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.

Law and Grace -- Sermon for 12 June 2016

I preached this sermon on the 12th of June, 2016, at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon.

UPDATE: An audio recording is available at http://www.saint-marys.org/sermons/

Scripture Readings:
1 Kings 21:1-10, (11-14), 15-21a
Psalm 5:1-8
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3

Back when I was teaching, the end of the school year always brought to a head the dilemma that I in fact faced throughout the year, which can be thought of as the tension between law and grace. I always put a lot of thought into my syllabus and spelled out clearly at the beginning of the semester what the rules and grading standards were going to be, and I still do believe that students learn important things by the rules we set and the ways that we enforce those rules. But invariably circumstances would raise the possibility that I might be able to teach some really important lesson by applying those rules and standards with some flexibility, tempering justice with mercy. So I could teach by means of “the law” that I laid down, and I could teach by instances of mercy in applying it. The main thing was that I wanted students to learn, and so I had to make judgments about how best to let that happen.

The danger in doing that, of course, is that students might come to disregard the rules and standards: to think, so to speak, only in terms of grace and not of law. In parenting it’s the same dilemma. How do we convey to our children the message that they are beloved by us, and forgiven for their misbehaviors, without implying that they have license to continue misbehaving? A similar dilemma also exists between married partners and between nations and citizens. Any time there’s a covenantal relationship between people, a relation of promises and obligations and allegiance, we’ll find that it’s important to spell out what those expectations are.

It’s no surprise, then, that God the Teacher, God the parent, is both a lawgiver and a merciful judge. The reason those two can both be present in God is the same reason they can both be present in us: God as lawgiver isn’t some punitive sadist who delights to send people to hell, but a teacher who delights to bring people to heaven. God as gracious and compassionate isn’t a pushover whose people can do no wrong, but a demanding teacher who understands and sympathizes with our errors but insists that we learn.

Because there really is evil in the world, and it really does harm both us and our neighbors. Where we can see that most forcefully, perhaps, is in politics. Consider our Old Testament lesson. There’s a man named Naboth who owns a vineyard. King Ahab of Israel wants to buy the property, which is next to his own, to plant a royal vegetable garden. The setting of the story is the town of Jezreel, which at the time was in the heart of the northern wine country. Jezreel is not very big, around 14 acres (a little bigger than a couple city blocks), most of which was occupied by Ahab’s palace. Actually the palace at Jezreel wasn’t even Ahab’s main one; that lay two arduous days to the south. Jezreel is Ahab’s version of Martha’s Vineyard or Camp David, a nice spot in Israel’s most fertile region to get away from it all. Ahab asks, fairly enough, to buy Naboth’s property at market value. But Naboth turns down the offer because it was his ancestral property.

In Israel, “ancestral property” had religious connotations, because they believed that God had distributed the land to each of the families and that it was important to keep it in family hands. We could hope that the story might end there, with the king reluctantly accepting Naboth’s answer, but it doesn’t. Ahab goes back home to Samaria, where Queen Jezebel is waiting. She is the real villain of this story, and she decides to help Ahab acquire the property he covets. Now there are all kinds of overtones here that have to do with Jezebel’s foreignness and with her idolatry. There’s also the overtone of Ahab’s following in the footsteps of the other northern kings by rebelling against the Davidic kings in Jerusalem. But I want to focus on the abuse of power in the story.

How Jezebel gets Naboth’s vineyard for Ahab is by using the legal system. She hires some professional liars to bear false witness against Naboth, accusing him of blasphemy and sedition.

It isn’t unusual, in our world or in ancient Israel, for people to use the good law, twisting it to do evil deeds. When they do that, it doesn’t mean that the law itself is bad; it means that the law is a tool and what makes it good or evil is what it’s used to do. Indeed it’s worth noticing that Ahab’s covetousness and the professional liars’ bearing false witness violate two of the ten commandments. But it is Naboth who is quickly condemned and stoned to death, and his property is added to the king’s holdings. Evil has triumphed, as usual; end of story. Except that it’s not the end of the story, which goes on to tell how God sent the prophet Elijah to pronounce doom on Ahab and Jezebel and how, eventually, they were punished for their murderous acquisitiveness with death and disgrace.

As we do with so many of the stories of the Old Testament, we might tend to hear in this story a reinforcement of our notion that God is a judgmental, legalistic God who metes out reward and punishment. But when we do that we’re missing the point of telling the story, which is to be taught by it that we must learn to apply the law in ways that preserve people’s livelihood. As concerns Ahab and Jezebel, God condemned them for doing evil to their neighbor. From Naboth’s point of view, God’s judgment came too late to help his case. But from our point of view, as readers, we have this marvelous story in which a corrupt judicial system and a corrupt ruling establishment only appear to be successful, and in which God makes things right in the end. In other words, we’re invited to reflect that evil’s triumph is merely temporary, which is a very hopeful thing.

What would it have been like to be one of those bystanders at Naboth’s trial? Would we recognize that there was more at work than a simple charge of blasphemy and sedition? Would we be critical of the judgment? Or would we join our neighbors and throw stones of condemnation at the innocent man? I suspect that most of us would do as they did given the same circumstances. But we readers realize we’d be wrong to do so. We can see what the townspeople could not: the scheming of Ahab and Jezebel, the innocence of Naboth, the falseness of Naboth’s accusers, and eventually the judgment God pronounces through Elijah. So what do we learn from our readerly perspective?

Maybe we can remind ourselves that law is meant to teach more than it’s meant to punish, and that we also need mercy to really teach effectively. Did you notice in the gospel story how, when the woman who was a notorious sinner came to Jesus, he might have condemned her sinful behavior? He’d have been correct to do so. But instead he graciously accepts that marvelous gift from her hands and uses the opportunity to teach everyone around him — the woman herself, the Pharisee named Simon who was Jesus’ student and host, everyone else who were at table with him, and indeed to teach us who read the story now. We all learn from this incident not that the woman wasn’t really a sinner, but that her sins had been forgiven and she had been saved because of her faith. We learn that there is more to her than her sin, and that more part is worth loving. We learn that sometimes we should be merciful rather than stringent, in order to teach the lesson that needs to be learned.

I think we have to keep working for a just society, to be active politically and using the legal means we have, in order to instruct and be instructed by others about our obligations to one another and to God. But let’s remember that the law, and our standards of all sorts, exist to make people better, and not for their own sake. In this vitriolic political environment, this world in which it’s so easy to demean as stupid or immoral anyone who is different from us; in this judgmental society that is so ready to condemn racists and bigots, cheaters and haters, liars and smugly self-satisfied pontificators, Republicans and Democrats, true believers and those who are disenchanted; let’s remind ourselves of our own sinfulness — our own racism and bigotry, and the whole list of evils we see in everyone else. Let’s remember that all of us fall short of God’s glory, that all of us are being trained by God’s law, and all of us are in need of merciful treatment from God and from one another.