“Pay attention to the TIME”
Mark 1:9-15
1st Sunday in Lent / year B
26 February 2012
ATTENTION!
Attention, all you calendar-flipping, time-line-drawing, date-marking and note-taking Nativity people!
I have an announcement that is going to turn your world upside down!
TIME … is not linear.
TIME … does not pass like this … (straight line)
TIME … continues … like this … (circle)
Well … all right … certainly, the modern Western civilization human understanding of time, the way we people who live in this place and time mark things … that’s linear. Things have a beginning, a middle, and an end … and every point along that line of time that we draw can, and will be measured, marked, and noted.
But you need to leave that sense of time outside the door this morning. Check your baggage of linear time … get a claim ticket and you can pick it up on the way out after worship.
Now I say this … not because I’m wanting to diss modern Western civilization and uphold a model held by other equally fascinating cultures in the history of the world … cultures who saw, who see time not as linear, but as circular … cultures such as Native American, African, or Ancient Near Eastern … (well, maybe I do, a little) …
… I say this, not because the church has traditionally seen time as circular rather than linear (the church or liturgical year being the primarily example) …
… no, I’m here this morning telling you that TIME IS NOT LINEAR, TIME IS CIRCULAR …
BECAUSE JESUS SAYS SO.
That’s right. Jesus says so.
It’s right there in our Gospel reading.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent , and believe in the Good News.
The time is fulfilled.
If I was teaching you a Greek lesson, I’d go into how the Greek word Jesus uses here isn’t or linear time (from which we get the word chronological), but here Jesus uses the word … which means God time … time which doesn’t have a beginning, middle or end … circular time.
But I’m not here to teach you a Greek lesson.
I’m here to proclaim to you the Word of Salvation.
And this morning, that word is ROUND.
The time is fulfilled.
It’s time.
But more, it was time … it is time … and it will be time again, soon enough.
A word about what this round time is not.
It isn’t “Groundhog Day,” that old Bill Murray movie where he keeps waking up and it’s the same day, Groundhog Day, over and over and over again, circumstances repeating and repeating and repeating.
It isn’t reincarnation either, people dying and coming back as cats or dogs or banana slugs. I don’t wanna be a banana slug.
Enough about that! That’s not what we’re, not what Jesus is talking about here.
It’s round time … circular time … Jesus time … God time …
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
IF … and this is purely a hypothetical question, because remember, here and now, today, this first Sunday in Lent, time is ROUND … but IF time was linear …
THEN … you’d only have … one chance … one opportunity.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
WHOOPS! Missed it, Jesus.
I was out having a donut. Arguing with my brother. Watching “Survivor.”
OR …
Or … well, I repented, and believed … but then … I slugged my brother. Cussed at the TV. Had another donut.
WELL, TOO BAD FOR YOU!
But thankfully, that’s not the case.
The Kingdom of God is not about “one and done.”
Because time is circular.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
And in a little while:
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
And in a little while:
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
Thanks be to God for God’s Round Time.
Because Round Time, circular time, gives us continued opportunities … “time for amendment of life” as the old hymnal’s confession and forgiveness service used to say … time to repent and believe the Good News … then, when we “seize the moment” and fall back into thinking it’s all straight-line time, all about us, selfish, self-centered, sinful us … then, once again, the time is fulfilled … time to repent and believe in the Good News.
Again and again and again. As many times as we sin and fall short of God’s good time … God gives us more time … time and time and time again.
I gotta tell ya, I LOVE THIS TEXT.
Not just because it gets in the faces and under the skin of everyone who loves to live in straight line time … because hey, I do too. You’ve seen me enough times fiddling with my Blackberry, checking my calendar, to know that.
No, I love this text because it’s SO INCREDIBLY FREEING.
Straight line time is a prison.
Straight line time tells us, if we’re going to be successful, if our lives are going to matter, then we’ve got to make PROGRESS. We’ve got to move along, become more and better, greater and keep improving, ever increasing, whether that’s in our number of Facebook friends or in our bank accounts or on those reports I turn in every year to the Bishop.
But “every day in every way, we’re getting better and better” is no way to live.
Because it’s a lie. “Every day in every way, we’re getting better and better” leaves no room for discussion … questioning … changing course … waiting for a season. It’s all about “improvement,” and anything other than “improvement” is seen as “failure.”
And that’s a lie. Because it’s not, we can’t always be “every day in every way, we’re getting better and better.” Every day in every way, we’re getting … older … balder … fatter … you name it … the best friend and closest companion of linear time is decay, destruction … death.
Little, daily deaths, coming in separation from others … because for one to have more and better, someone else has to have less and worse, and that leads to jealousy and envy and greed and cutoffs between people and between nations.
And then the big death. The looming cloud at the end of our lives which is the ultimate separation … the separation from everything … emptiness … nothingness … the final God-forsaken vacuum.
No wonder Jesus, seeing that final blackness from the cross, cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The end of his linear time was a dark, cold, empty Dead End … as death is for all of creation.
Linear time ends … in separation from everything.
BECAUSE NOTHING LASTS FOREVER.
Every note, every calendar page or mark, every work, everything behind us on our own individual timelines … once linear time runs out for us … they run out as well … and soon enough, we’re just a memory, and then, forgotten.
That’s all folks!
LINEAR TIME IS NO WAY TO LIVE. It’s a way to DIE.
Jesus does not want death for us. Jesus wants life for us. God the Father wants life for us. So much so that he yanked Jesus out of the emptiness, the abyss of nothingness and separation that is the end of linear time, so that he would be with him, alive and free, in his, the Father’s good and gracious time, which is also FOR YOU.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
The time is fulfilled, child of God, wandering in the desert of straight-line time; come, be drowned daily in the Word of hope and promise, the Word of your Baptism … beloved child of God, you are mine forever, and nothing can separate you from me.
The time is fulfilled, child of God, wandering and wasting in the desert of straight-line time; come, eat and drink in my Word of hope and promise, the Word of my meal, for you … beloved child of God, be filled with faith, hope, forgiveness and life … strengthened for the journey … and sent out to serve and share with my world.
The time is fulfilled. So pay attention as you walk your daily walk in straight line time, pay attention for the in-breaking of circular time, of Jesus-time … the time is fulfilled … pay attention to those kairos moments in the midst of a chronos world … pay attention, because they come, they come … Jesus says they come, and he brings them …
Pay attention for the moments of repentance. Repentance which isn’t always on- your- knees- I’m- sorry. But repentance, which in circular time simply means … Stop. Observe.
Observe your own life, and where it intersects with others.
Reflect. Does your life show forth Jesus?
Discuss. Discuss, because relationship can only be renewed in relationship.
Then, believe. Believe, which is all about being rescued from our life-deserts, being drowned in our Baptism, again and again, being fed at Jesus’ table, again and again. Listen to his voice in your life. How does Jesus call me to be, here and now? Plan, account, and act … receive Jesus’ gracious forgiveness, and then live it out, bringing circular time into the linear, bringing Jesus time into, to and for, the world stuck in linear time … into the world on its way into hopeless separation and death … YOU, bring hope … and love … and life.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the Good News.
It’s TIME.
So what are YOU going to do now?
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
22 February 2012
Ash Wednesday
“Weeping between the vestibule and the altar”
Joel 2:17 / Isaiah 58:1-12
22 February 2012
Stephen King … yes, that Stephen King … the author of ”Carrie” and “Christine,” “Pet Sematary” and “Cujo” … Stephen King may seem like an unlikely source for an Ash Wednesday sermon.
Ah, but then there’s “The Green Mile” … and the character King creates known as John Coffey … the larger than life miracle-working death row inmate. In the 1999 film version of King’s novel … Coffey utters some words, as he prepares to go to the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit … words which are most appropriate for us, gathered here today:
I'm tired boss. I'm tired of being on the road lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having a buddy to be with to tell me where we's going to, coming from or why. Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time.
If ever there was a day to be tired of people being ugly to each other … tired of the pain in the world every day … it would be today, Ash Wednesday, this day which begins our introspective season of Lent, this one day in the Christian year when we are called upon by the Word and the Lord of the Word to stop, and take stock, of ourselves, the world, all our shortcomings and failures, commissions and omissions, all that separates us from God and from each other.
Though for much, most of the world, those words are a call to folly and futility … look around you, pay attention to what’s going on all around us here, gathered away and apart as we are for this hour today (tonight). Does the world notice, does the world, indeed, care what we’re doing here, marking a time of repentance, marking ash crosses on our foreheads as signs of shame and sorrow?
Of course not. Life goes on, pretty much unabated, today as it does every day.
And that’s probably because, having a “day of repentance and atonement” is seen as a pointless enterprise. We live in the age of the “non-apology apology” … surely you’ve heard these before … “Oh, I’m sorry that you feel that way.” What a self-centered, self-serving utterance of pure garbage. You’re sorry that I feel insulted … hurt … embarrassed … separated from you, because of your behavior. You’re not sorry for your behavior … far from it … you may well be proud of it … you’re just sorry that I can’t join you in the joy of your self-indulgence.
What a different picture we have painted for us in the words of the Prophet Joel.
Certainly this Old Testament prophet was familiar with the Hebrew traditions surrounding Yom Kippur … the yearly observance of a Day of Atonement, prescribed by God in the book of Leviticus, and still marked today by observant Jews, their most solemn day of the year.
Joel’s words in this second chapter echo the actions called for on such a Day of Atonement … God calling his people to repentance and renewal.
Yet … here in Joel … there is a sense that some, one or more, individuals of the community bear a particular burden in this Atonement, this making at-one-ment between God and his people, for their sins, for their shortcomings …
Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.
Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery,
A byword among the nations.
Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?”
The priests. The tribal shamen. The professionally religious. They are the ones who take on the burden of their people.
Certainly in the Old Testament time, the time of the Priestly class in Israel, this was the case. A rabbi Kathleen and I knew in the Twin Cities painted a particularly poignant image of the work of the Priest in Israel’s history.
All week long, the priest would do his duties, offering animal sacrifices on the altar of God brought by the people as atonement for their sins. But even on his day off, the work wouldn’t cease. On his day off, the priest would take off his robes and finery, put on the ancient equivalent of an old pair of Levi’s and a worn hoodie, fill a bucket with warm water, throw in a rag, and then, he’d get down on his hands and knees in the Temple Holy of Holies and scrub up all that blood that had been thrown on the altar in the previous week, the blood of their sacrifice, the blood of their atonement . Even on his day off, he’d still be bearing the burdens of his people.
Of course, today the priestly class in Israel is long gone, the Temple destroyed two thousand years ago … but there’s still a sense that the professionally religious … priests and pastors … continue to bear the burden of the people, the community of faith in which they serve. Some, more than others … due to denomination or piety, theology of the office of pastor, high or low, and so on … but I know, I feel it. There have been … there are … and there will continue to be days when there’s much weeping between the vestibule and the altar … days when John Coffey’s words are most certainly my own:
Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time.”
We do hear about much pain and suffering. We read the news and watch the TV and the internet with a particular sensitivity to the pain and suffering of the world … “people being ugly to each other” … those words, those images, those enfleshed-stories, in the lives of people we know and care for and in the lives of those we don’t know at all … that’s what we in this inadequately-named “caring profession” do … we care.
Now in our Reformation-centered thinking, of course, we know in our heart of hearts that “caring” is no longer limited to the priest or the pastor, the professionally religious. We live in the church which is the “priesthood of all believers,” after all, everyone capable and called to go before Christ directly in prayer and in service without the intermediary of one of the Levite religious.
Many of us know, and do that, every day; we walk wet in our baptismal promise and heritage, which call to be Christ and bring Christ, through our thoughts and prayers, words and actions, to our neighbors.
And soon enough, once we start, we find that it hurts to care. It’s like pieces of glass in our heads all the time.
Why does it have to hurt so much to care?
For me, part of why it feels that way is because so many people choose not to care. Of those outside the circle we draw which we call “church” … well, perhaps their behavior can be excused as understandable, if not endorsed or approved. They don’t know God’s Word, God’s admonitions, God’s Law about how we are to treat “the least of these” … as the words of our other Old Testament reading for Ash Wednesday, from the prophet Isaiah, lay out so clearly:
To loose the bonds of injustice,
To undo the thongs of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free,
And to break every yoke?
… To share your bread with the hungry,
And bring the homeless poor into your house;
When you see the naked, to cover them,
And not to hide yourself from your own kin?
But what about those inside that circle called “church?” Those who most certainly fly the flag of “Christian” over their lives? What of them?
My words here … not Jesus’, but mine … though I believe I have the mind of Christ in them.
There can be no excuse … none whatsoever … for those who call themselves “Christian” to treat others in such utterly reprehensible ways … to speak of them in such contemptible terms … to show no love, no care or compassion … indeed, in some cases, to show such total revulsion for those who, by their own work or will, are unable to rise above their life-station or situation. It’s not Christian. No matter how often you go to church, how many times you use Jesus’ name, how many crosses, how many TV cameras you stand in front of and proclaim it.
Those damned pieces of glass in my head, all the time. People being ugly to each other. The pain I hear and feel in the world every day.
Honestly, it’s not like God doesn’t give us plenty of chances … words of hope … and promises for us, if we turn around, repent, seek at-one-ment with God and each other.
Again, from Isaiah:
If you offer your food to the hungry
And satisfy the needs of the afflicted
Then your light shall rise in the darkness
And your gloom be like the noonday …
The Lord will guide you continually
And satisfy your needs in parched places
And make your bones strong.
Yes, there’s a Gospel word in this old, old Word from one of God’s prophets.
Granted, it’s conditional … “if-then.” If you do this … then I … God … will do this.
And maybe that’s the problem. Because much of the time it sure seems like those who don’t offer food to the hungry, those who ignore the needs of the afflicted, their light sure seems to shine bright in the darkness too; their gloom, it’s also a lot like the noonday.
There sure has to be more to repentance than this. Some doin’ it, some not, and all the while, people being ugly to each other … pain in the world … every day.
Yes, there is.
Martin Luther … he, another famous one who had pieces of glass in his head, all the time … he put it so well in the opening salvo of the Reformation, the Ninety Five Theses:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
In other words, it’s not the pieces of glass in our head, it’s not the pain we feel and hear in the world every day, that names and shapes us … but the waters of baptism … the bread and wine of the meal of Holy Communion … and those precious words which each contain …
…lovely child of God … beloved sister, beloved brother of mine … you who have heard my call to lay aside all that removes you from being what my Father creates and what I call you to be … you are forgiven … and freed from these chains, your bondage to sin and sorrow, pain and death … freed … to go, and live, and do for others in my name …
And thus, in everything we do ... all our words, all our actions, from the moment we rise to the moment we fall asleep at night … we receive every moment as a moment of, a moment for, God’s grace, at work in and through our lives … into the world.
The crosses drawn in water and oil on our foreheads and in our hearts, they take larger place, larger than the pieces of glass, larger than the pain we feel and hear … though we sin every day, though every day is filled with sorrow, every day is also an opportunity for repentance … and every repentance, a moment for at-one-ment with God and each other, because in Christ we are forgiven, again and again, and freed from the pain being in charge in and over our lives because Christ takes it on himself, for us.
And that’s the message of this day, this Ash Wednesday. Jesus, God taking on our finite humanity, becoming even ashes … even … nothing … so he could burn and purify out all the pain, the pieces of glass in our heads and on our hearts … change them, remake them ... where before there was despair, there’s now hope … where there was pain, there is joy … where there is death, life.
Make no mistake … those pieces of glass in our heads … the despair, the sadness, the pain we feel for others, and for ourselves … they’ll still be around … they will still be part of our lives and in the lives of these we care for, those we love.
For anyone with a heart, with compassion, with love, that is true.
BUT DO NOT FEAR.
They do not rule you. They are not the last Word for you.
These ashes are.
May this cross of ash you receive today remind you that in Jesus, all is being made new. The pain, the sorrow, the pieces of glass … and you, yourself … made new …
Made new, to go, and serve, and tell.
Tell others that, out of the depths, we shall rise.
Because of Jesus, and in his name.
Amen.
“Weeping between the vestibule and the altar”
Joel 2:17 / Isaiah 58:1-12
22 February 2012
Stephen King … yes, that Stephen King … the author of ”Carrie” and “Christine,” “Pet Sematary” and “Cujo” … Stephen King may seem like an unlikely source for an Ash Wednesday sermon.
Ah, but then there’s “The Green Mile” … and the character King creates known as John Coffey … the larger than life miracle-working death row inmate. In the 1999 film version of King’s novel … Coffey utters some words, as he prepares to go to the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit … words which are most appropriate for us, gathered here today:
I'm tired boss. I'm tired of being on the road lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having a buddy to be with to tell me where we's going to, coming from or why. Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time.
If ever there was a day to be tired of people being ugly to each other … tired of the pain in the world every day … it would be today, Ash Wednesday, this day which begins our introspective season of Lent, this one day in the Christian year when we are called upon by the Word and the Lord of the Word to stop, and take stock, of ourselves, the world, all our shortcomings and failures, commissions and omissions, all that separates us from God and from each other.
Though for much, most of the world, those words are a call to folly and futility … look around you, pay attention to what’s going on all around us here, gathered away and apart as we are for this hour today (tonight). Does the world notice, does the world, indeed, care what we’re doing here, marking a time of repentance, marking ash crosses on our foreheads as signs of shame and sorrow?
Of course not. Life goes on, pretty much unabated, today as it does every day.
And that’s probably because, having a “day of repentance and atonement” is seen as a pointless enterprise. We live in the age of the “non-apology apology” … surely you’ve heard these before … “Oh, I’m sorry that you feel that way.” What a self-centered, self-serving utterance of pure garbage. You’re sorry that I feel insulted … hurt … embarrassed … separated from you, because of your behavior. You’re not sorry for your behavior … far from it … you may well be proud of it … you’re just sorry that I can’t join you in the joy of your self-indulgence.
What a different picture we have painted for us in the words of the Prophet Joel.
Certainly this Old Testament prophet was familiar with the Hebrew traditions surrounding Yom Kippur … the yearly observance of a Day of Atonement, prescribed by God in the book of Leviticus, and still marked today by observant Jews, their most solemn day of the year.
Joel’s words in this second chapter echo the actions called for on such a Day of Atonement … God calling his people to repentance and renewal.
Yet … here in Joel … there is a sense that some, one or more, individuals of the community bear a particular burden in this Atonement, this making at-one-ment between God and his people, for their sins, for their shortcomings …
Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.
Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery,
A byword among the nations.
Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?”
The priests. The tribal shamen. The professionally religious. They are the ones who take on the burden of their people.
Certainly in the Old Testament time, the time of the Priestly class in Israel, this was the case. A rabbi Kathleen and I knew in the Twin Cities painted a particularly poignant image of the work of the Priest in Israel’s history.
All week long, the priest would do his duties, offering animal sacrifices on the altar of God brought by the people as atonement for their sins. But even on his day off, the work wouldn’t cease. On his day off, the priest would take off his robes and finery, put on the ancient equivalent of an old pair of Levi’s and a worn hoodie, fill a bucket with warm water, throw in a rag, and then, he’d get down on his hands and knees in the Temple Holy of Holies and scrub up all that blood that had been thrown on the altar in the previous week, the blood of their sacrifice, the blood of their atonement . Even on his day off, he’d still be bearing the burdens of his people.
Of course, today the priestly class in Israel is long gone, the Temple destroyed two thousand years ago … but there’s still a sense that the professionally religious … priests and pastors … continue to bear the burden of the people, the community of faith in which they serve. Some, more than others … due to denomination or piety, theology of the office of pastor, high or low, and so on … but I know, I feel it. There have been … there are … and there will continue to be days when there’s much weeping between the vestibule and the altar … days when John Coffey’s words are most certainly my own:
Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time.”
We do hear about much pain and suffering. We read the news and watch the TV and the internet with a particular sensitivity to the pain and suffering of the world … “people being ugly to each other” … those words, those images, those enfleshed-stories, in the lives of people we know and care for and in the lives of those we don’t know at all … that’s what we in this inadequately-named “caring profession” do … we care.
Now in our Reformation-centered thinking, of course, we know in our heart of hearts that “caring” is no longer limited to the priest or the pastor, the professionally religious. We live in the church which is the “priesthood of all believers,” after all, everyone capable and called to go before Christ directly in prayer and in service without the intermediary of one of the Levite religious.
Many of us know, and do that, every day; we walk wet in our baptismal promise and heritage, which call to be Christ and bring Christ, through our thoughts and prayers, words and actions, to our neighbors.
And soon enough, once we start, we find that it hurts to care. It’s like pieces of glass in our heads all the time.
Why does it have to hurt so much to care?
For me, part of why it feels that way is because so many people choose not to care. Of those outside the circle we draw which we call “church” … well, perhaps their behavior can be excused as understandable, if not endorsed or approved. They don’t know God’s Word, God’s admonitions, God’s Law about how we are to treat “the least of these” … as the words of our other Old Testament reading for Ash Wednesday, from the prophet Isaiah, lay out so clearly:
To loose the bonds of injustice,
To undo the thongs of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free,
And to break every yoke?
… To share your bread with the hungry,
And bring the homeless poor into your house;
When you see the naked, to cover them,
And not to hide yourself from your own kin?
But what about those inside that circle called “church?” Those who most certainly fly the flag of “Christian” over their lives? What of them?
My words here … not Jesus’, but mine … though I believe I have the mind of Christ in them.
There can be no excuse … none whatsoever … for those who call themselves “Christian” to treat others in such utterly reprehensible ways … to speak of them in such contemptible terms … to show no love, no care or compassion … indeed, in some cases, to show such total revulsion for those who, by their own work or will, are unable to rise above their life-station or situation. It’s not Christian. No matter how often you go to church, how many times you use Jesus’ name, how many crosses, how many TV cameras you stand in front of and proclaim it.
Those damned pieces of glass in my head, all the time. People being ugly to each other. The pain I hear and feel in the world every day.
Honestly, it’s not like God doesn’t give us plenty of chances … words of hope … and promises for us, if we turn around, repent, seek at-one-ment with God and each other.
Again, from Isaiah:
If you offer your food to the hungry
And satisfy the needs of the afflicted
Then your light shall rise in the darkness
And your gloom be like the noonday …
The Lord will guide you continually
And satisfy your needs in parched places
And make your bones strong.
Yes, there’s a Gospel word in this old, old Word from one of God’s prophets.
Granted, it’s conditional … “if-then.” If you do this … then I … God … will do this.
And maybe that’s the problem. Because much of the time it sure seems like those who don’t offer food to the hungry, those who ignore the needs of the afflicted, their light sure seems to shine bright in the darkness too; their gloom, it’s also a lot like the noonday.
There sure has to be more to repentance than this. Some doin’ it, some not, and all the while, people being ugly to each other … pain in the world … every day.
Yes, there is.
Martin Luther … he, another famous one who had pieces of glass in his head, all the time … he put it so well in the opening salvo of the Reformation, the Ninety Five Theses:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
In other words, it’s not the pieces of glass in our head, it’s not the pain we feel and hear in the world every day, that names and shapes us … but the waters of baptism … the bread and wine of the meal of Holy Communion … and those precious words which each contain …
…lovely child of God … beloved sister, beloved brother of mine … you who have heard my call to lay aside all that removes you from being what my Father creates and what I call you to be … you are forgiven … and freed from these chains, your bondage to sin and sorrow, pain and death … freed … to go, and live, and do for others in my name …
And thus, in everything we do ... all our words, all our actions, from the moment we rise to the moment we fall asleep at night … we receive every moment as a moment of, a moment for, God’s grace, at work in and through our lives … into the world.
The crosses drawn in water and oil on our foreheads and in our hearts, they take larger place, larger than the pieces of glass, larger than the pain we feel and hear … though we sin every day, though every day is filled with sorrow, every day is also an opportunity for repentance … and every repentance, a moment for at-one-ment with God and each other, because in Christ we are forgiven, again and again, and freed from the pain being in charge in and over our lives because Christ takes it on himself, for us.
And that’s the message of this day, this Ash Wednesday. Jesus, God taking on our finite humanity, becoming even ashes … even … nothing … so he could burn and purify out all the pain, the pieces of glass in our heads and on our hearts … change them, remake them ... where before there was despair, there’s now hope … where there was pain, there is joy … where there is death, life.
Make no mistake … those pieces of glass in our heads … the despair, the sadness, the pain we feel for others, and for ourselves … they’ll still be around … they will still be part of our lives and in the lives of these we care for, those we love.
For anyone with a heart, with compassion, with love, that is true.
BUT DO NOT FEAR.
They do not rule you. They are not the last Word for you.
These ashes are.
May this cross of ash you receive today remind you that in Jesus, all is being made new. The pain, the sorrow, the pieces of glass … and you, yourself … made new …
Made new, to go, and serve, and tell.
Tell others that, out of the depths, we shall rise.
Because of Jesus, and in his name.
Amen.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
12 February 2012
“Living letters of recommendation”
2 Corinthians 3:1-6 / Mark 1:40-45
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
12 February 2012
Our Epiphany season long journey through the first chapter of Mark’s gospel comes to an end today with the third story (in three weeks) of Jesus healing people.
Two weeks ago it was that outspoken man in the synagogue in Capernaum, from whom Jesus cast out an “unclean spirit,” while last week’s text told of Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother in law, as well as “casting out demons” from many people.
Ah, but in both of those stories, the people involved behaved much as would have been expected of them, in that place and time. Jesus – the healer – he encounters … he has brought to him … people who were sick or suffering some kind of debilitating condition which prevented them from living life as God’s good and gracious will would have it be for them, for us … full, rich, abundant. And so Jesus acts, to restore this life to them.
But there’s been this interesting comment thread, in the Gospel text, the past two weeks. That man who came to Jesus, saying “I know who you are … the Holy One of God” … Jesus wouldn’t let him keep speaking, but ordered the unclean spirit to come out of him. The demons which were cast out weren’t allowed to speak, either, because as the text says, they knew Jesus.
Now this week, in our final healing story of the chapter and of this season, Jesus heals a leper from his dread skin disease … and once again, tells him to say nothing to anyone.
Why all the secrecy, Jesus?
Perhaps it’s all a matter of supply-and-demand. If the word got out about Jesus, he’d be overrun by people wanting to be healed, cured, dis-possessed. By keeping things quiet, he wouldn’t get slammed by the sick, dinged by the demon-carriers.
The Gospel last week, at first glance, seems to bear this out … it says he cured, not all, not everyone, but that vague word many.
So does Jesus want to put limits on himself … put a qualifier on his opening words in Mark’s gospel that “the kingdom of God has come near” … I- Jesus- I’m just near to some, FOR some, but not for all? Does it mean that he wants to be deliberately vague, slipping in and out of town like a spectre, healing, de-demonizing one minute, gone the next, leaving people asking and wondering, “hey, who was that guy?”
Well, if that’s the case, then why does last week’s Gospel text end with these words: And Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons?
Something else must be going on here.
And so we must return to this week’s story of Jesus and the leper.
Now, as it begins, we probably don’t hear this story as anything particularly strange, out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t a leper beg Jesus to heal him?
Ah, but that’s precisely the point. The leper, by simply coming to Jesus, asking, imploring, daring Jesus to heal him … If you choose … if you are wishing / willing / wanting / desiring … you can make me clean …in saying, in doing this … the leper is going outside the legal code of Israel, outlined in Leviticus 13 and 14, which is very clear about how the leper is to conduct him or herself:
• A leper is to wear torn clothes and let the hair of their head be disheveled.
• A leper is to cover their upper lip and cry out, “unclean, unclean.”
• A leper is to live by themselves outside of town, and remain alone and apart from other people.
So right here, in the very first chapter of Mark’s gospel, this leper crosses the boundaries, steps outside the Law … he calls Jesus to his side and dares Jesus to heal him … though, still giving Jesus the “out” of his religion … leaving Jesus room to escape, through observance of his Jewish ritual rule system, to just walk away from this leper.
But he still dares Jesus.
And Jesus – he doesn’t take the easy out. Jesus takes up the leper’s dare. “I do choose! Be made clean!”
And the leper is healed, and made whole.
Though … note that, as in the earlier healing stories in this first chapter of Mark’s gospel … Jesus remains consistent. He tells the leper not to say anything to anyone, but to remain within the rules and laws of the religious system.
Go, show yourself to the priest.
But this doesn’t happen. The leper goes out and tells everyone about what happened to him. It’s a natural reaction to this leper’s supernatural encounter.
And so this is the outcome … Jesus could no longer go into a town openly.
So why does Jesus want this leper to remain silent?
Because this leper has only a one dimensional picture of Jesus … to him, he’s simply the rabbi who healed him. And that’s what he goes and tells everyone, so that people came to him from every quarter, wanting to be healed or to see him heal others.
It’s a one sided letter of recommendation for Jesus, that the former leper gives in his healed body.
Now we know something about letters of recommendation. Especially these days … especially at this time of the year … with college and grad school applications due … with more people trying to come back into the job market, to find a new job or just get employed.
I’m glad to write letters of recommendation for people. And I often get asked to do just that.
Most of the time, the one asking me to write a letter of recommendation, I know them well, so it’s not difficult to write a well-rounded letter. Occasionally, though, I’m asked to write a recommendation for someone I don’t know well at all, a community member, an acquaintance, and that’s tougher … you can only write truthfully about what you know, and if that knowledge is limited or one sided … well, the letter shows it.
The Apostle Paul in our reading from 2nd Corinthians today is writing to his friends in the congregation in Corinth about their recommendations of him and for him. Itinerant missionaries at that time needed to carry letters of recommendation from one place to the next … in much the same way pastors and congregations today provide references to and for each other, as they engage in that delicate dance known as the call process. When you interviewed me eight years ago, you provided me with some character references for this congregation, and I did the same for you.
What Paul is saying here in these verses from 2nd Corinthians, though, is something like “letters … schmetters!” You, people of Corinth, you are my letters of recommendation, letters written on your hearts … and more, you, people of Corinth, you are living and true letters of recommendation to the world of the love and grace and forgiveness and peace given by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Paul could say this because he knew that they … through Paul … had more than a one-dimensional image of Jesus. He knew that, through his … Paul’s … preaching and teaching, the Corinthians had seen the Christ of the Cross … the cross, The Defining Moment for Jesus, his life, his ministry, everything he said and did. And so Paul could confidently say, if you’ve seen and heard me, seen and heard me bear witness to this Jesus, you know him in the One Way you need to know him … as Paul wrote to that same Corinthian congregation in an earlier letter, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Truth-telling. Honest. Brutally convicting. And awesomely freeing.
And so back in Mark’s gospel … the most clearly cross-shaped of the Gospels … everything in this Gospel is meant to be seen, and be heard, through the Cross.
In the next few weeks, as we end this season of Epiphany and begin the season of Lent … we’ll see this play out … in next Sunday’s Transfiguration story, as the disciples see and experience Jesus in yet another, new way, high on the mountaintop, standing and talking with Moses and Elijah, and the voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus my beloved Son …
… and, in the following week’s start of our Lenten journey, the story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness and his Temptation … all of these are little glimpses, vignettes, previews, steps in the journey to the Cross.
We who live on the other side of Jesus’ cross, we have the advantage of knowing already how the story turns out. But the people in these stories, early witnesses to these pieces of Jesus’ story … they only saw one side of him, so Jesus asked them to stay silent … they didn’t have the whole picture of Jesus, so they couldn’t be those “living letters of recommendation” for him … and as they spoke, the world got the wrong impression about Jesus.
Today … that struggle continues. Some would try to limit Jesus to one or another aspect of his life … their “letters of recommendation” for Jesus come off one sided … “Oh, he’s a great moral authority” … “he’s my best friend” … “he’s a healer” … “he’s a judge.”
But it’s only through the Cross that we see, that we experience, that we receive the whole Jesus … the depth of life’s emptiness, and the fullness of God’s salvation … and it’s only through these cross-shaped gifts for us … Baptism … Holy Communion … that we receive all of Jesus into our own lives.
Through the cross-shaped gift of baptism … we receive Jesus, as he calls us to die to what we’ve been and then, he raises us up to what we shall be, in him, once, and every day of our lives …
Through the cross-shaped gift of Holy Communion … we receive Jesus, forgiving, freeing us from our diseased, distressed, even demon-riddled pasts … here, this and every week, Jesus comes into our lives, into our very bodies, and he makes us new …
And then, made new, dead and alive, buried and risen, we are sent out, watered in the Word, walking wet in the baptismal hope and promise Jesus gives us, fed and strengthened in his meal, we are given grace and peace for life … his cross, planted firmly in the crossroads of our lives, as the questions of life come upon us … Jesus, his cross, stands squarely in the gap for and with us.
Why illness? Why are the bad things of life happening, to me, to us?
Only in the Cross do the disturbance, and peace, of life meet for us … total abandonment, and full reclamation … utter despair, and highest hope … and only in the Cross, Jesus standing in the gap there, with and for us, are we given the strength, wisdom, power and authority … to be his “living letters of recommendation” … to and for others, our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers and families … to and for the sake of the world.
Jesus asked the leper to remain silent, because he didn’t have the whole picture.
But you do. And to you he’s given a name, a charge, a calling … beloved child of God, my living letter of recommendation … go and show, go and tell, go and proclaim, go and be … for me … for life … for you … and for them.
Amen.
2 Corinthians 3:1-6 / Mark 1:40-45
Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
12 February 2012
Our Epiphany season long journey through the first chapter of Mark’s gospel comes to an end today with the third story (in three weeks) of Jesus healing people.
Two weeks ago it was that outspoken man in the synagogue in Capernaum, from whom Jesus cast out an “unclean spirit,” while last week’s text told of Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother in law, as well as “casting out demons” from many people.
Ah, but in both of those stories, the people involved behaved much as would have been expected of them, in that place and time. Jesus – the healer – he encounters … he has brought to him … people who were sick or suffering some kind of debilitating condition which prevented them from living life as God’s good and gracious will would have it be for them, for us … full, rich, abundant. And so Jesus acts, to restore this life to them.
But there’s been this interesting comment thread, in the Gospel text, the past two weeks. That man who came to Jesus, saying “I know who you are … the Holy One of God” … Jesus wouldn’t let him keep speaking, but ordered the unclean spirit to come out of him. The demons which were cast out weren’t allowed to speak, either, because as the text says, they knew Jesus.
Now this week, in our final healing story of the chapter and of this season, Jesus heals a leper from his dread skin disease … and once again, tells him to say nothing to anyone.
Why all the secrecy, Jesus?
Perhaps it’s all a matter of supply-and-demand. If the word got out about Jesus, he’d be overrun by people wanting to be healed, cured, dis-possessed. By keeping things quiet, he wouldn’t get slammed by the sick, dinged by the demon-carriers.
The Gospel last week, at first glance, seems to bear this out … it says he cured, not all, not everyone, but that vague word many.
So does Jesus want to put limits on himself … put a qualifier on his opening words in Mark’s gospel that “the kingdom of God has come near” … I- Jesus- I’m just near to some, FOR some, but not for all? Does it mean that he wants to be deliberately vague, slipping in and out of town like a spectre, healing, de-demonizing one minute, gone the next, leaving people asking and wondering, “hey, who was that guy?”
Well, if that’s the case, then why does last week’s Gospel text end with these words: And Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons?
Something else must be going on here.
And so we must return to this week’s story of Jesus and the leper.
Now, as it begins, we probably don’t hear this story as anything particularly strange, out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t a leper beg Jesus to heal him?
Ah, but that’s precisely the point. The leper, by simply coming to Jesus, asking, imploring, daring Jesus to heal him … If you choose … if you are wishing / willing / wanting / desiring … you can make me clean …in saying, in doing this … the leper is going outside the legal code of Israel, outlined in Leviticus 13 and 14, which is very clear about how the leper is to conduct him or herself:
• A leper is to wear torn clothes and let the hair of their head be disheveled.
• A leper is to cover their upper lip and cry out, “unclean, unclean.”
• A leper is to live by themselves outside of town, and remain alone and apart from other people.
So right here, in the very first chapter of Mark’s gospel, this leper crosses the boundaries, steps outside the Law … he calls Jesus to his side and dares Jesus to heal him … though, still giving Jesus the “out” of his religion … leaving Jesus room to escape, through observance of his Jewish ritual rule system, to just walk away from this leper.
But he still dares Jesus.
And Jesus – he doesn’t take the easy out. Jesus takes up the leper’s dare. “I do choose! Be made clean!”
And the leper is healed, and made whole.
Though … note that, as in the earlier healing stories in this first chapter of Mark’s gospel … Jesus remains consistent. He tells the leper not to say anything to anyone, but to remain within the rules and laws of the religious system.
Go, show yourself to the priest.
But this doesn’t happen. The leper goes out and tells everyone about what happened to him. It’s a natural reaction to this leper’s supernatural encounter.
And so this is the outcome … Jesus could no longer go into a town openly.
So why does Jesus want this leper to remain silent?
Because this leper has only a one dimensional picture of Jesus … to him, he’s simply the rabbi who healed him. And that’s what he goes and tells everyone, so that people came to him from every quarter, wanting to be healed or to see him heal others.
It’s a one sided letter of recommendation for Jesus, that the former leper gives in his healed body.
Now we know something about letters of recommendation. Especially these days … especially at this time of the year … with college and grad school applications due … with more people trying to come back into the job market, to find a new job or just get employed.
I’m glad to write letters of recommendation for people. And I often get asked to do just that.
Most of the time, the one asking me to write a letter of recommendation, I know them well, so it’s not difficult to write a well-rounded letter. Occasionally, though, I’m asked to write a recommendation for someone I don’t know well at all, a community member, an acquaintance, and that’s tougher … you can only write truthfully about what you know, and if that knowledge is limited or one sided … well, the letter shows it.
The Apostle Paul in our reading from 2nd Corinthians today is writing to his friends in the congregation in Corinth about their recommendations of him and for him. Itinerant missionaries at that time needed to carry letters of recommendation from one place to the next … in much the same way pastors and congregations today provide references to and for each other, as they engage in that delicate dance known as the call process. When you interviewed me eight years ago, you provided me with some character references for this congregation, and I did the same for you.
What Paul is saying here in these verses from 2nd Corinthians, though, is something like “letters … schmetters!” You, people of Corinth, you are my letters of recommendation, letters written on your hearts … and more, you, people of Corinth, you are living and true letters of recommendation to the world of the love and grace and forgiveness and peace given by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Paul could say this because he knew that they … through Paul … had more than a one-dimensional image of Jesus. He knew that, through his … Paul’s … preaching and teaching, the Corinthians had seen the Christ of the Cross … the cross, The Defining Moment for Jesus, his life, his ministry, everything he said and did. And so Paul could confidently say, if you’ve seen and heard me, seen and heard me bear witness to this Jesus, you know him in the One Way you need to know him … as Paul wrote to that same Corinthian congregation in an earlier letter, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
Truth-telling. Honest. Brutally convicting. And awesomely freeing.
And so back in Mark’s gospel … the most clearly cross-shaped of the Gospels … everything in this Gospel is meant to be seen, and be heard, through the Cross.
In the next few weeks, as we end this season of Epiphany and begin the season of Lent … we’ll see this play out … in next Sunday’s Transfiguration story, as the disciples see and experience Jesus in yet another, new way, high on the mountaintop, standing and talking with Moses and Elijah, and the voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus my beloved Son …
… and, in the following week’s start of our Lenten journey, the story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness and his Temptation … all of these are little glimpses, vignettes, previews, steps in the journey to the Cross.
We who live on the other side of Jesus’ cross, we have the advantage of knowing already how the story turns out. But the people in these stories, early witnesses to these pieces of Jesus’ story … they only saw one side of him, so Jesus asked them to stay silent … they didn’t have the whole picture of Jesus, so they couldn’t be those “living letters of recommendation” for him … and as they spoke, the world got the wrong impression about Jesus.
Today … that struggle continues. Some would try to limit Jesus to one or another aspect of his life … their “letters of recommendation” for Jesus come off one sided … “Oh, he’s a great moral authority” … “he’s my best friend” … “he’s a healer” … “he’s a judge.”
But it’s only through the Cross that we see, that we experience, that we receive the whole Jesus … the depth of life’s emptiness, and the fullness of God’s salvation … and it’s only through these cross-shaped gifts for us … Baptism … Holy Communion … that we receive all of Jesus into our own lives.
Through the cross-shaped gift of baptism … we receive Jesus, as he calls us to die to what we’ve been and then, he raises us up to what we shall be, in him, once, and every day of our lives …
Through the cross-shaped gift of Holy Communion … we receive Jesus, forgiving, freeing us from our diseased, distressed, even demon-riddled pasts … here, this and every week, Jesus comes into our lives, into our very bodies, and he makes us new …
And then, made new, dead and alive, buried and risen, we are sent out, watered in the Word, walking wet in the baptismal hope and promise Jesus gives us, fed and strengthened in his meal, we are given grace and peace for life … his cross, planted firmly in the crossroads of our lives, as the questions of life come upon us … Jesus, his cross, stands squarely in the gap for and with us.
Why illness? Why are the bad things of life happening, to me, to us?
Only in the Cross do the disturbance, and peace, of life meet for us … total abandonment, and full reclamation … utter despair, and highest hope … and only in the Cross, Jesus standing in the gap there, with and for us, are we given the strength, wisdom, power and authority … to be his “living letters of recommendation” … to and for others, our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers and families … to and for the sake of the world.
Jesus asked the leper to remain silent, because he didn’t have the whole picture.
But you do. And to you he’s given a name, a charge, a calling … beloved child of God, my living letter of recommendation … go and show, go and tell, go and proclaim, go and be … for me … for life … for you … and for them.
Amen.
Sunday, February 05, 2012
5 February 2012
“Bedeviled by demons”
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
Mark 1:29-39 / 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Confirmation of Devon Williams
10.30 am sermon
5 February 2012
As we continue through this first chapter of Mark’s gospel here in these first Sundays of the new year … the Epiphany season … and what the church calls “Ordinary Time” … we are hearing some stories which are far from ordinary.
There is a thread of illness and healing here. Last week, Jesus healed a man who, as Jesus entered the synagogue in Capernaum, met him with these words:
Just then, there was a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
That man’s loud words, they probably caused embarrassment to those people there, honored as they were to have Jesus be there among them.
Ah, but this week’s text, picking right up where we left off last Sunday, this text is an embarrassment to many of us, we who gather in worship every week hoping, praying to hear a word that speaks to us in our own situations, a word we can freely share with others without fear of embarrassment or ridicule, or sounding like we’ve checked our brains at the church door.
That evening, at sundown, they brought to [Jesus] all who were sick OR POSSESSED WITH DEMONS … and he cured many who were sick with various diseases, AND CAST OUT MANY DEMONS; and he would not permit the DEMONS to speak, because they knew him.
Demons. That’s an offputting word for us, post modern mainline Christians … moderate to liberal Protestants.
It’s offputting and offensive to some of us, because it reeks of … primitive culture. A time and place, back then, long ago, people who didn’t understand illness and health the way we do today, and so they blamed mental, physical, emotional illness on the work or possession of demons. You can see something of this line of thinking portrayed in this artwork inside our bulletin today … the scene depicting, in medieval painting, Jesus casting a demon out of a woman … you can see the little black winged figure flying out of her as she collapses in a heap, and someone has to come to her aid.
Talk of demons causing people to feel or behave badly today probably sounds plain stupid and foolish to us … nowadays we have names for these illnesses, like schizophrenia and depression, cancer and colitis; and medications which can control, treat, or even cure people of these chemical imbalances or bacterial or viral infections.
Labeling truly ill people as “demonically possessed” brings up all sorts of painful memories. Here in the Northwest in particular, we’re reminded of our reprehensible history in dealing with and treating the mentally ill. Oregon and Washington have an absolutely atrocious record when it comes to how we’ve chosen to work with the public health issue of mental illness. My father used to tell me stories of driving through Salem, Oregon’s capital, in the 1940’s, and being scared to death when they went past what was known just 60 years ago as the State Insane Asylum, the inmates leaning out the barred windows, yelling and screaming at anyone and everyone who would hear them. Others of us remember the stories of Frances Farmer or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” … coincidentally enough, that movie just aired on channel 9 Friday night.
These are parts of our Northwest history we’d certainly rather forget … today, we aren’t this horrid in how we treat the mentally ill, but we still have a long, long way to go in serving these brothers and sisters with the dignity and compassion which they most certainly deserve.
To others of us, though, talk in an ELCA Lutheran church of demonic possession aligns us far too closely with our evangelical brothers and sisters (and here, I use that word not in the classic but the received sense, in which it is used today … referring to conservative, literalist, even fundamentalist churches) and the way they use that word, demonic … (even though in our own theological history, Martin Luther used the word in the same way)… pointing to Satan as Devil, evil incarnate, in the body, in the flesh, an opposite to God, a dualist demiurge, if God is the source of all that is good and right and true, then the Devil is the source of the exact opposite. And so the Devil or his army of demons gets blamed for everything bad we think or say or do … “the Devil made me do it” … and worse, far far worse …our enemies, “them,” those who see things differently from “us”, politically, economically, morally, they get the label of “Devil” or “evil” slapped on them, too … this or that is labeled “the work of demons” or “demonic.”
A story from my own recent past comes to mind.
Several years ago, you may remember that a tattoo business opened a little way north of here, on 140th. Though I thought this location rather odd, I didn’t give it much more thought.
However, some did. Shortly after the tattoo business opened, I was visited by a member of our community who was trying to rally all the pastors in the area to stage a boycott and protest against the tattoo parlor because of what “they” were doing, “foisting off on our community,” “tempting our young people” with what was positively “demonic” and it had to be stopped.
I listened politely (all the while thinking of the many Lutherans … parishioners and pastors … I know who themselves are tattooed … one of whom I know quite well … none of them have sprouted horns or are spinning their heads around as they spit pea soup)… I thanked this neighbor for her visit … and that was it.
There was no protest. No boycott. No campaign of terror against another neighbor-business.
And that was because … there was nothing inherently demonic about that business up the road. The woman who came to visit me, she just didn’t like the idea of a tattoo shop opening up in our neighborhood, so she demonized them, to try to run them out of the neighborhood and out of business.
But that is so NOT how we as Christians are called to be politically active. You may have heard that yet another Christian pastor is in the news this week, demonizing a Certain Large Local Coffee Company, encouraging a Christian boycott because of a political view that Large Coffee Company holds.
Again, that’s just plain wrong. In our free-enterprise democracy, if it’s a political point of view with which you don’t agree … please, don’t bring demons into it.
We Christians, like everyone else who lives in this country, will rely on the market to make the decision, as to whether a business fails or succeeds.
If you’ve noticed, the tattoo parlour up the road went out of business. Not because of demonization and boycott by the local Christian clergy. But because their business just didn’t fit in here in Fairwood. The market took care of things. Or, as we Lutherans would say, the First Use of the Law … supply, demand, How Things Work in the World.
But what about Martin Luther? you might ask. After all, he called his opponents “Devil” and “demon,” especially the Roman Catholic church and the Pope.
Luther certainly wrote and said and did many good things in his work as one of the founders of the Christian Reformation. His pejorative use of the label “devil” and “demon” against his opponents is not part of that good work. These words of Luther have caused much harm. Modern Lutherans separate ourselves from, we condemn, Luther’s pejorative, damaging writings … his demonization of Roman Catholic clergy … and especially Luther’s writings against the Jews; which we could indeed label as demonic, for they laid the foundation for Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
So what do we do with a text such as this, which is before us today? Do we just throw it out, as a backward relic which embarrasses us because of its simplistic explanation of larger problems … or worse, words which cause us much grief over the harm they have caused, and continue to bring upon our world?
Well, I don’t think we need to be that drastic.
If we return to the core meaning of “demonic,” we find that it’s simply “that which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” “That which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” Or, in the words of another definition which I found this week: “Anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be, is demonic.”
Now a LOT of stuff can fit in this broad, deep basket … illness, disease, war and suffering, hatred, fear, crime, economic poverty, spiritual anguish and pain, death itself. Everything, anything that comes to us as “bad news,” bad news for us in this life here on earth.
Many of us get that … and thus we can more readily, compassionately understand how people and cultures without the medical and technological advances we have today used the word “demon” as a way to comprehend and communicate this bad-ness which was greater than what they could deal with, what they could fix.
We also “get” that bantering around “demonic” as some kind of a sledgehammer against our opponents on the one hand … or, on the other, saying that God sends what is truly “demonic” … illness, tragedy, global catastrophe … upon his beloved creation … both those extremes are not Christian behavior. They are anathema to Christians … the total opposite of what we’re about … and we shall not cease to speak out against such blatantly slanderous, sinful words and actions being done in the name of Jesus.
But there is an even greater Word for us here.
Note that what the text says Jesus does with the demons of his day is “cast them out.” Jesus “casts out” demons … he sends them away from the people to whom he ministers and for whom he cares and loves and shares his life.
As God’s chosen people through the waters of Baptism, Jesus has entered and daily enters our lives with a name for us and a claim on us … “beloved child of God” … that is our first name and our first vocation and our first calling in life. And so the “demonic” forces in life … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … those forces have been dealt a death-blow and put on the run from us, “cast out” by the Watering Word sprinkled, poured, enveloped around us through God’s gift of Holy Baptism.
Every day as we hear Jesus’ call to remember our Baptism … every time we dip our fingers in this font and trace the sign of the cross on our foreheads … every time we confess our sins and hear the words of forgiveness … every time we gather around this table and eat and drink that Word into us … Jesus casts out the demonic … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … Jesus casts that out from us.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from making life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God for us individually… career choices, relationship choices, economic choices.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God corporately … choices about giving and serving, witnessing and standing in justice and love with and for others, especially the others who are under the thumb and pressed down by the selfish powers of this world and this life.
Devon, this is what it means for you when in a few moments you stand up here and join with all of us, in the historic words of our Christian liturgy, as we renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God … the powers of this world that rebel against God … the ways of sin that draw you, draw us from God … and then, turning, affirming your Baptism, confessing your Word-Watered faith which Jesus has planted in you and which your parents have nurtured and for which this faith community has worked and prayed and which you have wrestled with and tossed around and thought about and will, we hope and pray, continue to wrestle with and toss around and think about and grow in all the days of your life. Confirmation … your public affirmation of your Baptism … means we draw around you and uphold you and support you and walk with you … us, together, against the demons … yours, mine, ours, and the world’s.
When they draw close to you, know that Jesus Christ is closer, and that he has the ultimate power over everything, everything that would hold you back from becoming the person our God would have you be. And know that, wherever you are, wherever you go, you carry this Word of promise and hope with you … for you, and for the sake of the world God loves … baptized, beloved, child of God, one with us in God’s promise, sealed by God’s Holy Spirit, and marked with the Cross of Christ forever.
Jesus still casts out the demons of this world. Whatever we choose to call them … poverty, injustice, mental, physical and emotional illness, political strife, economic slavery, untrue words about God and God’s people … Jesus calls and sends his Word-Watered people into those places and to those brothers and sisters who need to hear the Good News that in Jesus, God is calling us to bring the Word of love that life is more than our bad situations, more than being defined by our illness or disease, more than being trapped in a series of bad choices, more than being frozen or strangled by fear … Jesus calls and sends us there to point to, to enflesh, to be the hearts and hands and feet of the Kingdom of God come near
… until that day when Jesus Christ is all and all is Jesus Christ and everything is made right.
And until that day, we all have something to say … we all have something to do … in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
Mark 1:29-39 / 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Confirmation of Devon Williams
10.30 am sermon
5 February 2012
As we continue through this first chapter of Mark’s gospel here in these first Sundays of the new year … the Epiphany season … and what the church calls “Ordinary Time” … we are hearing some stories which are far from ordinary.
There is a thread of illness and healing here. Last week, Jesus healed a man who, as Jesus entered the synagogue in Capernaum, met him with these words:
Just then, there was a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
That man’s loud words, they probably caused embarrassment to those people there, honored as they were to have Jesus be there among them.
Ah, but this week’s text, picking right up where we left off last Sunday, this text is an embarrassment to many of us, we who gather in worship every week hoping, praying to hear a word that speaks to us in our own situations, a word we can freely share with others without fear of embarrassment or ridicule, or sounding like we’ve checked our brains at the church door.
That evening, at sundown, they brought to [Jesus] all who were sick OR POSSESSED WITH DEMONS … and he cured many who were sick with various diseases, AND CAST OUT MANY DEMONS; and he would not permit the DEMONS to speak, because they knew him.
Demons. That’s an offputting word for us, post modern mainline Christians … moderate to liberal Protestants.
It’s offputting and offensive to some of us, because it reeks of … primitive culture. A time and place, back then, long ago, people who didn’t understand illness and health the way we do today, and so they blamed mental, physical, emotional illness on the work or possession of demons. You can see something of this line of thinking portrayed in this artwork inside our bulletin today … the scene depicting, in medieval painting, Jesus casting a demon out of a woman … you can see the little black winged figure flying out of her as she collapses in a heap, and someone has to come to her aid.
Talk of demons causing people to feel or behave badly today probably sounds plain stupid and foolish to us … nowadays we have names for these illnesses, like schizophrenia and depression, cancer and colitis; and medications which can control, treat, or even cure people of these chemical imbalances or bacterial or viral infections.
Labeling truly ill people as “demonically possessed” brings up all sorts of painful memories. Here in the Northwest in particular, we’re reminded of our reprehensible history in dealing with and treating the mentally ill. Oregon and Washington have an absolutely atrocious record when it comes to how we’ve chosen to work with the public health issue of mental illness. My father used to tell me stories of driving through Salem, Oregon’s capital, in the 1940’s, and being scared to death when they went past what was known just 60 years ago as the State Insane Asylum, the inmates leaning out the barred windows, yelling and screaming at anyone and everyone who would hear them. Others of us remember the stories of Frances Farmer or “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” … coincidentally enough, that movie just aired on channel 9 Friday night.
These are parts of our Northwest history we’d certainly rather forget … today, we aren’t this horrid in how we treat the mentally ill, but we still have a long, long way to go in serving these brothers and sisters with the dignity and compassion which they most certainly deserve.
To others of us, though, talk in an ELCA Lutheran church of demonic possession aligns us far too closely with our evangelical brothers and sisters (and here, I use that word not in the classic but the received sense, in which it is used today … referring to conservative, literalist, even fundamentalist churches) and the way they use that word, demonic … (even though in our own theological history, Martin Luther used the word in the same way)… pointing to Satan as Devil, evil incarnate, in the body, in the flesh, an opposite to God, a dualist demiurge, if God is the source of all that is good and right and true, then the Devil is the source of the exact opposite. And so the Devil or his army of demons gets blamed for everything bad we think or say or do … “the Devil made me do it” … and worse, far far worse …our enemies, “them,” those who see things differently from “us”, politically, economically, morally, they get the label of “Devil” or “evil” slapped on them, too … this or that is labeled “the work of demons” or “demonic.”
A story from my own recent past comes to mind.
Several years ago, you may remember that a tattoo business opened a little way north of here, on 140th. Though I thought this location rather odd, I didn’t give it much more thought.
However, some did. Shortly after the tattoo business opened, I was visited by a member of our community who was trying to rally all the pastors in the area to stage a boycott and protest against the tattoo parlor because of what “they” were doing, “foisting off on our community,” “tempting our young people” with what was positively “demonic” and it had to be stopped.
I listened politely (all the while thinking of the many Lutherans … parishioners and pastors … I know who themselves are tattooed … one of whom I know quite well … none of them have sprouted horns or are spinning their heads around as they spit pea soup)… I thanked this neighbor for her visit … and that was it.
There was no protest. No boycott. No campaign of terror against another neighbor-business.
And that was because … there was nothing inherently demonic about that business up the road. The woman who came to visit me, she just didn’t like the idea of a tattoo shop opening up in our neighborhood, so she demonized them, to try to run them out of the neighborhood and out of business.
But that is so NOT how we as Christians are called to be politically active. You may have heard that yet another Christian pastor is in the news this week, demonizing a Certain Large Local Coffee Company, encouraging a Christian boycott because of a political view that Large Coffee Company holds.
Again, that’s just plain wrong. In our free-enterprise democracy, if it’s a political point of view with which you don’t agree … please, don’t bring demons into it.
We Christians, like everyone else who lives in this country, will rely on the market to make the decision, as to whether a business fails or succeeds.
If you’ve noticed, the tattoo parlour up the road went out of business. Not because of demonization and boycott by the local Christian clergy. But because their business just didn’t fit in here in Fairwood. The market took care of things. Or, as we Lutherans would say, the First Use of the Law … supply, demand, How Things Work in the World.
But what about Martin Luther? you might ask. After all, he called his opponents “Devil” and “demon,” especially the Roman Catholic church and the Pope.
Luther certainly wrote and said and did many good things in his work as one of the founders of the Christian Reformation. His pejorative use of the label “devil” and “demon” against his opponents is not part of that good work. These words of Luther have caused much harm. Modern Lutherans separate ourselves from, we condemn, Luther’s pejorative, damaging writings … his demonization of Roman Catholic clergy … and especially Luther’s writings against the Jews; which we could indeed label as demonic, for they laid the foundation for Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
So what do we do with a text such as this, which is before us today? Do we just throw it out, as a backward relic which embarrasses us because of its simplistic explanation of larger problems … or worse, words which cause us much grief over the harm they have caused, and continue to bring upon our world?
Well, I don’t think we need to be that drastic.
If we return to the core meaning of “demonic,” we find that it’s simply “that which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” “That which goes against or blocks God’s good and gracious will for the life of God’s creation.” Or, in the words of another definition which I found this week: “Anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be, is demonic.”
Now a LOT of stuff can fit in this broad, deep basket … illness, disease, war and suffering, hatred, fear, crime, economic poverty, spiritual anguish and pain, death itself. Everything, anything that comes to us as “bad news,” bad news for us in this life here on earth.
Many of us get that … and thus we can more readily, compassionately understand how people and cultures without the medical and technological advances we have today used the word “demon” as a way to comprehend and communicate this bad-ness which was greater than what they could deal with, what they could fix.
We also “get” that bantering around “demonic” as some kind of a sledgehammer against our opponents on the one hand … or, on the other, saying that God sends what is truly “demonic” … illness, tragedy, global catastrophe … upon his beloved creation … both those extremes are not Christian behavior. They are anathema to Christians … the total opposite of what we’re about … and we shall not cease to speak out against such blatantly slanderous, sinful words and actions being done in the name of Jesus.
But there is an even greater Word for us here.
Note that what the text says Jesus does with the demons of his day is “cast them out.” Jesus “casts out” demons … he sends them away from the people to whom he ministers and for whom he cares and loves and shares his life.
As God’s chosen people through the waters of Baptism, Jesus has entered and daily enters our lives with a name for us and a claim on us … “beloved child of God” … that is our first name and our first vocation and our first calling in life. And so the “demonic” forces in life … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … those forces have been dealt a death-blow and put on the run from us, “cast out” by the Watering Word sprinkled, poured, enveloped around us through God’s gift of Holy Baptism.
Every day as we hear Jesus’ call to remember our Baptism … every time we dip our fingers in this font and trace the sign of the cross on our foreheads … every time we confess our sins and hear the words of forgiveness … every time we gather around this table and eat and drink that Word into us … Jesus casts out the demonic … “anything that keeps us from being the individuals or the community that God wants us to be” … Jesus casts that out from us.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from making life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God for us individually… career choices, relationship choices, economic choices.
Jesus casts out … the fear which holds us back from life choices that draw us closer to the Kingdom of God corporately … choices about giving and serving, witnessing and standing in justice and love with and for others, especially the others who are under the thumb and pressed down by the selfish powers of this world and this life.
Devon, this is what it means for you when in a few moments you stand up here and join with all of us, in the historic words of our Christian liturgy, as we renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God … the powers of this world that rebel against God … the ways of sin that draw you, draw us from God … and then, turning, affirming your Baptism, confessing your Word-Watered faith which Jesus has planted in you and which your parents have nurtured and for which this faith community has worked and prayed and which you have wrestled with and tossed around and thought about and will, we hope and pray, continue to wrestle with and toss around and think about and grow in all the days of your life. Confirmation … your public affirmation of your Baptism … means we draw around you and uphold you and support you and walk with you … us, together, against the demons … yours, mine, ours, and the world’s.
When they draw close to you, know that Jesus Christ is closer, and that he has the ultimate power over everything, everything that would hold you back from becoming the person our God would have you be. And know that, wherever you are, wherever you go, you carry this Word of promise and hope with you … for you, and for the sake of the world God loves … baptized, beloved, child of God, one with us in God’s promise, sealed by God’s Holy Spirit, and marked with the Cross of Christ forever.
Jesus still casts out the demons of this world. Whatever we choose to call them … poverty, injustice, mental, physical and emotional illness, political strife, economic slavery, untrue words about God and God’s people … Jesus calls and sends his Word-Watered people into those places and to those brothers and sisters who need to hear the Good News that in Jesus, God is calling us to bring the Word of love that life is more than our bad situations, more than being defined by our illness or disease, more than being trapped in a series of bad choices, more than being frozen or strangled by fear … Jesus calls and sends us there to point to, to enflesh, to be the hearts and hands and feet of the Kingdom of God come near
… until that day when Jesus Christ is all and all is Jesus Christ and everything is made right.
And until that day, we all have something to say … we all have something to do … in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
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