March 17, 2013, Fifth Sunday in Lent

Year C, Lent V

March 17, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          It is a little discombobulating, how the Lenten lectionary is laid out for us this year.  We have not followed Jesus and his friends on their journey chronologically or geographically.  Lent, in Year C, is St. Luke, and is expressed rather thematically, but this week, we are plopped into St. John’s narrative in Bethany, on the doorstep of Jerusalem. The scene is six days out from the Passover, much as we are a seven days out from Holy Week, our Christian nod to the Passover remembrances.  We find ourselves scripturally with Christ at the final push before the tragedy and loss of Holy Week, preludes to the mystery and joy of the Easter event.  And St. John paints for us quite a scene in the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.

          Who were Mary, Martha and Lazarus? _____  They were siblings. Lazarus, most famously, was raised by Jesus from the dead.  Remember, everyone complained about the smell?  But it worked out.  And Mary and Martha?  In Luke, they hosted Jesus in their home.  Martha bustled around the kitchen while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet listening to His teaching which rather annoyed her sister, but when she complained to the Rabbi He pointed out how distracted Martha was, how all over the place she was and that “…Mary has chosen the better part and that will not be taken away from her.”  I am just glad that it is Martha and Mary, not Martha and Gary because we men-folk would never hear the end of that one.  Basically, they were part of the community that Jesus formed around Himself.  They were supporters of the movement, housing and feeding them when they were in town, maybe gathering friends and family in Bethany to hear Him preach, or maybe to talk or pray together when He was not there.  Probably they raised money, too.      

          There is deep humanness in this story, not just John 12:1-8, but the whole of the Gospels, the whole of the Bible, actually.  Remember, Jesus is a person, a man.  Fully human and fully divine; you can’t realize your full humanity, facing death, facing pain and loss and joy and happiness if you somehow also floated above it as God.  No, to be human is to be in this morass with the rest of us.  And Jesus Christ was up to his neck in humanity, I can’t imagine that He fully understood the depth of His true divinity.  The humanity of it all is incredibly important to remember as we involve ourselves in the Gospel.  This is not a story about them, the Holy ones, Others…  no, the Gospels, the Bible is about us, people, living our lives in our own extraordinary times and places.

          This story today focuses our attention on the full humanity of two people who don’t usually get a fair shake. Adoring Mary and famously horrible Judas.  These two people, like any of us, do not lend themselves to a single frame interpretation.

          Adoring Mary.  We know very little about Mary, other than that she must have been a force to reckon with in her day because not many women are mentioned in the gospels and even fewer by name.  She must have been influential, important to the movement during the life of Jesus and probably afterwards, too.  She was a listener.  Maybe a contemplative.  Sitting at the feet of a Rabbi is a contemplative act.  And she listened, deeply.  Jesus had been speaking of his coming death and this whole nard anointing unmistakably alludes to the preparation of a body for burial.  She listened to Him, heard Him and did what she could do.  And what could she do?  Love Him; care for Him as she knew how and was able.

          Mary could have been a flake, lazy or just plain irresponsible.  Again in this scene, Martha is doing the serving while Mary anoints Jesus with 300 Denari a pound perfume.  A denari was a day’s wage… this stuff was expensive, extravagantly expensive.  What help could we offer with $20,000?  Folks here complained about a $250,000 organ.  What if I picked out some $5,000 vestments? Or we wanted antique salvaged teak for the building addition we are envisioning?  Yes, probably the same reaction that Judas had to this extravagance.  Mary was a whole person.

          So was Judas the Betrayer.  Unlike Mary, most everything we think we know about Judas is negative.  He betrayed Jesus to the collaborationist Temple authorities who betrayed Him to their masters, the Romans.  He was paid off with unclean blood money.  And depending on the account, he hung himself, his bowels exploded or even worse depending on the source.  He was very bad, betraying God with a kiss.  Now if that kiss was the will of God because Jesus needed to be betrayed in order to die in order to be raised, I just don’t know, it is a slippery slope into very bad theology.  It would be like saying that the Holocaust had to happen so that Israel could be founded so that the end times could begin in a Jewish Jerusalem.  It doesn’t make sense; or at least it doesn’t make sense in relation to the God that I know and follow.

          But there is another side of Judas.  The pragmatist.  To him, maybe the nard worth a year’s salary was just another foolish, pie in the sky, out of touch with reality decision that his companions are making.  Another bad decision in a line of bad decisions by a bunch of flaky activists.  “Why are we even going to Jerusalem?” I can imagine him asking.  “Are we idiots?  Are you, Lord?  We’re going to lose this fight.”  He kept the purse maybe not because he was stealing it, but because no one else could handle it.  He knew what he was doing.

          Judas was a Zealot.  What was that?  ____  A radical anti-Roman sect advocating tossing the Empire (and the collaborators) out of Palestine.  Zealots led the 66 – 70 revolt.  He was a serious revolutionary.  He had been in movements for a long time and I can imagine him bristling at the naiveté, or even incompetence of his fellow apostles, or at least at this twit Mary.  $20,000 on His feet?  Urrrgh!!!   My new favorite theologian remarks regarding Judas, “only fools follow lost causes.”  Maybe he wasn’t a fool.  Maybe the betrayal was a last ditch effort to save the movement.  “Jesus is great, but He’s dangerous.  We need him out of the way if we are going to really take on the Romans.”  And the cause here sure looks lost from our vantage point; what it must have looked like in a pre-resurrection world?

          We have two people finding themselves in a very dangerous, very stressful moment in time.  Someone they love, a community they believe in, a movement, a way of life they are risking their lives for was at a crossroads.  Two good people came to very different conclusions about what was to be done.  And in this very case, who’s to say which had it right?  Well, Jesus tells us, but these are real people.

          I have been talking recently about how we know right from wrong when we see it.  We know good.  We know evil.  Right?  We can smell it; it is a faculty we have been blessed with (well blessing or not, that depends on how you read Genesis.)  We do know right from wrong, but rarely are the actionable options before us easy to differentiate.    

          We all know that poverty is terrible, it needs to be ended, but how?  Or homelessness, or federal budget woes or guns or your husband’s drinking, your daughters refusal to speak with you, the cat peeing on the couch.  All terrible things, but what to do about it?  What do we do about complex, dynamic problems involving other human beings?  In short, how do we approach anything of importance?

          Now if I had a definitive answer to this I’d have done better in that election in Rome this week.  I struggle with this every day in my life and ministry.  Do you think I preach a hard sermon like last week’s lightly?  I say some crazy stuff from up here, crazy because it is not stuff you are hearing elsewhere, and I am always wondering, “Is this too much?”  “Is this about me and my opinions or about the Gospel and the movement of the Holy Spirit in this community right now?”  Is this village the right way to approach homelessness?  I don’t know.  I know what is happening now doesn’t work.  Ask anyone on the street if you doubt me.  So we might as well try something different, right?  How do we know what we are doing is right?

          “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”  St. Irenaeus observed this truth in the 2^nd century and it stands today.  You have the answers.  You…  They live in your being.  Maybe not on the tip of your tongue, but in the blood that flows in your veins.  Maybe you can’t tap the truth out on a keyboard but it is apparent in the living of your life. In breathing in and breathing out, truth manifests; it is encoded in you, in each of us, in the creation of the universe.  Being fully alive, being fully yourself, opening yourself to encounter this world real time; that is the expectation and the answer.  No matter how scary or painful it can be, no matter how tempting it may seem, no matter how many times you have fallen flat on your face, all God in Christ expects of us is to be who we were created to be.  You are a most precious Child of God.  Being that is being the truth, and the truth will set us free, free of doubt and fear, free of hatred and misunderstanding.  Mary and Judas came to radically different conclusions about what to do in that moment so long ago.  But what they did, what they chose reflects precisely them being the fully alive human beings that they were made to be.  May we have that courage to be, too.  AMEN    

March 10, 2013, Fourth Sunday in Lent

Year C, Lent IV

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

March 10, 2013

          “…the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.”

          Last week we spoke about repent and return, right?  We spoke about the Kingdom of God being simply how things are supposed to be, right?  We are called to repent of our sinful ways and return to the way things are supposed to be, return from exile from the kingdom of God.  The real question is what is it supposed to look like, this Kingdom of God?  We are called to return from our posture of consent to, of complicity in, of collaboration with forces of idolatry, gluttony and avarice that rule our 21^st century American lives; the call to return from that life is as clear as it was in the days of Isaiah and Jeremiah as well as Jesus.  But where is it we are returning to?  What does that kingdom of God look like?  How is it supposed to be?  That is our Lenten question this morning which finds its voice right there in our lectionary this morning.

          The book of Joshua is the story of the conquest of Canaan.  In the wake of Moses’ death, God gives command of Israel to Joshua.  It is a tough book, lots of smiting and really reinforces a manifest destiny narrative for Israel in the Levant that is still hideously unresolved.  In any case, that’s where our lectionary leads us, to the first celebration of Passover in Canaan and the end of the rain of manna.

          What was manna?  Right, bread from heaven.  In the Exodus story, Israel escapes from Pharaoh and the people find themselves starving in the desert and they began to have nostalgia for “…the land of Egypt, where we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.”  God heard their cries and through Moses declared, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread.”  So from that day forth, for all forty years of the Exodus, quail covered the camps in the evening, and in the morning, as the dew lifted, a manna was left on the ground.  It was “as fine as frost” (Ex 16:14) or like “coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.”  (Ex 16:31) Enough meat and bread for everyone; the way it is supposed to be.  And, of course, it coming from God via Moses, there were rules.

          Does anyone remember the rules of manna? Rule one:  “Gather as much of it as each of you needs.”  (Ex 16:16)  Pretty simple.  Take as much as you need.  Rule two:  “Let no one leave any of it over until morning.”  (Ex 16:19) Do not accumulate.  Do not hoarde.   What happened when they tried to store it?  “it bred worms and became foul.” (Ex 16:20) Have faith that God will provide. And rule three:  Keep the Sabbath.  “Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord; bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.” (Ex 16:23)  Miraculously, on the Sabbath, the seventh day, the manna did not turn foul when kept overnight. Sabbath is key.  In the words of Ched Meyer, with whom I studied two weeks ago, “Sabbath observation means to remember every week this economy’s two principles: the goal of ‘enough’ for everyone, and the prohibition of accumulation.” Take what you need.  Don’t accumulate.  Observe the Sabbath. To sum it up, abundance is a gift from God, it is the true nature of things that there is enough for everyone AND, self-limitation is the appropriate response to such a divine gift.  A Sabbath economy is part and parcel to the kingdom of God.  It is there that we are called to return.

          “Great idea, Fr. Brent.  Manna.  There’s there’s solution to the hunger problem in Oregon.”  True, manna in its pure form is scarce.  It is not traded on the Chicago mercantile exchange.  But that is the very point.  Our world is not commodifiable, actually.  It is not ownable; not really, or at least really not in the kingdom of God.  God’s plan is not to carve up the earth for the strongest, the most aggressive and competitive to accumulate more than they can possibly use while others do not have what they need. It is that world that we need to repent and return from.  An economy of Sabbath; that is where we need to return to.

          The conference I went to was all about Sabbath economics.  This is an economy that is based on the principles of gift and limit.  There is abundance, enough for everyone.  Moving at the pace of the Sun, there is food, clean water, clean air, space for everyone.  Even with nine billion of us, there is enough of everything necessary for everyone to live if we all just got along and shared of the abundance.  No, the world cannot consume like we do in Eugene 2013, there is distinctly not enough for that, but there is enough that no one need starve to death, or freeze to death, or die of thirst.  You see, disparities of the order of magnitude in the world are not natural, but rather are the result of human sinfulness.  Wealth disparities are are anthropological aberrations. It does not happen like this in nature, that 1% of a population controls 50+% of the wealth.  The phenomenon of the 1% is unique to humanity, but at least we are consistent.  If we read the Gospels closely, Occupy’s critique of the 1% in our day mirrors Jesus Christ’s critique of the 1% in His, which mirrors the critique of the prophets 500 years before that.  And the solution that Jesus Christ offers is the solution that Moses offered, which is what God offers: jubilee.  When shared, there is enough.  Vast disparities of wealth through improper accumulation are not part of God’s plan but are the result of human sinfulness, and the solution is jubilee, the redistribution of the abundance gifted to us by God.  I said it:  the redistribution of wealth, the jubilee, this is God in Christ’s economic plan.  I fear that Jesus’ political career would be short in modern day America talking like that, but He does talk like that, and if we are going to be serious about following Jesus Christ, we need to pay attention.

          God’s plan for the Israelites was simple, the wandering for 40 years was to purge the Israelites of the habits of the fleshpots of Egypt.  The duration of 40 years was key.  In 800 BCE when this all takes place, 40 years was the far end of life expectancy.  So after 40 years, the first hand experience of slavery was going to be aged out of Israel, that is why Moses had to die before crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land, that land was not for him, but for the children.  40 years away from the concentration of wealth, of man’s dominion over humans, over animals and plants and rivers and soils.  And over the course of that 40 years, they lived in a Sabbath economy.  Every day their life was sustained by the gift of God’s grace: manna and quail with water occasionally pouring forth from rocks.  40 years… the lazy habits of empire broke on the rocks of God’s hesed, steadfast love.  Israel was prepared to enter the Promised Land and to practice the Sabbath Economy they had been trained in, so on that day, in the midst of that first Passover, the manna was to cease and they ate of the crops of Canaan.  With the tools they had acquired in the wilderness and backed up by the Law, usuary, the collection of interest was forbidden, the Sabbath every 7^th day, every 7^th year, and in the years 7 times 7, the 49^th year, the year of our Lord’s favor, the proclamation of jubilee. All debts were forgiven, all accumulated land was returned to its rightful owners, all indenturedness ceased. Israel was living the dream.

          Well, they lived the Sabbath economy for a while, maybe a few of hundred years.  By the time the prophets are writing in the Babylonian exile, 500ish, they are primarily decrying the destruction of Israel in terms of their distance from jubilee, in their participation in Empire, in accumulating wealth, in placing faith in the 1%.  We here, we don’t have forty years to clean up this mess.  Climate-wise alone, the past 100 years raised the globe’s temperature 1.3 degrees, something it took 5000 years to do of its own volition.  How much warmer will it get in the next 40 the way things are?  But we don’t have 40 years.  Fortunately, we don’t need 40 years.  We know the truth when we see it, we know right from wrong when we see it, and it is right here.  The kingdom of God is at hand for those with the eyes to see it, the ears to hear it, the voice to proclaim it.

          Our story of repentance, of the repentance required of us, very specifically us in this room is specifically the story of the Prodigal Son.  This is a uniquely Lukan story, and we all know it.  There are two brothers, one cashes in his inheritance and “squandered it in dissolute living.”  He ends up broke and starving and humbly returns home, where to his surprise he is joyously welcomed by his father because to him, “…this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

          The trusty, devoted, stay at home brother is not impressed with his whore mongering brother’s return and the grandiosity of his welcome, but the father explains, “…he was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”  And then they dug into that fatted calf at the feast.

          That is our story.  We are a wasteful and spiteful people; a prodigal people.  We have squandered the earth, our inheritance.  Talk about dissolute living.  But every day, every moment of every day we have the choice, the chance to do it different.  And God in Christ is there, waiting, waiting with infinitely wide and eternal patient arms to welcome us as we return from our sleep walking, our blindness, our death to the kingdom of God.  There is enough for everyone.  Disparity is not God’s plan.  God’s plan is Jubilee, redistribution. Repent and return to this brave new world. Now that is a Lenten message we can sink our teeth into.  AMEN

March 3, 2013, 3rd Sunday in Lent

Year C, Lent III

March 3, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.”

          Everyone hearing this story would have known the Jesus was talking about rotted manure, compost.  Fresh manure, when it is actively breaking down, ties up so much nitrogen that it can actually kill a plant.  But let it sit for a while, turn air into it, mix it with leaf mould or other brown organic material and it is straight up alchemy.  The diversity of life that develops in short order in a compost pile is staggering and very poorly understood.  What we know though, is that from a pile of poo and the detritus of any natural system evolves the stuff of life: humus.  

          Now this story that Jesus is telling is not about compost.  It is about repenting and returning to God. This is what Lent is all about, repentance and return.  What most of think of when we think repentance is stopping our naughtiness and being sorry so that we may be forgiven our sins.  That isn’t it.  Sin isn’t naughtiness.  Sin really is about distance from God.  Things are sinful in that they increase our distance from God OR they result from our distance from God.  It is kind of hard to tell which is which.  Are we violent because we do not feel the love of God or do we not feel the love of God because we are so violent?  Which comes first the distance or the sign of the distance, I do not know, but repentance and return is what we are called to do make things right.  

Repent and return is not just about ceasing sin, turning from sinful activity, but, in the words of a Jesuit scholar, it is more importantly “…an acceptance of the visitation of God in the proclamation of God’s kingdom.”  In lay terms, true repentance and return happens in seeking, accepting, inhabiting the Kingdom of God proclaimed by God in Jesus Christ.  It is at hand, that Kingdom.

I recently had a bit of a revelation about this Kingdom of God that we (and Jesus) talk about so much.  I am learning that God’s kingdom is not something mythical, not other worldly, not something we need to wait for until the eschaton, the prelude to the end of days… No.  The kingdom of God is something far more ordinary, far more commonplace that that: The kingdom of God is simply how things are supposed to be.  Think the archetypical Eden before the apple incident.  Think the fine balance of wilderness.  Think the activity of the Horsehead nebula.  The kingdom of God is when and where things are the way they are supposed to be.  From Paul Tillich’s towering “the arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice” to the base understanding that the concentration, the hoarding of wealth has been a primary source of human suffering since people considered things ownable; it is all the same.  We know how things are supposed to be, we can smell it, we know it when we see it.  See the quite joy of a mother nursing an infant.  (Well, ideally it is a quiet joy).  Sneak a peek of two sisters pretending together, or a mighty river endlessly coursing or a sea lion floating peacefully in the chaos 100 meters off of the beach.  How do they do that?  I don’t know but that is the way it is supposed to be.

That is the most devastating thing about all of this, the world.  We know what is right and good and joyful when we see it.  We know what to do.  We know how to be.  We know to be ourselves as God intended us to be, but goodness it is hard to stay on that path.  Well, it is for me, anyway.  Besides a tiny percentage of severely broken people with deep pathologies, we know the difference between right and wrong, truly; we know the difference between good and evil, between what we should do and what we should not do, how we should conduct ourselves in the world and how we should not.  Sure we have lots to learn because much of the world is not as it seems and is not as we have been taught, but in our hearts we know light from dark. You know when you are on the wrong side.  You do.  But if only it were as easy as knowing.  We must repent and return, constantly.

          One of the key understandings of repentance and returning is making things as they are supposed to be.  Now that is exceedingly hard to do in the context of a society (if not a civilization) founded on principles directly not in line with the way things are supposed to be, but it is possible.  We can repent and return.  We can take baby steps towards the kingdom, which, brings us back to the matter of compost.

          “O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

          How can you be alive you growths of spring?...

          Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within

you?

          Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”

          Walt Whitman wrote these words reflecting his experience walking across the hallowed fields of Gettysburg when it was still littered with the dead in various stages of disrepair.  

          He continued:

          “Behold this compost!  behold it well!

          Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person – yet

behold!

          The grass of spring covers the prairies,

          The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden…

          The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of

its graves…

          Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

          It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions…

          It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings

from them at last.”  That is just a snippet of a longish

poem, but you get the point.

          Compost, the process of compost turns the sick into the healthy, the broken into the whole, the dead into the living.  This is the way it is supposed to be.  The complex economy of life and death, of desiccating or mouldering into the next generation… that is the way of life.  It is the way of the kingdom.

          War is one of the great manifestations of human sinfulness.  It breaks the bodies, minds and spirits of everyone involved and rains desolating sacrilege on the land upon which it was fought.  But in due order, that desecration is reconciled.  The kingdom is poking through the mould in those bean plants.  The kingdom is resurrected in the pale visage of wheat.  Horror and death happen.  Brothers rise against brothers, sisters rise against sisters (though less often and with fewer weapons) but the kingdom of God, the way things are supposed to be… it is right there.  Waiting.  Sometimes waiting in that top five inches of soil, but always waiting.  Waiting to take the filthy and make it clean.  Waiting to turn the foul into flowers, stench into sweetness, disease into health.

          What do we have to discard of ourselves on the compost heap of existence?  What in our lives, our beings do we need to excise and purify in the mighty 150 degree furnace of a good compost system?  This is a way to approach repentance.  This is a way to understand our return to the kingdom of God.  

Is this that unlike God’s definitive revelation to Moses on Mt. Horeb?  “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters… So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”  This is not the way it is supposed to be.  Empire.  Slavery.  The subjugation of a people under harsh taskmasters.  This is not the kingdom of God, and here, God in God’s self intervenes and ordains a man; an orphan, a refugee, a survivor, God ordains Moses to go down to Pharaoh and lead God’s people to the promised land.  The promised land flows with milk and honey, cultural code words for life much like grapevines and fig trees were code words for God’s blessing by the time Jesus walked in Galilee.  (Micah 4:4; Joel 2:22)

Life and Blessings.  These are Godly ways.  These are kingdom ways.  Life flows like milk and honey.  Blessings increase like grapes on the vine and figs on the tree.  The trouble is, we don’t go from bondage to the promised land in a single bound.  We don’t go from carcass to bean plant overnight.  We don’t move from death to life, from curse to blessing without some form of trial, winnowing or ordeal.  Yes, that half eaten ham sandwich will compost eventually, but it is quite a thing to go through to get there.

This is the journey of Lent.  This is the journey of repentance and return.  

 Because like those Galileeans slaughtered in the midst of worship, or the workers killed as the tower of Siloam collapsed, the end often comes unexpectedly.  We only have today to work on our relationships with each other and with God.  Repenting and returning is a daily process, a daily reconciliation of the way things are supposed to be.  It is no less than a daily practice of envisioning and realizing the kingdom of God.  We have our work cut out for us.  Repent and Return.  AMEN.