Surprise Surprise Surprise

God has many surprises in store for us, and don't we love to be surprised!

Proper 6b 2015 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

We heard in last week’s Scripture readings about how the people of Israel rejected God and asked to have a king instead. Samuel agreed, and Saul became king, but as we can see from today’s reading it didn’t take very long for the glow to fade from this particular rosebud. King Saul enjoyed a very short honeymoon, and things quickly went from bad to worse. It got so bad that God had to step in, and even while Saul was still king, set about choosing someone else to take over when the inevitable total collapse of Saul’s leadership would come to pass.

This is one of the few sections of First Samuel that we have heard in our Sunday lessons, but this time around it comes with a different twist, given the other readings that accompany it. And that twist is about the power of God to surprise even a prophet, even a saint, even the church itself.

The big surprise for Samuel — as we’ve heard before when this passage comes up — is that for king number two God doesn’t want another king like Saul. Saul is a kind of Hebrew Hercules, a strong-man military leader; but this time around, God chooses the runt of the litter, the youngest of all of Jesse’s sons; not big tall Eliab, high of stature, but the shepherd boy David — the one even his own father Jesse doesn’t think is a likely candidate to throw his yarmulke into the ring and call him home from keeping the sheep. But when the boy finally comes, God lets Samuel know that this is the one God chooses to be the new king — and Samuel anoints him in the presence of all his brothers and his father.

In addition to perhaps reminding us of the pile-up of presidential candidates we see around this time every four years, this passage should also remind us of another Scripture about younger brothers and older brothers. We read one, and studied in it in Bible Study not too long ago — the one where Joseph’s dreams are realized and he stands before his father and his brothers as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. Does that ring a bell? This is a theme that runs through Scripture — God favoring the younger over the older: Abel over Cain, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his brothers and David over his, and even, you might note, Jesus over John the Baptist (though they were more distant relatives than brothers. Jesus was younger than John by six months; and as John himself finally had to admit, “He must increase; I must decrease.”)

Still, in spite of how often it happens throughout the Scripture, this seems to come as a constant surprise — that God is not impressed with age or power or strength, but on the willingness to do as God says, and respond to God’s call. That shouldn’t surprise us, and more than that it shouldn’t have surprised Samuel or Jesse. Maybe it’s just that God knows his children, and that deep down we love surprises. And like a child who never tires of peek-a-boo, so too we always respond to God’s surprising grace, no matter how often God bestows it.

In this game of divine peek-a-boo we do, to a large extent, have our eyes closed — walking by faith and not by sight — so that when God does tell us to open our eyes and behold the surprise, we can rejoice like the children of God we are. For if anyone is in Christ — which is what it means to be a child of God — there is a new creation: we are reborn in Christ. Everything old has passed away; and see — peek-a-boo — everything has become new.

Saint Paul, while still known as Saul, experienced this himself on the road to Damascus; he thought he had God in his hip-pocket and was doing what God wanted by arresting the first Christians and sending them off to prison. He was no better than his namesake Saul the king, who thought God wanted sacrifice instead of obedience — Saul the king and Saul who later became Paul just couldn’t understand and couldn’t follow directions! God gave the second Saul a second chance — showing him in a surprising flash, a flash that blinded him for a time, how wrong he had been about his religion and his God. And, peek-a-boo, the scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight — and he saw the whole new-created world with new eyes. And everything looked new. Not just because it was new, but because he was new: he was reborn.

God is always out to surprise us, and Jesus shows us one more way God does so in the parables of the sower and of the mustard seed. The first parable emphasizes the hiddenness of God’s subterranean working. The one who sows the seeds scatters them — but does not know how it is that the seeds sprout and grow. It happens out of sight. He knows when they have grown, however, and he eagerly sets about the work of the harvest. Now that’s not so surprising, though it does emphasize that the one who sows does so in faith and not by sight — that is, much of the sprouting and growth is underground, and it is only when the stalk, the head, and the grain appear that he can truly rejoice in this new creation.

So Jesus follows up with a truly amazing parable — as if you were to take a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, and plant it, but instead of a mustard plant growing up — a mustard plant which is a bush a few feet high — up sprouts a mighty tree so big that birds can build nests in it. I mentioned Cinderella in connection with our readings last week — but this week it’s more like Jack and the Beanstalk! You wake up and look out your window and instead of a shrub you see a gigantic tree reaching for the heavens. As Jim Nabors used to say, Surprise, surprise, surprise! The kingdom of heaven is never what you expect, it is always an amazing surprise.

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Do we still have the capacity to be surprised by the grace of God? Have we become blase or accustomed to the same-old same-old and lost the wonder a child experiences when Grandma plays peek-a-boo — or more importantly, when God brings us a personal miracle, whether of healing from disease, or being delivered from an accident, or just being able to wake up in the morning and get out of bed! Isn’t that a miracle enough to give thanks for — that each new day is a new creation, and if we will let it everything will become new for us in that day? For every day is “the day that the Lord hath made” if we will open the eyes of our faith and behold God at work in every instant of our lives — every day in every way: in our journeys and our resting places, in our sitting down and rising up again. If only we can know of God’s presence, not just in the parts where our eyes are open and we can see, but even, and maybe especially, as we sleep and the deep subterranean work of God goes on we know not how, germinating and sprouting underground but preparing to burst forth in an avalanche of blessing at the harvest time? We may have to, from time to time, cry our eyes out when we go out carrying the seed; but Oh! how we can rejoice when we behold the harvest and bring in the sheaves!

Keep that spirit of readiness, my friends, that willingness to be surprised by the grace of God as it fills and forms your life — for without that grace we can do nothing at all. But with it — surprise, surprise, surprise: all that we do can be done to God’s glory, and to the praise of God’s most holy Name, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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Spirit of Adoption

Trinity B 2015 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.

Most of us learn early on where babies come from. Our parents may have tried to keep us in the dark for a time in our early childhood, with stories of deliveries by stork or finding children under the leaves of the cabbage patch, but soon enough we are ushered into the company of the birds and the bees, if not something more explicit. The long and the short of it, as we ultimately learn, is that babies come from their parents — from their father and mother. This is the most elementary of the “facts of life.”

As far as we know, there are two only exceptions to this rule, and both of them are in the Bible. The first appears in the second chapter of Genesis. It tells us that Eve — whom Adam calls the “Mother of all living” had no mother herself; she came from Adam’s side. You all remember the story: God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone, and cast him into a deep sleep; then God took that rib from his side and made it into the one designed as Adam’s companion — bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

The second exception to the general rule about fathers and mothers concerns the second Adam — Jesus Christ. Just as Eve came out of Adam without a mother being involved, so too Jesus was born of the flesh of the Virgin Mary without no earthly father being involved — he was conceived by God, of the flesh of the Virgin Mary, working through the power of the Holy Spirit.

These are, as I said, exceptional instances. Everyone else who has ever lived is born of a father and a mother, and in many cases — perhaps most, but certainly not all — children are also raised by their father and their mother. There are many circumstances in which children are not raised by one or both of their biological parents. Tragedies can happen, leaving the child as an orphan. Other unfortunate events can also take place, and many families experience divorce or separation which often leaves the children in a painful and delicate situation. And in both of these and in many other cases, the concept of adoption comes in. Someone who is not the child’s biological father or mother takes the child as their own — in some cases joining with a remaining biological parent, or in some cases with a new couple replacing both of the child’s original parents — and in each case putting the child under their protection and in their care. This is legally recognized, an action that has existed in many human cultures for thousands of years — for the reality that children are sometimes left without one or both parents has been true for as long as there have been human families.

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But just as there are few exceptions to the rule of parenthood and the facts of life, there is one exceptional human family into which no one is ever born, and in which every single member is adopted — and that is the church, the family of God. Although people will sometimes say, “I was born an Anglican,” that is not literally true. No one is born a Christian of any sort — you become one through baptism. As Jesus says in John’s Gospel, you join that household of God by water and the Holy Spirit; that is the way into this “kingdom of God.” All of us are adopted into God’s family, the church. None of us is here by nature of our birth. (Although it does help if our biological or adoptive parents — your family, your grandparents — are already members of the church, and they, together with the godparents, see to it that you are baptized — brought into the church at an early age; so the earthly family is important in extending the heavenly family.)

Becoming a member of the kingdom of God is not like being born the citizen of a nation — that is more or less automatic. If you are born in the United States of America — with a very few special exceptions, like a diplomat from another country whose wife may have a child here in the US — with those few exceptions you are automatically a United States citizen. But becoming a member of the household of God, the family of God, the kingdom of God, is a process more like that required to become an American citizen if you were born in another country. All us born in this earthly realm have to apply for citizenship in the heavenly one. We need the water and the Holy Spirit to become citizens of the kingdom of God.

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I mentioned that our biological or adopted family, and the already existing family of the church, play a role in this process; the most important role — for it is through this family that the family grows. But supporting this work, the work of God which we could not do on our own — is the work of God working through us, through the power of the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: which is one of the reasons that that’s how we baptize — those are the words we use. We baptize in the name of the Holy Trinity, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Trinity is the major worker in this — we’re just the assistants.

That short reading from the Letter of Paul to the Romans sums this up in a few choice words. Notice how all three persons of the Holy Trinity are involved. The Holy Spirit is the primary agent in this work — and I use the word agent as I would to describe someone who assists me in obtaining citizenship or arranging for an adoption. Any of you who have done either of those things knows the amount of paperwork you need to go through, and how helpful and even necessary it is to have an agent working with you, to help you in that process. The Holy Spirit is our great helper: we sing about “God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come...” Well, the Holy Spirit is the primary helper, the Comforter, the one who works through us and with us to help us do all God aks of us. And that begins, right at the start, at Baptism. The Holy Spirit helps guide through the process, to set up all that is needed. The text of Romans uses the term “adoption” specifically — and it is the Holy Spirit that Paul calls “the spirit of adoption,” the one who cries out through us, naming the one whom we desire to be our parent — one who is not our parent by nature but only by choice and adoption — as the Holy Spirit, working in us, gives us the power to call out, “Abba! Father!” to God above — something we would have no right to do on our own, if the Holy Spirit were not working within us. This is a cry that is part of the testimony, the documentation, in order to be adopted by our new Father in heaven, becoming God’s children.

And, so the text tells us, if children, then heirs — heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. Just as an adopted child becomes an inheritor in the estate of her adoptive parents, so too do Christians become inheritors along with their new brother, the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who becomes our brother when we are joined into his family through baptism.

So it is that all three — God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — are involved in this work of adoption, and it is through their action — working through the church, the family of God — that we are added to this great assembled body that is the Body of Christ; the kingdom of God, the family of God.

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And this action of the church, the family of God, through which God acts by means of the Spirit, brings me to my last point. Once you have become a member of this new family, you are expected to take on new responsibilities— there are chores to do in any household, and the household of God is no different.

And it isn’t as if some of us were the natural children and all the others were like the step-children, like Cinderella who got all the dirty jobs and no chance to go to the ball — until she was aided by her fairy godmother (and isn’t it interesting that even in a fairy tale the language of baptism makes its way into this story of a girl who starts out cleaning up the fireplace, but rises to become a princess! The godmother is the crucial figure in that story.) No, in God’s family all of us are stepchildren, but all have also been blessed by the Holy Spirit, the BGE: the Best Godmother Ever, and raised from the cinders to the throne, brought into the family of God, heirs with Christ, joint-heirs, princes and princesses each and every one of us in the kingdom of God.

But we still have work to do — chores in this household, even for the royals, such as us. You’ve seen them on TV: Harry and William have their jobs to do; they’re out there dedicating supermarkets, opening bridges, christening boats — everybody’s got a job no matter how royal they are. And that counts for all of us too, in this royal kingdom of God, in which we are part of the royal family.

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Fortunately the Spirit continues to help us in this work. The Spirit may be like a wind that blows where it chooses, so that we hear the sound but cannot tell its source or destination, but when we are moved by that Spirit we share in its motion, we can sense its direction. You can’t tell where the wind is blowing all by itself; but if you see a leaf flying through the air, you can tell that’s the way the wind is blowing. And so it is with those who are moved by the Spirit — when we are moved by the Spirit we can tell where we are moving, and we can tell where we are going. That’s what God does for us: invisible and yet made seen by the movement of the church itself.

The primary chore of this church, this royal family, is to serve as God’s hands and feet, as each of us, filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, spread God’s word and bring others into this household, this royal family, helping the kingdom to grow by acting as agents ourselves, agents of God filling up the number of those to be adopted. Our task is to assist others to be made citizens in God’s kingdom, new princes and princesses in God’s royal family — the one into which no one is born, but where all are welcome.

This is our task, my friends — you and I and all of God’s children by adoption, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ — to spread the word as free and as far as the invisible wind. This is our mission — our assignment and our task, our chore in the household of God. May the Lord find us hard at work when he comes in the glory of his kingdom.+

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Lift High the Cross

The cross he bore is life and health -- to us -- though shame and death to him.

Lent 4b 2015 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

Today we reach the midpoint of our Lenten journey. It marks a turning point and a resting place. I’m sure we’ve all seen the signs on the turnpikes or superhighways alerting us to the service area coming up, or those spots that are set aside for the long-distance truckers to pull off the road when they find themselves getting drowsy. We are also familiar with the sign announcing a scenic view — a spot off the road set aside for people to pull over and appreciate the countryside, the lake, or the mountain view. All of these special spots are indicated by a sign of some kind.

One of the signs that marks this Sunday as special is the color code — we switch from purple to rose for this Fourth Sunday in Lent. We might think of it as the color of a rosy sunset, before we plunge into the deeper evening darkness of the last half of the Lenten season leading up to the terrible events we commemorate on Good Friday, when the sky grows dark and the Son of God breathes his last.

But what points us towards Good Friday is the very sign we are reminded of today: and that is the cross itself. Jesus tells the crowds that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so too the Son of Man will be lifted up. To fill in the background we are treated today to the passage from the Book of Numbers. This passage that gives us the backstory about this serpent that Moses lifts up. The wandering Israelites become inpatient, and complain about the quality of the food that God has provided (notice how foolishly ungrateful and inconsistent they are when they say there is no food — and we hate this food!). God punishes them by sending poisonous serpents to bite them, and when Moses intercedes, God instructs him to make a bronze replica of a poisonous serpent and set it on a pole. And when anyone who has been bitten by one of the real serpents looks at this bronze replica they will be healed and live.

Jesus applies this incident to himself — he promises that the Son of Man will be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him will be saved and have eternal life. He is referring, of course, to the cross upon which he will offer the supreme sacrifice of himself for the sake of the whole world. Why? Because, as probably the most quoted verse of Scripture puts it, “because God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him.” This is what Jesus came for, this is what Jesus was born for, and this is why he will die — not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. The world has rejected God’s gifts and been stung by the poisonous serpent of ingratitude, and it is only by looking upon the Son of God, given for us as the greatest gift, that we can be healed. And the sign that marks this gift, this saving gift for the good of the whole world, is the cross.

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Sometimes a sign indicates ownership or possession. Along many a country road you will see signs on the trees saying, “no trespassing.” And you might well wonder, what are they so worried about out here in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes the sign of ownership or possession is symbolic and consists in planting a flag — why, there’s even a flag up on the moon; and I can guarantee you there will probably be no more trespassers there than there are in most of those remote country woods.

The sign of the cross fulfills a similar function — especially when we use it in baptism. Every time I baptize a child, I also mark their forehead with holy oil, making the sign of the cross and saying, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” I like to think that when I make that same sign of the cross on people’s foreheads on Ash Wednesday that I am dusting for God’s fingerprint — the cross is already there and those ashes only make it show up so that it can be seen: truly a sign that tells you something about the one who bears it. It tells us who we belong to — the one who bought us with his own precious blood; the one who gave us life by his death, who healed us by his wounds.

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As the old hymn says, “The cross he bore is life and health” — to us — “though shame and death to him.” We were worse than just snake-bitten — and I can tell you from personal experience, a lot worse than cat-bitten! — we were, as Paul told the Ephesians, dead through our trespasses. We had not just pouted and frowned and complained about the food. We were Gentile sinners — by nature children of wrath, as Saint Paul puts it. We were not just occasional lawbreakers but renegades and outlaws, without any hope of salvation or even all that much interest in it.

Yet God, “who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” And this is all by grace, all by a free gift from God to us; not because of anything we did or anything we deserved, but just because God loved us, so loved us that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. And God set up the sign for all who choose to turn towards it to see and behold — — that Good Friday two millennia ago when the Son of Man was lifted from the earth, so that any and all people could behold him in his sorrow and his glory.

Signs do many things. I’m old enough to remember the signs for the fallout shelters when everyone was worried an atomic war might break out any day. There are signs that tell you to stop and there are signs that tell you to yield. There are signs that tell you where to get a good deal on a used car, and there are signs that warn you not to drink the water in the pond because it is deadly poison. A sign can save your life.

The cross is such a sign. It is a shelter from the stormy blast, whether that blast is an atomic bomb or a frigid wind. It is a sign that tells you to stop — to stop your foolishness and look and listen and see and hear that the train is bearing down on you and will wreck you if you don’t get off the tracks. It is a sign that tells you to yield to the one to whom all obedience is due. It is a sign that points you to the best deal you will ever get in your life — salvation for free, without a price to be paid by you because someone else has paid it for you, with his own shame and death.

It is the cross, upon which the Son of Man was lifted up. May we who bear his name as Christians never fear to bear that cross, and trust in it, as the emblem and sign of our redemption and salvation. Lift high the Cross, my friends, lift it high, every day of your life, every way that you can — for in doing so you may call others to this banner, where they too may find shelter, peace, and life.+

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Through What Door?

Each of us has come on board this ark of salvation, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes in search of answers.

SJF • Lent 1b • Tobias S Haller BSG
God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you.

My friend Peter — named for the saint, of course — entered into Christ through a little blue door. He came to Columbia University in the late sixties as a graduate student, with the usual doubts and hopes of young men of that age, and that time and that place. People were saying that God was dead — yet the church still seemed to have some utility. The civil rights struggle showed the church was still one of the few things still alive and kicking against a world whose heart it seems had grown cold.

Peter was an intelligent young man, with a passion for justice and civil rights, and a cultured taste in art and music — he was studying medieval literature. But he wanted to learn more about the church before he got too involved with this whole “religion” thing.

And so he called on his neighborhood parish church, which, if you know Columbia will know just happens to be the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine. Given his intellect, passion for civil rights, and his taste for art, the choice was natural: the Episcopal Church was considered “the thinking person’s church” and the Cathedral leaders had taken a strong stand for civil rights, at the cost of a few wealthy donors. And there was no denying the beauty of that building, even in its unfinished state — and it’s still unfinished fifty years later!

Peter called the and they connected him with Canon West, who, the receptionist thought, would be the best person to talk with him about religion. Peter found Canon West much too busy to see him that week, but West told him that if he would come to the little blue door he would find half-way up the cathedral on the southern side at about 10:45 next Sunday morning he might have some time to talk with him about religion.

Peter had come of age in a culture that had forgotten what it is that goes on in cathedrals on Sundays at about 10:45, so he was caught short went through that little blue door into that cavernous space and asked for Canon West. Before he knew what was happening, he was whisked into the sacristy; many helping hands vested and girded him and dressed him up in an acolyte’s outfit, then handed him a one of the massive crucifixes that they use there at the Cathedral — and they weigh about 70 pounds! — and pushed him towards the head of a procession, maintained in place by Canon West’s stern eye and finger-snaps, and the nods, gestures and elbows of more experienced servers at the altar.

Peter was confused, but also furious, but he dared not challenge the imposing Canon West — with his bald head, black goatee and long black cape, who knows what powers might be at his disposal? Even had he dared, before he could protest, he was swept up in the worship — right at the head of the procession, along with at least three more crosses behind him, along with the embroidered banners that emerged from clouds of incense, floating like the masts and sails of ancient dream-ships navigating the valleys of those towering rough-hewn rock columns and walls. The roar of the organ resounded in the caverns of that space, the waves and wash of breakers of sound resounded and echoed back and forth — after all, the Cathedral is an eighth of a mile long; ranks of choristers and clergy in vestments ancient and modern, gloriously colorful, gold and scarlet; and there was Peter right in front — just behind the man with the incense-pot swinging and twirling the prayers of the saints up and up into that now invisible dome — and the congregation bowing in waves as he passed with that cross, as if pressed down by the weight of glory he was carrying.

And all the while all he could think was, “I’ll kill him!”

When the worship ended, as he was hanging up the borrowed vestment, still quivering with rage and disorientation, Canon West came up behind him, and laid a bony hand on his shoulder. The old priest spun him around, fixed him with a stern look, out from underneath those bushy eyebrows, and said, “Now, my boy, I’m prepared to talk to you about our religion.”

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Lent is upon us, a time in the church year when we raise the intensity a notch in our efforts to think about our religion. I’m sure all of us here could tell a tale about how we got here — through what little blue door each of us passed to enter the ark of salvation. That’s what it is, you know, this church of ours. It was prefigured, as Saint Peter tells us, in the ark in which Noah and his family were kept safe amidst the waters of the flood. Our church is an ark. As I have pointed out before, churches are often built like upside-down boats: if you look up to our ceiling there, in that part of the church called the “nave” — which also betrays its naval origins — you’ll see that the ribs of a boat’s hull have become the ribs that hold up our roof.

Each of us could tell how we boarded this upside-down boat, through what little blue — or red — door — even if we were carried in kicking and screaming when we were just a few weeks old. And yet here we are, the company of the baptized, some of you baptized right here in this font — I know, because I was the one that did it! We are gathered here together in this boat, a boat that has no first or second class passengers, no steerage for the poor, nor staterooms for the rich — but just one big lifeboat!

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It may seem strange to start the season of Lent with Scriptures all of which refer to baptism either directly or figuratively — since by tradition Lent is the one time of the year during which baptisms are not performed! But Lent anciently was the time when people were prepared for baptism at Easter; it was during these weeks that they studied, and fasted, and prayed to be ready to be baptized at the Great Vigil of Easter. And so we begin our Lent reminded of baptism, and of the fact that the church — this church, not just the building, not just the upside-down boat, but we the people are the company of the baptized, and it is worth reflecting on what it means to be on board this boat — and to reflect on where this boat is heading.

So this year, I want to use our Lent together to focus on what it means to be the church — this gathering of people who have been through the little blue door, a little red door, who have been washed in the waters of baptism, and fed with the bread of heaven. For this is how it begins, my friends — in the church as the ark of salvation. Now, some might be tempted to ask, “Isn’t there salvation outside the church?” well, it is not for me to speculate on God’s grace, or to place limits upon it. God can and will save whomever and however God pleases to do so. Is there salvation outside the ark of the church, outside the lifeboat? I hope so — there may be some good swimmers out there! But I know that there is salvation inside the ark of the church, inside the lifeboat; and it is my calling and my task — as it is yours, my friends — to gather up people floating out there in life jackets before they freeze to death!

We will not do this merely by talking to them about religion — there is plenty of talk about religion out there, my friends, and much of it probably keeps people away from church rather than bringing them to it. No, the answer is to invite them here, through our little red door, into this lifeboat, the one we know, where we can hear words about religion — but more importantly be dressed in a new garment, given a cross to bear, hear the music and the song and join in it too, and be fed with the bread and nourished with the wine, and not just hear words about God but give thanks to the Word of God — Jesus the Christ.

This is the Gospel Cruise my friends: the ark of salvation right on the corner of Jerome Avenue and 190th St in the Beautiful Bronx — as unbelievable and specific as God being born in a stable, and as wonderful and as gracious as being pulled from freezing water into a lifeboat.

This is where it all starts my friends — there will be time to talk about it later; but those who want assurance of salvation will first come on board.

When they have gone through the little door, blue or red, been clothed anew with the garment of baptism, and have carried the cross while rows of their sisters and brothers bow in reverence to the powerful symbol of the unspoken and unspeakable Word above all words and worlds — then, as Canon West said, there will be time to talk about our religion.+

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God's Justice Isn't Ours

thank God we don't get what we deserve... (apologies for the quality of the sound this week. This was recorded on the organ bench rather than the pulpit...)

SJF • Proper 20a • Tobias S Haller BSG
The landowner said, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

In spite of the fact that we’ve had a mild summer, it’s a little muggy today, and all things considered I can still sympathize with the workers in our gospel this morning who had to bear the burden of that long day and that scorching heat. So, to prepare for the coming fall season — it starts tonight! — and the winter that will no doubt be close on its heels, let me to remind you of a scene from one of my favorite winter movies, A Christmas Carol. I’m thinking of a scene from Scrooge’s younger days, when his employer, Mr. Fezziwig, throws the annual Christmas party for the workers at his warehouse. The Ghost of Christmas Past notes Scrooge’s pleasure at the festivity, and comments, “A small matter to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.” When Scrooge protests that it isn’t small, the Ghost reminds him, “Why! Is it not! He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves your praise?” Scrooge responds, more like his youthful former self than the cold mean thing he has become, and says, “The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” And even as he says those words, he realizes how much he has changed since those happy days, before money became the golden idol of his worship, and as he feels the Spirit’s stern look upon him, he lowers his head in shame.

Well, in our gospel today we see a man very much like Mr. Fezziwig — the landowner in the gospel is eager to employ people, but also generous even to those employed only for a fraction of the day. Had he been like Scrooge, you had better believe he would have divided up those wages according to the hours worked, and the latecomers would have been pro-rated at only a fraction of a day’s wage. But this landowner is generous, and he does as he chooses with what he has.

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But wait a minute. If he is really so generous — as he describes himself — why doesn’t he give those who worked all day long an extra bonus? Why is it that they just get what they bargained for, while the latecomers get more than their fair share? For those who worked all day in the heat of the sun, and only get that agreed-upon daily wage, this does not appear to be generosity — at least not to them! — but favoritism. As far as they are concerned, it simply isn’t fair.

And you know what? They are right; it isn’t fair; but the landowner doesn’t claim to be fair — no, he says he is generous. And that, my friends, is the point of the parable.

Generosity isn’t about giving everyone what they deserve, or more than they deserve, but about the freedom of the giver to give out of his abundance to whomever he chooses — freely, not under constraint as if the giver were paying a debt, but solely because the giver wishes to give.

Now of course, this is a parable; and like all parables in this one Jesus is trying to tell us something about God and our relationship to God — what God’s kingdom is like. He is telling us about God’s generosity, as well as reminding us about human envy, how easy it is to presume upon generosity, to expect it, to resent it when others receive it and ourselves not.

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The lectionary pairs this gospel with the story of the Israelites complaining against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness of the Exodus. There is a Yiddish word that describes this kind of whining complaint: to kvetch. Well the children of Israel are the biggest kvetches in history, complaining and whining again and again. Even though God has delivered them from captivity and is bringing them into a new land of milk and honey — they kvetch! And even though they don’t deserve the treatment God delivers, God hears them and answers their kvetching and gives them the manna, the bread from heaven. God pours his grace and mercy on people who really don’t deserve it, people who have earned no credit with God and have even complained against God’s chosen leaders, kvetching like spoiled children. They don’t deserve God’s grace.

Which is, of course, what makes it grace. For grace and mercy are precisely needed where credit isn’t earned, where grace isn’t deserved. None of us is so good that we deserve salvation; none of us earns it, however much good we do; God doesn’t owe us anything. And yet our loving God gives us everything — even himself, in the Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord. God isn’t fair by human standards, the standard of “get what you deserve”; but God is good — and God is generous, and treats us infinitely better than we deserve. Even the grace of believing in God is a gift from God, as Paul told the Philippians: “He has graciously granted you the privilege ... of believing in Christ.” God is like the landowner who surprises the part-time workers with full-time pay; God is like Mr. Fezziwig who doesn’t count the cost of bringing joy, but simply brings it. And God brings that joy not just on Christmas — believe you me, though that is when we commemorate the start of it all — but on every day of the rolling year. God, thank God, is gracious and merciful and abounds in steadfast love. His grace covers the multitude of our sins, and the generous outpouring of his blood washes away our guilt. None of us have worked for the whole of the day — all of us are latecomers, and God chooses to be generous to us because God isn’t fair by human standards, but because God is good through and through, the fountain of all goodness, the generous well that never runs dry.

For there is only one day’s wage, my friends, one day’s wage worth working for, one day’s wage with which we can be paid: the one day’s wage of the one Lord’s Day which will last forever, the one day’s wage of entry into the kingdom of heaven. God can give us no more than that, nor should we desire more — and he is generous to those of us who come late, as he is to those who came early: why, he even lets the last in first — so generous is this God of ours.

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Let me close with another parable. Once there was a man who died and came to the pearly gates where Saint Peter greeted him. Peter, in addition in to carrying the keys, had a clipboard in hand. He said to the man, “Before we let you into heaven there are a few questions you have to answer and I have to fill out this form. You see, we work on a point system here in heaven — maybe you’ve heard something about it. You tell me the good things you’ve done and I’ll score your points — and when you reach a hundred points I’ll let you into heaven. Is that alright?” The man thought for minute and then began to recite his good deeds. “Well, I was married for over 50 years and I never cheated on my wife all that time; I never even looked at another woman with lust in my heart.” Saint Peter said, “Very good; better than most, in fact; though as I recall you made that promise on your wedding day; but well done, considering it’s so rare: that’s worth three points.” The man was a little surprised at that score, but continued, “I was very active in my church — I went every Sunday and I was a longtime member of the men’s group.” Peter said, “Excellent; remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy: that’s another point! But being a member of the men’s group? You are a man, aren’t you? I’m afraid I can’t give you any points for that.” The man was starting to feel very nervous, and said, “Well, I was also very generous with my wealth. I tithed to my church and I gave all my old clothes to the Goodwill.” Peter responded, “Let’s see, clothes you didn’t need any more... a tithe of your wealth… I recall hearing Jesus saying something about giving up all your possessions to follow him; but, hey, I’m in a good mood. I reckon that’s worth another point.” Exasperated, the man said, “My goodness, at this rate I’ll never get into heaven based on what I’ve done. I can only throw myself on God’s mercy.” And tossing aside the clipboard, Peter said, “Oh, that’s worth a hundred points right there. Welcome to heaven.”

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No my friends, God isn’t fair by our standards. He rescues and feeds ungrateful, disagreeable, judgmental, ornery kvetches and wretches and feeds them with bread from heaven. He gives to the latecomer the same favor as he gives to the one who works all day. And he gives us himself, my friends, he gives us himself. So let us not be envious, but rather thankful that God’s generosity exceeds even our greatest expectations, and that his goodness and mercy and grace endure for ever and ever.+

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Limited Forgiveness

Are there limits to what God will forgive?

Proper 19a • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
His lord summoned him and said to him, You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you? And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.

Today’s Scripture readings confront us with two deeply troubling passages. In the reading from Exodus, God delivers his chosen people Israel by causing the waters of the Red Sea to part so that they can pass through on dry land — safe and secure to the other side. So far, so good. But then God brings those walls of water crashing down upon the chariots and the drivers of pharaoh’s entire army, all those who had followed the people of Israel into that miraculous channel. There is no getting around the horror of this scene, and even though the Israelites will go on to sing in joy about their deliverance, we are treated to the reminder, in that closing verse, that they also saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore: bodies bloated, twisted, sodden with water, eyes glazed, staring sightless the sky— strewn on the seashore like so much rubbish or rags. It is a truly horrible, nightmare scene.

Exodus goes on to record that Moses and Miriam and the children of Israel celebrated and sang in thanksgiving for their deliverance, rejoicing in the downfall of their enemies. But there is also a Jewish tradition that when the angels in heaven began to join in the song,

the Holy One himself told them to stop. God said to the angels, “The works of my hand are perishing in the sea, and you want to sing praises?!”

That leads me to ask, why is God so hard on the Egyptians, who are the works of his hands as much as are the children of Israel? Why not let them escape with a lesson learned? Why toss them into the sea and bring those waters down upon them so that not one of them remained?

The clue to answer these questions lies in that second terrible reading we heard today — that story from Matthew’s gospel about the unforgiving slave, the one who although forgiven himself fails to forgive another slave, and so pays a terrible price — not just being thrown into prison, but being tortured until he should pay the entire debt. Jesus tells this tale in response to Peter’s question about how often one should forgive someone who offends against you. Probably thinking himself generous, Peter suggests seven times would be more than enough — but Jesus responds with a number eleven times that: one is to forgive 77 times.

That multiplier eleven reminds me of just how many chances Pharaoh is given — ten times Moses comes before him demanding that he let the people go, and all but the last time he says No; but then he backs out of his agreement and sets out after the people of Israel to recapture them. But even then, he gets one last chance — the eleventh — when he sees the waters part and Israel escape on dry land. He has the opportunity to see the hand of God at work in this miraculous deliverance, one last chance to repent the error of his ways and turn back; to forgive and forget. But he doesn’t take this eleventh chance — he orders the chariots forward. Which is how he ends up losing his army in the depths of the Sea.

At first this faces me with a dilemma — if God says you should forgive those who sin against you 77 times, why is God so hard on Pharaoh, and on that wicked slave in the parable. And the answer is that God forgives everything but the refusal to forgive. The wicked slave’s master forgives his debt, but not his failure to forgive another’s debt.

This answer shouldn’t really be so strange to us. To be forgiven one must forgive. Isn’t that what we say every day in the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us? The moment we stop forgiving, whether the first or the eleventh or the seventh or the seventy-seventh time, we are cutting off forgiveness for ourselves, cutting it off as surely as the waters of the Red Sea were cut off and then turned back on again.

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God, it seems, is ready to forgive any sin except the sin of being unforgiving. And that is so because nothing is so unlike God — and what God wants for his people — as being unforgiving. I said a few weeks ago that the mercy of God is like a well that never runs dry, and that is true. God is always more ready to forgive than we are to repent of our own sins — but the lesson before us today is that God is not ready to forgive us our failure to forgive others for their sins against us. In other words, God wants us to be like God — to be loving and forgiving. We cannot be like God in power, or in wisdom, or in any of the other ways in which God so far surpasses merely human life — but we can forgive

when others sin against us.

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In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul makes this point very clearly: “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.” I reminded us a few weeks ago of the clear, succinct teaching of Jesus, “Do not judge.” For judgment is the opposite of forgiveness — and in the long run, as Paul suggests, it is a form of idolatry in which we put ourselves in the place of God and act as if we were the agents of God’s judgment. But what God wants from us is to be God’s agents of forgiveness — to spread the grace rather than the fear, to forgive the debts and the trespasses, the harms and the hurts, the offenses and the crimes. How did John the Evangelist put it: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved.” Christ commissions us as his agents in spreading that work — the Son’s work — not the work of condemnation, but the work of salvation and grace through the forgiveness of sins. We are not called to store up grievances and grudges but to pour out grace and gratitude.

The irony is that some people think they are acting most like God when they judge others; when in fact we are most like God when we forgive others — for it is in God’s nature to forgive. And the only thing, it seems, that God will not forgive is that narrow, stingy, mean, nasty tendency not to forgive.

We learn a lesson today from Pharaoh and his army, his chariots and his horsemen; we learn a lesson from the slave in the parable — when given the opportunity to be tough and mean, to hold people to standards that meet our expectations (even when we fail to meet the standards others set for us), to keep people down instead of setting them free: God has shown us how to act, in graciousness and generosity, and with forgiveness, so that we too may be forgiven every fault or failing in our lives. Mark the words of Jesus: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Brothers and sisters, let gratitude and grace abound, the gratitude of forgiving one another all we owe each other, and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will truly be with us ever more.

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Unexpected Good

God is a well of mercy that never stops flowing...

Proper 15a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Joseph told his brothers, “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.… So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”

Some years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This was not a book written from the dispassionate standpoint of a scholar and teacher. Rabbi Kushner was dealing with a personal tragedy as well — the death of his own young son. Even had he not experienced such a tragedy in his own family, he would not have needed to look very far to see many examples of bad things happening to good people. All you have to do is turn on the TV news to see plenty of examples of such tragedies. There is a whole subsection of theology dealing with just this question and I could go on and preach a couple of dozen sermons on the topic.

But for today I want to take a different approach and look at a different question, the opposite question: Why do good things happen to bad people? And I do that because of the continuation of the story that we heard this morning from the book of Genesis. We heard the start of Joseph’s story last week — how his brothers, jealous of their father’s affection, were on the point of murdering him; and how a sequence of events led them to sell him into slavery in Egypt. Today we jump almost to the end of his story — in between last week and this Joseph is framed on a charge of sexual misconduct with his boss’s wife, thrown into prison, makes use of his skill as an interpreter of dreams to get out of prison, and more than that, to be raised to a position of high power in Pharaoh’s kingdom. And he uses that power to store up supplies of food for the world-wide famine foretold in Pharaoh’s dreams — a pair of dreams that Joseph is able to interpret as a warning from God that a famine will strike the whole world.

When his brothers arrive, Joseph takes the time to indulge in a bit of payback: in the previous chapter — for they have come to Egypt to beg for food, for the famine is indeed world-wide, but have failed to recognize Joseph as their brother. This gives him an opportunity to play a few mean tricks on them — which, of course, they fully deserve. After that payback he finally chooses to reveal himself to them, in large part because he wants to see his elderly father again, and he knows that the famine is only just beginning and will get much worse. And the lesson he derives from this, is that even though his brothers did a truly terrible thing to him — he now sees that this was God’s way of working; God has taken this very bad thing and made a good thing come out of it. As Joseph would say in the last chapter of Genesis, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people.” So it is that a good thing came out of the actions of bad people; and in the end, even good things for those bad people.

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And that’s the hard part for us to understand. We expect wrongdoers to get punished, not rewarded. We expect bad things to happen to bad people. The problem is that this is a point of view that puts us in the place of God; it puts us in the position of judging others, deciding that they are bad and deserve punishment. And it isn’t really a question of being right or not — that is, it may be perfectly true that the people who we think are be bad are bad, and do deserve to be punished. The problem is that in placing ourselves in the judge’s seat and condemning others, even if we are right, we forget that we too are guilty — perhaps at times even more than those we condemn.

This is one of the hardest teachings of Jesus to wrap our heads around. How many Christian leaders seem to think that their primary task is telling other people how bad they are? How easy it is to forget that a central teaching of the Christian faith is, Do not judge! How easy it is for Christian disciples to consider themselves equal to their master, competent to judge — and even worse, getting on a high horse to decide who is a worthy recipient of God’s mercy.

We see them do that in today’s gospel reading. A Gentile woman, a Canaanite, approaches Jesus and begs him to cast a demon out of her daughter. And notice that at first Jesus says nothing. Matthew goes out of his way to include that detail: Jesus doesn’t answer her at all. He keeps silent. Is he waiting to see what the disciples will do? Will they intercede and join in her plea for mercy? Will they say to Jesus, Look at this poor woman? Jesus doesn’t have to wait long because they very quickly urge him to send her away because she keeps shouting after them. And at first he confirms their action — for he tells them that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Even when the woman comes and kneels before him, and asks for help, he says that it isn’t right to take children’s food and throw it to dogs. But she insists that even the dogs get the scraps — and Jesus acknowledges her great faith and her daughter is healed instantly.

Just as Joseph puts his bad brothers through the ringer — framing them for theft and putting them in prison — before finally revealing himself to them and forgiving them; Jesus puts his disciples to the test, and gives the woman herself a hard time, before relenting and responding in mercy.

And mercy is the point, the point we often miss. Because God is judge, we tend to want him to act like a judge, particularly when we agree with the guilt of those who are accused. We want to see the judge hand down a hard sentence when other people are before the court. We want to see that hard sentence passed, and that the guilty are punished as they deserve — we want bad things to happen to bad people. And so we want to see God act as a stern judge.

Except when we are the ones standing before him. That’s when we want God to be merciful. The problem is that God doesn’t change — God is always just and always merciful. God is always bringing good out of bad. Joseph’s brothers do a terrible thing in trying to kill him and getting him sold into slavery. But God uses that very action to put Joseph in the position to save the lives not only of his brothers but of countless other people, as God gives him the wisdom to understand Pharaoh’s dreams, and to store away enough food to last through the seven-year famine that will afflict the whole world.

Jesus teaches his disciples a lesson about mercy in this gospel we heard today — a lesson about mercy and faith. For recall how just last week he chided Peter, when he sank in the water he tried to walk on: “You of little faith!” Yet here — in front of Peter and the other disciples — he praises this Canaanite woman, this Gentile pagan, without doubt a worshiper of false and foreign gods, he praises her and gives honor to her “great faith.” Imagine how Peter felt at that moment!

Jesus answers the prayer of one who is not among his lost sheep, who is not his child, who is no better than a dog in the household. He does good for one who deserves no good — not because she deserves it but because he is merciful. Mercy is what it is all about. All, as St Paul said, are under disobedience, so that God can show mercy to all. It’s all God’s mercy, grace, and favor that saves us. I’m reminded of a quote from Mark Twain: “When you get to heaven, you will have to leave your dog outside. Admission to Heaven is by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would come in.”

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In his letter to the Romans, Paul the apostle makes that point in big letters. All are placed under disobedience so that God may show mercy to all. There is none perfect, no not one; and yet God causes his sun to shine and the sweet rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. God is a well of mercy that never stops flowing.

God may have seemed, Paul says, to have turned on his people, his chosen ones, the descendants of Joseph and his brothers, the people of Israel. But Paul insists that their disobedience is temporary and their punishment is temporary, for the very purpose of allowing the good news of salvation through Christ to be extended out beyond that Jewish household to those very Gentiles whom the Israelites think are no better than dogs, unworthy of salvation and doomed to destruction. God is showing mercy to the Gentiles and will do so for Israel in due time. Good things do happen to bad people: for God is merciful. God takes the twisted, broken mess of our lives, what we in our foolishness or our selfishness have spoiled or ruined, and God cleans us up, repairs us, restores us — redeems us.

There is a refrain in the Psalms: his mercy endures forever. Let us give thanks for that at all times — for his mercy endures forever; not seeking God’s judgment, for others or ourselves — for his mercy endures forever; but trusting in God’s mercy — for his mercy endures forever; that even the disobedient and the sinful will find redemption and release — for his mercy endures forever.+

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Lost and Found

Blessed are those who thirst for God, the living God...

Proper 7a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG Sarah saw Ishmael, the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had born to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son.”

Before I begin my sermon today I want to note that the Hebrew Scripture readings that we will be hearing over the next months up to Advent mark a departure from the old prayer book lectionary. We have been using the new Revised Common Lectionary for some years now, but this is the first year in which are hearing the alternate track of readings from the Old Testament — most of them never read in worship before, which is why the revisers thought it was about time for us to hear them; and I hope you agree. Now to the sermon proper.

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In the gospel today Jesus talks about the strife that will come to a household between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and various arrangements of in-laws. I’m sure we’ve all been there at one point or another. When we look at the passage from Genesis, however, we encounter an even more painful situation. We picked up the story in the middle of things, so let me back up just a bit.

As I’m sure you recall, Abraham and Sarah had grown to old age without having a child of their own; but Sarah, knowing how important it was for Abraham to have a son to carry on his name, had encouraged him to father a child with her slave-woman, Hagar. Then God enters the situation and blesses Abraham and Sarah with a child of their own, even in their old age. And that’s when the trouble starts — as we see in the passage we heard this morning. Sarah insists that Abraham cast out this slave and her son; and Abraham, after being reassured by God that all will be well, complies with Sarah and sends Hagar and young Ishmael out into the wilderness with bread and water.

There in due course the mother and the boy run out of water, and Hagar, at her wit’s end — thinking that they are doomed to die of thirst but unwilling to watch her child die — leaves the boy under a bush and goes off some distance away to wait for the inevitable. Weeping, she lifts up her voice to God, and the boy cries, too — and God hears and answers, and assures Hagar, as he had Abraham, that this boy will not die but he too will become a great nation. And so, as God has done so many times before, God provides water in the wilderness, opening Hagar’s eyes to see the well of water.

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Whenever I encounter this passage — including this first time as part of our Sunday worship — I find I feel a great deal of sympathy for Hagar, and that Sarah does not come off well. And the visual image that comes to mind is of Syrian refugees escaping from the horror of the very uncivil war going on in their country; most especially the women and their children, dusty and ragged and thirsty. I picture Hagar and her little boy looking like that: covered with dust, perishing of thirst, out in a sunny wilderness; and I ask myself, Why didn’t God help them as soon as they set out from Abraham’s tent? Why let them run out of water first, and get to the point almost of dying? Why let Hagar descend into such a pit of anguish that she could leave her child under a bush to die, out of her pitiable inability to watch the tragedy of his death unfold?

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And the answer is that you have to be lost before you can be found. You have to go without something before you know how much you need something. Now, this is so obviously true about ordinary things that it has become proverbial: I don’t know how many of you have heard the proverb, “Hunger makes the best appetizer,” but it’s true; nothing makes food taste better than being really hungry. And it’s the people who live in the desert who know how valuable water is; who know because they thirst what that thirst-quenching drink does to you — satisfying you the way nothing else can. They also know how hard water is to come by in these days of global warming — I just saw on a documentary last week that there is a town in Yemen used to have to dig wells 80 meters deep to reach water; now they have to dig ten times as deep, to 800 meters, and will soon have to dig to a thousand — that’s two-thirds of a mile! That’s a long way to walk for a drink, let alone having to dig — it’s as far from as from here on up to Bedford Park Avenue. Not many of us would like to walk, on a sunny 98-degree day from here to Bedford Park just to get a drink of water — imagine having to dig straight down that far to find some; and then for the well to run dry!

Now, to put this into the theological framework that the authors of the lectionary no doubt intended: it is those who know their need of God who will find God. It is those who thirst for the living God who will find God springing forth into the desert of their lives.

People who are full of themselves, satisfied with wealth and happiness in life without a care in the world, are not likely to give God much of a thought — perhaps this is why Jesus said that it was so hard for the rich to be saved! But those who have trouble in life, those who thirst after righteousness or hunger for justice, are comforted in the knowledge that God will hear and answer them — but not before they experience that hunger and that thirst, hunger and thirst that develop an appetite for God.

And this is in large part why Jesus tells his disciples that he has not come to bring peace to the earth. He has come to stir things up, to put us in the position of having to make choices — sometimes, perhaps often, hard choices. He lays before us the choice between the easy smooth way, and the hard and difficult way; and offers us the chance to choose the wide highway to perdition rather than the strait and narrow path that leads to everlasting life.

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It is not that Jesus is saying we will need to seek out sorrow or difficulty. These things will come if we are living a Christian life; for being a Christian, one devoted to the teachings of Christ, one willing to respond to the demands of the cross, one willing to be crucified with him as he was crucified for us — that will cost you some trouble, perhaps in your family or with your friends, who would rather you join them on that easy-peasy path that they have chosen. But the hard road that is the gospel of Christ — and it too has a proverb to remember it by: “No cross, no crown” — or as Jesus says in today’s reading from Matthew, “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” In God’s cosmic lost and found you have to be lost before you can be found, or as the great old hymn says, blind before you see. You have to wander for a while in the desert before you realize how much God means to you — and look, as to wandering in the desert, all the best people did it! Moses and Elijah and Hagar and John the Baptist and even Jesus himself all spent their time in the desert — and that is where they found the miracle of God’s grace.

Jesus reassures us — as God reassured Abraham — even as he promises him and us difficulties. He reassures us by promising us that however bad things get God will not abandon us, for we are very dear to God, of much more value than a whole flock of sparrows — and if God keeps an eye on them how much more surely will God keep an eye on you, on me, on all of us who have come to know him — who have been lost in this wicked world — but have come to know how much we need our Lord and our God. And who know that whenever we have reached out for God, whenever we have raised our voices, we have found God ready to help, showing us the well of water that was there all along — but which, in our grief, blinded by our tears, we had not seen.

We have taken up the cross and wandered into the desert of this life, but we have found the well of water, starting with the baptismal water into which we were baptized into his death so that, just as he was raised from the dead, so we too might walk in newness of life. He who lost everything for us, who gave himself up to the death of the cross, has redeemed us and found us — the lost has been found.

Thanks be to God for the thirst for God, that leads us to these plentiful waters of grace. To him be the glory, henceforth and for evermore.

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Sight Unseen

Having the wrong theory can prevent you seeing what is right in front of you...

SJF • Lent 4a • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
For the Lord does not see as mortals see...

This Sunday the designers of the Lectionary — the scripture readings we hear week by week — have interrupted our exploration of Paul’s Letter to the Romans by inserting a reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians instead. But Paul’s theme continues: that God has come to us to us to find us, not because we are worthy, but because we are lost. Today’s readings all present this “lostness” as blindness, real or metaphorical.

For Samuel this takes the form of a quest: looking for something important, but not being able to find it, not recognizing it when it is right in front of him. Samuel is sent in search of a new king for Israel. The old king, Saul, has lost favor with God. Saul has disobeyed God, and God withdraws his favor, and the royalty drains out of Saul like a slow leak from a punctured tire, leaving him driving on the rim. Samuel grieves over this loss as much as poor deflated Saul.

Finally God tells Samuel, “Quit your moping, and get on down to Bethlehem, down to Jesse’s house — you know, Ruth’s grandson. I’ve taken a mind to make one of his boys king.” So Samuel heads down to Bethlehem with his oil-horn full, and he starts looking for majesty. And this is where his eyesight fails.

Have you ever seen a friend coming up the street, gone up to say hello and then discovered that it wasn’t who you thought it was? Or have you ever experienced the opposite, having what seems a total stranger come up to you with a cheery hello, and then suddenly you recognize them?

This is what happens to Samuel. Prophet though he is, his vision is not always clear. When he sees Jesse’s oldest son, the first son, big, strong son Eliab, he thinks, “Why, he’s just like Saul — a strong warrior — surely he must be our new king.” But God says, “Hold your horses. Yes he looks like a king, but there’s more to kingship than strength, as experience with Saul should have taught you! Learn to look at the inside.”

One after another the candidates pass by, and God surveys them with divine X-ray vision, like the quality control at the assembly line. The defective would-be kings pile up at the end of the conveyor belt at the end of the line, and Inspector Number One keeps shaking his head. Imagine how frustrating this must be for Samuel, and how embarrassing for poor Jesse — especially after the big buildup and swelling pride that one of his sons is going to be king!

Then just when Jesse seems to have run out of sons, he remembers David, the one nobody thought was even in the running, the one nobody thought even needed to be called to come. And I suspect that even when God says, “This is the one,” Samuel’s heart must sink for a moment, reflecting doubts a later prophet would have about himself, “He’s only a boy!”

But when that anointing oil touches that boy’s head, there is no mistake. The presence of God’s Spirit is manifest, and all of their eyes are opened. What was inside David, all along, sight unseen, the potential for love, obedience and courage, suddenly becomes visible on the outside; and the shepherd boy becomes the king.

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Having your eyes opened is a gift, but it is a gift not everyone receives. We see that most clearly in our Gospel account of the man born blind. This man doesn’t ask to be healed. He’s just minding his business, begging by the roadside. Unlike blind Bartimaeus of Jericho, who made such a fuss that Jesus had to stop, this unnamed blind man doesn’t yell out to be healed. You see, he’s been blind from birth, and no one blind from birth has ever been healed, so why waste the healer’s time. He’s just happy to sit and beg; he doesn’t expect anything; if he gets a coin he’ll be happy. This blind man regards himself as a hopeless case; he and everybody else knows it.

And no doubt the blind man has heard the debate about what caused his blindness many times. Rabbis have stood around him with their students, arguing about whose sin caused this blindness. And you’ll notice that the disciples want to pull Jesus into just such an argument, right at the beginning of our gospel. You can imagine the kinds of conversations the rabbi would have with his students, as the rabbi would ask: “Was the blindness of this man caused by the sin of this man or his parents — he is blind from birth? Surely he could not have sinned before he was born, could he? So it must be the parents!” Then one bright young student would say, “But does not the prophet Ezekiel say that ‘Only the one who sins shall suffer’?” “Ah,” says another, “but does not Moses say that ‘God visits punishment to the third and fourth generation’?” And all the while the poor blind man sits patiently, literally like a patient at Einstein, surrounded by doctors and med students discussing his incurable case as if he wasn’t even there.

I don’t want to put too much blame on physicians, as I value them too much, but the rabbis and the man’s neighbors are another story, with their own sort of blindness. They don’t see a human being; they don’t care enough even to ask his name; he’s just, you know, “The Man Born Blind.” Every city has people like him, the Man who Begs on the Corner of 183rd Street; the Woman who Sits Outside Penn Station — thousands of people pass them by every day; no one asks their names. They are landmarks, fixtures of the cityscape, so familiar as to be passed by sight unseen. After this blind man is healed, some of his neighbors don’t even recognize him any more. Without his defining blindness, they can’t see him as the same man any more.

And of course, he isn’t the same man any more. Not only is he no longer outwardly blind, but his inner vision is amazingly clear. He doesn’t offer speculation as fact. He isn’t clouded by preconceptions or prejudices. He is an ideal witness, which infuriates the lawyers, who desperately want to convict Jesus of Sabbath-breaking — that’s what they want. The healed man sticks to the facts as he clearly sees them: he was blind, now he sees. He will not be cornered into theorizing about Jesus being a sinner, as he himself had been theorized over from his childhood on.

The Pharisees in their own blindness can’t see a work of grace has been done, the unheard-of miracle that a man born blind now can see. They are completely caught up with theories about the Sabbath, theories that block the vision of grace at work, the grace that alone gives meaning to the Sabbath.

The irony is that this is exactly the opposite of what a theory should do. The word theory means “a way of seeing.” It is a way of seeing that makes sense of everything, that covers all of the evidence, that pulls things together so that finally you can understand what it is you are looking at. And the ultimate theory that God gives us, the ultimate way of seeing, is supposed to be about grace and forgiveness, not sin.

But just as all they see in the man born blind is a sinner, all those Pharisees see in Jesus is a Sabbath-breaker. Their theory is about sin, not about grace. They look at the world through sin-colored glasses. They expect to see sin everywhere, and so that’s all they see.

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All of us have suffered from some kind of spiritual vision impairments in our lives. One could argue that our blindness results from sinful unwillingness to see things from other people’s point of view. One could argue that we are all “blind from birth” due to the corrupting influence of original sin. But I don’t want to fall into the trap the Pharisees’ fell into with their theory a bout sin. I don’t want to spend my time debating why we are spiritually blind. Rather, I want to rejoice that whatever our past condition, though we were blind, yet now we see. Amazing grace has been poured out upon us and is being poured out still.

Our big brother calls us at the last minute from the sheep-fold, and a wild old man pours oil on our head, and suddenly we feel the power of God flow into us and through us; power to take responsibility, power to deliver others from the domination of injustice and tyranny, the royal power of God to be who and what we were always meant to be.

While we sit begging in the street, dull and oblivious to the pointless voices arguing about how bad we are, and why we are so bad, a man comes by — a man we don’t even know, a man we didn’t ask for, a man we cannot see. And he touches us, and says, Go, wash. And we go and wash, and our eyes are opened.

And after the religious authorities have driven us out of the synagogue because they can’t accept this miracle of grace, someone asks us, Do you believe in the Son of man? We hesitate; how can we know him? Who is he? Like Samuel, our thoughts run, What would such a man look like? We remember past disappointments, when we’ve put our trust in people who turned out not to be what they seemed, or what we hoped.

And the one who asks us knows this. He is patient. He smiles, and says, “You have seen him.” He pauses as our thoughts race in excitement. When? Where? Our eyes have only just been opened and yet we’ve already seen so much and so many! And then the man before us says to us, “I am he, the one who talks with you now.” And, as Saint Paul told the Ephesians, we who once were darkness are now light.

Sight unseen the Lord has been with us all this time, and we did not know it. But the blindness has been lifted from our eyes, and we see in this man before us — even as he is nailed to a cross and dies for us — we see all the power and the majesty of God — the power to love with the strongest love which isn’t afraid to be thought of as weak, the purest love which does not fear to be called names by the blind and ignorant, the greatest love that gave itself to the world for the sake of the world, that all might see, and believe, and be saved. To him be the royal glory, henceforth and for evermore.

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God and the Ungodly

Water comes to the thirsty...

SJF • Lent 3a 2014 • Tobias S Haller BSG
If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.

We come now to the Third Sunday in Lent, almost the halfway point on our journey to Easter. I want to continue today in reflecting with you on Saint Paul’s message of hope and salvation, what he called “his gospel,” as he laid it out in his Letter to the Romans. How shocking this gospel must have been to the observant Jews and philosophical Gentiles to whom Paul was speaking, especially when he spoke about Christ dying for “the ungodly,” dying for “sinners.” He writes in the passage we heard last week that “God justifies the ungodly” and repeats this idea in the passage we heard today, and tries further to explain it. And I will attempt the same, as it is crucial to our understanding of how God works in the world, and in us, to accomplish his great purpose: not to condemn the world, but that all the world might be saved.

Saint Paul uses two terms that bear further study: justification and reconciliation. Both are acts of God done for us and to us, not for any merit of our own, but because God chooses to do so, because, as John says, God so loves us.

The problem is that we tend to think about justification as if it means “to be found just.” We picture God judging and weighing us and our works, and finding us worthy. But that is not what justification means. It does not mean “to be found or judged just”; rather it means “to be made just” — and only that which is unjust needs to be made just.

Fortunately for us, the word justification has another meaning that can help us understand, and you’ve got an example of it today right in front of you, in the Sunday bulletin! Most of you who have used a word-processor on a computer know that justification means arranging the spacing of the text so that the words all line up along one or both margins. Look at the way our long Gospel reading is printed in the bulletin — and, Paul, I hope your biceps are doing well, for holding up the book for that long! — look at how the Gospel is printed: you’ll notice that the text runs even down the left side of the page, but along the right it’s uneven, it’s ragged. That is called “left justification” and is easily accomplished: in fact, back in the days of typewriters that’s how all typewritten text looked — for those among us who remember typewriters!

But look at the first or the second reading. Notice how the words line up down both sides of the text. In the days of manual typesetting that was very tedious work indeed, and thank goodness the computer can do it now with the touch of a button! The point is that text is not “naturally” justified. It takes work. Naturally speaking, each letter and word take up so much space, so if you make no adjustments — as in our Gospel text — if you start at the same place at the left, the words will go across the page, following their own course, and end up uneven on the right, since the total number of letters and of words is different line by line. But in the fully justified text — and that is what it is called — in the fully justified text extra space is added between the words and sometimes between the letters (and hopefully unperceptibly) to stretch the lines out so that they line up flush — justified — both on the left and on the right. Left to their own devices, they would be as ragged as the other text, but through the intervention of the computer program — the lines are made to stand evenly down the page: they have been justified. And it took work; it took the work of someone — in this case the computer — outside the words themselves to do justify them. Left to their own, they would be ragged still.

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I think perhaps you see where I’m heading with this! But I’d first like to also take up the other word that Saint Paul uses for this process: reconciliation, for it too has a contemporary meaning that can perhaps help us understand what Paul is getting at. I’m sure that many of us here have had the experience of trying to balance your checkbook when the statement from the bank comes in. Sometimes the figures just won’t come out right, and you have to work and work to find where you have made a mistake, either entered the wrong amount in the wrong place or added or subtracted incorrectly, and compare it with the statement that you got from the bank. And this process of examining and comparing the bank’s statement and your record, and correcting any errors, is called reconciliation. If you never got the bank statement, the errors would pile up and accumulate month after month, and you would end up terribly out of balance. It is impossible to “reconcile” your bank account on your own, just from your own perspective: you need that statement from the bank to compare with your record, and it is only through the arrival of that statement that reconciliation is possible.

God’s reconciliation works the same way: God comes to us — God sent us his “statement” — and deals with us in the messed up checkbooks of our lives, where we’ve entered the wrong numbers and done the math wrong — and reconciles us, bringing us into sync with what God and God alone knows is righteous and true.

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Both of these words, justification and reconciliation, show us that it is the unjustified who need justification and the unreconciled who need reconciliation — and that is who we all are; for as I reminded us last week, we are the ones who are not righteous: there is none who is righteous, under his or her own power; no not one — we are all, as the old song goes,“standing in the need of prayer.”

And of more — in need of a savior. It is the ungodly who have the greatest need of God; it is the sinners who require reconciliation. And the great good news of Paul’s Gospel is that God comes to us in our need. As Saint Paul says, “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly... While we were still sinners Christ died for us... and we have been justified by his blood... while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.”

God’s ultimate “statement” — and you can bank on it! — God’s “Word Incarnate” — is nothing other than Jesus Christ himself, who comes to us in our raggedness and imbalance and pulls us back into alignment and righteousness: he makes the ungodly righteous, by his own saving act, his death on the cross and his coming to life again.

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Some people don’t grasp this powerful message. They want to think we do it on our own. They don’t understand the truth that Christ Jesus came to save sinners: which is to say, all of us who stand in need of justification, who need the nudging of the Spirit to align our ragged edges, who need his overarching perspective to see our faults and reconcile us to his perfect will.

We have a wonderful vision of this in the Gospel reading today, that story of Jesus spending time with someone who on three counts should have been beyond the pale. She is a Samaritan, and Jews have nothing to do with the hated Samaritans. She is a woman, and in those days a Jewish man wouldn’t think of speaking with a strange woman in public — you note how the disciples are astonished that Jesus has done so. And finally this woman is, to use a phrase from way back, “no better than she should be.” Among other things, she’s had as many husbands as a Hollywood celebrity, and she’s working on the next one!

And yet Jesus is there with her — we’ve even got a picture of her in our stained glass window here — he is there with her, holding the longest sustained conversation with any individual in the entire gospel. Think of that! This is the longest recorded conversation with an individual person Jesus has in the entire Gospel: a Samaritan, a woman, and no better than she should be! In spite of her nationality and her religion, in spite of her sex and her role in society, in spite of her personal morality...

— But wait a minute! What am I saying? Have I too so easily forgotten Paul’s Gospel? It is not in spite of these things that Jesus spends all of this time with her, but because of these things! Jesus comes to sinners; he comes to those who need him. He comes to bring living water not to those who are so full of themselves they think they have no need, but to those who know they thirst. He comes to bring word of his Holy Spirit to those who are starved for that breath of fresh air, the wind that blows from where and to where we know not, but which bears the unmistakable scent of new life.

Jesus comes to justify and reconcile the unjustified and the unreconciled, to bring water to the desert, and the wind of the Spirit that carries the scent of green things sprouting even out in the parched land of sin. For it is there that the grace of God is needed, and it is there that the grace of God is shown. As Saint Paul so beautifully said, “If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

God has come to us, the unrighteous, to make us righteous; he has come to us, even in the prison of our sin, to bring us into the freedom of his kingdom. In him, and in him alone, are we justified and reconciled — and saved.

May we always give thanks to God our heavenly Father, for that gift of his Son: who lived for us and died for us, and risen from the dead now lives and reigns forever.+

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Get Up and Go

Combating inertia and momentum is not just a physics lesson...

Lent 2a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation...”

Have you ever felt so discouraged, so worn out, that you just feel like giving up? I know I felt that way a few weeks back when I heard that yet another winter storm warning had been issued. You reach the point at which you feel like your “get up and go” has got up and gone! Newton’s First Law of Motion declares that an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by some force; and sometimes when you are resting you need quite a bit of force to get up and get going. I know that many of us can likely testify to another scientific fact: that the gravitational force of your mattress tends to increase in inverse proportion to the earliness of the alarm going off! The earlier the alarm, the harder it is to get up. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who found last Sunday, with that lost hour of Daylight Saving Time, that my “get up” only wanted to go back to sleep!

So it is that people will tend to stay put unless acted upon by some force. And in our scripture readings today, on this Second Sunday in Lent, we see forces at work to get people up and going.

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The prime mover, of course, is God. As I noted last week, left to our own devices and desires we will be pulled down by original sin that lies coiled in our hearts, an inescapable gravitational force — more powerful than the most comfortable pillow-top mattress — a force that pulls us down and away from love of God and neighbor, nested in our own wishes and desires, curled up and content to let the rest of the world fend for itself.

Pulling against this force — raising us up — is the power of God, manifest in God’s call — a call that is strong enough to wake the dead, which, if you think about it, is what all of us are until we come to live in Christ, and come to life in Christ.

We see this powerful call of God at work in the Hebrew Scripture passage that we heard this morning — the call of God to Abram to get up and go; to leave his home and his father’s house and travel to a distant land that neither he nor his fathers knew.

And in that call, and by its power, Abram acts. He gets up and goes. Even in this simple act, Saint Paul assures us in that Letter to the Romans, Abraham shows his righteousness. He didn’t question God — “God, why can’t you bless me right here and now, instead of there and then? Why not here in this place I know so well, among my own people and in my father’s house? Why not here on my home turf? I’m so comfortable here, and I hate traveling! Is this trip really necessary?”

No, Abraham doesn’t make any such excuses; he answers the call, like that, trusting that God has a purpose for him, and trusting in the righteousness of God rather than in his own skills or talents — or works. If he relies on anything at all it is simply on his faith, his faith that God will fulfill all that God has promised. And a refrain will take over his life, the rest of his long life: The Lord will provide. That is his faith. He leaves his own father, his own home in the trust that God will indeed provide, and make him the father of many nations. God’s promise itself gives Abraham the greatest gift, the gift of faith, and the power to get up and go.

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Then, in our Gospel passage today we see a different kind of getting up and going. I’ve spoken before about this passage, and how easy it is for to misunderstand the language of “being born again,” or being “born from above.” What Jesus is saying here is after the fashion of an orchestra conductor, saying to the orchestra: “Let’s take it from the top!”It is a charge to return to the beginning and to start again. Being born again isn’t an emotional feeling; it’s starting over.

You know, sometimes if you get lost what you need most to do is retrace your steps and get back to where you started, to at least to find some landmark with which you are familiar, and which you can use to help you reorient yourself. Sometimes, as C.S. Lewis once said, when you find you have gone the wrong way the best thing you can do is turn around and head back!

And one thing I’ve learned when traveling, is that sometimes you need to turn around to see what the signs on the other side of the highway say, in order to realize how far you’ve gone in the wrong direction! Has that ever happened to you? Your driving along and the signs are telling you that you are heading somewhere that you don’t want to go; and so you look back and see, on the other side of the highway, a sign saying Poughkeepsie is that way. I wish they’d had a side on this side saying, Poughkeepsie is back that way; turn around! And we get that in the gospel, don’t we: you have to be born again. It’s a sign saying, Go back, you’re headed the wrong way; start over. Take it from the top!

This is really a big part of what being born again or born from above means. It isn’t that you haven’t gotten up and been going — it’s just that you’re headed in the wrong direction! And to return to Newton’s First Law, just as an object at rest tends to stay at rest, so too an object in motion tends to stay in motion — and if it is headed the wrong way, it requires some force to turn it back again.

This is literally what repentance means — not feeling sorry, but turning around, heading back the way you came, for only by doing so can you find the right path. This Lenten season is given to us all as a time to focus on repentance, on assessing where we are. We are given this time to see, by looking at where we are, perhaps how far we’ve strayed, or how far on the right path we have traveled, to listen carefully and look for the road-signs — including those on the other side of the road — to be sure we are following the call and direction of the one who gave himself for us, and gives himself to us every day.

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For there is one final “get up and go” in our Scripture readings today. It is the greatest “get up and go” that ever happened. Only the one who descended from heaven and ascended there again has made such a trip. God sent his Son, because God loved the world so much that he gave him to us. And this sending has a purpose: to the end that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

God sent his Son, told him to get up and go, to leave his heavenly throne and descend into the very heart of the world God made at the beginning of time, to be born as one of us — as God with us — so that we might behold him in his innocence and in his glory, lifted up so that he might draw the whole world to himself. That signpost is raised for us at the end of Lent a few weeks from now — on Good Friday, when we will see the greatest sign ever given, when we behold the Son of God upon the cross of shame, which is also the cross of glory. It is through the love of God and the power of God and the call of God in Christ that we are called forth from the sleep of sin, shown the way forward, and empowered to get up and go: to follow him where he has gone before, ascended into heaven, where he again sits enthroned at the right hand of God the Father. So heed the call, see the sign, and get up and go: Turn to him, my sisters and brothers, saved by the one in whom all salvation rests, even Jesus Christ our Lord.

Above and Beyond

The challenge is not just to return good for good, but good for evil.

Epiphany 7a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

I’m sure all of us have heard, or perhaps even said those words, “go the extra mile.” Churches will even talk about “extra-mile giving” to describe contributions that members make beyond their regular tithe or offering. The contrast is between actions seen as a duty, and those that are above and beyond the call of duty. The military will recognize such actions by awarding a medal or a commendation.

The problem is that the “extra” or “second mile” that Jesus talks about is not about doing better than good. He is not talking about doing good at all. In fact, he says that this is about how to deal with evildoers. Do not resist them, he says; if someone hits you on the right side of your face, let them hit you on the left as well; if they take you to court to sue you for your shirt, give them your jacket, too; if they force you to go one mile, march another mile for good measure. None of these are good things; these are nasty things done to you by nasty people — evildoers; and Jesus says that not only are you supposed to put up with it, but to welcome more of the same treatment. Most surprising of all, he continues by saying that you are to pray for these evildoers who persecute you, and to love your enemies. “Going the extra mile” is not meant by Jesus as a shorthand for generosity to those who deserve it. No, it is about acting like God.

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For God, Jesus assures us, makes the sun rise on the evil as well as the good. God sends sweet rain on the righteous, but on the unrighteous, too. If we are to show that we are children of God, we are challenged to behave like our Father in heaven, to act like God in this crazy way that God acts — when God rewards with good even those who are evil; to do good even to those who do not, by our understanding, or any by reasonable standard, deserve to be rewarded; to forgive those who trespass against us.

This is not an entirely new teaching, though Jesus puts it in terms that are considerably more blunt than they had been in the past. There have always been those who adopted the other point 9of view: the tit-for-tat of doing good in return for good done, a kind of reversal of the Golden Rule: not doing good as you would be done by, but doing good — or evil — as you are done by, a gracious act in return for a gracious act, a tit for a tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. There were always those — and there still are — who would talk about “the deserving poor” as if being fed when you are hungry or given something to drink when you are thirsty was something you had to qualify for.

In response to such people who thought that good treatment must be earned, the Lord spoke to Moses, charging him to tell the people that they were called to be like God — to be holy as God is holy. So when they reap the harvest, they are not to reap every last patch, or gather what falls by the side; they are not to strip every last grape from the vines, or pick up those that fall on their own — even though the grain and the grapes belong to them, they are to leave these portions of their own crops for others, for the poor; not because they deserve it, but because they are poor, and this is how God means to provide for them: to let the people be good as he is holy; to let some of that good filter through to them.

This may be hard for some to understand. They might complain that it is an unfair attempt to redistribute wealth, or combat income inequality by taxing those who have to give to those who do not, and who, moreover, do not deserve to be helped. Think of old Ebenezer Scrooge, who scoffs at the idea of giving a little so that the poor could have some food and drink and means of warmth at Christmas-time. “Why?” is his cold-hearted question. When told that some of them might die, he proudly shows his lack of care, “If they had be like to die they had best be quick about it and decrease the surplus population.”

And sad to say, the world is full of Scrooges to this day. There are plenty who want an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, to be rewarded and praised for doing what is really only a duty to one’s fellow human beings — not just those you like, not just your friends and your family, or those who pay you back, but even, as Jesus said, your enemies, and those who persecute you.

And my friends, I will admit that this doesn’t make sense. But it is how God acts; it is how God asks us to act: not just to do good when we are done good by, but to do good even when we are persecuted, punished, and put upon.

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I will end this reflection by telling you the story of an Irishman named Gordon Wilson. One day in November 1987, Wilson and his twenty-year-old daughter Marie were watching a parade on the streets of Enniskillen, in Northern Ireland. Just as a group of parading soldiers and police came by, a terrorist bomb went off, leveling the brick wall next to which Wilson and his daughter were standing, and the wall collapsed and buried them both under several feet of bricks. Wilson couldn’t move, but under the pressure of the bricks he felt someone take his hand. It was his daughter Marie. He could hear her muffled voice, “Is that you, Dad?” He answered, “Yes, Marie.” In the background he could hear distant sirens, and the sounds of people moaning or screaming. He asked, “Are you all right, Marie?” “Yes,” she said, but then she began to cry and moan, and the moan built towards a scream. He asked again if she was all right, and between sobs she kept assuring him that she was, and then she became more quiet. Finally, after a long silence, she said, “Daddy, I love you very much.” Those were the last words she spoke, as she sank into unconsciousness.

They and others injured by the terrorist attack were unearthed and taken to the hospital, where Marie died. Later that same day a reporter asked Wilson if he would consent to an interview. His injuries were relatively minor — just a broken arm and shoulder — so he agreed. After telling his story, the interviewer asked, clearly expecting and answer that he could really make use of, “How do you feel about the people who planted that bomb?”

Wilson surprised many when he said, “I bear them no ill will. I bear them no grudge. Bitter talk is not going to bring Marie Wilson back. I pray, I shall pray tonight and every night for God to forgive them.” Over the next months and years, people expressed amazement that he could forgive such a terrible act. But he explained, “I was hurt. I had lost my daughter. But I wasn’t angry. Her last words to me were words of love, and they put me on a plane of love. I received grace from God through those words, and through the strength of God’s love for me, to forgive.”

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Love... your enemies, Jesus said, and pray for those who persecute you. God willing, none of us will ever be asked to walk the extra mile that Gordon Wilson walked, a walk of forgiveness and an affirmation of life even in the face of death. He could have walked a very different path, he could have walked a way of anger and revenge. Instead he chose the path of love, a love that overflowed from his dying daughter’s hand, and brought him peace.

May we be so washed in the love of God that we too can learn to walk the extra mile, to turn the other cheek, and to forgive. In this may others see and know us to be children of a loving, forgiving God; for God forgave his enemies, though they nailed him to the cross. Such is the way of God, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile. Let us strive to be perfect as he is perfect, holy as he is holy; to be like the one who is above and beyond all, to be like the one whom we worship, and follow him whom we adore, even Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Swearing Words

We cannot do good on our own, but God's credit can be applied to our expenses...

6th Epiphany A 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
It is written in the Book Ecclesiasticus: If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of you own choice.

There is some significant tension between the language of today’s opening collect and that of the author of Ecclesiasticus, Joshua the son of Sira. For while that wise man, who wrote about two hundred years before the birth of Christ, portrays being good or bad as a simple matter of choice — in which one can always choose the good, and keep the commandments and act faithfully simply by choosing to do so — the collect today with which we began our worship acknowledges, a bit more humbly, and realistically, that “in our weakness we can do nothing good without” God’s help and grace.

In a case like this I am very glad to endorse the official Anglican position that the writings of Joshua ben Sira, the book of Ecclesiasticus, like all of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books — which are part of the Bible for Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, but are treated separately by Anglicans and Lutherans, and completely ignored by most Protestants — that these apocryphal or deuterocanonical books can be read for instruction but not to “establish...doctrine” as the Sixth Article of Religion puts it. And if you’d like to look it up, it is on page 868 of the Book of Common Prayer.

It is helpful to have the church’s authority for this point of view. For even if it weren’t our own experience, even if it weren’t just common sense, you know that what Joshua ben Sira said is just not true. The idea that one can simply choose to be good, and always act faithfully as a matter of one’s own choice, conflicts with the teachings of Jesus and of Saint Paul, and those teachings form a part of our canonical and authoritative Scripture, not just for instruction, but for doctrine!

Towards the end of today’s Gospel reading Jesus takes on those who, like Joshua the son of Sira, put all the stress on us: ben Sira says, “Do not swear falsely, but carry out your vows” — as if vows could simply be carried out by the force of our own will alone, unaided by grace; as if you could just choose to be good and the action would follow the choice as the night the day. Jesus teaches in contrast (and in contradiction) that it is folly to swear in such a way. It is beyond our strength to rely on our own strength unaided, to take it into our head that we could do such a thing when we cannot even control a single hair on that head, to make it change from white to black!

Saint Paul even more readily admits his own weakness when he writes to the Romans, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (7:18b-19) And in the epistle before us today he calls out the quibbles and quarrels of those Corinthians, accusing them of acting like infants — and anyone who has had to care for an infant knows that infants cannot always choose to do the good! It is said that Saint Augustine once pointed out that anyone who doubted the existence of original sin only needed to spend an hour or two with an infant to be convinced otherwise!

The sad truth, though, is that adults often act no better than spoiled, whining children; as Saint Paul says to the Corinthians, not ready for solid food, still on milk. If you don’t believe me, or Saint Paul, just turn the TV on to any of the 24-hour news stations; it’s like turning on a faucet that will pour forth a steady stream of infantile behavior, by supposedly grown people.

Saint Paul also points out — and here we return to the collect of the day — that the ultimate victory over such petty and infantile quarrels and quibbles and fleshly temptations of human inclination, infant or adult, do notcome from Paul, or Apollos, or from the Corinthians’ own inner virtue. They are God’s servants, working God’s field. Paul echoes the beautiful language of the 100th Psalm, though translating it a bit from sheep to agriculture: “Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” Just so the collect of the day appeals to God for the help of God’s grace, so that God can supply what is lacking to give us the strength — not our own strength but God’s strength at work in us — to keep God’s commandments.

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Now, you might well say, if it’s all about God and we can’t do any good on our own, and that any good we do is just God working in us and through us, is this trip really necessary? Let me say that’s a cynical thought, but it’s one I can understand — as I’m sure Joshua ben Sira would have understood too, and it’s a sentiment he would have stood by: God has given commandments and we are expected to do them under our own steam and by our own power, and if you do, in the end you will receive the reward for having done well.

There are whole religions built on this principle — but thankfully Christianity is not one of them, at least not in the way we Anglicans and Episcopalians understand it. We understand, on the contrary, and as the collect of the day says, echoing Saint Paul, that “in our weakness we can do nothing good without” God.

Still, you might say, Then if it is just God acting through us when we manage to do good, is God just pleasing himself through us? Are we just puppets? Let’s look at it another way; not as puppets, but as children. There is a charming TV commercial that shows a little boy standing with his chin just reaching the top of the jewelry counter in a fashionable store, pointing to an item he wants to get hismother for her birthday. The sales clerk nods and the little boy proudly empties his hand on the counter, revealing a crumpled dollar bill and a few coins. The clerk raises her eyebrows sympathetically and looks over the head of the child to see the boy’s father standing there behind him, discreetly waving his credit card. He and the clerk almost wink at each other — though no wink is needed.

This is what we are like and God is like when we do good. Our inclination is in the right direction, but our handful of change could never actually accomplish what God has willed for us — or what we have willed for ourselves or for each other. It is nowhere near enough to make the purchase we desire and need.

Yet God is with us, and the credit of God’s grace can cover any good towards which we set our minds and our hearts and our wills. On our own we could never accomplish the good intent that warms our hearts, but with God’s grace and support we can accomplish this — and anything good, to which we set our hearts. And God is pleased with our intent even though it is God who supplies us with the means to put that good intent into action — just as that little boy’s father and mother are and will be pleased even though he didn’t actually buy that bracelet with his own money.

There is an old saying, “It’s the thought that counts,” and in this case it is true, for it is the thought and choice to do good, when undertaken in prayer and in confidence in God’s grace, not our own strength, that we will receive timely help in putting that good will into good action, that, as the collects says, we may please God “both in will and deed.” God is pleased when we will to do good, and will give us the grace to do it.

After all, he paid a debt for us far greater than the cost of a bracelet, far more costly than the most precious jewel. Godin Christ paid for all our lives with his own life, and bought salvation for us at the cost of his own blood. If we swear by anything at all let it be this: Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to your Name alone, be glory given, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.+

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Two Christmas Presents

Grace and Peace are wrapped and ready... under the bed or in the hall closet... for us!

SJF • Advent 4a 2013 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
To all God’s beloved... who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Over these weeks of Advent I’ve been preaching on the three of great virtues embodied in the season: love, hospitality and patience. Today, as Christmas is nearly in sight, I want to turn to look ahead to two of the Christmas presents towards which our Advent preparation points us. These two Christmas presents are summed up in Saint Paul’s greeting to the Christians in ancient Rome: “Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Grace and peace: what better things could we wish for! We live in the midst now of the winter of our discontent, in a time of terrorism and war, when all the premature Christmas carols in the shopping malls cannot drown out the somber voices droning on twenty-four hours a day on the cable news channels; when all the well-spiked holiday punch and egg nog cannot numb us to the sobering knowledge that war is still raging, and a generation is perishing in horror in that same Syria of which Isaiah spoke — a land tearing itself apart in a most uncivil war. We are hungry and thirsty for grace and peace, and long for God’s promises to be fulfilled, yet wherever we look, they speak of war.

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So too it was for King Ahaz to whom Isaiah prophesied; so too for the Roman Christians to whom Saint Paul wrote; so too for Joseph troubled in his mind that his wife-to-be was already pregnant — and not by him! Our present turmoils and troubles, foreign or domestic, are nothing new, my friends — the world has always longed for the promise of grace, the fulfillment of peace.

The good news is that this promise of God does not go unrealized. God does come through! God delivers those Christmas presents of grace and peace more efficiently than Santa and his elves, though the gifts of grace and peace often come to us in ways that we do not expect and sometimes don’t even recognize. So often the gifts of grace and peace come as a surprise — not as what we expected, but as what we most assuredly need.

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So let’s take a quick peek in the hall closet or under the bed to see what Christmas presents lay in store for us. First the gift of peace — man, do we need that, not only in the world but in the church! Yet this is the promised gift, the gift promised by God through Isaiah to that war-weary King Ahaz of Judah. You see, his ancient enemy, the Syrians of Damascus — that same Damascus that is going through so much trouble today — those Syrians have allied with the northern kingdom of Israel against his own land of Judah in the south. This is long after the split that came after the death of Solomon, when the empire that son of David built was torn in two in the kind of civil war that has plagued the Middle East ever since — and Israel in the north was partitioned from Judah in the south.

So God sends Isaiah to Ahaz and tells him to ask for a sign. When Ahaz is reluctant, Isaiah tells him that God will give him a sign anyway: and there follows that wonderful vision of a young woman whose child will soon be born and who will receive a wonderful name, who will be a sign of God’s deliverance. This was a vision so powerful that it would nourish hope in that land for hundreds of years — until an angel would remind a certain righteous Judean carpenter of the promise... But I’m getting ahead of myself; I’ll get to Joseph in a moment.

For now let’s stick with Ahaz, and Isaiah’s promise that peace is coming, and coming soon! How soon? A young woman is with child and will give birth — so we’re talking less than nine months. This child will bear the name Immanuel — God is with us — and by the time this child is weaned from nursing, able to eat the baby food of curds and honey, by the time he is old enough to know that he likes the curds and honey but doesn’t care for that evil broccoli — say, another year and half — the enemy lands of Syria and Israel will be devastated, their kings defeated!

Now this may seem like a round-about way of promising regime change, but this was the promise none-the-less. Regime change will come; Judah will be delivered, the enemy kings of Syria and Israel will be deposed. Peace will come! Now, it won’t be the best kind of peace — unfaithful Judah and its weak King Ahaz don’t quite deserve that! This will be the peace of occupation — as an invading army will come in from outside and destroy those kings of Israel and Syria — but at least it will be peace; it will remove the threat of destruction be set to one side and people will be able to get on with their lives — much as even today we might hope that the UN or some other force would go into Syria and take it over and stop the war. Occupation is not the best peace, but it is better than a terrible war. And so, even today, many would long for such a peace as a precious prize.

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And what of grace? Well, as we know from the great and well-loved hymn, what? Grace is amazing! That is part of what makes it grace, after all: it is not what we expect, but comes as a wonderful surprise, a gift we do not deserve but which it turns out is exactly what we most need.

This Christmas present of grace comes to us wrapped up in the story of Joseph and Mary. Now, if anybody needs gracious good news it’s poor Joseph. He discovers that his bride-to-be is already pregnant; but since he’s a good and righteous man, not hard-hearted, he’s unwilling to make the kind of fuss he perfectly well could, including, under the laws of those days, dragging Mary into the town square and putting her to public shame, and possibly even being stoned. Rather, he prepares to take the option ending the marriage quietly, putting her away with as little embarrassment as possible. That’s what he’s decided to do; he’s going to call it off — and then, amazing grace happens! The angel comes to him in a dream with exactly the same message delivered hundreds of years before to Ahaz — only this time the promise is not of earthly peace, but of heavenly grace, the full and perfect fulfillment of that ancient prophecy. You see, that prophecy had a double meaning: it wasn’t just a word to Ahaz; it was a word for Joseph, and a word to us. This child is not the result of infidelity on Mary’s part; rather this is the act of God the Holy Spirit, descending into the created reality over which the Holy Spirit moved at the beginning of all things, now to bring forth from the womb of a human mother a child who shall be the savior of the world — not just of a small Middle Eastern kingdom, but of the whole world.

This is the wonder of grace: instead of a prudent end to a scandalous episode in the life of a Judean carpenter — a sort of first century Downton Abbey — instead we overhear Joseph being told, and hear ourselves, of the earth-shattering and life-changing arrival of God himself in the person of a child to be born in Bethlehem. This is the grace to which we look, my brothers and sisters in Christ, a grace that is amazing and unexpected and yet exactly what we need.

So let us, in this last few days before Christmas, in the hustle and bustle and the last-minute shopping, remember what it is we are waiting for. Let us make use of all of those virtues of love and welcome and patience, as we look forward to the great gifts of grace and peace, the peace which passes understanding, and the grace that announces the presence of our Lord and Savior, Immanuel — God with us and all who believe. Let us prepare for the salvation of our souls and the redemption of our bodies, for the restoration of all that is broken and the lifting up of all that is fallen, so that our consciences, being purified and made ready to receive him, may at his coming be as mansions prepared to welcome him, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, even Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate.+

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Why God Came

God tests us, but loves us, and forgives us...

Proper 19c 2013 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners…

There is a strange phrase at the end of today’s Old Testament reading: “The Lord changed his mind.” Well, it certainly looks as if God changes his mind. It starts when God tells Moses to deal with his problem people as if they belonged to Moses: “Your people, who you brought up out of Egypt!” Sounds like many a parent when a child acts up! Have you ever been told, or perhaps even said, “Look at what your son has done! He sure didn’t get it from me!”? Well, God is giving Moses a hard time on account of the Israelites. And God is prepared to give them an even harder time! So Moses tries to placate God, to intercede. He suggests that if God wipes out the people he will get bad press back in Egypt. And God appears to change his mind, and let the Israelites be.

Well, yes, that’s what the story says. But let’s not forget who wrote the story: Moses. There is a rule when you study history, sacred or secular: consider who is writing it. From Moses’ point of view he is the calm one, the reasonable one. It is God who is flying off the handle.

There is another, better explanation for this passage, that takes account of the rest of Scripture: which shows that God is not likely to fly off the handle; God is not “flighty.” God is wise, powerful, loving, and just; but not flighty or given to whims. As the prophet Samuel would later say, “God is not a mortal to change his mind.”

So maybe Moses misses something in this event, in what is going on here. God is indeed testing his people Israel, as he will continue to do. But in this particular moment God is testing Moses. God wants to know what kind of leader Moses is. If God gives him the chance, will he say, “Yes, God, wipe them out! Make a great nation out of me!” Is that the kind of person God wants to lead his people, a people he’s loved and cared for throughout their bondage in Egypt? the people he’s delivered with signs and wonders, and to whom he has promised a land flowing with milk and honey, a people God loves even when they act up, as any loving parents love their children?

Of course not. Moses doesn’t reveal himself as as someone who would willing to condemn his fellow Israelites, to wipe them out so that he can be the founder of the new kingdom; he passes God’s test. Moses doesn’t grab the chance to become the father of a great nation; in fact he “reminds” God of the promises God had made to the real fathers, the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God then sees that Moses would even talk back to him, even confront God himself on behalf of his people; he will be a mediator, an advocate, to stand between God and his righteous judgment of those fellow-Israelites (as bad as they are) and beg God to be merciful.

So it isn’t that God has a change of mind or of heart, but rather that God finds that Moses is a man after his own heart. For the heart of God, is love, not destruction, it is mercy and forgiveness. As Jonah would discover hundreds of years later, in very similar circumstances, when God confronted him after he got upset that God didn’t wipe out Nineveh, and said to Jonah, “Am I not to care for this whole city — and you’re upset about a little sun shining on your head because the bush withered?!” People get to know God better when they face God — you know that!

There is a wideness in God’s mercy that goes beyond the measure of our mind: God’s grace is amazing; so it is understandable that Moses might have misunderstood what was going on that afternoon when he thought he calmed God down. Moses passed the test, he passed the trial, without even realizing he was being tested or tried! You might be able to picture God smiling to himself years later, looking over Moses’ shoulder as Moses wrote those words, “And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”

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No, brothers and sisters, it is not in God’s nature to change his mind as a mortal does. For God is single-minded in loving, in forgiveness, and in willingness to put up with us in our error, our wandering, and our sin. The mind of God doesn’t change. Thank God!

Saint Paul knew this well. He had been a terror to the church. As he says of himself, “a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence.” God didn’t change his mind about Paul; but God changed Paul. God didn’t wait for Paul to come to his senses. God met Paul on the Damascus road, while Paul was carrying in his bloody hands the death warrant for more Christians. God met Paul, a man who thought he was God’s own hatchet man on earth, who thought he was doing God’s work while he was killing God’s servants — and God knocked him senseless to the ground.

Jesus Christ appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus, revealing himself as one who forgives even before repentance; who comes to us while we are yet sinners; who reaches out to us even when we are at our most impossible, tooth-gnashingly, frowningest, mean and ornery and self-righteous, “I don’t need your help thank you very much” selves. Christ revealed himself as the Son of God who is love and who does not change his mind but whose mind is always towards the best for his children.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be reading from the Letters Paul wrote to his disciple Timothy. Today we heard, from the first letter, those familiar words, “The saying is true and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” These are familiar and comfortable words. We don’t often hear Saint Paul’s punch-line: “...Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.” Paul knows that the grace of God is poured out precisely where most needed, on the dry, hot, mean and angry ground of his own self-righteous self. The water of grace wells up in the desert waste where I am the only lone who is right, and everybody else is wrong and needs fixing.

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Jesus tries to tell the Pharisees and scribes the same thing. They have a chance to join him at the banquet, and instead they stand outside grumbling that he shares his table with sinners. “Just look at the company this Jesus keeps. Guess that tells what sort of a character he is. Birds of a feather!”

You know they were right! Those Jesus calls to supper tell us just what sort Jesus is. This is a true saying, and worthy of all to be received. That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; to find the lost coin, the lost sheep. He came into the world to find the unloved, the disposable, the outcast, the misfit. He came to find those who know their need of God, and those so far-gone they have lost hope even in God.

But he also came to save the ones like Paul, the self-righteous ones who don’t even know they need saving; who think they have God in their hip-pocket, the ones who think they have it made. Those are the hardest sort to save, since they don’t even know they need saving! Jesus calls them to supper; some will respond, but some, rather than joining the feast, will stay outside, shaking their heads and grumbling. They cluck their tongues and shake their heads, deaf to the voices of all the angels in heaven rejoicing and shouting out loud that the lost has been found, and are sitting down right now to the banquet with the king of heaven. Outside, shaking their heads, they fail the test God put to Moses, hardening their hearts in the time of trial, and imagining they are righteous when they are absolutely and completely wrong.

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And it still happens. Time and again people who profess and call themselves Christians fail that test; they crumble in the time of trial, failing to refrain from self-righteousness, judgment, and prejudice — sometimes even violence — choosing instead to condemn and reject those they judge not up to their standard, forgetting that they too must answer to the one just judge of all.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bomb was set by the Ku Klux Klan, men who thought they were righteous, who wore on their chest the sign of the cross in a circle, believing themselves just and righteous, secure in their racial superiority. They didn’t just bomb an empty church building to destroy the property of that congregation. They set the bomb to go off at 10:15 on Sunday morning when they knew that church would be full of people, and killed four little girls who were down in the restroom combing their hair, getting ready for the Sunday service. It was Youth Sunday that day, so the place was full of kids and proud parents. And a group of men who thought themselves to be doing God’s work blew up that church.

God is just. God sees it all, and God doesn’t change his mind.

When it comes down to it, there is only one right answer for this test, a test that some so often fail when their limited hearts face God’s abundant grace. There is only one right answer in the time of trial, one right response to the prosecuting attorneys: the clucking tongues and shaking heads, the angry hands full of blood, and the self-righteousness of hypocrites. There is only one right testimony. It is a saying that is sure and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus — our only mediator and advocate, our defense attorney in the time of trial — came into the world to save sinners — among whom, thanks be to God, we have had the grace to acknowledge ourselves numbered, and have accepted God’s welcome to come to this place and sit at his table. Blessed are those who know their need of God! Blessed are those invited to the supper of the Lamb!

May God shake self-righteousness and hypocrisy from the fabric of his world, bringing of all his children, even the most stubborn and resistant ones, even the ones who don’t even want to be seen dead in that company, into the banquet hall. So that we may then on that great day, join with Saint Paul and all the saints who once were sinners, in giving glory and honor to the great unchanging mind of our loving God, giving “to the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, all honor and glory forever and ever.”

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No Estate Tax

We cannot save ourselves.

Proper 6c • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

Today we continue our journey through the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Galatians, and I find once again that I have a slight bone to pick with the translators of the New Revised Standard version of the Bible, the version that we use in our readings, because they make a translation choice in common with many of the modern translations, thought not all of them. The bone I have to pick may at first strike you as trivial, but it is an example of how one small, simple word can change the whole meaning of a passage. And I find that in this regard I prefer the translation of what’s know as the Authorized Version. It is probably better known as the King James Bible because King James I was the one who commissioned its translation — which celebrated its 400th anniversary two years ago. Some things stand the test of time.

The word at issue here is the little two-letter word “in” used throughout Galatians as part of the phrase, “faith in Jesus Christ.” Wherever the modern translations, such as the New Revised Version say it that way, say, “in Jesus Christ,” the Authorized Version says, “faith of Jesus Christ.” Yes, I’m giving you prepositions this morning; it’s the difference between two little two-letter words — of and in — but what a difference they make, including how best to make sense of Saint Paul’s theology of grace. I will also add that I also find this translation to be a bit more accurate. The King James translators are closer to the original meaning of the Greek in which Paul wrote — so their reading not only makes better sense, it is more accurate. And when sense and accuracy combine, I have to say I am convinced! Are you? Let me say more about both.

First of all, Galatians is concerned with the contrast between rival sources of justification, different approaches to righteousness: the grace of God versus the works of the law. Make no mistake, Paul comes down squarely on the grace of God — that is, the justification that starts with God and comes from God. We cannot save ourselves — for after all, if we could have we would have, and Christ would have had no need to be born, baptized, suffer, die, and be raised from the dead for our salvation. As Paul says in his punch-line: “If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”

So justification is not our work — it is Christ’s work, work done for us, on our behalf, work that involved his suffering and death in the full faith that God would raise him from the dead in the ultimate act of justification, the ultimate declaration of his righteousness. So it is that the faith of Christ — his faith in God — that God would vindicate him — vindicates us as well, because we have, through our baptism, shared in his death so that we can share in his life. It is not that we simply have faith in Christ — in the sense that we believe in him — but that through the mystery of God’s grace we have become part of his body the church; we are in him and so are saved by his faith. As Paul argues, just as the faith of Abraham made him the father of many nations, so too the faith of Christ has led to the justification of many — through his life and death — and life again.

Paul often uses analogies of life and death . Here he says he has died to the law: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” And as the Authorized Version will continue, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” In his Letter to the Romans, Paul uses the analogy of widowhood, portraying the law as a husband. A woman who has an affair with another man while her husband is alive is an adulterer, but once she is a widow she is free to marry again — and since Christ has come the old law has passed away and we, the church, the bride of Christ, have a new husband.

Later in Galatians he will use yet another image of life and death, that of inheritance: the point being that you don’t earn an inheritance — it comes to you by virtue of what someone else has done. This is precisely what makes it grace, a gift — not something that you earned.

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Our gospel passage today shows us one of the most beautiful examples of grace in all of Scripture. In its own way it presents a vivid contrast between the kind of life that trusts in righteousness through the law, and the kind that trusts not in its own righteousness but in the forgiveness and grace that is a free gift to all who turn their hearts and souls towards the source of all that is good.

There is no doubt that Simon the Pharisee is a righteous man — he has worked hard at it, he has followed the rules laid down by Moses, as his sect has interpreted them, taking care above all that he has observed everything. And there is also no doubt that the woman of the city is a sinner — the text clearly says so right at the beginning, and Jesus says “her sins were many,” and so Simon judges rightly that she is a sinner, even if he judges wrongly concerning how Jesus ought to have reacted to her. From his standpoint, he would have pulled back in horror that this sinful woman had touched him; he would have thrown her out of the house. Jesus doesn’t do that, and the Pharisee is scandalized.

Now we would be as mistaken as Simon the Pharisee if we were to think that Jesus has forgiven this woman because of what she did — that is, because she bathed his feet with her tears and anointed them with costly ointment. Note the explanation that Jesus gives to Simon: he does not describe her actions — contrasted with those of Simon himself, or rather his inactions — he does not describe her actions as the reason her sins have been forgiven, but as her response to the fact that her sins have been forgiven. To use Jesus’ own parable — both the Pharisee and the woman have been forgiven their debts, but the one who owed more is more grateful. The gratitude does not earn the grace, but flows from it, like tears and precious ointment.

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In spite of the clarity of this Jesus’ teaching — here and in many other parables that he taught, and many further explanations from Saint Paul in his other Epistles — there are even still today some who would insist that it is doing good things that makes you a righteous person; that the works of the law are the way to salvation and justification. But as Saint Paul bluntly puts it, if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. What need is there for grace if we can make it on our own? Referring back to that ancient story from Genesis: who needs God to bring us to heaven, if we can build our own tower that will take us there?

The answer, of course, is that even our best efforts cannot and will not bring us to that goal — for there is none righteous, no not one. Any and all righteousness that any of us have does not come from us but from God, Christ working in us, as we live in him, and the life we live in the flesh is lived by the faith of the Son of God — who died and was raised. We live because he died — and rose. It is on his coat-tails, my friends, that we ride, we and the whole saved world. As our Presiding Bishop once said, “Jesus is our vehicle” to salvation — and it is by being in him that we share in that journey, and in the benefit of his faith. His cross is the vehicle on which we get a free ride, for through our baptism, like Paul, we can say that we have been crucified with Christ, and the life we live is no longer our own, but life in him.

The good works that we may be able to do are not the way we earn salvation, but they are signs of gratitude that we have been saved. Like the tears and the ointment of that woman of the city, any good works we do are testimony to the grace we have already received. It is as if we have all received a huge inheritance — and I will tell you we have, even if we don’t know it — we have received an inheritance and been invited to move into the mansion prepared for us, and invited to the banquet set before us. And it is all a gift from a generous God who has forgiven us all of our trespasses just as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us. Our debts have been forgiven and canceled, nailed to the cross, and there is no estate tax on this inheritance. God is gracious; God is generous: and everything good comes to us as a gift, a justification in righteousness transmitted to us by that incredible act of faith, the faith of Jesus Christ our Lord. And who would not show gratitude for that?+

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Faith in the Gospel

This is the gospel; this is grace, and this is glory...

Proper 4c • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
If we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!

Starting today and for the next five weeks we will read portions of the Letter of Saint Paul to the Galatians. Over these weeks Bill and I are going to take advantage of this semi-continuous reading, to walk with you through this Letter, and to reflect on what it tells us about both Saint Paul and those to whom he wrote it; what it meant for them, and what it still means for us today. And after our worship, we’ll continue our reflections down in the study room, for anyone who wants to continue the discussion in Bible study.

The first thing to notice is that Saint Paul is mad — so mad that he barely finishes writing his return address at the start of the letter before he has launched into a defense and an attack. This is especially striking if you compare the opening verses of this letter with those of his other letters: he usually observes the standard form of first identifying himself, and then briefly stating to whom the letter is addressed, followed by a short prayer or a blessing. But here, just after identifying who the letter is from as “Paul, an apostle” — and before getting to the address and the greeting, he adds a quick parenthetical note in self-defense to assert his authority: that he is an apostle, and moreover one sent neither by human commission or from human authorities, but directly from God; I’m tempted to add, “so there!”

Right from the start, this Letter tells us something about Paul and something about the Galatians. Somebody in Galatia is challenging Paul’s authority; some are saying something along the lines of, “Who is this Paul anyway? Where does he come off calling himself an apostle? He wasn’t one of the twelve, was he? And didn’t he persecute Christians, arresting them and sending them to prison, and even taking part in their execution?”

So right from the start Paul is asserting that he is indeed an apostle and that he is moreover and apostle whose authority comes from God through supernatural agency — and he will tell his story in the passage that we will hear next week about just how this came to be.

But for now, he wants to get right to the point: someone has challenged him, and more importantly, challenged his gospel. Someone or ones are preaching a different gospel contrary to what Paul has been preaching. He will get to the details of this false gospel soon, but right here he sets the stage: there is no other true gospel than the one he has preached, and he even summarizes it in these first verses. Just as he included his self-defense of his apostolic status in his return address, when he comes to the address to the Galatians and the greeting, he says, “To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ...” but then he rushes right from that into a summary form of the gospel that he has preached: “...the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” (So there! again you might well say.)

This is Paul’s gospel, which he will expand upon later in the letter: that everyone, Jew or Greek, slave or free, man or woman, is saved through the sacrifice of Christ who gave himself for our sins even to death on the cross. This is the gospel he has been preaching throughout his ministry, about which his other letters bear testimony: we are not saved by ourselves, we are saved from ourselves, by God in Christ, by grace, through faith in him who died and was raised.

So why had this become a particular problem for the people of Galatia. Well, many if not most of them were Gentiles by ancestry. Someone had been telling them — and we will get the details later in the letter— that it wasn’t enough to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, and to put your whole trust in his grace through faith; but that one had to earn salvation through the works of the law, in particular the law of Moses, which for men included circumcision.

As I say, we will get more details on this later in the epistle, but for now I want to highlight the fact that for Paul this entirely misses the point of grace, and it squarely contradicts his gospel, the gospel he has been preaching all that time. Salvation comes to us from God, and all we need do is turn to God in faith to receive it.

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We are helped to understand this by the other Scripture readings appointed for this day. We have a portion of King Solomon’s prayer to dedicate the temple he has constructed as a dwelling place for God in Jerusalem. This portion of the prayer asks for God’s grace upon all foreigners — all Gentiles — who turn their eyes and hearts and minds towards God and his dwelling and put their trust and faith in him, that God will hear their prayer, even though they are not followers of the Jewish law. Solomon understood God to be the God of the whole world, the Lord of everyone in it — King of kings and Lord of lords. And he beseeches God to hear the prayers of any foreigner, any Gentile, who turns towards God, and to answer that prayer with blessing.

Then, in the gospel, we hear the beautiful story of the faithful centurion — again, not a Jew but a Gentile, a Roman; one who has done much good for the Jewish community but who has not himself undergone the rite of circumcision required for any Gentile male to become a Jew. Here we have a specific example of a foreigner who has turned towards God — and in this case he has turned to God incarnate, Jesus Christ himself — making an appeal, not for himself, but for the sake of his sick servant, and doing so on the basis of trust and faith that the prayer will be answered, the request will be fulfilled. He recognizes his own unworthiness, but still he is not afraid to ask in faith, and knowing that Jesus has the power to grant his petition. Jesus gives the verdict on this astonishing case, “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith.”

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Such texts as these should have warmed the hearts of the Galatians — most of them Gentiles and foreigners to the Jewish way of life. These were a part of the promise that it is in turning towards God that they are saved, not by the works of the law. As will see in the coming weeks, a different gospel has been circulating among them, and people have been trying to undercut Paul’s authority by questioning both his pedigree and his gospel. But he will continue to press his case, both reasserting his authority and reaffirming the truth of the message that he has preached to the Galatians and will continue to preach throughout his ministry: that all are saved by grace through faith, by Christ who died and was raised — and not by the works of the law.

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And what about us? We who are, after all, all of us, Gentiles? We are here because we too have placed our trust and our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord, our Lord and our God. It is he who has saved us and not we ourselves. We too are assailed by “different” gospels — though they may not call themselves that. We are assailed by those who tell us that we will find happiness in the right car, the right video-game console, the right deodorant, the right restaurant, the right smart-phone, the right political party. We are told that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, lose weight with the right pill, learn a new language with the right computer program, get luscious hair with the right shampoo; we can even increase our testosterone if it’s gotten too low — all of these instrumentalities and products, combined with our own initiative, will make us happier people. Such is the gospel promise of today’s secular evangelists.

But in the long run these are as contrary to Paul’s gospel as that preached by those Galatian troublemakers. All these various things may occupy our time, but they will never make us better people. They may bring passing relief, but cannot heal the wound of division that separates us from God. Only one is capable of doing that, and all we need do is accept him. For he has done it for us already, two thousand years ago. He has, indeed, given us a commandment, most importantly that new commandment that we should love each other as he has loved us. But that commandment isn’t what saves us; what saves us is him: Jesus Christ, his death on the cross, and his rising to life again.

He has invited us to turn towards him, as the foreigners of old turned towards the temple in Jerusalem, as the centurion turned toward Jesus in his need and sent to bid healing for his servant. Jesus invites us to turn towards him, to stretch out our hands and to receive his body and blood, to take and eat, to take and drink. And we could do worse than recall those words, first spoken by the centurion, as we do so, words said in devotion even as we take that bread and take that cup: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.” This is the gospel; this is grace, and this is glory.+

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Take It All In

Deep cleaning is what is needed, in the heart of hearts 2014 not just washing one's hands. A sermon for Proper 17b.

Proper 17b • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.

In our Gospel passage this morning it might appear at first glance that Jesus is being a bit hard on the Pharisees and the scribes. After all, their criticism, “Why do your disciples eat with defiled — that is, dirty — hands?” could come from the mouth of many a mother or grandmother or aunt talking to a son or granddaughter or nephew or niece. At least I was brought up that way — and so it was a tradition in my family home, as much as it appears to have been for the Pharisees and all the Jews, as Mark observes. It is not that unusual to be expected to wash your hands throughly before you eat — particularly when you are eating without knife and fork, but dipping your hand in the bowl and breaking the loaf of bread with your bare — and, one hopes, clean — hands.

But as Jesus notes, there is more going on here than just hygiene and table manners. The thing that seems to pull Jesus’ last nerve is the tendency of the Pharisees and the scribes, at least the ones who confronted him, spectacularly to miss the point of God’s law, and to substitute rules and regulations of their own, and focus on those hand-made laws, rather than on the deeper matters of justice, truth, and love, that are embodied in God’s sublime law: the Law summarized so well in the commandment to love God and neighbor.

As important as washing your hands may be, there is something superficial about it. It cleans only the outside; it does nothing for the inside. Think for a moment of another famous hand-washer from the Scriptures: Pontius Pilate. A good politician — or perhaps I should say a bad politician — he takes a poll and follows the prevailing opinion rather than standing up for what he really knows is right: At the urging of the crowd, he sends Jesus to be whipped and crucified, then washes his hands of the whole affair — literally. Outside, his hands are clean. Inside, he is “as guilty as sin” as my grandmother used to say; remembered around the world and down through the ages only for this single act, as people everywhere in countless languages recite each Sunday, “crucified under Pontius Pilate... crucificado bajo Poncio Pilato...” What a way to be remembered!

Pilate could wash his hands from dawn to dusk, for a week at a time or for two thousand years, and like Shakespeare’s Scottish assassin’s wife, Lady MacB, never manage to get that damned spot of blood off of his guilty hands. And even if he could, it would not change the inner reality of who he is, and what he did. He chose not to risk trouble with the crowd, and sent the Lord of glory to his death.

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But enough about Pilate. Let us return to the one of whom Pilate washed his hands. The point Jesus is making, as he goes on to teach, is that tarting up the outside is no good if the inside is filthy. Washing your hands will not make you a righteous person. Jesus made this point to the Pharisees on another occasion when he talked about them being like whitewashed graves: pure and spotless on the outside but full of corruption and rottenness within. And here he contrasts the talkative lips that honor God with their literal lip-service, and the all-too-fallible and sinful human hearts that conceal God only knows what evil inclinations and mischief deep within, where sin crouches for employment, ready to leap out at the first opportunity.

In the present case Jesus is addressing the question of food — for the Pharisees would hold that even kosher food would be contaminated by eating it with unclean hands. But Jesus goes beyond the food question to expound on one of his favorite themes: what does God really want from us? Does God want merely the appearance of righteousness, a superficial ship-shape and bristol fashion on deck while down in the engine room is all is chaos and confusion and unruliness? Does God only want clean hands and a clean slate, or rather a clean heart, an inside cleaned and voided of all the wretched impurity that lurks within, and defiles as it comes out?

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The Apostle James — not our Saint James but the other James, who wrote the letter we heard this morning, believed by many to be the brother of Jesus — echoes this teaching in his call for the inside of the believer to be purified — weeded and trimmed of the rank growth of wickedness, and transformed inwardly by the implanted word of God, like a seed planted in a newly cultivated garden plot, ready to grow inside the heart of a faithful person, so that the righteous man or woman can actually do what God requires — not only hearing the word with the ear or speaking it with the lips, but actually doing what it requires; not being like someone who looks at his superficial reflection — his outside — in a mirror, but one who takes the word in, in to the heart, where it empowers the righteous person to act rightly, and the good to do good.

Ultimately goodness does not come from within us, as James testifies: “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” But if we allow this graceful gift to enter us, to cleanse us inwardly of all our faults, then we can bring forth things other than those awful and defiling things that are all we could do on our own, without God’s grace. As Jesus is quoted as saying in the parallel passage in Matthew’s Gospel, “Clean the inside of the cup and then the outside will be clean.” The vessel that needs cleaning — inside — is us, and only God’s grace and God’s gift can do that cleaning, deep down where it matters, in our heart of hearts.

It is not enough just to wash our hands, or to hear the word — we are called and invited to take it all in, to allow God to cleanse us “through and through,” as the Psalm says to God, “Purge me from my sin and I shall be pure, Wash me and I shall be clean indeed.” God indeed looks for truth deep within us, and plunges the depths of every human heart. God will cleanse us and weed and cultivate our inward garden plot, so that his implanted word will bear fruit, and bring it forth accordingly.

Let us pray. Cleanse us, O God, in our heart of hearts, that we may be your faithful people, and do such good things as only your grace can empower us to do, that we may serve you not only with our lips, but in our lives, in holiness and righteousness all our days, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Nothing from Nothing

A miracle on the North Side of Pittsburgh -- a sermon for Proper 12b

Proper 12b • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what is that among so many?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.”

In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear the old king is trying to urge compliments from his daughters in return for their getting a share of the kingdom from which he is choosing to retire — very unwisely as it turns out. Two of the daughters are lavish in their flattery — the ones who, as it will turn out, really despise their father and hold the old man in contempt, and eventually conspire to dispossess him completely. But the youngest, Cordelia, who truly loves the old king, is also determined to be honest with him and not hand him a platter full of false flattery. She knows that her love is richer than her tongue. When Lear coaxes her as her turn comes up, “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” The honest daughter responds simply, “Nothing, my Lord.” Lear then warns her that “Nothing will come of nothing.” And so the tragedy begins, as the foolish king imagines that his loving daughter does not love him.

We’ve seen in recent weeks, how it is that old King Lear might have had experience on his side. It is true that nothing comes from nothing. If you want to grow a tree, you need a cutting or a seed. If you want to build a building, you need stone and mortar.

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The pairing of the reading from the Second Book of the Kings with today’s Gospel from John is new to our cycle of Scripture readings. No doubt the editors of this lectionary wanted to highlight the fact that Jesus was acting after the manner of one of the prophets of old when he fed the multitude. What is more important to me about both of these passages concerning miraculous feedings is that they start with some food — twenty loaves of bread in one case, and fiveloaves of barley bread and two fish in the other — and it is from these scant resources that the multitude is fed. Nothing, in this case, comes of nothing, but something from something: both Elisha and Jesus take a small amount of food and they feed many with it.

So this is not a miracle like that of the manna in the wilderness, where bread miraculously simply raided from heaven. Jesus — as I hope you’ve noticed — prefers not to work that kind of miracle. As you may recall, he rejected the devil’s temptation to turn stones into bread. No, he takes five loaves and two fish — which the apostle Andrew recognizes is not enough to feed five thousand people, as anyone would realize — and somehow that food stretches, not only to feed and satisfy that crowd of thousands, but to leave twelve baskets full of leftovers. Nothing comes of nothing, but a great deal can come from something, with the power of God at work.

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A priest friend of mine, Gene White — who I’m sad to say died young almost twenty years ago from a rare form of cancer — once told me about an experience he had while in seminary in Pittsburgh. This was some years ago, as you’ll soon be able to tell. Every seminarian studying for ministry had to learn what it was like to be homeless for at least one night. They were each given a dime to make a phone call in case they got truly desperate — a dime, so now you know how long ago this was! Not only could you make a call for a dime, but there were actually phones on the street where you could make a call.

Gene came from a respectable middle class background, and was at a significant loss as to what to do with himself. With only a dime there was no place to go to, no food he could afford, even in those days when a dime went a lot further than it does today. He was hungry and thirsty, lonely and miserable. Finally he gravitated to the public park and took a seat on a park bench. No doubt he’d seen many homeless or impoverished persons do just that, so I suppose he thought that was how you do it, this is what you do when you are homeless: you go to a park and you sit on a bench. He was naturally reluctant to approach anyone to ask for help — he had never had to ask for help in his whole life — and so he just sat, praying, hard, that something might happen to get him out of this terrible situation.

Well, his prayer was answered, but in a way he never imagined. A middle-aged day laborer in dusty work-
clothes happened to come by, and noticed him, and no doubt saw how miserable this young man was, sitting there on a park bench by himself, with his head bowed. He approached Gene and asked if he needed help. Gene could see that the man was not likely to have any money to give him, but simply said that he was hungry, and didn’t have any place to stay. It took a lot for him to swallow his pride and his upbringing to say those words. The man nodded and said that if Gene liked he could come home with him to have supper with his family.

Gene brightened up at the prospect, hungry as he was, and went along willingly. They walked a good while into the poorer part of town on the North Side — and if you know Pittsburgh you know it’s got some pretty poor parts. The man turned in at the gate of a run-
down house, its front yard littered with odds and ends, spare parts of cars and washing machines. Three or four young children were playing in the dust around these relics of appliances, but they jumped up when they saw their father arrive, and they ran to him and they hung off his dusty work-clothes until the man carried them all inside, and beckoned to Gene to follow.

The man called out to his wife in the kitchen, saying that there’d be one more for supper. She called back, “That’s fine; the Lord will provide.” She came to the door of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron — remember aprons? — and waved hello to the guest. The man invited him to sit on the ratty sofa and wait for supper. They chatted for a while, and then after a little bit the family gathered around the Formica-topped kitchen table. There were places set for all and an extra one for Gene. The china didn’t match; neither did the knives and forks; but that was O.K. The father bowed his head and the family did the same. “For what we are about to receive, Lord Jesus, give us grateful hearts. Amen.”

It was only when the meal was served that Gene realized just how costly this grace was. For what the mother set before the family and the guest was half a loaf of Wonder Bread fried in Mazola Oil. Gene never forgot the sparkling eyes of those little children looking up at him and grinning as they relished this feast of bread fried in oil. And he never forgot the generosity of that family, willing to share that half-a-loaf of Wonder Bread and that bit of oil. They did not feed a multitude that night — except the countless throngs of angels that gathered round that house and savored the rich taste of pure grace and charity.

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Nothing comes of nothing. If we are not willing to offer what we have — however modest it may be, however small and unlikely to satisfy, however little it may seem among so many — then nothing will come of it. But if each of us offers that little, that little of what we have, then we will find that there is more than we expected. Nothing comes of nothing, but great things can come from small things, when those small things are dedicated to God and to God’s glory, blessed and sanctified with prayer for God’s purposes. So let us then give of ourselves, dedicating our small gifts to God’s service, with grateful hearts. Who knows how many they will feed, both in body and in spirit, when we give them with open hands, and in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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A Dangerous Trade

Being a prophet means telling the truth, and telling the truth can get you into trouble; but telling the truth can set you right with God -- and who do we think we are fooling anywy? -- a sermon for Proper 10b

Proper 10b • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’”

All of us here, I’m sure, were brought up with the lesson always to tell the truth. Although I’m sure it has fallen out of fashion by now, I can recall being brought up with the stories of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — both famous truth-tellers. Washington, as a six-year-old child, simply “could not tell a lie” — even when it meant that he had to incriminate himself about having used his little hatchet to debark his father’s favorite cherry tree. This was before the U.S. Constitution and its fifth amendment barring self-incrimination. It is a little hard to picture six-year-old George Washington calmly saying, “I decline to answer on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me,” instead of, “I cannot tell a lie.”

And of course “Honest Abe” was renowned for his straight-from-the-shoulder directness, both in his early days working in a general store and later as an attorney, and later still as President. It is said that once when he realized he’d short-changed a customer in the general store when he was a young man, he traveled all the way out to their farm to bring them the proper change, which amounted to a few pennies. Of course, in the case of Lincoln it is about greater truths, and truth-telling, than that for which he is most remembered. Truths such as, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. This government cannot endure... half slave and half free.” That was a powerful truth, and Lincoln a powerful truth-teller in his willingness to tell such a truth when others counseled a go-along get-along, easy-peasy sort of accommodation of a diversity of opinions on the question of slavery.

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The problem is that telling the truth or being a truthful person can be dangerous — when what you say is a challenge to the Powers That Be; when some truth you reveal is an embarrassment to those in high positions; when the uncomfortable truth does not incriminate you, but possibly charges others with serious crimes; when a truth you proclaim undermines the power-base of some entrenched authority — all of these are situations in which the truth will not set you free, but may end you up in prison or on the scaffold.

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Lincoln spoke about a house divided against itself, quoting the Scripture; and Amos the prophet describes a similarly troubled construction, a house whose walls are no longer upright, but tilting dangerously. God himself stands in judgment against the house of Israel, holding up the plumb-line of his truth against its tottering walls. It is a kingdom whose king Jereboam has introduced a golden calf into the sanctuary at Bethel, and for good measure — or perhaps I should say, bad measure — another golden calf at a temple in Dan. God holds up the measure of his plumb-line against this tilting, tottering wall, and calls on Amos to warn that the house is doomed to collapse — for if a house divided against itself cannot stand, what hope is there for a house divided against God! Jereboam has done the unthinkable — he has forgotten what happened when Aaron made a golden calf for Israel while Moses was on Sinai meeting with God to obtain the law written with God’s own hand on tablets of stone. And yet Jereboam has not only installed one golden calf, but set up two of them: one at Bethel near the southern border with Judah, and the other at Dan in the far north, two golden calves in temples at opposite ends of his kingdom. And Jereboam has committed the ultimate blasphemy, telling the people, “These are your gods who brought you out of Egypt.”

Amos tells the uncomfortable truth about this blasphemous idolatry, in words that the people, the priests, and the rulers cannot bear to hear. But, all things considered, he gets off with a warning, as the priest Amaziah urges him to flee from the king’s temple, to head down south to Judah, to flee the country and earn his bread down there, far away from the king of Israel. Truly the people and their rulers in the north have turned from God and no longer even want to hear the truth, let alone act upon it; but Amos is given the chance to flee for his life.

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Our gospel passage, on the other hand, shows us what befalls a truth-teller who persists in proclaiming a truth, in spite of warnings. It is hundreds of years later, and the issues are different, but it is still a king and a prophet who are at odds. John the Baptist castigates Herod the king for having married his sister-in-law. In doing so, John has made many enemies: not so much Herod himself, who is intrigued by this prophet and even interested in what he has to say. But Herod’s illegitimate wife has a serious grudge, as the Scripture says, and she finds a way to force Herod into silencing the prophet once and for all, tricking the ruler into doing what he would do on his own by simple persuasion. It isn’t enough that the prophet has been slapped in prison — no, he must be silenced, and in the most brutal way possible, by having his head cut off. Only his death will satisfy the anger of Herodias.

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Yes, telling the truth can get you into trouble. You see the warning given to Amos, and the fate of John the Baptist. I don’t think I need to remind you about what happened to Abraham Lincoln. And how many other tellers of truth down through the centuries have suffered at the hands of those who would rather believe a comfortable lie? If human beings were cruel enough to lay their hands upon the one who was Truth Himself — the Son of God come to deliver us from the lies that Satan wove around us — if the Word of God himself suffered and died, nailed to a cross in spite of having done nothing wrong — it is evident that truth comes with a price, a high price.

Yet this is the price we know that God demands. Though human beings may be bought off with a lie, God cannot be so cheated. God stands with his plumb-line poised against every person and community, against every corporation and country, against every individual and institution, poised with that plumb-line to test how upright it is. For that is what a plumb-line does: it shows how true and on the square and level stands the house, whether our own personal house or household, or the household of our state or of our church.

Honesty, truth, and clarity are what God demands of us — no deception or delusion, as if God could be fooled, but a willing engagement with the truth of his Word and his promise. As the Apostle Paul assures us, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished upon us.” So let us, then, when we fail, not try to conceal our failures under a cloak of comfortable lies from the one who sees through all our pretense anyway. Let’s take the example of young George Washington, and incriminate ourselves willingly — for it is only in admitting our guilt and confessing our sins that we will find mercy and forgiveness through the amazing grace of God. God stands with his plumb-line against our hearts; let us, my friends, be honest with him who is so ready to forgive.+

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