November 18, 2012, 25th Sunday after Pentecost

25^th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, Proper 28

November 18, 2012

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Beware that no one leads you astray.”

          I do not think that the precipitous fall from grace of CIA director David Petreaus is one of the signs that Jesus was talking about in this, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse, but it is worth making comment on.  It amazes me that so many are shocked that the moral character of the director of the CIA has come into question.  He was the director of the CIA; his job was to skirt the outer limits of morality under the cover of darkness in the violent defense of a specific group of people: us.  He ran the drone war.  He ran the secret prisons across the globe.  He declined to take responsibility when 27 CIA operatives were convicted in abstentia in the courts of our ally Italy for kidnapping a man and shipping him to Egypt where he was brutally tortured.  And before this, as a soldier, his vocation was to kill people, or more accurately as an officer, to get 19 year olds to kill people.  I had that same job once.  And yet what outrages us, what forces his resignation is that he had sex with someone other than his wife?  If we were to put this on a hierarchy of sin, I’d rather that he had a lot more sex with a lot more biographers and killed a lot fewer people.  I suppose if you are going to betray an oath before God to a spouse you are probably more likely to betray an oath to a nation, so this revelation of impropriety is operationally relevant, but still.  We should have been outraged by this man’s conduct in the world way before he betrayed his wife.  Truly, if this by all accounts great man had dedicated his talents to alleviating poverty, eradicating malaria or to some other common good, he would have gotten much further in his mission to make this world safer, freer and more secure for Americans as well as for everyone else.  His fall is no great loss for our nation, I do grieve, though for him and his family, Ms. Broadwell and her young children and husband.  Terrible all around.

          I don’t think this is one of the signs Jesus was talking about.  I don’t think the General was one of those leading us astray, not intentionally, at least.  He was pretty central in the rumors and conduct of wars, of kingdoms rising against kingdoms, nations against nations.  I don’t think the CIA can cause earthquakes (that is the natural gas company’s fracking operations.)  I am not all conspiracy crazy.  All of this stuff is and true.  True like Marcus Borg says when he uses the term post-critical naïveté, which means, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true.”  Just like today’s gospel, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse. 

I just want to be clear why I bring up such a thing as this, something so current-eventy, so newsworthy at church.  My understanding of the mission and purpose of Christ’s church is all wrapped up in why I think speaking about a disgraced public figure on Sunday morning is not only appropriate, but is important if not necessary.  We gather here week in, week out, to pray together.  That is what this is, the Mass, a form of common prayer.  Prayer is a practice, a practice, as our Catechism teaches us, that is all about responding to God.  This practice of responding to God together deepens, complexifies, enriches, makes stronger our relationship not only with God, but with each other and the world we live in.  One of the primary fruits of a life of prayer together is learning to make meaning of the world and our relationships with the world.  Being here together in a Holy community, saying, singing, proclaiming Holy words, orienting our beings on the Holy Sacrament… these are beautiful things, but in and of themselves are valueless, if not dangerously and narcissistically distracting, if they do not help us live in the world in a way more in line with God’s will, more in line with the true nature of things.  Making meaning, discerning the will of God, discerning our part in the vast interdependent web of existence… if being here does not help you, motivate you, enable you to bring all of your faculties to bear on how you live in the world, how you conduct your business, your classroom, your family, your political life, your money, if being here doesn’t inform that, if not define that, your kind of missing the point of the religious life.  Certainly the religious life Jesus Christ leads us on is one straddling eternity and the present moment, the finite and the infinite, the now and the forever.  Our public and private lives, our religious life, our professional life, our family life… there is no delineation of these spheres, no separation, no boundaries.  Our whole lives are a seamless continuum in the eyes of God, therefore our religious life, the meaning we make through our religious life has to inform how we live in the world. It has to inform the choices we make, the leaders we select, the society we aspire to.  So following the advice of Karl Barth, perhaps the greatest theologian of the 20^th century, I preach with the Gospel in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  The always and everywhere illuminating the here and now.  

          Today’s passage, St. Mark’s Little Apocalypse is a case in point of the always and everywhere illuminating the here and now.  What does the word apocalypse mean?  ______   Revelation. And what does that mean? ____  Right, making known that which was unknown, particularly in the case of a divine disclosure of knowledge or wisdom.  Apocalypse has popularly come to mean the revelation of something to do with the end times, but more accurately, what is revealed are mysteries of the future or mysteries of the heavenly realm. In this passage, the 13^th Chapter of St. Mark’s good news to us, what mysteries are being revealed?

          Remember where St. Mark and his community were in history.  They were in the time of a major insurrection against Roman imperial hegemony that would end in 70 with desolating sacrilege descending upon the Temple.  What a time.  How terrifying.  What Jesus is saying is that, yes, terrible things are happening, but this is not the end, not yet, it is just the very beginning and you have to be prepared for the long haul.   Then the rest of Chapter 13 goes into pretty close detail about the terrible trails and tribulations that the faithful will suffer in these times, but Jesus’ primary warning is “Beware that no one lead you astray.”  So what is he talking about?

          Wars, famines, earthquakes… these are generic embodiments of all Jewish apocalyptic literature, so they could be just that, poetic references to the future state of things heavenly and otherwise.  There is also the real possibility that what was being discussed here were contemporaneous events.  Wars, rumors of wars… Roman legions, 5,000 man fighting units moved around Palestine then.  Would there be a siege?  Are they leaving?  A terrible famine blanketed the eastern Mediterranean in the 50s, certainly leaving a deep impression on St. Mark and his community, that famine would have been an abiding memory.  And earthquakes?  In 60, an earthquake devastated Laodicia, a city in Asia Minor mentioned by Paul.  Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 62.  

          50s.  60.  62.  The war of 66 – 70.  These dates are all well after the death of Jesus Christ…  So either He was speaking purely metaphorically, His prophecy was dead on accurate, or, and what most scholars more or less agree on, these words, the Little Apocalypse of St. Mark are not the actual words of Jesus Christ but were crafted by St. Mark in the spirit of the teaching of Jesus Christ. The words “do not be alarmed,” is a translation of a Greek word meaning literally “to avoid precipitous action.”  In this time, yes, there were many messianic, apocalyptic figures running around Israel, our own Lord and Savior and his herald St. John the Baptist among them.  There were also insurrectionists, rebel leaders recruiting heavily for those rumored wars to end all wars with the imperial forces.  Barrabas, the man freed in Jesus’ stead by Pilate; he may have been one of these.  Judas Iscariot, our unfortunate anti-hero, he is associated with the Zealots, a violent movement of extreme religiously motivated rebels; I have an image of 1^st century jihadists in my mind.  

          So St. Mark, with all of this swirling about, rebellion, famine, darkened skies from a distant volcano in his not so distant past, with Jesus Christ on his mind, in his heart and through his pen, he begins to make meaning of the world.   He expresses his understanding of Jesus Christ’s message to not be a call to armed insurrection against Empire and her collaborationist allies, but of non-violent resistance to those same dark forces.  In the words of Mark scholar Ched Meyers, “Mark prepares the reader for a discourse not of revolutionary triumphalism, but of suffering and tribulation.  Against rebel eschatology, Mark pits the death/life paradox of his own narrative symbols and the politics of non-violence.”

          Be it the authentic words of Our Lord and Savior, or the spirit of that Savior inhabiting the words of St. Mark, what is clear is that meaning of the movements of the world, the actual day to day movements of the world, making meaning of those, that is a religious imperative.  Poverty, disease, violence, corruption, disingenuous religious leadership, injustice of all forms and offering models of life as corrections to life in a broken world; this is what Jesus preached.  He did not preach in abstracts but in the concrete realities that he experienced as a landless peasant in the occupied territories of 1^st century Palestine.  (Israel.  Rome.  Some things don’t change.  God bless the people of Gaza and forgive the people of Israel in this, yet another terrible hour).  This is the body and blood of our shared existence that Jesus Christ demands we take deeply into ourselves; demands that we make meaning of; demands we do something about; demands we be something different.  “This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”  AMEN

November 11, 2012, 24th Sunday after Pentecost

Year B, Proper 27 

November 11, 2012

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

“For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all that she had to live on.”

Giving everything that we have.  Now there is a theme of a stewardship sermon!  No? 

This story begins with a broad condemnation of temple leadership.  There are Jesus and his friends, sitting in some busy city square, looking at the comings and goings of Jerusalem.  Jesus, in the verses just before this, had been confronted by one of the scribes.  It worked out in the Messiah’s favor, but things must have been tense.

This little band of men and women from Galilee were simple country folk sitting in one of the busiest quarters of the busiest city in all of the Levant.  The variety of people they must have seen, of all colors in all sorts of dress from across over the Empire.  The smells of foreign foods and spices, the presence of all that wealth.  All the fancy people.  I imagine that they felt a bit like I feel when I am in New York, not quite a bumpkin, but certainly not at home.  Sit on a bench in Union Square and watch the world go by.  It is dazzling.  I can imagine them sitting there with their rabbi, dazzled by the grandeur of Jerusalem.  

Jesus starts by talking about the scribes.  The scribes were just that, writers, public officials associated with the Temple who could write.  They carried the responsibility for recording political, financial, legal and religious proceedings.  They were highly educated in theology and the law and held an esteemed place in society, thought to be smart, wise and just.    Jesus pointed out their long robes, the sign, like Joseph’s Technicolor dream coat, that they did not do physical labor. Unlike what Rabbi Jesus had taught, being the servant of all, the scribes expected respectful greetings in the market and expected the best pew in the synagogue and a seat of honor at the parties.  

Then he says, “they devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.”  This takes some explaining… throughout the Law, the care of widows and orphans was given high religious merit.  Over time, the temple, or temple officials (such as scribes) became involved in the care for widows.  If a widow lacked a replacement husband of suitable kinship, her wealth might have been entrusted to a scribe who would administer her affairs on her behalf (heavens, women could not be trusted to handle their own affairs)!  Invariably, this became a center of sin and corruption, as widows, being at the very bottom of the social ladder, had no recourse against their scribal protectors with rank, prestige and those long sleeves.  So as Jesus commended to the tax collectors to collect no more than they were supposed to, he condemns the corruption unleashed on the least of these by trusted officers of the Temple.  Fair enough.

Then they got up and moved, sitting down across from the Temple.  The place was huge, certainly the biggest building complex they had ever seen by an order of magnitude.  Ever been to Rome? Their new seats gave them a view of the Temple treasury, a little bit bigger an operation than Gay’s office after Mass.  It was found in a part of the Temple called the Court of Women.  Around the walls of this court were thirteen massive, trumpet shaped chests invested out of bronze, probably.  As the money went in, they probably rang out so all could hear how much (or little) you were putting into the coffers.  All taxes not bound for Rome would have been collected there, in addition to the regular giving and payment for sacrificial animals.  It was big business.  And there are Jesus and his friends, heckling to themselves about the vast wealth being dumped into the treasury of a corrupt institution led by corrupt people, and with an expiration date.  In the very next paragraph Jesus tells his friends that the Temple will be destroyed, “not one stone will be left here upon another.”       

     

Then there is the poor widow.  What does she do?  She gives two small coins.  “For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”  That is something else, everything she had to live on.  So is she a model for us, or a warning?

Think about it.  Jesus has just given a damming critique of the scribes in their arrogance, their privilege and their status in society.  They “devour widows’ houses.”  The machinery of the Temple society is corrupt, not praying for the least of these but preying upon them.

Maybe the woman giving all that she has to live on is a tragic figure in a cautionary tale.  What warning might her example offer?_______

Don’t be duped by bad religion.  And there is a lot of that.  It used to be pretty common on television, the preacher claiming that for every $100 you send him, God will return with $1000.  God doesn’t.  Or the prosperity Gospel; God wants people to be rich, or that riches are a sign of God’s favor.  Again, God doesn’t and they are not.

Maybe the warning is that the days are numbered for religious institutions that exist for their own good, and not for God and the world.  Remember, the next paragraph talks about not one stone left atop another. And also remember, St. Mark’s gospel was recorded just as the temple actually was destroyed in the desolating sacrilege that only an empire can dish out.  So maybe Jesus is showing the disciples the tragedy of poor widows being had by the powers that be.

So then, how might she be modeling positive giving for us?

That is harder, no? With all the facts in hand, it is harder to see the positive in the poor widow’s selflessness.  We have to be careful, for far too often we put on a pedestal those who make great sacrifice and we don’t consider all the facts.  Deep giving, real sacrifice is too often a non-voluntary action. Too often those with little are forced to give more than they should, more than they can. Since knights started falling to longbows, it is the poor, the immigrants, the disenfranchised who fight wars.  How much of the brunt of domestic spending cuts are borne on the backs of the homeless, on the unemployed, on women, infants and children?  Prisoners?  How many of Eugene’s budget woes are solved at 4J’s expense? At the expense of the 2500 people living on the streets?   And don’t forget, Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a higher marginal tax rate than he does.  That issue came up a little bit with this most recent election cycle. This woman is giving all she has, all that she has to live on.  This is a poetic way of saying that she was giving her whole life to something, but to what?  What is Jesus teaching about the temple?  Right, it is broken.  It is perverted from its true vocation.  She is giving her life to something that is corrupt and condemned and will be destroyed, St. Mark knows this as he writes.  It has happened, and she is still giving.  Giving to the Temple, it is a return ticket on the Titanic.  She is giving a foolish gift to an undeserving recipient.

So here is the religious twist, the surprise, the unexpected truth that the Gospel so often plops on our laps.  This kind of foolish gift to an undeserving recipient is exactly the kind of gift that Jesus Christ Himself was about to make.  This scene here, these teaching around the Temple, this is the end of his conventional ministry.  From here, “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice to the whole world.”  Look around:  ours is a corrupt and condemned world, every created thing will witness its eventual destruction, from the tree that falls and rots into the mould of the forest floor, to the mighty mountain that will eventually end up as sand grains on some beach, to each of us, for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.  And the church?  We’re doing OK.  We give a lot, but we are sitting on a bunch of wealth, just this land, I mean, how many people could live safely here, if just overnight?  What more do we have to give that we don’t?  How tightly do we grasp to OUR treasure, how little do we pass through to do God’s larger work in the world?  What do we, here, deserve?  And yet… and yet… Jesus Christ gave all that he had, His body and His Blood, the perfect sacrifice of suffering and death, and of praise and thanksgiving to a dying, a failing, a wholly undeserving world. He gave His life that our feeble, dying, broken bodies and souls might have a taste, or even a chance for a taste of the Living God.  Is that a wise use of what one has to give?  Is that a way to live, to give up a life for something that is worthy only of being condemned?  AMEN

November 4, 2012, All Saints Sunday

All Saints, Year B, November 4, 2012

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          The Feast of All Saints.  This is one of the major feasts of our church, a feast of memory, remembering the lives and work of those who have gone before us.  We remember the triumph of light over darkness, right over wrong, good over evil.  That is what saints do, and that is what we are supposed to do for this feast; remember them.  This is part of our birthright as Anglicans, the Communion of Saints, that cloud of witnesses, named and anonymous, that have served God and humanity in our past, and we are to remember them and their stories.  But that is not the whole story.  All Saints does not stand alone.  This week we also celebrated All Hallows’ Eve, Halloween on the 31^st, and on the 2^nd, All Souls, or officially, the Feast of All Faithful departed.  These three days come together in a complex of feasts that should probably have a name, but doesn’t.

          All Hallows’ Eve...  Not that I don’t love all the witches and superheros and kitty cats and mermaids running around the neighborhood, and the cheap candy and spider webs hung from trees, but Halloween has lost its traditional power.  What is being taunted on All Hallows’ Eve?  Death.  Death itself.  It is a carnival, in its most ancient sense, which means it is an occasion for humans to bring our wit and sense of humor to bear on serious, terrifying, and solemn subjects. All Hallows’ Eve is a lot like Mardi Gras, but instead of mocking the fast leading up to remembering Christ’s death as in Mardi Gras, in All Hallows’ Eve we are mocking our own death.  Wearing a fanciful, outrageous or even obscene costume and eating too much candy or drinking too much whatever, I am saying, “Death – I mock you.  You have no power over me because I can chose to not take you seriously.  And I so choose.  (Tonight).”  That is where it comes from, Halloween.  It is not where we are today.

          For All Faithful Departed, All Souls, we remember our own common of saints, those that we as individuals and communities have lost to death’s inevitable embrace.  Remembering our dead in hope; that is part of the light perpetual shining on those who have passed into the sweet by and by.  All Faithful Departed is celebrated in the full knowledge of our collective mortality, mitigated by a hope for a common eternity, or at least by the hope that even in death, I think Bob Marley says it best, even in death, “…every little thing’s gonna be alright.”  Even in death, it is going to be fine, there is nothing to fear.

          This autumnal triduum, anchored by All Saints, is among the most powerful complexes of Holy Days that we have.  The dark and chaotic mockery of Halloween, the commemoration of powerful servants throughout history for All Saints and the solemn remembrance of our own dead on All Faithful Departed… there is powerful medicine in there.  But this feast complex is, barely observed religiously by anything besides reading the names of the dead and singing “For All the Saints.”  Why?  

          Earlier this week, someone described to me a cartoon they saw.  It may have been in the Guard. It had two panels, the first a man in a suit just standing there, the second, the same man in a suit, this time standing in rather deep water in what was obviously New York City, and each panel had the same caption: “This is no time to talk about climate change.”  On the eve of a complicated election, in the wake of a devastating and unprecedented storm, or in the words of our resident expert on such matters, John Orbell, an “ ‘anomalous’ and extreme weather event,” it is what, disappointing, dismaying, disgusting that neither major party candidate has even uttered the words climate change.  It is beyond negligent.  This fact is an abomination of Biblical proportions.  We are experiencing the overwhelming and willful disregard of our and our planet’s future by our so-called leaders.  And not the distant future.  My sister’s sculpture studio under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges was under 6 feet of water on Wednesday (they still don’t have power).  And she was blocks from the river, the studio is in a good neighborhood, but not that good.  First Bangkok was under water this year, now New York.  Millennial droughts occurred across the central US this summer, they are still ongoing.  And in the artic, we experienced the smallest summer ice pack ever.  This is it happening; climate change.  Wet places getting wetter, dry places getting drier, storms getting bigger.  And no one is talking about it, not without being couched by politicized and partisan deniers of what are accepted and now, in the wake of Sandy, widely experienced facts about the reality of climate change. How can they get away without ever talking about climate change in this whole campaign (or poverty or homelessness or barley even the wars we are involved in)?  How do we let them get away with it? Why does this happen?  Why?  

          Well, why?__________

          What I think, is that they, you know, They think, that we can’t handle the truth.  Remember that line from Rob Reiner’s film A Few Good Men?  “We can’t handle the truth,” that truth being that the world is a brutal place that needs brutal people to protect us by brutal means.  That is in fact not true, but They operate under that premise, andby extrapolation, so do we.  If we, the people, knew how bad it was, is, knew how precarious our atmosphere has become, knew how much the ocean has warmed and knew, truly knew what we were facing, sure, we’d be angry, we’d certainly not reelect some, and would certainly not elect others, we’d change consumption habits, change a lot about how we live and then get on with it.  That’s what New Orleans is doing.  It is what we did during World War I, the Depression, and World War II.  We can handle the truth.  We have, and we can again.

          And the same thing goes for death. Ours is a death denying culture.  Over the generations, they, and by that I certainly include we, the clergy we, as part of the problem, we have come up with all kinds of death denying jargon, theologies, distractions, taking us away from the heart of the matter.  And the heart of the matter is that, yes, we will all die.  You heard it here.  It is true.  Death is in all of our futures.

          The thing is that that, death, is not the end of the story.  Here is where the liberals among us start to get uncomfortable.  And hey, I get confused too.  But the words of Sam Portaro, an Episcopal priest and writer, bring us to the heart of the matter is that, “We Christians dare to hope beyond the constraints of mortality.”  That is what this whole All Hallow/All Saints/All Souls feast complex is about.  Christian hope is all bound up with the departed in the face of death: saints, souls and otherwise, a vast collection of those gone before us living life everlasting, beyond time, beyond mortality, now and forever.  And every little thing’s gonna be alright. 

          There is no evidence for this, of course, evidence for eternal life, not immortality, that is heresy if not sacrilegious, but eternal life.  The testimonials on the hereafter are spotty and are generally unreliable.  But Christianity is THE hopeful religion.  It is the religion of eternal life.  Our culture lives as if there is no tomorrow.  It, we spend our natural resources, our real wealth, our people as if there is no future to expect.  That is the ethic of clear-cutting, strip-mining, tar sands, and fission reactors. If there is no hope for tomorrow, there need be no worries for today.  That is the guiding theology of late stage free-market capitalism of the West; no hope, so… (Lots of words flow through my mind that are not appropriate for Sunday mornings, so I’ll settle with a locally grown slogan) just do it. That is not a Christian way to live.

          Hope is the guiding force in the life of the Christian.  Not hope for some forseen or wished for future, not some grasping image of how things might be, or how you want things to be, not some vision of a world unstained by death, a world that miraculously turns the corner on global warming, but an eschatological hope, a hope unconcerned with the mechanics of it all but with the blessed assurance we can do it.  By do it I don’t mean that you are going to live.  None of us are, not that much longer, but by “do it”, I mean that you can go through all that you have to go through.  You can handle the truth of what it means to be alive, alive, formed in the imago dei, the image of God.  We, Christians, live in the hope of the Resurrection; of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, yes of course, and of the perpetual nature of life, eternity, time outside of time, and the very real, cold fact of death, and its inevitablility.  Christian hope is the balance of inevitable death and equally inevitable eternity.  Christian hope is bound up with the indelible mark of life, the unstoppable will to live, and the intense fragility of the living.  We can handle the truth.  About our own future and about the future of our planet.  And the complex of All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints and All Faithful Departed, we can handle that, too, and in handling those observances, we might even be able to handle the rest of it even better.  So until next year, give to the departed eternal rest: may light perpetual shine upon them, because every little thing’s gonna be alright.  AMEN