My Manifesto Against Fright Speech

WHEREAS

1. Many people are frightened by the rhetoric of the current political climate. People to the right of me are frightened by the threat of terrorism and by their perception that the US government is not doing enough to protect them from it. People to the left of me are frightened by what they perceive to be “right-wing terrorism” and by the ubiquity of guns. People are frightened by Mr. Trump, by Mr. Cruz, by Mrs. Clinton, and by Mr. Sanders. I have no doubt that, should Mr. Kasich’s candidacy gain traction, someone will be frightened by him. Although I’m concerned about many of those things, I refuse to be scared of any of them. I have heard apocalyptic language many times before — about presidential candidates and popes and bar-codes and many other things — and they have never been the end of the world. Even the most evil of them were not unmixed with good, and even the best fell short of what they might have been. 
2. Even if the apocalyptic scenarios play out and this world does end, my Christian faith teaches that its end will mark the beginning of something still better. And in fact pretty much every other religion teaches the same. If those religions aren’t true, then there’s no hell for the world to go to, hand basket or no. 
3. The “frightening world” scenarios are, for the most part, self-fulfilling prophecies. Some are so afraid of others (or afraid of the government) that they arm themselves to the teeth, which may — depending on how you evaluate the data — result in increased violence. Some see the police as universally corrupt and thuggish, which of course results in less rather than more professionalism among the police forces. What you assume about races and classes determines, in large part, what your experience of people who belong to those races or classes will be. If we allow ourselves to perceive and speak about the world as “a scary place” or to be “frightened” by the “nightmarish scenario” of this or that political candidate winning an election, we make ourselves more susceptible to manipulation.
4. Not only theology, but history as well shows that fears of doom are rarely realized, and when doom comes it’s rarely related to what people fear. At the height of the Middle Ages, people dreaded many dooms relating to the end of the first millennium, but what actually decimated Europe was the Bubonic Plague, a disease transferred not mainly by marauding armies but by the new shipping industry. No amount of “being frightened” would have protected people.
5. Everyone is going to die, and most will die sooner than they expect or would like. You can be afraid of cancer all you want, and you can cure it, which will perhaps help you not to die of that particular thing, but you’ll still have to die. Sure it would be nice if you didn’t get murdered by rampaging militias, but in the final analysis there’s not all that much difference between being murdered in that way and dying of a heart attack. It’s different for the perpetrators, of course, because doing so turns them into murderers. But from the point of view of the one murdered: not much difference.

THEREFORE although I’ve had to catch myself many times, I’m making a concerted effort not to use the language of fright, and not in fact to live my life with fear in control.

• I will not use the language of enmity with my neighbor; I will use instead the language of hope and reconciliation. 
• When I disagree with someone’s politics, I won’t let that disagreement be an excuse to demean or denigrate; instead, I will assume that my neighbor is just as good and just as smart as I am, and has arrived at different conclusions for good reasons. I need not “be terrified” of someone simply because their ideas are different from mine.
• In my economic and political life, I won’t live as if I either win or I lose, with nothing in between; instead, I will assume that I’ll probably be able to live no matter what happens, and even if not, I’ll die just as I will no matter what. (And, since I’m a Christian, I have hope that such a death will not be the last thing.)

Homily for the Feast of St. Matthias, 2/24/16

Scripture Readings:

Psalm 15
Acts 1:15-26 or Phil 3:13-21
John 15:1, 6-16

Today is the Feast of St. Matthias. Matthias was the first person elected by the Church to apostolic ministry. The twelve apostles had been appointed by Jesus himself, but the twelfth, Judas Iscariot, had shown by his actions that he was not a fit apostle, and at any rate he had died. To use the allegory from John’s gospel, Judas was a branch that had to be trimmed off to allow the whole vine to flourish, and Matthias was a shoot that the Vinedresser trained to become integral to the whole plant.

How Judas died is actually a bit of a mystery. All four gospels record that he was a betrayer, of course, though only Matthew and Luke record his death. Matthew’s gospel records that, feeling guilty about his role in Jesus’ death, he returned the bribe money, throwing it down in the temple precincts, and then went and hanged himself. In Matthew’s account, it was the priests who bought the potter’s field to be used as a cemetery. In Luke’s telling, though, it was Judas who bought the field and then fell there, apparently by accident, disemboweling himself.

In any case, the death of Judas means that the Twelve apostles now lack one person, because the number twelve is not a random number but a symbolic one connecting the Church to the twelve tribes of Israel. The candidates were two disciples who had been following Jesus since His baptism, a certain Joseph and today’s saint, Matthias. Lots were cast to choose which of them would be Judas Iscariot’s successor. This is the beginning of the apostolic succession, which is apparently Matthias’ claim to fame; apart from that literally nothing is known about Saint Matthias.

The collect for the feast of St. Matthias makes the point:

Almighty God, who in the place of Judas chose your faithful servant Matthias to be numbered among the Twelve: Grant that your Church, being delivered from false apostles, may always be guided and governed by faithful and true pastors…

To me, there’s a natural contrast between the perfidy of Judas Iscariot and the quiet faithfulness of Matthias. Judas gained notoriety by his act of betrayal; and indeed he is almost unknown in the gospels apart from that act of betrayal, yet he’s one of the most recognized characters in the story because of what he did. Matthias disappears after this point from the Bible’s narrative, which probably means that he just quietly went about serving the Church as a pastor.

That’s in fact where almost all of us are, who live out our calling faithfully. Like the hymn says, “One was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green.” Ordinary people leading lives of extraordinary sanctity, not because of who we are, but because of who our Lord is. Christ is the Vine and we are branches. While it’s true that living vines always find expression in branches, to lose a branch does not kill the vine and can even help it; we branches can only live and be who we are on account of the Vine. The Vinedresser cuts off some branches out of concern for the whole plant, but the healthy branches — the ones nourished by the rich sap that flows from the vine into the branches, the sap of love and joy and God’s commandments — God prunes those healthy branches so that the whole plant is still healthier.

So let us eat and drink that sap this morning. Let us be nourished by the living Christ entering our bodies in this feast and filling us with His Spirit. Let us submit to the Vinedresser who, through that same Spirit, through Scripture, and through the faithful ministrations of the Apostles and their successors, prunes us and makes us branches that will bear much fruit. Amen.

Crow Sermon for 4th Epiphany 2016

Sermon preached at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in Eugene, Oregon, 30 and 31 January 2016. By Loren Crow.

Scripture Readings: Jer 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; 1 Cor 13:1-13; and Luke 4:21-30

O LORD, open thou my lips and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise. In the name of God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — Amen.

You might think you know someone, but you don’t. No matter who you are, and no matter who she is, you perceive at best only a dim reflection her. Love her anyway. But be ready for her to surprise you, and to disappoint you, and to challenge your assumptions about who she is. She is herself, and who she really is, is a mystery to everyone but God. Just love her.

We’ve just heard two stories, one about Jesus and one about the prophet Jeremiah. And we’ve heard a very famous passage from St. Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth (I don’t care whether you call it First Corinthians or One Corinthians, as long as you read it!), the so-called “love chapter.”

Our gospel reading begins with Jesus telling a group of people that a piece of Scripture has been fulfilled. The back story is that Jesus has been preaching and doing miracles in the Galilee region of northern Israel and is becoming famous. He returns to his home town of Nazareth, goes to synagogue (“as was his custom”) and reads the passage “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor….” Today, he says that Scripture has been fulfilled.

We’re told that everyone was impressed with his eloquence, and doubly so because they recognized him as a local boy, the son of Joseph whom they knew. But for no apparent reason Jesus launches immediately into a pronouncement of judgment on the town, telling them that prophets are never accepted in their own homeland, and citing two examples from sacred Scripture of prophets —Elijah and Elisha — who saved foreigners rather than Israelites. Jesus had to realize that telling these two stories to his parents’ friends, who after all were just trying to be supportive of this local boy who spoke so well, would be sure to rattle some cages. It does even more than that! They mob him and are going to throw him off a cliff. But Luke concludes the story, abruptly, with “But passing through the midst of them he went away.”

These people had a script in their heads for who Jesus was supposed to be. They recognized Jesus, Joseph’s son, and they were willing to be supportive as long as he continued in the role they had in their mind for him. But He refused to play along. In the end, their inability to recognize the real Jesus, as opposed to the Jesus of their mental image, allows him to walk right through the middle of the crowd with no one the wiser. They were open to the Jesus they thought they knew, but could not accept the Jesus who actually was, and so they missed out on his miraculous presence.

No matter who you are, I’m willing to bet there’s someone in your life who doesn’t quite fit into the role you envision for him. Learn from the people of Nazareth: when the person you think you know turns out to be different from what you expect, who doesn’t fit into the script you’ve got running in your head about him, don’t throw him off a cliff. Just love him.

Now, on to Jeremiah. We’re not told when in Jeremiah’s life this event occurs, but it’s at the beginning of his book so most of us presume that it’s at the beginning of his ministry. It tells the story of Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet. Since before his birth, says God, he has been known by God, sanctified by God, and appointed by God as a prophet — and particularly as a prophet to the “nations” or “gentiles,” which is to say, to people other than Israel. Naturally enough, Jeremiah objects: “Ah, Lord GOD, I wish I could — honestly I do — but really, I’m not a very good speaker and I’m way too young!” (In my head, he sounds a lot like Woodie Allen.) What I notice here is that Jeremiah’s self-image is different from God’s image of him, and we have to assume that God’s assessment is the correct one. As it turns out, reading the rest of the book, we find Jeremiah to be an eloquent poet and an influential commentator on the politics of his day. How often, I wonder, do we have a self-interpretation that threatens to inhibit us from doing what God wants us to do? How often do we hate ourselves because the selves we are, are at variance with the selves we envision? I don’t know if you feel this way or not, but I’m largely a mystery to myself on so many levels. If you sometimes don’t meet your own expectations, or if like Jeremiah you suffer from a tendency to under-rate your abilities, relax. Love yourself anyway.

That’s what First Corinthians chapter 13 is about. The whole letter addresses a church that was filled with power struggles and sinful people, with charismatic tongues-speakers and prophets, with rich merchants and poor beggars. Corinth was a very cosmopolitan and commercial city, lying on the isthmus between the Greek mainland and the Peloponnesian Peninsula, midway between Athens and Sparta. It lay on a major shipping crossroads between Italy and the East. The Church in Corinth was about as diverse as you could imagine.

That diversity was tearing the Church apart; Paul argued, conversely, that its diversity was its great strength. Their view of themselves was that of a church divided, but that view was misleading. It was like viewing oneself in a mirror, dimly. But in this letter Paul begins to formulate his metaphor of the Church as the “Body of Christ” where all the body parts need one another, and need one another precisely because of their differentness. What good would a hand be if it were shaped like an eyeball? A head without feet wouldn’t be able to accomplish much. The body isn’t a body unless it’s composed of parts that are different from one another and equally necessary.

The problem is that it can be terribly difficult to see that unity, maybe even impossible. We have these scripts running in our minds about the importance of this or that ministry, and it’s not that we’re wrong, but we are short-sighted. We see only part of the picture. God has given us in our diversity to one another, so we have to assume that the diversity is a good. This is something we should constantly bear in mind as we struggle to make sense, for example, of the struggles within the Anglican Communion: We NEED them and they NEED us. Our vision is limited, and none of us is the head of this body (the head is Christ, and He’s the one who understands the whole).

We have to honor our limited vision because it’s what we have and the understanding we have is a precious gift from God, but we also have to realize that we see in a mirror dimly. Others won’t fit into our notions of what they should be. We’re commanded to love them anyway. We may be less important, or more important, than we understand. We have to love ourselves anyway. This isn’t just one of those “Oh wouldn’t it be nice” sorts of things; unless we’re willing to love people despite tensions and failures and differentness we’ll find pretty fast that we can’t live with, well, pretty much anyone except ourselves. And then we’ll find that we can’t live with ourselves either.

But there is a better way, “a more excellent way.” We have to have faith that what we see is false, incomplete, finite, and that God really does see and hold the truth. We have to have hope that the truth is better than we can imagine. And in light of that faith and hope, as we wait for the coming of God’s Kingdom, we have to love. Love, despite the fact that we don’t understand. Love, even when we think we’re right and are disappointed with others. Love may not make the world make sense, it may not solve all our problems, it may not even make you happier. Love anyway.

Amen.