Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing, says Jesus. Forgive them. They do not know. Paul echoed Jesus later on when he said, we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But the crowd who had welcomed him with palms cried “Crucify!” Pray, said Jesus to his disciples, that you may not come into the time of trial.

The Passion is the story of the time of trial. It is a dense story. It is impossible to get all of it, no matter how often we hear it. It is impossible not to be touched by it. Overtly, it is a story in which Jesus is put on trial, but it is the world, not Jesus, that is in fact tried. We are tried. It is a story of betrayal, haste, grief and exhaustion. It is a story about facing our deepest fears. It is about a Savior that dies for our sins, not by erasing them, but by showing us what our sins really are. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

A teacher writes: Bad things happen when the pace of change exceeds our ability to change, and events move faster than our understanding. It is then that we feel the loss of control over our lives. Anxiety creates fear, fear leads to anger, anger breeds violence, and violence … becomes a deadly reality. (p. 2)

Lord, should we strike with the sword? cry Jesus’ followers when the crowd storms their garden. One of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. ⁵¹But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him. No more of this. Violence, coercion, even in the best of causes, even to save, it will not get us where we wish to go. Violence only sets Barabbas free.

Peace is a paradox. Those who show courage in the heat of battle are celebrated. Those who take risks for peace are all too often assassinated.The pursuit of peace can come to seem to be a kind of betrayal. It has none of the clarity of war, in which the issues -- self defense, national honor, patriotism, pride -- are unambiguous and compelling. Peace involves a profound crisis of identity. (p. 8) 

When our world falls apart, we forget who we are. When we forget, we grow afraid. When we are afraid, we will betray all that is best in us just to make it go away. It doesn’t go away. Most of us, at one time or another, have been afraid.

Man, I do not know what you are talking about!’ At that moment, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. ⁶¹The Lord turned and looked at Peter.

Why was Jesus arrested? What social equilibrium did he threaten? What was the matter?

We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor.

The crowd has no idea what it is saying. Jesus did not forbid taxes to the emperor. Indeed, he told us to give the emperor his due, to not hold on to all that stuff. How many show trials have accused people of things they never did or said? Jesus asked us to serve God, to empty ourselves to God, to let God transform us. If we become people of God, the emperor will no longer have the power to harm.

Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

Do we know what Jesus is talking about? Pause, and in the stillness of your heart, let Jesus look at you.

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

On the Trinity

Good morning. Since most of you don’t know me, I’ll begin by introducing myself. I’m Carol Luther, chaplain and teacher at St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Oakland. Today is Trinity Sunday, which is all about a teaching.

It is said that one day Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" And his disciples answered and said, "Some say you are John the Baptist returned from the dead; others say Elias, or other of the old prophets." And Jesus answered and said, "But who do you say that I am?"

Peter answered and said, "You are the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple."

And Jesus answering, said, "What?"

As Christians came to understand themselves, their Christ and the nature of the Divine, prayer led them to see that God, while One God, exists in Three Persons. Not three Gods. Not three Aspects of One God, but a One that is also Three. Most people today would ask, why does that matter? But did you know that during the fourth century, actual riots broke out on the docks of Alexandra over the nature of the Trinity? That people cared that much?

From our perspective, rioting over a doctrine seems nothing but weird, but that’s only because we’re not arguing over the Trinity at the moment. We’ve got much hotter issues. Can the Religious Right share a table with Christian Progressives? Do Democrats speak to Republicans? You may have seen in the paper yesterday that a Catholic nun was excommunicated when she gave permission for an abortion that would save a woman’s life. Science and the Humanities occupy two different worlds. And so it goes. Ever since the Ancient World, Western society has been fueled by conflict over belief. Conflict mars our relationships. When Jesus began to heal conflicts, people accused him of being demon possessed. He answered, “Do demons cast out demons? A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Even so, Western culture has always sought power by dividing things. Divide and conquer.

But God cannot be divided. God is relationship without conflict. Trinity says that relationships are not to be manipulated, nor seen as a source of domination. Since God is relationship, relationship is divine.

If religions usually start with God, they do not end there. First and foremost, religions teach us what it means to be human. Isn’t that what Jesus came to do? For the past six months, since the beginning of Advent, we have been telling the story of Jesus. We have followed him from birth to baptism to wilderness to teacher to arrest to death and resurrection. We saw him open the gates of heaven at Ascension and the descent of the Spirit as fire at Pentecost. And now that the story is complete, God comes to bless us. “Show us the Father,” said Philip in last week’s Gospel. And today, Jesus does. “All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Note that the verb is “declare” and not “show.” We do not see God as much as we hear God. In the ancient world, people believed that eyes were lamps that cast light. Ears, on the other hand, received. Even today, in many traditions of prayer, seeing is associated with psychological projection, with my imposing myself upon the world, my “views.” I cannot receive God if I am full of myself. As I listen, I grow empty. As I listen, God can enter me through the Word, the Logos, filling my mind through the ears and teaching me from within. There’s a lovely tradition that says that Mary of Nazareth conceived simply as she listened deeply to God’s life-giving word. Have you ever wondered why silence is so important to the life of the soul?

The Divine. The Human. The Spirit. In the book of Deuteronomy, God told the people of Israel to choose life. God is life. Jesus rose from the dead to show that God is life. The Trinity is life.

In order to live, I must do three things. I must eat. I must drink. I must breathe. We recognize all three in our worship. I eat the bread of the Eucharist. I drink the sacred wine and am washed in the waters of Baptism. With my breath I sing, I pray, I read the sacred story, and in silence, I breathe. Earth, water, breath. These three make life possible, and while each is complete in itself, together they sustain life. This is both religious and scientific truth.

My body is made of the same elements as the stars, the soil, the trees, the insects, the wolves, the deer, the otters, the grass, the dust on my windowsill. Every day I nourish my body with these same elements. Every day my body sheds cells and grows new ones, and these atoms that once were mine now become soil, trees, insects, rocks and solar wind. I am one with earth. The way I treat this world says a great deal about the way I treat myself. If I pave it, pollute it, plunder it, I am in a very real way plundering and polluting my own body. We could go a long way with this metaphor, but I’m going to stop here. The earth and I are separate persons, but we are one substance. God is present in all creation, but God is not the same as creation. There are as many cells in my body as there are stars in the sky.

I am also water. Parts of my body, like my lungs, are 90% water. My veins and arteries are nutrient rich rivers bringing oxygen to all the inner parts of me. If I could see this network within, I would see something that looks very much like the network of rivers and streams and tributaries that water our earth. I must drink water to live. At his baptism, Jesus came out of the river. To the woman at the well he spoke of living waters. That said, to dam up rivers, to keep them from flowing into the sea, as the Colorado River no longer can all the time, is like the build up of plaque within my arteries. Oil is spilling out of the deep even as we speak. To fill the living ocean with plastic, to destroy its silver fish swimming is to have deep and real repercussions upon my own inner tides and currents. I could go a long way with that one, too, but I will stop. The water and I are separate, but one substance. Jesus emerged from the waters knowing that to be fully human was to be fully obedient to the Divine. He was one with God, but also himself.

And finally breath. The entire planet, wrapped in an atmosphere, is infused with breath. This atmosphere animates both us and our world. At every moment, we breathe in and we breathe out. To be conscious of breathing is to be conscious of life. In most languages, the word for breath is also the word for spirit. The baby becomes fully alive when she takes her first breath. In breathing meditation, we are taught that every time we breathe, we are in communion with God, literally infused with God. The tree of life is not a metaphor, but biological fact: the tree inhales our carbon and exhales oxygen. What a beautiful symmetry. That said, it strikes me as interesting that when we started to build smoking factories, we also began smoking cigarettes, becoming chimneys ourselves. And now that we have an economy that is absolutely dependent upon burning carbon, we are endangering the fragile envelope of air that may indeed be the breath of God. I am separate from the air I breathe, but we are one substance. The Holy Spirit is everywhere. The spirit inspires. The spirit is the still small voice that speaks when I am in trouble and helps me find a way out. It was the spirit that showed Moses the way out of Egypt.

I am a single person, yet I am in full communion with earth, water and air. I am also in communion with you. In a culture that likes conflict, it is good to take time for the teaching that the Divine is not an individual but a relationship, that my life depends upon your life. We are separate. We are One. We partake of the Divine Trinity: the One, the Many, the God who is one substance with all things. A God whose very essence is relationship means that you will never be alone. AMEN.

Passion Sunday

Forgive them, Father, for they do not know what they are doing, says Jesus. Forgive them. They do not know. Paul echoed Jesus later on when he said, “we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Cor. 2:7-8)

But the crowd who had welcomed him with palms cried “Crucify!” 

“Pray,” said Jesus to his disciples, “that you may not come into the time of trial.”

The Passion is the story of the time of trial. It is a dense story. It is impossible to get all of it, no matter how often we hear it. It is impossible not to be touched by it. Overtly, it is a story in which Jesus is put on trial, but it is the world, not Jesus, that is in fact tried. We are tried. It is a story of betrayal, haste, grief and exhaustion. It is a story about facing our deepest fears. It is about a Savior that dies for our sins, not by erasing them, but by showing us what our sins really are.

None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

A teacher writes: “Bad things happen when the pace of change exceeds our ability to change, and events move faster than our understanding. It is then that we feel the loss of control over our lives. Anxiety creates fear, fear leads to anger, anger breeds violence, and violence … becomes a deadly reality.” ( Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, 2)

“Lord, should we strike with the sword?” cry Jesus’ followers when the crowd storms their garden. One of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. ⁵¹But Jesus said, ‘No more of this!’ And he touched his ear and healed him. 

No more of this. Violence, coercion, even in the best of causes, even to save, it will not get us where we wish to go. Violence only sets Barabbas free.

Peace is a paradox. Those who show courage in the heat of battle are celebrated. Those who take risks for peace are all too often assassinated.The pursuit of peace can come to seem to be a kind of betrayal. It has none of the clarity of war, in which the issues -- self defense, national honor, patriotism, pride -- are unambiguous and compelling. Peace involves a profound crisis of identity. (Sacks, p. 8) 

When our world falls apart, we forget who we are. When we forget, we grow afraid. When we are afraid, we will betray all that is best in us just to make it go away. It doesn’t go away. Most of us, at one time or another, have been afraid.

Man, I do not know what you are talking about!’ At that moment, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. ⁶¹The Lord turned and looked at Peter.

Do we know what Jesus is talking about? Pause, and in the stillness of your heart, let Jesus look at you.

Why was Jesus arrested? What social equilibrium did he threaten? What was the matter?

We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to pay taxes to the emperor.

The crowd has no idea what it is saying. Jesus did not forbid taxes to the emperor. Indeed, he told us to give the emperor his due, to not hold on to all that stuff. How many show trials have accused people of things they never did or said? Jesus asked us to serve God, to empty ourselves to God, to let God transform us. If we become people of God, the emperor will no longer have the power to harm.

Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

During the week ahead, let us, who together know so much, enter into the mystery of unknowing, the mystery of one, who even on the cross prayed for us, the one who emptied himself and became the truth that sets us free. 

On the Prodigal Son, Lent 4, Year C

Our works do not exist in opposition to God’s grace; God’s grace is what blesses our works. 

Last Sunday, Corrie raised a question that has probably haunted everyone in this church at least once in your lives: if God is so good, then why do bad things happen? 

Today’s Gospel is full of bad things: a father loses his property to a wayward son, a wayward son crashes and burns, and the righteous son is left, thankless, out in the cold, as a party is given for a wastrel, who, after losing one fortune is now gifted with the family’s best ring, robe and the fatted calf. What gives? If wastrels get parties, what’s the point? Or, to put it as the Pharisees asked, if Jesus is a teacher from God, why does he hang out with those kind of people? What would you think if you saw Jesus at dinner with a bunch of really creepy repo men? 

We usually don’t ask ourselves who we would not be caught dead with, but I think we should, since Jesus is asking us to think in a whole new way about good guys and bad guys and about the God who made the world in which we all live. It’s both liberating and scary. I mean, how would you feel if the Koch brothers lost everything, fell on their knees and said they were sorry, or if Wal-Mart went bankrupt? Might we just not think they got what they deserved?

The Prodigal Son is the story of someone who does a great wrong, comes to his senses, and finds forgiveness.  All of us need that kind of love sometimes. I’ve heard so many people tell how they have encountered God’s love at the lowest moment in their lives. In spite of everything, says this story, God loves me. Even though I’ve been a complete fool and done irrevocable harm, God still oves me. God will make things right. God wants things right. There is hope, even now, says this parable. We can come to our senses.

But then, here’s the other side, should God forgive the bad guys too? 

A great deal has been said and written about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In fact, just about everything that can be said about this parable has been said. But that does not make the story any less troubling or compelling. The younger son does great harm. The older, righteous son, is unforgiving. The father appears to play favorites.

But this is also Rose Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, the Sunday in which we are asked to relax our penitential breast beating and give thanks for the Grace of God. Our first reading begins: Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt. We have sung “Amazing Grace.” And we read from the letters of Paul, a reprise of that moving sentence that began our journey on Ash Wednesday:

He made him, who knew no sin, to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God, in him. (New American Standard Bible)

I’m using a slightly different translation than the NRSV we heard this morning, because it was this translation that one Lent I listened to in a musical setting every day. The singer phrased it like this:  He made him, (pause) who knew no sin, (pause) to be sin (pause) on our behalf, (pause) that we might become (pause) the righteousness of God, (pause) in him. Sing it enough times and it becomes a prayer, and as a prayer, it asks us, how could God have ever become sin? And how does this lead to righteousness?

When Paul wrote his second letter to the Corinthians, he had been seriously beat up. At the beginning, he confesses: “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” He doesn’t tell us which of his adventures crushed him; only that he despaired of life itself. (A little like the Prodigal, feeding pigs?) And that God picked him up and gave him the grace to go on. 

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a story about works and grace. What we do matters. 

The parable of the Prodigal son is about facing the things that hurt; it’s about what we do to one another. All three characters ache in this story: the father who loses his son, the son who loses his dreams, the son who loses his sense of his own goodness.  The older son cannot forgive. We have no assurance that the younger will mend his ways. What will happen to these people? And where is God?

Among the many essays written about this week’s Gospel, perhaps the most striking comes from a GTU graduate, David Henson: 

God seems to appear in this story in the role of the doddering old fool, manipulated by the half-cooked apology of the prodigal son to forget all that has passed. Not only this, but the father ignores the harm done to the other son, the one who stayed home, followed the rules, loved him without vacation.

And the father does harm the other son. The father’s indiscriminate love to the prodigal wounds the brother, as it rightly would us all.

But what if God isn’t the father in this story?

What if God instead is the prodigal who seems so irresponsible?

What if God is the God who comes to us in the disguise of those we despise, those who have hated and killed us, rejected us and abandoned us, those who annoy and frustrate us most, those who are excluded?

Picking up that theme, what if God came to me, the Eco Queen in the person of the president of Exxon Mobil? This is the whole theme of the soul’s shadow, the parts of ourselves we cannot own, so we turn them into monsters. But in fact, we need the creativity and daring of our darker sides; if I want to help the relationship of ecology, I need the relational genius of an entrepreneur.  When I sit around hating the oil companies, I miss their genius. As older son, I become crabbed and limited. All of us have a dark side. We don’t usually encounter it when life is going well. It is when we suffer that we discover the stuff of which we are made. In the depths of his suffering, the Prodigal Son learned the most important thing of all and that was to love.

Parables are a lot like dreams. Like dreams, parables are non-literal stories that ask us to engage  an event from a variety of points of view. Anyone who does dream work knows that since every dream I dream takes place inside of me, every part of the dream must also be an aspect of myself; thus, if the Prodigal Son were my dream, I would be all the characters, the father, the elder brother, the younger brother, the younger brother’s drinking companions, even the pigs he was feeding! God, too, is in all these things, for God is known in relationship. The younger son realized this, while the older one did not.

Most of us Americans are like the older son. New York Columnist David Brooks began his Friday op-ed piece: “Those of us in secular America live in a culture that takes the supremacy of individual autonomy as a given. Life is a journey. You choose your own path. You can live in the city or the suburbs, be a Wiccan or a biker.”

To live in a culture where the individual reigns supreme, however, is also to live in a culture that will eventually become divided into factions: my choice against your choice, my interests against your interests, a culture based neither in the laws of nature nor the grace of God. 

Law, whether the laws of nature or the Jewish Mitzvot, are descriptions of right relationship and societies based upon competition, whether in ancient Rome or modern America, make relationship into winning and losing, not interdependence. Under conditions of oppression or depression, relationships are damaged and living law itself becomes oppressive or depressive. But that is the problem of sin, not of law. 

We need rules to live well in community, rules that help us get along rather than pit us against one another like the brothers in our tale. One of the reason kids love soccer: it builds a tight community around clearly understood rules. They tell me they’ll let their team down if they don’t play. Sportsmanship codes help kids deal with their feelings. They cannot do well if they don’t understand their fellow players’ strengths and weaknesses. It’s why I don’t always mind that my young friends miss church for a soccer game, because many of the lessons are the same. In playing by living rules, kids on the field can find grace, unless the sin of competition, like the righteousness of the older brother, takes them over.

On the Fourth Sunday of Lent, we’re being asked to love one another, with all our weaknesses and growing edges. So I’ll leave you with two quotes. The first is from MLK. The second is from a very old TV show that remains my all time favorite: 

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

There's a dark side to each and every human soul. We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are, but there's a little Darth Vader in all of us. Thing is, this ain't no either-or proposition. We're talking about dialectics, the good and the bad merging into us. You can run but you can't hide. My experience? Face the darkness. Stare it down. Own it. As brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes!

The Fire in the Barnyard: Lent 2, Year C

Some of you may remember a science project from way back in the early ‘90‘s called Biosphere 2. It was a geodesic structure, the size of two football fields, set in the desert of Arizona. Biosphere 2 was to be a perfectly closed ecosystem in miniature, a series of self sustaining biomes that could support human life, as a starship might support human life in some distant future. Biosphere had a rainforest, plains and even a small ocean. In 1991, after several trials, and amid some fanfare, a crew of eight people were sealed inside, there to live and work. If you followed the story then you will know that the experiment didn’t work. The crew developed interpersonal problems; invasive marigolds and invasive cockroaches proliferated, one ecosystem got too wet, another too dry, oxygen levels dropped and carbon dioxide levels rose. The food grown did not have sufficient calories to maintain crew weights. A crew member became sick and had to be removed, which, in the eyes of some, compromised the integrity of the closed system. As it turned out, even with the best science in the world, we could not replicate in a closed system the web of relationships that sustains life on the planet. Maybe that is because the earth is not a closed system.

Most of the time, we live as if it was. We are encouraged to live that way. We get up, we go to work, we drive cars. We pick up our necessities at the market. We pass gated communities, go through airport security, sigh as our children are subjected to standardized tests. We turn on computers, go to meetings, and so on, encouraged to seek our own private pleasures and heal our private woes because that’s the best we can do.

But each year, during the six weeks of Lent, we are asked to step back and look at our lives, at our relationship with God. Last week we followed Jesus into the desert where he was tempted. This week, the temptations fall closer to home. Where, asks Paul to the Philippians, are our minds set? 

The story of Abram is one of the greatest tellings of God’s open system and God’s open heart, but it is also honest about the problems we face when we try to live with God. When God called Abram “Get up, go, leave the land of your ancestors for the land which I will show you and I will make you a great nation, so that you will be a blessing,” Abram said yes. Full of hope, he set out with his family and his flocks. Trouble is that years passed and nothing at all happened. Sarai remained persistently barren and the heir of the household was not a son, but a slave, Eliezer of Damascus. Abram’s temptation was not to answer God’s call, but to stick with it.

A great deal of the life of faith is precisely like this. For every peak experience, years of plodding around follows. It takes time for God’s promises to sink in, to be deeply understood, to be fulfilled. In contrast to the instant gratification of modern technology, the life of the spirit is a slow process. It is very easy, in a world of instant gratification to say, “Yes, God, I know you promised, but I still have no children and a slave born in my house is to be my heir!” 

God answers, but God does not do so directly. He takes Abram outside. Outside the closed world of his tent and his expectations. God shows Abram the stars. God shows Abram the open system. God asks Abram to offer up things of the earth. Abram does so, only to have a deep and terrifying darkness fall upon him. God enters his closed self in the form of a dream, reminding us that even in the fastness of sleep we are open to the universe. This story says that to be in relationship with God is to be open to surprise, for often, as both Abram and later Moses attest, we find God, not in the brilliance of our success, but in the vulnerable darkness of our unknowing.

Darkness reminds us that the journey toward God is not always clear. And thirteen more years will have to pass before Sarai is finally pregnant with Isaac. 

The Pharisees think that they are doing Jesus a very good turn when they warn him that Herod wants to kill him. Right before today’s Gospel opens, Jesus has made one of his prophetic, and potentially incendiary remarks, “Some who are last will be first and some who are first will be last.” This is just the kind of thing that tyrants mistake for a call for rebellion, and the Pharisees are telling Jesus to get out of Dodge.

Jesus does not give them a direct answer. Instead he says, “Listen. Go and tell that fox that I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow and on the third day I finish my work. I must be on my way, for it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem.” 

Jesus does not answer the question. He says “Listen.” 

And then he speaks of curing and healing, of life and death, of the tensions between the word of God and the world of earthly powers. He calls Herod a fox. 

In the Greco-Roman world, Fox was the trickster, the one who could move effortlessly between the worlds, in Herod’s case, the worlds of Judaism and Rome. Foxes are adaptable. They land on their feet. Even if Luke is not especially fond of Herod Antipas, he holds a kind of grudging respect for tricksters, as we will learn later on, in the parable of the unjust steward. Tricksters almost always fall prey to their own tricks in the end, and this will happen to Herod. But if that is all suggested, the image does not stop with there. It continues to a mother hen and her chicks.

And this changes everything. We move from power and knowledge to a whole bunch of little baby birds, a not entirely comfortable image. Yes, God loves us. But Foxes also invade hen houses. They devour the little ones who have no place to run. The political message is clear. To live in an empire is to be trapped inside someone else’s world. Empires are closed systems. God and the universe are open. Where to turn?

As Biblical scholar and former Bishop of Durham NT Wright writes: 

“Though the word ‘fire’ does not occur in this passage, the powerful image Jesus uses here has it in mind. 

“Fire is as terrifying to trapped animals as to people, if not more so. When a farmyard catches fire, the animals try to escape; but, if they cannot, some species have developed ways of protecting their young. The picture here is of a hen, gathering her chicks under her wings to protect them. There are stories of exactly this: after a farmyard fire, those cleaning up have found a dead hen, scorched and blackened – with live chicks sheltering under her wings. She has quite literally given her life to save them. It is a vivid and violent image of what Jesus declared he longed to do for Jerusalem and, by implication, for all Israel.”

If this is a premonition of the cross, it is a powerful and compassionate image. The mother hen does not engage in atonement for a sinful humanity unable to pay its debts to God. This is raw rescue. God sheltering God’s frightened children in the midst of an absolutely impossible situation about which they can do nothing.” 

God asks that we do not run. God asks us to Listen. To Receive. To have the courage to be open. That is what we do in Lent. Don’t be afraid to be surprised. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! This is a poignant foreshadowing of what will in fact happen during Holy Week: the disciples will flee, they will deny having known Jesus, they will be scattered by fear. Today’s readings ask us to consider: From what do we run? Where, like Abram, do we feel stuck? What promises in our lives have yet to be fulfilled? Do we boldly stand before God with our deepest questions? Do we live in a biosphere that is closed and fearful, or open to the wind of the spirit? Can we trust God to take us under her mothering wings? Do we realize when we go out with Abram to number the stars that we are made of the very same stuff as they? Are we ready to meet God? 

First Sunday of Advent: The End of the World as We Know It

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.

Thirty one years ago last summer, at exactly half the age I am now, I visited the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president and Biblical fundamentalism was rising as a political force. It was in such a climate of fear and loathing that I took myself to the land of the enemy.

I was not religious then, except in an existential, artistic and literary way. And what country had better art and literature than Russia, the land of Pushkin and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Akhmatova, Russia whose language I loved and whose people I longed to meet. 

Like the beginning of Advent, my three weeks in Russia were a hinge time. It was there that I left behind the hopes and passions of my youth, my desire to become an artist, a keeper of the rarified world of culture, because there I saw that rarified culture supported oppressive elites. It was there that I first heard the natural world cry out against industrial patriarchy. It was there I encountered the protest of freedom against others’ attempts to manage us, whether through political ideology or religious certainty. Visiting Russia began my quest to try and see the world as it really is. And of course, it was also in Russia that I had my first glimmers of God, not as the father figure of my childhood, but as the beating heart of the universe.

We spent most of our time in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, as guests of the University. At one of our roundtables, a professor explained how the Soviet economy worked, an interlocking grid of five year business plans. As I sat there listening with an open mind, I began to feel very uncomfortable, for there was no room in anything this man was saying, for the unexpected: the surprise discovery, story, innovation, joy. So I raised my hand, and after an eloquent preamble about the brilliance of philosophy and its architecture of thought, I asked, “What do you do when something totally unlooked-for happens?”

The professor laughed. “We don’t have to worry about that," he said, "because that’s in the plan, too.”

And so we come to Advent. Advent is not unlike my professor’s five year plan. On the surface, it is a time when we are called to open ourselves to waiting and to mystery, but it is no mystery what we are waiting for. We are waiting for Jesus to come and save us. As one of my priest friends wrote so well on his weekly blog: Advent invites us to get back in touch with our primal hunger for God. It asks us to feel and know that we are all waiting for something from God that has yet to be fulfilled, that we have yet to experience in its fullness.

Notice the trajectory of this reflection: primal hunger, waiting for something, fulfillment.  Hopefully, that desire is for God, but if you’ve ever been caught in a fit of desire, you will know primal hungers are often unclear, and if you hang around children at this time of year, you know that those primal hungers are more often for presents than they are for God.

And if Advent is about primal hunger and fulfillment, why do we begin the season with readings about the end of the world? Is it because a new world cannot be born until an old world dies? Is it to gently remind us that we’re always going on about the end of the world, but it hasn’t ended yet and probably isn’t going to, so get a life? Is it to highlight a tradition of Biblical prophecy that called Israel to wait for the arrival of a savior? Is it because the moment we say that a story has a beginning, it must also have an end? Or does it come to teach us something about ends themselves?

There’s a very wise teaching in the Jewish Talmud. “We do not see things the way they are; we see things the way we are.” 

In his brilliant book The Great Partnership, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes about what happens when cultures fall prey to the grip of Messianic hope: “Abrahamic monotheism lives in the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Normally, this gap is bridged by daily acts of altruism, the ‘redemption of small steps.’ This is…the long, slow journey across the wilderness…a day at a time. But sometimes the gap seems so large that it leads believers to hope for and expect a sudden denouement, a miraculous transformation of history, the ‘world turned upside down.’1

This is the hope that comes up at this time of year, isn’t it? All my pain will be swept away by the magic of Christmas morning and my dreams will at last come true. 

Which brings me back to the world of five year plans. What shocked me in Russia was not their crude attempts at social manipulation and control; it was how much better at it we were. Russia made me aware of my own world, our culture of advertising that arouses primal hungers we didn’t even know we had; our sense that education is less about entering the mystery of learning than it is about turning out standardized test taker workers who will service the economy, a corporate culture that seeks to maximize certainty with computers and surveys, with niche marketing and statistical inventories. When humans live so deeply in a culture of control, it becomes very hard to see God, because it is in the very nature of  God to surprise. Indeed, one of the most reliable indicators that an empire is in decline is when it thinks it has discovered all the answers.

Jesus plays on all these hopes and fears in today’s Gospel. Our reading this morning is part of a larger teaching that pits statistical probability and apocalyptic drama against the daily step by step journey through an imperfect world. The first part that we did not read, describes the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, which in fact did happen in 70 AD, but it did not take a genius to see that Rome and Judea were on a collision course. But then (and here’s where we begin today), Jesus moves from probabilistic  depictions of war to cosmic hyperbole: "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

What, exactly, does all that mean? We know that Jews were not supposed to take stock in divination or astrology, but instead to understand times and seasons as given by God. So what might be these signs in the sun, moon and stars? Signs that we have lost it? What is distress caused by the roaring of the sea and its waves? Isn’t the sea supposed to roar? Are we so caught up in our own obsessive distress that we aren’t even a part of nature anymore and so a normal ocean becomes a source of confusion and fear? Have we become like King Saul at the end of his life rushing off to the witch of Endor because the fear and contradictions in his life had driven him mad? Is utter craziness a prequel to sober insight? 

For Jesus goes on: 

Then he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

It would seem to make more sense, if Jesus were really teaching us about endings, that he would say, ‘when the fig tree has lost its leaves, then you know that winter is near.’ Instead, he uses an image of growth and renewal, as if to say it is this, and not destruction that should concern us, pay attention, not to the vanities of history, but to the seasons in their measured course, a redemption of ‘small steps.’

A close reading of the text reveals another important detail. Jesus does not say that this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place, but simply until all things have taken place. We won’t get to where we are going until we get there. And, we are all members of this generation, for again as Sacks writes, “sustained reflection on the Earth’s ecology  has made us aware that life in all its almost unimaginable diversity is interlinked.”2 We all come from the same genetic and spiritual source, endlessly recycled.

Jesus was not born to lead us into a perfect world; we don’t need God to show us perfection. All empires are about order and perfection. Five year plans and corporate branding, these are perfection. No surprises. That is perfection. Death is perfection. God does not call us to be perfect; God calls upon us to live. God calls us to live in this  world, a world that is always in process, always open to transformations, to let go of our own need to be in control and to join with God in a daily, step by step journey, one small deed at a time.

Hence the Collect. The works of darkness are not evil, they are ignorance. The works of darkness are what we do when we try to move around in the night and bump into walls and trip over the dog. The armor of light is the flashlight that helps us and others see in the dark. If we shine it back at ourselves, it will blind us. 

Advent reminds us that we are always beginning. That we still don’t know, even as we move toward an event that we do know. Light and dark together. That the babe to be born in Bethlehem will not be as all the carols so confidently proclaim, “the newborn king,” but one who, like the fig tree, will live in the midst of animals and humans, and show us how to have the courage, in the face of overwhelming temptations to the contrary, not so much to save the world and each other, which involves control, but to love it, which means letting go. AMEN.

¹ Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership, p. 257

² Ibid. p. 272

Sermon for Episcopal Schools Sunday

Free Spirits

‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!’

“Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.…and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.”

“Test everything.”

The readings appointed for Episcopal Schools Sunday take an approach to education that one rarely encounters in our industrialized age: education, not as the transmission of information or the creation of skilled laborers for the workplace, but education as the transmission of spirit. In both our Old Testament and Gospel readings, we witness the spirit moving from teacher to disciples, a power so profound and so visceral that it spills over into the camp and even those who are not part of the formal assembly feel its effects.

The enormous power of God is something quite simple. The power of God is the power of Gift. It is handed on, from parent to child, teacher to student. It passes from generation to generation. All that we are and all that we have and all that we know are gifts from God. Always, like the Israelites in the desert, we walk toward the unknown, and it is not our own strategic planning, but the voice of God that will tell us what to look for.

Few things in our world are as misunderstood as gift. Most of the time, when our culture talks about gifts or giving, we’re really talking about a transfer of assets. Assets are not gifts. Typically, we have earned our assets, while gifts, by their very nature are as free as the spirit that landed upon Eldad and Medad in the camp of the Israelites. Gifts are Free, in that I have not paid for them, free in that they may come and go as they wish. Many years ago, when I was speaking of the difference between a gift and an asset in this church I distinguished between them, saying that if an asset was an enhancement, a gift was “something I did not ask for.” Assets are an achievement of economics. Gifts are the work of a community. Suffering is never an asset. But sometimes, when it leads to growth or heals a relationship or gives us courage to risk ourselves, it can be a gift.

Education at its very best is a gift. Good education does not require fancy buildings or expensive equipment. It happens when people want to learn. It happens in fields and forests, when walking down the street, or sharing a story. Education is an act of love. It is a gift to our children to help them understand the gift of their lives. It is the gift of helping them to grow into the people God wants them to be. Every day our children bring their gifts to school. Sometimes that gift is a brilliant mind or brilliant athletic skill or musical genius. Sometimes that gift is anger, or resistance or inattention. All of them speak deeply about the human condition, not as we would have it, or engineer it, but as it is. A good educator listens.

In his brilliant book The Gift, Lewis Hyde warns us that nothing is more dangerous to the sharing of our gifts than the market economy that seeks to quantify gifts into assets and control them by setting monetary value upon them. Money does not set us free. As Jesus says in the reading that is appointed in the regular lectionary for today, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Money turns us into instruments, into units of production, indentured to something called the “economy.” By giving us the illusions of success and achievement if we have it, or the illusion of worthlessness if we don’t, money blinds us to reality. Money edits the complexity of life into “haves” and “have nots.” As one of my seventh graders said last week, “We think it is going to make life easier, but it really makes life harder.” The economics of education, like the economics of medicine, make it easy, as we strive for better buildings, more consistent program, to forget that the real work of education as gift, is to surprise us: to lead us out of our confusions, not to institutionalize them. Education is a human right, not a market product. The whole fuss about test scores in the academic world is a total consequence of the money economy, because that is what currencies do: they standardize. Industrial economies don’t need human beings, they need interchangeable, skilled workers. In schools across the country, as we seek to be competitive, the sacred conversation between teacher and student is being called “product.” And once you start talking about product, everything changes.  

As today’s readings remind us, the best education gets us out of Egypt, not deeper into it. The very word education derives from Latin word “educare,” which means to “lead out.” When education becomes about compliance, it becomes not education, but indoctrination. That, says our tradition, is not what God wants. “And you shall know the truth,” said Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” He did not say “And you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you a skilled laborer.” In the classrooms of great teachers, children are set free to be the surprising beings they really are. 

Today’s readings ask us to consider what spirit we are passing on to our children. How are we gifting them? What gifts do we hope they will pass on -- for a gift, you know, never stays in one place very long. Will our children be ready to do the great work of adulthood? Are they going to be ready to take on the risks and adventures of social leadership, of bringing life to a war torn world, and restoring health to our our fields and forests? Are we going to help our children grow up to be gifted or are we only going to burden them with more possessions?

In Episcopal schools, we are called every day to take on every hard question of mind, life and spirit, because it is the genius of the Episcopal tradition to be the people of God at the heart of this brilliant and flawed world. Episcopal schools call us to be a people of spirit in a world defined by stuff. Episcopal schools call us to appreciate the unique gifts that each child brings to school, to receive both the genius and the difficulties with love. Episcopal schools call those of us who teach to speak the truth as best we can. As you know from this election season, truth has never been more important or more endangered than it is right now. We know that we live in a very controlling culture. We know that Jesus came to help us let go of all our illusions of control. We should not be afraid to live and to love into the tension. We know where we need to go. The question before us is the same question that lay before Moses. How do we get there?

On Episcopal Schools Sunday, we celebrate the journey, the ancient and ever mysterious journey that each child makes toward adulthood. We celebrate its triumphs and its dangers. We celebrate fourteen year old Malala Yousafzai who was willing to risk her life to learn. Shot by the Taliban in Pakistan, today she lies on a ventilator in Rawalpindi, condition satisfactory, an icon of inspiration for girls the world over who seek to rise above the strictures imposed upon them for no other reason than that they were born female. Malala Yousafzai refused to be standardized. Malala Yousafzai gave herself for us.

On Episcopal Schools Sunday, we also celebrate the tiny island of Haiti, home of our sister school École St. Pierre. Haiti’s history is a tragic version of our own, plundered by the French for its wealth, its people stripped of their humanity and valued only for their enslaved labor, forced to turn its lush gardens into factory farms generating product, in this case sugar. People were enslaved to that product, but the Haitians rose up for freedom. They chose education. They chose to be led into a world of danger and risk rather than be tools of someone else’s economy. This one small island has seen it all: colonialists, hurricanes and earthquakes. But even so, the children at École St. Pierre begin each day with a song. Haiti has struggled, but Haiti has not given in. Both Malala and Haiti remind us that great education is about the gift of courage.

On Episcopal Schools Sunday, let us consider courage. Let us pause and honor the journey that education makes possible. Let us pause and give thanks for the gift. AMEN.