Holy God, Holy People — Sermon for 2/19/2017

Sermon for Epiphany 7A, 19 February 2017

Preached at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon

Lessons

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18
Psalm 119:33-40
1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
Matthew 5:38-48

Once there was an old farmer who worked a small family holding in northern China. The winters were hard there, and he was barely able to grow enough food for him and his family to eat. But he was content. One day his young son went outside and discovered that an animal had come into his garden and eaten the tops of the turnips. The boy ran inside and said, “Father, the most terrible thing has happened!” But the father just said, “Perhaps.” He went outside and saw that the turnips had indeed been ruined, but then discovered the culprit, a fine horse that was worth more than he could have afforded even by saving for years. He caught the horse and began to be able to plow more ground, and farming became easier. The neighbors noticed the man’s good fortune and told him that he was the luckiest man they knew. “Perhaps,” said the man. One day, when his son got to be a teenager, he was out riding the horse, and fell off and broke his leg. “Oh no!” said the villagers, “What a calamity!” For they knew that the father had come to rely on his son’s help with the chores. But the aging farmer just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Perhaps.” The next day, soldiers came and conscripted all the young boys of the village into the army. Since the farmer’s son had a broken leg, he was excused from duty. The story goes on, as all stories do, and after each episode the father repeated his: Perhaps.

The point of that story, of course, is that you never know where you are in history. The Israelites went down to Egypt thinking that they were being saved from the famine; and so they were, but then they were enslaved and escaped only by means of disaster against the Egyptians. They came and had a marvelous “God moment” at Sinai, with thunder and lightning and God’s booming voice, and received God’s commandments that, by keeping them, they would receive huge blessings. But I want you to notice that not everyone felt like those commandments were a blessing. The divine requirement, “Be holy for I the LORD your God am holy,” meant that some behaviors could not be tolerated, and this clearly placed restrictions on people’s tendency to be selfish. God was giving them land, but they weren’t allowed to use the land however they pleased: they had to harvest the crops in such a way as to deliberately leave some produce for the homeless. They had to be truthful with one another and honest in their dealings, even if it meant putting themselves at a financial disadvantage. In short, they had to be as concerned about the welfare of their neighbor as they were about their own welfare. They had to love their neighbor as they loved themselves.

The thing to get about this is that it’s a corollary of the character of God. Jesus makes the same argument, grounding His moral teaching in his observations about God’s behavior. We’re to do good to people without discriminating between who deserves it and who doesn’t, as he says, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” This principle of what theologians call imitatio dei, “the imitation of God,” underlies all the moral teaching of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. That’s not to say that it’s all necessarily correct for all times and places. Notice that Jesus’ observation about God’s character leads him to a slightly different teaching than the one in Leviticus. Notice that St. Paul, who is still concerned about the holiness of God, now as manifested in His Temple, applies the principle of the Temple’s holiness to the Church at Corinth, beginning a line of reasoning that he’ll work out into many implications in letters to them. The body is God’s temple, and here he means both their individual bodies and the Church as a whole, the Body of Christ. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be destroyed. The temple is holy; therefore it must not be joined to a prostitute. The temple is holy; therefore we mustn’t think of our fellow Christians as more or less important than one another. The temple is holy; therefore we belong not to ourselves but to God. The temple is holy; therefore its priests deserve financial support. The temple is holy, and our body is God’s temple; therefore God lives in us.

Now we could spend quite a long time unpacking the idea of holiness. Whole books have been written on the subject. But what I really want to get across to you is this central fact that the holiness of God and of God’s people requires different responses in different ages, because although God sees the big picture of history we do not. When the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel had to wrestle mightily with the question of “Does this mean that God’s holiness is gone from us? Or is it that God’s holiness will be with us in a new way?” The answer, as we now know, is that God was still among God’s people, but didn’t require a temple to be among them. But then a Second Temple was built by returning exiles, and that temple was important enough that the only time we hear about Jesus being violent it was in defense of that temple’s holiness. When the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, the question re-emerged: Is God still among His people? Jews gave the answer that God was still powerfully present with His people in Scripture and in prayer, but some Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah, along with their gentile fellow-believers, reinterpreted the Temple to be composed of partakers in the sacrifice of Jesus.

Today is the only time in the entire three-year lectionary cycle that we read from the book of Leviticus. That’s unfortunate, in my view, because it gives the impression that we get to cherry-pick the passages of Scripture that we like and disregard the others. To me it seems better to read all of Scripture and acknowledge that some of it contains things we can no longer agree with. This is exactly what Jesus does. He reads, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” which appears in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and contains the important principle that our punishment must fit the crime, but then he sets it in light of the higher principle of doing good to good and evil people alike. Why? Because that’s what God does. If that law is subject to reconsideration in light of God’s grace, then surely the other laws we find troublesome on Leviticus and elsewhere can be reconsidered as well. Instead of simply refusing to read them, let’s read them and then ask where the Spirit of God is moving. Because we don’t know where we fit into history. We don’t know how what we see now will turn out. The only thing we can be sure of is the character of this God whose mercies are new every morning and who calls us to imitate Him. As God has forgiven us, so we must forgive those who’ve trespassed against us. As God blesses all creation with abundance, so we must bless those who are in our power to bless. As God has loved us while we were yet sinners, so we must love others regardless of their worthiness. Quit worrying about whether the Church is flourishing or dying; don’t be immobilized by whether there’s the right or the wrong government in power. Even if there are wars and rumors of wars, the end is not yet. Well, maybe it’s the end. Perhaps. Or maybe there’s another chapter yet to be written. What’s needed from us in any case is for us to be holy, to imitate God, to make God’s mercy present in the world he made. Holy, holy holy, LORD God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of God’s Glory. May we be signs and sacraments of God’s holiness. Amen.

The Desert Road

"The Desert Road"

Sermon preached on 11 December 2016 at Saint Mary's Episcopal Church, Eugene, Oregon

Collect: Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

Scripture Readings:
Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:4-9; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for You, O God.” Amen.

That famous line from Psalm 42 was not one of our readings for this week, but it expresses perfectly the Advent sentiment. Think not so much in terms of Oregon deer, which get plenty of water, but think of deer in the Palestinian badlands, where rain is rare and the only water comes from springs that bring water down from the mountains. All the land around you is parched; such plants as there are, are hardy, thorny things. You can’t really just stay by the springs because that’s where the predators are. So you have your trails on the steep hillsides and you wander them endlessly looking for the next green plant to munch and trying to stay away from the lions and jackals. Most Israelites didn’t live in the desert, of course, but they saw it from where they lived, and it represented for them the realm of chaos, of demonic powers — the realm of death. In contrast to the land made fertile by God’s grace, the desert was ever visible as a part of the world that resisted the divine gift. Nowadays we see desert and wilderness as places, perhaps, where we find God, and Israel has stories about finding God in the desert, too, but mostly the desert is someplace where God is experienced as absent, a place in need of re-creation, that needs to be made fruitful. What the poet who speaks in Psalm 42 does is makes a connection between that physical condition of unfruitfulness to the spiritual condition of feeling God’s absence.

Now I know as well as you do, or anyone does, that God is never actually absent. Yet there are times, aren’t there, when God’s absence seems almost palpable, when the “God-shaped hole in the human heart” feels like more than mere emptiness. At least that’s how it sometimes feels to me. And yet that emptiness is such an ache, such a longing, that it’s like God is present in that very absence and even by means of it. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” goes the saying, as a ravening thirst increases one’s love for cool water. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God.” 

Advent is a time to feel that absence, to relish it as you relish the feeling of hunger when you smell the afternoon feast cooking on Christmas morning. It’s not just a desire to satisfy your hunger with food; there’s something delicious about the hunger itself, which serves as a sign of the feast to come.

This is the kind of feeling we ought to have as we hear Isaiah’s marvelous poem. Remember that to the ancients of the Middle East, desert symbolized the parts of the world that were in rebellion against God’s tireless efforts to make the world live. The desert was where demonic forces, predatory animals, and uncleanness of all kinds endured. If you got sick, and especially if you were infirm in a way that led to ritual uncleanness, such as being lame or blind or had leprosy, then you were of the desert, whether you lived there or not. But in Isaiah’s vision, God makes the desert fertile and lush, and all those symbols of barrenness are cured. The desert blossoms and becomes as fruitful as the greenest regions in Israel. The sight of the blind and the hearing of the deaf is be restored, those who had been unable to speak now can sing, the lame are able not just to walk but to leap for joy. The waterless wastes overflow with vigor. And no predators endanger anybody. And in the midst of this re-created land, this former desert, this place formerly inhabited by the unclean and demonic, there is now a sacred road that leads to Jerusalem and to the temple of God on Mount Zion there. This is imagery of pilgrimage to the temple. The power of God’s new creation, and of the holy road that leads to God’s presence, is so great that even fools can’t miss it, there is no uncleanness on this road because all uncleanness has been healed by God. The highway leads inexorably to the presence of God, and God’s redeemed people travel that way with joy that is so great as to drive away all sorrow and sighing. Doesn’t this vision of Isaiah just make you want to find that road and walk on it, like a thirsty deer who smells the water from afar? Walk with me through Advent; that’s our holy road and it leads to God’s own Self, who was made a human being like us for our salvation.

What I’d like to invite you to see with me is that the healing that’s needed by the desert, and which God promises, is also needed by us. Because there are things that dry us up, that make us forget who we are created to be, things that get control of us and make us who are called to be children of God into slaves. We are, as the Collect says, “sorely hindered by our sins.” I used to think of God as a stern old man who scowled when anyone smiled. That God wanted to prevent us from sinning mainly because he didn’t want us to have any fun. But the longer I live the clearer it becomes to me that that’s wrong-headed. Sins are the things we do that hinder us from living fully, that make us less than fully human, that deaden our physical and spiritual nerves so that we’re unaware of the world’s marvelousness. If you’re like me then you probably don’t have too much trouble thinking of the sins that dry up your soul, things you’ve neglected to do that you should have done; things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have done. Attitudes that cut you off from God and your neighbor. God promises to make the desert bloom again, to save us from our sins, but here we are still in the midst of them. In Advent, hoping and longing for the salvation of God to be born in us and in the world. In this Advent desert I long for God’s healing grace like a deer thirsting for flowing streams.

This the solution of the powerful riddle about how the loving God is also our judge: When God comes to be our judge, He comes to save us. God’s judgment is not a punishment for failure to be saved; it is the means of God’s salvation. That’s because what God is saving us from, is our sins, the attitudes and actions that shrivel up our hearts and make God’s world a desert. God will save us from those sins, because God is recreating everything into a new, green, fertile heaven and earth. I think myself, using Leonard Cohen’s words, that “every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” But even if we utterly refused that salvation, God would save the rest of the world that we insisted on destroying. God’s salvation is inevitable, because life and bounty are God's way.

So what do we do while we live in Advent, in this time of expectation as we await the final victory of God? In modern Israel, the desert is increasingly being made fruitful by irrigation. That is, through a combination of human effort and God’s miraculous gift of life. Our individual lives are like that, too. The main way God frees us from our sins is by helping us to stop sinning. It doesn’t do any good to ask God to free us from our sins if we won’t walk in the freedom we’re given. The desert becomes fruitful when we irrigate it. The holy highway leads to the Jerusalem, but it is our legs that have to carry us on it. Our effort is part of the grace that God gives; it’s not good works versus grace, it’s the grace of good works. And so we remind ourselves annually, in this Advent season, to come back to the Source, to watch and pray for the Lord’s return, to do works of justice and mercy and peace. To eat and drink these signs of the banquet which we shall all eat, cured of our diseases, healed from our infirmities, and saved from our sins. This bread and this wine are the very presence of God breaking into our dried and twisted roots of our souls and beginning to irrigate the parched land. Strengthen the weak knees. Break up your fallow ground. Let streams begin to flow in the desert. 

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so longs my soul for You, O God.”

Pot Calls Kettle Black, Gets Called Back -- Sermon for September 4, 2016

Sermon preached on 4 September 2016 (Proper 19) at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Jeremiah 18:1-11

Psalm 139:1-5,12-17

Philemon 1-21

Luke 14:25-33

Last week we heard that we should not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, because some people, like Abraham our ancestor in faith, have occasionally entertained angels unawares. This week I want to remind you that some of those angels might very well be inside of you being brought out, sometimes painfully, by the Creator who does all things well. 

In our lesson from Jeremiah, God shows the prophet a potter in his shop, making useful things with clay. Perhaps Jeremiah remembered the old Israelite creation story in which the Lord “forms” (it’s the potter word) the man out of dust. In this story, the potter is dissatisfied with the shape his pottery is taking, so he starts over and uses the same clay to make something else. 

Central to the meaning that Jeremiah wants to get across is the idea of turning, of repentance. When the potter finds that what he’s making is ruined, he “turns” or “repents” and makes something different. The call that God issues to the Israelites is a call to repentance, a call for them to turn from their evil ways, and if they will turn then God promises that He will also turn from the course of judgment that He has set. It’s a call to a radical change, and the piece of pottery that will emerge afterwards will be different from the one that might have been possible before it was ruined. Different, but not worse. The skill of this Potter are such that the remade vessel is never second-best, but always simply best.

The Gospel lesson articulates the call to radical change like Jeremiah, but now draws our attention to how difficult and painful it can be. In Luke’s telling, Jesus says to his hearers that anyone who wishes to be His disciple must hate their father and mother, hate their spouse and their children, hate their brothers and sisters, even hate their own life. That’s strong language! Matthew’s version of the same saying (Matt 10:37) makes it a matter of degree: “Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” But here in Luke’s version, it’s more stark and it’s this very starkness, the scandal of it, that makes it powerful. Now I don’t think we should understand that He’s calling His hearers literally to hate their families — after all this is the same Jesus who earlier in Luke commands His followers to love even their enemies, to do good to them even if they don’t appreciate it (Luke 6:27ff). But if we allow Jesus the teacher to say shocking things, and allow ourselves to be shocked by them, then we can see that this is a call to discipleship and a radical one. 

The really important thing, the thing to which Jesus goes on to call us, is carrying the cross and following Him. He doesn’t say here anything about dying on that cross; he talks about carrying it and following Him. What does it mean to carry our cross? I think it means putting ourselves like clay into the hands of the Potter and trusting Him to re-form us into something good. This Potter doesn’t just work the clay into a shape and then let it dry. He keeps working the clay, adding water, re-shaping it, crunching it back into a ball and starting afresh. I don’t want to push that analogy too far — it’s only an analogy, after all — but I do think the point of the story is that we should trust the process and trust the Potter to make us better than we are now. 

Here’s another way to think about it, the Philemon letter. When St. Paul wrote his letter to Philemon and Apphia and the church that met in their house, he used the language of love. They’re a wealthy couple who have a church that meets in their house. They love Paul and are beloved by him. They have refreshed him and met his needs enough times that he’s truly thankful. These are people who are noteworthy for their hospitality, for their active good works. It’s hard to imagine a more laudatory description of them than we get here in this little letter that barely fills a single page.

They were also slave owners. In his letter, Paul calls on Philemon to receive the runaway slave Onesimus back not as a slave but as full fellow-citizen in the Kingdom of God. He could have commanded it, but he wanted them to welcome Onesimus freely. Why didn’t St. Paul, while he had this opportunity, simply declare that slavery was wrong and forbidden by God? Surely he knows that slavery is against the very heart of the God who created all peoples. Why didn’t he say so? I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that it shows to this virtuous Christian couple, and the Church meeting in their house, that God still has a way for them to go, bearing a cross, being smashed and re-formed by the potter.

Philemon and Apphia no doubt thought of themselves, as Paul obviously thought of them, as persons in full receipt of God’s mercy and grace, thoroughly acceptable to God and beloved by Him. They may not have even conceived slavery as the moral evil that we now know it to be. Nowadays it’s impossible to imagine anyone who could, with a clear conscience, be a serious, committed Christian and own slaves. But slavery was a blind spot for them, as it was for many Christians in the United States not that long ago. 

I have absolutely no doubt, none, that we have similar blind spots, aspects of our culture and character that God will re-form, so that in a few hundred years people will say of us, just as we say of the early American Episcopalian slave owners, How could they have thought that was right? What aspects of our culture and character will need that reform? We probably have some ideas, but some things will be surprising, because they’re blind spots. All we can do is trust the divine Potter to re-shape us into the right kind of vessel, and follow Him, enduring the pain of the re-shaping, wherever He leads.

I also have no doubt that if we will commit our whole energy to the following of that painful way, what will emerge in us will be something better even than angels. What the Divine Potter will make us will be something before which even the angels themselves will bow in reverence. It will be the very likeness of the crucified and risen Christ, in us. That, my friends, is a pearl of great price indeed, a glory worth enduring any pain, a hope that subordinates all rival affections. It lies within us already, and we long for it to emerge pure like gold from a furnace. Look for it in yourself; look for it in others; and when you glimpse it be thankful. Amen.