Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the 5th Sunday in Lent: John 12:20-33
One of our RAIHN guests last week was someone who liked to ask questions. She had a lot of them. “Who is Jesus for you?” she asked. To be perfectly honest at the time I only wanted to go to bed. I didn’t answer her very well. It was a serious question that deserved a serious answer. She got a few mutterings was all, something about which I am a little ashamed.
The next morning she caught me again in the kitchen just as the water was boiling for my first cup of coffee. “Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?” I asked myself, should I give her the short answer or the long answer? I chose the short one. “Yes,” I said. She seemed satisfied by that and we went about our business.
But that question nagged me all week long, not helped by the fact that I had to talk about salvation to the Lent class on Thursday. Do I believe Jesus died for our sins? Yes, of course. But there is a long answer that gets at questions like “why?” and “how?” that are very important. The death and resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of our faith, so we better be able to talk about it. What does it mean?
There is an answer to the question that most everybody knows. It goes something like this:
God created the world and all was well. The first human beings lived in paradise until the day they broke the one commandment God had given them. That disobedience changed everything. We call it “the Fall.” God was very angry and threw them out of paradise. Their descendents kept on being disobedient and God kept on being angry.
God was in a quandary. Part of him wanted to be merciful, but he could not deny that he was also just, and the continued sin was an affront to his very honor. And the problem was that human beings could never make up for what they had done. They just didn’t have it in them. And yet they had to do something.
So God decided to send his Son into the world as a human being. As a human being he could pay the price of sin, but since he was also God, that payment would be eternal. It would be enough to appease God’s anger. So Jesus died for our sins, took upon himself the price that we couldn’t pay and God wiped the slate clean. Now if any human being agrees to have their sins covered by the blood of Jesus, they are saved.[1]
That way of telling the story has dominated in the church for almost 1,000 years. It is so dominate that most Christians cannot imagine there is any other way of telling the story. And yet, for the first 1,000 years of the church’s life there was a different way of telling the story, and even in the Bible itself there are different ways of telling the story.
In this morning’s Gospel reading, for instance, Jesus talks about his death, what it means for him. He uses a kind of parable:
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
For those first thousand years of the church’s life, Jesus’ death and resurrection were primarily about death, not about sin. Jesus died and then rose victorious from the grave. He beat death. And since death was beaten, sin was beaten too, but it was his victory over death that was of primary significance.
That means the main story line is not “Jesus died for our sins,” but “Jesus died to destroy the power of death.” After Jesus’ death and resurrection, humankind could live as if death were not. They needn’t be afraid of death any longer.
It is the fear of death that is at the heart of sin. So, one of the fruits given birth by Jesus’ death is indeed forgiveness. If we needn’t be afraid of death, then we can experience ourselves as forgiven. And we can be empowered to live a life without sin.
We continue to be afraid and so we also continue to sin. But we do see Jesus and we are drawn to him as he said we would be. And as we are drawn we are slowly transformed into his likeness, the likeness of one who lived as if he wasn’t afraid of death, and so lived without sin. That is what we are becoming.
That’s a very long answer to the question, “Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?” How could I have answered that and been true to what I actually believe about the death and resurrection of Jesus? Maybe two (albeit compound) sentences.
I believe that Jesus freely gave himself up to death and destroyed it once and for all. That means you and I don’t have to be afraid of death and part of that not-being-afraid is knowing ourselves to be forgiven.
I hope you can see what a different way of telling the story that is from the crucifixion as satisfying the vengeance of an angry God. Now I will concede the point that you can find pieces of Scripture that seem to support that way of telling the story, but it cannot be denied that the alternative way I just told it also has its support in Scripture as well as the thinking of the early church.
We’ve just got to decide which lens to use to read the story. I chose to use the “victory over death” lens rather than the “satisfying the vengeance of God” lens.
The good news in the “victory over death” way of telling the story is that I do not need to be afraid of death and the more unafraid I am the less I need to abuse others (i.e., sin) and the more I can lead a life of forgiveness.
Let us allow ourselves to be drawn into the arms of Jesus who offers us a life without fear, a life forgiven.
[1] Thanks to James Alison, On Being Liked (Crossroad, 2003), pp. 18-19.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
eing Honest with God about Your Life
Sermon preached at St. Stephen' Church on the 4th Sunday in Lent: Numbers 21:4-9, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21
We were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. Ephesians 2:3
But those who do what is true come to the light. John 3:21
My question this morning is: How honest can you be about your life before God?
It may seem the easiest of the questions. “Absolutely, totally honest” is the obvious answer. It wouldn’t do any good not to be. God is, after all, the one to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from [whom] no secrets are hid,” in the words of the familiar prayer.
Yet we all play games with God, and we all play games with ourselves. “Denial,” as they say, “is not just a river in Egypt.” It is how we get by a great deal of the time.
How honest can you be about your life?
For my money, honesty about my life is what the second question of our baptismal covenant is about:
Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
In traditional Christian language, being honest about my life with God means being honest about sin. It means being able to repent. It means continuing to live into my salvation. Sin, repentance, salvation: three words that will turn off the minds of most Episcopalians almost as quick as words like stewardship and evangelism.
They are words about “the bad news,” and we would much rather spend our time thinking about the good news and using words like grace, faith, and love. Fair enough. Me too. When I hear Paul refer to us as naturally “children of wrath,” something in my brain starts protesting. “Oh, Paul, give it a rest, most of us aren’t that bad.”
So why talk about sin?
Barbara Brown Taylor asks that question, and gives the following answer,
The only reason I can think of is because we believe that God means to redeem the world through us. We have been chosen, in the language of Genesis, not only to be blessed but also to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Our participation in that high calling requires us to understand God’s grace as something more than the infinite remission of our sins. If we want to take part in the divine work of redemption, then we will also understand God’s grace as the gift of regeneration—the very real possibility of new life right here on earth—complete with new vision, new values, and new behavior. (Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, p. 5)
Of course, the language of sin has been abused by many in the Christian community. It is language that has been used to exclude and control and abuse. It is language that has been primarily about inducing guilt and controlling behavior. This is why many of us hear the word “sin,” and start thinking about where we might go for lunch after Church.
But the language of sin, rightly and necessarily used, has never been primarily about guilt. It is primarily, as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, about salvation, about transformation and liberation. It is about getting to really good news. As Taylor also says, quite wonderfully provocatively, “Sin is our only hope.”[1]
How can this be? She puts it this way,
Sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.[2]
Pretty obvious, right? But also, frequently, not pretty at all. Recognizing and naming that something is wrong in my life is not a particularly easy thing to do. It sometimes takes time. It’s often a messy business, because there are few neat and clean answers. It’s rarely as simple as, “I stole something from the grocery store and that was wrong.” What is wrong in our life is often all tangled up in what is right, and untangling the skein is tricky and risky business. And, what’s more, my tangled life is different from yours. What’s wrong for you, in some situations, might be right for me, and vica versa.
It’s complicated enough for one to throw up your hands and say, “Why does it matter anyway? God loves us. Grace is real. If it turns out something was wrong in the end, I’ll say I’m sorry, and that will take care of it.”
And it’s true. It probably will. But, you will have missed a chance to change the world, to participate in God’s work of transformation. And that, too, is sin. “What we have done, and what we have left undone,” the General Confession says.
We are all of us asked to become children of light. In the words of this morning’s Gospel, we are all asked continually to bring our lives into the light, unafraid of what will be exposed. There’s nothing that can be exposed that God cannot deal with, nor that you cannot change with the grace of God being your helper. It is God’s desire that we not remain children of wrath, but are always becoming children of light.
I say “we” quite deliberately here because sin, from the Bible’s point of view, is more a communal problem than an individual one. That is not how we tend to think of it, but it is how the Bible thinks of it. Sin is a communal problem. It is why we Anglicans have always been comfortable with the General Confession we use in the liturgy. “We confess that we have sinned against you . . . by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” When we say this confession we are standing before God on behalf of the whole human family, and confessing our participation in the larger problem that is sin.
Which is not to say, of course, that each one of us as individuals does not have to take responsibility for our own behavior. We do. But it is to say that most of our behavior that is sinful in the eyes of God is our participation in a much bigger problem.
That bigger problem is the alienation, degradation, violence, slavery, complacency, greed, and prejudice that drives so much of human interaction.
The answer to that bigger problem does lie on an individual level, however. The answer to the problem is human beings, you and I, naming the sin and choosing not to participate in it. That’s what repentance is, choosing not to participate in it, turning to a different way.
Just like sin is not primarily about guilt, repentance is not about punishment. It is about acceptance and change. It is about recognizing one path and choosing a different one. It is about a child of wrath becoming a child of light.
Can you be honest with God about your life? The answer is yes, of course. And the reason is that God does not want to be just wrathful in his relationship with you or anyone else. God wants to love. God wants to transform, liberate, and heal.
This is ultimately what that very strange story from Numbers is all about, Moses lifting up a bronze snake in the wilderness to heal the people of their snake-bites. One of the messages there is that it is only when we lift up the “snakes” in our lives, that we can be healed from their venomous effect. Hauling those things that are wrong in our lives—our sins—into the light of God’s love, is the only way for anything ever to be different.
Sin is our only hope, when it is named and offered to God. And we need not be afraid, because God does not want our guilt. God wants our liberation. And that is why we can be honest with God about our life, our whole life.
[1] Ibid., the title of chapter two.
[2] Ibid, p. 59.
We were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. Ephesians 2:3
But those who do what is true come to the light. John 3:21
My question this morning is: How honest can you be about your life before God?
It may seem the easiest of the questions. “Absolutely, totally honest” is the obvious answer. It wouldn’t do any good not to be. God is, after all, the one to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from [whom] no secrets are hid,” in the words of the familiar prayer.
Yet we all play games with God, and we all play games with ourselves. “Denial,” as they say, “is not just a river in Egypt.” It is how we get by a great deal of the time.
How honest can you be about your life?
For my money, honesty about my life is what the second question of our baptismal covenant is about:
Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
In traditional Christian language, being honest about my life with God means being honest about sin. It means being able to repent. It means continuing to live into my salvation. Sin, repentance, salvation: three words that will turn off the minds of most Episcopalians almost as quick as words like stewardship and evangelism.
They are words about “the bad news,” and we would much rather spend our time thinking about the good news and using words like grace, faith, and love. Fair enough. Me too. When I hear Paul refer to us as naturally “children of wrath,” something in my brain starts protesting. “Oh, Paul, give it a rest, most of us aren’t that bad.”
So why talk about sin?
Barbara Brown Taylor asks that question, and gives the following answer,
The only reason I can think of is because we believe that God means to redeem the world through us. We have been chosen, in the language of Genesis, not only to be blessed but also to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Our participation in that high calling requires us to understand God’s grace as something more than the infinite remission of our sins. If we want to take part in the divine work of redemption, then we will also understand God’s grace as the gift of regeneration—the very real possibility of new life right here on earth—complete with new vision, new values, and new behavior. (Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, p. 5)
Of course, the language of sin has been abused by many in the Christian community. It is language that has been used to exclude and control and abuse. It is language that has been primarily about inducing guilt and controlling behavior. This is why many of us hear the word “sin,” and start thinking about where we might go for lunch after Church.
But the language of sin, rightly and necessarily used, has never been primarily about guilt. It is primarily, as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, about salvation, about transformation and liberation. It is about getting to really good news. As Taylor also says, quite wonderfully provocatively, “Sin is our only hope.”[1]
How can this be? She puts it this way,
Sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.[2]
Pretty obvious, right? But also, frequently, not pretty at all. Recognizing and naming that something is wrong in my life is not a particularly easy thing to do. It sometimes takes time. It’s often a messy business, because there are few neat and clean answers. It’s rarely as simple as, “I stole something from the grocery store and that was wrong.” What is wrong in our life is often all tangled up in what is right, and untangling the skein is tricky and risky business. And, what’s more, my tangled life is different from yours. What’s wrong for you, in some situations, might be right for me, and vica versa.
It’s complicated enough for one to throw up your hands and say, “Why does it matter anyway? God loves us. Grace is real. If it turns out something was wrong in the end, I’ll say I’m sorry, and that will take care of it.”
And it’s true. It probably will. But, you will have missed a chance to change the world, to participate in God’s work of transformation. And that, too, is sin. “What we have done, and what we have left undone,” the General Confession says.
We are all of us asked to become children of light. In the words of this morning’s Gospel, we are all asked continually to bring our lives into the light, unafraid of what will be exposed. There’s nothing that can be exposed that God cannot deal with, nor that you cannot change with the grace of God being your helper. It is God’s desire that we not remain children of wrath, but are always becoming children of light.
I say “we” quite deliberately here because sin, from the Bible’s point of view, is more a communal problem than an individual one. That is not how we tend to think of it, but it is how the Bible thinks of it. Sin is a communal problem. It is why we Anglicans have always been comfortable with the General Confession we use in the liturgy. “We confess that we have sinned against you . . . by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” When we say this confession we are standing before God on behalf of the whole human family, and confessing our participation in the larger problem that is sin.
Which is not to say, of course, that each one of us as individuals does not have to take responsibility for our own behavior. We do. But it is to say that most of our behavior that is sinful in the eyes of God is our participation in a much bigger problem.
That bigger problem is the alienation, degradation, violence, slavery, complacency, greed, and prejudice that drives so much of human interaction.
The answer to that bigger problem does lie on an individual level, however. The answer to the problem is human beings, you and I, naming the sin and choosing not to participate in it. That’s what repentance is, choosing not to participate in it, turning to a different way.
Just like sin is not primarily about guilt, repentance is not about punishment. It is about acceptance and change. It is about recognizing one path and choosing a different one. It is about a child of wrath becoming a child of light.
Can you be honest with God about your life? The answer is yes, of course. And the reason is that God does not want to be just wrathful in his relationship with you or anyone else. God wants to love. God wants to transform, liberate, and heal.
This is ultimately what that very strange story from Numbers is all about, Moses lifting up a bronze snake in the wilderness to heal the people of their snake-bites. One of the messages there is that it is only when we lift up the “snakes” in our lives, that we can be healed from their venomous effect. Hauling those things that are wrong in our lives—our sins—into the light of God’s love, is the only way for anything ever to be different.
Sin is our only hope, when it is named and offered to God. And we need not be afraid, because God does not want our guilt. God wants our liberation. And that is why we can be honest with God about our life, our whole life.
[1] Ibid., the title of chapter two.
[2] Ibid, p. 59.
Monday, March 16, 2009
The Ten Commandments
Sermon preached on the 3rd Sunday in Lent at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Exodus 20:1-7
Our first reading this morning was the Ten Commandments. I want to walk through them this morning and seek some relevance for our life today. Can these ancient commandments still speak to us?
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
This first commandment may be the simplest: no other Gods but God, and not just any God, but the God of liberation.
The commandments are really how to live as a liberated people. They are not how the people are to be liberated; that has already occurred. It is how they are to react to their liberation and remain liberated.
And first things first: the God who liberated you is the only God. There may be things that we are tempted to treat as gods, but they are not to get in the way of our relationship with God. Relationship with God always comes first.
As I said, it may be the simplest commandment, but it is also perhaps the one we are most tempted to break. The things that compete with God for our attention and our loyalty are legion. We are tempted to put anything and everything between us and God, and God demands that we do not do that.
Why is this so important? Because it is the only way we stay liberated. We can only trust God absolutely with our freedom; anything and everybody else can take that freedom away, even those we love if we put them before God.
So the first commandment is how we stay a free people.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who keep my commandments.
The second commandment is the longest of the commandments, which means, if nothing else, that God takes this one really, really seriously. God is touchy about this one. Breaking it is clearly how easiest to get on the wrong side of God.
No idols. It is perhaps something we are not very tempted to do and it was clearly something ancient Israel was very tempted to do, so maybe it isn’t very relevant today.
Except there are other things that we worship. For us it is mostly people, people we “idolize.” The commandment suggests that idolizing another person is not a very good idea and it makes God very, very mad.
And the thing about idols is they always disappoint. They are, after all, human. They, like us, are incapable of not screwing up. They are not worthy of our ultimate trust because nothing is worthy of our ultimate trust except God.
We need to respect, appreciate, even honor other people, but never idolize them.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
We usually think of this as the commandment not to swear. Don’t use God’s (or Jesus’) name as a curse word. And sure, that’s right. But it’s way, way bigger than that. Misusing God’s name is perhaps the biggest temptation for religious people.
We throw God’s name around as if it were candy on Halloween. God has done this, God has done that. It’s as if we controlled what God does. This is the restraint commandment, I would call it. Be restrained in your use of God’s name. Be shy about attributing this or that to God.
Thank God for blessings, pray to God for relief from suffering and temptation. Tell God you’re sorry when you get something wrong, praise God for being God. But don’t go walking around as if God were your best friend who told you everything he ever did. God is not your best friend. He is God. Protect his mystery.
If you are tempted to tell somebody that God did something, just shut up. If you must say something, thank God you’re alive and leave it at that. It’s enough said.
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
This is the other long commandment which again is a signal of how important God thinks it is. It’s really quite simple. Everybody and everything deserves a break. Rest is not only a means for our refreshment, it is the primary way we honor God.
Why is that so? It is because it is a sign of trust. It’s a time of letting go of our own productivity as a sign of our dependence on God.
Near my neighborhood there is an orthodox synagogue and so on Friday evening and Saturday you can see orthodox Jews walking to synagogue. They take sabbath very, very seriously. I envy them; we all should.
This is probably the commandment we break the most. We just cannot let go. It’s bred in us that we are what we do. What this commandment is trying to do is to protect us from that. Once a week we are to be reminded that we are simply who we are.
Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
Interestingly enough, this is the only commandment that comes with a promise. People have wondered why—with no particularly good answer—almost since it was first uttered.
I think it has something to do with relationship, not only with one’s parents but with one’s self. I will lead a troubled life if I cannot accept who I am and where I came from, the good and the bad of it.
My parents are not perfect; they have their flaws, which, of course, are most obvious to me. Yet I am commanded to respect them, for they gave me life. Hopefully I will love them, too, but that is not the commandment. The commandment seems to know that love is sometimes hard even for our parents. But respect is the bottom line.
You shall not murder.
The commandments now get short and to the point. These things are necessary if you are to live as a liberated people—if everyone is to live as a liberated people.
Taking another person’s life is wrong, period. They, too, are created in the image of God and are worthy of life.
You shall not commit adultery.
Those of us who have made a vow to another person are asked to consider that vow to be sacred. We are asked to be faithful, and that means, among other things, to be sexually exclusive.
Which is to say that relationships under vow should not be entered into lightly. It is serious business. It is about more than feeling love for another person, wanting to be with them. It is about establishing a sacred loyalty that is absolute.
You shall not steal.
The commandments recognize the right to personal property and command its absolute respect. What is not mine is not mine and it needs to stay not mine.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
This commandment is meant to protect people from false accusations that can deprive them of their freedom and livelihood. One of the bedrocks of a free and fair society is that people will tell the truth in a court of law. If that is not the case, then chaos ensues.
Sometimes this commandment is shortened to just, “You shall not lie.” That’s fair. All lying is bearing false witness, either about another person or about one’s self.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Why is envy such a bad thing? I think it is mostly because it is sort of the opposite of gratitude. If I am envious of my neighbor’s house, I am not being grateful for my own. I can easily start to live in an “If only…” fantasy world that is destructive of my own sense of self-worth.
It is also a sign of what the Prayer Book calls an “intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts” (Litany of Penitence, p. 268). In other words I become obsessed with what I don’t have which either drives me into despair or into the kind of acquisitiveness that can actually destroy my life rather than enhance it. I become dependent on more and more things. This commandment has a lot to do with the commandment against idolatry.
So there you are. I hope there were some fresh ways of looking at the commandments.
The last thing to be said about them is that we all break them and thanks be to God, we can “repent and return to the Lord” with the promise of forgiveness.
But nevertheless, these commandments are the simple ways in which we continue to live as a liberated people.
Our first reading this morning was the Ten Commandments. I want to walk through them this morning and seek some relevance for our life today. Can these ancient commandments still speak to us?
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.
This first commandment may be the simplest: no other Gods but God, and not just any God, but the God of liberation.
The commandments are really how to live as a liberated people. They are not how the people are to be liberated; that has already occurred. It is how they are to react to their liberation and remain liberated.
And first things first: the God who liberated you is the only God. There may be things that we are tempted to treat as gods, but they are not to get in the way of our relationship with God. Relationship with God always comes first.
As I said, it may be the simplest commandment, but it is also perhaps the one we are most tempted to break. The things that compete with God for our attention and our loyalty are legion. We are tempted to put anything and everything between us and God, and God demands that we do not do that.
Why is this so important? Because it is the only way we stay liberated. We can only trust God absolutely with our freedom; anything and everybody else can take that freedom away, even those we love if we put them before God.
So the first commandment is how we stay a free people.
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who keep my commandments.
The second commandment is the longest of the commandments, which means, if nothing else, that God takes this one really, really seriously. God is touchy about this one. Breaking it is clearly how easiest to get on the wrong side of God.
No idols. It is perhaps something we are not very tempted to do and it was clearly something ancient Israel was very tempted to do, so maybe it isn’t very relevant today.
Except there are other things that we worship. For us it is mostly people, people we “idolize.” The commandment suggests that idolizing another person is not a very good idea and it makes God very, very mad.
And the thing about idols is they always disappoint. They are, after all, human. They, like us, are incapable of not screwing up. They are not worthy of our ultimate trust because nothing is worthy of our ultimate trust except God.
We need to respect, appreciate, even honor other people, but never idolize them.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
We usually think of this as the commandment not to swear. Don’t use God’s (or Jesus’) name as a curse word. And sure, that’s right. But it’s way, way bigger than that. Misusing God’s name is perhaps the biggest temptation for religious people.
We throw God’s name around as if it were candy on Halloween. God has done this, God has done that. It’s as if we controlled what God does. This is the restraint commandment, I would call it. Be restrained in your use of God’s name. Be shy about attributing this or that to God.
Thank God for blessings, pray to God for relief from suffering and temptation. Tell God you’re sorry when you get something wrong, praise God for being God. But don’t go walking around as if God were your best friend who told you everything he ever did. God is not your best friend. He is God. Protect his mystery.
If you are tempted to tell somebody that God did something, just shut up. If you must say something, thank God you’re alive and leave it at that. It’s enough said.
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
This is the other long commandment which again is a signal of how important God thinks it is. It’s really quite simple. Everybody and everything deserves a break. Rest is not only a means for our refreshment, it is the primary way we honor God.
Why is that so? It is because it is a sign of trust. It’s a time of letting go of our own productivity as a sign of our dependence on God.
Near my neighborhood there is an orthodox synagogue and so on Friday evening and Saturday you can see orthodox Jews walking to synagogue. They take sabbath very, very seriously. I envy them; we all should.
This is probably the commandment we break the most. We just cannot let go. It’s bred in us that we are what we do. What this commandment is trying to do is to protect us from that. Once a week we are to be reminded that we are simply who we are.
Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
Interestingly enough, this is the only commandment that comes with a promise. People have wondered why—with no particularly good answer—almost since it was first uttered.
I think it has something to do with relationship, not only with one’s parents but with one’s self. I will lead a troubled life if I cannot accept who I am and where I came from, the good and the bad of it.
My parents are not perfect; they have their flaws, which, of course, are most obvious to me. Yet I am commanded to respect them, for they gave me life. Hopefully I will love them, too, but that is not the commandment. The commandment seems to know that love is sometimes hard even for our parents. But respect is the bottom line.
You shall not murder.
The commandments now get short and to the point. These things are necessary if you are to live as a liberated people—if everyone is to live as a liberated people.
Taking another person’s life is wrong, period. They, too, are created in the image of God and are worthy of life.
You shall not commit adultery.
Those of us who have made a vow to another person are asked to consider that vow to be sacred. We are asked to be faithful, and that means, among other things, to be sexually exclusive.
Which is to say that relationships under vow should not be entered into lightly. It is serious business. It is about more than feeling love for another person, wanting to be with them. It is about establishing a sacred loyalty that is absolute.
You shall not steal.
The commandments recognize the right to personal property and command its absolute respect. What is not mine is not mine and it needs to stay not mine.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
This commandment is meant to protect people from false accusations that can deprive them of their freedom and livelihood. One of the bedrocks of a free and fair society is that people will tell the truth in a court of law. If that is not the case, then chaos ensues.
Sometimes this commandment is shortened to just, “You shall not lie.” That’s fair. All lying is bearing false witness, either about another person or about one’s self.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Why is envy such a bad thing? I think it is mostly because it is sort of the opposite of gratitude. If I am envious of my neighbor’s house, I am not being grateful for my own. I can easily start to live in an “If only…” fantasy world that is destructive of my own sense of self-worth.
It is also a sign of what the Prayer Book calls an “intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts” (Litany of Penitence, p. 268). In other words I become obsessed with what I don’t have which either drives me into despair or into the kind of acquisitiveness that can actually destroy my life rather than enhance it. I become dependent on more and more things. This commandment has a lot to do with the commandment against idolatry.
So there you are. I hope there were some fresh ways of looking at the commandments.
The last thing to be said about them is that we all break them and thanks be to God, we can “repent and return to the Lord” with the promise of forgiveness.
But nevertheless, these commandments are the simple ways in which we continue to live as a liberated people.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Come Join Us and Die
Sermon preached at the Church of S. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene on the Second Sunday in Lent: Mark 8:31-38
Our Gospel reading this morning occurs right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel and is in many ways its pivot point—the point around which everything in the Gospel turns.
It’s part of a larger story. Jesus and his disciples are on the way to Caesarea Phillipi, a town in the northernmost part of Galilee. While they’re walking along, Jesus asks them a question. “Who do people say that I am?” They give him several answers. He then asks them, more pointedly, “Who do you say that I am?”
It is Peter who speaks on behalf of all. “You are the Messiah.” Jesus’ response is not to deny it, but to order them not to tell anyone about it.
Then comes this morning’s reading. The answer to this question has been a critical moment. Jesus decides it’s time to start preparing the disciples for what he believes will take place. They are almost going to go to Jerusalem and they need to be ready for it.
He began teaching them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Peter is indignant. This is not at all what he believes it means for Jesus to be the Messiah and he tells Jesus so in no uncertain terms. Jesus, however, comes right back at him, stronger, in extraordinarily harsh words,
Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.
And then he makes the nightmare worse.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
It is the first mention of the cross in the Gospel, and it is meant not for Jesus alone, but for all his followers. The cross was a terrifying thing and those listening to Jesus would have reacted with fear and horror.
Imagine the stir I would cause if I hung a great banner from the tower out front: “Come join us and die.” You would have thought that I had gone stark raving mad. And people out there would be repelled and wonder if we had become some strange cult.
Yet Jesus said we had to take up our cross.
Then there is one last challenge.
Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.
We decorate our churches with crosses, some of them simple, some with Jesus’ body on them, some empty and quite pretty. We wear crosses around our neck. We do so to identify ourselves as Christians, yet we do not think much that these crosses are for us as much as they are for Jesus.
What a terrifying thing to contemplate! What did Jesus mean when he said we had to die in order to follow him?
Well, he tries to teach the disciples again after they had journeyed back south deep into Galilee. Again they are on the road and he is teaching them
The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.
This time we are simply told that they do not understand what he is talking about and were afraid to ask him about it.
Afraid? Of course they were afraid! This was all taking a very strange turn.
Yet they did talk among themselves on the road. When they arrived at their destination, Capernaum, he asked them what they were talking about, for they seemed to have been arguing about something. Mark tells us
But they were silent, for they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
He knows what they were arguing about and the depth of their misunderstanding of what he is about. He tries to teach them what he means.
He sat down [Mark says], called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”[1]
They continue south, heading toward Jerusalem, which is making everyone afraid. Once again he takes the disciples aside and tries to explain what is going to happen to him using the same language as before. Their response is not recorded but Mark tells us right after he said these things, James and John approached him and asked if they could sit at his right hand and his left hand when he came into his kingdom.
They just don’t get it. He says to them,
You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”[2]
Mark gives us no indication that they understood, in fact, he implies that they remain blind, by telling one last healing story, the giving of sight to Bartimaeus. Jesus gives sight, but the disciples remain blind.
Then Palm Sunday happens and it is too late to understand anything because it is upon them.
Jesus has made it clear what it means that we have to die in order to follow him, what it means to “deny ourselves and take up our cross.” It means to live the life of a servant.
Now that would make a better banner, “Join us and be a servant.”
But the truth is that people do not want to be servants, even we in the church chafe under that bit, paying it lip service with our fingers crossed behind our backs. We will be a servant if it does not cost us anything. But Jesus says it will cost us; it will cost us everything.
It will cost us being in charge. It will cost us our reputation as a winner. It will cost us being surrounded by all the things that say to the world, “I have made it.” It will cost us that attitude that the world around us rewards: “I take care of myself first.”
The disciples of Jesus are called to be servants, which means that they will often look like people who are on the losing side of life.
Try as we may, there really isn’t any way to make the cross pretty. It is not a pretty thing. It is a symbol of death, Jesus’ death and ours, our death as people who’ve got it made, and our rebirth as servants of all.
“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” the deacon says to send us out into the world at the end of the service. We hear the words so much we do not pay any attention to them, but they are strong words about setting our face to face the world—not as self-made men and women, but as servants.
If it is your practice to dip your finger in the holy water and make the sign of the cross as you leave the church (a practice I commend) take it as a sign of your acceptance of the death of which Jesus speaks and say to yourself, “I will take up my cross and be a servant.”
[1] The second passion announcement is Mark 9:30-37.
[2] The third passion announcement is Mark 10:32-45.
Our Gospel reading this morning occurs right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel and is in many ways its pivot point—the point around which everything in the Gospel turns.
It’s part of a larger story. Jesus and his disciples are on the way to Caesarea Phillipi, a town in the northernmost part of Galilee. While they’re walking along, Jesus asks them a question. “Who do people say that I am?” They give him several answers. He then asks them, more pointedly, “Who do you say that I am?”
It is Peter who speaks on behalf of all. “You are the Messiah.” Jesus’ response is not to deny it, but to order them not to tell anyone about it.
Then comes this morning’s reading. The answer to this question has been a critical moment. Jesus decides it’s time to start preparing the disciples for what he believes will take place. They are almost going to go to Jerusalem and they need to be ready for it.
He began teaching them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Peter is indignant. This is not at all what he believes it means for Jesus to be the Messiah and he tells Jesus so in no uncertain terms. Jesus, however, comes right back at him, stronger, in extraordinarily harsh words,
Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.
And then he makes the nightmare worse.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
It is the first mention of the cross in the Gospel, and it is meant not for Jesus alone, but for all his followers. The cross was a terrifying thing and those listening to Jesus would have reacted with fear and horror.
Imagine the stir I would cause if I hung a great banner from the tower out front: “Come join us and die.” You would have thought that I had gone stark raving mad. And people out there would be repelled and wonder if we had become some strange cult.
Yet Jesus said we had to take up our cross.
Then there is one last challenge.
Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.
We decorate our churches with crosses, some of them simple, some with Jesus’ body on them, some empty and quite pretty. We wear crosses around our neck. We do so to identify ourselves as Christians, yet we do not think much that these crosses are for us as much as they are for Jesus.
What a terrifying thing to contemplate! What did Jesus mean when he said we had to die in order to follow him?
Well, he tries to teach the disciples again after they had journeyed back south deep into Galilee. Again they are on the road and he is teaching them
The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.
This time we are simply told that they do not understand what he is talking about and were afraid to ask him about it.
Afraid? Of course they were afraid! This was all taking a very strange turn.
Yet they did talk among themselves on the road. When they arrived at their destination, Capernaum, he asked them what they were talking about, for they seemed to have been arguing about something. Mark tells us
But they were silent, for they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
He knows what they were arguing about and the depth of their misunderstanding of what he is about. He tries to teach them what he means.
He sat down [Mark says], called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”[1]
They continue south, heading toward Jerusalem, which is making everyone afraid. Once again he takes the disciples aside and tries to explain what is going to happen to him using the same language as before. Their response is not recorded but Mark tells us right after he said these things, James and John approached him and asked if they could sit at his right hand and his left hand when he came into his kingdom.
They just don’t get it. He says to them,
You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”[2]
Mark gives us no indication that they understood, in fact, he implies that they remain blind, by telling one last healing story, the giving of sight to Bartimaeus. Jesus gives sight, but the disciples remain blind.
Then Palm Sunday happens and it is too late to understand anything because it is upon them.
Jesus has made it clear what it means that we have to die in order to follow him, what it means to “deny ourselves and take up our cross.” It means to live the life of a servant.
Now that would make a better banner, “Join us and be a servant.”
But the truth is that people do not want to be servants, even we in the church chafe under that bit, paying it lip service with our fingers crossed behind our backs. We will be a servant if it does not cost us anything. But Jesus says it will cost us; it will cost us everything.
It will cost us being in charge. It will cost us our reputation as a winner. It will cost us being surrounded by all the things that say to the world, “I have made it.” It will cost us that attitude that the world around us rewards: “I take care of myself first.”
The disciples of Jesus are called to be servants, which means that they will often look like people who are on the losing side of life.
Try as we may, there really isn’t any way to make the cross pretty. It is not a pretty thing. It is a symbol of death, Jesus’ death and ours, our death as people who’ve got it made, and our rebirth as servants of all.
“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” the deacon says to send us out into the world at the end of the service. We hear the words so much we do not pay any attention to them, but they are strong words about setting our face to face the world—not as self-made men and women, but as servants.
If it is your practice to dip your finger in the holy water and make the sign of the cross as you leave the church (a practice I commend) take it as a sign of your acceptance of the death of which Jesus speaks and say to yourself, “I will take up my cross and be a servant.”
[1] The second passion announcement is Mark 9:30-37.
[2] The third passion announcement is Mark 10:32-45.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Absolutely Everybody
Sermon preached on the First Sunday in Lent at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene: Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22
It was just a few weeks after I had started in my last parish when the Sunday School year began and I offered to kick it off by telling the kids a story from the Bible. Unwisely, I did not plan ahead which story it would be. I thought I would see if the kids had a story they wanted me to tell. Pointing to a toy Noah’s Ark, one of the children said, “Tell us about the Ark!”
Well the Ark is cute and the rainbow is pretty, but the story itself is neither. I was, however, trapped. To make things worse I had just read a book with which I was very impressed that had argued for not keeping the hard stories of the Bible from our children. Tell them about Cain and Abel, the writer said. After all, what child with siblings has not contemplated murder?
So I told them the story about the flood.
When I had finished there was quiet for a moment and then a boy of about eight shot up his hand and asked, “Did God really kill absolutely everybody in the flood?” I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, the story is that the flood killed everybody except Noah and his family.” And I was going to add that the rainbow was the promise that God would never do such a thing again, when the boy interrupted me.
“Wow!” he said. “Cool!”
That little bit of enthusiasm notwithstanding; the story of the flood is a difficult story: all those people dead. True they were supposedly evil, but I suspect some of them no more evil than most of us. However you rationalize it, the story is that, save for Noah’s family (which proves in the end to be just as dysfunctional as the average family), God killed absolutely everybody.
Now we can also rationalize it by saying that we don’t believe it actually ever happened. It’s a story from pre-history, a story that got told among a group of people for generations that said something truthful about the God with whom they were in relationship. But why did they have to tell it?
Well, probably because they needed to say that their God was Almighty and held the power of life and death, and was a moral God, utterly opposed to evil living. But they also needed to tell it with the ending that they gave it—that God would never do this again, not even threaten it, which made their God unique among the competing gods of the peoples around them. Their God was ultimately Almighty, but also ultimately merciful.
Still, there are all those dead people. It’s a story we could perhaps live without, despite the cute Noah’s Ark play sets.
I think the people of God have always struggled with this story. I suspect this was true right from the beginning, from the early telling of it. One of the reasons I suspect this is because in the rest of the Old Testament there are only two mentions of Noah and only one allusion to the Flood itself.[1] It was not a story that Israel liked remembering.
And then there is this strange reference to it in 1 Peter, our second reading this morning. It points out how troubling the story was to the early Christians. A question on their mind was just what happened to all those people. Were they simply lost, forever damned for their wickedness?
No Peter says, and he repeats what must have become common speculation about what happened to Jesus between his death and resurrection. He did not passively wait in death. On what we call Holy Saturday, in death, he brought the good news to the dead, including all those people who died in the flood.
What a strange story, although we reference it every time we say the Apostles’ Creed—“He descended to the dead” (or, as we used to say more graphically, “He descended into hell”). One could, however, argue that we could survive without this bit of fanciful imagining just as much as the Flood story itself.
But the image, I believe, is powerful and necessary if we are going to keep telling the Flood story. The image proclaims the very depths of the good news. Absolutely everybody is saved. Jesus left no one behind. Jesus leaves no one behind.
The image gets picked up in Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection. In them Jesus stands over the broken gates of hell and with his two hands he lifts up Adam and Eve from the dead. Absolutely everybody. It’s an incredibly powerful image.
Yes, the story was told by our ancestors in time before time that God once regretted his creation and wiped out absolutely everybody save for one family. But the story is also told that even they are not outside the reach of God’s amazing love.
Which means, my brothers and sisters, that the good news is for us, for all of us, for absolutely everybody. There is no place we can go, nothing we can do that can separate us from that love. If there ever was such a thing as hell, its gates are broken and the good news is the good news even there.
Peter says,
Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.
Jesus has brought us to God. Jesus has brought absolutely everybody to God. He has literally gone to hell and back in order to do so.
It is that simple truth that we will celebrate at Easter, and it is that simple truth that Lent wishes to drive us into more deeply.
We have been brought home to God. Absolutely everybody has been brought home to God. How we would change if we actually believed it! How the world would change if it actually believed it!
[1] Isaiah 54:9 and Ezekiel 14:14 (the former being the allusion to the Flood).
It was just a few weeks after I had started in my last parish when the Sunday School year began and I offered to kick it off by telling the kids a story from the Bible. Unwisely, I did not plan ahead which story it would be. I thought I would see if the kids had a story they wanted me to tell. Pointing to a toy Noah’s Ark, one of the children said, “Tell us about the Ark!”
Well the Ark is cute and the rainbow is pretty, but the story itself is neither. I was, however, trapped. To make things worse I had just read a book with which I was very impressed that had argued for not keeping the hard stories of the Bible from our children. Tell them about Cain and Abel, the writer said. After all, what child with siblings has not contemplated murder?
So I told them the story about the flood.
When I had finished there was quiet for a moment and then a boy of about eight shot up his hand and asked, “Did God really kill absolutely everybody in the flood?” I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, the story is that the flood killed everybody except Noah and his family.” And I was going to add that the rainbow was the promise that God would never do such a thing again, when the boy interrupted me.
“Wow!” he said. “Cool!”
That little bit of enthusiasm notwithstanding; the story of the flood is a difficult story: all those people dead. True they were supposedly evil, but I suspect some of them no more evil than most of us. However you rationalize it, the story is that, save for Noah’s family (which proves in the end to be just as dysfunctional as the average family), God killed absolutely everybody.
Now we can also rationalize it by saying that we don’t believe it actually ever happened. It’s a story from pre-history, a story that got told among a group of people for generations that said something truthful about the God with whom they were in relationship. But why did they have to tell it?
Well, probably because they needed to say that their God was Almighty and held the power of life and death, and was a moral God, utterly opposed to evil living. But they also needed to tell it with the ending that they gave it—that God would never do this again, not even threaten it, which made their God unique among the competing gods of the peoples around them. Their God was ultimately Almighty, but also ultimately merciful.
Still, there are all those dead people. It’s a story we could perhaps live without, despite the cute Noah’s Ark play sets.
I think the people of God have always struggled with this story. I suspect this was true right from the beginning, from the early telling of it. One of the reasons I suspect this is because in the rest of the Old Testament there are only two mentions of Noah and only one allusion to the Flood itself.[1] It was not a story that Israel liked remembering.
And then there is this strange reference to it in 1 Peter, our second reading this morning. It points out how troubling the story was to the early Christians. A question on their mind was just what happened to all those people. Were they simply lost, forever damned for their wickedness?
No Peter says, and he repeats what must have become common speculation about what happened to Jesus between his death and resurrection. He did not passively wait in death. On what we call Holy Saturday, in death, he brought the good news to the dead, including all those people who died in the flood.
What a strange story, although we reference it every time we say the Apostles’ Creed—“He descended to the dead” (or, as we used to say more graphically, “He descended into hell”). One could, however, argue that we could survive without this bit of fanciful imagining just as much as the Flood story itself.
But the image, I believe, is powerful and necessary if we are going to keep telling the Flood story. The image proclaims the very depths of the good news. Absolutely everybody is saved. Jesus left no one behind. Jesus leaves no one behind.
The image gets picked up in Eastern Orthodox icons of the resurrection. In them Jesus stands over the broken gates of hell and with his two hands he lifts up Adam and Eve from the dead. Absolutely everybody. It’s an incredibly powerful image.
Yes, the story was told by our ancestors in time before time that God once regretted his creation and wiped out absolutely everybody save for one family. But the story is also told that even they are not outside the reach of God’s amazing love.
Which means, my brothers and sisters, that the good news is for us, for all of us, for absolutely everybody. There is no place we can go, nothing we can do that can separate us from that love. If there ever was such a thing as hell, its gates are broken and the good news is the good news even there.
Peter says,
Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.
Jesus has brought us to God. Jesus has brought absolutely everybody to God. He has literally gone to hell and back in order to do so.
It is that simple truth that we will celebrate at Easter, and it is that simple truth that Lent wishes to drive us into more deeply.
We have been brought home to God. Absolutely everybody has been brought home to God. How we would change if we actually believed it! How the world would change if it actually believed it!
[1] Isaiah 54:9 and Ezekiel 14:14 (the former being the allusion to the Flood).
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