Faith in the Cracks: Sermon for Sunday, October 21st, 2012

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Hey folks-- sorry about all the extra audio at the end... forgot to turn of the recorder!!

Letter to the Norwich Bulletin dated 10/17/12

There has been a lot of negative press surrounding the move of St. Vincent de Paul Place to Cliff St. in Norwich-- mere blocks from it's former location at 10 Railroad Place.  I recognize that there are arguments to be made on both sides, and there are legitimate concerns all around.  However, I believe that as a community, it is absolutely essential that we get past the accusations and negativity in order to come to a workable solution.  While there are some who accuse the city and the diocese of having dubious intentions, I think that the majority of Norwich residents recognize that everyone involved with St. Vincent de Paul Place has intentions that are compassionate, noble, and honest. A few days ago, an editorial in the Bulletin said that "the soup kitchen cannot simply be evicted from the school and forced to close its doors. There are residents of this city who rely upon those services. They have no place else to go."  This is true. All of us in Norwich have a responsibility to solve this problem, and we cannot in good conscience allow the soup kitchen to close and leave these needs unaddressed.  These are our brothers and sisters in Norwich, and we cannot forget that at the heart of this debate are real people with real needs.  No matter what happens, we cannot abandon them. 

St. Vincent de Paul Place deserves our utmost respect for working hard to make lives better every single day for the most vulnerable in our community.  Theirs is a thankless job, and they receive a lot of criticism without much public affirmation to go long with it.  I applaud them for their courage and hard work every day as they stand up for the powerless and give voice to the voiceless, and I know I am not alone in my support.  These kinds of issues ultimately show our true character and commitment as a community, so let's show our character and work together to ensure that the vital ministry of SVDPP is able to endure. The work that SVDPP does is not easy.  They face challenges every single day about how to meet rising demand with dwindling resources.  It's time for the rest of us to stand up and say thank you to SVDPP for the work they do, and get behind them as they seek a permanent solution to this unforeseen problem.  It's time to show who we really are, and I believe we are up for it.

Called to Seek the Lord and Live: A Sermon on Amos 5:6-7, 10-15 and Mark 10:17-31

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I want to take you back to the year 2007 and tell you a story about a man-- we’ll say his name is John. As far as John can tell, things could not be going any better. He just moved into his own office in a beautiful building on the corner of Broadway and Wall in Manhattan. It’s not a corner office-- those are for the real big shots-- but it’s a perfectly respectable office. It’s got a window, and there’s a name plate on the door with his name on it. And to top it all off, he just got a nice hefty bonus check. Yes, things are definitely going well for John. Everything seems to be going his way.  The only thing that could possibly put a damper on all of John’s success is that in the midst of his prosperity, there is the dim awareness of a kind of background noise— some doom and gloom guy, probably from somewhere in from Washington, who thinks himself some kind of prophet, who keeps saying that the success that John and his colleagues are enjoying is somehow not fair.  That it’s been built on the backs of the poor and vulnerable.  Something about predatory lending… But John brushes all that aside. Because even if all that were true, he’s not the one making the loans, he’s just a numbers guy. He can’t be held accountable for other people’s bad decisions. And what do they expect him to do about it anyway? Is he supposed to just walk away from it all? After all he’s got a mortgage to worry about too, he’s got kids in college and a family to support. No, he’s worked hard for his success, and he’s not going to let a bunch of naysayers in Washington that have nothing to do with him make him feel guilty about it. He just keeps on doing what he’s doing, because it’s working out just fine.

Well. We all know how that turned out, don’t we? 2008 rolled around, and the doom and gloom prophets turned out to be right this time around. Tremendous financial gains that had been built on unethical practices turned out to be bad for everyone. We all know this story very well by now. We’ve heard it told a hundred times—though often it’s by politicians who are trying to make one another look bad.  I am telling you this story, however, to help us understand—even if only by a tiny fraction-- how the people of Israel might have reacted to the words of the prophet Amos which we heard in our first reading this morning.

Around the time Amos came along, Israel was also at the top of its game as a nation. They were expanding their territory, agriculture was booming, and cities were clothed in elegance and splendor. The rich built palaces adorned with costly ivory, and food and wine was plentiful. Things were going pretty well for Israel. And so I sort of wonder if the prosperous elite of Israel may have felt the same way about the prophet Amos as the elite of Wall Street may have felt about those who were predicting their demise back in the mid 2000s. Just another doom and gloom prophet begrudging the success of others and trying to make everyone else feel guilty.

            “You who turn justice into wormwood,” Amos says, “and bring righteousness to the ground. Because you trample on the poor and take from them in order to build your houses of stone, you will not live in them.  You have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. Seek the LORD and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it.”

Ouch.

Even those of us who hear the words of the prophet today may feel they are a bit harsh. So full of fire and brimstone, anger and judgment. For those of us who may have grown up in churches that placed a heavy emphasis on sin and guilt, this may be exactly the kind of religion we are trying to get away from.  But there’s a little more to it than just that fire and brimstone version of old time religion. The prophets are harsh, yes, but that’s because they are passionate about a better world.  They are tough on us only because they believe deeply that we can be better, and that we were created for something more than just economic advancement. Old Testament scholar Carolyn Sharp writes that the words of the prophets can be daunting and challenging, but it’s because we have only one life to live, we only have one life to offer to God, “and the prophets want to make sure we know what is at stake in every moment of it.”

“Seek the Lord and live!” the prophet Amos declares. Reminding his people that luxury, ivory palaces, and opulent feasts may be nice, but they will not give us true fulfillment in life. And in fact, it’s more likely, that those kinds of things will only ever get in our way. The affluence of the Israel had dulled their Spirits to the Lord. The decadence of their ivory palaces dulled their eyes to the beauty of God’s creation. The excess of food and wine had dulled their minds to the presence of the Spirit. The isolation of their wealth had dulled their compassion for the poor.

“Seek the Lord and live!” Amos cries, calling them and us to live into the best versions of ourselves.  The version of ourselves that God created us to be.

We listen to the prophets because they call us towards greater purpose and closer communion with God. And we listen to the prophets because they were in fact the ones who paved the way for Christ himself, who called his own disciples to a higher and more noble purpose. And lest we think that Jesus was willing to accept mediocrity or lackluster faith where the prophets were not, we have this morning’s gospel reading to shake us out of our complacency. The story of the rich young ruler is one we also all know well.  It’s presence in three of the four gospels makes it pretty likely that his story is true, though perhaps many of us wish that he hadn’t shown up at all. Because of this man, we have one of the most challenging texts in the Bible.  More challenging perhaps, than any of the words of the prophets, because quite frankly, Jesus is a little harder for us to ignore.

“Go, and sell all that you have.  Give the money to the poor.  Then you can come and follow me.”  Again-- Ouch.  Are we really supposed to do that? Could we do that— even if we wanted do? As far as we know, the rich young man was unattached— no family, no debt, no mortgage, no children. Perhaps he was free to leave his riches behind with no negative consequences for anyone else.  But what about us? We have kids to raise and put through college, mortgages and student loans to pay off, families to support and care for. We can’t just walk away.  Not to mention we how much money we do give away. Not to mention that many of us already struggle with the feeling that we don’t do enough. We already feel guilty because of our own inner critic-- the one that chides us for our doubts, our weaknesses, and our attachment to material things.  I mean, honestly, do we really need more voices from the outside reminding us of all the ways we aren’t living up to our potential? Don’t we do quite enough of that ourselves?

Let’s be real here for a minute.  None of us are rich Wall Street executives. We’re not the elite of ancient Israel living in ivory palaces. We’re not the rich young man, unattached and uncommitted. We’re just regular people, doing the best we can.  And yes, we know that sometimes, we could do better. But still, we are doing the best that we can. So where do we fit into all of this?

The gospel says that when Jesus saw how earnestly this man desired to follow God, Jesus looked at him and loved him. Jesus looks at the man, and really truly sees him.  Jesus sees past the wealth, and into the depths of this man’s heart. He sees that this man is a seeker—a man who knows there is something more beyond desperate accumulation of wealth, and he wants desperately to know what that something more is.  But like a doctor making a diagnosis, Jesus also sees the problem. He sees what it is that is holding the man back. And like the prophets before him, he offers the man a harsh course of treatment, because he knows that it’s the only course of treatment that will truly allow this man to live the life to which he has been called. Give it all away,” Jesus says. “It’s your stuff that’s holding you back. So get rid of it.”

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes that we Christians tend to misunderstand this story in one of two ways— either by thinking it’s all about money, or by thinking it’s not really about money at all.

First of all, let’s be clear-- this is very much a story about money. Jesus and the prophets before him understood that money has a lot of power. Power to do good—yes— but also power to dull our senses and our hearts to true freedom in God. It’s about money for this rich man in particular, and it’s also about money for us, because we all have the same appetites towards material comforts. As human beings, it is simply our nature, that the more affluent we become, the more easily we cast aside dependence on God. In our Thursday night Bible study this week, one member observed this quite keenly by pointing towards the trends of decline and growth in Christianity around the world. In affluent countries like ours, fewer and fewer people are going to church. Fewer and fewer people are finding it important to set aside time for communal prayer and worship. In the global south, however, in some of the poorest countries in the world, Christianity is exploding. And while I’m quite sure there are many reasons why this is so, I’m also quite sure that one of the reasons is that in some of these poorer countries, wealth has not yet become an idol to place above God. Faith in human economics has not yet trumped faith in God. So make no mistake, this story is about money. It’s a story about how wealth can easily distract us and keep us from truly seeking God.

But… it’s also about more than money. Because we all know- or at least we should know- that the kingdom of God is not for sale. The rich cannot buy it with their riches any more than the poor can buy it with their poverty. The kingdom of God is free. Grace is free. God’s presence is free. Tapping into who it is that God created us to be—that’s free as well. But here’s the catch-- we have to be free as well.  We cannot receive it if our hands are already full, if our lives our already too preoccupied with other things.

And so ultimately, I think that where we fit in all of this, depends on what Jesus would see if he were to look into our own hearts. What would he see holding you back from being the person who you were created to be?  What would he see holding you back from seeking the Lord and truly living? What are we holding onto so tightly that we are unable to reach out a free hand to take hold of God’s grace?

No one can answer that question for us. Each of us must answer it for ourselves. And I suspect that many of us already know the answer, or at least we have a pretty good idea of what it might be. And so maybe what we need this morning, more than words of judgment, would just be a word of encouragement to keep us on the path. We’ve already received the challenge this morning: Seek the Lord and live. That’s the challenge. And so here is the encouragement: With God, all things are possible.  Now I know, maybe it seems like despite the words of the ancient prophets, despite Jesus’ example, despite the modern day prophets who challenge and inspire us and call us to do better, we keep on dropping the ball.  We keep on filling our lives with more and more stuff that prevents us from being free to receive God’s grace.

But just forget about all of that for a moment. Just forget it.

Because you are here right now.

And you can be here again next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. And every day—rather every moment-- is another opportunity to seek the Lord and live. To become the person you know you have been called to be. Because with God, all things are indeed possible.

God's Healing: A Sermon on Luke 13:10-17

One of the hardest things I have ever had to do was a couple of summers ago, when as part of my ordination process, I was required to spend a summer working as a hospital chaplain.  The hospital I ended up at that summer was a large, level one-trauma center, which meant that all of the worst accidents in the area ended up at this particular hospital. As I started the summer, I was terrified by this. I was terrified to be on call— having to respond to whatever came into the emergency room at any hour of the day or night. Gunshot wounds, car accidents, motorcycle accidents— you name it, I saw it. Yet while those first few on-call experiences were indeed terrifying, as it turned out, that wasn’t the hardest thing I had to do that summer. The hardest thing about that summer was actually my experiences working on the oncology and intensive care units-- working with patients who were there day after day after day, and seemingly not getting any better.  Sometimes, their families would ask me to pray for them— to pray for a miracle, a cure. I would comply, yet day after day, despite our prayers, I would watch patients continue to decline in health and their families continue to suffer. At times, the patients themselves would confide in me about their anger with God. Why was this happening to them? What had they done to deserve this suffering? Why hadn’t God answered their prayers for healing? Were they doing something wrong?

These were the questions that haunted me over the course of the summer. These were the questions that challenged me more than anything else I experienced. And this morning’s gospel story— for me— calls to mind those experiences. It calls to mind those questions that I think all of us have, about prayer and healing, miracles and human suffering.

It’s a familiar scene— our gospel reading this morning. Jesus crosses paths with someone who is in need of healing. And despite the restriction of not working on the Sabbath, Jesus doesn’t hesitate to heal the woman of her ailment. I say it’s a familiar scene because time and time again, in every gospel, Jesus does not fail to work anything short of a miracle when he encounters those who are sick and suffering. Every single time, he provides a miraculous cure— one that wipes away any trace of illness or deformity.  For many Christians, these are stories of hope. But I have to admit, that summer, that when confronted with patients and families who wanted to know why God wasn’t answering their prayers, I sometimes found more frustration in these stories than hope. I would think to myself, if only there were a few stories where Jesus didn’t provide a miraculous cure, and instead, offered simple compassion and care to a sick or dying person-- care that didn’t necessarily cure them, or rid them of their physical infirmity, but that comforted them in their time of distress. If only there were such a story I could point to so that these patients and their families didn’t have to feel abandoned by God. So that they didn’t have to feel that their prayers somehow weren’t good enough, or that their faith wasn’t strong enough.  Even the book of Job— the quintessential biblical tale about the nature of human suffering-- has a happy ending. Yes, Job suffers tremendously. But in the end, he regains everything that he had lost.  The very last line of the story says that “Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, for four generations. And Job died, old, and full of days.” I’m pretty sure this is the biblical version of “and they all lived happily ever after.”

This leaves many of us asking the question: what about all those times when fortunes aren’t restored? When illnesses aren’t cured? What about those times when disabilities and deformities aren’t taken away? How do we, as Christians who process the healing power of God, make sense of all those times when continued woundedness and brokenness-- not miraculous cures-- seem to be the result of our prayers?

I was in a Bible study once, when the subject came up of the difference between praying for a cure and praying for healing. One member of the group gave an example from a film called “The Robe”— a film which takes place after Jesus’ death and centers around a Roman centurion who wins the robe worn by Jesus during the crucifixion. In one very powerful scene in the movie, the centurion comes across a character by the name of Miriam. Miriam is filled with love and light— she is an inspiration to those around her, and her community sees her as an example of Jesus’ miraculous healing power. Miriam also happens to be crippled. And so the centurion is mystified by Miriam and the claims made by her community.

“How is it,” he asks, “that you claim she has been miraculously healed?! She’s a cripple! Can’t you see that??”

An elder in the community explains to the centurion that since she was paralyzed at a young age, Miriam had been bitter and hateful for most of her life. She had affected everyone around her with her envy and malice. But one day, in their small town of Cana, there was a wedding. Everyone in the town went— everyone except Miriam. She stayed at home-- bitter and weeping— for what man would ever ask to marry her? But when her parents returned home from the wedding, they found Miriam changed. She was smiling, singing, and full of joy.

“Wasn’t Jesus at that wedding?” the Centurion asked.

“Yes,” the elder said, “but he came late.”  He had another stop to make first.

The healing that Miriam receives is no less miraculous than the one we read about in the Gospel story for today. In some ways, it is even more extraordinary. For it is not a healing that takes away her physical limitations.  Rather, it is a healing of her soul.

“He could have healed my body,” Miriam explains to the centurion, “but he did something even better for me. He made me an agent of his word. He left me as I am, so that all others like me would know that their misfortune needn’t deprive them of happiness, or their place in God’s kingdom.”

Now this is, of course, a fictional story.  It’s just a movie.  But in some ways, this is the kind of story that I wish we found more of in the bible. Perhaps then there wouldn’t be so much hurtful theology out there. Theology that tells people with chronic illness or disability that the reason for their continued suffering is that they are weak in faith, or that there is some hidden sin that keeps them from being cured. There are plenty of Christians out there who would argue that if God does not heal people in the visible, dramatic way that is expected, then those people have not prayed hard enough.  Their faith is weak. But I don’t think that’s true. I disagree with that theology, because I believe that God does not always heal in the way we demand or expect. I believe that God’s healing does not always amount to God delivering us from every trace of what ails us.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point that there is at least one character in scripture who has a story that mirrors that of Miriam’s story.  The apostle Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians that he was given a thorn in his side— something that plagued him a great deal. We don’t know what this “thorn” was, many have speculated, and many biblical scholars suspect it was some kind of physical disability or deformity.  We don’t know for sure.  However, what we do know is that Paul appealed to the Lord multiple times for it to be taken away. Whatever it was, it was something that burdened him deeply. One can imagine that in the religious culture of the day, in an age when any kind of physical illness or disability was seen as the product of sin, that he may have received quite a bit of grief for this. 

“Look at him,” some might have said, “he talks a whole lot about the power of faith, so why can’t he free himself from this ailment? Why doesn’t Jesus deliver him?  Why doesn’t God just cure him?”

But unlike the woman from our gospel reading, Paul is not cured. The thorn in his side does not leave him. Nevertheless, he remains to this day one of the most powerful witnesses to the gospel of God’s love and grace that there has ever been. His writing on the power of faith in the midst of suffering has offered us comfort to many going through difficult times.

“We do not lose heart,” he says, “because we look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

The thorn— whatever it was-- led Paul to the most earnest kind heartfelt kind of prayer— the kind of pouring out of the soul that requires total dependence on God’s love and grace. A grace that is sufficient, Paul learned, to hold us together in the midst of whatever challenges life may bring our way.

I think perhaps one of the biggest differences between a healing and a cure is that while we tend to think only sick or disabled people are in need of a cure, there is not a single one of us that is not in need of healing. Almost all of us have some aspect of our lives in which a “healing” is needed. Some “thorn in our side” that we wish the Lord would take away. Maybe we suffer from chronic pain, or perhaps we or someone we love has experienced depression or some other mental illness. Perhaps there has been a traumatic event in our lives that has kept us enslaved to feelings of fear, bitterness, or resentment. In some way or another, I suspect we can all relate to the woman from the gospel this morning— bent over, struggling under the weight of what ails us, unable to see the sun. We pray consistently for God to heal us and to take away that which ails us. But it may be that God is already sending healing grace into our lives— perhaps in unexpected ways. And it may be that while there are aspects of our lives that are difficult, we are intended sometimes not to be rid of them, but to allow Jesus to walk with us as we go through them. For only then do we come out on the other side— healed in ways that we could never have imagined.  Paul says that we are to be agents of Christ’s reconciliation and Christ’s healing in the world. Perhaps it is to be that like Miriam, like Paul, and indeed like Christ himself— our own woundedness can often be the very thing which allows us to be a healing force for others.

We yearn— all of us do— for healing and wholeness. For ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the world. I believe that one of the greatest miracles of all, is that God offers this healing to each and every one of us— without exception. I believe that even in the midst of brokenness, there is hope to be found. A hope which can be summed up for me in four words: we are never alone.  God does not abandon us in our suffering— God walks with us. And just as God walks with us in our suffering, we can then find the strength to stand, and walk with others in theirs— allowing the hope given to us by the gospel to heal not only us, but to begin that great and grace-filled work of healing all of creation.