March 30, 2013, The Great Vigil of Easter

Year C, Easter Vigil

March 31, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

“How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.”

          Welcome to the mystery of Easter.  It is totally fantastic, this story.  The capture, torture and execution of a messianic figure in a time and place rife with messianic figures, of a backwater religious and political radical in a time of religious and political radicalism…  Somehow that action, that horrible death ontologically, that means fundamentally, it ontologically changed the fabric of existence, changed humanity’s relationship with God and everything.  It is fantastic.  

          Without a doubt, the fantastic is why I am Christian.  I am Anglican because I think we remember it well, our rites and rituals are potent tolls for focusing human attention and intention, for conjuring holy remembrance, but I am a Christian for what we are remembering.  

What are we remembering?  The incarnation of our Lord.  What are we remembering?  The revelation and conduct of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry: lifting up the lowly and casting down the mighty, freeing the needy from needless suffering.  What are we remembering?  The death, descent, and rising again in power of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  We remember these fantastic stories because they give us a glimpse, a vision of God active in this world, of God alive in this world, fully, and somehow, mysteriously, we remember a vision of the world as it is supposed to be.  And this is not imagination; this is cellular, soul-ular memory.  We know how it is supposed to be, our beings remember it.  We are made of dust that was there at the beginning.  That is the mystery.  Revel in our immersion in the mystery of this night, when earth and heaven are joined and we are reconciled to God.

          Immersion in mystery, in mystery enacted in the rites and rituals we practice tonight, rites and rituals that have been practiced for two thousand years much like this, that alone is a take away message.  It is an Anglican truism that praying shapes believing, and praying like this, together, by this flame, in this particular way that comes but once a year, that helps us believe.  But believe what?  It helps us believe that things aren’t always what they seem. It helps us believe that God’s ways are not our ways and that we are the ones that need to do the adjusting. It helps us realize that those adjustments that are needed are hard; for God does expect the impossible, God does demand what we can’t even begin to comprehend, God does require sacrifice and forgiveness, loving-kindness and humility solely on the basis of faith.  Faith that there is a way things are supposed to be, faith that the Kingdom of God is at hand and faith that in faith we can make real the Kingdom of God on earth, faith that in faith we can make it real in our life times, faith that in faith we can make it real in this very moment.  Great is the mystery of faith.

          Why is this mystery so critical?  Why is a cosmic humility that we don’t understand it all, that we can’t, why is that such an essential aspect of our approach to understanding ourselves and our relationships with God, our neighbors and everything?  Why is a bow to the unknowable the key to knowing anything?  

          Mostly, it is because it is the nature of reality.  We all float in a great sea of unknowing.  Our memories are fatefully flawed; any historian or expert on witnesses at trials will attest to that.  Our perception of what is happening right now is inconsistent at best:  someone right now is having a deep religious experience, someone else is learning something about themselves or maybe even God.  Someone else is bored, annoyed by my droning on, someone else is thinking about how cute Amelia is or the basketball game that she is missing or his high school boyfriend.  We have so few things in our collective existences that ground us, that anchor us to some modicum of common shared experience, we share so few reference points to connect us to the true nature of things.  Great is the mystery.

          The mystery of faith posits that even though we are all adrift in the fog, that even as mired as we all are in darkness, there is a way.  There is an eternal reference, a known point in existence that intersects with our realm, the realm of time and space.  That point, that reference point is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  He is the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.  Jesus Christ transcended life and death in the mystery of the Passion and Resurrection as He transcends the probable and possible in His eternal and actual presence in the hearts, minds and bodies of the faithful, and in His eternal and actual presence in the church and in her sacramental being.  How?  Why?  I am afraid that these are unanswerable questions to the point of being unaskable. 

          We are drawn to God in the light of Christ because we carry that light within.  We are not separate from God, we are not estranged from God, not really, it just seems that way.  If we had the eyes to see it, the ears to hear it, the tongue to taste it, the memory deep enough to hold it, we would see that the distance between us and God is a figment, a very massive and convincing figment, but a figment of our imagination.  That is the nature of sin:  distortion and distraction.  This is the atonement, the reconciliation of us and God that Jesus Christ offers.  Jesus removes that distance, closes that gap and reminds us of how it is supposed to be.  What do we need to remember?  That it is in God that we live and move and have our being.  That it is in Christ, the Morning Star that all of creation is enlightened.  That it is the Holy Spirit that moves across the abyss and fills our lungs with life.  

Tonight we remember welcoming the light of Christ into the world with the words of the Exsultet.  “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.” And when we rest into this deep mystery, this cloud of unknowing how and why it is the way it is, we have the chance to remember that there is nothing, nothing, nothing to worry about.  It all just is.  This is the Good News of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior with whom we commune this night.  Great is the mystery of faith.  Hallelujah!  

Let me end with this poem by Lynn Unger that Bryn up in the choir shared with me.

They thought they were safe

that spring night; when they daubed

the doorways with sacrificial blood.

To be sure, the angel of death

passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert

without a home, without a bed,

following new laws to an unknown land.

Easier to have died in Egypt

or stayed there a slave, pretending

there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first

naked days outside the garden,

is that there is no safety,

only the terrible blessing

of the journey. You were born

through a doorway marked in blood.

We are, all of us, passed over,

brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,

whose imagination you hold.

God did not promise that we shall live,

but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,

brilliant in the desert sky.

Great is the Mystery of Faith.  Christ is Risen! Happy Easter.  AMEN

March 28, 2013, Maundy Thursday

Year C, Maundy Thursday

March 28, 2013

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

          It is so fabulous to share this table with you again.  We should have communion like this more frequently.  This was how it was in the early church, a real meal.  The early church, like the first 100 or 200 years, met mostly in people’s homes, quite often in the homes of rich women, actually.  Everyone would gather for reading scripture, praying, singing hymns and giving alms.  Then at the passing of the kiss of peace, the unbaptized would leave, and the gathered saints, the baptized would have the ritual meal all intertwined with an actual meal; much like we are doing tonight.  (BTW, it would take three years of catechumate to move to the ranks of the baptized). It is good religion, mixing ritual observance, worship and thanksgiving with the necessities of being alive, eating and community… the circle of life, the immanent and the transcendent in harmony…it doesn’t get any better than this.

          It is ironic, though, the passage from which we use as our institution of the Lord’s Supper.  “On the night when he was betrayed He took a loaf of bread…”  that part, the part that is absolutely required in our way of consecrating the Eucharist.  It is ironic, because it comes from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, a church that was pretty messy.  He actually writes these lines as a conclusion to a series of suggestions he offered to the fledgling church in Corinth that the NRSV subtitles “Abuses at the Lord’s Supper.”  Most of the abuses involved people eating and drinking too much at the meal.  He wrote, “For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry while another becomes drunk.  What? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those with nothing?  What should I say to you?  Should I commend you?  In this matter, I do not commend you.”  Those with much took more, and those with little were left with nothing.  All was not well in that Corinthian paradise.

          The name of those original Eucharistic suppers, was the same as this supper tonight, this supper in memory of Jesus and His disciples’ last supper together:  the Agape feast.  What does agape mean?  _____  Oxford defines it as “Christian love” and “selfless love.”  That is pretty good, but it doesn’t quite get to the root of it.

          Greek, which I do not read lest I give that impression, was a very precise language.  Very precise in particular, about the word love.  We have that one word, Love, to mean so many things.  So when I say “I love roses” it is context that tells me this is a different shade of love to describe my love for Windy, which is different than my love of the girls, my folks, our goats, and God in Christ.  In Greek, they had three words, agape, philos, and eros.  Philos is basically described as “brotherly love” or more technically, as “dispassionate, virtuous love”  Aristotle included love within a family, between friends, and love of things and activities.  “I love roses” is love in the key of philos.

          Eros is less obscure.  It is the root of the word “erotic,” and it while it does not have to have a sexual connotation, it certainly does apply to “intimate love,” specific love for a specific person.  Plato relates eros to a love of beauty which connects the soul to deep spiritual truths.  Eros is always very organic, earthy, leading us transcendently through various states of human consciousness into deep, intimate relationship.

          And then there is agape.  This is the love Paul uses in 1 Corinthian’s pinnacle passage, “Love is patient, love is kind…”  This is not attractive love, but is deep love, even sacrificial love.  It  hearkens back to the Hebrew hesed, streadfast love.  This is the love of God radiating into the world, the root cause of human relationship, agape, like this feast, is the nature of the love Jesus Christ felt for his friends on this night so long ago, it is the nature of the love He felt from the Cross so long ago, agape is the nature of kingdom of God, and bringing it back home, agape is very much the nature of this feast we are celebrating in this very moment.

          When I say that we here, the church, a local parish in Christ’s church, when I say that we are an outpost of God’s kingdom, an embassy of the kingdom of God, it is this that I am talking about.  This, gathering around a table, older and younger, richer and poorer, all of us in various stages of kookiness, all of us rejoicing and suffering in our lives, all of us struggling and succeeding, seeking and being sought, finding and being found… that all of this happens around a single table, that we form a discernable family in Christ, that what gathers us defines us more than what divides us… that is the way it is supposed to be; that is the kingdom that we all seek, that we all proclaim. This is agape happening. Look around; this is it happening just like it did on that fateful night two thousand years ago.  This kind of love, Agape, this kind of community, it doesn’t save us from suffering, it doesn’t shield us from affliction or tragedy, pain or loss, or death, but it makes all of that bearable.  That is part of Jesus Christ’s gift to us on that night long ago.  This is that gift happening.  This is a glimpse of how it is supposed to be.  This is a glimpse of the kingdom of God.  This is a glimpse of the love of God with a pulse.  This is agape.  AMEN.

March 24, 2013, Palm Sunday

Year C, Palm Sunday

March 24, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Certainly this man was innocent.”

          Those are the words of the centurion overseeing the execution of Jesus Christ.  Innocence.  What a word.  It conjures images of unspoilt childhood, of quaint naïveté.   Innocence implies preciousness, something that can be lost, and once it is lost it is gone forever.  Then there is the innocence of, “I didn’t do anything wrong”, of innocent until proven guilty.  When it comes to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, it would seem that that centurion had it comprehensively right, “Certainly this man was innocent.”  But then again, I do suppose innocence is in the eye of the beholder.

          Everywhere Jesus Christ went He healed people, cast out demons, fed the hungry, taught the meaning of law and prophecy, had and encouraged deep relationships with people and had and encouraged deep relationships with God.  He even raised someone from the dead.  Everywhere He went He did the right thing, He was blameless, innocent, even.  

          Did Jesus do anything wrong?  I mean not in a “without sin” kind of way, but in a guilty-of-anything-in-the-eyes-of-man kind of way?  He ticked people off, pretty much continuously, but was that wrong, was He guilty of anything?  His glorious procession into Jerusalem, the procession we remembered with our foot steps this morning, sure it slowed traffic and certainly would have annoyed some merchants whose business would have been disrupted by the commotion, and civil/military authorities despise anything unexpected or unpredictable-seeming, but wrong, guilty?  The money changers might have a case, Jesus certainly violated decorum, tradition and probably law in driving them out of the Temple, but disobedience to laws, civil, religious or otherwise, is only wrong if it is applied to just laws.  

          Jesus was guilty of nothing.  He was not leading people astray from society or the faith.  He was not preaching against the Law or the Prophets.  He was not advocating violence or an overthrow of the standing government or religious authorities.  He certainly did not speak or act against the sovereignty of God.  Yet even at his birth, people, powerful people largely, sought to suppress Him, silence Him, kill Him.  Beginning with Herod’s pogrom against infants and toddlers, the slaughter of the innocents, through the horror of this coming week, everywhere Jesus went, He was met with hostility, with anger, hatred and open violence.  His own people, the people of Nazareth tried to throw Him over a cliff, the demoniacs all cried, “Leave us alone,” the authorities came under cover of darkness to take him away, and the crowd screamed “Crucify him!” One writer put it, “He came with the gathering love of a mother hen, yet was met with deadly resistance.”  Everywhere He went He met resistance to not just what He said or did, but more importantly, to what, to who He was.  Why is it that we hate the innocent so?

          I do mean we.  This story, the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, this day’s raucous Yippie-like political theater, a 1^st century Occupy Zombie March into the capital, the agony of the Passion; this is a reflection of our nature, our very broken, our very sinful, our very human nature.  We reject the naïveté of “it is simply the right thing to do” in public policy and in how we live our lives.  We disallow as simplistic, radical notions of Sabbath, gift and cooperation.  We shun honesty and in doing so, condemn the honest; we shun the disruptive, so we reject the agitator, often the bearer of simple, blatant truths.  We marginalize those who offer mercy and those in need of mercy.  And why? Why do our own agendas become the most important? Why do our own needs trump the needs of others?  Why do our desires and even dreams seem to be more important than others’ ability to survive?  Why do we sacrifice, or consent to the sacrifice of the innocent that we may not be put out or inconvenienced?  Or more directly put, why do we think it is ok to be a bystander?

          The violence of National Socialism was unveiled in 1938’s Krystallnacht.  Across Germany religious buildings, businesses and homes of Jews were ransacked.   Dietrich Bonheoffer, the great Reform theologian was a witness to this terror, and notated the haunting 74^th Psalm in his personal Bible with the words, “How long, O God, shall I be a bystander?”

          The cross is a bitter symbol.  It is disgusting.  Dirty.  Filthy.  It is obscene, really.  And in its obscenity it demands our attention.  It represents the torturous execution of the innocent at the hands of corrupt priests, collaborationist leaders and their Imperial overlords, it doesn’t get any worse than that.  Well except for adding us, the throngs of bystanders along the edges of this scene, bystanders passively watching it all happen.  The cross refuses to allow us to be bystanders.  That is the agonizing mystery of the symbol of our faith.  We may not, on pain of a death estranged from God, be bystanders any longer.

          As we immerse ourselves in the agony of this week, in the horror of the Passion, imagine what Jesus and His friends were going through.  Imagine not knowing that Easter was immanent.  Imagine not knowing that this story was going to end up OK.  Imagine not having the blessed assurance that the light shines in the darkness. truly.  Imagine what the world would look like if we were not just bystanders to the slaughter of the innocent, if we were not bystanders to the crucifixion of the innocent like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?  Imagine what that would take?  Imagine.  That is our task this Holy Week.  AMEN

           

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.