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Living with Enough

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:28:53 -0800

Imagine traveling by foot into the Great Valley. It is cold and wet. Your body already feels sore but you make the sacrifice because you are looking for someone that friends say will change your life. You hope his words will help to clarify who you are and what you should do. Your heart longs for a connection to the Holy One and people say that the spirit is powerfully with him. You wonder if you will be able to find him, and what he will say.

Advent is the season when Christians go out to meet John the Baptist. What does he say right now? It might help to begin by asking what he might say to people who travel with us.

Along the way you meet Bill Chalmers. Just over forty, he is struggling to become a senior partner in his firm. In the course of the conversation you see how constant email messages and cell phone calls are eroding the relationship he has with his wife and only son. He can’t help himself and repeats his company’s motto a few times, “the maximum information in the minimum time.” He tells you he is happy to take care of his family, he is proud to take care of them – as long as they appreciate him. They have no idea of the burden he carries every day. He doesn’t ask for much, just that they should do more little things for him, maybe compliment him more often.

I guess we all had the chance to walk for a while with Tiger Woods this week. In 2008 he made $110 million and was the highest paid professional athlete in the world. I read somewhere that during one of his previous absences from golf, tournament television audiences declined by 50%. Now after the still-mysterious car accident and more women come forward claiming to have had recent affairs with Woods, he is withdrawing from golf to try to repair his life with his wife and two small children. He’s made terrible decisions. Still I can’t help but feel sorry for this man who has everything, but still tried to fill a kind of emptiness in such destructive ways.

What would John the Baptist tell Tiger Woods?

Another person we heard a lot from this week was President Obama. In his Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech, the president went to great lengths to talk about the tension between war as both a necessity and an expression of human folly. He alluded to the irony of hearing a lecture about peace from the commander-in-chief of a country currently engaged in two separate wars.

At the same time, representatives of the world’s governments met in Copenhagen to talk about a coordinated response to climate change. This should be of special interest to us as Americans since we produce 20% of global emissions with only 5% of the world’s population.

Yes John the Baptist has a lot to say these days. Like the people I know who take Advent seriously, he is out of step with the “Holly, jolly Christmas” we see in the shopping malls. But he also speaks the truth about who we are and who God is calling us to be.

On Wednesday night our family played the ukulele and sang as we rang the bell for the Salvation Army. Our 8 year-old daughter Melia started by wishing people “Merry Christmas” then changed to “Happy Holidays” to avoid offending non-Christians. The next lady who came up to her said, “No, it’s Merry Christmas.” I wanted to tell her that actually we probably should be wishing each other a “Holy Advent.”

During Advent we walk out to the desert places of our lives to work on who we are. In this process John is a much more helpful figure than Rudolf or Santa or Frosty. Our biggest problem is that we’ve been told his message so many times that we no longer really hear it. So let’s listen again. I believe the scriptures say three important things to us on this third Sunday of Advent.

1. First, John emphatically warns us that we do not have a special place in God’s heart because of any accidental condition of our birth. God does not love us any more than his other children. God does not give us a special break. God is not biased in the way we are about our own actions. In fact God does not care about our religion, race, nationality, family, or social status. It is hard to avoid the feeling that we somehow magically deserve what we have because we were born on the north side of the Mexican border, or because we inherited a great education or work ethic from our parents. There are no chosen people, if we mean by that people who God has a special obligation to over everyone else.

We were not created merely to be cared for. The purpose of our life is not simply to survive. John’s favorite image for the human condition is the fruit tree on a farm. The tree’s value comes solely from the fruits that it produces. A metaphorical axe lies at our roots to remind us that we only exist to produce the fruits of God’s kingdom.

So John says quite simply “Repent!” I think for people in our time the meaning of this word has been worn out. It doesn’t mean merely feeling guilty for bad things we’ve done in the past, or making a resolution to do better next time. Instead repentance is the process of turning our life toward God. It means to give all of our energy and passion into the hands of Jesus. It means putting yourself at God’s disposal so that God can work through you to transform the world.

2. In case “repentance” still seems like an overly abstract idea, Luke provides us with very specific examples. Whoever has two coats or more food than they can eat, share with the one who does not have enough. If you are a tax collector, don’t collect more than you are supposed to. If you are a soldier don’t make extra money by threatening civilians. You don’t have to overthrow the Roman Empire or quit your job as a tax collector or soldier – you just need to share. You need to know that you already have enough.

This is difficult for us isn’t it? But it is the most important thing that John says to our Silicon Valley neighbors, our nation and the industrial world. John says it to Tiger Woods, Larry Ellison, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to you and to me. Turning your life toward God means beginning to live and act as people who have enough.

The Stanford professor Rene Girard says that the commandment that lies at the heart of all the others is “Thou shalt not covet,” you shall not desire what you think others have. He is right. When we don’t think God is enough, we make idols. When we think our spouse is not enough, we commit adultery. When we think that we don’t have enough we steal. When we believe that the truth is not enough, we lie. Turning our life toward God means changing our hearts.

This morning John calls all of us to consider what it is that we think we lack. What do we think we do not have enough of? Is it: love, respect, power, safety, spirituality, attention, authority, usefulness to the world? How can we live more completely in thanksgiving for God’s generosity?

This seems like a crucial issue for us as a church right now. People do not resist change; they resist loss. I wonder if we have been getting into the habit of experiencing our life together as one of loss rather than as a gift that God gives us so that we can bear fruit. Somewhere along the line we started believing the story that what we have is not enough. Because of this we may also have gotten into the habit of regarding church as the place where our needs are met.

The healthiest part of our life together focuses not on what we don’t have but on what God gives us to reach out to the world in love. The purpose of the church is not to serve us, but to help us to receive gifts as God’s children that will make it possible for us to bear fruit by serving the world.

3. My last point concerns what might at first seem like the mixed message of this Sunday in Advent. On the one hand John screams about the brood of vipers who need to turn their life toward God. At the same time our other readings focus on rejoicing. The prophet Zephaniah writes, “Rejoice and exult with all your heart… your God is in your midst… he will renew you with his love” (Zeph. 3). While Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice… Do not worry about anything… with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God” (Phil. 4).

Being a person of faith means celebrating like a Boston Red Sox fan after the 2004 World Series, or like a South African after the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The world doesn’t quite know what to make of us. On the same Sunday that we’re talking about repentance, we’re also jumping around giving each other high fives. We seem to be engulfed by the same darkness that is bringing despair to the world, but at the same time we are rejoicing.

The reason for this seemingly jarring contrast is that being in the process of turning our hearts toward God looks very different before and after one begins to repent. Repenting naturally draws us into rejoicing in the divine life. When we turn toward God, when we become people who have enough, we experience the joy of being what we were created to be.

Albert Einstein said that there are two ways of seeing the world: as if everything was a miracle and as if nothing was a miracle. When our attention rests on what God has given us rather than on what we lack, we experience all life as a miracle.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber writes about how human beings long for closeness and intimacy. People who know that they have enough are at home with the people in their lives, they are at home with the world because they have found their home in God. They know that they do not simply act alone on the world, but that when they surrender their lives, God does miracles through them.

The sensitive man whose heart was breaking from all the pain and injustice of the world cried out, “Dear God, look at all the suffering and misery in your world. Why don’t you send help?” God responded, “I did send help. I sent you.”

Let us pray:
Most loving God, help us to bear fruit by turning our lives toward you, to see beyond what we lack and to recognize what we have to share, so that we may rejoice as your children and be drawn more completely into the life of your son Jesus Christ. Amen.
___________________
Alan Lightman, The Diagnosis (NY: Vintage Books, 2000), 14, 154.
Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Tr. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: 2001).
David J. Wolpe, Why Faith Matters, (NY: HarperOne, 2008), 18.
Ibid., 39.
___________________
© Malcolm C. Young, 2009 Zeph. 3:14-20
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon P27 Cant. 9
3 Advent (Year C) Phil. 4:4-7
Sunday 13 December 2009 Lk. 3:7-18

Living with Enough
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone” (Phil. 4).

Cursed and Blessed Expectations

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:00:45 -0800

The thirty-nine year old man at the L’Enfant Metro subway station in Washington D.C. wore a Nationals baseball hat, a long-sleeved t-shirt and blue jeans. He set up his violin, threw a few dollars into the case as seed money and at 7:51 a.m. on a cold winter day he began to play six pieces of classical music. Two things were remarkable about the next forty-three minutes.

First, was his seemingly perfect invisibility to nearly everyone. The musician remarked, “I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all… Because you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!” Of the 1,097 people who passed only seven stopped for more than a minute. Twenty-seven gave a total of $32.17. He was universally ignored by every demographic category, by men and women, workers and retired people, rich and poor, Asian, white and African-American – with the one exception of children. They tried to stop and listen but their parents always hurried them on.

People lined up at a nearby lottery machine and didn’t even turn around. A deafening silence followed the end of each piece. Only once was there more than one person listening. Of the 1,097 people only one person recognized who he was and only one other person really stopped to listen.

Yes the second remarkable fact was that this was Joshua Bell who later that year won the Avery Fisher Prize as the best classical musician in America. He was playing some of the most powerful and difficult music ever written on a Stradivarius violin built in 1713 which last sold for $3.5 million a few years ago. The night before he had filled Symphony Hall in Boston with people paying about $100 per ticket.

The woman who recognized him said, “people were not stopping, and not even looking… I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?”

Why were so few people able to receive this gift? Quite simply it was because they were not expecting it. To use Jesus’ words, “their hearts were weighed down with… the worries of life” so that this moment of grace caught them “unexpectedly” (Lk. 21). Expectations matter. They constantly give form to the reality that we experience.

Have any of you ever watched the sardines circle around the entryway to the Outer Bay exhibit at the Monterey Aquarium? All these shining fish go clockwise around the light blue top of the circular room together as a school. But one sardine swims above all the others and goes the opposite way. Being a Christian in Advent is a little like this. The Christian in December is the same kind of creature, doing the same kind of thing in the same kind of environment but differently.

Welcome to the season of Advent, the church’s new year observance when the world around us seems both strangely near to and oddly distant from our hopes. It is a time of imperfect harmony. The world waits for Christmas and expects to experience a little more generosity and kindness than we see at other times of the year. We as Christians participate in this too. We might even recognize some of our hymns played in shopping malls, but we also have much higher expectations. We expect the coming of the Holy One. We await the advent of the Christ. We hope that Jesus will be born in our hearts.

With our culture we all share in common this season characterized by expectations. For every human being what we hope will happen is a vital part of our experience of what already is and who we are. This morning I am wondering about the difference between expectations that deceive and damage us, and expectations that save us and show us the way into new life?

Last week before the Big Game I went to a dinner banquet with other alumni from Bowles Hall, the last all male residence in the University of California system. Some men there had distinguished careers and one of us even has an airport named after him. But the group who had been in college with me seemed weighed down with the heaviness of failure. One friend had lost a fortune in the last year and was now working at a job that he considered below his capabilities. Another just never felt like he lived up to his potential. I had known these gray-haired men when they were goofy freshmen and the sadness of these unfulfilled expectations moves me.

We talked about the 2008 movie The Wrestler as a kind of symbol for our experience. The wrestler played by Mickey Rourke is about a man in his forties who had been a celebrity professional wrestler back in the 1980’s. Despite his now painfully ruined body he tries to make a comeback until a heart attack forces him to reevaluate his life. He reaches out to his estranged daughter, becomes close to a stripper with whom he has fallen in love. But he cannot change. He cannot free himself from the expectations that have motivated his life for twenty-five years. He seems bent on his own destruction. His dreams are literally killing him.

Tragedy could be defined as suffering for who we are. The pain is magnified by the feeling that we cannot in any meaningful way change. But all of us can change our expectations, not only of our circumstances, but of other people and even of ourselves.

The nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was famous for his pessimism. He believed in a fatalism that makes us victims of a malicious universe which controls our happiness through our circumstances in life. He wrote that, “Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.” What I mean by our expectations is not merely fantasizing that good things will happen to us. I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking.

I’m just saying that our well-being includes a subjective element. How we respond to what happens to us is a more important determinant of our happiness than our situation. When we regard ourselves as mere responders, when we think that quality of our life comes from our health, wealth, position, power, experience or good fortune, we tend to ignore the good things we already have. Expectations that make us judgmental of others, that lead us to blame someone else for our unhappiness endanger us. Expectations that lead us to disapprove of or condemn others diminish us right now. This way of experiencing other people will keep us from growing into our fullness as children of God.

You may be surprised to hear it, but despite his reputation John Calvin (1509-1564) has done more than almost any other person to influence my faith. He points out that one of the most deeply rooted human beliefs is our expectation that God will not take care of us. Most of our behavior having to do with the future rests on this assumption. Because of this, for Calvin faith is not merely believing that God exists, but believing that God cares for us.

We see evidence in Jesus’ sacrifice for us. We understand its implications through the inspiration of the spirit. Becoming a Christian means beginning to live as people who know that they depend on God.

In so many ways we sit in judgment of God. We have our own idea of justice which is biased deeply in our own favor. We think that we could run the universe better than God does. We easily become angry with God about what happened to us in the past. Or we just do not trust God with our future.

The expectation that God will be good to us in the future sets the Christian apart. My college friends have a faith that rests in their individual accomplishments, in the respect that other people have for them and in the wealth that they believe will protect them. Everything in their life depends on what happens to be given to them on the outside.

We are like that sardine swimming above it all. The world is baffled by Christian faith because it comes from the inside. This trust in God’s goodness toward us leads to a new experience of reality that arises out of gratitude and love.

It is the expectation that the most powerful change we witness in our life will be the change in our own hearts as we turn our life to God. The experience of being God’s children makes us more accepting of other people’s faults. It changes our expectations of what God should be doing for us so that we can receive the gifts that God is actually giving us.

One of my favorite lines in scripture comes from Paul’s letter to his friends in distant Thessalonica. Scholars believe that these are the oldest words in the New Testament. He writes, “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we feel before our God because of you…” (1 Thess. 3:9). Paul loved those imperfect people in the way that we love each other here at Christ Church. This attitude of joy and gratitude arises naturally out of our faithful expectations.

Literally one person in a thousand recognized Joshua Bell as he played the violin in the subway station. Only one other person really heard him, John Picarello, a short man with a baldish head who works as a supervisor for the postal service. He told a reporter what he heard. “It was a treat, just brilliant, an incredible way to start the day.”

In these autumn days when the trees around us burn with the fire of red and gold as the hills surrounding us become green with new life, we too can choose to be like children and receive God’s gift. How will you change your expectations this Advent? How will you let God change you?
______________
My summary cannot come close to doing justice to my excellent source. See Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can One of the Nations Great Musicians Cut Through the Fog of a D.C. Rush Hour? Let’s Find Out,” The Washington Post, 8 April 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721_pf.html
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Tr. R.J. Hollingdale (NY: Penguin, 1970), 168.
Faith is knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the promise in Christ revealed by the Holy Spirit (Inst. 1:551).
One of the most vivid scenes in William Young’s bestselling novel, The Shack happens when the main character, a man named Mack, encounters the spirit of God’s wisdom in a cave. In the center of the room stands the judgment seat. Mack worries that he will not be able to stand this scrutiny over his sins. He is then surprised to learn that instead this is the place where he sits to judge God. Sophia points out that judging requires us to believe that we are superior over the one being judged. William P. Young, The Shack,(Los Angeles: Windblown Media, 2007) 159.
Calvin points out that the heart is more difficult to convert than the mind.
______________
© Malcolm C. Young, 2009 Jer. 33:14-16
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon P26 Ps. 25:1-9
1 Advent (Year C) 1 Thess. 3:9-13
Sunday 29 November 2009 Lk. 21:25-36

The Curse and Blessing of Our Expectations
“How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we feel before our God because of you…” (1 Thess. 3).

Evensong: Righteousness & Forgiveness

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:35:27 -0700

Malcolm C. Young Micah 6:1-8
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon P24 Ps. 111
Sung Evensong 4:00 p.m. Ps. 112, 113
Sunday 11 October 2009 Lk. 7:36-50

Righteousness and Forgiveness
“Then he said to her, your sins are forgiven…” (Luke 7).

When my wife Heidi and I were first married I had the responsibility to come up with names for our pets and houseplants. We had Anselm, Perpetua, Habbakuk, Hildegaard, Tertullian, Athenagoras and Ambrose. She told everyone that I got to name our pets but that she would be the one to choose names for our children. In 1999 today’s first reading came up in the Sunday lectionary. After I preached that day, I felt so moved by the text that I asked Heidi if we could name our son after this prophet. I was surprised when she said yes. There is something about righteousness that moves us.

“…[W]hat does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8).” Justice, kindness and humility. These virtues along with the Ten Commandments define righteousness.

It’s a shame that we no longer use the word righteousness in a positive way in our ordinary conversations. Not having a name for this quality makes it harder for us to identify and maybe even, harder to attain.

When Jesus goes to Simon’s house he recognizes the righteousness of his host, just as he acknowledges the sin of the woman who anointed him and kissed his feet. He does not say that sin doesn’t matter, or that we’re all equally good or that we should just give up on the Ten Commandments.

He is trying to make a far more radical point. It is not the love of the woman that brings about her forgiveness. Instead, it is her reception of forgiveness (of greater than ordinary forgiveness) that creates her love. The twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich says that, “nothing greater can happen to a human being than [to be] forgiven. [F]orgivness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable...”

I am the kind of person who agonizes over my own mistakes. When I screw up something at church or in my family life, I know I can’t turn back the clock and redo it. There is no way to make ourselves worthy of forgiveness. We can emotionally punish ourselves, we can reject ourselves and wallow in feelings of guilt. But this self-punishment will not help us. It will not make us any more worthy before God. “God’s forgiveness is independent of anything we do.”

But here’s the strange thing. Forgiveness creates repentance. It’s not like we change our minds about our lives and then go to God as changed creatures. We ask for forgiveness, and if we are able to receive it, then God gives us the strength to make our life new.

Forgiveness is the experience of being brought together again. It is the healing of the greatest sorrow in our lives. “Forgiveness is what makes love possible. We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.”

When we feel rejected by God we are not capable of loving God, ourselves or anybody else. Being forgiven makes it possible for us to know what it feels like to love God. Loving God allows us to accept life and to love it. The puritans and other religious people through history were able to love God and hate this world. But the kind of love I’m talking about is a form of being reunited not only to God but to the power of life in everything that we experience (especially in each other).

This life in God accepts you and “loves you as a separated part of itself.” This experience of being forgiven by God ultimately makes it possible for us to accept ourselves.

Being righteous in the way that Micah describes it is wonderful. But there is more to our existence than righteousness. New life and our greatest power comes to us in seeking God’s forgiveness and receiving it.

The Blind Side and the Word of God

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:59:57 -0700

A few years ago, my brother Andrew was working in the kitchen when one of those sickle-shaped food processor blades slipped out of his hand and buried itself in the vinyl flooring. It went through his foot between the bones and pinned him to the kitchen floor. To make matters even worse this happened not long after the company he founded got venture funding so he was between jobs and without healthcare. It cut away some of my own illusions of invulnerability.

In Hebrews we hear that, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword… it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4). To translate into modern language, sometimes God’s word seems sharper than a food processor blade. This sharpness comes from the way it exposes us, and cuts away the lies we habitually tell about ourselves. It reveals our true intentions and desires. We don’t read scripture enough because quite often we don’t want to know who we really are. In G.K. Chesterton’s words, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”

The German reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) famously used the Latin phrase incurvatus se to describe our condition. Sin means that rather than being open to the world, to truth and to God, we are curled in on ourselves to such an extent that we even try to use our ideas about God against God. We are blind to ourselvesIn one way or another we ignore our shortcomings, either we choose not to think about them or we harbor the sneaking suspicion that we’re pretty good. We quickly come up with excuses for our failures.

Here in Silicon Valley when a racing BMW cuts my wife Heidi off, I sometimes remind her that the driver might be racing to the hospital for an emergency. She thinks I’m incurably naïve. When we’re the ones driving like that we always justify it with a reason. What we accept in ourselves is often what we condemn in others. C. S. Lewis points out that we know we are guilty of the sin of pride because we hate it so much when we see it in others. He writes that every person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride.

Let’s go back for a minute to Martin Luther. He believed that although we are curved in on ourselves, God provides the Bible to help us. For him the Word of God is not the same thing as scripture. He might even object to the way we say, “The Word of the Lord,” after we do a reading in church. Luther regards scripture as a kind of potentiality. It only becomes the Word of God when it confronts us.

Luther writes, “It is one thing when God is present, and another thing when he is present for you. But he is present for you when he adds his Word to scripture and declares, ‘here you shall find me.’”

God’s word confronts us. It exposes how we choose to avoid reality in big ways and small ways in virtually every moment of our life. Luther compares these false shelters to the blankets a child hides under out of fear of the dark. God’s Word strips away what we falsely imagine will protect us. Standing nakedly in this holy presence, God asks, “Where are you in your life?” “What do you really stand for?”

So a rich man from somewhere like Los Altos Hills or Sunnyvale or Mountain View comes to Jesus. He has it all but knows that something is missing. He doesn’t feel whole. He sees the falseness of the lie that we believe most of the time – that more success, more power, more wealth, better reputation, intelligence or even our own beauty will be enough for us to feel complete.

Jesus tells him that to inherit eternal life he should keep the commandments. The young man feels pretty proud to say that he has done so. Jesus loves him. He says “sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven” (Mk. 10). For that rich man and for us a seemingly ordinary encounter suddenly becomes the Word of God. It feels a little like dropping the food processor blade through our foot.

That’s it - Jesus loves us by giving us the truth. Although this young man thought he cared about God, for the first time in his life he realizes that wealth is what really most matters. Imagine Jesus in our own time saying, “the ushers will now be passing the plate to collect the title to your house. Make sure to put in all your bank account numbers because we’ll be distributing all of your wealth to poorer people this afternoon.” Does the word of God feel sharp to you yet?

Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side will be released as a film next month. It tells two parallel stories. The first concerns how football strategy has changed since the 1980’s era San Francisco 49ers emphasized a game based on short reliable passes. This in turn vastly increased the value and pay of professional left tackles who are the primary defenders of a right-handed quarterback’s blind side.

The other story is about a remarkable young African American man named Michael Oher who grew up in the slums of Memphis. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine. His father was uninvolved in his upbringing and was murdered when he was in high school. Michael lived in foster homes and was homeless. For large periods of his life he simply did not attend any school.

But then he got a break. Michael Oher was crashing at his friend Steven’s place. Steven’s dying grandmother had one last wish, that her grandson should receive the education he needed to become a Christian minister. Steven’s father Big Tony had the gumption to take this request seriously and brought both boys to a Christian high school far out in the white suburbs.

At Briarcrest Christian School Michael stood out. For one thing he was one of only a few African American students and for another he was about six foot four inches and weighed 330 pounds. He rarely said anything. He came from such an impoverished background and had attended so little school that he didn’t know what a cell was in biology or what the word atom meant. He had never heard about nouns or verbs. There were so many things he didn’t know about in that middle class world, that he couldn’t even follow the conversation.

Then Michael Oher got his second break. Sean Tuohy had been an outstanding college basketball player twenty years earlier and was the hero of his own rags to riches story. He had long been married to a Leigh Anne the former cheerleader who had been his college sweetheart. Although he worked as an announcer for the local professional basketball team, most of his money came from owning more than 70 fast food franchises. As luck would have it their daughter Collins was one of Michael Oher’s classmates.

Sean Tuohy realized that Michael had no money for lunches and quietly arranged to pay for a charge card so that the boy could eat. One thing led to another and before long he had set up a special tutor who worked with Michael for hours each day. Then Michael moved in as their adopted child. This young man never had a bed before. Not long after he arrived his new mother Leigh Anne remembers sending him into the house for his backpack. She told him that it was in the foyer. She went in ten minutes later to find him wandering around the living room. He didn’t know what a foyer was.

I don’t have time to elaborate, but I hope that you take a moment to think about the ramifications of making a homeless teenager a full member of your family. Imagine what it means to so completely connect your life with someone who has been seriously damaged by a world run by rival drug gangs. Or imagine what it was like to be a homeless teenager and suddenly immersed in a world with totally different rules and expectations.

Michael worked with a dedicated tutor and through on-line classes brought his grades up enough to play college football. He was chosen in the first round of the NFL draft and now plays for the Baltimore Ravens on a five year $13.8 million contract.

Sean and Leigh Anne were involved in forming one of the fastest growing evangelical churches in Memphis. I have a hunch that like us they have felt the sharp edge of God’s word. Like us they had choices when they heard today’s gospel. They could sell their 70 fast food franchises and give the money to the poor, or go away disappointed like the rich young man. But these aren’t our only choices. They could decide that the important part of the story is not “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mk. 10).

Perhaps the most valuable lesson to learn from this is that as the gospel says later, “for God all things are possible.” With God’s grace Michael Oher and the Tuohy’s took a real risk and experienced a real miracle. God makes possible the good things we do.

This morning we talked about the difficulty of Christianity for us as people who are turned in on ourselves. God finds us in this state. God’s living word sharper than a food processor blade confronts us. It takes away the false sense of security that blankets our life.

But this is not the end of the story for us. We are not creatures defined by our inability, but sons and daughters who live in the promise that for God all things are possible.

What does a confrontation with the living word of God show you about your blind side? There is an answer to our deepest questions. God invites us to draw close to the one who is most familiar with the mysteries of our heart. In Amos’ words, “Seek God and live” (Amos 5). Let God make all things possible in your life!
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, (NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911), 10 (from What is Wrong with the World).
Luther writes, “[D]ue to original sin, our nature is so curved in upon itself at its deepest levels that it not only bends the best gifts of God toward itself in order to enjoy them (as the moralists and the hypocrites make evident), nay rather, “uses” God in order to obtain them, but it does not even know that, in this wicked, twisted, crooked way, it seeks everything, including God, only for itself.” Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster Press, 1961), 159
C.S. Lewis “The Great Sin,” Mere Christianity (NY: Macmillan, 1943), 108ff.
What follows is a close paraphrase of Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 249.
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (NY: W.W. Norton, 2006).
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2009 Amos 5:6-7,10-15
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon P23 Ps. 19:7-14
19 Pentecost (Proper 23B) 8:00 a.m. & 10:00 a.m. Heb. 4:12-16
Sunday 11 October 2009 Mk. 10:17-31

The Blind Side and the Living Word of God
“Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4).

The Way We Never Were

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:31:46 -0700

At our house you can make the lampshade buzz by hitting a low “D” on the piano. This both irritates and fascinates me as I anticipate when it comes up in the music I play. In a similar way, we are tuned to the key of the gospel. When we really hear it - something in us moves. Even if we don’t like it, we want to hear more of it. We long for it, because we want the truth and not just a comforting lie.

We believe that the Bible is not a manual for getting into heaven. It is a collection of many authors’ wisdom written over centuries to help us to be God’s people, to become the way God’s kingdom comes into being right now. The reason we are here, the reason the church exists, is to announce by our words and deeds the nearness of God’s presence and to point to signs of the kingdom, signs of life, light, healing, reconciliation and peace.

This morning God presents us with both a warning and a promise.

1. Let me begin with the warning. You may remember the context of the gospel from last few week. The disciples feel embarrassed when Jesus discovers them arguing over which one of them was the greatest. To show them that, “whoever wants to be first should be last of all,” he takes up a little child in his arms and says, “[w]hoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mk. 8). The disciples have a hard time understanding this. They may not like it but within the group the one who is first is servant of all.

Although presumably some time has passed, the next account concerns how the disciples should treat people who are doing ministry outside their group. This time they take offense because some people were successfully casting out demons in Jesus’ name. The idea of demon possession may seem a bit foreign to your life, but imagine these people having an uncanny ability to cure others of their psychological neuroses, to bring people back from the brink of depression and despair. Imagine them, through some wonderful gift, helping people to make sense of their life again.

The disciples take immediate offense at this. The Greek verb tense (the past imperfect) indicates that although they tried, they were not able to stop these strangers from doing this ministry. The disciples must have been very surprised that Jesus, rather than helping them to stop these “imposters,” instead rebukes his own disciples harshly. He uses some of the most frightening language in the Bible. He talks about having a millstone hung around you neck and being cast into the sea. He insists that it is better to have your hand or foot cut off, to have your beautiful God-given eye plucked out, than to have these parts of your body cause you to sin in this way.

Each gospel writer presents us with a subtly different picture of Jesus. This is one reason why it baffles me that some people can claim to read the Bible literally. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus uses this language but in a very different way. As a faithful Jew, writing to other Jews, Matthew does not use this language to talk about outsiders healing in the name of Jesus. Instead he uses this warning for people who violate the Ten Commandments especially the one about committing adultery.

In Matthew Jesus teaches, “You have heard that it was said, ‘you shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…” (Mt. 5:27-29). He goes on to say the same thing about our right hand.

This morning you too have to wrestle with this severe warning. Jesus says that trying to stop people who are casting out demons in his name is like violating one of the commandments, that it puts us within reach of the gates of hell. What does this mean in your life? What is essential to this danger? Does that other person actually have to be casting out demons? Does it have to be in Jesus’ name? Or could it be any of our efforts to inhibit good work done by someone whom we regard as an outsider? Is this a warning to us, who by our inaction or outright opposition, impede efforts to provide healthcare for everyone? This is the warning. I hope we take it seriously.

2. The promise comes from our other story about Moses, the people of God and their suffering as they travel through the wilderness. I have thought about this story a great deal over the last six months. I believe that it is the story of our life here together at this time in our history. But that doesn’t make this easy to talk about.

I can’t tell you what it felt like to spend a few days at clergy conference this week with dozens of other people who are preparing sermons on exactly these readings. They were full of ideas and after all our conversations, I know that I could probably preach four sermons on what we’ve heard today.

One great young priest reminded me that this story was the same one Professor Owen Thomas chose to preach about at my installation here as rector. Let me remind you what he said. “Moses has a problem. The people of Israel are complaining, as usual, this time about food. They remember all the delicious food they used to have in Egypt. And they accuse Moses of having dragged them out into this wilderness to starve them to death; and the complaints go on and on.”

Owen pointed out that, “complaining is one of the most gratifying human pleasures, as we all know from experience. Why? Because it is so satisfying to blame other people for all our troubles. After all, don’t we pay [the bishop] so that we can complain to him about everything that goes wrong in the Diocese? And… the same applies to Malcolm. And so it goes.”

Before getting back to what Owen taught us that day, I want to point out an observation made by a wise rabbi, hundreds of years ago. The eleventh century rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (1040-1105), better known by the acronym Rashi wrote brilliant commentary on the Talmud that has been included in every edition since its first printing. His commentary on the Bible has deeply influenced Christians from the twelfth century to today.

Rashi observes that the people of Israel fondly remember, “the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing” (Num. 11:5). He points out that this contradicts the earlier scriptures about what life was really like in Egypt. In Exodus 5:18, for instance, the Egyptian overseers were so harsh and cruel that they would not even provide straw for making bricks. According to common sense and the rabbi, they certainly would not give the slaves free fish.

We don’t really remember the past and because of this it doesn’t completely belong to us. Scientists have designed experiments which verify this. When children return to school from summer vacation and are asked to name good things and bad things that happened over the summer, the two lists tend to be equally long. Over the year as the exercise is repeated the good list grows longer and the bad list shrinks. By the end of the year the children aren’t describing what happened on their actual vacation but their idealized picture of “vacation.” Stephanie Coontz’s book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, uses this example to explain why she thinks our image of the 1950’s is far too positive.

Like the ancient Israelites, when we complain here at Christ Church, we also often appeal to a past time which no longer objectively exists.

But let me return to what Owen said that day about what God did for these people whom he loved so much. Owen told us that complaining is the secret of true prayer and gives us an example of how God answers prayer. “Moses has had it with [the Israelites]. He has heard enough complaints. So what does he do? He complains to God, which is an example of true prayer.” Moses says, “why have you treated [me] so badly?… Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them… so that I have to carry them? “… they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me put me to death at once” (Num. 11). Does this sound familiar to you?

The people complain to Moses. Moses complains to God, and since God doesn’t have anyone to complain to, God proposes an idea. “Moses, appoint 70 wiser elders to help you in dealing with all the complaints and problems of the people. And I will take some of the Spirit that I gave to you and will give it to the 70 to guide and strengthen them in this ministry.” Owen went on to describe how in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus uses exactly this strategy. He chose 70 people and sent them to announce that the kingdom of God was near and to heal people who were sick or damaged by life.

We began today talking about the way that at a very deep level we are tuned to the gospel. Even when it unsettles us, we feel drawn to its truth because we long to hear news about what God is up to. We considered the vehemence of Jesus’ warning not to thwart ministry done by other people who we don’t understand. We remembered our attraction and tendency toward nostalgia, that in important ways the past is no longer available to us. We wondered about how we love to complain so much, and how this can be a form of prayer that God answers.

How is the spirit speaking to the church this morning? God is warning us not to set up roadblocks to people as they try to do ministry at Ventana School, the altar guild, through home ministry, outreach and the Third Place. God is also challenging us to raise up 70 leaders. Immediately after church you will have the opportunity to be those leaders, to sign up at tables to do ministry that will challenge you. You will have a chance to participate in the visioning process and in all the new things that the spirit is doing in this church.

Let us Pray:
Almighty God, grant that by your holy Word which is read and preached in this place and by your Holy Spirit grafting it in our hearts, we the hearers may come to know and love you and be enabled to fulfill our ministry in this parish and beyond, all of which we ask through your incarnate Word, Jesus Christ our savior. Amen.
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Stephen Hassett conversation at clergy conference 23 September 2009.
Owen Thomas, from the sermon at my institution as rector at Christ Church, Los Altos 10 February 2002.
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (NY: Basic Books, 1992), xv-xvi.
Owen Thomas, Christ Church 10 February 2002.
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© Malcolm C. Young, 2009 Esther 7:1-6,9:20-2
Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon P22 Ps. 19:7-14
17 Pentecost (Proper 21B) 8:00 a.m. & 10:00 a.m. James 5:13-20
Sunday 27 September 2009 Time & Talent Sunday Mk. 9:38-50

The Way We Never Were
“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them” (Numbers 11)!