The 15th Sunday after Pentecost - 400th Anniversary of the KJV

The readings you have just heard sounded the way the Bible in English sounded for quite a number of years—four hundred of them, in fact!  Some of us grew up with the King James Version of the Bible in our homes.  I remember trying to read it as a young person and becoming quite frustrated. In college, though, I discovered two modern translations—the Revised Standard Version and the New English Bible.  I became entranced with each new translation or well-done paraphrase published. Each offered me another opportunity to better understand holy scripture.

I can only imagine what it would have been like in the late middle ages to only know the Bible through stained glass windows or medieval miracle plays and mystery plays.  Actually I like all those things, but they don't have the authority of scripture.  And if I managed to live through bearing children, I would have been kept in my place by the authority of mother church and the priests and bishops who ran the church.  I would not have been taught Latin.  So when I did go to mass, I would have had no idea what was being said.  For example, the words we can use to describe something that fools people, “hocus-pocus,” came from the Latin words used by the priest as he elevated the host and said (in Latin, of course) “Hoc est corpus meum.”  The most sacred moment of worship turned on its head!

What Bob Dylan sang about in the 1960's, “The times they are a-changin’,” could be applied to late 15^th century and all of the 16^th century as well.  Although I love history, I am not an historian. Others can explain the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance much better than I.  The same is true of the Reformation. Nevertheless, I will spotlight what I hope will help us appreciate—400 years later—the great gift of the Authorized Version of the Bible—authorized by King James I of England.

Moveable metal type changed the cost and availability of books.  By 1500 the mechanization of bookmaking led to the first mass production of books in history in assembly line style. A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to forty pages by typographic hand-printing and a few pages by hand-copying.  Printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes. [This information about printing came from Wikipedia.] So when the King James Bible was published in 1611, it could be made available to any literate person.

There were several Bibles in English prior to the King James Version. William Tyndale, the first English Bible translator, worked in the 1520's and 30's.  He described his motivation for this work to a disapproving clergyman:  “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou doest.”  Oxford-educated, Tyndale fled from England to the continent to escape church authorities. Cardinal Wolsey of the English church had declared Tyndale a heretic, and the Reformation was not yet supported by King Henry VIII.

Until he was betrayed in 1536, Tyndale translated and published all the New Testament.  He also completed the translation of Genesis through Joshua.  He used original Hebrew and Greek texts—the best ones he could find.  His gift for this work was clear when the committee responsible for the translation authorized by King James used Tyndale's work as the basis of theirs.  Eighty percent of the King James Bible uses Tyndale's work.

A man of well-chosen words, Tyndale spoke just before he was executed, “Lord, open the King of England's eyes.”  In fact, just four years later, no longer bowing to the authority of the Roman church and the Bishop of Rome, Henry allowed English translations of the Bible to be published in England.  All were based on Tyndale's work.

As Jesus challenged the religious authorities who questioned whether he had true authority to teach about God and perform miracles, Tyndale challenged the authority of church and King who tried to keep people ignorant of what holy scripture said in a language they could understand.  Tyndale's claim that the plough boy would know more scripture than churchmen and scholars has the same flavor as Jesus' upbraiding of the religious authorities of his time:  “Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.”

Yes, the Reformation challenged many questionable practices in the church.  One of the most profound challenges was to the church's control of how holy scripture should be interpreted. We may choose to agree with the church’s teaching or not.  But if we can read and understand the scriptures for ourselves, then we can disagree on a rational basis.

We should be grateful for this opportunity.  We should be grateful, too, that gifted writers and scholars produced these two great works in English: our Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, and the King James Bible.  And we should be grateful that the English Reformation developed three sources of authority—scripture, tradition and reason—equal and in conversation with one another.  Yet, scripture, translated so that native speakers—in our case, English speakers—can read and understand it, will always hold a place of primacy.  Yes, for all these things, instead of saying “Deo Gratias,” we now say, “Thanks be to God.”

The 14th Sunday after Pentecost - Complaining and Receiving!

The readings today were: (1) from Exodus when the Israelites in the desert complained about starving and received manna from God, and (2) from a parable in the Gospel of Matthew about vineyard workers who received the same pay, despite working different lengths of time.  The ones who worked the longest hours complained to the vineyard owner.

What gives someone the right to complain?  Not enough to eat—without hope for finding or growing any food?  How about getting the same pay as someone who worked very little in comparison to how long and hard you worked?

Place most of us in the desert with the Israelites—or set us in the world of the parable about the laborers in the vineyard—and we would be complaining as loudly as anyone!  Poor planning and clearly unfair treatment: neither of these will win a leader any loyalty or decent approval ratings.  In fact, I wonder which of the day workers would go with the vineyard owner early the following day?  And how many would wait until later in the day? 

What does the complaining by the Israelites or grumbling by workers hired early signify? A mind-set, I think, of entitlement: when we behave in a proper way we will merit good things happening to us.  Taken to the extreme, preachers of the prosperity gospel—rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ—suggest that giving to God's work through their ministry will result in the giver's getting a better job or a better car or perhaps an unexpected financial gain.  A softer version of this attitude says that following the rules and keeping out of trouble merits God's love and God's blessing.  There is the connection between how we act and what we get from God, according to this point of view. 

Do we truly merit the good we receive in our lives?  Do we recognize how often our comfort often depends on another's toil?  And this toil may occur in very unpleasant, even unfair, circumstances.

Because this is Sea Sunday, we are asked to pray for those folks who work on merchant ships in conditions that I dare say all of us would complain about.  Their wages are low, given the long hours they work.  Many of these seafarers have signed a nine-month contract to sail without returning home. During those months they miss many events—the birth of a child, family weddings, funerals, birthdays, holiday celebrations. Yet we benefit from their work by eating the food and using the products their ships bring.  Every time we drive north on I 495, we can see the docks where what they bring us is off-loaded.  Do we think about how we benefit from the seafarers' toil?

When we say the Lord's Prayer and use these words: “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are not asking for what we deserve or what we merit.  We are praying these words, because we need to receive what God provides for us.  God provides our daily bread through the talents God gave us and through the talents God has given others.  This makes all we receive a gift.  Our prayerbook offers these words in Prayer 34, For Towns and Rural Areas: “. . . grant that all people of our nation may give thanks to you for food and drink and all other bodily necessities of life, respect those who labor to produce them, and honor the land and the water from which these good things come.”

So we can see the provision of manna by God as such an unmerited gift.  Seminary professor Theodore Wardlaw calls manna, “an extraordinary ordinary thing” that God gave in abundance.  He noted this description of how manna occurs:  “In the Sinai Peninsula, 'a type of plant lice punctures the fruit of the tamarisk tree and excretes a substance from this juice, a yellowish-white flake or ball. During the warmth of the day it disintegrates, but it congeals when it is cold.  It has a sweet taste.  Rich in carbohydrates and sugar, it is still gathered by natives, who bake it into a kind of bread.'” Then he draws an important conclusion: “ . . . for people hungry enough to notice, this ordinary food—given to them day by day as a completely unearned gift—is linked to the miraculous generosity of God.”

Perhaps this miraculous generosity is what St. Matthew wanted to call our attention to when he reported Jesus' teaching about the capricious vineyard owner's way of compensating his day workers—and Jesus' statement that brackets this parable, “And the last will be first, and the first will be last.” Yes, the workers who had been in the vineyard all day grumbled. But for those who had waited all day without being chosen—in the same scorching heat as the ones chosen first—and who perhaps had resigned themselves to being hungry another day—for them the vineyard owner’s act of paying everyone a day’s wage must have seemed as “miraculous generosity” indeed.

So the question today's gospel reading confronts us with is this: “Where do you place yourself in this parable?”  Are you among those workers chosen early who believe your hard work merits what you have received—and probably even more?  Or are you among the last chosen who knew they did not really deserve the wages they were given?  This is not an economic question.  This is a spiritual question.  And I don't believe it is an easy question to answer.  Admitting our vulnerability before God, our unworthiness because of sin, and our (sometimes) uncertain faith can make us most uncomfortable.  Yes, in this parable Jesus was warning us against getting cocky about our relationship with God. But Jesus was also assuring us that God can show miraculous generosity when we are in need.  Exercising as much humility as we can muster, can we look for evidence of God's “extraordinary ordinary” generosity in our lives—and in the life of our community here at St. Nicholas'?  Could there be manna here we have never noticed before?

The 13th Sunday after Pentecost - Forgiveness? Mercy?

On September 11, 2001, I had begun my day at North East Middle School.  I don't remember exactly what I was told when someone came to the classroom around 9:45, except that there was a crisis and I needed to return to my home school, Cherry Hill Middle, without delay.

As I drove quickly over the back roads between the two schools, I listened to my car radio and heard the tragic news.  By the time I arrived, the decision had been made by the school system to send students and then staff home.  After I arrived home, I finally saw the pictures of what had happened in Manhattan on our television. I watched for a long time trying to comprehend what had happened.  It seemed so unreal.  But, of course, it was very real.

I'm sure all of us here today can recall that morning in their lives with the same clarity I do. What would be somewhat different, I think, if we compared notes, were our emotional reactions.  What might even more divergent, I'm sure, would be our opinions concerning all the decisions made and actions taken by our government on our behalf in response to the 9-11 attacks.

As we remember our feelings and reflect on our opinions about this attack on our country and our country's response, we supply the context in which we hear our scripture readings this morning.  Although the usual ways I interpret scripture in my sermons would be valid to use today, I can't imagine doing so.  Rather, the 10^th anniversary of the four airliners being hijacked and used as weapons against thousands of ordinary people, must be the interpretive context used.

The themes of our three scriptures are these: judgment, mercy and forgiveness.  Choosing to act with mercy or to forgive helps us restrain our very human need to retaliate or take control of a situation through violence. All the scriptures refer to situations in which individuals have made or will make choices about how to respond to injury or offense by another.  In them, judgment—and action based on that judgment—are reserved for God.  In addition, the reading from Genesis claims that God can bring good out of the worst of situations.

Our readings make strong claims about judgment being God's and about Jesus' teaching that his followers should practice mercy and forgiveness when they have been wronged.  Do these hold up in the context of September 11, 2001?

To answer this question, I want to offer the testimony of two people.  The first comes from a military chaplain who was working at the Pentagon the morning 9-11; the second, from a 17 year-old young man whose mother died that morning in the Twin Towers.  When she died, he was just 7 years-old.

Navy Chaplain James Magness and other senior Armed Services chaplains were attending their annual meeting at the Pentagon.  After the plane struck the Pentagon, they all assisted with rescue efforts. Chaplain Magness experienced very strong anti-Muslim feelings as a result.

He recounted his feelings and how he dealt with them: “For days on end I contemplated how people of faith, people who affirmed the Abrahamic faith that Jews, Christians and Muslims embrace, could do such a horrible thing. I'm not necessarily naive about people who do bad things. After all, when I was younger I spent the better part of a year in Vietnam being best friends with an M-16 rifle and a 50 caliber machine gun. I learned plenty about the bad things people, me included, can and will do.

But somehow this was different. I wondered if maybe President Bush could be wrong, and we were in a religious war.

Something was happening in my psyche and in my soul. It was as though I was two persons: light and darkness. I was trapped in my own dualism where two competing opposites held me in tension. This was a type of dualism that had captured many Americans. Back in those days right after 9/11 the smart money was for the darkness to win.

Out of my darkness I wanted to get even. I wanted to make ‘those persons’ pay for the pain they had caused us. . . Instinctively, I knew that I had to break out of this dark funk. But how? I prayed the Daily Office of Morning Prayer from my Episcopal prayer book each morning. That didn't do it. I led and attended public worship services. That didn't do it. I talked with a therapist and with my closest friends. Even that didn't do it. What could I do?

Desperately, I needed a change of heart. Yet, I found that the change would not come easily or quickly. For months I grappled with what had by then become a spiritual dilemma in my life. Then, without warning, I got a jolt to my soul that awakened me to a new vista, a new way to move into a greater understanding and grasp of God.

In my role as a leader of Navy chaplains, I visited the military chaplains assigned to our new Joint Task Force detention facility at the Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ever since the facility opened, we had assigned a Muslim military chaplain to be on staff and work with the detainees, suspected terrorists whom almost all embraced the Muslim faith. Upon arrival I was told that there was significant conflict between the commander of the detention facility and my Muslim chaplain. Though to this day I am still not clear about precisely what caused the conflict, I was very aware that in the end a significant part of the problem was based in the commander's distrust of a Muslim chaplain. On my second day I ended up standing between, quite literally, the commander and my chaplain. Instinctively, I knew that as a leader I had to stand up for the person for whom I was responsible. Well, that was it! At that moment the darkness in my life began to ebb away, the light began to shine.

But why? How? The change began when I was able and willing to sacrifice some of my own safety and security and stand up for a chaplain for whom I was responsible but with whom I had religious differences. That day God had led me to the point at which I had the opportunity to sacrifice my comfortable, condescending and divisive views about all Muslims. I learned that day that once I could affirm my chaplain, my Muslim chaplain, that I could begin to be transformed so that in my soul I could see more light than darkness.”

Seven year-old Nicolas Lanza had lived with his mother in New York when she was killed on 9-11.  Then he went to live with his father in Virginia.  As you might imagine, he had significant adjustment problems. Here is what he wrote:  “I can recall days then the sun would be up but all I could see was darkness. . . I thought for the longest time what happened on 9/11 was my fault.  I could not forgive myself.  I could not forgive the man who caused me the most harm: Osama bin Laden.  I didn't know how to handle the burden of being a 9/11 victim. I told some people who I was, they told others, and pretty soon everybody at my school . . . found out, as did members of the church I attended. But my issues still didn't change.  My inner demons kept on attacking. The summer before high school, I went to a church camp.  It turns out that it was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.  You see I was still carrying the one thing that was wearing me down and leaving me broken. I was still carrying my mother. . . But then during one service, one of my good preacher friends and a few other ministers gathered around me, and they began to pray for me. 

My preacher friend told me that it was time to let everything go. . . For a moment . . .all I could see was this blinding white light. A voice began to say, 'You belong to me my child.  You shall no longer be burdened with these chains that you wear about you.  You are free.'

It was then that I realized I was . . . bound by the thick iron chains of depression, wrath, unforgiveness, and—the thickest and strongest of all chains—my own mother. . . Then words came into my head. . . as though they had been there all this time: I love you.  Now go and tell others the same.”

Nicholas said he had a strong desire to tell Osama bin Laden that he forgave him for “the hideous crime he committed again me.  He reflected on his new understanding:  “Forgiveness is essential to really moving on from any tragic happening. I came to learn this through studying the word of God, prayer and real-life experience.”

An awareness of the importance of forgiveness came for both Chaplain Magness and Nicholas Lanza came as a sudden burst of insight.  It can come more gradually as well.  It comes, I believe, when we accept the connection we share with ALL people through God, our creator.  St. Paul explained this connection with these words: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or we die, we are the Lord's.” And in the end, God will both judge all humankind and show mercy as God sees fit.

“Sprituality forged in smoke and fire,” by James Magness, Episcopal News Service Online, September 7, 2011.  OR http://www.episcopalchurch.org/80050_129692_ENG_HTM.htm

“Finding Nicholas” by Nicholas Lanza, Newsweek, September 12, 2011, pp. 32-33.

The 12th Sunday after Pentecost - Why have you come?

One of the first tasks in a classroom at this time of the year happens as the teacher and the students decide how their class will function.  The two essential parts of this task are rules and routines.   Sometimes the teacher has these posted on a bulletin board for the students to see as they enter.  Other teachers spend time in the first few days engaging the students in the development of rules.  Routines often follow from the teacher's style of instruction.  But students, through their restlessness or their cooperation, often influence the routines the teacher uses.

Rules and routines help us order our lives.  If they are imposed on us by others, we may resist.  If we create our own, they become our habits—comfortable, if not always good for us or folks around us.  If we are in a family or any group that lives or works together, conflict happens when my view about what the rules and routines should be disagrees with your view in these matters.  How will it get resolved?  Is there a right way that decisions should be made?  Especially in the body of Christ, the church, does scripture lead us into good ways to order our life together?

Were I a person who had no experience in a church community and showed up this morning to find out more about “church,” what would I think as I listened to the reading from St, Paul's epistle to the Romans and the reading of Jesus' teaching from Matthew?  (I might just not come back!) On the other hand, we who have been  members of this Christian community (or any Christian community for a while), how will we react Paul's teaching and Jesus' instruction?

These lessons indicate that the life in a Christian community is important to its members and to God.  Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” St. Paul noted that Christians should “owe no one anything, except to love one another.”  How important is this community for each of us?  Why is it important?  What do with gain by being part of this community?  What, if anything, do we give up by making a commitment to our church?  Each of us came this morning with an answer to these questions—even though we may not be aware of exactly what our answers are.

Might your answer be like St. Paul's?  This community should be a place where I can learn about and practice self-giving love—agape. I should find moral behavior honored, especially the mandate not to harm others by self-centered and violent behavior.  I would expect this community to focus on salvation through the light of God in Jesus Christ and reject behavior that pulls a person away from what is good and wholesome.

Then there's a possible answer in the reading from Matthew’s gospel.  Did you come this morning expecting to find a place where folks take responsibility for keeping the community safe by working to help others recognize when they have been engaging in self-centered behavior that wounds others.  Matthew reported that Jesus recommended steps to keep the community “safe” by dealing with conflicts between disciples. What sorts of behavior will be allowed in the community?  Although Matthew's putting the word “church” in Jesus' mouth may be a bit premature, the issue is the same for any group committed to holy living and decision making for the greater good.

Douglas Webster, a Presbyterian pastor, comments on the irony in this passage: “Jesus' spiritual direction on confrontation compels us to distinguish between definable overt sins and the chronic friction we inflict on one another.  We are habitual sinners—troublemakers at the core.  If we confronted one another over every issue that bothers us, we would spend all our time scheduling appointments.”  Webster explains he derives comfort in Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds.  In this parable, Jesus “[cuts us] some slack, allowing some things to take their course. [In the parable] he's telling us to leave the 'weeding' and the judging to God.”

My guess is that the answer to the question, “Why did you come this morning?” is found in neither passage.  Mine certainly isn't.  I'm really not looking for someone to take me aside and tell me how I have offended them—nor do I come to planning on taking someone else aside for conversation about how they have missed the mark.  In addition, I don't actually feel holy enough to measure up to the standards St. Paul sets for “putting on the armor of light” and eagerly anticipating salvation.

Rather I come—and indeed I came all those years before I was paid to show up on Sunday with a sermon in hand—I come because I believe that it is in Christian community generally and in our community of St. Nicholas' at this moment that I will encounter God's blessing, God's love and God's grace.  I count on blessing, love and grace from God coming through the power of the Holy Spirit to infuse our liturgy, our fellowship and even (God help me) my preaching.  We need to receive what God has prepared for us today.  We need to receive it in the company of others who long for exactly the same things.  Why?  So all of us may get through the week ahead with whatever life places on our path.  And more—we will be strengthened to share the forgiveness and peace we have received.  We will be empowered to work for the relief of folks in need.  We will be emboldened to share the good news of salvation with all whom God loves—which is everybody.

So it's not some rule, nor even my routines that bring me here this morning.  It is my hope, my hope in God, that brought me here.  How about you?