Team in Training

          Now here’s an open invitation for me to talk about sports again in the pulpit, if ever there was one! Did you hear St. Paul today in his letter to the Corinthians? He is talking about the self-discipline and dedication of marathon runners and professional athletes, using imagery that seems as alive to us as it did in ancient Corinth, seat of the famous biennial Isthmian Games. We’ve all seen the discipline of body and spirit required by today’s Olympic athletes as they train for years in their special events. We’ve watched all of the heart-warming movies about the rag-tag sports team who pulls together and practices night and day in order to triumph over the big, mean team that has been lording it over them for so long. Perhaps you have even prepared yourself for a marathon or perfected your body in a dance studio? I don’t know much about sore muscles or athletic competition, but I have experienced the same all-consuming drive and self-control necessary for musical accomplishment: the solitary hours spent practicing, the discipline of giving all of oneself to one single pursuit, the family investment of time and money spent on lessons, the mind games involved in constantly measuring oneself against one’s competition. Such a pursuit of individual excellence demands utter commitment and purpose, and like the Corinthians, we understand the image of the struggle for salvation that Paul is conjuring up in our minds …. Or do we?

          Taken alone, these few verses from Paul’s letter sound as if they are inviting us Christians into some kind of individual competition with one another or with the rest of the world. Who can live the holiest life? Who can push through the mediocre crowd first to snatch salvation and approval from God’s almighty hands? Who has the self-discipline to perfect his soul like an athlete perfects his body? Thanks be to God, such self-perfection is not what Paul is arguing for here in his letter to the Corinthians. Taken in the context of the whole letter, these few verses are part of Paul’s over-arching argument that the squabbling Corinthian Christians need to take care of one another, that they need to love one another and work together in unity. As he writes in the beginning of his letter, “I exhort you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be of a same mind...” Paul is asking us, then, in today’s lesson, to apply all of the self-discipline of the athlete to our difficult relationships with one another in community, to work to perfect the divided body of Christ with all of the effort and dedication that it takes to win an Olympic gold medal.

Paul is indeed arguing for that struggle, self-control, and discipline that we all know so well in our individual accomplishments—but he is switching the goal of all the hard work from our own growth and healing to the growth and healing of our brothers and sisters. The crown of laurels that we are striving to win, says Paul, is not the personal “perishable crown” of first place in a sport, or of an Oscar, or of a Platinum album … or of my own Glory in any shape or form—but it is the “imperishable crown” that the Good News of God’s love places upon the heads of our brothers and sisters. The crown that we are working so hard to win is woven from the healing of the world around us. Paul names his victory crown when he calls the Philippians, “my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown.”

We in the Church have a long way to go to measure up to Paul’s dreams for us. At our clergy retreat this week, we talked about a video that the Presiding Bishop made for the deputies who will be attending General Convention this summer. It is a wonderful video all about the mission of the Episcopal Church, about how the structures and resources of the Church should be focused on spreading the Good News of God’s Kingdom and on responding to the needs of the world, rather than on internal dynamics and a structure of command and control. Yet the speech itself has caused a tempest in a teapot, because the President of the House of Deputies is upset that the Presiding Bishop has addressed “her” House of Deputies directly and out of turn. What if the energy spent on internal squabbling between branches of our national church could indeed be turned toward spreading the Good News of God’s love for all people? And closer to home, what if the squabbling within our parishes and dioceses about everything from the color of the carpet in the parlor to the size of the organ to diocesan funding or same-sex blessings could, with great discipline and self-control, be treated as less important than the faith and salvation of the world within and around us? How would that effort change the dynamics and growth within this Body of Christ?

As a “liberal Christian,” I was convicted years ago by a comment in one of Rowan Williams’ sermons that the problem with “liberal indifference” is that it “seeks to draw the sting from bitterness and conflict by suggesting that both sides should stop believing things so hard … yet that is saying … that [our] struggles aren’t worthwhile, that [our] life is not at stake here [in what we believe.]”[1] Indeed, “not believing things so hard” is not the answer that Paul gives us to our conflicted life together. Rather, Paul wants for us to believe with all the strength and focus and energetic spirit that we can muster, and then some. He does not want us to be boxers who stand around “flailing at the air,” ineffectual and unconvinced. Yet, all of our labor needs to be turned to the race being run by our brother or sister. “It is by your holding fast to the word of life that I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain or labor in vain,” he writes to the Philippians.  Why do we have to get along? Why do we care about the Christians who don’t agree with us? Because without them, we lose the race.

Some of you may have seen or heard about a You-Tube video sensation a few weeks ago made by a young Christian rap artist named Jefferson Bethge. Called, “Why I hate religion but love Jesus,” Bethge’s message that skewers the Church and its hypocrisy, while contrasting it with the loving freedom shown to us in Jesus Christ, has been seen by over 18 million people on the Internet. His message picks up on our overwhelming feeling these days that all institutions, from the Church to the government, have failed us in their squabbling and hypocrisy. Last week, writer David Brooks wrote about the video sensation, pointing out that when Bethge was challenged in his statements by older theologians, he immediately recanted, changing his once-passionately-stated position. Why did Bethge agree, “not to believe too hard?” For Brooks, “Bethke’s passionate polemic and subsequent retreat are symptomatic of a lot of the protest cries we hear these days. This seems to be a moment when many people — in religion, economics and politics — are disgusted by current institutions, but then they are vague about what sorts of institutions should replace them.”[2] The answer that Brooks offers to this phenomenon is that we have forgotten the benefits of a tradition, a set of practices and beliefs that ground us in a way of life. “Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings,” he writes. “It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart …They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.”

I think that St. Paul would agree with David Brooks on this point. As the one body of Christ, we Christians share in a common “end” or goal; we are part of one overarching story of hope and forgiveness and love. It is the common race that we are running for the sake of the world that gives us the focus and the means to turn passion into change. At the same time, we are a mess of squabbles, indecision, and “flailing at the air.” If we give up on ourselves and our story, though—if we strip off our team jerseys to sunbathe naked in our own individual brilliance or if we offer up only defensive strategies—then we will indeed “fail to qualify.”

We don’t need to back down in what we believe, as long as we are communicating with a shared vocabulary and striving for a common end in God’s Kingdom. We can still play the tough game, still run the difficult race. The question that we need to ask ourselves, individually and as a community, is whether we are willing to ache and sweat and give our all so that others (even our enemies) can receive the crown of life. For such is the paradoxical race for which our Lord is gathering us, the Church, for spring training as his Body in the world.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Ray of Darkness, 89.

[2] David Brooks, “How to Fight the Man,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/brooks-how-to-fight-the-man.html?_r=1

Hanging with sloths and gliding like eagles

          Of all the “deadly sins,” I would say that the least exciting yet most widespread, just might be the sin of sloth. Sloth, or acedia, is not simple laziness. The desert fathers called it the “noonday demon,” the bone-deep weariness that set in on monks and hermits as they tried to pursue their daily prayers, giving them headaches and making them want to give up their spiritual disciplines. Acedia, as it affects all of us, is a lack of caring that is difficult to distinguish from clinical depression and contains, according to author Kathleen Norris, “weariness, despair, ennui, boredom, restlessness, impasse, and futility.”[1] It is a “wearied heart,” a tiredness so deep that it prevents us from caring. It drags us down so that even evil fails to rouse us, and we give up trying to fix the wrongs that we see around us. “Oh well,” we sigh, “Nothing that I can do matters.”

          In her book, Acedia and Me, Kathleen Norris claims that acedia is an affliction that is rampant in our 21^st century culture. Not only does it attack the spiritual lives of solitary monks and the productivity of introverted writers and poets, but Norris sees acedia even in the busyness of our ordinary, over-scheduled lives. “Acedia has come so far with us,” she writes, “that it easily attaches to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothful, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more.”[2] When we spend our short moments of leisure flipping restlessly through 130 TV channels, finding nothing that interests us, that is an attack of acedia. When we sign ourselves and our families up for activity after activity just so we don’t have to stop and hear the quiet voice inside that wonders if any of it really matters, that is an attack of acedia. When we are forced to sit quietly after a storm in a house with no electricity, and feel as if, without something to do, the weight of the world has descended on us all at once, that is an attack of acedia. When we read headlines about rapidly increasing poverty and shrug, “Isn’t that a shame,” as we plod on with our own lives, not caring enough to do anything and not able to muster the energy to care, that is an attack of acedia.

          The prophet Isaiah knew something about acedia and the weariness and hopelessness it brought to the ancient Israelites exiled in Babylon. “What is the use of following the Torah,” the exiles must have sighed, “it won’t do us any good. We might as well just live like the Babylonians. Even God can’t do anything about our struggles, or we would be out of here by now. If God is powerless, then we might as well give up. What’s the use? Why does any of it matter, anyway?” Isaiah tries to shake the despairing people of Israel out of their torpor by crying, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” Of course they know that God’s ways are incomprehensible to mere mortals. Of course they know that God is so far above the nations and their kings and their gods that God cannot be compared with them. But acedia has made the people forget all that they have been taught about God. Acedia has worn away at their spirit, so that they shrug their shoulders even at the power of God, no longer able to take spiritual nourishment from the stories of their ancestors. Isaiah calls on the people to remember, to shake off the drowsiness that has closed in on them and to open their eyes, to open themselves up to what they see and know of God all around them.

          In just the last five verses of Isaiah’s ringing call to the truth of who God really is, the prophet mentions some kind of “weariness” ten times. God, who does not faint and grow weary, is the One who can deliver us from the weariness of acedia, Isaiah says. All we have to do is “wait for the Lord,” and we shall “run and not be weary …. Walk and not be faint.” We don’t have to bat our wings furiously, flapping around on the concrete like a wounded sparrow trying futilely to become airborne. Instead, we need to stretch out our wings like an eagle standing on a cliff, waiting patiently for a gust of wind to lift him, soaring, into the skies. Like the eagle, Isaiah points out, we have to wait for the wind, however. “Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength,” he warns. We must acknowledge our complete dependence on God, giving up all of our own frantic efforts to get off of the ground, and stand in confident expectation at the edge of the cliff.

          Many of you probably know the popular song, “On Eagles’ Wings.” I will spare you my version of singing it, but of course I dug it out as soon as I decided that I would preach on the Isaiah passage. The words of the song are beautiful. The chorus goes: “He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn, make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of his hand.” But—all of the verses taken together do not seem to honor the struggles of our very real weariness. “If you are with God,” they seem to say, “if you are saved, then nothing bad will ever happen to you. You don’t need to be afraid of anything, for you will be ‘raised up,’ riding effortlessly on the wings of God’s giant eagle. The Hebrew words of the text from Isaiah, however, do not really say that we will be raised up on eagles’ wings. Literally, they say that those who wait on the Lord will stretch out their wings as the eagles. God isn’t going to put us on some divine carousel ride, plopping us down on an eagle so that we can soar into the sky, away from our tasks on this earth. Isaiah is telling us that, if we trust in God, then we will be willing to stand on the edge of the cliff and hold out our wings, waiting to be carried out of our exile by the breath of God.

          While we must be careful not to confuse the spiritual malady of acedia with clinical depression, a disease which indeed requires medical treatment, Kathleen Norris and the desert fathers also seem to agree with Isaiah that the only way out of the spiritual doldrums of acedia is through careful and prayerful waiting. We must begin our daily tasks with prayer and pursue them with dogged discipline, even when our efforts seem hopeless, like the monk who was given the task of watering a piece of dry wood until it bore fruit. Norris points out that keeping our marriages going or finishing a project can feel like watering a piece of dead wood, but our patient waiting as we put one foot in front of the other, recommitting ourselves to each new day, is the only way through. Henri Nouwen points out that our real "rest” in God is not the absence of pain or conflict, like we might hope, but it is a rest in God in the midst of a very intense daily struggle. The “rest” comes from unceasing prayer.[3]

          Our Gospel lesson shows us that Jesus, too, practiced “prayerful waiting.” Instead of forging his way through the Galilee, healing and doing great works without ceasing, as the disciples and the crowds apparently expected him to do, Jesus gets up early and sneaks out in the dark to a deserted place to pray. Perhaps Jesus was tired, too, spiritually empty from the healings and exorcisms that he had done, weary of the daunting task before him, threatened by the despair and restlessness of acedia. Mark tells us that Jesus was in the dark and in the wilderness, certainly the haunts of hopelessness. But Jesus knows that he must wait patiently on God the Father, that his ministry and mission can only be accomplished if he begins each day by opening himself to God in prayer. So he leaves the disciples looking all over for him, and he prays. And then he goes out to “do what I came out to do.”

          Kathleen Norris uses a prayer from our Prayer Book in her own struggles with acedia. One of the personal “prayers for the sick,” it goes: “This is another day, O Lord. I know not what it will bring forth, but make me more ready, Lord, for whatever it may be. If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely. If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently. And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. Make these words more than words, and give me the spirit of Jesus.” This is the prayer of the eagle who stands in exile on the edge of the cliff, waiting for the wind to come. This is a prayer that we can pray as we struggle to care, to get through the boring tasks of life, to persevere despite the tempting voice of the “noonday demon” saying, “it doesn’t matter, just take a nice, long nap and forget about it.” God doesn’t expect us to live our lives on our own power, doing everything ourselves by getting busier and busier, by flapping our wings more and more frantically. But God does expect us to trust God enough to stretch out our wings in readiness daily and to wait, finding rest in prayer.

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[1] Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008) 231.

[2] Ibid., 130.

[3] Ibid., 6.

Breaking the Power of Evil

          One of the most heated dinner-table conversations that I ever had with my teenage children was over the reality of Evil. “We know that people do bad things,” they asked me, “but is Evil really some objective power out there?” “Isn’t it just an absence of good?” “Can’t it just be explained away with psychology or historical analysis?” “If there’s no little red Devil with horns running around, come on, Mom, why talk about Evil with a capital E?”

          Their challenge made me think, yet I kept coming back to the language of our Prayer Book. Before baptism, we renounce not just our own waywardness but also “Satan, and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God” and “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” Are these powers and principalities merely outmoded imagery? If so, what do we do with Jesus the exorcist in today’s Gospel? Is the man with the unclean spirit really possessed, or is he just mentally ill, or perhaps someone with a misunderstood case of epilepsy?

Maybe that’s it… I understand medicine, psychology, and sociology. But deep-down in my heart I still have trouble letting go of the living character of the evil that I have myself encountered in this world. I’ve led a pretty sheltered life. I haven’t been in concentration camps, or wars, or third-world countries. Yet I have seen the creatures of God bound and shackled by powers that seem to have a life of their own. I’ll never forget, for example, walking away from my beautiful Gothic campus of higher learning at Sewanee, going through the woods and down a dirt path to the settlement of shacks, without heat or indoor plumbing, that sat less than a mile from my academic paradise. I’ll never forget looking into the innocent, intelligent blue eyes of three-year-old Jenny, a little girl at the Headstart Center there, and knowing with a chilling certainty that their brightness would soon cloud over with the despair born of a life in those shacks, those shacks right on my doorstep. Weren’t the chains that bound us each to our separate worlds an evil power that destroys the creatures of God?

And what about the sweet, frail lady that I would visit at Baptist East when I did my pastoral care training, the one whose entire family and all of her friends were dead or gone? Entirely alone in the world, poor, wasting away with disease, in pain—she would lie there week after week, knowing that she would either die alone or return alone to an anonymous nursing home bed. Weren’t the complex chains that bound her to her solitude and sickness an evil power that destroys the creatures of God?

And what about the brilliant man with the mental illness? Young, full of talents and possibilities, he was crippled in his prime by a dragon of despair that latched hold of his mind and spirit and would not let go, dragging him through dark, frightening places that no beloved child of God should have to see. Isn’t the combination of his mental illness and our world’s reaction to it a power that destroys the creatures of God?

I could go on and on. All of the myriad variations of our bondage to sin and death are powerful forces beyond our control, powerful forces worthy of the name of Satan, which really just means, “the Adversary:” the Adversary of the goodness and wholeness that God intends for creation. The reality of these powers among us is why Mark has Jesus confronting them at the very beginning of his ministry. “What have you to do with us?” the demoniac shouts at Jesus. “Why are you interfering with us?” he cries. In this one man, Jesus confronts the plurality of the powers of evil: sickness, sin, and death. In Jesus, the Holy One of God, filled with God’s Holy Spirit at his baptism, utters words that send the evil powers into a tailspin. They recognize right away that Jesus has come to destroy them, that Jesus’ words and deeds usher in God’s Kingdom, crushing their hold on the world. Hearing Jesus, they know that they are defeated. Jesus’ teaching is special not because he gives a more interesting sermon than the scribes. It is special because his words really shake up the balance of power in this world. Mark begins and ends our passage by commenting on Jesus’ “authority.” In the synagogue, Jesus teaches “as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” And after the exorcism, the crowds murmur, “A new teaching—with authority.” Authority here means the sovereign power of God, the power that creates out of nothing, the power of God in nature and in the spiritual world. It is a life-giving, liberating power, a power that makes whole. Beginning here in Capernaum with the very first acts of his ministry, liberating power pours from Jesus’ words and deeds. This is Good News!

Of course, I can hear my children’s response: “Well, Mom, if Jesus’ words have freed us from the powers of sin and death, then why are you still talking about Evil?” It is important to note that, in our Gospel story, we have the dawning of the Kingdom of God, and no one is catching on but the unclean spirits. The powers of evil recognize God in Jesus and shake in their boots, yet the crowds scratch their heads in wonder, asking one another, “What is this?” and spreading only the sensational news about the next up-and-coming exorcist in town. We, Mark’s readers, know what is going on in this story, because we live on the other side of Easter. We know about Jesus’ saving death and mighty resurrection, and we read this story and nod, “Of course God is present in Jesus. See—God’s Kingdom is dawning in Jesus’ words and works.” But not so for the Jews in that synagogue in Capernaum, at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Here they were in an occupied land, weighed down by a corrupt political and religious establishment and struggling with disease and poverty. How are they to recognize that the strange, healing words of a young, dusty new teacher from Nazareth will inaugurate the Kingdom of God?

Today, we can easily see what is happening in Mark’s story, but we don’t do any better than the Capernaum crowd when it comes to recognizing God’s power in our own world, or in responding to it. We are an Easter people, yet we still look out of the window on a cold, rainy January day and see bare branches and gray sky rather than the buds and warm breezes soon to come.

We do not see Jesus’ power around us because we are looking in the wrong places. Rather than providing the kinds of worldly freedom of which we dream and for which we scheme, Jesus’ liberating authority actually causes controversy and forces us to abandon the guarantees that we seek in this world. It confuses what is seen as clean and unclean; it turns established structures upside down; it makes impossible demands. Jesus’ authority scandalizes not only the demons but also the other human secular and religious powers around Jesus, who are so threatened and disoriented by his strange authority that they condemn him to die on the Cross. In the end, God’s power conquers the power of sin and death by giving itself over to them.

We need to remember what kind of strange power God exerts in this world—not just so that we can feel comforted that someday everything will be OK, which it will—but because, as Christians, we are expected to exercise the same kind of power ourselves. Paul makes this clear to the Corinthian Christians in today’s Epistle. In Corinth, Christians don’t agree any more than we do how to live in the murky “already” but “not yet” of God’s Kingdom. Some Christians feel comfortable with a gospel of liberty that frees them from all dietary restrictions. Other Christians worry about scrupulously following directions and are less sure of their right just to decide things for themselves, fearing a slippery slope into chaos. (Sounds like some contemporary moral debates to me!) Paul warns the feuding Corinthian Christians about their use of power in their dealings with one another. He cautions them about how they wield the liberating authority that they have each received in Christ. Liberating power in Christ is slavery to Christ, says Paul, so that in the Christian life we all become responsible for one another. Christian responsibility is not a question of proving who is right and who is wrong, but of building up the community in love.

Evil is a power, I think, just like Love is a power. We can sense both of them swirling around us in the abstract, but they touch our lives in concrete ways. Christ has already set me free from sin and death. He has freed me to change my lifestyle in order to alleviate the poverty enslaving little Jenny at the Sewanee Headstart center; he has freed me to spend my leisure time visiting the lonely lady at the nursing home; he has freed me to love people who are strange, disagreeable, and downright hard to be around; he has freed me to do, not what I want to do, but what is best for my community. Like the unclean spirits in our Gospel lesson, we tremble before Christ’s liberating power because Christ’s power is freeing us not for personal glory, but for change… for difficult change that opens doors and windows into his Kingdom.

Fishing for People

“Do you know how Episcopalians do evangelism?” the joke goes. Referencing today’s Gospel, the response is: “They take an aquarium and put it down in the sand on the beach and then wait for the fish to jump in.”[1] We Episcopalians are shy about “imposing” our faith on anyone else. We don’t like to knock on strange doors or to take our testimony outside of our comfort zones. If Jesus had been an Episcopalian, I doubt that he would have been described as acting “immediately!” in today’s Gospel lesson. Instead, he would probably have done some economic and sociological surveys of the Galilee before approaching anyone about discipleship. He would have allowed prospective disciples to sign the guest book first and waited for them to come back a few times before asking them to do anything. He might even have looked more like Jonah, slinking through a few streets and mumbling his proclamation with the minimum number of words, more anxious to be safely back in familiar territory than to proclaim the Kingdom of God.

          Maybe it is my own Episcopal reserve that made my ears perk up at the suggestion that the well-known “fishing” metaphor in today’s lesson can be seen to have some issues, at least when used for Christian missions. The story of Jesus calling the “gentle fisher folk” in the Galilee and asking them to follow him as “fishers of people,” is one of the basic, most well-known stories that we all learn in Sunday school. But have you ever thought about that image from the point of view of those who are being fished for, wonders author Don Richter?[2] Who wants to be tricked and lured to bite onto a barbed hook before being yanked out of the water? Who wants to be swept up in a big net and dumped on the shore in a heap?

Richter also points to the negative and dishonest practice of phishing (spelled with a “ph”) on the Internet these days. In this kind of modern phishing on the computer, identity thieves trick unsuspecting Internet users like you and me by sending out phony credit card company memos and bank announcements, trying to lure us to click on bogus sites and to divulge our banking information so that they can steal from us. Fishers of men and women, indeed!

Even elsewhere in the Bible itself, the image of fishing for people is a negative one. The prophet Jeremiah uses it to refer to God’s judgment, proclaiming that God will send “many fishermen” to catch the sinful Israelites, “for my eyes are on all their [evil] ways.”[3] Rather than dishonestly luring people or grabbing them against their will to devour them, isn’t it better, then, to delicately place the aquarium on the shore and wait for the fish to find their way inside? Part of me would definitely like for that to be the best way to spread the Good News.

          There is nothing careful or delicate about the way that Jesus enters upon the scene in our Gospel lesson, though. Eugene Peterson’s translation begins the passage: “After John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee preaching the Message of God: ‘Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.” The Kingdom of God is here. In my presence, God’s rule has begun—right now--Jesus announces. Simon, Andrew, James and John sure seem to realize from the beginning that there is no time to dilly-dally. They drop what they are doing and walk off together into the new life of the Kingdom.

That’s not really very normal behavior, though, is it? The normal thing to do would be to take some time to think about such a momentous, life-changing decision. Instead, it is as if … as if, a big net has come in to sweep them along into a new place. It is as if the whole world is being carried into a new creation on the crest of a wave. Mark almost seems to emphasize the role of the net in fishing in these few verses from today’s lesson: Simon and Andrew are casting a net into the sea; they left their nets; James and John were mending their nets. The arrival of God’s rule in Jesus Christ is not a piece of bait bobbing around, luring us to grab hold of the hook inside. The arrival of God’s rule in Jesus Christ is a huge net scooping up everyone and everything in its path, drawing them to God and holding them together as a new entity.

          By turning the disciples into fishers of men, I don’t think that Jesus is so much giving us license to lure others to God as he is joining us to God’s project, making us what he is, transforming who we are. Our role as fishers of men should not be a source of pride for us. It should not give us reason to lord it over the fish. Instead, it is the sign of a repentant heart. Changing how we use our gifts and our very selves is part of the transformation that Jesus is bringing about in our world. We are no longer limited to a life consisting of earning our living and going home to watch TV. We are called to turn that old life inside out and upside down, to take whatever gifts we have and use them for God’s kingdom, for spreading the love of God in Jesus Christ.

A colleague in the diocese recently sent me a You-Tube video of some Christians “fishing” for men and women in Italy.[4] This video doesn’t have anything to do with the sea or with nets or with fishing poles, but I thought of it right away in reflecting on today’s Gospel. A church group in an Italian town had made big signs that said in bold lettering, “Free Hugs.” Wearing these signs like walking billboards for a local business, dozens of men, women, and children from this church walk slowly around a downtown square. The film shows the surprise on peoples’ faces when they read the strange signs. Some people smile, some wrinkle their foreheads, yet most of them walk hesitantly up to the billboard-clad Christians and reach out for a careful hug. By offering free hugs, these Italian Christians are not luring anyone with false advertising. They are not using hooks, bait or barbs. They are not telling anyone what to think. They are merely offering to love their neighbor, to enact with simple signs the coming of God’s reign of love into this world. Watching the film, one could tell that a huge net of joy was slowly spreading around everyone in that town square, bringing them together and holding them together in God’s hand.

Thinking about this film, I wondered what would happen if we all went over to the Westport Road Shopping Center across the street wearing signs that said, “Free hugs.” Would that act of fishnet evangelism spread God’s Kingdom? Would it bring us new members? Or would it make us look silly or get us arrested? To be honest, I would be kind of scared and reluctant to try it out. I’m much more comfortable with putting out the aquarium and waiting for it to fill up. But I can’t get the image out of my head of us walking around hugging everybody like we do at the Peace. Publicly acting as if God’s reign is among us. Among all of us. Fishing for people…

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[1] As told to me by a colleague in the diocese. I don’t know who originally came up with this quote.

[2] See Don Richter, Mission Trips that Matter (Upper Room Books, 2008), 98.

[3] Jeremiah 16:16

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN8CKwdosjE

Praying for a Touchdown

          Pay attention, because I’m going to talk about something that you will rarely hear much about from me in the pulpit…. Football! The furor in the news over Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow has reached even my sports-deaf ears. In case you haven’t heard, Tebow is an evangelical Christian and an amazing, if inconsistent, football player. He has become famous for bending down on one knee in prayer on the field, and for his talk about his relationship with Jesus Christ. I read this week, though, that his pastor has claimed that Tebow wins games because of God’s favor, because God blesses him with victory, rewarding him for his faith.[1] I also read that many are saying that his record-setting 31.6 yards per pass (for 10 passes!) in last Sunday’s overtime win over the Steelers is a direct divine correlation with John 3:16, the verse that Tebow used to wear inscribed in his black under-eye glare-shield before NFL officials made him take it off. Many Christians are claiming, then, that Tebow’s performance in this week’s game is a result of his prayers and is direct proof that God is revealed in Jesus Christ. (Last night’s game, though, will prove more difficult for them to explain …)

          From the few interviews that I have heard with Tim Tebow, I like him. I find that he is sincere and faithful, and his life off of the field seems truly to mirror the Christian faith that he shows when the cameras are rolling. It bothers me, however, to see the claims that his fellow Christians are making about prayer and revelation. I have to agree with author Lillian Daniel who wonders with a chuckle if God, Creator of heaven and earth, is really “sitting up in Heaven on a Barcalounger, with a beer, a bratwurst and a Bronco’s jersey, handing out touchdowns.”[2] I remember rolling my eyes when my son came home years ago from a Quick Recall tournament incensed that the team that his school was playing had prayed aloud over the computer scoring system before the match, asking God to rid it of evil and lead them to victory. There is something about such prayer that rubs me the wrong way, somehow mixing thanksgiving and intercession with evangelism, using conversation with God to prove something about God to the rest of the world.

Today’s lessons seem to speak to these relevant questions concerning prayer and revelation. They seem to show us that God’s in-breaking presence is more than football victories, that faith is more than winning, and that prayer is more than words.

Let’s look first at our Psalm for today. The book of Psalms is our prayer book. More than any other book in the Bible, the Psalms reflect our human voices, our words to God, and not just God’s words to us. They include both individual and communal prayers of praise and thanksgiving, laments, and pleas to God. They include beautiful human words, like those in today’s psalm … and also some very human words that make us shudder at their violence and hatred: May God bash the heads of enemy children upon the rocks. May I bath my feet in the blood of the wicked. And from today’s psalm, in the words that our lectionary purposefully leaves out: “O that you would slay the wicked, O God! … Do I not hate those, O Lord, who hate you?” What would the papers say if Tim Tebow started praying on television for the opposing team to sustain crippling injuries? Even though giving voice to such violence makes us uncomfortable and could indeed have dreadful consequences, the Psalms seem to encourage us to let our human hearts speak freely in our prayers, both in public and in private, to pour out the words that lift us up and the words of which we are ashamed. Tebow could easily borrow today’s psalm in order to thank God for the muscles that help him run, the coaches who have taught him well, or the miracle of birth that brought him healthy into this world. With today’s psalmist, he could praise God’s wonderful works, thanking God that he is “marvelously made.” In addition, if Tebow asks God to teach a lesson to the people who mock him or to the teams who threaten him, he would also be in line with the psalmists’ all too human responses. Indeed, many of the psalms that plead for victory in battle could easily be transposed to the football field. With the psalms as part of our canon, I do not believe that we can fault Tebow on any of his prayers.

It is when we start making claims about the way in which God responds to Tebow’s prayers, that we get in trouble. In our Old Testament lesson, people were thirsty, as we are, for divine revelation. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Young Samuel is having trouble knowing when God is calling him, running around frantically looking for the source of the voice that keeps calling his name. It is only when Samuel stops, though, lies down, and listens quietly to God’s call, that he hears what God is saying to him. Just as eager and desperate to hear God’s voice as is Samuel, we run from sign to sign, hearing God’s call in a touchdown, or in a number pattern, or in some other sign of blessing. God speaks to us, however, in the quiet of our hearts, when we stop our running and pointing and waving and bow our heads saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

God has a message for Samuel, all right, just as God has a message for Tim Tebow and for you and me, but it is often not the message that we are waiting or wanting to hear. When Samuel finally settles down enough to hear God’s voice, he is called to do something that he does not want to do: he must speak a harsh and difficult truth to his friend and mentor. Tebow might have heard God’s word just as distinctly in last night’s defeat as in last Sunday’s victory, but I doubt that anyone will be pointing to that on the evening news.

“But we have to testify,” some might argue. “When we hold up a winning Christian for all to see, when we point to a miraculous victory, then we are testifying for Jesus Christ!” Well, before we get too proud of our testimony, we need to take a look at our Gospel lesson for today. The disciple Philip is doing some serious evangelism in the Galilee. He is telling people about Jesus, approaching strangers and convincing doubters. Yet when Nathanael, clearly skeptical of Jesus’ claims, rolls his eyes and scoffs, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth,” Philip does not start listing for him all of the blessings that God has poured out upon him since he has been a disciple. He does not brag about all of the prayers that God has answered in Nazareth or anywhere else. He does not point to any certainty that will convince the skeptic beyond all shadow of a doubt. He simply says, “Come and you will see.” He invites Nathanael to follow Jesus, to see for himself, to watch and listen for God’s voice. Isn’t it often that way? Where explanations fail, an invitation to walk alongside in God’s presence is what opens closed hearts.

And then, when Nathanael finds out that Jesus already knows him, when he seems to have found that sign, that miraculous event, that will prove that Jesus is indeed the Son of God and his prayers for a messiah have been answered, Jesus laughs at him. “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?” Jesus chuckles, shaking his head. “You will see greater things than these.” I can hear Jesus now: “Do you believe, because Tim Tebow made a bunch of touchdowns? Do you believe because somebody knelt down on a football field and then won a game? You will see greater things than these. Very truly I tell you, I will come to you and fill your cold hearts with love, and you will see God. I will rip away the chains that bind you, and in your freedom, you will know me. I will come as the hungry child that you have fed, and I will put my arms around you, and you will know my presence. I will come to you as the poor man that you have clothed, and you will see God. Signs under a fig tree!? Touchdowns?! You’ve got to be kidding me.”

          Let us go ahead and pray for whatever we feel drawn to pray. We don’t need to censor or judge our own prayers or the prayers of others. But if we want to hear answers to our prayers, we need to remember to lie down in quiet and listen patiently, for as long as it takes. And we need to remember that conversions are not won by proofs and signs, but by life in the presence of Jesus Christ. A little more quiet listening and faithful living wouldn’t hurt our Christian image in the press, either.

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[1] Lillian Daniel, “Reflection” in dailydevotional@ucc.org.

[2] Ibid.

God's Beloved

They are heaven-ripping words—powerful, transforming words that change the heart in an instant, pushing in like a divine hand tearing open the sky: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

          Jesus hears these words at his baptism, as he emerges from under the water of the Jordan, and the Spirit alights on him like a dove. Mark doesn’t say that anyone else hears them, but Jesus does, and they mark the beginning of his ministry. How we long to hear them, too, directed at us! We search the world over to have someone name us as Beloved and bestow on us words of approval, words of unconditional love. Neglected souls wither for lack of hearing these words; pampered souls grab for them greedily. Even otherwise well-adjusted adults will do just about anything to hear them, turning to work or sex or manipulation of others in order to get the daily fix. As a child, my world turned on seeing an “A” for approval printed in red at the top of my schoolwork each day. A positive comment scrawled on one of my papers by a teacher would leave me smiling all day, feeling, at least for awhile, as if I mattered in this world. Whatever we think might bring us a jolt of approval—our brains, our youth, our artistic gifts, our self-sacrificial actions, our social standing—those are the things that we count on to bring us that stamp of love for which we all long so desperately.

          I can’t help but wonder what Jesus was looking for when he came to be baptized by John. If he was without sin, why did he need to repent? Did he decide to set a good example for his cousin John’s followers? Was he wandering around waiting for a sign to begin his ministry? Was he seeking approval and love? Of course, we can’t know what Jesus was thinking, but we can get a pretty good idea of what Mark is trying to tell us by beginning his Gospel with Jesus’ baptism. Mark puts definite bookends around his Gospel, tying Jesus’ baptism to his death.[1] Mark doesn’t distract us with stories about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem; he leaves out all of the angels and shepherds and kings. Instead, he starts in the wilderness, on the banks of the Jordan River, in the place of New Beginnings, where God first led the people of Israel into the Promised Land. Like us, Jesus doesn’t get to sit back and bask in God’s approval for long, however. Still dripping wet, he is driven out “immediately” into the desolate, dangerous desert to face temptation. God does not name him again as his beloved Son until the Transfiguration. And then, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, Mark clearly repeats the same pattern seen at Jesus’ baptism: Instead of receiving the Spirit- dove, Jesus breathes out his spirit; instead of the heavens being ripped open, the curtain of the Temple is torn apart; and instead of the voice from heaven, the Roman Centurion proclaims Jesus the true Son of God.  In using such a similar pattern as bookends for his Gospel, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ baptism points to his death on the Cross, and his death on the Cross echoes his baptism. Jesus is seeking neither purity nor affirmation as he wades into the Jordan with John the Baptizer. He is taking his first steps on his path toward the Cross.

It’s a strange, dangerous Love, then, that God pours out upon his Son at his baptism. Our decorous little silver shells of warm water, spooned gingerly over the foreheads of Episcopalian candidates for baptism, unfortunately no longer make clear to us the kind of love that we are really being baptized into as Christians. But it was different for Christians in the first centuries of the faith. They entered the chilly waters of deep baptismal pools, built over springs of running water in dank, dark caves. Stripped naked, they were dunked completely underwater by the priests, Southern Baptist style. Emerging choking, spluttering, and blue with cold from an experience much like drowning, they were clothed right then and there in new white garments, wrapped in a new life in Christ. It must indeed have been a very dramatic—even frightening--sacrament. While we don’t baptize like that anymore here at St. Thomas’, our baptism is still an entrance into Christ’s death, as well as into his Resurrection.

No one puts her finger on the dangers of baptism better than author Flannery O’Connor. In her short story, “The River,” O’Connor tells us about a little boy in desperate need of love. Only about 4 or 5 years old, he already lives in a gray, flat world of despair, neglected by his alcoholic parents, pawned off on a series of babysitters who ignore him. O’Connor describes him as plodding dully through life “mute and patient, like an old sheep waiting to be let out.”[2] He only knows the names of God and Jesus as curse words, until one of his sitters takes him with her to a revival meeting down at the river. There, the itinerant preacher speaks with passion about “the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood.” “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it” intones the preacher. “It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river round my feet.”[3] Pushed toward the preacher by his zealous babysitter, the little boy suddenly realizes that what is going on at this river is serious stuff, unlike anything he has ever known before. “Where he lived, everything was a joke” writes O’Connor. “[But] From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke.”[4] And then the preacher speaks to him the magic words, the words that we all long to hear in our desperate searches for approval in this world: If you are baptized, “You won’t be the same again … You’ll count.” That is what we all want, isn’t it, to count? To be someone in someone else’s eyes, to be recognized as the child of God that we are, to have a meaningful place in this world? Grabbing the little boy and shoving him under the water, the preacher proclaims the truth triumphantly, “You count now … You didn’t even count before.”

Like Jesus and like us, the little boy in O’Connor’s story does not get to remain long in the triumphant moment of baptism. He is returned to the wilderness of his uncaring parents, to his boring, meaningless life, to a world where everything is a joke. But having tasted God’s powerful love, the love that makes him count, the little boy is drawn back to the river. Thinking about the river, “his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.”[5] Not waiting around for God or the Church, he goes to the river to baptize himself one more time, to find the Kingdom of Christ hidden down in the River. Gasping and sputtering in the water that is slowly rising around his neck, he keeps floating, he keeps being pushed back by the waves. Despairing that he has misunderstood, that God doesn’t even really want him, either, he fights and kicks at the water, until the current catches him and “like a long gentle hand” pulls him under and away. God’s love is a love that we must drown in, O’Connor seems to say. We must drown in it in order to re-emerge into the resurrected life, the life where we “count.”

In hard times, we fear more than ever that we do not count. When our jobs change or are threatened, we doubt ourselves and our futures. When we have to move to a new place, when disease or age diminishes who we think we are, when relationships end and we find ourselves alone … we become so desperate for affirmation that we are indeed ready to throw ourselves into the nearest river to find it.  Yet, at the same time, sitting here comfortably as Christ’s Church, we draw back from that futureless, all demanding divine love that laps at our toes. We are afraid of what it might do to us, wary of how it might change us. We are caught between our desperate desire for love and our insistence that we do not need to change. So, even in the church, we hang back, proclaiming, like another one of O’Connor’s characters, that we don’t need to be dunked under the water of Love, choked and battered by waves that escape our control—we claim that “What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it,”[6] we protest.

But our protests don’t matter. When the chrism is placed on the foreheads of the newly baptized, they are “sealed as Christ’s own forever.” God has in baptism marked each of our hearts with the cross, and they will never be the same. I am God’s Beloved, no matter what, forever and ever. I count. And so do you. And so do each one of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are “one Body and one Spirit. One hope in God’s call to us. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all.”[7] We don’t need to run or to fight for our own spot in the sun. We are the Body of Christ. We will drown and rise together in the terrible, invincible Love of God.

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[1] According to Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, “The River,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1988), 155.

[3] Ibid., 162.

[4] Ibid., 165.

[5] Ibid., 169.

[6] The Violent Bear it Away, 172.

[7] Book of Common Prayer, Baptismal service.