[Parish] Two Sermons
Malcolm Young
malcolm at ccla.us
Mon Aug 17 11:15:27 PDT 2009
Dear Friends,
Enclosed are two sermons. One from yesterday and the other from the
end of June.
It was so wonderful after church to have the chance to talk to people
about what they are thinking theologically.
I hope you are well.
Yours,
Malcolm
______________________________
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_______________________________
Malcolm C.
Young
1 Kgs 2:10-12,3:3-14
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon
P19
Ps. 30
11 Pentecost (Proper 15B) 8:00 a.m. & 10:00
a.m.
2 Cor. 8:7-15
Sunday 16 August
2009
Mk. 5:21-43
Flesh and Blood
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…” (Jn. 6).
Traveling and staying in new places disrupts our sleep but it also
makes us remember our dreams more vividly. God appears to Solomon in
a dream at Gibeon. God says, “ask what I should give you” (1 Kings
2). One can almost imagine Solomon replying, “Is that a trick
question?”
What would be the point of trying to tell God what he wants to hear?
Presumably God knows something of Solomon’s heart already. I wonder
what your response to this would be, or better yet, what it is that
you honestly want from God. Do you even know what you want? Is it
what God wants?
By his emphasis we know what Jesus wants in today’s gospel, and what
the people around him uncomfortable. Jesus repeats seven times that
his body is a kind of bread. To a people whose purity laws forbid
explicitly drinking blood, he insists that drinking his blood brings
eternal life. You might understand why this made the people gathered
around Jesus uncomfortable and why Roman citizens persecuted the
early Christians in some instances going so far as to believe that
the followers of Jesus ate human babies.
1. In any event these accounts invite us to think about wisdom, the
strange physicality of our existence and the desire of our hearts.
This week I had a very odd experience. I agreed to participate on a
panel of religious leaders at the invitation of an artist named
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Ukeles has been commissioned by Montalvo for
a work to commemorate the great oak trees that are dying from Sudden
Oak Death on its 175 acre property.
Mierle is so weird and wonderful. She was one of the most talented
students in her art school and many were surprised when she seemed to
abandon art in order to raise a family. In 1969 she published a
manifesto called “Maintenance Art” that draws our attention to the
often unnoticed acts of cooking, cleaning and raising children that
keep society going. She made this point by cleaning art galleries as
a form of performance art.
Mierle is perhaps most famous for a project she called “Touch
Sanitation.” This art consisted of shaking hands with 8,500 New York
City sanitation workers and saying, “thank you for keeping New York
City alive.” It turned out to be a very moving experience for many
of these workers some of whom had never been thanked for their
service to the city. She also installed mirrors on a garbage truck
that both made this usually unnoticed fixture of urban life visible
and at the same time made it possible for viewers to literally see
themselves reflected in it.[i]
The Roman Catholic nun on our panel asked Mierle what picture or
sculpture she would make. Mierle told us that this conversation WAS
the art. Her life work makes the connections between our selves and
all that support us clear, and beautiful. She helps us to have a new
experience of our sometimes frail bodies, the physical, the
surprising fullness of God’s creation.
Alan Watts often talked about how we habitually see our interior life
as radically different than the world beyond our skin.[ii] Inside
there is intelligence, consciousness, dignity and love. We act as if
the world outside is governed by impersonal, mechanistic laws that
don’t care at all about us. Modern people regard the world as dead,
driven by blind will as expressed in the Freudian word libido which
means simply lust.
Watts makes the point that this is an error. Human beings share
basic qualities with the universe, we belong in it as our home. In
popular speech we say, “I came into this world.” But that is not
true. Really you come out of it as the hibiscus flower comes out of
the stem or as an orange from an orange tree. In the same way that
an apple tree apples, a galaxy “peoples.” Human beings are an
expression of the energy of the universe and share its nature. If
people are capable of intelligence, responsibility, knowledge and
love, so is the universe from which we came. A cat gives birth to
kittens not zebras, beans are the seeds for more beans not tomatoes.
The universe gives birth to us.
So the first thing I want to point out about Jesus’ repeated
statement concerning his flesh and blood is the importance of our
physicality, our bodies and history. For followers of Jesus
spirituality isn’t something that happens in our heads or in some
spiritual realm. How we care for our bodies and other people’s
bodies matter in a world filled with God’s love and that is our home.
2. Now that you are thinking of yourself as a physical being brought
forth through the universe by God, we can talk about the spiritual
part of being alive. Being alive means more than just being not dead.
[iii] What makes us alive? This week we have an especially vivid
clue with regard to this question.
Two thousand years ago scribes in ancient China identified the
Perseids, an annual meteor shower caused by debris from the Swift-
Tuttle comet.[iv] On two occasions this week with friends I watched
these shooting stars. Imagine yourself on a high mountain ridge
above the fog at Big Sur, far away from the city lights, experiencing
surprise over and over again as each meteor burns across the sky. In
this case surprise does not mean unpredictable. We all knew we would
see something like this before coming out here and yet somehow we are
moved by the experience.
The monk David Steindl-Rast describes surprises like this as the
beginning of a kind of fullness. He calls it gratefulness and it is
a measure of how alive we are. The Greek philosopher Plato calls
this surprise the place where philosophy starts. I believe that it
is the beginning not only of our thinking but our loving too. It
happens when we suddenly notice the gift of our life that we receive
from God.
Kabir (1440-1518), a fifteenth century saint from India wrote poetic
verses about this. “Do you have a body? Don’t sit on the porch! / Go
out and walk in the rain! // If you are in love, / then why are you
asleep? // Wake up, wake up! / You have slept millions and millions
of years. / Why not wake up this morning?”[v]
We have to choose between two kinds of risk: a. the risk of sleeping
through our life, and, b. love which is the risk that comes from
being awake. Wakefulness in this material-spiritual world means
being subject to loss and heartache and disaster. It means being
vulnerable in the same way that God made himself vulnerable for our
sakes. With couples in premarriage counseling we talk about how this
new relationship will make it likely that they will be hurt by each
other more than anyone else. This kind of suffering is a part of love.
One of the things that gratefulness and love do is to make us
dependent on others. We have been taught self-reliance so diligently
that this is difficult. There is a sense in which even God
experiences this kind of hurt. You might be wondering how God could
in any sense be dependent on creatures like you and me. I imagine it
to be like a mother’s birthday gift from her eight-year-old son. She
gives the boy paper and crayons for the card, she gives him money and
drives him to the store to buy bubble bath and tells him her favorite
kind. Everything she receives ultimately comes from her and yet she
still is in a sense vulnerable. She is a “maintenance artist” and
takes joy in the gift that at every step she made possible.
Brother David teaches that gift giving celebrates the bond between
the giver and receiver. He writes, “one who says, “Thank you,”
really says, “We belong together.” The monetary and volunteer gifts
that we give to support this church, the mystery of the bread and
wine in communion, the effort to help people we never met before, all
are ways of belonging to each other and to God. The word we use for
communion is Eucharist and it means thanksgiving or gratefulness.
I bring all this up because there is something difficult about being
told to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink his blood even when we are aware
of ourselves as physical beings whose “aliveness” depends on our
gratefulness and love. This is not unrelated to Mierle’s call for us
to “Touch Sanitation.”
The world takes offense at Jesus’ gift. I’m not sure we know
ourselves well enough to understand the source of our own
discomfort. We know Jesus is talking about the Eucharist that in a
mystical way means we belong together.
Is it hard because of the power blood and flesh have on our
emotions? Or is it difficult because we cannot believe that the
universe even has an entity capable of caring? Or is it because we
don’t believe that God cares about us. Or is it that at some level
we don’t want to be dependent?
Jesus invites us to be in the most intimate relationship imaginable,
to exist in the realm of the physical with gratefulness which also
makes us vulnerable to love. He says, “Those who eat my flesh and
drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the
last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.
Those who eat... abide in me…” (Jn. 6).
I began today with the question Solomon had to answer - what should
we ask from God? I don’t know how you would answer this, but for me
I ask God not to transcend the physical – but to allow me to be more
deeply in it, more fully alive, to be a kind of maintenance artist
for creation. I pray to God for the courage to risk a tangible
experience of gratefulness and I give thanks for the strange
experience of knowing Jesus as the flesh and blood that sustains us.
Wake up! Wake up this morning. What do you want from God?
[i] Mierle Ukeles introduced us to her friend Marcus Young who is the
artist for the city of St. Paul, MN without mentioning that she was
the artist of Fresh Kills Park (formerly the largest landfill in the
world). Maybe you have seen images of her snow workers ballet
(performed with bulldozers).
[ii] These few paragraphs come from Alan Watts, “Not What Should Be
But What Is,” audio recording beginning at 2’48”.
[iii] David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness,the Heart of Prayer (Ramsey,
NJ: Paulist Press, 1984).
[iv] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/08/
BA75195H52.DTL#ixzz0Nj0feeRW
[v] There are so many examples of this in Thoreau’s Walden, I’m just
glad to find it somewhere else so that people can have a break from
Henry. From The Kabir Book translated by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1977) cited in David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness,the Heart of
Prayer (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 7.
_____________________________________
Malcolm C.
Young
2 Sam. 1:1, 17-27
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon
P18
Ps. 30
4 Pentecost (Proper 8B) 8:00 a.m. & 10:00
a.m.
2 Cor. 8:7-15
Sunday 28 June
2009
Mk. 5:21-43
Living by Fear or Living by Faith
“Do not fear, only believe” (Mark 5).
Heidi and the children have been away so I’ve spent more time with my
other roommates this week. Late at night when I can’t sleep I go in
and talk to Jennie, Mango and Oreo. Guinea pigs are good listeners
and very friendly. It’s hard to believe that they use guinea pigs as
- well, guinea pigs.
On the radio this week I heard someone describe us as a “guinea pig
generation.” The speaker said that we have a Stone Age mind in a
digital age.[i] Most of us can remember life before phone answering
machines or cable television. Now we are being communicated and
entertained to death. We continue to become more constantly
available through cell phones, text messages, email, twitter and
facebook just as the number of entertainment choices have exploded.
We have everything from video games, films, digitally recorded cable
TV, exotic music to the world’s newspapers or arcane discussion
groups on the Internet. We seem to be not experiencing what is
happening in the present but accelerating time, unwittingly hurrying
toward our death.
The way we use these technologies is changing the structure of our
brain and our fundamental experience of society and ourselves. Every
day a friend of mine from high school logs onto his computer to
consult with fellow conspiracy theorists who among other things
believe that the lunar landings were a massive hoax. Similarly, a
huge part of how Jim and I understand the world has been carefully
influenced by editors at the New York Times (with a little dash of
Opera News). As a country we share much less in common than when
there were fewer outlets for the news. At the same time news about
the recession, or Katrina or 9/11 is becoming more real to us than
our actual neighbors.
As Christians we have a responsibility to pay attention to these
changes. They deeply affect faith our faith. This week I heard a
talk by Intel CTO Justin Rattner about technologies of the future.
[ii] Mr. Rattner believes that at least in the next 50 years and
probably much sooner our machines will surpass us in intelligence.
They will themselves make better machines than we are capable of
designing. He believes that there will be more progress in the next
one hundred years than there was in the last 20,000 years.
That statement is more remarkable for what it assumes than for what
it forecasts. What is progress? What matters about being human?
Will this be a great advance in artistic achievement, education,
music, politics, architecture, psychological health, ethics, ordinary
kindness, or empathy? Are we looking forward to surpassing the
religious progress we’ve made in the last millennia? Rattner talked
about social networking for robots – will they be Buddhist robots or
Muslim ones? Perhaps the strangest part of Rattner’s talk was the
extent to which it simply left out the role of human bodies, sexual
desire, social identity, and the values that direct our lives (as
aspects of experience).
We are struggling with the question of what it means to be human and
one very popular answer is that humans through their intellect have
control. The good news is that in this contested question each of us
has a vote that matters. We contribute to this debate about the
meaning of life by what we choose to value. We also have guidance
from ancient sources like the Bible and contemporary ones such as the
way that Jesus lives in his church right now.
Although we seem to face this question of our humanity more urgently
now, it has always been with us. One of the major contributions to
this discussion comes from the Gospel of Mark. Mark explains his
purpose in the very first sentence. “The beginning of the good news
of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk. 1). You couldn’t be plainer
than that. These stories are about Jesus and his special relation to
God. They are about what kind of beings we are that this is good
news for us.
After a stormy passage over the sea, crowds have already gathered to
meet Jesus on the other side. Jairus, the synagogue leader
interrupts Jesus and brings him to heal his daughter. Mark likes to
put a story within a story. He brings two different circumstances
together to add meaning to both.
On the way to healing the girl, crowds push in on Jesus. A woman
touches him and although it means nothing to anyone else, both Jesus
and her share the sense that something very special has happened.
This woman whose name we do not know has been hemorrhaging blood for
twelve years. It has made her ritually impure. She has spent all
her money trying to cure it. She is an outcast. She takes a big
risk in reaching out of her isolation to Jesus.
Mark says that after Jesus confronts the crowd about this anonymous
touch, the woman comes forward in “fear and trembling… [to tell] him
the whole truth” (Mk. 5). Jesus lovingly replies, “Daughter, your
faith has made you well.” Then almost as an afterthought he adds,
“go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” For me this means that
the faith that makes you well and the healing that Jesus brings are
different. You can have faith and be sick, or be sick and have faith
– your wellness comes out of your faith that you are a child of God.
But of course the story continues. Jairus gets word from an
unsympathetic crowd that his daughter has died. Jesus in that
crucial moment lays down the choice and his teaching about it saying,
“Do not fear, only believe.” He finds the dead child and heals her.
The problem with miracles is that we cannot get enough of them. When
we witness one we want another for ourselves. When God gives us one,
we long for more. But make no mistake our hearts desire some noble
miracles.[iii]
Years before we met I served as a chaplain at a children’s hospital.
One of my closest friends there was a sixteen-year-old boy named Chad
who was suffering from cystic fibrosis. We spent the last months of
his life together. We prayed together a lot and he used to ask me
how prayer works. All these years later I still think of him and
what I ought to have said.
Prayer is not about convincing God to do what you want, that’s just
another way for us to stay in control. Mark doesn’t tell us this
story to give a blueprint for how we can control God or our lives.
This is the good news of Jesus Christ. It shows us who God is, who
Jesus is and who we are, and who we’re not for that matter. We are
not God, but that doesn’t mean that there is no hope for us. Barbara
Brown Taylor writes that prayer works. “It keeps our hearts chasing
after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers
us back. There’s nothing that works any better than that.”[iv]
Earlier I talked about some of the ways technology changes how we
understand ourselves and how from an Intel perspective our humanity
comes from our intellect’s ability to control the world. We have
given our own species the Latin name homo sapiens sapiens. It does
not mean beings who control but literally the beings who know that
they know.
One of the things that we should know is that change and suffering
are inevitable parts of our life. We may be able to hold things
steady and not change in the short run, but ultimately this comes at
a terrible cost. What Jesus teaches me today is that control is
another word for fear. It is the lack of trust that refuses to leave
the universe in God’s hands. It is the sense that we would be better
at being God than God is.
And so Jesus says it. “Do not fear, only believe” (Mk. 5). At every
moment in our life we have the choice between our desire to control
arising out of fear, and the trust that comes naturally to us when we
understand ourselves to be children of God. Your faith makes you well.
How will you know that you have begun deciding to have faith rather
than fear? There will be something about you that no one can quite
name but that makes people want to be around you. Forgiveness and
love will come more naturally to you. The assumptions that you make
about other people’s motives will be more positive. Instead of
seeing how you have reason to be disappointed in your lot you will
find yourself spontaneously giving thanks to God for simple
blessings. You will be at home with God and you will begin to even
love yourself.
I want to conclude with a short poem that seems to allude to what it
might feel like to live in faith rather than fear.
Derek Walcott, “Love after Love”
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.[v]
[i] “Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Science of Mindfulness,” on Speaking of Faith
hosted by Krista Tippett, 16 August 2009. http://
speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/opening-to-our-lives/
[ii] “Into the Future: Man and Machines” in Conversation with Intel
CTO Justin Rattner Moderated by Kate Greene of MIT’s Technology
Review, Computer History Museum Soundbytes, Thursday 25 June 2009.
Mr. Rattner was asked about ethical questions that these technologies
might raise and replied by taking the classic route of saying that
was up to philosophers and sociologists, that he was just a soldier
in the trenches when it came to making judgments regarding
responsibility.
[iii] This section is influenced by Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by
Another Way (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1999) cited in http://
feministheology.blogspot.com/2009/06/proper-8b.html
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Derek Walcott, “Love after Love,” from Collected Poems
1948-1984 (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
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