June 18, 2000 - "Father's Day"

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June 18, 2000 - Father Andrew Green

I have something to pass out to you all. Now, that would take the whole sermon if I passed it out to each of you, but there is one of these to go around and make sure it gets this whole area. The kids are going to come up here with me. It is a picture I would like you all to have a chance to look at.

If I could have the kids come up front please, and you don't get to sit this time, you have to stand. We are going to stand, and I want to talk, so look to see if you can see me, O.K?

(Kid's answers in italics)

What's today?

Sunday

What is special about today, Sunday?

Father's Day

It's Father's Day! Did you notice anything in the lessons that had to do with, or that might be connected with Father's Day? Was there anything in the lesson which you heard today, maybe from one of you who read the lesson and might have heard something, about fathers, or that would relate to Father's Day?

(Nervous silence)

When we become part of the body of Christ - when we are baptized - we become God's children. God becomes our Father when we are baptized, and it said in the lesson that Kevin read that the Spirit allows us to call God by a nickname. It says "Abba". Now, that translates out to be Father, but it is more like Papa or Daddy. So, one of the things that is really important to think about on Father's day is that the model for fathers ought to be the kind of relationship that we have in the Scripture from God. But, not everybody has a father. I don't know if you know this, but I don't have a father; because my father died almost ten years ago, so I don't have a father anymore. So, on Father's Day, I specifically remember my dad, but I look to God, who made me His child with baptism.

Now, the second thing that today is - today is Trinity Sunday. Have you ever heard of the Trinity? Some of you have. We say a lot of things about the Trinity in Church. We talk about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - three. I'm not going to try to explain a lot of it, but I want to show you a picture, the same picture that I am passing around to the congregation out there. Do you see that? What does it look like?

It looks like you.

It looks like me? O.K., besides me, what does it look like? Jeffrey?

They are eating and drinking.

They are eating and drinking. They are sitting around - what?

Christ's last meal, or something like that?

Nope, that's the last supper, and there would be 12. There are only 3 here, so they are kind of short for the last supper. O.K.? But, you see, there are three of them. They are sitting around the table - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, O.K.? This was painted. It is an icon painted by Andre Rubaleff, and it was painted at about the year 1460. Now, you notice, it is kind of hard to tell whether they are men or women, isn't it?

Yeah!

O.K. This is not the 1990's or 2000 political correctness. This is that they were drawing angels, and they didn't want them to be specific. This comes from a particular passage in the Bible. In Genesis, in chapter 18, Abraham and Sarah are living in an area that is now Hebron in Israel, and they are living in that area. Abraham looks out on the road (there were not a lot of people then), and he sees these three folks coming. He rushes out to the road and invites them to come and eat with him, and, so, they give him a blessing. Because of his hospitality, Abraham became a father to Isaac at that time.

Well, these three are depicted here as eating around Abraham's table, and it tells us something about the Trinity. I'm not going to talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit stuff. What I am going to talk about is that this tells us that, in this picture, there is something missing. Hospitality has something missing. Do you see the table that they are sitting around?

Yeah.

Is the table completely full?

No.

No. Is there room?

Yeah.

There is room right here, right in the front, for somebody else, isn't there?

I know what's missing.

What? What's missing?

A chair.

There is actually - it is kind of a weird perspective, but there are some benches that they are sitting on. But, what's missing is us. This tells us something about God - that the Father, Son, Holy Spirit - God - is sitting around in fellowship, eating, drinking, sharing hospitality, and there is room in this icon for someone else to be there.

I want you to do me a favor. Each of you join hands. The picture that you saw was a picture of those three strangers, whom we believe the artist meant to be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - angels - that Abraham entertained and did not know what he was doing, but he invited them to share the meal with him. That is what we are doing. It tells us something about God, that God is not complete unless other people are being invited to share God's life, so strangers, people we don't like, people who are not like us, necessarily - the issue is not who the people are, but that we are inviting them. So, the key for it is that, around God's table, just like in this picture, there is room for more, and God is not complete without all of those whom God has made participating in God's life. So, every week, when we come here, you all are invited to this table to share in the meal, to become part of God's Divine Life, to become part of the hospitality that we believe defines God.

So, I want you to think about this, and, the next time somebody asks you what the Trinity is, let them know that the Trinity is some sort of a dinner party, or maybe even a buffet, that is there to feed all of God's people and invite all of God's people to become part of the table. And, when we come forward to Communion today, remember that it is not Kathy inviting you, it is not Father Andrew inviting you, it is God who is inviting you to come forward and share the meal. All right?

All right!

AMEN

August 6, 2000 - "The Feast of the Transfiguration"

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On the Feast of the Transfiguration, we read this passage about Moses going up on the mountain to receive the Law, because it very much parallels the Gospel lessons. Some rabbis were thinking about what happened there, because we hear about what happened at the foot of the mountain, but, since nobody else went up with Moses, we don't know what happened at the top. So, I wanted to reflect a little bit on that and read some of the discussion they had about this.

Rabbi Levi said, "On top of Mount Sinai, Moses was given the choice of receiving the Commandments or seeing God face to face. He knew that he could not see God without first dying. It was like looking into a mirror with no reflection inside." Rabbi Ezra said, "Moses did receive a Commandment, but only one, only the first. All the others blended into silence, as all colors blend into white." Rabbi Gamaliel said, "Moses received only the first phrase of the first commandment, 'I am the Un-namable.'" Rabbi Alhanon said, "Moses saw on Sinai what he heard from the burning bush. There was just one message, 'I Am'." Rabbi Samuel said, "Not even that. The only word the Un-namable whispered was, 'I'." Rabbi Yoshi said, "In the Holy Tongue, I is anoky, spelled aleph nun kaph yod. What Moses received from God was the first letter of I." "But aleph is a silent letter." Rabbi Yoshi said, "Just so!" Kind of a mystical understanding of what Moses found revealed.

Do you remember when Elijah was hiding, and he was in the cave, and God appeared to him? He didn't appear in the earthquake. He didn't appear in the fire, but He appeared as the sound of sheer silence or, in the older translations, the still, small voice. The idea is that Moses had this experience.

What would that be like? What would it be like to come face to face with God? Moses' experience changed him. It changed his appearance, so that, when people saw him now, immediately, not knowing what had happened, they were afraid. So, Moses begins to wear a veil over his face, so that no one is afraid to approach him; and he takes the veil off when he goes in to be with God in the Tabernacle, but he puts the veil back on when he goes out.

St. Paul had a little bit different interpretation, because St. Paul understood the veil as being a result of the reflected Glory of God being held back by the Law - that the veil was to Moses' face like the Law is to us. Moses was afraid, or the people were afraid, so the veil protected. Because of the weakness of humankind, and their ignorance, and that the time had not yet come for Christ, the Law was the veil that protects. But, now that Christ is here, there is no need for a veil anymore. And so, Paul is writing and talking about our invitation from God to see God unveiled in Christ.

Reading from Second Corinthians, Chapter Three, "And all of us with unveiled faces, seeing the Glory of the Lord as though reflected in the mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." We are all being transformed to the same image from one degree of glory to another.

As with Jesus and the three disciples on top of the mountain. They fall asleep. They don't see all of the things we saw described as they appeared. They awake from their deep sleep, and, immediately, they see this whole scene before them. They didn't see Jesus change, they saw the end product. They didn't see Moses and Elijah arriving, they saw the three of them together. And, they immediately go into the mode of trying to be very hospitable - of being good hosts. "Let's make three dwellings, three tents." The cloud overshadows them, Moses and Elijah are gone, and they hear the voice from the cloud, "This is My Chosen Son. Listen to Him."

The significance of this particular Gospel passage has to do not so much with the ends, as it does with the means. Jesus on the mountaintop is transfigured just like Moses was, but Jesus and Peter had just been in something of an argument before they went up to that mountaintop. It tells us that this happened, what, eight days later? Eight days after this, the Gospel starts out. But, what happened was that Jesus asked them, "Who do people say that I am?", and Peter said, "You are the Christ." And, He said, "Yes, and the Christ has to suffer and die and then will be raised." And, Peter says, "Oh no, Lord! That will never happen to you!" And Jesus says, "Satan, get behind me." Jesus has taken these disciples up on the mountaintop with Him, and they have seen the glory, which was always there, but, for their benefit, was revealed to show them the end - to show them what they will see again, in a sense, at His Resurrection. They will see it again at the Ascension. They will see something that they will come to relate to Jesus' Communion with God the Father, and this is to let them know that the means to it is not the way they normally, and more humanly, think.

We have just experienced, over this last week, the Republican Convention, and we have the Democratic Convention coming up. I can't imagine any more modern occasion designed to glorify a person. I listened to a few of the speeches and watched some of the pageantry that goes with it, and everything is designed to move you to the place where the last word will be the acceptance of the nomination, and then out into the world to share. And there will be speech after speech. 2,000 delegates! And, of course, it has been 30 years since the delegates had anything to vote on, so the delegates are mainly there as a backdrop and a background for the candidate being presented. And, it isn't just one party or the other, it is the way our system works. All of this glory! But, Jesus says there is a different way. Jesus says that the way to the glory that you are seeing on top of the mountain is not through human means, and it is not through the traditional ways that people get glory in our world, it is through suffering. It is through self-deprecation. It is through giving oneself up for another.

And, Jesus tells us that, just like St. Paul says, we will begin to see ourselves transformed from glory into glory into the same image of Christ that we seek. Jesus, on top of the mountain, was not just talking about His end, He was talking about our end - that the means are the same. If you can't bear the Cross, you can't wear the crown. Jesus is reminding us that His transfiguring in glory will have a cost, and that cost is His life for the rest of the world. And, He is reminding us that, if we were to follow in His way and share in His glory, then we also have to share in His suffering, in His giving of Himself, in His making of Himself less than He might have, for the benefit of others.

It is a great reminder for us, in the midst of all of the hoopla that surrounds our lives, that the One who was in the image of God and displayed it most perfectly to us, was the One who was willing to walk the way of the Cross. From this mountaintop, Jesus has one destination. His destination, to which He has set His face, is Jerusalem. Everything we will read in the Gospel of Luke, from this point on until the Resurrection, will be aiming Him toward confronting the powers of this world and defeating them by offering Himself.

Each of us are invited, not to receive an external reflective glory, like Moses, not a glory that comes from the Law that is external to us, but we are invited to share in the Glory of Christ. As St. Peter says here, "You will do well to be attentive to this teaching, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts." Peter is telling us that we should be prepared - that if we walk in the Way of Christ, that we will experience, revealed inside us, that same transfiguration and glory that we saw on the mountaintop. That is our end and the means that we will get there by are the same - following our Lord, who leads us first through suffering, first through giving of ourselves, but, ultimately, to be changed completely into the image of Christ. That is our goal, and that is our path.
AMEN

August 13, 2000 - "Christ, the Bread of Life"

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(Father Andrew begins by singing this little jingle). "Nothin' says lovin' like something from the oven . . ." (And a very few of us add the rest - very few!) I hear two people. Does anybody else know it? "Nothin' says lovin' like something from the oven, and Pillsbury says it best."

Probably off-key and everything else! But, I grew up with that, and I connect this with another phrase that I have just learned in the last year or so. From what I understand, it is kind of an "in-phrase," and I don't always do well with those. Comfort food.

Now, that ad makes you think of a variety of things. Have you been to Aspen Mills lately? You walk in to Aspen Mills, and the smell of that baking bread . . . You walk into any restaurant where they bake. I used to have to bake bread in a restaurant I worked at. I baked about 25 pounds of bread a day, and that smell does something to me.

Jesus' disciples and followers, who were with him on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, thought they had the ultimate comfort food. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and Jesus fed them miraculously with this little boy's box lunch. And, they loved it! In fact, they loved it so much they followed him around the lake, hoping to get some more. They saw it as food that was to comfort them, just as the Israelites in the Wilderness grumbled and grumbled, and, finally, God gave them Manna. They were out in the desert, and they thought, "Oh, He fed us," so they came, and they wanted more food. They wanted more of that Manna.

But, Jesus was not content to let them have comfort food. Jesus decided that He was going to give them "discomfort" food. Because the bread was fine, just like most comfort foods. My understanding of it is that they tend to have things like gravy. They tend to be full of all the stuff that you are not supposed to eat, and comfort foods maybe remind you of when you were growing up, before anybody knew what was an appropriate diet, or maybe it is something else. For me, it would be something like a pineapple upside down cake. It just feels good. I call that self-medicating food. When I want to get away from my troubles, I don't drink; I eat (or shop, but the sermon is about eating, so we won't go to shopping). And the comfort food works until somebody reads the label, until you are confronted with the grams of fat, the sodium, the sugar, whatever it is, even red dye # whatever, that might be in it.

The crowd was happy as could be with Jesus and with his bread from wherever, until He decided He had to tell them about it. He couldn't just leave it as bread and let them be filled. He had to explain to them what happened. He had to let them know that they were seeing bread, but they were getting Life. He discomforted them by explaining to them what the bread meant.

Everything in John's Gospel surrounds signs. He doesn't call them miracles; they are signs. And, for us, it is great that John calls them signs, because signs always point to something; so, whenever Jesus does something out of the ordinary, you can bet it is supposed to point to something. Usually, it is pointing to Jesus. But, the people were just saying, "Can you knock this off and give us some more bread?"

Jesus was discomforting them by saying things like, "I am the Bread that came down from Heaven. Anyone who eats of this Bread will not die forever. I am the Bread of Life. He who comes to Me - anyone who comes to Me - will never hunger." And, darn it! He went on long enough that it finally made them think, and they started analyzing and reflecting, and they weren't sure if they liked this bread. They were truly discomforted.

Many of them probably grew up around Jesus. They said to one another, "Isn't this Joseph's son? Isn't this Mary's son? We know Him. Don't you remember when He was ten and (fill in the blank)? And now He is telling us that He is the Bread that came down from Heaven? We know where You came from!" And, another point about John's Gospel is that anybody who thinks they know where He came from is usually wrong.

This discomfort has other impacts, too. St. Paul is writing - the author of Ephesians, anyway - is writing to this Church in Ephesus, and Paul (I'm going to say Paul; we're not sure who wrote it, but we think Paul) is not going to give them just a word of comfort. He is discomforting them. How does he start out this section we read? He says, "Let's stop lying to one another. Let's tell the truth." He starts describing things about them that would probably make them upset. He is talking about the way the Church that he is writing to really operated, as opposed to the sign that is out front, "All Are Welcome Here. You're Our Friend" - all these kinds of things.

And what happens usually in Churches? You get in and find you are welcome, unless you are the wrong kind of different, or, unless you get to the coffee hour, and everybody is busy talking to their own friends, and they ignore you. There are all sorts of things about the way we like to think about it and what comforts us at our church, but Paul, when he is writing to the Ephesians, is discomforting them, because he is talking about what is really happening.

Think about this! If you look at it and look at the kind of place this is, he says, "You folks, be angry - go ahead, be angry with one another - but don't sin. Don't give the devil a foothold. Don't go to bed angry." Well, now, most of us don't ever want to admit to having fights, so, if a Church didn't have any fights, why would he need to be writing to them about how they get angry with each other, and how they fight, and to fight fairly? They must be fighting. "Thieves, give up stealing." Well, we know what kind of clientele Paul saw in Ephesus! "Let no dirty talk come out of your mouth. Put away bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander, malice." Is this the kind of a place that you want to go to Church on a Sunday morning?

But, to be honest, it describes the reality of life in most congregations. If we hear God's Word, we should all be somewhat discomforted, because, when we tend to focus on various kinds of sinful behavior, we tend to go after what I call the "Big Three" (and I won't even name them), and we forget about all the other stuff.

But, Paul is dealing with something much more important than just kind of middle class moral ism. St. Paul is dealing with what really destroys a congregation or a community and what really builds up a community. It is not the fact that somebody is doing something that everybody knows they are not supposed to be doing that destroys a congregation, it is people treating one another with bitterness, not letting bygones be bygones, not going to bed without anger, but nurturing the anger. We have our candle here that never goes out. In Churches, there are people that have a little lamp of anger that they never let go out, and they nurture it for years and years. Paul is being very honest with this congregation, because he is not going to leave them just thinking about all the things that are wrong. He gives them another option, because, you never change anything. This is for any of you who might ever want to go council with Father Vern. One of the things that you will hear is that you don't change a bad habit just because you want to. You change it by replacing it with something else. Instead of thinking about whatever the old habit is and doing that, you do something that is positive, that gets you where you want to be in a good way, and that is how you change a habit.

So, Paul looks at this slander, bitterness, wrath, and everything else, and he says, "Instead, be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children." Paul wants us to hear this and be discomforted, not discomforted and go away that way, but discomforted in a way that helps us to really rebuild our lives. When Jesus gave them the bread and then started talking about it, so they couldn't just eat the bread and be happy and leave, He had more to His message, too, because his message said, "Anyone that the Father gives Me, I am not going to lose. None of them. Any of them that come to Me will not be sent away."

There is the Good News in all of this - that we have to start being able to look at the realities of all life that is about us and realize that it is that real life that God takes and redeems. It is the fact that we live among a people who might sometimes be selfish, obnoxious, wrathful, slanderous, bitter - sometimes it might even be me. God knows that and still loves us. God knows that we fit that bill and still sent His Son to die on the cross for us. And God says that, "All of you who are called to be a part of My life will not be lost." Jesus promises us that no one that the Father has given Him will be lost.

So, we are in this for the long haul. Jesus wasn't just doing one really cool thing with these people, He was trying to educate them and feed them, not for the moment, but for eternal life. When we come to grips with really listening to the words of Christ, to God's Word, we are confronted about things, but we are also brought to a place where we can grow and develop and learn and become more and more the people whom God has called us to be. We can build ourselves and our Church, and, ultimately, our community, into the image of Christ. That is the ultimate comfort food. The comfort food that accepts the reality of where we are, that allows us to be discomforted, but then really nourishes us, really feeds us and gives us the food that isn't going to go away after it is digested and out, but is the food that will last for eternity, the food that will link us to one another and to God forever.

Christ - the Bread of Life.
AMEN

August 20, 2000 - "Spin Doctors"

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If only Jesus had taken a publicist with him on his preaching tours. He could have benefitted from his own spin-doctor. Most politicians and many leaders from other venues have people trained to "spin" or interpret what they say, or what they meant to say. The CEO who announces massive layoffs (generally thought of as a negative) is followed by the spin-doctor who describes this a downsizing or a repositioning in a competitive marketplace.

Can you imagine Jesus leaving the podium, and someone in the audience asking about his statement, "so whoever eats me will live because of me?" If only Jesus had had a spin doctor to soften that statement. If only he had been able to leave one of the disciples behind to remind the listeners of the Wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures.

From Ezekiel chapter 3:3{The LORD} "said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey." Or he could have reminded them of the passage from Proverbs, chapter 9:1Wisdom has sent out her servant-girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, 4"You that are simple, turn in here!" To those without sense she says, 5"Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. 6Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."

The spin-doctor could have reassured the congregation. "Jesus was not talking literally, he was making the point that he is the Wisdom of God. He was ONLY speaking metaphorically."

This would have made sense to the people. In fact, throughout the time since Jesus taught, this has proven to be a very popular way of spinning what Jesus said. It has been popular to emphasize the metaphorical implication of Jesus' words. It has been safer to keep our distance from the implications of eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

It is safer because it protects us from too much intimacy with Jesus and with each other. If the meaning is only metaphorical, only symbolic, only intellectual, it is open to interpretation, ultimately our own interpretation; then, Jesus has no claim upon us, but what we invent.

Jesus did not have a spin doctor. We know this because many of the people who heard this teaching on the Bread of Life, found it too hard and stopped being Jesus' disciples. We know this because the religious and secular leaders heard Jesus' words and were so frightened that they put him to death.

Each of us hears the words of Jesus through our own filters and we each shade the meaning based on many factors in ourselves and in the world around us. This is a good thing. God gave us our minds for this purpose. From time to time, I have been invited to teach a portion of the Critical Thinking Course at College of the Desert. My segment is Critical Thinking from A Religious Perspective.

I love to reflect on the ways that humanity has developed to ponder things sacred and divine. We discuss analogy and allegory, rationalism and literalism. We examine how people make religious and ethical choices, the choices of what we believe and what we will do.

My question is this: Which kind of interpretation leads us face to face with Jesus? Understand, I am not looking to learn about Jesus, I want to meet Jesus. I don't meet him in the interpretation that sees him as a great teacher who had a unique way of disclosing Eternal, but generic Truth. I don't meet him when I spiritualize him so that he is only the 2nd person of the Holy Trinity. I meet him when his Word becomes flesh, in the Bread and Wine -- and in You.

Queen Elizabeth I was asked how she understood Holy Communion as the Body and Blood of Jesus. She declared: "His was the word that spake it, and what his word doth make it, I do believe and take it." Not a bad answer if you have to keep a divided kingdom happy. Her answer told us nothing about her belief.

On the other hand, when our daughter, Sarah was two, we were talking to her about Holy Communion. I asked her who was there with her at Communion, expecting her to name Fr. Peter or Fr. Jim. She floored me with her answer "Oh, Jesus."

I find that when I am more willing to meet Jesus in all his "fleshliness" I begin to meet him in more people and in more places. The kinds of encounters that I have with other people are different, too.

We can tend to intellectualize or spiritualize the problems or conditions of the people we meet, especially when we don't want to touch them.

This last week, I have had more encounters than usual. If a homeless person comes into the office, it is easy to take the person out of the problem. Homelessness can be intellectualized into such a big and complex problem that it is meaningless to address it one on one. It is easy to say, "Go Away." In fact, the man who came into the office was so experienced at this process, that he supplied all the "outs" for me.

"I'm sorry to be taking your time. I can just go away."

"I don't mean to be a problem." "If I am disturbing you, I can leave."

At least for that encounter, I focused on the person, not the problem and let him talk. To make a long story short, I think that I handled that more like someone who hoped to meet Jesus, than like someone who was too busy to notice Jesus.

I'm glad that Jesus did not have a spin doctor with him. I'm glad that hard sayings like, "Eat my flesh and live" have not been pasteurized so that they are safe. They are signs that God's Word, the Eternal Word, the Wisdom of God became flesh, that is -- became totally human in Jesus. We will proclaim it in the Creed in a few minutes. This is the overwhelming mystery and paradox of our faith. But even this is not the greatest mystery or paradox.

The miracle that is greater than the Word becoming flesh in Jesus, is that Jesus promises that when we eat his Flesh, he will make OUR flesh into HIS Word.

September 3, 2000 - "Laws"

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September 3, 2000 - Father Andrew Green

"Hear, O Israel, listen to these laws and teachings. If you obey them, you will live, and you will go in and take the land that the Lord has given you. He is the God your ancestors worshipped, and, now, He is your God. I am telling you everything He has commanded, so do not add anything, or take anything away."

Moses was directing the people to be faithful to their laws - the laws their God had given them, and which marked them as a peculiar people. It was not a generic law-and-order message. It was the sign of a Covenant, by which they identified themselves as the people of God. The Ten Commandments and all of the laws were not given for everybody, but were given for those who would make a commitment to Yahweh.

I would like, at this time, to ask all of you to stand, and, for those of you who are American citizens (others are welcome, too), I would like you to turn to the flag with me and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Please be seated.

I feel like saying, too, that there is always a Boy Scout around, or an ROTC student around when I hear this these days.

Whenever I say the Pledge of Allegiance, whenever I hear it, my mind always runs to one verse, the only verse I still remember from when I learned it in Spanish in elementary school, "with liberty and justice for all". When I am saying it in English, I am thinking it, "con libertad e justicia para tos". (This spelling is a guess on the part of the transcriptionist, who asks to be forgiven if it is wrong!). It is one thing that keeps coming up in my mind. It is part of our Creed. It is part of what we are about as Americans.

Do you remember the "I have a dream"-speech by Dr. King that he gave in Washington, D. C., I believe, in 1963? He talked about his dream for America, about how people would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the quality of their character. An e-mail-friend of mine, Grant Gallop, who is a priest in Managua, Nicaragua, kind of a revolutionary-sort of guy, reminds us that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was not calling us as Americans to be anything other than what we already claim to be - what we claim to be in our Declaration of Independence, what we claim to be in our Constitution, what we claim to be in our Pledge of Allegiance - a land where liberty and justice are for all.

One of our members has been in the news lately, and it wasn't me! Dr. Wayne McKinney works to make the dream a reality - liberty and justice for all. For all, even homeless people. He's not perfect. He's not always wise. On many issues, we disagree. He is a royal pain for the city of Palm Springs, but he wants us to be sure that we live up to the ideals that we proclaim over and over again as an ethical community, and as an American city - liberty and justice for all.

Now, we Christians may not be comfortable with the flavor of the lesson from Ephesians today. It is kind of militaristic. It talks of going to war, or preparing for battle. Listen.

"Let the mighty strength of the Lord make you strong. Put on all the armor that God gives you, so that you can defend yourselves against the devil's tricks." We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world. We are not going to war. We are at war! We are at war on many levels. However, the one thing I can tell you is that we are not at war with one another. We are never to be at war with one another. We are at war with the powers, the spiritual forces, and the institutional mentalities that want to make us forget that the abundant life of Jesus Christ is for absolutely everybody. The war is against exploitation, racism, poverty, and all forms of prejudice. It is against irrational fear of foreigners. It is against ignorance and child abuse. It is against the culture and the economy of drugs. It is not a war against people, but it is a war against the forces that oppress people and the destructive choices that people make.

Jesus critically examined this battle on one level when he was confronted by the leaders about a lack of attention to common ritual. They asked him, "Why do your disciples eat without washing their hands properly?" Now, those of you in the medical profession already know how to do this, but you wash your hands in this ritualistic fashion. You wash them all the way up to the elbows, and you make sure that you hold your hands up so that none of the water that has dirt and soap in it comes back over your hands and defiles them. Sometimes, it can be a tedious sort of process. Now, I have no question that Jesus was in favor of good sanitation, but I only have speculation as to why his disciples did not get the ritual washing right. Perhaps because they were simple laborers ( note the connection - Labor Day). Perhaps because they were simple laborers, they had never had the time to learn the proper way to wash, so that none of the water ran back down on their hands. Remember Tevia's dream in Fiddler on the Roof - to some day have the leisure to study the Torah all day long. Jesus chose to make that confrontation an object lesson. Were people to be judged for the perfection with which they followed the rituals of the elders, or was it more important to see if and how they fulfilled the mission? In responding to his disciples' continued lack of understanding, Jesus explained how this process of true purity and fitness for the Kingdom of God worked with individuals, and it is real simple. "Then Jesus said, 'What comes from your heart is what makes you unclean'".

Nothing outside can get in and make you unclean. No food that you eat, no ritual washing, nothing from the outside can make you unclean. I would go further and say that nothing outside, no devil out there, can come in and make you unclean. It is what comes out of you that does it.

Now, how might this work on some other levels? Jesus' level was to deal with an individual. Jesus was talking about that sense of individual piety. But was He really? I don't think that Jesus ever talks about individuals, per sè, in the Gospel. When He is talking about people, He is talking about people in relationship to the Law; and the Law was not given to an individual, the Law was given to a people. The Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, the Law of God was not given to you to say, "Well, you know I think that is kind of neat! I like that! I am going to make that part of my personal rule of life! The Ten Commandments!" The Law was given to the people of God, so that those who wanted to be a part of the people of God would have a sign of their Covenant.

It is me, and everybody else that are a part of the people of God, that have a responsibility to God and to one another. Just as our body is not defiled by what we put in it, our larger associations are not defiled by who is admitted. We are defiled by what comes out of us, by what we produce. It is popular these days to act like it is immigrants that are ruining our country; but, I have to tell you, without immigrants, I wouldn't be here, and I don't think most of us would be here. The smelly, homeless person in the pew next to you is not out of place, but right where he or she belongs. The sinners of all types, who populate this congregation, make us stronger, not weaker. Sometimes we look down on the alcoholic and the drug addict. I would guess that the alcoholic in recovery has a much tighter grasp on their relationship with God than those of us who have no need for recovery. We have, as a community, opportunities to stand up for what we believe.

Now, what we did earlier was that we stood up, and we said the Pledge of Allegiance - at least I hope most of us did. And, we will later talk about our Creed. We will say our Creed together, what we believe as Christians. We also have a chance to do more than talk about it. We have a chance to stand up and do something about it. We can stand against violence. You will be reading in the paper soon about an opportunity to view a movie called "Journey to a Hate-Free Millennium". You have a chance to see that and learn about how you can stand against hate and violence. We can stand up against discrimination, and we can do it really easily. We can do it by refusing to listen to any more jokes that demean or put down anybody, from ethnic minorities to blonds. We can stand shoulder to shoulder with the hurting and the lost, who need the same words of love and forgiveness that we need. We can stand for just wages for workers. We can stand for liberty and justice for all, rather than just for the "right ones".

Now, Paul ends up this section of the Letter to the Ephesians in a wonderful way, as an extended teaching on prayer, about how we should always be praying in the Spirit. And, then, Paul does something that most of us are reticent to do - he says, "Pray for me. Pray for me."

Pray for me that I will have the ability to stand and to preach the Gospel, to stand up for the abundant life of Jesus Christ, boldly. Pray for yourselves, pray for one another in the Body, and pray for our elected leaders. Pray for those who want to be our elected leaders. Instead of sniping and demeaning one another, pray for one another, that whomever we elect would have the courage to stand up for what we just said we believe. Pray that every one of us who is baptized into the body of Christ would stand, would stand firm. I have to tell you, I need your prayers, and I know you need mine. We need one another.

One Nation, indivisible, we stand together, with liberty and justice for all.

AMEN

September 10, 2000 - "Ministry"

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September 10, 2000 - Father Andrew Green

I don't know what the people who put the lectionary, the lessons that we read Sunday by Sunday - I don't know what they were thinking, but I can't imagine a more perfect lesson for this Sunday, because, as this Sunday we kind of celebrate people getting off of vacations and getting back, we see Jesus returning from his vacation at the seashore in Tyre and heading to the lake region around the Sea of Galilee and beyond, and we learn something.

Before we do anything else, we have to understand that ministry is what happens on your way to doing something else.

Jesus was on His way back from the coast, and He was wandering along. There is nothing that tells us that He anticipated that this day He would run into a deaf man who needed to be healed. One would imagine that, in a region like that and in that era, there were probably quite a few deaf people, and He probably ran into them all over the place. But, on this day, someone brought a particular person to Him with a request that He would heal the man.

Ministry is what happens while you are on your way to doing something else.

Now, this particular story also tells us something else about the way that Jesus does ministry. Sometimes we want to do things in a way that keeps us as far away as possible from the person we are helping. For example, if there is a poor person begging, we will get our change and drop it in, so that we don't get any closer than we need to. The cooty factor!! We are concerned about that. At one time in our town, the primary doctor who cared for AIDS patients, it seemed to the patients, didn't want to be touched by them, and didn't want to touch them. Can you imagine having a doctor diagnose you who didn't want to get any closer than this - didn't really want you to breathe on him? Jesus doesn't operate like that. Jesus gets down and dirty with the people He deals with. He sticks His finger in the ears, spits, and, most people say, spits and grabs the tongue, touches it. I can't get anyone in my family to touch my tongue - let alone strangers. Ministry the way Jesus does it is quite earthy. It is not safe. There are a variety of ways of understanding how this miracle takes place. Jesus has, on other occasions, healed someone just by saying the word, and the person in another area is healed. He didn't even need to go there. But, in this case, it is really up close and personal. One idea might be that the particular Word that He spoke was just the right Word, and that person was healed. There is another simpler version. (Father Green holds up a Q-Tip). The person might have just had some wax built up, and Jesus did just the right thing. It could have been that simple. Very earthy, perhaps very simple.

Clergy have made a living at preaching about these things by having a dozen different interpretations of it, and you are going to get three today - at least three.

The simplest is, of course, that Jesus just knew what the guy needed, cleaned it out, and that was it - he could hear again. In reading it, I would assume that the person might have heard at one time in his life, because he could talk a little bit. The text says that he had an impediment in his speech. It doesn't say that he was completely unable to speak, but that he had a problem when he spoke. That is evidently fairly characteristic of people who have been hearing at one time, and have then lost their hearing. They lose the ability to make it really connect, but they can still speak. In my limited understanding, I have learned that people who have never heard have a great difficulty learning to speak, because they have nothing to base it on.

So, Jesus healed this person. There is one other part about that healing I want to focus on today. There are a lot of little details here that really help us to understand more about Jesus. It says that He sighed. (Father Andrew does several sighs). I have been practicing sighs. Well, with three teenagers, I really have a whole range of sighs to work from. But, what kind of a sigh was it? Well, if you read Greek, you will find out that sigh might be kind of like the words used for company - groan might be more accurate. Parts of this I decided not to practice, because people who, in that era, were doing some kind of a mighty healing work, as a part of everybody knowing that they were about to do something really interesting, would work their face into a contortion, and their body would contort a little bit, and that might be the kind of sigh we are talking about. I don't think it was just a "Hum". That sigh, in my opinion, was Jesus' prayer - Jesus' prayer to the Father for guidance about what was the right thing to do, how to heal this individual.

Here is where the different interpretations come in. Is this a story about Jesus, who ran into somebody who had too much wax in the ears, or had had some kind of a loud noise or an illness, a virus, which caused him to lose his hearing, and Jesus simply made them hear? They could speak clearly after that, and everybody went on about their business, thinking Jesus was great. That is really the simplest thing, but the question is, what does that mean for you and me today? For those of us who perhaps have all of our hearing or speak well, it doesn't mean much to us.

So, there are other interpretations. One interpretation is - What about us as believers encountering the Gospel, or people who have never been believers, who encounter the Gospel? Is it possible that the deafness that we have is our inability to clearly hear what God is saying to us? Is it our inability, when the Word is read, to hear that God is active in that Word, and that that Word is alive for us and means something personal and special, just to each one of us, that, if we heard it, we would be able to speak the Gospel to others clearly? What are the impediments? What are the things that stand between you and me and hearing the Gospel clearly? Some of these things may sound repetitious over weeks and months, but, you know, we have our upbringing, we have our own understanding of our language, we have where we learned our language from, what part of the country, what class we learned our language from - all of that has something to do with how we will hear and understand the Gospel. Sometimes, we hear the Gospel, and, immediately, we think, "Oh, deaf person - that's not me". We have an impediment. We have an ability to believe that this is not for us.

This good news is for somebody else, somebody far more needy, somebody I might not want to be sitting next to in Church, but it doesn't have anything to do with me. I will tune in when there is something in the Gospel that applies to me. Other impediments are the impediments that are done to us - abuse - when we have been trained to think, "Oh, God doesn't have any good news for you. You are not good enough." I dealt with a woman yesterday who, 30-some years ago, was divorced and learned from that, in her Church, that she could not receive Communion - that she was not worthy to receive Communion any longer. So, for 20 years, that was the message that she heard, so, whenever she heard the Gospel, there was an impediment. There was something blocking her that made her deaf to hear the Good News that was there for her, because she had been trained that it was not for her anymore, and that it didn't apply to her. Only when another priest, whom she met on a cruise, and who became friends with her and her husband - only when that priest reminded her that she was still beloved by God and invited her to receive Communion, did she start to hear clearly and did she start to be able to speak the Good News with conviction.

What about us as a Church? Does God want this Gospel to be heard by us? What is it that we do as a congregation that prevents us from hearing God's Word? As Episcopalians - you know, I have used this joke before, but there is the story about the woman who says, "Why do we do evangelism? Everybody who ought to be an Episcopalian already is one." Imagine listening to the Gospel if that is your mind-set. Imagine when a whole Church community sees itself as that kind of a place. We used to call it the Frozen Chosen. How can that group ever speak the Gospel? How can they hear it when they know that there are only certain parts of it that are for them? (The best parts, of course.)

What about as a country, when we can't hear the Gospel, when we can't hear the needs of other peoples in other countries. I was reading, this last week, and one of the things that I read said that there are 18 million refugees today - 18 million people who are out of their homes. Has anybody here been out of their home for a couple of weeks or months because of construction? Has anybody had somebody with a gun or a bazooka chase you out of your home - or let you know that, if you came back, you would be killed? Or let you know that, because you were the wrong race, religion, or height, you weren't welcome here anymore, and, for generations, this had been your home? Or because now that God has given this land to us, God has taken it away from you - go someplace else, please. 18 million people who are refugees. In our own streets, we have people who are refugees and are homeless. If we are not aware of that and cognizant of it - if we don't realize that those people have the same claim on God that we seem ready to make - how can we hear the Gospel?

Well, remember, Jesus was just wandering back on his way back from vacation, in my telling of the story, anyhow, when some folks came up to him and said, "Our friend is deaf. Can you help him?"

Here is where we have to be listening. What do we see out there that needs God's help? How can we be intercessors to bring it before God? How can you, as an individual, bring it before the Church? How can the Church bring it before our community? How do we, as a community, bring it before the nation? How do we act as intercessors to bring these things to God, believing that God can deal with them? You and I often don't have the ability. I am not good with deaf people. I mean, I don't do that healing well, but God does. Hearing the Word clearly is critical to being able to do anything about it. Hearing it by itself is not enough. It is a start.

It is interesting that, here we are now, connected with the Lutherans through this agreement about full Communion, and I am always reminded that Martin Luther called the Epistle of James, the Epistle of straw, because it wasn't big on faith and righteousness. It had a lot of good deed stuff in it. But, the truth is that, if we hear and do nothing, we are wasting our time. God heard the cries of the people, and God spoke His Son into existence, into flesh. We are to hear the impediments that keep us from the Gospel and ask God to heal them. We are to bring those who have needs to God, for God to heal. We are to take action to make things happen.

I would like to finish with a passage that was from the Christian Century. Any of you grammarians out there - if you are the folks that like to go through the bulletin and underline all the bad grammar - the grammar here is not accurate, but it's effective at getting the point across.

"Be open" is a prayer grown between Heaven and earth for us - a sigh to God who hears us into speaking. It is Jesus' own language, calling the Church to be a hearing place, not only a speaking place. We may indeed hear one another into speech. We might begin to hear the Gospel spoken in new ways, strange sounds to us at first, or in pictures we had not imagined. Slowly, new visions of truth will be born. Stay with the blurred edges. Wait. Listen. The Gospel is stammering its way to life among us. And Jesus stays with us, sighing between earth and Heaven. He says, "Be open".

AMEN

October 15, 2000 - "Fist"

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October 15, 2000 - Father Andrew Green

Can you make a fist for me?

This passage that we didn't quote, but which might be very easily quoted (You can put it down now - it is too terrifying to look out and see all those fists) - a quote that is very much like the quote from Amos says, "You shall not make a fist to the poor." And, the idea is not that the writer of the Hebrew Scriptures is worried that somebody is going to beat them up, although, certainly, that happened. The idea is that when someone holds their hand out, then you make a fist. The idea is that you are cutting them off, that you are not helping them, not giving them what they need.

The lessons today are the lessons that some of the folks in the Parish dread. In our Bible study on Wednesday morning, one of our members wasn't there, and everybody at the study said, "Oh, it's too bad he's not here, it is the one he always hates. Because, every time we read this lesson, he says, 'How come Jesus is always taking after the rich? Why is he always picking on them?'"

Well, Jesus is picking on the rich man today. Jesus is giving him a challenge that is much like the challenge to not close your hand to the poor. In fact, Jesus is asking him to take everything that he has and give it to the poor. Now, one of the things that is important to understand here is that sometimes you want to squirm out from under this lesson. The commands of God in this lesson are tough. Even if you don't consider yourself rich, they are tough. Jesus is responding to the man who came up to Him and said, "What must I do to inherit Eternal Life?" And, in His answer to him, Jesus never once mentions anything that he needs to believe. Jesus only deals with the six behavior-oriented commandments and adds one more, Thou shalt not defraud. That is not in the top ten, but Jesus added it. But, He does not mention any of the four commandments that talk about loving God only, about keeping the Sabbath Day holy, about having no other gods before Yahweh. There is nothing about purity of belief in here. It is only about what he has to do, and the things that he has to do have to do with getting rid of his possessions and his behavior toward others. We like to be Grace-oriented Christians - you know, we are saved by Grace, so we don't have to do works to get saved - but, in this case, it is a hard word to deal with.

The way that I understand it is this - that the man who came to Jesus had indeed been a good man, was a good man, and sincerely asked what else he needed to do. And, Jesus, looking at him - it says "Jesus loved him", Jesus was able to maybe look in his soul, and he saw what was the big obstacle to this man's being able to grasp the Kingdom of Heaven. And so, He told him, "Get rid of everything that you have".

Now, people who have assumed that this means that everybody should do that have rushed to interpret this in different ways, so that they are off the hook. For example, one very common interpretation is that we are supposed to understand this lesson spiritually. That is always good for the pocketbook.

We are supposed to understand these lessons spiritually. We are supposed to not give all of our possessions away, sell them and give the money to the poor, because what would they do with them anyway but waste them. We are supposed to really hold onto them and manage them for the benefit of all of God's people, especially the poor, but not really let go of them. That is the spiritualizing interpretation.

But, I think, to be really honest, when Jesus looked at this guy, He said, "Sell it, give it away, and, when you are unencumbered, come follow me." But, He doesn't, in any place, say that everybody has to do exactly that, because, to be honest, some of us have different obstacles between us and God. This might not be the right one for us, but, on this day, this person had to deal with his possessions. I have to also say that this is a great time to slip in a stewardship message here, giving to the Church and stuff, but, to be honest, Jesus didn't say, "Sell what you have, give it all to the Temple, and come follow me." He said, "Care for the poor", so, if I am going to really make a stewardship message, I have to go someplace else.

The second story I want to tell you has to do with someone whom I met this last week or so, who was telling me the story. He woke up - Kathunk! Kathunk! - And he was startled. Kathunk! Kathunk! And he is kind of groggy - you know, how when you are awakened unexpectedly, you are not processing everything right, and you don't know what's going on. You are trying to make sure you are not eating the sheets or something like that, and he is wondering where this noise is coming from. Kathunk! Kathunk! It keeps happening, over and over again, and he is looking around. He notices that he is in a hospital room, and he sees a vent down on the floor, like our vents, and it sounds like a cover that keeps flapping over the vent, but there is no cover. So then, maybe it is some construction going on outside the hospital, and it is one of those jackhammers. Kathunk! Kathunk! Kathunk! Kathunk! But, it is not that. And he keeps hearing it. Kathunk! Kathunk! Kathunk! Kathunk! And then he realizes that it is not outside, that he has just had a valve replaced in his heart, and it is his heart's artificial valve making a noise that he has never heard before. Kathunk! Kathunk! And it stands out. To this day, it has been ten years since that happened to him - it has been ten years, and, when he is very quiet, he still hears that artificial valve clicking over - Kathunk! Kathunk! Kathunk! - when he is very quiet.

I want you to make a fist for me again. You have to do more work with this one this time. Now, I don't know, but I was told (those of you who are more medically-minded than I can check my facts) that the heart is somewhat larger than your fist, and your heart - Kathunk! Kathunk! - 70 times a minute at rest, let's say, your heart pumps. So, in a day, you have had about 100,000 beats. O.K? Then, per week, you have had, what?, about 800,000 - in a month, 2.-something billion - at ten years, it is 15 million. I stopped because (a) I got tired, and I stopped at 45 years, and I was up to about 35 billion beats of your heart. Are you tired yet? Those of you who maybe are not at rest all the time have been doing a little more work. Those of you who have been around longer than 45 years, your hearts have been doing a bit more work, as well.

But, here is the message. When did you last receive a bill for your heart's hard work? Did you get an invoice? I mean, if you don't pay the bills, the gas and the electricity get shut off, and your phone gets turned off; but when was the last time you received a bill for the working of your heart? 70 times a minute - Kathunk! Kathunk! - billions and billions of beats. The truth is that you have never received a bill for your heart. Every single one of us is a beneficiary of the most extensive affirmative action program ever - God's desire to give us life and to, without cost, give us everything that it takes to meet our needs to live and to thrive. The goal here is not just that you be amazed at how much your heart works, but that you might have a response of gratitude. Because, you see, there is no bill. The only thing that you can do to let God know how appreciative you are is to be thankful, to praise God and to be thankful that your heart is still working. It is one of the things that I can look around the room and say. No matter who is here, if you are here and listening to this sermon, your heart is still working. So, God has been faithful in keeping you.

It seems like gratitude is perhaps the one thing that this rich young man was missing. Perhaps he was unable to get past what he had to know to realize that it all came to him from God.

The last point. Time for another fist. (I like it that I made all of you bring the props for this sermon!) When I was about 15, I went rock climbing. The only time in my life that I ever went rock climbing was during that summer when I was 15, and I went to the Pinnacles National Monument (some of you from King City know the Pinnacles), and I learned some things. One I am going to tell you about is not something that I learned, because I didn't get that extensively into it, but, when you are rock climbing, you use all sorts of holds. You use little indentations that you brace against. If you watched the movie, Mission Impossible 2, you saw Tom Cruise hanging from just a little finger-hold. It looked like he was hanging from two fingers, and I think he actually was (I bet they had ropes on him, though.) Well, one of the things that you do sometimes is that, if you are really tired, you make a fist, and you find a big crack, if there is one available, and you jam your fist into the crack, and then you can kind of let go. You are still hanging by your arm, but at least you do not have to be stressed about that.

That is what this rich young man is being asked to do. That is what, in fact, every one of us is being asked to do. We are being asked to look inside, get an awareness of everything that God has done for us, come up with what the liturgy says is the "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving", and then give everything we've got to God. Take our heart, that we are so dependent on, and give that heart to God, just like jamming that fist in a crack, and then let go and let God care for us, let God meet our needs. It is more like becoming aware of how God is meeting our needs, because, just like with your heart, until I mentioned it, you probably had not thought about your heart beating today.

Actually, there are probably a couple of people here who are recent surgery recipients and may be thinking about it, but, until I mentioned it, you probably didn't think about it much. You probably took it for granted. The idea would be that, all those things that we are taking for granted, we turn them over to God in gratitude, and we let go. We let God care for us, and we give thanks to God for everything.

So, when you think of your fist, first of all, make sure your fist is not closed to the poor. Whether it is food or "stuff" that they need, or whether it is somebody who needs your care or needs you to listen - in any way, don't have yourself closed off like a fist. Secondly, for your heart, which beats regularly, remember to give thanks for it. And, finally, jam, like that fist, your heart into God's hands and let God carry you.

AMEN

November 19, 2000 - "The Role of the Scriptures"

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November 19, 2000 - Father Andrew Green - The Role of the Scriptures

Just at the time of year that we start getting inundated with newcomers and visitors, we have these lessons that I think appeal to most people, who are deciding about coming to Church, not in the best way; because, of course, people want to come to Church and hear about things that comfort and uplift them. They do not want to hear about desolating sacrileges - let the reader understand, or otherwise. But, I have to tell you that, on this day, I am actually not preaching on the lesson, which is an unusual thing. I am preaching about the Scriptures.

If you will look at your collect for today, it is a collect that we read every year, on the Sunday before the last Sunday of the Church year; and, on that Sunday, we read a collect that talks about the role of the Scriptures in our Church and in our lives.

"Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning, Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of Everlasting Life, which You have given us in Our Savior, Jesus Christ."

It tells us the role of the Scriptures for us and for the Church, but I want to stop for a minute.

I want you to imagine yourself (since so many people here live in various places where they have homeowner's associations) - imagine yourself at a homeowner's association meeting. Now, you have to imagine that, if you are a woman, you are not there. Sorry! This homeowner's association meeting is only for men, and it is in about the year 300. This meeting is made up of Bishops from around the Church, which means around the Mediterranean. Do you know what they are gathering to do? They are gathering to approve the Bible. I don't know about you, but most people that I run into somehow have the idea that the Bible came to us down from Heaven, and it just kind of floated down, and - It's here!! Sometimes Churches that perceive themselves as taking the Bible very seriously, in fact, worship the Bible. We call it Bibliolatry - making an idol out of something that God gave us for our sustenance and for our support. At this committee meeting, called the Council of the Church in the year of about 302, they actually voted on which books were in, and which books were not in the Bible.

Most of the books that we know of in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and the Gospels (for sure!), there was no question. There was no recount! (Pause for much laughter from the congregation). But, there were a couple of books that were "iffy", and I am going to mention the two - the Epistle of James, and the Revelation to John. Both of those got people a little bit on edge. James almost didn't make it, and the Revelation to John was almost replaced with a book called The Shepherd of Hermis. How many of you have every heard of The Shepherd of Hermis? Do you see what happens when you lose the vote at these committee meetings? Most people in Episcopal seminaries have had a chance to look at or to read The Shepherd of Hermis and a variety of other things, which were Christian literature, but which did not make it into the Bible.

Do you know why they picked some books, and why they did not pick others? One was because they were generally read by most of the Churches, and most of the people were familiar with them. When St. Paul wrote a letter to the Thessalonians, the Thessalonians read it and passed it on to the other Churches, so many Churches were aware of it. The second thing was that they could connect it with Paul, or they could connect it with one of the apostles; so the Epistle of James and the Revelation to John each had an apostle's name attached. The Shepherd of Hermis - well, you can go back and read, and you will find that Jesus never picked an apostle named Hermis. So, that is one of the reasons.

Now, we honestly believe - and I believe this 100%! - that the Holy Spirit inspired those people who were at that meeting and inspired them when they voted; and, the result is that that council gave us, more or less, the Bible that we have today.

We used to have a huge Bible that sat on the pulpit here, and you would have to go and kind of cut and paste as you went through reading. We eliminated that and put one that had it all together for the ease of the readers; but, every Church used to have a huge Bible like that. And, if you go back about 500 years, those Bibles were chained to the pulpit, and they called them "chained Bibles". Do you know why they were chained? To keep people from stealing them, because, 500 years ago, a big change happened. From the time of that council until that period, the Bible was the possession of the clergy. The clergy read it, interpreted it, and preached about it, if they decided to preach; and, when the printing press was invented, and the general literacy of the population increased, and Bibles became available for more than just a Church or a Monastery, more people, more average, generally middle-class and wealthy lay people, began reading the Bible.

So, we have two extremes - one in which the Bible is the captive of the clergy leaders and the elite, who decide for themselves that everybody should only have what they are willing to share with them of the Scriptures - and, on the other side, is the individual who knows that he or she has the answer. In the Reformation, one of the ways that they talked about it was, "Every man a Pope", or every woman a Pope, because each, when they had the Scriptures, could interpret it in the way they wanted to and claim that they were right.

Our collect gives us some really sound advice as to how to really take the Scriptures seriously in the way God intended them for us. It says, "Read, mark, learn". Much of that is intellectual - we are listening; we are reading; and, if you study it, you will learn it. But, then it says, "inwardly digest". You don't get that by reading even this much Scripture on Sunday, once a week, or, as in some people's cases, once or twice a month. You don't inwardly digest anything with that little exposure to it. Monday through Friday, we read Morning Prayer here. We read at least a chapter of the Old Testament and half of a chapter of the Epistles or the Gospels, every day. On Mondays and Fridays, we generally read a little bit more, because we sneak the Saturday and Sunday lessons in.

You find yourself starting to think like people in the Bible. You find yourself understanding images that come up often. You find yourself praying things that you have been reading in the Bible. You have begun to inwardly digest the Scriptures, but, the most important part of this is that, the captivity of the Bible to the clergy, or the captivity of the Bible to the individual, are both extremes, and are both to be avoided. Just like that council in the year 300 or so, the Church, the Body of Christ, the Community together, needs to come to terms with how we understand and interpret the Scriptures in our own day; because, let me tell you, in every era, there are parts of the Scriptures that get interpreted differently. It is the Church that has the responsibility to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to make those decisions faithfully. But, the faith of the Community is what it is all about; because, ultimately, the Bible does not understand any of us, individually, as having Salvation, it understands us as people who are saved by virtue of being a part of the Body of Christ.

The last line from the Letter to the Hebrews that we read today says, "But we are not among those who shrink back, and so are lost, but we are among those who have faith". We are a part of the Church, the Body of Christ, and so are saved. The Scripture is God's food for us. The Scripture is to nourish and sustain us as we live our lives of faith. The Scripture is not a stick to beat one another with, nor is it something that each of us should figure out ("Aha! I know what it is all about now!"), because one passage has been a burr under our saddle.

With the passages that we read today from Mark, where it talks about "if you are up on the rooftop, don't go back", there have been people at various specific times in history where whole groups of people gathered on their roofs, waiting for Jesus to return, because the Bible told them to.

We need to take into account lots more than just what strikes me on a particular day. We, as the Body of Christ, have the responsibility from God to inwardly digest and to proclaim the Good News of Salvation revealed to us in the Bible.

AMEN

December 31, 2000 - "Story"

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December 31, 2000 - Father Andrew Green

John 1:1-18
Galatians 3:23-25

At the beginning of the Gospel of John, we have a kind of summary, and, in a sense, it is disconnected from a lot of the other parts of the Gospel of John; but it kind of tips us off as to what is going to happen later.

It is very much a hymn, and the closest thing I can think of is kind of absurd; but, if you grew up in my era, what you learned about was TV shows. I was thinking about (I won't exactly go into it), but . . .

(Father Andrew sings) "Here's the story of a lovely lady"

The Brady Bunch! The theme song for the Brady Bunch tells you what took place, in order to get you ready for what is going to happen in the show. Gilligan's Island? I won't even go there! But, it is the same thing. There are all sorts, and you have your own favorites.

What you have in John's Gospel is a hymn explaining the story - not the story of Jesus coming to Nazareth, and the shepherds, and the wise men, and all of that - that is a very particular story. The Gospel according to John begins with the "Big Story". Just like the Hebrew Scriptures begin, "In the beginning. . .", so John's Gospel starts over, and it gives a hymn about what God has been doing from the beginning. In fact, you might almost want to say, "In the beginning was God's Story, and the Story was with God, and, in fact, the Story was God". (I believe the quote is from William Willimon.)

It is an incredible thing about Story. It plays a significant part in our lives. Story is incredibly important to us. Every one of us has a Story, and, from the time we recognize that we have a Story, the rest of our lives are spent reforming, reformatting, retelling our Story. As the different things that go on in our lives happen to us, they change the way we tell the Story. It is not cumulative. It is not like we start out with a 2-year-old Story, and we just keep adding years. Every experience we have causes us to go back and re-look at the things that went before. The Story of my youth is quite different when I tell it now, than it was when I told it ten years ago. The fact, for example, that my parents have died has made a difference in the way I tell that Story.

I would take a step further with the Story that we are looking at in the beginning of John's Gospel. This Story is one that is so important that the Church has raised it up in a number of ways over the Church's history. I don't know if you are aware, but, before we had an Advent season - you know that the Church year begins with Advent - before we had an Advent season, this Gospel was used and was read on Christmas morning, because Christmas morning designated the beginning of the Church year. And so, this Gospel was read to tell the Story and to set up the whole Story for the Christian faith. In more recent times, this Gospel was used at the end of every mass. It was called the Last Gospel. It was read by the priest, before the altar, before he (and, at that era, it was always "he") would leave the Church, because it told THE Story of the Incarnation.

Story-telling is incredibly important, and understanding God as "The Master Storyteller" is significant in how we understand our lives as Christians, and how we understand what is expected of us as Christians. And, probably, it comes in a very different way than you have thought about it before. How did God create the world, in the beginning? When the first things were created, how did God do it? God spoke, and it was. So, in other words, when God started telling the Story that was in God's mind, the Story started to unfold in real-time, in our lives and in our time. God created the world by telling the Story that already existed within God about the world.

So, Story not only describes - that is what we are used to, because we kind of think of our Stories as describing what is going on in our lives - but God's Story also creates, and our Stories also create. We actually change our lives when we retell our Stories, when we incorporate new facets. Think about the Story of your family when a new member was added, or when a member was lost. As you tell that Story, your family actually changes. When there is a funeral, Vern and I both invite people to tell the Story of their loss as often, as many times, and to as many people as will sit still for it. What is happening is that you are actually participating in God's healing, and you are creating your new life as you tell the Story. Only someone who has been subjected to hearing your story 20 to 30 times would know that the Story, itself, changes as you tell it. The things that were painful the first time you tell it get dimmer, and other things are raised up; and that is the way it is with the Story that God began telling at the beginning of Creation.

Jesus wasn't an afterthought. The Word was not something that came up at the last minute. This tells us that God's Word, God's Story, was there at the beginning, and nothing in the world that came into being came into being without first being part of God's Story. Think about it. We start talking about our theology - our dogma, our right's and wrong's. Think about what it would mean if we simply invited people to listen to our Story. This is my Story. (Now, there is another song that I won't go into, either.) This is our Story as Christians, and, on Christmas, we recognize that telling that Story is really what we are about. Sometimes, we call it preaching, witnessing, evangelism, but, really, all of it together is called "telling our Story". We are participating in the creative action that God has done, continues to do, and will always be doing in our world when we tell that Story.

When we tell the Story of how we came to believe - when we tell the Story of how God has healed us and touched us - when we tell the Story of our hurts and the fears in our lives and how God has met us there - we not only share a witness, but we create a new way of life with God by telling the Story. The Gospel and the Epistle, particularly, underline it for us. This portion of the scripture describes the Story that Paul tells to the Galatians. He uses the phrase, "the Law was our disciplinarian, the Law gave us instruction. Now, the Word is here." Now, a different Story is here, and we are expected not only to tell it, but also to become a part of that new Story. The Law, the instruction, came through Moses, but our full Story is revealed in Jesus Christ.

As we become more and more a part of the life of Jesus, our Story becomes more and more like the Story that God had in mind from the beginning, and the Story that will be fulfilled at the end of all things. And we are helping to create that Story. We are participating in making that Story come true, not by our own human desire, not by our own human ability, but because it is God's good pleasure that we would share in the Story.

Now, lots of things might change if we recognize that what we are simply doing is inviting people to join us in Storytelling. It is not nearly as threatening as fundamentalism and fanaticism. I remember that my Rector when I was a teenager corrected me once when I called somebody a fanatic, saying, "You know, I have learned that a fanatic is just somebody who loves the Lord more than I do".

What I learned was that, when I tell my Story, I talk from my perspective, and I talk about me. When I tell my Story, I don't point fingers and talk about "them". I understand that I need to grow in my love of God; and, as I begin telling that Story, all of a sudden, my attitude changes. The way I relate to people - especially people who disagree with me, especially people who don't like me - my relationship begins to change with those people. The Story, itself, begins creating the reality that I want to see.

"In the fullness of Jesus", it says in John's Gospel, "we have all received grace upon grace." It is one of the things that explains why, no matter how many times we hear the Christmas Story, to many of us it still brings tears. God's grace continues to unfold and grow and develop within us when we tell the Story.

But, there is a hook in all of this, and the hook is this. I learned that God wants us to not just sit back and be passive listeners to the Story ("Oh yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that"), but that God wants us to be tellers of the Story and creators of the Story with God and with one another. Before I learned that, it wasn't my responsibility.

The way Paul talks about it, we were slaves to the law, but now that Christ has come, we have been invited to be God's children, and, if God's children, then heirs. What do we think about when we think about heirs? Well, if it is an estate - "Ooohh! I get my cut!" But, the other thing that comes with being an heir is responsibility. Heirs share in responsibility. Not only do they get a cut of the estate, but, if there are debts, they get a cut of paying those debts back, too.

At one time, we were not responsible. We were just listeners. We weren't participants. We were just slaves to sin, or to whatever it might be that was holding us. Now that Christ has come, we are children. We are God's children and heirs of God's Kingdom, fellow heirs with Christ and with one another, and we are responsible.

But, there is Good News even with this hook. What are we responsible for? We are responsible for telling the Story. The Story, which we have heard and integrated, now becomes our Story, and we tell it.

So, when you think about God's Word becoming Incarnate (and we asked in our prayer that it might be Incarnate in us), what we were asking was this: Can we be grafted into God's Story? Can we find our place in that Story, and can we find our place as creators and tellers of it? And, can we look for other people who need to hear it? And, because many people have already heard it, can we, by sharing it again with one another, heal, bless, forgive, and create new life by the power of God's Spirit in ourselves and in the community that surrounds us?

Not by being right, not by being better than, not by being superior to, but by telling the Story that invites everyone else to join us. It is God's Story, and every single one of us, and every person on Earth, is invited to find their place in God's Story, and tell God's Story.

AMEN

January 7, 2001 - "Expectations"

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January 7, 2001 - Father Andrew Green

It had already started by the time I walked in. In fact, as I was walking outside, I could hear through the window that there was a woman yelling. She was really screaming. And, I walked in, and I tried to find my place in the restaurant. Now, the place that I wanted was quite different, knowing that there was somebody screaming and yelling. I really wanted the place over in the corner, because I had been there before when there had been a fight or something, and I like to find a place where I can be very small and not a target or anything. And, I got there, and, it is interesting, because I knew the woman who was screaming, and, in fact, the other three tables in the restaurant all knew each other. I didn't know any of them, but her. All of them knew each other, and it was very apparent to me that they expected a fight; not just somebody screaming, they seemed to think it would develop into something else. Well, it turns out that the woman who was screaming - and she was saying some very not-nice things about another woman, who had evidently wronged her at work - the woman who was screaming had gotten in trouble, evidently, and she was saying some not-nice things about the man that the other woman was with, and the other people who were at their table, too. And, what I found was that the woman who was screaming and a friend of hers were sitting in there and had really just about finished their meal, and the second table came in, who knew them, and they were just about finished with their meal, too. And then, the third group came in, and they had been drinking; and they were just ordering. And so, the waitress innocently came up and said, "Well, how are you tonight?" And, they said, "We were fine, but she is here!" And that is what started it. She heard that, two booths away, and she got up and started yelling - so loud that, as I am getting out of my car, I hear her yelling outside. And then I find that, as they are going along - this middle table that, as yet, is uninvolved - they are not done with their meal, and one of the guys starts getting involved; and he starts egging the woman on. He starts, "Yeah, yeah, go on, blah, blah, blah. . ." And she is getting louder and louder - never attacking him directly, but just kind of egging on. And then . . . .Well, the manager has called the cops, and the manager is trying to get her to be quiet and to leave. The other folks want him to get her out, and all of this other kind of stuff is going on, and, eventually, she does leave. She walks on out, screaming all the way as she goes. I didn't notice at first, but the woman who was with her stayed; and she starts taking the other people on! But, she is doing it quietly. "You know. You know in your heart what you did. You know." And so, these people, now, they start getting on her, and, all of a sudden, the guy who was egging on a few minutes before, he is now saying, "Well, you know, I'm really tired of this." (Of course, not quite in the same language). "I am really tired of this, and, you know, this has ruined our meal completely, and I am not going to pay for this." And, the two women left, and they didn't pay, and the table of the foursome that started it all didn't pay. And then, at the end of all of this, I thought, "I am the only one in this whole restaurant that had to pay for my meal!" But, what was obvious to me was that these people, once they saw each other, they expected something bad to happen. They expected a fight. They expected it to escalate, and it did a little bit, but not quite that much.

There is a psychological experiment that you can do about expectations, and the idea here is that, what you don't expect, you won't see. You will see what you expect. I read about this, this last week, and the person who is testing you has you sit there and shows you cards very rapidly - six cards - and your job is to, just as rapidly, tell them what you saw. So, at first, you are given about a half-second - Boom! Boom! Boom! - And you have to come back with them. So, the first time through, the woman who was doing this could name four. Then, they went to a second and a half - five. Then, a second and a half, again - five - still missing one, scratching her head, "What am I missing?" Finally, they call time-out, said the deck is fixed, and showed her, very carefully, each card, and it got to the one that she had missed, a 10 of clubs, but it was red. What color are clubs? Black! She did not expect a red 10 of clubs, and she could not remember it, no matter how slowly she saw it, until they told her, "Wait, you are not expecting this". I don't know if any of you are Monty Python fans - Monty Python's Flying Circus - but, whenever something like this would happen, they would have an office or something, and, all of a sudden, Torqemada would be there, and the punch-line would be, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." Well, that is the kind of thing this is. You don't see what you don't expect.

The Gospel tells us that the people were filled to overflowing. There is one translation that I like that talks about their being on "tippy-toes of expectation", kind of like dancing, I guess. They were full of expectation about John the Baptist. They expected him to be the Messiah. Now, their expectation comes with baggage. What is a Messiah supposed to be? And there was like an off-the-rack idea of a Messiah, and there were at least two to three different kinds; and John the Baptist was doing things that made them think that he might be one. First of all, he is raising hell. He is criticizing the authorities, religious and secular. He has kind of an odd lifestyle - that whole locust and wild honey thing! And, he was kind of fitting into their expectation, so they were full to overflowing with expectation. They were waiting for God to do something, and they thought that John the Baptist might just be the one that God was going to use. And, so, with John the Baptist, much of his ministry, according to the Gospels, is making sure that people know what he is not. He is letting them know, "I am not the one, but there is somebody who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie". Now, is this sounding familiar to you? Because, we had this lesson three weeks ago, but we get two more verses now, when Jesus gets baptized. "The thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie - He is coming after me, and, if you think I am tough, you ain't seen nothing yet! My baptism is with water. His baptism is with fire."

So that is the set-up, and then we go away from it; and, all of a sudden, it says, "When everybody else had been baptized, Jesus, Himself, also was baptized, and the Heavens opened, and the dove descended upon Him, and the Voice from Heaven. . . ." It was not what people expected. They were ready and expectant about a Messiah, and John the Baptist sort of looked like it. He certainly looked like he was an unusual person; but Jesus, in this baptism scene, is very unassuming; and He was not what they expected.

And, what you don't expect, you can't see.

So, this is what I want to think about today, because we have seven baptisms this morning. Now, how many of you, like me were baptized, more or less, as an infant? How many of you were baptized as an infant? I was two, and that is close enough to being an infant. We didn't have a lot of baggage. We didn't have a lot of expectations about it. In fact, our expectations about our baptism all were developed after we were baptized, right? But, those of you who were baptized as older children or as adults, you went into it with expectations. You might have done it as the result of a conversion experience. There might have been something life-changing that happened to you, and, as a result of that, you got baptized. Or, you might have fallen in among a really odd crowd who took you down to the ocean or the river and talked you into it, and you might have thought that it had been really neat for a while, and then, after a while, you felt a little bit like you had been taken advantage of. All sorts of things come into this. When we do baptism preparation, we talk about what people expect from baptism, why they want to be baptized, and, as you can imagine, over time, it runs the course of events. The most common expectation for baptism - so my baby won't go to hell if they die. And, I really hate to hear that one, because I have to tell them, "Oh, rats! The baby is not going to go to hell anyway." Even the Roman Church doesn't teach that anymore - not even limbo! (I am thinking of George Carlin now - eternity in limbo for a hot dog on Friday).

So, expectations - they run the gamut of expectations from that something bad is going to happen, to that it is going to mean something to the family, to me, to my child ("Well, you know, everybody else in the family has done it, so I guess I better"). We have a range of expectations about baptism, and I guess what I would like you to think about, as we think about Jesus' baptism, is that I would like you to kind of think again about your own baptism. One of the really great things about the Church today is that, anytime a baby is baptized (and, those of us who were baptized as infants, I can almost guarantee you that we were baptized privately, probably on a Saturday or some other time, because it was a messy kind of service, and you just didn't do those on Sunday morning), but now we do them on Sunday morning, specifically so that everybody else can think about what their baptism was like - can hook in mentally to the baptisms of these other children, adults, and babies that we are going to witness today. Because, we have an opportunity to renew our baptism every time somebody else is baptized. Jesus' baptism - it is O.K. to do all the human-thinking stuff about our thoughts about baptism, and some of you who had the idea about not going to hell and everything about baptism, you might feel a little embarrassed, but it is still O.K.

But, now, we think - what did Jesus expect when he was baptized? All of a sudden, we have 2,000 years of baggage about Jesus. We have the Son of God, Incarnate Word, all of these other kinds of stuff, and, I don't know about you, but it sometimes scares me to put words in Jesus' mouth, because they aren't recorded any place. Nowhere are we told what Jesus had in mind when he went into the water. In fact, we are not really even told here that the whole baptism scenario was set up. It just says something like "everybody else was baptized and Jesus also was baptized" - it was a past perfect kind of thing that just happened to have been done.

Well, first of all, I want to say that my assumption is that Jesus probably had some very similar expectations as we do about it. Sometimes, when we think about Jesus, because we know the whole story, we assume that Jesus never had any second thoughts, never had any doubts, and always understood everything perfectly; but that is not the way our lives are. The Scriptures are very clear to us that Jesus took on everything it means to be human, and, in His resurrection, and even in His birth, redeemed everything it meant to be human, so I don't think there is anything wrong at all with kind of putting some expectations in Jesus' mind, as long as we know they are just our speculation.

Jesus had this interesting birth. Wise men from the East showing up, giving presents, and, in our day, presents that we would think were not particularly useful at all, either, or attractive (well, the gold, I guess anybody could use). But, from then until His baptism, there is very little record in Scripture of Him having any other specific kind of contact with people to let Him know about His special status. So, I would assume that Jesus was probably raised as a pretty regular person, who had maybe a bent for ministry, become a rabbi and everything, but just kind of ordinary, and, all of a sudden, in this baptism, He is wondering what is going to happen here. And He has an experience, but the experience that Jesus has is nothing like the experience we talk about in the preparation for baptism class.

I am not going to quiz you folks here in the front about what we said and what I talked about, but there are usually four things we talk about baptism meaning. Baptism is the remission of sins, the washing away of sin. It is being born into the Body of Christ. It is dying with Christ in His resurrection. It is being filled with the Holy Spirit. All of those things are things we talk about when we talk about baptism, but that is not what I am talking about today. Because, today's Gospel does something very unusual. Today's Gospel tells about Jesus' baptism almost as an afterthought, and here is the Messiah, the Chosen One, the One whom the Scriptures have foretold for ages, just kind of wandering into the water and getting baptized - no fanfare - none of that expectation that was laid on John the Baptist that he spent his whole ministry getting out from under. And then it says He came up out of the water, and, as He came up out of the water, the Heavens were opened, but there is no peal of thunder, there is no trumpets, there is no blast, there is no ripping sound. The Heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descended upon Him - not a falcon dive-bombing Him - not a violent, coercive, cathartic-kind of experience - but a dove, lighting upon Him - ultimate in gentleness. And then He hears a voice, and it is a voice from Heaven like none other, and what does it tell Him? The voice from Heaven tells Him, "You are my Son. I love You, and I am incredibly proud of You." And that's it! No marching orders - "get out there and save the world, Jesus". Nothing like that, not even any criticism (we seem to expect criticism from our parents, sometimes) - just love! Imagine that! Imagine that today as you witness these baptisms. Think back to your own baptism. Whatever your expectations then were, I want you to think about something different right now. As the water is being poured over the heads of each of these, I want you to remember when the water was poured over you, when you were immersed, when they daubed you with a damp cloth, whatever they did, and I want you to hear those words, "You are my son, my daughter, and I love you, and I am incredibly proud of you."

How often have you thought about God, thinking about you like that? How many times do we spend our lives wondering how we are ever going to learn to measure up, and how we can stop doing those things that put us in a bad relationship with God, or shaming our parents, and everything else? How many times do we think about God looking at us very specifically, very individually, and saying, "You are my son, my daughter. I love you, and I am so proud of you".

And then, this doesn't have to end today. When you come up for Communion, and you receive that piece of bread, the wine, imagine God saying to you, "Oh, my son, my daughter, I love you so much. I am very proud of you. I am glad you came. Take and eat."

What we don't expect, we don't see. Sadly, so many of us never expect anybody to love us, without strings. Today, remember, "You are my son, my daughter. I love you very much, and I am incredibly proud of you."

AMEN