Winter 2008

Darkness Not Overcoming

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 14:47:57 -0800

Agathokakological do any of you know this word? It means something that is made up of both good and evil. I learned it in a book written by Ammon Shea. He spent about ten hours a day for a year reading the 150 pound, 21,730 page, Oxford English Dictionary. He writes about words like futilitarian, that’s someone devoted to futility. I learned useful words, that inadvertist is someone who persistently fails to notice things or that incompetible means not within the range of one’s competence. A kakistocracy is government by the worst citizens. A pejorist believes that the world is getting worse.

But in this holy season, I don’t want to be a somnifactor. That’s a person who induces sleep in others. There are so many things and experiences that have been identified by English words. Yet at the same time most of what it means to be human resists being named. No wonder we feel frequently misunderstood or that when we do hear the truth it can move us so completely.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isa. 9). Isaiah spoke these words 2,700 years ago but we feel intensely aware of this truth. We know something about darkness right now.

I don’t mean to sound like a pejorist, but most people have a mixed response to Christmas. This may not seem immediately obvious because most of what we hear about Christmas comes from people who are trying to sell us something. But it should be obvious from conversations with people we trust.

On the one hand we witness the ecstatic impatience of children waiting to unwrap their presents. But at the same time we feel a nostalgia for past Christmases with a sense that something has been lost. We appreciate the beauty and serenity of nature now but we also worry about bills and our economic security as the New Year looms with its anxieties. We draw inward to be with family but also face the many different kinds of brokenness in family life. It is the only time of year that we use the word “merry” and the season when depression most acutely threatens us. As we celebrate the arrival of the Holy One during these the shortest days of the year we feel the fragility of our health and realize that we will not be together like this on earth again.

Especially in the financial turmoil of these days, we know what it means to be people who walk in darkness. We feel like we have lost something that we worked hard for; we feel betrayed by people we trusted. But what about the gospel? John writes that, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” (Jn. 1). What is the truth about the light?

I spoke with a friend of mine this week. She’s an engineer and has been reading the atheist bestseller The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The argument seems compelling to her that faith only exists because we were so strongly indoctrinated into it as children. She pointed out what I already know, that there seem to be inconsistencies in the accounts of the biblical authors about the birth of Jesus.

Matthew’s story concerns a special star. He tells about the magi or wise men and the holy family’s escape to Egypt. Luke writes a completely different story, about appearances of angels to announce the birth, shepherds and the emperor’s census. Mark, John and Paul don’t even mention anything about this episode. It may make you wonder. Is it true?

I guess one obvious answer is that we may never know what is factually true about this birth. We treat these stories differently than the first hearers did. The gospel writers probably didn’t really care much about astronomical facts or the exact chronology of Quirinius’ reign as governor. They were trying to make a point about Jesus, about the one person who changed history more than any one else. No fact can compete with this truth. The shape of our world, its ethics, art, culture, politics and technology, even the way that we understand ourselves and the world, has been utterly transformed because of Jesus.

No one has any idea what life on this planet would be like if he had not been born. That is true for everyone, but for people of faith it is even more so. Through the ages millions have described the difference between knowing Jesus and not knowing him to be like the difference between life and death. He makes possible a whole new way of being, a new relationship to the world and its creator.

Ever since Jesus’ birth he has inspired people to give themselves away in order to walk more closely with him. People of every different kind and disposition, in every culture, in remote deserts and in the world’s largest cities have found themselves made complete in him. I hardly know how to say it except that the spirit of Jesus fills the most surprising people. They are moved by the story of his life. They find healing in the deepest parts of themselves. Through him they experience reconciliation in their most important relationships, and discover in themselves a power and confidence that they never knew before.

Earlier generations called him Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And so in our time we also say it in a slightly different way than Matthew’s story of the magi or Luke’s account of the shepherds. Although we have difficultly expressing it, at bottom it all amounts to the same thing. In this child and the man he grew up to be, there is power to bring light into the darkness, to make us whole. He gives new life to anyone who turns to him in faith, even you and me.

You may be gently nodding your head along with me because in that most private part of yourself you have met the Lord. You also may be wondering what the heck I’m talking about. You might ask why people like me claim that someone born so long ago continues to live in them and make them complete, why life in Jesus seems to at the same time make our suffering and joy so much deeper, why this experience continuing over time even makes it possible to really love first our friends and family and over time even ourselves and our enemies.

If you have somehow forgotten it like I often do or never knew this, how do you test whether this is true? Jesus tells us. Beyond all the fine points of the doctrines built up since the first century, he simply says, “follow me.” He asks us to pray like him, to a God who is more like a father than a judge or a king. Jesus promises that if we knock the door will be opened. If we seek we will find what it is that we long for. If we ask it will be given to us. He wants the world to be able to recognize us as his disciples.

The only way to know what is true about Jesus is to try to live in the way he taught us. This means being a person who walks bravely like a kind of light into the darkness. He warns us that following him we will experience something like our own kind of cross. But he also promises that beyond that or perhaps even in it we will be protected by the father, that we will experience the longing in our heart satisfied and the peace that passes all understanding.

In his own way the German mystic Meister Eckhart agrees that it is a agathokakological world. He writes that, “all human life stands under the shadow of nothingness, but beneath the nothingness is the flame of love.” I thought of a friend of mine in prison when I read somewhere that the motto for the Outward Bound program is, “If you can’t get out of it - get into it.” I looked it up on the internet and discovered the author was wrong. Their motto is really “to strive, to serve and not to yield.” On second thought perhaps these mottos mean roughly the same thing. Getting into life means going beneath the darkness to the light. It means carrying that light with you into the world.

A few minutes ago I talked about the way that words give shape to reality. Words draw us out of our inadvertist stupor and make us really notice the world. Words make experience come alive. Jesus is the light of the world. As God’s own word he gives us meaning and power to be children of God.

As this year winds down and people look ahead to 2009 we’ll hear about everyone’s resolutions. We’ll be reminded that people who write down their goals are more likely to meet them. What is your goal as a Christian? As a church how can we be the light for each other and for the world? How can our faith make us stronger, more courageous, kinder, more generous and more holy than before?
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Ammon Shea, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages (NY: Penguin Books, 2008).
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
This and what follows is indebted to Frederick Buechner’s “Come and See” in The Hungering Dark (NY: Harper, 1969), 52ff.
John O’ Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, (NY: HarperCollins, 1997).
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2008 Isa. 9:2-7
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon O34 Psalm 96
1 Christmas Sermon – 8:00 a.m. & 9:30 a.m. Titus 2:11-14
Sunday 28 December 2008 This could be better if it stuck w/logos… Lk. 2:1-14(15-20)

Darkness Not Overcoming
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined” (Isa. 9). “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” (Jn. 1).

Pray Without Ceasing

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:23:40 -0800

I’m not a big tattoo person. Although lots of my friends have them, they really became popular in the generation after mine. But sometimes I fantasize about what I think is so important that it would be an appropriate subject for permanently marking my body. What tattoo would you choose – a picture of your spouse, an American flag, your atm number? If I had one, this simple line from scripture probably would be it. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”

I believe that being in Christ should be the goal not just of all people, but all things, all of creation. The Holy One calls us to be that part of God which always actively reaches out to the world in love. We are in Christ, we approach what we were made to be, when we do this.

Paul gives us concise instructions for being in Christ – it means rejoicing, praying and giving thanks.

1. When Paul writes “rejoice always” he doesn’t mean that we should just “cheer up” or try to pretend things are going well even when our life seems like a disaster. Neither does he instruct us to be like the character in Voltaire’s Candide who constantly repeats that this is the best of all possible worlds.

Instead, I think that what Paul means is that even in the midst of terrible suffering and brokenness a person who believes in Jesus sees signs of hope, that person of faith is him or herself a sign of hope. We are not what your enemies describe us as. We are not a summation of the bad mistakes we have made. As God’s children we have the source of deep joy at the center of our being. We are children of light.

Ultimately Paul says that what matters most is not our faithfulness to God, because that comes and goes. The important thing for us is that God’s faithfulness never wavers. Jesus’ life and sacrifice for us represent a sign of God’s determination that we will not be lost. This is something we can always rejoice over.

I have a friend who is a senior scholar at the end of his career. He wants to write the book that will be his final summary contribution to his field but he can’t get anywhere. His doubts about himself and his ability are debilitating. When we rejoice always we find our center not in ourselves but in God. This gives us a new power to do our work and to lead holy lives.

2. Paul’s second instruction is to pray without ceasing. I don’t think that this means that you necessarily need to become a monk. Instead Paul wants prayer to be a practical part of our daily routine. Prayer makes it possible for us to rejoice always by helping us to see beyond the range of our narrow interest into the experience of the whole.

Many people talk as if prayer were the way that God listens to us. This isn’t true. God always listens to us. Instead prayer is the way that God gives himself to us (or better perhaps, it is the way that we can receive God’s gifts). When we constantly pray we bring all that we encounter, all the people we know and every event before God and we experience them in the light of holiness. Prayer is the divine living in us. It sustains and strengthens us. It connects us to the source of life.

An anonymous nineteenth century Russian monk wrote a book called The Way of a Pilgrim. The author writes about his wanderings and longing to pray without ceasing. He prayed the Jesus Prayer, which for me goes like this, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God have mercy on us.” People who have persisted in this have found that eventually the prayer fills them so deeply with joy that it almost seems as if it prays itself.

3. Paul also says to “give thanks in all circumstances.” This may also be hard for us to understand.

This week I talked to an old clergy friend named Fred who I had lost touch with from our days in Massachusetts. I knew him during such a happy time in his life. Since then he had an affair with a woman who was not his wife and was removed by the governing board of his church. He feels such deep despair and guilt for the harm he caused that he has become incapable of supporting himself. He told me he has lost everything and is thinking of taking his own life.

Giving “thanks in all circumstances” is not the same as giving thanks for all circumstances. There is not much to give thanks for in Fred’s story right now. But this instruction to give thanks in all circumstances does remind us that there is no bad circumstance that is beyond God’s power or love. Even in the most desperate places God is still present and we still see signs of reconciliation. In fact, in the midst of what seems irresolvably broken, we ourselves become signs of redemption.

Fred and I talked about exactly this. His could be the story of a terrible breach of trust that led to complete waste and disaster. But it could also be the story of someone finding new life in God. It could be the sign of God’s forgiveness and love to someone who doesn’t deserve it but is nonetheless God’s beloved child.

Even in the most desperate circumstances we can always give thanks for God’s love, that the book of God’s mercy is never closed to us forever. We can give thanks that God through the spirit constantly works creating more than we can see or imagine. Like the mother of Jesus, we thank God for giving us a share in this work to reconcile the world, for making us holy and drawing us nearer to new life.

Let us pray: Dear Lord, in whatever spirit we find ourselves during this time of Advent expectation or pre-Christmas celebration please be with us and help us to rejoice always, to pray without ceasing and to give thanks in all circumstances so that we may be in Christ. Through your grace make us signs of the coming of your kingdom. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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This and some of what follows is indebted to Fred R. Anderson’s sermon “God’s Will for You” at http://day1.net/index.php5?view=transcripts&tid=739.
The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way. Tr. R. M. French (NY: Harper, 1954).
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2008 Zeph. 1:7, 12-18
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon O32 Ps. 123
3 Advent (Year B) – Short Lessons & Carols Homily Lk. 1:26-2:20
Sunday 14 December 2008 1 Thess. 5:16-24

Praying Without Ceasing
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thess. 5:16-18).

The Unreality of Time and Money

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:29:09 -0800

On July 16, 1962 a twenty-three year old French geologist named Michel Siffre began an experiment. He went down 142 yards under the earth to live in a glaciated cave in total darkness without any kind of clock. He wanted to know what it would feel like when absolutely nothing happens for weeks on end. He had a small light but batteries were expensive so he often sat in the dark.

The only living creature he encountered was a spider. He talked to this spider friend. When he got the idea of sharing his food with the spider it died. Siffre had to ask his assistants in the experiment to pull up the ladder so that he wouldn’t rashly quit. Only a single telephone wire connected him to the outside world.

As you might expect Siffre became terribly disoriented. He’d call up to the surface thinking that only an hour had passed when he had actually lost the whole morning. He thought he was taking a short hour-long catnap but ended up sleeping for eight hours. What his assistants soon realized however was that although Siffre was becoming dangerously confused about time, his inner clock maintained a strict 24 1/2 hour cycle of sleeping and waking.

When Siffre emerged by rope ladder on September 14, he thought that it was August 20. In two months he had lost twenty-five days of his life. Siffre tried the experiment again in Texas in 1972. After spending 205 days underground a full two months were simply lost to his memory.

I want to point out two things about time. The lesson we learn from the cave is that we experience time as fundamentally subjective. While the objective clock matters to our bodies, events give time its shape to our consciousness. You can lengthen your span of life by controlling stress, exercise, healthy eating. Statistically people who have a church community live longer too. But you can also experience more life within that finite time.

As we age time seems to speed up. But scientists have also noticed that we can exercise some control over our experience of time. Instead of subsiding into the same old habits that make the years identical and accelerate time, we can choose to seek out new experiences that transform our sense of time.

The second thing that I want to point out is how radically the pace of life has accelerated in recent years. Virtually instantaneous global communication: the internet, integrated world financial markets, cell phones, satellite television, etc. have created a culture of instant gratification. They have changed how we communicate with each other and our expectations about time. According to polls more people now feel a shortage of time than ever have before.

Today we believe in the myth of multitasking, that we can do two things at once. In reality though our consciousness is more like a spotlight that can focus only on one thing at a time. When we keep shining it back and forth, here and there, we experience far fewer moments of concentrated attention. Just as we can add to the richness of our experience of time, we can be physically alive without living in time. We can experience empty hours watching television or playing video games. Time can pass by us without anything happening.

I began by talking about time this morning to reinforce the idea that when Jesus tells this story about slaves investing or hiding money he is making a point about how we spend our whole life. This certainly includes money but it is also bigger than it.

In the same way that I am questioning the objective reality of time, we as a society have been noticing the unreality of money lately. Money seems to be becoming so much less connected to real things. In a relatively short time we watched huge sums of wealth simply vanish. To begin with, we can barely conceive of the vast amounts of money we talk about in the subsidies for finance, insurance and auto companies. Take the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan. If you were to count one number per second to 700 billion, it would take 21,000 years (not that we have any real conception of a thousand years either). Incidentally this fiscal year the Pentagon plans to spend $607 billion on regular military operations plus another $100 billion on Afghanistan and Iraq).

It should have been obvious sooner that something is fundamentally wrong here. Fortune 500 CEO salaries in 1976 were 36 times that of the average worker. In 1993 they were 131 times greater. Now in 2008 they are 369 times higher. People made more money just by owning steeply appreciating houses than they ever could have in a lifetime of working and saving.

In this tense time we face the power of our greed and the unreality of money. It means both that we desperately need to hear what Jesus says and at the same time are in danger of completely misunderstanding him. He tells us that God’s kingdom is like a master who goes away leaving five talents, two talents and one talent with three slaves. The first two double their money through shrewd trading. The third buries the money, calls his master a hard man, and then suffers the consequences as the master rewards the first two and rejects him.

This is not a story about compensating successful fund managers or the importance of taking risks. Jesus does not tell us this to make money seem more real or meaningful, but to use the one thing in our lives that seems most real to show us who we really are. This is a story about the absolutely incomprehensible generosity of God. This reckless love for creation relativizes everything else.

I want to talk about two reasons I believe this. First, we have an odd way of reading the Bible. Every week we hear a very short selection and then move on. If we heard Matthew’s whole gospel told together at once over a campfire we would come away with a different impression.

Jesus says a lot about God’s kingdom. Putting these stories together helps us to better grasp the thread that connects them. Let me give a few examples. God’s kingdom is like a farmer who rather than saving the precious seed and planting it in the best soil, profligately sows it everywhere even on the path. Imagine a Sacramento Valley rice farmer sowing seeds on the road, in the irrigation ditches and on his neighbor’s property.

The biggest fights I experience around weddings involve culling the invitation list. If the wife comes from a huge family and the husband from a small one we argue about whether it is fair for each person to invite the same number of guests. In Jesus’ crazy parable world however, no expense is spared. Not only are all the families and friends invited but the father goes out into the street to invite even the strangers.

Imagine if General Motors abolished pay scales so that all workers received the same as the plant manager. No bail out plan could save them. Jesus says that the kingdom of God is a little like this. It is like an owner who pays exorbitant amounts by giving a full day’s wages to people who only worked an hour.

God’s kingdom is like a person who risks absolutely everything in order to save one tiny part. It is like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to rescue the one who has lost its way.

All these stories concern a kind of reckless generosity. The principle character in all these accounts seems totally unconcerned about personal safety or well-being and determined to give away what most of us spend our lives trying to hoard and protect.

A second observation may also change the way this story looks to you. One denarius equals a day’s wage, one hundred denarii equal a mina and sixty minas equal a talent. So a talent equals six thousand days wages. Even if you assume a $200 per day wage, that makes a talent equivalent to roughly $1.2 million. Giving a slave 5 talents is like giving someone six million dollars, or more money than most people can earn in several lifetimes.

Today talking about the value of a human life makes us uncomfortable so we leave that up to insurance companies. But these slaves are not us. They are probably acutely aware that their master has given them far more money to care for than they themselves are worth. Yes, this is another example of extravagant generosity.

The Bible repeatedly instructs us that God does not demand a sacrifice but mercy and steadfast love (Hos. 6:6, Mt. 9:13, 12:7). On this stewardship Sunday I am not going to explain in detail all that the church needs or my fears about our financial situation in this time of acute crisis. Instead I want to encourage you to be more reckless in your generosity, a little more like God. Heidi and I are increasing our pledge to the church because we are growing more fully into this challenge.

For almost everyone around us time and money have in some way become the answer to the question, “what is the meaning of life.” Our society has made time and money into gods. But these gods have betrayed us.

You don’t have to spend months in a glaciated cave talking to spiders to lose your life. Maybe you know that because you already experience the increasing pace of time stealing away and emptying out your years. In this moment money seems less connected to physical reality than ever. It seems like it hardly matters how hard we work or what we are able to contribute.

But I am here this morning to remind us that we are the ones that make time and money real by what God makes it possible for us to do with them. God has not given us all this so that we can bury it in a hole or create false comforts for ourselves, but so that we can extravagantly spend our life for the sake of God’s love.
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This story and much of what follows about time comes from: Klein, Stefan The Secret Pulse of Time. Tr. Shelley Frisch (NY: Marlowe & Co., 2007).
He tried to calculate the passage of time by the length of the Beethoven sonatas he played on his battery-powered record player. The only thing he looked forward to was falling asleep.
James Caroll writes, “The annual American military budget is at least ten times the military budgets of Russia and China… it is 20 times larger than the entire budget of the U.S. State Department.” International Herald Tribune, 3 October 2008.
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions (NY: Harper, 2008), 17.
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2008 Zeph. 1:7, 12-18
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon O31 Ps. 123
27 Pentecost (Proper 28A) – Stewardship Sunday 1 Thess. 5:1-11
Sunday 16 November 2008 Mt. 25:14-30

The Unreality of Time and Money
“Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, as indeed you are doing” (1 Thess. 25).

Rendering

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:49:38 -0700

It is a question of sincerity and speaking the truth impartially, not just telling people what they want to hear. A man stands caught between the needs and desires of ordinary people and the fiscal requirements of a massive empire. His enemies try to entrap him in his own words. Great power and authority is at stake and a crowd stands ready to ridicule and condemn. Did I mention it is a dispute about taxes?

You probably can’t tell yet whether I’m talking about John McCain, Barak Obama or Jesus. This gospel is so alive right now. Perhaps it has never been truer. What does this timely message from the spirit say about who we are as children of God?

Mostly I preach about a single story, sometimes about a sentence or even a word, but today I want to talk about the whole thing, one man’s vision of what the Christian Bible and the Christian life is all about. René Girard is a French historian, literary critic and philosopher who retired from teaching at Stanford in 1995. This morning I am going to try to outline his picture of faith as we try to find out where we stand when it comes to truth, money, power, the individual and the masses. This sermon about anthropology, coveting, Satan, mythology and resurrection may take some hard work on your part, but I think it is worth it.

1. Anthropology. Girard starts with human nature. He observes that we are imitative beings. We learn how and what to desire from copying models. We learn pretty much everything by copying. I see this most obviously as I watch our children playing. For hours, Melia plays at being a teacher and Micah plays scientist and builder with his legos. Children copy gestures and expressions before they really understand what they mean. Their identity comes from trying on other people’s identities. Our identity comes from others too. Even practically, whether it is on the level of learning a language or music by copying an expert, or of conforming to the norms of our workplace, we learn by imitation.

Imitating the wrong models leads to the problem of rivalry. Whether it is respect, love, sexual pleasure, ability, or a mansion, we want what the people we admire have. We are also willing to compete with others to get those things. Doing this, we get in each other’s way, we become stumbling blocks to each other. This leads to a kind of permanent instability, a war of all against all, masked by the temporary coalitions we form in order to better get what we want.

Girard points out that social scientists wrongly expect a state of peace and cooperation to be the normal state of human affairs and think of war and destruction as an aberration. He believes instead that it is harmony that is unusual and requires explanation.

2. Coveting. For Girard the Ten Commandments vary in specificity but essentially all state a variation of the same basic rule. The first and last commandments matter the most. The first commandment is, “you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20). If we had no other gods, if we didn’t worship idols, we wouldn’t put our model in the place of God and compete with rivals over what we want.

As you might imagine the last commandment is particularly important to him; “you shall not covet your neighbor’s house, wife” (Ex. 20), slaves, animals or anything that belongs to your neighbor. This also concerns how we make things of the world into our gods. Murder, stealing, adultery, lying, even disrespecting our parents comes out of the war of all against all, the inevitable conflict that happens when we put something in the place of God. Most of our neighbors probably do not even regard coveting as a sin. For them this wanting is good for the economy, the source of good healthy competition. Even the children of God have difficulty remembering the last commandment.

3. Satan. Girard laments that many modern Christians regard Satan as only peripheral to Christian life when he is a large figure in the gospels. He points out that the gospels use two different words interchangeably for the one Jesus and Paul call the Ruler of this World (Jn. 16:11 and 2 Cor. 4:4). The Bible refers to him as diabolos and Satana. Although we use the word Satan as a name, in Greek the word literally means the accuser, the chief prosecutor in a court.

Satan is not an independent being or a kind of junior version of God, but at the same time he is real. The translation of the gospel we read this morning says that Jesus responds to his accusers aware of “their malice” (Mt. 21). The Greek word for this is actually evil. It names the demonic forces and the power of accusing and blaming that we see in society, cliques and frankly in ourselves.

According to Girard, Satan is a force that causes both disorder and order. Satan is by his nature divisive but he also unifies. The ancient Hebrews would put their sins on a goat and send it alone into the desert. Satan also uses this scapegoating mechanism to convert a world of all against all into a world of all against one. Everywhere we can recognize this pre-rational, mythological cure for the disorder that arises out of greed and coveting. Satan promises to end chaos through violence. We’re familiar with its extreme forms as lynching and genocide. But we also recognize it in subtler forms. Whatever your feelings about George W. Bush right now, you can see it at work as republicans wash their hands of him and democrats blame him for everything.

4. Mythology vs. Christianity. Many ancient religions in the Near East, the Mediterranean, Northern Africa and the Americas endorsed rites of sacrifice as a means to control or contain chaos. The Greek word pharmakon means both remedy and poison, but it was also used to refer to people that ancient Greeks would ritually set apart from society, beaten and then murdered. We may believe we have evolved beyond this, but at an unarticulated, subconscious level we do the same thing in our own way. Look at how we are searching for someone to blame for our financial crisis or as we ridicule our political leaders. You can see it in the extraordinary severity of punishments meted out by a punitive justice system that seems bent on destroying people’s humanity.

On the surface, the Christian story about a sacrifice for the sins of many, may seem similar to these myths. But Girard points out that it is fundamentally different. First, the one suffering is clearly innocent. Also we do not see the story from the standpoint of the crowd’s fears. In Christianity we identify with the victim. Although we don’t always succeed, the power of our faith comes from its ability to make us feel empathy for an innocent sufferer, to resist scapegoating.

Standing on the other side of history puts us at odds with everyone in the story. For them, Jesus is the stumbling block, the one who stands in the way of getting what they desire. The disciples want Jesus’ approval and status. The crowds want healing and the dignity of being a free people. The religious leaders envy his popularity and charisma. The Roman government wants order. Even the people who feel favorably disposed toward Jesus, even the people, like Peter, who love him ultimately turn against him out of fear.

5. Resurrection. When the disciples meet the risen Jesus, they experience a true conversion. The Accuser’s method of making scapegoats no longer has the same power over them. Through Jesus we no longer belong to Satan but our concern for victims makes us citizens of God’s Kingdom.

The nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) hated this. He called Christian efforts to protect the weak “slave morality.” But he was right to identify this Christian value as a deep part of the modern world. This belief that all men are created equal,” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” lies at the heart of modern democracies and the movements to end slavery and to support racial and gender equality.

6. Our Context. Let’s hold onto Girard’s image of Christianity and return to the world that was so much on our minds before we came to this holy place. Today we face the possibility of environmental disaster. At the same time we live with a global financial catastrophe in which credit has frozen, banks are failing, and stock markets are falling as wealth simply disappears. Remarkably candidates for public office seem oblivious to all this and in their zeal to be elected, they simply repeat the same tax cutting rhetoric that we’ve heard since 1980. No one asks how we can pay for tax cuts in the face of a trillion dollar deficit, an expensive financial bailout plan, continuing war in two different countries, and a broken social security and healthcare system that will soon be stressed by retiring baby boomers.

In the face of all this I am here to remind you that you are children of God. Jesus has a simple message. “Give to the emperor what belongs to him.” Having or exercising more power will never resolve the dissatisfaction in our hearts. So do not covet, even that which you used to have. God will take care of your needs. You are far too precious to give yourself away, to be owned by things or manipulated by the desires that make you want what other people have.

Jesus says, live joyfully for God’s kingdom, because God is generous to all of his children. The kingdom of the world where people lie to gain power, where scapegoats are slaughtered, politicians ridiculed and the prophets slain is not all there is. We can choose to be citizens of the resurrected life of God, free from coveting, accepting disorder when we have to, loving people who are different and loving ourselves.

This morning I pray that you will meet Jesus, perhaps even for the first time. You will recognize him as a humble person so full of God’s love that he enjoys an amazing confidence and sense of peace. With his hand he shows you a coin. You know that it belongs to the emperor whose image is on it. He reminds us that we are created in the image of God. We belong to the Holy One whose image we bear.

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© Malcolm C. Young, 2008 Ex. 33:12-23
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon O28 Ps. 99
23 Pentecost (Proper 24A) RCL 1 Thess. 1:1-10
Sunday 19 October 2008 Mt. 22:15-22

Rendering and René Girard
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt. 22).

The God of Fear and the Fear of God

Sun, 5 Oct 2008 10:03:49 -0700

Something terrible has happened. Things are so bad and the future is so threatening that we never find out what it was. Civilization has collapsed into total lawlessness. Dust covers the sun and moon. Nothing will grow out of the earth.

To avoid the others, the two only walk at night. They go south through the cold and the ashes. Traveling down an abandoned superhighway they wonder if they can survive the winter. Along with all their possessions in a shopping cart, they carry a gun that has two bullets. The eight or so year old son has never known any other world than this. His father taught him to kill himself, if necessary, to avoid being captured.

On the way they meet feral city dwellers fighting for the last few remaining cans of food. They encounter cannibals who gradually consume the dozen people they have locked in a farmhouse basement.

Every morning the father coughs up more blood. He knows he is dying. He tries to teach his son both to remain human and yet at the same time not to give in to that impulse to help others which could endanger them.

Many of you may already recognize this story as Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Road. Perhaps because I also have a son this age who asks similar questions about the world, I had nightmares when I read it. I felt a constant low-level anxiety similar to what a lot of Americans feel these days.

From my second Sunday here after September 11, 2001, Americans have struggled against an undertow of fear. At first we worried about terrorist attacks here at home. The color-coded threat thermometer told us how afraid we should be. Then we agonized over military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as our siblings, children, cousins, nephews and nieces came home wounded in body and spirit. During this time we became even more conscious of how seriously we have changed the composition of the atmosphere and the effects this might have on all earth’s life.

Now after a summer of rising fuel prices, the unspoken but constant anxiety has reached a kind of apotheosis this month with an unprecedented credit crisis, a cascade of major bank failures and a seriously declining stock market. Now we have passed a $700 billion bail out plan so that the government can buy bad loans that should never have made. No one has any idea if this plan can work. I think we passed this legislation directed toward some of the best-paid workers in our economy because we could not think of anything else to do.

Incidentally, do you know what the word apotheosis means? It means the culmination or highest point. It means literally “to make a god of.” This week we’ve seen it again. We have made fear our god. You may wonder with me, what is a Christian response to this anxiety? What makes our experience of all this different from our secular neighbors?

1. As so often happens, this morning we look at the gospel and it speaks directly to the fear, greed and violence that surround us. Jesus tells a familiar story, similar to the one in Isaiah, about a landowner who after heavy investment sends slaves to collect rent from his vineyard. One gathers that over the many years that it takes for vines to yield grapes, the tenants had come to regard the land as their own. They beat, kill and stone the slaves sent to collect. Hoping to exploit a law that gives squatters title to land if the heirs die, they kill the landowner’s son.

This story has been used to do a lot of dirty work over the course of history. Today many churches celebrate what was once known as Reformation Sunday and has been given the more politically correct title of World Communion Sunday. The line that sums up this interpretation is, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom” (Mt. 21). Historically this story has been used to claim that the kingdom of God has been taken away from the Jews, from Roman Catholics and I suppose today from mainline churches such as ours.

But I want to propose another way to understand this story, a version that confronts our fantasies that God is on our side, that the Lord will avenge us. For me one of the most extraordinary things about it is that Jesus stops in the middle. He tells about how the tenants kill the son and then asks his hearers to supply an ending. People like the chief priests and Pharisees say that the owner will, “put those wretches to a miserable death.” And indeed one might say that this is how the world works. People who have power extract revenge in just this way. These religious leaders by not really hearing the story become doomed to actually become participants in it when they murder Jesus.

I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether Jesus agrees with how they end the story. Does Jesus accept the picture of God that their story suggests? Remember how often Jesus teaches us to take a different path, to seek reconciliation and forgiveness, to bring about an end to the cycle of violence and retribution. My first point is that Jesus’ response to anxiety is in such contrast to the world’s that it is easy for us to overlook it. In a world where each violent or greedy act begets another, Jesus breaks the chain. When it comes to God, we can expect not simply more of the same, but something entirely different. Our fear differs from that of our neighbors in part because we trust that God is not constrained by the past but is always at work doing something new.

2. The second thing to realize from these vineyard stories, is that Christians fundamentally should fear very different things than our secular neighbors do. Because we hear the voice of the world so much in the media and our neighbors, we forget how the gospel promise sets us apart.

In the first of the vineyard stories Isaiah says God, “expected justice but saw bloodshed, righteousness but heard crying” (Isa. 5)! We believe that these are the “fruits of the kingdom” (Mt. 21) that lies at the heart of Jesus’ account too.

The world feels anxious primarily about security, this means struggling for the wealth and weapons that give their owners a kind of power over other people. But the children of God have a very different goal. We seek the kingdom. We value justice, godliness, righteousness and love. We do not fear losing our power, in fact we often give it away. Instead, we worry that the image of the divine in us can become so badly obscured by greed and hatred that we can fundamentally cease to be God’s creatures.

Make no mistake this system of values puts us at odds with both political parties (who constantly describe this country as one of limitless opportunity for everyone). During the Vice Presidential debates Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden stumbled over each other trying to portray themselves as defenders of the middle class majority. Neither of them seems concerned about widows and the poor in the way that scripture is.

In the United States we have created vast urban ghettoes. The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded domestic and agricultural workers at a time when two thirds of all African Americans were employed in this way. In the twentieth century the Federal Housing Administration made home ownership possible for huge numbers of middle class people, but routinely denied inner city loans. 1950’s and 1960’s era transportation and public housing initiatives further concentrated poor people together. Now we have a massive disparity between unsafe, ghetto wastelands with little access to education or commerce and wealthy suburbs like this one.

In my life I’ve never seen this nation attempt to address these problems in any way that approaches how we have concentrated our efforts on the current credit crisis and on waging war in the Middle East. No one ever has been crazy enough, or Christian enough, to propose that we spend $700 billion to help chronically poor people to have a new life.

3. In case you haven’t noticed by now, this is a three-point sermon and I have reached my last point. It is a simple one. During times of fear Christians can take comfort in our faith that ultimately God is the one in charge. We feel tempted to believe, like our secular brothers and sisters, that we are the owners of our lives. But when we see the world through the scriptures we soon realize again, that we belong to God. We have not been given these rich vineyards to be our own, but to produce the fruits of the kingdom for God’s sake.

This means that you can never be “compensated” or paid what you are really worth, because you are so loved by God, that your value is infinite. Your life isn’t meant to be a job, but the experience of fully participating in the divine.

I began this morning with a terrifying picture in which trust and love seem to endanger survival and fear makes us less than human. Oddly enough the Pulitzer Prize winning novel two years before Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was another story about a dying father’s relationship to his young son. Marilynne Robinson’s book Gilead is a fictional letter from an old Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town to the son who is too young to have a chance to know him.

This old preacher struggles with his shortcomings and tries to forgive the son of his best friend. But ultimately he embodies the kind of trust in God that protects us from fear.

Near the end of his life the pastor writes, “There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only the glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.” “[T]he Lord is… constant and… extravagant. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?”
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Cormac McCarthy, The Road (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
This comes from the Oxford American Dictionary on my computer.
2 October 2008 Vice Presidential debates between Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 238 and 245.
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2008 Isa. 5:1-7
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon O27 Ps. 80:7-14
21 Pentecost (Proper 22A) RCL Phil. 3:4b-14
Sunday 5 October 2008 Mt. 21:33-46