My primary work is as a preacher. These are sermons preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Los Altos, California.

How Can it Be Christmas for You?

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 11:30:39 -0800

Two weeks ago at the Federal Building in San Francisco police arrested our bishop at a protest. Of course, some people in our congregation strongly supported and others strongly opposed what he did. I felt a degree of ambivalence myself, until I realized that a few years ago at Christmas I almost got arrested.

For years I felt too embarrassed to say anything, but we’ve become close enough friends for me to tell you now. Maybe it might make you feel better to know that Christmas can be a very stressful time for clergy. Really bad things happen to people at this time of year, the weight of unfulfilled expectations can really crush the most vulnerable people in a congregation. As a minister it is hard to not let this get to you.

Anyway it all started innocently enough on a year when Christmas seemed difficult to celebrate. In the late afternoon I took our two young children in the bicycle trailer up to the north water tank at Rancho San Antonio. On the way up you could see the breath of the deer grazing on the hillside. Our daughter Melia was just a toddler. The three of us chased each other and rolled around in the vivid green grass laughing. At sunset, the last red light crept east across the Valley and then up to the peaks of the Hayward Mountains.

As the distant ice crystals in the horsetail clouds turned pink, Christmas suddenly happened for me. It felt like I was standing next to the Christ at the beginning of creation. God said, “let there be light,” all created things seemed to sing Alleluia, and the light came into my heart.

This happened about forty minutes after the park gates closed. Racing down the hill on my bike Deer Hollow was pitch black. I saw the headlights at just about the same time that I heard the ranger’s truck. I immediately panicked. Two days earlier I had done the same thing and the ranger had severely warned me not to be in the park after the gates had closed.

This time I couldn’t feign ignorance. I desperately hoped that it wasn’t the same ranger, although it didn’t much matter since my decision to hide would be a sure indicator of guilt. I drove the bicycle and trailer bumpily off the road behind the brush. Oblivious to any possible poison oak I jumped off and tried to get the children to be absolutely quiet as the truck went past.

We three were in deep darkness. The light shined on us as the truck rolled by within five feet of our hiding place. I kept imagining what the Town Crier would say if I were caught. When the truck went by I jumped back on the bike and pedaled as fast as I could, looking over my shoulder for the ranger.

Although we may have a chance to see the light, darkness is always part of Christmas. We don’t need the cynical voice on the radio to remind us of the traffic, stress, loneliness, the manipulative commercialism and shallowness of much that we see around us. We know that we are lonely or financially over-extended and in many other ways insecure. If you haven’t seen signs of desperation around you and even within yourself, you probably haven’t been paying much attention.

On this holy night in an often not-so holy world you and I come here seeking the same thing. We want to be surprised by God’s grace. Not sure what to believe - hope and circumstance draw us to this place. In one way or another we ask, “how can it be Christmas for me?”

People have various answers to this question. Many think that nostalgia for their own childhood might bring back the holiness. Perhaps the beauty of music or the companionship we find at parties can do this. Others try to become children again by losing themselves in their own children and grandchildren. Some probably try to believe through sheer force of will against all evidence because they think that it is more pleasant to believe (or because of movies like Santa Claus Two or Miracle on 54th Street). Perhaps all of us will try to find this Christmas joy by being generous and trying to make other people happy.

But how can it be Christmas for you tonight? It’s late, I’m going on sabbatical in about an hour and I have only two suggestions.

First don’t disbelieve for the wrong reasons. The nineteenth century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) described modern people as Olympic-level athletes of disbelief. We go much further in doubting than we have to.

Last week our five-year-old daughter asked my wife if Santa Claus was real. Our seven-year-old son overheard and was horrified. “Of COURSE, he’s real,” Micah said emphatically, “otherwise where would all the presents come from?” Washing dishes my ears perked up. I don’t know how the division of labor worked out this way but at our house Heidi is in charge of Santa Claus and I am the one who tries to answer questions about God. Perhaps the best thing that Heidi could say was that Christmas means different things to children and adults.

Although some people don’t understand it, the question of God’s reality isn’t quite as simple as an up or down vote. Virtually everyone I know has a totally different image of God. This alone makes the idea of God a moving target. Furthermore, because so much emotion and politics and personal history is wrapped up in these questions, some of the smartest people have the shallowest pictures of God.

In a recent letter to the Harvard student newspaper psychology professor Steven Pinker writes about a controversial plan to require all Harvard students to take at least one course in religion. He opposes the “Faith and Reason” requirement because it makes religion seem like a “parallel and equivalent way of knowing.” He then goes on to treat religion exactly as that. He criticizes religion precisely because it is not science, or rather he describes it as a failed science, like astrology or parapsychology. Pinkner defines faith as believing without good reasons for doing so.

I’ve enjoyed Pinker’s books very much but we all live according to different myths. One of the myths that dominates his thought is one that he shares with most of us. Perhaps an example can help us here. A few years ago Apple Computers introduced a family of software programs that they call iLife. It includes the iPod music database and programs for email, editing and storing photos and film, for making your own audio recordings, email, website editing, etc.

It exemplifies a powerful belief for us as modern people. We tend to think that a sound recording, photo or film can hold a moment objectively forever, that we can capture what is real and preserve or communicate it. We share a sense that we can be exempt from time and have intimacy with what is absent. Seeing is believing for us. We have an unspoken faith that we can fully measure, comprehend and communicate the meaning of a moment in our life.

Pictures and film are not copies or substitutes for reality. A month ago during a heavy swell I took photographs at one of my favorite beaches. I came home with a picture of a lone surfer looking out toward large waves breaking on the rocks at the edge of the bay. It is a contemplative scene about our place among the larger forces in the universe. The only problem is that the picture is not at all what it was like. Really there were a hundred surfers in the water and a telephoto lens made the rocks seem like they were a closer part of the experience than they were. Photographic reality and scientific reality for that matter are not copies of what we experience but a different kind of real thing in themselves.

Eleanor and Buck Kendrick enthusiastically told a priest about a conference they attended. They were a little bit disappointed when they noticed that they were saying two different things. The priest said that’s how you know it is real.

It is not that religion is based on believing things that are contradicted by reason, as if its purpose was to be a replacement for history or physics. Reality is simply not reproducible. It can’t be saved, copied and pasted onto your computer. Falling in love, carrying your infant son in a backpack through a snowstorm at Walden Pond, your last conversation with your grandmother, how it feels to visit the home in which you grew up or rolling around in the grass with your toddler children or even almost being discovered by an angry park ranger – to really experience these things you have to be there yourself, and sometimes even that is not enough

In the context of a lecture about how believing in God would adversely affect his research, the scientist Neil Hayden talked about a childhood visit to a planetarium. He said that in that moment he felt the call of the universe which ultimately led him to become an astronomer. For me religion is this kind of openness to reality and to mystery, it is the profound recognition of the holiness of other beings which changes how we live. The Feast of the Incarnation, which we celebrate tonight arises out of our conviction that God chooses to remain involved in his creation. The Christ is the living spirit of God that is present to us in our darkness and directs us to the light.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the last time you will hear my voice for several months while I am on sabbatical. Over the last five years you have become the people who I feel closest to and I will miss you a great deal while I am away. When we see each other, again we will all be changed.

My greatest prayer is that whether it is on a winter hill in Rancho or at a planetarium or even in a quiet moment at home, you will cultivate an appreciation of the holy. Our busy lives are not oriented toward holiness. I think that stereo headphones may be one of the most powerful symbols of who we are in this time. But my wish for you is that you will seek out God’s goodness with all of your heart.

I will leave you with words from the English mystic Julian of Norwich (1342-1416).

Let us pray: “Lord, let not our souls be busy inns that have no room for thee or thine,
But quiet homes of prayer and praise, where thou mayest find fit company,
Where the needful cares of life are wisely ordered and put away,
And wide, sweet spaces kept for thee; where holy thoughts pass up and down
And fervent longings watch and wait thy coming.” Amen.
_____
Steven Pinkner, “More Reason, Less Faith,” Harvard Crimson, 27 October 2006.
Philip Hefner, “Going Beyond Belief,” Sightings, 14 December 2006.
F. Dean Lueking, “Silence” Alban Weekly, 18 December 2006.
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2006 Isa. 9:2-7
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M28 Ps. 96
Christmas Eve Eucharist (RCL) Titus 2:11-14
Sunday 24 December 2006 Lk. 2:1-14 (15-20)

Indicators

Sun, 3 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0800

I owe so much to Mike Heidegger. He dropped out before dropping out was fashionable in the sixties and became one of the pioneers of big-wave surfing on Oahu’s north shore. Before beginning, I thought that he would be teaching me mostly technique - the balance, flexibility and strength that surfing would require. Instead the most important thing I learned was a whole new way of seeing.

We’d cross the Bay from Berkeley in his roofing-contractor pick-up truck. It smelled like a combination of neoprene wetsuit rubber and cigars. As we hit the bridge incline he’d point out the first of what he called “indicators,” the tankers off Hunter’s Point. The ships have anchors in the front to avoid the propeller machinery. If the bow of the boat is pointing toward the Bay, it means the tide is coming in. If they are pointing the other way the tide is going out. You can literally watch the tide change as they rotate like giant clock hands.

At the curve just before the tunnel through Yerba Buena, he’d ask me to check out Fort Point in the distance just below the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. I can still feel the pit in my stomach when I would see towering walls of white water there. This showed us that we could expect heavy surf.

Along the way, every flag and stretch of water showed us the wind direction and strength. On beautiful fall days we’d catch our first glimpse of the ocean on the high cliffs above Pacifica. The lines of waves stretched to the horizon. We used all these indicators to determine whether we were seeking pounding surf at Taraval, Sharp Park, Rockaway and Montara, or the gentler waves of Lindamar and Princeton Jetty. Now, years after Mike moved back to Hawaii, I do the same thing integrating information from buoy readings, computer wind forecasts, tide tables and global weather maps. These indicators, these signs help me to decide where to go.

For the same reason, Jesus talks to his disciples about “distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves” and shaking the powers of heaven. He does this not to give you a full report of exactly what the end will be like, but so that you will know where to go and how to live. He plainly says, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation… and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth” (Lk. 21).

Jesus could hardly say anything more radical to us during the Christmas season, a time when we turn up the volume both on our dissipations and our worries. One more contemporary translation of that sentence is, “Don’t let the sharp edge of your expectation get dulled by parties and drinking and shopping.” We have so many distractions in this season. Ironically this means that while the culture as a whole turns its attention to a Christian feast, we Christians are in danger of losing our way.

This morning I want to talk about the end time, about signs and what they mean to a Christian especially during the season of Advent. I will begin with a brief summary of what Christians have believed about the end of the world and then go on to what I think these signs mean to us right now.

1. The range of opinions among Christians about the end of the world always surprises me. We think that the very earliest Christians were millenialists, that is they believed that Christ would come back for a thousand year earthly reign. By the third century, Christians were more apt to see this as a metaphor for their current reality. Eusebius (275-339) and Augustine (354-430) thought that the Church was this millennial reign. On the other hand during the Reformation Christians like Martin Luther and John Calvin called the pope anti-Christ and argued that the church based in Rome was the evil described in the Book of Revelation. There have been moments in the history of Christianity when the end time was the central question and generations in which it was hardly addressed at all.

During the last two hundred years (in response to modernization) we have even wackier premillenialists and postmillennialists each looking for signs in the Middle East and on grocery bar codes that Christ is coming. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels (Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins) exemplify this way of understanding the world. In our age people even have bumper stickers that say, “In the Event of the Rapture This Car Will Be Driverless.” It is my policy never to trust anyone who is that sure of himself, but I leave you to make your own judgment. This whole movement seems to project the kind of exclusive distinctions that structure human society onto the divine.

The point of thinking about the end time should not be to formulate a perfect description of what will happen, but rather to change how things are now. Like Mike Heidegger’s indicators, these signs will never give us the perfect picture of the future. They only help us to make decisions about where we are going.

2. Now I want to talk about the role of signs in my walk with Jesus. The Greek word for apocalypse, which we use to describe the kind of scripture about the end time, means to uncover or disclose. What is revealed in a book like Revelation is an apocalyptic secret.

The philosopher Sisela Bok defines a secret as information that is “intentionally hidden” so that others are prevented from making use of it or revealing it.” The German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) goes even further and regarded secrecy as “the hiding of realities by negative and positive means” to create an alternative reality. For both of them secrecy is a deliberate effort to create a false reality.

Maybe they are right and this is the devil’s work in concealing God’s love for creation. Mostly though I believe that to see the truth of faith requires a certain way of living. The reality of God surrounds us but like the meaning of Mike’s indicators to non-surfers (the tankers, white water and flags), this truth may be invisible to us. The lifelong process of learning to be a Christian means becoming the sort of person who sees these signs.

I want to talk about three ideas that Christians know and live which help us to see God’s signs, that is the “indicators” which in turn direct our lives toward holiness.

A. The first way of living that helps us to realize the truth is the conviction that life is good and the gift of a God who loves creation. In so many ways society teaches us that we get what we deserve, that we earn what we have. This includes love. In contrast, Christians believe that we get much more than we deserve or even can receive. An attitude of thankfulness makes it possible for us to see better just how much God loves us.

This includes Christ’s gift of the church. In the oldest book of the New Testament you can hear what this meant to Paul. He writes, “How can we thank God enough in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you” (1 Thess. 3)? This perfectly expresses how I feel about this church and the amazing things that I see you do for the sake of your great love and faith.

B. A second thing that Christians know that make it possible to recognize the signs, is that in God’s eyes absolutely every human life has infinite value. The white South African Nadine Gordimer (1923 -) won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. In her novel July’s People (1981), she imagines a liberal professional, white couple who feel concerned about the plight of black South Africans. During a revolution as white people all around them are slaughtered their servant July rescues them, taking them far away to a hut in his village. The couple wonders why they didn’t heed the signs and escape to Canada.

In some respects though they understood even deeper signs that made them recognize the humanity in every person. The novel feels both true and difficult because the social circumstances that set them up as masters and others as servants makes any true understanding nearly impossible (despite everyone’s best intentions). This “contempt and humiliation that came from his blood and theirs,” this sin which we cannot avoid makes it hard for us to see the truth.

C. The final thing I want to point out is something that you might already have noticed. Isn’t it extraordinary to you that for centuries Christians believed that human sin could result in the destruction of the world and now this is obvious to political and natural scientists too? Through war, biological or nuclear accident, or environmental catastrophe arising out of our disregard for the effects of modern life, we could destroy not just the human project but all life on the planet.

The last thing that Christians live which helps them to see the signs is a profound sense of the incompatibility between God’s nature in giving and creating with the suffering that we see. This last truth is the basis for the season of Advent and our conviction that ultimately God’s justice prevails.

In conclusion, learning to be a Christian is especially difficult at Christmas. For the rest of the society Christmas speeds up the process of buying and selling for an orgy of nostalgia-based gift exchange that helps to forget the pain of the world. For Christians Advent reminds us that God continues to choose to be part of the world’s brokenness and that we wait for the second coming of Christ to restore God’s original gift to us.

During this holy season of Advent I pray that your form of life and faith will make it possible for you to see the indicators, the signs of God’s love and the work of his son to save us. And when your end comes, which it inevitably will, I pray that you will greet your savior with joy.
__________________________

Who will have a share in eternal life represents another such question that people haven’t hesitate to speculate about. During the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513 the assembled bishops agreed that there was no such thing as conditional immortality. The resurrection does not depend on our good deeds or personal worthiness. Catholics and Protestants agree that eternal life is not a reward but a gift.
Liddell and Scott, 201.
Michael Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy After September 11,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2006, Vol. 74, No. 2, 277.
It is not that someone is hiding the truth from us so much as we don’t see realty because we simply do not want to. The twentieth century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) claimed that it wasn’t lack of intelligence that made most people unable to write good philosophy. Instead he believed that, “lying to oneself about oneself, deceiving yourself about the pretence of your own state of will,” was the principle barrier. This egotism is our problem too. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (NY: Free Press, 1990), 366.
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (NY: Penguin Books, 1981), 98.

© Malcolm C. Young Jer. 33:14-16
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M26 Ps. 25:1-9
1 Advent (Year C) RCL 1 Thess. 3:9-13
Sunday 3 December 2006 Lk. 21:25-36

Winner Takes All Success

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0700

Some of the best afternoons of my life as a priest have been spent with Dick Millard, our own ninety-two year old retired bishop. His piety and sense of humor teach me how to be a priest. More importantly, his stories about the history of our church explain so much about how what I take for granted came to be. On a spectacular California day this week among the groves of redwood trees in the foothills of Portola Valley, Dick talked about the difference between being a priest today and what it was like fifty years ago.

He pointed out that in many respects being a priest is much more difficult today. Back then, ministers were authorities in their communities. Their education and experience meant that they had a better sense of what was happening in the world than most of their parishioners. Today we all have access to the same information and each one of you comes here formed by your own judgments. Globalization is not just about labor unions, international wage competition, the erosion of third world cultures, and Walmart. It affects what kind of person you are, how the media and other forces shape our identity.

Today we are also much less satisfied by anything less than perfection. A few seconds of images on the television screen cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and have been produced by scores of the most capable communicators in our society. Most of the music we hear has been recorded and we are used to hearing nothing but the best. I am acutely conscious of the difference in quality between your ordinary experience and church, especially my preaching. In our age we know what it means to experience the best.

Rabo Karabekian in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard regards himself as only a modestly talented expressionist painter, “a footnote in Art History.” As someone who believes he was born to draw, he reflects that back when people lived in groups of fifty to a hundred, God or genetics arranged for someone to be a good story teller and another to be a good cave painter. Now in a mass communications society used to only the best, there was no place left for him. In his words “simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that.”

Thousands of people work to make a movie but less than half a dozen really matter in terms of influencing box office receipts. Among thousands of pro tennis players the vast majority of endorsements goes to the top ten. We recognize these people, like Mel Gibson, Condoleeza Rice, Alan Dershowitz, Madonna, John Madden, Barry Bonds, Bob Dylan, Yoyo Ma, Meryl Streep, Donald Trump, and Stephen Hawking. We take for granted that only barely perceptible differences in quality result in vastly unequal amounts of attention and wealth.

This is true even in fringe activities. Thirty years ago when it was only an amateur subculture, the filmmaker Paul Witzig could write, “when everyone surfs there will be no time for wars and killing.” Since then surfing went the other way. Now surfers actually fight each other for waves, and the sport has become a multi-million dollar industry. A handful of egotistical top performers make amazing amounts of money. This is true in snowboarding, mountain biking, skateboarding, etc. In entertainment, sports and arts we live in a winner take all society.

In their book of the same name Robert Frank and Philip Cook point out that this is becoming an ever-increasingly dominant characteristic in many other fields. They describe “unknown celebrities,” experts recognized only within their narrow areas. Modern information technology makes this true in law, journalism, medicine, finance, publishing, engineering, fashion, the academy, even in manufacturing and marketing.

The character of Silicon Valley depends on this. Organizations from Stanford University, Lockheed, NASA, Xerox, HP, Intel, Cisco, Apple, Netscape, down to EA and Google, rely on these subfield superstars. We all know them. Some are here in this room. Today the rewards for being the best are greater than at any other time at history, just as the number of things to be best at has expanded beyond imagining.

Juliet Schor pointed out the effects of this in her book The Overworked American. She used astonishing statistics fifteen years ago to prove her point. Contrary to the expectations of the 1950’s, people today work far longer and harder than before (increasing at that time by about nine hours per year). Working Americans, either struggling just to get by or to be the best, have no free time. This has a huge effect on churches, participatory democratic government, the Elks Club, and children.

If it is difficult for the disciples to understand what Jesus means by success what hope do we have in our over-worked, winner-take-all world? Those people who walked most closely with Jesus, who heard all his sermons and were personally close enough to ask him questions about them, they simply did not get it.

The sons of Zebedee were right there. They stood nearby and watched at the transfiguration when Moses and Elijah appeared. They heard the voice from the clouds saying this is my beloved son (Mk. 9). While they were having this mountaintop experience of pure holiness, the other disciples were back in the flatlands unsuccessfully trying to heal an epileptic boy.

Perhaps this was what led to the discussion along the road, the one about which disciple was the greatest. In any event Jesus probably thought that he put the record straight when he hugged a young child to give them an example of how to welcome someone in his name. Didn’t he say pretty clearly then, “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all”?

When it comes to being taught about success they, like us, are stone deaf. The sons of Zebedee want special seats of honor beside Jesus. No one likes this kind of person and yet all of us at times are this kind of person. Jesus, so patient with the ones he loves, quietly replies, “you do not know what you are asking.” When the other disciples get angry with the Zebedee brothers, Jesus makes peace again. “Among the nations rulers lord it over their people and the greatest are tyrants.” ”But among you whoever wishes to become great must be your servant. The son of man came not to be served but to serve.”

Ambition can be destructive or good. Being the best video game designer, the best software engineer, the best merger and acquisition specialist may be a worthwhile goal. But make no mistake, what God means by the best is something different that what we usually mean by it. The best one is slave of all.

I want to give three examples of this. 1. Today we celebrate the creation and installation of these extraordinary stained glass windows. The world might see them and admire them as the work of Gabriel Loire, one of the world’s finest artists working in this medium. But I am closer to them. I pray in this room every day and I see them in a totally different light. For me they are the outward and visible sign of a whole community’s love for Christ and for each other. The real story of these windows is about the sacrifice of ordinary people who worked hard so that we could see God’s glory in this world. Many of them bless us by being here today.

2. Do you know what the fastest growing category of housing was during the 1990’s? Prison cells. Each month approximately 4,500 people are added to the prison population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2004 there are more than 2.2 million people in American jails. Soon there will be more inmates than Episcopalians in our country. At 724 per 100,000 residents the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This rate has quintupled since 1971.

So in our society who is the best judge? I heard about a federal judge this week who visits or writes to every single person whom he has ever sentenced. He says that he doesn’t want his only influence on a person to be taking away his or her freedom.

3. Jesus turns the world upside down and so do his followers. My last example is from one of the most extraordinary social examples of this in our time, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells a story about a woman whose eighteen-year-old son was taken at night from their house. The son was killed and while the police officers were drinking and talking they burned his body.

In exchange for amnesty officer van de Broek admitted to her face that he had done this and that subsequently, he came to their house again. This time he took the woman’s husband. While being burned alive the husband’s last words were, “I forgive you.”

At the end of the testimony this woman didn’t request millions of dollars in damages. Instead she asked for three things. First, she wanted to know where this was done so that she could gather up the ashes and give her loved ones a proper burial. Second, she said, “Officer van de Broek took from me the only family I had, and I still have a lot of love to give. So I wish that he would come to my house twice a month so that I could have someone to love.”

For her third request she said, “I wish that Officer van de Broek could know that God forgives him and so do I. And in order for him to know that such forgiveness is real, I want to go over and embrace him.”

What does it mean to be first or last in your life? How can you be first in love and forgiveness and reconciliation? How can you put God first?
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Cited in Chris Mauro, “Hardly Alone,” Surfer Magazine, 2006.
Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get so Much More than the Rest of Us (NY: Penguin, 1995).
Although we are more productive and could use that productivity to work less, we have chosen to work even more. See Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (NY: Basic Books, 1991).
Jason Byassee, “The Church Behind Bars,” The Christian Century, October 3, 2006, 20.
Kenneth L. Carder, “The Call to Prison Ministry,” The Christian Century, October 3, 2006, 25.
David Zersen, “Learning What to Wish For,” http://www.predigten.uni-goettingen.de/archiv-8/061022-6-e.html

© Malcolm C. Young Job 38:1-
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M23 Ps. 91:9-16
20 Pentecost (Proper 24B) RCL Heb. 5:1-10
Sunday 22 October 2006 Mk. 10:35-45

Wealth

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0700

Sometimes the Bible hurts. Just listen to this passage from the book of Hebrews, “Indeed the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit… it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart…” (Heb. 4). I continue to see the truth of this. Everything is at stake when we take God’s word seriously.

There exists a kind of death in today’s gospel that horrifies us. A young man runs up to Jesus throws himself on his knees and says, “what can I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus tells him to keep the commandments: do not murder, commit adultery, steal, lie or cheat. The man says, “I have done this since my youth.” Jesus looks at him, loves him, and says, “sell what you own, give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, follow me.”

The man goes away shocked and grieving because he has many possessions. Jesus even more deeply divides soul from spirit and says, “how hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…” Maybe you are shifting in your seat a little the way I do when I hear this.

Part of us walks away dejectedly from Jesus with that man each time we hear these words. Tuesday night, I read this to the vestry and one of the most generous women in this church, a person whose piety I admire, said that these words leave her feeling conflicted and guilty. She probably isn’t the only one.

We all have moments of clarity when we step out of the ordinary into the eternal. This happened in a conversation I had with my grandmother only five months before I left my parent’s household. As we walked together she asked me about my plans. I told her I wanted to be a minister like my father’s father and a businessman like her husband, my mother’s father.

She paused thoughtfully and said, “Your grandfather says that every man has to choose between being a clergyman or being a businessman. No one can be both.” As a child you take a lot of family matters at face value and don’t ask questions. In that instant I began to be an adult. I realized that although we had almost always lived in the same town, I had never seen my grandfather in a church. I had never heard him pray or even talk about God.

You may still think that I look young, but when my grandfather was my age, he had already made a large fortune and retired. Early on he worked tremendously hard as a chartered accountant and part owner of a brewery which also imported wine and spirits. He rose from very modest beginnings to great means. I remember hearing stories about balls that they had attended with royalty.

He grew up in the north of England in a Methodist household. At that time abstaining from alcohol was a defining feature of Methodism. Ultimately, he couldn’t reconcile the faith he inherited and the life he chose.

Each of us has to ask, was my grandfather right? Does the plain meaning of this text demand that we must either give it all up or walk away from Jesus? I want to make three short observations about this dilemma.

1. Although my grandfather said you cannot be a churchman and a businessman, I intuitively feel like both. It takes business and organizational skills to make a church work. We make tough and prudent financial decisions and have to work to recognize our resources and deploy them effectively. I personally have a narrow field of skills, but we succeed as a church because generous and gifted people volunteer to help in a hundred different ways. The money you give is important, but so is the effort you put in to helping the church solve its problems. We are called not just to tell about the kingdom of God but to be that kingdom.

At the same time, I know business leaders who clearly depend on their spiritual gifts to succeed. They recognize that ultimately each of us is equal in God’s eyes and that we are all accountable to each other. They have intuition, a sense of meaning which directs their lives and organizations. God does not seem entirely separate from their work.

2. A philosophy teacher at San Francisco State asks his students to imagine the most serious problem they face and then how much money it would take to resolve it. Try this yourself right now. What problems do you have - unhappiness at work, a difficult relationship, your health, the well being of someone you love? Maybe you are just not happy in an indefinable way? Exactly how much money could fix this?

What surprises the professor is how many problems can be solved by a specific amount of money. What seems remarkable to me is how few problems can be solved by money and how short-lived these solutions are. Fundamentally, we are spiritual creatures who use money in spiritual ways mostly to change or maintain relationships with others. We solve problems that matter not with things that come from the outside but by our own inner resources.

3. Wealth makes some things possible for us. At the same time, our possessions can own us. We can live for the sake of wealth rather than for the good things it can do for us. When Jesus says, “how hard it will be for those with wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” he uses a derivation of the Greek word xraomai. It means having many of the things that satisfy our needs. It may be so obvious as to escape notice, but this reminds us that wealth actually creates need – for finer things, more complicated software, pool cleaners, financial planners, to be more respected or recognized, etc. Having more possessions means needing more things that are not God. It keeps us from recognizing our dependence on God.

Let me summarize my three observations: practically business and spirituality do not seem totally distinct from each other, money has spiritual meaning for us and our needs expand with our wealth. Knowing this probably does not make you feel more at ease about the story of this wealthy man. But it does make us want to look more carefully at what it demands.

The dilemma seems so acutely painful when you regard it as a choice between giving up everything we own or abandoning Jesus who is like life itself to us. One of the vestry members pointedly reminded us that you can not have everything and still follow Jesus, that all of us have to give up the one thing that we think that we can not live without.

She is right of course. Real relationships demand real sacrifices. Parents, spouses and friends know this. We all give up something for the sake of every relationship we have. Faith means both giving God something and a sense that God is giving us something. But this isn’t really it. These gifts are not equal as if we had some kind of existence independent of God. In a sense everything we are and everything we have comes out of God. We cannot understand our relationship with God as a kind of transaction.

And this is what I think Jesus means. The question, “what can I do to inherit the kingdom,” is the wrong one. There is nothing that anyone can do to inherit the kingdom. But in Jesus’ words for God all things are possible. Even business-oriented, high need, easily-distracted rich people like us can be saved by God.

God’s kingdom is not a reward to be earned, but a gift that we learn to receive. We do this by imitating God in our own generosity. We give out of God, along with God as partners in God and remarkable things become possible.

Julia Novogratz is the CEO of a nonprofit venture-capital fund working in developing countries. At the age of twelve her uncle gave her a sweater that became her favorite. It had sentimental meaning and she probably didn’t want to give it away, but eventually she donated it to Goodwill. Last year while she was jogging in Rwanda, Novogratz saw a boy wearing a sweater exactly like it. She ran up to him looked at the collar and saw a tag with her name on it.

God sees all of these connections between you, your benefactors and your beneficiaries. This church is a tangible testimony to your generosity and to that of our spiritual forebears. We depend on far fewer subscribers than for instance public television does and because of this we require gifts of a different magnitude – thousands of dollars per household each year. People here give not out of desperation to earn their way into the kingdom, but out of gratitude in what God does for us and through us. Because of this, the kingdom comes into being here, in millions of different ways, most of them invisible to us.

This week I went for a walk under the arching oak trees of Rancho San Antonio. I saw deer, turkeys, a bobcat and a tarantula. In October you can smell the muskiness of deer and dusty sagebrush. I saw a covey of California quails pecking in the dirt along the path. As I walked closer they all scattered. But one bird took a few tentative steps toward me. I saw that it had a twig with sharp thorns lodged under its wing. Pain and hope drew it closer to me. But ultimately, fear kept it away from what could have healed it.

In conclusion, after so many years of reading about Jesus and the wealthy man, I now believe that this is a healing story. The Bible is full of them. Someone approaches Jesus because they need healing. He asks if they want to be healed, they say yes and they are. The tragedy of today’s story is not that we can never live up to the ideal of giving everything to the poor, but that our wealth may be the reason we say no to God.

I visited my grandfather as he was dying. His sadness and regret felt tangible. He asked about my life in seminary. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I tried to tell him this. The good news of Jesus Christ is good news for everyone. Who we are and what we have do not need to separate us from the love of God.
_________
“The point I wanted to make was that money can buy almost anything we want – the problem being that we tend to want only the things that money can buy. Money can solve almost any problem, but the solution never lasts.” Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life (NY: Doubleday, 1991), 112.
From Atlantic Monthly (October 2005) and reprinted in The Christian Century, 3 October 2006, 7.
_________
© Malcolm C. Young Job 23:1-9,16-7
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M22 Ps. 90:12-7
19 Pentecost (Proper 23B) RCL Heb. 4:12-16
Sunday 15 October 2006 -Stewardship Mk. 10:17-31

Castration Controversy

Sun, 1 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0700

“… have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” Mark 9

Origen, like you and me, lived as a Christian in a secular society that misunderstood him and his faith. Don’t be put off by his strange name or the fact that he lived in Egypt between the years 185 and 254. You get a sense for him from his nickname. “Adamantinos” in Greek means “man of steel.” That’s English for “adamant.” He was like that hard-headed kid you played football with and who used to argue about politics in the locker room.

Origen’s father, along with the greatest instructors of his time, taught him the faith. But at age seventeen, his dad was killed during a Roman crackdown against Christians. The only thing that saved the enthusiastic Origen from meeting the same fate was his mother. She hid all his clothes so that he could not go out of the house. After the Roman government confiscated the father’s wealth his family of nine was left impoverished.

Origen began teaching that year. At least seven of his students were martyred. Origen visited them in prison, attended their trials, embraced them when they went off to be executed, took their bodies to the cemetery and then continued right on teaching. Later in life he felt nostalgia for these persecutions because it was easier to tell who was a real Christian back then. I wonder if he maintained this opinion when he was tortured to death later. He probably did.

Origen didn’t believe that God punishes us. He thought hell is the experience of walling our self off from God. Hell is being trapped in our own sin. He also believed that in the end, God’s love is so compelling that it will draw all things to itself. He even got in trouble with later church authorities for believing that no separation from God can be eternal. In many ways he was the opposite of today’s biblical literalists. He argued for a spiritual, metaphorical reading of the Bible.

For this reason some scholars think that the historian Eusebius (279-335) is wrong. Eusebius claims that in order to control his sexual desire Origen castrated himself. Because Origen didn’t interpret the Bible literally I don’t think he did this. Each of you is entitled to your own opinion in this controversy, but if he did it, he wasn’t the only one. Church councils up through the fourth century continued to forbid self-castration.

I bring this up because this debate in several ways seems related to what Jesus says to us today. “[I]f your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye that to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell...” (Mk. 9). You have heard me say many times that I believe it is incorrect and often simply impossible to read the Bible literally. Here is another example of what I mean. You have probably never met anyone who followed this teaching of Jesus. In reference to this verse, I have a friend named Rick Fabian who is fond of saying, “never trust a fundamentalist with two eyes.”

I have three things to say about this story:
1. The first concerns the context of Jesus’ remarks. A bystander who had watched Jesus or heard of him, starts trying to cast out demons by his name. This upsets the disciples who don’t recognize him as part of their club. First they try to stop him, then they tell on him to Jesus. Jesus says that whoever is not against us is for us. He illustrates the importance of watching our own behavior through the most extreme examples. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of the little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” Chop off your limbs if they cause you to sin.

To use very modern language, I think Jesus is concerned about what we call boundaries. In other places he talks about taking a speck out of someone else’s eye when we have a log in our own. The bottom line is that although we are constantly tempted to control others, we are most responsible for our own behavior. In our house when the children try to discipline each other, we tell them that this is not their job. They only have to be concerned about their own behavior and with being a good brother or sister to the other. When they grow up and have children of their own, they will have a different responsibility (and incidentally, I expect they will find that it is much more fun not to be responsible for the behavior of children).

Silicon Valley drivers are constantly trying to discipline each other, even though they have no idea about the other person’s circumstances. I imagine that bosses and coworkers and spouses and in-laws all make the same mistake. Because I have a lot to say about my second point, I’ll let you think of other examples of this on your own.

2. I want to talk about renunciation. For me, this means giving up something of yourself that is not God, something in yourself that is always in danger of replacing God. Jesus does not want you cutting off your hands and feet or plucking out your eyes. This is hyperbole. But he does want us to recognize a grave danger - that some of what we call our selves can keep us from the only thing that really matters. We need to change in radical ways. To be children of God parts of us have to die. This is true of us collectively and as individuals.

Last week I made a remarkable archaeological discovery in one of my favorite places in San Francisco. How could it be possible to find a thousand foot long wall that I had never seen before, pristine without any graffiti on it, yet a hundred years old? I discovered a sea wall at ocean beach. This wall at Taraval was covered for decades as the sand dunes retreated. Now with changing sea levels they have retreated right past it.

In the last twenty years, I’ve watched the parking lots at Sloat and Princeton Jetty disappear into the sea. This summer, on the north shore of Maui forty trees at Baldwin Beach Park had to be removed because the ocean washed away the land supporting their roots, as the ocean covers the road to Lahaina more and more. By changing the composition of our atmosphere, human action is having a major effect on almost every form of life on the planet. We hardly know where to begin in renouncing these habits.

Perhaps we can begin with ourselves. One of the strangest little books I read as a teenager was C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. The title refers to the Romantic poet William Blakes’ (1757-1827) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Both books feature tours of hell much like Dante’s Inferno. The narrator in The Great Divorce finds himself in an endless Prufrock-esque city at dusk waiting in a line of quarreling passengers at a bus stop.

The bus carries them out of this ugliness to a beautiful, garden-like wilderness. In this place described as more real than earth, the passengers discover that they are insubstantial ghosts unable to break even the stem of a daisy or to lift a fallen sycamore leaf. In comparison, the people who they once knew on earth but who live in this paradise positively glow with an unusual power and beauty and light.

These angels try to convince the passengers to begin a journey with them to God, but almost all of them refuse. In this picture, it is not terrifying or horrible sins which destroy souls but petty little quirks that make embracing the divine impossible. The damned include: a woman so single-mindedly focused on her son that there is no room in her heart to love anyone else, a man who thinks he has everything all figured out, a wife who finds her only sense of meaning in controlling her husband and a man who derives his identity from looking down at everyone else (and insisting that he should just get what he deserves). My favorite of course, is the liberal bishop-theologian who would rather deliver a paper about God in hell than experience God for himself in heaven.

Lewis’ point is that each of us has something that we have to let go of in order to embrace God. You may not be able to imagine parting with something that seems easy for me to let go. The thing that you are called to surrender may even seem very good in itself. One of the hardest things I had to give up was, strangely enough, a church.

In 1997 the vestry of my dream church elected me rector while I was away on vacation. This place was my spiritual home. In college I imagined serving as a priest there. My bishop ordained me on the chancel steps. At that time we lived in the rectory next door and were deeply involved in community and university life. My secular friends have a hard time understanding my experience as a priest in which all my friends, my house, my job and my hometown are all wrapped up together. When you leave a church you come close to leaving everything.

When I heard about the vote from my senior warden I asked her if it was okay with the bishop. She assured me that it was. When I got back the bishop called me into his office and told me not to accept the position. According to canon law, the unanimous vestry vote meant that he did not have the power to stop me from becoming rector. According to my vows as a priest however, he was my spiritual authority and whether I liked his decision or not, following Jesus means being responsible to him. I had to give up not only my dream, but my sense that I was the one who should control my life.

3. “A God comprehended is no God.” The German hymn-writer Gerhard Tersteegen wrote this some time before his death in 1769. For this reason, preaching always means talking about something that you do not fully understand, to people that you cannot hope to perfectly understand either. Your ethical life remains a mystery to me.

I don’t know what stands between you and God. Perhaps it is your temper, a sense of intellectual superiority or worry. Maybe it is pornography, drugs, intolerance, fear or a simple lack of generosity toward your spouse. It could be your impatience, dependency on material things, a tendency to blame others or a need for attention. It could be passivity or aggressiveness. It could be a kind of moral weakness or false pride that I can not even name.

But I do know that when I have stepped over the walls around my own soul and called out to God, I have found help in some of the most unexpected ways. I have found comfort in a hard-headed theologian who was ready to pay the ultimate price and at the same time convinced that his tormentors too will one day find a place in God. I find hope in you. After leaving a church I loved I never expected that so many of you would be like angels of power and beauty and light when I needed it most. Above all, I find peace in Jesus. For him, you and I are the little ones he wants to protect from stumbling. Because of all this I believe that nothing can separate us from Christ forever.
__________
Liddell Scott, “adamantinos,” 20.
The historian Eusebius provides us with much of what we know about Origen. Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 38-9.
Origen’s exegesis of Matthew 19:12 “some have even made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” is the strongest evidence that he did not castrate himself. In the centuries after his death, Origen’s theological positions made him a controversial figure.
CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (NY: Macmillan, 1946).
Gordon D. Kaufman, In the Beginning… Creativity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004), 57, quoting Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 25.

© Malcolm C. Young Num. 11:4-6,10-6,24-9
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M20 Ps. 19:7-14
17 Pentecost (Proper 21B) RCL James 5:13-20
Sunday 1 October 2006 Mk. 9:38-

Succeeding

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:00:00 -0700

Are you successful? What would make you more successful right now? How do you know when you are successful? This week I discovered how often this whole constellation of questions recurs in modern life. I didn’t know where to turn for answers so I consulted the bible, that is, the bible for MBA’s, Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive.

Two hundred years ago most of us would have worked on farms. Some of us would probably have been a little better at that than others, but in general there were far fewer possibilities and choices. In Drucker’s words, “for manual work, we need only… the ability to do things right.” Today, as what he calls “knowledge workers,” we need, “the ability to get the right things done.” A worker on the assembly line needs to figure out how to make more shoes, his boss needs to figure out what kind of shoes to make or whether to make shoes at all or kinky boots.

In our time, for both workers and managers what we are supposed to be doing is always up in the air. Because of this and because so many different kinds of success are possible for us, we constantly agonize over what success means.

But before we leave Drucker behind I want to mention a side point that is not unrelated to our life together. One of the primary reasons he thinks executives fail is that they spend too much time dealing with matters that are internal to the organization rather than its position in the world. Churches are even more prone to do this. It reminds me that what you do for Jesus out in the world is usually far more important than what I do merely in the context of our community. When I help someone, or invite them to church, I’m only doing my job. When you do this it has a far more profound impact.

I didn’t realize how often we think and talk about success until I started paying attention to it this week. The newspaper described how the artist Andy Warhol had to transform himself into something totally different than he was by inclination and personal history all for the sake of fame. Last weekend at the Richard Nixon library it struck me forcefully that his desire for lasting fame, and the tape recordings that he hoped would accomplish this, led to his downfall. This morning the New York Times has an article called, “Too Big for Your Boss,” about the tendency of mentors like Donald Trump to fire their protégés when these people get too successful. Not only do we talk about success constantly, we are conflicted in our feelings about it.

The German word schadenfreud describes the joy we take in the suffering of other people. This is a good word to describe the appeal of a recent Times article called “Fools of Fortune: When the Rich Go Broke.” One of my economics professors in college said that the great American question is, “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich.” This article thoroughly depends on this logic and marvels that rich people often are not so smart.

It reminds us that from the author Mark Twain and performer Buffalo Bill to the boxing champion George Foreman and Michael Jackson, famous and rich people have frequently either lost everything or come terribly close. The journalist smugly observes that, “America’s rich, it would seem, sometimes do believe that money grows on trees.” He even found a “financial psychologist,” and an investment manager who memorably says, “the rich are different from you and me: they are more egotistical [and] think they know everything.”

Perhaps the saddest part of the article was the end. The rags to riches to rags to riches again boxer George Foreman speaks about the confidence of his friends who work as longshoremen. These men have a little equity in their homes and a little savings in the banks, but remarkably enough to him, they seem happy. He says that after nearly going bankrupt he will “never feel secure again. I’ve got to earn, earn, earn, earn.”

If an internationally famous sports hero, whose hamburger griller made him $137.5 million in cash and stock, a man who collects fancy watches, cars and houses, cannot feel secure or successful, what hope is there for you and me?

For years I have read today’s gospel as the story of rather stupid and self-seeking disciples each trying to be first in line for the power and honor that come from following Jesus. I thought that the story exemplified a deep irony. Each disciple wants to be above the others and lifted up without realizing that honor in Jesus’ world means being raised up on the cross.

My superior attitude toward the disciples in effect keeps them at arm’s length from me. But this week, I see them struggling with the same basic questions of how to be successful. I see the magnitude of Jesus’ task in teaching them how to live joyfully in God.

When we meet them this morning, they are on the way. Mark writes that they are passing through. As they go Jesus says that the Son of Man will be betrayed into human hands, that they will kill him and that in three days he will rise again. The disciples sensibly enough do not understand him and like normal frightened people they don’t ask him for clarification.

Perhaps this very confusion leads them into the conversation they had amongst themselves as they travel. When they arrive Jesus says, what were you arguing about on the way? Maybe they were silent not so much because they were embarrassed but because they hadn’t reached any conclusions about what it would mean to be a successful follower of Jesus.

After this week of studying success, I have learned that words sometimes are not enough. Jesus gathers his friends together he gives them the words again saying that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. But his gesture means infinitely more. He takes a little child into this circle of great leaders. He hugs the child saying, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” For God, success is not wealth or power or fame or even finding happiness in ordinary things. It is taking care of the littlest, most vulnerable ones.

This may be hard for us to remember. On Monday night at Men’s Club our guest speaker lectured about legendary leaders of Silicon Valley and his secrets to success. This Christian man talked about the importance of having a plan and vision, of being passionate, of a balanced life, and philanthropy. But ultimately for him success seems to boil down to a kind of happiness that comes when others recognize our attainments.

For Jesus, success is not a need or a feeling or the admiration of others, it is the way of the cross. Jesus has a difficult time teaching this to his disciples and it is hard for us to learn too. In the simplest terms it means laying something of your life down, and picking up something greater, something eternal, something resurrected.

Last week in a speech about the relation between reason and religion Pope Benedict quoted a fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor who said that Islam was evil and inhuman. This week the pope kind of apologized and then really did apologize. The newspapers published interviews from right wing Roman Catholics who think that the pope should more vehemently denounce Islam as violent, to people making threats on the pope’s life, to the Libyan leader’s son Muhammad el-Qaddafi who believes that if the pope really wanted to talk about reason he should resign and convert to Islam.

One very angry Islamic extremist referred to Christians as “worshippers of the cross.” He may not have intended it, but for me, he was a channel for God’s grace this week. As a Christian, this reminds me how fundamental the experience of the cross is. Terrorists and national governments may strike out in anger against people who have humiliated them. The goal of the Christian life, our ideal of success, is not to avoid this kind of humiliation or to seek retribution for it, but with God’s help to bring new life out of death. The cross itself is an instrument of terrorism, but resurrected people do not act out of their sense of terror.

Of course, we don’t worship the cross. It just teaches us something profound about the relation between our God and loss, about what it means to be first and to be servant of all. Life for a Christian contains constant experiences of resurrection, examples of not having it all that probably seem to others like the opposite of success. My wife Heidi doesn’t pine away for her old single life, but she gave up a lot of interesting and handsome men in order to spend almost all of her time hearing about my prostate complaints. Other married people also know what if feels like to lay down the past and to pick up something eternal.

You already know that one of my many heroes in this church is Bob Stanfield. After the naval academy and brilliant service as a teacher and in Vietnam, he was on the way to becoming an admiral. At the same time he realized that his family needed more attention, so he left the navy life he loved and become the nearest thing I know of to an “admiral of the church.” Like in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, almost every parent I know has in some degree laid down one kind of life so that they could take up another.

The people I know who live most completely out of Christ’s resurrected life shine for me, they become shepherds of holiness. Every person has experiences of transcendence and miraculous peace. Perhaps this happens as you listen to music or relax with friends or create art or volunteer at church. All of us sense it in the face of birth and death, loss and gift. But the people of the resurrection draw us to this holiness, they, or perhaps I should say “you,” have eternal life in God already.

In conclusion, we inhabit a world of effective executives, fame-seeking politicians, jealous mentors, insecure millionaires and humiliation-influenced fanatics who all have something to say about success. But what does your life say? Are you successful?

If you travel the way of the cross – you are. If you are a resurrected person who has laid down one life to discover eternity in another – you are. If God’s holiness born in you finds life in the world – you are a success.

“Then Jesus took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’” Mark 7

“May only the truth be spoken, and only the truth be heard.” Amen.

Are you successful? What would make you more successful right now? How do you know when you are successful? This week I discovered how often this whole constellation of questions recurs in modern life. I didn’t know where to turn for answers so I consulted the bible, that is, the bible for MBA’s, Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive.

Two hundred years ago most of us would have worked on farms. Some of us would probably have been a little better at that than others, but in general there were far fewer possibilities and choices. In Drucker’s words, “for manual work, we need only… the ability to do things right.” Today, as what he calls “knowledge workers,” we need, “the ability to get the right things done.” A worker on the assembly line needs to figure out how to make more shoes, his boss needs to figure out what kind of shoes to make or whether to make shoes at all or kinky boots.

In our time, for both workers and managers what we are supposed to be doing is always up in the air. Because of this and because so many different kinds of success are possible for us, we constantly agonize over what success means.

But before we leave Drucker behind I want to mention a side point that is not unrelated to our life together. One of the primary reasons he thinks executives fail is that they spend too much time dealing with matters that are internal to the organization rather than its position in the world. Churches are even more prone to do this. It reminds me that what you do for Jesus out in the world is usually far more important than what I do merely in the context of our community. When I help someone, or invite them to church, I’m only doing my job. When you do this it has a far more profound impact.

I didn’t realize how often we think and talk about success until I started paying attention to it this week. The newspaper described how the artist Andy Warhol had to transform himself into something totally different than he was by inclination and personal history all for the sake of fame. Last weekend at the Richard Nixon library it struck me forcefully that his desire for lasting fame, and the tape recordings that he hoped would accomplish this, led to his downfall. This morning the New York Times has an article called, “Too Big for Your Boss,” about the tendency of mentors like Donald Trump to fire their protégés when these people get too successful. Not only do we talk about success constantly, we are conflicted in our feelings about it.

The German word schadenfreud describes the joy we take in the suffering of other people. This is a good word to describe the appeal of a recent Times article called “Fools of Fortune: When the Rich Go Broke.” One of my economics professors in college said that the great American question is, “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich.” This article thoroughly depends on this logic and marvels that rich people often are not so smart.

It reminds us that from the author Mark Twain and performer Buffalo Bill to the boxing champion George Foreman and Michael Jackson, famous and rich people have frequently either lost everything or come terribly close. The journalist smugly observes that, “America’s rich, it would seem, sometimes do believe that money grows on trees.” He even found a “financial psychologist,” and an investment manager who memorably says, “the rich are different from you and me: they are more egotistical [and] think they know everything.”

Perhaps the saddest part of the article was the end. The rags to riches to rags to riches again boxer George Foreman speaks about the confidence of his friends who work as longshoremen. These men have a little equity in their homes and a little savings in the banks, but remarkably enough to him, they seem happy. He says that after nearly going bankrupt he will “never feel secure again. I’ve got to earn, earn, earn, earn.”

If an internationally famous sports hero, whose hamburger griller made him $137.5 million in cash and stock, a man who collects fancy watches, cars and houses, cannot feel secure or successful, what hope is there for you and me?

For years I have read today’s gospel as the story of rather stupid and self-seeking disciples each trying to be first in line for the power and honor that come from following Jesus. I thought that the story exemplified a deep irony. Each disciple wants to be above the others and lifted up without realizing that honor in Jesus’ world means being raised up on the cross.

My superior attitude toward the disciples in effect keeps them at arm’s length from me. But this week, I see them struggling with the same basic questions of how to be successful. I see the magnitude of Jesus’ task in teaching them how to live joyfully in God.

When we meet them this morning, they are on the way. Mark writes that they are passing through. As they go Jesus says that the Son of Man will be betrayed into human hands, that they will kill him and that in three days he will rise again. The disciples sensibly enough do not understand him and like normal frightened people they don’t ask him for clarification.

Perhaps this very confusion leads them into the conversation they had amongst themselves as they travel. When they arrive Jesus says, what were you arguing about on the way? Maybe they were silent not so much because they were embarrassed but because they hadn’t reached any conclusions about what it would mean to be a successful follower of Jesus.

After this week of studying success, I have learned that words sometimes are not enough. Jesus gathers his friends together he gives them the words again saying that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. But his gesture means infinitely more. He takes a little child into this circle of great leaders. He hugs the child saying, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” For God, success is not wealth or power or fame or even finding happiness in ordinary things. It is taking care of the littlest, most vulnerable ones.

This may be hard for us to remember. On Monday night at Men’s Club our guest speaker lectured about legendary leaders of Silicon Valley and his secrets to success. This Christian man talked about the importance of having a plan and vision, of being passionate, of a balanced life, and philanthropy. But ultimately for him success seems to boil down to a kind of happiness that comes when others recognize our attainments.

For Jesus, success is not a need or a feeling or the admiration of others, it is the way of the cross. Jesus has a difficult time teaching this to his disciples and it is hard for us to learn too. In the simplest terms it means laying something of your life down, and picking up something greater, something eternal, something resurrected.

Last week in a speech about the relation between reason and religion Pope Benedict quoted a fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor who said that Islam was evil and inhuman. This week the pope kind of apologized and then really did apologize. The newspapers published interviews from right wing Roman Catholics who think that the pope should more vehemently denounce Islam as violent, to people making threats on the pope’s life, to the Libyan leader’s son Muhammad el-Qaddafi who believes that if the pope really wanted to talk about reason he should resign and convert to Islam.

One very angry Islamic extremist referred to Christians as “worshippers of the cross.” He may not have intended it, but for me, he was a channel for God’s grace this week. As a Christian, this reminds me how fundamental the experience of the cross is. Terrorists and national governments may strike out in anger against people who have humiliated them. The goal of the Christian life, our ideal of success, is not to avoid this kind of humiliation or to seek retribution for it, but with God’s help to bring new life out of death. The cross itself is an instrument of terrorism, but resurrected people do not act out of their sense of terror.

Of course, we don’t worship the cross. It just teaches us something profound about the relation between our God and loss, about what it means to be first and to be servant of all. Life for a Christian contains constant experiences of resurrection, examples of not having it all that probably seem to others like the opposite of success. My wife Heidi doesn’t pine away for her old single life, but she gave up a lot of interesting and handsome men in order to spend almost all of her time hearing about my prostate complaints. Other married people also know what if feels like to lay down the past and to pick up something eternal.

You already know that one of my many heroes in this church is Bob Stanfield. After the naval academy and brilliant service as a teacher and in Vietnam, he was on the way to becoming an admiral. At the same time he realized that his family needed more attention, so he left the navy life he loved and become the nearest thing I know of to an “admiral of the church.” Like in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, almost every parent I know has in some degree laid down one kind of life so that they could take up another.

The people I know who live most completely out of Christ’s resurrected life shine for me, they become shepherds of holiness. Every person has experiences of transcendence and miraculous peace. Perhaps this happens as you listen to music or relax with friends or create art or volunteer at church. All of us sense it in the face of birth and death, loss and gift. But the people of the resurrection draw us to this holiness, they, or perhaps I should say “you,” have eternal life in God already.

In conclusion, we inhabit a world of effective executives, fame-seeking politicians, jealous mentors, insecure millionaires and humiliation-influenced fanatics who all have something to say about success. But what does your life say? Are you successful?

If you travel the way of the cross – you are. If you are a resurrected person who has laid down one life to discover eternity in another – you are. If God’s holiness born in you finds life in the world – you are a success
_________
Malcolm C. Young Prov. 1:20-33
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M19 Ps. 1
16 Pentecost (Proper 20B) RCL James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Sunday 24 September 2006 Mk. 9:30-37

Succeeding
“Then Jesus took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’” Mark 7

“May only the truth be spoken, and only the truth be heard.” Amen.

Are you successful? What would make you more successful right now? How do you know when you are successful? This week I discovered how often this whole constellation of questions recurs in modern life. I didn’t know where to turn for answers so I consulted the bible, that is, the bible for MBA’s, Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive.

Two hundred years ago most of us would have worked on farms. Some of us would probably have been a little better at that than others, but in general there were far fewer possibilities and choices. In Drucker’s words, “for manual work, we need only… the ability to do things right.” Today, as what he calls “knowledge workers,” we need, “the ability to get the right things done.” A worker on the assembly line needs to figure out how to make more shoes, his boss needs to figure out what kind of shoes to make or whether to make shoes at all or kinky boots.

In our time, for both workers and managers what we are supposed to be doing is always up in the air. Because of this and because so many different kinds of success are possible for us, we constantly agonize over what success means.

But before we leave Drucker behind I want to mention a side point that is not unrelated to our life together. One of the primary reasons he thinks executives fail is that they spend too much time dealing with matters that are internal to the organization rather than its position in the world. Churches are even more prone to do this. It reminds me that what you do for Jesus out in the world is usually far more important than what I do merely in the context of our community. When I help someone, or invite them to church, I’m only doing my job. When you do this it has a far more profound impact.

I didn’t realize how often we think and talk about success until I started paying attention to it this week. The newspaper described how the artist Andy Warhol had to transform himself into something totally different than he was by inclination and personal history all for the sake of fame. Last weekend at the Richard Nixon library it struck me forcefully that his desire for lasting fame, and the tape recordings that he hoped would accomplish this, led to his downfall. This morning the New York Times has an article called, “Too Big for Your Boss,” about the tendency of mentors like Donald Trump to fire their protégés when these people get too successful. Not only do we talk about success constantly, we are conflicted in our feelings about it.

The German word schadenfreud describes the joy we take in the suffering of other people. This is a good word to describe the appeal of a recent Times article called “Fools of Fortune: When the Rich Go Broke.” One of my economics professors in college said that the great American question is, “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich.” This article thoroughly depends on this logic and marvels that rich people often are not so smart.

It reminds us that from the author Mark Twain and performer Buffalo Bill to the boxing champion George Foreman and Michael Jackson, famous and rich people have frequently either lost everything or come terribly close. The journalist smugly observes that, “America’s rich, it would seem, sometimes do believe that money grows on trees.” He even found a “financial psychologist,” and an investment manager who memorably says, “the rich are different from you and me: they are more egotistical [and] think they know everything.”

Perhaps the saddest part of the article was the end. The rags to riches to rags to riches again boxer George Foreman speaks about the confidence of his friends who work as longshoremen. These men have a little equity in their homes and a little savings in the banks, but remarkably enough to him, they seem happy. He says that after nearly going bankrupt he will “never feel secure again. I’ve got to earn, earn, earn, earn.”

If an internationally famous sports hero, whose hamburger griller made him $137.5 million in cash and stock, a man who collects fancy watches, cars and houses, cannot feel secure or successful, what hope is there for you and me?

For years I have read today’s gospel as the story of rather stupid and self-seeking disciples each trying to be first in line for the power and honor that come from following Jesus. I thought that the story exemplified a deep irony. Each disciple wants to be above the others and lifted up without realizing that honor in Jesus’ world means being raised up on the cross.

My superior attitude toward the disciples in effect keeps them at arm’s length from me. But this week, I see them struggling with the same basic questions of how to be successful. I see the magnitude of Jesus’ task in teaching them how to live joyfully in God.

When we meet them this morning, they are on the way. Mark writes that they are passing through. As they go Jesus says that the Son of Man will be betrayed into human hands, that they will kill him and that in three days he will rise again. The disciples sensibly enough do not understand him and like normal frightened people they don’t ask him for clarification.

Perhaps this very confusion leads them into the conversation they had amongst themselves as they travel. When they arrive Jesus says, what were you arguing about on the way? Maybe they were silent not so much because they were embarrassed but because they hadn’t reached any conclusions about what it would mean to be a successful follower of Jesus.

After this week of studying success, I have learned that words sometimes are not enough. Jesus gathers his friends together he gives them the words again saying that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. But his gesture means infinitely more. He takes a little child into this circle of great leaders. He hugs the child saying, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” For God, success is not wealth or power or fame or even finding happiness in ordinary things. It is taking care of the littlest, most vulnerable ones.

This may be hard for us to remember. On Monday night at Men’s Club our guest speaker lectured about legendary leaders of Silicon Valley and his secrets to success. This Christian man talked about the importance of having a plan and vision, of being passionate, of a balanced life, and philanthropy. But ultimately for him success seems to boil down to a kind of happiness that comes when others recognize our attainments.

For Jesus, success is not a need or a feeling or the admiration of others, it is the way of the cross. Jesus has a difficult time teaching this to his disciples and it is hard for us to learn too. In the simplest terms it means laying something of your life down, and picking up something greater, something eternal, something resurrected.

Last week in a speech about the relation between reason and religion Pope Benedict quoted a fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor who said that Islam was evil and inhuman. This week the pope kind of apologized and then really did apologize. The newspapers published interviews from right wing Roman Catholics who think that the pope should more vehemently denounce Islam as violent, to people making threats on the pope’s life, to the Libyan leader’s son Muhammad el-Qaddafi who believes that if the pope really wanted to talk about reason he should resign and convert to Islam.

One very angry Islamic extremist referred to Christians as “worshippers of the cross.” He may not have intended it, but for me, he was a channel for God’s grace this week. As a Christian, this reminds me how fundamental the experience of the cross is. Terrorists and national governments may strike out in anger against people who have humiliated them. The goal of the Christian life, our ideal of success, is not to avoid this kind of humiliation or to seek retribution for it, but with God’s help to bring new life out of death. The cross itself is an instrument of terrorism, but resurrected people do not act out of their sense of terror.

Of course, we don’t worship the cross. It just teaches us something profound about the relation between our God and loss, about what it means to be first and to be servant of all. Life for a Christian contains constant experiences of resurrection, examples of not having it all that probably seem to others like the opposite of success. My wife Heidi doesn’t pine away for her old single life, but she gave up a lot of interesting and handsome men in order to spend almost all of her time hearing about my prostate complaints. Other married people also know what if feels like to lay down the past and to pick up something eternal.

You already know that one of my many heroes in this church is Bob Stanfield. After the naval academy and brilliant service as a teacher and in Vietnam, he was on the way to becoming an admiral. At the same time he realized that his family needed more attention, so he left the navy life he loved and become the nearest thing I know of to an “admiral of the church.” Like in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, almost every parent I know has in some degree laid down one kind of life so that they could take up another.

The people I know who live most completely out of Christ’s resurrected life shine for me, they become shepherds of holiness. Every person has experiences of transcendence and miraculous peace. Perhaps this happens as you listen to music or relax with friends or create art or volunteer at church. All of us sense it in the face of birth and death, loss and gift. But the people of the resurrection draw us to this holiness, they, or perhaps I should say “you,” have eternal life in God already.

In conclusion, we inhabit a world of effective executives, fame-seeking politicians, jealous mentors, insecure millionaires and humiliation-influenced fanatics who all have something to say about success. But what does your life say? Are you successful?

If you travel the way of the cross – you are. If you are a resurrected person who has laid down one life to discover eternity in another – you are. If God’s holiness born in you finds life in the world – you are a success.
______________
Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (NY: Harper, 1985), 2.
Robin Pogrebin, “A Portrait of an Artist Both Loved and Hated” New York Times, 20 September 2006.
Stacey Stowe, “Too Big for Your Boss,” New York Times, 24 September 2006.
Timothy L. O’Brien, “Fortune’s Fools: When the Rich Go Broke,” New York Times, 17 September 2006.
He spoke about the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from basic physical needs to our higher order more psychological needs suggesting that success is a basic need for human beings.
Ian Fisher and Peter Kiefer, “Muslim Anger at Pope Shows Signs of Easing,” New York Times, 19 September 2006, and Ian Fisher, “Pope’s Regrets Over Statements Fail to Quiet a Storm of Protests,” New York Times, 19 September 2006.
On Monday I talked to another of the most successful people I know. Her mother died in the same year she was divorced and she has experienced a lot of tragedy lately, but crucifixions like this have not made her bitter. Walking in the park last week she saw a twenty-year old seated on a park bench and holding her head in despair. My friend asked her if she was okay. The woman said she was. Later my friend passed by and asked her again. The two of them sat together for an hour and I am sure that they experienced something of the holy.

© Malcolm C. Young Prov. 1:20-33
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M19 Ps. 1
16 Pentecost (Proper 20B) RCL James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Sunday 24 September 2006 Mk. 9:30-37

Be Opened!

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:44:51 -0700

In 1949 Lester Young (1909-1959), one of the greatest jazz musicians of the twentieth century, was inducted into the US Army. On a routine barracks inspection his commanding officer discovered a picture of a smiling woman taped inside his locker. The officer poked it with a fat finger and berated him for being an African American private with a white woman’s picture. The officer went on and asked Young if he was married. When he replied that he was, the officer screamed at him for having this picture up instead of Young’s own wife.

Quietly, trying not to give offense when it was unavoidable, Young said, “that is my wife, sir.” The officer told him to tear it down and stood immovable. Young had to walk around him to get to the locker. His wife’s picture tore as he took it off. The officer contemptuously told him to crumple it up and to throw it in the trash. He did.

My intention in repeating this story is to try to feel the weight of this humiliation as if it was our own. Maybe it already is or maybe this is just impossible. I also thought of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Manzanar, the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” (about lynching), stories of police harassment (like in the movie Crash) or how African American students felt when they first integrated southern schools. Will Price’s sister is married to a Palestinian. She can vividly report on endless humiliations at border checkpoints.

This is how to interpret the Bible. You take the real stories in it, stories which we forget are real, and you touch these stories to the real stories of our life until none of the reality is wasted or forgotten or ignored. The Bible is not just about Jesus. It is about you and me, but this week our social location makes it hard for us to understand.

Many of us experience society and our place in it as the result of our own hard work. We made good choices. We struggled to finish at the top of our class. We still put in extra hours and take pride in our accomplishments. At work we help those who help themselves. We operate under the assumption that people get what they deserve. The truth about race and our own privilege simply don’t fit into this story.

Far from home and the holy land, Jesus goes into a house to get away from the crowds. But as Mark writes, “he could not escape notice.” Although known for sparse and pared-down language, Mark uses three ways to describe this woman’s ethnic identity. She lives in the region of Tyre. She is Hellenis, a part of the Greek cultural and political empire. And she is of the Syrophoenician race.

Mark drives this point home hard. Who someone is, who their people are, where they are from, all matters. As soon as we know someone’s hometown or their race we are already predisposed to respond to them in a certain way. I don’t expect you to know much about Syrophoenicians but this is like someone from East Palo Alto in Atherton or a Southern Lebanese Arab in Tel Aviv. Like Lester Young, Jesus is from the wrong side of the tracks. He experiences humiliation because of his race.

It may not be anything that the Syrophoenician woman did, but who she is that separates her from Jesus. A few decades later the Jewish historian Josephus described her people as “our bitterest enemies” (Ant. 13). Jews working in the countryside would starve to death while the city storehouses that they filled overflowed. They called the Syrophoenician taskmasters dogs. When this woman asks Jesus’ blessing for her daughter, he seems to make reference to this in his reply. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The word in Greek is the diminutive like “doggies” or “puppies.” He seems to be reminding her about the relation between these two peoples, how his nation continues to suffer and badly needs his blessing.

I’ve been reading a book that has shaken my faith. A former seminary theology teacher and a close friend (Owen Thomas) long ago recommended Gibson Winter’s 1961 book, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches. It describes a cycle of immigration into the center of American cities and the upward mobility that brings these groups out into the suburbs. Last century when African Americans came into the cities, job and housing discrimination made it impossible for them to move out or move up. This led to what Winter describes as “urban blight,” a kind of hopelessness that destroys institutions, the physical environment and the human spirit.

During this time the mainline Protestant denominations failed the inner city and focused resources on the expanding suburbs. Because the middle class was growing in numbers and wealth, church leaders failed to notice that whole classes of people were being left behind. With changes in transportation technology housing location became part of our society’s reward system, vastly increasing the extent of segregation.

This led to a deep division between two spheres of experience: 1. our productive life, which forces us to recognize interdependence between all classes and races, and 2. our private life in which we form associations mostly with people like ourselves. Winter points out that one of the marks which so radically distinguished the early church from all other institutions in the ancient world was its radical inclusivity. Slaves and senators, immigrants and landed gentry, women and men all worshiped together.

In contrast, Winter claims that our churches reinforce social stratification. They have almost nothing to do with the interrelationships of the public world and serve only to put people at ease in the private sphere so that they can produce more. Maybe it was the prostate infection, but for a few days last week I had moments of despair as I thought of my whole life unconsciously dedicated to keeping society segregated.

God must have seen how upset I was. Suddenly, the reality of the Bible’s story intensified and clarified my own story. And for the first time in my life I came close to really understanding this gospel story which seems so puzzling. The circumstances of my life reminded me that I don’t do anything for the church perfectly. Something about who I am and who my people are, damages the church and sets me apart from God.

But I took comfort and felt a great deal like the Syrophoenician woman, who has no claim on Jesus but who persists anyway. She says, “Even the dogs… eat the children’s crumbs.” She implies that fragments from God’s table are more than enough to give us new life. And Jesus is moved by her. In another story like this Jesus heals a foreign army officer’s servant and exclaims, “in no one in Israel have I found such faith.” (Mt. 8:10).

What kind of faith is this? This woman and the centurion did not read the bible. This is not a faith in the Bible. It is not the faith of the Nicene Creed or an abstract idea about God or a religious authority. This faith is the boldness to cross the substantial boundaries of human identity in trust. This faith recognizes our need and reaches out to God for help. It is hard for us.

The problem is that we have a spiritual deafness. Like the deaf man that Jesus heals with the word Ephphatha, or “Be opened up,” we are unable to hear the truth about our situation and incapable of articulating our dependence on the holy one.

A good friend named Adam from another church is deaf. His mother wanted him to fit in to the hearing world so badly that she never taught him to sign. He received a hearing implant as a teenager, but by this point he was isolated from both worlds.

Adam taught me that deaf people have a much higher rate of depression, anxiety and nervousness than blind people do. Their disability cuts them off from others. Because of this he talked about being overly cautious and closed in on himself. He has to make a concentrated effort to be part of life around him. We are deaf like this. To the deaf, to closed up Silicon Valley, to this affluent suburb, Jesus says, “Ephphatha, be opened up.”

You may wonder what this openness looks like. Yesterday I was reminded as we celebrated Jim Johnston’s life. Everyone prayed and sang loudly for this man who humbly served as an acolyte right at this altar. Until the last days when Alzheimer’s disease finally overwhelmed him, even long after he lost the brightness of his intelligence, Jim was thoughtful and kind. Most of all he lived in Christ, as someone who was opened up to God. He was too smart to have a childish faith, but like so many of the people I have met at Christ Church he did have a childlike faith. I mean this in the sense that Jesus did when he talked about accepting the kingdom of God like a child.

I almost cried as I realized this while the choir sang Isaac Watts’ (1674-1748) hymn. Don’t miss these words, “The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days; oh, may thy house be mine abode and all my work be praise. There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come; no more a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home.”

Like a child at home. Every night I read a story to our children and pray with them on our big bed. They are so perfectly at home there, one on each side of me. Their prayers always surprise me in their openness to God. One night after they went to bed, my wife told me how our daughter goes around town telling everyone that she has two fathers. It embarrasses Heidi who wonders if people think that she has a boyfriend on the side. Melia says her two fathers are me and God.

In a life of humiliations and segregation, misunderstanding and cruelty, I pray that she continues to have this vulnerability that makes her so open to God. This is Welcome Sunday. It is not just for people returning after summer. We say welcome to people who are like us and people who are different. It reminds all of us that the church, these people, are our home. This is a place where together we are trying to open our hearts to God. Ephphatha. Be opened!
_________
Geoff Dyer in his book But Beautiful tells this story in the form of a powerful dialogue. Although you would really hear me if I could do it that way, the cruelty and ugliness of the scene was too much for me, and I think for you too. It is hard to know if the tenor sax player would have been less self-destructive if his life weren’t filled with incidents like this. Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 12-14.
Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (NY: Doubleday, 1961).
Mt. 18:4, Mk. 10:15, Lk. 18:17.
Hymn 664.

Malcolm C. Young Isa. 35:4-7a
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M18 Ps. 146
14 Pentecost (Proper 18B) RCL James 2:1-17
Sunday 10 September 2006 – Welcoming Sunday Mk. 7:24-37

The Whole Armor of God

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:00:00 -0700

“Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Eph. 6

You never know what you’ll remember forever. At three o’clock, on that 102 degree August afternoon, a five-year-old boy watched us as he held his mother’s hand. She clearly did not want to be there, probably no one did. With no shade trees anywhere, all you could do was feel the relentless heat and breathe in the dust from the hard-baked clay of the practice field.

We were doing the chutes. Two football players would run full speed directly at each other through something like a waist-high metal cage and collide with bone-shattering force. At each impact the boy would grimace. “Why are they doing that, Mom?” he cried. In that moment he seemed like the most reasonable person in the world.

The difference between football and rugby is that on the football field anyone can be a target at any time. In rugby you only become vulnerable when you are directly involved in the action. Perhaps this is a reason for the other thing that distinguishes these sports – all the pads that football players wear. When the coach issued those hard helmets, shoulder pads and knee braces at the beginning of the season, I had a visceral sense for what it meant to be protected by equipment.

That summer in church I heard the reading from Paul encouraging us to “take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able… to stand firm” (Eph. 6). I understood it in a way that I never have since then. A high school student needs the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God.

A beautiful dark-haired girl named Julie had invited me over to her apartment during the day when her mom was at work. She told me she wanted to smoke marijuana and make love. Despite the boldness of this invitation, she had a certain vulnerability, even a kind of sweetness and I liked her. It was hard to say no. It was hard to believe the Jesus who says, “It is the spirit which gives life; the flesh is useless” (Jn. 6).

Anyone who is conscious of the difference between flesh and spirit has felt this tension at some time. It isn’t just about sex, either. It concerns every conflict between our highest ideals of the way things ought to be and what we think we need to do to get by. It is about instinctively putting ourselves before others and that little voice that tells us what is wrong. As creatures of great beauty and depravity, of light and dust, we have everything in common with the first disciples of Jesus.

Our gospel records a terrible crisis in Jesus’ ministry. To us sclerosis means a hardening of the arteries. The Bible says that miracle-seeking crowds fell away because Jesus’ words seemed too skleros, too hard for them. Perhaps the raw physicality of his spiritual teachings offended those people. They couldn’t understand why they were required to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

It also could have been a theological offense. The idea of a distant creator god may have been easier for them to understand than the intimate Father God that Jesus talks about. Not many people appreciate how difficult it is to really imagine what the creator of all time and space could have to do with a single historical person anyway. Maybe they left because Jesus said that no one can come to him unless it is granted by the Father.

In any event, Jesus tells us that his words are “spirit and life,” that the one who eats this bread will live forever.” At a basic level, for Jesus these words have more meaning and importance than miracles.

The earliest fragment of the New Testament that exists is a parchment containing a small patch of John from the first half of the second century. Scholars believe that the gospel was written some time between the year 90 and 120 AD. Biblical experts think that a community wrote this out of their deep conviction about the presence of the living Christ among them and the conflict with neighbors who did not understand the meaning of the central ritual in which they experienced this, the Eucharist.

This morning I want to tell you what I believe about Jesus’ hard words, but I’m not sure that I can do it. This week I received an education in just how hard some of Jesus’ words can be.

I used to know more people who said that they read the Bible literally. Perhaps they think Jesus’ words are softer. I wish they were still around because I always come up with more questions for them. It isn’t just this business about eating flesh and drinking blood. In the Gospel of Mark Jesus says, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hid” (Mk. 5:14). In the Gospel of John Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever walks in me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12). So which is it?

In John, Jesus has many “I statements.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” (Jn. 6:35). “I am the way and the truth and the life” (Jn. 14:6). “I am the gate for the sheep” (Jn. 10:7). “I am the good shepherd” (Jn. 10:14). “I am the true vine” (Jn. 15:1). “I am God’s son” (Jn. 10:36). “I am the resurrection and the life” (Jn. 11:25). “I am not of the world” (Jn. 17).

My friend Donald Schell believes that because the apostle Paul writes that the church is the body of Christ, all of these “I statements” apply to the church, to you and to me. Jesus says that when we are at our best, we are the good shepherd, we are light and life, and most importantly that we are the bread of the world. At the feeding of the five thousand Jesus says, “you give them something to eat.” And this is what he expects us to be doing today – giving ourselves to nourish the world.

In Buddhism, the Boddhisatva vows not to enter Enlightenment until all sentient beings are also enlightened. The point is not who will save the world, Christians or Buddhists or anyone else, but what happens to us spiritually when we become willing to be the way the world is saved. You and I are what happens when God works through the Eucharist to make the world more divine.

I talked about this to a friend of mine at Christ Church this week. She would have understood if I hadn’t used a word that was hard for her. I said that “the Church” is the bread of the world. She told me that she didn’t feel like she was even part of the church. For her, “the Church” means the Inquisition, shouting fundamentalists, papal encyclicals, missionaries suppressing local cultures or the unapproachable holiness of exceptional saints. For her, the church at worst stands for cruelty, and at best it fails to share authority and is too abstract.

For me, the church is not abstract at all. It is not an institution or a building. It is not a set of explanations about the world or a system of rules and beliefs that must be adhered too. It is so concrete that you can see it. It is Randy Wild arriving early to put on his vestments so that he can help our acolytes and staying late to make sure that we can thank people for their gifts. For me the church is Buck Kendrick flying our priest Morgan Silbaugh to Reno so that he can visit the White’s son after a life-threatening car accident. It is the altar guild setting out flowers before a funeral or Gabriela Brown joining the instrumental ensemble because she wants to give too.

Another friend of mine is a real estate agent. He tells me that everyone in the world distrusts people in real estate and that a church has the same problem, sometimes even with its own members. He says that you have to come in under the radar. It is not easy to be the bread of the world. It is hard to even believe that we are holy. But this is where we must start if we are to be bread for the world.

This gathering of people called church reminds you of your holiness. The food we eat together teaches us, “that precious things have been put into [our] hands and that to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

John Chrysostom (347-407) a fourth century bishop speaks to us from the distant past about the ritual that we celebrate right now. He says, ”Venerate the nature of the offering itself. Christ is there, sacrificed. And for what purpose was he sacrificed? To bring peace to the things of heaven and earth, to reconcile you with the God of the universe and to make you his friend… What the Son of God has done in this way, you must do too as far as your human strength allows, by being a builder of peace both for yourself and for others…”

This world needs bread. This is not just a problem in distant Africa and Asia. A recent study from the University of Chicago stated that fewer than fifty percent of Americans have more than three people in their lives they can confide in. Twenty-five percent say that they have no one to confide in at all. In modern times our isolation kills us and destroys what God created us for.

Yesterday our five-year-old daughter Melia drew pictures in a card she wrote to my cousin Caitlin. Caitlin has a hamster named after the tule reeds that grow in our Northern California marshes. Melia’s picture had a hamster, a girl and some other unrecognizable things. When I asked her what they were, she said, “that’s the wrench, the hammer and the other tools.”

I began this sermon by telling you what Paul’s armor of God meant to me as a young football player. But the older I get the more I realize that God is not calling us chiefly to a private morality. Truth, faith, righteousness, salvation and the word of God are not like padding to protect our personal purity. They are the tools that make it possible for us to be the bread of the world. They give us the confidence to risk ourselves so that we can most truly be ourselves.
______________
http://bibletexts.com/terms/i-am.htm
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2004), 246.
The rest of the quote is as follows: “that is why at the moment of the sacrifice, the only commandment of which he reminds you is to be reconciled with your brothers. [Jesus saying, 'if you're making your offering and remember your brother has something against you, leave you offering on the altar, first go be reconciled with your brother, then make your offering.] Thus he shows you that this is more important than the others.” John Chrysostom, “On the Teacher of Judas,” Homily 1, 6 (PG49.381).
Jon Bruno and Bryan Jones, “Open Hearted, Open Minded Christianity,” The Episcopal News (Diocese of Los Angeles, http://www.episcopalnews.com/.

M17

1 Kings 8:22-30,41
Ps. 84
Eph. 6:10-20
Jn. 6:56-69

Calming the Storms

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 12:00:00 -0700

It was exactly like a bad dream of a dinner party in which you in which you couldn’t stop yourself from saying something thoughtless and insensitive. This morning I preached about suffering at the 8:00 a.m. service. I looked out at my friends there and almost everyone in the room had lost a spouse or child or parent in the last few years. My first story was about a man who committed suicide and none of us could recover from it.

In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about her experience after her husband’s death and her daughter’s fatal illness. Like C.S. Lewis she describes the way that grief isolates us and destroys language. Grief creates distance and this morning at 8:00 a.m. we were lost in it.

Sometimes people ask me how I manage to handle the suffering I face in ministry. Often I do not handle it well. Harold Brumbaum our former rector and I have talked about how difficult it is as priests to fully empathize with people who are suffering without being overcome by it. Our readings today provide a way of talking about personal pain and Christianity.

1. Avoiding suffering. The physical act of preaching can be exhausting. I have it easy. I preach very short sermons, to a small, attentive and forgiving congregation. And I have a microphone. Still, watching and adjusting to your responses, thinking of the right word, planning what is coming next takes a lot of energy. Imagine what it was like for eighteenth century preachers like John Wesley. In his diary he guessed that he traveled 8,000 miles and preached 5,000 sermons every year.

After a similarly punishing schedule of sermons and healings Jesus feels physically and mentally exhausted. I love the way that the Bible puts it, “leaving the crowd behind him, they took him with them, just as he was.” When I first was ordained this last clause was a mystery to me. Now I think it means that he simply never had the chance to rest. Despite the dangers of a building storm Jesus falls asleep in the stern.

I remember surfing at Kanaha on the Northshore of Maui when winter waves higher than our house were draining a razor sharp reef. A set would come in and I would frantically paddle up these mountains hoping that I could just reach the top before the wave broke. There is nothing like this kind of experience to remind us how completely God’s hand sustains our fragile life. I’ve never been tempted to sleep at a moment like this.

But seasoned sailors guided the helm of Jesus’ boat. He trusted the expertise of these fishermen. He put his life in their hands. I wonder what would have happened if Jesus had not been with them.

I imagine that they would have used all their skills, made good decisions and somehow pulled through. Instead Jesus’ very presence on the boat gave them an odd kind of permission to panic. Rather than relying on their own inner strength and expertise they immediately look to Jesus to take their problems away. Jesus says, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” I don’t think he says this to be cruel but to make explicit the temptation that we all feel to wallow in dependence when God calls us to exercise courage.

Parents constantly have to decide when it is appropriate to help their children and when to let them work out their problems on their own. A half dozen times a day Micah or Melia ask for help with something that they should do themselves. Sometimes it is hard to discern if and how to intervene.

When I was a child, three neighborhood bullies were working me over when my mother walked by on the sidewalk. As she went by she said that dinner was ready. The moment she turned the corner the boys continued humiliating me. I went home in tears because she hadn’t helped. She explained that she did help me by giving me the excuse to go home with her right then. She knew that by intervening more forcefully it would only have made everything worse during the next time they confronted me.

Our own personal security is a central organizing principle of this community. Too often secular suburban life teaches us to deal with suffering by avoiding it. The sad fact in this time and place is that sometimes when things go wrong people stay away from you as if your pain were somehow contagious. As human beings God made us to survive suffering. Walking with Jesus means having the strength of Jesus and facing pain in the way that he did, that is, with some measure of confidence in God’s love.

2. Sources of Fear. At birth a child is afraid of two things: falling and loud noises. Everything else that you fear is something that you learned to fear. Mostly you are afraid because the world taught you to be. Try listing the things that you fear most. At the top of that list are probably noble worries about people you love. Further down are some of the fears we have difficulty admitting to ourselves.

One of our deepest fears, in this ultra-capitalist culture, is the fear of failing. In so many ways we define what is good as success. Performance then becomes the way we define, identify and group people. Where we live, how live, what we do and most importantly how we regard ourselves and others arise out of our worship of success.

From college, I remember bumper stickers that said “Berkeley Engineering.” Maybe I didn’t get it but I thought that they implied, “it is not enough to be bragging about being smarter than all the people who didn’t get into Berkeley. I’m smarter than all the other non-engineers here too.” Perhaps I thought this because I was just insecure myself.

Of all the organizations that you belong to the church is one of the few places that doesn’t have grouping people according to their success at the heart of its mission. Yet even here I cannot stop evaluating our performance in thoroughly world terms.

If somehow through magic our worship of success could be deleted from our character, we wouldn’t even recognize ourselves. Would you have chosen the same major, career, friends, spouse or home? Imagine who you would become if fear of failure no longer motivated you.

The apostle Paul shows us what it might be like to replace our obsession with personal success with a passion for God’s Kingdom. Sometimes, I think that is why he is so hard to understand. To friends in Corinth he writes, “We are treated as imposters, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Instead of referring to the world, he sees his life in relation to God’s Kingdom.

You too could have nothing and possess everything. Like Paul you could be a person transformed by freedom from fear. You too could see that Jesus’ failure as a Messiah, that is as a kind of first century global dictator, represents a huge success for the human race. Because of his crucifixion we see failure as “both real and not final.” To put it in Rowan Williams words, “resurrection is the transaction in human beings that brings about the sense of a selfhood [that is] given not achieved.”

3. The Promise of Jesus. Christianity is not just a religion of ancient texts. In the catacombs and in early house churches we have images too. One of the most powerful examples of these are pictures which depict the church as a kind of boat awash in the storms of this life. Although we will all suffer, some of us will face tragedy far beyond failure, exceeding what we think we can bear. It threatens to obliterate our identity and even our existence.

For Christians this sometimes feels like we have fallen out of the boat of faith. One of the greatest blessings for me is that I get to witness how Christians reach out to brothers and sisters who waves have washed overboard. As Christians we never need to face our tragedies alone. We are never strangers to the world or to each other as the body of Christ.

In a very practical way, prayer helps me when the suffering seems overwhelming. I pray at all different hours of the day. I lift up all my concerns to God. When I cannot control my response to sadness, when my thoughts are thinking me, the Jesus Prayer gives me a deep peace in my heart. It is simple, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” After years of slowly repeating this prayer, it calms me and I feel the strength of Christ.

The church and prayer can help us but so can our faith. Death always has a certain kind of hold on our house. We pray for everyone at Christ Church who has died. Recently though our six-year-old son Micah has been very afraid of death. He asks when we, his parents, will die. Most of my answers have to be that we do not know what will happen to us or when. But most of the people who I have been with at death were by that time ready for it.

When I was a little boy like him I was afraid of shaving, of driving a car, of having children and adult responsibilities. But by the time I was old enough I was ready for all of these things. I expect that dying will be like that too for most of us. If we are not ready, God will help us to prepare. Just in the same way that we have faith in God to care for us every day, we have faith that he will continue to love us after we have died. In terrible tragedy faith may not be enough but it can help.

In conclusion, I hope this morning to remind us that we are equipped to handle suffering, that our life doesn’t have to be organized around the principle of avoiding pain. Second, I pray that your faith in Jesus will give you freedom in a society distorted by its fear of failure. Finally, when you face real tragedy I hope that the church, your habit of prayer and faith will draw you near to the Christ who says to all creation, “Peace, be still.”

__________
After all these years, I still remember the bitterness in the man’s face. His sister just looked confused and tried to find reasons for what had happened. Sitting in my office the hurricane of despair swept them away. Their other brother Clay, a Vietnam Veteran, had enjoyed success in business, but had never been able to really find happiness. He lived a block away from the church but I had never seen him there.

That weekend he had shot himself to death with a hunting rifle. The brother was convinced that he did this in a way that would guarantee that his son would be the one to find the body. The sister tried to give him the benefit of the doubt and searched their shared family history for reasons.

For pastoral reasons I couldn’t tell any of this to people at the church. The Sunday after the funeral, I preached a terrible a sermon. Let’s just say that at the end of the service someone muttered, “why can’t you just preach a happy message?”
John Wesley, The Heart of John Wesley’s Journal. Ed. Percy Livingstone Paker and Augustine Birrell (NY: Flemming H. Revell, Co., 1903), 392, 97.
Rowan Williams “Resurrection and Peace,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 273, 271.

Malcolm C. Young Job 38:1-11
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M15 Ps. 107
3 Pentecost (Proper 7B) RCL 2 Cor. 6:1-13
Sunday 25 June 2006 Mk. 4:35-41

What is the Spirit? The Da Vinci Code

Sun, 4 Jun 2006 12:00:00 -0700

Today we celebrate one of the four most important feasts of the year – Pentecost. It is the birthday of the church when we remember how the spirit descended upon the apostles. We wear red as a symbol of the Holy Spirit’s love and to represent the tongues of fire that were signs of its presence.

This morning I want to think with you about a question that is easy to articulate and difficult to answer. What is the spirit? Part of what makes this a difficult question is that we share this word and this idea with people outside and inside the church who misunderstand it. We know what Pentecost means because the group of people who use this word is restricted to a relatively small group who have largely shared values. But everyone uses the word spirit and spiritual to describe anything from cheerleading squads to business strategies to a sense of our own interior depth. Fortunately our readings give us strong direction in this question.

1. Imagine the birth of the church, when there was only a small group of scared people who had already shared everything together, who had sacrificed their families and work, who had found miraculous new life in Jesus. Their friend entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and only a few days later was executed as a political and religious criminal. These first followers felt no security. They had no plan, only a shared sense of disappointment.

Suddenly the spirit came down on them like fire and filled them. When they spoke, others heard their own native language. Even in our time we recognize that it is a miracle when we meet someone who really understands us. The puritan Jonathan Edwards emphasized that it is God’s nature to communicate (“God is a communicative being”). God has something to say to every person, to every living being. To us, God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.” This does not mean all ministers, or all Episcopalians or all Christians but all of living reality will show the presence of God.

Other very different depictions of the spirit and the church exist. One example is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which sold 40 million copies and recently came out as a movie. To summarize the story very briefly a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon and a French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work together to solve mysteries related to the murder of the Louvre Museum curator. These involve secret religious societies, codes in famous paintings and buildings and ultimately the search for the holy grail. The institutional church seems fiendishly intent on subverting any effort to discover the truth.

The novel is fun to read and it may make some people more curious about God. But there are two kinds of problems with it. The first concerns facts. The Christian Century magazine uses the word “truthiness” to account for the appeal of The Da Vinci Code. Truthiness describes the way that people insist what they want or feel to be true should be treated as true. Politicians and public figures constantly do this. This isn’t totally different than recent scandals around the question of how true a memoir must be to make it nonfiction. Brown’s novel fits in perfectly with this cultural climate.

We like to feel that we are learning something even as we read a novel and this is what The Da Vinci Code implicitly promises. The book cover describes the novel as “intricately layered with remarkable research and detail.” Immediately following the title page Brown includes something that looks like a dictionary entry which says, “Fact:… All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

According to the novel “the greatest cover-up in human history” was that, “not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father… Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel… that bore the bloodline of Jesus Christ” (249). Also I should let you know that, “Walt Disney made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations” (261). Biblical scholars may sometimes say odd things but they have to offer some support for their findings and no one I have heard of has made suggestions like these.

Crazy statements and treating Christ as some kind of last name rather than as a messianic title made me completely distracted as I read this book. Being a serious student of religion and reading The Da Vinci Code is like someone who knows about baseball reading a novel about how the Chicago White Sox won the 1967 world series… by strategically running the bases the wrong way round.

The second problem with The Da Vinci code has more to do with the spirit of its depiction of Christianity rather than particular facts. Secret rituals, hidden symbols, bloodlines and magical powers are not at the heart of Christian faith and practice. As I said earlier, God is a communicative being. God pours out the Holy Spirit on all flesh. Christians have always made their claims in public where their ideas can be confirmed or rejected. Jesus says his followers will be distinguished by what they do in public not by secret beliefs. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that says, “God wants spiritual fruits not religious nuts.” The fruit of the spirit is love.

2. The second thing that scripture reminds us about the spirit concerns its connection to prayer. The apostle Paul suffered for his faith. Through prayer the spirit gave him great strength. In a letter to his friends he writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8). This week I met another Paul who helped me to understand this.

It all started with a magic carpet ride. On Wednesday night I flew with Will Price over the snow-covered Rockies to Montana in a small plane for one day of fly-fishing on the Blackfoot River. Growing up I played a lot of sports and worked outside in lumberyards, doing landscaping and out in the fields. In college I continued with sports and lived in a residence hall with 200 men. Although since my ordination I am almost never in all-male environments, I miss this. I enjoy spending time with men like our fishing guide Paul.

Paul is a powerful man in his sixties. He’s intelligent and strong, with a beard and piercing eyes that cut right through the surface of things. He tells the truth simply and humorously without exaggeration. You could depend on him in an emergency.

We pulled our boat out for lunch twenty yards away from a nest with two immature bald eagles and their mother. Will’s father was talking about the way that our failures can more powerfully shape our character than our successes. This led Paul to express his own regrets about his divorce from his wife of forty-one years. He also talked about marrying a woman who had never been married before and who was four years older than himself. “This time I am doing things differently,” Paul said. “My wife and I begin each day looking each other in the eyes and praying.”

If you pray you will become acquainted with the spirit. You’ll know yourself better too. Prayer is when I begin to be honest with myself about what I really want. I face my weaknesses and the narrowness of my vision. And the spirit takes our badly articulated prayers and “with sighs too deep for words,” makes God’s love known to us.

3. My last observation about the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus. This is the hardest part to explain. At the Last Supper Jesus reassures his disciples that even though he will die he will never abandon them. The Greek word that he uses for spirit is paraclete. The dictionary says that this is literally the person you call to for help - like a doctor if you have chest pains or a lawyer if you find yourself in jail or a river guide if you are drowning. Jesus says, this “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment… he will guide you for he will not speak on his own…” (Jn. 15).

Earlier I approvingly quoted a Montana bumper sticker about religious nuts and spiritual fruits. The one thing that bothers me is the way that it suggests an opposition between bad institutional religion and good private spirituality. I want to say something about my friends who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

I think what they mean by this is an inner experience of depth, a “true self,” an authentic self free of all the roles we play, a self independent of how others perceive us. For them this is what spirituality is and because this idea is very powerful in our age Christians begin to mistake this idea of spirituality for the Holy Spirit.

The archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams believes that this idea of the self comes out of a fantasy of perfect communication. We imagine “an ideal other,” “a listener to whom I am making perfect sense,” a sympathetic hearer who always gives us the benefit of the doubt and understands our often less-than-clear good intentions. Williams says that the problem with this is that the world is not filled with people who understand us perfectly.

One may go further and note that often we do not even understand ourselves very well. We lie to ourselves in order to justify our bad intentions. A private spirituality based on the idea of a true self may be a very deeply seated way of avoiding how God is drawing us to the holy.

When I am in an argument with my wife Heidi and I find myself saying, “that’s just the way that I am,” I know that I am on shaky ground. The spirit is not a deeply interior matter of being stubbornly true to yourself. The spirit works through other people, through all flesh. Our spouses and neighbors and colleagues and church family are the way that the spirit brings the world to God. They are the way that the “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin” (Jn. 15).

In conclusion, the late Roman Catholic professor Ralph Kiefer used to say, “The Bible is not the Word of God. The Word of God is what God says to the church when the Bible is being read.” Real people, not words on a page are the way that God calls to you.

This church has no secrets. It exists in and is constituted by the Holy Spirit revealing itself in all flesh. Like my friend Paul, in our weakness the spirit calls us into new strength through prayer “too deep for words.” The spirit working in others “proves the world wrong about sin,” not through an ideal imaginary true self but in the real people in our lives. On this Pentecost morning, I invite you to celebrate God’s spirit in all of us together.
________________
The American Dialect Society named the word “truthiness” as the word of the year in 2005. Although Stephen Colbert reinvented the word as part of his political satire, this idea has been around since the nineteenth century. Rodney Clapp, “Dan Brown’s Truthiness: The Appeal of the Da Vinci Code,” The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, 22. See also Wikipedia “Truthiness” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness. In this last source Colbert in character says, "The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for 'truthy' dating back to the 1800s....'The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all,' Stephen Colbert said Thursday. 'You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.’”
Page numbers from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (NY: Doubleday, 2005).
“paraklesis” in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1958)
Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 239-241.
Richard Fabian from an unpublished lecture delivered at Sewanee on St. Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco.

Malcolm C. Young Acts 2:1-21
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M12 Ps. 104
Pentecost (Year B) RCL Rom. 8:22-27
Sunday 4 June 2006 Jn. 15:26-7, 16:4b-15

Abiding in California

Sun, 14 May 2006 12:00:00 -0700

Between heaven and earth suspended on updrafts above the redwood forests and just below the chaparral of Mount Tamalpais hovers a red-tailed hawk. This keen-eyed hunter seems oblivious to this magnificent setting, to the skyscrapers of the financial district and the massive tanker slipping out through the Golden Gate past Seal Rock and Ocean Beach. Great bridges and cities seem so insignificant in comparison to Mount Diablo, the expansive Bay, the ancient forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the infinite Pacific Ocean.

On Friday night we celebrated a friend’s sixty-fifth birthday at the West Point Inn on Mt. Tam, accessible only by a two-mile hike, seventeen hundred feet above sea level. The huge city, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country, seems so quiet up there (where the wingspan of a swallow at sunset seems larger than Sutro Tower in the distance). I sat there on the porch of that historic building and gave thanks to God that we live here together. I tried to understand what it means to make this place my home, what it means to abide here.

Abide is a thoroughly archaic word, eight of seventeen uses in the Oxford English Dictionary are obsolete. We never use it. We don’t say that people abide together before marriage. We don’t ask new acquaintances where they abide. I suspect that Christianity is the only thing keeping this word alive. Abiding represents a central idea in the gospel of John from the first chapter when John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus where he abides (Jn. 1:38) to the last supper when Jesus tells his own disciples to abide in his love. Jesus promises quite simply, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (Jn. 15). What does it mean to abide in Christ?

Understanding what it means to be a Californian helps us to see the challenges that we face as we try to abide in Christ. I want to begin by thinking about three elements of abiding in California.

1. Fiction. I hope that by this time all of you recognize that California is more than a place. Even if you don’t claim it, it is part of your identity. Even if you don’t recognize it, its stories are yours. Its stories are you.

From the beginning California was a fictional place. In 1510 the Spanish writer Garci Ordonez de Montalvo wrote a bestselling novel (Las Sergas de Esplandian) about the siege of Constantinople. There at the battle was a race of Amazons under the command of Queen Calafia. They were from a place he invented. It was located “on the right hand of the Indies… very close to the Terrestrial Paradise. It was rich in gold and gems. He called it California.

The dominant stories of California share in common a hope for surprising and unexpected success. The fictional wealth of El Dorado motivated the Spanish explorers who discovered California. Gold rush dreams led to a population explosion and sudden statehood. The entrepreneurial story of changing the world and accumulating wealth and power along the way still exercises a powerful claim on our imagination. I don’t know how many, but this week more people moved here to become a star.

2. Conflict. California is not just a fiction. It is not just a dream or a hope. It is also a shared history of conflict. Some scholars have suggested that one third of all Native Americans in the continental United States lived in California before European contact. This population was almost completely wiped out in a way that highlights the difference between how the mission system operated in Mexico and here.

By the 1920’s there were more Latinos living in Los Angeles than any other American city. Millions of these Americans with their American born children were forcibly repatriated to Mexico during the 1930’s by a program which historians rightly call ethnic cleansing. The persecution of Japanese Americans didn’t begin during World War II when 110,000 of them who were locked up behind barbed wire in remote relocation camps (227). In the early years of the twentieth century the White California movement, which included the most powerful politicians and business leaders in the state, worked to segregate public schools and to prevent Japanese from even owning land (223).

Our history includes vigilante terror campaigns against non-white populations. It consists of large landowners in combination with law enforcement officials brutalizing the laborers and farm workers who were essential to California’s prosperity. Racism, exploitation and conflict are part of who we are as we abide in this place.

3. Technology. Our orientation to science and technology also sets us apart. By the mid 1920’s fifty thousand commuters were passing through the San Francisco Ferry Building each day making it the busiest terminal in the world except for Charing Cross station in London (186). This need combined with technology and boldness led to the construction of a trestle bridge at Dumbarton point and then to the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges. During the same period one third of all the country’s air traffic was operating out of fifty landing fields in greater Los Angeles (255). In many respects California inventors and companies made the airplane a California technology. Indeed, we are not the first generation here to depend for our livelihoods, recreation and for that matter our water on the most advanced technologies of our day. We forget that the transcontinental railroad was an engineering miracle.

These technologies build on each other. The Pelton Turbine made hydraulic gold mining possible and washed away whole mountain slopes in the Sierra’s. This same technology vastly increased the production of hydroelectricity. This in turn made it cost effective to work with aircraft aluminum in Southern California. Pioneering work on vacuum tubes was done here in the 1920’s. In the 1930’s California led the world in atom-smashing. Then in the 1950’s it was semiconductors. This led to a leading role in the personal computer revolution and now the Internet. California is modern, always influenced by ever-receding dreams of becoming a technological utopia.

We abide here. Different regions in California place a different emphasis on these three elements but the shared fictions, our history of conflict and orientation toward technology define us as a people.

Jesus is right. If we only abided in California we would be lost. I suspect that we already know this. We are just as acquainted with the California nightmare as with the California dream. I believe that abiding in Jesus fundamentally changes our experience of the fiction, the conflict and technology. Because of him we can have lasting hope. The promise that we receive at our baptism is that California can never completely own us because we belong to our God.

Jesus describes this relationship by using the image of the grape vine. His primary point is that without our connection to God we cannot accomplish anything. Our success will always arise out of our relationship to God through the church. Secondly he says that the defining feature of our connection to God is the productivity of our lives. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” We are defined as Christians by our connection to Jesus through the church and by the fruits of our lives, not by what we believe as individuals.

An image of this that sustains me is the altar guild. No one here at Christ Church serves on the altar guild in order to be famous or rich. Each of these women spends a lot of time with Jesus and each other. They attend to the most meticulous details of our worship services together. They spend hundreds of hours each year dedicated to God’s glory making this church beautiful. When I was a child, my mother served on the altar guild and I would go with her to set up the weekday service. In the quiet of that silent church in the presence of those dedicated women, I felt the presence of God.

I have hinted at this. It is hard for us as Californians to understand abiding because it means really settling down, being present through thick and thin. The women of Christ Church’s altar guild have done this. But others of you know what it is like too. Those of you who really abide with your spouse realize that loving does not mean maintaining a certain mood. Contrary to what you see on TV, love is primarily a gift and a task, only secondarily is it a feeling.

In conclusion, our story of hope differs from that of other Californians. We do not put our trust in a twenty-first century Gold Rush. We are not first of all entrepreneurs or aspiring stars. Instead we believe that Jesus invites us into a community that will change the world and he gives us the power to do this. As Christian Californians we recognize our share in the history of conflict that surrounds and penetrates us while having faith that God can make us agents of reconciliation. We understand that technology is a kind of power but also that God is love and it is love that makes us whole.

I want to leave you with one final picture of what it means to abide in Christ. Last week I visited with a friend for what is likely to be the last time. Brian Thompson has accomplished a great deal in his life. I think he owned a bus company. Growing up he loved trains and as an adult he collected them. In fact all of you have seen these vehicles in Hollywood movies. This interest along with his unmatched passion for California history led him to start the railroad museum in Sacramento.

But above all Brian abides in Christ. These days his wife has Alzheimer’s disease and he is dying of cancer. He amazes the doctors not just by surviving beyond any of their expectations, but by living. Brian continues to live joyfully as a Christian fully connected to the body of Christ and because of this he I see him bearing fruit to the very end. As our last conversation wore down he said, “Malcolm you’ve got to tell them this. You never realize the depth of your faith until the chips are down.”

Brian’s confidence shows me the gift of the spirit. I still see him in my imagination, like the hawk flying over the ridges of Tamalpais, Brian is surrounded by beauty somewhere between California and heaven.
____________
Kevin Starr, California: A History (NY: Modern Library, 2005), 5. Page numbers in text refer to this book.
If I chose a fourth element that is essential to our identity as Californians it would be our orientation to our natural environment. This physical setting has a huge influence on how we see ourselves.

Malcolm C. Young Acts 8:26-40
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M11 Ps. 22:24-30
5 Easter (Year B) RCL 1 Jn. 4:7-21
Sunday 14 May 2006 Jn. 15:1-8

Disbelieving for Joy

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:00:00 -0700

I learned this week that three million Americans believe that aliens visit this planet in UFO’s. At the same time there are 2.2 million Episcopalians. This leads me to ask, what are the aliens doing that we are not doing?

It is so easy to find fault with the church, to criticize our failed good intentions or our constant struggle just to get organized. We haven’t done that much to feed hungry people or to advocate for the poor. Furthermore, we don’t handle the holy well. Sometimes we priests come to God with a false kind of professionalism a pompous dignity that keeps the radically transformative work of the spirit at arm’s lengths.

Other times we probably look more like a circus act, forgetting that our microphones are on, missing cues, saying the wrong things, interrupting each other and talking too fast. Sometimes we present you with unsingable hymns and jump around the prayer book as if we were administering a wacky intelligence test. The truth is that for most people church can at times be boring. There should be a disclaimer in the bulletin that says you should not operate heavy machinery while participating in worship.

When I was a child I thought that in Jesus’ time things were different, but the closer I read the scriptures the more human the disciples seem. When they see the risen Christ they don’t conclude that God’s kingdom is breaking into the world. They are startled and frightened. They don’t believe. They disagree. Because some of them think he is a kind of ghost, he invites them to see and touch him. Even then they still disbelieved for joy and wondered. Jesus goes to the absurd length of showing them that he can eat broiled fish.

Then he teaches them. The Bible says that he opens “their minds to understand the scriptures.” In this life and in resurrected life Jesus looks deeply into their souls. He sees what they most long for. He understands the part of them that stands between them and true joy. He shows them how their relationships can be healed, how God can restore their lives. Imagine someone who knows you so well that he or she can heal your soul. Imagine being part of a group of people who are on fire with the Holy Spirit.

What would it take for us to believe? Or more importantly what can we do to help others to have their lives transformed by Jesus? We accomplish both these tasks when we become better at telling our stories and at listening for connections between our lives and those of the people around us. The German thinker Max Weber described modern life in an industrial society as an “iron cage.” I believe that one of the effects of our hectic times is that it suppresses our stories, even the stories of our salvation.

Last night at a family party I had the blessed opportunity to spend a few hours with Melia’s godfather Mario who is a law professor at Miami University. I told him that as a citizen I was alarmed that the number of people incarcerated in this county has quadrupled in only twenty years. If our Gross Domestic Product or the population of San Francisco, or the size of our own family or unemployment rates or any almost any other figure like these had changed so dramatically in such a short time, I would want to know what caused it.

I asked, “Is the legal profession taking concerted action to address this serious problem.” It amazes me that he said, “No.” I asked him about the causes of this phenomenon. He said that mandatory sentencing rules, heavy prison terms for relatively minor drug crimes, increasing poverty all have contributed to this, along with a far more retributive approach to justice that is not at all concerned with rehabilitating prisoners. In Europe many nations simply address the drug problem differently. In Europe there is less violence associated with property crime than here and this also reduces prison terms.

Mario talked about the experience of going through the court system. Police in this country are allowed to lie, to say that they have witnesses to your actions when they don’t, to say that they will arrest your family when they can’t. In one famous case police told an unusually dim-witted suspect that the fax machine was a lie detector and convicted him on the basis of this confession.

Mario told me that the purpose of this is to force a suspect to fit into categories, into preconceived stories that this system uses to simplify the process of administering justice. In that world the details of your story are erased and your identity gets compressed so that you are merely an African American involved in urban drug culture, or a suburban white-collar criminal, or an Islamic terrorist.

He told me that if your crime is especially heinous they will listen more carefully to the details of your story and if you have a lot of money to hire legal experts they will too.

Millie Simpson was an elderly African American domestic servant who lived in Newark, New Jersey and commuted out to the wealthy suburbs by bus. She had an old car in her driveway that she never drove. One day an acquaintance took the car without asking and was involved in a hit and run accident. A witness identified her license plate and she was brought before the court. The first judge was only interested in her plea. After hearing that she claimed not to be driving the car, the judge entered her plea as not guilty.

The next judge interrupted Simpson when she tried to explain what happened. Even though her public defender was out of the room and he didn’t see any evidence, he ruled that she was guilty and sentenced her to a fine, community service and revoked her license. Because of the community service Simpson could no longer work after hours for one of her suburban clients. They needed her so badly that they hired a lawyer who went before the same judge and had the previous sentence dismissed. Simpson was quoted as saying, “I couldn’t understand what [the judge] was saying… I didn’t know what he was talking about.” Simpson's employer, however, had a different comment on Simpson's legal experiences: "[T]his was 'the typical story of American racism. To get justice, the poor black woman needs a rich white lady."

This is not an exception. Mario’s point was that part of the problem is that institutionally and through culture our criminal justice system and society in general suppress our individual stories.

I sometimes think that it is unfortunate that you did not know me before I became a priest. Mostly this means that you are in the habit of thinking that I am different than you. I sometimes wonder how this affects the way that we talk about Jesus together. At my class reunion last summer, although the people who really knew me expected it, most of my old friends from high school were surprised to learn that I had been ordained. Many of them learn only about Christianity from television dramas. Few of us have had much experience with younger clergy.

After the Vietnam War the leaders of my home diocese thought that there were too many priests. They stopped ordaining people who were in their twenties. They told young people to go and have another career and then come back to the church with their wisdom. There are many great second career priests. But this policy effectively told the world that the spirituality, the faith stories, of young people was less important.

I grew up in a community of people who firmly believed otherwise. St. Martin’s Episcopal church in Davis included me as a teenager in adult Christian education programs. They insisted that I serve as an acolyte and gave me the responsibility of teaching Sunday School for younger kids. When I expressed an interest in being ordained they supported me through the process and cut through the red tape that could have held me back. Most of all they always listened to my story and saw its connection to the Bible.

Jesus is not present in a general way. The Holy Spirit is not vague. These are the tangible ways that I saw God at work in the world. When my friends or I needed help, when I was tempted to go astray, God was saving me through the church.

I bring this up because I feel Jesus more and more present at Christ Church every day. In the holiness of the Lent that we shared together, through our ministry at Ventana School and Rebuilding Together, in the care we show to sick and suffering people, God is here. At the retreat last week four year old Melia Young and Lynn Saunders painted a picture together and what was most beautiful about that picture was that as they did it they shared their stories.

In a world which suppresses the unique stories of individuals, we are finding our voice. I want to ask you to do more to tell your story about God’s grace to people who have not yet discovered Christ Church. This is not to tell them that the way they see the world is wrong, but to let them know there is a place where their stories can be faithfully heard. Invite your friends to church. We are ready to receive them.

Someone once asked a French poet, “if the Louvre Museum were burning and you could only choose one work of art which one would you save?” He replied, “I would choose the fire.” In your life and your calling as a child of God be free to choose the fire. Allow yourself to be the way that God transforms the world. Let go of the stories that others tell about you which imprison or control your life-giving spirit. Let the risen Christ appear to you and appear in you, even when you are confused or afraid. Then we shall “be called children of God” and “when he appears we will be like him” (1 John 3).
_________________
This story and the concluding one about the Louvre Museum came from the presentations that various bishop candidates made during this week. The first came from Bonnie Perry quoting Jonathan Jensen. The second was from Marc Andrus.
Mario Lamont Barnes, “Black Women’s Stories and the Criminal Law: Restating the Power of Narrative,” 39 U.C. DAVIS L. REV.

Malcolm C. Young Acts 3:12-19
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M10 Ps. 4
3 Easter (Year B) RCL 1 Jn. 3:1-7
Sunday 30 April 2006 Lk. 24:36b-48

The Lost Gospel

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 12:00:00 -0700

On a rainy day last week I met my friend Cliff in a Berkeley coffee shop. In our conversation, Cliff described himself as “kind of a loser” back when we were in high school. It seems pretty obvious to me that now he is a loser for Christ. Cliff is my friend who is a congregational minister and who was recently released after serving a prison term for trespassing during a protest of the School of the America’s in Georgia. With a passionate voice he reminded me that the prison system in this country has expanded fourfold over the last twenty-five years. In our free society we use incarceration to solve many problems that other countries address differently.

Cliff believes that the Christian churches should be sending missionaries into prisons, not as chaplains who work for the system and carry keys so that they can lock up when the guards are off, but as fellow prisoners. Recently Cliff was invited to preach at the First Waldensian Church of New York City. Don’t look it up when you visit. After surviving eight hundred years of persecution in Europe, this congregation of immigrants refused to merge with the Presbyterian church back in the 1920’s. Now they have no building and gather only once a year on the Sunday closest to February 17th and reminisce about Pastor Janavel from their wheelchairs. Whether it is to people who have lost their freedom or elderly immigrants who have lost their culture my friend Cliff ministers to people who have lost something important. He cares for losers.

I guess this makes us all eligible for Cliff’s attention. We are all in the process of losing something. What we are losing can never be replaced. The public has lost its sense of security. Nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere along with climate change could lead to the extinction of everything we know.

But there is also private loss. Look around this room. The people sitting next to you have lost fortunes, friends, husbands, wives and children. Perhaps you yourself are losing the job that defines your identity. Maybe you learned from a note on the kitchen table that your spouse was leaving you. If you pause to think about it, your children’s childhood is quickly slipping away. Others of you have lost your health and soon will lose your life.

The losses I am talking about are not trivial. Imagine the woman who crosses the street with her daughter every day to go to her mailbox. One day she hesitates to pull a few weeds out of her garden. Her little girl waits for permission before going across the street for the mail. She gets a few bills out of the box and asks if it is safe to cross again. Her mother glances up and says yes. But a car she didn’t see kills the small child. Without some kind of miracle this mother will never be able to forgive herself, she will never be whole. If you think it is difficult to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, try believing that losers like us can have hope.

In Jesus I have been blessed beyond imagining and found strength in the face of my losses. I know what it feels like to have hope, to be saved by him. For millions of others around the globe faith is the experience of finding oneself in the person of Jesus Christ. Although what we have lost can never be restored, we find our lives transformed in him.

So much about Jesus has been lost in history. It seems like a small miracle to discover something new. This is exactly what happened last week when the National Geographic society announced that it had found a Coptic translation of the Gospel of Judas originally written some time before the year 180 A.D.

News accounts about this fall into two categories. The manuscript was discovered during the 1970’s in a cave by Egyptian farmers. The first kind of newspaper article focuses on the greed of the antiquities dealers who took so long to bring it before the public. This kind of article asks ethical questions, whether this is a looted artifact and about the responsibility to share archaeological findings with all scholars.

The second type of article stirs up theological controversy. These writers interpret the text to mean that Judas did not betray Jesus as churches usually teach, but rather that he was under Jesus’ secret orders in going to the police. The most frequently quoted line from the Gospel of Judas is obscure without the context. It has Jesus saying to Judas, “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Newspapers ask what the account of Jesus’ crucifixion would mean if none of his friends so blatantly betrayed him. Others simply reject the usefulness of this text out of hand. Officials at the Vatican condemn the Gospel of Judas as contrary to Christian doctrine.

But what does this ancient manuscript mean to us as people who continue to lose what cannot be replaced but who still find hope in Jesus? For me this description of Jesus written more than a century after his death gives a clearer picture of God’s church right now. Most importantly it serves as a reminder that Christians have never completely agreed on who Jesus is.

It doesn’t take more than a few sentences for anyone who has studied biblical history to recognize that the Gospel of Judas was written by Gnostic Christians. The Greek word gnosis means wisdom and these Gnostics saw themselves as Christians. They knew that what most separated them from the orthodox church was their belief in secret teachings about an all-encompassing battle between the material world and the spiritual one.

The animating idea behind the Gospel of Judas is that the disciples of Jesus never understood his true teachings and the church they founded is irrecoverably corrupt. Orthodox Christians regard Judas as a betrayer. According to this text he was the only one to really understand Jesus. In the Gospel of Judas Jesus says, “[L]et any one of you who is [strong enough] among human beings bring out the perfect human and stand before my face.” And only “Judas Iscariot… was able to stand before him.”

Reading this text is like leafing through the books in the Rosicrucian Library at the Egyptian museum in San Jose which is a kind of new age bookstore on steroids. Like those authors, this writer seems so confident in his intentional obscurity. It seems deliberately unclear in order to create an aura of mystery. This recovered gospel includes a lengthy account of Judas’ secret vision. Jesus teaches him about the “enlightened divine Self-Generated,” about the angels appointed to control the “aeons and the heavens” and about the other angels who rule over “chaos and the [underworld].”

Orthodox Christians rejected Gnostic teachings about Jesus from the very early days of the church. The whole reason I knew about the existence of a Gospel of Judas was that orthodox Christians such as Irenaeus (130-202) mention it.

I think that they were right to exclude texts like this for use in worship for two reasons. Apart from being unclear and its one-dimensional portrayal of Jesus, The Gospel of Judas makes it seem as if some people really are special, perfect even, immune from the losses that define our humanity. According to the Gnostic picture of the world only the wisest, most intelligent people can attain true faith. This effectively reproduces earthly hierarchies in heaven. The orthodox church was right to resist the power grab that lies behind pictures of religion as a form of secret knowledge.

Second, I believe in the incarnation. That is another way of saying that I believe in a God who creates the world and is still involved in it. Jesus was a real person with real earthly needs, desires and sufferings. But Jesus is also still here. The church is the body of Christ at work in the world.

In summary, the Gospel of Judas increases my appreciation for the vivid stories about a human Jesus in the Bible and its promise that God’s love always exceeds our tribal instincts and is really part of our world. Discovering the Gospel of Judas reminds me that we can never own Jesus, our historical connection will always be a question for us.

An example from today’s readings makes this clear. Most scholars that I know are pretty certain that we do not have the ending that the author of Mark’s gospel wrote. The gospel concludes with these words about the women who discovered the empty tomb, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Experts who study the Bible believe that a scribe at some point supplied a longer ending using words, a style and a theology that were alien to Mark. You should look at the text yourself. The longer ending sounds completely different from the rest of the gospel even when you read it in English.

This probably isn’t common knowledge because this kind of thinking upsets some people. A modern church that condemns the Gospel of Judas as heresy, or an ancient sect that claims that what really matter is a secret knowledge for spiritual elites, or for that matter an atheist who regards religion as merely a belief about God all fundamentally get it wrong.

Beliefs about Jesus will come and go. But ultimately what you believe isn’t what really matters. The spirit of God is not something that we can own like a possession. Our job as Jesus’ followers is not to convince everyone else that their ideas are wrong.

Instead the life of faith is the process of being transformed by Jesus. It means beginning to pray like he prays, to love what he loves. It means having the same kind of relationship with God and other people that he had. It means beginning to be defined by our hope that God gives life even in death rather than identifying ourselves with our fear of loss.

In conclusion, not so long ago Midwest farmers at the first sign of a blizzard would run a rope from the back door to the barn. They all had heard stories of people who had lost sight of home in a whiteout and frozen to death in their own backyards. Our modern blizzards, our public disasters and our private despair leave us in danger of losing our very selves. But like my friend Cliff we are beginning to be losers for Christ. The Bible, the church and our prayers together teach us about Jesus and he connects this home on earth to our home in God.
____________
I don’t know what names the kids call each other these days, but when I was in high school “loser” was one of the words they used. We probably didn’t think about this word too much. Our classmates used it to describe my friends who hung out smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. What is a loser?
It isn’t the opposite of being a winner because that wasn’t an adjective we used to describe people. Maybe it was someone who didn’t have complete control over how others perceived him or who just didn’t care about what others thought really mattered. On the other hand perhaps the word only says something about the person who uses it.
February 17 is the anniversary of the Edict of Emancipation.
I read this in a sermon preparing for 5 Lent.
“How the Gospel of Judas Emerged,” New York Times, 4/13/2006.
John Noble Wilford and Laurie Goodstein, “In Ancient Document Judas Minus the Betrayal,” New York Times, 4/7/2006. More recently both themes are addressed together. Peter Steinfels, “A Debate Flares on Betrayal,” New York Times, 4/15/06.
“Papal Preacher Blasts Da Vinci Code, Judas Gospel, ”Reuters 4/14/2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-pope-davinci.html.

Malcolm C. Young Acts 10:34-43
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M9 Ps. 118:1-2, 14
Easter Sunday Year B RCL 1 Cor. 15:1-11
Sunday 16 April 2006 Mk. 16:1-8

Giving Your Life

Sun, 2 Apr 2006 12:00:00 -0700

This poem is called “Ask Me,” by William Stafford (1914-1993):
“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”

Is what you have done your life? What difference have those who love you and hate you made?

Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12). He puts into question what it means to live or die. He makes us less certain what our life really is. I believe that it takes someone with the power of Jesus to dispel our most persistent illusions. Some fantasies can be so widespread within a culture that it can take generations to understand the truth.

Between the years 1570 and 1630 Western Europeans burned between thirty and fifty thousand people to death as witches (only a comparatively tiny number of heretics were burned during this same period). In Trier, Germany 368 witches were burned in twenty-two villages over only a six-year period. In two of these villages the persecution did not stop until there was only one woman left.

Amazingly enough during the preceding so-called Dark Ages there was little or no witch persecution and canon law even specified that “whoever believes in witches is an infidel and pagan” and “unchristian.” Then in the fifteenth century these convictions changed. A professor at the University of the Sorbonne wrote in 1601 that the existence of witches could be disbelieved only by those of unsound mind.”

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary features of this cultural hysteria is that historians can find no evidence to suggest that ritual devil worship actually happened in Western Europe. The historian Margaret Miles convincingly writes that, “Witchcraft seems to have been neither a religion nor an organization, but a massive collective fantasy.”

Why did this happen? The recent invention of the printing press made it possible to circulate thousands of pamphlets which included details about what witches did and how they were punished. These broadsheets told people that witches caused disease, impotence, accidents and crop failures. Because more than eighty percent of the people who were burned to death were women, misogyny probably was a contributing factor in the persecutions. Historians also believe that a connection existed between the use of judicial torture and the intensity of this hysteria. England was the only country that did not use torture for either crime or witchcraft and persecution was less a part of life there.

But these reasons cannot explain the deep anxiety in the mind of that generation. I wonder what behavior we take completely for granted but that may seem equally baffling to future historians. What is our massive collective fantasy? What fears inform our actions and what do they tell us about our life and our commitments? (I wonder which of our attitudes concerning drugs, children, terrorism, healthcare, immigration, globalization, incarceration, work, etc. will make sense to another generation).

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus became famous as a defense witness in court trials of people who were accused of sexual abuse on the basis of repressed memories. She points out that there is no scientific evidence that what we call repression really exists. Scientists study various kinds of amnesia closely. Some people may forget what happened in a traumatic traffic accident, but they are conscious that a memory is missing. Those who believe in repression claim that we can have no sensation of having forgotten some of the memories that are most important to who we are. They also seem to overestimate the reliability of our memory.

On August 18, 1967 at Boston’s Fenway Park Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was at the plate facing California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. On the first pitch Hamilton threw a fastball that crushed the left side of Conigliaro’s face. Conigliaro never completely recovered from his injury. He left baseball in 1975 and died at the age of forty-five. That moment changed Jack Hamilton forever too.

In 1990 when Conigliaro died, Hamilton gave an interview with the New York Times in which he recalled what happened that day. “I’ve had to live with it,” He said,”I think about it a lot. It was like the sixth inning when it happened. I think the score was 2-1, and he was the eighth hitter in the batting order. With the pitcher up next, I had no reason to throw at him.” Hamilton remembers visiting him in the hospital that afternoon. He also remembers wondering whether he should return to Fenway for the next series of games that season.

Although Hamilton probably thought about this day many times his recollections were almost completely wrong. The accident didn’t happen in the sixth inning but in the fourth. The score was not 2-1 but 0-0. Conigliaro wasn’t the eighth hitter but the sixth. It wasn’t even a day game so Hamilton couldn’t have visited him in the hospital that afternoon, and there were no other games in Boston that year for him to wonder about whether or not he should go back there.

It should come as no surprise to us that our memories are unreliable, that we can get important details wrong. A cognitive psychologist asked forty-four students the question, “How did you first hear the news of the space ship Challenger explosion.” He asked them the morning after the explosion and then two and a half years later. Although they described the memories as vivid during this second interview, none of their memories were completely accurate and one third of their memories were what the researcher called “wildly inaccurate.” Many of these students couldn’t believe that their revised memories were wrong. “This is my handwriting, so it must be right,” said one student, “but I still remember everything the way I told you [just now]. I can’t help it.”

Not only can we be completely wrong about past events, we can remember things that never even happened. Psychologists have studied the ways that false memories can be inadvertently and intentionally implanted in someone else’s mind. One student did this by asking his fourteen-year-old younger brother to write a paragraph each day on four events that he described. Three of the events actually happened as part of the family’s history and one was a fictitious story about being lost at a mall. By the end of the week the younger brother could describe details about something that never happened.

Earlier I mentioned Elizabeth Loftus as a psychologist who studies memory. She is not an uncontroversial figure. Some people absolutely hate her. It may be partly because they believe she defends criminals, but even this is not enough to explain the vehemence of their response to her work. I have a theory. I think that it is partly because her research undermines some deeply held assumptions about who we think we are.

In modern times there are so many subtle ways of not believing in God. One of them is to understand ourselves as a kind of videotape that summarizes our past, to think that in a significant sense we are our memories. If this is the implicit picture that someone has of himself, a psychologist’s claims that the tape is unreliable can seem like an attack on his identity.

For me this way of understanding our selves is in contrast with the Bible. According to Christian tradition we do not have an existence that is independent of God. Who we are does not derive from who we were. Our life is not something that came about accidentally because of the lust or love of two other human beings a long time ago. We don’t earn our life. Instead we constantly derive our life from God. Who we are is a gift from God that we receive every day.

In the Old Testament God speaks to us. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts; and I will be their God” (Jer. 31). Our existence is a constant expression of God’s love. At the deepest level of who we are is not a memory but God.

I’m having a hard time saying it, but what this means is that you are fundamentally safe. You do not need to worry about losing your job, your spouse, your health, the respect of the other kids in school. The self that you are is not something that you achieve through some kind of work. It is not something that comes into existence because of what you think. This self is safe from the world

Perhaps what Jesus means is that the part of ourselves we are so afraid of losing isn’t really us anyway. When the Greeks come, they want the same thing that I do. They tell Philip that they want to see Jesus. He says to them, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

The novelist Ernest Hemmingway writes about a father in Spain who wanted to be reconciled to his runaway son. The father takes out an advertisement in the Madrid paper El Liberal. It says, “Paco, meet me noon on Tuesday at the Hotel Montana. All is forgiven! Love, Papa.” Paco was a common name in those days. When the father showed up he found eight hundred young men looking for their fathers.

The way that Jesus speaks through the Bible is like this. Right here we have a whole church full of Pacos, of children returning to their father. We are not our memories, our thoughts or even our actions. Like California pitcher Jack Hamilton and the witch hunters of the sixteenth century we will make minor mistakes and some terrible life-changing ones.

But none of this changes the truth. You can ask me if what I have done is my life or about the influence of people who have loved and hated me. But that is not what I am. We are children of God who Jesus calls to return. And one day he will lift us all up into the fullness of divine joy.
_________
Published in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (NY: McGraw Hill, 2004), 530.
Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 296-7.
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketchem, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 75.
Ibid., 91-2.
Ibid., 97-8.
Thomas Tewell, “The Things We Dare Not Remember,” Thirty Good Minutes, 16 November 2003. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/tewell_4707.htm

Malcolm C. Young Jer. 31:31-4
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M8 Ps 51:1-13
5 Lent Year B RCL Heb. 5:5-10
Sunday 2 April 2006 Jn. 12:20-33

Lifting Up Serpents

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0800

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life” John 3:14.

Look around you. Imagine that you are the people of Israel, because in a way you are. You left slavery in Egypt with sore backs and calloused hands. Beatings and hard labor made your joints so sore that you thought you could never escape the Pharaoh’s army. When the Red Sea swallowed up the finest warriors in the world, you wrote songs of celebration.

Fresh from this victory, breathing the clean air of freedom and with a new lightness in their steps the people of Israel passed quickly through the desert to the edge of the promised land. Before going into this land of Canaan you choose twelve people: Rachel Wagner, Alan Sarles, Laura Barker, Robert Pescosolido, Jim Snell, Maryetta Shriver, Clare Ledwith, Gloria Wing, Paula Matosian, Bob Stanfield, Paul Kojola and Bill Bien. You send them as spies to survey the land.

They arrive at harvest time and spend forty days traveling in secret through a place of overwhelming beauty. The twelve agree completely about the richness of this land of milk and honey. They cannot help but notice the severe contrast between it and the desert they just passed through. At the same time, ten of the spies (I won’t say who) have also noticed that the people who already live there seem stronger and larger than us (Numbers 13).

Two of the spies want to follow God’s command and find a place to live in the promised land. They make their case but the overwhelming majority of us are so afraid to go that we threaten to stone them to death. And so we all return to the desert for forty years, where each of the spies dies, except for the two who did not rebel against God.

Even though WE chose it, the harshness of desert life makes us complain about God. We say that he should have left us in Egypt. We seem to despise our own freedom. Nothing seems quite right to us although we probably grumble about our food the most. There is a kind of poison in our community and we will not be won over to God. So God sends poisonous snakes which kill our friends and our children. Imagine many of us dying, the rest of us bitten and waiting to die.

But again God sees our suffering and has mercy on us. He instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent on a high pole. The people who look at it will live. So Moses walks deliberately around our camp tents. He calls each of us out by name so that we can look and be saved. Moses cannot change the fact that we have been bitten. He cannot remove the poison, but through him God can make us live (Numbers 21).

We are the people of Israel. The same poison runs thick in our veins also.

In one summer month both of my grandfather’s sons moved to California. I’ll never forget the day we said goodbye, my hippie uncle telling my conservative father that he would meet us in the promised land. He was right. We live in the land of milk and honey, in these green hills between the richest agricultural valley in the world and the vast mystery of the Pacific Ocean.

At this time of year, in this mild climate, the wildflowers covering these hills seem like signs of God’s continuing grace. According to any measure from objective industrial productivity to the subjective beauty of our sunsets, California is rich.

We would notice this more if it we did not have the poison. All of us experience its effects in slightly different ways. We have conflict with people who we are supposed to love. We worry about the future. We have a vague sense that something is not right, that we are not keeping up, or living up to our potential. We also see signs that frighten us: this country’s steeply rising debt and our own, increasing healthcare costs, the declining quality of education, global climate change along with our political leaders’ vague threats of terrorism. Personally we feel vulnerable, that somehow we haven’t done enough to protect ourselves.

Alan Watts, a former Episcopal priest and teacher of Zen Buddhism points out that we will never be satisfied if our happiness depends on material things or on other people’s opinion of us. I have read Alan Watts’ books. I recognize this wisdom. At the same time I feel wounded by knowing that this was too hard for him and that he died young of alcoholism.

Watts never wrote openly about his own struggles with alcohol, but in a touching aside he writes anonymously about what seems to be his own experience. “In very many cases [the alcoholic] knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not being drunk is worse. It gives him “horrors” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.”

If anyone should be immune from this poison, the symptoms of which include our basic sense of insecurity, it should be graduates of Harvard Divinity School. They should be both intelligent and spiritual. Last June I heard Professor Kim Patton give the sermon at graduation. She addressed students applying to jobs and doctoral programs who were concerned about “gaps” in their resumes. She said, “Like the wider American culture, Harvard lionizes the loner, the brilliant individual who has won some high-level game of musical chairs where 150 players contend for 8 seats and the music is by Mahler.” She reassures them that, “[t]he gaps on the resumes are the abysses into which we fall from time to time, and in the process, fall into the hands of the living God…”

The bad news is that everyone has the poison, we all just show different symptoms of the same disease. I pray about this because I believe that this poison leads many to misunderstand one of the most important things that Jesus ever said. This verse is a famous one. At football games people hold up signs that say “John 3:16.” In it Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Unfortunately a vast majority of Christians in this country interpret these words to mean that if you are not in their Jesus club, God will condemn you to eternal death. For them, unless you say certain words or think certain thoughts about Jesus, in the way that they do, you are what they call “unsaved.” This is not a biblical word so you may have trouble understanding it. But if you spend time with Christians like this you hear it all the time. They talk about their “saved” friends and their “unsaved” friends. And then the complicated world filled with our own poison suddenly seems a lot safer and simpler to them.

“Saved” Christians may not tell you this, but the context of Jesus’ remarks matter. Jesus is talking to Nicodemus a kind of first century theology professor who came to him secretly in the night. Nicodemus wants to know who Jesus is. And because like us both of them are people of Israel, Jesus answers by referring to a story about the time when the people of Israel chose to wander in the desert rather than follow God’s instructions.

Jesus says, “[j]ust as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…” Unless you remember the story of Moses curing his snake-bitten people with the bronze snake pole, this can be one of Jesus’ most perplexing statements.

Even after reading both stories this might justifiably leave you lost. This is a prophetic symbol, in other words it is a sign to let you know what God is about to do before it is too late. We’re all familiar with symbols like this. We encounter them in secular contexts all the time. For instance, in the movie Titanic, we see the officers on the bridge drinking a cup of hot coffee on a cold night peering out into the fog. The camera pans all the way down the ship, as some ice floats by while the audience hears cellos make a low shimmering sound.

In ancient times people believed that when you saw something, a part of you went out from your eyes and touched the world. It sounds odd when Jesus compares being crucified to being lifted up like Moses’ bronze snake. But Nicodemus probably understood what Jesus means. Seeing the bronze snake could not take away the poison but it could restore life. In the same way, if we can be touched by a God who suffers on the cross, we can have life too. This does not mean that all the poison in the world instantly disappears. But Jesus does make it possible to survive, to really be alive again.

This is the central mystery and challenge of Christianity: letting go of a picture of a god who miraculously adjusts the world to meet the demands of our ego and embracing the real Jesus who suffers for you and with you and in you, who through you brings love into the world.

It is hard to keep an image of Jesus suffering on the cross at the center of our life. We want to substitute that picture with the Messiah king who uses overwhelming power to justify us and bring the kind of peace we want. But in the end it is the suffering Christ who can save us.

I wish I could speak at greater length about this, because I have seen so many miracles happen through Jesus’ love. Sometimes amazing grace comes out of terrible suffering.

Fred Craddock is one of the most distinguished preachers of our time. He tells the story about God’s persistence in calling his father. He says, “When the pastor used to come from my mother’s church to call on him, my father would say, “You don’t care about me. I know how churches are. You want another pledge… Isn’t that the whole point of church?”… My nervous mother would run into the kitchen crying for fear somebody’s feelings were hurt… I guess I heard it a thousand times.”

“One time he didn’t say it. He was at the Veteran’s Hospital. He was down to 74 pounds. They had taken out his throat, put in a metal tube, and said, “Mr. Craddock, you should have come in earlier. But this cancer is awfully far advanced. We’ll give radium, but we don’t know.” I went in to see him. In every window [were] potted plants and flowers. Everywhere there was place to set them – potted plants and flowers… There was by his bed a stack of cards. And I want to tell you, every card, every blossom, every potted plant [came] from groups, Sunday School classes, women’s groups, youth groups… of my mother’s church – every one of them.”

“My father saw me reading them. He could not speak, but he took a Kleenex box and wrote something on the side from Shakespeare’s Hamlet… He wrote…, “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.” I said, “What is your story, Daddy? And he wrote, “I was wrong.”

Look around you. Imagine that you are people of Jesus, because you are. In your veins you have the same poison that is killing others all around you. But somewhere in your heart God has revealed his suffering for you. In our shared Eucharist his love becomes eternal life in you.
_____________
This part of The Wisdom of Insecurity is quoted in Monica Furlong, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2001), 150.
Kimberly C. Patton, “When the Wounded Emerge as Healers,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter 2006, 57
This whole paragraph comes from a conversation with Rick Fabian who is preparing this material for a lecture at Sewanee on the open table.
Cited in Jim Fitzgerald’s sermon, “Serpents, Penguins and Crosses,” Preacher’s Magazine Lent/Easter 2006. http://www.preachersmagazine.org/webmar26.htm

Malcolm C. Young Num. 21:4-9
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M7 Ps 107:1-3,17
4 Lent Year B (RCL) Eph. 2:1-10
Sunday 26 March 2006 Jn. 3:14-21

Divine Gifts

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0800

“Indeed what can they give in return for their life?” Mark 1

Once there was a young shoemaker so down on his luck that he only had enough leather to make one pair of shoes. By the time he finished cutting the leather, it was time for him to go to bed. He left the pieces on his workbench planning to sew them into shoes the next day. In the night two naked elves come and build the shoes. The shoemaker is astonished by what he discovers. He has never seen such perfectly stitched shoes.

The first customer who enters his shop recognizes the amazing workmanship and buys the shoes with so much money that the shoemaker is able to get enough leather to build two pairs of shoes. Again he cuts the leather and goes to bed. In the morning he finds two absolutely perfect pairs. The shoes sell for such a high price that he is able to buy enough leather for four pairs of shoes. Over time the shoemaker attains tremendous success.

Before Christmas, he and his wife start wondering who is making these extraordinary shoes. So they leave a candle burning in the shop and hide while the elves do their work. The next day his wife says, “there must be some way for us to thank these little men who have made us so rich. They look cold. I’m going to sew them warm clothes. Why don’t you make them some little shoes?”

When the clothes are finished the shoemaker and his wife leave out the small suits and shoes, and hide themselves again. The elves are delighted to find the clothes. They put them on and sing, “Looking cool and smooth, we’re out the door / We will not build shoes anymore!” They dance a jig around the room and leave forever. But by this time the shoemaker has learned this fine craftsmanship himself and continues to prosper.

I want to give this story a little more time to sink in before I come back to it. This week Heidi and I were working in the kitchen when a song by Marvin Gaye came on the radio. I said, “Do you remember when we used to listen to that album?” and we shared a moment of awkward silence.

Thirteen years ago after visiting our families in the West over Christmas, we returned to our Boston apartment in zero degree weather. The first thing I noticed as the cab cruised up to our apartment was the black ash in the high snowdrifts. A man was boarding up our place with sheets of plywood. “Heidi we’re going to be okay, but we may still need the cab,” I said. That night our home had burned. The water that put out the fire had frozen as it ran down our walls and all of our rugs were under three inches of dirty ice. Pretty much everything we owned was destroyed, all Heidi’s clothes, my books and our Marvin Gaye album.

Not too long after this I served a church in which a third of the parish lost everything in the Oakland Fire. These kinds of catastrophes remind us that what we are to ourselves is fluid. Things do not just belong to you, to a certain extent they are you. Memory isn’t something that just happens in your head. Many of the memories that define our identity are embedded in objects like photographs, art, a particular church pew, even your spouse’s favorite coffee mug or a collection of record albums. Anyone who has lost someone they love realizes this. Physical objects extend our memory, they give us the power to listen or speak to distant selves.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) in Nicomachean Ethics tried to describe what freedom means to human beings. He starts with a definition of individual happiness. He points out that this depends on the well-being of others. Not only does this make suffering unavoidable it implies that in some sense our self includes others, that it is distributed beyond our body in this way too. Who we are does not just depend on individuals it also depends on groups of people: republicans, Giants fans, Americans, Roman Catholics, Vietnamese immigrants, Los Altans and Rotarians.

If the self includes our things, other people and our sense of group identity, what we are will always be a deeply spiritual question for us. In today’s gospel Peter isn’t thinking of this when he confronts Jesus. What Peter believes he is makes Jesus’ teaching completely unsettling for him.

It is a mistake to project our own political identities back on ancient peoples. What we mean by Jewish today is not exactly how Peter understood himself. As a person suffering under the Roman occupation he grew up in a society which prayed for a great ethnic, political and religious leader called the Messiah. The Messiah would lead his people in military campaigns that would atone for their all of their humiliations.

This picture of a Messiah is so powerful that we still have it with us today. My son Micah found a Christian fundamentalist comic book at Christ Church about “the Lion of Judah.” This heavily muscled Jesus wears a knight’s armor and rides a huge black stallion. He protects people from evil by the exercise of overwhelming force. Our “shock and awe” images of Christ as the King invariably refer back to this sort of picture.

But when Peter evokes this tempting image of great force on our side, Jesus rebukes him. Jesus redefines what we mean by Messiah and this changes who we are. If God does not just destroy our enemies but suffers for us, this changes everything. Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mk. 8).

Jesus criticizes what we think of as our life, as our self. We are often wrong in what we think is most authentically ours or us. Jesus points out this truth by saying that we actually lose our life when we try most fervently to protect it. In many respects this already seems obvious to us.

This summer my friend Mark was out at night in the North Beach district of San Francisco when he ran into Jay, another old friend. At first Mark barely recognized Jay. He had a beard and his hair was tangled. You could see Jay’s toes sticking out of his shoes and his clothes looked old and worn. Mark has always been one of my most generous friends and he immediately invited him to stay at his house for a few days. Jay smelled terrible and Mark’s girlfriend didn’t like having a homeless heroin addict in her apartment. Jay grew up in a town just like Los Altos but somewhere along the line he had lost himself.

We all know so many examples of people who are losing their lives in order to gain something else. Because we are here in Silicon Valley we especially see people who have given themselves over completely to a business idea or a new technology. This culture affects every aspect of our life here from the way we raise children to city planning. John Calvin (1509-1564) wrote about this in a different way saying that the human mind is a “factory of idols” (Inst.). As creatures made to worship we persist in venerating the wrong things.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes about what he calls the “consumerization” of the church. He asserts that too often these days the church merely assimilates the worldly values of our culture into its doctrines and practices. He worries that we treat faith as merely a matter of “personal style.” To address this, he believes Christians need to keep God’s eventual judgment at the center of their faith. Although fundamentalists talk about salvation as a matter of simply believing in Jesus (in the way that they do), Williams reminds us that in the Bible Jesus tells stories about judgment based not on our system of belief but on our actions in helping people who are in need. This is how God separates the sheep from the goats.

I too believe in the judgment of God, but for me this is not something that only happens in a distant future. Jesus overthrows the idea of a messiah as world dictator and the one whose primary relation to us has mostly to do with judgment. What is far more central to Christianity is our experience of life and faith as a gift. God gives us life and Christ gives us a life that transcends fear. The problem is that both of these can be difficult for us to receive.

Because we live in an age dominated by the global economy we do not understand gifts very well and this makes it harder for us to love God. Twentieth century anthropologists who study societies in history and around the globe identify certain characteristics of gift exchange that differentiates it from barter or trade.

By now most people know where the term “Indian giver” comes from. Imagine it is 1638 and an Englishman is visiting the lodge of a Pequot Indian. The host shares a pipe of tobacco to make his guest feel welcome and then offers him the pipe that it has been smoked in. This peace pipe has circulated among the Pequots for generations. The Englishman recognizes its value puts it on his mantelpiece to save as a family heirloom.

Later, a different group of Pequots visit the Englishman’s house and he is surprised by their expectation that they will smoke together and that he will give them the pipe. They are angry that he is taking something out of circulation, something that should be shared. He is hurt to realize that some gifts aren’t privately owned in the way he imagined and come with certain expectations.

According to anthropologists, what makes given objects and sold products different is that we do not get a gift through our own efforts. Gifts also create communities and relationships. Gifts that are removed from circulation cease to be gifts. It is in exactly this sense that I understand Jesus who says, “For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Our life and the salvation we find in Jesus cease to exist when we stop giving it away.

A very strange thing happened to me last night. After being too busy to write a sermon all week I left an outline on my desk. When I woke up, I discovered a whole sermon carefully typed into my computer. Those naked men started it with the familiar story of the “Shoemaker and the Elves.” This parable has been used many times to describe the experience of creating art.

A mentor takes time to pass on the skill of composing music or drawing or ceramic tile work. At first the learner is in no position to repay anyone. It takes time to receive the gift. Eventually, although the student’s art is influenced by the master, it becomes individual and unique. Then for this gift to have value it must be practiced and passed on.

I don’t mean to equate God with a naked elf but I believe that Christianity is like this. It is learning to receive a gift by beginning to give ourselves. It is saving the one thing that is truly ours by giving it away. So we give not out of fear that God will judge us but because we are made in the image of a God who pours himself into the world and gives himself away
__________
This version is heavily based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 48.
Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of the World,” On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 3.
This work originated in Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift which I cannot find on my shelves right now. For this summary see Ibid., xiv.

Malcolm C. Young Gen. 17:1-7, +
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M6 Ps 22:22-30
2 Lent Year B RCL Rom. 4:13-25
Sunday 12 March 2006 Mk. 8:31-8

Voices from Heaven

Sun, 5 Mar 2006 12:00:00 -0800

“And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased…” Mark 1

I know for sure only that it was ordinary time and that angels were there. Colored light on a summer afternoon streamed through stained glass windows in patterns on the floor. The people in the world who most loved me handed me back and forth. Then my grandfather held me in his large hands and looked into my eyes (in the way I have come to be blessed by the newly baptized myself). Then he poured water on my forehead and God’s song entered my heart.

I have to be honest with you. There have been times when I have not heard that song. There have been periods in my life when I could only hear the demands of my own ego, times when my anxieties and fears made me not listen to this song. I have done things that have made me not want to believe in God or at least that made me try to forget God’s justice. Like you perhaps there have been moments when I have been so tempted by despair that this melody sounds infinitely distant. Tragedy with my lack of faith has made me forget that in every place God brings forth the new.

But that song has never left me. It makes me more likely to notice what is good and beautiful. It gives me confidence and a sense of purpose. The greatest things I accomplish in my life arise out of that song. I have been blessed by my godparents and by other Christians who fill in for them. They have learned this song so well that when I am lost they help me to find my place in the music.

You all look so comfortable that I hesitate to ask you this. But I am curious. Please stand if you are a godparent or sponsored an adult friend or your own child for baptism. As you stand in this church before the altar remember the feeling of responsibility that you had on that day. What were your prayers and dreams for that person?

Today’s gospel has haunted me this whole week. Using the simplest Greek words Mark has compressed lifetimes of symbolic meaning into only five short sentences. What is heaven, repentance, belief, the dove, baptism or Satan? What does the father’s voice sound like? What does the spirit look like? Was Jesus surprised? What does it mean to fulfill time or that the kingdom is at hand? How can Jesus be tempted and why is it in a wilderness with wild animals and angels? How did he feel when he learned that his cousin John had been arrested? What does Jesus’ proclamation of the good news have to do with us?

The song, your hopes at baptism and this story all concern what makes us spiritual beings. And this has a real effect as we decide who we are trying to become. Many people do not believe in the spiritual life or that at baptism God puts a song into our hearts.

I wonder if Thomas Midgley, Jr. believed in this song. Midgley has the dubious distinction of being the single living organism that has had the most destructive influence on the global environment. In the 1920’s refrigerators killed people because they used toxic gases. Midgley worked to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive and safe to breathe. He brought the world chlorofluorocarbons or CFC’s. Overnight CFC’s came to be used in thousands of different products from aerosol sprays to car air conditioners.

It took fifty years to realize that CFC’s were completely destroying the ozone layer of the earth’s protective atmosphere. We only now understand the fragility of the processes that sustain life on this planet. If the ozone that we depend on was distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere this layer would only be one eighth of an inch thick. The problem is that one pound of CFC’s destroys seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. At the time of his death we didn’t understand this, but Midgley did comprehend the dangers of his other invention.

God must see some amazing connections and coincidences in the human carnival. One of the most extraordinary is that the same person who invented CFC’s also brought us the idea of adding lead to gasoline. Because the dangers of lead were already well known this was a controversial move from the very beginning (that was why they called the gasoline additive ethyl rather than lead).

In human beings lead lasts forever. Lead that you swallow or breathe is not excreted but becomes more and more concentrated in your bones and blood. It is a neurotoxin. Symptoms of overexposure include blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer and convulsions. In acute forms it produces terrifying hallucinations and madness.

Immediately after its introduction, workers in lead gasoline additive plants started suffering from lead poisoning. In only five consecutive production days at one plant five workers died and another thirty-five were permanently afflicted with brain damage. When employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions a company official disingenuously told reporters that, “These men probably went insane from working too hard.”

For forty years the only scientific studies on the effects of lead on human beings were funded by manufacturers of lead additives. Perhaps this is part of the reason we failed to realize what we were doing. Before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere. Since then quantities of lead in our air have sky-rocketed. Almost ninety percent of it came from automobile tailpipes. When lead was removed from all gasoline in 1986 lead blood levels in America fell by 80 percent. But because lead lasts forever most of us still have 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago.

The inventor of ethyl additives Thomas Midgley did understand the effect of lead. He himself had been poisoned only a few months before he gave a demonstration of lead’s safety at a press conference. He poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held a beaker of it up to his nose for sixty seconds claiming that he could repeat this daily without any harm. The truth was that Midgley recognized the danger of his invention and stayed away from it when reporters weren’t around.

If you don’t believe in the song that God puts into your heart at baptism it makes it a lot harder to hear your conscience. I try to imagine what led Midgley to lie so blatantly in order to cover up the danger of a compound that he was about to introduce into the tissues of every animal on the planet. Perhaps he feared being called a failure. Maybe like all of us, he just wanted people to admire him. We do this all the time. We become gods to our self.

One of the most famous teachers at Harvard Divinity School was Henri Nouwen. He gave up the prestige of academic and public life to live with and care for mentally disabled people at L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto. He once said that many of the people he lived with there heard voices. These voices said, “If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving.” I hear that voice and I wonder if Thomas Midgley did too. Nouwen goes on to describe the spiritual life as a process of gradually learning to listen to the voice that says instead, “You are my Beloved.” This is the song and the promise given to us at baptism.

The Buddha in his teaching draws our attention to this phenomenon. He believed that we would be happier if we acted as if we did not have a self that needed to be pampered, protected and asserted. He reasoned that without an overriding consciousness of the self we would no longer hate or feel greed or be anxious about our status and survival.

He called this state of nonattachment, nirvana. Nirvana means literally “blowing out,” like a candle after supper. It signifies the extinction of the ego, total freedom from the self that is the source of all unhappiness.

I might be inclined to more fully believe this if I didn’t hear the song first given to me at baptism. That music whispers to me that I do not need to extinguish my self, but that I don’t need to protect it either. Everything I have, everything I am, comes as a gift from God. That gift becomes real when I give out of that life to others.

On Friday our children Micah and Melia and I were leaving Cooper Park when they saw a woman struggling painfully with crutches. Our daughter asked her at great length what had happened. And after she finished explaining, I could see that my children wanted so badly to help her. Our son spoke right up and told her that I was a priest and could give her a blessing.

It was an amazing moment for me. I love what I do. I feel awed and humbled in that moment when I pronounce a blessing. Somewhere along the line our children have learned what this means to me.

But this calling from God does not come to me alone. All of us through baptism receive the song that will change the world. The barrier separating you from heaven is torn away. God’s spirit dwells in you. You are the location where God happens to other people.

In conclusion, I have tried to express what this song means to me and the way that ignoring or hearing it changes our lives and the world. When it comes to this music all of us are part Thomas Midgley, part Buddha, part Henri Nouwen, part Micah Young. I believe that listening to this song and living it is what Jesus means when he calls us to repent.

If you dare, I invite you to shut your eyes and imagine the song that God put into your heart. It is not loud because it is intimate, in the deepest part of you. It sounds like this: “You are perfectly loved as my beloved child. You belong to me, and I belong to you. I give everything to save you and draw you to myself. You will be safe. Trust this gift that you are to the world.” Amen.
____________
Although this idea comes from a google search of Midgley, the rest comes from Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), Chapter 10.
“The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow… by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.” Ibid., 159.
Henri Nouwen, “The Life of the Beloved,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1991. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/nouwen_3502.htm
Karen Armstrong, “Is Immortality Important?” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 1 (December 2006), p. 24.
This arises out of Henri Nouwen’s “The Life of the Beloved.”

Malcolm C. Young Gen. 9:8-17
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M5 Ps 25:1-9
1 Lent Year B – Aunt Lucy Visit 1 Peter 3:18-22
Sunday 5 March 2006 Mk. 1:9-15

Good to Be Here

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 12:00:00 -0800

“Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here…” Mark 9

It is good for us to be here! It is good for us to be here together today with the Nevksy Choir. It is good to be with the Stirling sisters who have missed only a handful of Sundays here over six decades (the bars they gave for Sunday School attendance would be a mile long for each of them), with Helen Connolly who has never just walked past me but has given me a hug on my best days and my worst. It is good to be with the Old Testament prophet Fritz Schneider, with our self-effacing bishop Dick Millard and Debra Ting who has the most holy smile I can imagine. It is good to be in the place where you can find the infectious laughter both of June Barlow and Patrick Brown and little Jimmy Snell.

On any given Sunday most of us here, along with a little boredom, discover a glimpse of what is holy. But every week one or two of us has the lid ripped right off, God lifts the veil and we see him face to face. This is not a slick or polished church. We make a lot of mistakes. We ring a huge bell in your ear if you are a minute late. Perhaps this makes it seem even more remarkable how often the holy overwhelms us here.

When Jesus goes up to the mountaintop to pray with his three closest friends it happens there too. Jesus is transfigured before them in a dazzling white glow. The unbearable glory and light behind everything in the universe appears. The chronology of ordinary time is broken open. Suddenly the two men who for readers of the Bible have most indisputably seen God, Elijah and Moses, appear before them. Then Jesus’ most bold friend Peter says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” The author then speaks up to defend Peter writing, “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

Most biblical interpreters seem to pretty much agree on two things about Peter. First, he betrayed his friend and teacher Jesus in the final hour. Second, that in the face of the sudden appearance of the holy, Peter couldn’t help but say something stupid. In defense of Peter, I think all of us have been guilty of talking too much when we should have let a moment speak for itself. The scholars forget that one remarkable thing about being human is that sometimes when we say, “it is good for us to be here,” we actually make the moment better. Somehow being with someone and saying, “this surf is great,” feels better than enjoying it alone. I imagine this may be true of our mountaintop experiences too.

Every year the beauty of spring in California takes me by surprise. I can’t help but remember that spring when Heidi and I fell in love. You’ve all probably heard the story too many times. Heidi was a delightfully perky college student with a yellow daisy behind her ear. I was an always over-dressed, overly-serious university administrator. I sent her love poems over the campus mail system.

But dating me never was easy. That spring I invited Heidi to walk with me from UC Irvine’s campus over the hills to her aunt’s house in Laguna Beach. It’s about ten miles as the crow flies. The problem is that we’re not crows. I had walked about a quarter of the way there myself, but there are no real trails, so I wasn’t completely sure where to go.

At the halfway point we came to a barbed wire fence. On the other side, there in the middle of nowhere, stood a mean-looking bull. Heidi doesn’t even like suspicious dogs but there was no way to go around. Our plan was to have me jump the fence in front of it and distract the animal while Heidi walked quickly behind him over to the next ridge. The bull made a few menacing gestures but we got by it.

Within an hour as the adrenaline trailed off, we reached the top of the mountain. Surrounded by acres of wildflowers and rich grasses, alone on top of the world we seemed so far above the distant desert, the suburban sprawl and the infinite blue Pacific. The air was so clear we could see snow on the mountains beyond L.A. and our whole future seemed spread out before us. We felt God blessing us and in that moment something of who we are today came into being. The holiness we experienced there will always be part of my soul. It was good for us to be there.

I know that there are places in your life where it was good to be, when God’s glory flashed before you and left you speechless. You have enriched my life by telling me about your moments of transfiguration. Many of us in such an instant have been changed forever by God. These stories become so central to how we understand ourselves, it is almost hard to realize how many others have had these mystical experiences too.

One of my favorite writers, the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) collected dozens and dozens of mountaintop experiences in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. He writes, “there are moments of sentimental and mystical experience… that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination when they come…” James believed that scientists should not ignore these transformative experiences. He reports that even people who do not believe in God can have them.

I want to give an example of what James means. He quotes a Swiss person who wrote the following on a hiking trip. “I was in perfect health… I can best describe the condition I was in by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God – I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it – as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life… I felt his reply.”

The Bible reports on this experience too. The prophet Elijah was running for his life and hiding out from the king’s army in a cave. God didn’t appear to him in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in a sound of sheer silence. Like Elijah God has called to you. Like Elijah God has a purpose for you and it will probably be clearest in the moments when he seems most near to you.

Christianity involves more than the joy that we experience when God comes to us on the mountaintop. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. This Wednesday we enter the holy season of Lent. Six weeks later on the last Sunday of Lent we read a story very much like the one we have today. Jesus goes off again with Peter, James and John to pray in Gethsemane on the night he is arrested. He says, “I am deeply grieved” and asks them to stay awake with him, but they cannot. These two stories share in common the prayer, the holy mystery of God’s actions, the scared friends at a loss for what to say.

These two stories are like bookends which contain Lent. We as Christians live both out of these stories and between them. We know the enlightening joy of being transfigured by God and the darkness of Gethsemane. This week I stayed with a friend during an examination after doctors discovered that she had cancer. I learned that a man I love will have to have surgery a fifth time because all the other efforts to cure him have failed. I talked with a couple I know going through the wasteland of divorce.

I know that darkness has touched you this week too. Maybe you feel lonely or vulnerable or you worry about the future. Perhaps you feel betrayed or see no way to be reconciled to someone who you are supposed to love. We are all well-acquainted with darkness.

This is hard to explain but our relation to the darkness is part of what defines us as Christians. Other religions and philosophies of life seem mostly to avoid the darkness. Their gods seem distant and pure, uninvolved or oblivious to the pain of the world. But this is not the way of the Christ. Jesus chooses to be betrayed and humiliated. He chooses to suffer terrible pain all for the sake of love. In fact, as Christians we believe that there is something about this world that can only be cured by the self-sacrifice of God.

The Gospel of John frequently describes the crucifixion of Jesus as his glorification. For us Jesus transforms the darkness of failure and suffering and despair. The light of his transfiguration and our own transformation always remind us that the darkness will not overcome us. But his example does not just transform our experience of death and suffering.

Through him we experience the light in a new way too. Those mountaintop experiences when we have seen God face to face become more than just a comfort to us. They provide us with the peace and confidence to take the risks and make the sacrifices demanded by love.

By now everyone has probably heard the old preacher’s story about the abbot of an Egyptian monastery. A visitor asks him, “Do you believe in miracles?” The monk pauses and replies, “It depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people say it is a miracle when God does what the people want him to do. We say it is a miracle when the people do what God wants them to do.”

In conclusion, I pray that you will have a holy Lent, that you will visit the mountaintop and create the space in your life that will make it possible to hear God’s call to you. I pray that you will discover within yourself the glory and joy of transfiguration along with the power that love’s sacrifices demand. I am grateful that we share each other’s company in our travels as we pass through the valleys of darkness and the mountaintops of clear light. I feel thankful that Jesus is our guide. Like Heidi and I on top of Signal Hill we get a glimpse of the future of God’s kingdom when we gather together. It is good for us to be here!
___________
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 in Writings 1902-1910 (NY: Library of America, 1987), 23.
Ibid., 68.
For this comparison I am indebted to the more articulate Rowan Williams, “Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, March 2, 2003. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2003/030302.html
From Madeleine L’Engle’s sermon “The Mythical Bible,” http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/l'engle_3501.htm

Malcolm C. Young 1 Kings 19
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M4 Ps 27
Last Epiphany Year B – Nevsky Choir 2nd Visit 2 Peter 1:16+
Sunday 26 February 2006 Mk. 9:2-9

Connections We Cannot Make

Sun, 5 Feb 2006 12:00:00 -0800

I love my friend David like a brother. Last week we were driving in a car together. He told me that in the last five years something had happened to his faith. He said, “Malcolm, I’m not sure I believe it anymore.” “What don’t you believe?” I asked. “Any of it,” he replied, “heaven, a god who made the world and sees what we do and cares about us. I’m not sure that the world has any meaning at all. If there was a god, why is there so much suffering?”

In our Old Testament reading a Shunamite woman has such absolute faith in God that when her only child dies she tells no one, not even the boy’s father. She believes with such conviction that God will restore her son and God does. My friend David asks, what happens when the child does not come back to life?

This week I felt the presence of God and it scared me. It happened during a bible study with my friend Sheila. As we read this story I was trembling as I remembered visiting her daughter in the hospital less than four years ago. Like the Shunamite woman Sheila had also trusted God and asked for help. But this daughter, whom she loved more than life itself, never recovered. This week there was a heavy silence in the room and we wondered what Sheila would say. For me she is a kind of saint. Through these terrible years she has continued to bring so much love into this church. So why do David and Sheila draw such different conclusions about the relation between God and tragedy?

I think it is because they have very different pictures of Christianity. My friend David seems to believe that Christianity offers a reason for why everything happens. He talks as if its primary purpose is to defend God’s actions, as if the idea of heaven serves only to justify the bad things that happen here on earth. For him God is either all-powerful or he simply does not exist. Perhaps David imagines God moving us around like a cosmic chess player. Maybe he imagines God’s act of creation as one of choosing from an infinite number of possible worlds, one without mosquitoes, one without email spam and another without cancer.

David seems to see suffering and pleasure almost in an absolute sense as if it were possible simply to measure the amount of each, to put them on the scale and see which was greater. In his eyes suffering outweighs the good. Because of this he cannot accept God.

The primary difference between David and Sheila is that David is trying to work out answers alone (or from what we hear about God outside the church). Sheila on the other hand is part of a community of people who are sharing their experiences, trying to love God and to heal the world.

The god who controls everything like a cosmic puppeteer is the god of some ancient Greek philosophers. It is emphatically not the God of the Bible. From the very beginning, Christians have regarded death not as necessary for a greater good but as God’s enemy. In the book of John Jesus says about his crucifixion, “Now is the judgment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (Jn. 12:31-2).

Suffering, evil and pain are not the work of God although at times they are the occasion in which we see God’s grace. The Bible inspires us to heal suffering whether we encounter it in poverty, loneliness, racism, psychological disease, violence or even in arguments which suggest that our lives have no meaning. The story of Jesus is about how God desires to heal us so badly that he will suffer terrible pain and betrayal in order to have a relationship with us.

Human beings are tormented not just by what we have loved and lost, or by the pain that we have suffered or witnessed. The real issue is the pain that we are responsible for both in ourselves and in others. The real question is do we contribute to the world’s joy. On this earth we do not experience suffering or joy in absolute quantities. Our actions and our consciousness magnify them.

When my son Micah was one year old, I took him to an exhibit of photographs by Edward Weston (1886-1958) who lived in Carmel during the first half of the twentieth century. At the time we lived in Boston and it was a miserable winter day with gray skies and freezing rain falling onto dirty snow. The trees had no leaves. There was nothing green outside at all.

As he slept in the stroller I wandered through the exhibit. There were so many beautiful pictures of California. At first I felt a little homesick. Weston had photographs from Monterrey of pines, cypress bark, rocks and beautifully shaped sand dunes. But he also had more surprising pictures: close ups of the twisting skin of peppers that looked sensual like a human body. He showed the geometrical perfection of an artichoke that had been cut in half. The strangest images of all were pictures of a toilet that made it look breathtakingly beautiful. When we left the exhibit the world was transformed for me. That whole afternoon I could look at very ordinary things and see great beauty. Our life can be like this, it opens up to deeper levels when we pay attention.

The seven-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater was on his way to the contest that could give him his next championship. As the plane taxied down the runway he kept sending text messages on his cell phone. The passenger next to him told him that it would interfere with the plane’s electronic systems. Slater felt tempted to be a punk and swear at the man, but he didn’t. Instead he turned his phone off and they had a long conversation together. Afterwards, Slater realized that this change in attitude was a turning point for him and even contributed to his victory. Loving better helped him become a better surfer.

In our lives we can choose to see beauty and bring love into the world or we can deny them. We can take the suffering that we feel and make other people suffer too. So why do we fail to see? Why do we experience and cause suffering? Why does God often seem so distant from us?

In today’s reading the apostle Paul writes, “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” I used to think that this meant that Paul was a fake, that he pretended to be something that he wasn’t, as if he were trying to fit into a high school clique in which he did not belong. But since then I have come to see this in an entirely different way.

People who do not believe in Christ see differences between people as irreconcilable, that the difference between Palestinians and Israelis, black people and white people, skaters and jocks, parents and teenagers, are the most important things about us. I think that what Paul means is that in Christ we do not have to be cut off from each other, we do not have to continue to harm or be harmed by each other. God invites us into a new kind of life that will give us power over suffering. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury says, “God is in the connections that we cannot make.”

Christian de Cherge (1937-1996) was a Trappist monk in Algeria who dedicated his whole life to building bridges between Christians and Muslims. In 1993 when Islamic radicals grew in power he and his fellow monks had the chance to flee the country. Instead they chose to risk their lives so that they could continue their work. Three years later de Cherge was beheaded by militants.

He left behind a letter to his family in which he expressed his fears that his death would be used to condemn the people of Islam whom he loved. In it he writes, “Obviously, my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve or idealistic… But such people should know that my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able – if God pleases – to see the children of Islam as He sees them illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences. I give thanks to God for this life, completely mine yet completely theirs [also] to God who wanted it for joy against… all odds… And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves if it pleases God, our common Father…”

The twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich argued that sin is not a particular immoral act like killing or stealing. Instead sin affects all of us all the time as the state of disconnection which he calls estrangement. We are cut off from the God who we were created to intimately know. We feel isolated from each other. Like porcupines on a cold winter night we huddle together for warmth and poke each other with our sharp spines all at the same time.

Perhaps the most important thing that Tillich ever wrote was a short sermon called “You are Accepted.” His point was that, in the words of the Bible, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ” (Rom. 8:39). We cannot earn God’s love by being good or by believing in him. God loves us no matter what we have done and no matter who we are. After Tillich’s death his family found a copy of this sermon in his desk in which he had written a dedication, “to ME.”

In conclusion, I think that many of us at times feel tempted to believe in a god whose power is greater than his love. But whether it is through a photographer of toilets or a champion surfer God shows us many ways to bring more beauty and love into the world. Jesus, the crucified and the Holy One of God, with his children such as Christian de Cherge and Paul Tillich struggle together against suffering and death. The God of infinite connection is with us and invites us to share in joy.

During bible study this week, I told my friend Sheila that I especially wanted this sermon to speak to teenagers. And this woman who lost her daughter said, “above all tell them that God loves them and that this love can lift them up even in the darkest moments of their lives.”

Let us pray: O most holy God you bring us into connection with yourself and each other. We pray that your care will always be felt by those who know you and those who do not yet see you. We ask this in the name of your son who died so that we can love. Amen.
______
Cited in Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004), 39.
Ibid., 32.
Anne Foerst, God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us about Humanity and God (NY: Dutton, 2004), 178.

Malcolm C. Young 2 Kings 4:8-37
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M3 Ps 142
5 Epiphany Year B – Scout Sunday 1 Cor. 9:16-23
Sunday 5 February 2006 Mk. 1:29-39

Jordan Day

Sun, 8 Jan 2006 12:00:00 -0800

My first church secretary Marianne was a Hitler Youth. I don’t mean this pejoratively or metaphorically, although she really could be a bulldog to callers trying to sell me copying machines or Sunday School curricula. Marianne grew up during the 1930’s in Germany and thoroughly enjoyed the campouts and singing and camaraderie with other Hitler Youth. The Hitler Youth she talked about and the one you read about in the encyclopedia (“a paramilitary organization… [that] served as a recruiting ground for new storm troopers”) sound entirely different.

Marianne lost both her parents in World War Two. I will never forget the frightening stories she told me about being an orphan in post-war Germany. What you sensed she was leaving out made the stories even more terrifying. I’ve been thinking so much about Marianne this week as I read Hans Erich Nossack’s book Der Untergang written three months after the Battle of Hamburg.

Nossack tries to write about an experience that simply cannot be expressed, about memories that are too difficult to recall. On July 27, 1943 in the midst of 8 continuous days of bombing, Allied forces trapped fire fighters in the city center while detonating incendiary bombs on the periphery of the city. This created a Feuersturm, a firestorm with 150 mile per hour winds and 1500 degree Fahrenheit temperatures which burned up 8 square miles of the city. Street asphalt burst into flame, tens of thousands of people were incinerated or asphyxiated in bomb shelters. In that week sixty thousand people were killed and one million people lost everything they owned.

We are used to seeing images of horror on our television screens. The remarkable thing about Nossack’s account is how different it seems from news coverage of Iraq or from a normal crime drama. Nossack writes about the interior experience, the alienation and shock that despite the terrible situation does not seem discontinuous with normal life.

He poignantly describes the abyss separating those who lost everything and those who could help them, why even a generous hand can tire of giving and why it is even more difficult to receive (20). He writes, “Who could blame the helpers for being disappointed when they [realized] that what they offered [clothes, shelter and food]… basically didn’t make any difference at all” (20).

A refugee would walk through a strange room, “touch an object, hold it and look at it absently. The host would follow him with his eyes and expect a statement like: We too once had something like this… But instead… the unspoken question would fill the room: What is the use of still having such things” (20). “Those who were known to have experienced unimaginably frightful hours, who had run through fire with their clothes burning, stumbling over charred corpses… in whose arms a child had suffocated; who had seen their house collapse right after their father or husband had gone inside… why didn’t they cry and lament? And why this indifferent tone of voice when they spoke of what they had left behind…” (21).

“So it came to pass that people who lived together in the same house and ate at the same table breathed the air of completely separate worlds. They tried to reach out to each other but their hands did not meet. They spoke the same language, but what they meant by their words were completely different realities” (22).

This terrible divide between people who showed by their actions that life goes on and those who cast doubt on the meaning of life made each individual an island. It might seem odd to you but writing in the heat of the moment, Nossack focused less on the loss of life and property than the annihilation of self that he saw in these isolated survivors.

This week I have also been reading another book. At first the two seemed like total opposites. A classmate from high school named Franz Wisner recently sold the film rights of his book Honeymoon with My Brother for something like a million dollars.

Franz begins by telling how his long-term girlfriend left him a few days before a lavishly planned wedding at Sea Ranch. In the aftermath of this total disaster he and his brother decided to go on the honeymoon - together. Traveling suited them and they visited 53 countries over the course of two years.

The book shows me the ways people both change and remain the same over time. It helps me to better understand feelings that I could not articulate about people I used to know. Sony Films is probably more interested in it because Franz was the press secretary for former governor Pete Wilson and they see potential for the story as a buddy film.

I think Franz tries to show that this experience changed him from being a political manipulator to a person who recognizes what really matters, that through his travels he became someone capable of really being close to another person. But I don’t know if he succeeds.

Visiting another high school friend in the Czech Republic Franz meets Jana “an aspiring singer and model.” He writes, “She wore a black miniskirt that barely covered the tops of her stately legs, a snug mocha-colored sweater… She was gorgeous" (102). Franz describes Jana’s underwear and the joy of sex with her (I’ll spare you the details). But then he devotes the next page to how boring she was afterwards and how he couldn’t get her to leave until he faked his own departure from the city. In Franz’s stories people only seem to have importance in proportion to their usefulness to him.

On the surface this book about a wealthy clever, often cynical Californian traveling the world with his brother could hardly seem more different from the refugees who lost everything in the firebombing of Hamburg. But both books left me with the same kind of sadness, the loneliness of disconnection. In Nossack’s words they are both about “people who lived together… and… breathed the air of completely separate worlds.”

The people in Hamburg did not know who they were because losing everything made them question their existence. My classmate seems similarly isolated because, strangely enough, it takes a lot of energy to have everything. I guess the problem with having everything is that even then there is still always more.

There is a kind of darkness that engulfs us when, for whatever reason, we cease to see beyond ourselves. Every one of us knows this feeling. Today the church celebrates the first Sunday of Epiphany. The word epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphano which means to shine. On this day we give thanks for the light that God shines in us and that the darkness around us cannot extinguish it.

In Bulgaria they call Epiphany, Jordan Day because that was the river in which Jesus was baptized. In some cities there, after the Epiphany church service, the priest takes the statue of Jesus in a procession out of the church and through the city. When they arrive at the river, they break a hole in the ice and drop the statue into the depths. The young men of the city make larger holes, strip down to their swimming trunks and dive in. Deep under the ice and water, without air, sound or light they grope around until one of them finds the statue and brings it up.

These young men must really love Jesus or the fame associated with finding him. I love this image of looking for Jesus in a world of darkness. We all do this. I am grateful that Jesus is not that hard to find.

At Christ Church we find Jesus together. To use Nossack’s words we reach for each other and our hands touch. We speak the same language. We use words that refer to the same experiences. Church growth experts recommend that churches segregate the congregation. They claim that programs and church services should keep younger people and older people apart so that they don’t bother each other.

But we as a community have made a conscious choice. We decided that we would be one body in Christ, that we would either succeed or fail together, that we would do our best to make room for everybody. Although it seemed impossible at the time, we have met with remarkable success.

But this isn’t always easy. A few weeks ago a small group of older people were wondering how they could help make coffee hour easier to host. One or two of the ladies thought that they should ask parents to rein in their children so that they don’t devour all the snacks before the service is over. Other older ladies hoped that they themselves could provide coffee hour snacks for kids so that this wouldn’t be necessary.

When a few moms realized that some older women were prepared to make food for their children every single Sunday, these young ladies immediately began an email conversation about how they could make coffee hour better for both younger people and older people.

I am not naïve. I realize that a very small number of people see the glass as half empty and that it is human nature to distrust people who are different from ourselves. The remarkable thing to me is the extent to which we as a community get it. Jesus is with us. We are doing out best to embody his teaching of unconditional love.

The light God shines is the light of this community. Ultimately we see it because this is a place where you are accepted. If you are married or divorced or single or gay you are accepted here. If you are an inconsiderate younger person or a cranky older person, you will find love here. If you are not sure that you believe, if you think that you are unforgivable this can be a place where God is present for you. You are accepted here if you are a refugee who has lost everything or if by every measure you seem to have it all.

When my secretary Marianne lay dying of emphysema in her hospital bed, she was part of a church that even accepted former Hitler Youth. I spent many hours visiting her in those days and one of her greatest gifts to me was this Epiphany prayer from her childhood written in German.

Lord, let me hunger now and then,
Because being always full makes us dull and sluggish
And struggle moves us to strength.
Hang the crown of glory
Higher among the stars…
And let the light of Epiphany shine brightly in our hearts and our actions
That seeking Jesus we will find him.
Amen.
__________
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth.
Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943. Tr. Joel Agee (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Franz Wisner, Honeymoon with My Brother: A Memoir (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
From Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, 61.

Malcolm C. Young Isa. 42:1-9
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon M1, D1 Ps. 89:1-29
1 Epiphany Year B Acts 10:34-8
Sunday 8 January 2006 Mk. 1:7-11