Christy Zuzelo Preaching
Get you Grandma and Grandpa on
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Texts of Terror
Rev Molly Phinney-Baskette
I hate horror movies. Watching a movie where you spend half your time waiting for something terrible to happen, and the other half watching the terrible thing happen, is not my idea of a good time. I never liked garden-variety slasher films to begin with, but now even the new brand of intellectual, artistic gore-fest is off the table. The Coen Brothers, who I used to love, are forever ruined for me. Quentin Tarantino is in the doghouse. The reason for my newfound sensitivity? I had a kid. Having kids cracks you open in a way you’ve never been opened; it makes you vulnerable, and anything dark or violent in your immediate vicinity leaks into all the new fissures in your soul. It makes it impossible to watch the evening news, let alone The Lovely Bones. I manufacture enough daymares and nightmares in my imagination now, without any help from Hollywood.
I have never understood, in any case, what pleasure there can be in watching the same old horror movie motifs over and over again: the threat of pure evil on the innocent, the foolish choices of that innocent, who goes into the basement when they should go out of the house, into the woods when they should run toward buildings and people and light. T the failure of supernatural help, the ultimate failure of the innocents to live, leaving only one witness alive to tell the tale, to pass it on, as a warning.
Which is why I get why it might be so hard for some of you to open your Bibles. Because you see, particularly Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Daniel, it is one horror show after another. The prophet Daniel is thrust into the lions’ den, where many other Jews have gone before, their bone fragments lying about, the smell of blood still heavy in the air. Joshua, the successor to Moses, has his Hebrew soldiers march 7 times ‘round the Jericho city walls. The walls fall down, the soldiers storm in, and they slaughter every toddler in diapers, every little old lady, face to face. And these are just stories we tell our children. What else is in there?
Tamar is raped by her brother. Jael kills her enemy with a tent peg through the skull. Lot’s daughters are sent out to the mob to be gang-raped in lieu of the visiting angels.
But perhaps the worst “texts of terror,” as they have come to be known since feminist theologian Phyllis Trible published a book of that name in 1984, are the Biblical stories in which God instigates the violence. The classic text is the extermination of all but 8 human beings, and most other life on earth, in Noah’s Flood. And then there are two stories we’ll look at more closely today: two children, beloved and wanted, come close to dying because of God’s command. What could be worse than the death of a child? If God is good and merciful, how do we swallow these stories?
A recap, so we know what we’re looking at. In the first story, Sarah is barren, the worst thing for a Hebrew woman. She is less than nothing without children. In desperation, she gives her maid to Abraham as a surrogate, and Hagar becomes pregnant. Hagar is young and foolish, and struts obnoxiously around Sarah as her belly swells. Sarah, embittered, treats her like garbage, and Hagar runs away, but God sends her back. Ishmael, her son, is born. Then in an interesting twist God gives Sarah what she’s wanted all along, and even though she’s an old woman, she gets pregnant. Isaac is born, and there is much rejoicing. But when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac one day, something breaks open in her, and it’s not compassion. It’s rage. Mother-bear, genetic-code-protecting rage. She orders Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away, into the wilderness. God agrees it’s for the best, and tells Abe to listen to Sarah. Abe gives Hagar some bread and water, helps her get Ishmael on her back, and they go. They don’t make it very far in the desert, under that North African sun, a young woman alone and her child. Hagar knows what she’s up against. She can feel death, calling for her and for her child. She might as well be running into the woods, or into the basement. Slowly, slowly, she puts Ishmael under a bush, a reflexive act of protection that will do no good. She shuffles a couple of hundred yards away, she sits down, and she wails, loud enough for heaven to hear, because she cannot bear to see her child die.
In the very next chapter, is an echo of child sacrifice. Isaac, this time, the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah, is to be put to death, simply to test the faith of Abraham. This story is a favorite of rabbis and atheists. Each of them use it to prove their point. Imagine Isaac, about 13 years old, going on a hike with his dad. Not only is he clueless about the danger that awaits, chattering on about pokemon cards and making star-wars sounds as he fights imaginary enemies, his dad actually puts the firewood that will burn his young body on Isaac’s own, skinny, pre-pubescent back. He is a young Christ, mounting Calvary.
There are a few different ways to read these stories. The one that brings the most relief is to read them as metaphors, etiologies, made-up descriptions of how things came to be the way they are. This isn’t a stretch, because it’s what, in fact, these stories were. Ishmael is commonly accepted as the mythical ancestor of the Northern Arab peoples—so his exile into the wilderness explains the fact of the Arabs’ wandering, nomadic nature. The struggle for succession and the right of primogeniture between Isaac and Ishmael also explains, and supports, the historic enmity between Jews and Arabs.
We can read the sacrifice of Isaac, and really, a lot of the carnage in the Old Testament, as a gloss on the many pogroms on the Jewish people through the ages, an etiology for why the line must remain ethnically pure, the people absolutely faithful to the Lord, the God of Israel, lest they disappear forever. And Sarah’s ability to get pregnant at the age of 90, foreshadows the rise of IVF in the late 21st century.
All this clever literary criticism might help us to feel better, feel as if we are living in a safe house of metaphor instead of in the painful reality of a world where women are demoted when they are infertile, where women still turn on women instead of on the patriarchal systems that oppress them, where children are still exposed on mountaintops or thrown into dumpsters, where child abuse and genocide still routinely happens.
Another solution to the texts of terror is to say that for Christians, the whole Old Testament exists as a foil for the New Testament—like, isn’t it amazing what God has done? How good of God to change His mind, to stop all that senseless violence, to stop it in the very body, the self-giving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all that nonsense come to an end at last. God is good. All the time. Except before 33 A.D.
But that is cafeteria Christianity, and a little anti-semitic to boot: to leave the God of wrath to the Jews, marry violence to their view of history, and to end up with Jesus, sweet of face, stringing daisies with the children. It’s dishonest, and it’s not true. Phyllis Trible says “to contrast the Old Testament God of Wrath with the New Testament God of Love is fallacious. The God of Israel is the God of Jesus: in both testaments, there is tension between divine wrath and divine love.” Just because God only almost permits the death of two innocent children—Ishmael at the mercy of the elements in the desert, Isaac at the mercy of his father on the mountaintop, doesn’t mean God gets to step in at the last second and play the good guy. “Oh, Hagar, I heard the child crying. Here’s what we’re going to do.” “Oh, Abraham, your faith is sufficient and complete, here’s a substitute.” God let His own son die, painfully, on the cross. The fact that he was resurrected doesn’t take away the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, which were real.
There are many tacks we could take to excuse God, and they are all worthy. We could say that the ways of God are inscrutable; that we are to God as the ant is to the human; we can’t possibly understand the fullness of the mind of God, we just have to trust that God knows what God is doing. But we can trust and love God utterly, and still feel that God has some explaining to do.
We could say that, in a sense, God grew up with us—just as in the Great Flood God realized another nature, and promised never again to destroy humankind by flood (gee, thanks God!), that God ultimately realized in the person of Jesus that only self-giving sacrifice would ever end the cycle of violence, so have we too matured, evolved, as a species. We have a better view of God.
We could say that all these stories are fallible, told from a human perspective, and that we attribute dark motives to God when they are, in fact, ours. For all we know, it was Abraham who dragged Isaac up the mountain of his own accord—Isaac, after all, was thirteen, and what parent hasn’t been thrown into a murderous rage at least once by their teenage child? Perhaps God was saving Abraham as well as Isaac.
But it is not our responsibility to make excuses for God to others, or justify these stories to ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, the point of these stories is much more basic. To make us feel, fully and poignantly, the value of each human life. To prevent us from forgetting Rwanda, Darfur, Dachau, to force us to bear witness to the continuing reality of all that Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael represent: the runaway, the stepchild, the single welfare mother, the aging wife made superfluous by the mistress, the bag lady, the refugee, the child dying of diarrhea for lack of clean water in the wilderness. All of these people are real, not ancient, not fairy tale characters; they live, and they breathe, and they fight, and they die. We know because we see these people; and we know because we are these people. Will we be broken open, are we willing to feel what they feel?
Perhaps, Trible suggests, the reason these stories remained embedded in our sacred text is to be a thorn in our sides, a reminder of our own dark natures, until we have finally and completely learned to live together without jealousy, ambition, the eternal violent struggle for resources and land and status.
When I went to worship at other churches this summer, I noticed a curious trend among trendy churches. None of them called what we do on Sunday morning “worship.” It was always “Worship Celebration” or “Gathering of Joy.” All very peppy and upbeat. Except, the thing is, it’s not always celebrating that we need to do on Sunday morning. Sometimes, we need to cry. Sometimes, we need to shake our fists at heaven, and where is the room in a Gathering of Joy to do that? Maybe that’s why these stories are here. Great wracking sobs shaking Hagar’s body, Abraham’s hand trembling above his son, his only son, whom he loved. Sometimes you just have to face the darkness, and live with the sadness. And yes, sometimes, God does swoop in at the last second to make things come right, or at least, more right than they were. As someone put it, “everything turns out all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” Will we refuse God’s help, however, and whenever, it comes?
Because another way to read these stories, is to say: we don’t know what would have happened IF. The big IF being: if people hadn’t listened to God, hadn’t trusted God utterly. IF Hagar had stayed with Sarah and Abraham, Sarah might have gone postal on Ishmael one day, a bloodbath. IF Abraham hadn’t raised that knife over Isaac, maybe neither Isaac nor Abraham would have gone on to lead and protect the many people in their care in the precise way that they did. Sometimes, only almost dying will teach you what life is worth. Walter Brueggeman, after he’d read Genesis cover to cover, and tried to make sense of these stories, said, “Faith is nothing other than the trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance.”
And maybe, just maybe, the point of the pointy, difficult stories in the Bible is to remind us that we do not live in a tame universe, that our God is not a tame God. The feminist sci-fi novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said it this way: “Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison, and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
I hate horror movies. Watching a movie where you spend half your time waiting for something terrible to happen, and the other half watching the terrible thing happen, is not my idea of a good time. I never liked garden-variety slasher films to begin with, but now even the new brand of intellectual, artistic gore-fest is off the table. The Coen Brothers, who I used to love, are forever ruined for me. Quentin Tarantino is in the doghouse. The reason for my newfound sensitivity? I had a kid. Having kids cracks you open in a way you’ve never been opened; it makes you vulnerable, and anything dark or violent in your immediate vicinity leaks into all the new fissures in your soul. It makes it impossible to watch the evening news, let alone The Lovely Bones. I manufacture enough daymares and nightmares in my imagination now, without any help from Hollywood.
I have never understood, in any case, what pleasure there can be in watching the same old horror movie motifs over and over again: the threat of pure evil on the innocent, the foolish choices of that innocent, who goes into the basement when they should go out of the house, into the woods when they should run toward buildings and people and light. T the failure of supernatural help, the ultimate failure of the innocents to live, leaving only one witness alive to tell the tale, to pass it on, as a warning.
Which is why I get why it might be so hard for some of you to open your Bibles. Because you see, particularly Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Daniel, it is one horror show after another. The prophet Daniel is thrust into the lions’ den, where many other Jews have gone before, their bone fragments lying about, the smell of blood still heavy in the air. Joshua, the successor to Moses, has his Hebrew soldiers march 7 times ‘round the Jericho city walls. The walls fall down, the soldiers storm in, and they slaughter every toddler in diapers, every little old lady, face to face. And these are just stories we tell our children. What else is in there?
Tamar is raped by her brother. Jael kills her enemy with a tent peg through the skull. Lot’s daughters are sent out to the mob to be gang-raped in lieu of the visiting angels.
But perhaps the worst “texts of terror,” as they have come to be known since feminist theologian Phyllis Trible published a book of that name in 1984, are the Biblical stories in which God instigates the violence. The classic text is the extermination of all but 8 human beings, and most other life on earth, in Noah’s Flood. And then there are two stories we’ll look at more closely today: two children, beloved and wanted, come close to dying because of God’s command. What could be worse than the death of a child? If God is good and merciful, how do we swallow these stories?
A recap, so we know what we’re looking at. In the first story, Sarah is barren, the worst thing for a Hebrew woman. She is less than nothing without children. In desperation, she gives her maid to Abraham as a surrogate, and Hagar becomes pregnant. Hagar is young and foolish, and struts obnoxiously around Sarah as her belly swells. Sarah, embittered, treats her like garbage, and Hagar runs away, but God sends her back. Ishmael, her son, is born. Then in an interesting twist God gives Sarah what she’s wanted all along, and even though she’s an old woman, she gets pregnant. Isaac is born, and there is much rejoicing. But when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac one day, something breaks open in her, and it’s not compassion. It’s rage. Mother-bear, genetic-code-protecting rage. She orders Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away, into the wilderness. God agrees it’s for the best, and tells Abe to listen to Sarah. Abe gives Hagar some bread and water, helps her get Ishmael on her back, and they go. They don’t make it very far in the desert, under that North African sun, a young woman alone and her child. Hagar knows what she’s up against. She can feel death, calling for her and for her child. She might as well be running into the woods, or into the basement. Slowly, slowly, she puts Ishmael under a bush, a reflexive act of protection that will do no good. She shuffles a couple of hundred yards away, she sits down, and she wails, loud enough for heaven to hear, because she cannot bear to see her child die.
In the very next chapter, is an echo of child sacrifice. Isaac, this time, the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah, is to be put to death, simply to test the faith of Abraham. This story is a favorite of rabbis and atheists. Each of them use it to prove their point. Imagine Isaac, about 13 years old, going on a hike with his dad. Not only is he clueless about the danger that awaits, chattering on about pokemon cards and making star-wars sounds as he fights imaginary enemies, his dad actually puts the firewood that will burn his young body on Isaac’s own, skinny, pre-pubescent back. He is a young Christ, mounting Calvary.
There are a few different ways to read these stories. The one that brings the most relief is to read them as metaphors, etiologies, made-up descriptions of how things came to be the way they are. This isn’t a stretch, because it’s what, in fact, these stories were. Ishmael is commonly accepted as the mythical ancestor of the Northern Arab peoples—so his exile into the wilderness explains the fact of the Arabs’ wandering, nomadic nature. The struggle for succession and the right of primogeniture between Isaac and Ishmael also explains, and supports, the historic enmity between Jews and Arabs.
We can read the sacrifice of Isaac, and really, a lot of the carnage in the Old Testament, as a gloss on the many pogroms on the Jewish people through the ages, an etiology for why the line must remain ethnically pure, the people absolutely faithful to the Lord, the God of Israel, lest they disappear forever. And Sarah’s ability to get pregnant at the age of 90, foreshadows the rise of IVF in the late 21st century.
All this clever literary criticism might help us to feel better, feel as if we are living in a safe house of metaphor instead of in the painful reality of a world where women are demoted when they are infertile, where women still turn on women instead of on the patriarchal systems that oppress them, where children are still exposed on mountaintops or thrown into dumpsters, where child abuse and genocide still routinely happens.
Another solution to the texts of terror is to say that for Christians, the whole Old Testament exists as a foil for the New Testament—like, isn’t it amazing what God has done? How good of God to change His mind, to stop all that senseless violence, to stop it in the very body, the self-giving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all that nonsense come to an end at last. God is good. All the time. Except before 33 A.D.
But that is cafeteria Christianity, and a little anti-semitic to boot: to leave the God of wrath to the Jews, marry violence to their view of history, and to end up with Jesus, sweet of face, stringing daisies with the children. It’s dishonest, and it’s not true. Phyllis Trible says “to contrast the Old Testament God of Wrath with the New Testament God of Love is fallacious. The God of Israel is the God of Jesus: in both testaments, there is tension between divine wrath and divine love.” Just because God only almost permits the death of two innocent children—Ishmael at the mercy of the elements in the desert, Isaac at the mercy of his father on the mountaintop, doesn’t mean God gets to step in at the last second and play the good guy. “Oh, Hagar, I heard the child crying. Here’s what we’re going to do.” “Oh, Abraham, your faith is sufficient and complete, here’s a substitute.” God let His own son die, painfully, on the cross. The fact that he was resurrected doesn’t take away the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, which were real.
There are many tacks we could take to excuse God, and they are all worthy. We could say that the ways of God are inscrutable; that we are to God as the ant is to the human; we can’t possibly understand the fullness of the mind of God, we just have to trust that God knows what God is doing. But we can trust and love God utterly, and still feel that God has some explaining to do.
We could say that, in a sense, God grew up with us—just as in the Great Flood God realized another nature, and promised never again to destroy humankind by flood (gee, thanks God!), that God ultimately realized in the person of Jesus that only self-giving sacrifice would ever end the cycle of violence, so have we too matured, evolved, as a species. We have a better view of God.
We could say that all these stories are fallible, told from a human perspective, and that we attribute dark motives to God when they are, in fact, ours. For all we know, it was Abraham who dragged Isaac up the mountain of his own accord—Isaac, after all, was thirteen, and what parent hasn’t been thrown into a murderous rage at least once by their teenage child? Perhaps God was saving Abraham as well as Isaac.
But it is not our responsibility to make excuses for God to others, or justify these stories to ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, the point of these stories is much more basic. To make us feel, fully and poignantly, the value of each human life. To prevent us from forgetting Rwanda, Darfur, Dachau, to force us to bear witness to the continuing reality of all that Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael represent: the runaway, the stepchild, the single welfare mother, the aging wife made superfluous by the mistress, the bag lady, the refugee, the child dying of diarrhea for lack of clean water in the wilderness. All of these people are real, not ancient, not fairy tale characters; they live, and they breathe, and they fight, and they die. We know because we see these people; and we know because we are these people. Will we be broken open, are we willing to feel what they feel?
Perhaps, Trible suggests, the reason these stories remained embedded in our sacred text is to be a thorn in our sides, a reminder of our own dark natures, until we have finally and completely learned to live together without jealousy, ambition, the eternal violent struggle for resources and land and status.
When I went to worship at other churches this summer, I noticed a curious trend among trendy churches. None of them called what we do on Sunday morning “worship.” It was always “Worship Celebration” or “Gathering of Joy.” All very peppy and upbeat. Except, the thing is, it’s not always celebrating that we need to do on Sunday morning. Sometimes, we need to cry. Sometimes, we need to shake our fists at heaven, and where is the room in a Gathering of Joy to do that? Maybe that’s why these stories are here. Great wracking sobs shaking Hagar’s body, Abraham’s hand trembling above his son, his only son, whom he loved. Sometimes you just have to face the darkness, and live with the sadness. And yes, sometimes, God does swoop in at the last second to make things come right, or at least, more right than they were. As someone put it, “everything turns out all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” Will we refuse God’s help, however, and whenever, it comes?
Because another way to read these stories, is to say: we don’t know what would have happened IF. The big IF being: if people hadn’t listened to God, hadn’t trusted God utterly. IF Hagar had stayed with Sarah and Abraham, Sarah might have gone postal on Ishmael one day, a bloodbath. IF Abraham hadn’t raised that knife over Isaac, maybe neither Isaac nor Abraham would have gone on to lead and protect the many people in their care in the precise way that they did. Sometimes, only almost dying will teach you what life is worth. Walter Brueggeman, after he’d read Genesis cover to cover, and tried to make sense of these stories, said, “Faith is nothing other than the trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance.”
And maybe, just maybe, the point of the pointy, difficult stories in the Bible is to remind us that we do not live in a tame universe, that our God is not a tame God. The feminist sci-fi novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said it this way: “Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison, and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
Sunday, October 4, 2009
How Do You Read Me? Let Me Count the Ways
Rev Molly Phinney-Baskette Preaching
Last week Laura Ruth kicked off our sermon series on the Bible with a whirlwind tour of the 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament. She did a remarkable job of summing up the WHAT of the Bible, and began to get us into the HOW. HOW should we read it? Is there a right way, a wrong way?
My doorbell rang in the middle of the weekday last week. I am an extrovert when I’m out, but an introvert when I’m in, and I live in dread of the doorbell ringing, jealous of any intrusion into my monkishness. But since sabbatical, I’ve been trying to be more open, to be attentive to the divine in each moment, and that means rolling with it, and answering the doorbell. You never know who it might be.
This time, it was a young man with beautiful black curly hair and an intense gaze beaming out of his brown face. A deep scar raked his forehead, impossible to ignore; this was a man with stories. He began to speak quickly in broken English, the Brazilian Portuguese occasionally cutting through, and gesticulated wildly at my roof. After looking anxiously to make sure that there were no cat-burglers or low-flying planes up there, I listened. I got enough of what he was saying to learn that he was by trade a chimney-fixer, and had gotten a good look at the state of Parsonage chimney, and was rescuing us from certain chimney-apocalypse. I explained that the house was in fact part of the church’s property, and I would need to consult with them about his services. His eyes lit up at the word “church” and he asked me if I went to that church, and did I love Jesus? How do you answer that to someone with limited English skills? I said yes, yes, that is my church, and I’m the pastor, and I love Jesus, very much. He became excited, and began to tell me about his own church, gesturing vaguely away from my chimney and toward the other side of Davis Square, a good church, with a good pastor, all of which he found when he arrived in Somerville from Brazil with no money, no job, no family. They had saved his life, he said, praise Jesus.
We chatted for a few more minutes, about chimneys and about Jesus, and he asked, “Do they preach the Bible at your church?” “Sure, sure, we preach the Bible,” I said lamely. But I felt like a hypocrite because I suspected the question he was really asking, if he’d had the language for it, was “Do you preach the inerrancy of Scripture? Do you believe that every single word of the Bible has proceeded directly from the mouth of God, and is literally true?” And, because my inner monk was calling me back into the office, and because I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, and because even I, after 3 years of seminary and eleven years of pastoring dread these conversations of theological one-upmanship, I said yes, yes, we preach the Bible. His ravaged face melted into an expression of fierce joy to hear that answer. “I could see, I could see you have Jesus in your heart. I have Jesus in my heart, too. I’m so glad for you, for this church. You know,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “there are churches that don’t preach the Bible. They not like your church and my church. Listen, I love your church; I come do the work for free. You call me, you CALL me!” he said, and he pressed his number into my hand, and went on his way.
Last Sunday, during the prayers, a woman I’d never met before stood up and spoke gently, fluidly, about the Bible. She said, the judgment against us unspoken, that the Bible was not fairy tales or fantasy, that every word was true, and that when she was ill, several years ago, it had saved her life. Then she blessed us, and walked out of worship slowly, with great dignity. No one knew what to think or say—should we feel sorry for her, for her obvious mental illness that led her from church to church, monomaniacally preaching inerrancy? Should we be angry that she had disrupted worship in this way, that she had shaken the dust off her sandals at us? Judge not, lady, and ye shall not be judged. Or perhaps we should feel corrected, take her words to heart—could she have been Jesus in disguise?
That man at the door, with Jesus in his heart; that woman in our church, who shook the dust from her sandals: are they really saying that if we don’t take the Bible literally, we have no place in the kingdom of Heaven? If it is so, that is just the kind of ‘you’re in or you’re out’ theology that has driven so many people away from Christianity entirely. And yet, these two people were full of love and gentleness, full of testimony to how God and God’s word had changed their lives. Doesn’t a part of you want what they have?
The culture wars over Christianity in the last 40 years have set us up for a false choice, between taking the Bible literally on the one hand, or taking the Bible as literature on the other. As for taking the Bible literally, I wouldn’t know how to begin to do that. In seminary, we read the Song of Solomon, a love letter. My professor handed out a representation of the author’s lover, with her neck like a stone tower of Lebanon, her teeth like lambs, her breasts like two gazelles, and we all had a good laugh. Clearly, the Bible’s authors used figures of speech to texture their language, to give it layers and depth, as all good writers do. So when I am told that I have to take the Bible literally, it’s not that I disagree per se—I just have no idea on earth how I would do that, even if I wanted to.
But on the other side of the scriptural football field, rooting for their team, are those who would reduce the Bible to literature, literature good or literature bad. When I was a younger, greener preacher, I’d get myself into a lot of trouble with my mouth. I once preached a sermon debunking the Nativity story as a fiction: there was no star, no corroboration of Caesar’s census near that time; even the dating of Jesus’ birth was wrong: my Harper Collins Study Bible notes that Jesus was likely born in the year 4 BC, that is, four years Before Christ. In the sermon I extolled the beauty of the Nativity as story: allusion, alliteration, chiasmus, o lovely chiasmus! The point of the sermon, if I remember correctly, was something about how the stories of the Bible don’t need to be historically true to have power for us, to be, spiritually true, the way a poem is. What I didn’t realize, while I preached it, was that I was stripping away the naïve faith of many who sat in the pews. It was worse than taking Santa away from them. One woman was angry at me for a whole year before she found the courage to tell me: simmering with anger at me through every coffee hour, every deacons’ meeting.
Of course, once that innocence is gone, it’s gone. And who among us would want to un-eat the apple? Our ability to interpret, digest, draw conclusions, our critical faculty is as much a gift from God as our childhood faith. But when we read the Bible only as literature, we find out that something precious is missing, the mystical experience. Because I can’t help but fit things into my own tidy dualisms, I might put it like this: literalists take the Bible as all mystic, no mind; literary types as all mind, no mystic.
So how are we to read it, bringing, as we do, our biases and our thickheadedness and our unique perspectives? Augustine, one of the great saints with feet of clay, said this about scripture. He said that if ever we read the word of God and in it we seem to hear judgment and hatred, we are to read it again. We are to look at it again, and again, until all we can see is love, because that is the sum total of God’s message. (reference Luke, turn to it) At least the lawyer testing Jesus got that part right: he answered Jesus’ question about the most important part of the Law with the Great Commandment, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Augustine gives us another example, which might help us understand when to take the Bible literally, and when to take it figuratively. It involves the letter to the Romans, which, incidentally, you can read with friends at New Old Fashioned Bible Study with Althea after worship today. Augustine tells us that when Romans says in Chapter 12 (verse 20) “if your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink,” we are to take that part literally, we are to literally tend to the physical needs of our enemies. But when scripture goes on to say, “…for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,” we are not to take that literally, because then someone might have to call the authorities; plus it would defeat the purpose of feeding our enemy to begin with. Augustine goes on to say “We cannot even take the expression figuratively, but unlovingly—as meaning that our act of goodness will shame the enemy, but rather, ‘love should call us to generous action, so that you understand the coals of burning fire to be burning sighs of penitence that heal the pride of one who grieves that he was an enemy to the one who relieved his suffering.” In other words, we are to love our enemies, because our love will be a refining fire that transforms them into friends. Everything in the Bible should be read in this light: read and read and read again, until our reading finally produces an interpretation that contributes to the reign of love.
If Augustine is right, if any way you slice it the only message in the Bible is love, how do we get past all of the other stuff, to that message?
Here is the thing. The Bible won’t yield its loveliness unless you love it. It won’t be trustworthy until you trust it. I love people, but I strive to love God above all people, to love God better than people, so that I may love people better, too. And I love books: I’d rather read than eat. But I love this book that God gave us above all books, so that the wisdom and insight it offers me may shed light on wisdom from every other book. The Bible is like any person—it will only reveal its secrets to you if you trust it; it only gives itself up to the person who pursues it in love. Maybe that is what the chimney-man and our guest in church last week were talking about.
There’s a phrase that has never let me go since I first hear it. It’s not from the Bible, but from a Bible wanna-be, another Gospel that the early church fathers chose not to include in the canon, the Gospel of Thomas. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was given to mystical statements about himself, and one such statement is, “Split a piece of wood, and I am there.”
This phrase says something to me about the elemental nature of God: that whatever Jesus embodied, we can see, encoded in all the bits of Creation, at a molecular level. And I’ve always experienced this in the Bible, too! That in spite of the surface contradictions and errors and widely diverging viewpoints; it has its own integrity, an order, a single Word underneath all of those words. If I could only take an electron microscope to the Bible, if I could just look deep enough, I would see a kind of cosmic code, not a series of zeroes and ones, but a single word, repeated over and over, the best word you can think of, a word that if said aloud would bring peace to the nations, cast out all fear. The word that says it all, that makes it all come right, all come clear.
Last week Laura Ruth kicked off our sermon series on the Bible with a whirlwind tour of the 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament. She did a remarkable job of summing up the WHAT of the Bible, and began to get us into the HOW. HOW should we read it? Is there a right way, a wrong way?
My doorbell rang in the middle of the weekday last week. I am an extrovert when I’m out, but an introvert when I’m in, and I live in dread of the doorbell ringing, jealous of any intrusion into my monkishness. But since sabbatical, I’ve been trying to be more open, to be attentive to the divine in each moment, and that means rolling with it, and answering the doorbell. You never know who it might be.
This time, it was a young man with beautiful black curly hair and an intense gaze beaming out of his brown face. A deep scar raked his forehead, impossible to ignore; this was a man with stories. He began to speak quickly in broken English, the Brazilian Portuguese occasionally cutting through, and gesticulated wildly at my roof. After looking anxiously to make sure that there were no cat-burglers or low-flying planes up there, I listened. I got enough of what he was saying to learn that he was by trade a chimney-fixer, and had gotten a good look at the state of Parsonage chimney, and was rescuing us from certain chimney-apocalypse. I explained that the house was in fact part of the church’s property, and I would need to consult with them about his services. His eyes lit up at the word “church” and he asked me if I went to that church, and did I love Jesus? How do you answer that to someone with limited English skills? I said yes, yes, that is my church, and I’m the pastor, and I love Jesus, very much. He became excited, and began to tell me about his own church, gesturing vaguely away from my chimney and toward the other side of Davis Square, a good church, with a good pastor, all of which he found when he arrived in Somerville from Brazil with no money, no job, no family. They had saved his life, he said, praise Jesus.
We chatted for a few more minutes, about chimneys and about Jesus, and he asked, “Do they preach the Bible at your church?” “Sure, sure, we preach the Bible,” I said lamely. But I felt like a hypocrite because I suspected the question he was really asking, if he’d had the language for it, was “Do you preach the inerrancy of Scripture? Do you believe that every single word of the Bible has proceeded directly from the mouth of God, and is literally true?” And, because my inner monk was calling me back into the office, and because I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, and because even I, after 3 years of seminary and eleven years of pastoring dread these conversations of theological one-upmanship, I said yes, yes, we preach the Bible. His ravaged face melted into an expression of fierce joy to hear that answer. “I could see, I could see you have Jesus in your heart. I have Jesus in my heart, too. I’m so glad for you, for this church. You know,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “there are churches that don’t preach the Bible. They not like your church and my church. Listen, I love your church; I come do the work for free. You call me, you CALL me!” he said, and he pressed his number into my hand, and went on his way.
Last Sunday, during the prayers, a woman I’d never met before stood up and spoke gently, fluidly, about the Bible. She said, the judgment against us unspoken, that the Bible was not fairy tales or fantasy, that every word was true, and that when she was ill, several years ago, it had saved her life. Then she blessed us, and walked out of worship slowly, with great dignity. No one knew what to think or say—should we feel sorry for her, for her obvious mental illness that led her from church to church, monomaniacally preaching inerrancy? Should we be angry that she had disrupted worship in this way, that she had shaken the dust off her sandals at us? Judge not, lady, and ye shall not be judged. Or perhaps we should feel corrected, take her words to heart—could she have been Jesus in disguise?
That man at the door, with Jesus in his heart; that woman in our church, who shook the dust from her sandals: are they really saying that if we don’t take the Bible literally, we have no place in the kingdom of Heaven? If it is so, that is just the kind of ‘you’re in or you’re out’ theology that has driven so many people away from Christianity entirely. And yet, these two people were full of love and gentleness, full of testimony to how God and God’s word had changed their lives. Doesn’t a part of you want what they have?
The culture wars over Christianity in the last 40 years have set us up for a false choice, between taking the Bible literally on the one hand, or taking the Bible as literature on the other. As for taking the Bible literally, I wouldn’t know how to begin to do that. In seminary, we read the Song of Solomon, a love letter. My professor handed out a representation of the author’s lover, with her neck like a stone tower of Lebanon, her teeth like lambs, her breasts like two gazelles, and we all had a good laugh. Clearly, the Bible’s authors used figures of speech to texture their language, to give it layers and depth, as all good writers do. So when I am told that I have to take the Bible literally, it’s not that I disagree per se—I just have no idea on earth how I would do that, even if I wanted to.
But on the other side of the scriptural football field, rooting for their team, are those who would reduce the Bible to literature, literature good or literature bad. When I was a younger, greener preacher, I’d get myself into a lot of trouble with my mouth. I once preached a sermon debunking the Nativity story as a fiction: there was no star, no corroboration of Caesar’s census near that time; even the dating of Jesus’ birth was wrong: my Harper Collins Study Bible notes that Jesus was likely born in the year 4 BC, that is, four years Before Christ. In the sermon I extolled the beauty of the Nativity as story: allusion, alliteration, chiasmus, o lovely chiasmus! The point of the sermon, if I remember correctly, was something about how the stories of the Bible don’t need to be historically true to have power for us, to be, spiritually true, the way a poem is. What I didn’t realize, while I preached it, was that I was stripping away the naïve faith of many who sat in the pews. It was worse than taking Santa away from them. One woman was angry at me for a whole year before she found the courage to tell me: simmering with anger at me through every coffee hour, every deacons’ meeting.
Of course, once that innocence is gone, it’s gone. And who among us would want to un-eat the apple? Our ability to interpret, digest, draw conclusions, our critical faculty is as much a gift from God as our childhood faith. But when we read the Bible only as literature, we find out that something precious is missing, the mystical experience. Because I can’t help but fit things into my own tidy dualisms, I might put it like this: literalists take the Bible as all mystic, no mind; literary types as all mind, no mystic.
So how are we to read it, bringing, as we do, our biases and our thickheadedness and our unique perspectives? Augustine, one of the great saints with feet of clay, said this about scripture. He said that if ever we read the word of God and in it we seem to hear judgment and hatred, we are to read it again. We are to look at it again, and again, until all we can see is love, because that is the sum total of God’s message. (reference Luke, turn to it) At least the lawyer testing Jesus got that part right: he answered Jesus’ question about the most important part of the Law with the Great Commandment, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
Augustine gives us another example, which might help us understand when to take the Bible literally, and when to take it figuratively. It involves the letter to the Romans, which, incidentally, you can read with friends at New Old Fashioned Bible Study with Althea after worship today. Augustine tells us that when Romans says in Chapter 12 (verse 20) “if your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink,” we are to take that part literally, we are to literally tend to the physical needs of our enemies. But when scripture goes on to say, “…for by doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head,” we are not to take that literally, because then someone might have to call the authorities; plus it would defeat the purpose of feeding our enemy to begin with. Augustine goes on to say “We cannot even take the expression figuratively, but unlovingly—as meaning that our act of goodness will shame the enemy, but rather, ‘love should call us to generous action, so that you understand the coals of burning fire to be burning sighs of penitence that heal the pride of one who grieves that he was an enemy to the one who relieved his suffering.” In other words, we are to love our enemies, because our love will be a refining fire that transforms them into friends. Everything in the Bible should be read in this light: read and read and read again, until our reading finally produces an interpretation that contributes to the reign of love.
If Augustine is right, if any way you slice it the only message in the Bible is love, how do we get past all of the other stuff, to that message?
Here is the thing. The Bible won’t yield its loveliness unless you love it. It won’t be trustworthy until you trust it. I love people, but I strive to love God above all people, to love God better than people, so that I may love people better, too. And I love books: I’d rather read than eat. But I love this book that God gave us above all books, so that the wisdom and insight it offers me may shed light on wisdom from every other book. The Bible is like any person—it will only reveal its secrets to you if you trust it; it only gives itself up to the person who pursues it in love. Maybe that is what the chimney-man and our guest in church last week were talking about.
There’s a phrase that has never let me go since I first hear it. It’s not from the Bible, but from a Bible wanna-be, another Gospel that the early church fathers chose not to include in the canon, the Gospel of Thomas. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was given to mystical statements about himself, and one such statement is, “Split a piece of wood, and I am there.”
This phrase says something to me about the elemental nature of God: that whatever Jesus embodied, we can see, encoded in all the bits of Creation, at a molecular level. And I’ve always experienced this in the Bible, too! That in spite of the surface contradictions and errors and widely diverging viewpoints; it has its own integrity, an order, a single Word underneath all of those words. If I could only take an electron microscope to the Bible, if I could just look deep enough, I would see a kind of cosmic code, not a series of zeroes and ones, but a single word, repeated over and over, the best word you can think of, a word that if said aloud would bring peace to the nations, cast out all fear. The word that says it all, that makes it all come right, all come clear.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Creative Expressions on Race, 4 of 4
This is part 4 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 4 features the vocal stylings of First Church's own Pete Shungu aka Afro DZ ak and all in attendance singing "We Shall Overcome."
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Creative Expressions on Race, 3 of 4
This is part 3 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 3 features the music of the First Church Somerville Choir Ensemble directed by Thom Whittemore and the poetry of Elizabeth West.
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Creative Expressions on Race, 2 of 4
This is part 2 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 2 features the music of Rev. Laura Ruth Jarret and the spoken word poetry of Vangile Makwakwa of Speak2BFree.
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Creative Expressions on Race, 1 of 4
This is part 1 of 4 of the Creative Expressions on Race program held at First Church Somerville. Part 1 features a poem by Meck and the music of First Church Somerville's Children's Choir directed by Thom Whittemore and Assisted by Melissa Hines
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
As part of its Sacred Conversations on Race Project, First Church Somerville invited artists to show and to perform works that illuminate and further our conversation on race and racism. This evening, which included spoken word, music, poetry, and visual art was called “Creative Expression on Race,” and was held on Sunday, March 22, 2009 at First Congregational Church of Somerville, 89 College Ave, Somerville, MA 02144.
www.firstchurchsomerville.org
Persevering up Heartbreak Hill, Racism Panel Discussion
Persevering up Heartbreak Hill is the Panel Discussion on Racism that was held at First Congregational Church of Somerville on April 30, 2009.
The speakers were; Elena Letona, who served as Centro Presente’s Executive Director; Somerville’s Police Chief, Anthony Holloway; our Associate General Minister of the national United Church of Christ, Edith Guffey; and Wellesley professor and the author of “The Knapsack of White Privilege”, Peg McIntosh will be our panelists. This panel of experts spoke about racism in Somerville, racism in religion, and racism in our congregations, amongst other things. The panel was moderated by Tim Duhamel and LaTayna Purnell.
The speakers were; Elena Letona, who served as Centro Presente’s Executive Director; Somerville’s Police Chief, Anthony Holloway; our Associate General Minister of the national United Church of Christ, Edith Guffey; and Wellesley professor and the author of “The Knapsack of White Privilege”, Peg McIntosh will be our panelists. This panel of experts spoke about racism in Somerville, racism in religion, and racism in our congregations, amongst other things. The panel was moderated by Tim Duhamel and LaTayna Purnell.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
How To Practice
Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett Preaches
We who were brought up in the church may be surprised by the thought that Christianity has spiritual practices like other religions we admire – like Buddhist and Judaism, to name two. Some of us thought the only practice of Christianity was the practice of belief. We were taught that the only way to be Christian was to believe.
Some of us have thought the stuff we were supposed to believe was crazy, ridiculous, hypocritical, evil! Trinity, virgin birth, died but resurrected, sins forgiven, a sacrifice of a son – what! These were offered as a set of facts or propositions, and our acceptance was supposed to happen instantly, magically. No!
I’m not even going to talk about stuff we couldn’t believe because our churches turned away the poor, the colored, the crazy, the queer, or because our churches taught that if you love Jesus, Jesus will help you get that Jaguar, that job, that distance from dirty.
Where I grew up, not believing was a big problem, and questioning that package of facts was dire. You were socially ostracized in this life and bound for hell in the next. Some of us turned ourselves inside out trying to believe, or else we found ourselves turning away from our home communities, we got the hell out.
Still, belief is important. Some folks have a gift for it, and some do not. For some, belief comes easily. For me, and maybe you, it doesn’t come instantly or at all.
Some of us have been and are inspired by Buddhism’s spiritual teachings, in my case, because Buddhism seemed to offer methods of spiritual practice, a way of coming to expanded knowledge and consciousness, a way of wrestling with belief. Sitting meditation may help us suffer less, may teach Buddha mind, truth mind. Practicing detachment keeps us from minding others’ business and keeps us focused on our own work. Practicing wishing all beings be well keeps us humble, wishing and working for wellness that includes community, the world, the universe.
I wonder, how did Jesus came to belief. Did he believe in God, or Judaism out of the shoot because, well, he was God? Did he believe in himself? But how did he learn how to marshall his energies, when to rest and retreat? When he was healing folks, how did he learn to let out the right amout of power so that folks were healed but not raptured or slain? How did he know when to raise someone from the dead (if we believe he did) and when to let folks lie moldering. How did he know or handle the fact that folks thought he was the Messiah? How do you learn how to do that, be the Messiah?
There is a body of legend, that says, during the years between his bar mitzvah at 12 in Jerusalem and taking up his “ministry” at about age 30 in the Galilee, he went to Persia, India and Asia, seeking the masters of spiritual practice.
In the novel Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Jesus, accompanied by his childhood pal Biff, goes first to the Wise Men from the East, Zoroastrians, to see if he can find out how to become the Messiah. The wise men helped him, then sent him on to consult and practice with Hindus, and Buddhists.
Our canonical scripture says nothing of this sort, and I don’t want to make too much of these stories, except to say that this novel is very funny and you should read it. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, to think about, that Jesus might have sought spiritual teachers to figure how use his spiritual gifts, how to live into his spiritual purpose?
Doesn't it make sense that we need spiritual teachers and practices to know how to channel our energies, to make some good disciplining choices to know how to use our spiritual gifts and live into who we are made to be?
So then, what would Christian practice be? What does Christianity have to offer that might help us expand our consciousness; deepen our awareness of what is truer than true, or that will at least help us through the night?
First I’d offer the idea that Jesus teaches ideas similar to Buddha. Buddhism, which precedes Christianity by 500 years, teaches living in the moment, worrying not about the past or the future. Jesus teaches that we should not worry about what we eat or drink. We should consider the lilies of the field. We should look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them. The Buddhist practice is staying present and the Christian practice is staying present.
Here’s a list of only a few spiritual practices from Christian scripture. All these are from Jesus’ teaching or Jesus’ example.
• Pray
• Take care of children, don’t mistreat them.
• Come away and rest.
• Feed the hungry, clothe the naked.
• If someone mistreats you, doesn’t welcome you, shake the dust off your feet and leave.
• Take time to reflect, eat, and practice compassion, these from our today’s gospel reading.
• Don’t commit adultery.
• Don’t lie.
• Don’t throw your pearls before swine.
These may sound like commandments to you, but I want to ask you to think about this list as spiritual practices instead of commands.
Take for example, “don’t throw your pearls before swine,” one of my mom’s favorites. I think this means stop doing stupid stuff to make people like you, I mean me. I think it means, mind my dignity. When I’m unwell, I’d really rather have people like me, so I like to practice being well, practice honoring my dignity. When I do practice being well and being dignified, I often find myself centered, happy, with a wider vision that my tiny misery, such a relief, and a compassion for myself and for others, one of the ways I know I’m Christian.
Another practice that maybe you thought was a commandment: you shall not commit adultery. Not committing adultery is hard! It takes spiritual practice not to step out on your partner! Some of us prefer the thrill of indiscretion to the centered, patient, kind, sometimes painful, sometimes dull, working out of relationship, or the careful dissolution of relationship that no longer works. What we learn from relationships, we learn about ourselves and about our relationship with God. So, practice fidelity in relationships, a kind of fidelity you and your partner work out. It takes practice.
Take time to reflect, what - while Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice are on the radio? But what if we did reflect on our behavior or our love, and we made choices about how to do it different or the same tomorrow, or next time, think of the trouble or the love we’d save.
Don’t lie. Figuring out how to tell the truth takes a lot of practice, telling truth not as a weapon, but as a means of being in relationship – letting your yes be yes and your no be no. Hard, work! Not a thing done perfectly, or instantly. It takes a lot of practicing. Once we stop being attached to telling what we wish were true, we can become free. This is what Jesus teaches, the truth will set us free.
Our church asks us to practice these: come to services, participate in communion, pray, take retreats, learn what’s in your bible and what it means to you in this generation, be in covenant with each other, the earth, and with those who seek God.
So how do we find practices that are our own? Choosing a practice that is connected to our sense of our authenticity, and engaging in the activities that fill us with joy, or contentment, a certainty of right action or spiritual solidity, activities that we are so committed to that we practice for hours and hours, becoming expert, these are the practices that are right for us.
Here are some spiritual practices that you have told me about this last week. Some of us play drums, learn Arabic, play violin, feed the hungry every Monday and once a month on Wednesday and Thursday, plan and lead services on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, and tonight for the first time, on Sunday night. Read, write, spend time with friends, paint, sculpt, sing, oh sing, play the organ, the piano. Care for children, read the 23rd Psalm, lead Bible study, take kind care of our bodies and others’ bodies and psyches, walk in nature, put things in our pockets that remind us to pray. If you love to cook and grow a garden, this is what you should do.
Here’s why. When we practice, we find our rest in God. When we practice, our consciousness is expanded, we fall in love with God, we fall in love with humanity, we find that we are right-sized and we like that. We find serenity, a peace that passes all understanding.
But also spiritual practice leads us into belief, belief that little by little, or maybe very quickly, causes us to understand truths too large to be contained by our puny, valiant, striving, resilient, market saturated spirits, truths that attempt to be explained by the metaphor of Trinity, or virgin birth, life that does not end. Here is a spiritual practice. Try not to limit the work of God. Try not to make the vast mystery of God small. Try not to get tripped up by other people’s metaphors. Have patience and let God be revealed to you, allow yourselves to be opened. This is my prayer for you.
We who were brought up in the church may be surprised by the thought that Christianity has spiritual practices like other religions we admire – like Buddhist and Judaism, to name two. Some of us thought the only practice of Christianity was the practice of belief. We were taught that the only way to be Christian was to believe.
Some of us have thought the stuff we were supposed to believe was crazy, ridiculous, hypocritical, evil! Trinity, virgin birth, died but resurrected, sins forgiven, a sacrifice of a son – what! These were offered as a set of facts or propositions, and our acceptance was supposed to happen instantly, magically. No!
I’m not even going to talk about stuff we couldn’t believe because our churches turned away the poor, the colored, the crazy, the queer, or because our churches taught that if you love Jesus, Jesus will help you get that Jaguar, that job, that distance from dirty.
Where I grew up, not believing was a big problem, and questioning that package of facts was dire. You were socially ostracized in this life and bound for hell in the next. Some of us turned ourselves inside out trying to believe, or else we found ourselves turning away from our home communities, we got the hell out.
Still, belief is important. Some folks have a gift for it, and some do not. For some, belief comes easily. For me, and maybe you, it doesn’t come instantly or at all.
Some of us have been and are inspired by Buddhism’s spiritual teachings, in my case, because Buddhism seemed to offer methods of spiritual practice, a way of coming to expanded knowledge and consciousness, a way of wrestling with belief. Sitting meditation may help us suffer less, may teach Buddha mind, truth mind. Practicing detachment keeps us from minding others’ business and keeps us focused on our own work. Practicing wishing all beings be well keeps us humble, wishing and working for wellness that includes community, the world, the universe.
I wonder, how did Jesus came to belief. Did he believe in God, or Judaism out of the shoot because, well, he was God? Did he believe in himself? But how did he learn how to marshall his energies, when to rest and retreat? When he was healing folks, how did he learn to let out the right amout of power so that folks were healed but not raptured or slain? How did he know when to raise someone from the dead (if we believe he did) and when to let folks lie moldering. How did he know or handle the fact that folks thought he was the Messiah? How do you learn how to do that, be the Messiah?
There is a body of legend, that says, during the years between his bar mitzvah at 12 in Jerusalem and taking up his “ministry” at about age 30 in the Galilee, he went to Persia, India and Asia, seeking the masters of spiritual practice.
In the novel Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, Jesus, accompanied by his childhood pal Biff, goes first to the Wise Men from the East, Zoroastrians, to see if he can find out how to become the Messiah. The wise men helped him, then sent him on to consult and practice with Hindus, and Buddhists.
Our canonical scripture says nothing of this sort, and I don’t want to make too much of these stories, except to say that this novel is very funny and you should read it. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, to think about, that Jesus might have sought spiritual teachers to figure how use his spiritual gifts, how to live into his spiritual purpose?
Doesn't it make sense that we need spiritual teachers and practices to know how to channel our energies, to make some good disciplining choices to know how to use our spiritual gifts and live into who we are made to be?
So then, what would Christian practice be? What does Christianity have to offer that might help us expand our consciousness; deepen our awareness of what is truer than true, or that will at least help us through the night?
First I’d offer the idea that Jesus teaches ideas similar to Buddha. Buddhism, which precedes Christianity by 500 years, teaches living in the moment, worrying not about the past or the future. Jesus teaches that we should not worry about what we eat or drink. We should consider the lilies of the field. We should look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them. The Buddhist practice is staying present and the Christian practice is staying present.
Here’s a list of only a few spiritual practices from Christian scripture. All these are from Jesus’ teaching or Jesus’ example.
• Pray
• Take care of children, don’t mistreat them.
• Come away and rest.
• Feed the hungry, clothe the naked.
• If someone mistreats you, doesn’t welcome you, shake the dust off your feet and leave.
• Take time to reflect, eat, and practice compassion, these from our today’s gospel reading.
• Don’t commit adultery.
• Don’t lie.
• Don’t throw your pearls before swine.
These may sound like commandments to you, but I want to ask you to think about this list as spiritual practices instead of commands.
Take for example, “don’t throw your pearls before swine,” one of my mom’s favorites. I think this means stop doing stupid stuff to make people like you, I mean me. I think it means, mind my dignity. When I’m unwell, I’d really rather have people like me, so I like to practice being well, practice honoring my dignity. When I do practice being well and being dignified, I often find myself centered, happy, with a wider vision that my tiny misery, such a relief, and a compassion for myself and for others, one of the ways I know I’m Christian.
Another practice that maybe you thought was a commandment: you shall not commit adultery. Not committing adultery is hard! It takes spiritual practice not to step out on your partner! Some of us prefer the thrill of indiscretion to the centered, patient, kind, sometimes painful, sometimes dull, working out of relationship, or the careful dissolution of relationship that no longer works. What we learn from relationships, we learn about ourselves and about our relationship with God. So, practice fidelity in relationships, a kind of fidelity you and your partner work out. It takes practice.
Take time to reflect, what - while Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice are on the radio? But what if we did reflect on our behavior or our love, and we made choices about how to do it different or the same tomorrow, or next time, think of the trouble or the love we’d save.
Don’t lie. Figuring out how to tell the truth takes a lot of practice, telling truth not as a weapon, but as a means of being in relationship – letting your yes be yes and your no be no. Hard, work! Not a thing done perfectly, or instantly. It takes a lot of practicing. Once we stop being attached to telling what we wish were true, we can become free. This is what Jesus teaches, the truth will set us free.
Our church asks us to practice these: come to services, participate in communion, pray, take retreats, learn what’s in your bible and what it means to you in this generation, be in covenant with each other, the earth, and with those who seek God.
So how do we find practices that are our own? Choosing a practice that is connected to our sense of our authenticity, and engaging in the activities that fill us with joy, or contentment, a certainty of right action or spiritual solidity, activities that we are so committed to that we practice for hours and hours, becoming expert, these are the practices that are right for us.
Here are some spiritual practices that you have told me about this last week. Some of us play drums, learn Arabic, play violin, feed the hungry every Monday and once a month on Wednesday and Thursday, plan and lead services on Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, and tonight for the first time, on Sunday night. Read, write, spend time with friends, paint, sculpt, sing, oh sing, play the organ, the piano. Care for children, read the 23rd Psalm, lead Bible study, take kind care of our bodies and others’ bodies and psyches, walk in nature, put things in our pockets that remind us to pray. If you love to cook and grow a garden, this is what you should do.
Here’s why. When we practice, we find our rest in God. When we practice, our consciousness is expanded, we fall in love with God, we fall in love with humanity, we find that we are right-sized and we like that. We find serenity, a peace that passes all understanding.
But also spiritual practice leads us into belief, belief that little by little, or maybe very quickly, causes us to understand truths too large to be contained by our puny, valiant, striving, resilient, market saturated spirits, truths that attempt to be explained by the metaphor of Trinity, or virgin birth, life that does not end. Here is a spiritual practice. Try not to limit the work of God. Try not to make the vast mystery of God small. Try not to get tripped up by other people’s metaphors. Have patience and let God be revealed to you, allow yourselves to be opened. This is my prayer for you.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Serial Shining
Serial Shining
One day, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton left the monastery to run errands in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. And there, between the dry cleaner’s and the grocery store, he had a religious experience.
He writes in his journal,
At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…to take your place as a member of the human race…I have the immense joy of being…a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate…If only everybody could realize this!…There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
People, have you ever had an experience like that—of moving through the city, and seeing everyone else walking around shining like the sun? I alternate those days with the days in which I wish everyone would just get the bleep out of my way. Or days when I think that humans, as a species, are really significantly less attractive than, say, cats. Those are the days when my mind and ego have the upper hand.
But oh, for those days when I can see with something like God’s eyes; when I can see into the true nature of people, into my own true nature, when everyone is illuminated and we are all walking around shining like the sun!
Why can’t we stay in that place, that place of shining? Why does it seem like the light flickers on and off? Why is it that we can’t always, or even often, see the way that others are shining, and shine ourselves with that holy glow?
I know your stories. And one thing we have in common, that you may not know we have in common, is that many of us are recovering nerds. Recovering nerds, unite! Hands in the air, for the recovering nerds! Recovering nerds find it hard, sometimes, to forget what it was like for us in school, a long time ago. We haven’t forgotten, and we haven’t forgiven. We were cast in the role of nerds and misfits because we were smart, or because we were poor, or because we asked too many questions; or because of our color, or our size, or our sexual orientation, or some cocktail of the above.
And we might have been ok, except that there were a few other kids who shone so brightly and left the rest of us in the darkness. Some of those kids were kind to us and that helped; but some of them were beautiful, and mean. I know now that they were mean because they were afraid of losing their shine and had to protect their dominance, defend it fiercely by putting others down, but man, did it hurt the ones they put down. In my version of the story, Danielle Daniels was the villain. Tall (but not TOO tall), blond, beautiful, and the Godmother of the junior high social mafia. Her shine was so tight that she didn’t need to do the dirty work anymore—she had a whole cadre of flunkeys who ran the mean girl franchise, and she just directed it from above, with cool gazes and flicks of her hair. She made fifth period orchestra hell for me, and likely for others, but such was her expertise that her victims never found each other, to band together and rise up against her. Dani was untouchable. When she walked down the hall, crowds parted, and people stared admiringly after her, shining with the artificial light of perfect perm, perfect clothes, perfect human approbation.
Years later, when I was in college, I ran into Dani. I had come into my own by then, had shed my geeky shell and gained self-confidence. I spotted Dani working the bar at a club on Lansdowne Street. She was still beautiful, but there was a whiff of brittle desperation about her beauty. She was riding that manufactured glory too hard: tight pants, big hair, frosted lipstick. I remember thinking, unkindly, “Boy, Dani peaked too soon.” At that moment it seemed like there was really something to God’s justice: the justice that says the rich will be poor and the laughing will weep—to suddenly see Dani, who had enjoyed such favor early on, slinging Lite beers to frat boys.
I felt schadenfreude then. I feel sadness, now. Maybe by next decade I’ll feel what I ought to feel: non-judgmental holy love. In the meantime, God has managed to teach me one lesson: what a gift it was to have to wait, to wait what seemed like a long time, to shine myself, to shine with a better light. At that moment meeting Dani again, I thought it was my new clothes, my new hair, that turned the tables. I know now to be grateful to all the people who coached me to pay attention to the holy shine within myself, the people from church camp and other places who said, “I see a spark in you, and it’s so beautiful. Won’t you let that light shine brighter?” I am also grateful to Dani herself, and to all the forces that shaped me, even those that hurt at the time. Some pastor or other said, “I try not to provide too much relief to people. Sometimes, the pain they are in is God letting the pressure build up, and if you take the pressure off, they don’t go and do what they otherwise might have done. They don’t become the people they might have been.” If the pressure’s off, if we get used to living in the artificial glow of human praise, we don’t wait for the better light, the better light of God, we don’t learn to want that light more.
Have you ever been friends with an old person you think is very beautiful, and you wonder what they looked like when they were young—they must have been a stunner, you think? And one day they die, and you go to the collation after the memorial service, and you look at the picture montages on the easel near the egg salad sandwiches, and you stare hard, because the person in the photographs, your friend, you hardly recognize them. The person in the pictures is really quite ordinary-looking. Homely, even. That can’t be the luminous being you knew. And the opposite happens, too: the beautiful person becomes ugly, not because of what age does to them, but because of what character does, what their particular wanting does. I tell my son, who is just learning to judge people by outward appearances: whatever is in you, beauty or ugliness, will come out eventually in your face and form. Some people’s beautiful takes a long time to come out. It takes a lifetime.
Let me tell you what I know about this beautiful, about shining with this kind of light, God’s light. Here’s how you can tell the light of God’s glory apart from the artificial light that humans manufacture: First, God’s light doesn’t require me to be less for you to be more: dumber so you can be smarter, uglier so you can be prettier, nerdier so you can be cooler. When you shine with God’s light, I catch fire too. It is a Mardi Gras 80s prom where every one of us Prom Queen. And the paparazzi go wild!
The other thing I know about the light of God’s glory, is: it can’t be willed or faked. It can be waited for, and deeply desired, and expected, but it comes when it comes and it goes when it goes. I’ve never met anybody who shines with it all the time. You find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you get your ego out of the way, and let the glory of the Lord come through. You might be on stage, singing a song you wrote, when this happens. You might be crying in the 4th pew at church, embarrassed, and hoping no one notices, but they do, and what they see is shining, and they shine back. Sometimes you can feel it in yourself, that your skin or your eyes are on fire; sometimes you only see it reflected in someone else’s eyes. And then the moment comes to an end. I call it serial shining.
It happens like this for everyone. It wasn’t any different for Jesus. He went up the mountain to be transfigured with light, and Peter wanted to hold on to the moment, to enshrine it, but it came to an end, and he looked like an ordinary man again. This was the very child of God, and even he didn’t shine all the time, neither with God’s light nor the light the people shined on him. The way his life went shows just how fickle and troubling human praise is, how little the favor of the crowd is to be trusted. Sometimes, Jesus was the life of the party, the bomb. People laughed at his jokes, and celebrities invited him to dinner and hung on his every word. He packed the stadium. But other times, nobody showed up. Or worse, they showed up with a lynch mob, pushed him around the locker room, crucified him. He was their mascot one day, scapegoat the next. You just can’t rely on the good favor of the crowd. Wait for the better light. Make room for it. It will come and go.
So much depends on our letting that better light shine from us. Jesus’ little speech that Laura Ruth read for us is part of his Farewell Discourse. He is leaving. He is dying. Maybe to be resurrected, maybe not? Who knows at this point. And like anyone, he doesn’t want his work to unravel just because he’s gone. The disciples always change the subject when he starts talking about dying. They pretend they don’t know what he is talking about. Because they know, he expects them to take his place, to love one another like he loved them. And man, that work is hard.
This is the work that Thomas Merton achieved, for a split second, standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. He managed to love everyone as Jesus had loved him, as Jesus still loves him. This work is God saying, “You are to shine, not for your sake, but for MY sake. You need to show people I am alive and well and at work in the world.”
Peter Johnston, our former admin, and I are putting together a week of camp for junior high kids this summer. We’re going with a couple of other beautiful misfits from our congregation, nerds in recovery. The conference is about competition and cooperation, but what it’s really about is this business of shining with God’s light against the cold and fickle light of human praise. I wanted to call the conference “Winners and Losers,” but the camp directors thought that was too negative. “Why don’t we just call it Losers, then?” Peter suggested.
Because we’re not calling it Losers, I expect there will be at least a few Dani Daniels’s there, and I expect they have little to no idea of how much harm they’re doing. They’re just doing what everyone else who can does in junior high—posturing, self-protecting, trying to hold on to the little bit of light they’re standing in. But I hope they can learn something—I hope they learn to love someone who currently looks unlovely, and in so doing let God’s light shine through both of them. I also hope some kids who have never shined before, learn to shine, and are amazed by the light that is pouring out of them.
And, if we can’t give them that gift, at least we can say to all of them: “I see something in you. It’s something very beautiful. Trust in it. Wait for it. Wait for the better light.”
One day, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton left the monastery to run errands in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. And there, between the dry cleaner’s and the grocery store, he had a religious experience.
He writes in his journal,
At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…to take your place as a member of the human race…I have the immense joy of being…a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate…If only everybody could realize this!…There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
People, have you ever had an experience like that—of moving through the city, and seeing everyone else walking around shining like the sun? I alternate those days with the days in which I wish everyone would just get the bleep out of my way. Or days when I think that humans, as a species, are really significantly less attractive than, say, cats. Those are the days when my mind and ego have the upper hand.
But oh, for those days when I can see with something like God’s eyes; when I can see into the true nature of people, into my own true nature, when everyone is illuminated and we are all walking around shining like the sun!
Why can’t we stay in that place, that place of shining? Why does it seem like the light flickers on and off? Why is it that we can’t always, or even often, see the way that others are shining, and shine ourselves with that holy glow?
I know your stories. And one thing we have in common, that you may not know we have in common, is that many of us are recovering nerds. Recovering nerds, unite! Hands in the air, for the recovering nerds! Recovering nerds find it hard, sometimes, to forget what it was like for us in school, a long time ago. We haven’t forgotten, and we haven’t forgiven. We were cast in the role of nerds and misfits because we were smart, or because we were poor, or because we asked too many questions; or because of our color, or our size, or our sexual orientation, or some cocktail of the above.
And we might have been ok, except that there were a few other kids who shone so brightly and left the rest of us in the darkness. Some of those kids were kind to us and that helped; but some of them were beautiful, and mean. I know now that they were mean because they were afraid of losing their shine and had to protect their dominance, defend it fiercely by putting others down, but man, did it hurt the ones they put down. In my version of the story, Danielle Daniels was the villain. Tall (but not TOO tall), blond, beautiful, and the Godmother of the junior high social mafia. Her shine was so tight that she didn’t need to do the dirty work anymore—she had a whole cadre of flunkeys who ran the mean girl franchise, and she just directed it from above, with cool gazes and flicks of her hair. She made fifth period orchestra hell for me, and likely for others, but such was her expertise that her victims never found each other, to band together and rise up against her. Dani was untouchable. When she walked down the hall, crowds parted, and people stared admiringly after her, shining with the artificial light of perfect perm, perfect clothes, perfect human approbation.
Years later, when I was in college, I ran into Dani. I had come into my own by then, had shed my geeky shell and gained self-confidence. I spotted Dani working the bar at a club on Lansdowne Street. She was still beautiful, but there was a whiff of brittle desperation about her beauty. She was riding that manufactured glory too hard: tight pants, big hair, frosted lipstick. I remember thinking, unkindly, “Boy, Dani peaked too soon.” At that moment it seemed like there was really something to God’s justice: the justice that says the rich will be poor and the laughing will weep—to suddenly see Dani, who had enjoyed such favor early on, slinging Lite beers to frat boys.
I felt schadenfreude then. I feel sadness, now. Maybe by next decade I’ll feel what I ought to feel: non-judgmental holy love. In the meantime, God has managed to teach me one lesson: what a gift it was to have to wait, to wait what seemed like a long time, to shine myself, to shine with a better light. At that moment meeting Dani again, I thought it was my new clothes, my new hair, that turned the tables. I know now to be grateful to all the people who coached me to pay attention to the holy shine within myself, the people from church camp and other places who said, “I see a spark in you, and it’s so beautiful. Won’t you let that light shine brighter?” I am also grateful to Dani herself, and to all the forces that shaped me, even those that hurt at the time. Some pastor or other said, “I try not to provide too much relief to people. Sometimes, the pain they are in is God letting the pressure build up, and if you take the pressure off, they don’t go and do what they otherwise might have done. They don’t become the people they might have been.” If the pressure’s off, if we get used to living in the artificial glow of human praise, we don’t wait for the better light, the better light of God, we don’t learn to want that light more.
Have you ever been friends with an old person you think is very beautiful, and you wonder what they looked like when they were young—they must have been a stunner, you think? And one day they die, and you go to the collation after the memorial service, and you look at the picture montages on the easel near the egg salad sandwiches, and you stare hard, because the person in the photographs, your friend, you hardly recognize them. The person in the pictures is really quite ordinary-looking. Homely, even. That can’t be the luminous being you knew. And the opposite happens, too: the beautiful person becomes ugly, not because of what age does to them, but because of what character does, what their particular wanting does. I tell my son, who is just learning to judge people by outward appearances: whatever is in you, beauty or ugliness, will come out eventually in your face and form. Some people’s beautiful takes a long time to come out. It takes a lifetime.
Let me tell you what I know about this beautiful, about shining with this kind of light, God’s light. Here’s how you can tell the light of God’s glory apart from the artificial light that humans manufacture: First, God’s light doesn’t require me to be less for you to be more: dumber so you can be smarter, uglier so you can be prettier, nerdier so you can be cooler. When you shine with God’s light, I catch fire too. It is a Mardi Gras 80s prom where every one of us Prom Queen. And the paparazzi go wild!
The other thing I know about the light of God’s glory, is: it can’t be willed or faked. It can be waited for, and deeply desired, and expected, but it comes when it comes and it goes when it goes. I’ve never met anybody who shines with it all the time. You find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you get your ego out of the way, and let the glory of the Lord come through. You might be on stage, singing a song you wrote, when this happens. You might be crying in the 4th pew at church, embarrassed, and hoping no one notices, but they do, and what they see is shining, and they shine back. Sometimes you can feel it in yourself, that your skin or your eyes are on fire; sometimes you only see it reflected in someone else’s eyes. And then the moment comes to an end. I call it serial shining.
It happens like this for everyone. It wasn’t any different for Jesus. He went up the mountain to be transfigured with light, and Peter wanted to hold on to the moment, to enshrine it, but it came to an end, and he looked like an ordinary man again. This was the very child of God, and even he didn’t shine all the time, neither with God’s light nor the light the people shined on him. The way his life went shows just how fickle and troubling human praise is, how little the favor of the crowd is to be trusted. Sometimes, Jesus was the life of the party, the bomb. People laughed at his jokes, and celebrities invited him to dinner and hung on his every word. He packed the stadium. But other times, nobody showed up. Or worse, they showed up with a lynch mob, pushed him around the locker room, crucified him. He was their mascot one day, scapegoat the next. You just can’t rely on the good favor of the crowd. Wait for the better light. Make room for it. It will come and go.
So much depends on our letting that better light shine from us. Jesus’ little speech that Laura Ruth read for us is part of his Farewell Discourse. He is leaving. He is dying. Maybe to be resurrected, maybe not? Who knows at this point. And like anyone, he doesn’t want his work to unravel just because he’s gone. The disciples always change the subject when he starts talking about dying. They pretend they don’t know what he is talking about. Because they know, he expects them to take his place, to love one another like he loved them. And man, that work is hard.
This is the work that Thomas Merton achieved, for a split second, standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. He managed to love everyone as Jesus had loved him, as Jesus still loves him. This work is God saying, “You are to shine, not for your sake, but for MY sake. You need to show people I am alive and well and at work in the world.”
Peter Johnston, our former admin, and I are putting together a week of camp for junior high kids this summer. We’re going with a couple of other beautiful misfits from our congregation, nerds in recovery. The conference is about competition and cooperation, but what it’s really about is this business of shining with God’s light against the cold and fickle light of human praise. I wanted to call the conference “Winners and Losers,” but the camp directors thought that was too negative. “Why don’t we just call it Losers, then?” Peter suggested.
Because we’re not calling it Losers, I expect there will be at least a few Dani Daniels’s there, and I expect they have little to no idea of how much harm they’re doing. They’re just doing what everyone else who can does in junior high—posturing, self-protecting, trying to hold on to the little bit of light they’re standing in. But I hope they can learn something—I hope they learn to love someone who currently looks unlovely, and in so doing let God’s light shine through both of them. I also hope some kids who have never shined before, learn to shine, and are amazed by the light that is pouring out of them.
And, if we can’t give them that gift, at least we can say to all of them: “I see something in you. It’s something very beautiful. Trust in it. Wait for it. Wait for the better light.”
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Open Secret
The other morning I lay in bed, pondering the resurrection of my body from it, and listening to the radio. The radio announcer reported that to save money during the recession, the Commonwealth has decided to turn off the decorative blue lights on the Zakim bridge, to the tune of 5,000 clams per month. I was crushed. I grew up in Boston, and waited 14 years for those lights to go on. They started the Big Dig when I went off to college, and finished it when my second child was born. Every time I drive over the Zakim bridge, I delight in those lights. They make me feel like I can fly.
But it’s hard times, and I guess we all have to be frugal, and avoid showy displays of conspicuous consumption. To that end, the Easter story I told you earlier this morning was from Mark’s gospel, the economical gospel. He tells in a mere 8 verses what it takes Luke 12 to say, Matthew 16 verses and the noisy and bombastic John a full 18 verses to communicate the resurrection of Jesus. Mark was the first gospel written down, and therefore the least embellished. Of course, he had to skimp somewhere. So Jesus doesn’t actually make an appearance in Mark’s gospel. The stone in front of the tomb gets better lines than Jesus, in Mark’s gospel. The women come to the tomb, early in the morning, with their spices, wondering who will roll the stone away. They arrive to find the stone, which was very large, already rolled back. A young man, probably an angel, reports that Jesus is risen, but there’s no actual resurrection appearance. It’s a cliffhanger. The story ends here, with the women fleeing the tomb, trembling and bewildered. Mark tells us they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Well. They must have told SOMEone. Everyone knows women can’t keep secrets. Thank God. Otherwise we would all be at brunch right now. Which fills the belly, but not the soul.
Jesus is conspicuously absent from our own sanctuary—Protestants focus on the resurrection, not the crucifixion, so our crosses are always empty, to remind us. This being Easter, our church deserves fresh togs just as we do, and I want you to notice our new cross, and the candle stands around it. The candle stands were made by an artist and friend of the church, AJ Liberto. He made them out of scrap wood leftover from the demolition of the stage in our parish hall, a part of our history. He built the verticals and painted them with gold leaf, and then he made stairs. He left some rough, sanded some fine, some finer, and set them in order. The lower down the stairs you go, the rougher the tread gets. The higher, the smoother. You could say it’s a stairway to heaven, or to hell, depending on your perspective. AJ also made the cross, with a lot of help from my father George, who is a self-taught carpenter and general contractor. The cross represents all of our stuff, our baggage, our pain, transformed, redeemed, into order and beauty, mystically, by the work of crucifixion and resurrection.
The Christian journey is primarily about redemption, and about following the trail Jesus blazed through the world, through hell and into heaven itself. This is hard work. I can comfort myself, from time to time, that Jesus and I have at least this in common: assuming he took up the family business, as most first-century Jewish men did, we both grew up with carpenter fathers. It is a unique burden to bear. What growing up with a carpenter father means, is that your house gets fixed after everybody else’s. For four years growing up with my own father, I climbed a 14-foot ladder to get to my bedroom; he built the stairs just in time for us to move.
The stairs to our cellar, on the other hand, worked perfectly fine, but the lights to the cellar didn’t. To get to our cellar you had to go down the creaky stairs, round the bend and into the deepest darkest recesses, grope for the light bulb overhead, and turn it in its socket to illuminate the room. For a child or teen with any degree of imagination, it was an exercise in terror.
Once the light was on, you could go about your business, but before you went back up you’d have to unscrew the bulb again, gingerly, with your hand wrapped in your sleeve. And when the light was out, it was darker than ever before, because one moment you’re staring into the sun of a lightbulb, and the next, utter darkness. You’d have to wait there for a beat, two, three, in the void—until your eyes adjusted, until you could see the thin light curving round the corner from upstairs, and begin to make your way toward it.
The dark is such a primal fear. Anything can happen in the dark of a cellar. You could step on something squishy. Hands could grab you from behind. Creepy things with many legs could skitter over your toes. Every step you go down, the darkness envelops you more—it’s just in front of you, then it’s leaking around your sides, then finally it clasps hands behind you and claims you, forever.
But sometimes, we have work to do, and the work takes us down those cellar stairs: work like moving things around, or throwing things away. Sometimes, we don’t go willingly—we’re pushed, two strong hands from behind, and go tumbling all the way down. You know what I mean. You’ve had to go down into the darkness, into the thing that feels like it could be the death of you. You have survived your parents’ arguments, their divorcing. You have lost your jobs and wondered what you were going to do; quit your jobs and wondered who you were without them. You have lost your mothers and fathers and spouses; you have lost your babies, and wondered when the sadness would go away. You have survived cancer and car crashes, you have gone straight from chemotherapy sessions to day care to pick up the kids. You have moved schools, moved house, moved mountains. You have had your heart broken. And maybe you already realize how these things that happened to you were instrumental in your coming alive, really alive. You already know you have been resurrected like Jesus, and you have nothing to fear from death. But maybe you don’t this, yet, or maybe you need to be reminded, to practice that courage.
Here’s the thing about darkness. It looks so much darker when you’re looking into it from the second step of the cellar, than when you’re in the middle of it, looking for the light. There are two kinds of people: those who stay on the second step, and those who go down, deep, who follow Jesus in his descent into death, into hell, and from that darkest place, look for where the light is coming in. Sometimes they are the same person, on different days.
I want to be clear here, because here’s where a preacher can get herself in a whole lot of trouble. The Church has used either/or language for too many years; either you believe in this way, or you are going to hell. I’m saying something different. I’m saying: either you believe, believe in Someone beyond yourself, your nose and what it smells, your eyes and what they see, or sooner or later you will find yourself going through hell with no way out.
For shorthand, then, I’m going to talk just for now about believers and disbelievers. You don’t always find believers in churches and temples, and you don’t always find disbelievers outside of them. It’s quite a bit messier than that. But it is true that those who seek, are much more likely to find.
Disbelievers stay on the second step to the cellar, looking down. This is where the dark looks darkest, and has the greatest power over us—before we’ve confronted whatever’s down there. We all know people like this. We won’t name them. They live as people who have no hope, as Paul put it. They are people who just can’t get off the stoop. I once sat with a dying man, whose only way of relating to me, or anyone, was to talk about the Red Sox. His wife was pining for a word of love from him before he left, a word of recognition of what their many years had meant. But he couldn’t do it. All he could do was shout at the television, challenging the umpire’s calls.
As for believers, once you know how to recognize them, they are a dime a dozen. They say things like, “I thank God I got fired—that job was killing me,” or “I tried for years to get pregnant, and I realized I needed to let go of control and let God have a say.” The most showoffy example of a Believer in my life, currently, is my friend Caroline. She was just recently diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. “But it’s the GOOD kind of stage four cancer!” she says, and begins to recount all the grace-filled moments since her diagnosis. “I’m keenly aware of the gift of each day…the day that the Lord has made,” she says. “And now that I’m starting chemo, I get to learn about makeup and hair, something I missed out on when I was a teenager!” Like many people before her, Caroline is finding out how cancer is teaching her about the things in her life that need to die, and the things that are coming alive.
People, my friend Caroline is not looking on the bright side. That is not what she is doing. She is not making the best of a bad situation. What she is doing is going to Galilee after the risen Jesus. She really believes that because Jesus Christ has already tread the path before her, has endured everything she will and more, that: made like him, like him she’ll rise. This is the open secret of Christianity, and those who learn it have nothing left to fear. All they see is resurrection.
I know you. I know what you have gone through, are going through. I know that much of the time, you would rather keep things as they are, if you have any say in the matter. The devil you know is better than the angel you don’t. I know there are days when you want to sit on the second step with those who disbelieve, and look down into the darkness rather than be in the depths of it. But God can’t resurrect what’s half alive. God can only resurrect what has died.
I know there are days when you are deep into the darkness and don’t know where to look for the light, don’t know if you even believe anymore that the light will ever come, can’t remember that it was ever there to begin with. I believe, Lord, said the man, help thou my unbelief. Jesus disappeared into the darkness for three days before he rose from the dead. Sometimes we have to spend a lot longer. At first, when we’re there, we might act like disbelievers, and despair. We kick, we scream, we rage, we cry, we give up. Temporarily.
But then we might remember that God’s first words in all of holy scripture for Jews and Christians were, “Let There Be Light.” And there WAS light.
What did the world look like to Jesus, on that first day, after three days in hell?
What does it look like, when we emerge from the dark place of death? The light, impossibly bright. The world, impossibly beautiful. We’ve gone down to the cellar. We’ve done our work. We’ve rearranged our stuff, or thrown it away. We’ve found the wine, and broken it out. Nietzsche was wrong. Whatever DOES kill us, makes us stronger.
My children like to play a practical joke on me. I’ll be in the cellar sorting things, and they’ll turn off the light. All of that primal childhood fear will rise up in me, and I’ll muster my stern mother voice past the frightened child voice, and say “turn that back on!” and they’ll dissolve in giggles. And whether or not they turn the light back on, I can follow the sound of their voices into the light.
Maybe Mark didn’t finish his resurrection story because he intended for us to. The angel says to the women, “Jesus is not here, he is risen!” It suggests something that happened once, but is still happening, every day! Jesus, no longer bound by conventional time and space, can appear anywhere, to anyone, at any time! Go, said the angel, go ahead back to Galilee, you’ll see him there! Get moving!
Sometimes, you are the person at the bottom of the stairs, trying to orient yourself toward the light. When you’re there, in the darkest dark, I have something for you. Save it till then. It’s a word from an angel—this letter, sealed. It won’t mean anything to you until you are in the darkest place, fearing death. Then, open it, let it calm you, let it help you notice where the light is coming from.
But sometimes, Believers, you are the laughter at the top of the stairs, pointing the way to the light for those who are frightened. Leave that light on no matter what it costs. The angel said, “Go, go! Go ahead to Galilee, you will see him there!” Sometimes people can’t see Christ, but they can see you; you are the Christ they will see: the Risen One, the one who has come through fire, drowning, crucifixion, and now walking around alive, alive-o, and shining with the light of the world.
But it’s hard times, and I guess we all have to be frugal, and avoid showy displays of conspicuous consumption. To that end, the Easter story I told you earlier this morning was from Mark’s gospel, the economical gospel. He tells in a mere 8 verses what it takes Luke 12 to say, Matthew 16 verses and the noisy and bombastic John a full 18 verses to communicate the resurrection of Jesus. Mark was the first gospel written down, and therefore the least embellished. Of course, he had to skimp somewhere. So Jesus doesn’t actually make an appearance in Mark’s gospel. The stone in front of the tomb gets better lines than Jesus, in Mark’s gospel. The women come to the tomb, early in the morning, with their spices, wondering who will roll the stone away. They arrive to find the stone, which was very large, already rolled back. A young man, probably an angel, reports that Jesus is risen, but there’s no actual resurrection appearance. It’s a cliffhanger. The story ends here, with the women fleeing the tomb, trembling and bewildered. Mark tells us they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Well. They must have told SOMEone. Everyone knows women can’t keep secrets. Thank God. Otherwise we would all be at brunch right now. Which fills the belly, but not the soul.
Jesus is conspicuously absent from our own sanctuary—Protestants focus on the resurrection, not the crucifixion, so our crosses are always empty, to remind us. This being Easter, our church deserves fresh togs just as we do, and I want you to notice our new cross, and the candle stands around it. The candle stands were made by an artist and friend of the church, AJ Liberto. He made them out of scrap wood leftover from the demolition of the stage in our parish hall, a part of our history. He built the verticals and painted them with gold leaf, and then he made stairs. He left some rough, sanded some fine, some finer, and set them in order. The lower down the stairs you go, the rougher the tread gets. The higher, the smoother. You could say it’s a stairway to heaven, or to hell, depending on your perspective. AJ also made the cross, with a lot of help from my father George, who is a self-taught carpenter and general contractor. The cross represents all of our stuff, our baggage, our pain, transformed, redeemed, into order and beauty, mystically, by the work of crucifixion and resurrection.
The Christian journey is primarily about redemption, and about following the trail Jesus blazed through the world, through hell and into heaven itself. This is hard work. I can comfort myself, from time to time, that Jesus and I have at least this in common: assuming he took up the family business, as most first-century Jewish men did, we both grew up with carpenter fathers. It is a unique burden to bear. What growing up with a carpenter father means, is that your house gets fixed after everybody else’s. For four years growing up with my own father, I climbed a 14-foot ladder to get to my bedroom; he built the stairs just in time for us to move.
The stairs to our cellar, on the other hand, worked perfectly fine, but the lights to the cellar didn’t. To get to our cellar you had to go down the creaky stairs, round the bend and into the deepest darkest recesses, grope for the light bulb overhead, and turn it in its socket to illuminate the room. For a child or teen with any degree of imagination, it was an exercise in terror.
Once the light was on, you could go about your business, but before you went back up you’d have to unscrew the bulb again, gingerly, with your hand wrapped in your sleeve. And when the light was out, it was darker than ever before, because one moment you’re staring into the sun of a lightbulb, and the next, utter darkness. You’d have to wait there for a beat, two, three, in the void—until your eyes adjusted, until you could see the thin light curving round the corner from upstairs, and begin to make your way toward it.
The dark is such a primal fear. Anything can happen in the dark of a cellar. You could step on something squishy. Hands could grab you from behind. Creepy things with many legs could skitter over your toes. Every step you go down, the darkness envelops you more—it’s just in front of you, then it’s leaking around your sides, then finally it clasps hands behind you and claims you, forever.
But sometimes, we have work to do, and the work takes us down those cellar stairs: work like moving things around, or throwing things away. Sometimes, we don’t go willingly—we’re pushed, two strong hands from behind, and go tumbling all the way down. You know what I mean. You’ve had to go down into the darkness, into the thing that feels like it could be the death of you. You have survived your parents’ arguments, their divorcing. You have lost your jobs and wondered what you were going to do; quit your jobs and wondered who you were without them. You have lost your mothers and fathers and spouses; you have lost your babies, and wondered when the sadness would go away. You have survived cancer and car crashes, you have gone straight from chemotherapy sessions to day care to pick up the kids. You have moved schools, moved house, moved mountains. You have had your heart broken. And maybe you already realize how these things that happened to you were instrumental in your coming alive, really alive. You already know you have been resurrected like Jesus, and you have nothing to fear from death. But maybe you don’t this, yet, or maybe you need to be reminded, to practice that courage.
Here’s the thing about darkness. It looks so much darker when you’re looking into it from the second step of the cellar, than when you’re in the middle of it, looking for the light. There are two kinds of people: those who stay on the second step, and those who go down, deep, who follow Jesus in his descent into death, into hell, and from that darkest place, look for where the light is coming in. Sometimes they are the same person, on different days.
I want to be clear here, because here’s where a preacher can get herself in a whole lot of trouble. The Church has used either/or language for too many years; either you believe in this way, or you are going to hell. I’m saying something different. I’m saying: either you believe, believe in Someone beyond yourself, your nose and what it smells, your eyes and what they see, or sooner or later you will find yourself going through hell with no way out.
For shorthand, then, I’m going to talk just for now about believers and disbelievers. You don’t always find believers in churches and temples, and you don’t always find disbelievers outside of them. It’s quite a bit messier than that. But it is true that those who seek, are much more likely to find.
Disbelievers stay on the second step to the cellar, looking down. This is where the dark looks darkest, and has the greatest power over us—before we’ve confronted whatever’s down there. We all know people like this. We won’t name them. They live as people who have no hope, as Paul put it. They are people who just can’t get off the stoop. I once sat with a dying man, whose only way of relating to me, or anyone, was to talk about the Red Sox. His wife was pining for a word of love from him before he left, a word of recognition of what their many years had meant. But he couldn’t do it. All he could do was shout at the television, challenging the umpire’s calls.
As for believers, once you know how to recognize them, they are a dime a dozen. They say things like, “I thank God I got fired—that job was killing me,” or “I tried for years to get pregnant, and I realized I needed to let go of control and let God have a say.” The most showoffy example of a Believer in my life, currently, is my friend Caroline. She was just recently diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. “But it’s the GOOD kind of stage four cancer!” she says, and begins to recount all the grace-filled moments since her diagnosis. “I’m keenly aware of the gift of each day…the day that the Lord has made,” she says. “And now that I’m starting chemo, I get to learn about makeup and hair, something I missed out on when I was a teenager!” Like many people before her, Caroline is finding out how cancer is teaching her about the things in her life that need to die, and the things that are coming alive.
People, my friend Caroline is not looking on the bright side. That is not what she is doing. She is not making the best of a bad situation. What she is doing is going to Galilee after the risen Jesus. She really believes that because Jesus Christ has already tread the path before her, has endured everything she will and more, that: made like him, like him she’ll rise. This is the open secret of Christianity, and those who learn it have nothing left to fear. All they see is resurrection.
I know you. I know what you have gone through, are going through. I know that much of the time, you would rather keep things as they are, if you have any say in the matter. The devil you know is better than the angel you don’t. I know there are days when you want to sit on the second step with those who disbelieve, and look down into the darkness rather than be in the depths of it. But God can’t resurrect what’s half alive. God can only resurrect what has died.
I know there are days when you are deep into the darkness and don’t know where to look for the light, don’t know if you even believe anymore that the light will ever come, can’t remember that it was ever there to begin with. I believe, Lord, said the man, help thou my unbelief. Jesus disappeared into the darkness for three days before he rose from the dead. Sometimes we have to spend a lot longer. At first, when we’re there, we might act like disbelievers, and despair. We kick, we scream, we rage, we cry, we give up. Temporarily.
But then we might remember that God’s first words in all of holy scripture for Jews and Christians were, “Let There Be Light.” And there WAS light.
What did the world look like to Jesus, on that first day, after three days in hell?
What does it look like, when we emerge from the dark place of death? The light, impossibly bright. The world, impossibly beautiful. We’ve gone down to the cellar. We’ve done our work. We’ve rearranged our stuff, or thrown it away. We’ve found the wine, and broken it out. Nietzsche was wrong. Whatever DOES kill us, makes us stronger.
My children like to play a practical joke on me. I’ll be in the cellar sorting things, and they’ll turn off the light. All of that primal childhood fear will rise up in me, and I’ll muster my stern mother voice past the frightened child voice, and say “turn that back on!” and they’ll dissolve in giggles. And whether or not they turn the light back on, I can follow the sound of their voices into the light.
Maybe Mark didn’t finish his resurrection story because he intended for us to. The angel says to the women, “Jesus is not here, he is risen!” It suggests something that happened once, but is still happening, every day! Jesus, no longer bound by conventional time and space, can appear anywhere, to anyone, at any time! Go, said the angel, go ahead back to Galilee, you’ll see him there! Get moving!
Sometimes, you are the person at the bottom of the stairs, trying to orient yourself toward the light. When you’re there, in the darkest dark, I have something for you. Save it till then. It’s a word from an angel—this letter, sealed. It won’t mean anything to you until you are in the darkest place, fearing death. Then, open it, let it calm you, let it help you notice where the light is coming from.
But sometimes, Believers, you are the laughter at the top of the stairs, pointing the way to the light for those who are frightened. Leave that light on no matter what it costs. The angel said, “Go, go! Go ahead to Galilee, you will see him there!” Sometimes people can’t see Christ, but they can see you; you are the Christ they will see: the Risen One, the one who has come through fire, drowning, crucifixion, and now walking around alive, alive-o, and shining with the light of the world.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
One's Enemies
First Church Somerville, UCC
Lent III, March 22, 2009
Matthew 5:43-48
“One’s Enemies”
Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett
When she got the diagnosis of diabetes, it became her enemy. She remembers the day of the diagnosis. She said that day, after blood tests, but before she knew for sure, she ate a meal thinking this was the last meal she would eat as a normal person, though she had not been normal for a while. And then the diagnosis, the phone call, come to the hospital, pack bags for four days, don’t eat anything, she and her mom went to the hospital, crawled onto the hospital bed together, and cried for four hours. Diabetes.
She made diabetes her enemy. She fought with it, swore it would never limit her, she gave her energy to repelling it, made decisions about her life based on what she was fighting. She did what we all do with our enemies. She tried to win over it, ignore it, trick it, kick its butt. She lived as if her time was limited, as if she had no time.
He had a boss that he hated, he could not think of anything else. He’d get home from work and rant and rave – oh the injustice of it, how stupid was his boss, he’d go to bed at night scheming how to get even, how to avoid, or how to work around this boss who impeded all progress, this boss who was a bane and a boil on the butt of good people. At parties, he’d fume to all who would listen, at church he complained, he even wanted to tell his children, to turn the hearts of his small children against a boss whom they would never meet.
I want to know, who are your enemies? The Federal government, the tax structure, the bailout recipients? Are your enemies the Racists? Homophobes? Conservatives? Liberals? Evangelicals? Is the enemy your alcoholic mother, your wandering abusive father, your boss, your disease, your HIV status, your addiction, your empty womb, your partner-less home, your very self, your body fat or thin, your face without make up, the lack of bicep or the abundance of belly, your tendency to talk too much or too little? Are you your enemy?
So Jesus tells us, we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
We might be tempted to think, that loving our enemies is a kind of civic duty, a kind of polite way to be in the world, a kind of middle class exercise in decorum. Let’s not make a scene, dear.
Or maybe you think that, in loving your enemy, you’ll be acquiescing, giving in, losing in games or at battle, sabotaging the little self respect you do have, giving in, giving yourself away again.
If I love my enemy and pray for those who persecute me, I’ll lose my power, my mojo, my place, my life, my fight. I’ll be weak, a namby pamby, a girl (you see how sexism and homophobia work). Or, I am weak, a namby pamby, a girl (you see how internalized sexism and internalized homophobia work), and the only choice I have is a lame kind of love.
But I want to tell you that loving your enemy is mightier than hate, it is faster than a speeding bullet, and it is an altogether different thing. Loving your enemy is a strong kind of love. I want to try to tell you, to convince you that loving your enemy is a spiritual tool that does the work of helping you, helping us to move to the place of the light, a place of joy that is not beyond this world, but lives beneath the seen world in your spirit’s undercroft, inside your body and psyche, in the internal place that is as large as the universe.
Loving your enemy is one of the tools that we, as spiritual people, use to lift manhole cover that blocks our way to the place of light, to the spiritual delights of walking with God, of coming into glory.
I don’t mean coming into glory when you die, although Dibbie told me last week she wasn’t afraid to die because she’ll go into glory – what a strong statement from a bold woman! But Dibbie is already glory.
I mean between now and the time you die, loving your enemy is one tool to help you live in glory now.
Loving your enemy and praying for those who persecute you helps in three ways. It restores your energy. Loving your enemy helps you to heal. Loving your enemy helps you re-orient your life to your unique purpose.
Hate provides a lot of energy. It is why people who feel aimless, or depressed, or full of fear sometimes choose hate. Hate is a force, hate can give a direction, can give life meaning. Hating a thing or person gives agency, mastery. Hate can give a kind of control over a situation, where control is not available. I hate my disease and I will fight it to death! But hate takes a lot of energy. Dredging up high dungeon is costly. But most importantly, hate does the opposite of love. Hate constricts, tightens the body and soul, ties up knots in the conduits of love divine.
Love, which is not the opposite of acquiescence, blooms. It expands, makes room for prayer, and prayer allows for vision. Love restores energy, gives life, allows denial to dissipate as we are able to hold what is true. Love lifts and makes space to decide how to heal.
Loving our enemies can help us to heal. I know a woman who noticed herself in the mirror. She looked up and what she saw in the mirror scared and it shocked her because she looked just like her dad, who had hurt her, her dad whom she had made her enemy.
She decided that it was time to love her dad, to forgive him, not to let him off the hook, not to deny what he had done, not to acquiesce. But in order to heal, she knew, she had to forgive him whom she saw in the mirror, so that she could love herself, so she could become whole. For her, it was the beginning of living again.
This is tricky, here. Please hear me say this: if we choose love over hate, we do it for our own healing. Later, much, much later, when we are incandescently, deeply advanced, spiritual beings like Jesus, like Mandela, like Howard Thurman, we might choose love or forgiveness for the perpetrator’s sake, the disease’ sake, the addiction’s sake, the bad stupid boss’ sake. In the meantime, we can give these ones to God who can forgive for their own sake.
Please also hear me. I am not saying that by choosing to love your enemy, you must go back to your enemy, to your addiction, the one who harmed you. You don’t have to embrace the disease, the behavior. I’m saying, love provides a space to see, to know, to decide how to be free, and how to heal.
When we are healing, we can use our energy to live in the center of our purpose. Gianna told me when diabetes was her enemy, she decided she would be a doctor – it is noble to be a doctor. But Gianna is an artist. Being a doctor is good, but Gianna’s spiritual gifts are in art, music and love. When we are in the throes of battling our enemy, it is hard to see how to become the human we are. So many times, when we are warring, we become the human we aren’t. We do the things we were not made to do. We kill each other, we walk by the wounded, leaving then on the street, in shelters, and in our homes. We take on too much, or we identify ourselves only as not the enemy. when in truth, we might be. And this is no life, no life at all.
But this is a life. Friday before last, some of us went to Cambridge Ringe and Latin High School to be a presence to counter the demonstration of the Phelps clan from Witchita. They came all this way to hate the gay/straight alliance at the high school. Most of us counter demonstators didn’t hate back. This is what I love about some gay folks, in the face of oppression, we danced. Got a boom box? Got Sister Sledge? You’ve got love that stands against oppression, but not against the hater.
Do you see the difference? We dance in order to love ourselves, in order to free energy, in order to heal, not wasting any of our precious energy on hating the hater. We do not give in, but we do not bind ourselves to the enemy.
Bound up in hating, we would likely not be able to look across to the place where the Phelps were to see the young boy who held up an ugly sign, and wish that he be well and pray God to protect him.
You see, how it works. Loving your enemy is not an end in itself, not a tidy discreet action. Loving your enemy opens the door to dancing, to glory, to vision, to living inside your humanity and God given purpose. Loving your enemy helps you to wake up and see who you really are, where you really are, what you really want to do, and who is with you. In this direction is glory.
Loving who loves you – hah, child’s work. Even Gentiles can do it.
But loving your enemy . . . you may have a chronic illness, an addiction, an ex-partner, you may have a stupid boss, an alcoholic father, a cold mother, an imperfect body, but if you make them your enemy and hate them, they have you. If you love them, you can tend them, learn from them, bless them, and let them go.
You will find that you will want to be free, and that you want others to be free.
Be love, be love. This is how Christianity works. This is what Jesus told us to do. Be love.
Lent III, March 22, 2009
Matthew 5:43-48
“One’s Enemies”
Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett
When she got the diagnosis of diabetes, it became her enemy. She remembers the day of the diagnosis. She said that day, after blood tests, but before she knew for sure, she ate a meal thinking this was the last meal she would eat as a normal person, though she had not been normal for a while. And then the diagnosis, the phone call, come to the hospital, pack bags for four days, don’t eat anything, she and her mom went to the hospital, crawled onto the hospital bed together, and cried for four hours. Diabetes.
She made diabetes her enemy. She fought with it, swore it would never limit her, she gave her energy to repelling it, made decisions about her life based on what she was fighting. She did what we all do with our enemies. She tried to win over it, ignore it, trick it, kick its butt. She lived as if her time was limited, as if she had no time.
He had a boss that he hated, he could not think of anything else. He’d get home from work and rant and rave – oh the injustice of it, how stupid was his boss, he’d go to bed at night scheming how to get even, how to avoid, or how to work around this boss who impeded all progress, this boss who was a bane and a boil on the butt of good people. At parties, he’d fume to all who would listen, at church he complained, he even wanted to tell his children, to turn the hearts of his small children against a boss whom they would never meet.
I want to know, who are your enemies? The Federal government, the tax structure, the bailout recipients? Are your enemies the Racists? Homophobes? Conservatives? Liberals? Evangelicals? Is the enemy your alcoholic mother, your wandering abusive father, your boss, your disease, your HIV status, your addiction, your empty womb, your partner-less home, your very self, your body fat or thin, your face without make up, the lack of bicep or the abundance of belly, your tendency to talk too much or too little? Are you your enemy?
So Jesus tells us, we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
We might be tempted to think, that loving our enemies is a kind of civic duty, a kind of polite way to be in the world, a kind of middle class exercise in decorum. Let’s not make a scene, dear.
Or maybe you think that, in loving your enemy, you’ll be acquiescing, giving in, losing in games or at battle, sabotaging the little self respect you do have, giving in, giving yourself away again.
If I love my enemy and pray for those who persecute me, I’ll lose my power, my mojo, my place, my life, my fight. I’ll be weak, a namby pamby, a girl (you see how sexism and homophobia work). Or, I am weak, a namby pamby, a girl (you see how internalized sexism and internalized homophobia work), and the only choice I have is a lame kind of love.
But I want to tell you that loving your enemy is mightier than hate, it is faster than a speeding bullet, and it is an altogether different thing. Loving your enemy is a strong kind of love. I want to try to tell you, to convince you that loving your enemy is a spiritual tool that does the work of helping you, helping us to move to the place of the light, a place of joy that is not beyond this world, but lives beneath the seen world in your spirit’s undercroft, inside your body and psyche, in the internal place that is as large as the universe.
Loving your enemy is one of the tools that we, as spiritual people, use to lift manhole cover that blocks our way to the place of light, to the spiritual delights of walking with God, of coming into glory.
I don’t mean coming into glory when you die, although Dibbie told me last week she wasn’t afraid to die because she’ll go into glory – what a strong statement from a bold woman! But Dibbie is already glory.
I mean between now and the time you die, loving your enemy is one tool to help you live in glory now.
Loving your enemy and praying for those who persecute you helps in three ways. It restores your energy. Loving your enemy helps you to heal. Loving your enemy helps you re-orient your life to your unique purpose.
Hate provides a lot of energy. It is why people who feel aimless, or depressed, or full of fear sometimes choose hate. Hate is a force, hate can give a direction, can give life meaning. Hating a thing or person gives agency, mastery. Hate can give a kind of control over a situation, where control is not available. I hate my disease and I will fight it to death! But hate takes a lot of energy. Dredging up high dungeon is costly. But most importantly, hate does the opposite of love. Hate constricts, tightens the body and soul, ties up knots in the conduits of love divine.
Love, which is not the opposite of acquiescence, blooms. It expands, makes room for prayer, and prayer allows for vision. Love restores energy, gives life, allows denial to dissipate as we are able to hold what is true. Love lifts and makes space to decide how to heal.
Loving our enemies can help us to heal. I know a woman who noticed herself in the mirror. She looked up and what she saw in the mirror scared and it shocked her because she looked just like her dad, who had hurt her, her dad whom she had made her enemy.
She decided that it was time to love her dad, to forgive him, not to let him off the hook, not to deny what he had done, not to acquiesce. But in order to heal, she knew, she had to forgive him whom she saw in the mirror, so that she could love herself, so she could become whole. For her, it was the beginning of living again.
This is tricky, here. Please hear me say this: if we choose love over hate, we do it for our own healing. Later, much, much later, when we are incandescently, deeply advanced, spiritual beings like Jesus, like Mandela, like Howard Thurman, we might choose love or forgiveness for the perpetrator’s sake, the disease’ sake, the addiction’s sake, the bad stupid boss’ sake. In the meantime, we can give these ones to God who can forgive for their own sake.
Please also hear me. I am not saying that by choosing to love your enemy, you must go back to your enemy, to your addiction, the one who harmed you. You don’t have to embrace the disease, the behavior. I’m saying, love provides a space to see, to know, to decide how to be free, and how to heal.
When we are healing, we can use our energy to live in the center of our purpose. Gianna told me when diabetes was her enemy, she decided she would be a doctor – it is noble to be a doctor. But Gianna is an artist. Being a doctor is good, but Gianna’s spiritual gifts are in art, music and love. When we are in the throes of battling our enemy, it is hard to see how to become the human we are. So many times, when we are warring, we become the human we aren’t. We do the things we were not made to do. We kill each other, we walk by the wounded, leaving then on the street, in shelters, and in our homes. We take on too much, or we identify ourselves only as not the enemy. when in truth, we might be. And this is no life, no life at all.
But this is a life. Friday before last, some of us went to Cambridge Ringe and Latin High School to be a presence to counter the demonstration of the Phelps clan from Witchita. They came all this way to hate the gay/straight alliance at the high school. Most of us counter demonstators didn’t hate back. This is what I love about some gay folks, in the face of oppression, we danced. Got a boom box? Got Sister Sledge? You’ve got love that stands against oppression, but not against the hater.
Do you see the difference? We dance in order to love ourselves, in order to free energy, in order to heal, not wasting any of our precious energy on hating the hater. We do not give in, but we do not bind ourselves to the enemy.
Bound up in hating, we would likely not be able to look across to the place where the Phelps were to see the young boy who held up an ugly sign, and wish that he be well and pray God to protect him.
You see, how it works. Loving your enemy is not an end in itself, not a tidy discreet action. Loving your enemy opens the door to dancing, to glory, to vision, to living inside your humanity and God given purpose. Loving your enemy helps you to wake up and see who you really are, where you really are, what you really want to do, and who is with you. In this direction is glory.
Loving who loves you – hah, child’s work. Even Gentiles can do it.
But loving your enemy . . . you may have a chronic illness, an addiction, an ex-partner, you may have a stupid boss, an alcoholic father, a cold mother, an imperfect body, but if you make them your enemy and hate them, they have you. If you love them, you can tend them, learn from them, bless them, and let them go.
You will find that you will want to be free, and that you want others to be free.
Be love, be love. This is how Christianity works. This is what Jesus told us to do. Be love.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Cyborgs and Circumcision
This Sunday our Student Minister Joe Zarro preaches with out text about becoming a Cyborg and Circumcision.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Making the Faith Our Own
Making the Faith Our Own
I remember the exact moment I knew First Church was the right place for me. The night before I preached the candidating sermon upon which the congregation would decide whether or not to call me to be their pastor, the people held a meet and greet. When I got my first look at the potluck table, I knew. On the table, side by side, were Dibbie’s homemade lemon squares, and takeout sushi. I knew this was a church that could treasure the old and welcome the new. “I’m home,” I said to myself.
We lost our sister Virginia Saunders this week. She wasn’t young, and still, she wasn’t ready to die. We also weren’t ready for her to die. There are some churches in which the young people might breathe a secret sigh of relief when an old person dies. There might be inchoate thoughts in the subconscious, relief and even joy at the old making way for the young, freeing up resources, freeing up power and the possibility of trying new things. But here, when one of our elders dies, we know what we’ve lost. We don’t know the whole of it, but when the lemon squares start to disappear from the table, we realize more and more that the new generation of Christians is on their own, that our continuity with our past, theological, political and culinary, is going away. We are on our own—have we learned enough from our ancestors? Do we know how to lead, teach, pray, testify to the Good News?
Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is a young one. It is exactly 52 years old this year. We are, ironically, part of the oldest denomination in the U.S. as well, the Congregationalists, who came here as the Puritans and Pilgrims to escape religious persecution from the Church of England. John Robinson, one of their leaders, famously said “There is more truth and light yet to break forth from God’s holy word,” meaning, the Christian religion is a work in progress. Centuries later, the United Church of Christ echoed this testimony when it affirmed in its Constitution, “the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.”
“The responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own.” Do you feel it, people? Can we do this thing?
When I was a student minister, I worked at a juvenile hall as part of my training. Some of the boys, the boys with the most serious transgressions, lived on the locked unit, an unholy place that was essentially a prison. When I went to visit them to do Bible study, I’d offer to bring them a Bible for their very own. Several boys in particular said they’d like one, but said, “Make sure it’s the Holy Bible.” I didn’t know what they meant. I brought all kinds of Bibles: strawberry-leather gilt-edged, hippie-era with fake denim cover, in all kinds of modern translations. They’d flip through, read a few words, shake their heads sorrowfully. Not the Holy Bible.
On my next visit, one of the boys, Kenny, told me he’d scored one. A Holy Bible. He held it out in reverence. It was a King James version. Ahhh. The Holy Bible. “But can you understand what it’s saying?” I asked. They looked at me like I was entirely missing the point. In their minds, the less they understand it, the more power it must have. These were boys negotiating their way to manhood amidst violence and degradation; spooling their lives out in cinder block cells. I had failed to see that what they needed first was a taste of the transcendent—of awe, of reverence, of magic. But I was unwilling to let go of the urge to give them practical instruction to live a different sort of life than the one they had been living. From that day on, I brought the boys each two Bibles—a King James, so they could feel the mystical power of the Word, and an NRSV, so they could get some practical guidance in how to make their way in the world.
You heard the story from the book of Acts today. The Church of Jesus is at the same sort of cultural crossroads at which we find ourselves. It’s a small but growing Jewish sect that is struggling to decide what it means to be a member of it. How are they to navigate in the wider world, to be in it but not of it? Are they still, in fact, Jews, or are they becoming something else entirely? At this point, not a single person has ever been called a Christian—that won’t happen until Chapter 12, and we are only in Chapter 11 of Acts. Church isn’t as yet a place—there were no buildings called churches; but the word we have come to know of as church, ekklesia, from which we get words like ecclesiastical, meant gathering, assembly, or, more literally, a people “called out.”
In the midst of this, Peter, and Paul, and Philip and Steven and many many others travelled around Asia Minor teaching people about the rabbi Jesus, his message and his works. Up to this point, they only taught other Jews. But there are some non-Jews, Gentiles, who are eavesdropping, and want to get in on the game. This was repulsive to the followers of Jesus, who held themselves aloof and apart. They had their own rules and customs, which made them distinct and special to God, the most important among these customs, were circumcision and keeping kosher. This seems so antiquated to our modern minds, not to mention, exclusionary. It’s hard for us to understand what the big deal was about sharing a dinner table with a pork-eating Gentile, why Jews were so disgusted by other Jews who did it. It might help to think of it like sleeping around, and then bragging about it at coffee hour.
Cornelius was one such Gentile who wanted to eat around with Peter and the other Jewish Christians. Cornelius was a man who was very much in the world. He was a military leader of the Italian cohort, the repressive Roman regime, and his work had made him very wealthy. His slaves had slaves. And now he summons Peter, to talk about religion. Can we understand how strange and appalling this is? Think about it like this: a wealthy white American vice-president of Blackwater, calling a poor brown Muslim cleric to his gated community in suburban Iraq, to ask him about his faith.
Peter might have been as disgusted as an observant Jew should have been at such a request, but God had sent him a timely vision, in which God says, “What I have made clean, you must not call profane.” In other words, God affirms the responsibility of Peter, the head of the Church, to make the faith his own in this generation. Peter went to Cornelius, and they talked, and Peter was converted as much as Cornelius was. What he says is: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” These words struck me to the core: “anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” The two things that matter most to God are: reverence, and right action. These are like the two axes to the Cross: the vertical is reverence, reaching toward heaven, acknowledging the Divine; the horizontal, is right action, reaching toward one another in compassionate love.
As the Church grows older, as the Christians in it move through the centuries, we have a responsibility. That responsibility is to learn our history and orthodoxy, and at the same time, to live deeply in the world as it is, to make sense of where these meet. Our responsibility is to translate the Good News for those who have never heard it, speaking their language, making sense of the ancient faith in a fresh context. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Just think about what the last 52 years of the UCC have brought us:
~A revolution in how we communicate via technology
~A revolution in sexuality, including reproductive rights, fertility and homosexuality
~A revolution in how we travel, and how far
~A revolution in how deeply we can see both out into the universe, and into the building blocks of Creation
~A dramatic rise in single-parent families, and the number of families where two parents work
~A more dramatic demarcation between rich and poor, and a deeper relationship between the labor of the poor and the wealth of the rich
Or, in more precise terms:
Facebook, text messaging, IVF, abortion on demand, private jets, the space race, stem-cell research, Wal-Mart, factory farming, far-flung, frantic families who worker more hours for fewer wages, just to name a few.
What does Christianity have to say about any of these? In the United Church of Christ, we have a general Synod, a national meeting, every two years, and this body will reflect on issues of grave importance to modern life. Four of our men, Ian, and Jason, and Branden and Joe, are all going to Synod this year, and will bring back the wisdom of the whole with them. But our church has flat leadership—no Pope, no Collegium—which means we can’t just leave it up to Synod delegates every two years. We have a responsibility in between times, to figure it out for ourselves. Making the faith our own doesn’t mean “keeping up with the times.” Nor does it mean putting a strawberry leather or a denim cover on your Bible, or reading it with Kindle II. It means blowing the cover off the Word. It means blowing the walls off the church. And you are the Church that in this generation will make the faith its own—or will fail to.
Why is this so urgent? What does it really matter? It is urgent because the generation of people who are coming into power, young people ages 18 to 29, see the Christian church as increasingly irrelevant, and worse. Christianity is failing now more than ever to inspire people to reverence for God, and right action with one another, and with Creation.
Some of you are holding a little piece of paper with a word on it in your hands. They are not nice words. They are names that many young people, outsiders to the Christian faith, call us. I want you to hear those words and feel the impact of those words right now:
Antigay
Antichoice
Angry
Violent
Illogical
Proselytizing
Coercive
Nostalgic
Lukewarm
Empire Builders
Sheltered
Too Political
Boring
Judgmental
Hypocritical
Do you feel your defensiveness rise up? Do you suddenly want to prove how good we are, how pro-gay, peace-loving, hip, open and tolerant to those who would throw those stones? And yet, some of those names are founded in truth. The Christian church has been all of those things. But our work is not to win the approval of our detractors, to be liked. Our job is to make the ancient faith, a faith durable and beautiful, oriented toward reverence and right-action, to make this faith relevant to modern times: to speak our truth in words people can understand, a truth that will set people free, if they choose to be freed.
Over the next five weeks of Lent, we will gather every Wednesday, downstairs. We will pray and sing in the Chapel. We will break bread, and eat around with whoever walks through the door. And then, we will talk about how to make this faith our own in our generation. It is not an intellectual exercise, tidy and sterile. It is not something we will do for those poor people who have no faith, like we do. We’ll do it for ourselves, to deepen our own sense of reverence and right action, and then we will do our best to be the Church in this generation: not a building full of people, huddled together, but a book with the cover blown off, a church with the walls blown off, a people called out to speak with our lives.
I remember the exact moment I knew First Church was the right place for me. The night before I preached the candidating sermon upon which the congregation would decide whether or not to call me to be their pastor, the people held a meet and greet. When I got my first look at the potluck table, I knew. On the table, side by side, were Dibbie’s homemade lemon squares, and takeout sushi. I knew this was a church that could treasure the old and welcome the new. “I’m home,” I said to myself.
We lost our sister Virginia Saunders this week. She wasn’t young, and still, she wasn’t ready to die. We also weren’t ready for her to die. There are some churches in which the young people might breathe a secret sigh of relief when an old person dies. There might be inchoate thoughts in the subconscious, relief and even joy at the old making way for the young, freeing up resources, freeing up power and the possibility of trying new things. But here, when one of our elders dies, we know what we’ve lost. We don’t know the whole of it, but when the lemon squares start to disappear from the table, we realize more and more that the new generation of Christians is on their own, that our continuity with our past, theological, political and culinary, is going away. We are on our own—have we learned enough from our ancestors? Do we know how to lead, teach, pray, testify to the Good News?
Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is a young one. It is exactly 52 years old this year. We are, ironically, part of the oldest denomination in the U.S. as well, the Congregationalists, who came here as the Puritans and Pilgrims to escape religious persecution from the Church of England. John Robinson, one of their leaders, famously said “There is more truth and light yet to break forth from God’s holy word,” meaning, the Christian religion is a work in progress. Centuries later, the United Church of Christ echoed this testimony when it affirmed in its Constitution, “the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.”
“The responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own.” Do you feel it, people? Can we do this thing?
When I was a student minister, I worked at a juvenile hall as part of my training. Some of the boys, the boys with the most serious transgressions, lived on the locked unit, an unholy place that was essentially a prison. When I went to visit them to do Bible study, I’d offer to bring them a Bible for their very own. Several boys in particular said they’d like one, but said, “Make sure it’s the Holy Bible.” I didn’t know what they meant. I brought all kinds of Bibles: strawberry-leather gilt-edged, hippie-era with fake denim cover, in all kinds of modern translations. They’d flip through, read a few words, shake their heads sorrowfully. Not the Holy Bible.
On my next visit, one of the boys, Kenny, told me he’d scored one. A Holy Bible. He held it out in reverence. It was a King James version. Ahhh. The Holy Bible. “But can you understand what it’s saying?” I asked. They looked at me like I was entirely missing the point. In their minds, the less they understand it, the more power it must have. These were boys negotiating their way to manhood amidst violence and degradation; spooling their lives out in cinder block cells. I had failed to see that what they needed first was a taste of the transcendent—of awe, of reverence, of magic. But I was unwilling to let go of the urge to give them practical instruction to live a different sort of life than the one they had been living. From that day on, I brought the boys each two Bibles—a King James, so they could feel the mystical power of the Word, and an NRSV, so they could get some practical guidance in how to make their way in the world.
You heard the story from the book of Acts today. The Church of Jesus is at the same sort of cultural crossroads at which we find ourselves. It’s a small but growing Jewish sect that is struggling to decide what it means to be a member of it. How are they to navigate in the wider world, to be in it but not of it? Are they still, in fact, Jews, or are they becoming something else entirely? At this point, not a single person has ever been called a Christian—that won’t happen until Chapter 12, and we are only in Chapter 11 of Acts. Church isn’t as yet a place—there were no buildings called churches; but the word we have come to know of as church, ekklesia, from which we get words like ecclesiastical, meant gathering, assembly, or, more literally, a people “called out.”
In the midst of this, Peter, and Paul, and Philip and Steven and many many others travelled around Asia Minor teaching people about the rabbi Jesus, his message and his works. Up to this point, they only taught other Jews. But there are some non-Jews, Gentiles, who are eavesdropping, and want to get in on the game. This was repulsive to the followers of Jesus, who held themselves aloof and apart. They had their own rules and customs, which made them distinct and special to God, the most important among these customs, were circumcision and keeping kosher. This seems so antiquated to our modern minds, not to mention, exclusionary. It’s hard for us to understand what the big deal was about sharing a dinner table with a pork-eating Gentile, why Jews were so disgusted by other Jews who did it. It might help to think of it like sleeping around, and then bragging about it at coffee hour.
Cornelius was one such Gentile who wanted to eat around with Peter and the other Jewish Christians. Cornelius was a man who was very much in the world. He was a military leader of the Italian cohort, the repressive Roman regime, and his work had made him very wealthy. His slaves had slaves. And now he summons Peter, to talk about religion. Can we understand how strange and appalling this is? Think about it like this: a wealthy white American vice-president of Blackwater, calling a poor brown Muslim cleric to his gated community in suburban Iraq, to ask him about his faith.
Peter might have been as disgusted as an observant Jew should have been at such a request, but God had sent him a timely vision, in which God says, “What I have made clean, you must not call profane.” In other words, God affirms the responsibility of Peter, the head of the Church, to make the faith his own in this generation. Peter went to Cornelius, and they talked, and Peter was converted as much as Cornelius was. What he says is: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” These words struck me to the core: “anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God.” The two things that matter most to God are: reverence, and right action. These are like the two axes to the Cross: the vertical is reverence, reaching toward heaven, acknowledging the Divine; the horizontal, is right action, reaching toward one another in compassionate love.
As the Church grows older, as the Christians in it move through the centuries, we have a responsibility. That responsibility is to learn our history and orthodoxy, and at the same time, to live deeply in the world as it is, to make sense of where these meet. Our responsibility is to translate the Good News for those who have never heard it, speaking their language, making sense of the ancient faith in a fresh context. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.
Just think about what the last 52 years of the UCC have brought us:
~A revolution in how we communicate via technology
~A revolution in sexuality, including reproductive rights, fertility and homosexuality
~A revolution in how we travel, and how far
~A revolution in how deeply we can see both out into the universe, and into the building blocks of Creation
~A dramatic rise in single-parent families, and the number of families where two parents work
~A more dramatic demarcation between rich and poor, and a deeper relationship between the labor of the poor and the wealth of the rich
Or, in more precise terms:
Facebook, text messaging, IVF, abortion on demand, private jets, the space race, stem-cell research, Wal-Mart, factory farming, far-flung, frantic families who worker more hours for fewer wages, just to name a few.
What does Christianity have to say about any of these? In the United Church of Christ, we have a general Synod, a national meeting, every two years, and this body will reflect on issues of grave importance to modern life. Four of our men, Ian, and Jason, and Branden and Joe, are all going to Synod this year, and will bring back the wisdom of the whole with them. But our church has flat leadership—no Pope, no Collegium—which means we can’t just leave it up to Synod delegates every two years. We have a responsibility in between times, to figure it out for ourselves. Making the faith our own doesn’t mean “keeping up with the times.” Nor does it mean putting a strawberry leather or a denim cover on your Bible, or reading it with Kindle II. It means blowing the cover off the Word. It means blowing the walls off the church. And you are the Church that in this generation will make the faith its own—or will fail to.
Why is this so urgent? What does it really matter? It is urgent because the generation of people who are coming into power, young people ages 18 to 29, see the Christian church as increasingly irrelevant, and worse. Christianity is failing now more than ever to inspire people to reverence for God, and right action with one another, and with Creation.
Some of you are holding a little piece of paper with a word on it in your hands. They are not nice words. They are names that many young people, outsiders to the Christian faith, call us. I want you to hear those words and feel the impact of those words right now:
Antigay
Antichoice
Angry
Violent
Illogical
Proselytizing
Coercive
Nostalgic
Lukewarm
Empire Builders
Sheltered
Too Political
Boring
Judgmental
Hypocritical
Do you feel your defensiveness rise up? Do you suddenly want to prove how good we are, how pro-gay, peace-loving, hip, open and tolerant to those who would throw those stones? And yet, some of those names are founded in truth. The Christian church has been all of those things. But our work is not to win the approval of our detractors, to be liked. Our job is to make the ancient faith, a faith durable and beautiful, oriented toward reverence and right-action, to make this faith relevant to modern times: to speak our truth in words people can understand, a truth that will set people free, if they choose to be freed.
Over the next five weeks of Lent, we will gather every Wednesday, downstairs. We will pray and sing in the Chapel. We will break bread, and eat around with whoever walks through the door. And then, we will talk about how to make this faith our own in our generation. It is not an intellectual exercise, tidy and sterile. It is not something we will do for those poor people who have no faith, like we do. We’ll do it for ourselves, to deepen our own sense of reverence and right action, and then we will do our best to be the Church in this generation: not a building full of people, huddled together, but a book with the cover blown off, a church with the walls blown off, a people called out to speak with our lives.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Loving Darwin
One of First Church Somerville's very own members, John Olson, preaches on why everyone should be Loving Darwin just like he does.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Entering Sacred Conversations
a sermon for First Church Somerville, January 25, 2009
Thank you to Revs. Baskette and Jarrett for your willingness to relinquish this pulpit to me and thank you to the members of this congregation who have entrusted the pulpit to me this morning. I pray that I am worthy of the task before me this morning. Amen.
Friends, First Church Somerville has chosen to take up the National UCC's invitation to engage in sacred conversation on race. This invitation came to all UCC congregations after the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons and the relationship of Rev. Wright to presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
"Let's talk about race," they said. "And let's do that in a sacred manner as people of faith."
In a country in which the very mention of race stirs up strong feelings of discomfort for most, this was a prophetic invitation. Who really wants to talk about race? Let's face it. It's an edgy topic. It's tempting not to talk about it at all. Besides, now that Obama has been elected into the highest office of the land, can we not declare it a new day? Oh, God, please. Surely, racism is now a thing of the past.
But does anyone here believe that sexism in the church died once women began being ordained? Or that heterosexism in Massachusetts ended once same-sex marriage became legal? Regardless of how you voted, you know it is no small thing that a man with African ancestry is President. But I doubt anyone here really believes racism is over. Just the fact that talking about race is so disquieting tells us that all is not well.
But before we enter this conversation, maybe it's worth asking what difference conversation can make. After all, talk can be cheap. Isn't it more important to practice inclusion and multiculturalism than to talk about it?
Let me ask you though, how inclusive can we be if we can't or don't know how to talk about ways institutions and communities tend to cater to the people who are already there? How inclusive can we be if we are afraid to hear from or about those on the margins of our communities? How can we correct the things that stand against love if we can't talk about them? I contend that being able to talk about race is foundational to creating a community that is truly inclusive.
But, as we take steps to engage as a community in sacred conversation on race, it is worth noting our individual and collective worry. What if we fail at this? What if our confusion or ignorance is exposed? What if we don't want to hear what others have to say? What if no one really wants to hear what we have to say? What if the conversation is only ever superficial? What if it becomes more challenging than we think we can handle? What if we are made to look like the bad guys?
I have been part of many, many conversations on race - and let me tell you: most of them have not been sacred. Often, they have been arguments within and across racial groups. There is disagreement about what is true and who is responsible. There is accusation, denial, judgment, disappointment, indignation, hurt, shame, guilt. And then nothing. No change. No transformation. No difference.
I have tended to think of these as failed conversations. And who wants to be part of that? Better not to even pick it up. Better to leave it alone.
But how can we leave it alone? This country has yet to make peace with the contradiction of its founding ideals of equality, freedom and democracy on the one hand and the concurrent reality of slavery and land theft on the other. The legacy of that history remains. As people of faith, we are asked to deal with that history and that legacy because these are barriers to our experiencing God's beloved community.
I want you to believe that stepping into sacred conversation is worth the risk of failure. What is failure after all? Failure is me forgetting God. Failure is a closed off, airless space I put myself in when I assume the outcome of my words and deeds is up to me. Failure is forgetting that God is in charge of outcomes.
A failed conversation is the one in which we forget that no matter what happens - even if it causes discomfort and pain - nothing can separate us from the love of God. That's all we have to remember. Though this is not easy, it is that simple. It's not easy to remember the love of God in the middle of feeling fear or anger or disappointment or shame. It's not easy as we face truths we'd rather not know that we're in God's hands and whatever happens, all is well.
And when we remember the love of God, it helps us find the opening that can liberate us from the mental, emotional, political, social traps that create systems of inequality. If I enter conversation believing that I have to prove my point to someone, if I enter conversation afraid of what I might learn about myself or the people I worship with, if I enter conversation determined not to feel anger or grief or joy, if I enter conversation attached to a particular outcome, I have boxed myself into a container too tiny for transformation.
In sacred conversation, we begin and end by remembering that God is our ocean, our sky, our rock. We cannot fail. We begin by remembering that God is in charge, not us. All we can do is show up, speak our truth and listen deeply.
Our gospel story for today gives us some clues about sacred conversation.
A woman is brought to Jesus. She has committed adultery and, according to the law, she should be stoned to death. The religious leaders bring her to Jesus to find out what he would do with her. We are told Jesus is being challenged: will he or will he not uphold the laws of Moses?
What's the first thing Jesus does? He writes in the sand. Biblical scholars don't know why Jesus does this though other Arabic stories also tell of people writing in the sand with a finger. Apparently, there is a Semitic tradition of doodling on the ground as a way of dealing with distress. Maybe Jesus is praying as he doodles. Maybe he is meditating. Maybe he is clearing his mind. In any case, he holds silence and creates some spaciousness in a charged setting. And make no mistake: the stakes are high. A woman's life is on the line. Ancient traditions and laws that have guided a people for generations are on the line. Jesus's authority as a teacher is on the line. A great deal is at stake. And Jesus begins in silence.
In the silence, there is no hurry. In the silence, there is room to remember our connection to God. This is how we begin sacred conversation.
What happens next in the story offers further insight into how we might proceed in sacred conversation. The woman's accusers insist that Jesus respond. And what does Jesus do? Does he tell them to back off? Does he deny the legitimacy of their charges against the woman? Does he challenge their authority to condemn her? Does he engage with them in debate about the shortcomings of judgment or the merits of mercy? No. Jesus accepts what is. The woman has sinned. The scribes and Pharisees have the right to condemn her to death. Whether Jesus likes it or not, he accepts what is.
Silence. Acceptance.
And then, an invitation: "Let the person who has no sin, throw the first stone." An invitation to consider how they are like the woman. They are not better than her. They are not separate from her. Jesus invites them to remember their connection.
Silence. Acceptance. Connection.
All key ingredients in sacred conversation.
But when Jesus invites the scribes and Pharisees to consider their own lives, he in not just reminding them that they are as imperfect as the woman. It goes much deeper than that. Jesus invites everyone in this drama to consider themselves and their tradition from another perspective. In suggesting they have options, Jesus invites these men to consider both their capacity for sin and their capacity for compassion. Not only does this remind them of their connection to the woman, it reminds them that they are the deciders. They choose. And today, they can choose something different. Today, not necessarily laws, accusations and condemnation. Today, the freedom to show loving kindness - not because they have to but because they can if they want to. Choice: another ingredient for sacred conversation.
Jesus invites the scribes and Pharisees to remember their own imperfection and their capacity for loving kindness. But he does something else, too. Equally profound. He invites them to consider the limitations of their perspective, the limitations of their understanding of their tradition. He asks them to consider that the laws of Moses might warrant a wider lens, a reconsideration.
Consider who the Pharisees are. They are the keepers of the tradition. Men who have devoted their lives to upholding Jewish law. It is difficult for Christians not to assume that the Pharisees are the bad guys in this gospel story because they are cast as the bad guys in every gospel story. Consider the way in which Christendom defines pharisaical: self-righteously moralistic and hypocritical. As Christians, we have been trained to believe that the Pharisees were small-minded bureaucrats who cared more about laws than about people.
In the spirit of sacred conversation, I invite us today to reconsider the limitations of our own tradition by looking at this story in a new way. Consider the possibility that John makes an incorrect assumption. That the scribes and Pharisees were not out to trap Jesus but to find liberation. Imagine that they did not have a taste for killing, that they wanted to be freed from the limitations of a tradition that asked for death as an antidote to sin. That they considered the possibility that Jesus might help them find the way to loving kindness. Maybe they were looking for a choice. Indeed, that is what they are offered. In sacred conversation, we are offered new ways of seeing and thus, possibilities foracting in new ways, too.
After Jesus opens up new perspectives, he bends down again and writes in the sand some more. He waits. Waiting, too, is part of sacred conversation. And what is Jesus waiting for? Is he waiting for the men to do what he wants them to? I don't think so. Jesus does not impose an agenda. This is what choice means. Jesus isn't waiting for them to do what he wants them to do. He is waiting for them to do whatever it is they will do. He knows he is not the decider. He has simply opened up the space for each of them to come to their own decision. And then, he waits. And, one by one, from the oldest to the youngest, they choose mercy.
Silence. Acceptance. Connection. A wider perspective. Choice. Waiting without attachment. New possibility.
That's how sacred conversation unfolds. In the quiet place where we can find the opening. In prayer. With acceptance that things are as they are - not some way we wish were different. In a recognition that all of us - no matter who we are or what life has offered us so far - all of us have within us both sinfulness and holiness; fear and love; accusation and compassion. Each of us can reconsider the truths we hold we hold most dear. Each of us can choose between condemnation and compassion. Each of us can learn to wait and resist imposing our will on others. Each of us can open ourselves to God's work in our hearts.
Sacred conversation assumes that the container for the conversation is God. God can hold it all. Whatever comes. The pain. The rage. The disappointment. The denial. The truth. The wholeness. Even the injustice. God is bigger than it all. Bigger even than the rules, the laws, the traditions. Nothing is outside of God.
In sacred conversation, no one is asked to deny their feelings, their experience, their longing. No one is asked to hold their questions. No one is told that their understanding is not legitimate. In sacred conversation, everything can be held. And because it can be held, there is no battleground, no need to use our feelings or understandings as clubs to pummel someone else. Whatever is, is.
At the end of the story, there is liberation. The scribes and Pharisees have freely chosen to exercise mercy. The woman is free to leave. And Jesus is free to continue his ministry of love and healing.
That, my friends, is the hidden possibility within sacred conversation: our own and others' liberation. In engaging in sacred conversation on race, we open ourselves to the possibility of the freedom God wants us to experience: the freedom to choose between fear and love, the freedom to open ourselves totally to the miraculous love of God and to the dream of beloved community.
May we remember this in the sacred conversations that unfold here at First Church Somerville in the coming weeks and beyond. May we proceed with confidence in the knowledge that whatever unfolds, however fearfully or hopefully we begin, however rough or smooth the road becomes, nothing can separate us from the love God.
Amen
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