Christmas Joy: By-Product of a Journey

Pastor Chuck's Message for Sunday, December 15, 2013

Scripture   Isaiah 35:1-10

It was good to see a dozen of our number braving the elements last night for our annual Christmas Caroling at Springhouse of Bethesda. In the audience were about 30 residents. Dorothy Saporta could have been one of them.

Dorothy is a 92-years-young woman who I learned from a Facebook friend this past week has suffered much in her later years. She lost her husband a few years ago, and she has lost her sight. She was forced to move into a retirement community recently that is just – shall we say – a bit substandard.

And yet, those who know Dorothy Saporta say you wouldn’t know her pain by meeting her. She is a joyful woman. When asked the secret of her joy, she cited five rules I later found on several Google listings – with that familiar source known to us all as “Anonymous” or “Author Unknown”.

So I will cite Dorothy as my source. Here they are, then: Dorothy Saporta’s Five Rules of Joy:

 

  Hate Less.

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.

  Give More.

Contrary to the seasonal expectations permeating our December air: For Dorothy Saporta, joy is not dependent on getting what we want. It is not presented to us.

Joy is a by-product of Journey. An Advent journey. A season – like Lent is to Easter – of cleaning spiritual house.

Four of Dorothy’s Five Rules of Joy are about cleaning house. They are about divestment, not investment. They are not about adding Xmas more. They are about freeing self from.

  Hate Less. 

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.  

Wish someone would have shared these rules of joy with Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, while he was busy soliciting votes for last week’s municipal elections.

On November 2, Maduro announced the official arrival in his country of “early Christmas.” He said all workers would receive the first two-thirds of their bonuses and pensions November 10-11. (And yes, his party won most of those municipal elections.) That same day, Maduro lit the Nativity lights at the presidential palace. He announced, “Merry Christmas 2013. Christmas (has come) early, (with) early happiness for the whole family.” Later, he added, “We wanted to declare the arrival of Christmas because we want happiness for everyone.”

That surprising announcement came a week after Maduro had created a new cabinet post: Deputy Minister of Supreme Happiness.

  I am not making this up.

  And we laugh.

But now that our Black Friday has dipped its claws into the Thanksgiving gravy, what digits have we left to wag at Maduro? “Early Christmas,” “(supreme) happiness for everyone”: He’s singing our song!

And then, midst this Hallelujah Chorus, we hear Dorothy Saporta speak:

  Hate less.

  Worry Less.

  Expect Less.

  Live Simply.

The path to true joy. Joy the by-product of less, not more. Not crowding our spaces with consumer trampling. But making room in our inn for God’s grace abounding.

The prophet Isaiah today envisions a desert where flowers unfold and waters spring. All originating from his people’s spaces of emptiness. All from his people’s places of less. All to a people scattered – lost – in their fragmented and fractured world of exile.

Only a people laid bare by the horrors of their Babylonian abduction could take such joy from their God of justice restoring them to their Zion home. For here, we read – among other lilting verse – “Then the lame shall leap like a deer,/and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy … the burning sand shall become a pool … the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp.”

After reading Isaiah, I no longer wonder why Gandhi smiled so much. After hearing him cry, “Glory!” I no longer wonder why Mandela beamed.

Prophets know joy! And their joy is always a by-product of a journey. “A highway shall be there,” Isaiah writes today, “and it shall be called the Holy Way.” A highway home. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return … everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” Everlasting joy that the first Christians understood – calling themselves not Christians, but The Way. Simply … The Way.

Prophets know joy! And they know the basis for their people’s joy.  Joy found not in getting or being given Xmas more, but found in their journey of Advent less:

  Hate less.

  Worry less.

  Expect less.

  Live simply.

… and, oh yes: One “more.” One more: the fifth of Dorothy Saporta’s Five Rules of Joy:

  Give more.

Rabindranath Tagore was a great Bengali polymath: a poet, a dramatist, a musician, an artist, a humanist … and more. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore once wrote this – and I feel like this each Christmas “season”: “I slept and dreamed that life was happiness. I awoke and saw that life was service. I served and found that in service happiness was found.”

Friends in Christ: I invite you to wake up with me from our ‘Tis the Season stupor. Lulled into commercial slumber, visions of sugar plum innocence dancing in our heads, we are told that in order to be happy, we simply turn aside from the world’s injustices and go back to shopping.

Wake up with me and discover the life that is service. Wake up with me, and partake of this table of sacrifice. Wake up, to where happiness – joy – is then to be found.

Wake up with me, and maybe – just maybe – give gifts this season as my older brother Tom insists gifts are to be given: for a redemptive cause, chosen by the gift’s recipient.

Wake up, and hear our Lord and Savior, saying: Join me – like Isaiah – on this justice journey. Join me in partaking of the sacrifice I have made. Let the brokenness of the world and the cup of my redemption be your journey, too.

Live a life of less: hate, worry, expectation, things. Let your bread of self be broken into less, that your cup may runneth over with God’s pools of grace.

Be a pool of healing for God’s longsuffering, “early Christmas” world.

Join me on this journey, Jesus says: to the joy that cannot be attained without one!

 

Humility: We Need Each Other

December 8, 2013

Scripture   Isaiah 11:1-10

I. I have served as an ordained pastor now for nearly two decades – and three church staff positions before that.

And unlike the gentleman holding the “I Am Humble” sign at the top of our bulletin today, I would say that thanks to my pastoral experience, my sign reads, “I Have Been Humbled.”

And I have been humbled. I have been humbled by the experience of standing up in Worship one day and exclaiming, “Something’s wrong with my microphone.” And the congregation responded as one, “And also with you!”

And I have been humbled by the sign I found on the warm air hand-blower in the men’s restroom at my last church: “Press Here for a Message from Your Pastor.”

And I have been humbled by the woman who approached me after Worship today and said, “Pastor Chuck, I so enjoy your sermons. They are always better than the next one.”

And I have been humbled by the same woman who then asked me when I was going to publish my sermons. “Well,” I said, flattered, “I am thinking about setting aside a few of my favorites and having them published posthumously.” “Oh,” she replied, “That can’t happen too soon!”

Even after all these humbling experiences: I have never awakened one morning and convincingly said, “I Am Humble.” Humility is not part of my individual emotional make-up.

Nor do I think humility is a part of anyone's emotional make-up. For I believe humility is intrinsically relational. It is something I receive in relationship with others, and with God’s universe. It’s not a virtue I have acquired or can acquire unto myself. It’s a result of what I learn from being alive.

Humility is intrinsically relational. Humility is learning over and over and over again that I have more sources from which to receive than from which to give. Humility for me is – in one word – teachability.

Humility means we need each other.

II. The prophet Isaiah today offers his longsuffering people a vision of the renewal of God's promise at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. The Captivity occurred in the sixth century BCE when the Hebrew leaders of Judah were captured and deported hundreds of miles east to Babylon.

Humbled they were, these captured leaders. And humbled we are, the presumed leaders of the free world, when we realize – captive or free – that we cannot make any hard journey alone.

We need help. Each of us needs help.

And yet, we deny it. For I have discovered there are three words I rarely hear church people say. Three words I believe are words of true humility: “I … need … help!”

Oh, we love to help – we church people. We need to be needed. Instead, we are so afraid of being seen as needy.

And yet, to need help doesn’t mean we are needy. To need help means we are human. (And we must be human to be humane.) To openly express our need for help means we have given up being godly or playing God – at least for the moment.

Humility: We need each other.

Can you say it with me? Let’s say it together: “I … Need … Help!”

In the words of Mister Rogers: "There. I knew you could!"

I knew you could – we all could – be humbled.

III. And so many of us can be humbled – needing each other’s help – as we approach one of the most difficult seasons for more people than any other.

“Oh, it’s the most wonderful time of the yearrrr”, we hear – for so many! And because our culture preaches and teaches and reaches out to tell us, every caroling moment of every Christmasy day, that it should be that way for all of us  … more and more and more, we buy into these unrealistic expectations which are nothing but resentments waiting to happen.

Or, if you are like many I know: You never bought into those expectations to begin with. You are instead tempted into the sadness of being reminded once again that the Christmas cheer of some nostalgic past will not be re-created. That Christ child innocence will be with you no more.

Which is why we’re having our first-ever Blue Christmas service two Saturdays hence. A time of meditative Worship at 5 pm – immediately following the falling of the sun on the Winter Solstice – when many of us can come together in this transept of the sanctuary with carols, candles, prayers, and the memory of a loved one – which we may wish to share, and will have the opportunity to share. This Longest Night service – December 21 – will honor the grief of the holiday season for many. BPC – this Place for Healing – will offer healing and hope to those who desire it: your family – your friends – it could even be you.

A time not when we can be humble, but when we can practice humility. Leaning on each other. Needing each other. Saying in the presence of our sisters and brothers, in the cacophony of God’s compassion – in the whisper of the Spirit – in the stillness and presence and hearing of one another – three simple words: “I … need … help.”

It’s not a Christmas gift we need to be given. Not yet, at least.

It’s an Advent gift, on the other side of Hope: The gift of Humility. Needing each other. Hearing others say – hearing ourselves say – “I … need … help.”

IV. It’s the Advent hope and humility from a prophet today who envisions fraternal shoots from national stumps … and spiritual branches from religious roots.

And it’s the fraternal spirit – versus the national religiosity – of reaching out that grows faith community in the most surprising and grace-full ways … if we but “shoot” and “branch” ourselves just a little this season.

Not to give just the right gift. Not to catch just the right spirit. To extend ourselves – our presence – to one another. We church people need each other – and need to reach others – in a Xmas culture gone Xmas mad. We church people need each other – and need to reach others – with an open heart and tender soul that says to one another: “Do you need help? Well: I need help, too!”

Help we receive when we approach this Lord’s Table with an open heart – and an open mind – and a willing and welcoming spirit this day …

Just Peace: Forging Weapons of Mass Construction

December 1, 2013

Scripture    Isaiah 2:1-5

Welcome to Worship! …

Happy New Year! The long night’s journey into day that is Christmas begins this very day: the first day of the Church year. The first Sunday in Advent. Advent 1.

Happy New Year! And yet: What’s so happy about it? We gave thanks for much on Thanksgiving Day. And then, the very next day, we trampled on one another to get what we did not yet have.

But now, Black Friday: Meet Good Friday! Peace-through-Consumer-Victory: Meet Peace-through-Human Justice.

The story of Just Peace. That’s today’s scripture story of Advent hope.  Of creating Weapons of Mass Construction.

Sermon …

What we have just heard is the Hebrew scripture reading for the First Sunday of this Advent season. Translation: This is our scriptures’ very first words to us as the new church year begins.

Act I … Scene 1.The curtain rises. A prophet walks onto the darkened stage in a circle of light. His first utterance: “In days to come …” A new beginning! He begins to sing – of a mountain. Of nations streaming there, for holy instruction. To be judged by that instruction. To make peace from that instruction.

As the song is ending, another sound arises. It’s a ringing sound – of a hammer striking metal. It fills the room. In the church’s new year, it’s the first sound we hear. A harsh sound. Hammer on metal: Bam – bam – bam! Forging weapons of mass construction.

It’s a new church year: “In days to come.” This First Sunday of Advent, we begin to peer into God’s future. A Christmas future, where the holiest ground is a place of just peace.

Just peace. God’s judgment of and arbitration for the nations, and our peaceful response that flows from this. A just … peace.

Isaiah’s destruction-into-construction images of just peace – destruction-into-construction – of swords forged into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks – provide the inspiration for a large sculpture that stands outside the General Assembly tower at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Just peace – a sculpture for all nations to hear the prophet’s call to justice and to be shown the way of peace from that call. Just peace – the United Nations’ mission is symbolized by this sculpture.

And yet, when was the last time we have heard of nations gathering at the UN to arbitrate, as this passage puts it, for a just peace? What we hear arbitrated instead are rationale for just war.

Just war. A protocol whose criteria originates not with a nation-state, but ironically with a churchman – St. Augustine – in the late fourth century.

Well, things have changed a bit in the ensuing 16 centuries. More than a bit.  We live in an age where more people were killed in war in the last century than in all prior human history. We live in an age where civilian war casualties are no longer five percent, as they were as recent as 100 years ago – they are 50 percent, or higher. We live in an age where 1/25 of the world’s population – here we are – own more military weaponry than the next 25 countries combined.

Can we engage anymore – therefore – in a just war? Leave we any room in our political lexicon for Isaiah’s vision of just peace: “in the days to come”?

The search for a just peace. According to Isaiah, our holy ground provides that highest ground. The church, the synagogue, the mosque, the ashram: These holy places and others can best speak of such a magnificent thing. All the just-warring nations will be judged by the voice emerging from those mountains.

And yet we know that this is not true. Faith communities throughout our land – especially the most influential faith communities in our land – are co-opted into driving the just war debates. Exhibit A: Iraq; Exhibit B: Afghanistan. Isaiah’s vision of a just peace – where God arbitrates and judges, where we respond with weapons of mass construction: Where may we see it? Where may it be heard?

And yet, sometimes – sometimes – God’s voice in Isaiah today – “I do the judging, I do the arbitrating!” – is so arresting, so compelling, the most powerful on the planet find themselves transformed. Transformed into warriors for a just peace.

It’s a call that a war-weary general-turned-President named Eisenhower overheard when he was urged by his military advisers and his Vice-President to intervene forcibly in a land known to very few in the 1950s: Viet Nam. Eisenhower’s reply: "I am not sending our boys ten thousand miles from home to fight a war in that elephant grass.” Ike left that quagmire for future presidents. A moment of just peace, Eisenhower’s was – consummated by his farewell address, warning us all with a prophet’s edge of the rise of “a military-industrial complex.”

The sounds of just peace reached the ears of President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The voices around his table rang clear: Attack the Russians! Drive them from our hemisphere! Kennedy’s response: Wait. History has chronicled that he heard another voice – and banked our country’s, and most of humanity’s, entire fate on that voice: the voice that said Khrushchev was hearing the same. Both of these statesmen heard it then: the voice of the Holy One judging us by how peacefully we respond. The voice of just peace.

That voice – God’s, saying “I judge, I arbitrate, you transform your weapons in response” – is heard among the culturally powerful, as well. When the professional basketball superstars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and their respective teams, the L.A. Lakers and the Boston Celtics, squared off throughout the 1980s, they carried with them “just war” hopes of separate races and separate coasts and their own ambitions to be recognized as the greatest at their craft.

And then, Magic Johnson discovered in 1991 he was carrying the HIV virus – a pandemic we remember, on this World AIDS Day, in our continued fight to vanquish it. And it was then that the uber-competitive relationship that has developed between Magic and Bird over the years became transformed.

“The day that I heard about Magic(‘s plight),” Larry Bird said, “It just sort of changed my love for basketball. It shook me up. Probably the same kind of feeling I had when my father died.”

Through tears, Magic Johnson remembered his archrival’s response. “I’m choked up because he did call me. You know, when something happens to you, and then you find out who really your friends are, the people who really care about you, you figure all those battles, all those things we had to go through as warriors, as competitors, and then as men … this man says, ‘You know what? You’re okay.’ And that was my greatest moment … to have him check on me, to make sure I was okay.”

The just war on the court between Magic and Bird had now become – in the game of their lives – transformed into the construction of a just peace.

The voice is God’s through Isaiah – it’s a voice of justice: “(I) judge the nations, (I) arbitrate (among) the peoples.”

The response to that voice is ours – it’s a response of peace: “(We) shall beat (our) swords into ploughshares, and (our) spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

God’s judging and arbitrating voice is sometimes – sometimes – so compelling, the most powerful people on the planet are turned into the most prominent warriors for a just peace.

Friends: We cannot lay our Advent hope on the “sometimes”. We can only trust in the Advent “days to come” that the prophet’s concluding invitation today may prove too compelling for us to resist: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”

In a world of institutions, political and religious, lost in the delusion there can be a “just war”:  Who but we who are faithful to the gospel can present on more than a “sometimes” basis God’s alternative to God’s world? Who but we can commit to the light of just peace – and hear others doing the same? And lead others to do the same?

This table of Holy Communion is where Isaiah’s “all the nations” and “many peoples” gather. This table reminds us that we are that Advent light of the Lord to the world. We come here today as erstwhile just warriors – each of us. We come carrying just warriors’ weapons: of resentment, of anxiety … of fear. We come here to be transformed into “weapons” of mass construction.

We come here knowing all this: locked in the stare of a world looking to justify war all around us. For the “just” in “just war” is not justice – no. It’s self-justification.

And so we come here knowing the burden of hope ironically falls upon us. But our burden is light. For we are not alone. For it’s a burden of a just-peace hope that Jesus carried. He died for that “peace-through-justice” hope.

And so now, we participate at this table in his dying once again. Dying, to the warring chimera of “peace-through-victory” all around us. Dying, to live into God’s calling : peace-through-justice, forevermore!

And so, I bid you – as the prophet bids us: Come. Take the first small steps with me of this Advent journey: This long night’s journey into day. The first small steps, from just war (peace-through-victory) to just peace (peace-through-justice).

“Come,” Isaiah proclaims to us today. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord!”
 

From Exile Houses: An Exodus Home

Scripture    Luke 19:1-10

I believe, in my deepest heart of hearts, that the Holy Spirit whose flame we celebrate during this six-month Season of Pentecost glows brightest and warmest and wildest when we find our story in the biblical story. And the biblical story we are finding our story in these July-to-November months is Luke’s Jesus journey narrative. A narrative that covers 11 chapters in his gospel, serving as the basis of our “On the Road with Jesus” travels.

In this 11-chapter sojourn, we find our story in this biblical story: Jesus’ sojourn from the mountaintop of his Transfiguration to his cross at Calvary. A journey from his ascent into mountaintop popularity to his descent into Calvary solidarity. A descending-road journey into spiritually-rich valleys that begins in Luke 9 with a single Greek word: exodov. Exodus. Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem, Luke tells us, and in the process claims and reclaims the Hebrew Exodus.

From his popularity offered to the world to his solidarity offered with the world: Over the last two generations, that’s been the painful and hopeful Exodus journey of this church – and so many other mainline Protestant churches. A journey from the Promised Land popularity of teeming sanctuaries – the Promised Land: we’ve arrived, Jesus scarcely leaves the temple! – to the leaner, longing, desert wonderment of the Exodus experience: a wide-roaming journey with Jesus to a new land of promise we can barely begin to see.

A Promised Land Jesus would have said something like this: “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for you must come to my Sunday house today!” Instead, we hear the reverse: The words of an Exodus church – inviting others to participate in the journey. “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”

Zacchaeus’ house: It’s his exile. Built on what the world would call riches. Jesus goes to dwell there, to bring Zacchaeus home. Moving away from a Promised Land model of ministry – to invite people in Exile – to participate in this Exodus journey.

Promised Land … Exile … Exodus. Arriving home … Left from home … Bringing home. These three stories form the trinity of all biblical stories – of all human stories.

There’s Promised Land – our church’s journey pre-1975. It’s a church many of us have seen in our 1941 church film, "Bethesda Presbyterian Grows Up." The Promised Land church: We’ve arrived at home – and we know it! We know it!

There's Exodus – our church’s journey today: We’re heading to a new home, now. We’ve been lost in the desert a time or two, but there’s that biblical something known as hope. We’re heading to a place called home. We may not know what that milk and that honey may taste like yet, but God is calling us to a place of faith – of trust. A place of trust, to take that journey together.

There's Exile. Unlike Promised Land home, or Exodus heading-home, it’s not a church-making story. Exile is captivity, as in Babylon. Exile is Zacchaeus: rich – or better put, made rich by his tax collector ways (they were known to be extortionists then). Someone possessed by what they possess. Someone with all the housing, but no home they can call their own.

And yet we cry, as Jesus’ Exodus journey companions: “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for we – this Body of Christ – must stay at your house today!” We must camp out at your house – your place of Exile – that you might join us on this Exodus adventure.

We have heard of places of Exile in several of our Changing Lives stories of late: The “What BPC Means to Me” stories. And some of these stories of Exile have come from seasoned veterans on our Exodus journey!

We have heard from members – new and old – how they were looking for a place where they could find a home. We have heard how this church entered their houses of exile once they climbed their sycamore tree of courage. For some, that climb began when they entered the sanctuary door. For others, that climb took a little more time. Time to share the stories housed within them over the years. Stories constructed in a single-dwelling house that had yet to find a healing home. Stories which for some found a Twelve Step shelter. Stories which then led to joining us on Jesus’ Exodus journey.

Because of our hospitality – and our hospitality alone –
Because of the embrace of our church’s love unconditional –
Because – like Jesus to Zacchaeus – we have “stayed at their house” through our repeated welcome home …

The Exile of members new and the Exile of members old are now folded into the Exodus of our church. Our Exodus to a Promised Land – known yet to God.

We – each of us – returns to that place of Exile. The lure is too great.

Like Zacchaeus, we become rich in the world, yet in the process find ourselves too short-sighted to see Jesus anymore. Like Zacchaeus, we grow isolated: more housing for our possessions and our ambitions – little home for community and common good. We forget to generously give to the poor and poor in spirit, and in the process receive so little of Jesus.

When that happens – and it happens to us all: What’s our calling as we gather ‘round this healing Pool of Bethesda – our Bethesda Presbyterian Church?

Our calling is simple: To practice hospitality. It’s the gift of receiving all our Exiles into Exodus. To stay at each other’s house – and find in each, our common home.

This home that is our Exodus journey. This home that is our Exodus hope. This home that is the offspring of healing. We call it wholeness – the Bible, salvation. “Today,” Jesus cries, “Today … salvation – wholeness – has come to (Zacchaeus’) house!”

May salvation – wholeness – come to your houses of exile. May you then find a home of generosity here: to give … and to receive.

  Over and over and over again.
 

What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?

 

Scripture    Luke 18:1-8

I. When I was in seminary a generation ago, there was a growing emphasis that each seminarian studying to be a pastor would receive a basic unit of Clinical Pastoral Education.

Clinical Pastoral Education . CPE. “Boot camp” for prospective clergy. Often, though not always, a summer-long intensive where you and your peers were subject to intense dissection of your deepest psychological motives to help, that you might provide better pastoral care out of it all.

CPE. A memorable experience. A revealing experience.

One revelation has served me to this day more than any other. It wasn’t something I learned about myself – and there was much I did learn about myself. What has served me to this day the most was a framing by our supervisor of the four basic food groups of human emotions: Mad … Glad … Sad … and “Afra’d.”

May not seem profound – or even revelatory. And yet, I have found this framing of basic human emotions extraordinarily grounding over the years in providing simple pastoral care to complex church people in complex situations.

Four basic human emotions: Mad, Glad, Sad, “Afra’d”. Four emotions which ground the 150 sung prayers in our scriptures – prayers known as the Psalms. Our Jewish forebears – Jesus among them – understood there was nothing in our human emotional universe excludable from our relationship with God. The constellation of Mad, Glad, Sad, “Afra’d”: All four expressions are fair prayer game.

II. And yet for us in polite Protestant society, one of these four basic prayerful emotions especially goes wanting. 

Is it the Glad: “Thank you, God!”? No – that’s not it.
Could it be the Afra’d or the Sad: “Help me, God!”? Not really.
How about, “I’m angry, God” – and perhaps even, “I’m angry at you, God”? Bingo!

What do we do with the mad that we feel? Well, what can we do, when we ignore it – repress it – forget it’s even there.

III. And so what do we do with our faith, in the process? For starters, we bowdlerize the Lord’s Prayer. We take the thundering demands of our most popular prayer and decorate them into polite petitions. We neuter the Greek imperative verbs of the prayer – “Thy kingdom: Come! Thy will: Be done!” and “Give us! … and Forgive us! … and Lead us not! … and Deliver us!” We neuter it with voices unraised: “Please, O Lord? Won’t you please allow us a small measure of your kingdom and some of your will and our bread besides? We know you’re busy. You’ve left us here to be independent, to rely upon our American selves, and so we don’t want to bother you overly much …”

Feel mad toward God? Forget it! No way! We are, after all, what Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion calls us: the happy Protestants! Those successful mainline ones, who have learned from the time of our mothers’ milk that to be mad was … well, to be mad was to be bad! And especially to be non-submissive before the Almighty. Otherwise, he’ll get us, but good!

And yet, the persistence of the widow in Jesus’ parable today is born out of that singular emotion of mad. Fierceness … passion … a hunger and a thirst: All these wonderful character traits stem from a burning within her that she would lose in either rage on the one hand or apathy on the other if she did not direct her anger into persistence for justice. Persistence for justice which is itself a prayer – and then which Jesus folds into his parable on persistence in prayer.

IV. What do we do with the mad that we feel? Well, first: We have to actively feel it! Once, during a nonviolent civil resistance action, I found myself in a city jail’s holding tank with Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson, and the Rev. James Lawson, Martin Luther King Jr’s mentor. Arun Gandhi told me the story of spending a summer with grandfather in India’s hinterlands when he was a rebellious youth. Out of that summer’s experience, he became the keeper of his grandfather’s flame. “My grandfather would tell me that summer,” Arun Gandhi said to me, “how much easier it was to attract an angry soul than an apathetic soul to his soul-force cause. For it’s the angry ones, he said, who become most passionate about compassion. It’s the ones who feel their anger inside who are fiercest in their commitment to seek justice through love’s nonviolence.” So feel the mad, the Mahatma was saying – so God can put it, as the widow did, to its best and most com-passionate use.

V. Now that we feel it: What do we do with the mad that we feel? How do we, like the widow, bring such fierceness and passion to bear on our exodus journey? Our exodus journey: away from our captivity to the mad that we feel, on the road with Jesus to his Jerusalem – and ours?

    Two true stories from here in our Nation’s Capital, and I’ll close.

1. One of the fiercest and most passionate D.C. barristers for many years was the late Edward Bennett Williams. Considered by many the best trial lawyer in America in his day, he defended some tough customers over the years: Mob boss Frank Costello, Jimmy Hoffa, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, junk bond king Michael Milken.

But one of his toughest customers proved to be Mother Teresa. One day, he received a call that she would like to see him in his office. Among his many high profile duties – among them along the way, owner of the Washington Redskins and Baltimore Orioles – Williams was the president of a major Catholic fund.

Mother Teresa came to Bennett’s office in the Hill Building to ask for a contribution from that fund to a hospice for AIDS patients. “AIDS is not my favorite disease,” Williams told a friend from the fund, and they rehearsed a polite refusal to Mother Teresa. Her head peeking over Williams’s enormous desk, the diminutive nun made her pitch, and Williams apologetically, but firmly, declined. “Let us pray,” said Mother Teresa and bowed her head. Williams looked over at his friend, and the two men bowed with her. When she was done, Mother Teresa gave exactly the same appeal. Again Williams politely demurred. Once more Mother Teresa said, “Let us pray.” Williams looked up at the ceiling. “All right, all right,” he said, and pulled out his checkbook.

2. Talk about persistence in prayer, and persistence for justice itself as a prayer! A prayerful seeking of justice another meek individual brought to DC and whose persistence won over a powerful U.S. Senator. Enjoy with me now this four-minute YouTube clip of a Presbyterian minister named Fred Rogers – Mister Rogers – and his testimony before Congress in 1969 to save the fledgling Public Broadcasting System from proposed presidential cuts. This sermon’s title, in fact,  is borrowed from his poem in this clip …

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_JPEWhV9N8

VI. And so what do you do with the mad that you feel? Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Mister Rogers, and Jesus alike teach us: Persist in prayer. And persist in justice – which itself is a prayer.

Be free to be mad toward others. Be free to be mad toward God.

  God can take it. 

  God is not as afraid of our anger as we are!
 

Want Faith? Well, Then: Be Faithful!

Message for Sunday, October 6

Part of a Season of Pentecost series:
"On the Road with Jesus: Our Journey to Jerusalem"

Luke's Narrative of Jesus' Exodus into the Nation's Capital!

Luke 17:5-10

“Stupid is as stupid does.” Quick: What movie is that from? ...

Think on that statement with me for a moment. It’s not “Stupid is as stupid thinks.” Stupid as defined by my dictionary : “slow of mind,” “given to unintelligent decisions or acts.” The statement’s not even, “Stupid is as stupid feels.”

It’s, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

I think Forrest Gump may have been well-schooled as a lad in Jesus.

The Scripture. “The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” (see depiction above)

Ah, those words: “Increase! Growth economy! Let’s get more!” But Jesus would have none of it! In this case, not the grandiosity, the pomposity, the heroics of believing more. Jesus emphasizes instead – as his ensuing words make clear – unceremoniously doing the next right thing: “We are your servants, Jesus – we have done only what we ought to have done.” No pats on the back. Just doing it. “Service is as service does.”

“Want faith?” Jesus is saying. “Well, then: Be faithful.”

Think of faithful, and many of us think of the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of over 4500 sisters and in 133 countries today. They run – as she did – hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis … soup kitchens … children's and family counseling programs … orphanages … schools. Beyond the typical three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience for a religious life, Mother Teresa had a fourth vow added: to give "wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor".

That’s what’s known as being faithful.

As for Mother Teresa’s faith? Here’s what she said to a priest in 1979: “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”

Certainly, she should be allowed that momentary doubt! And yet, the letters she wrote – compiled in a book and published after death – revealed more. Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, her spirits sank. "Where is my faith?" she wrote. "Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me."

Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith: "Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal," she wrote.

As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask. "What do I labor for?" she asked in one letter. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."

  Mother Teresa: Faithful as any to the end. As for her faith? … Welllll …

“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’” And the Lord replied – in so many words: Pay no attention to your faith – or at least the size of it! Enough with the “I believe” assertions! Put away those creeds! Know you are servants. Do only what you know you ought to do.

But what about justification by grace through faith – the cornerstone of the Protestant revolution? Well, that five century-old Protestant revolution is now an institution, and not very Protest-ant. We have worshiped at the house of the Apostle Paul with these words, and upon entering that house we have made of these words a restricted-entry theological parlor game.

Judging by the zeal of Paul’s commitment to the gospel, I think he would toss this faith-versus-works game aside and vigorously affirm a few words from Sr. Helen Prejean as closer to what he meant. Sr. Helen is the author of Dead Man Walking, and is a renowned advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. I can sense the Apostle Paul’s spirit in these words Sr. Helen once told NPR: “I watch what I do to see what I really believe.”

Sister Helen’s faith is, like the Apostle Paul’s and Mother Teresa’s, a journey-oriented faith. Faith not as a Sunday statement of right beliefs, but as a journey with Jesus to the Jerusalem of our lives, seeking with him the next right actions. Not right beliefs, first … but right and prayerful actions.

  Want faith? Well, then: Be faithful!

Beyond Possession by Possessions: Becoming Rich Toward God

 

Scripture   Luke 12:13-21

Said a rich man, graced by God with an abundant harvest – aka The Kingdom: “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” And this, he adds, will be his security – his security. Ah, the best laid plans … the best laid plans …

So it goes when we focus on security over our lives, versus security in our lives -- the good, internal kind, being “rich toward God” as Jesus puts it today. But the kind the rich fool was seeking: the external. The kind that makes out of God’s gifts our entitlement. The kind that makes out of God’s abundance our possessions.

Possessions that the late comedian George Carlin called “our stuff.” “That’s the whole meaning of life, isn’t it?” Carlin asks. “Trying to find a place for your stuff?

“That’s what your house is. A house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. ... (Your house is) a pile of stuff with a cover on it … And when you leave your stuff, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff! They don’t bother with what you’re saving. (Ain’t nobody interested in your fourth grade arithmetic papers.) They’re looking for the good stuff. That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff!  … Now sometimes you have to move. You have to get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff! You’ve gotta move all your stuff! And maybe put some of your stuff in storage. Imagine that, there’s a whole industry based on keeping an eye on your stuff!”

Think Carlin is exaggerating? I recall an enlightening PBS series in the 1990s, “Affluenza.” One revelation from it: The average American house built in the ’90 is 40 percent larger in space than the average house built in the ‘50s. And now with McMansions ..

We can all see how much of our life revolves around our stuff. Our possessions. Protecting our possessions. Becoming possessive about our possessions. Becoming, if you will … well: possessed!

Being possessive – if not possessed. The breeding ground of our search for security. The place we seek for ourselves externally when we fear so much that takes place internally.

Our household has acquired two cats over two years. Some of our number met the first cat of our house. We brought our tortoise-shell Founder with us from Ann Arbor – so named because an earlier owner had found her. She was already long in the tooth when we moved here, and so we knew she was not long for this world.

Not having a house pet since childhood, I had not encountered a phenomenon I experienced with Founder as she began to fade into that good night. An outdoor cat, she had her usual roosts. But toward the end, whenever we let her out the door, Founder would just continue walking. She was making a beeline for parts unknown – there was apparently no destination, she seemed to be running from something.

When Founder died, I asked the veterinarian what that was all about. The vet replied, “That’s what animals often do when they become very sick. They cannot distinguish threats internal from threats external. And so, feeling they are being pursued, they flee to the safety of some new shelter.”

When possessed by fear, animals often flee for a new shelter. When possessed by fear, we humans often build a new shelter. Build it, for more possessions – possessions that only further possess us. Failing to differentiate threats internal from external, we secure new shelters and flee to new shelters for the sake of our stuff, if not the sake of our safety.

Security, we cry; we need more security! Not the sense of peace that comes from within. But ever-expanding self-contained bunkers, providing us space in our need to possess. The place we humans prepare for externally to numb our possession of our fear internally.

A few presidential election cycles past, the successful candidate ran on three promises, repeated ad nauseam lest the candidate roam off-message. The three promises were: National Security … Homeland Security … Economic Security.

With many others, I have found that the political success of the theme of security has turned a true good into a false god. Security in our country became a word applied to describe to that we think we are entitled … versus practicing good stewardship of what God can only give. Security in our country became based on the fear of losing what we have or not getting what we want. As with the rich man in Jesus’ parable today, security in our country came no longer via the public good: faith that we shared abundance among us, providing for all from the common store. (The Obamacare now officially in force or no, can anyone claim to follow Jesus and say at the same time that all should not have quality health care in our land of medical abundance? What’s the use of building larger medical barns at Walter Reed and NIH if the common good is not being served? As Jesus asks today of us: “Whose will (all this) be?” For Luke’s Jesus, it’s always about God’s kingdom; it’s always about the “whose”!)

The trumpets continue to resound from within our Jerusalem, our D.C. gates: Security, security, and more security. National, homeland, economic security. Send forth the word, prepare ye the way: Security is an external good for the some who "deserve" it. Security for our exceptional nation – God Bless America! – over all the other, less exceptional ones. For the economically one percent within our nation, those who own forty percent – if not that, then certainly the twelve percent: those who own the ninety percent. While national and homeland security is the price we pay as a nation among nations, economic security is the price we pay as a nation among ourselves: becoming possessed by all our "stuff", our possessions. Which is, after all, why we call them our possessions!

So what is God’s kingdom antidote? What is it specifically that Jesus prescribes?

What does Jesus mean today by being “rich toward God,” so that we do not become possessed by our “stuff” – our possessions?

 

I close with two stories. One is a story of personal dispossession – a story someone told me of becoming free from. The other is a story of God’s possession of us: What becomes for us our freedom for, the fulfillment of all the freedom we seek.

The story of personal dispossession first. Sometimes it takes letting go of possessions rightly due us in order to restore God’s possession of our lives. Such was the dilemma with the one in the crowd whose cry sets the stage was set for Jesus’ parable of possession today: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

Returning from my vacation recently, I was driving a friend back to the D.C. area, where he could catch the Amtrak to his home in New York. In the course of our journey, he told me of his estrangement from his two older siblings.

It seems they cheated him of an equal share of the family inheritance. And so my friend carefully wrote his older siblings a letter, expressing his sorrow over this matter and his need to distance himself from their greed.

“I let them go at that time,” he said. And then he said – and he would repeat this twice: “I didn’t want to get cancer.”

My friend did not get the possessions he expected and deserved. And yet more importantly, he did not become possessed by his loss.

And when like my friend we seek freedom from the possession of possessions in our lives, more often than not we find more than we ever bargained for. Somewhere – somehow – at some time we experience being possessed by something remarkably holy.

Some of you may recall a generation ago when the American poet Robert Bly led wildly popular gatherings of men across our country. It was a time when male baby boomers were coming of age. As thirty-somethings, they were discovering they had to learn to let go, to dispossess themselves of their youthful illusions, in order to live a fuller, richer, spiritually satisfying life.

At one of these gatherings, a man came up to Bly afterward and told him of a time he was a young adolescent growing up on the coast. A self-described beach bum at that time, this he rebelled by growing his hair long. Very long – much longer than his father approved.

After refusing repeatedly to get his hair cut, he was tied down by his father, who  shaved it off of him – leaving him alone, beating the floor with his fists.

It was at that moment that the boy’s grandfather stepped into the room. He took in what had happened; he remained very quiet. Grandpa then said to the upset boy, “Come … I have something important to show you.”

When the boy had finally collected himself, they wandered together to the ocean nearby. The old man swept his arms out before him and said, “Here, my son: This is for you!”

Twenty years passed, and with them illusions countless. That once-adolescent boy returned to his original home on the coast, and – bam! There was the gift that his grandfather had given him.

“Here, my son: This is for you!” A possession for him to have? No – not at all. A poetic compensation received for his haircut? Umm … not really.

The boy’s grandfather had given him something far more important: the gift of an unaffected awareness of God. “Here, my son: This is for you!”

Given the use and misuse of the term before us, we may chafe at saying we are possessed by God.

To which I would respond: “Here it is – our horizon: God’s kingdom -- God's commonwealth -- for us all!”
 

"Lord, Teach Us to Pray": Rattling God's Cage

 

Scripture   Luke 11:1-12

Rattling God’s cage? That doesn’t sound like the deferential relationship, the “Protestant cool”, I was taught as a child to have with God as a long-bearded Father. The God of my childhood prayers summed up in two phrases: “Say please, and say thank you.”

Say Please, Say Thank You. That was the title of a book a president of my seminary alma mater penned several years ago. The book bemoaned the loss of civility in American life; the antidote, his title. About that time, a certain purple dinosaur erupted on TV screens around the land teaching little boys like my Andrew what could have been that book’s theme song: “Please and Thank You, They’re the Magic Words.”

And yet, what are our “magic words” with God? Our scripture before us today suggests that civility is not a top-shelf virtue in our relationship with our Creator. Not for our God, whose compassion we never need question. Not for our God, who is always bigger than the problems we bring. Not for our God, who is never as thin-skinned as we are. Not for our God, who craves our most intensive pleas and our most intimate passions. Not for our God, who is just dying to love us. Ponder a moment that phrase, if you will – that journey to Jerusalem phrase: Our God, dying to love us …

Our scripture today and elsewhere make plain that ours is a Semitic God of pathos Jesus engaged and taught and teaches us to engage. A God who craves an intensely I-Thou relationship, grounded in the passionate intimacy of Jesus’ first word of the Lord’s Prayer according to Luke: Abba – Pater in the New Testament Greek. It’s an intimacy we polite and self-sufficient Protestants often like to overlook. For with intimacy comes struggle, and who wants that with God? We might think, falling back on illusions of a demanding deity, that’s hardly a fair fight! The anger and frustration and pain we would share with God … perhaps it would cut both ways, we might wonder? On the other hand, perhaps God will simply choose to remain silent. Either has the power to undo us altogether.

And yet, that God of great pathos – of unquenchable desire – cannot be avoided. Certainly not out of the mouth of our Jewish Lord.

Luke’s Jesus knows what God wants, what God craves: Rattle my cage! Hammer away with the chisel of prayer until a breakthrough in the rock of the world’s injustice jars loose.

Handle the chisel simply … directly … and very personally: “When you pray, say: Abba: Sanctify your name! Your kingdom: Come! Give us each day our daily bread! And forgive us our sins – for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us! And do not bring us to the time of trial!”

Simple prayer. No “heap(ing) up empty phrases”, as Jesus warns against in Matthew’s more familiar rendition of the Lord’s Prayer – the Greek for empty perhaps better translated “babble” or “repeated”. No lengthy discourses … no (ahem) pastor’s long prayers …

Simple prayer, and direct prayer – rattling God’s cage. “Sanctify your name!” – not just, “hallowed be”. “Your kingdom – Come! … Give us this day our daily bread.” These are not requests. These are not in the indicative tense. These core prayers Jesus teaches us are in the imperative tense: cries from the heart, a people demanding justice of a God who promises abundance for all – while a few who hoard so much would deny them – as we will witness next Sunday …

Direct prayer, and personal prayer. Called to demand the kingdom God has promised. Jesus instructs us: Don’t just implore. Demand your just desserts! “Your kingdom: Come!”: God, this Empire business is killing us!” “Give us this day our daily bread”: Lord, they’re taking our food!

“Lord, teach us to pray,” his disciples plea. And Jesus’ responds: Rattle God’s cage! Make your prayers simple, direct, and deeply personal. God can take it! God really wants it! Our empathic God would have it no other way. Contrary to minority scripture reports, ours is not a lofty divine, starkly omnipotent and imperious and eternally unchangeable. That type of God would be consistent with Stoicism, a philosophy of sage removal quite popular in the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day – and come to think of it, among many Protestants today. The loftier the God and the more almighty, the better.

 
But that is not our God, Jesus teaches us. Our God is almighty in one way alone: compassion. Compassion unleashed by our God’s deepest desire: our desirous attention. Attention that if it is desirous enough, God’s kingdom promises of inclusive love and economic justice might actually begin to flower into being.

Too often when I was growing up in the church, I internalized messages – whether the church meant them or not – that God was in God’s heaven, and all was right in the world. Or at least, I should accept the way things are, and move on. From these messages, I came to believe that Almighty God was up there, and I was down here, and there was nothing I could do – sans believe upon the name of Jesus, the mediating bridge – to draw near to the power that made this void so.

How wrong I was! And how many years it has taken for me, for an ineffable Lord to become an intimate Abba. The God of Abraham and Jesus, who I have since discovered is more like a devotional expression that has grown in my estimation over the years: Each day, when I choose to take one step toward God … each day, God takes two steps toward me.

Each day. Each and every day. Each and every persevering day, Jesus calls upon us to rattle God’s compassionate cage.

  God can take it – and will love us and give us ever the more because of it.

  Question is: Do we dare persevere? Do we dare follow Jesus along that resurrection road?