A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

I remain profoundly indebted to the insights of the late Henri Nouwen, as found in The Return of the Prodigal Son, for many of the core ideas conveyed in this sermon.  I first read that book many years ago and it changed the way I have come to understand this parable. Although the work in this sermon is my own, it has emerged because of my debt to Nouwen.

I want you to notice who is in the audience as Jesus tells the familiar parable we just heard from Luke’s Gospel. There are the tax collectors and sinners, who have been coming to him to hear from him a word of healing, a word of “good news.” We can almost see in our mind’s eye, however, how their mere presence causes the scribes and the Pharisees to grumble. They practice a piety of separatism. They’ve been taught that they must not associate with sinners, that if they do it will somehow rub off on them. The way to remain “pure” is to steer clear of “this sort.” 

So Jesus tells them all a little story…

Actually he tells them three stories. All of them are what we might call “lost and found” stories. Story one is about a shepherd who has 100 sheep: one gets lost and so the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go after the lost one.

The second story is about a woman with ten silver coins. (A little note in my Bible says each coin is worth the equivalent of a day’s labor, so these aren’t dimes. Think of them more like $100 bills; I bet if you lost one you’d turn the house upside down, too!) She loses one, but after looking diligently she finally finds it, and she’s so happy that she throws a party.

Story three is the one before us today, the story most of us know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I imagine him as a restless soul, who lives for the moment. He can’t wait to leave home. But as soon as he does, he finds trouble. Or trouble finds him. And it doesn’t take long before he’s on a downward slide. When I reflect upon those gathered around Jesus as he tells this story, I imagine that most of those “sinners and tax collectors” could immediately identify with this character in the story. They encountered in him a kindred soul. Not so much, however, the scribes and Pharisees.

But I think we misunderstand the story if we are too literal about applying the lessons of the two previous stories about the lost sheep and the lost coin. Human beings are always more complicated than sheep or money. Moreover, I think that in this story there is more than one lost brother. In his own way, the elder brother is just as lost as the prodigal. It’s far more subtle, and perhaps less obvious both to him and to those around him. But no less real.

The older brother is also lost, and he, too, needs to be found. He’s an overachiever, but he’s grown to be somewhat resentful about that. Carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders has grown wearisome. I suspect he’s at least a little bit envious of his little brother, imagining what it would be like to be far from home, and living the good life—but forgetting or glossing over the fact that his brother ends up in a pig pen without any money.

I suspect that most of those scribes and Pharisees listening to Jesus (and perhaps a lot of us “successful” Episcopalians in this room) are lost in the way of the older brother. Lost less to lust than to resentments, perhaps. But still lost in ways that if left unexamined can lead us to self-pity and self-righteousness. Traits don’t leave much room for joy.

Full disclosure: I’m the oldest of four.

All families are complicated, and there are lots of factors to consider. But birth order always plays some part in shaping who we are. It is so easy for petty sibling rivalries, and jealousies to push aside the love and force us into roles that leave less of who God means for us to really be. If we hear too often at a young age: “he’s my shy one” it can get harder and harder for us to come out of that shell. Or “she’s the responsible one” – how do you throw caution to the wind and party like it’s 1999 if you are carrying that?

You with me? Old tapes often last long past their expiration date.  “He’s the one who can’t sit still,” or “she’s the one who is going to give me gray hair.”  But being human is never about simple stereotypes and if we forget that it can leave us feeling pretty lost. They may convey some truth, but they cannot define who we are. And we do change as well; all living creatures either change or they die.

I want to propose to you that in this story we have two lost sons, not just one. But at the end of this story, the younger brother has been found and he is celebrating. His story is like the hymn “Amazing Grace;” he once was lost, but now he’s found; he was blind, but now he sees. He is the recipient of an abundant outpouring of love that helps him to see the wideness of God’s mercy. as he encounters not only a human father with open arms, but a living God who welcomes back all the lost, all who are afraid and are ashamed.

But the jury is still out on the elder brother as the story ends. Will he uncross his arms and join the party or not? Even if he does, will he be able to let go of his anger and hear the words of his father? The fatted calf awaits him, too, after all. A fatted calf can feed a lot of people, and there is clearly enough veal piccata for everyone. No one has excluded him from the party. He has chosen to exclude himself. In order to enter and join in, he will need to let go of that sense that his brother is undeserving. Like the scribes and Pharisees who listen to Jesus tell the story, he needs to let go of the false notion that he’s “holier than thou” and risk embracing the whole human family.

Whether or not we know how lost we are, Christ desires to find us all. We are all beloved of the Father, and there is room at the Table for all of us.  If we are more like the younger brother, we need to “come to ourselves” by getting up out of the pig pen and making our way back home again. If we are more like the older brother, then we need to “come to ourselves” by letting go of our resentments and grievances.

The truth is though that these two have much more in common than either realizes, not just because each is lost in his own way, but because both are children of a compassionate father. And so are all of us. The Eucharistic Table is set, and all are welcome. There’s room for everyone. We are invited to come not because we’ve earned a place here, but because we are all children of a compassionate God, whose steadfast love and mercy abound. We are invited to sing and to dance and to live. We are invited to experience joy.

But once fed, we are also called to get up and then to “go and do likewise.” We are called to become more like the God who loves us, as we love our neighbor. Or as that former Pharisee, Paul, puts it in today’s epistle reading: we are sent out as “ambassadors for Christ.” We are given this same ministry of reconciliation, to share with others. We who have experienced reconciliation with God are sent out into the world as reconcilers who seek out all who are lost, sharing with them the good news that there is room enough at the Table for them as well. Our mission—our calling—is not to remain children, but to become like the father and to become instruments of peace, to become people willing to risk embrace as the defining posture of the Christian life.

Both of these brothers are in need of grace, and of healing, and of love. We all are. But as the story ends, only one of the two brothers has embraced this fact and received that gift. Only one has allowed love to heal and transform him and to unleash the peace that passes all understanding.

Now I admit that I may be overly optimistic about this; but I like to believe that while it may have taken him a while longer, eventually the older brother joined the party. He, too, “came to himself.” Maybe he tentatively walked toward the party; hesitating at the door. Maybe his younger brother sees him, and runs to embrace him, mimicking the role that the father played for him. And maybe the tears began to flow. Maybe it didn’t happen until the old man died and they had to both stand at his grave and remember they were both loved beyond measure and they found a way, in their shared grief, to reconnect.

What I do know is that this is how the world will truly be made new. As Dr. King said, “I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to humankind’s problems.” Holding on to grudges forever, even when we are right, never leads to new and abundant life.

Because the story does end where it does, it forces us to at least consider the possibility that the two never reconcile, and that the betrayal the older brother feels causes a permanent rift with his father. Perhaps he leaves home in disgust, never again to speak to his father or to his brother. We must consider that ending, because all of us know that it can happen that way, as sad as it is to admit.

Here, then, is what I believe is the main point of this little lost and found story: we are free—all of us—to refuse love. But at what cost? At what cost to our souls.

Of course it’s just a story. But it is a story that leaves so many questions hanging in the air, stories those first hearers took home with them—sinners, tax collectors, scribes and Pharisees. What kind of lives would they live after hearing such a story?

And it’s still powerful for us who hear it today: sinners and saints listening in together for a word of grace. The story confronts us where we are, with our own unique ways of being lost. But make no mistake about it – we are all lost in some way or another. And the real question is simply this: are we willing to be found? Like so many of Jesus’ great parables, the story lingers in the air, and across the centuries, still haunting us; still calling us.

We responsible children and we prodigal children are all invited to join the party. There is enough fatted calf and cake and ice cream for everyone. We who hear this story and claim that in it there is a “Word of the Lord” for us are invited as we read, mark, learn and inwardly digest it to continue to grow into the full stature of Christ by becoming more and more like the compassionate father who knows that love is not a limited commodity and there is enough to embrace both sons.

As we grow into the full stature of Christ we are invited to become no longer children but grown-ups who cannot help but to share the good news of God’s love with all whom we meet along the way, and to let them know that there is always room for one more at the party.

A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

The questions posed by Jesus in today’s gospel reading appear to be “ripped from the day’s headlines.” Before we take a closer look at that, though, I need to say a few words about Pontius Pilate.

While we don’t have any confirmation from outside the Bible about the particular incident of Pilate mingling the blood of slaughtered Galileans with the blood from their sacrifices, we do have numerous references that confirm Pilate’s barbarism. One example, recorded by Josephus, is about a group of Samaritans who were climbing Mt. Gerizim that he had killed.

To be at the receiving end of imperial power is dehumanizing. It is to be turned from human beings into “pawns” on an international chess board. By all accounts, Pilate took his job seriously. To enforce the Pax Romana in Palestine that sometimes meant he was ruthless. A few slaughtered Galileans here and a few murdered Samaritans were simply factored into the cost of maintaining the empire. Pilate was neither a nice nor a weak man. That’s important to say as we approach Holy Week, when we’ll see Pilate again. He may famously “wash his hands” of it all but here's the point: he could have stopped the execution of Jesus if he wanted to. He was not a passive bystander but a political appointee with a lot of power, but not so much on the moral compass or courage.

The Gospel writers, including Luke, had to be very careful, though, about how they told the story of Jesus’ Passion. By the time they wrote it down they were just beginning to show up on the radar of the Roman authorities as distinct from Judaism. They had to be politically savvy: “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” They knew the authorities were listening in and they could not afford a full-frontal assault on Roman imperial power. Pilate’s role in crucifying Jesus is therefore subtly down-played in the Passion Narrative. So we need to hear it with what feminist scholars call a ”hermeneutic of suspicion.” Make no mistake: it would have been clear to anyone living at that time that crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one and that Jesus was executed primarily because he was perceived as a political threat, more than as a religious threat. As long as religion is a personal private matter of piety the authorities don’t really care what you do.

In this shift away from blaming the Romans, it became easier to blame “the Jews” for killing Jesus. But that just isn’t true. Following Jesus doesn’t put us in conflict with other religions, it puts us in conflict with imperial power. Full stop. All of this is an aside, really, from today’s sermon. But it is, I think, an important aside. The point is that those who come to Jesus in today’s gospel reading already know that Pilate is ruthless, and they aren’t shocked by it. We shouldn’t be, either.

On to today’s sermon. Jesus seizes on the current events of his day to ask the theological question that is raised whenever bad things happen to innocent people. The first incident is this ruthless act ordered by Pilate on behalf of the Roman government. “Do you think that this happened to the victims,” Jesus asks, “because they were worse sinners than others?” The second is a tragic accident, the collapse of a tower over at Siloam that raises the very same question. “Do you think those who died were worse sinners than others?” Jesus says.

Jesus is clear in his response and we need to be as well: no, they were not worse sinners. These events were not some punishment from God. Jesus rejects the notion that tragedies like this are connected to moral behavior. Those people didn’t deserve to die.

But behind such questions is always another question, usually buried under some amount of anxiety and uncertainty. Sometimes we ask such questions because we already know deep down that the answer is “no.” But that can be a terrifying reality to confront. Because at least if the answer is “yes”—if those people were worse sinners, then our world can remain a tidy and ordered place. If bad things only happen to bad people and good things happen to good people, there is some comfort in that. We can keep ourselves safe by being good. Going to church and keeping a holy Lent and giving up chocolate keeps us safe from harm. It would be comforting in a strange way if the world were that predictable, so that I could be good and then I would be protected.

But that isn’t how the world works. And if it might just as easily have been me who was among those Galileans, or in that tower in Siloam, then what? If bad things can happen even to good folks who follow all the rules, what then? If people who never smoked a cigarette their whole lives get lung cancer and die and if people who get all the aerobic exercise they are supposed to and eat a low-fat Mediterranean diet drop dead of a heart attack, we are reminded that life is uncertain, and not always fair.

So Jesus is clear: no…they were not worse sinners. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t important things to ponder after such tragic events. Precisely because the world is not always tidy and predictable, we can take such moments and reflect on them. Moreover, they can become for all of us occasions that invite true repentance.  

Repentance. In Greek, it’s meta-noia. Noia is “mind.”  Everyone here recognizes the root word, the same root found in our English word, paranoia. Paranoia is when you are, literally, “out of your mind.” Meta- is the prefix we know from metamorphosis; it means “to change.” So metanoia means, literally, “to change your mind.” Repentance isn’t a feeling. It’s not about feeling sad or remorseful and certainly it isn’t about feeling frightened or ashamed.

But let’s be real, St. Michael’s: most of us don’t like to have to consider changing our minds about much of anything. Most arguments are more about stating our case than listening. We try to keep things in order, holding onto the “way we were raised” or the “way we were taught” as if that settles the matter. People were taught for centuries that the world was flat, though. People were taught that blacks were inferior, that women must not be ordained, that the first European settlers and the native Americans got along just fine. Truth is, sometimes we were taught wrong. Saying “let’s just agree to disagree” is intellectually lazy.

The story is told from the desert tradition of our faith that once upon a time a visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life. The Teacher said to the visitor, “If what you seek is Truth there is one thing you must have above all else.” “I know,” the visitor said. “To find Truth I must have an overwhelming passion for it.” “No,” the Teacher said. “In order to find Truth, you must have an unremitting readiness to admit that you might be wrong.”

Faith is not a security blanket to keep us snug and warm. Sometimes we are wrong and when we are we need to repent – to change our minds. It is of course easier to just shout louder than it is to listen, and easier still to make our world smaller and smaller until becomes an echo chamber that is filled only with people who tell us what we already are certain is true. The problem with that way of being in the world, however, is that we stop learning and we stop growing. And when that happens, repentance becomes nothing more than a psychological exercise, a kind of spiritual narcissism.

But the Christian journey is about growth in Christ, and there is never growth without change. Jesus invites us to true metanoia during these forty days. He seems to be suggesting in today’s reading that the uncertainties of life can become an opportunity for spiritual growth. It isn’t always about big national tragedies; sometimes it can happen when a person who is very dear to us dies, or when we encounter failure or loss. Anything that helps us to see that we, too, are mortal; that we, too, will one day return to the dust. That we, too, could be wrong…

We prayed two weeks ago in the Great Litany that God might “save us from dying suddenly and unprepared.” The answer to that prayer—whatever our age—is that we are becoming people who live as those “prepared to die.”  The parable of the fig-tree that doesn’t produce figs is a “right-brain” way of making this very same point. A fig tree that doesn’t produce figs isn’t doing what it’s meant to do. (Is it even still a fig tree?) The owner of the vineyard says to the gardener that he may as well cut it down; it’s just wasting soil. The gardener, however, buys the tree another year by digging around it and fertilizing it in the hopes that it will still bear fruit. The tree gets a second chance, another year to see if it might do what it is meant to do.

Jesus invites us to see our lives in this same way. What if, when tragedy strikes, we ponder the implications long enough to ask the question, “what if that was me” who died when that tower fell over in Siloam or what if it was me that the government disappeared in the middle of the night? What if, in the very asking of such questions, we discover the seeds of change, and become willing to dig around the ground of our lives, and to fertilize our souls? Reflecting on the precariousness of the world can become an invitation for real change—for new possibilities—and therefore for authentic spiritual growth. What happens when we hear God giving us a second chance, another year “to bear the fruit that is worthy of repentance?”  

How might your life be changed if you were told you had one year to live?

Mark Roark was, for many years, the director of our version of ECC in Western Massachusetts, Camp Bement. When Mark died from cancer at a much too young age, his wife, Holly, shared something at his funeral that I thought was incredibly wise and that has stayed with me for all of these years. She said that people would say to her, as they came to grips with the fact that Mark’s cancer was terminal, “you must live every day as if it were the last.” And Holly said, “no…that would be crazy…and just plain too intense.” Rather, she said, what they came to value as a family was “normal.” Finding time in each day to make room for God and each other, for friends and neighbors. It was the bedtime stories and dinner together that sustained them. It was in “opening their eyes to see God’s hand at work in the world about them.” It was about discovering (and rediscovering) that each day is a gift, and making time for the things that truly matter, and then letting go of the things that don’t.

What needs to happen for you to tap into the creativity God has given you, the gifts God has given you to use in service to others, that make you more fully alive? If your present life bears no resemblance to the way you answer that question, and you begin to make some real changes in order to get closer—even incremental ones—then this will indeed by a truly holy Lent that leads to the joy of Easter morning.

Those Galileans who were killed by Pilate…those eighteen who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them…were they worse sinners than anyone here today? No, of course not. But may the very asking of such questions be for you and for me and for this faith community an invitation to re-evaluate our priorities; an opportunity to make the necessary changes that allow us to repent and to return to God with all our heart, with all our mind, and with all our soul. 

A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent

If one aspect of keeping a holy Lent is about giving up those things that separate us from God, then here is what I am wondering: what old beliefs and religious baggage might you still be carrying around long past its expiration date, that you might need to let go of in order to encounter the living God in new ways?

Our worship began today with the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. It is true that we are apt to make idols of those things that are less than God and that the second commandment is about putting God first. We can make money, or nation, or even family into idols, giving these penultimate things our ultimate allegiance. But none of those will never lead us to full and abundant life. Lent is about returning to the jealous God who has brought us out of bondage and is leading us toward the Promised Land, the God leading us toward freedom and Easter morning. Lent is about reorienting our lives so that we keep first things first.

But sometimes our idols are not precisely idols in that sense. Sometimes the images we have of “god” can actually keep us from encountering the true God. This is the problem with Christian nationalism – which tries to turn the God of all the nations, the Creator of heaven and earth, into a flag-waving American. I’ll just leave that there for today. I trust that the people in this room already know God is not our nationalistic pet.

But there are other images that also aren’t so helpful, probably the biggest of those is the “old-bearded man in the sky.” A kind of “Santa Claus God:” the god who is making his list and checking it twice and who knows if you’ve been bad or good so you better be good for goodness sake! I know I’m mixing up my liturgical seasons, St. Michael’s. But hear me out! I invite you to let go of all of those images of God that keep you infantilized, including that one. Because the problem with thinking of God as “Santa Claus” is that Lent becomes a season where we try to be really, really good. And if we aren’t careful we start to believe that somehow if we get it all right and don’t sneak any chocolate or beer until Easter morning, then we’ll be keeping this Lent holy.

On the other side of things we begin to think that prayer is simply about reciting a never-ending wish list of things we want God to do for us. But remember that this is not how our God works. We pray for peace on earth and God replies, “then let it begin with you…”

The problem, I think, is that all of us have some old tapes playing in our lives. Maybe one of the gifts of Lent is that we become still enough to listen to those old tapes and then figure out which parts are still valid and what parts we need to let go of. Maybe your old tapes come from the nuns you had in grammar school, or a stern evangelical preacher or a well-intentioned but misinformed Vacation Bible School teacher. (Maybe even a not-so-well-intentioned Vacation Bible School teacher!) Or maybe from a parent or grandparent.

And to be fair, let’s remember that we can’t be sure what those nuns or pastors or VBS folks really did say or what they meant to say. Memory is a tricky thing and we heard many of those messages filtered through our own young ears. Even so, we all have these old tapes and they stay with us. And perhaps they are keeping you from the ways that can lead to health by hearing and experiencing the living God in fresh ways.

If the forty days of Lent focus on fear and shame, then they will stifle the faith that is in us.  Count on it. But fear and shame are tools of the devil, not of God. They will not lead us to true repentance and amendment of life and Easter morning. They can never lead us to the heart of God. God is love. As Michael Curry taught us over and over again, the way to God is the way of love.

So here’s the thing: I don’t believe for a moment that Lent is supposed to be about inflicting fear and shame. I think that it has more to do with our old tapes when this season is misused and misunderstood. And so we need to let that go. What happens to us when we give up fear and shame for Lent? We may well hear the reminder that we are dust in new ways. We may well remember that we are human and not divine, that we don’t have all the time in the world, that the time to live is now. We may well encounter God anew, speaking to us in and through Word and Sacraments and the sacred stories of our own lives. That is my prayer for all of you, for all of us, in this holy season.

In today’s first reading, we hear about how the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. That’s code language, so don’t miss it. God doesn’t tap Abraham on the shoulder and have a face-to-face chat. Maybe that’s an old tape we need to let go of. We sometimes think (maybe because of the nuns or the pastor or the VBS teacher or maybe just because that’s what we thought we heard as kids) that somehow the way God calls people is that the skies open up and God speaks in English, as clear as day and says things like: “hello Rich…this is God…go directly to seminary—do not pass go and do not collect $200.”

But it doesn’t work that way, though - not in our lives and actually upon closer reading we discover not in the Bible either. Rather, we get what T. S. Eliot once called “hints and guesses.” We sometimes read too quickly, eliminating the doubt and the struggle and the uncertainty that Abraham must surely have been feeling as he wondered if in fact Eliazar of Damascus might indeed be his only heir and that he needed to settle for that. The voice of reason in his own head must surely have told him that, since neither he nor Sarah were getting any younger. Yet somehow the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. I think you need to be extra still to hear that voice. And then, even more importantly, to trust it.

God isn’t encountered directly. It would kill us. Even Moses only gets to see God’s backside. The mystics and prophets and poets have their visions and dreams. The rest of go on “hints and guesses.” We do the best we can to make sense of those.

So maybe that’s another idol we need to let go of. Because the problem is that if we are sitting around and waiting for God to walk into the room and for the skies to open and for God to tap us on the shoulder then we will almost certainly miss the many ways by which God is already speaking to us in and through our lives, in and through other people, in and through the life of this congregation, in and through our ordinary encounters at home and in the world.

The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. And the message is essentially this:

• Do not be afraid
• I am your shield
• The future is in my hands, not yours. Trust me!

And the text says that Abraham did trust God. The promise is renewed and the covenant is remembered and God reckons Abraham’s trust as righteousness.

I wonder is this pattern is an invitation to all of the children of Abraham—Jew and Christian and Muslim—in every age. A kind of touchstone experience we come back to in Lent, to the core meaning of faith which is not about our doctrines or our behavior or even about our values. All of those things have their place. But first and foremost is the fundamental question raised by the Decalogue and by the patriarchs: where is your trust? Do you dare to put your trust in the living God?

• Do not be afraid;
• God is your shield;
• Do not worry about tomorrow.

It’s hard to hear that message, let alone to believe it and then let it sink in and live it. In the midst of all of the clutter of our lives there are countless voices insisting on precisely the opposite: that we should be very afraid. You know the long long list: afraid for our world, afraid for democracy, afraid that the market will crash, afraid of sexual predators, afraid of each other. It is easy to believe that God helps only those who help themselves, that we control our own destinies, that we can measure out our lives in teaspoons and keep ourselves safe.

In our fear and anxiety, we think that if we give up certain things then somehow God will love us more. But that’s not possible! God is already crazy about us! Lent isn’t an opportunity to manipulate God. We give up certain things so we can strip away the excess and be still in the presence of the living God, so that we can listen better. We go into the wilderness not as punishment, but for quiet.

So I wonder what happens to us if we allow ourselves to risk hearing the Word of the Lord from the pages of an ancient text and into this time and place, spoken to each of us by name. Ken, Elizabeth, Sue, Barbara, Allison, Deb, Keith, Frank, Rich:

• Do not be afraid;
• God is your shield;
• Do not worry about tomorrow. 

Lent is a time for discovery and rediscovery. I pray that we might put the “wild” back into this wilderness season in order to seek and question and wonder and risk. We hold up the Decalogue (the heart of which Jesus summarized in four words: love God, love neighbor.) To meditate on that is to be invited into a process of self-examination and to acknowledge where we have fallen short—and then to seek amendment of life and true repentance. We can pray, and fast, and meditate on the scriptures. We can give alms. We will not get it right all the time. No one ever has. Fortunately, though, God is merciful. Always, God is merciful.

Here is the good news I stand before you on this day to proclaim: we can choose to walk by faith. We can let go of our fear and turn our hearts to God. We can set out to an unknown future as Abraham did. May God reckon that to us as righteousness, as the journey continues to unfold.

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

“In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses spoke to all the Israelites…” (Deuteronomy 1:3a)

This is how the last scroll of the Torah begins. It has been a long journey, but they are finally almost there: thirty-nine years and eleven months since crossing the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit. As the Book of Deuteronomy begins, we are meant to imagine Moses and all of those refugees from Egypt standing there in the wilderness. They have almost arrived and they can see the Promised Land. They can practically taste the milk and honey that had been promised to them four decades earlier and now they are all huddled together, about to embark on something new.

What a great time for a long sermon! Because, as you will recall, Moses isn’t going with them. And so before they go, he has a whole lot of stuff he wants to say to them about the lessons of the wilderness and the challenges that lie ahead for God’s people. He tells them what he thinks will be important as they make this transition without him as their leader.

Now I’m no Moses, but this image has always captured my imagination. The basic premise is simple, and like all great preachers Moses keeps returning to the main themes again and again. It goes something like this: in our precariousness, we knew that we needed God. When you are in the desert praying for daily bread and water and you literally mean it, you learn to live your life one day at a time. You rely on God, hour by hour. You know that you are utterly dependent upon God’s mercy. As hard as life is in the desert, in a way faith becomes easier. The desert brings people to their knees; it makes prayer almost natural.

A while back I referenced Anne Lamott’s little book on prayer entitled Help! Thanks! Wow! These forty days invite us to re-learn how to pray those prayers in the midst of our pilgrimage toward the empty tomb.

Help, God! We have no food and we are really scared and we need you! And then of course there is miracle bread—whatchamacallit bread—manna. And it is enough. So thank you God. Or as Maya Angelou once put it: Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days / For then we have you to lean upon.

In the wilderness there are also plenty of opportunities to pray wow: at the parting of the waters at the Red Sea and that whole pyro-technic show on Mount Sinai where Moses encounters the living God, but also in smaller ways each and every day that the sun comes up, and there is water, and there is daily bread from heaven.   

Prayer flows more naturally in the desert, I think: help, thanks, and wow become part of the daily rhythm of life one day at a time.  

And it isn’t all that different for us, is it? Difficult times like illness or loss or addiction or financial worries can all drive us to our knees and become occasions when we truly, really recognize that we are powerless over so many things, and perhaps even that our lives have become unmanageable. We come by God’s grace in such seasons to believe in a power greater than ourselves that can and does restore us to sanity. In our precariousness, we don’t need a seminar in how to pray; we pray from the heart. Help, thanks, and wow flow out of our being…

But here is the thing: Moses knows that in a land flowing with milk and honey, in a promised land where there will be plenty of bakeries and an array of bread options to choose from, that it will be so much harder to remember God. And so he tells the people that the danger in the midst of affluence is going to be amnesia. Let me say that again, because it’s the key to reading Deuteronomy. We can literally forget ourselves, forget who we are and who we are, when surrounded by more and more stuff. We are tempted to say, in such times, that my hard work got me this bread and this milk and this honey and this nice house and this fast car. And, God help us, we may even be tempted to say, “to hell with my neighbor…he doesn’t work as hard as I do anyway.” When that happens we are lost, because you cannot love God whom you cannot see if you do not love your neighbor who is right in front of you.

Self-reliant people don’t need to pray “help” because they don’t need any. Self-made people don’t need to say “thanks” to anyone; they just pat themselves on the back. Self-centered people forget to pray “wow” because their world gets smaller and smaller, leading to a kind of ennui where the most amazing things—like sunrises and a child’s laughter and a walk on the beach—are taken for granted.

Moses is relentless, therefore, in saying that this self-made, self-reliant, self-centered stuff is a lie and a trap. And so he offers an antidote: remember, remember, remember. And you can remember best by teaching. So teach, teach, teach. Teach your children and your grandchildren. Tell them the stories again and again and again of what it was like under Pharaoh’s oppressive economy. Tell them what it was like to live in the Sinai Desert for four decades. Tell them what it was like to have nothing and yet to have everything because God was with us and because God saved us and because God gave us Torah and because God gave us water and manna and because God gave us to be companions to each other—one day at a time.

If you can remember all of that when you get to the promised land, then all will go well. But even so, it will still be much harder to be faithful there than it was in the Sinai Desert. Moses suggests that liturgy and prayer and faith practices are the ways to keep the lessons of the Sinai fresh. They will show God’s people how to remember from generation to generation. That is what we heard in the portion of this sermon that was read today:

When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us."

It’s a stewardship sermon. You take the first portion of what God has blessed you with and you give it back. Not just any portion—not what’s left over at the end of the week—because chances are that if we wait to see what’s left there won’t be anything. So take the first part, the best part—a tithe. Practice good stewardship not because God needs your money but because good stewardship reminds you that it was never yours in the first place. It helps us to remember that the word “mine” is as dangerous for adults as it is for three-year olds and that it is so much better for us to learn to share.

In the Promised Land, we can suffer from amnesia and start to value our stuff more than our God. So Moses continues:

When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors. (HELP!) The LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders (WOW!) And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (THANKS!) So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God.

Now Jesus was raised a Jew, not a Christian. I know you all know this but it is so tempting for us as Christians to forget this. And yet I am convinced that we cannot begin to understand Jesus and his ministry until we begin at least to understand the traditions that shaped him. He was raised on the Five Books of Moses, not on a King James Bible that had all his lines printed in red! So his parents and grandparents no doubt told him the story, over and over and over again. Mary and Joseph told him about the forty years in the desert, about Egypt and the Promised Land, about remembering to pray Help! and Thanks! and Wow! The desert represents that place where you go to encounter the living God, the place where you go to remember.

And so it is not all that surprising that after his Baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus is led into the wilderness for forty days. Not three weeks, or two months, but forty days. He goes on a kind of vision quest (if it helps to think of it that way) in order to get in touch with the wisdom of the ancestors. He is tested there by the Evil One, just as his people had been tested so long ago. But in that testing (and in the resisting of temptation) he comes out stronger and clearer about who he is and whose he is and what he is called to be about.

The forty-day season of Lent is patterned on this same kind of journey. We have now embarked on that journey together, having been invited this past Wednesday into a holy Lent. We won’t literally be going to the desert, although I wonder what it would be like for us if we could pack up this whole congregation and go out together to Arizona or the Judean wilderness or the Sinai Peninsula. What it would be like for us to learn to rely on each other there one day at a time?

We aren’t going to Arizona, or Egypt, or Judea this Lent. But we are going on a journey. The desert is not just a literal place. In the spiritual life it is a metaphor. And it’s a tricky metaphor because most of us have some un-learning to do about Lent. But all will be well, because Moses and Jesus—who both knew something about the desert—point us in the right direction on this first Sunday of Lent. They invite us to remember once more the solace of fierce landscapes, those places where we encounter the living God and rediscover the truth about who we are and where we can remember how to pray help, thanks, and wow.

Remember that you are dust...

The Hebrew and Greek words for “heart” are used 814 times in the Bible to refer to the human heart and 26 times to refer to the heart of God. Five of those uses come up in today’s readings. In Greek it’s cardio, a root familiar to anybody who has ever had an EKG or been in a Cardiac Care facility or gotten your heart rate up on purpose by doing cardio exercises at the gym. In the world of the Bible, the heart was seen as more than a pump. It was the center of emotions and feelings, of moods and passions.

The heart is capable of both joy and grief. In Acts 2:26 we read: “therefore my heart was glad.” In Psalm 13 the poet asks “must I have sorrow in my heart all the day?” The heart can be a source of courage as in II Samuel 17: “the heart of a valiant man that is like the heart of a lion.” Or it can be the source of fear, as when Joseph’s brothers discover their brother is still alive “and their hearts failed them and they turned trembling to one another…” (Genesis 42:28)

But in the Bible the heart is seen as even more than all of this. We tend to think of matters of the “head” and of the “heart” as separate realities with a clear division of labor: the head as the place for matters of intellect and the heart as more emotional. But for ancient peoples the heart was also seen as the center for decision-making, and as the place of devotion and obedience to God. It was the place where discernment happened.

As we begin our Lenten journey today, we hear Jesus saying in today’s gospel reading: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It’s more than a good stewardship text. If our focus and our energy are on the concerns of this world then that is where our heart is going to be as well. But moth and rust consume all of our stuff, eventually. Even we will one day go back to the dust.

So where is your heart today? Jesus says in another place: seek ye first the kingdom of God and all the rest will fall into place. Our hearts are meant for God. 

And so we heard the prophet Joel inviting us to “return to the Lord with all your heart.” What would it take for us to give God all of our hearts? What holds us back from that radical a faith? Joel also says: “rend your hearts and not your clothing.” In Biblical times, to show remorse and grief, people tore their clothing. Joel seems to suggest that God desires a torn or broken heart. What might that be about?

In Psalm 51 (which we will come to after the sermon today, as part of our confession) we’ll pray: “create in me a clean heart, O God.” And then there, too, we’ll pray that the heart that is acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart. Again we might ask: why does God want our hearts to be broken rather than whole? What is the ‘heart of the matter’ when it comes to keeping a holy Lent? 

Remember that the forty days of Lent are patterned after the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, following his baptism in the Jordan River. And remember that those forty days were patterned after the forty years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, after escaping from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea. In both cases the time in the wilderness is about prayer and learning to trust God, about temptation and spiritual growth. It’s about the journey from slavery toward freedom.

Do you remember how in that Exodus story Pharaoh’s heart was hardened? His government was oppressing those Hebrew slaves, yet he refused to change. He refused to let God’s people go. He actually didn’t believe they were God’s people at all, but his slaves. Where his “heart” was, there was his treasure also; namely with those pyramids and all the economic wealth that was being built on the backs of slave labor. And so Pharaoh could not see (or he would not see) the pain that his economic plan was causing those at the bottom rung of the social ladder. His heart was hardened to their plight, and things went downhill from there for him.

The Exodus, seen from the perspective of Pharaoh, was a financial disaster. That’s a reminder to us that perspective matters, and that we need hearts of flesh to rightly perceive God’s presence in our lives and in the world. But the problem with hearts of flesh is, well, that they are fragile. They are, as Ingrid Michaelson puts it, breakable.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess

We are so fragile
And our cracking bones make noise
And we are just
Breakable, breakable, breakable, girls and boys

Anyone who has ever loved and lost knows this. Once it happens we are tempted to put up shields and protective layers to keep our hearts safe and protected. And so we harden our hearts, thinking that is a way to protect ourselves. But hard hearts are the way of Pharaoh, not God. think that what is being suggested in these texts is that if we mean to approach God we need to allow our hearts to be broken as well. We need to become vulnerable, both to God and with one another.

Community and love are not possible without vulnerability. Love is the path to a broken and contrite heart. To pay attention—to be alive—to care about a world beyond our ego-centric realities is almost certainly to have our hearts broken. We are tempted to “harden our hearts” (as Pharaoh did) and call it survival of the fittest. Or we are tempted to give our hearts away to idols: the idol of money, or of security, or of nation.

So I simply ask, as this Lenten journey begins, where is your heart? And what state is it in? And perhaps even more importantly: where would you like your heart to be in forty days? How might this season be for you as an individual and for St. Michael’s as a community an invitation to draw closer to the heart of God?

The heart of the matter in Lent is that there are spiritual disciplines, practices of faith, that can help us with our heart’s desire:

Fasting, or some version of fasting helps us to be disciplined with our bodies;  

Meditating on God’s Holy Word and feasting on the Scriptures feeds us with food that really does sustain and nurture us, in body, mind, and spirit;

Alms-giving insists that we see the poor and the suffering in our midst and offer them more than just "thoughts and prayers;"

Prayer, especially in the form of confession, cleanses and heals us and opens the door to reconciliation with those whom we have hurt. (Remember that you can only confess your own sins, not anyone else’s!)

These ancient practices push us out of ourselves to glimpse the world if only just a little bit from God’s perspective. The heart of the matter in Lent isn’t about shame, which in my experience paralyzes us. It isn’t about beating ourselves up. Rather, it’s about learning to care, learning to love, learning to hope. It’s about asking God for a heart of flesh, and knowing that unlike a heart of stone, a heart of flesh is so breakable. 

But that is precisely the kind of heart that God can use. 

A Sermon for the Last Sunday of Epiphany

Today we come to the culmination of what has been a longer-than-usual Epiphany season. Our journey began almost two months ago—on January 6—when we marked the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem, bearing their gifts for the newborn king. Since then we’ve remembered the Baptism of our Lord and we have celebrated the Sacrament of Holy Baptism twice, each time renewing our own commitment to live the core values of the Baptismal Covenant. We listened in on Dr. King’s sermon, “Guidelines for a Constructive Church.” We celebrated Candlemas and held the 307^th Annual Meeting of this parish. We also had 76 people fill out the Congregational Assessment Tool – the CAT – and we took time to interpret what it means as we look to the future. Unfortunately got snowed out two weeks in a row.

Today we reach our destination: the Mount of the Transfiguration.

During these weeks of Epiphany our epistle readings have been coming from Paul’s letters to the Church in Corinth. By all accounts they were a profoundly gifted and cosmopolitan faith community. They were also a handful. So when Paul tells them about spiritual gifts he is speaking to people who have lots of them. They have talent coming out of their ears: they are smart and dedicated in so many ways. The challenge they face, however, is that they are going in a hundred different directions. They have high energy but they lack focus and purpose. Paul counsels them to remember that they are one body and then he reminds them that without faith, hope and love—and especially love—their gifts are nothing more than noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. Today we heard these words from that same epistle:

…all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Did you get that? It’s not only Jesus who was transfigured on the Mount of the Transfiguration. Paul says that we are being changed. You and I are being made new. We are being transfigured. You may recall how earlier St. Paul says something like, “now we see through the glass darkly; then we shall see face to face.” Today he seems to be suggesting that when we do see the face of God as in a mirror, we begin to see ourselves in a new light. We begin to walk as children of light.  

This is why we do not lose heart., my friends. No matter what. This is why we have such hope and can act with great boldness even when times are challenging. This is how we are able to love one another: because with unveiled faces we see the glory of the Lord reflected in a mirror, and we know that we are being transformed into the image of Christ. We are growing into the full stature of Christ. These are remarkable words to take with us as we walk the pilgrim way of Lent. They are remarkable words for a congregation in the midst of a pastoral transition. They are remarkable words for a faith community trying to be faithful in challenging times.

During these weeks of Epiphany, we’ve been praying Eucharistic Prayer C. I love  Prayer C, even if it feels a bit dated,  because it invites us to consider the whole cosmos, space, the final frontier and all of that. Because in that prayer especially we are aware that science and religion are not opposites, just different ways of knowing God’s good creation. And that exploring the mysteries of creation is also to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. What we have been praying for these past two months is that God might “open our eyes” to notice. These themes are not merely about remembering a God who was made manifest once upon a time in a galaxy far away, but of a God who is, even now, being made manifest in our very midst.

So we pray for eyes to see. And when our eyes behold the face of God, we are changed.

We speak of “mountaintop experiences” as a metaphor for our spiritual epiphanies because the landscape itself very often helps to open our eyes to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. In such moments we may have the experience of knowing God more fully and of being more fully known by God. There is a shadow side here, however; or at least a temptation. Such moments are fleeting; and yet it is tempting to want to try to hold onto them forever, and maybe even of trying to make them normative. I think that is primarily what is going on in the disciples’ desire to build booths on the Mount of the Transfiguration. In truth, every moment is fleeting. The good times, the hard times; time is an ever-flowing stream. Mountaintop moments in our lives are precious and a gift, for sure. But the journey of faith is not one long extended mountaintop experience. We are called to listen to the Voice of God in this story, which makes clear that we are called to listen to (and then follow) Jesus by putting one foot in front of the other. The challenge of faith is to live each moment; not to stay on a mountaintop in booths. We are a people of the Way, and specifically a people called to follow Jesus on the Way of the Cross.

So liturgically, the wisdom of remembering the Transfiguration today is to prepare us to take the next steps in the journey of faith into Lent by joining Jesus and resolutely setting our faces toward Jerusalem.

I want to interrupt this sermon with a commercial: an invitation to please make time to be here on Wednesday when we remember together that we are dust, which is simply to say that we do not have all the time in the world and therefore we need to make the most of it. For Christ’s sake and our own. Some of us grew up in faith traditions like the Roman Church where Ash Wednesday was a normative practice. Some of us grew up in more Protestant traditions where we would not be caught dead with ashes on our foreheads so as not to be mistaken for being “Roman Catholics.” But I invite all of us who are here now to journey with me into a holy Lent and begin again together on Wednesday. We’ll be here at noon for a simple spoken liturgy and we’ll be here at 7 pm with the choir. Both services will offer imposition of ashes. If this has not been a part of your experience, I invite you, this year, to come and see.

Now there is one caveat I need to share with all of you. Everything that I have said to you so far today is shaped by the Western Christian liturgical calendar. While there may be differences between Methodists and Lutherans and Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, we all follow this same basic path from Epiphany to the Jordan River and then on to Cana of Galilee and ultimately to the Mount of the Transfiguration; and from there to Ash Wednesday and ultimately to Easter morning where “cross and Easter day attest, God in flesh made manifest.”

While my own experience of the Christian tradition has been quite ecumenical, it has mostly been very western. Until, that is, I began taking pilgrimages to the Holy Land. There I am always reminded of the rich traditions of Orthodoxy that are rooted in the Church’s experience in the east: Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Ukrainian Orthodox and others. One of the surprises in the Holy Land is the ever-present reminder that Christianity is, at its roots, an eastern religion that spread to the west. You feel that and you smell it and you see it when you walk into a place like the Church of the Nativity or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Alexander Schmemman was the Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York, a leading liturgical scholar in Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. Many years ago an Orthodox priest friend of mine gave me Schmemman’s book on Orthodox Lenten practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. It transformed my life. In Orthodoxy, the weeks leading up to “Great Lent” are very different from what I have been describing to you. In the five weeks before Lent, the Orthodox focus on five themes: Desire for God (the story of Zacchaeus), Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee), Return from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son), Last Judgment, and then finally, Forgiveness Sunday.

The Orthodox are clearer than we have been in the west that Lent is not a time to wallow in guilt or shame, but an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s abundant love, which then allows us to more fully embrace the Paschal mystery by becoming instruments of God’s peace and ambassadors of reconciliation, as we participate in Christ’s victory over sin and death.

This year, as it happens, Orthodox Easter and Western Easter fall on the same date- which is unusual. All Christians, east and west, will celebrate Easter this year on April 20. What that means is that today is Forgiveness Sunday for the Orthodox, not Transfiguration, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak a bit about what our Orthodox friends are doing today.

 

Schmemman says that “sin is the experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred…and the first chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin, is forgiveness… which opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality, to God’s reality.” He writes that “to forgive is to reject the hopeless dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.” So today in Orthodox congregations there will be an elaborate dance where each person in worship says to every other person there, “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”

Now I am not going to ask you to dance, St Michael’s. Not today, anyway. But I want you to think about that for a moment: what would it be like today to ask each and every person here for forgiveness? What if the pulpit side of this room got up and began walking down the center aisle at the same time that those of you on the lectern side got up and starting from the back walked down the center aisle so that we made a figure eight, and as you passed each and every person you would say: “forgive me, for I have sinned.”

Now I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to forgive someone who has hurt you very badly. But at the very least, even when we aren’t yet able to forgive someone, we can remember that God forgives all who confess their sins and are truly penitent. So the liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you” because, to be honest, that just might not yet be true. So here is the liturgical response: “God has forgiven you.”  

Forgive me, for I have sinned. God has forgiven you. The spirit of Lent, Schmemman says, is an invitation to experience that mysterious liberation that makes us “light and peaceful,” by illuminating an inner beauty that he compares to “an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.”  Maybe that image gives us a connection between east and west! Maybe that is where the Mount of the Transfiguration converges with Forgiveness Sunday, taking us, as Don Henley once put it, to “the heart of the matter”—which is indeed about forgiveness. Forgive me, for I am a sinner. God forgives you, be at peace. May this simple prayer of confession lead you and lead us into a holy Lent, until we once again sing our alleluias on Easter morning.