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Sermons - Lent 2011


March 27, 2011 – Third Sunday in Lent
Year A – Revised Common Lectionary
    Exodus 17:1-7
    Psalm 95 or 95:6-11
    Romans 5:1-11
    John 4:5-26, (27-38), 39-42

The “Hound of Heaven”. That is how God is portrayed in the 19^th century poem of the same name. It paints an image of God as a hunting hound that pursues us no matter how fast and hard we flee.

Although I am not much of a poetry fan, I really love this poem and will attempt to recite a few lines:

    I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
    I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
    I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
    Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
    I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
    Up vistaed hopes I sped;
    And shot, precipitated,
    Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
    From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
    But with unhurrying chase,
    And unperturbèd pace,
    Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
    They beat…

Perhaps I love this poem because I spent so much of my youth running from God. I stomped out of church when I was fifteen, and didn’t return until I was 40.

When I DID return, one of the first sermons I heard was on this poem. Needless to say, it made an impact on my fleeing soul. I could practically feel the breath of the Hound of Heaven, the breath of God following me, nipping at my heels.

I also love this poem because it was written by such a misfit. The poet’s name is Francis Thompson. He was, by all accounts, a weird little guy, who dressed oddly, was an opium addict and suffered from tuberculosis. He died young and was not really appreciated until well after his death.

But he understood that God loved him despite his strangeness, despite his addiction, despite all of his self-loathing.

I think Francis Thompson would have loved today’s readings as they teach that God pursues us relentlessly, all of us, even those without faith, even those who the pride-filled goody goodies of the world think God should shun.

Let’s look first at the Old Testament reading. Here the Israelites are complaining yet again, this time about the lack of water. They have little faith in God to bring them through this latest in a series of crises in the wilderness.

Despite the fact that God has saved them EVERY time, with mind-bending, GIANT, OBVIOUS miracles (such as the parting of the waters of the Red Sea) they ask: "Is the Lord among us or not?"

If I were God, I would have left them to enjoy their pity-party and never looked back.

But I am not God and that is exactly the point. Unlike us, God never gives up on anyone.

Despite the Israelites’ whining, despite their lack of faith, God produces yet another miracle, water from a rock. This should have convinced them as water was an important symbol.

According to one rabbi I have read, “To the mind of the ancients the presence of water in a narrative was a form of foreshadowing, the presence of G*d was implied … Noah’s ark serves as the womb for the survival of earth’s non-water-dwelling species. Moses is placed into the Nile by his sister…the Israelites will be brought out of Egypt and the great birthing metaphors of the parting waters of the sea rebirth them as a new nation.”

As I said, this latest in a series of water miracles should have convinced them that God was truly with them. But alas, they soon lost faith again and got wound up with the whole golden calf worship thing.

The writer of today’s psalm remembers that lack of faith recounting a bit of the water and rock story, saying that the Lord declares, “They put me to the test, though they had seen my works.”

“Though they had seen my works.” Non-believers will often say that if they could just witness one giant, Old Testament type, miracle, they would believe. But I wonder. Didn’t seem to help the Israelites.

Why?

Maybe because if we if we really accept God’s reality and his action in our lives, we are no longer in control and we would have to bow down. As the psalmist says:

Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, *
and kneel before the LORD our Maker.

We, like the Israelites, seem to really have a hard time with this. I always find it interesting when people bow down to pray on only one knee. It seems especially common among football players praying before a game.

I may be making way too much out of it, but it seems to me like a withholding, saying to God, “I won’t completely give up control to you.”

But the bowing down, the letting go of total control, doesn’t have to be frightening, not if we know that God is love, that God accepts us just as we are.

The Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well discovered that truth.

This is an incredibly rich story. Let me retell part of it with some cultural explanation added in.

Jesus goes to Samaria. This is an area that had been conquered many centuries before by the Assyrians. The conquerors had settled foreigners in the area and they intermarried with the Semitic native peoples. Thus, though they believed in the same God as the Jews, the Samaritans were despised as foreigners.

In a Samaritan village Jesus sits down at a well to rest in the heat of noonday sun.

A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. Jesus asks her to give him a drink from her bucket. This is completely outrageous behaviour, scandalous even, because this woman is a three way outsider: she is a woman, she is a foreigner and she is also a marginal person.

We know this because she is there at noon, not in the morning or evening when the other village women would have gathered at the well to talk and draw water during the cool of the day. She is probably a fallen woman of some kind, either someone’s mistress or simply living with a man without marriage.

And Jesus is not only speaking to her, he is willing to touch her via the bucket.

She answers rudely, calling him Jew, instead of Sir, which would have been more proper. They dance back and forth, with Jesus offering what he calls “living water.” For him this is the offer of himself, God incarnate, God’s love.

She takes this all literally, thinking he is offering magic water that will never run out so she won’t have to go to the well every day.

She is soon shocked, however, when he tells her he knows that she is living with a man that is not her husband, after having had five husbands previously.

She begins to suspect that this is Christ, the Messiah. Jesus not only supports this idea, he goes further and identifies himself as God.

This is the only time the world Saviour is used in John’s Gospel, highlighting the importance of this passage. She runs to the village to tell the others.

This is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the Gospels. She is the first person in John’s Gospel to get who Jesus really is and she is the first evangelist. She, unlike the Israelites in the wilderness, trusts in God.

And why not?

Jesus keeps pursuing her with the offer of divine love, eternal life, which in John’s Gospel means more than just life after death but a deep, meaningful, truth-filled life on earth. He pursues her like the “Hound of Heaven,” despite her attempts to rebuff him and run.

The miracle that convinces her is not some sort of literal miracle like water from a rock, but instead the miracle of being seen for who she is and then loved anyway.

We all want to be seen and loved anyway.

As Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “The Messiah is the one in whose presence you know who you really are—the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is—who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises—speaking to you like someone you have known all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper, so that you go back to face people you thought you could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he spoke to you. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.”

St. Paul writing in Romans pounds on this point, saying, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

God loves us despite our weakness, despite our flaws, just at Jesus loved the Samaritan woman. He pursued her, the last person in the world he should have wanted as one of his disciples, were he not God who loves all.

So my question for us today is just this: How is God pursuing you? And how fast are you running in the other direction? Can you hear the breath of the Hound of Heaven, can you feel him nipping at your heels? How will you respond?



April 3, 2011 – Fourth Sunday in Lent
Year A – Revised Common Lectionary
    1 Samuel 16:1-13
    Psalm 23
    Ephesians 5:(1-7) 8-14
    John 9:1-31

Are we all blind?

Today’s Gospel Lesson should lead us to ask that question.

In this story Jesus heals a man who was born blind. This healing shows us the love and glory of God. In fact, Jesus says that the man was born blind “so that God's works might be revealed in him.”

The religious experts—the Pharisees—don’t believe it. They discount the blind man’s story of healing. They refuse to believe that Jesus worked the miracle. They don’t understand that Jesus is sent from God. They are blind, blind in their hearts.

On the other hand, the blind man is the one who truly sees; not only are his eyes cured, but also his soul, as well. In the end, he comes to believe that Jesus is the Son of Man, or better said, the Son of God.

Several characters in this story have hearts that are blind.

Some of the Pharisees have hearts blinded by their rigidity. They are so obsessed on the fact that Jesus violated the religious rules by healing on the Sabbath that they can’t see the miracle he has wrought.

They say, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath." And others say they know Jesus is a sinner.

These religious authorities, these pious men, are also blinded by their prejudices. They subscribe to the belief that was common then that if someone is sick then they or their parents must have committed a sin.

In addition, these Pharisees believe that if someone is a sinner, that person also is ignorant and lacks the ability to know God. Thus, they treat the blind man as though he were some kind of idiot saying, "You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?" And they tossed him out of the synagogue. Their beliefs made them blind and deaf to the Good News in Jesus Christ.

Even Jesus’ own disciples are blinded by their beliefs regarding the relationship between illness and sin. They ask Jesus, “"Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" But Jesus answers that the blindness has nothing to do with sin.

Are we blind? At times, yes.

The people in this Gospel lesson are blinded by their rigid personal belief systems. We, too, can be blinded by our beliefs as well.

For example, many of us continue to believe, if only in our darkest nights of the soul, that the illnesses that attack us are punishments from God. Punishment for some sort of sin we committed.

Of course, it’s true that some health problems are the direct result of sin—for example cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol or drug abuse. But this illness does not come from God, no, it comes from our own bad choices. It isn’t punishment from God for our sin of substance abuse. Instead it is the logical result of treating our body badly.

I don’t believe that God ever uses illness as a punishment. Why?

Because I believe that Jesus is God and we know something about God through him. Remember: We never, ever see Jesus cursing someone with illness because of sin.

In fact, we witness the reverse!

We consistently see Jesus loving, healing and forgiving all sinners.

When we believe that God sends us diseases as punishments, this belief can blind us to God’s blessings.

Sometimes we go so far as to think that all bad things come from God, but all good things come from good luck or our own efforts.

This makes us blind.

Sometime, too, we are blinded when we see only the surface of an event, the top layers. Like the Pharisees, we can’t see beyond what we expect to see. All they could see before them in the blind man was a sinner. They missed the chance to receive the Good News signaled by Jesus’ miracle-working.

It is quite sad, actually…

We too, at times, miss seeing the miracles that are worked before our very eyes because we are wound up in the surface event.

For example, let’s say we lose a job we really love. We become very anxious. But later on, when we land a job we like even better, we fail to see the miracle in the new job, remembering only the job we lost. We are blind to God’s glory and his help.

So, what can we do to pry open our blinded eyes?

Maybe nothing more than to be open to faith, to trust in God’s goodness.

The blind man was able to see the truth about what was happening to him because he had basic trust in Jesus. He did exactly what Jesus told him to do. He says, “"The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, `Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight."

And more importantly, when the blind man was healed, he didn’t question the miracle. Instead of letting his cultural expectations or belief system blind him, he accepted the miracle, accepted the Good News of Jesus saying, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing."

Jesus is the light of the world. All we have to do is open our hearts with faith and trust. In that way we can see God’s healing, God’s love and God’s glory.

We can open our eyes to the miracle of a life in Christ, a life free from prejudice and abuse, a life with eyes fixed on the light.



Good Friday – April 22, 2011
Year A – Revised Common Lectionary
    Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12
    Psalm 22:1-21
    Hebrews 10:16-25
    John 19:1-37

What’s good about Good Friday?

It appears to be a full-scale wallow-fest of suffering.

Which might be why so few people attend this service.

We don’t like suffering. We do all we can to avoid it.

As human beings we naturally want to avoid pain and discomfort, any animal does.

But in this culture, in this country, suffering is practically un-American.

Despite the fact that times are relatively hard right now.

Nevertheless, despite the hard economic times, most of us, especially those of us who are well-off, manage to evade much of the suffering that was commonplace less than a hundred years ago.

Today a woman rarely dies in childbirth. Many cancers can be cured, so can most infections. Heart attacks can be prevented and treated. Most people know there will be enough food on the table, that their stomachs are not dependent on the weather and the state of their crops.

Death in modern America has been staved off to the point that we often can fool ourselves that it won’t happen to us.

And we live in a place where the rule of law generally applies—this is not the California of the Wild West!

Instead of suffering we are inveterate comfort seekers. We, including me, waste huge amounts of resources in order to keep our houses at a perfect temperature, to stay in our cars instead of using public transportation, and to prevent a really bad hair day.

We believe there is a techno fix for every challenge, a drug for every problem.

A corollary to our constant campaign to avoid suffering, we also avoid risk. Even appropriate, necessary risk. Our leaders seem unwilling to risk—how many would do what Jesus did, or even what his disciples eventually did—be martyred for their beliefs?

Nope, they wimp out at the first sign of a negative poll.

Those of us who are well-off think we can buy our way out of suffering and often we can—perhaps that is why we are so shocked and almost insulted when it happens to us. We rush to blame someone, anyone.

No wonder then that many good Christians avoid Good Friday. Entire denominations skip right over today or give it only lip service.

We don’t like to be confronted by the bloody, dying Jesus, the weak Jesus, the impotent God. The crucifix instead of the tasteful, empty cross.

But Jesus DID suffer and DID die. And the truth is, without the Cross, the story is as empty as the tomb. You can’t get to Easter without the Cross.

No doubt about it, the crucifixion WAS horrible. Jesus suffered terrible pain. But even more, he suffered terrible degradation.

In his culture, dishonor was the worst thing that could happen to you. Your honor was more important than how much money you had or how powerful you were.

Crucifixion was reserved for slaves, bandits, prisoners of war and revolutionaries—low status people without honor.

You were forced to carry your own cross, you were stripped naked (forget the modest loin cloth—it wasn’t there) and you were often denied an honorable burial. Your death became the local public entertainment.

This was the most dishonorable of deaths. That is why we see all of the emphasis in the story on the spitting, the jeering, the mocking, rather than endless descriptions of Jesus’ physical pain.

So why go into this, why am I dwelling on this horrible stuff? Why be here at all today?

One reason is because suffering WILL visit most of us, if not all of us, at one time or another, no matter how fast we run, no matter how much money we throw at it. I know suffering has visited many of us already.

It has visited me.

So where is the Good News in this dark day?

It is here: that God suffers with us. God in Jesus of Nazareth knows what it is like to be a human being, to feel abandoned by God, to be abandoned by your best friends, to feel physical and psychic suffering. To die alone.

So God walks with us. God accompanies us in our darkest hours. God sends us hope in the form of friends, family, doctors, therapists, pets, a sunny day, a sumptuous meal, chocolate, a new medication, even total strangers.

As I told a parishioner earlier this week, “There is death and there are dogs.”

Dogs have got to be one of God’s greatest gifts sent to support us in what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “this vale of tears.” (An Ode to Rain)

There is also another piece of Good News besides dogs and chocolate:

It is this: suffering can save us—it certainly changes us and if we allow God to work through the suffering it can transform our lives for the better.

I can only guess as to why God allows suffering. I do not believe God sends suffering for punishment. I am not even sure God sends specific moments of suffering to teach us lessons.

But I am beginning to wonder if suffering isn’t part of the reason why we are here. I firmly believe we are here on this earth to grow, to learn to love, love in that expansive, spiritual sense. And I know from personal experience that suffering is usually integral to that growth.

I don’t like it. I hate it.

Still, here is the hope that I see: based on my own experiences and on scripture and on what the mystics tell us, God works to redeem the horrible into something good, to give the suffering a reason.

In my own case a period of intense suffering led to the virtual eradication of my snobbishness and sense of over-entitlement.

In fact, in my younger years, I once said that “most people in the world are just taking up space.” My suffering cut me down to size and God lifted me back up on the wings of compassion.

I like to believe I am better for it. God made the horrible in my life into a blessing.

This experience has led me to suspect in fact that it is impossible to be truly transformed without entering some sort of suffering, if only the existential suffering that comes from facing the reality of our own deaths. Facing it and not running away.

As one spiritual writer put it: “The inner logic of Jesus’ teaching is that our very encounter with God involves suffering, a losing of our selves in order to discover those transformed selves which it is God’s will that we should realize.” (Bruce Chilton)

Good Friday is good because it is part of the great story: In fact it is the very fulcrum upon which balances the whole life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It can be the fulcrum of our own lives.

Good Friday is good when we look forward to Easter.

In the looking forward we see that God took the squalid, illegal execution of an itinerate rabbi in a tiny, backwater country and turned it into the great Good News—the good news that evil and death and suffering are not the final word.

That suffering does not go on and on.

That Easter does come.

That in the end God wins.