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THE URGENCY OF GOD'S NOW

1/25/2015

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

Mark 1:14-20
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea — for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

I don’t often deal with more than one lectionary reading per week – there is so much richness to be found once we start digging that one reading is usually quite enough for my message – but today the theme of the readings is so strong, and these two bits are each so short, that I thought it would be interesting to compare the Old Testament version with the New.

Both of these readings, in their full settings, are about the urgency of “right now.” We all know Jonah’s story: God gives Jonah a message to carry to the people of Persian Nineveh - a message to repent, to turn away from their past and present evil behavior, right now, in order to avert the destruction God has planned for them because of those evil ways. Jonah, however, is first and foremost a passive man – he just wants to be left alone. He doesn’t want to get involved. Secondly, he dislikes the Ninevites heartily – actually, all the Israelites despised them because of the role they had played in the first great exile. So Jonah sees no good reason to put himself out to save a bunch of people he’d just as soon see wiped off the planet anyway. He doesn’t really argue with God – he just ignores God and goes the other direction.

God is having none of this, however. He wants the Ninevites saved and he wants it done now – so – storm at sea, belly of the whale, Jonah gives in because it clearly is easier to do it God’s way than to try to fight God. We all know this story. Jonah delivers God’s message – and miracles of miracles, the people of Nineveh listen, and their destruction is averted.

As I said, we all know this story but how much have we actually thought about it? The Biblical Literalists have done such a good job of directing all conversation to the devastatingly important question – to them – of proving that Jonah could have survived in that fish, that we have largely missed the real point of this story, which I see as two-fold. One, this is the Old Testament God going to all this trouble to save a non-Hebrew people. So much of the OT makes it clear that God only cares about the Chosen People - Abraham’s children – so where did this come from, this concern for an alien people? I don’t think it is ever really explained here. And secondly, why is this question of saving Nineveh so very urgent? Why does it have to be this very minute?

Could it be that Nineveh, while important, was always a secondary concern for the writer of this story? Could it be that the one in urgent need of saving was Jonah himself? Good old complacent, “am-I-my-brother’s-keeper?” Jonah, who didn’t care if the world succeeded or failed as long as it left him alone? Couldn’t it be old grumpy Jonah who needed to be awakened to a sense of compassion for his fellow humans? Awakened to an awareness of his birth into God’s rule in the world? Was it perhaps Jonah who was almost entirely lost and needed – urgently – to be reclaimed by seeing himself as one part of a larger whole? It had been, by this time, a couple of hundred years since Nineveh's crime against the Israelites -- surely the question of their punishment good have waited a little longer if necessary. But Jonah -- Jonah was running out of time to be "saved."

Now let’s look for a minute at the gospel reading we also heard read. At Advent we turned the church calendar and changed to liturgical year B - the 2nd year in the 3-year lectionary cycle. That means the gospel readings this year will all be coming from Mark’s gospel. Mark is the shortest of the gospels and the one with the strongest sense of urgency. This gospel is the one that repeatedly warns us that “the time in short.” Mark doesn’t waste any time on infancy narratives or genealogies proving Jesus is David’s son – either he figures that’s all covered somewhere else or he just doesn’t care. Instead, Mark jumps straight into the story of Jesus’ three years of public life. John the Baptist prepares the way, Jesus is baptized, he calls his disciples and – boom – he’s out there healing people. No time to waste. Time is short. Gotta move now.

Again, the literalists have managed to turn this sense of urgency into a rush to get personally saved before the “end times” arrive – thereby, I believe, completely losing the real message, which again, I believe is (at least) two-fold. First is the urgent need for each one of us to find and acknowledge our rightful place in God’s kingdom – right here, right now -- loving, healing, and caring for each other – bringing the reign of God to its fullness – here and now. Being who God created us to be and not being so worried about an afterlife that we miss out on this life.

Second is that this isn’t about us doing anything - this is about God, in the person of Jesus, acting in this world. This is God - moving people’s hearts and minds and pointing them toward Jesus, where they can learn in the most complete way possible. I doubt that Simon, Andrew, James or John got up that morning and thought they’d go looking for a new messiah so they could toss aside their families and livelihoods to follow a complete stranger. Can you imagine doing that? Only, I hope, with God’s strong urging.

There was no time for Jesus to woo them - to get to know them and gradually get them to trust him. There was just “Follow me”... and they did. For them the time was now. For every one of us, the time that God calls us is the “end time” – the end of our lives as we have known them thus far and the time we enter into something new – something beyond our wildest imaginings – a new life in God’s service, building God’s kingdom.

So the literalists get it partially right. This time is the time of our salvation. This, right now, is the life we get. This is the time we are saved from a life lived in our own creation rather than in God’s creation – God’s world. There is a sense of urgency – not because of some outside deadline, but simply because God is talking to us now.
I’m reading a lot right now from Barbara Brown Taylor, so be prepared to hear her quoted - often. As she explains this:

“...salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person's life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.”
(Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith)

“Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.” Have we heard the urgent call to follow -- to act -- to BE? Right now? Have we unlocked the door?

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KNOWN - INSIDE AND OUT

1/18/2015

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Psalm 139:1-16 [The Message]

God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
then up ahead and you’re there, too--
This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in!

Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? to be out of your sight?
If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there!
If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon,
You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;
night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.

Last week, I spoke on the creation story and God’s repeated affirmations that everything created – including us – was good - even very good. And I spoke of how, over the centuries, believers and the church as a whole had somehow managed to turn this upside down so that we seem much of the time to focus less and less on blessing and more and more on sin.

Sin seems to be something that obsesses us. I have actually had more than one person tell me that they had been so sinful that even God could not forgive them – a statement that is just mind-numbingly arrogant, in my way of seeing things. Do they really intend to claim that they are more powerful than God? That their power to choose evil is stronger than God’s will toward blessing and affirmation? Surely not.

Last week’s creation story was a generic affirmation of life and creation. This week’s reading from Psalm 139 goes even further in this direction – but rather than a generic blessing, this is a very specific affirmation. This affirms that God know me and affirms me (and you). There has never been a moment when God has not known each of us through and through. Even before we were born God knew everything there is to know about us – inside and out. And yet, here we are. Even knowing everything about us, God still gives each of us, individually, life and blessing. Perhaps it is time we stop being afraid of hope and trust and start believing that it is true - God made us for goodness and loves us enough to continue seeing us as good.

Believing ourselves to be innately flawed and sinful is actually the easy way out for some. If we were born broken and bad then whatever we do or become in this life isn’t our fault - we are no longer responsible for ourselves. It makes it all so simple. I’m not saying that I find this a comforting notion but many people apparently do.

But our scripture today doesn’t allow that kind of game-playing. God created us, but even before that moment of creation, God knew everything there was to know about us.

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.....
Body and soul, I am marvelously made! .....
You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body.....

Before we came to be God knew us - and God gifted us with life anyway.

Do we humans sin? Do we hurt ourselves and each other and the natural world around us? Of course we do. There’s plenty of evil in this world all around us everyday – I’m not claiming there isn’t. The question is: do we accept this as our natural state because we see ourselves as naturally evil? If the answer here is “yes” then I suspect we accept the wrongness and the brokenness around us much too casually. We witness the wrong and we bemoan it for awhile and then we just move on.

However, if we truly believe we are created for goodness and we have it within us – in spite of surface appearance – to be good and do good – because God created us that way – then we will live this life expecting to be better and expecting healing and forgiveness and hope for us all and we will work to bring this about.

I’m currently reading a book by Barbara Brown Taylor – an Episcopalian priest and a superb writer. The book is titled, An Altar in the World, and deals with the physicality of creation, including the physicality of us. When the church was busy changing God blessings into our intractable sinfulness, one of the ways it did this was by arbitrarily (and quite against scripture) separating spirit and matter. In this non-canonical separation, our souls became holy and capable of being touched by divinity, while our bodies came to be viewed as gross and defiled and simply ambulatory occasions of sin. Everything about our physical selves was dirty and nasty in the eyes of the early church – especially sex – and even more especially, sex involving women, who were the ultimate in dirty nastiness. We are still a very long way from freeing ourselves from this pernicious teaching.

But God created everything – not just the spiritual but the physical world. Every physical attribute of humanity was given us by God. I suspect God actually likes the physical part of creation since so much variety and attention to detail goes into our beings. Here is part of what Rev. Taylor has to say on the subject. I have read this piece over and over because I so need to hear it myself:

I can say that I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body. Maybe you think you are too heavy. Maybe you have never liked the way your hipbones stick out. Do your breasts sag? Are you too hairy? It is always something.....

This can only go on so long, especially for someone who officially believes that God loves flesh and blood, no matter what kind of shape it is in. Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.”

After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. Bodies take real beatings. That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle. That they give birth is beyond reckoning. When I do this, I generally decide that it is time to do a better job of wearing my skin with gratitude instead of loathing. No matter what I think of my body, I can still offer it to God to go on being useful to the world in ways both sublime and ridiculous.

God loves our bodies – God loves our spirits – God loves us. If we read our Bibles, if we spend any time observing the world around us and all its varied inhabitants - there is no getting away from it: God loves us – AS WE ARE – and we might as well get over ourselves and accept it. Can we do better? Of course we can but we aren’t ever going to manage to do that until we learn to accept ourselves as we are - the way God made us - the way God loves us. Until we actually believe that we are capable of goodness – deep down from the center of our being goodness.

This is not just an academic question. How we choose to act in the world – how we choose to interact with brothers and sisters around us depends first and foremost on whether or not we believe in God’s affirmation. We serve God with our hands and our hearts and our gifts – but we also serve just by consenting to BE the beautiful pieces of creation that God sees and loves.

It would be very good if we could stop obsessing over ourselves – our flaws and our supposed sinfulness – and then maybe we can get on with what we are supposed to we doing -- which is participating in God’s work of healing the world God loves. Amen.

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GOD SAW THAT IT WAS VERY GOOD

1/11/2015

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Genesis 1:1-5
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

The first chapter of Genesis gives us a story of how we came to be - how everything came to be. I don’t care if you want to talk about six days or 4.5 billion years – it makes no difference – God still created it all, and at every stage of creation, the story tells us, God looked at what had been done and pronounced that “it was good.” At the end of the entire process, at the end of the sixth day, God saw everything that had been made, and decided that indeed, it was very good.

If everything that is was initially created with so much approval, so much affirmation, how on earth have we ended up today with a world full of Christian churches focused so exclusively on evil? It makes no sense to me. How did the God who made everything with love and passion and heart-felt approval end up being the harsh judge always on the lookout for sin? Why is sin our primary focus? Why do so many of us live out our lives taking it for granted that we are doomed and damned? I have been told - flat-out - by many people over the years that they know they are going to hell because they are so bad – and I’m not sure that anything I have ever said changed anyone’s mind by even the smallest percentage point.

I suspect that many of us were trained by our past church experience to recognize sin when we saw it – in others and in ourselves. Then we were taught that Jesus died for those sins - but that doesn’t seem to have really changed things for an awful lot of folks - they still seem to see themselves as sinners, not as forgiven – never as loved and cherished anyway. None of this makes much sense to me either.

Worst of all, many of those of us who call ourselves Christians seem to take an almost gleeful joy in telling other people that they are sinners and they are doomed. Sinners, sinners everywhere and not an ounce of grace to be seen.

What difference might it have made in this world had our churches – from the beginning – actually preached and taught what scripture says so clearly in its very first chapter: God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good? Imagine if you had been taught all your life that you are very good. We know that it works the other way around – raise up a child by telling them constantly that they are no-good, worthless, useless and you almost always end up with an adult who has lived into their belief in that teaching - a no-good, worthless, broken human person.

I had the great blessing of being raised in a family that told me I was good and that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted it. I wasn’t spoiled - I wasn’t allowed at all to run over other people – I just wasn’t trained to see myself as a failure from the start. I grew up thinking everyone was raised this way and it was a hard lesson to eventually learn that I was, apparently, in a minority of the world’s population. It wasn’t in my home but in the churches of my childhood that I was taught I had to watch out for the punishing God. In all honesty I’m not sure that was the intended lesson, but it is the one I learned, nonetheless.

Why have our churches not been teaching love and respect all along instead of sin? Why did they - why do they not teach the grace of being created good? How did the God who loves and forgives get to be presented to most of us as the old man with a clipboard, trying to catch us sinning so he could punish us?

How did we manage to mis-hear so much of Jesus’ message? And how do we get out of this mess? It’s as if we are constantly being offered this incredible gift of unconditional love...and we keep refusing to accept it. You do understand that unconditional means just that - no conditions - zip, zilch, nada, NO conditions. Instead of believing in that love and affirmation we just keep making more and more rules for ourselvesas if the rules will save us – I guess because it is assumed that we cannot be trusted to live like decent beings if we aren’t constantly constrained by rules. And the more rules we make, the less we believe in ourselves, because we wouldn’t have rules if we didn’t really NEED them - right?

I believe that God’s creation is good and beautiful and cherished. I do. My head know this and my heart knows it too. It’s my vision, I think, that needs to be retooled so that I don’t see a not-very-clean homeless person on the street, I see a child of God - my brother. My ears need work, too, so that when I hear someone spouting classist, racist drivel I don’t hear a hateful person to be scorned, I hear my misinformed and possibly hurting sister.

My feet need to be trained to not automatically walk away from those who are different from me, but instead, to walk with them. And my voice needs to learn to not allow hurtful, dividing words to ever come out of my mouth.

The church, which should have been teaching us all along that we are one, has been instrumental for centuries in dividing us. It isn’t going to be easy to put us back together as we always should have been – to heal us. When I was a kid little gift shops always had signs up that read something like “if you break it, you own it.” Christians – the inheritors of Christ’s message – have broken Christianity, whether wittingly or unwittingly, it is broken. We need to own that and get busy fixing it.

It won’t be easy. We need to learn to say “yes” to the affirmation. We need to believe in the love for ourselves, and then maybe we can help heal others. We will need to work every day to re-affirm the goodness and re-issue the invitation – and a little humility on our part would probably be helpful, too. It will take prayer and effort and commitment on our part - and a ton of trust and belief in a loving, life-affirming God.

Can we do it? We have to start. Please, God, let us start. Amen.

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WHAT WE DO INSTEAD

1/4/2015

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Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:

‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

The reading above is the entirety of what scripture has to say about the "Three Kings" or "Wise Men" from the Christmas story. No camels marching single-file across the dunes; no Caspar, Balthasar or Melchior; no iconography showing two vaguely European-looking men and one Black African all dressed in ermine and velvet -- just the bare bones: some men from the east. We've always assumed there were three because three gifts are mentioned. We've assumed they were kings because only kings could afford those three particularly valuable gifts. All that we think we know about them -- beyond 'men from the east' -- is folklore, and the very scarcity of scriptural reference is what has allowed us over the centuries to embroider a rich full back-story that probably says more about us than about any possibly mythical visitors.

Today I've chosen two modern-day additions to the cycle of stories about the Three Kings, chosen them because they point us to questions about our own responses to the birth of the Christ Child. The first is a poem by Phyllis McGinley, titled The Ballad of Befana. It can be found here: http://www.jacwell.org/poetry/ballad_of_befana.htm among other places. Befana is a common figure is much of Italian folklore, an old housewife who fills the role of Santa Claus in Italy, leaving gifts for the children. In this poem, the Three Visitors pass by her home and invite her to come with them to welcome the newborn. She is greatly excited by the news and truly wants to go and bring gifts herself, but first she has to "finish the dusting and polish the stairs, and bake her bread"... The visitors, however, move on and a day or two later when her chores are momentarily finished she, too, finally sets out to visit the Child - but never finds him because she let her chance go by.

How often have we been too busy for worship or prayer or simply being in the presence of God? How many times have we been so wrapped up in the minutiae of our lives that we refuse to hear when God has called us? How many times have we told God, "I'm busy right now, I'll get back to you later?"

The three visitors of scripture -- whoever they might have been -- heard a call and they left everything to answer it -- then, having found what they were seeking, it apparently was enough for them and they journeyed on out of history.

The second story to share today is from Amahl and the Night Visitors, an English-language opera written in the 1950's by Gian Carlo Menotti. It is the story of a desperately poor shepherd woman and her sickly, crippled son who are visited one night by the entourage of our same Three Kings. Within the body of the story is a sub-plot where, set to achingly beautiful music, one of the kings asks the mother if she has ever seen a Child "the color of wheat, the color of dawn? His eyes are mild, His hands are those of a King, as King He was born. Incense, myrrh, and gold we bring to his side, and the Eastern Star is our guide."

She responds in much the same words, but it is obvious she is speaking of another child: "Yes I know a child the color of wheat, the color of dawn. His eyes are mild, his hands are those of a King, as King he was born. But no one will bring him incense or gold, though sick and poor and hungry and cold. He is my child, my son, my darling, my own." As the piece continues with other questions and answers it becomes obvious that neither is actually listening to the other - they are each so caught up in their own vision of how the Christ might look and where he might be found. The king sees the Christ as 'kingly,' the mother sees him in her sickly, hungry child. Both are right, but both are limited.

How often do we try to contain our God of Limitless Possibilities by placing our own human limitations onto God? How often do we search for God in one place only because we "know" that is where God has to be? How often do we miss out on the blessing because we are so focused on the wrong time and place?

The story of the Three Kings/Magi may be short on scriptural reference, but it is long on human imagination -- and if we meet God anywhere it is within our hopes and dreams and 'what-ifs' ... so let your spirit soar. The Child we seek is, after all, everywhere the human heart can go.

Amen.

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THE URGENCY OF GOD'S NOW

KNOWN - INSIDE AND OUT

GOD SAW THAT IT WAS VERY GOOD

WHAT WE DO INSTEAD

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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