Crossing the River

I read in a disturbing news article this week that people in our mainline American churches do not have a sense that God is present with us.[1] One of the researchers quoted in the article writes, “The loss of morale [in a shrinking church] creates an environment where many say: 'It doesn’t feel as if God is in this place.'”[2] According to this survey, high spiritual vitality in our mainline churches declined from 43 percent in 2005 to 28 percent in 2010. Interestingly, along with the feeling that God is absent is a clear decline in the emphasis given by members to spiritual practices such as prayer and scripture reading. The reasons cited in the survey for the slump in spiritual practices are that declining financial health in the recession is sapping peoples’ morale; that aging members are not open to new forms of worship; and that social service work is encouraged, while prayer and scripture reading are not.

At first glance, the triumphalist take on the entry of the people of Israel into the Promised Land created by the authors of the Book of Joshua was the last thing that I wanted to preach on this week. The book of Joshua, with its vision of leadership that is tied to divinely sanctioned war and violent conquest and genocide, is not my favorite book of the Old Testament. As I studied our text, however, I was struck by the author’s repeated insistence that Joshua be exalted before the people so that they will know that God is with them. Reading our lesson for today, I can, in my imagination, almost hear the discouraged Israelites expressing a familiar anxiety: “What will become of us now that Moses is dead? Moses always knew what to do. God was with him and spoke to him. Moses was pretty full of himself sometimes, calling us a stiff-necked people and all, but he interceded with God on our behalf whenever we went astray. He got the manna for us when we were hungry and water for us when we were dying of thirst. But now he’s dead, and we’re not yet at the end of our journey. Tomorrow we have to cross a river in order to enter into this wonderful new land that is supposed to be ours, but we don’t really know what is on the other side. OK, compared to the Red Sea, this river that we are supposed to cross looks pretty tame, and we don’t have the Egyptian army chasing after us with their chariots, but the water is awfully high right now …What if I slip and start to drown? Will the others leave me behind or will they stop to pull me out? What if one of the priests drops the most holy Ark of the Covenant, and God’s Law disappears under the water, never to be seen again? Without the binding action of God’s covenant with us in God’s Law, then surely God would abandon us, and all would be lost… All that I really ask is to know that the living God is still with us as we go into this new land, into this wide-open future.”

Like the desert wanderers emerging from the Sinai, we, too, want concrete reassurance that the living God is still with us in times of change. Before I cross a boundary from which there is no return, entering uncharted territory, I sure would like some proof of God’s strength and favor. If we were to follow the model of the Deuteronomistic Historians for our church leaders, perhaps we should be looking for the Holy Spirit to appear in tongues of fire upon Bishop Terry at Diocesan Convention in two weeks? We would know that God is with us then! Or what if Bishop Katherine in New York produced a document attesting to the conversion of a million new Episcopalians in one day? We would know that God is with us then! I would jump into the Church’s future with both feet, if those impressive things happened. That would be proof for the history books! Indeed, this week’s Old Testament lesson made me  wonder when God is going to come and fill the pews at St. Thomas to overflowing in order to put a divine stamp of approval on my own leadership here.

We long for leaders exalted by God, clearly marked with divine favor, people who will prove to us by their power and success that God is with us … but wait—there is another leadership tradition that runs through the Bible. What about Isaiah’s prophecy that we Christians know so well: “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel:--God with us. Isaiah spoke of this child during a time of war, a time as bloody as the Conquest of Canaan, except this time the people of Israel were the victims. It was a time when the heavy boots of invading soldiers could be heard pounding back and forth across the country, leaving bloody cloaks and mangled bodies in their wake. This child was born in a land in which God’s people had lost hope; wherever they looked it was as if they saw only “distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish.”[3] The birth of this baby, however, became a sign of hope for his people. Isaiah anchored God to the people’s hope in a name made everyone dance and sing with the delight and joy usually reserved for the celebration of a bountiful harvest or a great triumph in battle. It was a name born of hope, a name born from God’s passion for the impossible: God with us.

We Christians of course took Isaiah’s hope and found it again in Jesus of Nazareth, “God with us” in that stable in Bethlehem and forever more. All of us who follow Jesus will find that proof of God’s presence with us does not necessarily go along with success and glory. As a matter of fact, we hear in our Gospel lesson today just what Jesus thought about the successful religious leaders of his day, these successors of Moses who love their grand titles and their piety and their honor among men and women. In Matthew 23, God does not exalt God’s leaders for our benefit. Rather, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Remember, too, that Jesus found himself, like Joshua, at the River Jordan. He, too, was crossing into an unknown future, beginning the ministry that would lead to his crucifixion. Jesus, however, does not hold back the waters with one hand and walk across the river on dry ground. Jesus does not even command John the Baptist to kneel before him for a blessing. Instead, he submits himself to John’s Baptism, letting himself be submerged in the dark waters of the Jordan in baptism for the forgiveness of sins. And it is God’s love that greets him as he rises from the waters: This is my Son, My beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.”

My favorite book on Christian leadership is by Roman Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen. Nouwen writes that a Christian leader is actually called “to be completely irrelevant … to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.”[4] In the secular world, we know that we need a competent doctor when we are sick and a competent CPA when we need to do our taxes. We save our spirituality for times in which our secular competence fails. According to Nouwen, however, modern science has rendered us quite competent on our own. We no longer need spiritual answers to practical questions, questions that can be answered just fine by psychologists and doctors and political scientists. But that does not mean that spirituality has no place in our lives. We are still hungry for it, for we are still broken, despairing people who need God’s love and care and a sense of belonging to God and to one another. According to Nouwen, Christian leaders are to depend on three things: Prayer, so that their ministry stays connected to God’s Love; Confession and forgiveness, so that their ministry remains communal and mutual; and strenuous theological reflection upon the scriptures, which will allow us to discern where we are being led, especially since a true servant leader is often led where he or she does not always want to go.[5]

Prayer, confession, theological reflection on the scriptures: are these not the spiritual practices that our recent poll says are missing from the church? Rather than focusing on growth and numbers in our churches, what if we turned our anxious energy to sustained prayer, confession, and reflection on the scriptures, at home, as well as in community? It’s not quite yet Advent, but I invite us all to engage consciously in such spiritual practices at least for a trial run this Advent. If we do, God—Emmanuel--will indeed be with us as we cross the churning river into the future.

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[1] Peter Smith, “Struggling Churches Missing the Obvious.” http://blogs.courier-journal.com/faith/2011/10/26/struggling-churches-missing-the-obvious/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

[2] “Religious but not Spiritual.” http://blogs.thearda.com/trend/featured/religious-but-not-spiritual-the-high-costs-of-ignoring-personal-piety/

[3] Isaiah 8:22

[4] Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, 30

[5] Nouwen, 85.

What Wondrous Love is This?

            We hear it every Sunday in the Rite I service. We hear it at Church School and over and over in sermons:  “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” This is it: the distilled essence of Christianity, as well as the essential summary of all 613 commandments in the Torah and of all the entreaties of the Hebrew prophets.  However, I clearly remember not getting it.

          I must have been about 12 years old when it first hit me that I did not love God. I already knew that I didn’t love my neighbor. In fact, I had a Peanuts cartoon proudly pinned to the middle of my bulletin board that had Lucy proclaiming, “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” People were hurtful and disappointing and annoying … and besides, if I opened myself up to them, they might not love me back.

I was a religious kid. I said my prayers; I was taken to church and Sunday School every week by my parents; I knew that God was supposed to love me. But I also knew deep-down that I didn’t love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I might feel respect toward God, or curiosity, or occasionally loyalty or even awe—but certainly no warm and fuzzy, heart-giving love. I wasn’t even into loving Jesus. I didn’t like the songs in youth group that sounded like Jesus was everyone’s boyfriend. To me, love was a feeling, and it was a feeling that I didn’t have for God or God’s Son.

          As I grew older and less and less inclined to love hurtful humankind, I grew more and more desperate to love God. I thought that if I could just know God better, then I could love God more. If I could close myself up with God—just the two of us—then I would find some kind of union with God and could grasp the deep kind of love of which the mystics speak. I prayed that I might love God. I sought God in reason and Truth. I sought God in beautiful words and in music. I didn’t have much energy left over to love my neighbor, but I didn’t care. I was seeking God.

          What I didn’t know back then was that the two commandments that Jesus puts together in our Gospel lesson—one adapted from Deuteronomy 6:5 and the other from Leviticus 19:18—are not set in contexts in which love means a heart-warming emotion. Rather, they both tie love to commitment, to something that can indeed be commanded and willed. Deuteronomy 6:5 is part of the shema, the important creed recited several times each day by devout Jews, the phrase that is to be placed on their doorposts and recited to their children and bound on hand and forehead. The love that God is asking here from the people of Israel is a firm devotion to keeping God’s commandments, an unwavering commitment to follow and obey God, to chose God above all other gods, and to walk in God’s ways. Put in human terms, it is like the commitment involved in remaining faithful to a spouse, forsaking all others, both when we feel close and “in love” and in the times when we wonder what we see in them at all.

          In the same way, the love for our neighbor required in Leviticus 19 is not just a warm, loving feeling, either, but a commitment to take the needs of our neighbor seriously. It is the kind of love shown by the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, the kind of love that does not leave anyone bleeding on the side of the road. To love a neighbor is to avoid stealing from him, defrauding him, or taking advantage of him when he is weak. To love is to show mercy, justice, and faithfulness. As the prophet Micah proclaims, “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” God can indeed command us to love—not to bubble over with pleasant feelings—but to give ourselves over to God’s ways and truly to do acts of justice and mercy.

          A colleague shared with me last night after Marcus Borg’s lecture a story from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov.[1] In this story, Father Zosima, a wise, elderly monk, is consulted by a distraught and suicidal young woman who is tormented by her lack of belief in God and in the afterlife. Her life has no meaning, no joy, no purpose, without the belief that comforted her in her childhood. Father Zosima tells her that her despair is the most terrible thing that a human being can experience, and that he can help her. He does not offer her some abstract proof of God’s existence. however. Rather, he tells her to go home and every day, to commit herself to concrete, practical acts of love for the people with whom she comes in contact. If she does this, the wise monk explains, she will slowly and gradually begin to find that she believes in God. And the more that she practices true self-giving love with those around her, she will discover that she cannot not believe in God, who is self-giving Love itself. To believe in God is to commit oneself to God; it is to love God. And such commitment grows out of sharing in God’s outpouring love for humankind.

          I can testify to the truth of the monk’s wisdom in my own life. What transformed me from cold-hearted youth to this morning’s preacher, you might ask? It was not seminary. It was not knowledge found in reading all of those hundreds of theology books that I have in my office. It began with the witness of young children. For over twenty years, I spent most of my time each day with young children—both my own and the elementary school children in my classroom. And I learned what love is from them, from those little ones who are still so close to God. If you turn down the corners of your mouth and look hungrily at a baby’s cookie, she will immediately raise up a sticky hand to offer you a piece. If you rush around in a frenzy to finish your housework, a toddler will run over to hug your legs, smile, and pick up a rag to help. If you stand before a group of five-year-olds to teach them, they will turn wide, eager eyes directly to yours, ready to grasp and to tuck carefully away any wisdom that might fall from your mouth. If a first-grader, even an unpopular one, falls and gashes a knee on the playground, a sympathetic crowd of classmates will swiftly gather around him, vying for a chance to help him into the office for a Band-aid. Children are not always little angels, of course, but somehow the small, practical acts of openhanded love that I soaked up thirstily from those hundreds of children thawed my own dark and frozen heart; they made me feel safe to reach out, too, and they showed me how much we need each other. “Unless you become like little children,” says Jesus, “you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”

          Of course, it is Jesus himself who most clearly shows us, in word and deed, the place in which love of God and love of neighbor meet. Jesus shows us both total commitment to God and total commitment to justice and mercy in this world. While such commitment leads to the Cross, it also leads to Resurrection and to the Kingdom of God. In real, tangible acts--for what is more concrete than touching lepers, rubbing spit into blind eyes, or being nailed to the wood of a cross--Jesus Christ reveals the paradoxical power of living a life of divine, self-giving love. Jesus ties love of God and love of neighbor together because they are intertwined. “The second is LIKE unto it,” doesn’t just mean that the two commandments have a similar structure or that they are both equally important. They are interrelated and inseparable. Twelfth-century theologian Guillaume de St. Thierry writes, “The love of truth drives us from the human world to God; the truth of love sends us from God back to the human world.” Commitment to God’s ways will always send us back out into the world, just as surely as service to the world will send us to God.

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[1] Thanks to the Rev. Tim Mitchell!

In God's Back We Trust

Taxes! Now that is a relevant subject these days! The politicians bicker endlessly over taxes while the world holds its collective breath, and the news is full of the Occupy Wall Street protesters whose wide-ranging call to economic justice includes the question of taxation. What if Jesus stood on a New York sidewalk outside one of those flimsy tents among the noisy protesters and the eager reporters and the annoyed bankers? Whose side would he be on? What if a well-dressed day trader and a smiling politician came up to him and, posing and preening for the cameras, said, “Hey Jesus, we know that you are sincere, that you speak the truth fearlessly, that you love us, like it says in the Bible. So, come on, tell us what you think. Let’s settle this once and for all. Should we raise taxes or not? Come on, Jesus, tell us—whose side are you on?”

We hunt through the Bible looking for a Word from God that we can use to wield power over one another … or even to gain control over God … but Jesus would not play into the power games of the learned Pharisees or the opportunistic Roman collaborators, the Herodians, and I feel safe betting that he would not play into our power games right now. I bet that Jesus would not answer our question directly, either. In Jesus’ day, the Jewish people lived in an occupied land and paid a heavy tax burden to the hated Roman Empire. On the coins that they used daily to buy the necessities of life, was stamped a portrait of the Emperor, with the title, “The Son of God.” These coins were therefore blasphemous objects for the Jews, examples of idolatry, breaking the first two commandments. When Jesus cleverly gets his opponents to pull out a Roman denarius from their own pockets in front of the crowds in God’s Holy Temple, he has already marked their hypocrisy. And then he cleverly evades their question, refusing to choose sides. “To whom do you and your lives belong?” he pushes the crowd to ask themselves in his evasive proclamation, “to the emperor, or to God?”

Today on Wall Street, I wonder what Jesus would say to his modern interlocutors? Would he ask them to show him a dollar bill? Or would he ask to see the amount of debt on their platinum American Express cards? I’m not so sure that he would tell us to “give unto George Washington the things that are George Washington’s!” That would make no sense in our context. But this line of thought got me to reflecting further: if everything, including our money, belongs to God, and God’s image were to replace Caesar’s or George Washington’s on the currency that makes our world turn, what image would that be? Would it have a red face or a blue face? A white face or a black face? No, it would not be God’s face at all, for no mortal can see God’s mighty face and live. According to God in Exodus, it would not even be God’s fearsome Glory, that powerful, dangerous, forward-flung energy that heralds God’s presence in the world. But it might just be God’s backside printed on that money!

          Let’s think about that for a moment. In today’s reading from Exodus, Moses stands as close to the mighty power of God as any mortal has ever come, yet, like us, he is still a bundle of worry and insecurity. Lost in the overwhelming heap of his own uncertainty as leader and covered in worries about the future of his people, Moses looks up at his God and begs to crawl into God’s bosom, safe and beloved, and to watch the storm of glorious majesty crackle overhead. There is a satisfaction in thinking that we have divine power with us, especially in times of conflict and doubt. Our weakness longs for God’s strength. If we could just crouch down behind a pew of our own choosing, safe within holy walls of our own making, and watch God advance in power and might, then how our faith would soar, and everyone would know that God was there with us, on our side. Gazing blissfully at God’s front, we could perhaps even see into a certain and reassuring future.

          In Exodus, God tenderly refuses Moses’ desperate-sounding request. God agrees to send forth God’s Goodness before Moses, allowing him to observe all of the marvelous bounties of the creation that God has made. God shows Moses, “the things that are God’s.” And then he tells him that, when it is time for the dangerous, powerful Glory to appear, Moses can stand right beside God, with the divine palm cupped protectively over him, so that he will not be harmed. But all that Moses will be allowed to see, is God’s backside. What does God’s back look like? Surely, the infinite God doesn’t even have a backside? The novelist Mary Russell has two of her characters discussing God’s back at the end of her novel, Children of God. Musing over our passage from Exodus, they posit that perhaps God’s back, instead of being a physical metaphor, is really about time. One character says, “Maybe that was God’s way of telling us that we can never know His intentions, but as time goes on  … we’ll understand. We’ll see where He was: we’ll see His back.”[1] As a Christian, if I had to draw the holy space that is God’s back, I would draw a tiny baby whimpering in a manger in Bethlehem. Or a savior hanging as a victim on a Roman cross. Or the hope inside a mustard seed. But one thing is clear: God’s back, unlike God’s Glory, is not a place of thundering power. Recognizing its quiet strength in this world requires a big dose of trust in God’s goodness and mercy and wisdom.

Getting back to Jesus down at Occupy Wall Street, I wonder, then, if he might not just turn over the bill that the politician and the day trader hand him and make a comment on what is written on the back of our money: “In God We Trust.” If we ask Jesus which side he is on, he might well advise us truly to trust in what we have written on the back of our money. Do we live freely and generously, as if our trust is in God, the Creator of all that is? Does the use of our money reflect that trust?

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[1] Mary Doria Russell, Children of God (New York: Fawcett Books, 1998), 428.

A Few Autumn Thoughts

Against a background of rich autumn colors--corduroy browns and rusty reds--against the muted fading of light, stands a strange and spindly little tree in the gentle meadow outside my window. From far away, it looks as if wads of toilet paper have been glued to its thin, bare branches, their bright whiteness unnatural and incongruous in the autumn landscape. Crossing the meadow to take a closer look, however, I notice that the old tissues are really clusters of delicate, white flowers, fragrant springtime blossoms, sprouting from branches that are otherwise bare. A friend tells me that the miraculous flowering perhaps comes from the stress of drought that has pushed the young tree to bloom out of season, but I can't help but think of the folly of the Kingdom of  God. We have become accustomed to associating the miracle of new life at Easter with springtime buds and baby chicks, yet new life that blooms while the rest of the world withers seems to provide a strange new twist on resurrection glory. The frail beauty of the foolish blossoms speaks to me of love in the face of death, of love that must blossom even at great risk to itself, and of the disconcerting persistence of the holy.

Common Prayer

Wistful pilgrim prayers

scatter in the breeze,

crinkly with good intentions

like restless leaves

on an autumn day.

On the infinite path

to God's ears,

they hover haltingly,

often collecting

in the impotent hollow 

of some impediment.

How to gather them, Lord,

in heaping armfuls

for a mighty bonfire

of incense arising?

It's not just about being good

          When I was a student at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria, I enjoyed visiting the many historic 18^th-century churches in the area. With their red brick, white trim, and clear windows, these churches from our Anglican heritage look quite similar to our building here at St. Thomas. Inside many of these churches, though, on the wall behind the altar and the pulpit, the Ten Commandments are carved onto big wooden tablets with beautiful lettering, sometimes painted in gold. There is something comforting about seeing God’s golden, foundational Words tying together pulpit and altar during worship, something fitting about keeping them constantly before our eyes as a gathered community in the church.

          The Ten Commandments, really called God’s “Ten Words” in Hebrew, are the human side of the mutual Covenant relationship that God set up with the children of Israel. Christians, adopted into this relationship in Jesus Christ, are, in these divine words, tied together with God and with our neighbors by bonds that God promises never to break. Even though we are constantly falling short of living up to these words, constantly in need of repentance and return, God, in today’s reading from Exodus, sets up the guidelines that keep us close to God and to one another. As Martin Buber describes it, God’s first three commandments tell us how to love the God of the community; the next two commandments tell us how we are to live temporally in community, as time is divided by days and by generations, as words that address the “one-after-the-other” part of our relationships; and the last five commandments tell us how we are to love one another in community, as words that address the “with-one-another” part of our relationships.[1] The message is clear: You shall love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself, and here, in rather general terms, is how you are to do it.

          But the commandments don’t just tell us what to do. They are set in the framework of God’s faithfulness. Before God speaks God’s “Ten Words,” God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” If we stand before God as part of the Covenant People, we belong to God, to the God who “brought us to himself,” to the God who is creator and redeemer of the universe. We belong to the God who is constantly setting us free, constantly liberating us from worldly powers and from the enslaving entanglements of our own making. Kathleen Norris writes that the commandments show us that we have a relationship with a God “who does not exist as a convenience, magically giving us what we want … but a God … who loves us enough to care when we stray. And who has given us commandments to help us find the way home.”[2]

Understanding the commandments more as God’s support of us than as a way to condemn us, is why I cringe when I see all those little Ten Commandment signs in peoples’ front yards on the rural road to All Saints’ in Leitchfield. I do not claim to know the minds of those who put out such signs, but the little yard signs strike me as mainly an exercise in finger-wagging. “OK, sinful world out there,” they seem to sneer, “look at how far you have fallen! The good, holy, Christian people in this house know better. We have it all figured out and can tell you exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it. If you’re not one of us, just keep moving along and stay off our grass and out of our home.” We must always struggle not to resemble the evil tenants in today’s parable, who forget that they are working their Master’s land, producing wine for the joyous heavenly banquet, and not protecting the fine installations of their own territory.

The gold lettering in the colonial churches, on the other hand, is still a public sign, but to me, it seems different. Its presence behind the altar of our churches seems gently to pull the covenant community forward to rightly ordered lives, encircling us, guiding us, reminding us of the promises that seal the covenant on both sides. Engraved at the heart of our community home, the words are unifying rather than divisive. "Follow in your lives the God whom you encounter here in God’s Word and Sacrament," the golden commandments seem to say to us, "not because you need to 'be good,' but because we belong to each other."

          We give back to God as good stewards of all that God has given us for the same reason: we give not because we need to “be good,” or to justify ourselves in any way, but because we belong to each other, and all that we have really belongs to God. (I bet you were wondering how and when I would tie this reading to stewardship!!) To God, it doesn’t matter what we are giving or how much we are giving at any specific time. As in all that we do, it matters that we recognize, in the depths of our souls, that all that we have and do, belong to God, and that we respond freely out of love every chance that we get. Our stewardship campaign should be like the golden tablets of God’s framing Words in the colonial churches: reminding us that we belong to an upholding God who claims our whole selves and our whole lives, yet who sets us free.

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[1] Johanna von-Wijk Bos, Making Wise the Simple, 160.

[2] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace,  87.