The 8th Sunday after Pentecost - Compassion and Reconciliation

It's always good when someone who knows a lot more than you do agrees with you—or at least close enough to count as agreement.  My default point-of-view in sermon writing is to ask the two essential questions in interpreting scripture:  First, what does this passage tell us about God? And then, what should we do (or how should we live) in the light of our answer to the first question?  Of course neither question stands outside the context of culture and history, but they require us to distill the essence of what we have read.

Douglas John Hall, a retired professor of Christian theology at McGill University, thinks that understanding our gospel reading this morning requires answering two questions very similar to mine.  These two questions also arise from what he calls “the welter of global religious striving”—a way of describing the conflicts in the world that appear, at least on the surface, to involve opposing religious systems. His first question is this:  “How does your God view the world?”  His second is, “How does your God ask you to view the world?”  Professor Hall claims that how we view the world—which motivates our actions in the world—will flow from our ideas about God.  Theology informs ethics, and our ethics arise from our theology.

If you read Hebrew and Christian scriptural texts closely, you will find more than one depiction of the God.  Jesus Christ may be the same yesterday and today and forever, as the writer of Letter to the Hebrews asserts in the 13^th chapter.  But our human understanding of God's view of the world and how God asks us to view the world has changed and—if you accept that there is continuing revelation—our understanding about how to answer these questions will change again—and again.

This change is captured succinctly in the story from the 8^th chapter of the Gospel of John.  Jesus and the religious authorities were debating about the fate of a woman caught in adultery.  Trying to trap Jesus into speaking against the Law the authorities asked, “Now in the law Moses [which the ancient Hebrews believed was given to Moses directly from God]  commanded us to stone such women.  Now what do you say?”  Jesus answered by asking them to view the world—and this woman—with a compassion growing from their awareness of their own sinfulness.  As you know, he said, “You who are without sin . . .[cast the first stone]”

We have two words to consider from our readings today in the light of Professor Hall's questions.  The first comes from the letter to the Ephesians.  It is “reconcile.”  The second comes from today's reading from Mark's gospel.  It is “compassion.”  Both of them refer to a way of looking at the world—and humanity—that promotes a positive connection and a life-giving relationship with God and among people.

In the letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul describes God as viewing differences concerning the purity of one's life—and the religious practices that maintain that purity—as a wall that must be broken down. Paul does not critique the purity code itself, but he criticizes the use of a purity code to exclude the people for whom it would be a barrier—to exclude those people that now believe in the message of Jesus, but who are not Jews.

This is how Paul describes God-in-Jesus's point of view:  “He [Jesus] has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.”  Are we now called to view the world as a place where we need to follows Jesus' pattern and act as reconcilers across the differences that divide people of faith?  Exactly how we might follow that call to act as reconcilers must come as the result of prayerful discernment.

Now we turn to the word “compassion” we find in the reading from Mark's gospel.  This word may hold an important place in our discernment of how act as a reconciler.  Jesus and his disciples found themselves at odds with the crowd of people who would not let them get away and rest.  The crowd appeared to be desperate for Jesus' presence.  They scrambled to locate Jesus—almost mobbed him.  Did they need what Jesus and his disciples have been offering in their ministry:  healing and preaching repentance to prepare for the coming reign of God?

Jesus could have told the disciples to disperse the crowd, for he and they were quite weary.  The disciples even suggested that course of action to Jesus later.  But Jesus knew his mission—and that of his disciples—was to bring the people into a closer relationship with God—to be reconcilers.  So Mark reports that Jesus felt compassion for this disorderly group.  Yes, compassion as the route to acting as a reconciler—this Jesus taught through what he did, as well as what he said.  First, he taught the people in the crowd “many things,” according to Mark. I imagine this included God's desire to be in relationship with them—to be reconciled.  And then he fed them—a very, very large number of them.

To come back to the questions with which we began:  How does our God—the God we believe in and trust—how does our God view the world?  As a place where compassion should be practiced, so that all people may be reconciled to God and to each other? Yes.  And how does our God ask us to view the world?  Can there be any doubt about the answer?

So where do we begin?  I suggest we begin by praying for our hearts to be led to compassion.  Then we must look for occasions where we can reach out across the divide of conflict and show the same compassion to another person that our Lord has showed to us.  And right now. this morning. let us approach the altar to receive the feeding Christ offers us: the bread broken, the wine poured out for us.  Through receiving Christ's body and blood may we experience the reconciling grace of God.   And finally, since we have been filled with Christ's presence, may we offer Christ's compassion and reconciling presence to the world through our words and our deeds.

The 7th Sunday of Pentecost - Blessing!

How blessed are you?  How blessed are we?  How do you bless?  How do we bless?  One of the charisms of ordained ministry is to convey God's blessing to God's people at the end of the Eucharistic celebration and in other sacramental rites.  In the Episcopal Church priests pronounce God blessing on the assembled worshippers while making the sign of the cross.  Some people respond to that blessing by making the sign of the cross themselves: a blessing given and received.

But that does not mean that God's blessing is not be conveyed in other ways.  Sometimes we speak about how we blessed by the love and friendship of another person.  We pronounce God's blessing over the meal we are about to eat.  We might call an unexpected, positive happening a blessing. Sometimes we look back on a situation and find we received a blessing in a situation that seemed quite dire.

The church where I served as a seminarian experienced a devastating fire caused by carelessness on the part of some workmen making repairs.  Although the congregation of the Church of the Holy Apostles had to meet somewhere else for a couple of years, they were able to rebuild their worship space also to be the dining room during the week for a larger and larger soup kitchen ministry—about 1,200 served daily. The rector at the time of the fire was still there when I came.  He said it was very tough to deal with the situation, but so much good came out of their difficulty.  And the other part of the blessing was that not one day was missed by the soup kitchen ministry.

Our epistle reading from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians seeks to give a theology of blessing.  The opening sentence addresses the reciprocal nature of blessing: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.”  Paul declared that God loved humanity, blessing it in its pre-Creation state.  In the same way the writer of Genesis has God declaring each part of the created order good, Paul appears to be explaining some sort of “original goodness” for humanity in Christ. Our created purpose, from Paul's perspective, is to dwell in a holy and blameless state within God's love through Christ, as the second person of the Trinity.  Our response to this love should be to praise “God's glorious grace [another way to speak of God's love] that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved [Jesus].”

For Paul, as he expresses himself in this passage, blessing primarily is spiritual, not material. But like St. Thomas who demanded to touch the wounds of Jesus in order to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, most of us want or need a material manifestation of God's blessing to bolster our faith.  We can hear this expressed by psalmists. We hear this in Psalm 24: 4-5, “Those who have clean hands and a pure heart . . . shall receive a blessing from the Lord and a just reward from the God of our salvation.”

So we are not unbiblical, by any means, in longing for tangible evidence of God's blessing.  But if this is all we understand God's blessing to be, our view is too narrow.  Remember Jesus' explaining that rain falls on both the just and the unjust?  God's blessing is about relationship.  The real world is a fallen and dangerous place.  The only certain ground on which we may stand is God. Our relationship with God is through Jesus Christ. To switch the metaphor a bit, could God's blessing be like the rain, falling on us all, but not all of us at any particular moment are absorbent soil?  For us, coming to know Jesus perhaps may lead us to be more receptive to seeing God's blessing, to being in relationship with the divine.

In the reading from Mark's gospel there appears to be no blessing and no good news either.  One of my seminary classmates posted a picture on Facebook a couple days ago about this passage showing an open Bible and a pen resting on an empty legal pad. His caption said “Looking for the good news in this week's gospel.”

No good could be said about King Herod or the dreadful situation he created by his boasting about how generous he would be to his seductive, dancing daughter, Herodias.  And yet, there is one part of this vignette that caught my attention.  Keep in mind the image of the rain falling on both the just and the unjust. These words brought me up short: “ . . . Herod feared John knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.  When he heard him he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.”  John's testimony about repenting [again, changing one's mind] and turning to God was a blessing to Herod.  As we know from scripture and historical sources, Herod was not capable of responding to this blessing to become a blessing to others or to bless God.  But nevertheless God offered blessing to Herod through John's testimony.

Within the Christian community at Ephesus and within our own Christian community, God's blessing comes within the context of our faith.  Paul wrote:  “In him [Christ] you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit . . .”  Through our baptism and later adult acceptance of the baptismal promises, if we were baptized as infants, God has made us absorbent and fertile soil for receiving divine blessing that, as Paul noted, “ . . . we who . . . set our hope on Christ might live for the praise of his [God's] glory.”

So there it is.  God has reached out to us with blessing and we return the blessing by praising God's glory.  But there is more.  As John the Baptizer did, we must take what we have received and offer it to others.   Although our testimony about how our faith in Jesus Christ has blessed us may help others respond to God's blessing, we must also offer our deeds to those in need.  When we pack or cook food for the hungry, when we offer physical or pastoral care to others—these material forms of blessing flow from our being spiritually fed and cared for by God.  Paul understood all this in a spiritual way, not to earn salvation through our own righteousness—which would never be enough—but as a response to God's blessing that praises God's glory.

May God's blessing be ours; may Christ's peace be ours; may the Spirit's outpouring be ours—so we can be Christ's heart and Christ's hands each day for those we know and love—and for those to whom God sends us—even if they do not readily receive us!

The 6th Sunday of Pentecost - Cynicism or Hope?

Cynicism—no matter what you listen to on the radio today—no matter what you watch on television—no matter what you read in magazines and newspaper—you can't escape it!  Yes, I suspect it's worse because of the election campaigns right now, but it pervades most of the information we receive much of the time.

I don't use the word “hell” very often in my sermons, but today I want to offer a phrase that I first heard from someone who rarely swore.  This phrase was “going to hell in a handbasket.”  It provides a fascinating image, so I wondered where it came from.  Although its origins are murky, it appears to arise from an 18^th century problem.  Handbaskets were the woven baskets for passengers to ride in, suspended below a hot air balloon.  When the first untethered hot air balloon flight took place in 1783 in France, some people worried that the balloon might disappear, floating away to heaven or hell.  Cynicism about modern inventions is nothing new!

What attitudes lead to cynicism that people or situations are going “to hell in a handbasket?” Our scriptures this morning offer some glimpses into this issue. But they also offer hope for a different outcome.  Let's look at them more closely.

Our first concern should be that God looks at human sinfulness with a cynical eye. When Ezekiel hears God's voice, he understood God as describing the people of Israel as: “. . . a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me, they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day.”  Then God speculates that Israel may well refuse to listen to Ezekiel's speaking God's prophetic word.  Were God to examine our lives today, would God hold that same cynical attitude?

Our second concern should be that communities of faith can be troubled by leadership issues.  The rather confusing passage from St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians we heard this morning contains Paul's cynical take on how the Christian community in Corinth understood leadership.  Paul appears to be arguing that their leaders' boasting about their ideas and their qualifications will lead the community astray.  At this time when our General Convention is meeting in Indianapolis, do we feel cynical or hopeful about the outcome of its deliberations?  Perhaps we are beyond cynicism.  More locally, here at St. Nicholas', do we trust our leadership—particularly the Vestry—or do we feel cynical about the way they do their work?

Finally, we need to be concerned about whether our own cynicism about how the world works prevents us from seeing and experiencing the Holy One in our lives.  Cynicism certainly clouded the minds of the people who attended the synagogue in Nazareth that sabbath when Jesus came to teach:  “How could this hometown boy we knew be a great teacher or healer or prophet?  We knew him when he . . .”  You can fill in the blank.

Mark also reports a rather cynical response on Jesus' part: “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”  Rejection tends to bring out cynicism, doesn't it?

Since most likely we will not encounter Jesus in person, we should ask ourselves whether our cynicism about a certain situation or a certain person will prevent us from experiencing Christ in that situation or in that person?  Especially when that situation may make us uncomfortable or that person may confront us or disagree with us.  Do we believe so strongly that they are “going to hell in handbasket” that we cannot see beyond our own feelings to what God may be trying to teach us through them?

So where do we find ourselves now?  Concerned about how our sinfulness looks to God?  Mistrustful of our leaders in the church?  Experiencing barriers in relating to others who disagree with us or make us uncomfortable?  Yes, indeed, our human nature tends toward cynicism.  It can even lead us to reject God!

But I said at the beginning we could find hope in the scripture we heard this morning. Of course, hope can be an antidote to our cynicism; it can help us encounter the Holy One in our daily lives.  I believe hope will arise in our hearts when we allow ourselves to believe that St. Paul heard Christ correctly.  Paul wrote:  “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this [thorn in his flesh] that it would leave me, but he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.' ”

Our cynicism can be seen as a thorn in our flesh that prevents us from seeing the goodness in the world around us.  It can also prevent us from taking action to correct things in our lives and in our world that need to change.  But God's grace, freely given to us, can empower us, despite whatever weakness or helplessness we feel.  It can keep us from turning to cynicism, or it can help us turn away from cynicism. And we can affirm with Paul that through God's grace “whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”

The character, Sonny Kapoor, in the film “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” put it beautifully, “Every will be o.k. in the end—and if it's not o.k., it's not the end.”  As Christians we can have confidence that God has begun to redeem creation and, in the end, all human beings will experience reconciliation to God and to each other.  The end will not only be o.k., it will be all that we could ever hope for!