Merry Christmas?

Word of a birth at the end of a war... a sermon for Christmas Eve 2011

SJF • Christmas Eve • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian. For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

Merry Christmas! I say that especially this year because our readings this evening put me in mind of the soldiers returning from their service in Iraq, able to spend Christmas with their families at the end of this long war. Other members of the armed forces remain in danger, in Afghanistan and other troubled parts of the world, and they remain in our prayers as well. God give them a moment’s peace, even in the field, to pause and listen for the angels’ voices.

We tend to look back at the first Christmas through the lenses of sentiment and sentimentality — the memories of our own childhoods blending with the borrowed traditions of Victorian England and the New York Knickerbocker Dutch. Christian though we be, and as closely as we hold on to the mystery of the Incarnation, in our culture we cannot ignore the jolly old elf Saint Nicholas — even though, as history tells us, he was a Bishop and not an elf at all, jolly or otherwise!

The plumes of steam rising from pots of hot cider or from wassail bowls may fog our glasses’ lenses; the twinkling lights obscure or distract our vision, and the jingle bells impair our hearing — all the stuff of the secular Xmas may make it hard for us to see the somewhat stark realities of that first Christmas of long ago, and of the long stretch of years leading up to it.

During the Sundays of Advent we heard readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah, from those long years of preparation; and we pick up with him again tonight. He sets the theme of a new deliverance coming at the end of another war: a time when the people enslaved and oppressed are set free, the yoke from their shoulders and rod from their back is removed.

It is a vision like something out of the end of the siege of Stalingrad — the Nazis have retreated in defeat and the victors are sorting through the plunder: scavenging the abandoned tanks and weapons for ammunition; stripping the bodies of the dead soldiers of any valuables; the piles of discarded and abandoned boots and uniforms are used to light bonfires not just for celebration, but to keep warm in that hard Russian winter.

And into this scene out of a war movie there comes word of the birth of a child: an amazing child, a wonderful child; a child who is not only a child, but the son of God, the Prince of Peace.

When we turn to our Gospel reading the scene shifts, but not really all that much. Perhaps no longer quite the time of war or open warfare, as it is a time of peace. But it is a political peace in a very political world — a world of governors — even of places like Syria, much in the news even now — and emperors of Rome, and a worldwide census mandated and decreed by Imperial authority. If it is a world at peace during the time of Caesar Augustus it is only because Caesar has conquered that world and enslaved all of its peoples under the yoke of Roman rule, and the rod of his authority —it is peace at a price.

And again, into this less than perfect world, there comes the announcement of the birth of a child — not by a prophet speaking to the returned soldiers or the liberated captives, but by a host of angels speaking to shepherds out in the fields by night keeping their flocks.

Just as we can romanticize and sentimentalize Christmas, we can do the same to these shepherds. Lets first of all note that the gospel tells us that they were terrified. Wouldn’t you be? It’s the middle of a cold, dark night — dark as it could only be out in the country in the days before the lights of cities robbed us of the ability to see the stars. You and your fellow shepherds are out in the fields keeping watch over a bunch of sleeping sheep; it is quiet as only it can be out in the country where no traffic or elevated trains rattle down the street or planes fly overhead. You huddle down to keep warm with your blanket wrapped around you, probably half sleeping — for let’s be honest: I have no reason to believe that night-watchmen were any more likely to be able to keep awake all night back then than they are now — especially outside in the dark and the cold and the silence.

And into that cold and into that darkness and into that silence there suddenly breaks forth out of the heavens the glory of God and a company of angels. Who wouldn’t be terrified?

And so just as Isaiah’s announcement of the wonderful child comes into the midst of a war-torn scene, so this announcement by the angel of God comes in a time imperial power, mass migration of peoples to comply with the mandates of that power, and a terrifying message bursting upon an unsuspecting group of poor shepherds living out in the field, minding their own business, the sheep-minding business.

The message is that the child has been born, a Savior and Messiah, the child who is also the Lord. This is a message such as we long to hear at the end of another war, in another time when the powerful rule the world and most of us have to obey their demands and pay their taxes; when we must be registered and counted — even in a land as free as ours, where the political season and the campaigning, like the Xmas season itself, seems to start earlier and earlier each year, and where we cannot miss the fact that we appear to be appreciated more for our ability to vote than for any other exercise of our citizenship.

Yet this same message is the message we long to hear: of the end of war, of liberation of captives and an end to oppression.

And you know what? We have heard it. It is the Christmas message: not just a promise made to Isaiah or a revelation to some shepherds, but the same word brought to us through the proclamation of this gospel: Isaiah promised, the angels sang, Christ came, and Christ comes still — here, and now, with and among us as surely as he came to Bethlehem in Judea; with us in our hearts as surely as he was in the manger; with us in our hands as we hold the sacred bread that is his Body, just as surely as this newborn body was held in Mary’s arms.

“Christ is born today” — and every day — at the end of a war, in a time of peace; when shepherds watch and night-watchmen sleep; when emperors rule and candidates hustle for your votes; when the skies are silent and when they rumble with the flights of helicopters and jetliners; when the night is dark and when it glows with Christmas lights — or dazzles with the light of the heavenly host. This night, this very night, the wonderful child, the Lord Jesus, is born anew: O come, let us adore him!+

---

Angelic Greeting

The drama of the Angelus... a sermon for Advent 4b

SJF • Advent 4b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth...

Because Christmas falls on a Sunday this year — next Sunday — our Advent season is unusually long, and includes a full week between this, the last Sunday of Advent, and Christmas Day. But even a week seems far too short to jump from our Gospel account of the angel’s visit to Mary in Nazareth, to the birth of the child, conceived in that instant, in Bethlehem of Judea. And of course it is only the fact of liturgical time travel that gives us this drastically shortened one-week pregnancy. If we look back to March 25, the full nine months prior to Christmas Day on December 25, we will find this same gospel passage proclaimed on the feast of the Annunciation, where it most properly belongs. Still, every three years we get to hear this gospel on the last Sunday before Christmas — as a reminder of the momentous choice made by God, and the equally earth-shaking response made by Mary.
+ + +
Wrapped up in this gospel scene is another sort of Christmas present. Here it is that we find the origin of the prayer that many know by the name, the Hail Mary — or its Latin form, Ave Maria. It is also known as “The Angelic Salutation” because the angel Gabriel is the one who gives us the opening line of this famous prayer, right there in our gospel today, although we heard it in a more modern translation: “Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with you.” (We will get to hear the rest of this prayer on the Sunday before Christmas next year, when we hear of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who says, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”)
Those two Scripture verses formed the original version of the Hail Mary as it was prayed for many centuries. (The part asking Mary to pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death was added by the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation.) The original form of the prayer comes entirely from the text of Scripture and is focused on grace and new life rather than on sin and death.
+ + +
And it is, after all, to that upbeat focus that this holy season calls us: it is the season of grace and new life. Now, there’s obviously much more going on in this gospel passage than just the angel Gabriel’s initial greeting. That is just what starts the encounter off, and the angel goes on to respond to Mary’s perplexity at the greeting, and further perplexity at the further explanation.
I’d like to look at this little scene of grace and new life through the lens of another prayer to which it gave rise. This prayer has formed a part of Christian culture for several centuries. It is connected with, and includes, the Hail Mary, but it plays out the whole scene as a kind of dramatic dialogue. It is a prayer that formed part of the daily life of many Christians, as they paused in the morning, and at midday, and dusk, quietly to recite this prayer to themselves as they heard the church bells toll. There was a time when it was commonly recited in many churches, including this one, but I think fewer and fewer have retained the memory of this pious and once popular devotion. You may know it by its Latin name, the Angelus, and you’ll find it printed on the last page of today’s bulletin, at the end of our worship, together with Millet’s famous painting of two farm-workers pausing in the field at the end of day to say the prayer together. We will use it today at the end of our worship as a prayer and a blessing.
+ + +
The prayer takes the form of a miniature three-scene drama in three couplets. The drama moves from the grace of invitation through acceptance and into its completion with the celebration of new life — much like those three readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah I spoke of on the last three Sundays.
The first couplet introduces the theme: greeting, grace and conception, setting the stage for what is to follow. The second, and pivotal, couplet represents the real drama in the story: as Mary accepts the angel’s news and what it might mean for her. In spite of her perplexity and confusion, she puts her whole trust in God, that God would not ask of her anything that she ought not do. Even knowing the impossibility of bearing a child while still a virgin, even knowing how the tongues would wag when an unmarried woman began to show her pregnancy — still Mary accepts God’s invitation and presents herself as open to the possibility: of becoming the mother of the holy child who will be known as the Son of God.
The final couplet, from the prologue to John’s Gospel, shows the completion and accomplishment of what has come before. Through Mary’s willingness to say Yes to God, Yes to the angelic greeting, the Word of God — the second Person of the Trinity, God from God, Light from Light, purely spiritual as God is Spirit, from before time and for ever — enters the world of matter and energy, and is made living, breathing, pulsing flesh, to dwell with us human beings as a human being. The life of God takes on human life.
+ + +
We observe this drama especially at this time of year, as we move from the invitation of Advent into the remembrance of the Incarnation on Christmas — in this last week of a short pregnancy from conception to delivery.
But this prayer, this Angelus, for many years served as a three-times-a-day reminder to people around the world, with the ringing of a church bell at morning, noon and dusk, to pause and remember and give thanks for this great mystery. I understand that the Irish radio still broadcasts the sound of the Angelus bell three times a day for the same reason, and perhaps you’ve heard the church bells ringing in your neighborhood from time to time that pattern of three times three, followed by nine bells during the saying of the final prayer. We will end our worship today with this traditional prayer, as a blessing and a reminder.
But I ask you not to let this be the only time you remember and give thanks for the mystery and blessing of the Incarnation that we will celebrate next weekend. Even if you do not hear the Angelus bell ring in the morning or at noon or at the close of day, let this sentiment stir in your heart, to give thanks to God, to the angel, and above all to Mary, for saying Yes to God when God asked of her a perplexing thing. May we too, always and everywhere, say Yes to God and serve him with such open, willing hearts, even when he asks a hard thing of us. Let our souls, like Mary’s soul, be the sanctuary of God, ringing bells or not, every day and every hour of our lives.+

---

The Arrival

The good news of Messiah, among us to inspire us to work his will. — A Sermon for Advent 3b

SJF • Advent 3b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

Over these first three weeks of Advent we have been hearing readings from the prophet Isaiah. And as I have said, they form a sequence almost like “ready, set, go.” The first showed Isaiah asking God why he did not show himself, and challenging and imploring God to do so. The second announced that God was indeed soon to show himself, and that unmistakably. And in today’s reading — a reading which, as we know from the gospel of Luke, Jesus identified with and proclaimed in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth — in this reading the presence of the Spirit of God is formally announced: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me...” It is good to recall that the Hebrew word for one who is anointed is Messiah.

+ + +

God’s promise is fulfilled in this prophecy. and it is a time of great rejoicing and celebration. The imagery is that of people getting dressed for a wedding. The groom puts on a garland and the bride dresses herself in her finest jewels. These are not things one does long in advance of the event — these are the outfits you put on only on the day of the wedding itself, like the tail-coat and the wedding dress. That is how we know that the great day has arrived — and when we see the bride and the groom so attired, we know that it is already here.

But note that even these fine outfits are but a shadow of the glory of the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness with which God will clothe his people for the celebration of the Lord’s arrival. Not just the bride and the groom, but all the guests at the wedding banquet will be gloriously dressed. It is clearly something to rejoice about.

And so Saint Paul continues that word of rejoicing, urging those to whom he writes to rejoice always, to give thanks in all things, filled as they are with the unquenchable spirit of God and sanctified by the God of peace to be kept whole and sound.

+ + +

And yet... and yet. The arrival that Isaiah appears to celebrate did not come in the time of Isaiah. It happened centuries later in the time of John the Baptist. Isaiah’s words about the arrival of the Spirit of God were prophetic — even though, fired up with the sense of God’s imminent arrival, it seemed almost, almost, as if it was happening even then. It seemed that God would break through that very day, as if the bride and groom rose from their slumber and dressed for the wedding that would take place that very morning.

So eager were the people for this arrival in the days of Isaiah, and in the days of John the Baptist, that they looked for any clue, any sign, that God and his Messiah had come. You can see that in the grilling to which the priests and Levites subject John the Baptist. The arrival of the Messiah is so close that they almost feel that they can reach out and touch him — but as John assures them, he is not the one. The time is not yet, though as the song says, “soon and very soon.” John sets the stage, even quoting the prophet Isaiah, casting himself in the role of the one who cries out in the wilderness the very same words of preparation that we heard on the first Sunday of Advent — “make his paths straight.” He is coming.

And it is notable that someone else quotes from Isaiah — not just quoting but actually reading, as I said earlier. And that is Christ himself, who, when he was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read in the synagogue of Nazareth, found the very passage we heard this morning. And he not only read from it about the spirit of the Lord God and the anointing that would proclaim the Messiah — he not only read from the scroll but declared that it was fulfilled, then and there, in their hearing, in the presence of all who heard him read it. It was a proclamation that Messiah had come.

+ + +

Soon after, John the Baptist, believing but no doubt wanting to be assured, sent messengers himself to Jesus to ask if he was indeed the one — much as others had sent messengers to John to ask if he was the one! And Jesus gave to John’s messengers an answer similar to the one John gave to those who sought him out: look at what I am doing. And in Jesus’ case, he once again cataloged those evidences of God’s presence similar to the promises made in the passage from Isaiah: sight to the blind, healing to the disabled, release to the prisoners and captives. To comfort John with the assurance that Christ was indeed the one who was promised, he did not engage in a point by point Scriptural argument, but displayed his works of power — the power of God’s presence at work in him and through him, performing the signs of liberation that the prophet had promised. The evidence of God’s arrival is God’s work. This isn’t talk any more, but action.

+ + +

And God wants the same from us — action. It is very easy to talk about how much we love God, love the church, love our fellow Christians. But God wants more than talk: God wants us to put our hands to work as well. God wants us to proclaim in word and deed that same message of deliverance from bondage that Isaiah preached, that John the Baptist promised, and that Christ at the last brought into being. We live in a world that is still full of brokenhearted people — disappointed in their hopes and frustrated or maligned in their efforts to be and to do all that God intends for them. We live in a world that is still oppressed and hungry for good news; a world that is held captive by lust of possession that still works desolation, binding those enthralled by wealth and fame in chains — that while they seem to be made of gold, are cold iron underneath and weigh them down to the depths.

We live, in short, in a world that desperately needs to hear the proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favor, of the Lord’s forgiveness, of the Lord’s deliverance, and above all of the Lord’s arrival.

Will you do that? Not only in word but in deed? Will you proclaim with your lips and in your lives that God has come among us, and is among us still. Will you proclaim that Jesus lives, and that he reigns in your hearts and strengthens your hands to do his will? Will you follow up that proclamation with the hard work that shows that you mean every word you say, that what you proclaim with your lips is what you live in your lives? We, like John, may not be worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. But we can, like John, proclaim, and by our actions certify, that God is with us, acting through us, mighty in power and strong to save: even Jesus Christ our Lord.

---

Getting Ready

Isaiah's theme of preparing the human landscape... A sermon for Advent 2B

SJF • Advent 2b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.

We continue on this second Sunday of Advent with readings from the book of the prophet Isaiah. As I mentioned last week, these readings do not appear in our week-to-week worship in the same order as they do in the book of the prophet. But they do fall into a logical sequence as we’ve been reading them through the course of Advent and as we shall continue, almost as logical as “ready, set, go.”

Last week we heard Isaiah’s lament that God had abandoned and forgotten his people. We also heard his challenge to God to reveal himself, to tear open the heavens and come down, to shake the mountains and boil the sea if need be — to make himself known so that the nations might see, and tremble at his presence.

And today we hear word of God’s response. If, as I said last week, the initial appeal is like an injured child calling out for its mother to come and help, then today it is as if we hear the voice calling from the kitchen — I’ll be there in a minute!

God instructs the prophet to give the people a word of comfort, a word of assurance: God is most definitely coming and wants the way prepared, cleared, leveled out, all obstructions removed and a new four-lane highway built right through the desert so that God’s glory will be unmistakable when it is revealed, “and all flesh shall see it together” — as the text made unforgettable by Händel’s music puts it.

And there is a musical quality to this text today — just as last week we heard a dialogue, a duet of call and response between the prophet and God, so too in the midst of this text today there is a short interlude in the form of a duet — and I’m not going to try to sing.

The voice of God commands the prophet to cry out; and the prophet responds, “What shall I cry?” He then begins to fall back into some of that language of despondency and despair that we heard in last week’s reading. Shall I, the prophet asks, state the obvious: that people are as mortal as grass, as transient and frail and ephemeral as the flower of the field — living for a day or two and then parched by the heat of the sun or withered by the blast of a winter wind? Is that what God wants me to say? Where is the good news in that?

And in response, God orders not just the prophet but Zion itself and the holy city of Jerusalem to stand tall and proud and lift up voices full of strength as would a herald of good tidings, fearlessly crying out: Here is God! See, look! God is coming, the good Shepherd who will gather up the lost lambs, and lead the mother sheep.

+ + +

Today’s theme, then, is the primary Advent theme of preparation for the coming of the Lord. The apostle Peter reminds us that the coming of God will be sudden and unmistakable and that we are called to wait for that day, always being ready, always prepared by living lives of peace and purity and patience. And John the Baptist, while dressed in the costume of Elijah, fulfills the promise of Isaiah. He is the one who appears in the wilderness to call out for preparation — and indeed he does prepare the people with a baptism of repentance, to turn them back towards the place from which God will come, and the assurance that he is only the messenger and not the one for whom the promise was given; he is not the Messiah. No, he is not worthy even to take off the Messiah’s shoes, and while he has baptized with water, to prepare the people, the one to come will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

The preparation we are charged to undertake — as Isaiah makes clear — is a very personal preparation although Isaiah describes it in geological if not cosmic terms. The mountains that are to be removed and the valleys filled in to level out the way for building that four-lane highway for God’s coming are obstacles to us as much as they are to God. From the mountain of pride to the valley of despondency, these are obstacles that block God’s very entry into every human heart.

For that is where God seeks to enter in — through the empty desert of our needs and wants, past the fields of wilted grass and faded flowers of lost hopes and disappointments, filling in our deepest sense of inadequacy and weakness, as well as trimming down our pride and false self-sufficiency, leveling it down to size — past all these obstacles and impediments God seeks us out and bids us prepare for his coming by doing all we can — God giving us the power — to turn to him in faith, in hope, and with love.

For it is faith, as Jesus assured us, that can move mountains, even towering mountains of pride. It is hope that can guide us through the darkest valley, even the valley of the deepest sense of abandonment and despair, even the valley of the shadow of death. And it is love that will inspire us with the power of God’s own Holy Spirit to mount up on Zion and through the gates of Jerusalem to cry out to our beloved, Come, Lord Jesus Bridegroom, come! The Bride is ready. We have flung wide the portals of our hearts; Lord Jesus, enter in!+

---

Blaming it all on God

One thing God cannot resist is his beloved saying, "You don't love me any more..." — a sermon for Advent 1b

SJF • Advent 1b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSGO that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence... You were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

We come today to the beginning of a new church year, on this the first Sunday of Advent. In the four weeks leading up to Christmas — which falls on a Sunday this year — we will be hearing many texts of Scripture dealing with the theme of preparation for the Lord’s coming, both his first coming among us in Bethlehem as a child, and the second coming when he will return in power and great might to judge and rule the world.

Today we heard, and on the next two Sundays we will be hearing, passages from the prophet Isaiah. I will be taking them as my primary theme for reflection in this season of anticipation.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Isaiah both in Jewish history and in how the Christian church made use of his prophecies — many of which came in short order to be understood as explicitly related to the person and work of Jesus Christ. Passages from the book of Isaiah are threaded through our Advent and Lenten seasons in particular: for Isaiah is the prophet both of the Lord’s coming and of the Suffering Servant.

For the Jewish people, the prophecies of Isaiah were a source of comfort and reassurance in the times leading up to their captivity in Babylon and through it and beyond. So extensive are these prophecies that some modern scholars suggest that there may well have been two or even three different “Isaiahs” all contributing to this collection of prophetic writing over as long as four hundred years.

But my purpose here is not to engage in literary criticism or historical speculation — my interest is in asking what this text meant in its own time and what it means for us today.

+ + +

The text we have before us comes from the later chapters of the book of Isaiah itself. In its form it represents a good example of a fairly common biblical model: a personal encounter with God, combining elements of accusation, confession, and petition. Confession and petition we are all fairly familiar with — as it forms a major part of our own ordinary Sunday worship. But accusation? We Christians don’t normally display that Jewish characteristic of chutzpah — evident in people such as Abraham and Job and Jeremiah — to stand up and wag our fingers in God’s face.

But Isaiah does. In the first part of the passage he is basically saying to God, in a challenge, “Why don’t you show yourself if you want people to believe in you? Especially to those who deny you — those pagan nations that have been persecuting your people? Why don’t you act as you did back in the old days; when you tore open the heaven and came down like a mighty fire; when you split open the earth and made it quake?” Isaiah is challenging God to act as he did when he brought his people out of Egypt, when he brought about tumult and destruction in the land of Canaan, leveling the walls of Jericho, and delivered his people from the hands of those who sought to destroy them, bringing them to and settling them in a land of promise: that promised land of milk and honey.

Now, so far, in all of this Isaiah has been saying the kinds of things that appear elsewhere in Hebrew Scripture, especially in the appeals made to God in the Psalms. He is lamenting the fact that God seems to have hidden himself; that God is no longer manifest to the world, no longer helping his people. But then Isaiah says something rather astounding: “You were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.” I’m tempted to say, “Oh now it’s God’s fault!”

But fortunately, Isaiah doesn’t stop with blaming God for the sins of the people. As he makes clear in the rest of the passage, he is simply trying to show how completely dependent the people are upon God. Without God helping them, of course they fall into sin — without God’s constant help and support, even the best and most righteous of them is like a filthy cloth. The autumn season of this people is well underway: they’ve faded like leaves and their iniquities like the wind have blown them all away. They are like a tree that has been uprooted and removed from its soil. They are no longer planted in God, and so they wither away and perish. They have even given up praying — they are so disappointed and despondent because God has not shown himself for so long, has hidden his face from them for so long, that they have given up. They have despaired.

And then, of course, out of the depths of this despond, Isaiah turns to his affirmation: and yet you are our God. In spite of all of the feelings of abandonment, even of betrayal, God is still God and this people are the work of God’s hand. God is the potter and they are the clay. And Isaiah ends with an appeal to God to remember and forgive his people. The uprooted tree will be planted once again.

What Isaiah, and the other prophets and poets who wrote and spoke in the same way have learned is precisely how powerful are those words, “You don’t love me anymore”!

+ + +

This is the appeal that a loving God cannot and will not resist. For of course God loves this people, loves them as dearly as any lover ever did, loves them with the fiercely jealous love of a husband who suspects his wife has strayed, loves them with the powerful and protective love of a mother for her child in danger.

This appeal reminds me of a very powerful scene in a Yiddish film that was produced in Germany just before the Nazi assault on the Jews began in earnest. In its own way it was, sadly, as prophetic as Isaiah.

The film is set in a nineteenth century shtetl, in Eastern Europe in the era of “Fiddler on the Roof,” when and where the main enemies of the Jewish people were Russians and Poles, not Nazis. A village has been reduced to rubble by a marauding band of Cossacks. They’ve burned down the synagogue, raped the young women and killed most of the young men in the village. One old man is left sitting in the midst of the devastation, having rescued a precious Torah scroll from the fire. He sits in the ashes with the Torah scroll in his arms like a wounded child, rocking and weeping. And like a modern Isaiah, he raises his voice to God in a lament:

Why have you done this to your people, O God? Why have you allowed this to happen? Down through the ages, again and again we are persecuted and killed for your sake! I will not be silent; I will raise my voice and cry out to you, like a child who calls out to its mother. “Mama, Mama; it hurts!”

That old man, like Isaiah, hoped that God would hear and respond to this lament — though the response might be delayed, God the just judge — and even more the loving parent to these children — would hear this plea, and ultimately save and deliver his people. When all else fails, when other defenders are ready to give up, when human justice fails, the only plea that makes sense is to appeal to the highest court of all, before the judgment seat of the Almighty, even if it means calling out, “Don’t you love me any more?”

+ + +

So, while appearing to blame it all on God, this is actually an appeal to God, a way to evoke a response from God who will not ignore or reject the appeal of those whom God does love so much. It is an appeal to God to be God. For God is love, and is always more willing to forgive than we are to pray. So, then, let us pray that God will be God. And in our own times of trial, personal and communal, and feelings of loss or abandonment, kindle the fire of hope that God will save those whom he loves, and has called to be his own. That God will plant our leafless trees by streams of living water.+

---

Feeling Sheepish

The division of the nations, and God's threat and promise. A sermon for Christ the King, Year A.

SJF • Proper 29 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.

When I was a child, and behaved badly — at least the first time around — my mother and father would usually let me off the hook with a warning rather than a punishment. But they would always describe the punishment that would fall upon me the next time I behaved badly in the same way. And they would end that warning with a pointed reminder, “That’s not a threat; that’s a promise!”

Today’s passage from the Gospel according to Matthew is one of the greatest of the threats and promises made by Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry. It is a vision of the end of all time, when the Son of Man will return in glory with his angels to take up his place on the judgment seat, and judge the nations of the earth.

The passage portrays the king of heaven as a shepherd dividing sheep from goats, to one side and to the other. The sheep are told that they have done well even when they didn’t know they were doing so; and the goats are similarly told that they have done poorly, again even though they didn’t know what they were failing to do. And the doing or the not doing, whether by the sheep or by the goats, isn’t about how well or poorly they have treated their own kind, or about how the sheep have treated the goats or the goats the sheep. Rather it is about how they each and all have treated the members of the king’s family— and the least of them at that.

In other words, this vision of the final judgment contrasts with that portrayed in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. For the prophet, it is about the various members of the flock of sheep, and how the fat sheep have mistreated the lean sheep. The fat sheep have pushed and shoved and butted with their horns at the weaker animals and scattered them far and wide. And those pushy fat sheep are in for punishment when the shepherd judges between sheep and sheep.

So Jesus is using language similar to that of the prophet, but with a very different point. Obviously, as Ezekiel shows, it is wrong for the fat cats of this world to trod on the poor — the One Percent on the Ninety-Nine Percent — to take advantage of the weak, to push them out of the pleasant pasture to which all of the sheep are entitled.

But Jesus is making a rather different point — a more challenging point — and the threat and the promise are equally more demanding. It is not enough just to be good and fair to your fellow sheep and be content with your share of the pasture. It is not enough just not to butt with your horns or push with your flank and shoulder in taking advantage of the weaker sheep. The goats in Jesus’ parable suffer eternal punishment — and let’s be clear that that’s what Jesus is talking about here in his parable of the end of the world — they suffer this terrible punishment not because they’ve done bad things to the weak, whether sheep or goats, but because they haven’t done good things for those who needed good things done for them — and who those in need are, I’ll get to in a moment.

But first note that these goats are not punished because they’ve imprisoned people or stolen their food or stripped them of their clothing. They are punished because they haven’t visited those who were sick or imprisoned, or fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty or clothing to the naked. They are not guilty of any great crime or tyranny, but of neglect.

+ + +

And now the other matter: who are those towards whom the sheep and goats have done or failed to do good? First we might well ask who these sheep and goats are. And the text reveals they are “the nations.” These are those of whom Jesus will speak at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel — and we are almost to the end with this chapter — when he orders the disciples to “go and baptize all nations.” The sheep and the goats are the people of the nations — those on the receiving end of the ministry of evangelism — the ones to whom the evangelists will go to bring good news and baptize. So the ones towards whom the neglect of the goats and the generosity of the sheep is shown, is not each other, not the nations gathered for judgment — but rather the disciples themselves, the “members of Christ’s family” — those who are sent to baptize and bring good news to those nations.

This parable, then, is not simply a lesson for Christians to be good to one another — to visit the sick and those in prison, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked — those are things we ought to do anyway under the commandment of Jesus to love God and our neighbor.

This parable is offered as a threat and a promise: a comfort to the disciples themselves, who in their coming ministry in the early days of the church would be going out into the world to carry out the commandment to baptize and spread the good news out there — out among all those sheep and goats of the nations. It is offered as a warning to those who would treat the disciples well or badly in their hour of need. Though they were ignorant of the fact that in relation to the disciples — by visiting and feeding and clothing them — or not — they had the king himself with them, in the person of the members of the king’s own family: as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.

+ + +

Now, before we breathe a sigh of relief that this parable may be more about how we as Christians are to be received in the world when we bring the good news of the Gospel, than about how we are to behave towards one another, let’s not lose sight of the fact that we stand in relationship to one another much as the world stands in relationship to us. How we treat each other does matter — and it matters eternally — and that’s not a threat, that’s a promise. For if it is so vitally important that people treat strangers well, how much more important is it that we treat the members of our own family well. For all — all — strangers and family and friends — are under the rule of the great Shepherd of the Sheep. He is Lord of all. How we treat the members of the family to which we all belong is a judgment upon us — whether we know it or not. So the safest course is to do good to all, to visit and comfort those who are sick or in prison, to feed all of those who hunger and give drink to all who thirst, to welcome all strangers as well as all of our friends; and to clothe all who are naked.

As the beautiful prayer attributed to Saint Francis reminds us, “It is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Where else are we to comfort the sick than at the bedside of the sick? Where else are we to comfort those in prison except in prison? Whom are we to feed except those who are hungry? To whom shall we give drink but to those who thirst? And whom shall we welcome if not the stranger or the homeless who seek us out? These may well be members of the family of the king whom we do not yet know, long-lost relations or distant cousins who have wandered far from home — and we can welcome them back, and treat them as we ought. God help us if we fail to serve the king in the person of those who are least among the members of his family. And God bless us when we do. He has not only threatened; he has promised!+

---

Wedding Banquet

Saint James Fordham • All Saints Sunday 2011
The angel said to me, Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

There is an old tradition that on the night before a marriage, the future bride and groom are separately wined and dined by their friends at bachelor or bachelorette parties — with perhaps more emphasis on the wining than the dining! Well, All Saints Day is the day on which the church celebrates the marriage supper of the Lamb. And since the marriage supper is yet to begin — we’ve received the invitation but it isn’t dated; we’ve just been told to be ready and alert — in one sense the church’s whole vigil here on earth is like a long bachelor or bachelorette party as we anticipate the great day to come. We who have yet to cross over to the life of the world to come, we in what is called the Church Militant (as opposed to the Church Triumphant), we who feebly struggle while they in glory shine, we, Christ’s body still at work, remember and give thanks for those who rest from their labors.

+ + +

Now one of the things about the parties surrounding weddings, is that the guests usually bring gifts for the new bride and groom. But what can we possibly bring as a gift for someone who has everything already! For the wedding we are talking about is the wedding of Christ and the Church, the wedding supper of the Lamb! And if anyone ever deserved the title The Man Who Has Everything, it is Jesus Christ, the one who draws the whole world to himself.

The answer is that Jesus wants one other gift, one thing we possess but which we can hold back if we will, or choose to let go of and give to him. And that is ourselves. We can choose to keep to ourselves, or we can choose to give ourselves to the one who gave us everything; we can give our selves, our souls and bodies, as a reasonable and holy sacrifice.

The Saints in glory, both the big famous saints with churches named after them, whose likenesses are enshrined in stained glass and icons, (or on the wall outside the parish office!), and the less well-known saints with likenesses preserved on our own little remembrance board there under the altar, the saints are those who gave themselves to God. And their example can help us to be as generous with ourselves as they were with themselves. The wonderful thing about the communion of saints — and I mean all of the saints, living and dead, including us here as much as the saints in glory — the wonderful thing about the communion of saints is that we help each other become gifts to God. We bear each other up when we are tempted to slide back and away from our best efforts to serve our Lord.

Ultimately all of us come to the wedding banquet carrying some of our brothers and sisters and being carried by others of them. No one gets in empty-handed! We are called and invited to the wedding, and we are to come bearing love for one another, which ofttimes means literally bearing each other up. The only wedding invitation we will have to show at the door to heaven is each other. No one gets in unaccompanied.

Remember the stern question that God asked the first murderer, and his cavalier response: Where is your brother? and Am I my brother’s keeper? Think of the sadness that pierced the heart of God when he heard those words in answer to the question, and left unsaid the response, “Of course you are." We are responsible to and for each other, connected through the bond of our common humanity. That bond is stronger than mere nationality or culture, and is fundamental and basic to our very being as human beings.

The weight of each other, as we bear each other and each other’s burden — as indeed Christ bears us — is the gentle and easy yoke of Christ. All of us are brothers and sisters in him, because it is through him that we become children of God.

What form that family will take, what we will become when we arrive, remains to be seen — it is not yet revealed. All of the blessedness that Jesus describes in the beatitudes is sometimes only perceived in that retrospective glance. In the present, most of those things are not pleasant while they are being endured! The road of sainthood is hard, no doubt about it. Being persecuted for righteousness sake is no bed of roses. It is only once we have arrived at the goal of the heavenly call — only when we look back to see our lives laid out in testimony, that we will see what a journey we have taken.

And more importantly, who has been with us and bearing us up along the way. What unknown hands lift burdens from our backs? What unknown saints walk at our sides and help us over obstacles of which we may not even be aware? Only when we’ve reached the goal will we be able to look back and see.

And what we will see will be worthy of the vision of Saint John the Divine. All the church through time and space, all the prophets and apostles and martyrs, all the saints in their festal company, and all the holy people of God will be displayed as a huge inverted wedge of souls and saints carrying and being carried by one another, an inverted pyramid that focuses its sharp, heavy point on a man nailed to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem — who bears it all, with arms outstretched.

Though that weight pushed him down to the very depths when he descended to the dead, yet the power of God working in him raised him up again, and the power of God working through him can and will push that whole great pyramid of charity right on up and out of time and space and into eternity. And the first shall be last: the first fruits of the resurrection, Jesus the Bridegroom, is behind us urging us on, bearing us forward, ushering us into the banqueting hall.

+ + +

God is full of surprises. We thought we were coming to the wedding banquet as servants, then found we were no longer servants, but friends. Then we were surprised to find that the bridegroom would act as usher. But a far greater surprise awaits us. We had just settled into the notion that we were to be guests at the banquet, friends of the bridegroom. But it turns out that we are much more even than wedding guests. All this blessed company — ironically blessed in poverty, meekness, thirst for righteousness, hunger for mercy and peace, and even under persecution — all this company of blessedness will gather at the banquet, as more than guests: we are the Bride herself.

We, in company with all those who have gone before, the apostles, prophets, and martyrs, all the holy people of God, the blessed company of all faithful people, the saints militant and triumphant are the Bride!

This is the mystery we celebrate today. We and all our beloved ones, together with the unnumbered saints who have gone before us, participate in God’s great saving act in Jesus Christ our Lord. We as the Church in the communion of saints are eternally united to him by his gracious gift of himself once offered for us all — for what God has joined together shall never be put asunder. And so, to our Lord and God — and loving Spouse — let us with grateful hearts ascribe all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and forevermore.+

---

Minor Prophet

The truth may well be in the minority --- but with the power of God can turn the worlds upside down. A sermon for Proper 26a.

SJF • Proper 26a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them; the seers shall be disgraced and the diviners put to shame....

We heard a reading this morning from the book of the prophet Micah. He is one of the “Minor Prophets” — one of the twelve whose much shorter works are gathered together at the end of the Old Testament after the big-league heavy-hitters Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel — each of whose works alone is longer than the twelve others put together. But they are none the less important.

Micah is one of these Twelve Minor Prophets, but in today’s reading he also appears to be in the minority among the other prophets of his own time — the ones whom he accuses of leading the people astray. These are the prophets for hire, who cry out “Peace” when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing in their mouths.

This stand-off among the prophets is not all that unusual — oftentimes in Israel’s history there was disagreement among those called prophets: some said one thing and some another, and it was often the case that the one telling the truth — the true prophet — was in the minority.

You may recall the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel, when he alone faced off against several hundred prophets of the false god Baal — ridiculing them as they danced about and cut and gashed themselves in an effort to induce their god to show himself. Or you might recall that Amos (another of the Twelve Minor Prophets) prophesied in the minority and was chided for doing so. At that he protested that he wasn’t even a prophet — just a shepherd who lived off the fruit of the land— until God called him to speak the truth to the people of that land.

Another early prophet, Micaiah — not to be confused with Micah — like Elijah also had to bring bad news of defeat to Ahab king of Israel, noting that God had sent a lying spirit into the mouths of four hundred other prophets who told Ahab that he would be successful. Talk about a minority of one! — and yet he was the only one who told the truth.

The sad fact is that there were often false prophets, like those against whom Micah protests in our reading this morning: prophets at a price, prophets who thought in terms of personal profit — with an “F I” instead of “P H E” — and who would give you what you wanted to hear, for a price — like the fortune-tellers who will always give good news so long as you cross their palms with silver.

For those against whom Micah speaks, it is all about the money: not just the prophets, but the rulers who take bribes to hand out the desired judgment; priests who teach falsely for a price, or prophets who give pleasing oracles of peace in exchange for silver or gold. Micah stands in opposition to all of this. Although the prophets and princes and priests can be bought, God will not be bought off, and will bring his truth, will bring his rule, and his judgment upon all who turn aside to evil ways. As Micah says in another passage from his writing: you cannot buy God off with sacrifices and burnt offerings — even going so far as to imagine that God would accept your own children in a human sacrifice. No, Micah says: what the Lord God requires of you — in that ringing phrase — “is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

+ + +

The situation is not all that different by the time of Christ. The authorities — in this case the scribes and the Pharisees — enjoy the privilege of their station. They sit in the seat of Moses — giving authoritative interpretations of the Law — but they fail to follow through on the Law’s harder teachings about justice, fairness and equity. The return they garner in exchange is not so plainly financial, but rather the literal “fringe benefits” — like those fringes that decorate their prayer shawls in an ostentatious show of self-righteous piety. They have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at the banquets, and the respectful bows and curtsies in the street and the marketplace, as people nod to them and humble themselves and call them “rabbi.”

Jesus, like Micah before him, stands as a minority of one against this comfortable establishment. He knows — as indeed only the Word of God can know, as the one who sent the prophets in the first place — he knows that a prophet’s task is not to cozy up to power and prestige, but as Finley Peter Dunne once famously put it, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Those in the seats of power would later accuse the Christians of trying to turn the world upside-down. And indeed that is what they did, and what they were meant to do. A world in which even one child goes hungry or perishes from a treatable disease is a world that needs to be turned upside-down.

Our Gospel passage this morning closes with Jesus almost quoting his mother, Blessed Mary of Nazareth, who had herself spoken prophetically when she visited her cousin Elizabeth and said, “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.” This is what happens when the minority has God on its side — when the truth that they proclaim is not something they speak for what they can get out of it, or to please others or to gain their support from it, or to exalt themselves — but simply because it is the truth.

Telling the truth will often not win you friends or earn you praise or reward. It can get you into trouble, as it did Elijah and Amos and Micaiah and Micah... and Jesus — and as it did for the Apostles who spread the word of Jesus and his teaching, and turned the world upside-down, so that the rich and comfortable might slip from their seats — whether the seat of Moses or the prince’s throne — and come to learn what it is to be among the poor and disenfranchised of this world.

+ + +

Jesus ends his words in this morning’s Gospel with a warning to his followers. They are not to purchase honor with flattery, to take upon themselves high titles and the best seats in the places of earthly pomp and circumstance. No, they are to turn their hearts and minds — and ears — to the one in heaven, who is their Father, and to Jesus Christ who is their teacher and instructor.

We are called to be like the true prophets of old, who listened for the word of God — both for the unfolding of the written word of God, and for the teaching of the living Word of God in our hearts. The ancient prophets saw his day, far off and as in a vision, and were glad. We are fortunate enough to live in the days since his coming, and what is more, to continue to welcome him among us in Word and Sacrament. No better seat of honor, or more prestigious banquet exists than the one to which we have been invited and at which we are nowseated — not because of our worthiness, but by his grace. To him be the glory, now and for ever.

---

Charity Does Not Stay at Home

A call for outreach...

SJF• Proper 25a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
One of the Pharisees, a lawyer, asked Jesus a question to test him, Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

There is an old saying that goes, “Charity begins at home.” You’ve probably heard that said from time to time. It usually comes up in a church context when someone on a vestry or church board suggests sending money or resources out to the mission field, and someone else points out that there’s plenty of work to do right where they are. And of course, that’s the problem with, “Charity begins at home.” It usually means, in practice, “Charity stays at home.”

When the Pharisees came to test Jesus, our Gospel today tells us, the lawyer among them asked him what the most important law was; natural question for a lawyer. And he answered, as many a Jew of his day would, by citing two laws from the Law of Moses. First, from Deuteronomy: that one must love God with heart and mind and soul and strength; and second from Leviticus: that one must love one’s neighbor as oneself.

What these two laws show us is that charity — love — does begin at home, with oneself and one’s immediate neighbors; but that it cannot stay at home. True love, true charity, reflects the compassion of God, and though it starts at home, it reaches to the ends of the earth — just as the love of God does.

+ + +

Charity begins at home: because if you do not love yourself you will not be a very loving person to anyone else. Many personal relationships go sour because people feel unworthy and unlovable, and they reject the love that others try to show to them. This was the lesson of many a fable and fairy tale, for example, of the Beast whose heart was finally warmed by Beauty, who taught him to stop treating himself as a monster, and to realize his own lovableness.

Yes, charity — love — starts at home. But charity cannot stay at home: few people are as unlovable as those who are so full of self-love that they don’t reach out to those around them. The truly loving person is able both to love and to be loved, starting at home but reaching out beyond it, from self, to neighbor, and to God.

For you can’t jump right to claiming to love God if you don’t start at home first. As the beloved disciple John wrote, “Those who do not love their brothers and sisters, whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” How many people down through the years have quietly and contentedly claimed to love and serve God while ignoring God’s children — their brothers and sisters in the faith! There is a powerful indictment in the words of Saint John Chrysostom: “Do not, in your journey to worship Christ in the church, pass him by where he lies starving and freezing in the street! You cannot claim to love God if you do not love God’s children.”

Jesus taught us, in fact, that the primary way in which we show our love of God is in how we love each other. He was highly critical of the temple authorities for putting on such a show of piety while taking the last few resources of the widows and orphans. He criticized the Pharisees for imposing rules of such high demanding virtue that they lost sight of human reality.

And so Jesus offered a stumper of a question to the Pharisees, who were trying to test him, to catch him and trip him and if possible bring him up on charges. Jesus asked them how it was possible that David could call his own son, “Lord.”

Now this question stumped the Pharisees, as Jesus intended it to do! They lived in a world in which the younger always served the older, a world in which it was inconceivable that a man would call his son, let alone his many times great-great-great-grandson “my lord.”

Things simply didn’t work that way in their neatly ordered world. The humble and the poor are the servants; the rich and the mighty are the lords over them. That’s the way the world works. The Pharisees didn’t understand that what Christ brought them, what the disciples would later reveal was a movement that would “upside-down” their neatly ordered world. Had they been able to understand this one riddle, they might have grasped what Jesus was about: that turnabout of true charity, in which those who have serve those without, in which a leader becomes a nursemaid, in which the master takes up the role of a serving-woman and washes his disciples’ feet, in which a many many times great-great-grandfather looks to the distant future to see his distant son and heir lifted from the earth, to draw the whole world to himself,
and calls him, Lord.

+ + +

As you know, I was traveling in South Africa and England this past two weeks, and in fact had a brief stop in Ireland when the plane developed problems and had to turn back. (Rather more travel than I had counted on!) But I learned something in South Africa, where I had a wonderful experience meeting people from across the continent — from South Africa of course, but there were clergy from Sweden, people from New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Nigeria, from Rwanda, from Kenya — many parts of Africa, discussing many issues. And the one thing that surprised me was that the most inspiring talk I heard came from Chicago, from the priest in a parish in Chicago who presented to the consultation some of what her work is.

Her parish, which is called “All Saints,” when she came there about 18 years ago, had about 25 members. And the first thing she did, to challenge that congregation, was to challenge them much as Jesus the Pharisees — to suggest that what they needed to do was to look out to their neighborhood, to see what was going on, and to try to meet the needs of some of the people in that struggling, difficult neighborhood. And they began a very modest feeding program, having a hot meal served once a week.

Well, 18 years later, that church now has over 600 members, and they serve, still, one day a week, 400 people: a hot meal every Tuesday. They listened to the Lord, who challenged them, and told them to look beyond themselves to their neighbors.

And what I want to do is challenge us, here at St James Church, to do the same. As you know, some years ago, we had a dinner served on Thanksgiving Day — to homeless people and whoever was in the neighborhood. We stopped doing that a few years back and switched to Christmas, and I have to say the Christmas meal was not nearly as successful. I think one of the problems being that by the time it gets into December it’sgotten very cold, and people aren’t out on the streets — God knows where they have gone, but they aren’t out there. But on Thanksgiving, they still are. And I would like to challenge us once again to do what we did a few years ago, and open our doors and welcome people in to eat in our parish hall, now that the hall has been restored and prepared, we really have no excuse not to do it.

And I’m reminded of a wonderful hymn, which we’re not singing today because this just came to me this morning, the text of which says:

For the love of God is broader than the measure of Man’s mind,

and the love of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

If our love were but more faithful we should take him at his word,

and our life would be thanksgiving for the goodness of the Lord.

I’m sure you recognize that hymn. And I would like to challenge us today — and I’m doing this with the mind of honoring Bonnie’s parish, All Saints — with All Saints Day coming, and you’re having in your bulletin this morning an envelope for our annual All Saints Day remembrance, where we remember those who have died, our families and friends, and we normally put that money into our endowment fund, which is a wonderful thing, and a help for our future the church. But I would like to suggest that this year we take that offering that is dedicated to our own personal saints, our friends and family who have gone before us, and dedicate that money, and any other money we can raise, to put on a really splendid Thanksgiving Day celebration, and welcome people from far and wide, our neighbors in the Bronx, to come in and have a hot meal on a cold day.

Will you do that with me, will you do that, my friends. And next week I will ask for your help — and I’ll have a sign-up sheet prepared at the back of the church for those willing to pitch in, perhaps to cook something and bring it on that day. And the funds we raise will go to buy supplies and food, and whatever we need to help feed the hungry on that day.

Are you with me, my friends? Shall we allow God to challenge us and allow the love of God to grow in our hearts so that we can open our doors to our neighbors, who are less well off than we are? Let us do that, friends. It is what Jesus wants from us, and it is in his name we pray; in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

---

Letting Go

St Paul catalogues his virtues and then throws the catalogue away! --- sermon for Proper 22a

SJF • Proper 22a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

There was once a very successful Turkish prize-fighter, named Ismail Yousouf. He traveled the world offering to fight anyone who would contest his strength, and he always won. In addition to his physical prowess, he also had a deep distrust of banks and bankers. Because of that, he kept his winnings in the form of gold coins that he carried with him at all times in a money belt around his waist. I suppose he might have re-written the Scriptural saying to read, “Where your treasure is, there will your stomach also be!” This decision, to keep his wealth as close to him as his skin, led to tragedy, however, when he had the misfortune to be sailing on the passenger liner La Bourgogne in the summer of 1898, when it collided with another vessel off the coast of Nova Scotia and sank. A few of the passengers escaped the disaster, but Yousouf was not among them: in spite of his physical strength, his gold money-belt weighed him down, and he sank into the depths like a stone. Perhaps after all the old saying isn’t quite true, and you can take it with you! But is it worth the trip?

Yousouf’s story is not unique — even on that ship on that day, in which fewer than a quarter of the passengers were saved, there must have been others who might have been saved had they resisted the temptation to turn back for some valued item — a necklace or a briefcase or a wallet — and waste valuable time and add to their burden in reaching the lifeboats.

In a similar vein Mark Twain wrote of his visit to the ruins of Pompeii where he saw the remains of a man who was caught in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius just outside a door to a passage that might have protected him — now an ash-coated skeleton with a key to the door in one hand and ten gold coins in the other. Twain reflected, that had he not stopped to gather up the gold, he might have made it to the door.

The reality of someone dying because they won’t let go of some particular thing is so much a part of human culture that it has become what’s called a “trope” — which is a sort of fancy literary word for a cliché. How many movies have you seen where a character perishes for that very reason — failing to let go of some precious item. I’m sure you can think of many, and I won’t even start to list them,
but that word “precious” and the mention of volcanos can hardly pass without acknowledging poor Gollum and his obsession with the Ring of Power that ultimately leads him to his incinerated end at Mount Doom.

The moral of all of this is that some things are best let go of — and your life may depend on letting go. I reminded us last week of Jack Benny’s response to the challenge, “Your money or your life!” — “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” — which is comical precisely because we recognize that tension in our own lives — that tension between what seems to be of value and what really is of ultimate value; and our recognition that some people really do choose money over life, dying because they won’t let go — or maybe living, but not really having much of a life.

+ + +

In our reading from Philippians last week we heard about how Jesus Christ let go — let go of everything — not to save his own life but to save the lives of all who would turn to him in faith. Though he was the Son of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped at or held on to, but rather emptied himself, taking on our human nature so as to live and die as one of us — for our sake and for our salvation.

In the continuation of Philippians we heard this morning, Saint Paul does a similar thing. He begins by cataloguing all of the things he could be proud of if he wished: his being an observant Jew, a scholar and a teacher, in zeal and devotion a leader of his people, a man rich in his own acquired righteousness under the law. But then he shows that he is willing to toss that glossy illustrated catalogue onto the rubbish heap. He will not allow all of these inheritances and accomplishments, these native qualities and acquired skills, to hold him back — as indeed they had held him back — from Christ and his resurrection. Ultimately Paul knows that he must let go of the things that were most precious to him in his life before he came to know Christ. For since knowing Christ, all of these things, however valuable and good they might be, are of no comparison to the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

+ + +

Think for a moment about your own life — what are the things that might hold you back? Is it pride in your family or your education? Is it consciousness of your skills or satisfaction with the uprightness of your life? None of these are bad things, mind — that’s the point. These are things worth valuing. They only become a problem when we hang on to them instead of letting go in order fully to grasp what is much more valuable than any such earthly good: to grasp our Lord, clinging to the hem of his garment, as if our life depended on it.

Because our life does depend on it. If anything — however good — impedes your ability to grasp Jesus and trust in his goodness in his righteousness; if your hands are full of anything else at all, however good or valuable they might be, trust in God and let go of it. Forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. All else will be added unto you, if you put your whole trust in him who is the source of all good.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, you let go of everything for our sake, leaving the Father’s side to be with us as one of us, to save us from our sins. Help us to find the will and the way to strip off the money belt of reputation and rise from the ocean depths of materialism; to scatter the golden coins of pride, and place the key in the lock of the door that opens to salvation; to forsake the ring of power and prestige and accept the yoke of humble service; that we may at the last find our eternal home with you, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.

---

One Mind One Heart

Having the mind of Christ -- a sermon for Proper 21a.

SJF • Proper 21 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Be of the same mind, having the same love being in full accord and of one mind. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

In last week’s sermon I spoke to you about the double-mindedness and indecision of Hamlet the melancholy Dane, in contrast to the relative single-mindedness of Saint Paul the Apostle. Just as Hamlet wrestled with the question, “To be or not to be,” so too did Paul wrestle with the question of whether it was better for him to give up his life and be with God or continue to struggle along with his fellow Christians to build up the church for which Christ died. And it didn’t take him long to come to the decision to do the latter.

This theme of single-mindedness or decisiveness — making up your mind and then following through on your decision — lies at the heart of all of our Scripture lessons today. It’s important to hear those lessons because making decisions and being firm in your own mind once you’ve made a decision can be very difficult.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with or recall comedian Jack Benny — he was very popular in the days of radio comedy, and I have to admit I am just old enough to remember his popular early TV show from my early childhood. Over the years he had created a character notorious for his stinginess — he drove a car that was at least thirty years old, and squeezed many cups of tea from a single teabag he would bring to restaurants where he would order a cup of hot water.

One of his most famous comedy “bits” — one involving making decisions — was broadcast on his radio show. He’s returning home after an evening rehearsal — walking instead of taking a taxi, of course, because he’s too cheap — when a mugger comes up to him and says, “Your money or your life.” This is followed by several moments of silence, as the studio audience begins to giggle and chuckle; finally the mugger repeats, “Say, Mister, I said, your money or your life!” To which the cheapskate Benny finally replied, “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

+ + +

Most of us would not have to stop to think about such a matter — and of course that’s what makes Benny’s comment comical. And yet most of us face situations in our lives where reaching a decision simply isn’t all that easy. You may recall another favorite comedy portrayal of indecision with a character having a little angel on one shoulder and the little devil on the other shoulder — each of them a miniature replication of the person him or herself — and both of them arguing in one ear and then the other the various urgings of what to do or not do. So foreign and yet vivid can our own thinking become that we may project it out onto such imagined angels or devils on our shoulders. Sometimes indecision can feel like that — and the more important the matter the more likely we are to find ourselves in such a quandary of double-mindedness.

+ + +

It is a distressing situation in which to find ourselves, Because we want to know what it’s best for us to do. Sometimes we do know, but don’t really want to acknowledge it — which is why Ezekiel has worked himself up into such a temper addressing the house of Israel: surely they know better, well aware that the transgressions they have committed are transgressions. After all, they’ve had the Law of Moses for a thousand years and the words of other prophets for hundreds of years by that time, and they have the own sorry example to look back on, their own history — what happened time and again when their leaders turned aside to worship false gods. From Solomon on, most of the leaders forgot the Lord and turned aside to do what ought not be done. And the land and people suffered for it.

And so Ezekiel appeals to them to turn from the folly of their transgressions and make up their mind to follow the Lord — who, in all fairness, will save and restore them if they mend their ways. For when they have set their mind on God they will also have a new heart and a new spirit — one mind, one heart, devoted to God.

+ + +

Today’s gospel presents us with another form of double mindedness: those two sons who, when their father tells them to get to work, both have a change of mind, a change of heart — one for the better and one for the worse. It is important to note that neither one of them is a picture-perfect son to their father. That would be one who would both say he would do what he’s told to do, and then do it. But surely Jesus favors the son who changes his mind for the better and does his father’s will in the end, in spite of that initial back-talk. It is after that example that the tax collectors and prostitutes have turned towards God at the preaching of John the Baptist, changing their minds about their bad decisions, and turning their lives around to devote heart and mind to God.

Meanwhile, the chief priests and elders are caught in a two-minded dilemma. They failed in their ministry of inspiring the people to righteousness, and wrote off the tax collectors and prostitutes as beyond salvation. Along comes the layman, this unordained uneducated man John, whose powerful preaching cuts to the heart and soul and inspires those deemed hopeless sinners by the self-righteous to change their ways.

So Jesus puts the authorities on the spot with his pointed question — one they cannot answer without incriminating themselves. For if John was God’s agent, why didn’t they accept him? And if John was simply acting on his own, how to explain the people’s acclamation of him as a prophet who has changed their lives? Either way the evidence is against them. And so the ones who should be teachers are stumped like the dunce in the corner.

+ + +

Finally, Paul offers us the best way forward: the best answer to the double mind is to have in oneself the single mind of Christ. For the mind of Christ, which becomes ours through the Spirit of God and our adoption in baptism — does not equivocate, does not balance on the one hand this and on the other that, is not pulled from side to side by contrary temptations and urges for good or for ill.

Some of you may recall another figure from the 1950s, Harry Truman, who became President of the United States just at the end of the war, succeeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then was elected President. At one point in those tumultuous post-war years, the country was going through great economic problems and realignments — not unlike what we’re going through today. And Truman called upon a series of economists to get advice about what he should to — again, much as we find today. And the economists came to him and said, “Well, you could do this on the one hand, or on the other hand you could do that.” Time and again it was the same message. “Well, on the one hand, you could do this; but on the other hand, you could do that.” Finally Truman famously said, “Will someone please bring me a one-handed economist!”

Now, far be it from me to compare Harry Truman with Jesus Christ. But there is another famous thing that Harry Truman said that does apply: “The buck stops here.” He had that on a little sign on his desk in the President’s office. And “the buck stops” with Jesus. He is the One to whom we are all called to turn — both as our Savior and as our Example, in single-mindedness.

The mind of Christ moves right forward — doing the will of God the Father without veering or delay or detour. And that same mind can be in us, the mind of the one who though he was in the form of God did not grasp at divinity to exploit the powers that were his by right, but emptied himself, in a single-minded decision, to the cause for which he came among us: to live and die as one of us, in obedience to his Father’s will, to save us and redeem us. If we have that mind of Christ, then God will be, as Paul said, “at work in us” as God was at work in him — giving us with one heart, one mind, the hope and assurance of salvation. To him, Jesus Christ our Lord, be the glory, now and for ever.

To Be or Not To Be

Choosing life over death -- for the right reason. A sermon for Proper 20a.

SJF • Proper 20a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard-pressed between the two; my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.

In this morning’s reading from the prophet Jonah we encountered a rather petulant man prepared to die almost out of spite. Jonah is angry at God on two counts: for letting the wicked Ninevites off the hook because they repented in response to Jonah’s own prophetic warning; and more immediately and selfishly because the bush that shaded him from the harsh desert sun has withered at God’s command. Jonah the Impatient is not one to put up with such things, and one hopes he learns better by the end of the story. At that point Jonah appears to have been struck speechless in response to God’s final question putting things in perspective. He should, after all, be happy that his prophecy was heeded and saved an entire city.

When we turn to our Epistle there is no doubt that we are dealing with a much more positive assessment. In Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians we behold the efforts of a committed servant of God to wrestle with the issue of whether it is better to live or to die, but for the right reasons — not choosing to die out of spite, or even out of a desire to be with God, but choosing life instead in order to serve God’s people.

Living or dying: to be or not to be. That is the issue with which the melancholy Dane Prince Hamlet wrestles, though in very different circumstances from either Jonah or Paul. As you may recall, Hamlet is a philosophy student entangled in the midst of a family drama with supernatural overtones — his father’s ghost has appeared to him and told him that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle, who has since married his widow.

Shakespeare’s play is among the richest and most complex ever written, and the character of Hamlet can be played in many different ways. Sir Laurence Olivier’s version resonates most with our readings this morning — in weighing the question of life and death. You may recall that the film begins with Olivier’s voice-over introducing the theme, “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” That is the heart of Hamlet’s dilemma, and it lies in that most famous of Shakespearian speeches, the one that begins, “To be or not to be.” That is, as Hamlet observes, the question — the one that faces him, and Jonah, and Paul, and ultimately every thinking person. Is it better to live or to die?

Hamlet’s short speech is a brilliant summary of the philosophical arguments for and against choosing death over life, or life over death, laying out an “on the one hand this and on the other hand that” kind of argument with himself.

Hamlet really would like to just end it all — in modern terms we would probably say he is suffering from clinical depression. Life itself has just become too much of a burden — especially with his father’s ghost getting into the picture and planting seeds of suspicion — and Hamlet doesn’t know if the ghost is telling the truth or if the ghost is trying to tempt him into committing the murder of an innocent person! So Hamlet is looking for a way out, and is even contemplating suicide. In an earlier speech he has already expressed the wish that he could just die — that his “too, too solid flesh” might simply melt and evaporate and disappear; but he immediately recalls that taking any action along those lines himself has been forbidden, as the Almighty has fixed his law “against self-slaughter.”

So in the more famous speech Hamlet returns to the question, Is suffering a thing that makes you more noble and virtuous by enduring it, or is it something you should overcome or avoid? Who after all would suffer if it were an option simply to end your life in an instant, and plunge into that endless sleep? But in that sleep of death what dreams might come? Ah, as Hamlet observes, “There’s the rub!”

In the end it is the unknown — what comes after death in that “undiscovered country” from which “no traveler returns” — that keeps Hamlet alive: not a positive will to live and a commitment to act, but fear of the unknown and the consequences of action. As he concludes, “Conscience makes cowards of us all.” So Hamlet continues on the course of his tragedy, only able finally to act against his murderous uncle when he finds a way to be sure the uncle is guilty — but too late to save himself or his mother, or his prospective father-in-law or his fiancée, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or anyone else, from a swift journey offstage to that undiscovered country, death.

+ + +

Saint Paul, on the other hand, is not a man of doubt and double-mindedness, but of faith. He weighs the options, true, but he comes to a very different conclusion, and that right quickly. And this is because unlike Hamlet he is fully confidant of knowing what awaits him beyond the veil of death. He has absolutely no fear of what dreams might come. He does not regard death as an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns, but a land to which one indeed has gone to prepare a place for him, a land in which there are in fact many dwelling-places prepared, and from which that same one has returned, when the bonds of death were not able to keep him down. You know who that is, of course: Jesus Christ, the one in whom Paul places all of his faith. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is at the heart of Paul’s faith, Paul’s gospel, and it informs everything about his life and his ministry. It is his trust, his faith, his knowledge that he is assured of passage into the new life with Christ. In fact, he longs for it — not as Hamlet did as a kind of oblivion and end to his troubles — but as a positive desire to be with Christ. But Paul also knows that he still has work to do among the faithful — and though it is hard work and will be a sea of troubles for him, though it will mean suffering and pain, he commits to stay with it. His conscience is at work, but not to make him a coward, but to make him a hero — one willing to suffer for and with others rather than to take the easy way out. He chooses this course, convinced that remaining in the flesh — that is to say, remaining alive — is for the benefit of the struggling Christians to whom he writes. Even though he longs to be with Christ, he chooses to remain in service to and with his spiritual children.

+ + +

In the Buddhist tradition there is a figure known as the Bodhisattva. This is a person who has gained the Buddhist equivalent of sainthood — they have risen to the level of spiritual consciousness where they no longer need to suffer “the slings and arrows” of life in an endless cycle of reincarnation, but have broken through to the pure land of nirvana, the land of bliss — and yet, instead of going off to that endless bliss, the Bodhisattva chooses to remain, to stay in the flesh to help guide and teach others in their spiritual journey.

This is the kind of choice that Saint Paul makes — no quite the same, but a similar choice: not to depart and be with Christ in bliss, but to stay in the struggle, a struggle he voluntarily shares with the Philippians, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.

Paul chooses to be rather than not to be: to be in the flesh as long as the flesh is useful to himself and to others, and only to go Christ in glory when the time is right — when God has made full use of him and the cup of suffering endured in faith has been drunk down, and the vessel is empty and he has finished his course in faith. May we also serve so faithfully, working together as long as we have life, till by the grace of God this mortal life is ended and what is mortal is laid down to rest to wait for the day of resurrection, through Christ and in Christ, our redeemer and advocate, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

---

Hard To Forgive

There is no debt ceiling on forgiveness. A sermon for 9/11/11, Proper 19a.

SJF • Proper 19a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God. So then, each of us will be accountable to God.

It is timely that the Scripture readings appointed for this day should deal with judgment and forgiveness. As you are no doubt keenly aware, this Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America, the day that will for ever live in infamy by its numeric nickname Nine-Eleven.

It is abundantly clear that much was done on that terrible day that cries out for forgiveness. America was viciously attacked; thousands of innocent people met death in its most terrifying and capricious form, doomed to die by horrible means, suddenly and unprepared. Many were vaporized in an instant, unaware what was happening to them. Others were forced to make that agonized and desperate choice between being burned alive or hurtling to their deaths on the street below. Many more were crushed under the weight of those buildings, suffocated and snuffed out in darkness. None of us who witnessed that horrible day will ever forget it, and the TV news shows will not let us forget even if we wanted to, as they run those video clips again and again, and endlessly analyze.

What makes forgiveness all the harder in this case is that those who carried out these crimes knew what they were doing. They wanted their acts to be as terrorizing as indeed they were — that’s why they are called terrorists: they did not mean only to bring destruction, but to instill fear, horror, and anguish; and this not only in those they directly harmed, but in our society and nation as a whole.

How can we forgive such wrong? How can we forgive such terrible crimes? We know how hard it is to forgive someone even when they say they are sorry — how much harder to forgive those who do not ask for forgiveness, who think that what they did was right and justified, and even think they were doing a religious duty!

If somebody steps on my foot in the subway, and then apologizes, it’s fairly easy for me to forgive, although I may still feel the pain in my foot. If someone steps on my foot by accident and then looks at me like it was my fault, I will not be in such a forgiving mood. But if someone looks me in the eye, and then deliberately stomps on my foot, with a “so there” thrown in — well, what am I to do?

My natural impulse is to feel that only the repentant deserve forgiveness; that forgiveness is something that must be earned and asked for. It is only logical, this calculus of tit-for-tat: only those who acknowledge their faults deserve to be forgiven. This seems fair and square.

Unfortunately, God does not make things so easy for me. God does not say to me, Forgive those who say they are sorry. God does not say to me, Forgive others in proportion to their repentance for the harm they have done to you. God does not give me the option of measuring how much I forgive against how much someone else repents — or doesn’t. I am not told to balance my forgiveness against another’s apology; instead I am told to balance how much I forgive against how much I have been and expect to be forgiven. The wicked slave in Jesus’ parable is punished in the end not for his failure to pay his master what he owed, but for not forgiving the debt that was owed to him.

+ + +

This is a hard teaching, no doubt about it. How much easier to keep it to myself; to treat forgiveness as if it were simply earthly coin of the realm: to balance the books of grace as if grace were a commodity that I could control, so much forgiveness doled out for so much apology; no forgiveness given unless asked for, and certainly not given to those who do not ask for it or to my mind deserve it.

What does God think? That forgiveness should be free? Do I want grace to abound when I am the wounded party and no one says they’re sorry? Does that make sense to you? Don’t we want forgiveness to be costly, to be won from us, purchased from us, earned from us by those who have done us wrong? Like the worst of the medieval bishops who sold indulgences and offered the church’s absolution in exchange for gold, dare we fall into the corrupted tit-for-tat that puts a price on grace?

+ + +

And of course, there was a price for grace — it’s just that we did not pay it. For all the while we quibble and bargain, bartering forgiveness as if it were ours to dole out, a quiet figure hangs before us on a cross. He is the one who committed no wrong, earned no just punishment. He is the one who suffered so much at the hands of those who meant to do him ill, and even thought it was a religious duty to do so, who they were right and weren’t in the least bit sorry for what they did. As that innocent man was dying, after having been unjustly tried and tortured, as he hung up there to die, they did not look with sorrow or pity upon the one whom they hated. They cursed and mocked him as he died, spitting in his direction, putting out their tongues and treating him as the greatest fool who had ever born. All the weight of the world’s wrong gathered there and pressed down upon the crucified Christ: all of the hatred, all of the sin and ignorance and pride that had been stored up or would yet come to be. The sin of the whole world pressed down upon that dying man as he hung upon the hard wood of the cross.

And what did he do? He begged God to forgive them. He stretched out his arms of love. He did not cry out to his Father, “See what they do, O Lord my God. Punish them as they deserve!” No, he cried out, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”

Christ is our example and our Lord. He to whom the greatest wrong was ever done, forgave in full, forgave it all. No wrong, however bad, however painful, done to us can match what was done to Christ, yet he called out to God to forgive in full, without being asked by those who most needed the forgiveness, without the repentance of those who sinned against him.

And he challenges us to do the same: to find the strength to forgive those who sin against us, recalling how, in him, our debts have been forgiven. In order to do so, we will need to fight against our natural human impulse for revenge. We will need to quell our anger and our wrath, to recall that God has said, “Vengeance is mine,” and to echo the words of Joseph in the Old Testament passage this morning, and say, “Are we in the place of God?”

After we have quieted our anger, we will also need to go further, to quiet our need to hear the apologies of those who have done us wrong, and what is worse, who continue to wish to do us wrong. This will not be easy. It is not easy to forgive when you have been badly wronged, seriously injured, terribly assaulted. Do you think Jesus found it easy — dying there on the cross? It won’t be any easier for us to forgive. It is not easy to forgive when you know that the hand stretched out to forgive may receive another bite worse than the first. It is not easy to forgive — but it is the only way to be forgiven. The wise man spoke truly, “We will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”

God challenges us to stretch our little fabric of forgiveness until it covers a multitude of sins. Not seven times, but seventy-seven — which is to say, there is no debt ceiling on forgiveness. God reminds us that he is judge, he is the one before whom every knee will bow, every tongue confess, the one to whom we will all be required to render our account: the account of how much forgiveness we have freely given away.

Let us pray. Eternal Father, help us to find the strength to forgive those who have injured us, to pardon those who have assaulted and wounded us, that when we come to the last day to stand as we must before your judgment seat, we may find the wells of your compassion and forgiveness overflowing for us, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

---

Not Without Warning

The individual Christian may be a plaintiff or witness, but never a judge. — a sermon for Proper 18a

SJF • Proper 18a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.

Today’s reading from the book of the prophet Ezekiel was a favorite of Saint Gregory the Great, for two reasons. First of all, the name Gregory means watchman or sentinel; secondly Gregory was the pope — although the sixth century was a time when the powers of the pope were far less far-reaching than later popes would claim. But Gregory was particularly sensitive to his role and responsibility of caregiver and watchman over the church, for he was, first and last, a pastor. Such a wise pastor was he that the book he wrote on the subject of pastoral care was so highly regarded that for centuries after when bishops were consecrated they were given a copy of Gregory’s guidebook for pastors instead of a Bible. It is not for nothing that he gained the epithet, “Gregory the Great.”

+ + +

One of the major aspects of the watchman’s work — great or small — is the task of giving a warning. In Ezekiel’s case he is given the responsibility, when he hears a word from God’s mouth, to pass it along to the people as a warning, so that they may turn from their wickedness. Note that it is not Ezekiel’s own judgment that is at issue — he is given no authority to judge others. He has not authority to condemn or even to warn them if they are merely doing something that displeases him. He is only to pass along the warning he receives from the mouth of God himself; he is not a judge but a messenger.

And the purpose of the message is not condemnation but rescue: it is a warning to save those whom God perceives doing wrong, to be headed down the wrong path. For even God does not seek to punish the wicked but rather that they would turn from their evil ways, turning back from the path of crime and folly.

+ + +

Of course this fits in well with the teaching of Jesus, who commands us not to judge others. As you know he was particularly critical of the Pharisees and other busybodies who spent their time trying to take specks out of other people’s eyes when their own eyes were blinded by a beam or a log. Jesus gives us no right to judge another.

This does not mean, however, that people have to put up with bad behavior when it is directed towards themselves. As Jesus says, “If another member of the church sins against you...” you have every right to go to that person and make a complaint to them. Only if and when they refuse to hear what you say are you then authorized to take other members of the church with you to confirm the evidence of a crime committed against you. Then and only then, with continued refusal to listen, is the matter to be made public to the church at large. And it is the church that is finally given the authority to determine if the person is in the wrong. In short, the individual Christian may be a plaintiff or a witness, but never, on his or her own, a judge. Only the gathered assembly of the church has the right to pronounce the verdict of judgment — and what they decide on earth is also decided in heaven. In these matters the voice of the church is understood as speaking the verdict of God.

+ + +

This is why it is so important to understand that the authority of the church is not personal but corporate. Pope Gregory understood this — though some of his successors in the papacy began to accumulate powers as if they belonged personally to the pope rather than to the pope as the senior watchman among many sentinels.

The individualistic model, in which one persons sets him or herself up as the judge over others, inevitably leads to trouble — even when the individual is wise and prudent. We have all seen what happens, especially in recent months, in the political arena when a leader ceases to listen to his people, and becomes a dictator over them rather than a good leader concerned for their care and their well-being.

This form of tyranny and judgment is particularly problematical when it happens in the church. And I say that not only because it goes against the teaching of Jesus, but because it inevitably leads to quarreling. Notice how seriously Saint Paul considered the gravity of quarreling — just how bad he considered it: listing quarreling along with jealousy, debauchery, licentiousness, reveling and drunkenness as utterly inappropriate behavior for the church.

And the solution he offers is the opposite of judgment, which is love: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Just as Jesus himself summarized all of the other commandments under the law of love of God and neighbor, Paul repeats this message in his Letter to the Romans, summing up the whole law of Moses in that one word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is love, not judgment, that brings peace and harmony.

That is a solemn warning from the mouth of God himself in Christ Jesus our Lord: love and do not judge. If another member of the church does you personal harm, and wrongs you in some way, you have every right — perhaps even a responsibility — privately to let that person know they have done something to harm you. But gently, charitably, and in a spirit of forgiveness — not a spirit of judgment and restitution; for remember that Jesus also said that we are to forgive those who sin against us not on the basis of their repentance but in the knowledge that we will only be forgiven as we have forgiven them. This, ultimately, is the spirit of love, which, as Paul told the Corinthians, “bears all things.”

If the harm done to you is grave, seek out the one who has injured you and in all charity seek to fulfill the law of love in gaining that one back. If need be — if the person denies the injury or refuses to acknowledge the harm they have done to you — then and only then bring it to other witnesses or finally even to the church: but not in a spirit of quarreling or jealousy — for these are just as bad as all of the other sins that disrupt the good order of the church.

+ + +

We pass through life not without warning — warnings from God speaking in our own hearts, warnings from sisters and brothers alerting us when we have done them harm, and warnings from the church that calls us back to the fulfillment of the law of love that Christ himself ordained for us.

Beloved, let us love one another as Christ loved us and gave himself an offering and sacrifice of God, and in whose name we pray.

---

Formed-Conformed-Transformed

We are not called to vest ourselves in the camouflage of this world — a sermon for Proper 16a

SJF • Proper 16a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Who goes there? That is the challenge put by the sentry to anyone who comes to the border-crossing or gate. The sentry of course wants primarily to know if the one approaching is friend or foe, and will then react accordingly. Any of you who travel, especially internationally, know the importance of having a passport at the ready in order to show your identity, which in this case boils down to your birthplace, citizenship and reason for travel.

Who you are, it seems, depends a good bit on who is asking the question, and what it is about you that they are interested in, rather than in who and what you really are deep down at the depths of your being.

In many cultures the primary factor that identifies a person is ancestry. The first question you might be asked is, “What is your name?” Or “Who are your people?” The prophet Isaiah comes from such a tradition; that Jewish culture in which ancestry is extremely important — in case you ever wondered why the Old Testament has all those lists of who begat whom! Isaiah challenged his hearers to recall that ancestry — to remember that they are descendants of Abraham the righteous and Sarah the faithful. He wants them to recall that they are God’s chosen people, God’s nation, by virtue of their inheritance and family connection: as with grace itself, it is not something they have done, but solely due to God’s ancient choice of Abraham a thousand years and more before their time, that identifies them as who they are.

In many cultures it is your job or occupation that determines who or what you are in that society. In medieval Japan, many people didn’t even have personal names, but were simply known by the name of their occupation. And let's be fair: we don’t have to go quite so far as medieval Asia to find that in our own heritage — especially if your name is Sawyer or Smith, or Cook or Cooper, or Brewer or Baker — your name may well tell you something about one of your ancestors or even your family business in former times!

More importantly, people can form an opinion of you or make a judgment about you on the basis of the most casual and superficial things about you. They can judge you by how you dress — and be impressed if you are well-dressed or write you off if you are too casual, with no real account taken of the person under the fabric. “Clothes make the man” as the old saying goes, and it probably goes double for women. This is a serious matter, because how you appear in the eyes of others will be a major determining factor in what you are able to do in life — and to tie two of these identity factors together: how you dress for a job interview may be more important than what you put on your resumé or what work-skills you possess! How you dress may determine or limit what you end up doing for a living.

+ + +

The fact is, however, that what your passport says or who your ancestors were or what you do for a living or how you dress do not really say who you are deep down. But if the powers that be, whether the border guards, or the customs officials, or the job interviewers, give more weight to these external signs and symbols — which to be fair to them is all they have to go on — you may never get the opportunity to reveal more of your true self. You will have been formed by these aspects of your past or your outfit, identified not as who you are but as who you appear to be by those to whom you appear.

+ + +

In today’s gospel Jesus is entangled in much this same situation. Rather than proclaiming his own identity he asks the disciples what the word on the street is about him — who do people say that he is? The disciples report the usual list of prophets old and new — the word is out and about that Jesus is somehow either the reincarnation of, or is acting in the spirit of, one of the prophets of old, or even of John the Baptist. John, as we know from the Gospels, is only six months older than Jesus. He knew the value of how to dress the part — dressed in the costume of Elijah the prophet. But he had already fallen victim to Herod the Tetrarch and his dancing daughter-in-law. Yet even Herod himself saw something of John in Jesus.

But Jesus knows that he is none of these things — although he is acting in the prophetic spirit that John revived, Jesus is much, much more than a mere prophet — and he will not be formed by that opinion or conformed by the expectations of the crowd. He will not become what they want him to be. He will be who he is, which is, as the old Greek Fathers said, “He Who Is.” And so he presents the disciples with a second question, a more personal question for their opinion, the opinion of those who know him best — asking, But who do you say that I am? — to see if they are more perceptive than those crowds. And Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God.

Jesus accepts Peter’s proclamation as a divinely inspired revelation — and there is a sense of relief in his words: finally, it seems, someone has understood who he is, in all of his transforming, transfiguring power. The feast of the Transfiguration was on the calendar just a few weeks ago on the first Saturday in August, but to give due credit to Peter and his inspiration, that miraculous revelation of Christ in glory on the mountaintop comes later in Matthew’s gospel — shortly after the incident portrayed today — coming as if to confirm Peter’s perceptive proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah. That follow-up revelation is a kind of certification, a kind of setting the seal of the power of God present and active in the person of Jesus Christ, God in man made manifest: Not just someone dressed for the part of a prophet, but deep down through and through, true God and true Man, He Who Is.

+ + +

As Christians we are called to be transformed from our merely ancestral identities, our biological and familial heritage; we are called to transcend society’s expectations and limitations; we are challenged to resist the temptation to dress ourselves in the camouflage of this world, and instead to be clothed from above with the likeness of Christ and the armor of God — not conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

This is how we will find our true identity. And there is in the long run a job description that goes with it. If we are to be known by the occupations of our lives — let them be the occupations that Paul describes as the signs of God’s presence and our true identity as God’s children: in prophecy in proportion to our faith, in ministry and teaching and exhortation, in generosity and leadership and diligence and compassion and cheerfulness. When the challenge comes, “Who goes there?” this is the kind of answer a Christian should be prepared to give. I don’t know about you, but if people are going to judge me on the basis of what I do, that’s how I would like to be known! Cheerful, truthful, generous, diligent, and compassionate. Sounds good to me. How about you?+

---

No Boundary to Grace

We do not come to the banquet because of our righteousness but because of God's invitation. — A sermon for Proper 15a

SJF • Proper 15a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.

All of our Scripture readings today point in the direction of healing the division that has existed since the days when God first created a covenant with Abraham and designated him as the ancestor of a special, holy, and chosen people. This was a people separated from all the other nations of the earth. Brother Millard spoke last week of the end-of-Sabbath Havdalah ceremony by which Jews celebrate their “chosenness” and being set apart by God’s covenant with them, reflected in the separation of the Sabbath from the other six regular days of the week. The covenant of separation was cherished by the Jewish people down through the centuries as a sign of their unique status in God’s eyes.

That covenant was also renewed many times down through the years. Moses recommitted the people to obey the Lord their God at Mount Sinai. Joshua recommitted them, challenging them to obey the Lord as he and his household swore to do, when they crossed the Jordan and gathered at Shechem. Ezra and Nehemiah reminded the people of these commandments after their exile in Babylon, and the Maccabees did the same after their liberation from the Greek empire. Time and again that message was hammered home: you are God’s special, chosen people, unique in all the world because of your relationship with the God who made heaven and earth. As for the rest of the world, as the prophet Micah said, each of the nations walks in the name of its own god, but we walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.

That message, as it came to be understood, was that salvation itself was only for the children of Israel — they alone were chosen and precious not only for this world but for the next as well. Among the Rabbis it became a topic of some interest as to whether a non-Jew could even have any share at all in the life of the world to come — that is, was it possible for anyone who was not among the Jewish people to be saved.

In spite of the promises of the prophets, such as Isaiah, that God had a special place reserved for the Gentiles who sought him out and dedicated themselves to righteousness in his name — in spite of these promises, the question of whether Gentiles were worth God’s notice, or God’s salvation, was still a hot topic by the time of Christ.

Jesus appears, by one reading of the incident recorded in this morning’s gospel, to have accepted that stricter view that Gentiles and foreigners (which is all the same thing to most Jewish people of that time), are not God’s concern — God’s interest is in making sure that the children of Israel are looked after, after the mess they’ve gotten themselves into, like lost sheep who have wandered off but who are still valuable to the shepherd. But then Jesus appears to be moved by the Canaanite woman’s persistence, and her chutzpah in talking back to him when Jesus indirectly compares her tormented daughter to a dog. She is bold enough to remind Jesus, who has himself brought up the analogy of food and the dinner table, that even the dogs are remembered and fed — along with the children — from the master’s table, even if it is only with crumbs.

Now, I’ve often wondered if Jesus really was being as cold-blooded as he appears to be to this poor woman with a sick child, or if he isn’t — in keeping with reading this passage as a test of his disciples — seeing whether they would abide by the prevailing view that foreigners are trash and not worth their trouble, or if they would show the kind of gracious openness Jesus himself shows on other occasions. You note that the disciples come first to urge him to send her away...

But that is a topic for another sermon. Because whatever the reason, whether Jesus was moved by this woman or testing the disciples, in the end he broke through that boundary to grace and allowed it to flow freely to a Gentile. And of course, by the end of Matthew’s Gospel it is abundantly clear that Jesus intends salvation for the whole world, as he sends the disciples out to baptize all nations — and we might even translate that as all “ethnics” — which is to say all Gentiles — into the faith of the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

+ + +

In today’s epistle, Saint Paul addresses the question of how this might work in the manner of a good Rabbi — which he often reminded those to whom he wrote he was, himself a student at the feet of Gamaliel, who had himself been a student of the great Rabbi Hillel. Hillel had been an advocate of the generous view that Gentiles could be saved, and Paul no doubt believed that in Jesus Christ this doctrine of his spiritual grandfather had come true.

Much of Paul’s letter to the Romans is an effort to explain just how this might work. In the section we heard today the image is almost one of a seating at a banquet. Those who had formerly been seated — God’s chosen ones — have lost their seats because of their disobedience, their misbehavior, and it is only that misbehavior that has opened up the possibility for the Gentiles to take their place for a time. And that “for a time” is important because Paul promises the eventual ushering back in of all of God’s people all whom God foreknew and chose as his own — Jew or Gentile — for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

+ + +

In God’s good time, there is plenty of room for Gentile and Jew alike on the mountain that Isaiah envisages. In God’s good time there is no boundary to grace, no limit to the abundance of God’s generosity and God’s patience with Jew and Gentile alike. The ultimate message that Paul is transmitting in his Letter to the Romans is that salvation is the work of God: just as creation is the work of God, so too is the new creation in Christ; it is God’s work.

It is God’s party, and God invites whoever God wishes. It is not for self-righteous party crashers to push themselves forward on the basis of their own righteousness, Nor, even worse, is it right for some at the party to seek to keep those others they judge unworthy out, but for all to trust in the saving of mercy of God as the only basis for admission to the banquet. We are not invited to the banquet on the basis of our righteousness, but his righteousness, and his generosity.

There is plenty of room at the table, and crumbs aplenty under it — but believe me, no child of God invited to that table will be made to eat those crumbs, but will be given the choice and richest portions of the feast. God’s grace is God’s, after all, and our God is a God of abundant blessing and not of parsimonious stinginess, a God not of crumbs and crusts but of marvelous abundance of multiplied loaves and bread showered from heaven. To God be the glory, henceforth and forever more.

---

Weeding Lesson

SJF • Proper 11a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, where did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

A couple of weeks ago I was watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel about what has become the largest cash crop in the state of California. You might be surprised to hear that in a state famous for its citrus fruit, its grapes and its lettuce, that the biggest cash crop is now something that was once considered a weed. That’s right, it’s ganja, also known as marijuana, or perhaps less well known simply by the name it was called for ages. Long before people decided to start smoking it they called it hemp.

Northern California had always been a major source for this weed, even when it was illegal. But with the moderate legalization for medical use, growing marijuana is now a major source of legal income in many small towns dotting the rural countryside of Northwestern California.

The TV documentary charted the history of America’s ignorance of, neglect of, use of, hostility towards, and now moderate adoption of this curious plant. For a long time it was simply regarded literally as a weed. It could be found growing throughout the country in sunny spots on vacant lots and by the roadsides. It had fallen out of its long established use for making rope and canvas — and I learned that the word canvas derives from the Latin name for the plant: cannabis! Many a seagoing vessel down through the years has set sail under the banner of Mad Mary Jane without knowing it!

Some time after people started using it as a drug in the US, however, the government decided to approach the issue much like the servants in the parable today — they decided it was time to uproot the plants and wipe out its use as a recreational drug. And huge amounts of money and resources have gone into the effort to eradicate this dreaded weed.

Then, of course, came the discovery that thus weed actually has— in addition to its practical use as a source of hemp-fiber for rope, paper, and cloth — a legitimate medicinal use in helping people undergoing chemotherapy to find some relief from the severe nausea associated with it, and to help restore their appetite for food. Medical marijuana is now legal (with some restrictions) in sixteen states (though not our own!) and in the District of Columbia.

+ + +

Now, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this sermon isn’t really about marijuana! What it is about is the limitation on human knowledge, and the extent of human impatience. Marijuana, for all its usefulness as a source of fiber and in medicine, is still a dangerous drug — and like all drugs it can impair ones judgment and motor skills, and increase the appetite for food in people who need absolutely no encouragement! While it is clearly not the work of the devil, this weed isn’t wheat!

But the efforts of some completely to eradicate it are surely as misguided as the efforts of the servants in our parable — not that the modern zealots would have damaged any wheat in uprooting the weed, but they would have deprived those who actually benefit from the medicinal properties of the plant — that small comfort at a relatively low cost. I know that some of you here have suffered the rigors of chemotherapy, and I know that anything that can make that less burdensome is surely welcome.

But the message of the gospel today is, as so often with Jesus, Don’t be hasty to judge and take into your hands decisions best left to God. Don’t think you know everything. Recall that the stone the builders rejected is the one that became the cornerstone of the building. Even if what you do know is true — for surely the weeds were weeds, and the servants of the master knew that — still don’t be so hasty about putting your knowledge into action; there may be unintended consequences and collateral damage even to the most well-informed courses of action.

You see, the master, in addition to knowing weeds also knows his servants — the master knows that if they get themselves worked up in their excitement at getting rid of all those nasty weeds, they will inevitably damage the healthy wheat as well. The master has other workers better trained at this task — the reapers who will come at harvest time to do the work not only of harvest but of separation — to gather up all of the weeds first and bind them and cast them into the oven; but then to gather up the good grain and bring it safely into the barn.

And of course, just as this sermon is not about marijuana, so too Jesus assured his disciples that the parable was not about weeds and wheat: it is about the end times and the final judgment upon this world, when God will send his angels out to separate the children of the kingdom from the children of the evil one. This is no ordinary agriculture, but the ultimate fate of evildoing and righteousness, of evildoers and the righteous.

And lest we become too self-satisfied and too easily imagine ourselves, naturally, as among the righteous — as I reminded us last week, righteousness is not our natural capacity, but is itself a gift from God who adopts us as his own. If we are among the righteous, as I hope and pray — and trust — we are, it is not our own doing. We have no health in ourselves to help ourselves, no native righteousness, but only that which comes from God who is the source of all goodness and all righteousness. We are not God’s natural children — but children by adoption. And it is only by virtue of that adoption that we are able to cry out “Abba! Father!"

It is not that some of us are weeds and some of us are wheat, but that whatever it is that we are is determined by the one who makes use of us to his ends, and for his purposes. Just as even the weed of the vacant lot can be used for rope or cloth or even medicine— no human being is incapable of being adopted by God to serve God’s purposes and to be filled with God’s righteousness.

So let us not be eager to harvest or to judge, my brothers and sisters: let us leave that to God, and in the meantime spread the word that the adoption agency is open and that all are welcome to apply!+

---

What Comes (Un)naturally

And so we do not trust in what is merely natural to make us good, but in the supernatural goodness of God to make us his.

Sermon for Proper 10a

SJF • Proper 10a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

Some of the philosophers of the romantic era and in the 17th to 19th century came up with the idea that people living in simplicity in the time before civilization were somehow more innocent, more “natural” and hence unspoiled. The notion is sometimes referred to as that of the “noble savage.” The concept became attached to Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but it isn’t exactly his idea. Still, he shared the tendency somehow to idealize human beings in their uncivilized condition. He saw civilization itself as a kind of introduction of morality and consequent decline.

The idea as Rousseau espoused it is that people in their primitive state were morally neutral, and that it was only with later civilization that evil entered the world as society began to corrupt the natural innocence of primitive existence. As Rousseau put it, the problems began “when the first man staked out a bit of land and said, ‘This is mine,’ and convinced others foolishly to agree.”

The Christian tradition is said by some to see things rather differently, but a closer reading may reveal that it is not quite so different. People sometimes look to the story of Adam and Eve and think of the innocent perfection of life that they enjoyed in paradise. But surely the point of the story is precisely that they were not innocent. They sinned — disobeying what at that point was just about the only thing God had commanded them — while they were in paradise. They may have been created innocent, but they were also created capable of committing sin, and it took them almost no time to do so.

+ + +

Theologians have wrestled with the question of human nature for thousands of years — whether people are good by nature or bad by nature, or started good and became bad, or whatever.

It seems to me that Saint Paul had it right, and made the most sense both out of that ancient story of the Garden and the Fall, and the practical reality of his own human experience. Human flesh — with its cravings, devices and desires — is weak. Human beings also have a natural tendency towards self-preservation, like most living things. And human beings develop very quickly the sense of property: at least when it comes to their own property. Much as Rousseau observed, children don’t take long to get to the point at which they have learned the first person possessive: Mine! It’s just that he saw this as part of a decline rather than natural, in contrast to another earlier philosopher, John Locke, who took the view that property was a natural right. Whether a right or a tendency, though, as a child, I had to be taught that not everything was mine — I had to learn how to share with other children.

For Saint Paul, this natural tendency is a part of the “mind set on the flesh.” It derives from our creaturely existence — our neediness. We need things; we need air to breathe, we need to eat. All of that is natural, natural to us. And that neediness has to be governed and ordered and civilized by some kind of regulation. Thus far Paul would be in agreement with Rousseau and the English philosopher Hobbes, with the exception that Rousseau was a bit more optimistic about the short-lived innocence of primitive humanity.

+ + +

But Saint Paul stands apart from all of these secular philosophers, in that, while they saw from rather different angles that law was society’s answer to the problem of human weakness, Paul saw that law was an insufficient solution to the problem. It is like a drug that comforts but does not heal. He saw law as an insufficient means of bringing peace to the warring hearts of fallible human beings. Even the law given by God could not bring compliance: in fact, God’s law only laid down the penalty: “Of the tree in the midst of the garden you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall die.” That was the law that God gave to Adam and Eve, and it was the law they broke, before the proverbial ink was dry.

So what is the answer? What does Saint Paul offer us as an answer? Paul looks to God again — for something different this time; not for the law, but something different — after all, God is the source of all good — the fountain of all goodness, as we sang in our hymns today: it is from him that everything comes, the source of all good — but Paul did not look to God for the same old kind of law that God had given in the past, the law that was weakened by the flesh and so could not bring true righteousness.

Instead God sent his Son, but not, as the evangelist John would say, to condemn the world. God sent his Son precisely to relieve the world of that endless cycle of law-giving and law-breaking that was getting us nowhere, as we spun our wheels in the dry soil or the mud of our own failings.

+ + +

For Paul had observed something in that old, old story: you may recognize it too — let me ask you, when was it that Adam and Eve sinned? While God was away from them, while they were on their own. (Of course God was not really “away” but that is how the story goes — and we had best pay attention to the details of that story.) And Eve was off on her own — away from Adam — when the Serpent whispered sweet nothings in her ear and tempted her to violate the only law on the books at that time. And her weak flesh — the desire to live forever and become like God (even though, as the text shows, she and Adam already were like God, being made in God’s image) — as I say, her weak flesh gave in, and then she persuaded Adam’s equally weak flesh to join her: all of this while God was “away.”

So the answer to all of this, Paul says, is to be always “with” God — such that God is never “away.” And this is made possible both through the fact that Jesus Christ came “in the flesh” — that is to say, in and through and by means of the very human flesh that was the problem in the first place. And further to know that God is always with us, always present to us through the Spirit. If the Spirit of Christ dwells in you, God is with you, and even though the flesh might still seek to drag you down to death because of sin, the Spirit — God’s presence — is life because of the righteousness of Christ.

This is the hopeful message that Saint Paul brings: Christ came in the flesh and remains with us in the Spirit, and his spirit is at work in us and there it can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: even though we have no power in ourselves to become righteous, his spirit working in us is life because of his righteousness.

And it is a life that contains within it the promise of new life, the resurrection life. The Son of God, the Word of God, is at work within the soil of our human flesh. Remember how the story tells, what God made us from, at the beginning. Our soil, our flesh, comes from the earth. It is like the seed of the word received and nurtured, which grows in the soil to bear fruit for righteousness, “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” We are not good by nature, but by grace: our soil cannot bear fruit on its own, unless the seed of God be planted in it.

And so we do not trust in what is merely natural to make us good, but in the supernatural goodness of God to make us his. That is the message of salvation and grace through Jesus Christ our Lord.+

---

No Pleasing Some People

The curse of the double-minded judge, and the freedom of the children of God.

SJF • Proper 9a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

Some while ago I spoke about the fact that different people will find the same foods either enjoyable or awful. The same dish may be treated as a delicacy by some, and a culinary disaster by others — evoking delight or grimaces depending on the taste-buds of the diner.

It also appears to be true that some people are by nature “fault-finders” who will not be pleased whatever the dish set before them. Their noses are permanently upturned, and their manners ungrateful. Unlike the fussy Goldilocks — who at least found a bowl of porridge, and a chair, and a bed to her liking, and was at least satisfied a third of the time — there are folks who are just so picky that nothing completely pleases them. There is always something wrong for those who are impossible to please.

+ + +

Jesus confronted such people in the passage we heard from Matthew’s gospel. They’ve been offered two very different “dishes” — to continue my dining analogy. John the Baptist was what is called an ascetic: one who lived an austere life of fasting and privation. He lived in the desert wilderness, dressed in a camel’s hair mantle bound with a leather belt, and ate nothing but locusts and honey. And whether the “locusts” in question are the insects or the beans of the locust tree, it is a diet few, then or now, would be willing to duplicate. And what did these unpleasable people think of him? They thought he was crazy!
Then along comes Jesus, who, after his own relatively short but intense time of asceticism, during that forty days he spent in the wilderness fasting, returns to civilization and accepts the dinner invitations of well-to-do bourgeois tax-collectors, and passes his time in the company of women who, as the old euphemism has it, “are no better than they should be.” And what do these unpleasable people think of him? A glutton and a drunkard and a friend of sinners!

There is just no pleasing some people. If you don’t eat they condemn you as an overly scrupulous killjoy, and if you do eat they condemn you as a self-indulgent pleasure-seeking hedonist. And this condemnation — this refined ability not to be pleased with what is offered, this judgmental snobbery that wrinkles its nose towards whatever is presented to it — is held up as a kind of sophisticated wisdom.

+ + +

Jesus contrasts this snobbishness, this thing that passes for intelligence and wisdom, with the eager acceptance that infants will show for something that pleases them. How many times have I seen a child’s face light up at the first taste of a droplet of the sacred wine from the tip of my pinky finger on the day of that child’s baptism! Yet a connoisseur of fine wines would likely turn up his nose at the far from vintage port that we use as our communion wine — bought by the case from a liquor store in Yonkers with the distinctly déclassé name of Liquorfellers. Truly a certain kind of innocent ignorance is bliss!

But at a deeper level, this all points to the profound difference between judgment and enjoyment. One of the reasons that Jesus speaks so strongly and so often against judgment is that it actually is the biggest kill-joy of them all. It is very hard for a critic to enjoy whatever he or she is experiencing. A critic or a snob is always double-minded — of a double mind — because rather than simply enjoying what they are experiencing, a part of their mind is always standing back, comparing it, criticizing it, judging it. Off to the one side from the one enjoying and the thing enjoyed, is this analytical observer, this killjoy, the critic and the judge who tells you that you can’t really enjoy such a common or low-class thing.

+ + +

I don’t know how many of you may be familiar with “Keeping Up Appearances,” the television program featuring Hyacinth Bucket, who imagines her name ought to be pronounced Bouquet. She is a woman who has narrowed her own life, and that of her poor husband Richard, to the point where they can hardly enjoy anything any more. She is deeply embarrassed by all of her family members — except her sister Violet who married a well-off bookie, or as she says, a “turf accountant,” and who lives in a home with a Jacuzzi and a Mercedes and room for a pony. Hyacinth envies that one sister but she dreads encounters with the other two. She lives in terror that her only friend and neighbor will damage her hand-painted Royal Doulton tea-cups when she comes by for the obligatory visit. She spends so much of her life judging everything as not up to her standards, and in keeping up appearances, that she has little or no share in the raucous pleasures of her sisters Daisy and Rose. I’m sure that had she been around to hear the prophet Zechariah’s call to daughter Zion, to rejoice greatly at the coming of her king in humility riding on a donkey rather than in a chariot, she would have cringed said, “Really, Richard, a donkey!?”
This would be a tragedy if it were not for the fact that every once and a while Hyacinth is exposed — even to herself — for who she really is, and reluctantly lets her hair down and discovers she can in fact have a good time.

+ + +

Closer to our biblical texts, Saint Paul struggled inwardly with that spirit of judgment that kept him from living into the freedom of God’s love, the simple enjoyment of God’s forgiveness and grace. What he called “the law of sin” was at work in him at the very deepest level — that slavery to the law that is the fate of all who devote themselves to judgment rather than accepting the blessed liberty of the children of God. And Paul realized that the only way out of that double-mindedness was single-mindedly to throw himself, as one weary of carrying the heavy burden of the “body of death,” into the arms of Jesus, the source of rescue and rest, redemption and release.

Jesus offers himself, to all who are weary of the need to be in charge, to be displeased at others or themselves, and to accept him as the end of all of their burdens. We are free, like those in the crowds who simply would not be pleased, secure in their own sense of judgment and critique, to reject the offer of rescue and relief. But how much better to accept the offer of peace and joy as a child who reaches out for the sweet reward that is offered by a loving Father.

We have such a Father, made known to us in the Son of God himself, who with that Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.+

---

Prophet’s Reward

audio link

SJF • Proper 8a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.+

I cannot hear that short reading from the book of the prophet Jeremiah without picturing him with a wry smile. Jeremiah is, of all of the Old Testament prophets, the prime example of doom and gloom. He even has a separate book of the Old Testament dedicated to his Lamentations — the lamentations he delivered when his prophecies of doom and gloom came true.

In this brief passage, Jeremiah notes that the prophets who came before him — as far back as ancient times (which means ancient to him, which means really ancient to us — prophesied war, famine, and pestilence — much as he does himself. But, he seems to be saying, if a prophet predicts peace, and peace comes, then you’ve really got a prophet sent by the Lord.

He appears to be acknowledging, perhaps as I say with a slightly cynical smile, that given the state of the world it is fairly easy to prophesy war, famine, and pestilence; as these are more or less the normal state of affairs somewhere in the world at any given time — or if not, surely soon to happen somewhere or other.

A social scientist and historian once noted that in the entire documented history of the world there has only been a period of a few dozen years when there hasn’t been a war going on somewhere on our planet. Peace and war seem to be like an elusive balloon — squeeze it in here and it will pop out there. So prophesying war is almost a sure thing — there’s bound to be one somewhere sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. You can hardly go wrong!

But for a prophet to promise the coming of peace — that’s a much riskier enterprise, as it so very rarely happens. How long ago is it now that President Bush proudly proclaimed a “mission accomplished”? And yet how many additional conflicts have we become involved in since — Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Libya? Some of you here may be old enough to remember what they called “the domino effect” in the wars in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Well it sure looks like somebody’s unpacked the dominoes again and set up a card table out on the stretch all the way from Morocco Boulevard to Subcontinent of India Avenue. If, as Paul says, the wages of sin is death, there are plenty of people are working overtime, and getting a bonus into the bargain!

+ + +

Jesus, as is so often the case, turns the tables on this warring world. When he speaks of the prophets, it is not their message, whether of peace or of war, that is the focus of his attention, but rather on how that prophet is received and treated. When it comes to hospitality Jesus focuses on the host rather than the guest. Jesus has told his disciples, when he sent them out, to proclaim peace to those to whom they came. What is important is how the host received that greeting of peace.

I noted on Pentecost that “Peace be with you” is the standard way of saying hello in the Middle East — and the proper response is, And with you be peace. So the hosts whom the disciples greet will be judged on the basis of how generous their welcome has been. Do they return that blessing of peace, or not?

Jesus assures his disciples that whoever welcomes them, when they come bringing (after all) the good news of the peaceable Kingdom of God, are in fact welcoming him — and whoever welcomes him will receive the grace and blessing that comes with the presence of God: the true peace that surpasses understanding. “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” Even a cup of cold water given to a disciple in the name of the disciple, will be rewarded out of all proportion to the simplicity of that gift.

+ + +

It is, of course, relatively easy to welcome the prophet who brings a promise of peace and good tidings. It is much harder to welcome the one who comes bringing bad news. Jeremiah himself learned that lesson when he got himself thrown into a cistern for having brought bad news to the king. No prophet’s reward for him — or for the king!

Nobody likes bad news. How many people avoid going to the doctor to see to that nagging cough, or that sore that won’t heal, or that abdominal pain — not because they don’t want to be healed but because they don’t want to find out that what they’ve got might be serious — and by delay end up making their condition even more serious.

And just as people will avoid the doctor and hearing his diagnosis, so too people will avoid the prophet and his truthful warnings; For there are maladies of the soul as well as of the body: that sin can eat away at one’s soul like a cancer, or clog up the arteries of one’s spiritual heart until it grows cold and unloving, and stops. And in their folly, some will turn such a prophet away, and refuse to welcome the words of the Good Physician himself, and all of his associates and assistants, who come to warn of the spiritual dangers that lie in our paths, if we allow ourselves to continue oblivious to them.

For the peace that God brings us through such ambassadors is not simply the comfy peace of oblivion, but the attentive active peace of engagement with the Shalom of God. For “Shalom” does not just mean “peace” but completion, wholeness, and integrity. Who would not want to return such a promise with more than a warm welcome or a cup of cold water? God, through the many messengers God has sent and continues to send, offers us this transcendent peace, this completion and wholeness and rest, the removal of the obstacles. Let us embrace it, for of this we can be sure: when a messenger of God, be it a prophet or a disciple, wishes us peace and promises us peace in God’s name, it lies in our hands to receive that peace, and to join in the proclamation as we too become messengers and disciples in the name of God, and of God’s Shalom. God promises us grace, and that’s good enough for me.+

---