Transfiguration of the Lord
18 February 2007
Luke 9.28-36
Transfiguration and baptism
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
About twenty-five years ago at a pastors conference, our leader for the week guided us through a process by which we would access deep spiritual imagery within ourselves. He taught us techniques to still our body and quiet our mind. We let our imagination work out a specific place to locate ourselves as a beginning point for the sequence of events that would unfold deep within our spirit. Then the leader played for us a long selection of evocative music, which he did not tell till afterward was Richard Strauss’s study for thirteen solo strings, Metamorphosen.
As you might imagine, some of us found it so difficult to separate ourselves from the concrete reality around us—the temporal moment we were in—that we could not fully immerse ourselves into a vivid world of spirit. As you might also imagine, others of us so easily dissociated from concrete reality that immersion into a deep inner world apart from “actual facts” was as natural as falling off a log. And as probably everybody has already imagined, I fell off the log first and farthest. Awake or asleep, I am perfectly content to live in worlds other than this one most people call real.
So here’s what happened in my world of the spirit twenty-five years ago. I began from a place outdoors among trees. I ran, Forrest Gump-like, for quite awhile and then reached an opening in the earth, through which I ran and then kept running in a cave-like tunnel. For a while, I sped through the tunnel faster than I could run but without actually moving my legs. When I emerged again to the surface, there was all around a desert, and I kept running until I started up a grade into dry, rocky foothills. Eventually, I found myself clawing my way up a slope of loose stones and finally reached a plateau.
In time, a great black bird landed next to me, and I understood I was to climb on its back. The bird flew with me out over the vast stretch of desert that spread out for miles. I was watching for life, for changes, for anything unusual or threatening—anything new. We circled back to my observation point on the plateau. The bird left. I looked around, and there was hovering behind me a enormous eye, the size of, oh, this church building, looking directly at me. The eye receded up to the sky, never turning away its gaze. I stood alone and watched for life and activity in the desert.
The music ended, the leader called us back to awareness of the room we were in and each other. When I opened my eyes, it took me a minute to get reoriented to time and place. I’d forgotten I had been there.
When telling this to someone, I’ve gotten one of two reactions. The person either gets really fascinated or is struck with uncontrollable yawning, as if fighting against sleep. The difference doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the person’s religion, depth of spiritual conviction, intelligence or curiosity. Fascination and sleep are simply two ways of responding to something that reaches one from someplace other than immediate consciousness. Like Peter, John and James at the Transfiguration, the body seems to get confused about awareness and sleep around things like this.
This was not a dream. For I was fully awake, alert and conscious of myself. Neither was it like writing a story. Rather it was being and knowing in another way. I had simply decided to allow something like another dimension of experience become real and immediate, a dimension where I could make decisions, act and even remember. Many times, over the years, the memory of this experience has helped me understand my life, my vocation, my soul and God. I do not consider the experience a separate source of revelation, along the lines of Joseph Smith’s revelation in our neighboring village [Palmyra, NY] that led to his founding the Mormon church. I do consider it a lens by which I see the meaning of my world, my life and my faith. In this sense of being a lens, I refer to the experience as visionary.
When Peter and John and James climb up a mountain with Jesus and see him change, something like this is happening. They see things that don’t occur in the temporal moments they share with others in their normal awareness. They’re in a state of not exactly sleeping but not really awake to the normal reality of things.
“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.” And at the end of the visionary moment—after the terrifying cloud and its voice—the once extraordinarily present Moses and Elijah are now missing. There is only Jesus.
From my personal experience, then, I reject the choice some try to force us to make about such reports as these in scripture. Some people explain the story as the product of a vivid imagination in an attempt to interpret the specialness of Jesus as holy person—indeed, as the very son of God. Other people insist we believe that, had we been there with a camcorder, we’d have recorded entities as concrete as the two people in the pew on either side of you were standing on either side of Jesus, in the forms of Moses and Elijah.
Now, you can believe a storyteller created a fiction to explain the wondrousness of Jesus, but I think most of us are not satisfied to reduce these scriptural phenomena to reasonable fictions. We read a story like this, and if we care to seek and live under the power of God, we deeply long to feel a powerful movement of life and spirit in our engagement with them. Most of us, if we listen to the longing of our soul, expect that these stories in scripture will transform our life, if only we can let them enter our consciousness, excite our nerve pathways, and realign our reality as we know it.
Isn’t it why you come here to church on a Sunday morning, that you know something is not quite right—or that something is even terribly wrong—with what is real in this world, so far? Reality, so called, may just be the holding pattern for what God is preparing to perform among us. Reality, I for one most earnestly pray, is something far broader, more vibrant, more gracious and more glorious than all this. Reality is where the holy is not content to peek out bashfully only occasionally to the lucky soul who happens by at the moment, but it is where the holiness of everything shines forth in dazzling beauty.
Now then, if most of us are not satisfied with reducing all Bible stories to their reasonable explanations, neither are many of us content to be told that our only other choice is to believe the stories literally. We know that there are many inconsistencies and incongruities in scripture. The problem with having four gospel accounts of the life of Jesus is that they don’t always match up on the details, and that tells us that strictly literal acceptance of their stories was never the first concern of the authors or of the church that remembered those stories. Literalists want us to maintain our grip on this plain, everyday consciousness so much that they are willing to insist that there is no other depth of awareness or that there is no deeper reality to be aware of in it.
But this is where literalists, far from strengthening our faith by controlling our mindset toward scripture, instead would deprive us of the best that scripture offers for our faith. They would deprive us of the many vast dimensions of vision, truth and holy engagement through which God has been making God’s very being manifest to our world. Over the lifetimes of all the sinners and saints that ever were, mortals have been shaken, formed and startled into life by dreams and visions that set the mundane and ordinary aside and replace it with the wild and strange. Who is any literalist to tell you that something inconceivable from this side of the veil cannot in some deeply true and meaningful way, if not a literally way, be true? They want you to believe that certain miracles are simple facts, but they would deny you a spirituality of the simply miraculous.
So then, if you do not accept the lie that the Bible must either be reduced to explanations or set in concrete, you may enter the moment of the Transfiguration and, like Alice through the looking glass, find yourself in an astounding adventure.
Come to think of it, we believe something about as astounding as the Transfiguration is about to occur before our eyes. Three little babies are going to commit their lives to Christ. Now, I don’t want anyone to feel insulted, but I have to tell the truth about these babies. They do not sit up well, for starters. Even when someone puts food in their mouth, the part that goes down their throat isn’t half what dribbles off their chin. When you tell them things you want them to do—“calm down”; “please sleep the night”—they ignore you. When they want something, they make disturbing noises but never say what it is. So tell me, how does a person like that, in a literal sense, commit her (or his) life to Christ?
But here we are baptizing them into their committed life with Christ. The parents will answer questions on their behalf, renouncing sin—sin? a baby?!—and professing an intention to follow Jesus. The congregation will, as a sort of communal godparent, promise to support these three new Christians on their spiritual journeys. The minister will sprinkle water, say prayers and pronounce such words as will remind us that God is pouring mystery over them and through them. It all stretches our credulity, if we think about it. A reasonable person might scoff at us. We’re not embarrassed, though. We believe in what we’re doing. We believe these floppy, burpy humans will begin their relationship to God in Jesus Christ just minutes from now.
But who is to gainsay us? Someone who has arrived, whose spiritual life has advance to the state of all-knowing and all-seeing fullness? If a baby has made a quarter inch step on a thousand mile journey of faith, shall you or I or the best Christian you know, having traveled maybe six inches on the thousand mile journey, bear such superior authority as to pass judgment? No, we will not compare ourselves comfortably with the spirituality of a child and the spiritual possibilities of the universe in eternity. Let us then gather at this font in great humility and still trust our sense for mystery more than our thinking faculties.
Besides, who of us would not trade places with one of these little ones, beginning again the path toward wholeness, before all the brokenness starts to take its toll? Put yourself in their place. Become the child approaching baptism for a moment: Something a little different this morning there is in the mother’s touch, the father’s arm. A little more tension than usual, a little more determination. More deliberate care in dressing. A silence a little longer, maybe; a question answered a bit more brusquely than on other Sunday mornings. At the church, something anxious in the waiting, urgent in the watching. Rising; standing still at an odd place. Some man talking in odd tones, and then you are in his arms, somewhat awkwardly. Coolness on your head, wetness there; a firm, unfamiliar touch on your head. Back in familiar arms, a more than tender squeeze. Don’t tell me you do not know something more than common has just become of you.
I can’t say what these little ones will feel or know or wonder in their baptism, any more than I can say all that Peter, John and James felt or knew wondered when Jesus was transfigured before them, however that happened. I am, though, familiar enough in my small way with mystery that it delights me to suppose that a powerful, surprising and relentless love shines light where darkness had been. Such a mystery never leaves any one of us alone without the hope of grace, however much the world, and even its Christian religionists, would turn us against ourselves and alienate us from who we are and how we each in our own way come to know God.
Whatever these children—Grayson and Mara and Lindsey—experience, today, I know of a certainty that they will pick up a spiritual golden threat that runs through the fabric of the universe from their spiritual forebears Peter and John and James. These children are hereby sewn into the fabric of the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of this we are all witnesses. Amen.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
February 11, 2007 - Blessed are you
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
11 January 2007
Luke 6.17-26
Blessed are you
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
In my first ordained position, I was the Assistant Pastor of a large congregation in San Rafael, California. The pay was horrendous, especially for a job in the heart of Marin County. They told us before we ever got there that we’d have to live 15 miles away at the northern end of the county. We had a 4-year-old, Russell, and 2 month old Schuyler. Mortgage rates were high, so that even in the cheaper neighborhood where we bought a 900 sq-ft condo, our mortgage payment alone was well over half what I earned. Then there were homeowners fees, insurance and property taxes. Marcia figured out how to make some money at home and save on child care by working during naps and paying 8th grade girls to watch the kids downstairs, while she pounded out court transcripts upstairs in one end of our bedroom closet.
Somehow, we made it.
Now, when we looked around the world then, as we still look around the world now, it didn’t seem reasonable to call ourselves poor. Our floors were carpet and not dirt. We ate our fill at every meal. We were warm in the winter and dry in a storm. If we got sick, we saw a doctor. Poverty was not our condition. Yet, by comparison with people otherwise like us in church and with most of the families our eldest would meet in kindergarten, we were at the low end of the income scale. We didn’t drive the cars others drove or take the vacations they took. It was even too expensive for us to go out for dinner and a movie with friends we made at church. We just paid our bills, and we usually felt broke.
We remember it as some of the best days of our lives. When Monday came, my day off, we packed a lunch and drove. (Gas was cheap.) The Point Reyes National Seashore was free, where the tide pools were interesting for the parents and fun for Russell to splash in. Or there was Pier 39 in San Francisco. A block or two beyond the parking garage, we parked for free. There were buskers performing their street acts, our favorite the Butterfly Man, who had a butterfly tattooed on his bald head and who was clever at insulting those of us in the audience who could take a joke. The weather was especially pleasant in spring and fall, and after we picnicked on one of the benches, we threw bread to the seagulls and later splurged on ice cream cones—a few dollars treating the whole family.
When we spent time with people in our community or in the church, the lack of glitzy entertainment meant entertaining each other with just our own company, which proved to be easier than we’d have thought and was usually more enjoyable than the sort of outing that cost a couple of days’ wages.
One of our most memorable days, for me, was an afternoon and evening at the Tumazis. They were a family from Iran. The father, Peter, though, made sure we knew that they were Persians, not Iranians. They were from a proud and ancient culture, not a nation-state made up to accommodate a 20th century shah and international politics. We ate interesting food that night and learned about people in another part of the world of whom we’d been ignorant and whom by our ignorance we had demeaned. I became a better person that day, for I learned that there is a kind of ignorance that is not benign—that in my favored status in a powerful nation, my ignorance permits the ruin of lives and cultures. I was suddenly living in a bigger, more interesting world. It’s the sort of thing a week’s vacation in a tony cottage at Sea Ranch along the north coast, no matter how much you spend, cannot buy.
All the same, if Jesus had said to me in those days, “Blessed are you poor,” I think I know how I’d have taken it. I think I’d have said that even in my situation, if Jesus had hedged and said, “Blessed are you low-income,” it would have left me nonplussed. Scraping by is stress, and as far as I know, it is still true that family distress over finances is a leading cause of divorce in our country. Tight money is hard on a family, and that was true for us. Still, what Jesus says is also true. We are all of us blessed, and the grinding challenges of our lives—even abject poverty, famishing hunger, crushing sorrow, or devastating hatred—are somehow part of that. Blessed are we all of us.
And don’t forget how this day with Jesus starts out. There he is with that great multitude closing in on him. “They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured,” it says in Luke. “And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.” These are people with deep troubles. They’re desperate for healing, for cleansing, and for cure. They believe in the power to heal, and they reach for the power and the hope of life restored, no matter who knows it.
That’s not our kind of openness, is it? Not our kind of honesty. We can feel bad—we can feel terrible—but it makes everything worse when people know. And by all means, don’t let anyone think we’re desperate. Desperation is so shameful. Desperation is for sissies. We think this way.
The people coming across the plain to Jesus, though, they could care less what it looked like to stagger and grope their way to his touch. Jesus likes that. Not that Jesus needs to be needed, but how else is he going to know that someone has a disease to heal or a demon oppressing their heart and mind? Jesus does not see us in the privacy of his office. He does not hand us the little gown that closes in the back and tell us to change while we leaves the room. He does not do a little clinical tapping and probing and then hand us a note on which he has scribbled his best guess for what ails us. He does not send us out with our doubts and confusions and worries to wait silently by ourselves while something happens or does not happen with our health, strength and sanity. Jesus does not forget about us until we call again to say that what has happened or not happened has left us still far from whole, or especially to say that it is so lonely to be sick and worried and, inevitably, dying, having hidden ourselves from the world in our trouble.
Jesus does not send us into isolation but offers healing in the whole community of faith, where, because we all of us move to him and bend to him with our sores showing and our tears falling for the whole world to see. The way Jesus sees it, we are safest in our sickness with each other, not in quarantine. For when he is absent, his power to heal remains in our spiritual communion with one another and God.
Thus gathered for our care and cure at the touch of our Lord, he not only heals but also speaks, for we came both to be healed and to hear. He has said, “Blessed are you poor,” and we have already understood something about that, that being poor of itself is its own blessing. “For yours is the kingdom of God” is what he says next, which is to say not only that we are already part of the kingdom but that we also share in some way in our own sovereignty there.
Poor and hungry yet though we be, we are royalty with our places at the table of abundant grace. You may be a single mother out there, beset with worry in that world where your worth is defined by how well you compete for money, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the duchess of grace and peace. You may be a father out there in that mystifying world, where you daughter won’t speak to you but your prostate won’t leave you alone, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the duke of holy friendship and love. You may pull out that tray of pills, three sections for every day, tablets and caplets of all colors and shapes, reminders of how many ways things can go haywire in an aging body, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the prince and princess of wellness and fullness of life.
We are all of us here with you and for you, whoever you are. When you go downstairs for soup and a sandwich after worship, today, soak it in. Look around you and adjust your gem-crusted mantle. Tilt your scepter in greeting to your cousins of the royal family. Doff your crown to the princes and princesses scurrying about on the linoleum. Whatever ails you, whatever hatred and scorn may elsewhere oppress you, in line for le buffet royale de potage et sandwich, the blood running through your veins is blue, and the sun never sets on your realm. Rejoice in this day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, or at least next to the Crock-Pot® of chili.
So this is good, noticing before Jesus and one another our poverty and hunger, our weeping and the fact of hatred in some hearts toward us. It is good to stop and notice this. Then it is necessary to hear the rest, the woes to us who are already so rich that we can sleep in beds and heated homes, that our worst health problems visit us through our abundance of food and leisure. Woe to us who are full and rich and laughing, to us whom the world may resent but must also admire, if grudgingly, for having achieved such wealth and power that our influence reaches every corner of the globe. Everyone knows all about us.
It is necessary to hear these disturbing woes and necessary that we be disturbed by them. For the degree to which we tilt the balance of wealth and well being to our own advantage is the degree to which a power greater than ourselves will wrench it back toward level, and if Jesus is right, it won’t be pleasant.
We tend to believe in America, anymore, that the only invisible power greater than ourselves that moves the forces of wealth and well being on this planet is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that corrects all problems and imbalances through the magical workings of a free market. So if that is true, America’s manufacturing workers and farmers already know what a grim and cruel hand this free and unfettered market is, passing their jobs and opportunities to lands where decency doesn’t matter, health doesn’t matter and life itself in the waters of the world doesn’t matter. If the free market is what corrects the imbalance of wealth around this globe, the woes have already begun for many people just like us.
But Jesus believes—and I keep thinking American Christians still, in their heart of hearts, believe—in a moral hand that invisibly moves among the masses and even along the halls of power. And woe to them who neglect to watch for it, heed it and look for their moral direction in its reach. Woe to us when we intentionally blind ourselves to the immoral poverty and disease that arise from injustice, or to the immoral devastation and grief that arise from violence and war. If we believe there is a moral hand moving among us, woe to us if we fail to watch where its finger is pointing; woe to us when it opens to us and we fail to fill it for the sake of God’s compassion.
It is good to remember this side of Jesus who blesses, the part that when he blesses—however much blessing, though it be infinite, with which he has it in his power to bless the world with. It is good to remember, along with the blessing side of Jesus, this other side of him that cannot fail to see how little we some of us, or all of us sometimes, care that our enjoyment of life may be granted through the suffering of others. You may believe that Jesus will not in the end punish you for your comforts and pleasures here—and to be honest, I don’t believe he will either—but while I, for one, am here to enjoy the royal treatment of blessing through the touch of Jesus, I want to live in the light of that blessing and not under the dark cloud of his woes. To so live in that life, I have some reordering to do, and I intend to work on that, which, if we believe such saints as St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa and countless missionaries from all varieties of churches, is a great joy.
Anne Frank wrote, “No one ever got poor by giving.” Anne Frank, a teenage. Hiding in the darkness from people who hated her, she remembered in her poor state and in the crosshairs of some of the most vehement hatred the world has known, knew something about giving. If we can discover for ourselves the deep blessings of the hard times in our lives, and if we can find it in us to give from what we have now for the sake of bringing the world into the balance Jesus says he wants to see, then what blessings we will enjoy.
One way or another, in spite of it all and because of it all, blessed are you.
Amen.
11 January 2007
Luke 6.17-26
Blessed are you
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
In my first ordained position, I was the Assistant Pastor of a large congregation in San Rafael, California. The pay was horrendous, especially for a job in the heart of Marin County. They told us before we ever got there that we’d have to live 15 miles away at the northern end of the county. We had a 4-year-old, Russell, and 2 month old Schuyler. Mortgage rates were high, so that even in the cheaper neighborhood where we bought a 900 sq-ft condo, our mortgage payment alone was well over half what I earned. Then there were homeowners fees, insurance and property taxes. Marcia figured out how to make some money at home and save on child care by working during naps and paying 8th grade girls to watch the kids downstairs, while she pounded out court transcripts upstairs in one end of our bedroom closet.
Somehow, we made it.
Now, when we looked around the world then, as we still look around the world now, it didn’t seem reasonable to call ourselves poor. Our floors were carpet and not dirt. We ate our fill at every meal. We were warm in the winter and dry in a storm. If we got sick, we saw a doctor. Poverty was not our condition. Yet, by comparison with people otherwise like us in church and with most of the families our eldest would meet in kindergarten, we were at the low end of the income scale. We didn’t drive the cars others drove or take the vacations they took. It was even too expensive for us to go out for dinner and a movie with friends we made at church. We just paid our bills, and we usually felt broke.
We remember it as some of the best days of our lives. When Monday came, my day off, we packed a lunch and drove. (Gas was cheap.) The Point Reyes National Seashore was free, where the tide pools were interesting for the parents and fun for Russell to splash in. Or there was Pier 39 in San Francisco. A block or two beyond the parking garage, we parked for free. There were buskers performing their street acts, our favorite the Butterfly Man, who had a butterfly tattooed on his bald head and who was clever at insulting those of us in the audience who could take a joke. The weather was especially pleasant in spring and fall, and after we picnicked on one of the benches, we threw bread to the seagulls and later splurged on ice cream cones—a few dollars treating the whole family.
When we spent time with people in our community or in the church, the lack of glitzy entertainment meant entertaining each other with just our own company, which proved to be easier than we’d have thought and was usually more enjoyable than the sort of outing that cost a couple of days’ wages.
One of our most memorable days, for me, was an afternoon and evening at the Tumazis. They were a family from Iran. The father, Peter, though, made sure we knew that they were Persians, not Iranians. They were from a proud and ancient culture, not a nation-state made up to accommodate a 20th century shah and international politics. We ate interesting food that night and learned about people in another part of the world of whom we’d been ignorant and whom by our ignorance we had demeaned. I became a better person that day, for I learned that there is a kind of ignorance that is not benign—that in my favored status in a powerful nation, my ignorance permits the ruin of lives and cultures. I was suddenly living in a bigger, more interesting world. It’s the sort of thing a week’s vacation in a tony cottage at Sea Ranch along the north coast, no matter how much you spend, cannot buy.
All the same, if Jesus had said to me in those days, “Blessed are you poor,” I think I know how I’d have taken it. I think I’d have said that even in my situation, if Jesus had hedged and said, “Blessed are you low-income,” it would have left me nonplussed. Scraping by is stress, and as far as I know, it is still true that family distress over finances is a leading cause of divorce in our country. Tight money is hard on a family, and that was true for us. Still, what Jesus says is also true. We are all of us blessed, and the grinding challenges of our lives—even abject poverty, famishing hunger, crushing sorrow, or devastating hatred—are somehow part of that. Blessed are we all of us.
And don’t forget how this day with Jesus starts out. There he is with that great multitude closing in on him. “They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured,” it says in Luke. “And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.” These are people with deep troubles. They’re desperate for healing, for cleansing, and for cure. They believe in the power to heal, and they reach for the power and the hope of life restored, no matter who knows it.
That’s not our kind of openness, is it? Not our kind of honesty. We can feel bad—we can feel terrible—but it makes everything worse when people know. And by all means, don’t let anyone think we’re desperate. Desperation is so shameful. Desperation is for sissies. We think this way.
The people coming across the plain to Jesus, though, they could care less what it looked like to stagger and grope their way to his touch. Jesus likes that. Not that Jesus needs to be needed, but how else is he going to know that someone has a disease to heal or a demon oppressing their heart and mind? Jesus does not see us in the privacy of his office. He does not hand us the little gown that closes in the back and tell us to change while we leaves the room. He does not do a little clinical tapping and probing and then hand us a note on which he has scribbled his best guess for what ails us. He does not send us out with our doubts and confusions and worries to wait silently by ourselves while something happens or does not happen with our health, strength and sanity. Jesus does not forget about us until we call again to say that what has happened or not happened has left us still far from whole, or especially to say that it is so lonely to be sick and worried and, inevitably, dying, having hidden ourselves from the world in our trouble.
Jesus does not send us into isolation but offers healing in the whole community of faith, where, because we all of us move to him and bend to him with our sores showing and our tears falling for the whole world to see. The way Jesus sees it, we are safest in our sickness with each other, not in quarantine. For when he is absent, his power to heal remains in our spiritual communion with one another and God.
Thus gathered for our care and cure at the touch of our Lord, he not only heals but also speaks, for we came both to be healed and to hear. He has said, “Blessed are you poor,” and we have already understood something about that, that being poor of itself is its own blessing. “For yours is the kingdom of God” is what he says next, which is to say not only that we are already part of the kingdom but that we also share in some way in our own sovereignty there.
Poor and hungry yet though we be, we are royalty with our places at the table of abundant grace. You may be a single mother out there, beset with worry in that world where your worth is defined by how well you compete for money, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the duchess of grace and peace. You may be a father out there in that mystifying world, where you daughter won’t speak to you but your prostate won’t leave you alone, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the duke of holy friendship and love. You may pull out that tray of pills, three sections for every day, tablets and caplets of all colors and shapes, reminders of how many ways things can go haywire in an aging body, but here in this place—in the kingdom of God with your Christ and your fellow citizens around you—you are the prince and princess of wellness and fullness of life.
We are all of us here with you and for you, whoever you are. When you go downstairs for soup and a sandwich after worship, today, soak it in. Look around you and adjust your gem-crusted mantle. Tilt your scepter in greeting to your cousins of the royal family. Doff your crown to the princes and princesses scurrying about on the linoleum. Whatever ails you, whatever hatred and scorn may elsewhere oppress you, in line for le buffet royale de potage et sandwich, the blood running through your veins is blue, and the sun never sets on your realm. Rejoice in this day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, or at least next to the Crock-Pot® of chili.
So this is good, noticing before Jesus and one another our poverty and hunger, our weeping and the fact of hatred in some hearts toward us. It is good to stop and notice this. Then it is necessary to hear the rest, the woes to us who are already so rich that we can sleep in beds and heated homes, that our worst health problems visit us through our abundance of food and leisure. Woe to us who are full and rich and laughing, to us whom the world may resent but must also admire, if grudgingly, for having achieved such wealth and power that our influence reaches every corner of the globe. Everyone knows all about us.
It is necessary to hear these disturbing woes and necessary that we be disturbed by them. For the degree to which we tilt the balance of wealth and well being to our own advantage is the degree to which a power greater than ourselves will wrench it back toward level, and if Jesus is right, it won’t be pleasant.
We tend to believe in America, anymore, that the only invisible power greater than ourselves that moves the forces of wealth and well being on this planet is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that corrects all problems and imbalances through the magical workings of a free market. So if that is true, America’s manufacturing workers and farmers already know what a grim and cruel hand this free and unfettered market is, passing their jobs and opportunities to lands where decency doesn’t matter, health doesn’t matter and life itself in the waters of the world doesn’t matter. If the free market is what corrects the imbalance of wealth around this globe, the woes have already begun for many people just like us.
But Jesus believes—and I keep thinking American Christians still, in their heart of hearts, believe—in a moral hand that invisibly moves among the masses and even along the halls of power. And woe to them who neglect to watch for it, heed it and look for their moral direction in its reach. Woe to us when we intentionally blind ourselves to the immoral poverty and disease that arise from injustice, or to the immoral devastation and grief that arise from violence and war. If we believe there is a moral hand moving among us, woe to us if we fail to watch where its finger is pointing; woe to us when it opens to us and we fail to fill it for the sake of God’s compassion.
It is good to remember this side of Jesus who blesses, the part that when he blesses—however much blessing, though it be infinite, with which he has it in his power to bless the world with. It is good to remember, along with the blessing side of Jesus, this other side of him that cannot fail to see how little we some of us, or all of us sometimes, care that our enjoyment of life may be granted through the suffering of others. You may believe that Jesus will not in the end punish you for your comforts and pleasures here—and to be honest, I don’t believe he will either—but while I, for one, am here to enjoy the royal treatment of blessing through the touch of Jesus, I want to live in the light of that blessing and not under the dark cloud of his woes. To so live in that life, I have some reordering to do, and I intend to work on that, which, if we believe such saints as St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa and countless missionaries from all varieties of churches, is a great joy.
Anne Frank wrote, “No one ever got poor by giving.” Anne Frank, a teenage. Hiding in the darkness from people who hated her, she remembered in her poor state and in the crosshairs of some of the most vehement hatred the world has known, knew something about giving. If we can discover for ourselves the deep blessings of the hard times in our lives, and if we can find it in us to give from what we have now for the sake of bringing the world into the balance Jesus says he wants to see, then what blessings we will enjoy.
One way or another, in spite of it all and because of it all, blessed are you.
Amen.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
February 4, 2007 - At the shore of discipleship
5th Sunday in Ordinary Time
4 January 2007
Luke 5.1-11
At the shore of discipleship
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
I was listening to the Morning Stories podcast from WGBH, Boston. A woman who trains service dogs—puppies that assist people with special needs—was telling about a dog, Wenda, which she had trained for a little girl with epilepsy. Certain kinds of dog have the personality to learn how to be a companion for such people. This companion and helper is called a service dog. The dog was with the girl at a swimming pool. The little girl’s mother was farther away when the girl started to have a seizure in the water. The dog was the only one near enough to respond immediately. She managed to get in the water and tuck her nose under the girl’s shoulder, so her head would stay above the surface and prevent drowning. With moments, of course, the mother came over, and the girl was saved.
What amazed the trainer is that she had not trained the dog to perform this safety move. Somehow, the dog just knew what to do. The dog just got in the water and, very possibly, saved the girl’s life. (We could give the dog a water safety merit badge!)
I know that a dog is not what people usually think of as the model for being a disciple. When Jesus talks about dogs, it never even once involves a compliment. “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine,” he says, for example, smearing two beasts with one insult. But we’ve learned to appreciate what a dog can do, and one thing a dog can do is teach us something about being a disciple.
The dog that saved the girl with the seizure, as the trainer explains, had something in her personality that could be valuable in protecting her life. She is apparently watchful and concerned, always scanning the situation to see if her assistance is needed. She can submit to the leadership of a master and can learn the tasks that will be of use to her eventual companion. Most important, to one little girl, she can apply her native gifts of personality and the teaching of her master to a new situation. She can invent a solution in the moment of crisis, which is how Wenda the service dog saved a life.
That’s all there is to discipleship. Wenda can do it, and so can you.
Today, the gospel shows us the moment when the master and teacher has identified the persons whose gifts of personality are suitable for becoming disciples, and Jesus invites them into a life of service to the realm. They have something in their personality that could be valuable for the sake of life in the realm, the kingdom of God. Perhaps they are, like the life-saving dog, watchful and concerned. They may be cool and quick in a crisis. Or they may be open minded enough to accept the many new teachings that Jesus deems essential for the new life in the realm. Maybe they’re heartbroken, as Jesus is, that so many of the people God loves live under crushing oppression and get blamed for their lot in life. They might be humbly wise in the face of arrogant power or wildly hopeful in the face of impossible odds. Their spiritual vision, for all we know, may be just distorted enough as to obscure their tradition’s faded images of faith and bring into focus the previously indiscernible face of the God who seeks loyalty through friendship rather than judgment, who seeks commitment through love rather than threats.
Who knows what Jesus sees in Simon, or in James and John, the sons of Zebedee? He sees something.
These last few weeks we’ve been reflecting on spiritual gifts, which are the facilities we each of us have in some number and measure in our soul that we can use for the life of the church and the health of humankind. Everyone has a gift, and maybe several, that will be sought and called for in time. The gifts will come to fit together in a vital whole, the way organs and limbs come together in a vital body. The guiding principle of the vital fitting together of our gifts is love—even as the guiding principle of hope is love, even as our very faith is enlightened and enlivened by love. Now we understand that. Now what?
Now we enact our gifts, our vital unity and our love. Now Jesus speaks to us. “Let me show you something,” Jesus says. “Take your gifts and the implements of your livelihood.” (Let’s say you’re a fishing professional.) “Take your implements back out into the water, the deep water, where you have been failing to accomplish anything, so far, and see what happens.”
When Simon and his coworkers went out again, discouraged as they were, they apparently didn’t expect much. Maybe they expected merely to show Jesus and anyone looking on that the problem is there’s no fish, not that they’ve been bad fishing professionals. It’s a drag to fail at fishing repeatedly, and now there is this self appointed, uninvited fishing consultant is just one more mindless know-it-all. Maybe by failing yet again, after taking his advice, you can at least prove that the problem wasn’t you. Well, Peter and the others cast their net without hope, and yet, they hauled in that famously net-bursting catch of fish.
So Peter feels like an idiot. He knew he was doing it right—he was sure of it—but now look. “Go away from me Lord,” he cries, “for I am a sinful man.” Was he sinful because he couldn’t get it right until Jesus made him do it right? Or was he sinful because he was presumptuous about his competence? Or was he sinful because fish avoided him but merrily swam to their demise for Jesus? Peter is just so ashamed. He wants Jesus to go away, so that maybe he can shrink to the size of a pebble and be washed under the waves to the floor of the lake.
I know Peter’s pain. Believe me, I know. I work in Presbyterian churches. I struggle and sweat and strive, and I catch enough of whatever we need to live for another day. Good enough, though some days I come up empty. Then Rick Warren backs his U-Haul into a driveway at Saddleback, California, and the fish swim in by the thousands. He writes a couple of books: The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life. There’s absolutely nothing new in them. The theology is the same old theology, and the motivational tools, though proven, are timeworn. Yet there he is, Rick Warren, with all his thousands of church members and the best selling non-fiction book in history. The rest of us just look like idiots. It’s the most natural thing in the world that we feel ashamed, failures as we are by comparison..
But Jesus looks at things differently. He ignores our ashamedness.
Oh, that’s right. With Jesus, it’s not about making us afraid of things, including shame. I resist it, but what I do still so often feel shame, which is for me a cosmic punchbowl of fear spiked with 200‑proof sadness that I drink from, whenever life looks so hard and I don’t know what to do about it. Jesus, at his Christly best, doesn’t make it about shame. He makes it about grace.
So in that moment of grace, Jesus had said to Peter and the others, “Go do it again. Do what you know how to do. Use the implement of your trade you have learned how to use and the gifts in your body and soul that you got from the God who made you, from the God who made me. Go be yourself as fully and as hopefully as you can, and see what happens. I’m not going to do it for you, no matter how tired you are or how much you believe that it can’t be done. You really can do it, and you really are going to do it.”
And then when they did do it, and when Peter had come unglued and wished Jesus would go away and wanted to be a pebble, Jesus said—the way he would say again and again, the way angels had been saying to everyone since they invited the shepherds to Jesus’ birthday—Jesus said, “Do not be afraid.”
It is not about fear. I don’t know what it is about us that we make our faith, the most important thing in life, about fear. Fear makes us miserable, but in the face of an unknown future that depends in some important way on us, fear is also comforting. If we listen to fear, we may not act. If we don’t act, we can’t be blamed for doing it wrong. If we don’t act, at least everyone else who also didn’t act will share the blame. We can shrink into a pebble along with all the other pebbles on the floor of the lake. It’s actually sort of pretty, if you think about it, all those pebbles in the filtered light, lining the bottom of the lovely lake of fear. Fear gives us that almost pleasurable kind of comfort. And one thing about being fearful, you have lots of company.
Jesus figures if a Boy Scout can be brave, so can you. Fear is only the fog on your path to discipleship. You may not see through it, but it can’t stop you if you just keep walking. And you have to walk your path. You walk it down to the shore and take out your boat to the deep water and cast your net.
This moment when Jesus tells you that your time has come to haul in the catch, whatever that means for you, how do you recognize it? Hauling in your catch may be taking on the church responsibility you’ve been sidestepping or inviting people to form the small group you’ve been unsure how to start or talking to that lonely coworker about your faith. Hauling in your catch is the thing that you’ve finally decided to believe in about yourself that Jesus already believes in. When is that moment, and how do you know it?
It is not when you feel ready. God always feels ready for your decision before you do. You never feel ready for something like this, but you can decide when you see well enough to know it’s time to cast your net.
You look at yourself. You see the personality traits you have, which include the traits that aren’t very strong and trip you up. That’s all right. The reason you have strengths is that you have corresponding weaknesses, and your weaknesses are opportunities for other people’s strengths to flower.
You look at yourself, and you see, perhaps with the help of a guide or a teacher, the seeds of spiritual growth that would flower if you set them out in the sunshine and give them some water.
You look at your calendar and write down on it when you will start—I mean an actual calendar, the date and the time. It may surprise you that Jesus will consider this an appointment you have made with him, which he intends to keep, if you will.
Then you act. The day comes and the hour comes, and you act. Don’t be surprised if something extraordinary happens. Peter got a catch of fish; you may get a hug and the expressed amazement that you, all of a sudden, have discovered something about your life. It may not be obvious that this thing you can do is relevant to anything in particular. It surely did not occur to Peter that catching a lot of fish meant that he’d be a leader for a historic religious movement. The one seems unrelated to the other. You never know what’s going to happen when you finally just do what you’re made to do.
To read this story of Jesus with people that once fished for a living, you’d think these things happen with a sudden arbitrariness, a divine caprice bespeaking God’s sense for whimsy. Personally, I suspect that Peter and Jesus had a lot of conversations in the course of the decision Peter would make to follow Jesus. In any case, Jesus and I certainly have a lot of conversation still, working out what he sees in me, what I see in myself. And how on earth I will ever do what needs to be done for his sake?
I suspect that a lot of conversation with Jesus will be part of whatever you’re going to do, if you really mean to do it. Now is a good time to start your conversation, which we call prayer.. Pray in whatever way you can think of to pray, but don’t just sit there waiting for the words to come by themselves. Pray on your knees. or pray on a walk though the snow. Pray with your voice or your pen or a paintbrush. Pray with your spouse or with a friend. Pray after a dream. Pray before you turn on the television. Pray instead of turning on the television. Pray as if your life depends on it. Pray as if someone else’s life depends on it, which may well be the case. Even if you’re a dog.
Somehow in the process, you will become a deeply appealing person, because of your faith, and people will come to you. They will want to know what is this about you that gives off light, that awakens hope in them when you are near. They will want to have what you have, and you will find that you, like Peter, will be catching people.
Amen.
4 January 2007
Luke 5.1-11
At the shore of discipleship
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Today was Boy Scout Sunday at Park Presbyterian Church, and we had rows of blue and olive drab shirts to remind us of the spiritual—“reverent”—part of the Scout oath. At a couple of points in the sermon, their presence with us comes to
mind.
I was listening to the Morning Stories podcast from WGBH, Boston. A woman who trains service dogs—puppies that assist people with special needs—was telling about a dog, Wenda, which she had trained for a little girl with epilepsy. Certain kinds of dog have the personality to learn how to be a companion for such people. This companion and helper is called a service dog. The dog was with the girl at a swimming pool. The little girl’s mother was farther away when the girl started to have a seizure in the water. The dog was the only one near enough to respond immediately. She managed to get in the water and tuck her nose under the girl’s shoulder, so her head would stay above the surface and prevent drowning. With moments, of course, the mother came over, and the girl was saved.
What amazed the trainer is that she had not trained the dog to perform this safety move. Somehow, the dog just knew what to do. The dog just got in the water and, very possibly, saved the girl’s life. (We could give the dog a water safety merit badge!)
I know that a dog is not what people usually think of as the model for being a disciple. When Jesus talks about dogs, it never even once involves a compliment. “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine,” he says, for example, smearing two beasts with one insult. But we’ve learned to appreciate what a dog can do, and one thing a dog can do is teach us something about being a disciple.
The dog that saved the girl with the seizure, as the trainer explains, had something in her personality that could be valuable in protecting her life. She is apparently watchful and concerned, always scanning the situation to see if her assistance is needed. She can submit to the leadership of a master and can learn the tasks that will be of use to her eventual companion. Most important, to one little girl, she can apply her native gifts of personality and the teaching of her master to a new situation. She can invent a solution in the moment of crisis, which is how Wenda the service dog saved a life.
That’s all there is to discipleship. Wenda can do it, and so can you.
Today, the gospel shows us the moment when the master and teacher has identified the persons whose gifts of personality are suitable for becoming disciples, and Jesus invites them into a life of service to the realm. They have something in their personality that could be valuable for the sake of life in the realm, the kingdom of God. Perhaps they are, like the life-saving dog, watchful and concerned. They may be cool and quick in a crisis. Or they may be open minded enough to accept the many new teachings that Jesus deems essential for the new life in the realm. Maybe they’re heartbroken, as Jesus is, that so many of the people God loves live under crushing oppression and get blamed for their lot in life. They might be humbly wise in the face of arrogant power or wildly hopeful in the face of impossible odds. Their spiritual vision, for all we know, may be just distorted enough as to obscure their tradition’s faded images of faith and bring into focus the previously indiscernible face of the God who seeks loyalty through friendship rather than judgment, who seeks commitment through love rather than threats.
Who knows what Jesus sees in Simon, or in James and John, the sons of Zebedee? He sees something.
These last few weeks we’ve been reflecting on spiritual gifts, which are the facilities we each of us have in some number and measure in our soul that we can use for the life of the church and the health of humankind. Everyone has a gift, and maybe several, that will be sought and called for in time. The gifts will come to fit together in a vital whole, the way organs and limbs come together in a vital body. The guiding principle of the vital fitting together of our gifts is love—even as the guiding principle of hope is love, even as our very faith is enlightened and enlivened by love. Now we understand that. Now what?
Now we enact our gifts, our vital unity and our love. Now Jesus speaks to us. “Let me show you something,” Jesus says. “Take your gifts and the implements of your livelihood.” (Let’s say you’re a fishing professional.) “Take your implements back out into the water, the deep water, where you have been failing to accomplish anything, so far, and see what happens.”
When Simon and his coworkers went out again, discouraged as they were, they apparently didn’t expect much. Maybe they expected merely to show Jesus and anyone looking on that the problem is there’s no fish, not that they’ve been bad fishing professionals. It’s a drag to fail at fishing repeatedly, and now there is this self appointed, uninvited fishing consultant is just one more mindless know-it-all. Maybe by failing yet again, after taking his advice, you can at least prove that the problem wasn’t you. Well, Peter and the others cast their net without hope, and yet, they hauled in that famously net-bursting catch of fish.
So Peter feels like an idiot. He knew he was doing it right—he was sure of it—but now look. “Go away from me Lord,” he cries, “for I am a sinful man.” Was he sinful because he couldn’t get it right until Jesus made him do it right? Or was he sinful because he was presumptuous about his competence? Or was he sinful because fish avoided him but merrily swam to their demise for Jesus? Peter is just so ashamed. He wants Jesus to go away, so that maybe he can shrink to the size of a pebble and be washed under the waves to the floor of the lake.
I know Peter’s pain. Believe me, I know. I work in Presbyterian churches. I struggle and sweat and strive, and I catch enough of whatever we need to live for another day. Good enough, though some days I come up empty. Then Rick Warren backs his U-Haul into a driveway at Saddleback, California, and the fish swim in by the thousands. He writes a couple of books: The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life. There’s absolutely nothing new in them. The theology is the same old theology, and the motivational tools, though proven, are timeworn. Yet there he is, Rick Warren, with all his thousands of church members and the best selling non-fiction book in history. The rest of us just look like idiots. It’s the most natural thing in the world that we feel ashamed, failures as we are by comparison..
But Jesus looks at things differently. He ignores our ashamedness.
Oh, that’s right. With Jesus, it’s not about making us afraid of things, including shame. I resist it, but what I do still so often feel shame, which is for me a cosmic punchbowl of fear spiked with 200‑proof sadness that I drink from, whenever life looks so hard and I don’t know what to do about it. Jesus, at his Christly best, doesn’t make it about shame. He makes it about grace.
So in that moment of grace, Jesus had said to Peter and the others, “Go do it again. Do what you know how to do. Use the implement of your trade you have learned how to use and the gifts in your body and soul that you got from the God who made you, from the God who made me. Go be yourself as fully and as hopefully as you can, and see what happens. I’m not going to do it for you, no matter how tired you are or how much you believe that it can’t be done. You really can do it, and you really are going to do it.”
And then when they did do it, and when Peter had come unglued and wished Jesus would go away and wanted to be a pebble, Jesus said—the way he would say again and again, the way angels had been saying to everyone since they invited the shepherds to Jesus’ birthday—Jesus said, “Do not be afraid.”
It is not about fear. I don’t know what it is about us that we make our faith, the most important thing in life, about fear. Fear makes us miserable, but in the face of an unknown future that depends in some important way on us, fear is also comforting. If we listen to fear, we may not act. If we don’t act, we can’t be blamed for doing it wrong. If we don’t act, at least everyone else who also didn’t act will share the blame. We can shrink into a pebble along with all the other pebbles on the floor of the lake. It’s actually sort of pretty, if you think about it, all those pebbles in the filtered light, lining the bottom of the lovely lake of fear. Fear gives us that almost pleasurable kind of comfort. And one thing about being fearful, you have lots of company.
Jesus figures if a Boy Scout can be brave, so can you. Fear is only the fog on your path to discipleship. You may not see through it, but it can’t stop you if you just keep walking. And you have to walk your path. You walk it down to the shore and take out your boat to the deep water and cast your net.
This moment when Jesus tells you that your time has come to haul in the catch, whatever that means for you, how do you recognize it? Hauling in your catch may be taking on the church responsibility you’ve been sidestepping or inviting people to form the small group you’ve been unsure how to start or talking to that lonely coworker about your faith. Hauling in your catch is the thing that you’ve finally decided to believe in about yourself that Jesus already believes in. When is that moment, and how do you know it?
It is not when you feel ready. God always feels ready for your decision before you do. You never feel ready for something like this, but you can decide when you see well enough to know it’s time to cast your net.
You look at yourself. You see the personality traits you have, which include the traits that aren’t very strong and trip you up. That’s all right. The reason you have strengths is that you have corresponding weaknesses, and your weaknesses are opportunities for other people’s strengths to flower.
You look at yourself, and you see, perhaps with the help of a guide or a teacher, the seeds of spiritual growth that would flower if you set them out in the sunshine and give them some water.
You look at your calendar and write down on it when you will start—I mean an actual calendar, the date and the time. It may surprise you that Jesus will consider this an appointment you have made with him, which he intends to keep, if you will.
Then you act. The day comes and the hour comes, and you act. Don’t be surprised if something extraordinary happens. Peter got a catch of fish; you may get a hug and the expressed amazement that you, all of a sudden, have discovered something about your life. It may not be obvious that this thing you can do is relevant to anything in particular. It surely did not occur to Peter that catching a lot of fish meant that he’d be a leader for a historic religious movement. The one seems unrelated to the other. You never know what’s going to happen when you finally just do what you’re made to do.
To read this story of Jesus with people that once fished for a living, you’d think these things happen with a sudden arbitrariness, a divine caprice bespeaking God’s sense for whimsy. Personally, I suspect that Peter and Jesus had a lot of conversations in the course of the decision Peter would make to follow Jesus. In any case, Jesus and I certainly have a lot of conversation still, working out what he sees in me, what I see in myself. And how on earth I will ever do what needs to be done for his sake?
I suspect that a lot of conversation with Jesus will be part of whatever you’re going to do, if you really mean to do it. Now is a good time to start your conversation, which we call prayer.. Pray in whatever way you can think of to pray, but don’t just sit there waiting for the words to come by themselves. Pray on your knees. or pray on a walk though the snow. Pray with your voice or your pen or a paintbrush. Pray with your spouse or with a friend. Pray after a dream. Pray before you turn on the television. Pray instead of turning on the television. Pray as if your life depends on it. Pray as if someone else’s life depends on it, which may well be the case. Even if you’re a dog.
Somehow in the process, you will become a deeply appealing person, because of your faith, and people will come to you. They will want to know what is this about you that gives off light, that awakens hope in them when you are near. They will want to have what you have, and you will find that you, like Peter, will be catching people.
Amen.
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