17th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B

Proverbs 31: 10-31

Psalm 1

James 3: 13-4:3, 7-8a

Mark 9: 30-37

+In the name of God, our creator, our redeemer, and our sustainer.  Amen.

           

It’s only the twenty-third of September, or on the church calendar, the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost.  The weather has just begun to cool off after our horrendously hot summer. Fall is definitely in the air.  While we’d like to savor the season, our nation’s retailers are pushing us on towards Christmas with those catalogs that have started to show up in our mailboxes.  Though the church calendar keeps us firmly rooted in the present, today’s Gospel reading nevertheless makes me think ahead, too.  It makes me think about Santa Claus.  You’re probably wondering what I’m thinking of at this point, but please let me explain.

According to the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” Santa Claus knows if we’ve been naughty or nice even without being able to see or hear us.  He’s making a list and checking it twice.  This idea is a wee bit disconcerting, to say the least.  Popular culture endows Santa Claus with the omniscience that we usually attribute to God, who also knows when we’ve been sleeping, when we’re awake, and if we’ve been bad or good.  You know the rest.  When I was a small child I remember feeling some confusion between God and the bringer of Christmas presents.  Maybe you did too.  I thought that Santa Claus both loved little children and could read their minds.  I also thought that God made lists and kept score.  It wasn’t a comfortable idea at all.  Reward wasn’t guaranteed. Punishment—in the form of coal in one’s Christmas stocking or something eternal—was a real possibility.  Please hold that thought for a little while.

            Let’s go back to our reading from Mark now.  As Jesus and the disciples travel through Galilee to Capurnaum, Jesus tells the disciples that he will be betrayed, killed, and then rise again in three days.  Mark tells us “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”  Now we’ve heard this story over and over again through the years, and it doesn’t strike us as strange or frightening, even though it certainly is.  We affirm Christ’s death and resurrection every Sunday when we say the Nicene Creed.  We know how it all comes out and we know that through the terrible event of the crucifixion comes the salvation of the world.  But the disciples aren’t us.  They are first century Jews living under Roman oppression, walking down a dusty road with the man they’ve given up everything to follow.  They don’t know the end of this story, not in their hearts.  They’re scared.  So what do they do rather than face their fear?  They focus on something they can handle, something they can understand.  They argue about who will be first in Jesus’ kingdom; they argue about who is the greatest among them.

We know that they argue because Mark tells us that they do.  Mark doesn’t include the argument itself.  He doesn’t let us in on which disciple claims the top spot for himself.  We don’t get to hear the dispute, and Jesus apparently doesn’t hear it either.  Jesus asks the disciples what they’d been arguing about, and understandably the disciples don’t want to tell him.  If they’re afraid to ask him about what he’d been teaching them earlier, they’re even more afraid to tell him that after hearing about Jesus’ eventual death, all they’ve been doing is fighting over who’s going to be number one.

It turns out that Jesus doesn’t need to ask the disciples about their dispute.  Without being told, he just knows what they’ve been bickering about.  Mark doesn’t say so, but I think we can safely assume that the disciples were caught up short.  Here is one more sign—on top of all the death and resurrection talk—that their teacher is no ordinary rabbi.  Here too is a clear indication that the disciples have displeased their master.

If the disciples expect a reprimand, they don’t get one, or at least not the kind of reprimand they expect.  Jesus simply calls the disciples and says to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  What Jesus does next is even stranger.  He takes a child and puts it among the disciples.  The twelve would have been taken aback.  We’re used to seeing pictures of Jesus with children and probably grew up singing songs like “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and “Jesus Loves Me.”  In our time and culture children are cherished and singled out by law for special protection.  But the culture of first century Palestine was not like our culture today.  Children were virtually invisible in that society; they might as well have not been people at all.  It’s quite possible that their low status was the response to their high mortality rate; an alarming number of children of that time didn’t live to grow up.

For the disciples, Jesus’ next words are also deeply shocking:  “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”  In a few words, Jesus undermines the disciples’ assumptions about how God’s kingdom works.  Jesus demonstrates by word and action that everything and everyone the world holds up high is not as valued by God as the littlest and least among us.  No one counted for less in first century Palestine than a child, but Jesus tells us that even the little child is precious in his sight and in the sight of his Father.  The disciples’ notions, and our notions, of who will be first in God’s kingdom mean nothing at all.  God has a different value system entirely.  God cherishes the very ones who were of so little account in Jesus’ time as to be almost invisible.

In our Gospel lesson today the disciples’ notion of who matters in God’s kingdom has been completely turned upside down.  Maybe our notion of who matters in God’s kingdom could stand to be turned upside down too.  Who are the last and the least in our world today?  The undocumented farm worker who picks the food we eat is one of them.  The person standing on the median strip in the intersection with a “Please help” sign is another of the last and the least in our world.  The young mother with several children who stands in endless lines for food and clinic services is among the last and the least.   So is the person in the nursing home who never seems to have any visitors and so is the person with schizophrenia who talks to people we can’t see.

  While most of us here today are relatively privileged people, we’ve all experienced lastness and leastness at one time or another.  For the young, it’s not being picked for a sports team or not being invited to that party that all your friends are talking about.   In our middle years, it’s being laid off from a job or being cast aside by one’s spouse of many years.  As we age, it’s people treating us as if we’re too old to contribute to society any more or as if our opinions no longer matter.  For the rest of us, feeling last and least is what happens when others see our color, gender, or sexual orientation and ignore everything else about us.

The last and the least will be first in God’s kingdom, Jesus tells us.  In a few words Jesus tells us what the kingdom looks like and what being a disciple entails.  Like Jesus and the One who sent him, the disciples are to welcome those whom the world  values least.  As Jesus’ twenty-first century disciples we are to do likewise.  NO ONE is of so little account that they are beyond God’s love and concern, and NO ONE is of so little account that they should be beyond our love and concern either.

Like the disciples in our reading today, we won’t always succeed in living into this charge.  We may fall back into just the kind of disputes that prompted Jesus’ correction of the disciples.  God will know when we welcome the least in the kingdom and when we fail miserably in doing so.  But we don’t have to worry about whether we’ve done well enough to deserve the Christmas present or whether we’ll only get the piece of coal in the stocking.  God isn’t in the business of reward and punishment, and God isn’t in the business of assigning high and low status.  Jesus takes the little child in his arms.  That little child is each and every one of us.  My prayer for us all this week is that we will welcome all the little children among us as we ourselves have been welcomed.  Amen.

           

News from Downtown Deacon

After some time off for r and r, Downtown Deacon is now a suburban deacon assigned to a parish in a suburb of a southern city.  Stay tuned for a new sermon later this month.

Easter Vigil

Genesis 1:1—2:4a

Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13

Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21

Ezekiel 37:1-14

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

How is tonight different from all other nights? That’s the question that Jewish children were asking at Passover seders last night. It’s an equally good question for those of us gathered here this evening.

Let’s start with the most obvious difference. We are at church at nine o’clock at night; that’s different in itself. It’s pretty dark in here. The only light we have comes from the candles. You’ve heard the Exsultet chanted, so you know that “This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.”

I’ve heard it said that if a person only goes to church once a year, the Easter Vigil is the service to go to. You might think that’s because so much scripture is read at this service that it packs an entire year’s worth of church into one evening. We’ve certainly heard a lot of scripture so far, and we’ll hear more later as well. Tonight we’ve heard about God’s creation of the world and all that is in it. We’ve heard about God’s promise to humankind after the flood. We’ve heard the story of God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. We’ve heard the story of God breathing life into the dry bones.

This is the night when we’ve had the chance to hear, in one sitting, the foundational stories of our faith. They form part of the rock on which our faith is built. These stories provide a context for the overarching story of the night, the story of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. They are stories that took place a long time ago. Everyone in these stories and the people who wrote them down are dead. But the stories aren’t dead. Far from it.

These stories live today. These stories live in you and me. They’ve been told down the generations. Our many times great-grandparents heard these stories and passed them on. If we were lucky, we might have first heard them sitting in the laps of our own grandparents.

Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. These stories endure today because they are about love. These stories endure today because they are about God’s great love for us, about God’s faithfulness to us throughout history. These stories endure today because they are about God’s faithfulness to us throughout history even when we haven’t been particularly faithful to God. Did God deliver perfect, faithful people out of the wilderness? God most certainly did not. God delivered a group of people who whined, who complained, and who didn’t appear in the least grateful for God’s care for them. But God delivered them out of Egypt anyway. Consider that the next time you think you’re not worthy of God’s attention. God is faithful, even if we come up short.

These stories live also because, if we look at our own lives, we’ll find that we’ve lived these stories ourselves. If you’re shaking your head because you weren’t around for the creation of the world, or the great flood, or the parting of the Red Sea, just wait a minute. Creation is still happening every day in our lives. Look at the green shoots on the trees and baby birds in the nests. While God promised never to repeat that great flood, you’ve been around for a natural disaster or two, and you’ve seen the damage repaired and lives put back together. I remember seeing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in coastal Mississippi and thinking I’d seen a disaster of biblical proportions. If you’ve ever been lifted out of poverty or learned to enjoy life again after the loss of a loved one, you have some idea what it must have been like to have the Red Sea parted in front of you and to have been delivered out of Egypt. Like the Israelites, you probably did some moaning and groaning along the way. I know I have! But God has been faithful, despite our lack of appreciation for that faithfulness and even despite our lack of cooperation with it at times.

And then, of course, there’s the story of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. This is the story that may be the hardest to get our minds around, the one we find stretches our credibility to its limits. And yet, it happened and it continues to happen. Jesus lives. At any given moment, someone somewhere is celebrating the Eucharist, remembering Christ’s death and resurrection by consecrating bread and wine. There’s resurrection in the natural world as well. Have you ever seen a forest that’s come back from a devastating fire? Have you ever learned to love again after having your heart broken? Those are resurrections in more familiar form. I love the story about the pastor, who when asked if she believed in the resurrection, replied that she had seen it happen too many times NOT to believe.

Like our Jewish sisters and brothers at their Passover seders last night, we are a people with a story. We are people with more than one story. Our stories tell of the God who loved us enough to create us, who cares for us in times of tribulation, and who can bring us from death into newness of life. These stories are the fabric of the Christian community; these stories are part of the limbs and sinews of the Body of Christ.

So how perfect it is, that the night on which we retell our stories is also the night on which we welcome a new member of the Body of Christ. This is the night when M. will make these stories HER story. This is the night when she will make promises to share these stories as well. She’ll promise to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers. She’ll promise to persevere in resisting evil, and when she fails to do that, to repent and return to the Lord. She’ll promise to proclaim both with her lips and in her life the word and example of the Good News of God in Christ. These are mighty promises indeed.

Tonight M. will also promise to live into the love that our stories contain. She’ll promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to love her neighbor as herself. She’ll promise to strive for justice and peace and to respect the dignity of every human being.

The promises of the baptismal covenant reach to the heart of what it means to be part of the stories we’ve heard this night. Our faith isn’t just about WHAT we believe. It’s about HOW we believe it. While our faith is grounded in history, while our faith has been passed down to us through many generations, it’s not JUST history. It’s about how we live now. Diana Butler Bass said in a recent interview that the Christian tradition isn’t about dead dogma. It’s about whom we love, how we practice that love in the world, and who we practice it with. In other words, it’s about loving God in Christ, about loving our neighbor as ourselves, and about living into this love in community.

WE are that community. So let us prepare to welcome our sister M. into the household of God. Amen.

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

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6^th Sunday after the Epiphany Year B

February 12, 2012

2 Kings 5:1-14

Psalm 30

1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Mark 1:40-45

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One Sunday last month The New York Times ran an article about the growing number of luxury suites in hospitals. One woman they interviewed said she woke up in a Manhattan hospital and for a moment, mistook it for a five-star hotel. The bed linens were clearly expensive; the en suite bathroom was decked out in marble. The views of the East River were impressive indeed. A man in a black vest and tie appeared with a menu and announced that he was her butler. The care provided apparently matched the amenities according to the woman, who said she was supposed to have been in Buenos Aires on vacation but ended up in this New York hospital instead. “I’m perfectly at home here — totally private, totally catered,” she said. “I have a primary-care physician who also acts as ringmaster for all my other doctors. And I see no people in training — only the best of the best.”

Only the best of the best will do for very important people, it seems. Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Aram, was an important person indeed. He would certainly approve of such a fine healthcare facility; only the best would do for him. While Naaman was “a great man and in high favor with his master” and “a mighty warrior” as well, he had the misfortune to suffer from leprosy. Leprosy wasn’t a single disease but a name given in biblical times to a variety of repugnant skin conditions. Leprosy wasn’t just unpleasant and messy for the person who was unlucky enough to have it. It carried the taint of sin—which I’ll say more about shortly—and made a person ritually impure. So even a powerful person needed to do something about this condition, and he needed to do it quickly. Naaman would have done anything to be cured of this affliction, or so one would have thought.

When Naaman arrived at Elisha’s house expecting to be cured of his disease, he was greeted not by the prophet himself but by a messenger. The messenger told Naaman to wash seven times in the River Jordan in order to be healed. Naaman was incensed. He expected the personal ministrations of the prophet. He was a great man after all. Naaman was as affronted as the woman in the luxury hospital suite would have been if she had been visited by one of the medical residents instead of a renowned specialist. Fortunately Naaman’s servant persuaded him to go wash in the Jordan as he had been told. Just as Elisha had said, his flesh was made clean again.

In the first chapter of Mark we have another healing from leprosy. It contrasts sharply with the account in Second Kings. “A leper came to Jesus.” This man didn’t come with a resume like Naaman did. He didn’t even come with a name. His identity was his disease. It was as if the name of his disease told us all we needed to know about him. Specifically what the name of his disease told people was that they needed to avoid this man. As I mentioned in the story of Naaman, leprosy was more than a physical illness. It had a societal dimension. People who had leprosy weren’t considered fit for society, period. Leprosy had a moral dimension as well. People who had leprosy were believed to have sinned in some way or another. The affliction was seen as the just punishment for that sin. A person with leprosy was to be avoided at all costs. A person with leprosy ceased to be a person and became a “leper.” Leviticus 13 is quite clear that a person with leprosy is excluded. It says: “The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease…He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” It doesn’t get much clearer than this.

We would be mistaken to think that this ancient attitude to disease is no more. A few years ago I visited a shelter resident while he was in the hospital for tuberculosis. Normally HIPPA protects a patient’s right to privacy. Not so in the case of the TB patient. Hospital personnel who previously would have told me nothing about this patient were suddenly offering information, more personal information than I felt the situation warranted. All I needed was to be told was the diagnosis and to wear a mask and gown.

Patients’ rights and even dignity seem to fall even farther if the disease happens to be HIV-AIDS. Before my husband’s cousin Mark died he suffered more than the ravages of the disease. He suffered unnecessarily cruel treatment from clinic and hospital workers. One memorably refused to touch anything Mark had touched; the man refused even to push Mark’s wheelchair. Others were openly scornful of his condition, implying that it was his fault. These people didn’t see or treat Mark as a person, the loving son, partner, brother, and uncle that he was. No matter that before his illness he’d graduated from MIT and had a successful career as an engineer. Instead of a person, they saw a disease. Instead of compassion, they felt fear and disdain.

Such is the condition of the person in today’s Gospel who is known to us only as “a leper.” He was an object of fear and scorn. He was someone respectable people in his community crossed the street to avoid. No one would touch him. Any contact with a person with leprosy would make the other person ritually impure and outcast himself. No one would risk touching him. No one except Jesus, that is.

The man with leprosy in Mark’s Gospel stands in sharp contrast to Naaman. He doesn’t come demanding to be healed or argue about the manner of his healing. He comes as a supplicant. He comes and kneels. He says to Jesus, “If you will you can make me clean.” The words “if you will” might not have any particular resonance with us. These words might even sound like a challenge to us. But a first century reader or listener would have recognized the words “if you will” as the language of prayer. By approaching Jesus in this way the man with leprosy acknowledges both Jesus’ relationship to the divine and the proper way to approach divinity.

Jesus is “moved with pity.” We might think, “Well, of course. The man was clearly suffering.” We might feel revulsion, but we know we’re supposed to feel compassion. But in Jesus’ cultural context any so-called sane person would have only been moved in the other direction, to get away from this source of impurity as quickly as possible. Jesus does the opposite. Jesus does the unthinkable. Jesus “stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I will. Be made clean!” And as the Gospel says, “Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.”

As immediately as the leprosy left its victim, Jesus returns to the realities of his time and place. He tells the man two things. First, to go to the priest, make the required offering and get the official pronouncement that would restore him to society. Second, to tell no one. We’re not told that the man fulfilled the first part of Jesus’ instructions. Likely he did. But the Gospel clearly tells us that the man ignored the second part and spread the good news of his healing far and wide. “He went out and began to talk freely about it,” even though Jesus told him not to.

Wouldn’t you? I hope I would. How could you possibly keep such good news to yourself? What Jesus has done by curing the man with leprosy is every bit as miraculous as raising him from the dead. Jesus may just as well as have taken him out of the tomb the way he did with Lazarus. A person with leprosy in first century Palestine was worse than dead. Jesus didn’t just cure this man’s skin condition. Jesus gave him back his very life.

So it’s no small wonder this man didn’t keep silent. Thank heaven this man didn’t keep silent. Thank heaven he and others like him, down through the generations, didn’t keep silent about the great things that God in Jesus did for them. Thank heaven that someone told each and every one of us here in this place today that God in Jesus Christ did, can, and will work miracles in our lives. Thank heaven that we’ve heard the good news that there is no dark and hurt place in our lives that Jesus will not go to heal us. So when God in Jesus has done great things, share the good news. Give glory to God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.

October 2, 2011

1 Corinthians 1:21-31

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s lesson from First Corinthians Paul writes, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” Today is the first Sunday in October, the sixteen Sunday after Pentecost. We’re on the far side of the liturgical calendar from Holy Week and the crucifixion. I would suspect that many of us are happy about that. The joy of Easter is something to look back to and look forward to with gladness. The crucifixion is another matter entirely. It’s unpleasant. It’s uncomfortable. The crucifixion represents a breakdown of any system of justice—not that there was one in Pilate’s Palestine. Crucifixion was the nastiest, cruelest, most demeaning form of capital punishment that could be applied to anyone.

Because the crucified one is our Lord and Savior, we revere the cross. We bow to it as it passes us in the procession. But are we willing to acknowledge what it represents? What does it mean when Paul says we preach Christ crucified? After all, we worship Jesus, who in the eyes of the world was an abject failure. We worship the carpenter’s son who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. We worship a God who took on the flesh of a poor man in order to participate in the most painful and humiliating experiences that being human has to offer. When we preach Christ crucified—not Christ risen and triumphant—we preach Christ nailed to a cross. We are called to stand with all those who suffer, those who hunger and thirst, those who are punished unjustly.

We are called to stand with the poor. The poor aren’t an abstraction. They are flesh and blood people like you and me. They are not a category. They are individuals. Some of them are people that I meet in the community kitchen. They are people whom you pass by on this very street day after day. You’ve passed by Felipe, a double amputee. Felipe sleeps between parked cars at night. His story is a painful one, of depression, of an attempted suicide, of family estrangement. You’ve passed by Betty, who has schizophrenia. You may not have noticed her, because when she’s taking her medication she’s hard to pick out of a crowd of passers-by. You’ll notice her when she can’t stand the side effects and goes off her medication. Then she responds to voices you and I can’t hear. You’ve passed by Reggie, who has a new spring in his step now that he’s left the shelter and living in the community. It took not months but years to reach this goal. You’ve passed by Deedee pushing her disabled child in a stroller as she heads to the food pantry. She can’t afford enough food for her family. Her wages cover her rent but not much more. Sometimes Deedee has to decide whether to eat or to pay the gas bill.

The poor are near and they are also far away. Today, as we observe our creation cycle at the Chapel of the Cross, I’m thinking of the legions of poor people who suffered during Hurricane Katrina six years ago. It’s hard to even remember the horror of what happened in New Orleans and on the Mississippi coast. People of all stations in life suffered; a hurricane is no respecter of wealth or status. But the poor suffered even more. In New Orleans the wealthy Garden District was comparatively unscathed. Not so the Ninth Ward, where mostly poor people live. Even after six years the Ninth Ward hasn’t completely recovered. It may never be fully restored.

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina show us that our concern for social justice can’t be separated from our concern for the environment. When the earth hurts, we all hurt. And the poor hurt more than any of us. It’s easy to be complacent. Major disasters like hurricanes don’t occur every day. When they do, they grab our attention. Easier to ignore is the way the environment affects the food supply. On a smaller scale, droughts and floods decrease the amount of available food. The biofuel industry competes for grain that would otherwise be part of the food supply. Population and economic growth put pressure on the food supply as well. Who feels it first? Who feels it the hardest? The poor. Production is only one problem in providing enough food for people. We waste a LOT of food. It’s estimated that in developed countries over two hundred pounds of food per person are wasted every year. Still, many people, even right here in Chapel Hill, go hungry.

All of what I’ve said so far sounds rather gloomy. It is. But when we preach Christ crucified, we preach resurrection as well. There are signs of resurrection right here in the Triangle. You may have noticed trucks with the words “Interfaith Food Shuttle” on the sides. The Food Shuttle collects food from grocery stores and restaurants that would other wise be thrown into the trash. This food is still safe and good to eat, but is considered not quite fresh enough for retail sale. The Food Shuttle then distributes the food they’ve collected to soup kitchens and other organizations so that those who are hungry may be fed.

Food Shuttle isn’t the only reason for hope. There is an organization right here in Chapel Hill, led by one of our own parishioners, that works to better the lot of both the earth and its people. Farmer’s Foodshare helps support local farmers and sustainable growing practices. Farmer’s Foodshare buys up produce from farmer’s markets and makes it available to soup kitchens and food pantries. What is the result? Local farmers receive help to survive financially in these tough times, and those who need food assistance have access to fresh farm food, not just factory food. We all win—farmers, consumers, and the earth.

So what, you may be wondering, does supporting local farmers and the poor have to do with preaching Christ crucified? Everything, as it turns out. When we preach Christ crucified we’re not just talking about the salvation of individual souls. We’re talking about the salvation of everything. We’re talking not only about our souls but the salvation of everyone of us, of all creatures great and small, of the salvation of the very earth on which we live and move and have our being. Amen.

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 12A

1 Kings 3:5-12

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

If you’re a regular, or even semi-regular church-goer, you’ve probably been asked by a skeptical friend or relative if you really “believe all that stuff about the virgin birth and the resurrection of the body.” To many folk who pride themselves on their rational and inquiring minds, these doctrines seem quite implausible. After all, the virgin birth and the resurrection of the body appear to violate what we think we know about the laws of nature.

You might be relieved to know that I’m not planning to unpack those tenets of the faith for you this morning. Among other reasons, I don’t feel equal to the task, and we don’t have the time. Instead, I’d like to talk about an aspect of our Christian faith in which I think all of us have great difficulty believing.

Whatever we might say to the contrary, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s something that even the most devout Christian believer struggles with at times. What we have a hard time believing is that God loves us. More specifically, we have a hard time believing how MUCH God loves us. I’m not at all sure that this difficulty comes from any notion we have that we’re fundamentally unlovable. It’s not necessarily a problem, or not only a problem, of feeling worthy before God.

Our difficulty in believing how much God loves us is a result of OUR human finitude. Our difficulty in grasping how it’s even possible that God can love us to the extent that God does is due to our own limitations. WE have limited time, a limited attention span, and limited patience. We find ourselves stretched to our very limits by the competing demands on our own love. Our partners, our children—toddler and teenager alike, our aging parents and often our friends all ask for a part of us. Even the family pets ask for our love and attention! At the very least we may feel harried, and we may even feel overextended. It’s easy to think that God does too.

The theologian Robert Farrar Capon likes to compare our difficulty in comprehending the range of God’s abilities to the difficulty that an oyster would have in understanding how much humans are capable of. An oyster, as we know, is confined to its shell and living underwater. An oyster cannot conceive of a being that can move about freely in its less restricted environment. Similarly, we can’t really grasp the extent to which God’s capabilities far exceed our own. Our very human limitations are analogous to the oyster’s immobility. As the oyster is limited in the scope of its movement, so are we limited in our ability to love by our human constraints of time and attention.

Have you ever thought a concern was too trivial to bring before God in prayer? I know I have. It’s tempting to save the big stuff, like life or death situations, for God. It’s easy to think that seemingly trivial matters are a waste of God’s time. And we wouldn’t want to waste God’s time, because God only has so much, right? Well, NO. WE only have so much time, though even we probably have more than we think we do. God, though, being God, doesn’t share our limitations. While we’re tempted to act from a presumption of scarcity, God just doesn’t work that way.

God is all about abundance. That’s what Jesus has been telling us these past few weeks in the lessons from Matthew’s gospel and what Jesus is telling us in our reading from Matthew today. We’ve heard the words “the kingdom of heaven is like” over and over again. It’s been suggested that you could read these parables substituting the words “the love of god is like…” for “the kingdom of heaven is like…” Let’s try it and find out what we hear.

The love of God “is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” What a lovely image! The love of God starts out as something seemingly insignificant and grows into something living, spreading, and nurturing. The love of God grows from something so small as to be barely visible into a tree that provides a place to nest and be safe, a tree in which one can be fruitful and multiply.

If that image isn’t powerful enough, the next parable provides us with another one. The love of God “is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till it was all leavened.” At first glance this doesn’t sound like a big deal, until you look at a commentary and learn that three measures is a huge amount of flour. Three measures of flour is equivalent to 128 cups; that’s sixteen five pound bags! The leaven—yeast, most of us would call it—will work its magic with the flour until its volume is multiplied. Once the leavened dough is baked, there will be enough bread to nurture and nourish perhaps not the entire kingdom, but certainly a rather large crowd! And notice, please, that in this parable the stand-in figure for God is a woman!

The kingdom of God, or if you prefer, the love of God, is also like a pearl or a treasure. The love of God is worth all of what one possesses. The love of God is worth EVERYTHING. That any single thing could be worth everything flies in the face of conventional wisdom. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” is a well-known piece of advice, and probably good advice in some situations. You won’t find that phrase here in Matthew’s gospel, though. The kingdom of God, the love of God, IS worth everything.

The love of God is like a nesting place, a vast supply of bread for the body and the soul, a treasure in a field, and a pearl of great price. In case we haven’t gotten the message by now, Jesus gives us another one. He tells us that the kingdom of heaven, or if you prefer, the love of God, “is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad.” At first glance this might seem like a case of good news/bad news. Gathering every kind of fish indiscriminately is indeed good news. We might feel some concern about the sorting, though. But fear not. It’s Jesus who is speaking here, the same Jesus who eats with sinners and tax collectors, the very same Jesus who tells us that we must be willing to forgive not just seven times but SEVENTY times seven times!

If we’re still feeling uneasy about the prospect of sorting and judgment, turning to Paul’s words for today from the Letter to the Romans gives us much reassurance concerning God’s great love for us. According to Paul, God even helps us to pray when we’re not able to. “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” Can you imagine a more loving action from God? With Paul, then, may we all say, “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Amen.

Memorial Day 2011

Remembering with gratitude those who made the ultimate sacrifice and praying that we will study war no more.

Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Ain't gonna study war no more.

refrain

I ain't gonna study war no more,
I ain't gonna study war no more,
Study war no more.
I ain't gonna study war no more,
I ain't gonna study war no more,
Study war no more.

Gonna stick my sword in the golden sand;
Down By the riverside
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Gonna stick my sword in the golden sand
Down by the riverside
Gonna study war no more.

refrain

Gonna put on my long white robe;
Down By the riverside
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Gonna put on my long white robe; Down by the riverside
Gonna study war no more.

refrain

Gonna put on my starry crown; Down By the riverside
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside
Gonna put on my starry crown;
Down by the riverside
Gonna study war no more.

refrain

Gonna put on my golden shoes;
(ETC)
Gonna talk with the Prince of Peace;
(ETC)
Gonna shake hands around the world;
(ETC)