Preached at Wapato Presbyterian Church, Sept 5, 2010

Jeremiah paints a pretty bleak picture. He describes a hot wind blowing toward “my poor people” that is too strong for winnowing or cleansing. At the Campbell Farm we used to grow a little wheat, and we’d have the kids thresh the wheat and we’d use an electric fan to separate the wheat from the chaff. Carman liked to talk about it as the spiritual process we go through in our relationship with God. We do like to imagine suffering and trials as tests, but this wind that is blowing toward the people of God now in this scripture is too much. A gale force wind, not the gentle breeze of a fan. It is too much for the process of separating the wheat from the chaff, too much for any kind of purification.

How else can we explain it? Is God just angry? The prophet calls the people foolish, stupid children, with no understanding, skilled in doing evil, and it seems like no one knows how to do good. And definitely I know I have felt that way at times. Failure is a word I have used to describe myself more than once; I don’t need an angry God to beat me up. I do that to myself enough. When the winds of suffering blow too hard, when life is just too much for us to bear, we are not always at our best. We doubt, we are afraid, we seek to protect ourselves, we get defensive and sometimes we take it out on each other. Crisis sometimes brings out the worst in us, and we do act foolish. And even if we are trying to be faithful, the world sometimes is just too overwhelming, the problems we face seem too insurmountable and we have simply no idea what to do. And this, this scene that Jeremiah is describing seems like certain death. He describes the earth laid waste and void, no lights in the heavens, the mountains are quaking, hills move to and fro, the birds have fled, the fruitful land a desert, cities in ruin. The whole land is desolate. God forsaken.

But listen. God continues to speak to us even in this moment. He says, “I will not make a full end.” Though the earth shall mourn, the heavens grow black; God will not make a full end. Life comes from death, even this most horrible vision of a God forsaken earth - that is not the last word.

The psalmist tells us, “What is it that foolish people say? They say there is no God.” The psalmist is bitter in his lament at the foolishness of his people. He is in the same dark place about to give into hopelessness that Jeremiah was in. The place that we often go to in our own depression. It looks like all around him is darkness. Is everyone faithless? Is there no one who does good? Evil doers, they eat up my people like bread, the want to torture and confound the afflicted. The Psalmist sees the suffering all around him, the affliction of his people at the hand of their oppressors, and he is overwhelmed. And he prays for deliverance, “Oh that Israel’s deliverance would come out of Zion! When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel will be glad!”

Listen, listen. If there is but one who would be wise and seek after God, hear the prayer of the psalmist. Catch a glimpse of the hope against hope in that prayer. There will be deliverance.

Paul, in Timothy, knows that Jesus Christ is his strength. He does not boast about his position as a Pharisee or a Roman Citizen. He does not mention that he was an educated man of some position and power in his society. No, Paul talks about himself as the blasphemer, the persecutor, a man of violence, the least of the apostles, the foremost of sinners. He talks only about the mercy he received from Jesus Christ.

Paul says that Jesus displayed the utmost patience with him making him an example to those who would come to believe in Christ. Perhaps Paul is a little hard on himself, but it is all about giving glory to God and thanks for God’s endless patience. That is such a good thing. The God of patience works with us silly, stupid folks, who don’t know how to do stuff, who don’t know how to solve the myriad of problems we face, who are confused and bewildered much of the time. Many of us buy the line repeated by so many who seek to keep us down and in our place that we are unworthy. Or on the other hand we buy the line that others tell some of us, all about how our education or wealth or whatever credentials we possess, or the position we hold actually amount to something.

But all of us simply need to learn, over such a long time, a life time really, whether we are the lowest of the low or the most lofty, we need to learn that ultimately it is not about us at all, it is about God. It is about the fact that we are only and always just Beloved Children of God. GOD LOVES YOU! And yet this is sometimes the hardest thing to hear of all!

But listen, listen now. Even if you have been excluded from community because of who you are, what you might have done, or what others imagine you might have done. Even if others have looked down on you, closed the door on you, treated you like you were nothing. Or maybe you have been the one doing the looking down on, closing the door on others. Maybe you have been the one clinging to your pride, imagining that you can Lord it over others. You hide your insecurity and live in denial about your own need of God. Listen again and hear all you will ever need to hear. GOD LOVES YOU. Hear the words of Jesus from the cross who says, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!” All of us simply need to hear the words of Christ! We are forgiven, precisely because we don’t have a clue what to do. It does not matter, none of it matter, however you have screwed up, whatever you don’t know how to do. God says, “I LOVE YOU!”

It is this kind of welcoming love that Jesus demonstrated. I know you are all facing uncertainty about the future of the church. You are overwhelmed about how to meet the needs of the community, how to keep alive the presence of the gospel here in Wapato. It may not be the end of the world as we know it, like the description in Jeremiah, but there is fear of death here as well, and grief over loss like the lament of the Psalmist.

None of you have all the answers and yet you are here. You are listening and you are being faithful. In fact I think you are doing just the right thing! Jesus took the criticism from the powers that be, the Pharisees of his day, who stood on the side lines and complained, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them!” This is in fact the central action of Jesus, a radical hospitality, that welcomes all into the loving arms of God, and that, that is what you are all are doing here at Wapato Community Presbyterian Church.

Just as the shepherd goes off in search of the lost sheep, or the woman in search of her lost coin, you have gone out and sought the lost among our community and invited them in. And not just sinners, but what is sometimes even more difficult, people who are different from one another, even a little scary and you are beginning to find a way to form community together. You are now a community of people who were lost and God has found you! And you have found each other. I spoke the other night to one of the newest members of your community, an ex-gang member who told me how God had brought him back from the brink of death, and how now this community has offered his community a place to worship, a chance to celebrate new life. He told me about how, right here in this room, rival gang members were singing and praising the same God side by side.

Listen brothers and sisters! These are the sounds and sights of new life emerging in this place! I know the future is uncertain here to say the least, but listen, listen to the sounds of new life all around you.

There are Pharisees and Scribes who stand ready on the side lines, ready to criticize what you are doing. There is a conventional wisdom that says forget about the lost sheep or the missing coin. Cut your losses, close the building, dissolve the church and save what money you do have. You hear voices telling you, you don’t have what it takes to really do ministry here in this community! And some of you have doubts and fears as well. You are tempted to fight with one another over the vision of the church and the direction it seems to be heading. Some of you may be a little uncertain if the welcome you felt will really last. While some of you might be a little scared maybe of some of the new people you see filling the pews around you. Others of you grieve the loss of a past that is really lost forever and you cannot get it back. You see the inevitable writing on the wall, the lack of funds, all the old friends who have died or moved away, or who have become those folks who stand on the side lines.

There are structures and systems that are set in place that are really set against you, racist and unjust systems, those principalities and powers that the bible talks about that we are called to resist. We really barely understand these powers but they are there and they are weighted against us. These systems turn well meaning people in folks who have a hard time figuring out how to support you, and in fact will work actively against you, for what you are doing is in fact subversive! By the simple act of hospitality to a stranger, to those different from you, and to the outcasts, and sinners, you are creating an alternative community, a new way of being in the world, a vision of the Kingdom of God that finds unity in diversity! In which all are welcome in the loving embrace of God.

You are following Jesus. Praise the Lord! And I want you to know they kill people for that kind of stuff! And worse than actually intentionally trying to kill you, the powers that be quite unintentionally in their desire to control things kill stuff, by the ineptitude, and negligence and just plain stupidity of people in power, just like all of us fools who don’t know what to do. We can squash a good thing.

Today I want to call you to claim the promise of Jesus Christ. There are signs of new life among you. You are an incredible sign of new life. And I encourage you to continue on this journey to listen to Jesus.

We all have a choice. We can be driven by fear, fear of the future, of economics, of all the pain and struggle that goes on around us, we can be afraid of those who are different from us, we can be afraid of the voices of those who stand on the edge and criticize and comment. We can be afraid all we want. OR we can claim the power of Christ within in, we can claim the hope that, no matter what, God says, “I will not make a full end, I will deliver my people and restore their fortunes.” It won’t ever be like it was. Restoration does not mean turn back the clock and it all goes back to the way it was. NO what God is about is transformation, new life, new wine in new wine skins, new ways of doing things, new forms of community, a new and emerging vision for a new life that comes out of the ashes of death and dying. We believe in resurrection around here! Remember how Paul was transformed. Each and everyone one of you has a story of personal transformation. Remember that story! Look inside yourselves and see where God has been at work in your life. You each have known the new life that comes from death. So too this community will be transformed as well.

I want to tell you also that you are not alone. We have formed an Ecumenical Shared Ministry group that has been meeting over the last year to share the similar stories of small congregations and mission partners throughout the Reservation and surrounding communities. My small little Episcopal congregation with about 10 members has been involved, the Methodist, Lutherans, and Disciples, have all been involved. David Norwood, Marlyn, Valeta, and Carman at the Campbell Farm have come to the meetings. We are getting to know one another, building those relationships and finding ways we can support one another. I want you to know that all of us look to the community that is unfolding here at Wapato Presbyterian Church as a model we all want to aspire to! You need to know that there are fellow Christians around you who recognize the work of God among you, and want to walk along side of you and support you. We are all praying for you.

I have no idea how it will all turn out, but I do believe that something new is emerging. There is a new wind blowing. And this time it is the powerful wind of the Spirit of the Living God, moving among us in a new way.

Listen . . . Listen . . . Listen for it. Can you hear it?

AMEN.

A Homily for Julie

I came across a series of emails the other day between Julie and my wife, Sheri written back in 2007. Sheri died a few months after these emails and the two of them were swapping stories of their various struggles and cancer treatments. In response to one of these descriptions by Julie, Sheri said, “It sounds like it’s been a horrible few months.” To which Julie responded with the following:

“Oh no, it has not been horrible! There is a humbling, faith-building love to this adventure I'm on, and a certainty (always with me) that no matter what, I am fully in God's hands. What a release that is!”

In one of the last conversations I had with Julie, just after she entered hospice she spoke about the same confidence she had in God who would soon welcome her home. But what I was most struck with was the way she described herself. Said she, “I can already sense myself in transition, moving into a dream state.”

Julie had an ability to see the world as it really is. She peeked into what lies behind or beyond, or what exists in and through all things. This glimpse is something we get in the thin times and places, like at the moment of death, when the lines between time and eternity are blurred and something else appears to us as if in a dream, breaking through. But I think that all of Julie’s life was lived in this holy place of vision, as a poet, as a woman of faith, as someone who loved deeply. She blessed us all with her particular vision. She definitely gifted me with her sight.

For me it was her ability to see things in potential as though they had already happened here and now.

Years ago when I worked at the Stockton Emergency Food Bank, Julie nominated me for the Land Utilization Alliance award for Urban Affairs. I had just begun my work at the Food Bank, and it seemed to me that I had done nothing really compared to many others in the community who had worked for years. But she was adamant that I deserved it and lobbied for me to get the award. All I could say then was “You haven’t seen anything yet!” But she saw something in me that I could not see myself. For Julie my potential was a present reality.

And now, over the last year I have been emailing her my sermons. I am a postulant for ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. It has been a long journey for me having graduated from seminary over 20 years ago, and there are still a couple of years left in the process. But I preach once a month now in my congregation back in Washington and Julie already began calling herself a member of my far flung congregation. I am deeply honored by her request to have me be a part of this service, but once again I feel like I am standing here because of Julie’s ability to see in me what I do not yet necessarily see in myself. I am certainly potentially a priest, but I am already Julie’s pastor. This is the gift she has given me.

It is a gift of hope and faith in new life, resurrection, not as something far off or distant in the future, but a current reality. Julie saw us as we truly are, in all the fullness of the glory of the gifts God has given us. That is a pretty amazing gift. We might think that she was dreaming . . . but that is exactly what she was doing. Julie existed in her suffering in that thin space between life and death for some time, the liminal space between waking and sleeping when you aren’t sure whether you are dreaming or not. It is a sacred space in which we encounter the holy. And she saw into her suffering the potential for life. This life of hers is a sign for all of us, of a way to be in the world, and Julie wrote poetry about it for all us to catch a glimpse of the dream she saw.

In one of her poems, All Heal A Circus At the Beach, she says, “I came today resolved to do nothing, but the sun has become a circus mirror” and she contrasts all the activity and playfulness of all the people on the beach with her own sick, dry self covered in layers to protect herself. She writes,

But I am not sick, certainly not at this moment of this day:
As the stark October sun shifts on my chilled fall bones,
I sense this is like no other month’s sun -
Its warmth like memories of so many loved ones’ smiles.

In one noisy imprecise moment I know
I will see those smiles again, know it
with the same certainty that within each exposed heart exists
a collection of dried tears for each life lived with others.

In more words written to my wife, Julie speaks about her own sense of “being healed (whether it was for a minute, a day, or a long time).” And she was healed. In later emails besides work, she spoke of playing golf, taking a cruise, editing poetry journals. But whether in sickness or health, in all her strength and weakness, whether her blood count was up or down, I believe she was able to see the potential of all life realized. She knew she was in God’s hands. “What a release that was!”

Julie comforted my wife in her last days with these words. “You too Sheri,” you are in God’s hands as well,” she said, “You are also one who has helped to build my faith, so what an irony, or something like that.” The irony that Julie sensed was that she was being priest to this pastor, my wife, at that moment. She may not have thought of herself as priest, anymore than I do, anymore than any of us do at times. But she was a priest, as much as I am, as much as all of us are. Though it may seem ironical, it is the truth. We are all priests to one another, we stand in the in between space accompanying one another on the journey.

Bill Countryman, one of my seminary professors wrote a book called Living on the Border of the Holy, Renewing the Priesthood of all, in which he says that what it means to be a human being is to be a priest. All the other kinds of priesthoods are merely reflections of this underlying reality of what it means to be human. This is the kind of vision that Julie had. She stood in the place of transition, on the border, and saw the holy in all things, and she shared that with all of us. She looked into all of our lives and saw the potential there realized, all our hopes and dreams come true, in her ability to see things as they really are.

Laura and Katie, all of the potential of your lives as well, your mother really has already seen. It is your smiles, and all those she has loved, that she has already seen again, just as she saw her Creator welcoming her home in that last dream of hers. You may imagine all the places and times of your life that your mother will not be there for as you grow up, but just as I know she saw my potential, she has already seen yours. She has already been with you where you will go and has seen all that you are and will be. She has already been there with you in all of your lives.

Julie has gone before us. As certainly as Christ has gone before us, Christ, who is our great high priest, whom we all represent in our lives. Julie has caught a glimpse of the whole, the unity of all things, the life that comes from death, in a dream, in the transition time, on the border land. That is a really good thing. She is a witness for all of us. And that life is open to all of us, as we claim our own priesthood, as we see the world the way she saw the world, in all its fullness, and follow her there. We will say with her, “What a release that is!” Praise be to God. AMEN.

Sermon July 18, 2010

The passage from Amos begins with the image of a Basket of Summer Fruit. A timely image for us in the Yakima Valley. Cherries, peaches, apricots, plums, grapes, melons. A vision of the abundance of God’s creation.

It could have been a vision of all sharing in the blessing of creation, enjoying together its abundance, and the abundant grace of God, but no instead –

The passage quickly turns to condemnation “The end has come!” Literally a pun in the original Hebrew: “the time is ripe.” What looked like a sign of harvest festival, ripened fruit, is really a portent of doom to come. What unfolds is a grizzly vision of a future without God, a time of mourning and death when songs of the temple become wailing, dead bodies pile up and are cast out everywhere. The whole land trembles and rises and sink again, darkness covers the land. There will be famine, but not a famine of bread, but of hearing the word of God. A time when the people will be utterly cut off from God, left to wander aimlessly without this relationship to the ground of their being that roots them and gives their life meaning and purpose.

Why is God so angry?

“You trample on the needy, bring ruin to the poor of the land.” You are impatient with holy days, anxious to can get back to business and cheat the poor with false balances, and poor quality product, selling the sweepings of the wheat. It is this injustice, this corruption that is the reason for God’s anger and the reason for the dire prophecy of what is to come.

Sometimes we live in denial, we say, boy things were really bad in Amos’ day, and we thank God that we live in a time and place where people are more free and equal, in a society more just. Or we compare our life here in our own country with places around the world and we thank God that we are not like those other people. Or we blame some evil individuals or whole classes of people rather than seeing the systemic injustice that runs through and through the way things are set up. We live in denial, just like the people of Israel did in Amos’ day.

Amos plays a rhetorical trick on the people he is prophesying against. He begins in Chapter one by condemning everyone else; all of Israel’s neighboring nations. He condemns Damascus, and Gaza, Tyre and Edom, Ammon, Moab. And he sets the people up, works them up into a fervor of self-righteousness against the rest of the world around them. I can imagine his listeners thinking, he must be about to speak of how great Israel is compared to all the rest of those nations. But instead he condemns Judah as well. Ok, that was close. This is at the time of the divided Kingdom, Judah to the south, Israel to the north, and he is prophesying in Israel not in Judah. So, ok, yes we can condemn them as well! But we are still going to come out ok! Compared to all these others we are the chosen people, the city on the hill, the hope of world. Then Amos goes in for the kill.

This is what the LORD says:
"For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not turn back.
They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.

Then he launches into a relentless critique of the injustice, corruption and depravity of Israel and pronounces judgment from God that ends finally in the destruction of Israel. The last 5 verses of the book of Amos, as if an afterthought and in a completely different tone and style, speak of the restoration of Israel. Some scholars think that these five verses were added on later by another editor who just could let it end that way, could not leave the book where Amos left it in such utter hopelessness, unrelenting condemnation, the finality of judgment.

This sort of editing happens again and again in the bible and sets up a dialogue and debate in the bible itself about the ultimate fate of Israel. How shall we deal with this angry God? Will God completely forsake Israel? Will he listen to their repentance and turn to them once again? Is God’s promise to them unshakeable finally? Will he save all the people or just a remnant?

This is the same debate we have about humanity in general. Is there universal salvation? Will God finally turn his back completely on his creation? Will he only save a remnant, some chosen few, only the good people, or just the poor, while the rich go to hell, or is it true that not one of his sheep will be lost? Even in the face of the kind of anger at injustice that God exhibits in Amos, are we still finally, loved by God, saved by grace which is a gift for all of humanity? What is God’s ultimate intention for us? All of us need some sign that God still loves us.

I must say that I am one that would have edited Amos as well. I don’t like homogenizing scripture. We sometimes attempt to tame it by playing down some of its more dangerous, ugly and uncomfortable passages. But what I have come to understand is that the Bible is a dialogue. To faithfully read scripture you have to become a part of the conversation yourself.

For my part I want to add to the conversation the dialogue that occurs in the Color Purple. It’s a story of the journey of an oppressed people and the liberation of abused women. Two characters, Shug and Celie, have this wonderful conversation walking through a field of flowers, talking about God. Shug comes to a new sense of God in her journey of liberation. God just wants to love and be loved, she says, and the whole world is set up as this love relationship. All of us, people, flowers and trees just want to be loved, to be noticed, Shug says. It’s all about getting noticed, admired, recognized for who we are as beloved children of God. God wants to “share a good thing,” always giving back and loving us by creating more and more beauty.

Shug says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple

in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Celie asks, “What does God do when it pissed?” and Shug replies, “It just make something else!”

This is the image of the Creator God of Love who constantly holds in its hands the least of these, the most insignificant and simply notices and admires and loves, and cherishes every living thing. When we don’t, in return, notice and care for and cherish others and ourselves the way God does, God just makes more stuff and puts more beautiful people and things in our way for us to encounter until we do begin to notice and cherish and love all of God’s people and all of God’s creation, until we love ourselves and until we love God who is in all things.

With this vision of creation we are back to the vision in the beginning of the Amos passage of the Basket of Summer Fruit. No longer is it a vision of doom, but once again a vision of the hope to which we are called. Remember the prophecy in Amos is not a famine of bread or thirst for water, but of hearing the word of God. There is still all around us the continual image of the blessing of God, of the abundance of creation, the bounty of the harvest, a vision in which all can share in the blessing of creation. God’s creation is a constant reminder of abundance, grace and blessing. The reality is that there is enough for everyone if we only discover how to share in love with all - If we could only listen to God calling us into this way of being in the world.

One of my favorite passages from Annie Dillard, a naturalist writer, is her description of an ant hill. God does not just create one ant or a few hundred or even a few thousand. They just keep pouring out of the ant hill, in this incredible fecundity of creation. Fecundity is about fruitfulness, fertility, reproduction, the capacity for abundant production. This is the earth that God has given us.

And yet we often do not live out of this vision of abundance. We often live instead in a mentality of scarcity.

I attended a retreat once called the Ministry of Money a program of the Church of the Savior in Washington DC. It was a program that primarily took incredibly wealthy people on reverse pilgrimages to places like Calcutta with the intention of liberating them from their wealth. What I discovered first hand spending a week in retreat with a few very wealthy folks and listening to their confessions was how trapped they felt in their wealth, how fearful they were that they did not have enough, how concerned they were for their own security and safety.

On the other hand, I met a woman recently whose non-profit had just been awarded $20 million over the next 10 years from the California Foundation to design and implement a comprehensive poverty reduction plan. They have gathered together stakeholders from across her county, they are discovering the diversity of assets already in their community, how they can more effectively work together and they are beginning to address a broad range of issues across all sectors of the community. It is amazing what we can do when we stop fighting with each other, being afraid of one another, exploiting one another and begin to work together for the common good.

But it does not begin with doing. Rather it begins with listening.

Paul says, I became a servant of God to make the word of God fully known. There is a mystery that has been hidden through the ages but now it has been revealed to you. As the Colossians passage today reminds us Jesus Christ is the image of God, the first born of all creation. He is before all things and all things hold together in him. Christ is a universal vision of all the incredible diversity of creation united as one in God. This universal vision is embodied in the church. We are the body of Christ. Our role is to be a living sign of this universal vision of all things reconciled to God. We are a sign of all things reconciled in the abundant grace of God.

Jesus Christ is the image of the Basket of Summer Fruit, an image of abundance in which all can share in the blessing of God’s creation. There is enough for everyone. Everyone, rich and poor, young and old, people of all colors and backgrounds, the whole wide world can have a place at this table.

Listen. Hear yourselves become a part of the dialogue around the dinner table. Listen to Martha and Mary talking to Jesus and what Jesus says, “Mary has chosen the better part.” Martha, Martha, you are distracted by many things: not enough time, not enough help, not enough of whatever you think you need to get the job done. You are distracted, just like the Israelites in Amos’ prophecy who where in a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. They wondered from sea to sea, north to south, they ran to and fro seeking but never finding. They were completely lost in aimless activity without the word of God to guide them.

It is not until you sit down at the feast that has been prepared for you and encounter the one who is both the meal and the host that you will know yourselves once again to be beloved children of God, and find yourself once again among family. Only when you sit at the feet of the one who reconciles all things to himself, and allow his words and his abundant life to transform you, wash over you – only then will know. You will never be able to think of anyone as a stranger or an enemy again. You will never again be able to let the least of your brothers and sisters go unnoticed. You will never again be able to tolerate abuse or injustice in any form, to anyone, and you will seek always and everywhere to include everyone at the table of blessing. You will do this because this is who you are, because you listened to, you fed on, you have been filled with, the Word of God.

Pentecost 2010

Today we officially welcome Jennifer into the family of Jesus Christ. Today you are making a new commitment to follow Christ, and we are making a commitment also to support you in your journey. We also get a chance to renew our own baptismal vows. God is also, coming to you now in a new way, making a commitment to you as well, sealing the deal as it were, filling you with the Holy Spirit, just like on that first day of Pentecost, the birth of the Christian community. It is like a marriage, a three way covenant between you and God and us. Like in a marriage you are joining this new family with all kinds of crazy in-laws and relatives that come along as part of the package when you are in relationship to God.


This new community you are joining is by no means perfect. We have not arrived at our destination. But we seek to be signs of a new community of radical hospitality and welcome and inclusion. We are ambassadors of reconciliation and we are on a journey together all of us, coming to understand day by day as we live out our lives, the implications of the Good News that Jesus Christ reconciles all things to himself. In this new community we are able to be together across incredible barriers, in the early church it was the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles that was brought down as these communities found a new way to be together and in our own times the implication of the gospel about who is included continues to lead us forward into new understandings and new adventures.

This vision of a new inclusive community, finding unity in diversity, is contrasted with the story from our reading in Genesis of the city of Babel. In this story we have a mono-culture society in which everyone is the same and everyone speaks the same language. This story functions as etiology, a story meant to explain why something is the way it is. In this case why there are so many different kinds of people, and it imagines a time when this was not true, when everyone was the same and tells how that changed.

I imagine Babel as a fortified, walled city based on fear and anxiety of things that are different, in which sameness is enforced on everyone inside and differences outside are kept out by their walls. The only differences tolerated would be those necessary to do the different functions needed to build the city. There would be a dominant class that lords it over everyone else to enforce sameness. They build towers, sky scrapers that dominate the landscape as symbols of their power they want to exert on the world. Babel is in the east from Israel’s perspective, in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. The study of anthropology tells us that this actually is the kind of thing that happened when some people settled down after thousands of years of a nomadic life of hunting and gathering, and turned to agriculture. They built these big cities to support their growing stable populations, they established artificial boundaries, cities and states that divided up the unity of God’s creation and the family of God, and they amassed power and wealth, sought to spread their influence and conquer others, repeating what we have always done as “civilized” people, try to take over the world.

But this ancient story tells us that God purposely confuses this sort of reality. It is God who creates diversity, scatters the people and confuses their tongues so that no one understands each other anymore. According to this story it is God who constantly works against our tendency toward dominance and exclusion by constantly creating an abundance of diversity both biological and cultural. Some of us think of this as a curse and the story certainly reads like it is a curse, but I think we need to claim this diversity as God’s will, and see this curse as a blessing in disguise. Rather than being threatened by diversity, to be faithful to God we must celebrate it and thank God for it.

This interpretation is only confirmed by the story of the First Pentecost in the Book of Acts. Pentecost is actually built on the Jewish agricultural festival called the Feast of Weeks that gets a whole new meaning with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Here we have a sign of a new community in which all the diversity of the world is gathered from every language and nation. The miracle is not that everyone speaks the same language, nor suddenly has the same culture, nor thinks exactly the same way. No, the miracle is that when the early church leaders speak, nor the gathered crowd hears the gospel in their own language. It is a glimpse of a time when finally the whole world, all of God’s people, across the diversity of languages and cultures and places can hear and understand one another as if for the first time. It is a vision of unity in diversity.

Through this Holy Spirit we have been born anew into a different kind of community that exists on the edge of the way the world is set up now. We are called to be pioneers, to go back into the wilderness, to go back even further and be hunters and gathers, listening to the spirit of the land once again in all its wild diversity, back when the world was one, before the dividing walls of our kind of civilization tore us apart. We are called to live into the future, to live our lives searching always to be a sign of that new community, the Kingdom of God, in which all are including in the blessing of God’s creation.

Living into this kind of new vision of community means that you must take risks and you will make mistakes and you will discover all the time your own limitations and your need to continually rely on the Holy Spirit to guide you. For this kind of unity is only achieved through the Spirit.

I have plenty of stories of my own shortcomings along this line. Of the many pitfalls I have fallen into and land mines I have stepped on in my cross cultural relationships. Of the confusion and ambiguity that seems a curse. Hilary’s mom and I many years ago were buying our first car together.

The Filipino salesman was so thankful for our pending purchase that he invited us to his modest apartment home where his wife prepared us a wonderful meal. The first time I had lumpia. However, Ann and I realized that we really could not afford the car and backed out of the deal the next day. We had unknowingly entered into a reciprocity relationship and dishonored it thoroughly and both of us still carry this memory with some shame to this day.

Another time I was working at a family shelter in Stockton and greeted an Hispanic couple who had been working in the fields all day. They were covered from head to toe in the fine peat of the San Joaquin valley and I jokingly said that it looks like they worked hard today. They were both so offended and shamed by my comments that they immediately left the shelter to live I assume in their car.

Another time here on the reservation we were working with NW Area Foundation who promised all of us 10 million dollars if we as a community could come up with a vision to end poverty! Hispanic, Native, African and European American from Sunnyside to Selah came together to try to try to create a common vision. It was doomed from the beginning. In one small group, I made some comment about being on a vision quest together and immediately a tribal member stood up and lambasted me for co-opting the term vision quest. He said his vision was, “That we all get back on the boat and go home.”

This work of reconciliation, stepping across boundaries, into the confusion of all the diversity around us is fraught with peril and risk and yet we must take the risk and learn from our mistakes to be in community with our brothers and sisters. And always we must pray that the Spirit of reconciliation and unity fill us and empower us for this work.

And when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, just like the early disciples on that first Pentecost, people will think you are drunk, or “on something” or crazy or worse for imagining that you can go against the way the world is set up. Those who have an investment in the status quo will be threatened by your insanity, others who see in it the hope of their own liberation will count it as a blessing, but nevertheless everyone might still think you are crazy.

I learned this weekend at Diocesan Council a little bit about the history of the Diocese of Spokane of which we are a part. It started in a saloon in Walla Walla. How’s that for having the reputation of being drunkards. The first Bishop of the Diocese, Bishop Wells was accused of being crazy for wanting to build a cathedral, and the architect that he hired tried to warn people that this guy was a mad man, and yet there is now an incredible cathedral in Spokane.

We spoke about the Spirit of the Diocese that builds upon the wilderness, pioneer spirit. That is informed by the wild diversity of eco systems and landscapes and communities of people that live in Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. We talked about how we can support one another and give permission for folks to continue in that pioneer, entrepreneurial, experimental, crazy Spirit as it plays itself out in all the diverse places of the diocese. Not what you usually think of when you think of Episcopalians: Wild and Crazy. But that is what we are going for!

Jan, a retired priest in the diocese, told me yesterday that her favorite image of what it means to be a Christian filled with the Holy Spirit comes from one of the drawings of the classic illustrated edition of Jane Eyre. It is a picture of Bertha Mason, the crazy first wife of the abusive Mr. Rochester. She is kept locked in the attic and sometimes escapes to rampage through Thornhill Hall, and finally in the end burns the place down.

There are lots of images of the Holy Spirit. There is the burning bush that is not consumed which causes Moses to turn aside from the path he is on to discover a whole new reality and a new direction for his life. There are the tongues of fire in the Acts story of the First Pentecost that creates a whole new community in which people from all across the world finally understand one another. Then there is the fire in the hands of a crazy woman, burning down the unjust abusive structures that have kept her locked up in the attic.

I say claim the crazy woman in the attic as your own image. If people think you are “on something” or “off your rocker”, maybe naïve, or seriously misguided, or just plain incompetent for all the mistakes you make along the way taking risks, entering into uncharted territory, challenging the status quo, standing up against injustice and so on, never mind. But instead rejoice and be glad, proclaim boldly who you are. You are headed across the wilderness to the Promised Land.

Today we all renew our commitment to Jesus Christ, and we celebrate the coming of a new Spirit that creates a new community. I pray that you all will experience this radical welcome of the Spirit of God. I pray that you become a part of this new family beyond all the divisions we set up, in which all are included in the abundant blessing of God’s creation. And as you experience this welcome yourselves, I pray that you will follow Jesus Christ in offering this same welcome to all you meet.

Turn with me in your hymnals to page 463 and I want you to recite with me a poem by WH Auden which is set to music in our hymnal. They may seem like strange words, but let them sink into your being and see if they find their way into words you can call your own. Words you can say to one another and to all you meet along the way. Read with me.

He is the Way.

Follow him into the land of unlikeness; you will see Rare Beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety: you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love him in the world of the Flesh: and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

Creation

Who breaks the bread,
blasting, flinging into creation
the cosmos in all direction,
sending its minute particles
stars spilling upon the void; free
flying, forever landing, to be
trampled on, seeds upon the ground;
ground into ground?

Who, as a cloud bursts,
explodes into consuming flood
the body and the blood,
and fills the whole world
with the world poured out?
We are not other the earth. Shout!
We are broken, poured, spilled,
drowned, necessarily free
in movement suffering
toward creation.

As children pour forth from
red ripped flesh, yellow
purple and white, so
the whole world suffers, oozes,
rushes through whose hand? Whose gut?
We are not other than God. Shout!
We are broken, poured, spilled,
drowned, delivered and delivering,
necessarily free
in movement suffering
toward creation.

Palm Sunday 2010

How quickly the crowd turns. How quickly we move from the triumphal entry to the crucifixion. We telescope into one day in this Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday liturgy a week of events. But really the time from Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and to his death on the cross in the narratives of the gospels is but a week’s time. How quickly things can turn.


Obama signed Health Care Reform Legislation into law this week, what everyone is calling an historical piece of legislation. 600 people wanted to view the signing and he used 22 pens to sign his name so that he had enough to give away to the most important people who helped bring this achievement about. I actually donated some money the other night and will get a T-Shirt that says Heath Reform on it. And I get to co-sign the legislation with him and my name along with thousands of others will be archived somewhere for posterity’s sake. It is a jubilant moment for the President and for many who have waited for this moment for decades.

At many times throughout the year this legislation looked doomed and Obama’s presidency even seemed like a failure, so much was riding on this one achievement. And now how quickly the tables have turned and he is now the one who succeeded in a long line of democratic presidents who have tried and failed. Polls now show a majority of people in favor of the legislation and glad it passed. But the threats from the other side about how short lived this victory will be continue. Efforts are already underway to repeal and replace. Who knows how quickly the voters will turn and what will happen in the November election.

Life is a roller coaster of victories and defeats. On a personal level we move from some major accomplishment one day to a serious blunder the next. We might get praise from many for something we have done really well, and feel good about ourselves for a moment, only to find ourselves criticized the next day for something else we did. Sometimes it is different people who support and undermine us; sometimes it is the same people. One day a friend might be all for you and the next you are in a fight with them. This happened often with my dear wife, and I do it all the time to my son. One day I praise him for his grades and creativity and intelligence, and the next I am yelling at him for being irresponsible about some chore he failed to do.

In the face of this I know I experience some tremendous mood swings. Sometimes one of the hardest things to maintain, in the shifting sands of our personal relationships, is a continuing sense of our identity, our own worth. Who am I? What is at the core of me? What is it that I value, that hold dear? What are my deepest convictions in the face of some much change around me. One of the hardest things is hanging on to a sense of our identity when doing the exact same thing and being the exact same person gets drastically different reactions all the time, praise one minute, criticism the next. This is at the heart of abusive relationships, when the mechanism of control is to keep you guessing, at your very core, about who you are as a human being.

In our corporate life we know all too well the drastic swings in public opinion, often driven by the media. Our perceptions of what is popular, what is “in” and what is “out” constantly change. Politicians live and die by opinion polls. And just like the crowd in this Passion narrative, we have witnessed in our own day mass movements that seem to suddenly rise from nowhere. Individual wills and personal differences give way to a mass mentality that drives whole nations of people to do good or evil. Some are amazing stories of spontaneous democratic revolutions like the students in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989 that were faced down by the military. The Velvet Revolution was the peaceful transition of power, begun also in 1989 by students, which led to the defeat of the Communist Party and the establishment of the Czech Republic. These are two positive examples.

But then there are the horrors of genocide in Rwanda, when suddenly in 1994 a whole people turned against another and at least 800,000 people were killed in a maniacal cry for ethnic cleansing. Sarajevo, once the city of brotherly love and the host of the international community for the Olympics in 1984, only 10 years later was in ruins, devastated and destroyed by civil war and ethnic rivalries. We watched in our own county the swing of public mood through the attacks of 911, to the invasions of other sovereign nations, to the sense of betrayal when no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq. We naïvely entered triumphantly into Iraq and Afghanistan having no idea of the mass reaction we would unleashed against us.

How do we live our lives on an even keel in the midst of this kind of change, one minute on top of the world, and the next failing miserably? How can we know ourselves at all, if we allow the constantly shifting world around us to be the measure of who we are? We live in an ambiguous world at best. It is hard to tell whether things are getting better or worse, whether there really is a loving and good God behind the fleeting moments of joy, amid the pervasive suffering we experience. It seems impossible to really be sure about who we are given the examples of both good and evil that fill our history as a human race.

At the core of this lack of certainty is a deep fear that life is meaningless, and more personally, that our life has no meaning. I know this is a struggle for all of us who have faced death personally or have come in direct contact with the suffering of the world. It is overwhelming. We ask, “Why? How could it be?” in a cry that goes to the depth of our being. As Christ stood there before the crowd, and then on the cross he too wondered if God had forsaken him, he too cried deep and universal cry. He sweated blood in the garden. He too wondered if his life was not a failure, and if all of that had gone before was not in vain, ending, as it was about to, in death.

Trying to protect ourselves from the truth we fear, we hide behind all sorts of defenses. We hang on to prejudices in the face of overwhelming evidence. We create scapegoats and blame others for our suffering. We lash out violently at times to protect ourselves from having to face our worse fears. We recognize this kind of behavior all too well in our personal lives and the course of the history of nations. And Pilot and others waited for Jesus to do the same. Where are your armies Jesus? Where are the masses who will join you to violently overthrow the Romans? Where is your God who will intervene and come and rescue you from the cross? But Jesus says, “My Kingdom is not of this world. My truth is not the truth you fear. I know something else.”

The book of James says this: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.” James also says in this passage to “Consider to pure joy,” when we face trials of many kinds, because perseverance is working in us a mature and complete faith. He explains also in the passage that we might get mixed up about our value, thinking, for example, that if we were poor God somehow had not blessed us, or if we were rich God had somehow shown us more favor. Rather James turns the tables on the rich and powerful saying they will pass away, and he exalts the poor and suffering. He calls on us to see things from God’s perspective. James says, “Don't be deceived, my dear ones. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth that we might be a kind of first fruits of all he created.”

Through Christ we are first fruits of a new creation. God in Christ has revealed to us this truth. It is possible to know that we are beloved children of a loving God. This unchanging truth is at the core of who we are, no matter what happens to us. No matter how the world changes around us, supports us or turns against us. No matter whether things seem to be getting better one day or we are overwhelmed the next by nature’s destruction or the seemingly bottomless evil of people. This gift has been given to us from above, beyond anything else by which we are tempted to measure ourselves. This gift of forgiveness and acceptance and welcome by our God transforms us, reconciles us and brings us a peace beyond understanding. This is the meaning of our lives. It is the hope we have to offer to the world. We are in service to this Good News, and our hope is that all can one day know that they too are beloved children of God, and the world can be transformed by this revelation.

This is the truth that Christ ultimately knew about himself, when he says, “Father, I put myself in your hands,” and this same assurance he offers to us. In our Philippians passage for today, Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Oscar Wilde who wrote the children’s stories, The Selfish Giant and the Happy Prince, tremendous stories all about sacrificial love, famously said, “All art is quite useless.” I really like this phrase. The artist cannot measure the value of his or her work based on the success or fame it will bring. The artist cannot be dependent on the fickle nature of taste and trends and what is and isn’t acceptable at the moment. Art cannot be used for propaganda for some momentary political gain. It cannot even ultimately be measured by the change it may produce in people’s hearts, or the way it will influence the progress of the world. The artist creates from some deeper motivation; more akin to the “pure joy” that James says is to characterize the Christian life as we persevere through it all. From my Presbyterian roots I give you the Westminster Confession’s opening line: “The chief end of humanity is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” When I think of this I think of wildflowers on high mountain tundra, blooming in incredible splendor for whom? For what? I believe there is in them the same that is in us, a simple desire to glorify God, the pure enjoyment of simply being beautiful to God.

We as Christians certainly hope for the redemption of the world, we long for the new creation, for that day when all the good gifts from above will be shared by everyone. We long for the coming of the Kingdom of God when all will know that they are beloved children of God. But on this day - when the jubilant entry of our King of Kings is quickly overthrown and we see the Lord and Savior of all dead upon a cross - on this day, let us find within ourselves that deeper motivation, that gift from above, that gives us assurance, that even in this darkest hour, our lives still have meaning, and we can continue to proclaim, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son . . .”

February 28, 2010

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”


“See your house is left to you.” The version of the Gospel we read today differs from many other versions which add another word at the end of this sentence. “Your house is left to you desolate,” is the most common, but other translations add “abandoned, forsaken, vacant, waste.” “Your house is left it you” is actually the literal Greek which does not have an added modifier. Nothing else is really needed. The implication is clear. Without God, without the one who comes in the name of the Lord, we are left to our own devices, out of the relationship to the one who is the source of our life, alone, bereft, desolate.

The Bible is not shy about criticizing the religious; in fact much of the story of the bible is about the religious failing to recognize the holy, to distinguish the sacred from the profane, sacrament from desecration, and just who it is that is worthy of worship, that is favored by God. The bible is the story of a failure on a fundamental level to understand the difference between being a blessing and a curse. Often it is exactly the religious who imagine themselves blessed and to be a blessing whose house is in fact cursed and desolate. It is exactly religious people who make the proclamation that we all need God, who perform the sacred rites, and hold the keys to the heavenly Kingdom, who throughout history have killed and stoned and rejected the prophets God has sent to show the way. It is exactly religious people who in the name of God have oppressed to poor, and slaughtered the innocents of so many cultures around the world. It is exactly religious people who rather than a loving embrace have brought a sword and used the Gospel as an excuse to expand their own territory, power and dominion.

It is exactly the religious people who will offer up Jesus to be crucified. It is God in Christ who, in this feminine image, like a mother hen longs to gather her people under her wing, but they would not. Now in this Lenten Season as Jesus is on the road to his passion, we are called not to blame some other religious people. We are called to look deeply into our own roots, into the legacy and tradition we have inherited and help to perpetuate. We are called to repent of our own failure to recognize the One who comes in the Name of the Lord, and call him blessed.

The roots of this failure to truly understand blessing and recognize the One, go back a long way. God says to Abraham in today’s lesson, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. . . . To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” That is a lot of territory. It includes a great deal more than what is present day Israel, all the way from the Nile to the Euphrates!” And there is absolutely no thought at all about the people that were already living there! In much of the biblical story, the other inhabitants of the land are just so many obstacles in the way and their worship and culture are vilified and demonized to justify their complete annihilation. In another place God tells Abraham that he will be a blessing to many nations, but practically speaking this promised dominion and the annihilation of whole peoples does not look much like a blessing! At the very beginning of the story of the faithful, the message of blessing gets drowned out by the reality of violent domination. Can this really be what God was calling Abraham to, or is God simply used in this story to justify conquest?

There are certainly others stories, and alternative visions that run throughout the biblical account and into our own Christian heritage told by prophets and saints, but this dominant image of conquest remains a powerful overarching theme. Let’s move ahead in the story to the expansion of European Christian nations in the 15th century around the world and the missionary fervor that came along with this expansion. Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull at this time that justified the acquisition of non-Christian lands and even the extermination of the peoples living in these lands if they did not receive the Gospel. A series of declarations around this time have come to be known together as the Doctrine of Discovery and they draw their metaphorical strength from none other than a comparison to Abraham, the call to be a “blessing” to the nations justifying the forced mass conversions of peoples and cultures in the name of civilizing the pagans or of that didn’t work, their wholesale slaughter.

Just so you do not think this is ancient history the influence of this Doctrine of Discovery can be traced throughout our own legal system and our own history in relationship to the First Peoples of this land. According to the Doctrine land really belongs civilized Christian nations. At the foundation of our legal system is the fact that our land was really taken from the British not the Native Americans. In most of our treaties with the First Peoples of this land they are treated as subordinates lacking true title and equality among nations.

Our own version of Manifest Destiny is directly related to the theology that draws on the Abrahamic story. As Americans we believe that we are called by God to be a city on a hill, we are a blessing to the nations, we have been given this land by God, and we are destined to occupy it from sea to sea and that somehow gives us the right to annihilate everyone that stands in our way. Even the most well meaning Christian missionaries in our history who opposed the slaughter, enslavement and forced evacuation of tribal peoples, saw themselves as bringing civilization to the natives, and in their most charitable and paternalistic nature, they knew what was best for them. They were after all a blessing to them.

In 2006 The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues called for Pope Benedict XVI to revoke the 15th century papal bulls collectively known as the Doctrine of Discovery. The Episcopal Church became the first Christian denomination to repudiate the doctrine at our convention last summer and now a Quaker Indian Committee of Philadelphia, inspired by the Episcopal decision, has also disavowed the doctrine and voiced its support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In their statement they said, the committee “renounces the Doctrine of Discovery, the doctrine at the foundation of the colonization of Indigenous lands, including the lands of Pennsylvania. We find this doctrine to be fundamentally inconsistent with the teaching of Jesus, with our understanding of the inherent rights that individuals and peoples have received from God, and inconsistent with Quaker testimonies of Peace, Equality, and Integrity.” Now our friend David Bell, has written a paper on the subject in his attempt to persuade the Disciples to take a similar stance.

What are we to make of this?

Our current generation judges the action of our predecessors and we imagine now that we understand something our ancestors were not able to see, in their own historical and cultural context. How will we be judged in future generations who look back at what we imagine to be the best of intentions, our best attempts at following Christ, our efforts to be a blessing? How will our efforts to proclaim the gospel, to be in solidarity with the poor, to be good stewards of God’s creation, to be ambassadors of reconciliation, to worship and give thanks to our God – how will these efforts be judged by future generations?

The Apostle Paul says that God is clearly seen in the things that God has made and then he proceeds to judge the surrounding cultures of his time based on his own limited cultural perspective of the way things should be! We see the world through the lens of our own time and culture and there is no way to get around that. We are limited, finite people, we are small and weak vessels into which the universal eternal spirit of God is being poured. Even though Jesus says you cannot pour new wine in old wine skins because they burst, nevertheless that is exactly who we are and what we do all the time. And it is what God does. God always comes incarnate in a particular place and time and we can only know God indirectly through our relation - to creation, yes as Paul says, but not to all of creation, to a particular land and people in the particular time we are now in.

One of the main gifts I think we need to be able to see God is something we used to say at the Campbell Farm. It is part of a list of cross cultural communication skills that we used there. “Tolerate Ambiguity.” Groups often came with a great deal of certainty about who they were and what they had to offer and what they were going to do, and we thought it a good week if they left with more questions than answers as they entered briefly into relationship with the people who lived here on this land.

Zach and I watched the Messenger the other night, a movie about Joan of Arc. It is a perfect example of the ambiguity of revelation. Many of you know the story of Joan of Arc, a national French hero who led the French army against the British again back in the 15 century. She was burned at the stake by the church then and 500 years later canonized as a Saint by the same church. Did Joan really get a revelation from God, or was she just a traumatized woman that carried her obsession all the way through victory, defeat, betrayal, martyrdom and sainthood. Or was she both?

Joan’s revelation from God came as a young girl and grew out of her love of France then under English rule. She was an illiterate peasant and knew little beyond her home, her family and village and the land on which she lived. Her visions grew especially out of her love for her sister and the pain and trauma of the loss of her sister whose death Joan witnessed at the hands of British soldiers. She was convinced that God had given her a vision of a liberated France, and her battle cry against the English is not “Yield in the Name of the King of France,” but “Yield in the Name of the King of Heaven.” She is used as a pawn by the French royal family to gain a military victory over England and then abandoned to the English when her military solution gives way to political negotiations. She is accused of heresy, as well as prideful arrogance, presuming to speak for God, rising above her station in life and, among other things, dressing like a man.

Throughout her life she is constantly seeking priests to hear her confession but when on trial before the English priests for heresy they will not hear her confession. In the end her confession is heard by God himself in the guise of Dustin Hoffman, who visits her in her jail cell. He comes as both accuser and advocate, as she struggles internally with her doubts about the truth of her convictions. Though she is forced to sign a recantation which she immediately tears up, she never really denies that God has spoken to her, but she does confess her own arrogance and pride and selfish stubbornness to God. She is burned, a martyr and a saint, having been confessed.

Like Joan we are all sinful, finite, human beings, place and time bound and yet we receive the revelation of the infinite God. It necessarily comes to us only and always in terms of the land and people that we love and the times and circumstances in which we live. And it comes disguised and distorted as well by our own cultural limitations and perspectives. I believe God was speaking to Joan and yes the message - she always referred to herself as just the messenger - necessarily gets distorted. The calling to see Christ in the poor and suffering, to be in solidarity with the oppressed, results in pitting one group against another and ends in the horror of war and violent conquest. This is incarnation. It is messy and ambiguous and full of uncertainty. It is called in theological terms “the scandal of particularity.” We are all signs and symbols of the infinite and universal in all the incredible diversity of place and time in which we live. And we are also sinners, limited and finite expressions, the sacred mixed with the profane. We all fall short of the glory of God, but, nevertheless, we are called to glorify God. Like Joan we are torn between our pride and arrogance, and the conviction that we are being used by God for some greater good.

Yes, Abraham was called by God to be a blessing. But what if it were not just Abraham and his descendents who were a blessing to the nations? What if everyone, every people from every language and culture throughout the world was to be a blessing? What if in order to have a full revelation of God it takes all of us in all times and places being that sign, for God to be clearly seen in all that God has made. Early Russian Orthodox missionaries wrote back home that they found God already there among the native peoples of Alaska and this made all the difference in the approach the church took. What if our task was truly to recognize God already at work in all the peoples of the earth? What if our task was to stand in solidarity with all those who are marginalized, oppressed, on the verge of extinction, whose voices are silenced and whose witness to the divine goes unrecognized? Who the powers that be call cursed. What if our task was to call them blessed? What if the way to see Christ, this blessed one who reconciles all things to himself is to see - to really see him in all things, and especially in those that are rejected?

Then Abraham becomes metaphor not just for powerful nations in their expansionist agenda. But Abraham becomes metaphor for the remnant of Jewish people, those suffering, for example, at the hands of the Nazi Germany in World War II. In particular, I am thinking of one little girl, Ellen, hiding in the home of a Lutheran family who were part of the Danish Resistance in one of my favorite children’s books, Number the Stars. Here was a blessed home, a home who recognized the children of God and called the one who came to them blessed. The Danish Resistance smuggled out almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark, 7000 people. The promise of Abraham to them was salvation from extinction. And in turn they become a sign to all of us, that God will unite us, already has united us, all in one family as numerous as the stars and the grains of sand, one people from every tribe and language. Just as God numbers each and every star, so God knows each and every one of us. Each and every one of us is a precious unique image of God. God calls us all by name and together we reveal the whole. We come in the Name of the Lord.

I encourage you to go out and find God already at work among the peoples of the earth, discover the holy in all of God’s creation, discover the holy in yourselves and join God in the blessing already begun. David Norwood told me a wonderful story the other day about one of his paragliding buddies, a woman who found a wounded baby eagle. She brought it to an animal refuge in the tri-cities and they nursed it back it health. The other day they released it into the wild again from a mountain top. A group of paragliders joined the bird in flight along with a native elder on the mountain top who drummed and danced and sang prayers to send the bird off. David describes all the colors of the various wings as the paragliders and the eagle took to the skies together accompanied by the music of the elder. Do you see the sacred there? Can you see the One who comes in the Name of the Lord in that story?

Sheri Noah Memorial

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Sheri Noah Memorial

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Sermon January 24, 2010

Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, Luke 4:14-21

It has been a rough couple of weeks to say the least.

I looked up just the Episcopal Church in Haiti. In 2008 it was the fastest growing diocese in the Episcopal Church. It celebrated over 200 child and adult baptisms, and over 700 child and adult confirmations. There are over 83,000 Episcopalians in Haiti in 97 churches representing 115 congregations and faith communities. Now one quote I read said, “there is no Cathedral. The entire Holy Trinity Cathedral complex is gone including the school. The convent for the Sisters of St. Margaret is gone. The Bishop's house is gone. College St. Pierre is gone” and a Jubilee Center. All gone.

In this country, the political pendulum swings from one extreme to another with a Republican win in Massachusetts and a Supreme Court decision erasing decades of campaign finance reform. The debate over health care drones on and on and the economy continues to leave more than 1 in 10 of us out of work. All of this while at the same time we rally as a nation once again to meet the challenge of another disaster and unite around getting aid to Haiti.

Personally, I have been busy with our Homeless Network planning for a big event to serve a 1000 homeless people this coming week, while at the same time dealing with some angry landlords and non-compliant tenants who we simply put back on the streets. I have also been talking with folks about ministry possibilities here in the Lower Valley and the Yakama Indian Reservation and our conversation often turns to centuries old systems of oppression and disenfranchisement that lay underneath current problems.
I also spent the week finishing my Postulancy Packet. I worked through some pretty heavy questions. Describe your relationship with God and how it has changed over the years. Describe your prayer life and how you communicate and experience God. Describe the central themes of your ministry, a significant event in your life, your main reason for seeking ordination, your take on the baptismal vows and which are the hardest for you to live out.

In the face of it all I am left wondering really how do I feel? Mostly exhausted. Definitely a little small and weak.

I thought of the Jewish people returned from exile to their homeland in our scripture lesson today from Nehemiah. In this passage, the people are listening to Ezra and the scribes read and interpret the Word of God for the first time in generations in front of the Watergate across from the newly rededicated temple in the newly rebuilt Jerusalem. The people’s reaction is to weep and Ezra has to exhort them not to mourn, but to be joyful and find their strength in the Lord. Imagine if you were the Israelites returned to Jerusalem, with a remnant of folks and little resources. You begin to restore the ruins of your city, build a few walls, erect a temple that really looks nothing like what it used to be. You may have come back, but you know in your heart that the glory of the former days of Israel is long gone, unrecoverable. There is no way to recreate the past and all the efforts to rebuild the city of Jerusalem after the return from Exile pale in the light of the descriptions of what once was in the Holy Scripture. The reality of our best efforts always falls short of our visions of the way things should be.

And then there is Jesus in the Gospel lesson. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! The Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor!” And the congregation just stares at him. “Who is this fellow!? Isn’t this Joseph’s son? What in the world does he think his is saying? Really you know let’s throw him off a cliff for being so presumptuous!” We are called to follow Jesus, but really, none of us is going to get up and say this kind of thing in front of all our friends and family. And look at me, I’ve gone through the discernment process, I’ve submitted the packet, but really, what was I thinking! When it comes to judging me, I often take the side of the congregation in the synagogue that day!

Then I thought of Chrissy Chavez. Chrissy was my daughter’s best friend growing up in California. She has just graduated from Medical School and is actually a real doctor, which is pretty hard to believe.  And right now she is excited to be on her way to Haiti to give her expertise to the crisis. Many years ago I was suppose to pick Chrissy up after her soccer game near San Francisco and bring her to spend the week with us in Stockton. I was extremely late in getting there, she and her coach were the only ones left and she was in tears. Cell phones were pretty new then and mine was dead as a doornail anyway. But her mother finally got a hold of me and chewed me out royally. I felt so incredibly irresponsible!

But it dawned on me yesterday as I was writing this sermon that though I was feeling pretty small in the face of so many overwhelming events, I had actually made a rather significant contribution to Haiti long ago in that I did not lose Chrissy Chavez that day. As today’s Epistle reading says, “We are all the Body of Christ and individually members of it.” We cannot say to the hand I have no need of you. And we don’t get to tell ourselves that we are insignificant. It turns out as the lesson today says, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are in fact indispensable.”

We have all been baptized into this One Body. Turn with me to the Baptism service in your prayer book on page 304. I want to look at this with you.

I wrote a poem once with a line about “a voice crying in the wilderness, searching for a clear image of joy.” It described a group of poor children I saw once who were laughing and dancing in and out of the spray from a water hose among the broken glass and garbage in the alley between their rundown apartment buildings. That is baptism, finding joy in the wilderness. Like John the Baptist and the original disciples, we are all voices crying in the wilderness. In baptism we covenant together to be that image of joy in the wilderness for ourselves and the whole world.

Down at the bottom of the page. Will you persevere in resisting evil? We are called here to simply hang on in the face of overwhelming odds. There is the biblical image of the spiritual powers and principalities that seem to have control over this world. These powers can be clearly seen in the systems of racism, economic injustice, environmental degradation, all forms of political, social and economic oppression. They are there in the military systems that violently enforce the unequal distribution of power. These forces are larger than any one life, overwhelming, beyond our control but we are called to resist, to see how we in fact participate in these systems and whenever we fall into sin to repent and return to the Lord. Our small personal acts of penance, asking for forgiveness, has an impact in bringing down the evil that seems to run rampant in our world.

There is also just suffering that defies explanation. Natural disasters that we are facing now in which we cannot spend time asking why, looking for explanations, but instead simply respond with an out pouring of love. At the top of the page, “Will you proclaim by word and deed the Good News of God in Christ?” In the face of all of the suffering of this world, we vow to model an alternative way of living in our common life. We vow to continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship in the breaking of the bread and in the prayers. In this new community we seek to serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. We strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being. Thanksgiving for the grace of God is at the heart of this new vision. We are called to be a community formed by the grace and forgiveness of God in Christ. God has reordered our relationships and we have covenanted together to be ambassadors of reconciliation.

How to live out these baptismal vows in our daily lives and our corporate witness is of course no easy task. Loving our neighbor as ourselves means of course loving ourselves! Being able to ask for and receive God’s forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do, right alongside forgiving ourselves, let alone forgiving others! Much of our time in community is spent in all sorts of dysfunction. Being graceful to one another is at times the furthest thing from our minds as we are often too busy nursing our own wounds and inflicting pain. We must sift through a mixed bag of Christian tradition as well as changing morals discovering that some things we thought were sins really aren’t so bad, while other things we had no idea had anything to do with the Gospel suddenly are paramount. In the face of systemic evil and overwhelming suffering we don’t always know the right thing to do. All of this stuff is negotiated in community and we never fully agree on all the various lifestyle choices we can make, or actions we can take in our attempt to resist evil and live into the Kingdom of God. But one of my favorite lines from St. Francis which he said many times in his life to his fellow friars right up to his last days was “Brothers, [and Sisters] let us begin in earnest.”

Where we begin is with this one thing that is for certain. We cannot for a moment imagine that what we do is insignificant. All of our actions have eternal significance and reverberate throughout all of God’s creation, connected as we are one to another in the Body of Christ. The Spirit of the Lord is upon us and we are sent to proclaim Good News to the Poor! Each congregation is an intentional Christian community. In our baptism we have made a covenant with God and one another that forms us and guides us and we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to live out this life for the hope of the world.

Even though after weeks like this one, it is clear we are still in the wilderness - nevertheless, we are voices crying, singing, proclaiming in that wilderness. We are children dancing in and out of the water from the garden hose. We are Chrissy Chavez on her way to Haiti.