more than feed.  They listen to people’s lives.  They are able to help some move in more self sustaining directions.  But they also accept that there is fragility in our culture deserving care.  Their purpose is not to change people but to be with them in care.  They have stepped in where society has stepped out as we have been for these last several decades.

Perhaps the issue is the desire to further gentrify the area.  There are ways to do that that also care for the poor, but it comes with costs.  Those would be space, services, care, and humility.  It costs us to recognize the poor as special to God.  Why?  Perhaps because they are in the ditch for now.  They need a help up often.  It comes with the cost of knowing something deep, about their lives, their bearers, their value and values.  We heard it in the readings from Hebrews.

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

That is of course a reference to when Abraham and Sarah entertained three strangers who came to their tent.  Abraham and Sarah were just obeying the nomadic custom of feeding weary travelers.  They instead found an encounter with God and God’s plan for their lives.

The biblical norm is that God leans on our lives most notably when we welcome the stranger, care for the poor, notice who in vulnerable, stop and aid them.  Something in us opens and if we listen and notice, we will find something of God in our care.

Love does win and to some degree you may only see its reward at the resurrection.  Or you may find it in your deepest being where God waits to be found.

Fourteenth Tuesday after Pentecost, Proper 16: Syria and Solomon

Lessons: Psalm 5, 6; 1 Kings 1:38-2:4; Acts 26:24-27:8; Mark 13:28-37

The news is filled just now with the ongoing difficulties in the Middle East.  Egypt is a mess.  Syria has held my heart's attention these last weeks as the world and America has been hesitant to realize the use of chemical warfare by the government which is a republic under an authoritarian regime whose elected leader is more a monarch/dictator than a president.  The same family has held the title president since 1970.  We may wonder at the West’s responsibilities, yet the truth is we have been in and out of there for a long time.  The West’s involvement is a mixture of self-serving and humanitarian.  I’m not sure how one sees which is which.

Governments are always unstable even when they are stable.  There is always displeasure as well as pleasure.  I prefer to think of representative government as a chosen form of the tension of stable and unstable.  We have the power in the US to change up our leaders as we debate the course the government takes.  Yet there are powers of self interest that seek to influence how the government will organize us in care for elements or the whole of the nation.  Thus we hear much talk of special interest groups and efforts to fund politicians to represent their interest and laws to seek to regulate how much a politician can be bought.

In 1^st and 2^nd Samuel we read about the governing of Biblical Israel and how a nation came to be a nation.  1^st and 2^nd Kings takes us on the next chapters of ruling and becoming and falling apart.  Just now we are invited into the ever complex moment when one generation of leader is being replaced by the next.  The Biblical story is invested in where this does and does not please God.  This is largely told by who anoints the King.  Is it a bought anointing or is it a prophetic anointing?

As we read yesterday Adonijah’s was a moment of self promotion.  It seemed logical as he is now the eldest of David’s sons.  That works in England.  But it does not work here.  Once word is out that Adonijah has set up his own anointing before David is dead, the prophetic voice moves in.  Solomon, the son of Bathsheba and the younger has already been prophetically identified and identified by David as the one to reign after David dies.  So even as Adonijah celebrates his take over, those in Jerusalem anoint Solomon with the right religious, political process and approval thus undoing the coup. The gift ahead is one of if not the wisest leaders in Israel’s history. Solomon’s life will surpass David’s in moral integrity.  Perhaps this adds to the nation’s stability.

From that day to this there is always a just question about the moral integrity of those who lead.  How one comes to power, how one sustains power, how one abdicates power and passes it on are up for scrutiny.  So too in a democracy is the process by which we give power to those we elect.  We who elect need to weigh out the voices that claim to be prophetic, to speak for God or God’s values.  This is not always simple but it is essential at all times if we believe we live under some obligation to be pleasing to God.  It is our core belief that God judges all human activity and our spiritual responsibility is to act in accord with God’s values and will.  

Jesus in the Gospel speaks of the coming of this Judge and the need to weigh the voices that guide us. It is simply a reminder that we do not have the luxury of being inattentive either in daily life choices which include politics.

Therefore, keep awake-for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.  And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake." Mark 13:35-37

I am uncertain what exactly our nation’s responsibility is for Syria.  I am clear it is however not to turn a blind eye.  Even here we must stay alert for we will be judged.

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Sabbath

I am going to speculate that since we are all here we have some sense of Sabbath.  Sabbath is a time, a place, where we intentionally rest in God.  We enter into the heart/mind of God for a period.  We do it by the opening of scripture, the flow of music, by prayer, the opening of our minds and hearts to wonder about God’s purpose and to wander about our heart/mind to see where we might invite God more intentionally into our life. This is our grounding in things eternal.

The theme is woven into our psalm today.     (Psalm 71:1-2, 5-6)

In you, O LORD, have I taken refuge; let me never be ashamed.

In your righteousness, deliver me and set me free; incline your ear to me and save me.

For you are my hope, O Lord GOD, *my confidence since I was young.

I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother's womb you have been my strength; my praise shall be always of you.

Praise: this is Sabbath.

The Sabbath is a day for taking refuge or rest, a day to incline toward God that God may incline back toward us.  It is a day of focused praise where we lift our life God-ward.  This observance of sacred time with God is at the heart of Judaism and Christianity even if we have moved it from the last day of the week to the first day, the day of resurrection.

So it is not surprising that Jesus would go to the synagogue on the Sabbath. There is a rhythm of his Sabbath worship throughout the Gospel of Luke.  His humanity is thus nourished and he connects to the community as well as to the divine Other who flows through his life.

And so it is that while teaching on a Sabbath he grows deeply observant.  He notices a woman. 

“And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight.”

She has crippling arthritis or scoliosis perhaps.  It is perceived a spirit has done this to her.  Yet here she faithfully is.

This story takes me back to Kurt. Years ago I had a marginal parishioner with a form of crippling arthritis which should have been caught in his childhood.  But it wasn’t and he had a horrible bend in his body. He struggled to look up and see ahead.

I got to know him when Kurt and Susan came for premarital counseling.

Susan was an active Roman Catholic who sang in her church choir and was once married before to a handsome Italian man. His good looks were the undoing of their marriage.  But the church she loved would not remarry her because she would not seek an annulment as she had a son, Matthew.  He was living proof of her marriage.  So she was cautiously willing to try Kurt’s church. 

In those months of counseling and in the ensuing years I saw an amazing thing. She really saw Kurt beyond his bend as no one he had known before.    

And he saw her beyond the failed marriage and was willing to learn to be the step-father to her son, far more complicated than being a father, the father he had never really had.  I watched as the angry edge of a man whose body was bent by arthritis by parental neglect, who had been overlooked by many because of his bend and gate and was now so deeply seen and loved, as that anger began to melt away.

This was a new beginning for a man who in two years would help lead our parish’s homeless ministry team because as he would say, “Every time I am with them I remember how blessed I am, how rich my life is right now.”

Having been seen in love he could now deeply see.  Love can be very Sabbath like, a place where we are more whole.  Thus Jesus was a walking Sabbath, a place where one is loved, can rest, grow insight and hope.

And I could see more deeply.  When I see someone with what we call a malformation, I am grateful Kurt entered my life to teach me to  look more deeply at another.  Not to look away, but expectantly inward.

So too Jesus sees who is before him in this woman.

“When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’  When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.” 

Can you image that; 18 years and now whole, straight of spine?  You see dead ahead and you are seen face on.  And it is the Sabbath perhaps experienced in away it has never been the Sabbath before in your heart. 

She surges with possibility and faith and hope and life.  This breaks into praise. The miracle has to do with much more than her body.  It is her whole outlook and presentation to the world.  It has to do with how this woman was once marginalized by what? Pity, the discomfort she caused in others by her appearance, the limits of what she could do and be.

So here she is in her joy and what does she hear?

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day." 

Maybe he does care deeply about the Sabbath and its keeping. That would be one of his responsibilities as leader. Perhaps he cannot see the ease with which Jesus intervenes for the woman. Can you see the hump in his heart?  Wanting to love God perfectly, he is kept from seeing what is before him…a woman uplifted…a way of looking out made well…an intervention of the Holy in her life and their midst.  He seems to see only the law disturbed … but by what?  The holy, the hope in God new born.  Yet when you keep Sabbath you never know when the Holy will intervene in your life.

That is why we step into Sabbath time.  Not so much to be right, to obey a rule, but to be softened, to be instructed by God’s care and love, by grace. We do so to in fact be healed of the rough edges of the world where we are always weighed and measured. Sometimes we do just fine in the dailiness of life.  Sometimes we do not.

How often does a rule stand in our way of seeing what God is doing before us?  Rules are important. They help shape reality and how we interact with it.  They also have the possibility of blocking our compassion.  They can lower our outlook and cripple our compassion.  We need the softening stock of God.

Jesus does wear thin here, impatient.

"You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?”

There are two conflicting laws about this care for cattle in the Law. In one you do no work including caring for livestock. In another you show this care. In such cases there is a tendency to follow what preserves property. Jesus goes on.

“And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” 

We can hear this Gospel in many ways.  There are two I would suggest are worth our noting.

One is in Church.  We may do Sabbath variously.  Different things feed and nourish us.  Some need silence, some need conversation.  Some like loud clashing music, some like gentle soothing tunes.   Or we may like each as they modulate through the texture of liturgy, helping us look outward and then quietly inward. Some are managing children who find quiet difficult, some never need to carry this concern.  Some come to escape the press of life, to disconnect; while others come to connect and find close community.  God is in all these needs.  Wherever we are on any scale, allow ourselves to be fed and create the appreciation that others may be seeking something different.  Sabbath asks us...instructs us...to be patient with each other always as we learn each other.  This is the work of the Holy among us.

Another way to hear this Gospel is to look out for those who live outside the easy rules or recognitions or success of society.  Society can cripple and bend us so it is hard to look straight on, to feel seen for our true selves.  The glaring examples just now are undocumented people, illegal we call them.  Some are afraid to go to church as from time to time federal agents wait outside them to check papers and deport.

There are those who live what appears a marginal life by virtue of poor education, poor birth, mental illness, perhaps addiction, childhood neglect or abuse, or by virtue of growing old with too little.

When we look at them, when they cross our paths either physically or as images on in media, when we form political opinions about them, we do well to ask, how can we work together for healing and wholeness?  How can we breathe Sabbath into society? Do my actions and my opinions reflect Jesus’ Sabbath words; “you are set free from your ailment.” Do we take Sabbath time to hold the lives of others as sacred to the God who creates us all and as the psalmist teaches, “has sustained us ever since we were born.”

Sabbath is not a rule, it is a relationship treasured.  It is an arena of our remaking, to be made more whole.  May your Sabbath be deep.

Thirteenth Tuesday after Pentecost, Proper 15: Hanging responsible

Lessons: Psalm 121, 122, 123; 2 Samuel 18:9-18; Acts 23:12-24; Mark 11:27-12:12

Sometimes we betray ourselves.  That is Absalom’s situation today.  Having gotten lost in his own ego or privilege or anger at his father’s lack of care for Absalom’s sister, or something we do not fully see, he has placed himself above his father, David.  So successful is he that his father has abandoned the city of David, Jerusalem and taken to the hills.  Absalom has not calculated the loyalty that is toward his father and beyond him.  As he literally hangs by his hair between heaven and earth, his life is taken even though his father asks that he be spared. As he hung there, did he wonder at his actions that brought him to this vulnerable moment?

One has to wonder at David who does not seem keen on disciplining his sons.  Was he compassionate without teaching responsibility?  Is this the realm of royal privilege?  He will not deal well with this death.

Yet the truth is Absalom betrayed himself.  His arrogance left him hanging vulnerable to its rewards. Joab and his warriors have made it clear that Absalom will not cost anymore life in Israel. In a plot to hold no one guilty they kill him where he hangs.  All David’s hope for his son dies at their blows.  And yet as I read the story I cannot help but know this is his own doing.  He has taken things too far in his arrogance even as his father did with Bathsheba.

Jesus catches the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders in a similar self betrayal.  They choose not to see in his wisdom and actions the deep wisdom of God.  They are presented to us as asking a question by which Jesus sees them not seeking the truth but trickery. He turns the moment.

“I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin? Answer me.” Mark 11:29-30

They will not answer because it will betray their hand. The answer that serves their purpose will rile the people.  They avoid an answer. Jesus in a story reveals the dilemma they live in avoiding costly signs of God’s will.  The message is that their arrogance is causing them to lose sight of God’s work and will.  Thus God’s favor will be removed from them and their privilege gone.

Knowing God’s will is not always easy and yet our acting will betray how and if we are seeking to grow toward this will.  We often think of Jesus as our principle model of compassion and he is.  But he also expects, articulates that God expects, responsibility as well.  If we are to err it perhaps should be toward compassion.  Yet without holding ourselves accountable, responsible for motivations and outcomes, our compassion can warp and not produce the full character we are capable of developing. 

Remember Jesus’ story of the man whose debt is forgiven and he is granted time to collect himself.  He tastes his relief and yet goes out and demands payment of another’s debt to him showing no understanding for the other’s plight. It is like his. Having been granted grace and learning, he was responsible to mirror it. As a result of his own selfish actions, the compassion of his master is removed.

Where has grace entered our lives?  Where has compassion shaped our hope?  Do our values and actions betray us as learning wise compassion, accountable compassion?  What does it look like for us to live reflective of this grace and compassion? How do we administer it such that the recipient is free to receive it and know enough to be responsible to pass it on?

Excuse the pause in the blog

Having just resumed work, my rhythm is slower in blogging now.  I will find a new rhythm soon.

Twelfth Saturday after Pentecost, Proper 14: Waiting

Lessons: Psalm 107:33-43, 108; 2 Samuel 16:1-23; Acts 22:17-29; Mark 11:1-11

In all of today’s readings the principal characters are sitting in the midst of shift.  David has fled Jerusalem and must listen to the taints of those who have a long grievance. He listens, for the word of God might even be found here.  Is there a corrective he needs to hear?, he wonders out loud.

Paul concludes his attempt at setting his case before the Jews of Jerusalem and only barely averts a flogging as he awaits his rights as a Roman citizen.  He has failed to make any inroad that will change the outcome of his visit to the city.  Paul is not good at waiting.

Jesus sets up the entry into Jerusalem having just told his followers his arrest, death and rising is coming. Then he enters to the triumphant calls of the crowd but we know and he seems to have known this moment of entering in an old world kingly manner is but a foreshadowing of a very different outcome.

They simply remind us there are times we are not in control of what is ahead of us.  There are times the best we can do is be and place our being inside God’s judgment and hope.  There are harsh times when this is the only rest we can give ourselves and it is unclear where we will hear anything that can be clearly distinguished as a word from God or a tolerable outcome.  And yet we wait actively if we can.  We see the small changing or consistent movements of life and wonder, where now is God in this?

That wondering can become prayer.  It is the kind of prayer that is more about yielding over the moment than controlling the moment. It does not make a sign of everything but looks patiently to see if there is a sign beneath the ordinary where we might touch God’s will.  It is not so much logical as it is intuitive. It is like a slow walk through the unknown.  And if we are blessed it will become patience and trust and hope and thus faith.

Such moments come to us all.  Will we be able then to be, to sit, to listen?