The Dalai Lama and the Pharisee

The 22^nd Sunday after Pentecost

October 24, 2010

St. James’ Episcopal Church, Pullman WA

Joel 3:23-32; Luke 18:9-14

I don’t usually pitch the upcoming issue of the Tower because it sells itself. But this month you’ll be reading about a preaching conference attended by Dianne Lowe and Dean Ritchie. Both Dean and Dianne have told me what a profound experience it was for them to participate in that conference, and Dianne has contributed an article reflecting on the process. I know something about that life-altering effect because I had the privilege attending a week long conference on preaching at The Virginia Seminary shortly after graduating from seminary some ten years ago. Coming from the rough and crumbling facilities at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, we were immediately struck by the beauty and grandeur of the campus in Alexandria.

At VTS, the smallest dorm room was a large suite with its own private bath; meals were served in an ante-bellum mansion built as a refectory for the gentlemen (and then ladies) who would be raised up there to preach God’s word. The graceful 19^th century brick and wood chapel was another part of the simple grandeur of the place. Our course involved daily prayer in the chapel – including a sermon from the excellent preachers — Barbara Brown Taylor, Linda Clader, David Schlafer — who had come to help us that week grow into our craft. One memorable event for me was the closing Eucharist – when I, newly ordained a deacon, was invited to administer the bread. So newly ordained, it hadn’t occurred to me to travel with vestments. I rummaged through the sacristy to find an alb. But Virginia is the bastion of the southern church, where choir dress of black cassock and long white surplice is the norm, even at the Eucharist. Only the dean, Martha Horne, possessed an alb – and it was her alb I wore when I served at the altar that day.

Among those present at the conference were senior students from seminaries throughout the country, including students from seminaries in dioceses that do not ordain women or recognize the ordained ministry of women. The year before there had been a scene, when the students from Nashota House had risen up as one and marched out of the chapel rather than receive bread from the hand of a woman. Throughout the week I had been in classes with some of the Nashota seniors, had sat at meals with them, prayed with them. One of them had given me insight into the use of the Anglican prayer beads I had just that week purchased from the National Cathedral. So when it came time for the bread to be administered at the altar rail, the men from Nashota House lined up in front of my station, and made sure I was the one who placed the Body of Christ into their hands.

Friday afternoon that chapel, built around the same time that Episcopalians first came to Pullman, the chapel that heard the incredible sermons of those wonderful preachers, that nurtured and formed at least half the ordained clergy in this country, was gutted by flame. There’s nothing left but the external walls. The ancient wood went up in a flash.

Earlier that same day, across the country, the office of the Bishop of the Diocese of Northern California, was severely damaged by a fire that utterly destroyed the adjacent River City Food Bank in Sacramento. The River City Food Bank has been serving around 36,000 people a year providing food and basic services. The food bank has been quickly located to a temporary space; Goodwill Industries and local banks and businesses have donated funds to restore the 8,000 pounds of food that was on hand for distribution.

The chapel at Virginia Seminary will be rebuilt; Bishop Beisner and his staff will find a new place to work; the Food Bank will be restored. The time will come when the anguish of the flames are forgotten. The promise of another day is clear to us in God’s Word.

I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten , says the Lord in the words of the prophet Joel. We know next to nothing about when Joel lived, our nearest guess is that he lived sometime during the Persian period, in the centuries after the rebuilding of the restored city following the great exile in Babylon. By the 4^th century BCE, invasions, drought, locusts, these were the sort of thing that the people had come to expect in the land of Judah. Fire, destruction, calamity. The promise was there for the people who heard Joel in his own time, and the promise continued to be heard in the centuries to come. On the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection, we hear in the Acts of the Apostles what Peter has to say about the amazing events unfolding before them. The tongues of fire. The prophetic speech understood by everyone from every language, people and nation. The good news of the day of the Lord. The disrupting and disruptive witness of the life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, turning the whole world upside down. And when Peter stands to speak, it is the prophet Joel that provides the words of God’s promise: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.

The arc of God’s promise, the Rev. Martin Luther King reminded us, is always towards justice. Towards restoring right relationship, the wholeness of God’s good creation. The years that the swarming locust has eaten will be restored. Women now serve along with men as deacons and priests and bishops in this church and in provinces throughout the Anglican Communion. Conservative Virginia Seminary years ago made provision in those luxury dorm-rooms for accommodating same-sex partners. Over the past several years, two bishops in the American church were elected, affirmed, and ordained even after avowing their committed relationship with a partner of the same sex. The General Convention last year voted to approve the drafting of public rites for the blessing of same-sex committed partnerships. The years that the locust has eaten. The chapel will rise. The Bishop and his staff will have room. The food bank will continue its ministry until that day comes when the hungry will be fed and the justice of God is made clear.

Jesus tells a story about two people who stand before the presence of God and offer their prayer. The one is scrupulous in every way. Has heard God’s call to perfection in prayer, in fasting, in giving to the poor, in obedience to the commandments of God. Thank God, prays the one, I am not a murderer, or an adulterer, or a thief, or — looking around at the other standing afar off or like that one. The other is a traitor. Utterly objectionable. In the context of Jesus’ time, the worst sort of betrayer of family, nation, of God. Contract tax collector for the occupying army of Rome. Responsible for driving into poverty his own people, with the arms of the emperor at his back. That one knows there is nothing to thank God for. But rather prays abjectly the sinner’s prayer, “Have mercy on me!” And Jesus says that is the one who went home justified, and not the one who prayed and fasted and gave to the poor and obeyed the commandments of God.

Now before you go getting any ideas, please don’t think that Jesus is inviting you and me to live a life of betrayal and greed, and then beg abjectly for forgiveness. And if Jesus wouldn’t run up and shush me for even suggesting such a thing, then the Apostle Paul would certainly yell out from his letter to the Romans, Me genoito! Heaven forfend!

No, the tax collector’s prayer is the prayer of the one who knows the need for God’s forgiveness. The Pharisee has gotten confused about the point of all those rules he follows. The rules that Jesus will summarize when he talks to the rich man about loving God with all your heart and mind and soul, and loving your neighbor as yourself.

When we hear the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector we need to move the characters into present day, lest we walk out thinking our own prayer is, thank God I’m not like that Pharisee. Let’s make the Pharisee the Dalai Lama. A man probably most of us here would describe as the epitome of holiness. And now let’s make the tax collector, um, Fred Phelps. Someone whose daily behavior causes agony and anguish for people around the country. Now imagine, if we can, the Dalai Lama offering prayer that he is not like Fred. And Fred Phelps begging God for forgiveness. Now we can see the offense in the story. Because we’re not ever going to walk out of here thanking God we’re not like the Dalai Lama. No matter what happens, we are likely to walk out of here thanking God we are not like the members of the Westboro Baptist Church. That is how very disturbing and radical this story is that Jesus tells. That is the sort of thing that made people angry enough to want him dead.

We have to hear the disturbing part of the story to hear the upheaval and the day of destruction and the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood. We have to hear the disturbing part of this story to hear what Jesus has been repeating over and over again on that long walk to Jerusalem with his followers, where he has proclaimed the alarming and disturbing assertion that we are to call the creator of the universe, the Lord of Armies, the one who will turn the moon to blood and the sun to darkness – we are to offer our prayer to that God and we are to call him Abba, Papa, Father, Nurturing Parent.

And as we pray too our Papa, we are to pray without ceasing, we are never to give up, we are to batter the door with our unceasing demand for heavenly justice, on earth just like in heaven. For the bread we need for the day. For forgiveness –of ourselves and of one another. For protection from evil, for saving us from having our deepest faith put to the test. And we are to give thanks, to rejoice in God’s reconciling love that unites us all to the Creator of the universe, through Jesus the Christ, in the power of the Spirit that gives us grace to be witnesses to the world of that love.

 

 

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 20 Year C Revised Common Lectionary

September 19, 2010

St. James’ Episcopal Church, Pullman WA

The Rev. Mary Beth Rivetti, Rector

Luke 16:1-13

Last April the Episcopal Preaching Foundation sponsored a preaching conference that I would have loved to have been at if I hadn’t been running around the country on a train. Second best was the set of CDs from the conference that my friend Carol Westpfahl shared with me while I was staying with her in Connecticut a month later. One of the featured speakers was Dr. Thomas Long, who is Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta. Long’s presentation was about preaching from the parables of Matthew, Mark and Luke – at two hours, he hadn’t scratched the surface, and it was clear the people couldn’t get enough of him. He is a profoundly thoughtful scholar, and a marvelous story teller.

When he begins his talks about parables, he quotes John Dominic Crossan as saying that “Jesus was not crucified because he told parables; he was crucified because he believed the parables…When we are dealing with the parables of Jesus,… we are dealing with the essential structure of the faith of Jesus.” So it is worthwhile to look at what a parable is. Perhaps an “earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” But, taking the Greek word “parabole” – Long suggests that it is something that is put (bole) alongside (para) something else. Kingdom of God / alongside mustard seed, or a dinner party, or a woman looking for a lost coin. The story is a riddle, Long’s preferred translation of the word parable, a riddle that “teases out of the person who listens to it some creative jumping of the gap between the two things that are placed along side of each other.”

And then he offers a more formal definition of parable given by the New Testament scholar, C. H. Dodd who defines a parable as “a metaphor or simile drawn from everyday life, the meaning of which is sufficiently in doubt to tease the mind into active thought.” When he repeats the definition, I’m not sure he realizes that he changes it, but he says, “a metaphor or simile drawn from everyday life, the meaning of which is sufficiently in doubt to tease the imagination into faithful thought.”

The parable that we hear from Jesus today is a messy riddle, one that has teased us for thousands of years. There was a rich man who had a manager. We’ve been hearing stories about rich men. There was a rich man who had a dinner party. There was a rich man whose son asked him to divide his wealth and give him his inheritance. Next week we’ll hear a story about a rich man who dies and can’t get a drink of water in the fires of Hades. But this week, the story shifts to the manager – who has been caught skimming, and is going to be fired, and who concocts a radical, desperate scheme of deep discounts with all his master’s creditors. A hundred jugs of olive oil? Make that 50. A hundred containers of wheat. Make that 80. And then Jesus wraps up the story by saying, “And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”

Ok, a little grammar here. The Greek is ambiguous, as is the English. When Jesus says that the master commended the dishonest manager, is it Jesus or the manager who says “because he had acted shrewdly.” Did the master recognize a fellow con-artist and welcome him back into his good graces? Or did Jesus think that the manager was shrewd. And who thinks that the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light? The master? Or Jesus? And who is it who suggests we should make friends by means of dishonest wealth?

Some teasing here. Some perplexity. Some challenge and invitation for the mind to engage in. A riddle, as Long says, that presents “something for you to tease out – some mystery to be plumbed, some issue for you to ferret out in your own imagination.”

It looks like the people who heard Jesus tell this parable had to struggle with this story. And we’re far removed from its impact, as far removed, Long might suggest, as ripples at the edge of a pool where a stone has once made an impact. But even Luke — or the early members of the church who heard these stories, but we’ll say it’s Luke — has doubts about this, and starts heaping on some other wealth-related proverbs – the sort of thing that would probably get no one crucified. “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, [there's that dishonest wealth again] who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” Whew. Bury the story with pithy sayings. No one will every pay attention.

But what about that shrewd manager? What faithful imagination pulls us towards the heart of Jesus’ preaching? To the kingdom he proclaims in his first public teaching when he says: “I have come to bring good news to the poor; release to the captive”. The kingdom his mother inaugurates before he is born when she sings “he has lifted up the lowly.” What is that shrewd manager telling us about the essential faith of the Jesus movement? What’s he saying there that could get him, get us, in real trouble?

I have some guesses, that perhaps it has to do with wealth. Jesus talks more about money than he ever talks about anything else. Here’s a more modern parable. This is from the late Carl Knirk, who was the Canon for Planned Giving/Stewardship and Evangelism in the Diocese of Olympia, and over there they call this Carl’s Rules for Giving:

1. Everything you have is a gift from God.
2. No one has everything; no one has nothing.
3. All you have you will lose.
4. While you are in possession of it, you, and only you, decide how to use it.
5. How you use everything that passes through your hands will determine the kind of person you are and will become.

The more traditional translation of the word “manager” is “steward” – the one who manages, or stewards, the property that he has in trust from the master. That makes us, in some way – and I warn against reading through any parable with a one-to-one assignment of characters – in the position of that manager. Have we been skimming off the top? Are we about to lose everything we have? While we are in possession of the master’s goods, we’re the only ones who get to decide how to use the goods we’ve been entrusted with. Will the master say, “good work?” when we’re done? How will we know?

And what about making friends by means of dishonest wealth – the Greek says, “the mammon of unrighteousness.” A group of us spent the day yesterday in conversation with Alice Woldt, the executive director of the Washington Association of Churches, talking about negotiating that path between what our faith tells us is good and right, and what is possible in the world of politics if we are to use our resources to enhance the wellbeing of others. Accepting less than desirable legislation, and piecemeal solutions; working with politicians who regularly vote against our perceived interests to find common ground with them, to see them as attempting to live out their own principles, so that when we need allies for the big fight, we have developed those relationships and have greater hope for success. Maybe they won’t welcome us into the eternal habitations, but maybe they’ll help to move things along towards our baptismal vision of justice and dignity for every human being.

I have another take on that riddle of the shrewd manager – one I like to think of when I read this story. You have to start out with thinking that maybe, in the earlier story that Jesus just told, the one about the son who goes out into the world and comes back home to great rejoicing, the son who was dead and now is alive, you have to think maybe that scapegrace ne’er do well might be Jesus, being welcomed home by the unseemly patriarch who can’t help but host that marvelous heavenly banquet. And maybe the conniving manager is Jesus, too. Deeply discounting debt everywhere he goes – forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Seven times seven forgiving our debts. Wiping our debts completely clean. And at the end of the day the master looks at all that forgiveness and says, “That’s right. Good job. Now, let’s go to the feast.”

Quotes from Thomas Long are transcribed from the audio recording of his presentation at the Episcopal Preaching Foundation Conference, Kanuga Conference Center, April 19-22, 2010.

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 19 Year C Revised Common Lectionary

September 12, 2010

St. James’ Episcopal Church, Pullman WA

The Rev. Mary Beth Rivetti, Rector

Luke 15:1-10

Last month, archaeologists working in the lower Galilee published reports that they had discovered evidence of what they are calling the first feast, a funeral celebration for an elderly woman of 45, with an extravagant menu of barbecued tortoise and roast beef. The amount of food represented in the find could easily have fed 35 people, and for this reason the researchers conclude that this is evidence not just of some sumptuous party, but rather a communal meal with ritual significance. It’s hard to get more evidence on the matter, since the remains are around 12,000 years old. But it is still tantalizing to imagine that communal feasting can be traced back ten thousand years before Jesus walked through the Galilee; to know that at the moment that marked the transition from hunting and gathering to a more stable form of life, the community gathered in meaningful ways to mark important life transitions, to bind the people through common gestures, to invest their eating with more meaning than just replenishing bodies worn down through the very effort of survival.

Feasting is all around us this week. At the full moon last week began the Jewish New Year, and this weekend marks the transition from the crowning of the year with harvest offerings, to the reflective moment of Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. In the Jewish calendar these ten days are the Days of Awe, marked with feasting and fasting, prayer, memory of those who have died, and the hope of finding our names in the book of life. This weekend, too, marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the sunrise to sunset fasting, marked each sunset with the end of the fast and joyous feasting. This weekend is the Eid al Fitr, the big feast that concludes the holy month. And because the Eid, a moveable feast like Easter, coincides with the sad reminder of the attacks of September 11, this year the Muslim community has adjusted its celebrations – to Friday night in some cases, and tonight in this community. We are invited to participate with our local Muslim community at a community feast at 5:30 this evening – you’ll find the details in the bulletin.

Feasting is at the heart of the stories that Jesus starts to tell in the stories we hear in today’s Gospel. “All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” Now a couple of weeks ago Jesus was the guest of a leading Pharisee – perhaps the sort of guest we worry might show up some day, telling everyone how to behave, conducting a very public healing in our midst, preaching to us all about hating our fathers and mothers and giving up our possessions. But today, it seems, it is Jesus who is doing the welcoming; it is Jesus who is the author of the feast.

And the stories are about celebration as well. But first someone or something has to be lost. A sheep wanders off from the fold, and the shepherd leaves all the other sheep alone and goes looking for it, rejoicing as he carries back the sheep that was lost. The woman scours her house looking for the lost coin, and when she finds it, she calls in all her friends to celebrate the lost coin. And if you look at these two stories, they call our attention to the joy over finding something that was lost. And in fact they call our attention to a type of joy that is probably excessive and unseemly. Todd Scranton, the pastor of Simpson United Methodist Church downtown, assures me that joy would not be a response he recalled from his father tracking down wandering sheep. Annoyance verging on murderous rage at making him leave the other sheep behind – that might be a more accurate shepherdly response. Or some shepherds might even just leave the lost sheep to its fate – since leaving behind 99 sheep could expose them to wolves or thieves.

The woman in the story – at first perhaps the most reasonable of the examples – does what any housewife worth her salt would do – she spends the better part of the day sweeping through the house to find that little coin, that drachma that is worth a day’s wages – no small loss if she doesn’t find it. But her party with the neighborhood might be a little over the top. How much does the party cost where she invites in all the neighbors to celebrate? Even she is perhaps excessively festive.

Then there’s the big story – the one we didn’t hear today, but if you read this part of Luke often enough, you know what’s coming. It’s a story we hear in Lent – but it’s the next part of Jesus’ dinner talk. A man had two sons, and the younger son asked for his inheritance …. We know this as the story of the Prodigal (or wasteful) Son – who goes off to seek his living, blows his inheritance, and winds up losing everything including his dignity before he decides to turn back home. His father, most undignified for a man of substance, goes running out to meet him, covers him with a robe and a ring and a big smooch, and throws a big party for him. And the older brother, the good kid, grumbles about the party. And this is what Jesus is really trying to say to those Pharisees and scribes who were grumbling and saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them,” — my son was lost and he is now found. He was dead but is now alive. It’s not the son who is prodigal in this story, but the father – the one who throws the big party and slays the fatted calf – and maybe a few hundred barbecued tortoises for good measure. Because the point of the story is that there is joy in heaven over the return of one who was lost. Excessive joy. It is beyond decency. It is celestial. The angels get into the act. It’s downright apocalyptic.

Feasting at the heart of our stories and traditions of faith. At the heart of what makes us human. Feasting at the heart of our understanding of the bounteous love of God. Yesterday we gathered here for a Eucharist in memory of those whose lives were lost nine years ago in the terrorist attacks on this country; we gathered to remember those who have lost their lives in the wars we have fought since that day. We gathered in silent reflection over our sorrow at a world where human selfishness and greed and violence have dismantled creation, as we hear in the words of Jeremiah:

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;

and to the heavens, and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,

and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,

and all the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,

and all its cities were laid in ruins

But instead, in our sorrow, we heard the promise of feasting, the holy mountain of God where await us the rich food and the fine wine, the holy city of God where God will wipe away every tear. The tree of life at the center of the river of everlasting life, the Lamb in the center of the throne, the glorious company of apostles and saints and those we love but see no more, who gather with us each week right here, as we lift up our hands in thanksgiving and say, The Lord be with you.

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16  Luke 14:1, 7-14

My constant companion on the sabbatical train journey that I took around the continent this spring and summer was Joan Chittister’s annotated translation of the Rule of Benedict. The rule was written in the 6^th century by Benedict of Nursia, borrowing from earlier rules as well as his experience in founding monastic communities. From the 7^th century onward the Rule has formed the basis for all Christian monastic living, and it has gained a following in recent years among even non-cenobitic readers, that is those of us who don’t live in monastic communities, as a rule of life that has its origins in the earliest centuries of Christian experience, before there were mutual condemnations and exclusions, before the division of East versus West, before the wrenching divisions of the early modern era and the reformation.

Benedict’s rule looks a lot like the sort of household rules we see listed here at the end of Hebrews – that long text that might be a sermon, or a letter, or, in the author’s own words, “a word of encouragement.” The list we hear today reads like a summary of the sort of principles that hold a community of believers together: mutual love; hospitality; solidarity with the imprisoned and the tortured; faithfulness in relationships of intimacy; letting go our grasp on material well-being and trusting in God to provide what we need; imitating the saints who have showed us the way to God; centering our hope on God, and through Christ offering worship and the sacrifice of thanksgiving; doing good and sharing what we have. Print those ten steps out on a card, and you have a year’s worth of sermons, a lifetime of spiritual grounding, the life and meaning of Jesus of Nazareth, the son of God. Our Christian rule of life.

Benedict’s rule is presented in 73 chapters, which Chittister breaks into easily digestible portions, writing an expanding commentary on each portion. The design of her book is that the rule is read three times through in a year – in accordance with the instructions contained in the rule itself. So if you read the rule every day, you get to see yourself coming and going at different times of the year when you read the same passages over and over – what was I doing when I read this the first time? In mid-April, when I set out by train from Salt Lake City to Martinez, California, her commentary on chapter 61 began with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.” That passage returned two weeks ago, when I journeyed to Moses Lake with a team of trainers to spend a weekend with a group of clergy and laity from around the diocese, including Roy Johnson, to talk about race, about dismantling racism. Later on my train journey, and again ten days ago, she tells a story from the Zen masters, of wealthy donors inviting Master Ikyyu to a banquet. “The master arrived there dressed in beggar’s robes. His host, not recognizing him in this garb, hustled him away: ‘We cannot have you here at the doorstep. We are expecting the famous Master Ikkyu any moment.’” Well – we know where this story is going. The master returns dressed in his resplendent robe, where he is ushered to a seat of great importance. And he steps out of his ornate stiffened robe, and leaves it sitting upright at the dinner table and says “I presume that it is my robe you have invited since when I first arrived without it a little while ago, you showed me away.” [Chittister:Rule – August 15, August 19]

Journey and hospitality. Two themes of the spiritual life, whether they are written by Zen masters or desert fathers, by the author of Hebrews, or acted out by Jesus of Nazareth.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” Or, as some of us older types like to remember the line, “some have entertained angels unawares.” The line reminds us of Abraham and Sarah and the divine guests who visit them at the Oaks of Mamre; or the parents of Samson who similarly learn of a miraculous conception in response to their gracious hospitality. And in Jerusalem the leading Pharisee has invited God incarnate to his table.

Jesus, the host of every banquet, arrives at the banquet of the well-to-do and talks about being the guest. Not the disguised angel at the door or the sage in beggar’s clothing, but rather the person holding the invitation, the person entitled to be escorted up to a seat of honor. Perhaps this is why Episcopalians always crowd the back rows – we’ve heard these lines too literally: “When you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place” In a society that lives on honor and appearance and face – a little like the red carpet system at a Hollywood opening perhaps –  the wealthy people in Jesus’ hearing are challenged to give up their status so that they may be rewarded. And then an even greater challenge – to extend their own social invitations to people who can never reciprocate, so that their reward will be at the resurrection of the righteous. Extend our welcome to those we don’t want to bring inside, whose presence is offensive or disruptive or whose need is so great even our own resource cannot provide. To see angels in disguise in the face of all we encounter – that takes a faithful grounding in the Lord who took his people across the trackless wastes and fed them sweet honey from the rock. That takes the promise that the Lord is with us always. That Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

This week one of the final chapters in the Rule, after the discussions about the sort of person who makes the right abbot or prioress, after talking about the ordination process and disciplining unruly clergy, after describing the proper sort of person to be in charge of the monastery’s wine cellar, the rule moves to the Porter, the person at the door. “At the door of the monastery, place a sensible person who knows how to take a message and deliver a reply….This porter will need a room near the entrance so that visitors will always find someone there to answer them. As soon as anyone knocks or a poor person calls out, the porter will reply, “Thanks be to God,” or “You blessing, please,” then, with all the gentleness that comes from reverence of God, provide a prompt answer with the warmth of love. Let the porter be given one of the younger members if help is needed.” [Chapter 66]

It is great good fortune that the person who sits in the office by our front door is named Porter – Carol, that is — and I think that people will agree that she does a wonderful job about taking messages and delivering replies – and, while her response may be a little different from “Thanks be to God,” it is clear she does provide a prompt answer with the warmth of love. On Sunday mornings we have a team of volunteers who stand at the door so that visitors will always find someone there to answer them – and quite often those volunteers include some younger members who stand eagerly at the door asking for and receiving the blessing of all who enter. But our church door is only one piece of the whole community that gathers here for worship. Because we are not monks, because we journey each week out into the world before returning here for our refreshment and restoration, we each of us take the church with us everywhere we go. In the language of the catechism, we “re-present” the Church. We are the Porter at the door.

This week in our journeying forth let us each imagine ourselves as a porter at the gate of whatever community we are in: our home, our work, our professional group or cadre of scholars, our circle of friends our classroom. When a new face appears on our horizon, do we model that same hospitality, that welcome of those who come to our door? Is our response to ask “Your blessing, please” before we learn what they want? Can we think of that the next time we’re plagued by a telemarketer? And likewise, can we, on our journeys into grocery stories or places of business, into Dean’s offices or banks or libraries, confer that blessing, asked or not, on the porter who sits at the door?

Imagine that you are the angels who have been disguised, who have been sent on a journey whose meaning you don’t yet understand. You are, at the very least, the image of God, the Body of Christ. Where you go into the world, you bring blessing. Thanks be to God.

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11; Luke 12:32-40

This has been a week filled with commemorations and holy days. A newly published book, Holy Women, Holy Men, lists the days and commemorations throughout the church year – saints days from the earliest moments of the church, new commemorations of people whose history is not so very far removed from our own – over two hundred days each year that mark, “not models of absolute perfection, but men and women whose lives, with all their diversity of gifts and graces, were reshaped by God’s redemptive activity.”¹ So this past week, we recognized not only the 16^th century northern European artists Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, but also W. E. B. DuBois, and George Freeman Bragg, Jr., leaders and chroniclers of the ongoing struggle for equality and dignity for African Americans, who were nurtured by the Episcopal Church as much as they were challenged and dismayed. Capping them all on Friday was the Feast of the Transfiguration. That day when we tell again the story of the white light on the mountain top revealing Jesus to his inner circle in all his glory– that is one of the very few feasts on the church’s calendar that can “bump” the regular celebration of creation and redemption that is our worship here on Sunday. Forever that feast of the brilliant light on the mountain, celebrated for centuries on August 6, is tied to another blinding light, one that sixty-five years ago brought both destruction and hope at the end of the war in the Pacific. And since today is the anniversary of that second bomb, this one on Nagasaki, it seemed like it would be good to take a moment to reflect. Not at all to step away from our thanksgiving for creation and redemption, but to step back a little and look around.

As you may know, next weekend I will be in Moses Lake at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church as part of a team presenting a training in anti-racism called Seeing the Face of God in Each Other. In anticipation of the weekend, I sent a mailing out to our participants and the other trainers with a little light reading: a collection of General Convention Resolutions from 1991 forward requiring the training; pastoral letters decrying the sin of racism, sent out by the House of Bishops over the decades; a sermon by our Presiding Bishop preached at St. Thomas’ Church in Philadelphia in October 2008, and a report on the General Convention’s repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery at its session last year. With all that work already on paper, why should our diocese expend money, time, energy on the gathering that we will be holding next week? I should say that Roy Johnson is going to be there with us as part of the group – so he may well be wondering the same thing.

The news cycles of the last several weeks, and in particular the incident involving Shirley Sherrod, make clear that our national discourse is based largely in widespread ignorance of our national history. You may recall that the 45-minute speech Ms. Sherrod made on receiving an honor from the NAACP was edited to a two-minute clip that appeared to show her abusing her authority to prevent a white farmer from receiving his due. The edited clip was posted and publicized as evidence of wide-spread anti-white sentiment among members of the Obama administration. To make the fabrication worse, she was let go by an administration that is hyper-sensitive to charges of so-called reverse racism. Once the truth surfaced she was offered her job back, and a public apology from the Presiding. I don’t know if she has agreed to return to the new position being created for her in the Department of Agriculture. What I did learn in watching her 45-minute speech, in which she described the growth in her understanding over the years prompted by that very encounter with the white farmer, was that Shirley Sherrod is the wife of a man who helped organize voters in the south. Further, she is from a family that was the victim of the systematic racism in the department of agriculture over the decades following not only reconstruction in the south, but the civil rights act of 1964. The blatant abuse of African Americans by the government agency that was supposed to help them become self-sufficient was documented in the 1990s; Shirley Sherrod is the surviving heir of a family that was owed settlement money from the Department of Agriculture. And that is the woman that the Department of Agriculture and the White House ordered fired rather than risk appearing anti-white.

As the Presiding Bishop’s sermon points out, the consequences of our particular history of slavery, and the subsequent re-enslavement of black men in the Jim Crow era, continue in every aspect of our lives. “Most of us, white and black, put our money in banks whose history is in some way connected to profits made from slave labor. Most of us benefit from steel made by companies with some connection to those slave-driven mines of the industrializing south.” And, as is made clear in the research leading to the repudiation of the Right of Discovery – the 15^th century international law that made it possible for Christian Europeans to lay claim to the so-called New World – we are all living on land that belonged to someone else; we are all worshiping in churches that are built in places that others once claimed as their own. In yesterday’s paper was an article about a retired neurophysiologist reconstructing maps of local history. Tracing the paths of Generals Steptoe and Wright in forcing the Nez Perce into treaties I the19th century, Mahlon Kriebel notes, “The Northwest wouldn’t be the way it is without the Wright campaign and subduing the Indians.”²

Our ancestors may have come to this country after the Civil War. But none of us can claim to be free from participation in the system that continues to distort our humanity. There is, as we say in the old words of confession, there is no health in us. But.

Here is where the creation and redemption, where the dazzling light of transfiguration shoots through our heart. Here is where the dream of God, the dream the prophets proclaim, can be lived out in our commitment to justice. The group that we will be training in Moses Lake will join others in the diocese who have already engaged in this training with a hope to creating alliances in our churches and in our communities to dismantle racism. We have resources here in our community – the Human Rights Commission of Idaho; the Human Rights Education Institute – that we can join in supporting and defending their work. We can wash ourselves, make ourselves clean, remove the evil from before our eyes, seek justice, rescue the oppressed. The waitress in a local restaurant saw me leafing through the materials and told me of her church’s exorcising prayer when they learned they were meeting on the site of the last Klan meeting in Whitman County. Right then and there the two of us broke protocol and offered our prayer for the success of our ventures to place our treasure, our time and our talent where our heart is calling us to wholeness and healing.

The saving act of Christ is to include us all, beyond our national origin, beyond our history, beyond our age or our sex or our status – all of us included in the heavenly banquet, the celebration of life. Inclusion at that table does not mean we are all made exactly alike. In Christ we don’t instantly become stripped of our history, our story, our person-hood. In Christ those differences are pieces in the glorious mosaic that is the Body. When we look around this room and we see mostly people of one ethnic background, mostly people of one age group, mostly people of one social class – when will we be eager to be uncomfortable? When will we embrace being made different, being transformed by embracing those who are not like us? That flashing light from the mountaintop of transfiguration is not to lull us into sameness. It is dangerous, not comforting. It is fire and judgment and the pain of Calvary. It is also the promise, the evidence of things unseen, that guides us through times of uncertainty, times of disruption, to the true home that awaits us, the banquet of creation and redemption laid out for us in love each week, the dream of God that feeds our heart.

1 From the Preface, Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints, Church Pension Fund 2010, pages x-xi.

2 Macz, Brandon,“Mapping History the Right Way,” Moscow-Pullman Daily News, pages 1D and 3D, August 7-8, 2010.

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost – the Feast of Gordon Gekko

Are we all quoting Wall Street in our sermons this week? How can we pass up the “greed is good” speech when we’ve been told in Colossians that greed is idolatry, and in Luke that we are to guard against all forms of greed?

Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind ….” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street, is back – the long-awaited sequel played this spring at the Cannes Film Festival, and we will be treated to its release sometime soon. As in the mid-1980s the nation is once more reeling from the manipulation of financial markets; this time it is even more disastrous, unrelenting, and cataclysmic. This time, even more people are in danger of losing all that they have – a fearful situation that often produces in us a reaction of fear, a reaction of hoarding, of greed.

Some time ago I participated in a random phone survey run by the Barna Group, the evangelical research organization ,that asked about the church’s response in the face of the current economic uncertainty. Over the years, The Barna Group has documented in its multi-year tracking surveys of American attitudes, certain basics have become more important: health and a balanced life, financial stability, success, paying bills, having a good life. What seems to have lost ground in the top priorities has been faith itself. But when the young woman from Barna called me, she wanted to know how our congregation was responding to the loss of security and potential financial catastrophe. Were we reducing the amount of money available for programming? Were we deferring projects and looking for alternate sources of funding?  Or was our response “C. – the congregation responds by seeing this as an opportunity to share hope and good news through new outreach programs”  In the face of the Barna surveys, in the face of the latest incarnation of Gordon Gekko, the other option was to respond as if we had heard Jesus speaking the beatitudes: blessed are you hungry now, for you will be filled; blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Greed, we hear in the letter to the Christians in Colossae, is idolatry. Idolatry as in the worship of images – or, as Paul tells us elsewhere, as choosing a piece of the created world and mistaking it for the Creator. Giving to an object – a statue, a building, a text, or, as we hear today, the tokens of exchange – the honor, service and devotion that belong only to the one who is at the source of all that is holy.  So we who have been formed by God’s word know that greed is not good. It caps the list of behaviors we are to cast aside, to put to death, now that we have been raised in Christ: a list that is dominated by sexual greed: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire – the ways in which the goodness of our sexual nature is perverted into selfishness, abuse, violence, turning our fellow humans into objects – connecting that with the idea of greed as insatiable hunger for things – not for what they are capable of doing, but merely for having them, for taking possession of things that are merely here for us to share, an inheritance and gift we have no right to claim as ours.

Jesus tells the story of the rich fool in response to a person in the crowd asking him to intervene in a family struggle over inheritance. And like the good rabbi he is, of course he begins his response to the question with yet another question, “Friend, who set me to be judge or arbiter over you?” Who indeed?  Is this not the Son of God? But in response to haggling out the terms of the will and the accurate assignment of proportions according to law, we get the response that God would speak. One that warns us about “those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” What might being rich towards God look like? Is it something like that response “c” on the Barna survey – responding to the threat of financial shortfall with increased joy at the prospect of sharing the good news?

On the face of it, the rich man in Jesus’ story isn’t foolish. The wisdom of the proverbs and Ecclesiastes have taught him that storing up goods so that our old age may be quiet and secure, and our children provided for. On last night’s news there was the story of the Tuttle Farm in the northeast – the last heir of this land that has been in the family since the 17^th century is hanging it up. As he said in his interview, at his age he had a right to sell the farm to a developer so he could sit on his porch and sip a glass of iced tea – like anyone else who has worked hard for 45 years. He has worked hard and deserves his rest. The rich man in Jesus’ story has worked hard and wants to store up his goods in even bigger barns so that he can retire in comfort, eat, drink and be merry.

No, what is foolish is the absurd idea that the yield should be hoarded into ever bigger barns – almost like burying the good fortune, hiding it away. Like the unworthy slave in another story Jesus tells, this man wants to sit on the good yield of his land, as if that’s all it’s about, the accumulation of more and more possessions.

There was another story about a family farm in the news yesterday – this one in our local paper – about a group that has purchased a family farm from the last heir who had been considering selling the property to a developer. This group has instead banded together to form a conservancy with the land, to prevent its being developed, to preserve it as a farm in perpetuity. In agreeing to this new arrangement, the heir took less money than he would have received from the developer, but he is sharing in a project that will not only keep the inheritance of farming alive for many more generations, but will preserve more resources in the form of water and soil and air for the neighboring community.

A new life in Christ does not mean we are to strip ourselves of property, though sometimes it might be easier to do that. It does not mean that we are called to forego the gifts of life, our createdness, our humanity, our family, our good health. But it does mean that we are forever in neighborly relationship, called to richness towards God. It does mean that we must always see our goods as part of an inheritance, an inheritance that we must tend, nurture, and share.

How do we see the vast opportunity to share good news in this time of financial insecurity? Look at our generous response in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti earlier this year; look at the ongoing efforts of our Social Justice Outreach Ministry Team to forge a deeper relationship between this parish and the people of Haiti. Look at our elders who gather the cast-off items of the community and transform them into cash to aid our neighbors and provide resources for the formation of our youth, and to tend the inheritance of this place for those who will come after us. Our sharing of land and water with the Backyard Harvest to grow fresh produce for those who visit our food banks.

How has this financial crisis affected your life? How are you touched by depleted stocks? By loss of jobs or housing? Each of us knows someone who has lost a job, is losing a house, is facing financial hardship. How will we respond? With fear, with greed, with hoarding all our things so that we can be secure? Or by reaching out our hands in generosity, solidarity, and hope, clothed in the new raiment that is Jesus Christ, who transcends all barriers, who knocks down the walls we erect to keep others out, because in Christ, we are all fabulously rich toward God

St. James’ Day – the Presiding Bishop Preaches

In the heat of late July, with our congregation spread around the picnic area in McGee Park, it wasn’t possible to preach a sermon. I had thought of posting one of my better St. James’ Day sermons from years past, but our Presiding Bishop did me one better. Here is her sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London today, the Feast of St. James.

Feast of St. James

25 July 2010

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori

Presiding Bishop and Primate

The Episcopal Church

There’s an institution in New York City called the Doe Fund.  Its motto is Ready, Willing and Able.  Early in the morning, trucks bearing that logo can be found on the streets of Manhattan, and out of those trucks come workers with garbage cans, brooms, and equipment for collecting litter.  Some of the trucks disgorge workers with pumps and containers for collecting used cooking oil to be recycled into biodiesel.  The Doe Fund takes its name from John Doe, the traditional moniker for a person whose name is a mystery.  Its founder is a Roman Catholic layman who’s convinced that employment and learning personal responsibility are the key to ending homelessness.  The Fund assists people who are trying to leave homelessness by providing jobs, support in sobriety, and help with developing employment skills and a sense of their basic human dignity.

Each year the Doe Fund helps several hundred people transform their lives.  Those people are overwhelmingly from minority populations, more than half have been in prison, and most have substance addiction issues.  That motto, Ready, Willing and Able, is a proud witness to dignity gained.

That’s also pretty much what we hear when Jesus asks James and his brother John if they are able to drink the cup that he will drink.  Yep, they say, “we’re ready, willing, and able.”  Their journey in some sense moves in the opposite direction, but it is about the same kind of vocation.  James’ and John’s charge to fish for people is about serving whoever turns up, and following a leader who has nowhere to lay his head.  They are becoming workers without a permanent home because they’re focused on world-wide cleanup and the transformation of all communities.  The goal is a healed society where all have the dignity that comes of right relationship with God and neighbor.  We usually call it the Reign of God, or the common weal of God.

That commonweal of God work is a prophetic vocation, often deeply unpopular and challenging, and born of the dream that dignity for all is a deeply divine warrant.  That kind of prophetic witness, in both word and deed, is what made Jesus so offensive to the powers at hand.  The same kind of prophetic witness got James executed by Herod, the first of the inner circle of disciples to be martyred.  It is what Jesus himself pointed to when he said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matt 23:37).

But prophetic work is not primarily about death and homelessness, even though either may be a byproduct.  Prophetic work is about more abundant life for the whole world, and it is about a home everywhere, a home for all.

When Agabus and the prophets go down to Antioch and tell of a looming famine in Judea, the whole community shows itself willing and able to respond to that demand of the moment.  The people in Judea are losing their ability to build a home of the sort that God intends for all – enough to eat, freedom from oppressive government, the ability to worship.  Together the company of prophets and the early Christians in Antioch determine to respond in the way they are able.  They are helping to gather the chicks under God’s wings.

Prophets and disciples are meant to be ready and willing to respond to the challenge and opportunity of the moment, in whatever way the spirit is calling.  We continue to tell their stories and celebrate their lives so that we might be encouraged, and literally given a little more heart-strength to challenge indignity that results from injustice.

Dignity means a sense of worth, suitability, or honor, and it is the state in which God created all that is.  The indignities came later.  One of the eucharistic prayers in the Episcopal Church’s prayer book says that we have been created worthy to stand in God’s presence.  When we treat others as less than that, we reject God’s good creation, and in a very real sense, we deny our own dignity.

Prophetic work helps to restore the dignity of creation, and acknowledges that creation reflects the utter dignity of the creator.  We get in trouble when we limit dignity to lesser things, or deny dignity to some.  Dignity is really what James’ mother is after when she pesters Jesus to put her boys first when he becomes king.  She wants them to have the important chairs closest to Jesus.  Jesus responds by asking if they’re willing and able to suffer indignity, even die, in order to restore dignity to others.

What do the English call the circle of greatest dignity in this realm but the Court of St. James?  It’s not just the site of royal courtesies and where the monarch receives emissaries from other realms.  The Court of St. James takes its name originally from a place of healing, the Hospital of St. James, a leper hospital dating from at least the 13^th century.  The dignity originally offered to lepers is carried on in the dignity and courtesies extended to representatives of other nations, whatever their political reputation.  All those lesser dignities have their roots in the dignity of human creatures who bear the image of God.  We miss something essential when we mistake the lesser dignities for the divine one we all bear.

The other difficulty we all know too well is the human tendency to insist that some are not worthy of respect, that dignity doesn’t apply to the poor, or to immigrants, or to women, or Muslims, or gay and lesbian people.  Prophetic work is about challenging human systems that ignore or deny the innate dignity of all of God’s creation.  That’s the aspect of prophetic work that’s dangerous, for those systems often respond with violence – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the disappearance of righteous Gentiles who rescued Jews during the Second World War, or the expulsion of a Ugandan bishop because he asked the church to treat the gay and lesbian members of his society with dignity.

Members of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Church) are engaged in prophetic work right now.  The IFI is in full communion with TEC and the Anglican Communion.  A month ago, two lay leaders were assassinated by masked men on motorcycles.  Four years ago a retired bishop was assassinated in his kitchen.  Two priests have been similarly murdered, as have leaders in other denominations.  All have been working to bring dignity and basic human rights to farm workers and laborers.  Our own prophetic solidarity and advocacy just might bring some accountability from the former government and justice from the present one.  Can you imagine what might happen if a good number of Anglicans and Episcopalians insisted that our governments pay attention to human rights in the Philippines?

The search for dignity is work that all members of Christ’s body share.  We’re invited to join the band of prophets, share the meal and drink the cup.  It can be dangerous work, but most prophets I know are also filled with joy.  Prophets generally decide that it’s not worth living in a system without dignity.  Better to lose that life, and exchange it for one that builds up, because we lose our own dignity when we tolerate indignity for some.

The journey down to Antioch and back to Jerusalem led our ancestors to discover that one’s own dignity is mixed up with that of every other human being, and indeed all of creation.  James made the same discovery.  The work of the cross is the most life-giving journey we know.  Are you ready, willing, and able?

Mary, Martha and the Rummage Sale

The timing of the lectionary in the propers for the fixed dates in ordinary time has the story of Martha and her sister Mary entertaining Jesus – on the same Sunday that we conclude our annual Rummage Sale.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost – July 18, 2010

Luke 10:38-42

Margaret Rehberg and I finally get to be in church together at the same time. Not only was she on the road when I came back last Sunday, but even before I took off for three months, she spent a year serving as the Escort to the Grand Martha in the Eastern Star. This was a demanding role for her, one that required her to make journeys throughout the northwest, give speeches, and take on appropriate duties that support the work of the woman named for the heroine of today’s Gospel story.

We think that we know this story fairly well, don’t we? Jesus has come to dinner in the house of his friends, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and while Mary sits dreaming at the master’s feet, Martha calls out from the kitchen to ask Jesus to tell Mary to give her a hand with the chores. And Jesus surprises Martha by telling her that Mary has chosen the better part. For the rest of history, these two women have been idealized to represent the worker and the listener; the active life and the contemplative life. And Jesus tells us that the contemplative life is the better part. I used to try this out on my mother when I was a kid, except I wasn’t exactly sitting at the feet of Jesus when she would call me in to help out with the housework.

We think we know this story, but today I invite you today into its strangeness.. First off, I was struck by how very short it is. We’ve just had a fairly extensive story about the Good Samaritan that went on for several verses. Then there’s this little piece. The other thing that struck me is that in Luke’s Gospel, these are just some people Jesus knows in some village. There is no deep relationship like we know from their interactions in John’s Gospel. It’s almost as if Luke just pulled their names out of thin air to demonstrate a point, not to bring us those two impassioned women whose brother was raised from the dead, who challenge Jesus about resurrection, who anoint him with costly ointment. Somehow, this story becomes really different to me when I hear it again – different because it is now a couple of strangers in a strange setting. And the focus then becomes different, and strange.

We remember that last week we heard the story of the Good Samaritan told in response to the lawyer asking how to inherit eternal life. Love God; love your neighbor. But who is my neighbor? A man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho…. The neighborly character in that story was the one who did what was totally unexpected, who breached the dividing line between Samaritan and Jew, who stepped out of his comfort zone to rescue and restore a man who had been left for dead, who went above and beyond the call of duty in providing for his care, and covering his bill at the local inn. Remember, our lawyer wants to know how to inherit eternal life – the shocking answer is to step out of what is normal, go beyond what has been the expectation of his whole life.

And now Jesus is being welcomed in a home – and Martha is quite rightly doing what should be done to welcome any honored guest. She prepares food, she makes the guest comfortable, she sees to it that there is water for washing, a place to recline, all his needs are met. This is exactly what should be happening. Except wait. What’s Jesus doing, exactly, going into a home of two women? By himself? When he talks to a woman of Samaria in broad daylight by himself, his disciples get nervous. And here he is unchaperoned in the home of this woman Mary and her sister Martha? (Dan Brown fans, this is where we start wondering about their relationship).

And what exactly is Mary doing sitting with the man listening to him? Martha is absolutely right to be concerned about the propriety of this situation. It is out of the ordinary, strange, stretching beyond what we normally expect.

I read a quote from Thomas Merton the other day – he keeps showing up, doesn’t he? It’s from his book, Opening the Bible, and showed up in a daily mailing I get from the activist Christian group, Sojourners, people who probably think Martha got a bum rap. Merton writes, “There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible — until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves. But then we are perhaps too used to it and too at home in it. Let us not be too sure we know the Bible … just because we have learned not to have problems with it. Have we perhaps learned … not to really pay attention to it? Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it?”

How do we question this story from Luke? How are we questioned by it? If you worked on the rummage sale this past week, maybe you feel some solidarity with Martha doing all that work, and maybe you have some feelings about Mary sitting there talking to the company when there’s still work to be done. And Jesus, very inappropriately, it seems, entering the triangle she initiates when she tells him to get Mary to help her, tells her that Mary has chosen the better part. So if you’ve heard this scripture your whole life, it might indeed make you question this story from Luke to have your efforts relegated to useless worry. Do we have a right to argue with Jesus here? And maybe in arguing we can step away from the story to see the iconic brush strokes that depict for us that reckless, inappropriate love of God that the law and the prophets call us all to do. How do we inherit eternal life? Love God; love neighbor. Can we pull them apart?

There’s another story about hospitality in the Bible that this brings to mind. Think with me of the story of Abraham when he receives the divine visitors at the Oaks of Mamre. The Lord God came to Abraham, says the Bible. Or three men. In the mythic telling from Genesis, that detail goes unremarked and unexplained, and leaves us room for strangeness and wonder. Early on, Christians wondered if the three men also identified as the Lord God were a type, a model, for the Trinity.

Abraham immediately sets out to get work done, or rather delegating it to Sarah – slaughtering the calf, baking bread, bringing out yoghurt. It is a time-consuming ritual that shows his devotion to the visitors, despite, or even because of the effort, the work, the busy-ness and attention to detail. The famous icon by Rublev of that visit is in more than one version. In one version, Abraham and Sarah are visible in the margins engaged in their efforts. But in the one most familiar, it is only the guests who are there in the center, seated at the table in mystical tension and contemplation. The icon is called the Hospitality of Abraham. What will your household be like when the Lord God shows up unannounced? The icon draws us away from all the norms of hospitable activity to what is really going on – and takes us to the holy table set in the midst of the triune company.

Our baptismal covenant calls us to see the face of Christ in all we encounter, to seek and serve Christ in all we meet. That is a call to action for most of us. Action spurred by the like of the prophet Amos who could be reading the headlines of the New York Times when he rails against fraud, greed, corruption, selling the poor for the price of a pair of Manolo Blahniks. But it is also a call to sit in awe at the feet of Christ. To listen. To breathe in the holy spirit that leaps between us when we meet; to hold in tension that running spirit of divinity that draws the holy circle in the center of the icon.

As we celebrate the conclusion of our 81^st rummage sale, which has once again grossed enormous receipts representing perhaps fair exchange for the countless volunteer hours involved in gathering, sorting, displaying, selling the items that others no longer need – we watch a community transformed with the work of welcoming Christ in those who otherwise could not afford the clothing, the furniture, the books, the toys, the rich offering of gifts. We watch a community transformed by its connection to the rest of the Palouse, as friends show up to help with the work, and work carries on uninterrupted for days on end. I helped with the teardown yesterday, when the goods that were left over, unbelievable abundance, were boxed up and carted away by yet another community outreach organization serving the poor in Moscow. The funds we’ve gathered at St. James will support the work of the church both in forming the Christian witness of our youth and in direct assistance to the community in need. When the rummage sale calls, there isn’t a lot of time for sitting in devotion, but there is time today to thank our volunteers and hard workers, and also to thank God for this incredible outpouring of generosity, creativity, and abundance in our midst. We give thanks to God for this opportunity to sit in awe at the face of Christ in our midst.

Merton and the Plumb Line – July 11, 2010

Back on the Palouse and a warm welcome into the blessing that is St. James’ Episcopal Church. The day after my arrival, my stepson Steven, who hosted me when I began my journey, arrived with his two children to begin work on the Rivetti memorial fence. I learned a lot through watching him work with the army of parish volunteers the importance of measuring, re-measuring, checking and re-checking the level before any piece of wood went up.

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 11, 2010

Amos 7:1-17; Luke 10:25-37

Midway through my sabbatical I spent a relaxing ten days in the home of my friend and seminary classmate, the Rev. Carol Westpfahl, in Newtown CT. Carol graciously welcomed me into her home, warning me that although we might make a few sightseeing trips into New York, she had a lot of work to do which meant that I, poor me, had hours on end to read, to pray, to reflect.

On Carol’s refrigerator is the usual sort of collection one might find especially in a home without children. Calendars. Notes from friends; a card from her ordination; and a picture that I remembered from the last time I visited her in the fall of 2005. A grainy photocopy of an even grainer black and white photo apparently clipped from a book or article, with the caption “Thomas Merton said this is the only known photograph of God”– with photo credits to Thomas Merton. There’s no background – only a somewhat familiar object rendered unfamiliar by it being suspended as if in space, or no space. A cable hung with a lead weight – an industrial strength plumb line in fact – at the end of which is attached a powerful grappling hook.

Maybe it’s the hours of solitary thinking, but the picture just rang true.

The Lord God said to Amos, “Amos, what do you see?” The text we hear in the prophet is one of judging. The wall is going to fall down; Israel is going to collapse. If we’ve heard this story before, perhaps a hundred times since we were children, it’s always one that seems to chastise, to tell us to get into shape, rise to Level 4 Christianity, get right with Jesus — or else. Or else. But Merton’s photo reminds us that the snapshot of God we hear about in Amos is only part of the story. There’s the hook made of the same hard metal – the unyielding embrace of God pulling us always back.

The legal expert asks Jesus for a judgment. For holding up the plumb line and saying, yep, you’re good. You fit. You’re upright and righteous. But Jesus adds the hook. Jesus summarizes the law and includes that bit about the neighbor, and the lawyer asks that question, just to make sure we’re clear about which neighbor we’re supposed to love with the same impractical and outrageously over the top love we’re supposed to give to God. And before we get to the rest of the story, let’s think about another time when a young man asks Jesus about how to inherit eternal life. Remember how Jesus says you know the commandments – and proceeds to enumerate the neighborly ones. Not the ones that get carved first in those tablets you can buy for your display. About God and graven images. But the ones that talk about relationship with our neighbor. Stealing, defrauding, cheating, honoring elders, releasing workers on the holy Sabbath – those commandments are the ones that roll off Jesus’ lips that time. And the young man answers, I have kept all these my whole life. Well, there’s just one more thing – we know it, right? Sell all you have and give it to the poor.

Plumb line. Oops. The young man is on the wrong side of it. He goes off in despair because he has many possessions.

And today there’s another guy asking for the plumb line again – you know the law says Jesus – love God, love neighbor. And he thinks, I’m doing better than that poor guy who was told to give away all his stuff, but JUST in case, I want to make sure I’ve got the line in the right place. OK, I’ll bite. Who’s my neighbor?

A man went to Jericho. …Who’s my neighbor?

I was riding in to Whitefish, Montana, on the train, having departed at 11 from St. Paul, and not succeeding in getting much sleep. The car was cold, and in my rush to check my bags I had left my Amtrak blanket packed in my checked luggage. That and the steward kept coming through to rearrange the seating and to warn us not to get too comfortable since there would be passengers getting on in the middle of the night. My neighbor was a woman in her 70s who got on in the middle of the night. We exchanged brief greetings then went back to the business of closing our eyes. When morning came I crept over her to go downstairs and buy a cup of coffee – and another Amtrak blanket so I could fall back to sleep while we crossed North Dakota and Montana. When we both woke up she told me she had had to leave in a hurry from Brainerd because her son was not well, and she was hoping to get to Sandpoint in time. Hurry up and wait – ride a train across the country because that’s the only way to get there in time. To pass the time I asked for her story and she told me of her life growing up as one of 10 children on the plains, and marrying her husband who worked on the railroads his whole life – he built and maintained the tracks – and who retired as the writing appeared on the wall when Burlington Northern was sold. Her story sounded like the stories I’d been reading in Kathleen Norris’ books about life on the northern plains, about the lives described in Amazing Grace, Dakota, Acedia and Me. Hard lives, with joy carved out in snatches of memory against harsh elements, joy and loss shared with tenacity and fierce neighbors. She worked in the schools as a classroom assistant. She worked in her church as the secretary of missions. Her son had been an adventurer, hard time settling down, traveled to Alaska, then the wilds of Idaho. Life ate him up from the insides. When she was able to get cell phone reception in Havre, she learned he didn’t make it. We prayed together in that train car, we told stories, we laughed a little, we passed the hours, now longer and slower as we approached the point of my departure. She’d be getting off in the middle of another night. Meeting a daughter who had driven up from Billings, before they made that hard journey to Sandpoint to join her daughter-in-law and take on that solemn task no mother dreams of doing. I told her that if she were in my parish we’d have a prayer shawl for her to remind her of the prayers of our community. Oh, yes, they had a prayer shawl ministry in her own congregation back in Minnesota. Fortunately there was this new Amtrak blanket that I could place over her shoulders with another prayer for her safe journey.

Well, I don’t know who got the neighborly treatment that long day on the train. Was it my seatmate who got the pastoral presence she deserved as she went to join her family in their awful duty of burying her child? Or was it me, after two months of traveling away from this place, after a week spent in quiet prayer with monks in Minnesota, who had the honor of remembering my priestly care of souls?

The plumb line of judgment is never there because God wants to knock down crooked walls. The plumb line is there so we can remember, we can be recalled If we have a hard time remembering, the hook is there, too. The story that grabs us, recalls us, brings us back.

When we were talking on the train my neighbor tentatively ventured a question, careful in that she knew I was an Episcopalian, about whether we’d had, um, problems in our churches, you know, with the gays. Oh, how to be gentle with a grieving mother now! I think all of our churches, I replied, your church as well as mine, have been disrupted from their comfortable places as we keep remembering how to do what we’re supposed to do. Heck, my church has been in turmoil ever since they started ordaining women, and that was back in the 1970s.

I’d only earlier that day been reading about the dustup over the Archbishop of Canterbury making our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, present evidence of her credentials before being allowed to celebrate and preach in Southwark Cathedral in England. A dustup that makes us wonder whether our church can ever be relevant. What are we supposed to be doing? Fighting over mitres and credentials? Or proclaiming God’s new creation, God’s constant outreach to us throughout time and most especially through Jesus, the incarnate Word.

Urgency about embracing our neighbor, the ones who seem so different from us all, so scary. We have an opportunity coming up next month in fact to participate in the Diocesan Training in Anti-Racism, “Seeing the Face of God in Each Other,” in Moses Lake at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. We who take this course, who train others in this course, are building a grass-roots cadre of people who unite as allies in combating racism. All the clergy of the diocese are required to take it; all the lay leadership of the diocese are required to take it. But it’s open to anyone who wants to join.

As we find ourselves stumbling in national discourse about immigration, reaching for just solutions that are also compassionate, we may think of the plumb line and the hook. My father-in-law, that French chef whose picture you see guiding you into my kitchen, was an illegal immigrant from the south of France when he came to this country in the 1920s. He worked in Hell’s Kitchen in New York, and married a young woman from Connecticut who had been brought here from Italy when she was a toddler. They moved to New York and had a son, Robert, within their first year of marriage. And only after that did Michel Henri Rivetti go to Cuba and re-enter the United States with a valid US passport. ICE raids in the fruit-growing communities of Eastern Washington tear apart families, exiling to Mexico children and adolescents brought here as toddlers by parents risking their lives to pick in our fields the fruit that goes rotten when the immigrant workers are removed because no one else will pick the fruit. Our fear is of the less than one percent of illegal immigrants who are involved in the drug trade; our fear is of too few jobs going to people who do not deserve them. Our fear is of losing everything we have. Our hope is in the one who enables us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, whose perfect love casts out fear, and holds us ever upright and true in the holy fellowship of righteousness and peace.

The Fourth of July

The congregation at All Saints’, Columbia Falls, Montana, is a blending of two congregations at Whitefish and Columbia Falls, that were united in a single building exactly halfway between the two parishes. The really long-term interim there, the Rev. Bradley Wirth, agreed to let me supply there one Sunday while he was away on vacation. Which was fortunate for me since I was still staying in his family’s guest cottage on the Fourth of July. This is the sermon I offered there on July 4:

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 4, 2010

2 Kings 5

Let me begin today by thanking you all for the hospitality you have shown me these past few weeks as I have sojourned in your land – actually as I have holed up in the Wirth guest cottage on the tail end of my sabbatical. The last time I was here, around five years ago, I was traveling with my husband George, who died last summer after a long illness. Bradley and Jeannine were at our wedding nearly 19 years ago. But before George and I ever met, Bradley and Jeannine first introduced me to the beauties of this part of the world, encouraging me to take a couple of camping trips to the Grand Tetons, and up into Glacier park. When George and I did meet some 20 years ago, it was our mutual love of the Tetons and the Continental Divide that drew us to one another in the first place. The Wirths have been a part of our love story for a very long time, and it is my honor to stand with you today so that they can continue their well-deserved time together.

If Bradley were preaching today, of course there would be some good quote from a book about United States’ history or politics. There is no-one quite as eloquent that I know who is capable of taking the deliberative procedures of governance, whether of nation or of church, and transforming them into pure poetry. I will not be able to do that. Instead I’m going to talk about the Old Testament. He warned you, didn’t he? I want to talk about the Old Testament for two reasons. The first is that Our Lord was formed by the Law and the Prophets, he was bathed in that world, and it was that world that provided the context for his story, and for the commentary on his story that so richly infuses Paul’s letters to Gentile believers. But the second reason is that this story about the prophet Elisha is just dazzling, and perfect for talking about politics.

First – let’s tell the story again. We get most of the story in today’s reading, but I commend the entire chapter to you for some light reading this afternoon when you’re home. Naaman is the commander of the armies of Aram. We never hear the names of either the king of Aram or the king of Israel in this story. Just the Naaman. Schwartzkopf; Eisenhower; MacArthur, Washington. That big. He has defeated the king of Israel in battle, but big and important as he is, he has a humiliating skin condition that under normal conditions would make him an outcast. If he lived in Israel, he would be forced to stand apart from the community, ring a bell to warn people away. He would beg for his living. He has leprosy. A girl whom he has taken as a prize of warfare and given to serve his wife tells the wife that there’s a holy man in Israel who can help the master. So Naaman tells the king that he needs to obtain this cure, and the king writes a letter to the wrong person. He writes to the king of Israel. Because that’s what kings do. They don’t write to holy men. They write to their equals. The king of Israel immediately suspects a trap. He tears out his hair, rends his garment, swears and stamps his feet. If you’re hearing this story being read, which is how Jesus would have heard it when he was a child, you’re rolling on the floor laughing at this point. But Elisha comes to the rescue – and says, “There, there. I’ll take care of the situation. Send him to me.” Naaman shows up and offers the rich and generous treasure of Aram. But Elisha leaves him outside, cooling his jets, and sends word that he doesn’t need the ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of designer clothes. The leprosy will leave him if he just washes seven times in the Jordan. Now it’s Naaman’s turn to become apoplectic. More comic relief as he struts and storms and refuses to be consoled and almost blows his chance at being healed. Who does this guy think he is? Doesn’t he know how important a man he is? And he won’t come out and see me? He won’t perform an incantation or ritual or sacrifice or prayer service on my behalf? He just tells me to get into that trivial little muddy river Jordan? It takes another servant to calm Naaman down enough to convince him that maybe, just maybe, this will work. And it does. Even though Elisha won’t accept the gifts, Naaman does pledge to take a little of Israel home with him, some holy ground, that he can carry around with him in his pocket so that when he has to do his duty back home, which does include escorting the king into the temple of Baal, and, can’t be helped, bowing down with the king when he does obeisance to Baal, we’ll all know that he is truly a servant of the one true lord, the most high, the God of Israel. There’s a little coda we don’t read but it’s important just so you can get the symmetry of the story. Elisha has a servant named Gehazi who is pretty chagrined that Elisha has turned down the rich offerings for the healing. So he runs after Naaman and says, “Funny thing, we forgot to mention the fee….” When Elisha confronts him and he tries to pretend nothing happened, Gehazi himself ends up with the leprosy. So we move in a nice symmetrical pattern from the outsider – the girl/slave/captive to the outsider/insider – powerful general with leprosy to the insiders – king of Aram / king of Israel – to the outsider who is truly inside, namely Elisha – and then the comic ending with the leprosy landing on the servant, like the yukky mess in the Cat in the Hat.

It’s a funny story. And memorable. In its day — perhaps when it was being told to the exiles living in Babylon — it subverted the structures of absolute power with the faith of the outsider, as so many of the stories of the Hebrew scriptures do. God’s saving acts in history are effected throughout scripture by the folks who have no authority to do so. Younger brothers; Canaanite women; Ruth of Moab; Elisha the bald, understudy acolyte of the great Elijah, Daniel the vegetarian prophet, Jesus the working class kid from Nazareth. Those last, least, lost, little and dead that we hear about so often from Fathers Capon and Wirth.

When Americans tell the story of the Revolutionary War, they, too, like to tell the story of the unlikely success of the war. Of citizen patriots, the ragtag army, fired by a dream of liberty, overwhelming the superior armies of the king. We in the Episcopal Church also have another story of what was going on in our own history. For many Christians in the colonies who were members of the Church of England – the church established in Virginia, in Connecticut, in New York, in Maryland, in Pennsylvania – it had been a solemn aspect of daily prayer to offer prayers for the king. Clergy when they were ordained swore an oath of conformity to the king as God’s chosen ruler on earth. When independence was declared in July of 1776, those same prayers for the king became an act of treason. One priest wisely offered “Prayers, O Lord, for those whom we have been asked to pray for.” Other priests went into hiding, struggling with their fellow Anglican Christians throughout those uncertain years to grasp what their new role might be. After the war, as the church began to reform itself the bishop elected in Connecticut, Samuel Seabury, could not be consecrated by bishops in England because he would have had to swear anew his allegiance to the king. The solution, as we know, was that Seabury would have to go to Scotland, where the non-juror bishops had moved after the Glorious Revolution. These men, too, had taken a sacred oath to another king, James II, as God’s chosen representative on earth. And then there had been a revolution that imported a new regime, and the bishops were required to swear a holy oath in support of the new monarchs, William and Mary. Some of them could not so lightly give up that first oath, no matter how glorious the new political situation. Like the American clergy, they were caught in the midst of the development of nations, in the wrenching divorce between nation and religion. It was these non-jurors –the non-oath-takers– who consecrated Seabury, assuring continuity with the uninterrupted line of bishops of Canterbury, and thus of the apostolic laying on of hands. In exchange for this act, the bishops asked Seabury to include a little something special in the new prayer book that would have to be written if Americans were to begin anew. Not just prayers for Independence Day and the Nation – though that was an important piece of the new prayer book. But an expanded form of the Eucharistic prayer, something they’d found in their exposure to the Orthodox Church in the East, something they’d been trying unsuccessfully to get the Anglican Church and the Parliament to adopt, something we now take for granted every Sunday, but something that distinguishes us to this day from the Church of England, which has never received permission from Parliament to replace the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer. A key part of that expanded prayer of consecration is something called the “epiclesis.” The what? Listen today as I speak the words on behalf of the assembled people of God, as I call on God to send the Holy Spirit – that’s “epikleo” in Greek – on these gifts – to sanctify this bread and wine – and then I ask God to send that same Spirit on us, to sanctify us. Or as the old Prayer Book used to say, “fill us with thy grace and heavenly benediction,”so that the blessing on the gifts of God and the blessing on us carries us from this table, to a mystical place where the substance of bread and wine, and the substance of you and me, meet and become one communion of faith and one fellowship beyond time and space. In our communion here each week we have a glimpse of that new creation Paul talks about in Galatians, new creation that wipes out ethnic differences, that takes us beyond the borders and dividing lines that separate us from one another. All that. From those outsiders up there in Scotland, consecrating that outsider American bishop so he could bring that back to us as the special gift, that little piece of Scotland perhaps tucked into Seabury’s pocket and reminding us of the marvelous ways we are interconnected.

Fear of that lordly power of English bishops urged the newly formed government to create a constitution that drew a bright line between church and state. The Episcopal Church that was formed here on the other side of the struggle for independence embraced that separation, and created governing instruments that reflect a revolutionary, radical, and even holy concept, that the “outsiders,” the unordained, the laity share authority in the church as baptized members of the Body of Christ. One of the ongoing gifts of our Anglican heritage has been the realization that people who gather in worship in the one, holy, church universal, are humans who order our lives in communities through negotiation and government and local understanding – that is, through politics. In our weekly gathering of faith, our holy meal of bread and wine, we members of the Body of Christ are lifted up beyond time and space into that heavenly banquet offered from before time. But here in Columbia Falls, Montana, on this Fourth of July, we come as citizens of a nation that fought hard to be freed from the tyranny of monarchy, a nation that has struggled with its own story of hardship and success, its dire history of genocide and slavery, its unprecedented might and vast if finite resources, its great capability and challenge and promise. On this day we come with special prayers that God will bless our nation’s constant project of renewal and reformation as once more we dedicate ourselves to the founding principles of justice and liberty to which our forebears once pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.