[Sermons] 2 Lenten Sermons

[Malcolm Young]

Dear Friends,

I can't believe it has taken me so long to send these sermons to you.  Sorry about that...

I hope you are well.

Yours in Christ,

Malcolm
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This sermon comes to you from Christ Episcopal Church in Los Altos, California (www.ccla.us).  If you think that this would be helpful to someone you know please forward it to them.
 
Other sermons in written and audio form can be found at www.malcolmcyoung.com.
 
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Malcolm C. Young                                                                                                                  Gen. 15:1-12, 17-18

Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon Q7                                                                                                          Ps. 27

2 Lent (Year C)                                                                                                   Phil. 3:17-4:1

Sunday 28 February 2010                                                                                                                      Lk. 13:31-35

 
O Jerusalem!

“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing” (Lk. 13).
 
Many people point out that Jesus teaches us to pray for our enemies.  Not as many notice just how powerfully Jesus loves the people of the very city that killed him.
I cannot hope to do justice to this expression of Jesus’ love, but perhaps we can think about three aspects of it together.
 
1. The first thing I want to talk about today is the question of why we seem so determined to refuse God’s love.  Avoiding God’s judgment makes sense to me.  I can see why we would not want to face the truth about our lives and the choices we have made.  We want to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, to go on thinking that compared to others we’re pretty good.  Turning our backs on God can be a way of preserving the myth of our fundamental innocence.
 
But why do we refuse God’s grace, the free gift of love, which does not ask anything in return?  I can think of a few reasons.  First, we might think that it is too good to be true.  Many of the people around us in Silicon Valley feel that they cannot believe in God.  They regard religion as a fantasy.  They believe that nothing in this universe is higher than the human being, that accident rather than love is the reason for creation.  They see the glass of existence as half empty.
 
Because they have nowhere to direct their sense of thankfulness, they can’t experience as many of the everyday blessings from God.  This means that their antennas are disproportionately tuned to the hopelessness and suffering of life.  These are the people that surround us and we’re called to help them see the way that God blesses us in the most ordinary ways.
 
I think a second reason for refusing God’s love is that we simply do not want to surrender any control of our life to God.  As part of our Lenten Series we talked on Wednesday night about what it means when someone tell us that they are spiritual but not religious.  College chaplains and others who hear this the most say that these people want to affirm the importance of God, to have the good feelings of believing, but without being responsible to a community of others.  They want to preserve their independence and distance themselves from the hypocrisy and bad behavior that they associate with religious people.  It is challenging to belong to a community; it means we have to be accountable, that our beliefs need to have an outward expression.  The institution of the church is what has preserved Jesus’ teaching and practices.
 
We church-going people also rebel against God. Perhaps we worry that if we allow ourselves to be loved by God, eventually we’ll owe something in return.  If we accept God’s embrace now, we can imagine God later asking us to be on the vestry, or to tithe a tenth of our income, or even to become an overseas missionary.  So we play little games with God saying we’ll increase our pledge rather than commit to teaching Sunday School or serving on the outreach committee.  But this isn’t the way God works at all.  God gives completely freely.
 
Another reason we refuse God’s love is that at a basic level we know that we do not deserve it.  Most of us find it far easier to forgive other people, than to forgive ourselves.  We love others more than we love ourselves, and this makes it hard to allow God to love us.
 
We are set in our ways, but God persists with us and this brings me to my second point, God’s commitment to bringing his children together.
 
2.  One of my favorite expressions in Luke describes Jesus setting his face toward Jerusalem (Lk. 9:51, 53).  It shows a kind of determination that we can recognize in the really dedicated people we know.  Today’s gospel makes it clear not only that Jesus is healing and teaching on the road toward death, but that he is fully conscious of his end.
 
The Pharisees were the people of that society who may have been most like ourselves in their devotion to God.  Although they are frequently shown debating with Jesus about the meaning of God’s word, they come to warn him that Herod plans to kill him.
 
Some overzealous commentators have suggested that they are testing his status as a prophet.  They want to see if he will run away in the face of danger.  The text says nothing about this, and I think of them as genuinely concerned for Jesus.  This raises the question of why Jesus seems to speak this way to people who are trying to help him.
 
I don’t know how many of you have ever been in a totalitarian dictatorship before either in communist Eastern Europe or the developing world.  I remember East Africa during the 1980’s.  People lived in total poverty.  There wasn’t even enough money for advertising images.  But in every store or teashop or one room school, in every tiny village of the country there was a picture of the dictator.  No one there spoke casually about political figures who had disappeared, young men who had been tortured, or ordinary people randomly detained.  The regime used fear and brutality to silence dissent.
 
In our setting it may be hard for us to imagine the extent to which kings like Herod ruled through violence and fear.  Jesus didn’t build any monuments in the Holy Land, but the Herodians did.  They constructed cities and harbors, huge palaces with giant steam rooms and massive swimming pools carved out of rock only feet away from the Mediterranean Sea.  These all functioned as symbols, to remind the people of the Holy Land that everything about their lives depended on the whim of the king.  We simply cannot imagine the kind of power that Herod had over other people.
 
Jesus says, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow” but I am on my way to Jerusalem.  People tell Jesus to be afraid, to interrupt his ministry and run.  But Jesus has confidence in his work of healing and in God’s love for him.  Even though going to die at Jerusalem seems like a failure, he knows what God wants him to do and nothing can deter him.  Jesus is not getting what he wants, but he is not afraid either.  He has an abiding trust in God.
 
3. The last thing I want to think about is the terribly tragic character of God’s love.  What more powerful expression of this could we imagine?  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Lk. 13).  God makes promises through Abraham to a people who constantly turn away.
 
This echoes King David’s utter grief in hearing about his son’s death in 2 Samuel.  He cries, “O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Sam. 19:4).  David had many wives and as might be expected there was conflict among his children.  When David’s son Amnon raped his own half-sister Tamar, her full-blooded brother Absalom killed him.  Feeling shunned by his father for this, Absalom later raised up a successful rebellion against him by promising to reverse the rapid changes that took place during David’s reign.
 
Absalom forced his father David to flee the country, but then made a tactical mistake in not pursuing him.  Across the Jordan, David organized his forces and retook his kingdom.  David’s men found Absalom entangled in an oak tree and killed him.  When they told David what happened, “The king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice.  The grief so overwhelmed him, that David’s general Joab felt like he had to rebuke him.
 
Joab told David you have, “covered with shame the face of all your officers who have saved your life today…”  And this is my favorite line, “for love of those who hate you and for hatred of those who love you” (2 Sam. 19:6).  Joab goes on to say, “for I believe that if Asalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then you would be pleased.”
 
The French philosopher Blaise Pascal says the heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t comprehend.  We all know people, and even are people, who love another beyond hope.  Maybe you have a child who never could pull himself together, or a long-term friend who keeps disappointing you, or an unstable relative who you keep bailing out.  It might be a person who because of their fragile mental health or addiction to alcohol or drugs, simply can’t help but let you down.  You love them and don’t know what to do for them at the same time.  This is how God feels about us.
 
Our resistance.  Jesus’ determination.  God’s persisting, tragic love for us.  These three ideas arising out of today’s gospel have a great importance to us right now.  Our experience of faith means that we have deep convictions about the precious gift the church has to offer the world.  We have to learn to receive this gift in the way that God is offering it to us right now.  We also have to figure out how to share it in a way that the people around us can receive it.
 
Like Jesus we need to be courageous and determined in our ministry.  We have to see what lies ahead and set our face to our own Jerusalem, to transform our world.  Through our actions we bring into being God’s kingdom every day.  We are like hen’s wings.  We are the way that God enfolds the world in love.
 
Let us pray:
Almighty God, strengthen us in faith, hope and love, so that with grateful hearts we may do what you ask of us and come to share in the life you promise, through Jesus, who walks with us and rules in power through the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

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Malcolm C. Young                                                                                                                  Ex. 3:1-15

Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon Q8                                                                                                          Ps. 63:1-8

3 Lent (Year C) Scout Sunday (different epistle)                                                                                                                 Phil. 3:3-11

Sunday 7 March 2010                                                                                        Lk. 13:1-9

 
A Scout is Reverent

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is excellent and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4).
 
The Scout Law describes the scout as reverent, but what does reverent mean?  This week I asked this question and got some extraordinary responses both from the church and from Troop 30.  Tom Senter wrote about snow camping and a summer night on Lake Huntington under millions of stars.  Fritz Schnieder grew up in Boy Scout Troop 112 of Paris France.  He even went so far as to look up today’s Bible readings and to write a beautiful essay on this subject.
 
Reverence means a kind of respect for something outside of our self.  It means honoring the unnamable, mysterious source of all creation.  Moses encounters this “I am” and you can see the Greek translation of this word (ho on) written on icons to remind us that these are not gods, but pathways to an unknowable divine.  From the time before Moses (took off his shoes before the burning bush) to now, people have met the holy one in the beauty of nature.  Many in this room first felt this transcendent experience in nature through scouting.
 
At perhaps the most basic level, believing in God means that we have someone to thank for the gifts of beauty that God gives us every day in creation and each other.  Gratitude is part of reverence.  Believing in God makes us more conscious of the richness and joy and even miraculous nature of ordinary life.
 
Reverence does not involve condemning other people in order to feel morally superior.  It is not a tool for separating people into groups so that we can look down at others.  It is not a way we seek to be recognized, rewarded or admired.  Reverence isn’t trying to fit into someone else’s idea of propriety.
 
In fact reverence is not always what you think it is.  You can find reverence in surprising places – even the Bible.  You might ask what the Bible says about reverence.  Really the Bible, as a book written by many different authors over centuries, is more like a library than a single book.
 
But one writer in the Bible named Paul gives us a strange but very clear example of reverence.  Before going on I have to warn you that he does this in a way that sounds very irreverent.  In a letter, Paul addresses a church he had founded a long time before.  He writes a short autobiography and lays it all out, his family background, accomplishments, righteousness and zeal, everything he should be proud of – you probably have a list like this of your own.
 
And then he says, “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ…  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own… but one that comes from God based on faith” (Phil. 3).
 
So think of everything you are most proud of, everything you most want to accomplish.  For Paul compared to being in Christ these things are like “rubbish.”  Only of course Paul didn’t say that.  We’ve sanitized the translation because it offends us to hear what he really says.  Paul does not say “rubbish.”  The Greek word skubalon should be translated as “shit.”[i]  He regards his high status and all of his greatest achievements as shit compared to what he gains in Christ.
 
For Paul reverence doesn’t mean always saying the socially appropriate thing.  Instead, reverence is a kind of way that we order the commitments of our life; it is how we make sure that we put the first things first.  For Paul, and for many of the people in this room, it means putting Christ first.
 
But what does that mean?  There is a huge fight right now within Christianity about what it means to put Christ first.  For some it means condemning and excluding gay people.  Some say that if you aren’t in their Jesus Club, God will forsake you or condemn you to eternal torture.
 
I don’t believe either of these things.  For me being in Christ is not a magical belief that separates out the right believing people who are bound for heaven from others.  For me being in Christ means being fully alive right now, in the way that becomes possible when we try to live like Jesus.  This includes loving people who are very different from us, and the confidence that God cares for us in this life and in the life to come.
 
And as evidence we have a fairly randomly chosen example of Jesus’ teaching in our gospel.  At first, this seems like a scary story but we quickly recognize it as something we hear pretty often today.  People go to Jesus and tell him that the Roman governor had murdered some of the people from his home.  We wouldn’t know what they were driving at except from Jesus’ response.  He says, “Do you think that they suffered because they were worse sinners than others” (Lk. 13)?
 
To make his point clearer Jesus goes on.  “What about the eighteen who were killed by the falling tower of Siloam?  Were they worse offenders than the other people of Jerusalem?”  Jesus’ first point, to mix a common popular phrase with an ancient word, is that skubalon happens.  Bad things happen, they do not reflect the victim’s goodness.
 
It astonishes me that even today after great tragedies some idiot on television in the name of Christ will claim that these are acts of God’s judgment.  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others tell gullible viewers that AIDS is God’s punishment for gay people, that the September 11th terrorist attacks are God’s rebuke of secular America, that the Haiti earthquake was some kind of punishment meted out on people who are among the earth’s poorest.[ii]  I haven’t yet heard this about the Chilean earthquake but I’m sure someone said it.[iii]
 
But in case we start feeling too distant from this behavior or self-righteous, we need to be conscious of the way we do the same sort of thing.  Think of how most gossip works.  “Let me tell you something really bad that happened to someone else.”  Jesus points out that we actually use other people’s suffering to feel better about ourselves.  We feel morally superior when Tiger Woods, Akio Toyoda or Mark Sanford apologize in public for a fall from grace.  We vicariously enjoy the punishment that public opinion inflicts on them.  Even people who are in no way responsible for their own suffering give us the opportunity to at least feel lucky.
 
Jesus’ point is that reverence means seeing other people not as pawns to make us feel more successful, but as children of God.  A truly empathetic person doesn’t use someone else’s tragedy to win a philosophical argument.  We all make these comparisons and Jesus says repent or perish.
 
Apart from being aware of this tendency to use other people, Jesus also wants us to examine the questions that we ask.  All of us at some point experience overwhelming tragedy and suffering.  It may not be a tower falling on a loved one, but it is like that: a car accident that robs us of someone we didn’t think we could live without, a grandchild dying of cancer, mental illness that utterly incapacitates us.  There is almost something in our DNA that makes us cry out, “why do bad things happen to good people.”
 
Some people say that either God is either all-powerful or all-loving.  I believe that the whole thing is more complicated than that.  We inhabit an open world in which we can make a real difference, a shared world shaped by God’s creative energy that includes freedom that sometimes has disastrous consequences.  We inhabit a complex universe in which no human can expect to have all the answers.  Bad things happen to good people.
 
If you think about it Jesus himself is the perfect example.  Why did the worst possible thing happen to a person who so completely dedicated his life to healing and love?  The answer Christians have believed for centuries is that through him God embraces suffering, God endures suffering, God confronts suffering and ultimately God transforms suffering.[iv]
 
One way Jesus does this is by asking us to repent.  This word means to turn around.  He asks us to turn away from the blaming question, “why did this happen” and to embrace a different question, “what can I do?”  In place of one picture of God as a tower-destroying, tyrant-manipulating being who has already punished us for what we did in the past, Jesus gives us another one – a picture of a gardener who gives us rich soil and water, who protects us from being chopped down, so that we can bear good fruit in the future.
 
Martin Gray survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust.  After World War II he married, raised a family and became successful in business.  Incredibly, disaster struck him again.  In a single day his wife and children were all killed in a forest fire that burned his house in Southern France.  Neighbors urged him to demand an inquiry into the cause of the fire.  He refused saying that an investigation would focus only on the past, on the sorrow and pain.  It would pit people against each other and set someone up as the villain.  He knew that accusing other people for your misery only makes a lonely person lonelier.  He said that life has to be lived for something not just against something.  And so he reverently put his resources into a movement that would protect nature from fires.[v]
 
What is reverence?  It is gratitude for nature, for the love and holiness we encounter.  Reverence is the process of making good decisions about how we order our lives.  It is understanding that we live in a beautiful but untidy world where skubalon happens.  It is moving quickly past the “why” questions to the “what can I do about it” questions.  Reverence is knowing that what you believe is less important than the fruit you bear.

[i] Skubalon A Greek-English Lexicon: Compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott ed. Henry Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1616.
[ii] I don’t even want to dignify the bigot and homophobe Fred Phelps by mentioning him.  He leads that crazy, tiny Topeka church made up mostly of his own relatives which has protested at American military funerals and most recently turned up here at Gunn High School.
[iii] By the way why don’t we conclude that places that avoid suffering are particularly virtuous (like the Hawaiian Islands after the tsunami warning last week)?
[iv] This sentence and so much of this line of thought comes from a sermon called “Stuff Happens” by Susan Andrews (www.goodpreacher.com).
[v] Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, (NY: Schrocken, 1981), 136-7 (quoting Martin Gray, For Those I Loved).
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