The Thing Is: On Faith, Love, Loss, and Wonder

A home for Martin Elfert's homilies and reflections.

[martinelfert]

Five Meditations

Martin Elfert Easter Sunday 2017

Jeremiah 31:1-6 Acts 10:34-43 Matthew 28:1-10 Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

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Five Meditations on Resurrection

One

I am visiting with a woman whose husband of almost fifty years died the summer before last. The woman was young when she and her husband met and married, she was only a handful of years into her twenties. The two of them were together for just about all of her adult life.  

And now.

Now he is gone.

Maybe it is because I want everything to be okay for her. Or maybe it’s a little more selfish. Maybe I want everything to be okay for me. My wife, Phoebe, and I were more or less the same age when we got together as the woman was when she and her husband met. I’m not sure that I know how to be a grown-up without Phoebe. I’m not sure that I remember how to live life without her.

And so I say something facile, something neat and simple and clean about the importance of reengaging with life after the death of a loved one. I offer the woman this advice – and I am embarrassed to confess this to you – in much the same way that I might tell a child who has fallen off of her bike to climb back on and start peddling again.

I guess that am trying to reassure at least one of us that such a reengagement is possible.

The woman responds to the foolishness of my words not with anger or disappointment, but with a tired wisdom (is “tired wisdom” a category that even makes sense?) with the insight that comes from carrying a barrelful of grief for a long time.

It’s hard, she says to me.

It is hard to decide that life is still worth it.

And in that instant I catch a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse, of just how hard the woman is working. I don’t think that I had guessed before. I don’t think that I had guessed that she is like a marathon runner, her knees almost buckling as the miles move further and further into the double digits; that she is like a swimmer pulled by the current far, far out into the ocean, beginning to wonder if she can keep the struggle going, if she wants to keep the struggle going, knowing that sinking beneath the waves promises rest.

The woman has chosen to keep on living. She has chosen life. She has made this choice at great cost to herself.

The story says that there is a stone in front of the tomb.

You have to push hard if you want to move the stone.

Two

The farmer and poet and prophet Wendell Berry ends one of his most famous poems with a two-word invitation or command:

Practice resurrection.[1]

Practice resurrection. Resurrection, Berry suggests through the unexpected intersection of these two words, is something more than a piece of history, something more than an idea to which you and I are expected to agree, something more than a 2000-year-old fact to which you and I, because we are sitting in a church, are expected to intellectually assent. Resurrection, somehow, is about you and me.

Right now.

Around the year 33, the women find the tomb empty.

Around the year 2017, you and I find the tomb empty.

The tomb is opening still. It is opening right now.

If Wendell Berry is right, then you and I are called to witness its opening.

If Wendell Berry is right, then you and I are called to practice resurrection and to participate in its opening.

Three

A United Airlines flight sits on the tarmac. And a man of Asian descent who has bought and paid for a ticket is inside. The staff managing the flight realises that United has sold more tickets than they have seats. And so, aided by a computer algorithm that randomly selects his seat number, they tell the man to get up and get off the plane. When the man refuses to do so, when he says that he needs to get to his destination, the flight staff summon United’s security team. And the security guards drag the man from the plane. His fellow passengers get out their mobile phones and film as he is pulled down the aisle like a sack of garbage. The man’s lawyer will later explain that the security team broke his nose and knocked out two of his teeth.

This is the data. How shall we interpret it? What story shall we tell about it?

Maybe this is a story about a group of employees forgetting the dignity of a customer and, in so doing, forgetting their own dignity. Maybe this is a story about the danger of uncritically following orders. Maybe this is a story about a business culture that dehumanises its customers and employees alike, about a business that studies its spreadsheets hard but has forgotten how to study morality. Maybe this is a story about the erosion of community, about neglecting our duty to our neighbour. Maybe it’s a story about still another official act of violence directed against a person of colour.

All of these stories are true.

The story that I am curious about this morning, however, is another one. It is the story of you and me watching the cell phone video of the man being pulled from the plane. James Martin, the wonderful Jesuit writer, invites us to listen to ourselves as we watch, to notice the voice inside of us that says:

That’s wrong.

Pay attention to that voice, James Martin says. Pay attention to the voice that says, “That’s wrong.”

Because that voice is your conscience.

That voice – and the similar voices inside of the millions of others people watching this video – is the good news hiding within this story. When we see something wrong or evil or broken, there is a temptation to interpret what we are seeing as a fundamental indictment of creation, as evidence that God is absent and that the world is fractured beyond repair, as an invitation into despair and rage and apathy.

But actually, the very intensity of our reaction is good news. The world might be hopelessly broken if we watched the video from the airplane or the footage from Syria or – we don’t even need a screen here – the evidence of poverty in our own neighbourhoods and we shrugged, and we said, “That’s just the way things are.”

But we don’t shrug. Our consciences speak. And through our consciences, Christ speaks. Through our consciences, Christ invites us into action.

Sometimes the voice inside of us that says that’s wrong is the beginning of new life.

Four

An elderly man sits at home. The man has gotten to be older than most people get. He doesn’t leave home much any more, his body is reluctant to take him too far into the world. But he remains lucid, his mind clear. He sits by the window in the sunshine and watches the marvel of creation in the back yard.

A younger friend comes to visit the man – although to be this man’s friend means that, even though you are younger than him, you yourself are beginning to be old.

The two of them talk. And the younger person asks the questions that friends ask when they get together: How are you? How is your life?

The old man responds.

Now

Now I am almost entirely love.[2]

Five

The women come to the tomb before the sun rises. Much as they stood at the foot of the cross, their plan today is to stand outside of his grave.

What do you notice about their story?

Notice that the women come before dawn. In the cold and the dark and the lonely confusion of this night, there is the absence of light in every sense.

Notice that, in this short reading, we hear about fear over and over For fear of the angel, the soldiers guarding the tomb become like dead men. The angel says to the women, fear not. And Jesus says the same words to the rest of the disciples.

Notice that, notwithstanding the darkness and the fear, the women go towards the tomb. Somehow, part of meeting God involves overcoming our anxiety and, as Jesus did throughout his life, going towards the pain.

Notice that resurrection begins with an earthquake. That it begins when the very ground beneath our feet shakes and we are not sure anymore what is stable and what is true and real and what is up and what is down.

Notice that the angel says to the women:

You are looking for Jesus

who was crucified.

Resurrection is something other than optimism, it is something other than a happy ending to a movie. Jesus does not come out of the tomb saying, “Don’t cry: it was all a bad dream. See? I’m fine!”

Jesus is risen. But the reality of his crucifixion remains. The wounds remain on his hands and his feet and in his side. Resurrection does not say that the hurt or the injustice or the grief or the trauma never happened. It does not say that the bomb did not fall or that the man was not dragged from the plane or that the one that we loved did not die. It says that these hard, hard truths remain. And that, somehow, somehow, there is new life even as we continue to carry them.

Last of all, notice that resurrection means being with Jesus. At its simplest level – and at its most staggering level – this is what resurrection is. When the women brave going to the tomb, when we brave going to our own tombs, who we fid there is Jesus Christ himself.

At the beginning of the Gospel, we learned that Jesus is Emmanuel: God with us. At the end of the Gospel, we learn the same thing. God is with us in our searching and our grief our lostness as suredly as God is with us in our triumph and our ecstasy and our jubilation.

Before he died, Jesus said to us, I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.

Outside of the tomb, we know that abundant life is ours.

Before he died, Jesus said to us, I am the way and the truth and the life.

Outside of the tomb, we know that Jesus will show us the way to the Father.

And today. Today Jesus says to us, Fear not.

Fear not.

Fear not.

And amazingly, in the cold of the early dawn light, we notice that we are not shaking anymore. We notice that our fear is gone.

This.

This is resurrection.

[1] Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

[2] The line “Now / I am almost entirely mostly love” comes from Hayden Carruth’s poem, Testament.

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Everybody Hurts

Martin Elfert Easter Vigil 2017 April 15, 2017

Genesis 1:1-2:4a Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 Ezekiel 37:1-14 Zephaniah 3:14-20

Romans 6:3-11 Psalm 114 Matthew 28:1-10

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Yesterday morning, a song from my early adulthood abruptly resurfaced in my head. I don’t understand what is happening when memory works this way, when one of our neural bookkeepers makes the decision to open an old and dusty file cabinet deep in a corner of the brain. But I do know that yesterday my synapses made a connection and I began to hear R.E.M.’s 1992 hit Everybody Hurts.

Everybody Hurts is an unusual song within the R.E.M. canon, both because of the lyrics are pretty straightforward and because they are entirely intelligible – R.E.M.’s lead singer, Michael Stipe, made poor diction and enigmatic ideas into an art form. But on this song Stipe sings simply and directly and clearly:

Everybody hurts.

Take comfort in your friends.

Everybody hurts.

You’re not alone.

Maybe this song showed up in my head because, a quarter of a century after its release, it occurred to me yesterday that it is a song for the Triduum. It is a song for this service that extends over three days, this service that ends today with the discovery of the empty tomb and the proclamation:

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

This service is all about pain and about friendship and about not being alone. We proclaim these hard and beautiful realities through the use of symbols: dew or no occasions in the church year are as heavily laden with symbol as these three days.

All of these symbols are, in some way, about touch.

We began on Thursday with Jesus sharing a festive, final meal with his friends. Here is touch found in the washing of one another’s feet, in the embodiment of Jesus’ command to love and serve one another as he loves and serves us. Sometimes folks will complain that the foot washing is goofy or awkward or even icky. To which I can only reply: Yes. Yes, you’re right. It is goofy and awkward and icky. To wash one another’s feet, to touch and be touched in such a fashion, is to engage in act of deep mutual vulnerability.

And if the tender intensity of the foot washing is not enough, here is the removal of the sacrament to the high altar, to the garden, and the stripping and the washing of the altar. On Maundy Thursday, I have the privilege of touching the altar on your behalf. And this year I was startled as I did so, I was startled to find myself transported as I first washed and then dried the altar. As I touched the wood of the table, I abruptly found myself touching my father-in-law’s coffin, my hand upon its wood as it rested in the church at his funeral.

Yesterday, on Good Friday, all of us rested our hands upon wood, this time the hard wood of the cross. Somehow, this simple action of devotion holds all of the loneliness and all of the love and all of the pain and all of the longing that there is. Everything is there in the cross. The wood is rough and filled with the story of life and death.

And then there is today. A walk or a journey is an ancient part of this service: scholars tell us that the first days of the church, the Easter Vigil made multiple stops, each stop taking the worshipper ever nearer to Jerusalem. Tonight, we began around the fire, touched by its warmth. And then we walked, our feet in touching the holiness of the earth, our feet in communion with the ground. Like the cross, this walk is somehow also everything. It is the journey through the Red Sea and into freedom. It is the journey from life into death or death into life.

In not so long, we will touch one last symbol, one last sacrament, the Eucharist. While this symbol is more familiar to us than the washing of feet – we engage in it every Sunday – in many ways it is just as goofy and awkward and icky as the washing of feet. We come to the altar with this amazingly childlike gesture, palms open before us:

Feed me.

What could be more vulnerable, more filled with longing, than that?

What could be more wondrous than the promise that, in bread and in wine, we touch Jesus, and Jesus touches us?

One of the difficult privileges of my work is sitting with people in loss and in grief. And what I’ve come to understand is that everyone, everyone is carrying big hurt. We sometimes imagine that we are alone in our woundedness. But what I have come to know is that, when we create a safe space with one or more other people, a space in which we can hear and tell the truth, we learn that woundedness is universal and shared.

Everyone has a story of suffering to tell: the story of the marriage ravaged by addiction or infidelity, ravaged by promises abandoned; the story of the diagnosis, of the news that the doctor has run out of treatments; the story of cruel words that, even though it is sticks and stones that may break our bones, have unmistakably hurt us; the story of the unexpected and heartbreaking phone call;; the story of the loss of the job and, with it, the loss not just of income but of identity.

The Triduum, these three holy days, embodies the promise that we do not suffer by ourselves. There is a community that loves us and cares for us that is with us always. There is a God who loves and cares for us who is with us always.

We reach out in our lostsness and searching. And we touch – we are touched – by love.

Everybody hurts.

You are not alone.

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Trump Presidency: Walking Into What We Cannot See - SpokaneFāVS

Because of social media, because of the news, because of conversations with friends and strangers, I am thoroughly aware that these last several months have been a time of anxiety and sadness for a lot of folks. Over these few months, I have needed to log onto to Facebook for but a moment in order to hear multiple friends broadcast their distress at the prospect of a Donald Trump Presidency.

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Left Behind

Advent 1 November 27, 2016

Isaiah 2:1-5 Romans 13:11-14 Matthew 24:36-44 Psalm 122

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Keep awake.

Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

One of the major gaps in my theological education is that I have never read any of the Left Behind books. Nor, for that matter, have I seen any of movies or TV shows that fall into the same broad genre as it does, a genre that, I suppose, we could call “rapture action” – here are a lot of people disappearing, here is a lot of stuff blowing up, here is a lot of Second Comingitude in general.

Notwithstanding this deficiency in my training, I have a hard time hearing the passage that we just heard from Matthew without thinking about the rapture. Maybe you have the same experience. I suppose that’s because the notion of rapture so thoroughly permeates our collective imagination; it permeates it in the same way that the story of Dracula and Frankenstein permeate it. Even if you have never read Bram Stoker or Mary Shelley, even if you have never seen a screen or stage adaptation of their work, you know about guys wearing capes with pointy fangs and shambling monsters built from stolen corpses. And even if you never read even one of the seventeen, count ‘em seventeen, bestselling Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, you know about people abruptly vanishing from their homes and their cars, you know that these disappearances are evidence that God is on his way and that he’s feeling cranky.

You know that there’s going to be some wailing and some gnashing of teeth.

Rapture gives us a ready-made hermeneutic for reading Jesus’ words this morning. “Hermeneutic” is a three-dollar academic word. And notwithstanding its multisyllabic and slightly pompous nature, all that it refers to is the lens or the technique or the method that we use to interpret something. A hermeneutic is the set of glasses that we put on in order to read scripture or – let’s try a couple of different metaphors – it is the shovel that we use to dig into scripture, it is the X-Ray machine that we use to examine scripture’s body.

The given hermeneutic that we employ radically affects how we understand scripture. When you read with the hermeneutics, with the assumptions, of Calvin or Luther or Augustine you will end up in way a different place than when you it with the hermeneutics of Nadia Bolz-Weber or Sallie McFague or Rob Bell.

And that may tempt us to say, “Well, I’ll just read or listen to scripture without a hermeneutic.” But – and I’m going to risk making a bold claim here – that is an impossible goal. The popular turn of phrase notwithstanding, there is no such thing as “the plain meaning of scripture.” All of us come to scripture with a particular perspective, a particular set of assumptions, a particular set of biases, a particular history, a particular context. How we understand scripture is shaped by the culture and the time in which we live, by the people around us, by the very language in which we read the Bible. (There are all sorts of plays on words in Hebrew, for instance, that just don’t translate into English. And there are fascinating studies that explore how human beings actually think differently when we speak or write or read in different languages.)

Our choice, therefore, is not “Will I or will I not read the Bible with a hermeneutic?” Our choice is, “Will I be aware of the hermeneutic (or probably more accurately, the hermeneutics) that I bring with me to the Bible? Will I name those hermeneutics and will I engage with them critically?”

So.

Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.

What does the hermeneutic of Left Behind and of similar stories tell us when we apply it to these words of Jesus? What are the assumptions of the “action rapture” genre?

Well, here are three of the assumptions that I see in Left Behind. One, the people who are being taken are being taken by God. They are being taken back home to heaven. Two, with the exception of a handful of people whom God deliberately leaves in order to carry out some kind of divine special mission, it is the good and the devout and the holy people who are taken. When the rapture comes, you want to be taken. It is bad news to be left behind. And three, this business of being taken will happen at the end of days – at the apocalypse, if you like – when Jesus comes back.

Fair enough.

But let’s try a different hermeneutic. Let’s see if we can recapture the hermeneutic of Jesus’ audience and of Matthew’s audience, which is to say the hermeneutic of an oppressed people, a people who live under the boot of a brutal empire.

What does it mean to be taken when you live in a context like that one?

My paternal grandfather knew the answer to that question. Born in the late nineteenth century, he lived in Germany, first under the Nazis and later under the communists. And I don’t think that he saw a lot of distinction between the two of them. While the Nazis were officially far right and the communists far left, my grandfather’s experience was that the political spectrum is actually a political circle, so that far right and far left end up in the same place, a place of cruel totalitarianism.

Both under the Nazis and under the communists, my grandfather saw people taken. To use slightly different language, he saw people disappeared. In rare instances, the disappeared people would resurface. My grandfather told the story of a neighbour who returned home after a number of months. All of his teeth had been kicked out of his mouth and no one dared ask what had happened to him. But most of the time, the disappeared were just gone.

And my grandfather saw neighbours who were taken in another way. These were the people who didn’t physically disappear. These were the folks who disappeared morally, the people who responded to the violence of the state with silence, with indifference, with apathy. And maybe with collaboration.

The Roman soldiers who oppress Jesus and his friends and, later, Matthew and his friends wear different uniforms than the Nazis and the communists. Their instrument of death is the cross rather than the gas chamber or the bullet to the back of the head. But there isn’t actually a whole lot more than distinguishes them from one another. In every case, the reality of Empire refutes the hermeneutic of Left Behind.

Let’s go through the three points that I listed earlier again.

One, those who are taken (and I mean those who are taken physically as well as those who are taken morally) are not taken by God. They are taken by the state.

Two, being taken is not a reward. Being taken is a terrible kind of punishment. The hope, for your body and your soul alike, is that you will not to be taken. Notice that Jesus likens being taken to being swept away in the flood, he likens it to a brutal death by drowning. It is only Noah and his family who survive. The hope is to be like those on the ark. The hope is to be left behind.

And three, being taken does not occur at the end of days. For Matthew and for my grandfather after the taking, after the disappearances, the world continues. For Jesus’ friends after Jesus is taken, taken to the cross, the world continues. For better or for worse, for those left behind, life continues and they have to figure out what to do next.

I don’t want to dump on the left behind books: they have strengthened a bunch of people’s faith, and that matters. I do want to suggest that Left Behind is entirely unhelpful for interpreting Jesus’ teaching today. I want to suggest that, once we escape the hermeneutic of the Left Behind books, once we stop reading this passage from Matthew in an action-movie kind of way, Jesus’ words start making a whole lot more sense and carrying a whole lot more power.

Because when we realise that Jesus’ words are about right now, that suddenly means that the coming on the Son of Man is not some apocalyptic future to be hoped for or to be prayed for. The coming of the Son of Man is a reality that, with God’s help, we are called to create today.

And how do we create that reality? Well, the command that Jesus gives us is as simple as it is difficult:

Keep awake.

Notice that a number of liberation movements use the language of waking up or sometimes, simply, of being woke. To wake up is to become aware of the oppression that is part of our culture: the oppression of women, of people of colour, of GLBTQ folk, of undocumented immigrants, of the physically or mentally atypical, of the poor. And having become aware, it is to offer resistance to that oppression. Now, some of us are waking up pretty slowly. And there is a temptation to be impatient or disdainful when we see a slow awakening taking place, to react with a hoot of derision when a straight white man first allows the possibility that privilege might be part of his life.

But I hope that we can celebrate every step closer to being awake, even as we push for that awakening to deepen. And – this might be harder – I hope that we will accept the pushes that our allies may give us when they ask our own awakening to deepen.

A number of my colleagues, including Grace’s own Ken Powell, travelled a couple of weeks ago to Standing Rock to join those protesting against the pipeline, to join those protecting the water. They slept in tents. And my colleagues say that the day began early when a voice from outside the tents began to chant:

Wake up! Wake up!

This call was one of those moments when the literal and the figurative intersect. Because, on the one hand, this call was purely functional in nature: like at summer camp, it was a call to get out of bed and to get the day started. But it was also a deeper call, a kind of parable.

Wake up, that voice called. Wake up and see what we are doing to the earth.

We often speak of Advent as a season of waiting. And that is, indeed, what it is. But what Jesus tells us today is that waiting is not a passive exercise. Waiting is something that we do intentionally and actively, it is something that we do as a community, it is something that we do with God’s help. The kind of waiting that we do in Advent is about connecting with those on the margins, it is about seeking out allies, it is about learning. It is about declaring that we are ready, that we are awake and that we are getting more awake every day, that we will not be taken without a struggle, that we will not disappear, that we intend to be among those who will be left behind to greet the Son of Man.

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"Every expression of anger is a cry for love" - SpokaneFāVS

I wondered if I had just been part of interrupting a hate crime...

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Seeing everything as sacred - SpokaneFāVS

The reality is not that nothing is inherently sacred. Rather, the reality is that everything is inherently sacred but that human beings, in our brokenness and self-imposed alienation from God, have declared that certain things are profane.

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I’m Coming to Your House

Pentecost 24

Isaiah 1:10-18 Psalm 32:1-8 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 Luke 19:1-10

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One of the many things that draws me to Jesus is that he is both someone who tells parables and someone who lives parables. One moment Jesus will be hanging out with his friends and sharing his holy folk tales, his stories of transformation about a ne’er do well son being welcomed home by his staggeringly generous Dad, or a suspicious foreigner who is the only one to stop to help the wounded man beside the road, or – as we heard last week – a religious official who doesn’t understand much at all about God and tax collector who does. And the next moment Jesus’ very life will become a story of transformation: he will take us to a wilderness place where we discover that, in his hands, five loaves and two fishes are enough to feed thousands, we will follow him to a tomb where he invites the dead man inside to come dancing forth, we will watch from the foot of the cross as his dying changes everything.

Today, Jesus’ lived parable involves a guy by the name of Zacchaeus. Like the character whom we met in Jesus’ spoken parable last week, Zacchaeus is a tax collector – someone who is getting rich by collaborating with the occupying forces, someone whom most of the population hates and fears. Unlike the character whom we met last week, however, Zacchaeus is a chief tax collector, he is the one to whom the other tax collectors report. Maybe we could liken him to the Chief Executive Officer who accepts a salary of $37,000 a day while vigorously resisting any scenario in which his employees receive benefits or are paid more than the minimum wage.

Zacchaeus has gotten wealthy at the cost of his integrity.

Jesus is passing through Jericho, Zacchaeus’ hometown. Jericho is located about ten miles east of Jerusalem and about five miles north of the Dead Sea. It is situated in what, today, we call the West Bank: in Jesus’ time and now, Jericho is under occupation. And Zacchaeus is there. We can imagine him at desk counting his ill-gotten money, a first-century Scrooge.

Because it is the first century and there will be an almost 2,000 year wait before texting or Twitter is invented, Zacchaeus doesn’t find out that Jesus is coming through town by looking at his smartphone. He knows that Jesus is coming near when he detects a change in the air, an electricity. He understands it by feeling the hairs on his arm stand straight up. A moment later, Zacchaeus begins to hear the excitement in the street, he hears people speaking the name that he has been hearing in rumours for weeks, the name of the healer and the storyteller: Jesus. Zacchaeus looks out the window of his office and he sees the people being pulled like water across the beach when the tide goes out. They are headed for the main road.

Something is pulling Zacchaeus there too. He gets up out of his chair and starts walking.

When Zacchaeus arrives at the main road, the crowd is thick, and Zacchaeus can’t see. This is not an experience to which he is accustomed: his world is normally filled sycophants and with those who are afraid, people who are hoping to gain some advantage or to avoid some punishment. Normally, when Zacchaeus approaches a crowd, it parts before him the way the Red Sea parted for the Israelites, people are tripping over their feet to make room for him, people are asking if they can get him a cup of coffee or a newspaper. But not today. Everyone’s attention is turned towards the road and to the one who walks upon it. No one even notices that Zacchaeus is there.

Zacchaeus sees that some kids have climbed trees in order to see better. And an old muscle memory in his body kicks in. He was athlete as a child and, even though it has been years since he ran anywhere, a reflex sends a signal to his legs and he starts running hard, sprinting down the road to where Jesus and his friends are headed. And then, all dignity forgotten, he begins to climb a tree. His sandals push against the bark, his robe catches in the branches, his surprised hands – it’s been decades since there were callouses on them – take him, up, up, up.

Luke tells us that the tree in question is a sycamore. It is not, however, an American sycamore. Rather, Zaccaheus’ sycamore is a kind of fig tree, vigorous and bushy with wide spreading branches, growing perhaps thirty of forty feet high.

Zacchaeus reaches his perch. He is breathing hard: the running and the climb have very nearly winded him. But his location in the tree is perfect – perfect. He is well hidden within the trees’ branches, and the view couldn’t be better if he were in a sentry tower built for the purpose. The crowd, with Jesus at its centre, is approaching. From within the tree, Zacchaeus will be able to watch Jesus pass, he will be able to satisfy the strange, unnameable curiosity that drew him here. And then, once the crowd goes home, he will be able to quietly climb back to the ground and go home.

No one will even know that he was here.

Except.

Except that Jesus, as he gets near the sycamore, draws on that same holy intuition that tells him the instant that the woman with the hemorrhage touches his garment. He stops walking, he looks right up into the tree, and he says:

Hi Zack!

All of a sudden, without any intention on his part, Zacchaeus has become the main character in a parable about meeting God.

Hi Zack! says Jesus. Come down! I’m going to stay at your house today.

What do you notice about the parable?

Well, here are a few things that catch my attention. First, notice that Jesus knows Zacchaeus and that he knows him by name. Here is an echo of the words from Job, words that are often paraphrased at the beginning of the funeral liturgy:

I myself shall see [God], and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.

Whether or not Zacchaeus recognised it before this moment, whether or not it has ever been part of his waking knowledge, God knows him. God has always known him. And, in some ineffable way, Zacchaeus has known God in return. Zacchaeus – just like you, just like me, just like everyone, even if they find the very idea absurd or offensive – is known by God.

Second, even though God knows Zacchaeus – and knows him completely – God’s love for him remains absolute. Jesus is aware of what Zacchaeus’ job is, he is aware that he is a tax collector, that he is a state-sponsored criminal. And Jesus calls to him anyway, he invites himself to Zacchaeus’ house anyway, he treats him like a friend anyway. Listen to the crowd grumble: Jesus is going to be the guest of one who is a sinner. And their complaints are legitimate, they are reasonable: Zacchaeus has wasted no opportunity to exploit these people, to exploit his neighbours. But Jesus would call Zacchaeus “friend” even if he were a murderer or a war criminal or a child abuser, anything.

Stop and let that sink in for a minute.

The absolute love of God, well, it’s either the worst news or the best news that there is, it is either appalling or freeing. It is awful news when you realise that God’s love extends to the person whom you like and respect and trust the least in the world, when you realise that there is no one whom you could plug into the equation, no one whom you could put into the tree, and get Jesus to reject.

And it is freeing news when we apply it to ourselves. Many of us – maybe most of us – are carrying the cold and ancient fear that we are unlovable. The fear that if people found out who we really are – if God found out who we really are – no one, God included, could possibly love us. If people knew what goes on in my head or my heart, if people knew what I do at home after I close the door and pull the drapes, if people knew my past, if people knew my internet browser history, no one would ever love me. God would never love me.

But Jesus says: I know. I know everything. And I love you without reservation.

Third, meeting God changes Zacchaeus. Actually, I want to rephrase that, because I don’t want to imply that Zacchaeus is a passive observer of the change that takes place within him, that he is like a rock just sitting there while the tide erodes him into smoothness. Let’s try this: meeting God invites Zacchaeus to change.

Zacchaeus comes down out of the tree, out of this place of alienation and loneliness. And immediately, he repents. “Repent” which is an old word which literally means, “turn around.” Zacchaeus is suddenly facing a whole new direction.

Half of my possessions I will give to the poor, he says. And if I have defrauded anyone, I will pay them back four times over.

This is repentance. Not holy words or holy ideas, but holy action.

Now, I want to emphasise that Zacchaeus’ repentance, his choice to live and love in a Christ-like way, comes after he encounters Jesus’ love, not before. Again – and I’m going to risk repeating myself, but this is absolutely vital – God’s love is absolute. Jesus doesn’t love Zacchaeus because we are good. Jesus loves Zacchaeus because Jesus is Jesus. Jesus doesn’t look at our repentance and say, “Okay, that’s good enough: now I love you.” Before we say or do anything, Jesus says:

I love you.

God, to borrow a phrase from Richard Rohr, doesn’t love us because we have changed. God loves us, and that allows us to change.

Fourth – and last of all – notice that when Zacchaeus meets God, there is a abrupt reversal of Zacchaeus’ expectations: he thought that he was seeking God. But it turns out that, all along, God was seeking him.

There used to be a billboard about an hour to the East of my hometown Vancouver, BC, in a city called Abbotsford (insofar as the Vancouver area has a Bible Belt, Abbotsford is where it is). The Billboard asked a question. It said:

Are you ready to meet God?

I remember my late father-in-law, Bob – God rest his soul – seeing that billboard and remarking, “How could anyone possibly be ready to meet God? That billboard should say:

“God is ready to meet you!”

A lot of us describe ourselves as seekers: I have used that language to describe myself, I probably will again. What Zacchaeus discovers when Jesus calls him down from the tree, is that Jesus too is a seeker. And that what Jesus is seeking is communion with him.

And so Zacchaeus and Jesus walk to Zacchaeus house, where Zacchaeus family will be surprised to learn who they are hosting for dinner.

This is a parable about meeting God. It is a parable about being known, about being loved, about being invited into transformation, about seeking and being sought. It is a parable in which Jesus says to you and me.:

Hi James!

Hi Sue!

Hi Holly!

Hi Everyone!

I’m coming to your house!

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Is God Safe?

Jeremiah 14:7-10,19-22 Psalm 84:1-6 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18 Luke 18:9-14

*

A reading from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

We are about a third of the way in to the book. The children have journeyed through the wardrobe and into the wondrous and dangerous land of Narnia. And the three of them (Peter, Susan, and Lucy – Edmund has just slipped away to join the White Witch) are speaking with a couple of their hosts: Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, two of the talking animals who populate this magical place. They are learning they will soon meet Aslan, the Christ character who sits at the centre of all of the Lewis’ seven Narnia books.

Their conversation goes like this:

“Is – is [Aslan] a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the great Emperor-beyond-the-sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh” said Susan. “I'd thought he was was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there is anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn't safe.

“But he's good.”

One of C.S. Lewis’ great gifts was his ability to use captivating stories to express the big questions of Christianity, the big challenges of Christianity, the big promises of Christianity. And in this exchange between the three children and their animal hosts, he tackles one of the great questions:

Is God safe?

Across Christian history, a whole lot of people have tried pretty hard to make the answer to that question “yes.” Beginning way back in the early 4th Century when the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire (a strange fate, by the way, for a movement that began on the margins of society and whose central figure was executed by the state) and extending into the present day, there have been Christians doing everything that they can to make God into a figure whose primary job is to safely affirm and celebrate and bless the way that we already live our lives.

We see this safe understanding of God in the contemporary American phenomenon called the Prosperity Gospel: the theology that says that my wealth and my social status and my stuff are direct rewards from God for my fidelity to God, for the holiness of my behaviour. The Prosperity Gospel is so prevalent in America that it subtly infects our speech and our thinking even when we don’t directly subscribe to it. Every time, for instance, that we look at our finances or our possessions and we say, “I’ve been really blessed” – and by necessary and unspoken extension, that those who are living with poverty and a shopping cart filled with aluminium cans have not been really blessed – we are engaging in Prosperity Gospel theology. We are making God into someone who safely blesses worldly status. Much as in Constantine’s time, when God blessed Empire, God now blesses consumerism.

And we see this safe understanding of God as well every time that we mine scripture for passages or proof texts designed to back up our life strategies or biases or opinions. I get multiple emails a day from various advocacy groups that dress up pre-existing political talking points in the language of the Gospel. Now, I may very well be sympathetic to these political perspectives, I may very well want God to back them up. But I have learned that you and I need to be careful, that you and I need to get suspicious, anytime that we catch ourselves saying, “Isn’t it amazing how Jesus always agrees with me?”  Whenever we examine the great ocean of scripture in a self-oriented way, there is a danger that what we will end up in looking at nothing more than our own reflection. When we refuse to go deep, as my old boss Bill Ellis says, we turn Jesus into a Rorschach Test.

Today Jesus shares with us the second of a twin set of parables, the second, to borrow a turn of phrase from the visual art world, of a diptych, of two paintings that are designed to hang on the wall one beside the other. Last week we encountered the first of the set: the parable that we know as The Dishonest Judge. Today we encounter the second part. I’m not sure that this second painting has as clearly an agreed upon name as The Dishonest Judge. I’ve heard it called The Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and maybe that’s a good enough name for us to work with.

The parables that make up the diptych have at least two significant common elements.

First, both The Dishonest Judge and The Pharisee and the Tax Collector are funny. In each of them, Jesus uses over-the-top humour to lampoon a certain way of being in the world. The judge and the Pharisee alike are wild caricatures of pompous and aggressively selfish men: the judge, when giving his ruling to the persistent widow, says to himself, “I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone”; The Pharisee goes to church in order to pray, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.”

Second, both of these parables can be read in a way that makes God safe. When I hear Jesus’ stories, I often imagine them taking place in a contemporary setting and featuring contemporary people; on the stage of my mind, I am the director for Jesus’ plays. And if you live, say, in Portland in 2016 and, say, there is a Federal election going on, and you need to a contemporary figure to cast in the part of a pompous and aggressively selfish man…

The temptation to imagine judge or the Pharisee as Donald Trump is almost overwhelming.

My prayers are the best, everyone says so. Not like those other peoples’ prayers. Sad.

And doing that a lot of fun. But it is also a choice to make this story safe, to make God safe, to make God into someone who backs up what I already believe. Isn’t it amazing how Jesus always agrees with me?

Let’s see if we can encounter these pair of stories again, but this time let’s see if we can listen to them with the assumptions of someone living in the Ancient Near East. And let’s notice that, in both of these stories, the character who turns out to be pompous and sanctimonious and selfish is also the character who, according to the conventional rules of society, we ought to respect and to admire. A judge, then and now, is a person doing important and honourable work. We tend to hold judges to a higher standard than the rest of the population, there are rules, for instance, that say that judges must make every effort to appear neutral on political questions. And a Pharisee – a religious official – had a similar status in the Ancient Near East. These two men, by rights, ought to be the heroes of their respective tale. By contrast, a widow is someone on the margins. And a tax collector. A tax collector is a beneath contempt. A tax collector is a fraud and a thief. A tax collector is a collaborator with the occupying forces.

Maybe, if we want to hear these stories with the ears of Jesus’ original audience, we need to risk revising our casting. What if the Pharisee is an Episcopalian? What if the tax collector – well, what category could we draw on in order to feel the kind of visceral, immediate contempt that Jesus’ audience likely felt for tax collectors? – what if the tax collector is a terrorist, what if he is a young pharmaceutical executive jacking up the price of an HIV drug by 3000%, what if he is a pedophile?

The Episcopalian goes to church and says – maybe reasonably enough – “God, I thank you that I am not like those other people. I thank you that I am living a life of goodness and faith.” And the terrorist or the pharmaceutical executive of the pedophile says, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I tell you, Jesus says, this man – the second one, the terrorist or the pharmaceutical executive of the pedophile – went home justified.

Is God safe?

Now, before I go any further, I want to be clear that I am in no way suggesting that God is championing some kind of moral relativism, some lazy ethical standard in which everyone has their opinion and all opinions are equally valid, in which going to church every Sunday is no better and no worse than deliberately exploiting other people. I don’t mean that at all, I don’t believe that Jesus’ parables mean that at all.

What I am suggesting is that when Jesus tells us stories about judges and religious officials – when he tells stories about people like us (most of us gathered in this room have way more in common with judges and Pharisees than we do with poor widows or tax collectors) people who, by any reasonable standard, should be the heroes of his tale – and then he tells us how these respectable people’s disdain or contempt for others alienates them their neighbours and from the Kingdom of God, he is telling us through comedy what he will later tell us through suffering at the end of his earthly life.

Jesus is telling us that God absolutely refuses to exclude, that God absolutely refuses to make anyone into scapegoats. As Jesus hangs dying, he forgives the thief who hangs beside him. Staggeringly, he even forgives those who murder him. No one, Jesus tells us through these pair of stories; no one, Jesus tells us through his dying, is beyond God’s forgiveness. Or, to put that thought another way, when anyone says to God, “God be merciful on me, a sinner,” God always says yes.

Over the last century, our country has done important work. It continues to do important work. The end of state-sponsored segregation in the South was a triumph for justice. The achievement of marriage equality was a triumph for justice. And, in this ugly election season, I believe that there is good news hiding: as a nation, we are slowly awakening to how much racism and how misogyny much remains in our country. I hope and I believe that this awakening will lead us to work for a new triumph for justice.

As we continue to work for justice, Jesus reminds that God’s justice means holding no one, no one in contempt. We are simply substituting one injustice for another, one act of exclusion for another, if we stop holding people of colour in contempt and start holding Donald Trump and his supporters in contempt. We have just traded one outsider for another.

Jesus says: no more exclusion. As much as ostracism may strike us as fair or just, as much as we may want Jesus to back us up when we lock people out, Jesus won’t do it. Jesus won’t back us up any more than Jesus will back other people up when they lock us out. As unwelcome or hard or unfair as it may strike us, Jesus says that, in the Kingdom, there will be no outcasts.

Is God safe?

No.

But God is good.

[martinelfert]

Father Knows Best: Does God Hear Me When I Pray? - SpokaneFāVS

First, God listens always.

[martinelfert]

Amos 8:4-7 Psalm 113 1 Timothy 2:1-7 Luke 16:1-13

*

The story goes like this.

There is a man who so much money and so much stuff that he finds it necessary to hire an employee to take care of everything that he owns. This employee – the text doesn’t give him a name, he is simply the manager – is in charge of the rich man’s houses and cars and airplanes and exotic cats and mutual funds. Like a lot of rich people across history, the rich man comes to trust his manager, to depend upon him: he relaxes, he stops monitoring the manager’s work closely. And like a lot of rich people across history, he ends up disappointed: the rich man doesn’t realise how far things have gone off the rails until a friend calls him up and says:

“You know your manager? You might want to check on his work.”

And so the manager ends up in the rich man’s office. There to face the charge that he is squandering the rich man’s property. Whether “squandering” means something as serious as embezzlement or whether it simply means that the manager has made several big mistakes, Luke doesn’t say. Either way, the rich man doesn’t like the number at the bottom of the ledger sheet. He says:

“You cannot be my manager any longer.”

Now, this is the point in the story when the rich man probably should stop and seek the advice of a Human Resources professional. Because what he says to his manager next is:

“You’re fired.

“Partway through next week.”

The manager leaves his boss’ office. If you have ever been fired or laid off, if you have ever gotten an “F” on a test, if you have ever gotten the letter that says, “Thank you for your application, but…,” if you looked into the eyes of someone whom you loved and saw that she or he didn’t love you in return, you will know what is going on in the manager’s mind and heart and gut right now. He is fighting off tears, the room feels like it is rolling under his feet, he is wondering if he is going to throw up.

“What am I going to do?” he says.

“What am I going to do? I am not strong enough to dig. And I am ashamed to beg.”

And so the manager comes up with a plan. On the way out the door, he’s going to cook the books. And in particular, he is going to cook the books in the way that makes him as many friends as possible, in a way that generates a stack of favours that he can call in over the coming years. He knows everyone who owes the rich man money or goods. He goes to see them all. And he proceeds to give them twenty and even fifty percent discounts on their bills.

Up until now, the story is straightforward enough, unremarkable enough. It’s the sort of thing that you might encounter on the radio or on TV or on your phone on any slow news day. Kickbacks are commonplace, in the Ancient Near East and today. This story is, in other words, a minor cautionary tale. It might be another sad example of humanity’s dishonesty, but it’s nothing special, right? Except that Jesus, who loves reversal, who loves making things topsy-turvy, who loves taking the common and making it strange and wonderful and holy, grabs the steering wheel and turns hard.

The story spins around so fast that it’s amazing that it doesn’t flip over.

Jesus tells us that:

The rich man commends his manager because the manager has acted shrewdly.

The end!

That really is where the story finishes. Jesus does share some moral instruction with us (“if you’re dishonest in a little, you’ll be dishonest in a lot” – which may or may not shed light onto the tale that he has just told), but the story itself is over with the rich man’s commendation to his manager. This tale, in other words, is cut from the same storytelling tradition as the final episode of The Sopranos, in which we are hanging out in a diner with Tony Soprano and his family and listening to Don’t Stop Believing when suddenly

the screen goes blank.

What just happened?

Today at Grace is a Sunday of transition, it is a doorway between two times in our life together. It is a time of beginning, when we say “welcome” or “welcome back,” when we say “let’s get started.” The choir has been back for a couple of Sundays, Youth Group resumed meeting on Friday, the quilters and the Benedictine group and the team that puts together the Friday meal and the auction are all ramping back up to full speed. And it is a time when we name and celebrate what was, when we say thanks, in particular, for Art Camp.

When I arrived at Grace in late August of 2015, Art Camp had just wrapped up for the year. It was like the day after the carnival: the tents were still up in the courtyard, but the children and the counselors and the musicians and the artist-instructors were all gone. And so Summer 2016 was my first Art Camp. It was a joy to witness the music, the holy rambunctiousness, the curiosity. Two things in particular caught my attention.

First, at Art Camp, everyone – everyone – is invited participate in the joyous work of creativity, to be part of responding to beauty and of calling new beauty into existence. Art Camp, therefore, is an antidote to our wider culture, a culture that increasingly reserves creating art to the professionals: don’t you dare sing unless you can command a million views on YouTube, don’t you dare paint unless your work is hanging in the Louvre, don’t you dare dance unless you are onstage with Beyoncé. But Art Camp will have none of that. Art Camp says: Go! Go craft something out of glass or clay or paper, no matter how halting or goofy you may feel, go make beauty. Are you an artist? Well, if you are creating art, Art Camp says the answer is Yes.

Second, Art Camp is about turning outward, it is about empathy. When a group of people from this parish got together some twenty years ago to plant the seed that would become Art Camp, part of the genius of the model they crafted was that each summer would focus on a given country or culture. Art Camp has visited Peru, Greece, India, and this year, Alaska. And importantly, Art Camp has visited these places not as a tourist or as a voyeur or as someone hoping to appropriate or reform the culture that he finds there – this is not Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden – but Art Camp has visited with a curiosity and reverence for the culture that it meets. One of the highlights of Art Camp 2016 was the weekly visit by a pair of Native Elders who shared some of their people’s wisdom, who told some of their people’s stories. It was a gift to hear those Elders. It was a gift to see the rapt wonder with which the children listened to them.

In a real sense, what we see in Art Camp is a foretaste of the Kingdom of God. Art Camp isn’t just a fun thing that happens to meet at Grace and that could meet equally well at Lloyd Center. No. Art Camp is one of our core ministries, it is one of the reasons that Grace Memorial exists. Grace’s longtime rector Stephen Schneider says that the purpose of Grace Institute, the parent organisation of Art Camp, is to carry out this parish’s mission, but in secular language, in the language of the neighbourhood. And there is no question that Art Camp meets that goal. Even though the language and the symbols that it employs are often different that the ones that we use here on Sunday mornings, Art Camp is proclaiming the Gospel. It is inviting everyone to join with the creator in the work of divine artistry. It is inviting everyone to join with the creator in turning outward in empathy.

So.

Let’s track back to the beginning of the Gospel reading. And let’s notice who the audience is for Jesus’ strange and wonderful story about the manager who cooks the books. Over the past few weeks, we have heard Jesus talk to wealthy Pharisees, we have heard him talk to tax collectors and sinners, we have heard him talk to the crowd. But today he talks to the disciples, a group of people who predominantly or perhaps even entirely come out of generational poverty. These folks work in fishing and in carpentry, they have subsistence-level jobs, they own nothing but their clothes and a few tools. And if they know anything about debt, about one person having to pay something back to another, it is because they themselves are in debt, not because anyone owes something to them.

I want to suggest that the disciples’ economic status profoundly shapes how they hear this story. They do not identify with the rich man. Nor do they identify with the manager and his upper middle class job and upper middle class assumptions (“I am too weak to dig” are words these folks have never spoken – manual labour isn’t something that they can choose to opt out of). The people with whom they identify in this story are the ones who owe stuff to the rich man – the debtors are their people. Hearing this story through the disciples’ lens of poverty is a huge clue to where Jesus is going with it. Because when you strip the story down to its core, when you ask the question: in one sentence, what happens in Jesus’ story? The answer is this: the manager forgives debts. Or maybe even simpler than that: the manager forgives.

This choice to forgive is why the rich man (whom we may guess that Jesus intends as a stand-in for God) is so pleased with the manager, it’s why he commends him. Amazingly – and this just might be really good news for me and for you – God doesn’t care that the manager’s motivations were thoroughly selfish. God just cares that he has forgiven. It’s okay if you forgive because it makes you feel good, it’s okay if you forgive because you think you will get kickbacks for doing so, it’s okay if you forgive for no reason at all. Just forgive.

What God knows, and what you and I know, is that forgiveness changes something, it shifts something big. It changes not just the ones who are forgiven, but also the one who forgives. As immoral as the manager’s reasons for forgiving may be, he is made larger and more loving and more whole and more alive by his actions. It doesn’t matter that he did the right thing for the wrong reasons. It just matters that he did the right thing.

If you want to be an artist, then start making art. If you want to be the sort of person who forgives, them start forgiving.

And so this story, of all stories, is an Art Camp story. It is a story about participating in the holy work of creativity, of building beauty, of nurturing forgiveness. It is a story about empathy – even accidental or reluctant empathy, God can and will work with that – about turning outwards in reverent curiosity. It is a story about a manager who, like the artist-teachers and students and counselors at Art Camp, is surprised to find that, even though he’s not a lamp, every he goes, he is aglow with joy, with wonder, with the Kingdom of God.

[martinelfert]

Donating blood: Mysterious and sacred - SpokaneFāVS

Last Sunday, we were able to be part of saving the lives of people whom we will most likely never meet. What an unreal and wondrous thing to be able to say. Through the donation of our blood, we gave an extraordinary gift.

[martinelfert]

Extending gratitude to the dentist's office - SpokaneFāVS

Prior to sitting in that chair last week, I’m not sure that it had ever occurred to me to be grateful to be in a dentist’s office. I had always chosen to focus instead on the minor discomfort of having my teeth cleaned.

[martinelfert]

Three Meditations

Pentecost 15 August 28, 2016

Sirach 10:12-18 Psalm 112 Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14

*

Three meditations on setting your heart free.

Meditation Number One. Jesus goes to a party.

It is the Sabbath and Jesus is at a fancy dinner party. The party is held in the home of a Pharisee, a wealthy and privileged and respectable person. Vivaldi playing on a high-end stereo system, caterers carrying plates loaded with esoteric hors d'oeuvres, there are enough watches and necklaces in the room to open a small jewelry shop, there is a marble floor polished to an almost blinding gleam.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus’ host – and his host’s friends – are watching Jesus closely.

Hearing about this party and its watching guests, I feel a surge of sympathetic anxiety. I feel nervous on Jesus’ behalf. I’ve had enough teachers and bosses and other authority figures in my life over the years who didn’t entirely trust me (and, perhaps, who didn’t entirely wish the best for me) to understand what it is like to be in the presence of people whom you know aren’t 100% on your team. If you’ve had folks like that in your life (and I suspect that all of us have), then you’ll know how hard it is to relax in their presence, how hard it is to do your best work. I tend to I tense up when I am around my personal Pharisees, I get flustered, I inadvertently prove the people who don’t trust me right: I make way more mistakes than I would make if I were feeling relaxed and confident, if I were in the presence of people who were rooting for me, who had my back.

Jesus notices the dynamic in the room – both the conspicuous symbols of status and the conspicuous suspicion of him – and, because he is fearless or reckless or both, he immediately responds out loud. Maybe this is why so many people are watching him closely, because they know that Jesus is infamous for doing this sort of thing. He starts projecting his booming voice throughout the house. Jesus has a voice like a human foghorn, a voice like a PA system that he has trained talking to the crowds in wilderness. He interrupts the many conversations taking place around him.

And he tells a story about a wedding banquet.

The wedding banquet in Jesus’ tale is almost the perfect opposite of the dinner party. At the dinner party, everyone is looking for opportunities to network, to sit beside the person who will expand their influence or their career. At the banquet, by contrast, the good and the wise choose the place of least status. They leave open the possibility that the host will honour them by inviting them to sit nearer.

Everyone who humbles themselves, Jesus says, will be exalted.

And then, in the embarrassed silence that follows his story, Jesus turns and speaks directly to his host. Next time you have a party, he instructs him, don’t waste your hospitality on these people, don’t invite this crowd, don’t send your embossed invitations to folks who can send an invitation right back to you. Invite the poor, the physically and mentally disabled, the developmentally atypical, the ones whose English is too broken or whose skin is too brown be allowed entrance into a home like this one. Invite the people who, either because of an absence of money or an absence of social capital, can’t pay you back.

Jesus finishes speaking. And the silence returns to the room.

Luke doesn’t say what happens next.

Meditation Number Two. A love letter.

Let mutual love continue, says the anonymous author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

This entreaty to hospitality, which is almost assuredly a reference to the passage in Genesis in which Sarah and Abraham entertain three mysterious strangers in the desert, may sound more or less harmless to those of us living in Portland in 2016, it may sound like the sort of facile nicety that we might put on a T-shirt or a greeting card. But, as Naim Ateek taught us when he preached at Grace a few weeks back, hospitality was and is a really big deal in the Near East, hospitality was and is something awesome in the old school sense of the word. The author of Hebrews tells us the same thing. To be hospitable, Hebrews explains, is to:

Remember those who are in prison as though you were in prison with them

hospitality is to:

Remember those who are being tortured as though you yourselves were being tortured.

Holy smokes.

Hospitality, Hebrews tells us, is something radical, something transformative, something that involves us entirely. To choose the example of poverty, the example which Jesus chooses again and again across his ministry, hospitality is not simply saying to the poor, “Yes, you can have some food” or “Yes, you can use the restroom” or “Yes, you can use the phone,” although all of that stuff matters. Hospitality means remembering the injury of living on the street or the injury of living with hunger or the injury of having a full-time job and yet having to choose between health care and rent as though those injuries were your own.

Or what about the example of race? The Pew Research Center just released a study in which it found that white people are vastly less likely to use social media to discuss race than people of colour. (I don’t think I would be going out on a limb to guess that white people are similarly silent about race in “real world” conversations.) People like me, in other words, are leaving the heavy lifting, the difficult work of talking about race, to people of colour. Talking about race just feels too hard, too dangerous, too fraught to me. So I’m just going to choose to say nothing.

But Hebrews says: No. Silence isn’t what Christian hospitality looks like. Ignoring race, pretending to be “colour blind,” claiming to be “neutral,” (all of which, by the way, are privileges that are only available to white people; not noticing race is essentially impossible if you are a person of colour in America), not one of these actions or inactions passes Hebrews’ test for hospitality.

Hebrews says that those of us who are white are called to remember the anxiety of seeing a police car in a rear view mirror as though it were our own anxiety; we are called to remember the wild overrepresentation of African American men in our countries prisons as though we were incarcerated; we are called to remember the inherited generational imbalances in wealth in this country (imbalanced which trace their roots right back to slavery) as though it were we who were shut out of privilege; we are called to remember the exhausting reality of being under continual suspicion as though it were we who were suspect.

And having remembered, we are called to act. Do not neglect to do good and share what you have, says Hebrews, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Meditation Number Three. The beginning of pride, the beginning of freedom.

I know that a number of people in this room grew up in church contexts that were hard, that left you feeling burned or alienated or ashamed or injured, that promoted a picture of God as someone judgmental and vengeful and punishing, as the Angry Old Man in the Sky. I’m mindful, therefore, that today’s reading from Sirach may be difficult to hear. I want to emphasise, therefore, that what we encounter in Sirach this morning is a disaster if we read it as a literal picture of what God is like, if we read it looking for facts about God. God is not waiting to punish us for behaving incorrectly.

I want to suggest that this passage is best and completely understood when we read it in the same way that we read Jesus’ story about the wedding banquet – that is to say, as a parable.

What this parable tells us is that God persistently chooses the side of the marginalised, the side of those shut out from power. God’s choice to stand on the margins – a choice that we see throughout the Old Testament, that we see made throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry – is what Liberation Theologians call God’s Preferential Option for the Poor. God’s hospitality is directed towards the poor, the hungry, the forgotten, the hurting, the cheated. God will enthrone the lowly in place of the rulers. And we are called to be on God’s side, to join in with God’s work, to be on the side of those who are in pain.

And the parable in Sirach tells us that there is a cost to us when we choose to ignore the work to which God has called us, when we choose to ignore the plight of those who suffer. There is a punishment, if you like. But here’s the critical thing, the thing that we discover when we escape a literal reading of this passage: the punishment isn’t administered by God. It is administered by ourselves.

The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.

All of us have met people with withdrawn hearts. And at one time or another, all of us have been people with withdrawn hearts. I sure have. And much as virtue is its own reward, having a withdrawn heart is its own punishment. The irony of a withdrawn heart, the irony of what Sirach calls human pride, the irony of choosing selfishness, is that, while we withdraw in order to keep ourselves safe, the great cost of withdrawal is to ourselves. Having a withdrawn heart alienates us from God and from our neighbours and from creation.

I remember sitting at the feet of Kent Hoffman a couple of years ago, Hoffman who is man of deep prayer, and he has spent his forty-plus year career helping parents and children to nurture loving and vital and freeing relationships; he and his colleagues call their work Circle of Security. At that time, a particularly aggressive and boastful politician was in the news (thankfully, there is no one in the news like that today). And while many people spoke of this man with contempt or anger or hostility, Hoffman spoke of him with pity. He said:

I guarantee you, that inside of that politician is a little boy who is deeply afraid that he is incapable of loving or of being loved.

All of us have that little child within us. And when we withdraw our hearts, when we become closed and think that will make us safe, we starve that child of love.

Every reading that we have heard this morning is about opening our hearts up. All of them are about the scary and freeing and vital work of risking giving our hearts to God and, in turn, by risking giving our hearts to the world. In the Parable of the Banquet, Jesus calls this work humility. In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author calls it hospitality. When we see yes to this work, we give the greatest gift that we have to everyone and to everything around us. God’s promise is that we will receive the greatest gift that there is in return.

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A Play in Three Acts

Deuteronomy 30:9-14 Psalm 25:1-9 Colossians 1:1-14 Luke 10:25-37

*

We have just witnessed a play in three acts. In each act, a new character takes his turn upon the stage. None of the characters has a name; each of them is known only by the category to which he belongs. In Act One, we meet a man – this morning, I am going to call him The Stranger – who is beaten by robbers and left for dead. In Act Two, we meet the Priest and the Levite – strictly speaking, two characters, but because of the uniformity of their actions and the brevity of the appearance on the stage, I am going to treat them as one. In Act Three, we meet the Samaritan.

There is then an Epilogue to the play, in which Jesus himself – the playwright, if you like – comes out before the footlights and asks us a question.

I’d like to watch Jesus’ play a second time with you. But this time, I would like to encounter it in a slightly different way. I would like to reverse the order of the Acts, so that we watch Act Three, Act Two, then Act One. The Epilogue will still be last.

Act Three: The Samaritan

Intermission has just ended. The lights dim, the curtain rises, and a man steps onto the parable’s stage. This is the Samaritan.

This Samaritan sees the stranger lying on the ground. And Jesus immediately tells us how the Samaritan feels: the Samaritan is moved with pity. Or, as some translations have it, he is moved with compassion. The trick is that the Greek word used to describe what happens inside of the Samaritan doesn’t really translate into English. Scholars tell us that, in its earliest use, this word that our translation renders as “Pity” – Splagchna – referred to a blood sacrifice in which the inner parts of a victim were ritually ripped out.[i]

By the time that Jesus tells this parable, Splahchna had evolved to mean something like, “To be merciful.” It appears twelve times in the Gospels, and the Gospel writers use this word exclusively to describe the emotions of Jesus or the emotions f a character in one of Jesus’ parables. For instance, in both Mark and Matthew, just before the miracle that we call The Feeding of the 5000, Splagchna is what Jesus feels for the crowd.  In today’s story from Luke, it is the Samaritan who feels this gut-ripping compassion. Five Chapters from now, in the story that we call the Prodigal Son, it will be the Father who feels the same.

Eugene Peterson, in his paraphrase of the Bible entitled The Message, translates what happens when the Samaritan sees the stranger on the side of the road by using the expression “his heart went out to him.” That might be the closest phrase we have in English that captures Splagchna. Here is an experience of empathy that is like being gutted, that is like having your heart pulled outside of your body.

Seeing his heart lying on the ground before him, the Samaritan renders first aid to the man. He places him on his horse and he takes him to an inn. And there, in one of the most recklessly generous offers to be found anywhere in scripture, he agrees to be personally responsible for all of the stranger’s hospital bills. (Stop and think about that for a second. Even if you have a huge credit limit on your Mastercard, that is a staggering offer, possibly even a terrifying offer.)

And then, after promising the innkeeper that he will come back, the Samaritan returns to the road.

The curtain falls.

Act Two: The Passers By

Two men appear from the wings, one after the other. And they leave just as quickly. They get one sentence of stage directions each. And then they vanish from scripture forever, never to be seen again. (Although, in fairness to them both, their respective sentences show up in one of the most famous passages in the Bible). Here is the Priest. And here is the Levite.

The Priest and the Levite are high-ranking members of Israel’s religious authority. And they hold these jobs during a time when the separation of church and state isn’t so much as a pipe dream in the mind of an idealistic college student. Brian McLaren argues, therefore, that if were to transpose this story to the United States in 2016, we could defensibly render “Priest” as “Chief Executive Officer” and “Levite” as “Wall Street Broker.”

But I’m not sure that we actually need to look as far afield as McLaren suggests. Indeed, I want to suggest that the Priest and the Levites actions – or their inactions – are something that most or all of us know from our own lives.

The Priest and the Levite see the stranger lying on the side of the road. The Stranger has been beaten so badly that his eyes are swollen shut, his bloodied face reduced to a grotesque mask. At first it looks as though he must be dead, that the crows and the jackals and the flies can’t be far away. But then he takes a gasping breath.

And the Priest and the Levite have a choice.

The Priest and the Levite glance over our shoulders. Maybe they are checking to see if the people who beat the stranger are still around, if there is a second ambush to come, if their lives are in danger. Or maybe they are checking to see if they are observed, if anyone will bear witness to what they do next. As they stare at this stranger lying in the mud, a mud that is mixed with the stranger’s blood and tears, what do they feel?

Jesus doesn’t say. Jesus is amazingly economical in his storytelling, deliberately economical in his storytelling. doesn’t tell us about the Priest and the Samaritan’s Splagchna or anything else. He leaves you and me to decide what the Priest and the Levite feel. Is it fear? Do their consciences tug at them? Do they feel a surge of compassion or revulsion or both?

What Jesus does say that they cross the road and keep on walking.

Why?

Well, that answer is also is up to you and me. Here is the answer that I am going to venture today. The Priest and the Levite keep on going not out of fear or hostility or bigotry but for the same reason that most of us keep on going past men lying in the street: plain old exhausted despair and apathy. Helping the beaten man: well, it just feels like too much. I already have a lot of responsibilities, I am already stretched thin trying to pay my bills and raise my kids and deal with my aging parents. I can’t save someone else. I can’t let my heart be pulled out of my body.

It’s terrible that the man is lying on the roadside. I wish he wasn’t hurt, I wish he was safe, I really do.

But I can’t help. Someone else will have to do it.

And so the Priest and the Levite cross the road and keep walking.

Gone.

Act One: The Stranger in the Dust

It is 8.05 and the play is about to begin. The last few audience members, late from dinner or let down by a tardy babysitter, come rushing in. A disembodied voice tells us to turn off our mobile phones and not to take photos. And then the story begins.

The stranger has barely stepped onstage – again, here is Jesus’ economy of words – before the robbers set upon him. The violence is abrupt and intense and brutal. The violence leaves the stranger down on the ground. He lies where he will remain until Act Three.

Nothing happens for a while. Jesus – who is both the playwright and the show’s director – lets us watch our fellow human being, a wounded animal out in the beating sun. The moment goes on a long time, too long. The stranger does not call for help, he does not stagger to his feet, he does not to find his way to safety. None of that is possible, for the robbers have left him, as Jesus tells us, half dead.

Watching him lying on the stage, however, it is hard not to wonder if the stranger is, at least in part, aware of what is going on around him. Does he hear the wind and the call of birds? With his ear involuntarily pressed to the earth, does he notice sounds that he has never heard before? Does everything suddenly sound like opportunity or danger? As he swims in and out of consciousness, does he wonder if he will remain by the side of the road until nightfall, at which time the burning of the sun will end and he will freeze instead? What does he feel when, through his swollen eyes, he see the Priest and the Levite, people of his tribe, people of authority, people whom he has been taught to respect and trust? Is there a surge of hope at their approach, a surge of despair as they cross the road and go on their way?

And what does he experience when he sees the Samaritan? I’m not sure that we have a contemporary analogy for the way that the people of Israel felt about the people of Samaria – some combination of fear and loathing. Maybe we could come close if, when Jesus comes to the part of the story that says, “But a Samaritan while travelling came near him” we were to substitute “But a member of the Taliban while travelling came near him” or “But a member of ISIS while travelling came near him” or “Bit an ex-con covered in gang tattoos while travelling came neat him.” As the Samaritan approaches, the stranger feels a new wave of fear jolt through his already battered body. Perhaps he wonders what indignity or violence is coming next.

But no violence comes. It is the Samaritan who carries the stranger to safety.

This too is a moment of Splagchna, a moment in which the stranger’s heart leaves his body. For as the Samaritan binds the stranger’s wounds and places him on his horse and takes him to safety and promises to pay to  see him made well – as the stranger is saved by his enemy – the stranger is broken open, he is transformed. Impossibly, he finds himself experiencing healing and love in the last place that he expected it, through the last person from whom he expected it.

The Epilogue: The Question

It is G.K. Chesterton who said famously said:

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting;

it has been found difficult and not tried. Here is the playwright’s difficult question for us:

Who was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?

The answer is inescapable, it is almost absurdly easy. But if you’ve spent your whole life figuring that Samaritans are the enemy, admitting to it is almost impossibly hard.

The one who showed him mercy.

Today we attend Jesus’ play after a week of staggering violence in our country. A week in which still more black men were gunned down by the police. Philando Castille. Alton Sterling. A week in which five police officers were murdered in the coldest of blood. Patrick Zamarripa, Brent Thompson, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith and Michael Krol.

The temptation for me – maybe the temptation for you – is to give into despair and apathy, to keep distant and safe like the Priest and the Levite. But I know that isn’t what Jesus is calling me to do. It isn’t what Jesus is calling us to do. Jesus proclaims the simple and hard news that, if there is going to be justice and reconciliation in this broken world, we have to engage in Splagchna, we have to risk letting our hearts out of our bodies, outside where they may well be battered by robbers. We have to go towards grief and anger and hardship and injustice and loss, we have to stand in solidarity with those who endure these things, much as Jesus goes towards these things and stands in solidarity with those who endure these things when he hangs from the cross.

Letting our hearts out means joining with those who are doing the hard and vital work of building justice, the hard and work of healing.  And maybe even more difficult than that, it means doing something as vulnerable as naming out loud own need to be healed, it means accepting healing, even from a Samaritan, from someone whom we don’t like or don’t understand or don’t respect.

Jesus gives us a choice – there is always a choice, following him is always something that he wants us to do in total freedom. The choice is so simple. And it is so difficult.

Do we cross the street and keep on walking? Or do we join in the work of giving and receiving God’s grace, a grace than changes everything?

[i] This word study is taken from Paul Nuechterlein’s marvelous website, “Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary.” http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/proper10c/

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The Parable of the Sheepdog

Isaiah 66:10-14 Psalm 66:1-8 Galatians 6:1-16 Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

*

There is a scene early on in Clint Eastwood’s film, American Sniper, in which a family is gathered around the dinner table. Here are Mom and Dad. And here are two sons, one perhaps eleven, the other perhaps nine. The décor and the clothes and the hairstyles suggest that we are in a hard-working and straight-laced context somewhere in the early 1980’s. And the atmosphere at the table is tense. We soon learn why: that day at school, the younger brother received a vicious beating from a bully, a beating that had no end in sight until the older brother intervened, reversing the situation and raining punches down on the bully and bloodying his nose.

The father – a patriarch whom, the film suggests, these two boys both love and fear – listens to their story. And then he tells them a story in return.

There are three kinds of people in the world, he says. There are the sheep. These are the people who believe that evil doesn’t exist. And so, when evil shows up on their doorstep, they are unprepared to defend themselves. There are the wolves. These are the ones who prey upon the sheep. And then there are the sheepdogs. These are the people, as the father puts it, who have the gift of aggression and who use it to defend the sheep.

The father keeps on talking, pronouncing that they will not be raising any sheep in his family. And then, placing his belt on the table, he says that he will whup the boys if they become wolves. He goes on: if anyone picks on you – and this is a line that few directors other than Clint Eastwood, with his career in Westerns and in Police Thrillers could pull off – you have my permission to finish it. He asks the older boy – whom, by now, we have realized is the protagonist of the film, that he will grow up to be the very American Sniper for whom the film is named – if he finished things with the bully. The boy nods. And the father says approvingly:

Then you know what you are.

This scene (which, by the way, is a fictionalized version of an argument from a book written by Dave Grossman called On Combat[1]) has captured a lot of folks’ imaginations, mine included. I remember sitting in the theatre during this scene and feeling some kind of electric charge, some kind of thrill watching it.

My guess is that there are two reasons that this story connected so deeply with me and with so many of others. First, there is the element of achieving revenge against a bully. For a lot of us, the schoolyard was a hard place. If I survived elementary school, it was by fantasising about doing exactly the sort of thing that happens in Eastwood’s movie, about spectacularly reversing the power dynamic with a bully, about ending my own humiliation and beginning his, about beating that bully silly. In real life I was a feeble kid, incapable of punching anyone out; I was manifestly what the Dad in American Sniper scene would call a sheep. In my imagination, I was all powerful, capable of solving problems with violence. I was a sheepdog.

The other reason I suspect that this scene touched a lot of us in a profound way is that it employs archetypal imagery and, in particular, archetypal Biblical imagery. (Those of you who have seen American Sniper may remember that Eastwood underlines this connection by beginning this scene with his camera focused on a Bible sitting on the family’s sideboard.) Even in a society where a lot of folks don’t know many scriptural stories, most people know that sheep and wolves are images that Jesus uses repeatedly, that Psalm 23 begins, “The Lord is my shepherd.” This scene, in other words, has its roots in passages from scripture like the one that we hear today. Perhaps we could call this scene “The Parable of the Sheepdog.”

Here’s the problem. While the Parable of the Sheepdog may be deeply indebted to scripture, it is also a deep departure from scripture. In Luke’s original story – in Jesus’ original command to his followers – there are only wolves and sheep. The sheepdog is an innovation on scripture or a departure from scripture or – let me risk being harsh – a rejection of scripture.

See, Jesus says, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.

The command that Jesus gives to the seventy whom he sends forth – the command that he in turn gives to you and to me – isn’t that we are to be sheepdogs: it that we are to be sheep. We are to go forth, deliberately underequipped: no purse, no bag, no extra pair of sandals. I think we would be safe in adding: no gun. We aren’t to greet anyone on the road, an instruction that commentators figure means that we aren’t to ask for help or money or reinforcements before we reach our destination, before we come to face the wolves. And when we reach the wolves, we are to knock on their front doors and say:

Peace to this house.

If the wolves reciprocate our peace, if they share in it, then we are to go in and eat whatever they give us. If they do not, we are to shake the dust from our feet and move on.

I’d like to notice with you four aspects of Jesus’ command. First, notice that, from the perspective of the Parable of the Sheepdog, what Jesus is telling us to do is utterly naïve. Or if you prefer St. Paul’s language, it is utterly foolish. To wander out among the wolves unarmed is reckless, it is to risk being assaulted or killed. Perhaps we could even go so far as to say that being among the wolves in this way is to make ourselves complicit in whatever violence the wolves send our direction.

Second, notice that while Jesus’ command may be naïve by worldly standards, it is not unexamined. Jesus is absolutely clear that violence is a possibility and, indeed, that in some scenarios violence is very nearly a certainty. Unlike the sheep in the Parable of the Sheepdog, Jesus does not deny that evil exists. What he does do – here and elsewhere – is tell us to refuse to respond to evil with evil of our own or to violence with violence of our own. And let’s be clear, Jesus is not asking us to do something that he is unwilling to do himself. In many ways, the whole Gospel is the story of Jesus standing like a sheep unarmed among the wolves. Certainly his journey to Jerusalem, where he will confront Empire and the religious authorities and the cross, is such a story. This Gospel establishes this expectation from the beginning: remember that, in the Gospel of John, the first thing that John the Baptist says when he sees Jesus is: Here is the Lamb of God.

Third, notice that if judgment or punishment is required, it isn’t our job to dole it out. As we go forth carrying the Gospel, we may be welcomed. Or we may be rejected. And what are we to do if we are rejected? How are we to protest? How are we to get revenge? By shaking the dust from our shoes. By letting it go and – as the popular expression has it – giving it to God. If some kind of retribution is indeed in order (and I’m not convinced that there is – I strongly suspect that revenge is a human need, not God’s need), it is God, not us, who will deliver it.

Last – and this is where I want to spend the most time – notice that Jesus’ command assumes the possibility that the wolves will be converted and – maybe even harder than that – it assumes the possibility that we will be converted. It assumes the possibility of mutual transformation. When we go forth as what another generation called missionaries, it may be us who end up being transformed.

When we enter into a town, we are to eat and to drink whatever is put before us. We are, in other words, to participate in the culture that we find there, the culture that we find outside of the safety of our homes, outside the safety of a place like this church. We are to participate, if you like, in the culture of the wolves.

And that makes me wonder: What if Jesus has given a really similar command to the people in the towns? The people who, perhaps, understand you and me as wolves? What if he has said to them:

Wolves are going to come among you. You are not to bar your doors against them or reject them or meet them with violence. But you are to welcome them in and to feed them.

Few or none of us self-identify as wolves. I do not. I’m pretty sure you do not. And nor do the people in the towns to which we go. (Maybe there are a handful of psychopaths who gleefully identify as wolves, but they are the exception to the rule.) Most of us identify as good people, as the good guys. If we speak of wolves, it is when we speak of other people. Former CIA Agent Amaryllis Fox tells the extraordinary story of interviewing a captured Al Qaeda soldier who told her that he had seen a number of Hollywood films – Star Wars, Hunger Games, Independence Day, there are scores more – in which a small scrappy of group of outsiders will do anything within their limited resources to expel a technologically-advanced invader. What you don’t realise, the fighter told Fox, is that to us, you are the Empire, we are Luke and Han. We might paraphrase his words by saying:

You are the wolves. My friends and I: we are the sheepdogs.

Maybe what Jesus is teaching us is that going unprepared, going unarmed, going open to another culture: this is the only way that we will discover that those whom we meet are not wolves. And, in turn, it is the only way that those whom we meet will discover that we are not wolves. Unarmed and unprepared and open, we will discover that we are sheep together, and that the shepherd is calling all of us forth into freedom.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/after-orlando-examining-the-gun-business

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Do You See This Woman?

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10,13-15 Psalm 32 Galatians 2:15-21 Luke 7:36-8:3

*

Then turning toward the woman, Jesus said to Simon:

Do you see this woman?

The late British Science Fiction writer, Douglas Adams, is probably most famous for his whimsical series of novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But I am equally fond of another pair of books by Adams, both of which focus on the adventures and misadventures of a lazy and brilliant detective named Dirk Gently. One of the reasons that I find the Dirk Gently books so engaging is that, in them, Adams makes creative and effective use of the literary device of telling the story from the perspective of multiple characters, so that we variously experience the narrative through the eyes of Dirk himself, from one of his clients, from his client’s romantic interest, from a ghost who is wandering the streets, and – this is the perspective that I remember most vividly – through the eyes of a horse.

The horse explains to the reader that he has one great pleasure in life: hanging out in the meadow, perhaps under the shade of a tree, and eating grass. And he explains as well that he has one great complaint: people keep on jumping on his back and expecting him to carry them places. During one protracted scene in the book, a monk sits astride the horse, paralysed by spiritual doubt, while the horse wonders about just who this guy is wearing the robe and sitting on top of him. At that moment in the narrative, Adams inserts an editorial aside that sits somewhere between comedy and cultural commentary and maybe even prophecy. He says:

It is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

[Whereas] it is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.

All of a sudden, here in the middle of his playful detective story, Adams gives us a startling and powerful comment on the nature of power and of privilege. When we enjoy privilege, when we are on top of another within a hierarchy, odds are pretty good that we don’t give the one who is below us much thought. When someone else is on top of us, well, it is hard to think of much else.

I’ll give you an example from my own life. I typed this sermon on my Macbook, a laptop computer that I use daily at the office for work and at home for recreation. People who have visited the factories in China in which a company called Foxconn employs a massive workforce to build Macbooks and iPads and iPhones for Apple tell us that the process of building these electronic consumer goods is much less automated than one might guess – that human beings are manually assembling most of the parts. And they tell us as well that the conditions at these factories are frequently unethical and exploitative and soul crushing: workers labour in an accident-prone environment, they are denied the overtime that is payable to them, and their work is numbing in its repetitiveness. Infamously, Foxconn installed nets on the exteriors of several of its factories several years ago in order to stop its employees from escaping their work through suicide.

I’ve known these facts for a while. And yet as I typed them out on my laptop earlier this week, it occurred to me that I have never so much as considered the hands that built my Macbook. I’m not sure if I didn’t want to think about the people who made my machine or – and I don’t know if this is worse – if it simply didn’t occur to me to think about them. I am the one sitting on the horse. And now that I’ve noticed my perch, I’m suddenly nervously curious: do the people who endured drudgery and, perhaps, suffering in order to build my computer ever wonder about me?

What other examples of privilege – of rider and horse, to use Adams’ image – might we think of? How about transgender folks? My cousin, Eric, is a transgender man living in Kamloops, British Columbia. Eric recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail in response to an article in that paper that argued that “normal people” don’t think about the question of gendered restrooms. In his letter, Eric explained that this was precisely the nature of the problem: normal people don’t think about this question, normal people never have the experience of standing before a pair of restrooms and asking themselves the question: which one is least dangerous for me to enter? It is our privilege not to notice.

How about wealth and poverty? For most of us in this room, it is our privilege to be able keep on walking past the man holding the cardboard sign that says “Anything helps,” to never have to wonder about his life, to never suppose that he was once a baby eagerly awaited by proud and loving parents who were full of dreams for his future. How about race? For those of us who are white, it is our privilege to see a police car in our rear-view mirror and have no anxiety whatsoever about what its flashing lights might mean for our safety. I bet that, together, we could come up with a whole lot more examples.

So. Jesus is hanging out in the home of a Pharisee, a man, as we will learn partway through the story, by the name of Simon. If we were to translate “Pharisee” into contemporary vocabulary and experience, we could probably say that Jesus is at the home of someone who is comfortably off, who is respectable, who goes to church on a regular basis. Someone, in other words, who is a lot like me and, maybe, a lot like you. And a woman crashes the party. This woman, Luke tells us immediately, is a sinner. (There is a popular tradition of assuming that this woman’s sin is sexual in nature, that she is a prostitute, but actually the text is quite silent on that subject.) She begins to bathe Jesus’ feet with her tears.

Simon is appalled that Jesus doesn’t call security, that he doesn’t have the woman kicked out. He doesn’t say anything out loud – that would be impolite. But he makes a mental note that Jesus isn’t as quite as impressive as he thought he was, that Jesus isn’t really leadership material.

Jesus sees Simon stiffen, he sees the sudden coldness of his host’s body language. And so he says:

Simon. I have something to say to you.

There is a whole lot going on in what Jesus says next, more than we can tackle in one sermon. Here is the parabolic question about the two debtors. Here are the series of contrasts between the actions of the woman and the inactions of Simon. Here is the final, scathing assessment of Simon: The one to whom little is forgiven, loves little. Here is the forgiveness of the woman’s sins, a forgiveness which startles and, perhaps, scanadlises everyone sitting around the table. But what I’d like pay particular attention to this morning is the second question that Jesus poses to Simon:

Do you see this woman?

Now, one way of reading this text is to conclude that this sentence simply has the purpose of establishing context, of calling Simon’s attention to the person whom Jesus wants to talk about. If I were to say to you, “Do you see the choir?” I would simply be letting you know that I was about to talk about the choir and its ministry, about the creation of music. But I want to suggest that Jesus is doing something far more than drawing Simon’s attention to the woman. I want to suggest that Jesus’ question actually sits at the very core of Jesus’ message.

Do you see this woman?

At rudimentary level, of course Simon sees the woman. He is aware that she is in his house and that he is unhappy about it, much as you and I would be aware and unhappy to find our kitchen infested by ants. But beyond the level of nuisance or interruption or social embarrassment, he is not aware of her at all. To put that another way, Simon is aware of the woman at the same level that I am vaguely aware that someone must have made my laptop and that I have to walk around the man lying on the sidewalk and that being a transgender person before a pair of bathroom doors or a person of colour being pulled over by the police must suck. But at a deeper level – at the level that Jesus is interested in – Simon and I don’t see at all.

Do you see this woman?

If Simon and I are truthful, our answer is “no.” We have a rider and horse relationship with people like her.

The final question in the baptismal covenant goes like this:

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

And the Prayer Book invites us to make the promise:

I will, with God’s help.

Jesus reminds us that respecting the dignity of every human being begins with seeing every human being.

The genius of the Gospel writers – of Luke and his three colleagues – is that they will tell us a story such as this one and then they will leave it without an ending. Luke tells us about the parable of the debtors, the question Do you see?, the series of contrasts between Simon and the woman, the indictment of Simon, the forgiveness of the woman’s sin. And then the story just ends. He leaves us wondering: How does Simon react? What does Simon do?

Luke leaves the work of writing the ending up to you and me.

One possible ending sees an irritated Simon wrapping up the party finished as soon as possible. And then getting together with his friends the next day to tell them: “You won’t believe what happened. I had this guy as a guest at my house and he brought some woman with him – I think she was homeless. And he forgave her sins!” And Simon and his friends can agree that Jesus is totally unhinged.

But what about another ending? An ending in which Simon takes Jesus’ invitation and chooses to see the woman – and maybe here is the bigger risk – to be seen in return. Maybe he asks her: Where do you sleep? How do you live? What are your hopes? Maybe she asks questions of him. Maybe Simon is surprised by what this conversation opens in him, maybe he has an experience of what theologians call “reverse mission.” Reverse mission is what happens when we serve at the Friday Night Meal, or go to visit someone in the hospital, or travel to a foreign land to get a school started, or fight for a advocate for a higher minimum wage, and we are surprised to discover that, even though we went to offer healed, it is we who are healed, it is we who are transformed, it is we who are made whole.

Maybe Simon and the woman see one another. And they connect. They see one another human beings. as individuals filled with the spark of the Divine.

And that changes everything.

[martinelfert]

We Are Here

1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43 Psalm 96:1-9 Galatians 1:1-12 Luke 7:1-10

*

We are here. We are here. We are here.

We are here.

[and then]

I am astonished

says Saint Paul,

I am astonished

that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ

and are turning to a different gospel

On the advice of several friends – Grace’s own Corbet and Myra Clark being among them – I just finished reading Atul Gawande’s new book, Being Mortal. In addition to being an author, Gawande is a surgeon, a professor, a father of three small children, and a chairman of a not-for-profit devoted to making surgery safer around the world. When you read his biography, you have the impression that he sleeps about once every two weeks. While Gawande’s earlier books focused on his work in the operating theatre, his subject in Being Mortal is aging, the last few years of our lives, and dying.

Gawande begins Being Mortal with the thesis that, because our culture’s go-to strategy around aging is to simply deny that we might ever get old or become infirm – let alone die – we are woefully unprepared when we have to face some or all of these realities. (And thanks to modern medicine’s ability to prolong our lives even in the face of serious illness and injury, there is a good likelihood that all of us will have a time of significant time of infirmity in our final months or years.) Much as when you were a student getting ready for the final exam, therefore, it turns out that “I’d prefer not to think about that” is a remarkably ineffective approach to life.

The good news, Gawande says, is that when we do prepare for the last years of our lives – for instance, by doing something as simple as talking with our loved ones and our doctors about our wishes for the kind of interventions that we would like to have should we become faced with serious cognitive or physical limitations – our final years can be a rich time, a time full of meaning, a time full of blessings.

Of the several potential blessings of being old that Being Mortal encounters, one of them has particularly caught my attention. This blessing is what Gawande calls a narrowing of focus. So, when you have the sense that the end of your life is within sight, you automatically begin to iris down on the things that really matter to you: spending time with friends and family, with the people whom you love; making peace with God; nurturing a context in which you are able to look at your life and say that it is complete, in which you know that you have said and done the things that you needed to say and do. Contrast this time of narrowing with our younger years when our goal is to expand: to expand our achievements, to expand our social networks, to expand our reservoirs of money and status and stuff.

Fascinatingly – perhaps surprisingly, I’ll leave you to decide – this time of narrowing tends to actually a pretty happy time in people’s lives. You might guess that acknowledging that you are in the final five years of your life would be a huge drag on your emotions and energy. But, by and large, quite the opposite of true. The end of life, Gawande and his colleagues have found, is a time when folks tend to be less anxious, less depressed, less angry. Gawande says that this narrowing of focus and the resultant discovery – or rediscovery – of joy, comes as we choose to live for now rather than for the future, as we devote our time to being rather than to doing.

There are at least two reasons that I am fascinated with this time of being and its surprising joy. The first is that the blessing of a narrowed focus, while most common in the elderly, isn’t actually something that you have to be old in order to experience. Drawing on the work of a researcher by the name of Laura Carstensen, Gawande argues that what we might call a “being-oriented life” doesn’t flow out of the generational or cultural sensibilities of the elderly, it’s not something that you learned, in other words, by being born in a certain era. And nor is it a consequence of being old in and of itself. Rather, it is a consequence of something on which the elderly simply have a head start: waking up to the reality that our time on this earth is limited.

What Carstensen found in her research is that, whenever we notice that the time left to us is finite and uncertain, no mater our age, we narrow, we shift away from having, getting, and doing and towards being. Carstensen spoke, for instance, with young men dying of HIV/AIDS. And she found that these men’s preferences for how they spent their time were essentially identical to the preferences of the elderly. They wanted time with friends now, they wanted love and wholeness now. In another study, this one based around hypothetical questions, Carstensen asked people of all ages how they would like to spend an hour of their time. And she found significant discrepancies between young and old. But when she told the people answering her question to imagine that they were about to move far away, the age discrepancies disappeared.

As Gawande puts it, there is a chasm of perspective between those who have to contend with life’s fragility and those who don’t.

The second thing that caught my attention about this time of narrowing is that it sounds for all the world like a spiritual practice. During high school, I remember being fascinated with spiritual artwork called the Memento Mori, the remembrance of death. Popular over several centuries spanning the midway mark of the past millennium, Memento Mori were works of art – so, sculptures and paintings – which sough to remind the viewer of her or his mortality. I remember one painting quite vividly that featured a rotund merchant, fat with the success of the world, being dragged off to death by a skeleton. Some memento mori even anticipate surrealism, so that an ivory carving will be half-living and half decaying into skeletal remains. Like the ashes that begin Lent every year, one of the principal functions of the Memento Mori is to say:

Don’t forget that you are going to die. You don’t know the time or the hour.

Don’t forget to live now.

Similar to the Memento Mori is the practice of writing an imaginary obituary for yourself. Imagine, this practice says, that your life is over. Imagine that the people who knew you and, perhaps, who loved you, are looking back on your life and telling its story. What story do you want them to tell? That practice says:

Pretend that the time left to you in your life is finite and uncertain.

And then it goes on:

I’m going to let you in on a secret. The time left to you in your life is finite and uncertain.

Odds are good that a practices like these are going to narrow your focus.

So. It is the third week of the Season of Penetcost. And we are beginning a series of Sundays during which we are reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul gets his letter started on what can only be called an explosive note – we can imagine him turning red in the face as he penned these words or as he spoke them to the scribe who took dictation for him.  

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel – not that there is another gospel!

Now, there are a number of different schools or strategies for reading Galatians, for figuring out what Paul’s thesis might be in his letter, what it is that he finds so objectionable and, conversely, what it is that he finds so good and so important. Indeed, some of the most exciting Biblical scholarship right now is focused on this book, and we may encounter some of that scholarship in the coming weeks. Today, however, what I would like to do with you is to use Atul Gawande’s reflections on narrowing as a means of exploring Paul. In particular, I want to ask:

For you and me in 2016, what is the different Gospel that keeps us from narrowing down to what matters?

I suspect that all of us will have a somewhat different answer to that last question. But I suspect as well that what all of our answers have in common is that they are built out of some combination of denial and addiction. Denial, as I have said already during conversation this morning, that finitude is part of our reality, that aging and limitation and death might actually be something that happens to people like us. And addiction – well, to what? Sometimes to booze, yes. Sometimes to other drugs. But just as often our addictions are to anger, to being right, to having prestige and power and money and stuff, to consumerism, to having and getting and doing.

I want to suggest that there is some really good news is Atul Gawande’s book, there is some really good news about you and me being mortal. Remember what Gawande and Laura Carstensen discovered: it is in that irised out place when we pretend that our time is unlimited that we are most anxious, most depressed, most angry. By contrast, when we acknowledge the unwelcome news that our lives are finite and uncertain, when we stop denying, we automatically narrow down to what matters. We narrow down to the Gospel. We remember the beautiful urgency of being alive. In spite of everything, we discover the freedom and joy and possibility and agency that God wants for you and for me.

This life is a fleeting, beautiful gift. But for now:

We are here.