Whenever You Pray–Sermon on the Mount Bible Study

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This evening, we’ll be looking at Matthew 6, especially vss 1-14. I’m always struck when I encounter texts in different contexts and the liturgical uses of these verses are powerful and foundational for the Christian life. The Lord’s Prayer is also our prayer, recited in the Daily Office and at every Eucharistic celebration. Its familiarity is both blessing and problematic. When said consciously and meditated upon regularly, it offers the possibility of helping us shape our discipleship and faith. It helps to create a relationship with God that stresses our dependence on God for the necessities of life as well as our purpose and end (“Your kingdom come, Your will be done). But it’s also easy to allow the words to roll off our tongue unthinkingly. Sometimes that’s OK; for example when we need to pray but can’t find words of our own. Sometimes it may be an example of the sort of external piety that Jesus criticizes in the first verses of the chapter.

Those verses are always the gospel reading on Ash Wednesday. In that context they are problematic and challenging, especially of the piety we display on Ash Wednesday. It’s hard not to think about how our actions look to others, whether we’re walking around on Ash Wednesday with ashes on our forehead or attending church on Sunday morning when our friends and neighbors are drinking coffee and reading the paper or out on a bike ride or run. But hiding our piety for the wrong reasons is also a problem. Jesus criticizes “hypocrites” for wanting others to know about their donations and fasting. He isn’t addressing those of us who hide our actions or faith because we are slightly embarrassed of our quaint habits.

Perhaps most important is something implied rather than directly stated here: that our prayers and other practices should be sincere and come from the heart. Prayer is not about others or about ourselves; it is about God. Bonhoeffer has this to say:

Prayer is the supreme instance of the hidden character of the Christian life. It is the antithesis of self-display. When men pray, they have ceased to know themselves and know only God whom they call upon. Prayer does not aim at any direct effect on the world; it is addressed to God alone, and is therefore the perfect example of undemonstrative action

 

John Donne, 1631

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A Hymn to God the Father

By John Donne

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
         Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
         And do run still, though still I do deplore?
                When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
         Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
         A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?
                When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
         My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
         Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
                And, having done that, thou hast done;
                        I fear no more.

From The Poetry Foundation

John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, brilliant poet and preacher, died on this day in 1631.

Blindness, Sight, and Faith: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

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I used to have an intense fear of going blind. I was born with weak eyesight but on top of that I was, to put it in the words of a college friend of mine “wall-eyed.” I had two surgeries as a child in an attempt to correct that. I remember waking after the second of those surgeries when I was about 9 years old. When I couldn’t open my eyes–the lids were sealed by dried excretion–I screamed out in terror. For years after that, I practiced walking around in my house in the darkness, so I would be able to get around if (or more likely when) I went blind. I’m not blind yet, but my eyesight continues to deteriorate. In fact, one of the reasons I’ve taken to using an ipad in services is because I can increase the font size so I can read my sermons and the Book of Common Prayer. Continue reading →

Noah: I’m going to go see it!

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So, after reading a bunch of stuff about Noah, I’ve decided to go see it. Although I’ve not seen all of Darren Aronofsky’s movies, I have found his work thoughtful, challenging, and entertaining (especially The Wrestler and Pi). Among the most interesting reviews and writing about Noah are these:

Noah: A Jewish perspective:

Noah is not a hero in Jewish lore. The Bible says that Noah was a righteous man “in his generation.” He was only a righteous man compared to the others who were far worse than he.

Now, why wasn’t he righteous? Because righteousness is all about what you do for your fellow man. And Noah does NOTHING for his fellow man. He doesn’t care, he has no compassion. He executes God’s commandment to the letter. So when God says “I’m going to kill everybody,” Noah says, “will you save my skin? Oh, I get an Ark? Okay, fine.”

From Christianity Today:

Rather, it’s a movie that approaches the level of “good art.” It asks big questions. It explores concepts like grace, justice, pride, guilt, and love. It respects its source material and respects the power of human imagination. It takes a sober look at the evil in the human heart.

An interview with Aronofsky and Ari Handel, his co-writer from Christianity Today

Tony Jones:

From the New York Times:

“Noah” is occasionally clumsy, ridiculous and unconvincing, but it is almost never dull, and very little of it has the careful, by-the-numbers quality that characterizes big-studio action-fantasy entertainment. The riskiest thing about this movie is its sincerity: Mr. Aronofsky, while not exactly pious, takes the narrative and its implications seriously. He tries not only to explore what the story of the flood might mean in the present age of environmental anxiety and apocalyptic religion, but also, more radically, to imagine what it might have felt like to live in a newly created, already-ruined world, and to scan the skies for clues about what its creator might be thinking.

Andrew O’Hehir (Salon):

“Noah” is a grandiose and baffling journey that’s almost worth taking, a free-form adaptation of one of the world’s most famous myths that halfheartedly tries to appease those who long to take it literally. When it connects it’s awesome, and when it doesn’t it’s awesomely silly. If it’s a bad idea, at least it’s a bad idea on a grand scale, and a better bad idea than 90 percent of the ones that reach the screen from Hollywood.

The System is Still Broken

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I was given a stark reminder yesterday that Madison’s safety net for homeless people has gaping holes. It’s not just that the Men’s Shelter returned to “Summer Hours” with the arrival of Daylight Savings Time (I wonder if they ever considered changing that policy when the period of DST was extended into early March) and that the 60-day limit runs out for most men.

As I was leaving the church yesterday around 5:30, I encountered a couple of guys huddling for warmth in our entry way. Another staff person had seen them in the courtyard and invited them inside for a few minutes. One of the two men was carrying an oxygen tank. He had spent the day at Hospitality House and been brought back to the shelter by Porchlight’s van at 4:30. However, since the shelter didn’t open until 7:30, he would have to wait in 20 degree weather for three hours. He told me that doctors had instructed him to stay out of the cold weather and minimize physical exertion (like walking three blocks to the Public Library where he could be safe from the elements). So here he was.

I don’t know for certain he had been in the hospital last week. If so, I wonder if anyone considered how a homeless person could comply with instructions to minimize physical exertion and avoid being in cold weather. And I wonder about policies and procedures that leave a frail and nearly incapacitated man on his own on the streets for several hours or more. And I continue to despair about a nation and community that treats its weakest and most vulnerable members so callously.

 

Salt, Light, and the Law: Reflections on our Sermon on the Mount Bible Study

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Last night at our Lenten Bible Study, we focused on Mt. 5:13-32. I had hoped to get all the way through chapter 5 but that was not to be. We began by exploring the saying about salt. The scientists among us pointed out that salt can be adulterated but it can’t not be salt. Then we sought to understand the saying about salt via the saying about light. Both seem to be sayings directed at the disciples (Jesus first uses “you” in v. 11: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you”). This seems to suggest that the disciples by definition change the world, that their very presence and manner of life witness to the Reign of God.

Someone offered the parables as comparable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of the seeds…” I find this helpful because Jesus is holding up the disciples as members of the new community he’s calling into existence, a new community that is intended to usher in and witness the Reign of God.

We struggled with Jesus’ language in these verses. What should we understand as metaphorical; what should we take literally? That’s especially true when dealing with passages like vss 29-30: If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; if your right hand causes you to sin, cut if off. But if we are meant to understand this metaphorically, what about other things Jesus says, like love of enemy and turning the other cheek? Might Jesus be talking about our priorities here, what we ought to give up in order to follow him?

Next week, we’ll try to make it through chapter 5 and get into chapter 6.

My help comes from The Lord: A Sermon for 2 Lent

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We are accustomed to think of our lives as people of faith as a journey or pilgrimage. It’s an image that’s deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, perhaps beginning with Jesus’ own journey to Jerusalem, dramatically depicted in Luke’s gospel where he writes, “and Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Devout Christians over the centuries have understood their own lives and the experience of the Christian community writ large in terms of journey or pilgrimage. Journey is a word I often use when I’m welcoming newcomers and visitors to our services on Sunday morning. Like any metaphor it can become over-used, tired, even meaningless. The question becomes whether we can breathe new life into such language and by doing that, help us to think about our own lives and experiences in new ways. Continue reading →

Who are the “poor in spirit”?

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That was the burning question last night at our first Lenten Bible Study on the Sermon on the Mount. We began and ended with the Beatitudes, exploring what they meant in the historical context, in the context of Matthew’s gospel, and in the context of our own lives. The behaviors and attitudes Jesus blesses (declares happy), are they things to which we should aspire?

We struggled most with “poor in spirit.” What does  that mean? One powerful suggestion was that it refers to those who are beaten down by life, dejected, depressed, hopeless. Perhaps it refers to those who are spiritually empty, or empty themselves spiritually to receive God’s grace.

Frederick Buechner proposes that the poor in spirit “are the ones who spiritually speaking, have absolutely nothing to give and absolutely everything to receive …” That fits with another theme in Matthew’s gospel, the emphasis on the weakest, most vulnerable, “the little ones” (cf Mt 18:6).

In Christian communities, our tendency is to do just what we do in the rest of life, distinguish between the proficient and the struggling, the powerful and the weak, the successful and those who fail. God’s reign entails a reversal of values. We’re somewhat comfortable when the values that are reversed are material, there’s plenty of biblical precedent for that. What if God’s reign entails a reversal of spiritual values, too? What might that mean?

Blessed are you… The Beatitudes and Discipleship

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I’m reading Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship as I prepare for our Lenten Bible Study on the Sermon on the Mount. I’m not sure when I last spent any time with this Christian classic (25 years, 35 years?). Coming back to it after all those years, it’s striking both in the way it reflects its historical context and the ways in which it transcends its time and still speaks to us decades later.

For example, after going through the beatitudes, explaining them and showing how they speak immediately to the situation of Jesus’ followers in the first century, Bonhoeffer asks whether the community described in the Beatitudes exists anywhere on earth. His answer:

Clearly, there is one place, and only one, and that is where the poorest, meekest, and most sorely tried of all men is to be found–on the Cross at Golgotha. The fellowship of the Beatitudes is the fellowship of the Crucified. With him it has lost all, and with him it is found all. From the cross there comes the call “blessed, blessed.”

The fellowship of the Beatitudes is the fellowship of the Crucified!

Earlier, he points out that Jesus called his disciples blessed in the crowd’s hearing and that “the crowd is called upon as a startled witness.” From this he posits the essential unity of disciples and people. In his discussion of the Beatitudes, Bonhoeffer tends to emphasize the tension between Jesus’ followers and the world but here he stresses the commonality. It’s easy to read him (and to some degree the Beatitudes themselves) and place ourselves on that same grid. We hear a lot these days about the persecution of Christians in American, for example. But I wonder whether the perception might change if the emphasis were on the ways in which the people of God are meant to be a blessing to the communities and world in which they live.

In this week’s lectionary reading from Genesis 12, God calls Abram and Sarai out from Haran into the Promised Land, telling them, “I will bless you … so that you will be a blessing” and “in you all the families of the world will be blessed.” It’s easy to recoil, raise our defenses, withdraw or try to fight back when we encounter opposition. The world sees plenty of that from Christians. What might it be like to offer oneself and one’s community of faith as a blessing to its neighborhood and the world?

 

Remaking the Image of God: A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, 2014

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Like some of you, I have heard and read scripture for most of my life. I also studied it academically and taught it for more than a decade. On top of that, I preach it regularly. While I am not one of those people who has memorized vast swaths of the text and from time to time I encounter stories or ideas that are quite new to me, many of the texts we read on Sundays are as familiar to me as the back of my hand or an old pair of blue jeans.
But that’s not the case for everyone. Even a story as familiar as the story from Genesis 3 that we heard this morning is unknown to many in our society. That basic ignorance of the biblical story came home to me during my last semester of teaching when I made an off-hand reference to Adam and Eve in a Religion class I was teaching and a student asked, “Who are they?” She may not have known the story but she had an advantage over those of us who are familiar with it. She could read it as it appeared on the page without the two thousand years of Christian biblical interpretation and doctrinal development. For the story we know is not the story that appears in the text.
To point out several obvious points—nowhere is sin mentioned; neither is Satan, nor fall, nor even temptation. Even the decision by the editors of the lectionary to read it today, on the first Sunday of Lent, in conjunction with the gospel story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, contributes to our mis-reading of this foundational story of Judaism, Christianity, and western culture. Is it about original sin? If by original sin, one means the human condition, then yes.
The inclusion of the verses from chapter 2 helps us understand the authors’ perspective on human beings and on creation. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden, the Hebrew literally reads, “to serve it and to guard it.” Human beings were created to be in partnership with the garden, to protect it and preserve it. It’s a very different notion than that which appears in Genesis 1, when God commands the humans to have dominion, lordship, over all the animals and plants. We see here a sense of human beings cooperating with creation, given responsibility to protect it. One more point—there’s no sense here that before the fall, humans were intended to live in idleness, rather, they were placed in the garden for an end and a purpose. Created in the image and likeness of God, God intended them to flourish and to aid in the flourishing of creation.
But something happened. They met a talking serpent who gave them a different way to think about themselves and God. The serpent questioned what God had told them and promised them that by eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would become like God.
Everything the serpent tells them is true, if somewhat one-sided. They did not die after eating of the fruit of the tree and they did gain knowledge. And the fruit was desirable. Eve ate because the fruit was beautiful, good to eat, and would make one wise—all of these are appropriate reasons for her decision. And, I would add, of the two humans, at least the woman showed some agency: “she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.”
What were the consequences? They gained knowledge; most immediately, of their nakedness. They were ashamed. So whatever intimacy the two beings, “bone of bone and flesh of flesh” had had was suddenly gone—they needed protection from each other. And they needed protection from God. Their nakedness and exposure broke the pair’s intimacy with each other; it also broke their intimacy with God. Instead of becoming like God, they becoming frightfully aware of their difference from God. They wanted to escape from God but God wasn’t done with them. God sought them out in their hiding place, and when God located them, God showed continuing care for them by sewing clothes for them from animal skins. Any punishment would come later.
It’s a story of disobedience and rebellion against God. God created the humans for a purpose, for relationship with God and to participate with God in the care of God’s creation. Rejecting that purpose, they chose to aspire to be like God and so spurned their true nature, having been created in the image and likeness of God. It’s the story of humanity; it’s our story. Like Eve and Adam, we grasp for the beauty and knowledge we can see; and in grasping for what we want, we turn away from God and deface the image of God in us. The knowledge we gain is knowledge of our own fallen humanity, knowledge of our shame and embarrassment.
In the story of the temptation of Jesus, Satan asks him, “If you are the Son of God…” This story follows immediately on Jesus’ baptism, when he hears the voice telling him, “This is my Son, my Beloved.” The temptations of Jesus are temptations about what that means to be the Son of God, just as, in the garden, the temptation was about what it means to be human. The temptations of Jesus are temptations about what sort of Son of God Jesus is. Is he the Son of God in the sense that Roman Emperors were sons of God—the most powerful men on earth with all the trappings of power, wealth, and status?
Or is he the Son of God in some other way? Satan tempts him with other ideas about what it means to be the Son of God. He also tempted Jesus to prove he was the Son of God by forcing God to act in a certain way. But Jesus rejected both of them and in the end, was the Son of God who died on the cross.
We are at the beginning of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, many of us heard those words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.” They’re a reminder of our humanity, our frailty, and vulnerability. Today, in the Great Litany, we heard centuries-old language that confronts us with our sins and shortcomings, as individuals and as the human race. Lent confronts us with our humanity; it opens up for our reflection and inspection all of the ways we have fallen short of our human potential, all of the ways we have ruined the image of God in us.
But that’s not all. Lent is also about a God who loves us in spite of the fact that we have turned away from God, in spite of the fact that we have defaced God’s image in us. God loves us even when we hide from God like the man and the woman in the garden. Just as God continued to care for the two who had rebelled against God, sewing clothes for them from animal skins, God continues to love and care for us.
It’s easy to hear the language of sin in the Great Litany and throughout Lent as language of condemnation and rejection. It’s easy to recoil from that language, especially in our culture of self-help and self-actualization, our culture of gratification and enjoyment. We often want our religion on similar terms. Lent doesn’t allow that. But that’s not the end of the story or experience of Lent. It’s not the whole story of the Christian faith.
The purpose of our confession of sin, the purpose of our self-reflection in this penitential season is to receive God’s grace and love in all of its fullness. Lent is an opportunity for us to strip off our fig leaves of self-deception and self-protection, to allow others and God to see us as we are, and to let God begin to remake us in God’s image. Lent is an opportunity for forty days to experience briefly what the Christian life should be like 365 days a year, receiving God’s grace as we joyfully are remade in God’s image and fully realize the potential God has created us to become. I pray that all of us experience some of that joy and renewal in these forty days.Re