Back in the days when I was layperson, I would sometimes amuse myself as I listened to the readings by speculating on what the preacher would do with the texts that were read. Sometimes I would hear something strange or challenging, and wonder whether the preacher would take on that challenge. In such cases, I was usually disappointed. I came to learn over the years I attended Episcopal churches as a layperson that there were preachers who did everything they could to avoid discussing difficult texts. There were some, of course, who always avoided preaching on the texts at hand.

For me, preaching is all about that struggle with the text, wrestling with it to try and find some word to say to my congregation. As I said last week, I like to face those challenges head-on, in part because I don’t want anyone to judge me as a homiletical wimp. Sometimes, it’s hard to find something to say. Sometimes the texts seem barren, or so alien to our lives that they are irrelevant, and sometimes, they seem banal. Other times, it’s just the opposite. The lectionary might present us with three texts that are so interesting, so rich, so challenging, that it’s difficult to find one’s way through.

This set of propers is just such an occasion. We are reading from two of the theologically richest books of the bible, Job and the Letter to the Hebrews, and the gospel today presents us with some of Jesus’ hardest sayings, hardest particularly for our culture. These words of Jesus are so hard for us to hear, because they seem so foreign, so antithetical to our contemporary culture. Divorce is a reality. Some of us have been through painful breakdowns in relationships; certainly we all know people whose marriages have ended in divorce. Few of us would say that divorce is never wrong, but few would also say that divorce is never the appropriate end of a marriage.

So our tendency is simply to disregard such statements when we come across them in the Bible, and especially when we hear Jesus saying them. Simply to dismiss them as ancient relics, though, fails to do them justice, and fails to wrestle with their implications. Jesus’ words about divorce do not come in a vacuum. Mark puts these words in response to a question from the Pharisees. But it’s more than a question, it’s something of a contest or attempt to trick or trap Jesus.

The grounds for divorce made for a lively debate among Jewish rabbis in Jesus’ day, and the Pharisees’ question was intended to get him to commit to one side or other, the side of leniency or strictness. But as is often the case in the gospels, Jesus responded here, not with an answer, but with a question of the Pharisees. He used their answer as a way of criticizing them. God allowed divorce in Torah, because of human weakness—hardness of heart, but God intended that male and female be together. Here, Jesus seems to allow for divorce, on account of adultery, and he also seems to allow wives to sue for divorce.

We are tempted, as Christians often are, to read in these words of Jesus, these words in favor of life-long commitment between husbands and wives, and his criticism of the disciples for not allowing children to come to him, that what Jesus is espousing are what have come to be called “family values.” The connection between family and Christianity has become so strong that in many minds they are synonymous. Many of us have only found our way back to church through marriage and child-rearing, and we view the church as a last bulwark against all that assails the family in contemporary culture. But it’s not quite so simple as that.

Jesus had many things to say that undermined the family in favor of the community of his disciples. He rejected his own family in favor of his disciples in chapter 3 of Mark, and later he will speak of conflict within families, brother taking up sword against brother. So Jesus’ message was not, primarily, about family values. When we come to his statement here about welcoming children we are inclined to interpret it somewhat sentimentally. I am always reminded of the mid twentieth century art work of the American painter Warner Sallman. You may not recognize his name, but I’ll wager all of you are familiar with his paintings. Sallman’s paintings are kitschy, emotional, childlike, showing Jesus with long blond hair, blue eyes. There’s one where he’s sitting in a green meadow, surrounded by children and lambs.

It’s the sort of image that continues to tug at our heartstrings, because it seems to depict a simpler time when nuclear families were intact, and Christianity was a part of everyone’s life, times when the bumper sticker “the family that prays together, stays together” was descriptive not nostalgic.

It’s that sort of nostalgia that drives much of our political discourse concerning family values. Politicians and pundits appeal to an idealized past when white middle class families had fathers who provided financially for their families, wives were stay-at-home moms, children were well-behaved. Of course the politicians who appeal to such imagery are very often no better at keeping Jesus’ teachings than those they criticize the most. I won’t bother reciting the litany of conservative politicians who have gained and retained power by appealing to family values but have divorced and remarried, or had affairs, or the like. We seem to quickly forgive them, or ignore their misdeeds.

We like the idea of family values, and want our politicians and churches to pay lip service to them, but we don’t necessarily want too close scrutiny paid to our own lives. And of course, every time the church emphasizes “family” it is being exclusive, it is driving a wedge between certain kinds of “families” and those who don’t have such relationships. Thus singles, gays and lesbians, people who are divorced or widowed, single parents, or couples who don’t have children are left on the outside, looking in.  The community that Christ is bringing together invites all into relationship, not just people who live in traditional American families.

We struggle in the tension between ideal and real. The reading from Job presents another kind of ideal picture, that of Job, a righteous man, who was successful economically. The two went hand in hand, for in the ancient near east, as is often the case even today, people see a connection between their relationship with God and their financial well-being. “God helps those who help themselves.” Throughout the Hebrew Bible, those who are faithful to God the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are rewarded with wives, children, wealth in cattle and sheep.

The book of Job undermines that connection. Job is suddenly beset by all manner of disaster. His wealth vanishes, his children are killed, and finally, he is forced to suffer from a skin disease. But why? That is the question this book tries to answer. As we read, we may be struck by just how very strange the world of the book of Job seems to be. In the first place, Satan (translated here as “the satan” literary the adversary, or prosecuting attorney, to use our language) seems to be on relatively good terms with God. It is God who brings Job to the satan’s attention, “Consider my servant Job.” Satan draws the obvious conclusion, he’s a righteous man because he’s got an easy life.

Having watched her husband lose everything, and losing it all with him, Job’s wife urged him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” Her response to Job’s suffering, and her own, is very human, comprehensible, even warranted. When you’ve lost everything, I mean everything, anger and despair are perfectly appropriate. But what fascinates me in her response is not her statement, “Curse God, and die” By the way, those words were so harsh that ancient scribes replaced the word curse, with bless. No what’s interesting is the question that she asks Job first, “Do you persist in your integrity?”

What does that question mean? From Job’s response, we get some sense of its intent. For Job, being righteous meant accepting what happened to him as coming from God, the good and the bad. As Jesus said, “the rain falls on the just and on the unjust.” In fact, that answer will not suffice for Job, In the coming chapters he will challenge God to help him understand his fate, he will ask God to explain; in short, he will put God on trial. But throughout his ordeal, one thing remained certain, Job persisted in his integrity. He maintained his faith in God. His actions, his statements, everything he did in the book, was an attempt to understand who God was in light of his faith in God.

Now, don’ get me wrong. I am not saying that people who suffer pain, or loss, or hardship, should simply accept it as God’s will. No, it’s perfectly appropriate to question God, to question one’s faith, to feel despair. What I’m saying is that Job’s response to his plight was in perfect keeping with who he was. It was who he was. It came from his deepest sense of who he was, it came from his soul. When Job challenged God, he was speaking from his integrity.

That’s a word that is hard to say in this day and age. We look around at our culture, our political discourse, our celebrities, we look even at ourselves and too often we find, not integrity, but competing selves, masks that we display to particular audiences or groups of people. I’m no better at this than anyone else. We even do it with God. That’s part of the reason we see so many hypocrites in our culture, politicians who rail against gay marriage, pass defense of marriage acts, then are themselves caught in affairs, Clergy who spout morality but do the same, good Christians who are caught for financial misdeeds.

Our role as Christians and as the Church is not to decry immorality, but rather as Jesus and Job did, to live with integrity, to approach all of life, and all of our relationships with honesty, open-ness, and sincerity. If we do that, aspire to that, we will do more than keep this or that commandment, we will show god’s love in the world.

“Whoever is not against us is for us”
Proper 21, Year B
September 20, 2009

What does it mean to be Grace Church? What does it mean to be the body of Christ that meets in this place? Those are questions I’ve already asked you from this pulpit before. They are questions I will continue to ask. My hope is that you have begun to ask them of yourself, that you have begun thinking and talking about them. They help us explore what our role in this community is. But they also explore what it means to be community and how to be community.

These are not easy questions for any one or for any congregation, but they are particularly difficult given Grace’s past. They would be difficult even if we didn’t have the history of conflict that we do, for in the twenty-first century, the question of community is at once more pressing than ever before. Community building is more difficult, even though technology seems to have made it easier to communicate.
Community and communication go hand in hand, one can’t create bonds across the aisle, across the generations, across cultural and linguistic divides without communicating clearly and carefully. Yet almost everything in our culture makes such communication more difficult. Our political discourse has devolved into shouting matches, people trying to score points rather than listening, and that carries over into the rest of our culture. Dialog is devalued in favor of making and scoring points.

And then there is the decline of face-to-face communities. Some of you have heard me tell this story before, but it’s a good one, so it bears repeating. As most of you know, I spent most of the last fifteen years teaching in liberal arts colleges as well as serving in ministry. Over that time a vast chasm opened up between my experience, my cultural values and those of the students I was teaching. Of course, that was inevitable. The students got younger every year. But the depth of that chasm came home to me one day in the classroom. As class ended that day, I noticed that as students began to leave the room, not one of the fifteen or twenty was talking to another student. Instead, they had all put in their Ipod buds, pulled out their cellphones, or continued sitting, checking their email. They had abandoned face-to-face community and communication for the virtual variety.

The most obvious reason for such behavior is that my students, even though they were at a small liberal arts college, preferred nurturing community with friends and family who were separated from them by a few hundred feet or hundreds of miles, rather than do the hard work of talking to someone who sat in the desk next to them. Most of us are tempted by such virtual communities. We have facebook pages with dozens, hundreds, sometimes, thousands of friends. We know what those friends are doing from minute to minute, thanks to the status postings. But what is the quality of those relationships?

Of course, it’s easy for someone like me to complain about social networking. I’m over fifty and the realities of the lives of younger people, even people in their thirties, elude me. I don’t text, I can barely see the numbers on a cellphone let alone try to use my thumbs to write messages with it. But it’s not just that. There are now virtual religious communities, apparently. In a way, it’s an extension of the televangelist phenomenon of the seventies and eighties. People related more deeply to the tv-star preacher than to their local church. Now, the relationship is with a virtual community, that may or may not involve real people.
Above and beyond that, here at Grace we worship as a community on Sunday morning, by and large in three distinct and separate congregations. Each week we have visitors who may or may not return, other people who come here seeking connection. But for the most part, we are community on Sunday morning. Some few of us may have relationships that are deeper than that; some of us have known one another for years, decades even, and so there is something of a core, or perhaps cores, webs of relationships. But on the outer boundaries of those webs, there are many others, who are tied to us by the slenderest of threads. With all of these obstacles, how do we create and nurture community?

We should take some small comfort in the fact that early Christian communities described in the New Testament struggled to create and maintain community. Paul’s letters are vivid evidence of the intense conflict that roiled early Christianity, but that conflict is also reflected elsewhere, even in the gospels.

The author of the letter of James urged his community to take care of its weaker members, the ill as well as those who might have strayed from the path. The image of community he depicts is one in which members pray for one another especially for the sick. But the ties that bind them are so strong that they also confess their sins to one another.

In the reading from the Gospel of Mark, we have a pot pourri of sayings, that seem somewhat disjointed. But what unites these disparate sayings is a concern for community. The first odd, saying of Jesus is in response to a rather strange event. An exorcist, who was not a disciple, was casting out demons by invoking the power of Jesus Christ. When the disciples complained rather bitterly, Jesus replied, “whoever is not against us is for us.” Now, what’s odd about this is that just earlier in Mark, the disciples had tried to cast out a demon and were unable to do so. The puzzle is what all this has to do with discipleship, but it would seem to me that Jesus is treating discipleship in rather expansive fashion, “whoever is not against us, is for us.

Then come the central teachings about community. As did the writer of James, Mark wants his readers to recognize the importance of maintaining the community, and the dangers that conflict within the community present. It is not just outsiders who are threats. For Mark, writing around the time of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome that culminated with the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple, the Christian community faced severe, mortal threats from outside.

But there were also threats from within: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” The rest of the sayings ought to be read in light of that. It is not that one should pluck one’s eye out, or cut off one’s foot. What might a community, the body of Christ look like if all of us took seriously our responsibilities toward each other?

It is an exciting time at Grace Church. We have weathered a difficult period and come through. We have survived. But being the body of Christ is more than about keeping the doors open and the electricity on. It is about reaching out to others. Among congregational development literature there is an image that has become something of an old saw—the phrase goes “from maintenance to mission.”

In the weeks I’ve been at Grace Church I have come to learn a great deal about those people who have kept things going for the last decade, the last two or three decades. They’ve done incredible work. But they are tired and ready to pass the torch and the responsibilities on to the rest of us, to younger generations, with new energy and new ideas. In a few minutes, one of those torches will pass quite literally, as we install new leadership for the ECW, the Episcopal Church Women. But that’s only one organization, one area in which new leadership needs to come forward.

To take on those responsibilities, to live into our mission, we all need to roll up our sleeves, bend our knees, get to work, and to pray. We need to do the hard work to build community and the hard work of reaching out and extending that community beyond our doors, beyond the worship service which we find most comfortable, and comforting. The gospel for today concludes with a message that continues to resonate, “have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

“Good Advice, Bad Advice, No Advice”

Proper 20, Year B

September 20, 2009

It’s tempting for many to view scripture as a rule book, a how-to guide, with advice on how one ought to live one’s life. Of course, even for those most committed to such a view of scripture, there is much in scripture that they would and do ignore. For others of us, scripture is little more than a relic of a long-gone age, ill-adapted and irrelevant to contemporary culture. Perhaps many, or most of you, had that reaction while you were listening to this morning’s reading from Proverbs. Not only is it irrelevant, it seems at times downright dangerous.

Now, I could have taken the easy way out and used the alternative reading for today. In fact, there are two alternative readings, and either would be less jarring to contemporary listeners. But you may as well know now that I am not one to avoid a difficult text, or a difficult issue, simply because there’s an easier way. No, I like a challenge, and today we all are challenged by this image of the ideal wife.

Well, I’m not going to preach on that trope. And I will refrain from making any jokes about wives, ideal or otherwise. Rather, I would like to step back and take a look for a few minutes at where we’ve been in scripture these past few weeks, and where we are going. This September, we’ve been reading from the Book of Proverbs, and shortly we will shift from there to another book, the Book of Job for our lessons from the Hebrew Bible. Scholars put these two books, along with Ecclesiastes, and some apocryphal texts into a category called Wisdom literature. Wisdom is more than a genre or type of literature. It is also a world view.

What sets Wisdom literature apart from the rest of the Hebrew Bible is the approach its authors take. They are not interested in the Mighty Acts of God, salvation history. They are not interested in the exodus, or covenant, or even the law given by God at Sinai. Instead, they look closely at themselves, at the world around them, and try to derive principles for living from their analysis of human life. In Proverbs, this can be a very optimistic a very cheery look at life. Do this and you will be rewarded. The rules are clear, straightforward, and relatively simple to follow. As we will see when we begin reading from the Book of Job, there is another, rather pessimistic side to Wisdom literature.

Wisdom literature doesn’t downplay the importance of God. Rather, it assumes that one can see God in the workings of creation, human society, and in the mind. Earlier in Proverbs, in Chapter 8, there is the beautiful and famous, hymn to wisdom. It begins, «The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago… when he established the heavens I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep… I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always. It is significant, especially given the way our text talks about the ideal wife, that in both Hebrew and Greek, the word for wisdom is a feminine noun, in Greek, sophia.

When early Christians began to reflect on their experience of Jesus Christ, one of the important images they used was that of wisdom. So in the first verses of the Gospel of John, we have the famous hymn to the logos, the word, or reason.

We may not like the particular advice that Proverbs provides us with today, but we need to remember that it is conditioned by its historical and cultural context. The advice was probably the sort of common-sense advice that in an earlier age, but there is an important lesson for us to remember. The underlying notion that the universe as created by God is reasonable and its laws and ways can be understood rationally is a lesson that needs to be relearned time again. For the authors of wisdom literature, especially an author like that of Proverbs, or Ben Sirach, whom we hear occasionally in the lectionary cycle, natural law is subject to reason, to wisdom, and thus ultimately to God.

But there’s a tendency in the Christian tradition to downplay reason, to claim that human reason and wisdom are no match for God, that our reason will fail in the attempt. Often, supporters of such views will quote the words Jesus says in today’s gospel, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” But that’s a misreading of this saying. There are several ways in which this has been reinterpreted. In Matthew’s gospel, for example, the parallel saying is transformed into the statement that “unless you become like a child, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” So when we hear Mark’s version, we tend to interpret it in light of Matthew.

There’s more to it, however. The Aramaic word that presumably underlies this saying, the language Jesus spoke, the same word is used for child and servant. So by drawing his disciples’ attention to a child, he is making the same point he made when he used the image of a servant. Thus we come back to the central point of this section. In today’s gospel, we have the second passion prediction by Jesus. Last week we heard the first, and in a few weeks, we will hear a third. Mark has shaped these into a very tight narrative pattern. Three times Jesus predicts that he will go to Jerusalem, will suffer and die, and be raised from the dead.

After each of these, the disciples make clear that they don’t understand what he is talking about. Last week, it was Peter. This week, Jesus embarrasses them by asking them what they had been discussing. Each time, Mark then follows it up with Jesus saying something about discipleship. Last week, it was “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” This week, an equally difficult saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

I have to confess that this section of the Gospel of Mark among my favorites. It is also one of the most important sections. When I used to teach Bible, we would spend a day on these three chapters. When we came to the end of the gospel that we heard last week, That verse I just read to you, I would read it aloud to my students, most of whom were fairly conservative Christians, and ask them what they thought Jesus was telling them to do.

They would look confused for a moment, a common response to my questions, and then invariably, someone would try to explain. Well, Jesus is telling us that in order to be saved…” I would stop them right there and point out, that the saying goes, “whoever would save their life… will lose it. With these two sayings we are at the heart of one of his central teachings in the gospels.

Scholars often call it “reversal” or turning things upside-down. When Jesus teaches about discipleship or about the nature of the kingdom, the reign of God, he emphasized that what matters in the reign of God is a completely different value system than that which operates in our daily lives. What do we hold most dear? What is most important to us? Our life? Our family? Our health? Our wealth? Eternal Life? Whatever that is, the reign of God, according to Jesus, turns that value on its head. Whoever would be first will be last, the last will be first. Whoever will gain his life will lose it. Whoever would be greatest will be the least.

Hard as that may be for us to hear, and it is hard, because it challenges almost everything we hold dear—status, position, wealth, power, if you really think about what Jesus is saying, he is challenging even those things that we would do, those things we would give up for the kingdom. He is challenging even our deepest religious values. Whoever would save his life will lose it.

Proverbs would give us advice about human life. There are self-help gurus with infomercials, and how-to books who offer us the same. Oprah and Dr. Phil are ready with easy steps for happiness, and wealth, and weight loss. Jesus offers us none of those things. There is no twelve-step path for discipleship or for realizing the reign of God. Instead, Jesus confronts us with a call and a challenge: Whoever wants to be first must be last and servant of all. That’s not a recipe for success, survival, or recovery. That is the mindset of a disciple who walks with Jesus to the very end.