September 23, 2012. 17th Sunday after Pentecost

September 23, 2012

The 17^th Sunday after Pentecost,Year B, Proper 20

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

Jesus is telling us that the one with the greatest needs get priority in the eyes of God, and if we are to be followers of that, disciples even, we must do the same. If we are to be the church that we can be, we need to listen to Jesus.

We need to welcome the least of these in the name of Jesus.  When the broken arrive in this place, we need to continue practicing our habits of hospitality, radical hospitality to all.  We are doing it, let’s keep it up and keep opening our arms wider and wider.  We need to keep up our ministry to those who are suffering:  the home starter kits, the 2^nd Sunday Breakfast, Shelter Week and bringing food in for FISH.  We need to keep writing checks through the Outreach Commission and sewing dresses for kids in Haiti and blessed sock monkeys for St. Vinnie’s. …all those good works, we need to keep doing them, work like that is part and parcel of the Christian life.  But that is the easy part, the doing.  A challenge, Jesus is pointing out, is more subtle than that, more subtle than doing, it is an ontological challenge: it has do with being.

Being the servant of all is a real challenge to us when we need to start practicing it where we live.  Here.  The great spiritual lesson we are being presented with is not about charity or mission of any kind, it is not about how much of our wealth we share, or how often you serve breakfast, that is all external, we have obvious control and decision power about who we engage with and how.  Serving the needful from this place is largely done on our own terms. Placing ourselves in the role of servant is easy when it is a clear choice in the matter. Would we ever be dismissive of a guest we are serving breakfast to at First Christian?  Begrudge a young parent staying here during shelter week?  Of course not.  Serving folks, putting our own needs second in relation to people with such obvious needs is obvious.  But when we are in a community such as this, a voluntary community of peers, friends, fellow citizens of the Kingdom of God, the distinction of choice, whom we choose to serve, whose needs get holy priority, whose needs get the day in, day out welcome in the name of Jesus Christ, that gets a lot more complicated.  That gets a lot more challenging.  That gets a lot more personal.

Why are we talking about this this morning?  Why are we talking about the challenges of service within Resurrection?  ____ Change. Things have always been changing, but the pace of that change in this place is accelerating.  Look around.   Really, look around.  How many of us were not here three years ago?  Last year?  Last month?  Think about how many people are here in this church with you whose name you don’t know. How long has that been going along?  Things have always been changing and at this point in the life of this parish, things are changing more and more.  More and different people, new ways of praying and organizing ourselves, new ways of communicating with each other, new ways of serving and new ways of simply being in the world are all around us.  We even have a new listserve!  The Spirit is alive in this place and that is thrilling, it is titillating, it is encouraging and heartening and it is challenging and scary.  It is challenging and scary because we are being called into new forms of relationship with people we have no control over and it is happening right here, in our community, in our church home, our church family.  

I was at a retreat this past week, obstensably reviewing the preaching lectionary for the coming year.  Besides Fr. Bob Totten, the priest from Florence, everyone there was United Methodist.  If you are going to work on preaching, one could do worse than working with Methodists, they’ve got the whole holiness thing down.  The leader of the retreat is a church consultant and he had the fire of Christ in his belly.  He spoke with great urgency about what makes vibrant and vital parishes, what makes a church an outpost of God in the world.  In his decades of church service, as a parish pastor and consultant, he is convinced that the only churches that are long term viable, or even worth making an effort on, are the ones mid-wifeing and equipping disciples of Jesus for service in and to the world.  I went to work on our preaching ministry for the coming year, I come home thinking about discipleship.

That is why we are here, or why we should be here.  We should be here to learn about ourselves, discern our relationship with God, we should be here to practice living in relation to each other.  We are here to practice loving God with everything we have and practice loving our neighbor as ourselves.  We are here to be disciples, servants in the name of God.  There is a lot of fun and socializing here, but it is not a social club.  There is a lot of fun and serving here, but this is not a service organization.  This is a church.  We are The Church, the Body of Christ.  We are an athenaeum of sacred learning and discipleship.  We are an academy of practice.  We are a boot camp for recruits on God’s way.  And all are welcome to join us in our work and witness.  

This is the change and the challenge we most critically need to pray on together.  Following that winding path up the holy mountain into God, we will encounter pilgrims that we will not encounter elsewhere in our lives, and we will not be able to do this on our terms.  We will sit next to folks in church, sit on committees with, serve pancakes with, eat pancakes with folks we do not encounter anywhere else, and we must be glad for that.  As time goes on, as our message is delivered more widely, as more join us in our work and presence in the world, this caravan of pilgrims will look less and less like it does now and will look more and more like the kingdom of God.  In this we are challenged, we are ordered by Christ to be the servant of all.

 We cannot just tolerate these changes.  We cannot just tolerate those who join this caravan.  Tolerance is not a Godly virtue.  It is a bare minimum requirement for civil living, it does not meet the bar of Christian living.  Welcome. Acceptance.  Embrace. Maybe even Celebration.  Those are the kind of words Jesus would use, well, at least Paul would.  Accepting, embracing, celebrating each other is a requirement for life in this community.  Where and when we fail, which we will from time to time; where and when we do not measure up which of course we won’t from time to time, we must be willing to try, we must be willing to learn to try, because it is so hard to do.  

Serving the broken; helping the needful; lifting up the downtrodden… that is simple.  Loving the annoying; working with the low functioning; cooperating with the kookie, the cranky and the confounding; working, serving side by side with those whom you couldn’t dream of relating to anywhere else in your life…now that is holy living.  That is higher practice math.  That is what makes a church family, a Christian community, a full part of the body of Christ.  That is welcoming one such as a child.  That is being a servant of all.  That is another step on our journey in to God in Christ.  As St. James reminds us, “Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.” AMEN

September 16, 2012

The 16^th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 19

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          “Who do you say that I am?”

          We don’t ask that question very often here.  “Who do you say that I am? Who is Jesus to you?  Who is Jesus in your life?”  I am not sure why.  Any thoughts?______

          Our relationship with Jesus Christ is obviously a vital aspect of our lives as Christians.  The scandal of the Christian religion is that we understand that the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us, that God was actually and fully present in the world in the form of a 1^st century Jewish Palestinian peasant.  Scandalous.  God, the Almighty and Everlasting, the Alpha and Omega, the ground of Being, …sort of like the song went, “God was one of us.”  Our God had a mom. Scandalous.  That common Christian understanding of history begs us to discern the nature of our individual and collective relationship with Jesus Christ.  Our selection from St. Mark’s gospel is an invitation if not definitive demand to wrestle with the question, “Who do you say that I am?”  

          Today’s gospel comes from the end of the 8^th chapter of St. Mark’s gospel.  It is exactly mid-point in the book.  The first eight chapters weave the parallel narratives of Jesus’ ascendancy as a prophet, teacher and healer on one hand, and on the other is the story of His increasing tensions with the religious and civil authorities.  That’s the first half of the book.  In the eight chapters following this passage, the second half, Jesus and his friends are on a direct and accelerating path to Jerusalem, to the Cross and to the sweet bye and bye of the Resurrection.  But before this passage that Maron proclaimed today, the ministry of Jesus and his disciples was moving right along, it was business as usual in the mendicant prophet world of 1^st century Roman Palestine, and then out of nowhere, Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?”  That little question changed everything.

          Jesus asked his friends, “what are the people saying about me?”  They tell him that some think he is John the Baptist , Elijah or one of the other prophets reincarnated.  He seemed rather nonplussed, “Yeah, that’s cool, ‘But who do you say that I am?’”  Here, Peter, poor Peter always getting things turned around, he answers correctly, “the Messiah,” but for all the wrong reasons.

          Peter was part of a messianic movement, one of many in that time and place.  Largely, the messiahs of that time were more political, social figures then they were religious figures.  Think of a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Mohandas Gandhi.  They were religious figures.  Their mission and message was religious in context and much of the content, but the prize in their eyes was liberation from imperial hegemony, from oppression and violence and poverty. Most 1^st century messianic figures were of that stripe, liberators from temporal suffering.  Jesus our Messiah carried that kind of messianic message to be sure, but it is not until this point in His story that the full depth of his substance and mission are revealed.  

          Calling Himself the Son of Man, Jesus starts telling them about what was to come.  The rejection and persecution, the suffering and death, then the rising again after three days.  I can imagine Peter sitting there and thinking, “what is going on, Boss?”  And he pulled Jesus aside and rebuked Him, “we’ve got to stay on message, your scaring the boys.”  And Jesus’ response?  “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

          What Jesus is saying here is that all of what He was, all of what He was doing, it was all one.  It was one mission.  The liberation of the body, of people, liberation from poverty, degradation, violence and oppression, throwing the boot of the Roman (or any) empire off your neck, that was, that is the work of Jesus Christ.  What was revealed in this very moment was that to actually do this, to actually be liberated, to be saved, God is intimately and absolutely involved.  It all comes back to the Great Commandment.

          In Mark’s telling of Jesus’ story, Christ’s ministry begins with the “love your neighbor” part of the commandment.  It is about healing, teaching, working and walking in community.  And when they had that going on, when the organization was together, people were being fed and clothed and taken care of, when the fully human mission was underway, well then, Jesus seemed to think that the disciples were ready for the rest of the story.

          What was the rest of the story?  Jesus was clear with His disciples what His immediate fate was.  It was going to be a hard trip to Jerusalem.  Then He asked everyone who was there to gather ‘round so He could tell them what was in store for them. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake or the sake of the gospel, will save it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit life?”  Whoa.  I won’t even get to his critique of that adulterous and sinful generation…  

          It sure didn’t seem that the disciples were ready for the rest of the story. And 2000 years later, sitting here in Eugene on this gorgeous morning, are we any more ready for it?

          Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.  Losing your life for the sake of Christ or the gospel will save it, saving your life for yourself will lose it.  The imperative nature of the language reaches across the millennia and just stops us in our tracks.  Or, well, it should.   It stops me at least.  

          Is Jesus talking about really, really losing our life?  Our breathing, digesting, walking around kind of life?  Sometimes. From Archbishop Romero and his Jesuit companions in El Salvador in the 80’s all the way back to St. Steven in 1^st century Jerusalem, Christians have been called to martyrdom for their faith and liberating activity since the church began.  And these martyrdoms continue today in Nigeria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, Christians being killed for being Christian and for serving in the world as Christians.  Obviously we do not have the monopoly on holy and just martyrdom, and just as obviously the Christian church has martyred not a few just and holy people ourselves, but a call to full sacrifice is a possible outcome of the Christian life.  The enemies of justice and righteousness are well armed, well organized and extremely well funded.  Real enemies of Christ do exist and they often wear very expensive suits.

          Fortunately the vast majority of us are not called to that dramatic a loss of life, but each and every one of us is absolutely called to the loss of other forms of life.  Our inward life.  Not inner, inward, inward facing.  Our self-referential life.  A life where your assumed rights or freedoms trump another’s.  A life where your needs are satisfied before those of the less fortunate.  A life where the wants of the few outweigh the needs of many.  A life of isolation, broken relationships, bitterness and unhappiness.  Of consistently moving away from the light of Christ, not necessarily towards darkness, but towards lights less bright than they could be.  This is the life we need to lose.

          It is all fine and good, it is ever required that we ask ourselves, “What parts of my life can I, could I, might I be willing and able to lose?” It is a start to ask ourselves that question.  It is an entirely different thing when that question is being asked of us by Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ, God, is asking us to deny ourselves comfort, security, certainty in this world, safety in relationships, ease in community, and to take up our cross and follow Him. Jesus Christ is asking you that question with as much imperative as He asked His friends and disciples 2000 years ago.       

          Here’s the relevance to you in this very moment:  we cannot respond to this call with any kind of authenticity, any kind of real and holy passion if we do not know who is asking this terrible thing of us.  The entire mission of the disciples was permanently altered, their fates were sealed in a terrifying way once they understood what form of Man, what kind of Messiah their friend and rabbi Jesus truly was.  The simple question, “Who do you say that I am?” when pondered, when answered, changed everything.  When we ask that question in the dark of the night, when that still small voice within ponders Jesus Christ, when we pray on and converse over and debate that simple, simple question, “Who do you say that I am?” as if Jesus Christ Himself is asking us, we risk encountering the eternal and actual God, that same Jesus Christ in our hearts, in our bodies, in our minds and souls.  And when that happens, if that happens, just like for the disciples, everything, the history of the universe, the course of your life, what your afternoon looks like, everything changes.  AMEN

          

September 14, 2012, Holy Cross Day

September 14, 2012

Year B, Holy Cross 

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Cross.  This is the day for that remembrance because the Roman emperor Constantine had a massive religious complex in Jerusalem dedicated on this date way back in 335 on what is now the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  Tradition has it that this was built on the site of Golgotha, the place where Christ was crucified.  During the construction of the original complex, Constantine’s mother, St. Helena legendarily supervised the excavation of the One True Cross.  That is the why we celebrate the Holy Cross today.  The bigger question is why do we celebrate the Holy Cross at all.

It is a grizzly thing, the cross, an Imperial invention of torture, humiliation and execution.  It was designed to terrify a local population with the horridness of the death of its victims and the desecration of the remaining bodies by the dogs and vultures that lingered on places like Golgotha where our Savior was crucified for us and for many.

It is all of that, a symbol of violence, oppression and imperial hegemony.  And we mark our children with that sign at baptism.  Our foreheads are marked with it on Ash Wednesday.  Our sins are absolved in the Mass with the sign of the cross.  We welcome Christ into our bodies in the Eucharist with this movement, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.”  

The Holy Cross is a sign of the fleeting and fragile nature of life.  It is a sign, a reminder of the eschatological humility we share with Christ.  Jesus Christ was as fully human as he was fully divine.  We cannot really grasp that concept, the fully divine part at least, not really, but as Sam Potaro eloquently reminds us, “The greatness of God, and the holiness of Jesus, says Paul, is manifest in mortality and thus in humanness.

When we make the sign of the cross on our chest, when a priest moves her hands in that pattern at the absolution of sins, the blessings or in the consecration of the elements in the Eucharist, when that sign is made on our children’s foreheads in baptism, we bear that as a reminder of how precious is this gift of life we have been graced by God with.  

The next time you hang a cross around your neck, or make the sign of the cross on your chest, or receive absolution or a blessing under that sign, remember the humbleness it evokes.  Remember the preciousness of life it signifies.  Hold delicately the fragility of life that it reminds us of, and the blessing God offers us in the gift of that life.  All of this we say in the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.  AMEN

September 9, 2012, 15th Sunday after Pentecost

September 9, 2012

The 15^th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 18 

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

 

“So, Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

The Epistle of James is short, powerful and unequivocal.  This letter may have actually been written by St. James, the brother of Our Lord, who at the time of its writing was the leader of the church in Jerusalem.  It is probably based on a sermon, written in the mid-60’s, just months prior to James’ martyrdom.  This sermon was recorded, and then sometime after the fall of the Temple, in the 80’s or 90’s, was edited, expanded and circulated to the churches around Jerusalem.  This and Jude were the final letters testifying a Jewish Christianity, that is a religion of Jews following a Jewish Messiah into new understandings of God and the Law, the Torah. This epistle has been characterized as “ ‘the second voice of Jesus,’ reminding Christians that a faith that fails to bear fruit in the moral life cannot save.”  James does not mince words.

 This passage from James is a fitting lesson for today, what with the start of Sunday School, the breakfast ministry happening this morning, and the ministry fair directly following Mass. As we launch into another busy program year here at Resurrection, another busy school year, another “the summer’s over” season, we need to get clear on what and how we are church, together.  James, I think, will help us in this.

A big, big question about church is, “Does what we do matter?”  This has two sort of angles.  First, does the church stuff, the religious activity we do, worship, prayer, intercessory prayer all of that, does that matter to the world, and how?  And from another angle, the question is: do the things we do in the world somehow matter to God, can finite actions have infinite consequences?  So, does our religious conduct affect the world and does our worldly conduct affect our life in God?  These are the questions at hand.

This question brings up two themes from the Protestant side of our Anglican family. The first is, “We are justified by faith not works”  Who said that?  Martin Luther.  And the second?  It is a Calvinist or Reform saying.  “Works Righteousness.”  Not as famous, but it is a critical concept in the lives of some Christians.

“We are justified by faith not works.”  What does this mean? Very basically, it means that we are saved by faith, and faith is a gift of God by God’s grace alone. Salvation is underserved, unearned and unearnable.  We cannot earn salvation though our actions, not by doing good in the world nor being observant in our religious practices.  Martin Luther’s protest against Rome came to him as he read Paul’s letter to the Romans. In that letter, Paul critiques Judaism for being too concerned with adhering to the letter of the law and not concerned enough with God.  He felt that they were too concerned with works, with things they did or abstained from doing religiously.  In Luther’s time, the Church had a lucrative business called plenary indulgences. You could buy absolution.  And the wealthy did, in droves.  Luther was disgusted by this legalistic practice, and equated it with the same category of sin Paul was critiquing.  

There are not many funny stories about plenary indulgences, but I have one.  I don’t know if anyone remembers 10, 11 years ago, there was labor unrest at Harvard.  The custodial workers were unionizing much to the chagrin of Larry Summers, the eventually fired president of Harvard, and overall real piece of work.  Even with his bonafide liberal credentials, he was virulently anti-union and fought the custodian’s efforts to earn a living wage tooth and nail.  Yuck.

Well over at the divinity school, we were organizing with SEIU’s Jobs with Justice campaign and we had a fabulous idea.  We planned an action to have people at all of the gates to Harvard Yard carrying collection cans and asking for donations to buy Larry Summers a plenary indulgence for his obvious and egregious sins. We were going to give the money to the strike fund.  For the life of me I can’t remember why we did not do it, but it was pretty funny.  In any case, justification by faith, not works.

          Then there is works righteousness. It is our effort to act in the world, do good in the world in order to follow God’s standards, meet God’s expectations.  It does not so much imply that if you do good you can earn your way into Heaven, but rather if you don’t do good, or enough good, well, you could get a transfer from the ladders to the chutes, if you know what I mean.  Works Righteousness ties our fate and life in relation to God to meeting expectations of conduct in the temporal realm, in the here and now.  And who determines what is enough, how much good work is needed… very hard to tell.

          These two ideas seem to be coming from opposite directions.  Our works don’t matter on one side, they do on the other.  The key here, though, is “matter.”  To whom does it matter what we do or don’t do, and how?  

          We do lots here at Resurrection.  What do we do?  ______  We give charity, helping people in all sorts of ways.  We relieve suffering.  We care for one another.  Our money goes out to help those in need.  We teach children.  We witness justice in the world and amplify and encourage the witness of others.

          What else do we do?  ______  We keep the sacraments. We pray together and alone.  We study the Bible and other religious books.  We are formed for God and ministry.  

          The former, the works of mercy in the world, the good of these works is clear.  The reduction of suffering is a moral imperative of the Christian life.  We learn this from the Great Commandment’s admonition to love your neighbor as yourself; to Jesus recalling that when I was hungry you fed me, thirsty you gave me water, a stranger and you welcomed me, a prisoner me and you visited me; and back to James writing, “…you did not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So, faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” We have a moral and religious obligation to serve the needful world.  “A faith that fails to bear fruit in the moral life cannot save.”  This work is not guided by a “works righteousness” ethic because the call to action is not some quid pro quo formula of meeting God’s expectations, it is following a moral path that the practice of our faith in God leads us to, both individually and collectively.

How then does our religious life matter?  Do our religious works, the saying of the prayers, the Mass and our study… do we slip into Paul or Luther’s zone of suspicion of trying to be saved by works?  I don’t think so.  Here’s why:  A sacramental practice of religion is critical to the world for two reasons.  First, great is the mystery of faith.  We don’t know why, but it does matter.  I love the logic of theology.  I don’t know exactly why or how some Carmelite nuns pray 15 hours a day, year after year, but I am grateful that they keep that prayer wheel turning.  How does the eternal and actual presence of God arrived at in the sacramental act help, save, change the world?  Why does the ministry of Word and Sacrament, the keeping of the prayers and study of scripture matter to God?  I do not know but I have faith that it does.  Immersion in the sacramental mystery of God is a Good in and of itself.  That’s all I have to say about that.

But second, it matters because it puts us in a position to become closer to God, more receptive to God, in closer, deeper, more intimate relationship with God, more able to hold up the first half of the Great Commandment: to love God with all of our heart, all of our mind, all of our soul and all of our body.  The religious life is practice, practice putting ourselves in the postures that we need to be in to be fully formed people.  Religious practice helps us practice being kind when know that that miserable jerk doesn’t deserve kindness, merciful when the world says “You were already warned.”  Humble when we are successful.  Religious practice trains our souls to be to be like weebles, we wobble but don’t fall down, or when we do, our inner being, our core, our Christ-nature knows because it has been trained, to follow the bubbles up to the surface.  It is simple conditioning of ourselves to be the people God made us to be, the community God means us to be, the people, the species the part of the creation that God created us to be.  The religious life matters, the religious life of this place, matters.  Your own religious life, your practice in relation to God in Christ with the Holy Spirit matters.  It matters to you, to the world, and to God. As our year begins, let us keep up the good works, that our faith and our world may live. AMEN. 

September 2, 2012, 14th Sunday after Pentecost

September 2, 2012, The 14^th Sunday after Pentecost

Year B, Proper

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“Arise my love, my fair one, and come away;

for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

          and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land. 

The fig tree puts forth it figs, and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance. 

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

          Solomon offers this poem as a way to understand the true nature of things.  Solomon experienced a world of abundance.  Of plenty and joy.  Of light and life.  A beautiful vision, no?

          In the Gospel, we find Jesus offering a withering riposte to the Pharisees who again were nit-picking at the conduct of the disciples.

          “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.  For it is from within, from the human heart that evil intentions come…” and then he goes to offer twelve categories of human evil, from fornication to folly, avarice to wickedness.

          It is fabulous to put these two texts together, a passage from the Song of Solomon and a fragment of our Savior’s words as related by St. Mark. Solomon was a great King; son of the great King David.  He lived in still legendary opulence and unbridled worldly power.  And there is Jesus, Son of Man, raised by a humble tradesman, poor, mendicant, wandering the world as prophet with the attendant pariah status assigned to all true prophets of Living Gods. These words were recorded centuries apart, in contexts as different as could be imagined, and yet, from these very different perspectives and in very different ways, these two teachings on the true nature of things are saying exactly the same thing.

          “The voice of my beloved!  Look, he comes…and says to me:  ‘Arise my love, my fair one, and come away…Flowers appear on earth…the turtledove is heard…the fig tree puts forth its figs… Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.’”

          Beautiful, isn’t it?  Ecstatic.  You can feel the joy de vive, the immersion in the straight up fabulousness of being alive, and even better than being alive, being in love.  “…he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.  My beloved is like a gazelle...  Look, there he stands… gazing in…”  You might know that feeling.  The reckless abandon of love and joy and beauty.  That feeling you get looking out on a cold, rainy morning while you are as warm and cozy as can be.  The longing of missing someone and knowing you will see them again soon.  Sharing the thrill of a beautiful cloud passing by or moonlight sparkling on a river with a child.  Life is beautiful.  In all its forms life is abundant and radiant and pulsating.  God is good, very good, all the time.  

          Jesus knew this.  He knew that life was abundant.  He knew that the joy of God could be tasted in the sugars concentrating in the figs as they ripen.  He saw God’s face in the vines as they blossomed as He did in the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.  He knew how precious life is, how directly a gift of God is our breath in and out of our bodies.  And He, more than most, knew how fleeting the gift and joy of life is.  He knew more than most about the tenacity of life and its fragility.  He lived fully and bravely in the knowledge of where it would lead Him, and live he did, brilliantly.

          That would be wonderful if that were the end of the story.  It would be wonderful if all of our beloveds were frolicking along the hillsides, that everyone one had figs a’plenty to eat, and babbling brooks of clean, sweet water to drink.  It would be wonderful if all of us were quick to listen, slow to anger, if we were all doers and not just hearers of the Word.   What a world it would be if we could all see the face of God in that blossoming vine or that lily let alone in the face of another person.  But most of us are not like that.  Some of us are alone, or worse, are lonely.  Some our brothers and sisters do not have enough food or water.  Some of us are bitter, angry, and righteously so in the face of violence and oppression.  There is more to the story than life is beautiful.

          What Jesus teaches us, echoing the words of Solomon, is that the world, the Creation and the creatures who inhabit it are fabulous, very much because it and all of us are of God.  We are of God, immediately, directly. What Jesus is teaching is that all of these problems, from loneliness to hunger, anger to alienation these are our doing, not aspects of God’s creation, they do ot arise in the world in and of themselves.   “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile…” Now of course all hunger is not directly human caused, though it is harder and harder to tell which floods, droughts and famines are caused or worsened by human activity and those which are pure happenstance, but in any case, hunger and filthy water, like oppression and violence exists because we, humans, allow it to continue.  We have the means to feed the world and to make it safe (or at least safer) if we had the will.  But apparently we don’t.  So it is on us, we are culpable for that suffering.  The world doesn’t defile, but by our sins of commission and omission as individuals and as a species, we do defile. 

          All of this “defilement” talk, “impurity” talk is tricky business because words like this, religion based on or perverted by these concepts have been responsible for a great deal of evil in the world.  Only a generation ago the Mormon Church’s official teaching was that people of color were so unclean as to be sub-human.  Many groups of less exotic Christians exclude along gender lines because of the assumed impurity of women.  Our own Episcopal church still isn’t clear that gay folks (another “impure” class) can wear the purple shirt of Bishop without controversy.  So it’s tricky, but at the same time it is true.  The world is not “evil.”  The cholera bacterium isn’t evil, it just is. Swarms of locust don’t have a moral will which tends towards good or ill, they; like us have a will to live.  Concentrations of locust become a plague only when they pass into human consciousness.  Cholera becomes an epidemic only when it crosses our path.  

          Bits of the world become sullied, becomes impure, sin-laden in our hearts not because the world is evil, not because we are bad or evil, but because our whole frame of reference is so totally off.  It is not about us.  Absolutely, truly, really, really, really the world does not revolve around us, humans.  The world does not seek ITS place in relation to us, to humanity.  It is we who seek meaning, who seek to locate ourselves in relation to everything else. Case in point: many of us even address the greatest force of all, God, as “Father,” a decidedly human concept and that is just the beginning of our anthropomorphizing, our humanization our domestication of God.

          Jesus warns us, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”  We are far too entrenched in a human-centric version and vision of the world.  To most of us, everything somehow relates to us, and not in some philosophical observer effect kind of way, but really, most of us assume without it even occurring to us that that everything in creation is somehow ours by right to relate to, to make meaning from, to use as we see fit.  And this manifests in all sorts of terrible ways.  From major political parties embracing gas/oil/coal-only energy policies to introducing virulent genetically modified canola here in our beloved Willamette Valley, to me driving a truck to church that gets like 10 miles/gallon…  when it is all about us, when goodness and utility are only considered in relation to our own interests, when it is me, me, me or even we, we, we, it is not going to work out.  Well, the funny thing is that it is not going to work out most poignantly for us and our kind.

          The remedy?  Hold the world, but don’t hold on.  Be a gentle companion to the creation.  Take it all in, don’t just consume.  Don’t let yourself be defined as “consumer” or “resident” but be a participant and a citizen.  As you walk in the world, take only memories, leave only footprints (if that).  Most of all, follow the directions of Solomon:     

“Arise my love, my fair one, and come away;

for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

          and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land. 

The fig tree puts forth it figs, and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance. 

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”  AMEN