Redwood Trees

Letters from Prison

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 10:56:55 -0800

I have several friends currently serving prison terms or who have recently been released. This means that for years I have always had one of their hand-written letters with me in my appointment book. I treasure these letters and keep them there until I have time to write back. In an email age of hurried conversations, there are not many times when someone communicates with me in such a thoughtful and deliberate way.

My friend Cliff served a sentence at Fort Dix, the largest federal prison in America. He wrote at length about his fellow prisoners who he describes as “stunned by the length of their mandatory sentences.” 80-85 percent of them serve time for drug related offenses, almost every one of them grew up in poverty.

Cliff taught me that in two decades the federal prison population doubled every three years in large part because of mandatory sentencing. The federal government pays more than three times as much on prisons as education. And expenditures on federal and state prisons continue to grow at a faster rate than any other area of government spending. Still drugs are cheaper and more available than ever before.

Maybe people on the outside have begun to realize that there is something wrong with this. In a hopeful sign this Tuesday the federal sentencing commission voted unanimously to retroactively decrease sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. This effort to treat poor people’s drug crimes in the way we do those of wealthier offenders will affect nearly 20,000 current inmates (85% of whom are African American).

Cliff’s letters describe the indignities, frustrations and small graces of daily prison life. Every day they have four standup counts which take ninety minutes each. Every aspect of their life happens under a microscope. Prison is a religious place with chapel services and Arabic lessons for Muslims. Many people pray before eating and reading scripture is a normal thing to do there. At the same time Cliff does not try to hide the dangers. As a gay man keeping his identity secret, Cliff has even more reason to be afraid than the others.

I guess that in part these letters mean so much to me because what is happening on the inside seems like a more intense version of what is happening outside. My prison-bound friends seem more acutely conscious of the way we are hemmed in by circumstances, looking for human connection and small triumphs in an often de-humanizing world. They seek hope just like we do – but they are more aware that they are doing this.

Cliff and I went to seminary together and one time he surprised me by pointing out just how much of the Bible is prison literature, that is, either composed behind bars or written about prisoners. That is true of today’s gospel. John Buenz might describe it as another shocking intrusion into our happy holidays world. It makes the social problems of reindeers and snowmen look pretty insignificant.

Like the carefully handwritten notes in my appointment book, John the Baptist sends a message from prison. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another” (Mt. 11)? Fort Dix, San Quentin, Vacaville, Mule Creek, etc. may seem like desperate places to us. King Herod locked John in Machaerus a remote military fortress above the Dead Sea on a peak about the height of Black Mountain. Imagine how he felt at the base of those ninety foot fortified walls with steep ravines dropping off on all sides.

John the Baptist especially prized his freedom. He loved to be outdoors in the wild, close to nature and its holy source. He made his own clothes and lived off the land until the warnings that he believed came from God offended the rules. John knew that the tenuous balance between the king’s anger at his criticism and fear for his popularity could not last.

We read this basic outline of the facts not only in the Bible but in the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus who died sometime after the year 100 A.D. We have two different stories about what happened next.

One way of understanding John’s life and ministry has been passed down by the Mandeans. One could think of them as John the Baptist’s modern-day disciples. I especially wanted to talk about this religious sect today because their whole way of life has been so deeply threatened in just the last four years. Some estimate that when American forces invaded, there were 60,000 Mandeans in Iraq. Fewer than five thousand are left there today. As pacifists whose faith forbids them to carry weapons, they are terribly vulnerable in lawless Iraq so they are fleeing into neighboring Jordan and Syria.

Their ancient monotheistic religion holds a sharply dualistic view of the world. They may be the last remaining form of the Gnosticism that influenced Christianity back in the first century. They have their own language (Mandaic, a form of Aramaic), scriptures and ancient traditions. Mandeans see themselves as the spiritual children of Adam. Although they revere John the Baptist as the most important prophet to humanity, they regard Jesus as at best misguided and at worse a liar.

Because of their vulnerability as a tiny religious minority and the importance of saving their culture, I believe it is of the utmost importance that this group receive favored treatment in trying to immigrate to the United States. We have so much to learn from them.

I can’t read their scriptures so I cannot comment on their piety or imagine what their faith looks like from the inside. One way they have helped me this week is to re-imagine our own scriptures in a different way. For the first time I have seen the difference between John’s message and Jesus’.

Above all, John warns us about the future. He says repent you brood of vipers, the axe is lying at the foot of the tree. God will soon come in glory to condemn and destroy all that we take for granted. Jesus says some of the same things, but to use a modern expression, he does stay on that message.

This is the most important thing that I have to say this morning. In short, for John, God’s kingdom is coming. We look forward to it in fear or perhaps we hope it brings us revenge, or justifies our sacrifices. However for Jesus, God is not just a historical endpoint, but our companion right now. Perhaps even more crucial, he says that our relationship with God is not conditional on our good behavior or even our repentance.

I have no idea what the earth would be like if there were two billion Mandeans and only fifty thousand Christians, but I do believe that God helps us to transform the world. Because of loyalties to our own families and communities, it is hard to really live as if God loves all creation and every person in it. But from the time of Christ this has been the goal for Christians. This trust in God’s universal love and companionship has profoundly shaped history. Often we cannot see this because the gospel makes us so deeply intolerant of suffering that we fail to recognize our progress. We have moments of doubt.

This doesn’t just happen on the scale of whole societies or historical epochs. Like my friends in prison we experience this crisis of doubt persistently in our own lives too.

I love this church and spend most of my waking hours trying to think how we can more fully be God’s people. But this week has been hard for us. We had two funerals for friends we thought we couldn’t live without. At the same time our senior members have been struck down by strokes, cancer, bone-breaking falls, heart trouble, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

On Thursday afternoon I found myself at Pilgrim Haven nursing home visiting four of our saints when two more came by for physical therapy. Loie Shires was there. Fifty-seven years ago she was the wife of our church’s rector. Because of this she probably understands our family’s life here better than anyone else. If this were not enough, she has lived in almost all the same towns that I did and knows pretty much everyone in my family. She worked as a volunteer in the year and hospital where I was born. Her job was to hold the babies.

I remember this every time I see her. She’s like a kind of guardian angel to me. Now she lies down all day with her eyes closed and looks so miserable that I cannot help but despair. What kind of church could we ever be without our friends like her? I worry about our future.

That is the moment when like a prisoner I send word out in prayer to God. I need a thoughtful and deliberate communication when I ask, “Is Jesus the one or should we wait for another?”

Surprisingly to me the news I received back in answer to my prayer is good news. Jesus doesn’t require us to believe so much as he asks us to see. My faith is not based on an intellectual argument about the existence of God. It arises out of a deep trust that comes out of what I experience. Over my life this trust has proved to be reasonable.

People like Loie, the Bryson’s, Palmers, Connolleys, Jane Shea, Reg Pickett, Don Berger and the scores of others who built this church make my trust in God credible by the holiness of their lives and their kindness.

In conclusion, I am convinced that one day all the captives will be freed, that we will meet God and be reunited with one another in the way John the Baptist preached. But I also believe that we see signs of God’s presence right here. Now, in our day, God’s kingdom is breaking through the fabric of the ordinary. We experience Jesus in holy communion, in the lives of the people who love him, in this church which is his body in the world.
_________________________
David Stout, “Retroactively, Panel Reduces Drug Sentences,” New York Times, 12 December 2007.
One of my favorite letters describes four things that Cliff learned in prison. I don’t know if you’ll find these observations helpful: 1. “Do YOU” is a concise way of saying how prisoners succeed in getting along with each other. Don’t get into someone else’s business. Don’t criticize or pry. Work on yourself. 2. “The moral careers of prisoners vary widely. Some acknowledge past wrong-doings, some don’t; some repent, some don’t; some are as pretty close to innocent of crime as anyone; some place high value on acts of conscience and generosity and demonstrate this through the way they live; others don’t. Prison has changed my assumptions and prejudices regarding those who are incarcerated.” 3. Wiping tables in the Chow Hall can really be a blessing because it builds solidarity. I would have experienced much more isolation without it. 4. If you experience a bad day in prison (having your coat confiscated or just too many negative feelings at one time), the best thing you can do is “to lay it down” or go to bed and start next day fresh. This comes from a November 2003 letter.
This refers to the sermon John Buenz preached about the difference between having happy holidays and a holy advent at Christ Church on 9 December 2007.
Nathaniel Deutsch, “Save the Gnostics,” New York Times Op-Ed 6 October 2007. See International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/07/opinion/edeutsch.php.
I want to give just two short examples of this: The Greek thinker Aristotle (384-322 BC) could be the most important intellectual in history. He lived in the Golden Age of Athens and had major breakthroughs as a great scientist and philosopher. For him every existing thing constantly tries to reach its perfect potential, its telos or end. This had important political implications for how we distribute goods. The best flute should go to the person who is the best flute player not the richest person or the king.
Similarly people have different kinds of potential. For instance, the people who have the highest degree of civic virtue, who are efficient, moral and wise should be the government’s leaders. Unfortunately, Aristotle also believed that for a democracy to function, citizens needed to be free from menial work. Aristotle thought that this should be done by people who were by nature best suited to serving as slaves.
In the twentieth century we have a tragic problem in what we call human trafficking, people are bought, sold and transported across borders. But there are few in authority today who would try to justify human slavery. Our indignation in part arises from the Christian conviction that God loves all people.
We feel an imperative to share the extraordinary medical advances and production efficiencies made possible by technology. That is why the Red Cross works so hard to deliver aid to people in rural Afghanistan. We try to deliver medicines that save children’s lives. The Taliban doesn’t want people to feel dependent on the west and will raid a village and take everything that the aid workers left. They want to keep people in that primordial state of suffering. Helping these people matters to us because they are God’s creatures too. In our worse moments we will use people as means to our ends, but at some level we also recognize this is wrong.
This idea comes from Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
_________________________
© Malcolm C. Young, 2007 Isa. 35:1-10
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon N26 Ps. 146:4-9
3 Advent (Year A) (RCL) James 5:7-10
Sunday 16 December 2007 Mt. 11:2-11

Letters from Prison
“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Mt. 11:2-11).

Waiting

Sun, 2 Dec 2007 10:37:47 -0800

“Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?” Rainer Maria Rilke

What are you waiting for? This may sound like the first part of, “don’t just stand there – do something!” What do you wait for? When in your life have you had the most intense experience of waiting?

There are different kinds of waiting. Every year we wait for the reindeer bandits. They return some night before Christmas to reconfigure the lighted reindeer at our house into obscene poses. The children feel upset by these vandals. Heidi admires their pluck and wants to put out two baby reindeer this year. Keep awake, you do not know on what day they are coming.

Dr. Seuss writes about, “Waiting for a train to go / or a bus to come, or a plane to go / or the mail to come, or the rain to go / or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow / or waiting around for a Yes or No / or waiting for [your] hair to grow… / Waiting for the fish to bite / or waiting for wind to fly a kite / or waiting around for Friday night / or waiting, perhaps, for [your] Uncle Jake / or a pot to boil, or a Better Break / or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants / or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.” Dr. Seuss describes waiting as a “most useless place.”

We wait in frustration, hesitation or as old-fashioned procrastination. Dr. Seuss loathed waiting as a form of not doing anything. This week I learned that waiting can be an action. It can be a work of freedom, responsibility, intimacy and love. It can profoundly change us. Our life is shaped by what we wait for and those with whom we wait.

Almost everyone now seems to be waiting for Christmas. Let’s talk about three ways people do this so that we can understand better how to wait and what this means for us spiritually.

1. First there is the secular Christmas. Honestly, even the best of us (I have in mind Nancy Stirling and Mary Hosek) will experience a Christmas that is overwhelmingly secular. We cannot help but be deeply shaped by the consumer culture surrounding us. Think about it. What do people really expect out of Christmas?

Our neighbors might regard it as good for the economy. Maybe they hope for a generous Christmas bonus or that the office party won’t be too awkward this year. Christmas might mean no more than nostalgia for something that happened long ago. Perhaps they regard Christmas as a time of childish fantasy, a break from their boring routines. Maybe it is just the solstice, when the high tide of increasing darkness begins to recede again. Peace on earth is too much, so they just hope that the terrorists won’t get us.

As Christians, when we stand in the perspective of faith rather than merely absorbing the values of our culture, these seem pretty inconsequential. No one ever says it, but there could hardly be a greater contrast than waiting for a Christmas that one hopes won’t be so bad, and waiting for God’s glory to be revealed to all flesh. We wait for the coming kingdom, when the divine power sweeps away injustice, hunger, fear, greed and the thousand ethnic, national and class identities that make us hate and distrust each other.

The small hopes of a secular Christmas inevitably reflect the cynicism of our times. Cynicism leads to the materialism we hope will distract us. It fosters the unbelievable myth that there is no God beyond our self, that we are impotent little gods whose value comes from other people’s admiration of our accomplishments and possessions. But at some level we know that others really don’t care about this.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno writes, “The visible Universe… strikes me as too narrow. It is like an over-small cage against whose bars my soul beats its wings… The thirst for eternity… is called… love.” When we stop to think about the secular worldview we find our wings soon beat against it. We recognize its inadequacy and its infinite distance from the truth.

2. Although in Silicon Valley most of us have much less to do with religious fundamentalists, they offer a second picture of what it means to wait. Millions of Americans buy books like the Left Behind series, How to Recognize the Antichrist or The Late Great Planet Earth. They read current events as confirmations of coded biblical prophecies about the fast-approaching end of the world. Premillenialists believe in Christ’s bodily return before his thousand-year earthly reign (which they call the millennium).

I especially want to talk about this kind of waiting because that story of Christian faith relies so heavily on today’s gospel. Many of you may have seen the bumper sticker that says something like “In Case of the Rapture this Car Will Be Driverless.” Sometimes you might think that this would be preferable given how the current occupant is driving. Some fundamentalists believe that at the rapture the good will rise in their bodies to Christ leaving the rest of us here behind to fight it out.

People who believe this, point at today’s gospel which says, “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore; for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Mt. 24).

For me the irony about this passage is that in context it seems to mean exactly the opposite of what premillenialists say it does. The leaders in Jesus’ time don’t know him or trust him. They don’t believe what he says about God’s love or the coming kingdom - so they ask for more specific details and look for ways to discredit him.

To his disciples Jesus insists, “about that day no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mt. 24). In short, there can be no prophecy, no hidden clues in current events or the Bible that will reveal what the end will be like. Even Jesus himself does not know. (This should be a difficult text for Trinitarians like me who believe in the divinity of Christ. It is a startling thing to realize that Jesus himself cannot know the future in this way.)

Fundamentalists take this passage which denies the possibility of understanding the mystery, and make it a kind of hidden knowledge itself. The ultimate conformist fear of being left behind becomes the guiding principle rather than the imitation of Christ’s love for the world that we have right now. I think that these kinds of believers want to be un-humiliated. They would rather fantasize about God proving them right than seek to be Christlike themselves.

3. There is a third kind of waiting beyond the secular and the fundamentalist, a kind of waiting that transforms what is here right now. I learn this from each of you. It is the unpresuming readiness of Jesus who gives us a vision of God’s peaceful and beautiful kingdom but who himself does not know the time when it will become real for us.

No one could have been more surprised than me that a six-month assignment as a college administrator at U.C. Irvine would turn out to be the most important job of my life. Three months into my work there I started dating a vivacious young woman. We didn’t seem to have much of a future. That summer I was moving to Boston and she was going to Nairobi, Kenya. We left and didn’t see any chance that we would ever live in the same city again…

But I wrote to her every day. She would receive a letter that had a 112 written in the corner. It was the 112th day that she’d been gone and the 112th letter I had written. This kind of waiting was new to me. The theologian Paul Tillich writes that, “[a]lthough waiting is not having, it is also having. The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we already possess it.” He goes on, “[w]aiting anticipates that which is not yet real. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait.” Every day as I waited, Heidi came nearer to me. Two hours after she got off the plane I proposed to her.

I’ve had similar experiences at other times in my life. This week I reread my journal from when Heidi was pregnant. In those days of waiting you can clearly see a young man gradually became a father. Waiting this fall for my cousin to return from Iraq has fundamentally changed my relationship to her.

Inevitably we find our life shaped by what we wait for. In this season of Advent we wait for Jesus and find ourselves transformed by him. This Advent I encourage you to do something tangible for the sake of God’s kingdom and to also prepare your heart for Christ through prayer.

In a way, this church is a community of people who wait with each other. Every day I pray for people who wait: for Rick, Mike, the Palmers, Anne Bryson, Earl Connolly, for Zeina’s new life, for Ann Sena as she has early contractions, for Reg Pickett as he waits for his test results, for friends as they look for new jobs. I pray for each of you when you need it.

Through this waiting with you, God changes me and becomes more present to us. Our life is shaped by what we wait for and those with whom we wait. All the prophets, the Bible and creeds, our worship together shows that waiting is another way of being with the transcendent reality which renews us.

In conclusion, an old preacher says that how we wait for Christmas is an indicator of who we really are. In this community we have much greater hope than the secular world. We insist that God’s kingdom will break through the over-small cage that confines our wings. The kingdom of Jesus unites the living to the saints who have gone before. It saves us from poverty of spirit and the dark forces of despair.

Unlike the premillenialists who feel afraid of being left behind, we do not presume to know how or when this will happen. We have faith that nothing created by God, and truly living in God, will ever be lost forever. Waiting for God, becomes another way of being with God and a preparation for God’s holy kingdom.

__________________
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet tr. Stephen Mitchell (NY: Vintage, 1986), 61.
Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go! (NY: Random House, 1990).
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations tr. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 43-4).
This quote and the whole sermon about how waiting changes us is deeply indebted to P. C. Enniss’ “Waiting” on Day1 (http://www.day1.net/?view=transcripts&tid=663). He’s the old preacher I refer to in the conclusion.
__________________

Malcolm C. Young © 2007 Isa. 2:1-5
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon N24 Ps. 122
1 Advent (Year A) (RCL) Rom. 13:11-14
Sunday 2 December 2007 Mt. 24:36-4

A Society Without Pharisees?

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:38:37 -0700

Two Harvard Divinity School students were visiting the chapel at the business school across the river and decided to go in to pray. Kneeling in front, the two start praying, “Lord have mercy on me. I am an unworthy sinner.” A new business student barges in and sees their devotion. He doesn’t know quite what to do so he joins them. He says, “I’m a sinner. I’m not worthy.” The first seminarian whispers to the second, “Now look who thinks he’s unworthy!”

Okay, it’s an old worn out joke, but it does refer to a pretty common experience among Christians. Most theologians have regarded pride as a sin worse than lying, coveting, adultery, murder or anything else. By this they don’t mean school pride or the justifiable good feeling that we have in doing something well. Pride as C.S. Lewis writes is essentially competitive and puts us in conflict with every other person. Pride doesn’t mean that we are happy to have lots of money or a beautiful spouse or work success, a perfect body or a perfect soul. It means that we will only be satisfied with having more money, a better spouse, better grades or more job success than someone else.

Pride puts us at odds with each other and Jesus frequently points out that pride makes it hard to receive gifts from the God who loves us. Furthermore, pride can more than totally negate any good thing that we do manage to do (as is illustrated by today’s Pharisee who cannot stop comparing himself with the tax collector). At the same time pride is such a slippery sin that all of us probably have felt proud of being humble.

It helps to be reminded of this even though I think that all of you know it already. The sort of pride that our society takes for granted and even actively encourages is a thoroughly anti-God state of mind that walls us off from the one force in the world that has the power to save us.

The problem I have wrestled with this week is different and not so easy to explain. In our time we have seen extraordinary success in missionary work as millions of people have become Christians in Africa, Asia and around the world. At the same time we also witness something like the reverse of this in Western Europe. Formerly devout catholic nations like Ireland and Spain are changing before our eyes. Lutheran churches in Scandinavia and Germany are empty as are thousands of Anglican churches in England. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury who was here to talk about gay issues with American bishops, certainly must feel his position weakened by abysmally low church attendance figures back home.

For a while societies like these can live off their Christian heritage. The stories, ideals and values live on even though the churches are empty. But eventually these cultures begin to lose something of their Christian character.

In many respects, including our statistics on church attendance, I think that the Bay Area as a cultural region stands between Europe and America. I wonder what will happen here as our inherited Christianity begins to wear off.

So my question this week is: has our context already changed so much that this parable has lost its original meaning? When a society no longer has religious Pharisees or people like them can it understand this story? Since Episcopalians have consciously tried to remain a part of the society around them, I am asking if we fully understand what Jesus means.

This story of the Pharisee and the tax collector exemplifies a familiar theme in Luke, that the way we experience things will be reversed in the kingdom of God. In Jesus’ words, “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Lk. 18). The first century Christians who heard this story knew exactly what Pharisees were like. The point of the story to them may well have been to criticize those long-term church members who looked down on the new believers who didn’t yet understand what being a Christian meant.

The very next story in Luke has Jesus saying, “Let the little children come to me.” The word “children” for these first century Christians also meant those who are new to the faith. One of their major problems seemed to be that seasoned believers made it difficult for new people. Although as a community we are committed to growing, we do this in our own more subtle way today.

Although we have our own ways of making things more difficult for newcomers, I would not say that it was because we are too much like the Pharisees. Jesus makes a more subtle point than to merely dismiss the Pharisees altogether.

Tax collectors in the first century weren’t responsible IRS bureaucrats with pocket protectors upholding the letter of the tax code. Those first century tax collectors were thugs colluding with the occupying army and richly profiting from selling out their own people. Tax collectors basically prepaid an advance to the Roman Empire which gave them something like a license to extort money from their neighbors. Jesus is not saying that really tax collectors are good people too.

Perhaps Pharisees have a worse reputation among Christians now than they ought to have. The word Pharisee means “separated ones.” Others called them this because they had their own rules about interpreting the Bible, a stricter code of ethics, a disciplined prayer life. They refused to compromise their faith in order to get ahead and so they did not swear allegiance to the emperor. We know that they believed in a kind of life after death and a divine judgment.

Jesus’ point in the parable was not that the tax collector really wasn’t a sinner and the Pharisee really was one. Jesus instead wants us to know that even our attention to religious obligation if pursued in the wrong way can obstruct our openness to God. The important difference for Jesus between these two men is that the Pharisee depends on himself and the tax collector depends on God.

But can we understand this if our limited experience means we no longer meet those overly committed people that we might call religious Pharisees? I wonder what the implications of this are for two particular groups of people. Robert Wuthnow a sociologist at Princeton has just published a book called After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty- Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion.

Wuthnow points out demographic trends that keep this generation away from church. Americans are marrying later, having fewer children often later too. They have more education and live with more religious diversity. Because one’s marital status is the strongest determinant of church participation, the postponement of marriage and children means lower church attendance up until the early forties. In one generation the increase in the proportion of people who are not affiliated with a church has risen from on person in eleven to one person in five.

In short, Wuthnow claims that people between the ages of twenty and forty-five influence religion mostly by staying away from churches. Because of this, he worries that churches as we know them will not survive. Wuthnow writes, “My view is that congregations can survive, but only if religious leaders… pay considerably more attention to young adults than they have been.”

In many respects lack of commitment seems like a more pressing problem for this group as a whole than Pharisaical attitudes. I wonder what we can do as a congregation to reach young people who may have a difficult time understanding and accepting our religious rituals.

The second group I have in mind is this church. The tithe, or ten percent of our income, is accepted by Christians as the biblical goal for charitable giving. According to the diocese’s statistics this church actually gives about 1.43% of our income. In defense of the Pharisee, imagine what we could do if everyone gave ten percent of their time and income for the kingdom of God? Imagine if ten percent of our conversations were for the sake of God? This kind of commitment would make it a lot easier to reach the people who are not already here this morning.

Are there too few Pharisees in our lives for this parable to make sense to us? After a great deal of thought and prayer, I don’t think so. Luke writes, “Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves” (Lk. 18). The Greek word means to remain over and above, to save, secure, to metaphorically put ourselves up on a shelf for protection from the world below.

Regardless of our level of commitment to God, the church, our families, ourselves or anything else, at times we are those people. We’re a little like the tax collector and a little like the Pharisee. But we also know from our experience as Christians that our confidence cannot come from our goodness, worthiness or even spiritual humility.

Jesus wants us to have strength in God rather than ourselves because that is the only kind of power that really matters anyway. When we open our hearts to God we begin to see the world as it really is, we discover our full uniqueness as God’s children. When we stop trying to pacify and save that elusive voice of our ego we hear the pure voice of God.
________________________
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (NY: Macmillan, 1943), 108-114.
Martin E. Marty, “On Wuthnow,” in Sightings 10/22/07.
Brian D. McLaren, “Book Review of After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty- Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion,” The Christian Century, 16 October 2007, 50.
“Historic Stewardship Trends vs. Diocesan Averages for Christ Church Los Altos,” published in 2004 by the Diocese of California.
_______________________
© Malcolm C. Young, 2007 Joel 2:23-32
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon N22 Ps. 65
22 Pentecost Proper 25C (RCL) Stewardship Lunch 2 Tim. 4:6-8, 16-8
Sunday 28 October 2007 Lk. 18:9-14
“Jesus told his parable to some who trusted in themselves…” (Luke 18).

Fully Alive

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:05:46 -0700

What would make you more fully alive? On a beautiful spring day with rain clouds threatening at Humboldt State University, I felt it. I could smell the sweetness of the grass and mud on the rugby field. A flaw in Humboldt’s defense meant that I had just scored. At the time I didn’t know that I was in the best physical condition of my life. But as the scrum set up about fifteen yards in front of their goal line I knew that I was about to score again. I picked up the ball, my legs pounding, breaking tackles, straining forward. Every part of me physically, emotionally, spiritually, seemed heightened in that moment.

I feel this vivid sense of being alive when I surf or run the fire trails above town or ride my bicycle to my next appointment. I feel it when I make music, drawings or photographs. I felt it strongly when I first told Heidi how much I loved her. I feel it when I am closest to God.

That Samaritan leper had this vivid feeling of being alive when he discovered that Jesus had healed him. Unlike the nine others that Jesus healed, he experienced this so powerfully that we still remember his expression of gratitude twenty centuries later. Imagine him, doubly isolated - from the Jews who despised him and from everyone who feared his disease. In an instant Jesus heals him and suddenly he is free again. He can rejoin the human race. He becomes more fully alive. Perhaps this made it possible for the Samaritan to recognize who Jesus was in a way that the others missed as they hurried off to the priests.

Many times you have heard me say that knowledge opens up the scriptures, but this week I’ve been wondering if knowing more makes it harder to understand this story. There are two questions that have been gnawing on me this week. The first has to do with context. Looking at what happens before the story does not make it any clearer. Jesus talks about not creating stumbling blocks for people’s faith. Then it seems that even those who do this should be forgiven seven times a day if they repent. To this the disciples say increase our faith and Jesus tells them that great power comes with faith the size of a mustard seed. He goes on to say that they are like slaves expecting to be seated at table before their master, that they shouldn’t expect to be thanked for doing what they are supposed to do in the first place.

This all happens directly before a story about a Samaritan who didn’t do what he was asked to by Jesus but who instead thanked him. At first, it seems hard to know what role thankfulness should play in our lives.

My second question concerns history. We know from experience in the Anglican Communion that you have the worst fights with the people who are most similar to you. This was true in ancient times also. From the standpoint of history Jews and Samaritans had a great deal in common. Like the Jews, Samaritans regarded themselves as followers of Moses and accepted the first five books of the Bible. However they rejected the ideology which regarded David’s line of kings as divinely favored. The Samaritans resisted southern control in general. For this reason their temple had not been in Jerusalem but on Mt. Gerizim. John Hyrcanus one of the Maccabees and a ruler of Israel destroyed it in 128 BC.

In Jesus’ time tensions between Jews and Samaritans still ran high. A few years before Samaritans had desecrated the Temple at Jerusalem and killed pilgrims headed there. In response, Galileans had supported bandit raids that targeted Samaritans. In this climate of distrust, and what we would call terrorism, leprosy seemed to be the only thing that could bring Jews and Samaritans together.

So this is what has been bothering me. Did Jesus send the Samaritan to the Jewish priest? That would be like sending me to a Muslim imam or rather to a religious leader who I regarded as an enemy. If that’s the case, what merit is it that the Samaritan didn’t go but instead returned to Jesus? I don’t understand this and perhaps the best that I can do is to try to see why.

Last winter Tina Pan introduced me to audible books with a copy of the New Testament. I’ve been listening to a little of it every week, but at times it sounds almost unrecognizable to me. The voice the narrator uses sounds completely different than the voice I hear in my head as I read. That audible book reader makes Jesus sound so condemning that it almost ceases to be Jesus for me. In this story about the healing of these ten lepers, Jesus’ tone of voice is absolutely everything.

“[T]he other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Does Jesus say this in a hectoring or condemning way? Is this chiefly a reprimand or an expression of surprise? The Jesus I know in my life makes me hear this instead as a kind of infectious joy, maybe even admiration for a man who crossed a kind of boundary. This Samaritan felt God’s healing love so strongly that he “praised God in a loud voice,” and threw himself down at the feet of one of his enemies. In a way, I think Jesus saw that the Samaritan’s gratitude made Jesus’ work more complete.

1. I draw two conclusions for my life from this simple story. One of which I would like to illustrate through a simple thought experiment. Imagine that you are five years old and a grownup in a lab coat tells you about Jane who found $5 on the side walk; John who was splashed by a passing car; Jim, who helped his mother wash dishes and Sue who stole a toy from her younger brother. After each story the adult asks you how you feel about that person and to answer you point to one of four faces with looks ranging from a dark frown to a cheery smile.

If you are like the children in this Harvard study you unconsciously prefer lucky people to unlucky ones. In the same way that we prefer people who do good things, this statistically measurable “lucky effect” turns out to be a major factor in how we regard people.

I don’t think that any social scientists have said this, but the lucky effect applies to how we understand ourselves too. Whether we are religious or not we tend to see a magical connection between what we do and our luck. I experience this almost every day. This week I was visiting a woman in the hospital. She’s in terrible pain from a fall and she said something like, “I shouldn’t have said that I was doing well, then this wouldn’t have happened.” We take responsibility for impossible things that simply happen to us.

The authors of the lucky effect study point out the pernicious effects of this kind of magical thinking. At a deep level we tend to regard poor people, sick people as more responsible for their condition than they are.

You may be wondering where I’m going with all of this, but who could be more unlucky than a first century leper? Imagine being abandoned and feared by everyone except your few enemies unlucky enough to have the same disease. When the world thinks you somehow deserve it, Jesus comes along and completely undermines this magical thinking.

For Jesus this is not some kind of transaction in which the lepers have to do something particularly good (like go to the priests) in order to be healed. Jesus simply sends them on their way and heals the good and the bad, his fellow Jews and the Samaritan, the grateful and ungrateful alike. The first thing Jesus shows us is that being good doesn’t make you better.

2. Jesus also teaches us something useful about our basic disposition - that gratitude is more important than your religious heritage, religious knowledge or even always doing precisely what Jesus says. This is the reason it is so important to teach children and ourselves to express and to experience gratitude. What makes you more fully alive? Gratitude to God does.

Every time someone tells me that they cannot believe in God because they see so much suffering, I have to bite my tongue. I want to tell them that we are constantly being blessed by so many gifts from God that we don’t have the gratitude or attention to receive. And everything that happens – like that moment in the rugby game or when I first told Heidi I loved her – only happens once.

The poet Denise Levertov expresses this in a poem. “All which, because it was / flame and song and granted us / joy, we thought we’d do, be revisit, / turns out to have been what it was / that once, only; every invitation / did not begin / a series, a build-up: the marvelous / did happen in our lives, our stories / are not drab with its absence: but don’t expect to return for more. Whatever more / there will be will be / unique as those were unique. Try / to acknowledge the next / song… / present, as now or never.”

I think that it is for this reason that the apostle Paul says give thanks in all things.

In conclusion, what would make us more fully alive? From the very beginning of the church people like Irenaeus recognized that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. We can choose an attitude of entitlement or the magical thinking that we are what we have made ourselves. The lucky effect can convince us that we somehow deserve our good fortune or that we brought on our own suffering.

Or we can participate in God’s glory. We can recognize that the richness of our life is confined only by the limits of our gratitude and imagination, not by God’s love for us. Our days are filled with surprising and unexpected blessings that we cannot receive until we cultivate our gratitude to God.
____________________
Harbour Fraser Hodder, “The Lucky Effect: Fortune’s Favor” Harvard Magazine, March – April 2007, 18-20.
Denise Levertov, “Once Only.”
“… giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20).
____________________
© Malcolm C. Young, 2007 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon N19 Ps. 66:1-8
20 Pentecost Proper 23C (RCL) 2 Tim. 2:8-15
Sunday 14 October 2007 Lk. 17:11-19

“Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice…” (Luke 17).

Increase Our Faith

Sun, 7 Oct 2007 09:01:21 -0700

“Increase our faith O Lord!” Maybe you have prayed this before. In July my brother-in-law said exactly this when he told me about his worries that he couldn’t pay his huge new mortgage because his career doesn’t always guarantee a steady paycheck. I have heard this prayer spoken by grown children by the side of their more-pious parents’ hospital beds. I can imagine feeling this in the face of lay-offs at work.

We face such serious crises in education, the economy, the military, government, and culture. The pressures are so overwhelming that on Monday night our Men’s Club speaker, the founder of Intero Real Estate and a man who insists on optimism as a prerequisite for success, told us that he actually recommends that his employees simply stop listening to the news. The foundations seem to no longer support us in a world of declining faith.

I came back from clergy conference feeling how much everything seems to be falling apart. Church seminaries can’t attract enough students and are lowering their expectations for them. They talk about consolidation, decentralized theological education and more entrepreneurial professors. Even apart from the dismal possibility of whole dioceses leaving the church, our national church offices are in the process of restructuring because of tight budgets. Our own diocese keeps carrying a number of declining former parishes and seems to be on the verge of shutting down some of these permanent missions.

Even here, one of the brightest places I know of in the church, people like Ann Bryson, Evelyn Kolbe and Reg Pickett are getting sicker. Our adult worship attendance has declined in the last two years and we face a kind of leadership crisis in filling positions on the vestry, altar guild, choir, home ministry and outreach committees. I became a priest precisely because I saw this beginning to happen and I believe it is worth dedicating my life to the church. Still I say, “increase our faith Lord!” I guess I mean something like increase my confidence, increase my sense that we can get through this.

Just as my fantasy machine shifts into high gear and I start imagining a far better world than the one God made for me, Jesus tells me to stop. He reminds me that this mustard seed faith just might be enough.

Harvard cell biologists have started making mice with a rare type of muscle (IIX) that combines the qualities of slow twitch marathon-runner muscles with the fast twitch muscles of a sprinter. These genetically modified mice can run 25 percent longer on the treadmill and cover 50 percent more ground before being exhausted.

The fantasy of a genetically-modified faith, isn’t so different from other fantasies of transcendence. I imagine what it would be like to play the organ like a virtuoso but never practice, or pitch a hundred and ten mile per hour fastball, or bench press four hundred pounds without ever having to work out. Wouldn’t it be great to just sit down and write the great American novel without having had to dedicate your life to the craft of writing beforehand, or to create great art without having any training? We all have imagined somehow becoming rich without doing any work. This is how we fantasize about freedom and the ability to exercise more control over what others think of us.

The monk and mystic, Thomas Merton, calls faith “the opening of the inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of divine light.” The twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich described faith as the experience of being grasped by that towards which self-transcendence aspires. Faith is to by grasped by the Ultimate in being and meaning. Having faith is worth the effort. We cannot be happy or whole without the freedom and sense of meaning that this experience of being a child of God conveys. So we say, “increase our faith,” “make us more completely yours God, because we want more of this freedom and completeness that we experience in you.”

In today’s short passage Jesus gives two responses to this longing.

1. First, Jesus tells us that a little faith has great power. Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Lk. 17). What does Jesus mean by this strange example? What kind of a magic trick is this? What does it symbolize?

One of the biggest problems people have in reading the Bible is they read it selectively. We need the whole Bible, because we understand a passage by its context and by comparing it to others. Although what we read in church begins with the disciples saying, ”Increase our faith!” this is the middle of a conversation. Out of context Jesus’ response seems confusing.

Jesus warns his disciples about building obstacles that make it harder for people to understand his teachings. But then he says, “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And even if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.” It is in response to this very familiar longing for transcendence that the disciples say, “increase our faith.”

They aren’t saying help us to feel closer to God, or give us impressive physical, intellectual or artistic power. They are telling him that they believe that they are incapable of this forgiveness. They want God to magically help them to get along.

I don’t know what Middle Eastern mulberry trees look like. Some biblical scholars claim that this Greek word actually refers to the sycamore tree. These trees line Memorial Drive in Cambridge and their great size and root system seems to perfectly exemplify their immovability. Jesus’ point of course is that through even a tiny mustard seed-sized faith we can overcome even the most deeply-rooted problems, those conflicts in our families, jobs and communities that seem impossible to resolve. Perhaps he also implies that the faith that impels us to seek forgiveness may be the secret.

2. The second thing Jesus teaches is to take responsibility for our own faith. Again, he uses an example that may be difficult for us at first. The disciples ask God to increase their faith and Jesus says that this is like a slave insisting on being fed before his or her master. The Greek translation is tricky but it means that the master doesn’t owe the slave for what is being done. We too have a sense of spiritual entitlement. Increasing our faith so that we can be forgiving is not God’s job. It is ours.

One of the hardest things for me to understand as a Christian in a predominantly secular world is that we are responsible for our faith. As I tried to suggest earlier faith is not believing something despite facts to the contrary, it is not a kind of willed ignorance or credulity. Nor is it simply an attitude or frame of mind completely bestowed on us by God. Faith involves making a discrete decision to trust God. And out of this trust we move beyond our tendency to make feeling good the goal of our lives.

The apostle Paul quotes the Pentateuch and reminds his readers that God regarded Abraham’s faith as righteousness. I want to talk about three ways to increase your faith.

A. Pray. Too many people use prayer as a crutch in desperate times, rather than treating it as a discipline appropriate every day. Thomas Merton the world makes us regard all our experience in terms of cause and effect. But this is not how prayer works. He writes, “In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are, and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there.” Every big thing in my life originated as a little mustard-seed sized prayer. My daily discipline of prayer does more to draw me into the divine life than anything else.

B. Witness. A second way to increase your faith is to be a witness, to talk about your faith. It may sound next to impossible to you, but Christ wants you to tell your story about God. You don’t need to change other people’s minds about what they believe, but you should be looking for points where your faith meets the faith of other people. This means asking those around you how God is at work in their life. Being open to the spirit in this way will transform you. What you discover in these conversations will lead you into a deeper relationship with God.

C. Tradition / Action. Finally, recognize that Christians are not born but made, and this does not happen all at once but over time. All of us need to be intentional about how our faith is formed. Learn the tradition. Insist that this church becomes a place where you learn about Christ. As you understand what God has done in history you can make history of your own. The good that we do as a church arises out of this faith and in turn strengthens it.

In conclusion, I want to emphatically point out that Jesus is right. I can’t tell you what those first century stumbling blocks were, or what sins the disciples thought they needed help in forgiving, or any of their problems that seemed more deeply rooted than a sycamore tree. But I can tell you that twenty centuries later that tiny dissentious group of apostles has become 2.1 billion people, the world’s largest religion by a relatively large margin.

When we leave behind our sense of entitlement and our fantasies of magically enhanced faith, when we take responsibility for our own relationship with God, we also will discover that a little bit of faith can go a long way.
_______________________
Jonathan Shaw, “Muscles and Medicine: Mighty Mice,” Harvard Magazine, July – August 2007.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 130.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), 136-147.
David Steindl-Rast, “Man of Prayer,” in Thomas Merton, Monk ed. Patrick Hart (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983).
______________________
© Malcolm C. Young, 2007 Lam. 1:1-6
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon N18 Ps. 137
19 Pentecost Proper 22C (RCL) 2 Tim. 1:1-14
Sunday 7 October 2007 Lk. 17:5-10

“The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” Luke 17