Unlikely Heroes

Some have greatness thrust upon them...

Proper 16a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birth stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

One of my favorite television programs is a British program that is broadcast on PBS — no it’s not Downton Abbey, though I enjoy that one too. No, my real favorite — in fact one I have to number among one of the best TV programs I’ve ever seen — is the series Call the Midwife. If you haven’t seen it, I commend it to you as it is well worth viewing. Just remember to have the box of Kleenex handy. It is powerful and moves me, every episode. The series tells the story of a group of Anglican religious sisters and the lay midwives who work in the impoverished east end of London in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Watching the program has been made all the more poignant to me as I learned that our own dear Monica Stewart — God rest her soul — served as a midwife in London during just that time. I had always known her as a registered nurse working in Harlem at Metropolitan Hospital until she retired, but I didn’t know of her earlier career as a midwife working in London until I read her obituary. She delivered over 8,000 children in her career. Who they are and where, now— who knows? But that’s 8,000 world-changing possibilities in whose coming to be Monica played an important part. Blessings be upon her!

Back to the television series: the thing that moves me most about it is the basic goodness of the characters; none of them are great or famous — although Princess Margaret does appear in one episode — and all of them have their foibles — probably including Princess Margaret — but there is a deep and prevailing goodness about them, a goodness that forms their lives as they go about their work of bringing life and saving lives. Their lives are framed towards the good, even if they sometimes falter; and sometimes they reach greatness. They are unlikely heroes.

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So too are the midwives in today’s reading from the opening chapter of Exodus. Things have changed since Joseph served as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. A new Pharaoh has come along, one with a deep resentment towards the Israelites. For these aliens have prospered in Egypt as the Lord had promised Jacob and Joseph. And so the new Pharaoh institutes a wicked plan to keep their population in check — he orders the midwives to kill all the little boys as they come to birth.

This is a haunting foreshadowing of another order by another wicked king, Herod the Great, an order ironically evaded by another Joseph, with his wife Mary and the child Jesus, by escaping to Egypt rather than from it.

Pharaoh gives his horrifying command, and the midwives respond out of their fear of God; for they fear God more than they fear Pharaoh and they have the courage to disobey the king. These women, whose task in life was to assist in the most natural process possible — a woman giving birth to a child — become unlikely heroes. And as the story continues, more unlikely heroes appear: the Levite’s wife (Moses’ mother), who hides her baby for three months before turning him over to his older sister; and then that sister herself as she places him in the river, in that little ark made from a basket sealed with bitumen and pitch, placing him in the river there — and here’s the big surprise — Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the boy, and even recognizing that he is a Hebrew child whose death has been ordered by her father, she chooses to protect him and have him brought up in her own household — ironically giving him to his own mother to nurse — but also in the end giving him a name, a name that will resound through Jewish history and even up to our day, Moses.

Who would have thought that this unlikely cast of characters — and I hope you will note that all of them are women, young and old — who would have thought that they would be the means by which God’s chosen deliverer of his people would be himself delivered from certain death. Without these women, each and every one of them, the people of Israel would have remained in their slavery in Egypt. These women and their heroism is unexpected and unlikely, but marvelous.

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Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be so surprised. Heroism is not always what you think it is going to be. Who, after all, turn out to be the real heroes? When it comes to warfare, the great heroes aren’t the generals with their famous names; the heroes are the privates and the corporals and sergeants out on the front line risking their lives in the thick of battle, sometimes losing their lives to save their comrades. And I’ve been around hospitals long enough to know — nothing against doctors, mind you — but many of the real heroes are nurses and EMTs and technicians, the anesthesiologists, the nurses aides — all those others who work, quietly, but sometimes find that they are the ones who end up saving a life.

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In the church as in the world there is plenty of room for heroism — there are, as Saint Paul pointed out to the Romans, many different gifts that differ according to the grace given to each. Not everyone is called to be a hero — yet, who knows when the opportunity for heroism might arise. Those Hebrew midwives studied the art of helping women give birth — a noble task in itself — but they never imagined that they would help save the future savior of Israel. They thought their job was birthing babies — not saving nations.

There is a line in Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is the same with being a hero: most truly heroic acts are not performed by those who set out to become heroes, but by ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations in which a heroic act is required — and who then respond. Who knows when the gift that is given by God according to the grace of God for ministry, for teaching, for exhortation, for generosity, for diligence, or even for cheerfulness — who knows when such gifts might not, given the opportunity, blossom into heroism given the right place and time.

For there are ministers who serve in dangerous circumstances. Priests and ambulance drivers serve on the front line of battle; there are teachers who persist in teaching what they know to be right even when the authorities want to persecute or prosecute them for teaching science when what those authorities want is a dumbed-down refusal to teach what science offers; and there are students like Malala Yousafzai who persist in gaining an education even when there are some who would kill her — who tried to kill her — because they think girls are not supposed to go to school. Those who persist in doing what is right against such opposition are unlikely heroes, but heroes they are.

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One last unlikely hero appears in our readings today — Simon son of Jonah. Who would have thought that a simple fisherman would become one to whom the Lord of heaven would entrust the keys of heaven? Who would have thought that the man who just two weeks ago sank into the water instead of walking on it, when his fears outweighed his faith; that this man who would go on to deny his Lord three times before the rooster crows — who would have thought that this unlikely and wavering candidate could be a hero? Yet when the Spirit descended on that great day of Pentecost, when the Spirit came down on Peter and the apostles, that is just what he did: he is the one that stood up and would go on to face down the High Priest and the authorities and to proclaim the Gospel, even though in the end it brought him to the cross himself, crucified head-down in Rome.

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And so it is for all of us my friends — none of us here are born great. I doubt if any of us will be called to achieve greatness — but, who knows, who among us may have greatness thrust upon us — by being put in the right place at the right time to make use of the gift which we may have thought was purely practical, purely a useful trade, purely a way to make a living, suddenly transformed by the situation in which we find ourselves into something marvelous. Who among us may find some gift transformed into a way to be a hero and perform an act of heroism?

That’s what makes it grace, my friends. To become a hero is not something any of us should expect or even desire. Let us rather hope that if we are ever placed in the position to make such a use of the gifts that God has given us that we will have the courage so to do — to become unlikely heroes. Glory to God, whose power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.+

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Bondage and Freedom

Constraint comes in many forms... some prevents, some serves the gospel.

SJF • Proper 23c • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendent of David — that is my gospel, for which I suffer, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained.

In our Scripture readings today we hear of three different kinds of bondage, and also of the paradoxical freedom that transcends bondage in each case.

The situation in which Saint Paul found himself involved bondage in its most literal sense. As he wrote to his young disciple Timothy, he was bound in iron chains, kept under house arrest and unable to move from the inexorable path towards judgment before the imperial tribunal and death by execution — though he would move soon enough.

The Scriptural record of the early church, much of it from Paul’s own hand, cuts off before we reach the end of his story. To hear what happens after the end of Luke’s record in Acts of the Apostles, we must rely on other early historians of the church. They tell us of Paul’s execution in Rome in the days of the Emperor Nero.

But regardless of Paul’s ultimate end, here in this letter to his young disciple Timothy as we have been hearing over the last weeks — here he writes of his imprisonment, the indignity of being chained up like a common criminal. But he uses his situation as an opportunity to contrast the human condition of bondage with the divine freedom of truth. He may be in chains, but the gospel is not chained.

Ironically, Paul’s arrest and imprisonment not only did not stop the gospel from spreading, but actually helped the gospel to spread. This is part of the great paradox of his suffering. For as Paul was ferried from port to port on his journey to Rome, at each stop along the way he preached and shared fellowship with Christians in each place. And later in Rome at last he was given opportunity to witness to the power of the gospel, and make his testimony even in the court of the emperor. There he ultimately achieved the crown of martyrdom, executed by the earthly power of humans, but bearing witness to the heavenly power of God, trusting in those words he wrote to Timothy — “The saying is sure: if we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.”

There is an incident much later in Christian missionary history that bears witness to this truth as well. A group of Europeans in 19th-century Burma were captured by a warlord and placed in prison. Among them was a Christian missionary. The prisoners were hung by chains in a dank prison. One of the other prisoners, a colonial trader, jeered at the missionary, saying, “What do you think your chances are now of converting the heathen!” The missionary answered, “They are just as bright as ever they were, for the light of the Gospel is not quenched — even here.”

My friends, even in the place of bondage, the Christian is free. Think for a moment of the letters that Christians have written from prison: from the time of Paul, writing to Timothy; from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison, facing his own execution, awaiting his death; of the letter from Birmingham Jail, from Martin Luther King — yes, the man may be bound, but his gospel is not bound; it goes forth. And those letters are read to this day, while those who imprisoned those men are long gone and forgotten. Another Martin, for whom Martin Luther King was named, Martin Luther, stated it well in his great hymn: “The body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still; his kingdom is forever.” The bondage of restraint cannot stand against the power of God.

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Our gospel reading today tells of a different kind of bondage: a bondage not from without but from within. It is true that the lepers whom Jesus heals are freed from the bondage to disease that has kept them cut off from the rest of human society. But the bondage I want to note today in their case is not that external bondage, but rather the inner compulsion that leads one of them, one out of the ten, the Samaritan, to turn back to Jesus, to thank him for healing him. Here we are not dealing with the iron chain of imprisonment, but rather the elastic band of conscience. You know how that works. When you know that you ought to do something that you haven’t done, and that the longer you wait, and the further you get from the thing your conscience is calling you to, the stronger the pull becomes — the elastic band gets harder to pull the further it goes.

With every step that the healed Samaritan takes away from Jesus, the stronger he feels the pull grow, the pull of the need to give thanks. Finally the pull becomes so strong that he snaps right back to the feet of Jesus and falls there, offering his thanks!

The English writer Dorothy L Sayers once observed that “The divine scheme of things... is at once extremely elastic and extremely rigid. It is elastic, in that it includes a large measure of liberty for the creature; it is rigid in that... however created beings choose to behave, they must accept responsibility for their actions and endure the consequences.” This bondage of the conscience — this responsibility for ones own actions — becomes more binding the more you stretch it. The more freely you move, the stronger will be the pull.

And as we see in the story of the healed Samaritan, this is not a negative bondage — this is not a bad thing. In this case it is the bondage of gratitude: when you know you need to give thanks for something, because as even the casual expression puts it, you owe someone thanks. And it is no accident (I remind us in this stewardship season and on this day of the harvest) that it is exactly a tithe — one tenth — of the healed lepers who turns back: one out of ten, one tenth — a tithe.

This reminds us of our own call to give thanks by returning a portion of the abundance with which we have been blessed back to God — to God’s church, for the work of the church, the work of the spread of that ministry here and now — even to realize that somehow we owe God this portion of what we have received — and how some struggle, and how tautly pulled is that particular elastic in some cases! But when we return in faith and thanksgiving to the one to whom we owe that debt of gratitude, we feel the relief of knowing we have done as God wants us to do. Responding to the bondage of duty leads us to the true freedom of thanksgiving.

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The third form of bondage in our scripture readings today appears in that story of Naaman the Syrian. He too suffers from leprosy, but what seems to hold him in bondage, isn’t the disease himself; it seems to be more his pride — both his personal and his national pride. When the messenger from the prophet asks him to do a simple thing to free himself from the bondage of leprosy, to dip himself in the River Jordan, his personal and national pride stand in the way. He doesn’t want a messenger — he wants the prophet himself! He doesn’t want a to be told just to take a dip in the river, he wants a ritual; he wants a ceremony; after all, he is an important person! He deserves it! And he protests that the rivers of his homeland are better than all the waters of Israel. It takes the wise words of his servants to put him back on the right track: if you’d been asked something hard you would have done it; why not do what is simple? This wise counsel finally frees him from his bondage of pride and nationalism — and he takes those dips in the river, and he is healed of his disease, with his skin like that of a child.

Three forms of bondage — two negative and one positive — are set before us today. May we too, my dear sisters and brothers in Christ, when constrained by bondage beyond our control find the freedom of the Gospel; when healed of our ills give generously in response to the bondage of gratitude; and when challenged to do what is simple, released from the bondage of pride, and trust that God knows best what to ask of each and every one of us, and that God will be true in imparting gracious blessings, when we do as we are bid.+

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Free or Loose?

Freedom in Christ is like graduation... we even get a gown!

Proper 7c • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.

In his 1935 play, The Shoemakers, Polish playwright Stanisław Witkiewicz portrays a curmudgeonly old shoemaker complaining about the young folk and their fancy new “free school.” He grumbles, “Yeah, it’s a free school all right — so free it comes loose!” In those few words the old shoemaker says a great deal about the nature of freedom — and its limits.

We’ve been reading from Galatians the last few weeks, with a few more weeks to go. One of the themes Saint Paul raises is the nature of freedom, and he struggles — as the Galatians struggle — to find the balance between liberty and license; whether freedom is limitless or is bound by some restraint — is it grounded in a foundation of some basic principles, or like a house built on sand, does it “come loose?”

In the passage before us, Paul pictures the law of Moses as a disciplinarian, with a definitely “educational” overtone. Education then was not as it is today, so a word of explanation will be helpful. Most education for the lower and middle classes consisted of apprenticeship or joining in the family business — learning a trade was the main thing about getting ahead in life. For the upper classes, young children were usually tutored at home by a governor or governess or instructor — which is the word used in our text this morning although the translators have chosen to translate it simply as“disciplinarian.” And once again I have a beef with the translators of the New Revised Standard Version — for in the interest of removing gender-specific language, they use the word children for two different expressions — where Paul uses two different words; in this case they use the word children where Paul has the word for sons, as distinguished from children. And the difference that Paul is making is the distinction between being a young child who is under a tutor’s care, and a young adult capable of inheriting and managing one’s own affairs — what Paul calls “a son.” This translation misses the point that in Christ we are indeed children, but children who have come of age, who have come into our inheritance — in Christ we are all, as Paul says, “sons of God.” “Sons” in this sense are not just men — which is also why Paul is able say that the categories “male and female” do not apply to those who are “in Christ.”

So with that clarification, the freedom spoken of here is a kind of graduation — not into utter freedom but into new responsibilities, those of an adult Christian faith. I am reminded of a verse from one of the great “national songs” in our hymnal. (We’ll sing it next week in keeping both with Galatians and the Fourth of July). It’s second verse ends: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.” Freedom, whether of a nation or a person, does not mean the unlimited ability to do anything that takes your fancy, but carries with it its own responsibilities and duties. As another hymn puts it, “New occasions teach new duties.”

To pick up the educational analogy: when you graduate and you get your degree, the freedom it gives you is the freedom to practice the discipline you have taken up — whether it is in the arts or the sciences, social work or medicine — or even the ministry! And the word discipline is not to be missed. Everything bears it own rules, its own ways of working — even freedom. There are still rules and structures that guide the free exercise of new skills, when you graduate.

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We see a particular kind of graduation into ministry in today’s Gospel. It may seem strange at first, but bear with me. It tells the story of a man imprisoned, not by a tutor or disciplinarian, but by a legion of demons. These demons have controlled his life so much that he even fell under the sway of human imprisonment as well, guarded and bound with chains and shackles. The demons gave him the power to escape, but they kept him in their own possession, living a naked and homeless and miserable life out among the tombs, among the dead. Jesus sets him free from this captivity, allowing the demons to enter a herd of pigs, who rush into the lake and are drowned. (I wonder if the demons are perhaps spiteful and angry because they’ve been dispossessed, and they want to do as much harem as possible to the local economy by depriving the swineherds of their livelihood.)

Whatever the case, the man they held captive is now free — but his freedom is not absolute, it is not “loose.” For he is given a task by Jesus, the one who has liberated him: “Return to your home and tell how much God has done for you.” And so he sets off — and you’ll notice that he proclaims how much Jesus has done for him — rightly identifying Jesus with the power of God. This is the one thing that he learned from his demon instructors, for they too recognized that Jesus was and is “the son of the Most High God.” I said a few weeks ago that Jesus does not need or even want the testimony of demons — but he does accept the testimony of this man who has been freed from demons. He is freed to take up a ministry, a new discipline, to become an evangelist. And if it isn’t a sign of grace to transform someone whose life was spent homeless and naked among the dead, to one bearing witness to God in Christ, I don’t know what is.

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This is the same power of grace that is at work in all who put their hope and faith and trust in Jesus Christ. We have been adopted by God in Christ and become children of God through faith: the faith of Christ, as well as our own faith “in” Christ, in him because we are members of his body. This liberating faith sets us free from all sorts of limitations, though it brings new responsibilities.

Saint Paul itemizes some of the categories from which faith liberates us: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Those who are reborn in Christ are not limited by nationality or race — but are free to love and serve all their many sisters and brothers in the human family, God’s children, our graduation class.

Those who are reborn in Christ are not limited by their economic or social standing — but are free to mix and mingle with rich and poor alike, bearing witness to the newfound faith of the inheritance of the saints in light.

Those who are reborn in Christ are not limited by their sex or marital status — but are free to take up the discipline of love under the blessing of God, who is love, and in whom all loving souls abide.

All of the things that formerly both limited people and gave them things to boast about, are no longer of any significance in Christ.

This was a tough sell for the Galatians — it may be a tough sell for us — for all who took pride in their national, social, and even sexual status. Perhaps some of those Galatians were under the sway of those who wanted to impose the whole of the Jewish law upon them, and had heard the words of the Jewish prayer that a Jewish man would say each morning: “I thank God that I am not a Gentile; I thank God that I am not a slave; I thank God that I am not a woman.” Paul confronts that prayer by boldly proclaiming that God is the God not just of Jews but of Gentiles too, not just the God of the free but of all people regardless of their social status, not just of men but of women too.

In his effort to explain this to the Galatians, caught up in their preconceptions and misled by false teachers, Paul tries one more analogy, and I’ll try it out on you too, to help all of us understand what has happened to us in Christ. “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.” It is as if we have enlisted in God’s army — and been given new uniforms, uniforms that cover over any of our differences: social status, economic history, even gender or marital status. In the early days of the church, at baptism each of the candidates was given a white garment to wear over whatever else they had on — and we still wear these garments today as part of the vestments of those who serve at the altar. This white robe that is known in Latin as an alb (think albino!), is the white robe of baptism. And it lets us all know, that all of us here as ministers are among the baptized — as are all of you. This is the baptismal garment, the graduation gown into the new life of faith now that the old schoolmaster of the law has retired. This uniform covers over our personal peculiarities — you could be wearing discount jeans or a custom-made suit underneath, a JCPenney house dress or Dior haute couture.

None of that matters to Jesus — who liberates us from all of this legion of categories that we might wrongly take pride in, or feel ashamed of, but which in the long run bind us in chains of judgment and prejudice and despair. Graduation day has come, and the freedom that comes with it: freedom with a purpose. For freedom Christ has set us free — a freedom to love and serve one another as he loved and served us, by his grace and for his glory.+

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Letting Go

St Paul catalogues his virtues and then throws the catalogue away! --- sermon for Proper 22a

SJF • Proper 22a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

There was once a very successful Turkish prize-fighter, named Ismail Yousouf. He traveled the world offering to fight anyone who would contest his strength, and he always won. In addition to his physical prowess, he also had a deep distrust of banks and bankers. Because of that, he kept his winnings in the form of gold coins that he carried with him at all times in a money belt around his waist. I suppose he might have re-written the Scriptural saying to read, “Where your treasure is, there will your stomach also be!” This decision, to keep his wealth as close to him as his skin, led to tragedy, however, when he had the misfortune to be sailing on the passenger liner La Bourgogne in the summer of 1898, when it collided with another vessel off the coast of Nova Scotia and sank. A few of the passengers escaped the disaster, but Yousouf was not among them: in spite of his physical strength, his gold money-belt weighed him down, and he sank into the depths like a stone. Perhaps after all the old saying isn’t quite true, and you can take it with you! But is it worth the trip?

Yousouf’s story is not unique — even on that ship on that day, in which fewer than a quarter of the passengers were saved, there must have been others who might have been saved had they resisted the temptation to turn back for some valued item — a necklace or a briefcase or a wallet — and waste valuable time and add to their burden in reaching the lifeboats.

In a similar vein Mark Twain wrote of his visit to the ruins of Pompeii where he saw the remains of a man who was caught in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius just outside a door to a passage that might have protected him — now an ash-coated skeleton with a key to the door in one hand and ten gold coins in the other. Twain reflected, that had he not stopped to gather up the gold, he might have made it to the door.

The reality of someone dying because they won’t let go of some particular thing is so much a part of human culture that it has become what’s called a “trope” — which is a sort of fancy literary word for a cliché. How many movies have you seen where a character perishes for that very reason — failing to let go of some precious item. I’m sure you can think of many, and I won’t even start to list them,
but that word “precious” and the mention of volcanos can hardly pass without acknowledging poor Gollum and his obsession with the Ring of Power that ultimately leads him to his incinerated end at Mount Doom.

The moral of all of this is that some things are best let go of — and your life may depend on letting go. I reminded us last week of Jack Benny’s response to the challenge, “Your money or your life!” — “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” — which is comical precisely because we recognize that tension in our own lives — that tension between what seems to be of value and what really is of ultimate value; and our recognition that some people really do choose money over life, dying because they won’t let go — or maybe living, but not really having much of a life.

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In our reading from Philippians last week we heard about how Jesus Christ let go — let go of everything — not to save his own life but to save the lives of all who would turn to him in faith. Though he was the Son of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped at or held on to, but rather emptied himself, taking on our human nature so as to live and die as one of us — for our sake and for our salvation.

In the continuation of Philippians we heard this morning, Saint Paul does a similar thing. He begins by cataloguing all of the things he could be proud of if he wished: his being an observant Jew, a scholar and a teacher, in zeal and devotion a leader of his people, a man rich in his own acquired righteousness under the law. But then he shows that he is willing to toss that glossy illustrated catalogue onto the rubbish heap. He will not allow all of these inheritances and accomplishments, these native qualities and acquired skills, to hold him back — as indeed they had held him back — from Christ and his resurrection. Ultimately Paul knows that he must let go of the things that were most precious to him in his life before he came to know Christ. For since knowing Christ, all of these things, however valuable and good they might be, are of no comparison to the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

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Think for a moment about your own life — what are the things that might hold you back? Is it pride in your family or your education? Is it consciousness of your skills or satisfaction with the uprightness of your life? None of these are bad things, mind — that’s the point. These are things worth valuing. They only become a problem when we hang on to them instead of letting go in order fully to grasp what is much more valuable than any such earthly good: to grasp our Lord, clinging to the hem of his garment, as if our life depended on it.

Because our life does depend on it. If anything — however good — impedes your ability to grasp Jesus and trust in his goodness in his righteousness; if your hands are full of anything else at all, however good or valuable they might be, trust in God and let go of it. Forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead, toward the goal of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. All else will be added unto you, if you put your whole trust in him who is the source of all good.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, you let go of everything for our sake, leaving the Father’s side to be with us as one of us, to save us from our sins. Help us to find the will and the way to strip off the money belt of reputation and rise from the ocean depths of materialism; to scatter the golden coins of pride, and place the key in the lock of the door that opens to salvation; to forsake the ring of power and prestige and accept the yoke of humble service; that we may at the last find our eternal home with you, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.

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No Pleasing Some People

The curse of the double-minded judge, and the freedom of the children of God.

SJF • Proper 9a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

Some while ago I spoke about the fact that different people will find the same foods either enjoyable or awful. The same dish may be treated as a delicacy by some, and a culinary disaster by others — evoking delight or grimaces depending on the taste-buds of the diner.

It also appears to be true that some people are by nature “fault-finders” who will not be pleased whatever the dish set before them. Their noses are permanently upturned, and their manners ungrateful. Unlike the fussy Goldilocks — who at least found a bowl of porridge, and a chair, and a bed to her liking, and was at least satisfied a third of the time — there are folks who are just so picky that nothing completely pleases them. There is always something wrong for those who are impossible to please.

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Jesus confronted such people in the passage we heard from Matthew’s gospel. They’ve been offered two very different “dishes” — to continue my dining analogy. John the Baptist was what is called an ascetic: one who lived an austere life of fasting and privation. He lived in the desert wilderness, dressed in a camel’s hair mantle bound with a leather belt, and ate nothing but locusts and honey. And whether the “locusts” in question are the insects or the beans of the locust tree, it is a diet few, then or now, would be willing to duplicate. And what did these unpleasable people think of him? They thought he was crazy!
Then along comes Jesus, who, after his own relatively short but intense time of asceticism, during that forty days he spent in the wilderness fasting, returns to civilization and accepts the dinner invitations of well-to-do bourgeois tax-collectors, and passes his time in the company of women who, as the old euphemism has it, “are no better than they should be.” And what do these unpleasable people think of him? A glutton and a drunkard and a friend of sinners!

There is just no pleasing some people. If you don’t eat they condemn you as an overly scrupulous killjoy, and if you do eat they condemn you as a self-indulgent pleasure-seeking hedonist. And this condemnation — this refined ability not to be pleased with what is offered, this judgmental snobbery that wrinkles its nose towards whatever is presented to it — is held up as a kind of sophisticated wisdom.

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Jesus contrasts this snobbishness, this thing that passes for intelligence and wisdom, with the eager acceptance that infants will show for something that pleases them. How many times have I seen a child’s face light up at the first taste of a droplet of the sacred wine from the tip of my pinky finger on the day of that child’s baptism! Yet a connoisseur of fine wines would likely turn up his nose at the far from vintage port that we use as our communion wine — bought by the case from a liquor store in Yonkers with the distinctly déclassé name of Liquorfellers. Truly a certain kind of innocent ignorance is bliss!

But at a deeper level, this all points to the profound difference between judgment and enjoyment. One of the reasons that Jesus speaks so strongly and so often against judgment is that it actually is the biggest kill-joy of them all. It is very hard for a critic to enjoy whatever he or she is experiencing. A critic or a snob is always double-minded — of a double mind — because rather than simply enjoying what they are experiencing, a part of their mind is always standing back, comparing it, criticizing it, judging it. Off to the one side from the one enjoying and the thing enjoyed, is this analytical observer, this killjoy, the critic and the judge who tells you that you can’t really enjoy such a common or low-class thing.

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I don’t know how many of you may be familiar with “Keeping Up Appearances,” the television program featuring Hyacinth Bucket, who imagines her name ought to be pronounced Bouquet. She is a woman who has narrowed her own life, and that of her poor husband Richard, to the point where they can hardly enjoy anything any more. She is deeply embarrassed by all of her family members — except her sister Violet who married a well-off bookie, or as she says, a “turf accountant,” and who lives in a home with a Jacuzzi and a Mercedes and room for a pony. Hyacinth envies that one sister but she dreads encounters with the other two. She lives in terror that her only friend and neighbor will damage her hand-painted Royal Doulton tea-cups when she comes by for the obligatory visit. She spends so much of her life judging everything as not up to her standards, and in keeping up appearances, that she has little or no share in the raucous pleasures of her sisters Daisy and Rose. I’m sure that had she been around to hear the prophet Zechariah’s call to daughter Zion, to rejoice greatly at the coming of her king in humility riding on a donkey rather than in a chariot, she would have cringed said, “Really, Richard, a donkey!?”
This would be a tragedy if it were not for the fact that every once and a while Hyacinth is exposed — even to herself — for who she really is, and reluctantly lets her hair down and discovers she can in fact have a good time.

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Closer to our biblical texts, Saint Paul struggled inwardly with that spirit of judgment that kept him from living into the freedom of God’s love, the simple enjoyment of God’s forgiveness and grace. What he called “the law of sin” was at work in him at the very deepest level — that slavery to the law that is the fate of all who devote themselves to judgment rather than accepting the blessed liberty of the children of God. And Paul realized that the only way out of that double-mindedness was single-mindedly to throw himself, as one weary of carrying the heavy burden of the “body of death,” into the arms of Jesus, the source of rescue and rest, redemption and release.

Jesus offers himself, to all who are weary of the need to be in charge, to be displeased at others or themselves, and to accept him as the end of all of their burdens. We are free, like those in the crowds who simply would not be pleased, secure in their own sense of judgment and critique, to reject the offer of rescue and relief. But how much better to accept the offer of peace and joy as a child who reaches out for the sweet reward that is offered by a loving Father.

We have such a Father, made known to us in the Son of God himself, who with that Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.+

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Beyond the Call of Duty

SJF • Proper 18c 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.+

Some years ago, a mother sought to teach her daughter about stewardship. Before the worship began, she gave her daughter a dollar bill and a quarter, and told her, “It is up to you which of these you put into the offering plate.” All through the sermon, the mother watched her child considering the possibilities seriously; holding the dollar in one hand and the quarter in the other, looking back and forth between the bill and the coin and furrowing her tiny brow in concentration. Finally, when the collection began and the ushers passed the plate into the aisle, the child nodded to herself vigorously. Then with great deliberation she placed the quarter in the offering plate, and sat back with a contented smile. After the worship ended, the mother asked, “Why did you decide to put in the quarter instead of the dollar?” Her daughter responded, “Well, I was going to put in the dollar; but then the priest said, ‘God loves a cheerful giver,’ and I thought I’d be more cheerful if I kept the dollar.”

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Much Christian stewardship, and many Christian stewards, take this subjective view about giving to the church: how does giving make me feel? This is the “If it feels good, do it” school of Christian giving. Problem is that while some people may feel a glow of discipleship when they give generously to the church, too many others — like the child in the story — feel instead a glow of satisfaction at having held on to as much as they possibly can.

Our gospel this morning presents us with another view of stewardship, a view based not on feelings but practicalities: the examples of considering how much it costs to build a tower or to wage a war. This is the “Balance the Budget” school of Christian giving. It does have one particular advantages over the “Feel Good” theory. It is more engaged with the reality of what it costs to maintain a church. But it has a down-side too, in that giving to the church can be commercialized. Just as with the feel-good giver, this view is focused not on God or the church, but back on the giver, as it appears to say, “Yes, I support the church, for what I get out of it.”

In the nineteenth century when this church was built congregations often raised their funds through a true “Balance the Budget” technique. The annual cost of running the church was figured out, divided up, and if you wanted to be a member of this church, you paid a fee based on your share of that divided total cost. And this fee was in a very practical form of pew rental — you couldn’t just sit anywhere you wanted in the church, as we do today. If you came to Saint James Church in the nineteenth century, you sat in the pew you had bought with your annual pew fee, the pew your family rented — that’s why they have those little brass tags at the end of each pew, with a number, and a few of them still with the names of the families. And in those days the church-wardens were the ushers and “warden” carried as strong a sense it does in a prison. If you hadn’t paid your pew rent the wardens would know it; and you would be shown to the back of the church to stand until after the sermon, at which point you would be ushered up here to the seats on the side, where pews used to be before our remodeling; that was the “Peanut Gallery.”

Eventually people realized that this commercial approach wasn’t really Christian stewardship. It was more like the behavior of the Pharisees, who took the best seats in the synagogue. And there was also a growing sense that if people began to think of giving to the church simply as exchange for what they got, a kind of “give and get,” they would come to see the church as if it were just another shop on the street where you paid your money and took your choice, as if the church were a kind of vending machine that dispensed spiritual satisfaction to those who put their money in the slot. Such an attitude transformed believers into customers.

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Ultimately both of these views of stewardship run aground on the astounding statement with which today’s gospel passage ended: Jesus said, “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” How shallow both “feel good” and the “balance the budget” look in contrast to that astounding claim that Jesus makes upon us! While some of us here in this church devote a significant portion of our income to the church — the ten percent of the biblical tithe, yet how shallow even the most generous giver must feel in light of that astounding charge from Jesus: “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” What is five or ten percent compared to all! Even after we do our part with what we give, most of us are left with ninety or ninety-five percent — or more! So what could Jesus mean by this astounding, ultimate demand?

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We will find our answer to this hard question in the second reading we heard today — one of the longest Scripture readings we have in our worship — almost an entire book of the Bible in a single reading: all but the last four verses of Paul’s letter to Philemon.

This letter tells a deeply personal story of how important this young man Onesimus had become to the elderly Paul as he suffered in prison. And it also shows Paul trusts that when this runaway slave returns to his master with this letter in hand, he will not suffer the penalty imposed on runaways. No, Paul trusts that Philemon will welcome Onesimus back no longer as a slave, but as a brother in Christ; for the slave has become a Christian while with Paul, perhaps even a deacon — as Paul’s words suggest when he describes how Onesimus has served him. Now it is also clear from this letter that Onesimus had not been a very good slave — in addition to having run away, he had been, as Paul says, “useless” — making a bit of a joke out Onesimus’ name, which in Greek means Useful. Upon his return, he will live up to his name and be “useful” indeed as a brother in Christ; he will be more than a slave, not less. Paul assures Philemon that he is not demanding this: he wants Philemon to do a voluntary good deed, not something forced — even though Paul reminds him that he owes him more than he can possibly account for, in that wonderful flourish at the end, “I say nothing about your owing me even your own self” — echoing the teaching of Jesus.

You see, what Paul is saying is that Philemon can have his cake and eat it too! He can have the free service of a good and useful brother in place of the half-hearted work of a useless slave, by giving up the control of being a slave-master over him, in exchange for the cooperation of working with him as a brother in Christ.

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And it is that “giving up” that connects us back with that hard saying of Jesus: “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all of your possessions.” We don’t just owe God our possessions, after all, but, as Philemon owed Paul, our very selves! Yet Jesus does not say, I’mtaking your life — he wants us to live our lives in service to him, not throw our lives away. So too he doesn’t ask us to “give away” all of our possessions, but to “give them up.” And the difference is suggestive: this is about surrender, not commerce. He wants us to “give up” to him, to “surrender all” to him! It is about our learning how to loosen our grip on what we have, treating it not as something controlled by us, but as ultimately coming to us as a gift from God — as indeed our very lives come as a gift from God’s endless generosity, and he wants us to give them up to him as well. We are called to treat what we have been given, what we have been blessed to possess, with the same kind of liberty with which Paul counseled Philemon to treat his former slave Onesimus, and to do so voluntarily, not under compulsion or solely as doing our duty, but as going truly beyond the call of duty into the realm of the freedom of the children of God — where there are no more slaves, but we are free — free because we have given up, we have surrendered all to God.

We are not called simply to balance the books and pay our share so that we get what we pay for and what we think we deserve. Friends, I can assure you that if we all got what we deserved we would be neither cheerful nor proud!

But when we treat all we have been given — including our very selves — not as “ours” to control any more but as the free gift of a generous God, then we too can find ourselves going beyond the mere call of duty to maintain the church, to the mission of spreading God’s kingdom, the kingdom of freedom, in which all are God’s children.

Yes, it is our duty to maintain our little corner of the God’s kingdom here on Jerome and 190th Street, to do what it takes to financially support this building But we are called to do so much more; we are called to be God’s servants, not slaves working only because they have to, but children of God who work so hard because they love their Father in heaven, and love their brothers and sisters so very much, knowing that everything comes from him as well.

If this spirit of generosity and freedom can fill us all who knows what might happen? Let me tell you one thing. Onesimus the runaway slave remained a Christian. He became so useful in the church that decades later he shows up again in Christian history — as the bishop of the church of Ephesus! Who would have thought that a useless runaway slave could become such a useful servant of God?

When we give up and surrender all to God, who knows what he might make of us? When we go beyond our own contentment and merely feeling good about ourselves; when we go beyond just the call of duty to balance the budget; God will surprise us with his amazing grace, doing infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. To God be the glory, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.+

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Independent for What?

SJF • Proper 9C • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
For thus says the Lord: “I will extend prosperity to her like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and dandled on her knee. As a mother comforts her child so I will comfort you.”

Today is Independence Day, but you may have noticed that the Scripture readings we heard were not those appointed for the Fourth of July, but the regular readings from Proper 9 in Year C, for the Sunday closest to July 6. Part of my reason for choosing the regular Sunday readings rather than those celebrating the holiday is exactly that: celebration.

What exactly are we celebrating on the Fourth of July? Obviously we are celebrating independence — the independence of the United States — or as they were at that time the several colonies — from the British crown. It was on the Fourth of July in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was adopted and signed. So it is abundantly clear that independence that day in Philadelphia was independence from.

My question today is what is independence for. And that is why I chose to use the readings for the regular Sunday rather than the readings appointed for Independence Day. For although that first reading from Isaiah starts out with plenty of good news to celebrate — all of that language about prosperity flowing like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream; and being breast-fed at the glorious bosom of Jerusalem — after all that upbeat language comes that threat of the Lord’s indignation, when the Lord will come in fire with chariots like a whirlwind to pay back his anger in fury and his rebuke in flames of fire: “for by fire will the Lord execute judgment, and by his sword, on all flesh!” Does that sound like something to celebrate?

There is also sobering language in Jesus’s instructions to the disciples as he sends them out — empty-handed and like lambs among wolves. They are to beg for their food and wish peace to those who give it to them, but to pronounce an awful curse upon any who are inhospitable towards them, and who refuse to receive the good news they bear. And even when they return, excited and proud that they have been able to triumph even over demons, Jesus reminds them not to rejoice in their victory over spirits, but rather to give thanks that their names are written in heaven.

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And so, even as we rightly celebrate the fact that the United States freed itself from the dominion of the British 234 years ago — it is good to recall that even that declaration of liberty was followed by several years of hard warfare. It is also good and right and important for us to take stock of where we are now.

Is prosperity flowing like a river and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream? Most of the overflowing we’ve been hearing about over the last few months is not the wealth of nations but the waste of industry, a glutting spout of oil polluting the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and perhaps even the Atlantic shore, depending on how the waters flow and the winds blow. And the wealth of nations seems more like the wealth of notions, as any sense of value to anything seems geared not to consumable or practical things like goods and services, but rather to the relative values of the various national currencies, and of money itself; and even credit, which is merely the ghost of money, has become a commodity and object of speculation; and that latter speculation has brought about near total collapse in a financial world based on promises instead of performance.

And as for peace, is there peace to this house and to the world — or is the world as torn by strife and battle as always: druglords and criminals in the Bronx, in Jamaica and Mexico; our own seemingly unending battle against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, with further threats in Pakistan and Iran and North Korea — surely our world is more like that world of fire and whirlwind, rebuke and the sword coming upon all flesh, than like the vision of peaceable Jerusalem. And Jerusalem itself — and Gaza and the West Bank — is this the peace of God?

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Yet in the midst of all this we still see Jesus — the perfectly innocent man who was crucified, who suffered death for crimes he did not commit, for sins of which he was not guilty. We hear the voice of the apostle Paul raised in affirmation that he dare not boast of anything except the cross, the cross of Christ by which the world has been crucified to him and he to the world. He does not boast of his successes; he does not glory in his own accomplishments; he takes no stock of those who follow the law or of those who disregard the law — for neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but only the new creation, the new life in Christ.

Jesus himself, when, as I said, the disciples returned like excited schoolboys flush with their latest victory on the pitch, reminded them not to place their joy in this passing victory, but rather to plant the banner of their joy in the firm and secure knowledge of salvation — salvation won not by them but for them — by him, when from before the foundation of the world he saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. It is that cosmic independence — liberation from eternal death and for eternal life — that we are called to celebrate, with names written in heaven brighter and more lasting than any earthly fireworks.

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Today is Independence Day. But my brothers and sisters, it is not only a day to celebrate our independence from the domination of foreign powers — whether from the merely human foreign power of the British crown, or from the power of terrorists and militants ranged against us both at home and abroad, or even from the natural power of a hurt and wounded world lashing back at us for the damage inflicted upon it, or even freedom from the supernatural domination of the devil. We are, it is true, free and independent of all these things when we place our trust in Jesus Christ our Lord.

But there is more: because we are not only independent from, but independent for. God has a purpose for us — not only to be dandled like children on the knees of our mother Jerusalem; but for us to take our stand as adult men and women, disciples called to serve, and sent to serve. The harvest still is plentiful and the laborers willing to do their labor far too few. We may be sent forth — on this fourth of July — with limited resources. We may — no, we will — face rejection from some even as we offer them God’s peace and a kingdom word of good news.

But let us not lose heart, and let us not allow anyone to make trouble for us — for we too carry the marks of Jesus branded on our bodies. Those marks were made when we were baptized in water and the Holy Spirit, and the sign of Christ’s cross was made upon our foreheads. God help us, if we glory in anything other than that, if we rejoice in anything but the fact that we have been saved, that our names are written above, and that we have been called and commissioned to serve this wounded world. Let us make this the Forth of July — the day we march forth from this place in the power of Christ and of his Holy Spirit, to the service and the glory of God the Almighty.+

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Goodness Gracious, Put It Down

Proper 23b • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Jesus said to the rich young man, ‘You lack one thing...’+

Have you ever been shopping, and arrived home with your arms full of packages, only to be faced by the locked door, and the realization that your latch-key is in your purse or your trouser pocket? The only way to get into the house is to put the packages down while you get out the key and open the door. In effect, this is what Jesus said to the man who came running up to him in today’s gospel, asking him what he had to do to inherit eternal life.

This man, as the gospel tells us, had many possessions. You probably didn’t have to be a prophet to tell: no doubt he had a fine suit of clothes, maybe a couple of servants following him at a respectful distance. Here was the proverbial “man who had everything,” and yet Jesus knew he lacked the one thing he needed most of all. He was like a man accidentally locked in a storeroom full of canned food, starving to death because he didn’t have the one thing he needed — a can-opener. What this man needed was the grace to give up what he had so that he could follow Jesus. His arms were so full of his possessions he couldn’t set hold of the key to eternal life. He went away shocked and grieved — he couldn’t let go; he couldn’t put it down, though his life depended on it.

Now, it would be easy to say that this gospel only had to do with the wealth of this world — the physical possessions that weigh us down and keep us from following Jesus. We might remember poor old Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” He learned too late that the wealth that he should have used for the well-being of his community had instead became a “ponderous chain” he built up link by link in this life, and which kept him shuffling and clanking in his dreary afterlife, doomed forever to witness the suffering that he might once have eased — he “took it with him” and in the grave it kept him.

Yes, it would be easy for us to look at this gospel story as a warning for somebody else — for the rich — since few if any of us here are wealthy by the world’s standards. And it would be easy for me to turn the gospel on its head, and pat myself and all of us on the back just as the apostles did at the end of the reading.

But I would rather invite all of us to look at this message from the gospel a little more closely. Look more closely, and you’ll see that Jesus’ message wasn’t just about the wealth of this world, but about another kind of wealth, a kind of wealth that can get in our way and fill our arms with so many bundles we can’t make it through the door.

The man who came running up to Jesus was carrying more than gold and silver. This man was carrying a mountain of invisible packages, things he didn’t even know he was carrying. And they were good things, too! That’s part of the problem. This man came up to Jesus, knelt before him, and called him, “Good teacher.” And right off, Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good?” That should get our attention right away. What an odd thing for Jesus to say! But this odd saying of Jesus is the key to today’s gospel, to see that it is about more than money. What we have before us is nothing less than the difference between goodness and grace.

This man came up to Jesus with his arms full of his good deeds. And let’s make sure we’ve got that clear: he was a good man. He had done many good deeds. Jesus looked upon him and loved him. He was a model citizen, a faithful and obedient son of Moses, one who, as the prophet Amos said, “loved good, and established justice in the gate.” And yet his arms were so full of his good deeds, he was so proud that he had kept the law, that he couldn’t see the most important thing of all, the thing he’d neglected in his race to be a perfect “self-made man,” a good citizen.

The one thing he missed was the grace of God — a free gift that you can’t buy with all the money in the world, the free gift you can’t earn with all the good you do or try to do. This man was so conscious of his good works that he forgot his need for grace. As the collect for today reminds us, grace must “always precede and follow us” so that “we may continually be given to good works.” So that... Without that grace, no good can come.

This man thought the good works he did were his — he forgot that without God’s grace he could have done nothing at all worth doing. For not just his good works — but everything he was came from God. He thought himself a self-made-man, but he forgot that even his existence was owed to God, and God alone: God made him, and no one else.

And God would continue to give him all he needed. But when Jesus told him the one thing he lacked, to give up everything he was carrying and to follow him, trusting entirely in God’s grace and providence — not his own wealth, his inheritance, his skill, his wisdom — but in God’s grace, with no visible means of support, he just couldn’t do it.

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Have you ever sent someone on a shopping errand? Perhaps a youngster, or a brother or sister, or your spouse? You might say, “Oh, Alicia, would you run down to the store and get me a bottle of Pine-Sol?” And off she goes, and an hour later comes back with shopping bags brimful of all the wonderful things she’s found, the incredible bargains, and the once-in-a-lifetime offers — she’s got everything, except, can you guess? — the Pine-Sol! Now, she meant well; she made some wise purchases, perhaps she even saved you some money on a few bargains. But she didn’t bring what you asked for.

Jesus asks for one thing from us, one thing more than anything else — he wants our hearts, our trusting hearts — to follow him. Yes, he wants us to do good works, and he honors and welcomes those good deeds; he loves us for them as he loved the rich man in the gospel, who had done good with all his might from his youth on up. But Jesus, our gracious Lord, our savior who gives us grace without counting the cost, knows that our salvation is a gift that is in his hands to give. And with it all the rest will come, all those other things from God — the houses, brothers and sisters, and fields (with persecutions!) — all of that will come if we first give up what we have. We are not saved on account of our goodness — goodness has nothing to do with it, as Mae West once observed. Only grace — only Christ’s blood shed for us, can purchase our salvation — and this is a purchase Christ makes with what is his: his life, his blood, laid down for us. When we depend on our own goodness, on our own store of virtue, on our own spiritual riches, we are in danger of becoming too rich for Christ’s blood; and of forgetting that all the good we do comes from him in any case.

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Let me tell you a parable. There was once a man who wanted to become a great fisherman. He was a successful businessman, who had always dreamed of his retirement and the happy hours he’d spend fishing. So when he finally retired, he bought the most expensive fishing tackle, the finest high-tech carbon-fiber rod with the flashiest stainless steel reel, the most elaborate tackle and exquisite lures and lines of finest monofilament. And he went out to fish one day, but he couldn’t for the life of him catch a single fish. And to his amazement, when he looked downstream, there, in a quiet eddy of the very same stream, was a little barefoot twelve-year-old boy with a bamboo stick, a length of string, a can of worms, a bent safety pin — and a pile of fish! And the man yelled out, “How is it that a little kid like you with a stick and a piece of string can catch all those fish and I can’t get a nibble?” And the boy hollered back, “Well, Mister, I guess you have to be where the fish are!”

To be where Jesus is—that is the one thing necessary. And to be where he is, you have to follow him, right? — because he doesn’t stay still, does he? Jesus is on the move, and to follow him we need to be light on our feet, not weighed down with possessions or pride, but free to follow him where he leads. You remember the old hymn, “Where he leads me, I will follow; where he leads me I will follow...” Well, he’s leading; but are we following or just singing? We need that one thing — grace, the grace to follow him. It’s the same “one thing” Jesus told Martha — another person who had her hands full — remember Martha? — Jesus told her that “one thing” was needful: to be with him. That one thing is grace, the grace to be where Jesus is, to follow him and to accept what he offers: without this grace all the good deeds in the world will get you nowhere. But with this grace, we can go anywhere our Lord would have us go! Because he is marking the way before us, and all we have to do is be free enough to follow him.

This is the wonder of grace: It is impossible for us to save ourselves, but God, through grace, will save anybody who wants to be saved. With God’s grace, we need do only one thing: accept Christ’s invitation to follow him to the banquet. Light on our feet, we can follow him down the king’s highway, empty-handed and open-handed, ready to help our brothers and sisters, ready to do good, not because we win heaven thereby, but because the gracious good news of God is too good to keep to ourselves— and the more of it we give away the more of it we seem to have.

We have a choice to make. Would you rather enter into life empty-handed, or spend eternity with the camels parked outside — the camels who can’t fit through the gate? I think I know the answer. I know where I want to be, and I think you do too. “Where he leads me I will follow...”

So as you journey through this world, stay light on your feet and keep your hands free. Don’t stop doing good, but once you’ve done it, forget about it and put it down. You remember what Jesus said that in doing good we ought not let our left hand know what our right hand is doing. Don’t carry your good deeds around; keep both hands free to take Jesus’ hands in yours when he reaches down into the grave to lift you up to the risen life. If you do have too many possessions, if wealth is getting in your way, for the love of God, put it down. If you are conscious of your own good works, if you feel like maybe God owes you something because of your goodness, then for the love of God, and goodness gracious, put it down. If you carry anything, anything at all, then for the love of God let it be nothing other than the cross of Christ, the cross you take up each day as you follow him on the road that leads to the heavenly kingdom of his Father, to whom as is most justly due, we now ascribe all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and for evermore.+

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The Fire Alarm

SJF • Epiphany 3b 2009 • Tobias Haller BSG
And immediately they left their nets and followed him.+

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, once said that the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech does not give one the right to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater. He was assuming, of course, that there was no fire. It would indeed be a dangerous prank to shout “Fire” in any crowded place — when there is no fire. People could be seriously injured, maybe even killed, in the panic.

But what if there is a fire? What if there is some imminent danger and you see it? What do the signs in the subway warn us? “Si ves algo, di algo — if you see something, say something.” Surely it is incumbent upon you to do something to warn those around you of danger they — and you — are in, and shouting might just be the best way to do it. This is part of our understanding of civic duty — the responsibility we bear for one another. And it is no accident that the ancient rabbis taught that one of the principle failings of the wicked city of Sodom was precisely that people there did not look after one another, did not look out for others. It was said that the people of that wicked town were the sort who if they saw both your and their house on fire, would fight the fire at their own house but leave yours to burn.

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In today’s Gospel Jesus bursts upon the scene fresh from his baptism and temptation in the wilderness, which in the headlong style of Mark’s Gospel have taken up only the first thirteen verses. We are hardly off the first page, and yet the story presses on. The story has hardly begun and here is Jesus storming in and crying out, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And immediately, to use one of Mark’s favorite words, immediately he calls those four disciples — Simon, Andrew, our own patron James and his brother John — and immediately they follow him, leaving behind their nets, their boats, and in the case of the two sons of Zebedee, their bewildered father and the hired servants. It is as if Jesus has burst into the crowded theater and shouted, “Fire!” and the audience has jumped up and run for the exits, tossing buckets of popcorn in the air and leaving their coats and handbags behind in the rush to escape the disaster.

That is the immediacy with which Jesus delivered his message, and the immediacy with which the received it — at least by some of those who heard it. And let us recall what “immediate” means — with nothing in between, no intermission, no transition or connection. Those who follow Jesus will leave behind all the connections to their former lives: their nets, their boats, even their families. They will be transformed into disciples, and given a new task, to fish for people. And it happens all at once, without preparation or warning or transition. Jesus calls; they follow; no questions asked — immediately.

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It seems strange then to turn to our reading from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. In contrast with the panicked immediacy of Mark’s gospel it is as if Saint Paul is saying, “Not so fast!” He says, “Let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned,” and later, “Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.” Could it be, after Jesus calls out, “Fire!” that Paul should counter, “Sorry folks; false alarm”? Of course not, and if we look more closely at what Paul is saying, we can learn that far from contradicting Jesus’ gospel, Paul’s warning is — in its own way — a realization of it.

Paul is not saying, ignore the call of Christ: on the contrary Paul is saying that Christ is calling at least some of the Corinthians to do what they are already doing, because that is what God wants. Let each of you lead the life, he says, that the Lord assigned, and the state in which God has called you.

While Jesus did and does call some to leave their nets and boats and families behind to follow him as disciples on the road, Paul assures the Corinthians that Jesus also calls some people — in fact most people — to stay right where they are, right as they are, to “bloom where they are planted” as the old saying goes. Paul assures us that God calls some to stay put and do the work God has given them to do with singleness of heart, and to do that work with the newly discovered commission that it is God’s work, and that the kingdom needs those who toil at home as much as it needs those who toil on the road. And what could be more immediate than continuation? Continuing to do God’s work without intermission, being assured at last that this is the task the Lord has assigned? Discipleship takes many forms: for some it means totally changing their lives, for others, a deeper commitment to the life they already lead.

For what matters ultimately is how one’s heart stands with God, how well one’s heart is attuned to God’s will for each and every one of us. The Corinthian congregation was being split apart by some troublemakers who were insisting that in order for Gentile men to become Christian they had to be circumcised. Others felt that anyone who had given in to that teaching had betrayed the faith, and should seek to remove the marks of circumcision. It is hard for us to imagine the church being torn apart over such matters, though we have been through many similar debates in recent years, which centuries or decades from now may seem just as absurd as the circumcision argument did to Saint Paul. “Circumcision is nothing, uncircumcision is nothing,” Paul affirms, “but obeying the commandments of God is everything. Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called.” The problem, of course, as I’m sure some of the Corinthians must have said to Paul, is that the Scripture was clear. The Scripture demanded circumcision of any Gentile male who wanted to be part of the holy people, anyone who wanted to eat of the Passover. But as Paul would also say to the Corinthians, “That was then; this is now. Since Christ has come, he is our Passover who has been sacrificed for us. Things have changed, and Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to hear God’s call to them in the blood of Jesus, over the noise of their squabbles — and they squabbled over just about everything, spending their time in useless controversies instead of building up the church for which Christ died and rose again, and to whom he gave his body and his blood. That is the thing Paul keeps trying to call them back to again and again — the significance of that holy meal, the Holy Eucharist. But, of course, they even argued about that!

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This is a powerful lesson for us. This is a lesson for us as a congregation, and a lesson for all Christian congregations, a warning not to act like the Corinthians and let the church fall apart over matters about which God doesn’t give a hoot.

But there is also a lesson for us as individuals. Some of us will be called to life-changing tasks, like the fishermen by the sea-side, called to follow Jesus by leaving behind the nets of entanglement with the old life, abandoning the boats that provided security and livelihood, and even forsaking the comfort and support of family and home. Other of us, and if we can judge from Paul it will be the majority, will be called to follow Jesus by finding his commandments for us in our hearts, by discovering, like little Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” that there’s no place like home, and that we can be most effective blooming where we’re planted, bearing fruit in season and flourishing with leaves that do not wither.

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Downstairs in my office is a picture of a liturgy in this church from about 1985, and I can see myself in it, and I’m sitting right there. Father Basil Law is opposite on the other side, as Bishop Paul Moore preaches in the aisle. I had no idea at the time that God would call me one day to follow him on a path that would lead me to seminary and to priesthood, and a parish up in Yonkers; but then by his grace to be planted right back here just a few feet from where I was almost 25 years ago!

But that is how the call of God works sometimes. Sometimes when God yells out “Fire” you will discover that the fire is in your own heart, and it is a fire God doesn’t want you to put out, but to share, and God will help you find the place to share it best, if you will let him. That is what Paul tried to tell the difficult Corinthians, that by squabbling over the gift they were destroying it, like peevish children who fight over a toy and end up breaking it beyond repair, and neither of them can enjoy it. God calls us, all of us and each of us, sometimes to journey, sometimes to remain, but always to be his. God calls us each by name as I said two weeks ago, and gives us each a task as I said last week. He knows our going out and our coming in, our rising up to follow on the road, or our sitting down to work where we are. May we — each of us and all of us — answer his call, be faithful to our task, and ever conscious of his presence, the burning of the Holy Spirit, the fire of his love in our hearts; to whom we give — as Father Basil Law was always wont to say from this pulpit — as is most justly due, all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and forever more.+

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Five Kings

SJF • Christmas 2 2008 • Tobias Haller BSG
Herod secretly called for the wise men…and 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…”

In the dark early days of World War II, in the midst of the blitz and the Battle of Britain, leading politicians in England wanted to send the royal family away somewhere safe, away from London, which was well within the range of German bombers and the even more frightening terror-weapons. Some suggested they go to the country, to Windsor, or even further North to Scotland, others argued they would really be safest in Canada. The Royals refused, however, and the Queen — whom most of us would later know as the “Queen Mum” — won the hearts of the Eastenders when, after Buckingham Palace was bombed, she said that she finally could say in all truth that she was a Londoner, and look the East End in the face.

And look she and her husband the king did. Not only did King George VI and his Queen stay in London, but they went to the East End and the docklands to inspect the damage done by the bombs and rockets that had ravaged the heart of London’s port and center of trade. One day when King George was inspecting a bombed-out building, sympathizing with the survivors and mourning their losses with them, a frail old man came up to him, and after looking carefully into his face for a long while, pronounced his judgment: “You are a good King.”

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Today’s gospel tells us of several kings of different sorts, but only one of them is truly a Good King. We have “five kings” in our gospel today. King Herod the Great, the tyrant sitting uneasily on his throne in the very last years of his long and terrible reign; the so-called “Three Kings,” the wise men — who really are not kings at all, and the Scripture doesn’t even actually say there were three of them — and finally the newborn King, Jesus the Christ Child. And although only he deserves the title of Good King — since he is truly a king and truly good — we can learn something from all of the characters in our gospel story today.

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First the King who isn’t good: Herod the Great, he was called, and I guess he’s a fine example of how one can become great without being good. He ruled his land with an iron fist; he reconstructed Palestine along the model of a Graeco-Roman imperial state. He rebuilt the Temple in all its glory. He built mighty fortresses and palaces up and down the length of the country — including the great palace fortress at Masada that many years later would become the last holdout of Jewish rebellion against Rome.

But alongside all of these great works, you have to set the character of the man who worked them: and this is where all question of goodness evaporates. Herod the Great was a heartless murderer: so paranoid about his throne that he killed his own son when he thought he posed a threat. The Roman emperor Augustus, contrasting Herod’s murderous capacity with his surmised observance of Jewish food laws, said, “I’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son!” And we know from our own Scripture the terrible story of what Herod did when the Wise Men didn’t come back to give him the precise identity of the Christ Child: he murdered all the little boys of Bethlehem, horribly slaughtering the innocents to protect the throne he was so fearful of leaving, the throne where he died. He was a king, all right, but very far from being a good one.

The lesson for us in this, is always to keep clear in our minds the terrible difference between being great and being good — that fame and power gained at the expense of others will bring only grief and pain in the end.

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Then come these wise men — these magi who are clearly good, but who definitely aren’t kings. First of all, note that unlike Herod, who is so jealous of his throne that he won’t leave it, and sends out agents to do his dirty work — the wise men travel: they move. They’ve got the virtue of get up and go! When they see the sign of the star, they follow it; and they only rejoice when they reach their goal, when the star finally stops over the house where the child is found.

So the first part of their goodness is reflected in their willingness to change, their willingness to move, and their unwillingness to stop until they reach the goal, until they come to the feet of the one before whom they kneel in adoration and homage. The second part of their goodness is shown in what they give up: unlike Herod who didn’t want to give up anything, they freely offer their precious gifts to the Christ Child, they open their treasures and offer them, freely and without compulsion. Finally, the third part of their goodness is shown in how they keep the secret. Contrary to Herod’s explicit instructions, they do not return to him, but go back to their homes by another way, rejoicing they have been blessed, and unwilling to collaborate with evil against good.

The lesson for us in this is plain: God wants three kinds of freedom for us: freedom from being so attached to things that we cannot move where he calls us, freedom to give up our treasures for his use, and freedom to disobey the evil powers of this world when they seek to co-opt us to their ends.

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Finally the Christ Child, the center around whom this whole story revolves: he is the one who is both a King and Good. And I want to relate his goodness back to the king with which I started this sermon: King George VI, who remained in London through the blitz, and visited the East End to be with his people. Jesus the King of Heaven came to us his people in the midst of the war of sin, he came to be with us at our lowest and our worst, came to us bombed out and injured, wounded and incapacitated by sin, came to be with us and to lift us up out of the disaster into which we’d gotten ourselves.

He did not remain isolated from us, in glory at the right hand of the Father, dwelling in light inaccessible; but he came to us, the wisdom and revelation of God, to enlighten the eyes of our hearts. He did not leave us as orphans, but came to us to be our brother, so that we too could be adopted children of his Father in heaven, the one he taught us to call “Our Father” too. And as heirs with him of eternal life, he endowed us with the riches of his glorious inheritance.

The Good King came to us in our need, when we were beset by sin and troubled by the tyranny of evil; the Good King came to us as a child, as a brother, came to our rescue and our aid. Let us give thanks to him this Christmastide, and through the whole year long, praising his holy Name, now and forever, even Jesus Christ, our Lord.+

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