Christopher L. Webber's Blog, page 10

Violence and Incarnation

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on December 13, 2015 (Advent 3), by Christopher L. Webber.

Three years ago tomorrow, December 14, 2012, a psychotic young man walked into an elementary school in Newtown Connecticut and proceeded to shoot down 26 children and their teachers. This weekend is now designated National Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath weekend. We have, of course, numerous more recent violent episodes and one in this state, in San Bernadino, just eleven days ago.

Three years ago, of course, I lived in Connecticut, not far from Newtown. Some members of my congregation worked in Newtown and knew people there so there was an immediacy about it greater, probably, than San Bernadino to us here. Just the same, I thought it might be appropriate to preach today what is basically the same sermon I preached four years ago. The circumstances are somewhat different. There were no children killed in San Bernadino. But this is a sermon, not a political statement, and I think the deeper issues of violence and faith remain much the same.

It’s now three years also since I published a book called The Beowulf Trilogy in which Part III is “Yrfa’s Tale.” My first sequel to Beowulf, published six years earlier, followed a warrior’s effort to lead his tribe to a safer place but Part III, “Yrfa’s Tale,” looks at the same events through the eyes of the warrior’s wife, and halfway through she reminisces about their first child and how the baby, not yet two year’s old, died in an epidemic. She says:

“ I almost envied her,

To be at rest, beyond the rub and rush

And weariness of wending in this world,

But I would ask the question none can answer:

Of all the evils in this life of ours,

The constant care and conflict crushing us,

Why has the Heaven Ruler high above

Assigned the little ones to suffer so?”

There are many questions that could be asked after Newtown, and now after San Bernadino, many questions about the anger that flares out of control in our society and the prevalence of violence and the role of government, but the first question is always “Why?” Why do these things happen? What kind of world is it in which such things take place?

You can explore that question at many levels: the easy questions are the practical ones: Why did this man, this couple, explode in violence? Why were guns so available? Why don’t we have a society that deals better with people in trouble, and doesn’t make these explosions so easy? Why are there more than twice as many deaths from guns in this country as in any other western democracy and more than three times as many as in Canada? What are we doing wrong? What can we change? But those are the easy questions that we have to answer together later. Those are political and social questions and I have my opinions as you do but that’s not my department. The harder questions, if I can put it this way, are my department. Why did God create a world with so much pain? Why is there so much suffering?

John Milton in “Paradise Lost” said his purpose in writing was to “justify the ways of God to men.” And that’s the number one priority of the preacher: not so much to explain, to answer all questions, as to put things in context, to provide the balance and the perspective that are always absent in the immediate chaos. Why? Why? That, as I said, is always the question we ask first and we can explore it at many levels. But the deepest level asks: Why do bad things happen? Why is there such violence in human life? The human instinct is to look for an explanation. We want the world to be logical and human civilization exists only because somehow we expect the world to be logical and instinctively we look for reasons. If we know why, we can do something about it, so we look for reasons. Unfortunately, the first reasons that come to mind are political, gun control, radical movements, that sort of thing. They’re important and they have to be answered but I’ll leave that for now to the politicians. I want to ask the deeper questions.

Almost fifteen years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book called “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” and it was on the best seller list for weeks. Kushner set out to explain “Why?” He reduced the options to two logical choices: either God is not almighty or God is not good. Well, yes, in terms of human logic those are the choices. A good and all powerful God who we can understand would not allow such evil. So either God is not good or God is not almighty. Kushner chose option two: God is not almighty. But that assumes God answers to human logic and that human logic can answer all questions. But why should we assume that?

The Book of Job confronts the same question. Job was a good man and dreadful things happened to him and his family and Job and his friends asked, “Why?” His friends, using human logic, implored him to recognize that he must have done bad things. That’s the logical explanation. But Job resisted, insisted that he had done nothing to deserve such evil and finally God spoke and God asked the obvious question: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” In other words, “How can the created thing know the Creator’s mind?”

Every child asks every parent that question: “Why?” And every parent learns to say, “Because,” because the child is too young to understand. Eventually the child will be old enough for better answers. When children become adults and have an adult understanding they can be given adult answers. But human beings do not grow up to be God or arrive at God’s understanding so there will always be “Whys” that are beyond us, that have no logical answer. We can’t assume there are answers to every question that we will understand. At a point we have to be satisfied with the answer that doesn’t satisfy the child and can’t really satisfy us: “Because.” Just “Because.” It doesn’t satisfy our need for reasons we can understand, but we are not God. If I were God, I would do things differently, but I think we are better off with God running things than with me. I don’t understand and I’m not sure I will ever understand, but God is all powerful and God is love and that’s what I need to know.

I do, however, know one thing more and that one thing more makes all the difference: That one more thing is “incarnation.” This church holds up that answer: this is the Church of the Incarnation and “incarnation” means “God in human flesh.” God made us and therefore God knows how limited we are and how little we understand and therefore God came into this world to be with us in all our limitations. That’s what Christmas is all about: God here, God in human life, God in a cradle, God on a cross, God suffering for us, God suffering with us. As the Bible also says: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are.” (Heb.4). Our God is not some distant impersonal power but One who comes to be with us. Not to explain, but to share, to suffer with us. That, for my money, is the only reason to be a Christian: God knows our sorrows. God has been here. And God is here. An incarnational faith goes beyond words. There are times when you tell the child “Just because” but you probably also give them a hug that says, “I can’t explain it but I love you and that’s what matters. Jesus was a great teacher, but that’s not why we are Christians. We are Christians because God came to us and left us a meal to share, a physical evidence of God’s presence. Not just words, but bread and wine, something tangible, something physical, something real. Not just words. There’s a point in the musical “My Fair Lady” when Eliza sings:

“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!

Don’t talk of stars burning above;

If you’re in love, Show me!

Tell me no dreams filled with desire.

If you’re on fire, Show me!

Here we are together in the middle of the night!

Don’t talk of spring! Just hold me tight!”

Now, that’s incarnational religion: “if you’re in love, show me!” And God does love us and has shown us. St John wrote to his fellow Christians:

“We declare to you what was from the beginning,

what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes,

what we have looked at and touched with our hands,

concerning the word of life.” (1 Jn. 1:1)

So God shows us God’s love physically: on the cross, in the sacraments, outward signs of inward reality. Have you noticed how after a mass shooting, as people try to come to grips with the event, have you noticed – how could you not – how people will be hugging each other? Friends hugging friends, parents hugging children, co-workers hugging co-workers, strangers hugging strangers. And when they bring on the experts and ask, “What should we do?” They will tell you: “Hug each other.” But we don’t need grief counselors to know that, do we? We do it instinctively. We are what God made us to be: physical human beings who instinctively reach out for the physical contact that reminds us of who we are. We are not isolated, self-sufficient individuals but part of the human family who cannot survive alone. It would be nice to have answers, to be able to explain, to use our reason to find answers and cope, but we cope better by hugging, by coming together and being what God made us to be and what God also has shared. When they brought children to Jesus he didn’t sit them down to hear Bible stories, he took them up in his arms and hugged them.

Our worship here today is structured around that point. Half way through the service we stop talking for a while and reach out to each other physically. A sermon is important but not the center. A sermon can help but it never has all the answers. Anyone who tells you they have all the answers is someone who is ducking the hard questions. Finally, you know, there’s a question for all of us as we move on: in the close-knit fabric of human life, what role do we play now? Are we doing more to increase anger or to deepen unity? Every cross word, every impatient release of anger, changes the world. Most people are not murderers, but most of us do yield to anger from time to time and whenever we do, it spreads like the ripples in water when a stone is thrown.

I read a book recently called “The Confederates in the Attic.” It’s a book that explores the way the Civil War still poisons our relationships. There were no winners in that war. You can’t kill 750,000 people and then just move on. We are still victims of that war.

John Donne said it best 400 years ago:

“No man is an island, Entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own or of thy friend’s were.

Every man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

When theologians tell us that the cross is God’s way of showing us the consequences of human sin it’s hard to argue the point. Sin has consequences. We are all one body. Every human act has consequences and the first lesson to draw from each mass killing is that we need to love each other more, to forgive each other more quickly, to be more patient, more kind. It’s simple, almost trite, but essential.

Just a week ago we were reminded how President Roosevelt, on a dark day seventy-one years ago, told us that December 7, 1941, was “a date that will live in infamy.” I wonder whether December 14, 2012, or December 2, 2015, can be better dates: dates to remember not for revenge but for renewal. Let these deaths not be in vain. Let us resolve to make a difference in their memory, to be different ourselves, to incarnate God’s love more fully in ourselves. Remember the victims, and be kind, and forgive.

The End – and Beginning

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, by Christopher L. Webber on the Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 22, 2015.

This is the end. Today is the last day of the church year. Next Sunday, Advent Sunday, I’m sure you know, is Christian New Year’s Day. So this is the end but the beginning is right around the corner. This is the hinge between old and new.

In the second reading today God speaks to St. John in a vision and says I am the Alpha and the Omega the first and the last, the beginning and the end. So there’s our theme. Beginning and endings. Endings and beginnings. and I guess you should never start out without some sense of where you’ve been and where you want to end up. So one question to ask today is, “Where have we been and where are we going and how can we hope to get there?”

There’s also a lot in today’s readings about God as King. King of what? Well, if it’s not this world what difference does it make? And if it is this world what difference does it make? Where’s the evidence? Is there a reality to this vision of Christ as King? Does God rule?

Are you old enough to remember the Kingston Trio singing:

They’re rioting in Africa.

They’re starving in Spain.

There’s hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.

The French hate the Germans.

The Germans hate the Poles.

Italians hate Yugoslavs.

South Africans hate the Dutch

and I don’t like anybody very much!

That was written by Tim Lehrer in 1958 and sung by the Kingston trio in the 60s and what has changed? What’s changed? From Wall Street to Washington, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, to Paris to San Francisco, does God rule? What difference does it make?

I think there are two kinds of answer to that kind of question. One is power, the other is love. Power says, “I know God’s will and I can make it happen. I will get a bigger army, I will get more money, I will get more power, I will put boots on the ground or bombs in the airplane and I will make sure God’s will is done.”

My idea of God’s will of course, is not necessarily yours, and not necessarily God’s. But it’s my idea and that’s all that matters. Maybe my idea of God’s will is that there should be no abortions, and maybe my idea of God’s will is that there should be no birth control, or no same sex marriage, or, go back a bit in history, and we find people saying that prohibition is God’s will or slavery or the Crusades or, in modern times again, killing all the Jews or Christians or Moslems. Lots of opinions, many of them lethal, and most of them abandoned eventually leaving a trail of blood behind. That’s the way of power. That’s one way of seeing God as King, and it is a constant temptation to seize it and use it and say it is God’s will.

And we do want to serve God and do God’s will whatever the consequences. So it’s tempting, if we have power, to use it. But Love has a different approach. Love says, “I seek God’s will and I remain open to God’s guidance, I look for ways to give, to work together, to listen to others, to seek their welfare as well as my own.

That’s not instinctive. It’s instinctive to want power. Every child begins by seeking power for himself or herself. The child sees itself as the center of the universe: I cry and things happen, I get attention, food comes. I’m happy. Power works. As we grow we learn new strategies. Crying doesn’t always work but I can find other ways to get my way. Maybe sex, maybe money, maybe guns, maybe bombs. Some of us never outgrow that attitude. None of us, I think, ever completely outgrows it. We go to Wall Street or Washington or Silicon Valley to get more power or more money and if we are clever we persuade other people that we’re doing it for them.

Or maybe we have no big ambitions, we are content with a good house and job and family and a comfortable retirement but secure, comfortable, basically in control of things, enough power for my modest goals. But still no purpose except our own, still at the center, still wanting the world to keep us satisfied. And our end is like our beginning: it still basically about me.

There is another way and every one of us here today knows it: it’s why we’re here. We’ve caught a glimpse of a different way and it scares us a bit because it isn’t about power and it isn’t about me. It’s about Jesus, about God, about my neighbor, about other people not just here in San Francisco or just America – – it includes other people, other needs, other visions of reality, even other religions, other loyalties. And as I said, it’s scary, because those people may not share my vision, or know about Jesus, and we also know what happened to Jesus and St. Paul for that matter and most of the apostles and a great many other Christians down through the ages. It’s often been hard, costly, painful.

Jesus talked about taking up our own cross, he talked about finding ourselves by losing ourselves. But there is that basic impulse in us still that wants to cry and be fed, that thinks first of all about me. But we do know, don’t we, that we can’t let the children grow up getting their way all the time.

Well, actually, not everybody does know that. We’ve probably all seen children growing up with parents too self centered themselves, to take time with their children and teach them about love. They think love means giving children what they want and we’ve all seen the results. But I think most of us know that love requires giving of ourselves with patience and self-sacrifice and that it is worth the time and trouble and cost. We fall short, but we know what’s needed.

Look again at the readings for today: on the one hand there is a vision of the end and the final kingdom in which God is truly King, truly worshiped, and on the other hand there is the story of Jesus confronting Pilate and trying to get Pilate to understand a new and different kind of kingship, not of this world in other words, not based on human power, but based on love. Pilate doesn’t get it. it’s not surprising; even we Christians haven’t gotten it very often. We try. We do try. And it does make a difference and we see it making a difference in this community in people we know and respect and we want it to make more of a difference.

I think of St. Augustine’s line: “Lord, convert me; but not yet.” And God did – – eventually. And God can. That’s what we need to remember: God is able. God is able to work in every one of us and God does and God will often when we are least aware of it. Sometimes we just instinctively act the way Jesus would because we’ve been here and heard about it week after week and gone to the altar and opened our hands to receive the life and strength that can work within us and change us. God is able to do that.

In fact, you and I are able to do that. You and I can love our neighbor or whoever it is that’s near us and they will change in response to love, because love is God and God is love and God is able to work in us God is the Alpha and the Omega at work in us from the beginning to enable us to begin anew again and again until we come at last into the kingdom of love for which we were made.

 

Mites

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, by Christopher L. Webber on November 8, 2015.

The last mail about the election on Monday came on Monday: “Vote for Proposition Q; Vote against proposition Q;” and the first Christmas catalogs showed up on Tuesday. It’s that time of year, isn’t it? Who knew there were that many companies selling through catalogs? And you don’t see some of the catalogs I see because I get more Bible-themed, church-oriented catalogs than most people. One catalog I received advertised a “widow’s mite” bracelet – which brings us to today’s gospel and the story of the widow’s mite. To make the widow’s mite bracelet the catalog people take genuine coins and set them in silver and sell them for $99.95. The widow in today’s gospel wouldn’t have been able to afford a “widow’s mite bracelet.” I went on line also and found a widow’s mite pendant for $660. Earrings are priced at $485.

But let’s limit ourselves to the bracelet. What occurred to me was this: if every member of this congregation would put just one – not even two – just one of those widow’s mite bracelets in the offering each week, we could almost double our budget and do wonderful things. Is that impossible? Well, $99.95 (call it $100) is a tithe of an income of $1000 a week or $50,000 a year which is slightly less than the average household income in the United States and maybe not everyone here earns that much, and some of those here are couples with only one income between them or maybe married to someone who contributes to another church but some surely earn more. The average household income in San Francisco is $83,000 and I know that includes some very wealthy people – but also some who are homeless and unemployed. We can’t be that much below the average, and the tithe is the officially adopted standard of giving in the Episcopal Church.

These are things to think about. Last week was Stewardship Sunday and today we have the appropriate reading! But you can always revise your pledge if you feel a need! The theme of stewardship comes up again and again as we come toward the end of the year and it’s about much more than money.

In the Gospel today Jesus is teaching his disciples as he often did about wealth and poverty. It’s not out of date; you can read about it in the Bible and you can read about it in today’s paper. Some things don’t seem to change. But all the studies I’ve seen show the rich getting richer and everyone else being left behind and I’m not sure how that works out for the church. It seems to be good for the banks and insurance companies, but I’m not sure about the church. There have been numerous studies that show that those with the most give the least. But if more and more have less and less that might just work out well as more people become poorer and therefore more generous.

There was a day, of course, when a lot of the 1% were Episcopalians. And if that were still true, I guess we would see church income go down as Episcopalians got richer and richer and gave less and less. But I don’t think Episcopalians are mostly of the 1% – if they ever were. The Koch brothers are said to be evangelicals. So they may be giving less these days to evangelical churches. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates both claim to be agnostics although Gates does more good with his money than many Christians. But what do people with all that money do with it if they don’t give it away? What else could Gates do with it anyway except give it away? He can’t eat it. He can’t plan to take it with him. But can anyone really be so smart, so skilled, so valuable and so irreplaceable as to earn that kind of money in the first place?

The Bible has only one message about wealth; we read it again and again from the prophets, from Jesus, from the apostles: it condemns the rich for their avarice and calls for justice for the poor.

The story of the widow’s mite is part two of a longer section and the previous three verses warn us to beware of people with money and power. Jesus said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” That’s the background for the story of the widow’s mite.

That story – today’s gospel – tells us how Jesus sat down and watched people putting their money in the temple offering. Most clergy, at least in the Episcopal Church, make it a point not to know what members of the congregation pledge. There should be no excuse for thinking they favor the better givers. But Jesus apparently wasn’t worried; he watched what each individual put in. Imagine that: Jesus watching as the plate is passed! So Jesus was watching as the scribes who had probably just made a deal to defraud a widow of her inheritance were putting in their tithe: ten per cent of what they had stolen. But Jesus was watching – and is. Jesus is well aware of what happens when the plate is passed.

Now, this is politics and this is economics. Preachers are supposed to avoid politics and economics and stick to what they know about. Well, I majored in politics and economics in college so I do know something about it, but I’ve spent much more time studying the Bible and you can’t do that without encountering politics and economics on every side. But you read the papers and watch television so I’ll let you make the connections. You know the standard question: What would Jesus do? I think what he would do is what he did do: he would teach, he would point out to his disciples what they could see right in front of them. He would ask them what they thought of it.

There was also the day when Jesus acted, when he drove the money changers out of the temple. It was probably the most aggressive action of his whole ministry: driving out the people who would cheat and steal in the temple courtyard. Who would he drive out today? I’ll let you think about that because we might answer it in various ways. What would Jesus do today about wealth and poverty? I’m not sure what he might do, but I’m very sure what he would say because we know what he did say. He said, “Wealth is a snare. Money is a snare.” He didn’t say, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” But it’s in one of the New Testament epistles and a kind of summary of Jesus’ teaching. The only good thing Jesus ever said about money was about the widow and her mite.

I read a piece in the New Yorker a while back about the young people of the Ivory Coast in West Africa whose only dream is to get to America. Why? Because they watch television and they see a society of incredible wealth and people who indulge themselves in ways a young west African can only dream about. It’s ironic that there are Americans who leave all that behind and go to West Africa to try to bring modern medicine and education to people who lack everything. But the tragedy is that they make far less impact on African minds than the ones who stay behind and pile up their wealth and create the picture the world sees on television of a society concerned only for itself and using its strength and wealth only to increase its own wealth and security. From their point of view, that’s all of us. What would Jesus say? He’d say what he did say: “those who devour widow’s houses will receive the greater condemnation.” Those in Washington, those on Wall Street, those anywhere, who work to acquire the resources of the poor to increase their own comfort are condemned. They will stand before the King on his judgment seat and have nothing to say when they are asked why they didn’t respond to Jesus’ presence in the poor, the hungry, the homeless. They are condemned, and the poor widow is praised.

The gospel reverses the values of society – its own society and ours as well – and we need to ask ourselves how it can be that this so-called Christian nation, a Bible-reading society, doesn’t understand the gospel, doesn’t know the judgment it faces. It all comes back eventually to some very basic stuff. It’s a matter of who God is, of what we believe about God, and what that means for the way we live. It’s the ABCs of Biblical faith: God is first of all a Creator: Genesis, Chapter 1. God created a universe and created human life and placed us here with responsibility for it, to care for it. It’s a matter of stewardship. Why, after all, does God create? To enrich God? Don’t be silly. What does God need? No, God creates out of love. Creation is always an act of love, of giving, of self-expression. God is first of all a giver and God made us in the image of God and calls on us to grow into that likeness, to be increasingly like God: to give, to love, to share this good earth.

I have sometimes suggested that we should think of stewardship from the top down instead of the bottom up. Take today’s widow as an example. She didn’t stop to figure out a tithe or to plan a budget for the week. She just gave all she had. I think that’s the model the Bible gives us for stewardship. You take it off the top not the bottom. God first; self second. Now probably you do need some for yourself: groceries, clothes, the mortgage, the stuff you need to survive. And since in this society you can’t count on the government or church to pay all your medical bills or support your golden years, you probably need to salt some away. But start with 100%. That’s where the widow started. That’s where God starts. Start with 100% and decide whether you can afford to return it all to God right now.

Eventually there’s no choice; you can’t take it with you – though a bishop I used to know liked to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it ahead.” It all comes back to God sooner or later. You never see a Brink’s truck following the hearse. Sooner or later, you have to give it away or leave it behind. But now, when you have a choice how much do you need to keep? Sooner or later, we all will give back 100%. So if not 100% now, then what? Maybe you can’t even give back 90%, maybe not even 50%, but 10% from that point of view isn’t asking much at all.

I heard a story once about a man who decided when he was very young that he would tithe. He would always give God 10% of whatever he had. And he told his clergyman that this was his solemn commitment. And this young man did very well for himself. He started at ten dollars a week – this was long ago – and he put a dollar in the plate every Sunday. And he prospered, and before long he was making a hundred dollars a week and every week he put ten dollars in the plate. And still he prospered. Five hundred dollars a week; fifty dollars in the plate. A thousand dollars a week; a hundred dollars in the plate. Ten thousand a week; a thousand in the plate. But finally he began to feel that maybe he’d made a mistake. And he went back to his pastor and said, “You know I made that commitment when I didn’t have very much, but now that I have so much, it seems like a terrible amount to give and I want to ask you to relieve me of my commitment.” The pastor thought for a minute or two and said, “Well, I don’t think I can relieve you of your commitment, but I could ask God to set you back to a level where you felt more comfortable keeping it.”

I wonder whether we as a society are in somewhat that position, where we feel as if God has given us so much we can’t afford to respond fully. They’ve done studies, as I said, that show that the higher your income level the less proportionately people give away. The rich are less generous than the poor. Those with the most ability to give, give least. It makes no sense, but that’s what human beings are like. It’s why God needed to give us a specific example of the way we are meant to live. Jesus is more an example than a teacher, and more an example in his death than his life. The cross is the symbol of our faith because it sums up the full meaning of God’s giving: giving all; holding nothing back. The cross is not a tithe and certainly not a tip or a minor gesture.

By the time we come to the end of the Christian year we are supposed to understand this. We have heard of Jesus’ birth, we have read about his fasting and temptation, we have taken part in the events of Holy Week and Easter, we have spent the time since then hearing week by week of how Jesus healed the sick and fed the hungry; we’ve heard again the parable of the Good Samaritan and the story of the Prodigal Son. And it’s all about giving, it’s all about stewardship, it’s all about the right use of the gifts we are given. And what better way to come to the end of the Christian year now only two weeks away than with the story of this widow who gets it, who knew the gospel and lived it to the full. She understood it. Do we?

Saint Samuel

A sermon preached at All Saints Church, San Francisco, on All Saints Day, November 1, 2015.

All Saints-tide, I have always believed, is a time for stories. It seems to me that it’s like a family reunion at the end of the year when we gather together – as many of us will do at Thanksgiving – and tell stories about our family and especially about members of the family no longer able to be with us physically but members who are worth remembering and telling stories about because of the impact they made on our family and because of the example they gave us in some special way. Remember how Aunt Emily always insisted on three kinds of cranberry sauce and Uncle Bill made us all go play touch football before we could eat. That kind of thing: memories of special people, special members of the family.

All Saints Day is for Christian memories. Over the years I’ve just told stories about lots of the more remarkable members of our Christian family, people of every race and nation and century, who were part of our family, some of whom died only recently and some who died long ago, but all departed this life, all men and women of another age.

This year, I want to do something a little different. Instead of telling you stories about past saints, I thought, because we’re having a baptism this morning, that today might be a time for telling you about future saints: Saint Samuel, for example. That future begins in a few minutes. In just a few minutes there will be a new saint, a small one, I’ll admit, but a real one all the same because, you see, saints are not made by popes. All the ceremony and hoopla of a canonization in Rome changes nothing; it only calls attention officially to something that happened long ago and that most people already know about. It says that Francis of Assisi or Julian of Norwich or Mother Teresa or Launcelot Andrewes or William Laud was somebody special and it’s time we took official notice. But it doesn’t make them a saint. That happened long before when someone took them to the font and someone poured water on them and said. “Francis, Julian, Teresa, Launcelot, William, I baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” And, you see, that’s exactly the same thing we will do here this morning. This is, we might say, a real canonization. This really is “the making of a saint,” and you are here to see it.

Today we will give Samuel his name – a name already taken, if I can put it that way, by some notable saints. There was, for example, Samuel Seabury, the first bishop of the Episcopal Church after the American Revolution, and one of my favorite names, Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, who was born of Jewish parents in Lithuania and became a Christian and came to America became the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in China, the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui and translated the Bible into Chinese. There are stories to tell about these other Saints Samuels, but I want us to concentrate today on the next Saint Samuel because this is where it all begins. Not the halo. That comes later. But saints are like any other people. They begin small and they grow. Some grow faster and some more slowly. Usually they grow in spurts, very unevenly, and sometimes they stop growing for long periods of time. But once a saint, always a saint.

We’re starting something here that we can’t stop and won’t stop because God will be doing it, quietly most of the time, hardly visible to most of us, but continuing to make a difference. I’m sure there will be times when we have our doubts, very small saints can get very fussy at times and medium size saints aren’t always easy to understand. When a sculptor sets out to carve a statue out of a block of marble it’ll be a while before we can see what he or she is up to: there’ll be lots of chips flying around and jagged edges. But sculptors know what they are doing and when it comes to making saints God is the sculptor and we are the rough material.

But what I’ve usually done at All Saints-tide as I said, is tell stories and that’s what I plan to do today: tell stories about a future saint, about Samuel, Saint Samuel, and the only problem is that it’s a little dangerous to give too many details in advance. And certainly there will be times when Samuel’s parents are likely to wonder whether what we did here really “took.” St. Samuel! at terrible two, or as a teen-ager! He must have been kidding! But you have to be patient. It’ll happen slowly, but it will happen.

So look ahead. I could tell you about the time, for example, when Samuel came home from Church School in about the year 2020 – not that far away – and told his parents the story the teacher had told their class and how impressed his parents were that he remembered it so well. It actually made them go look it up themselves in the Bible and see whether Samuel had it right – and he did! And then they talked about it for awhile as a family. That was a big day because it was probably the first real sign of God being at work in Samuel’s life. Of course, it was a still a small sign which his parents didn’t even remember afterwards. But God works so quietly that that often happens and no one stopped to think that back in 2015 they had prayed that God would “open his heart to God’s grace and truth.” They asked God to make a saint and God was doing it even though nobody really noticed. There were weeks when they didn’t even go to church but when they did it always seemed as if something stuck, something happened, it made an impact.

But anyway, the years went by and Samuel was in High School, freshman or sophomore and going around with some other kids who were, well, not bad kids, but maybe a little more trouble than most. Anyway, one day one of them got hold of some of that new drug they were using back in the early 2030s, some new chemical that everyone was trying and they invited Samuel to join in a party one of the group was planning. And he really wanted to go, wanted to be with his friends, but on the other hand he had this funny feeling, not somehow feeling quite right about it, and so he didn’t go at the last minute, he made some kind of excuse and stayed home that night. His parents thought it was kind of funny that he didn’t even ask about going out that weekend but they had long ago stopped trying to figure out this young teen ager in the family so they just kept quiet about it.

They forgot that they themselves had placed this young man in God’s hands fifteen years earlier and said, “Keep him separate: ‘Deliver him, O Lord, from the way of sin and death; Fill him with your holy and life giving spirit …’” And probably they even forgot how the preacher that day had talked about how the word “saint” means “separate” among other things: separate, set apart, belonging to God, different. “Once you put someone in God’s hands,” he said, “they are always a little different, a little separate; they don’t quite identify with the rest of the world. It’s as if they had a different agenda.” And that’s tough for a kid in High School, it’s tough at any age. But that’s how you know it’s God at work when you see it happen, when you feel it happen. God makes us different, God gives us a new identity, and sometimes it shows. Sometimes you can really see it.

There was another time too. Let me see if I can fit in one more story. It was along about the year 2043, I think, not long after Samuel was married. He’d gone east for college and met this terrific young woman from Massachusetts and moved up there just outside Boston. He’d been married maybe two or three years by then and it wasn’t going all that well. He and she both had jobs and there was a lot of pressure on them and they didn’t always have time to get things sorted out. They were trying to save enough to buy a house, and suddenly they found out a baby was on the way and the tension was just too much. There were nights when it seemed as if there were constant arguments and no matter what either one said it just seemed to make it worse. They just couldn’t seem to communicate, to understand each other. And one day Samuel had enough and just walked out, just got in the car and drove.

At first he just wanted to get some space but then he thought he ought to go somewhere and he had a friend down in Hartford so he went there and they talked, they talked for hours. Samuel told his friend how terrible it was and all the arguments and fights they’d had and the friend said, “Well, why put up with it if you don’t have to? Why not just walk away from it and get a separation and just get your life back under control. Take charge of your life. You’ve got to take care of number one. You don’t have to put up with all that garbage.” And put that way, you know, it made a lot of sense and he decided to do it. He went out and got in the car and started driving back up to Massachusetts. But it was a Friday and traffic was slow and somehow as the miles went by it all seemed to get mixed up again. It wasn’t all that clear after all. But the car kept on going somewhere, going home, and after awhile it was almost as if he, too, was heading somewhere, almost as if he had a sense of being pulled, being guided.

I don’t think he ever knew that the priest at his baptism had talked about a saint as someone who has a calling, a vocation, someone called sometimes even to suffer for the sake of others and for the sake of getting to the place where God wants them to be. But somehow the friend who laid out the alternatives so clearly had really helped clarify things and he knew what he didn’t want and when his wife got home he was there and they had a really good conversation for the first time in months and agreed they both needed to cool it a bit, try a little harder to see another way of looking at things, be a little more patient. It wasn’t anything very specific but somehow after that it went a little better . . . not always, of course, but a good part of the time.

I mentioned another Samuel and I want to digress a minute to tell you my favorite story about Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. (I love that name!) He went to China, as I said, as a bishop and had a stroke that left him badly crippled and confined to a wheel chair – but it was there that he did the most important work of his life, translating the Bible into Chinese and able to type it out using only the middle finger of his partially paralyzed right hand. When a friend came to visit, toward the end of his life, he told him, “I have sat in this chair for over twenty years. It seemed very hard at first, but God knew best: he kept me for the work for which I was best fitted.” St. Julian of Norwich said once that God never promised “you will not be tempested, you will not be travailed” but God promised “you will not be overcome.” Sometimes it seemed that way for Schereschewsky and this later St. Samuel also.

Later that same year, the baby was born and they went to the church for a baptism and the priest talked about how holiness isn’t a matter of halos but perseverance and taking the small steps one by one that add up to a difference that matters and being open to the quiet inner working of God’s Spirit. More than anything else, he said, It’s being open to God’s gift of grace that makes that difference – sometimes so quietly we hardly notice – and brings us often to a good place we could never get to by ourselves.

Well, I could go on, but you realize I have to keep the details vague at this point. But that’s the story – or something like that – or maybe I should say, that will be the story. It’s maybe not very exciting because God likes to work in the background and not be noticed. But where God is at work, good things happen. God makes us better people than we might have been left to our own devices, makes us different, makes us holy, claims us for God’s purpose, and changes the world one life at a time. One final word. We hear the stories of past and future saints to learn from their example and find some help for ourselves because no saint is up on a pedestal all alone. Saints, above all, are people involved with God and with God’s people. So Samuel’s story will be shaped by our stories and ours by his, because we are all saints together and we are all involved in each other’s stories and God is at work in all of us to write more stories and to make more saints as we are doing here this morning.

The Priesthood, Jesus’ Priesthood, Our Priesthood

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on October 25, 2015, by Christopher L. Webber.

“but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” Hebrews 7:24-25

Until I moved to California two years ago I served on two committees that have to do with the ministry of the church. One of them is called the Society for the Increase of the Ministry or SIM. SIM is an organization that gives out money to encourage people to go to seminary and prepare for ordination. The other committee I served on was the board of examining chaplains which examines candidates for ordination and some people think it’s a committee dedicated to rejecting the candidates SIM sends forward.

It did sometimes feel as if we were working at cross-purposes, but I have to admit that I did sometimes wonder whether the candidates had learned what they ought to have learned. One thing I was looking for that I seldom found, was a sense of priesthood. It wasn’t so much facts – though that was sometimes an issue, but sometimes we would get into a discussion of priesthood and I would ask the candidates for ordination why they felt called to be priests and they would tell me they like working with people or that they like to teach or that they’re good at counseling or they feel a vocation to serve, but almost never did I hear from a candidate for priesthood why they felt called to be priests. If you’re going to be a doctor you probably know what doctors are for and if you’re going to be a bus driver, you probably know what bus drivers do. So shouldn’t a future priest know what priests are for?

A priest is, of course, many things: a marriage and bereavement counselor, a discussion leader, a bulletin proof-reader, a program organizer, a teacher, preacher, baptizer, etc. and so forth, but first he or she is a “priest.” That’s the term used in the ordination service and all through the Prayer Book for the one presiding at the ordinary Eucharist, the weekly gathering of the people of God. You also find the term “minister” in the Prayer Book but that could be anyone; any lay person can be a minister. I think the Prayer Book is a little schizophrenic on that subject. The Catechism says the “Ministers of the church are lay people, bishops, priests, and deacons” but it sometimes speaks of “ministers and people” as if there were a difference.

But ordination in the Episcopal Church is not about “ministers” – as I said, that’s everyone – most often it’s about “priests.” And I think we often overlook that fact and sort of lump Episcopal priests with Protestant ministers. There is a difference and it’s useful to think about it today because the term comes up again and again in today’s second reading and also because I celebrated an anniversary of ordination just last Tuesday so priesthood has been on my mind.

We read a passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews and it ought to be required reading not only for future priests but for all Christians because priesthood is central to the life of the church and large parts of the church lost sight of it at the Reformation. The Epistle to the Hebrews is not read as often as it should be. It’s not always easy reading but no other book in the New Testament has as much to say about priesthood. It’s talking about Jesus’ priesthood, but it’s because Jesus has a priesthood that the church has a priesthood. We are members of Jesus’ body, the church, and the Epistle of Peter calls the church, you and me, “a royal priesthood.” So I’m not just talking about future priests, I’m talking to you who have a priesthood yourselves.

As members of the Body of Christ we share Jesus’ priesthood and the people we call priests are simply the ones who symbolize and express what all Christians are called to be. It’s maybe something like the way in which the President represents America.* We’re all Americans but when we need to negotiate treaties or persuade Congress to act the President is empowered to act for us. We’re all Americans but only he can act for us all. So we all share Jesus’ priesthood in the church but the priest stands at the altar to represent us before God and reenact Jesus’ priesthood. Jesus took bread and wine and said, “This is my body . . . this is my blood;” and the priest does that same thing on behalf of the congregation. The congregation provides the bread and wine and the priest does what Jesus did – takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and gives it to the gathered disciples – that’s you. And the bread and wine becomes what Jesus said it was – his body and blood, his life to renew our lives. It becomes holy, set apart, because of what the priest does with the congregation – he or she can’t do it alone, only with you because all of us together are Jesus’ body and here we are fed with that body to be renewed in his life.

So priesthood first of all is something shared: you and I together in different roles become who Jesus is and we together become for the world what I am for you – priests – a priesthood, a royal priesthood – to do what priests do: which has to do with sacrifice and offering and holiness. Only Roman Catholics and Episcopalians and the Eastern Orthodox talk about their clergy as priests. It’s one of the reasons we call ourselves a Catholic Church: that we maintain and continue a priesthood.

We are surrounded, of course, as I said by Christians for whom, for historical reasons, priesthood is an unknown aspect of ministry, rejected at the Reformation and never recovered. The protestant churches became centered on preaching instead of sacraments. But I think something is happening. In our visual age, as people become less and less able to assimilate long sermons, as we respond to the visual images of television rather than the aural input of radio and lectures and sermons, as we become attuned to the eye instead of the ear I notice that the Protestant churches are recovering some of the outward signs and symbols – wearing vestments, putting crosses on their buildings and in their buildings and, indeed, holding communion services more often.

So perhaps this is an opportune time to share with Protestant Christians some understanding of priesthood — if we have such an understanding ourselves. What can we hope to accomplish if priests don’t know about priesthood and people don’t know about their role as priests? So what is priesthood? Here’s my definition: “Priesthood is many things. It’s first of all about sacrifice, a critical Biblical concept. It’s about self offering. It’s about participation in Christ’s self offering. It’s about the reality of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine. It’s about a God who works through material things to become known in material beings and to bring us life through material things.”

Ultimately we need life and human beings have always had a sense that out there somewhere is a life giver – a source of life, a Creator. But how to approach that life giver is the problem. Most races and tribes have evolved some way to do that: they make an idol and pray to it or they take an animal and sacrifice it. We have Jesus, who offered himself in sacrifice for us. And our calling is to offer ourselves and our world, to come here and bring our offering, the money and bread and wine, but more important, ourselves: to offer ourselves for God’s work, offer ourselves to be Christ’s presence in the world. It is not about a spirituality divorced from the real world. There’s too much of that these days, too much self-centered spirituality. It’s about bringing Christ to the world and bringing the world to Christ. Another name for it is mediation – Christ our great high priest is also “our only mediator and advocate” as we still say in Rte I – but we are members of Christ’s body, what he is, we are; we share that mediatorial work. The church has a priesthood to the world and the priest personifies that role within the church.

Think how critical that is. Protestant ministry is primarily a ministry of the Word, a preaching ministry. We have that ministry too and I’m not sure we exemplify that any better than we do priesthood. But be that as it may, nobody likes to be preached at all the time, nor is that our role. A mediator has something to offer: the world to God and God to the world, the gift of life and meaning and purpose. That’s useful. It connects to a real world and its needs. So a priest is a mediator.

My favorite Bible text is Hebrews 4:15-16: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” I quote that to Inquirers’ Classes all the time. For my money, it’s what Christianity is all about. It’s about the role of a mediator, the one who makes connections. We all have needs and out there is someone able to supply that need. Maybe I need a job and somewhere there’s a chief executive who could use my skills. Maybe I need money and somewhere out there is a Wall Street plutocrat with tons of the stuff. But the common fix we are in is that the friends I have don’t have the jobs and the money and I don’t know the people that do or how to get to them. e often say, “We need connections.” So we need a mediator, a way to approach the one whose help we need, and Jesus – the one who has come here to share our life – the one who is God in human flesh – Jesus – is that mediator, that priest. We know him and he “has connections” and he knows us and he brings us back to the source of life.

That’s good news enough, but even better news is that he offers himself as mediator for the whole world and calls us to share that mediatorial work and to make that role as specific and concrete as possible by embodying it in a certain few who can represent to the rest of the church and the world that priesthood, that mediatorial function. That’s an incredible gift. And here we sit with this gift – and ignore it, hide it, misrepresent it, when it needs to be offered and shared. Won’t we find more and better candidates for ordination if they realize the full meaning of the call? Wouldn’t the church be less divided if we truly saw ourselves as a royal priesthood with gifts to share rather than a debating society about sex and morals?

For now, maybe it’s enough to know that we have a gift to share and a gift to celebrate and a job to do in a world that need Christ’s presence: to be a mediatorial priesthood bringing Christ to the world and bringing the world to Christ. It’s an enormous job but it’s desperately needed and God gives it to us. Let’s do it. Let’s be the royal priesthood we are called to be – here – today – together and tomorrow wherever God places us, a royal priesthood – breaking down barriers, bringing people together, reuniting the world with God.

*I didn’t say so in the sermon but it is of interest that the term used in the early church for the one presiding at the eucharist was “president.” Nowadays people often use the term “presider.”

Being Saint Luke’s People

A sermon preached  by Christopher L. Webber on St. Luke’s Day, October 18, 2015, at St. Luke’s Church, San Francisco.

St. Luke was a doctor – as far as we know. St Paul calls him “the beloved physician,” but there’s also a tell-tale passage in the gospels where Mark tells a story about a woman who, he says, “had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse.”(5:26) Well, that’s not a nice thing to say about doctors so Luke tells the story differently. Dr. Luke says, “she had spent all she had on physicians, and no one could cure her.” (8:46) So it looks as if Luke was a doctor; there does seem to be some self-interest at work there. But the Gospel according to Luke also shows a doctor’s natural interest in symptoms. He describes the diseases Jesus healed in more detail than the other gospels. But whether it’s Luke or Matthew or Mark or John it’s clear that Jesus was primarily a healer. Yes, people came to hear him teach, but perhaps even more they came to be healed and the apostles carried on that ministry and the church has always done the same.

St. Luke’s Hospital, San Francisco, one of the oldest hospitals in the city and now one of four campuses of California Pacific, was founded by an Episcopal priest in 1871. There are at least half a dozen Episcopally sponsored hospitals named for St Luke all over the United States and more overseas. My wife was born in St Luke’s Hospital, Tokyo. I looked around on line and discovered St Luke’s hospitals everywhere – in Bethlehem PA and Maumee Ohio and Chesterfield Missouri and Duluth Minnesota and Boise Idaho and they weren’t always founded by Episcopalians. (St. Luke may or may not have been an Episcopalian himself. I think he was but there’s no clear evidence.) But I noticed that while the hospital in Houston is called St Luke’s Episcopal Hospital it’s usually hard to find any reference to denominational identity. More often, whatever the founding church may have been, you find references to ecumenical chaplaincy services and interdenominational chapels and it’s clear that the ministry being done, like that of Jesus, is based purely on need. And of course that’s the way it should be.

Hospitals surely are first of all for healing, for carrying on Jesus’ ministry of healing, and it’s more important now, I think, than ever to emphasize the ministry of healing in all its dimensions. There was a time when doctors seemed to feel that they could do it all – just get the right science, right pills, right surgery, and all will be well – but I think they’ve come to recognize that human beings are not simply physical beings who can be fixed, but spiritual beings also whose physical healing sometimes is advanced or retarded by spiritual things. It’s all very well to be hooked up to tubes and machines but we need also to be visited, we need the human touch, we need to be in relationship with others. That’s why Episcopal churches more and more often have a pastoral care team that includes lay people some of whom may have a special gift for that ministry and exercise it as they do here at the end of the Sunday liturgy and at the mid-week service also. Yes, the priest needs to go and take communion and the holy oils for anointing but there needs to be also that human contact with other members of the community. There are still, I think, a good many doctors who don’t understand that, but I think most of us choose our doctors for their human touch more than their credentials and technical skills and sometimes the human touch is really more important.

Health care, of course, is headline news these days so it’s good that we have St Luke to think about while the country tears itself apart about health care reform because it reminds us, I think, that we need to have some input as Christians, and too often the so-called Christian input is negative and has not very much to do with the Bible. But I think there is a positive Biblical perspective and it begins with Jesus and even that very basic question: “What would Jesus do?” Because I’m pretty sure that Jesus would not suggest that health care ought to be based on what kind of insurance you have. I don’t remember that he ever asked who would pay the bill. So you can argue if you want about how to pay for health care and how to provide it, but I don’t think that we as Christians can argue that there should be anyone left out. If the system we have leaves anyone out, and it does, that system is not a Christian system. Well, it’s not a Christian country either but our role as Christians is to advocate for the best as we understand it and we’re not there yet and we can hold up a higher standard – good health care for all and no one left out.

We hear these angry debates over universal health care and for Christians it can’t be an issue. Of course there should be universal health care – in fact we have it already – no one gets turned away from an emergency room. The only issue is who should provide it and who should pay for it. We not only have universal health care already, we pay for it already – but we pay too much for it because the uninsured cost money and you and I pay their bills in taxes and premiums. And we pay more than we ought to because the uninsured don’t get preventative care and therefore cost more when they come to the emergency room. So the system we have is stupid and it’s expensive and it doesn’t need to be. The issue isn’t whether to do it but how to do it and we need to work that out and it would help if we could do it calmly and rationally.

We get hung up on slogans and irrational fears. Everyone, for example, from the president on down agrees we shouldn’t provide health care for illegal aliens. But we do! We already do – and we already pay for it – and we should pay for it. There’s no clearer message in the Bible than the command to care for the alien in your midst, so the question again isn’t whether but how. And it shouldn’t be that hard to figure it out. Most other industrialized countries have figured it out already and its ridiculous for a country with this many Christians to be left behind. This is not, of course, a Christian country; I don’t think it ever really was but I hope the church has an influence and that Christians will use their voices and votes to see that however we wind up no one is left out, that no one is left out, unless you can imagine Jesus leaving someone out because they couldn’t afford his visit.

It’s about healing. Luke wants us to see the healing ministry of Jesus. The world has been changed by Jesus’ ministry whether you are Christian or not and St. Luke is the great witness to that aspect of Jesus’ ministry. So St Luke tells us about Jesus as a health care provider and that’s important to think about but Luke has much more to say than that because healing, as I said, isn’t just about physical bodies and healing involves not just individuals but societies also. Societies get sick and need healing. When you find people shouting at each other and calling each other names that’s a sick society and it needs healing too.

It’s partly, I think, the increasing divisions in our country between wealth and poverty that cause the trouble. Last year American chief executives earned 262 times the average wage of their workers and that was ten times more than the difference back in 1970. So we hear about chief executives and others with incomes beyond what most of us can imagine and then when jobs disappear and homes get foreclosed even if it’s not your job or your home but just someone you know it makes you nervous and angry and no wonder we get people shouting at each other.

How can we deal with that anger? I don’t think the churches help as much as they should and could because so many of them emphasize individual salvation. Do you know the old hymn that begins, “I come to the garden alone”? It’s all about me and Jesus: “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own . . .” Too many hymns begin with the word “I.” But when you put the emphasis on “me” and my feelings and my relationship with Jesus and how I feel and my emotions it turns the focus away from my neighbor’s needs and society as a whole and the corporate, social healing we need.

St. Luke emphasizes the corporate dimension of healing. He makes a point of the social dimension. None of the other gospels has as much to say as St Luke about the divisions between rich and poor. Luke starts out with Mary’s song the Magnificat, and her praise for a God who puts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, who sends the rich away empty and fills the hungry with good things.

There have been churches and there have been religions that saw wealth as a sign of God’s favor and poverty as evidence of sin, but certainly St Luke doesn’t see it that way. In Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount it’s not “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” That’s the way Matthew reports it, but Luke tells us that Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor . . . and woe to you who are rich.” It is not God’s will that some prosper while others suffer. There’s a social healing we need; greater and greater divisions are a sign of sickness in a society and the church’s job is to heal, to look for common ground, to reconcile, to bring together, to unite.

I wonder whether we Anglicans have gone at it the wrong way too because we also are becoming divided by social issues instead of healing them. I wonder whether our traditional emphasis on reason isn’t helpful because the divisions aren’t rational divisions whether it be anti-abortion and pro-choice, whether it be for or against illegal aliens, whether it be for or against gay marriage. There are reasons on both sides but also deep emotions on both sides and emotions can override reason. I think we need to realize that these divisions are sometimes too deep for rational discussion. We feel them too deeply to be influenced at an intellectual level. I don’t think we usually choose up sides after thinking it through carefully and weighing the arguments. Sexuality, for instance, isn’t usually a matter of rational choice, is it? – I mean, if you’re married, was that a rational choice? Did you sit down and weigh the factors for and against? I don’t remember that I did! So emotions may trump reason, but part of growing up is learning to control emotions, recognizing them, and keeping them in check if we can – if we can – but we should realize at the least what’s happening and the need for time and space to calm down and listen to each other and try to find ways to live together in peace.

We surely know that shouting doesn’t change any minds We know it; lots of others don’t. but, you know, reasoning doesn’t always change minds either. Have you tried reasoning with the NRA? But when was the last time you saw a television commercial that just laid out the facts, the scientific data, the logical reasons for buying this or that – whether drugs or cars or furniture or detergents? No, what you get is an appeal to the emotions and what gets through to your emotions may not speak to me at all, may just turn me off. Thank goodness for the remote control so I can turn the TV off. There are certain commercials that make me automatically hit the “mute” button. But it does appeal to someone or they wouldn’t do it.

So how do we find ways to live together in spite of the differences. How do we learn to open ourselves to God’s ability to change us and heal us and unite us in spite of ourselves. Doesn’t it begin right here? If it were easy, we wouldn’t be here would we? And if there were another way to do it, we wouldn’t be here on Sunday morning would we? But healing takes time and patience and commitment and that’s why we’re here. It’s why we have programs here on the death penalty and gun violence and support Rivers ministry to the homeless and the Saturday food bank. And the mission last year to the Philippines. It’s all about Healing, trying to be St. Luke’s people healing a sick world. And God needs us to be here and so does our society. So tell people about it, bring others with you, because what matters is what St. Luke talked about – God’s healing – God’s healing power – proclaimed in the gospel and available in the church and lived out daily, right here, right now, day by day, by each of us trusting in God’s healing strength.

To heal, to heal, to heal: it was Jesus’ ministry, it’s our ministry to our nation, to our neighbor. Let’s be doing it.

Vanderbilts, Refugees, and Us

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on October 11, 2015.

 

A few years ago I read a book called: “The Power of Their Glory: America’s Ruling Class: The Episcopalians.” It was published long before I read it, almost forty years ago, and I remember that when it first came out I read reviews of it but I didn’t think I could stand reading it so I didn’t. And then, ten or fifteen years ago, I decided I needed to read it because of another project I was working on, so I did.

Don’t bother. It’s a basically silly book – and boring. After a while you get tired of the name dropping, and there’s no real point to it: What it tells you is that a lot of silly people had more money than they knew what to do with and many of them were Episcopalians. But so what? Did you know that Cornelius Vanderbilt had a yacht with a crew of forty, formal dinner china for 108, and eight kinds of crystal glasses in the bar. It cost $7,000 a month to keep the thing in dry dock and a lot more to take it out. And that was in the 30s when a thousand dollars was still a lot of money. Did you know that Grace Vanderbilt spent five million 1900 dollars to build a “cottage” as she called it in Newport, RI.?

Do you care? None of that has much to do with you or me and the current crop of zillionaires make the old ones look like amateurs. It doesn’t have much to do with you and me but it does have something to do with the Gospel which talks again and again about wealth, and about riches, and about poverty, and about those in need.

It sometimes seems as if, every Fall, as we gear up for the annual stewardship campaign the Gospel comes back to this theme of wealth and poverty. I think in fact that it’s a theme that comes up year round, but we are especially aware of it in the Fall because we’ve just begun to plan about stewardship and it makes us more aware of what the gospel is always saying and what it told us this morning: “How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God.”

Now, I often point out that by any standards except those of the Vanderbilts and 1% the rich is not someone else. It’s us. In comparison with most of the world’s people we live in luxury, in luxury as unimaginable to them as the 1% to us. I can’t imagine owning a yacht with a crew of forty. I’ve never owned a rowboat though I did once buy a rubber raft. More than half the world’s people live on less than $2.50 a day. Twenty per cent live on just over a dollar. Relative to most people we are all very rich.

What annoyed me most about the book I read was that it put nothing in perspective. It told the tale for the fun of telling it but without a purpose except to entertain. But why would we enjoy reading about immorality? Of course, we do. We read about sex and violence and are horrified at one level and maybe secretly envious at another. Self-centered greed is equally immoral and we may be secretly envious and wish we too could have solid gold toilet fixtures but in a way that kind of greed is worse than murder and adultery because it does more harm. Murder seldom harms very many but greed has a quiet destructiveness that harms millions.

This is a very rich world. It’s a world of abundance whose resources we have scarcely begun to tap. There’s no need for anyone to go homeless or hungry but if one individual hoards up millions and billions, then others will not have enough and some will be hungry and some will die because of someone else’s greed. While the Vanderbilts ate caviar on their yachts, children worked twelve hours a day in the textile mills of New England and coal miners died early of black lung disease and the book I read never mentions that. It’s as if it didn’t matter. As if self-indulgence has no consequences. But greed kills. It kills those who needed what the greedy spend on themselves. And, in fact, it kills the greedy too. They die physically, of course, because of their self-indulgence in a day when no one knew about the dangers of nicotine or the value of exercise and diet, but even more important they die spiritually because spiritual growth is based on love of others. and you cannot love God and be indifferent to the needs of others.

“He who says he loves God and hates his brother,” said St. John, “is a liar.” It’s not possible. It can’t be done. Love can’t be limited. You can’t focus it on yourself and not love others. You can’t have it on Sunday unless you have it also on Monday. And you can’t spend some of your money lovingly and the rest selfishly. It’s all of a piece. And the greatest challenge we face is just that struggle to give our lives unity and wholeness to be the people God calls us to be all the time, not just some of the time, to live out our faith day by day and moment by moment, to be whole people, wholly loving, wholly serving, holy people. To give ourselves wholly to the God who gives all to us.

I was pondering all this recently and began wondering what it would be like to put a price on what God has given us. I wondered, for example, what we would be willing to give if we could go back to the moment before our birth and be offered a choice: You are about to be born into this world and the odds are not good that you will be an American – maybe one chance in ten. And faced with the possibility of being born into a family in Bangladesh trying to eke out a living by growing rice on a half acre of land in a river delta subject to flooding and monsoons with a life expectancy of twenty-five or thirty or born into a family in Morocco where unemployment is 25% and families support themselves by sending their children out to work in mills making rugs for ten hours a day at ten cents an hour to be sold to tourists or a family in Syria where the best you can hope for is escape – to get out of there somehow by boat, by walking – just get out and hope to rebuild a shattered life.

Well, read the papers, watch television, and ask: where would I rather live – and if asked to put a price on it, what would you give – gladly – for the opportunity to live here and not there? And wouldn’t you be willing to share some of what you have with those who have less for the privilege of living in this country at this time? Do you suppose God gives us all this because we are more deserving or because God loves us more or because God hopes against hope that we, knowing as much as we do about the need, might be willing – even glad – to share our abundance.

But that’s to put it in material terms. Suppose you were given another choice: a life as rich as the Vanderbilts and all their ilk: yachts and mansions and servants, the whole thing, with a lifespan like theirs of sixty or seventy years and no more. Just that. One brief and possibly happy life – though I’m not sure how happy they really were – but then death, eternal death. If you haven’t learned to love here, if what you have learned here is self-centered grasping, how could you be happy in a place centered on self-giving love?

So there’s that on the one hand, and on the other hand a life lived with the hope of eternal life hereafter, a life centered on growing in love so that at last you might be able to hope to live and grow in love forever. What would you give for that? But of course, you can’t buy it and you don’t have to. It’s freely offered. God in love freely offers to us and the whole human race an eternity of love and the offer is for all those who have so learned to love that they would be at home in such a place. You can’t buy it. There’s nothing you can give to earn it. And yet giving is all that is asked. God gives to us to show us what giving can be. God pours out love on us to teach us how to give – freely, generously, totally because that is why we are placed here and that is what life is for.

With Us or Not?

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, September 27, 2015.

Some years ago, the church I was serving was using mite boxes for something or other and put extras out in the vestibule for people to pick up. One day some children wandered in and found them and went up and down the street ringing doorbells and telling people they were collecting for Christ Church. We never found out who they were and never got the money, but we did stop putting out mite boxes. You can’t have just anybody collecting in the church’s name.

Now I think that’s a little like the story we just heard from the Gospel. Someone was casting out demons in Jesus’ name and it wasn’t Jesus. It wasn’t even one of the apostles or disciples. And that got the disciples upset. How come he’s out there talking like one of us when he’s not a dues-paying member? What right has he got to do good things if he doesn’t come to our church on Sunday? And Jesus said, “Those who are not against us are for us.”

Now, the hard part of this is that we are reading St. Mark’s gospel this year, and in Mark, Jesus says, “He who is not against us is with us,” but in St. Matthew you find the opposite: “Those who are not with us are against us.” And in St. Luke’s gospel you find it both ways two chapters apart. One way is open and inclusive, the other is narrow and exclusive. And depending on which gospel you read, or which chapter of which gospel, Jesus said one or the other or both.

So, what do you do about that? Well, but doesn’t it depend on the context? I mean, suppose you’re rolling a rock up hill and the slope is slippery and you’re about to lose your grip and the rock is about to roll back down and take you with it and your friends are just standing there watching, giving you the benefit of their advice but not putting their shoulders to the stone. Those who aren’t with you are against you. But suppose someone who hates you is trying to round up a gang to come and throw stones at your house and he goes to one neighbor after another and says, Let’s go throw stones at the Webbers’ and gets turned down. Turns out, they don’t much care, one way or the other, but they’re watching a soap opera on television or weeding the garden or something else and can’t be bothered to get involved one way or the other. You might wish they were more supportive, but, hey, at least they do no harm. “Those who are not against you are for you.”

Now, Matthew shows Jesus facing a hostile crowd and saying “Those who are not with me are against me.” But Mark shows the disciples reporting on someone who is somewhere else acting in Jesus’ name. That’s a very different situation and in that situation, those who are not against us are with us. They’re spreading the word that there’s healing in Jesus’ name, and that’s good news no matter who is doing it.

So now think about our life in this community, and in this congregation. Jesus’ followers in San Francisco line up in any number of separate groupings on Sunday morning and we all claim to be acting in Jesus’ name. Should we try to prevent the others from claiming the title Christian; if they aren’t here, they’re the enemy? Well, do they enhance the name of Christian or not? Do they act in a way that brings credit to the name or do they dishonor it? Isn’t that the basic question? If members of other churches bring honor to the name of Christ that strengthens all of us; that’s a positive. But if they act in a way that makes others sneer at Christianity, that’s no help, it’s negative.

Or look at it in terms of our church, our parish: we don’t have a lot of members so when the doors open on Sunday morning and someone is missing, we know it and it’s a negative, it weakens us. He or she who is not with us is against us. But suppose that missing person had actually started for church this morning when someone in front of them on the sidewalk keeled over and that church member dialed 911 on their cell phone and then administered CPR until the ambulance came and then since no one else was available rode with them to the hospital to make sure the patient was cared for. Well, they didn’t get to church, but surely in that situation, he or she who is not with us is for us – is acting in a way that bears witness to our faith.

Or try a wider frame: in this country, there’s a pretty wide range of people claiming to speak for the gospel. And there are, to be honest, some who claim to be with us who do damage to the name of Christ, so that people say, “If that’s what Christians are like, forget it.” and there others who maybe aren’t any kind of standard brand Christian, but who make outsiders say, “If that’s what a Christian is, I should check it out myself.”

I think the attitude Jesus reflects in this gospel is one of a broad and generous inclusion of anyone who is serving God. And I think this attitude of a broad and generous inclusion is very much a part of the Anglican tradition – though we haven’t always been true to it – and I think it’s an attitude other churches are beginning to adopt also. Episcopalians and Lutherans, for example, both come from traditions that used to say “Those who are not confirmed or ordained in our tradition aren’t doing it quite right and aren’t acceptable at our altars.” Episcopalians used to say that if you weren’t confirmed by a bishop in apostolic succession you couldn’t come to communion. We may read the same Bible and say the same Creed, but we have some different customs about bishops so we can’t possibly work or worship together. Those who are not with us are against us.

Both Lutherans and Episcopalians used to take that kind of stand. But does it really work against us and against the cause of Christ if we have slightly different patterns of ministry as long as ministry gets done? If those who claim to be Christian are selling snake oil on television that’s another question. If they are teaching hostility toward other Christians, that’s another question too. If they are witnessing to a kind of Christianity that’s intolerant of immigrants or unconcerned for the poor, they do harm to the possibility of common witness. Those not with us in ministry to human need are against us. But don’t we do more damage to the name of Christ by our divisions than almost any other way, and isn’t it good that we’re beginning to be a bit more open toward those with whom we have so much in common?

It seems to me the new Concordat with the Lutherans is a step in the right direction. In fact, aren’t there even greater opportunities than that to work together with other people of good will toward common objectives? There are service groups in every community made up of Christians and non-Christians working together for the common good. And I think that’s a good thing too. God is able – believe it or not – to work through non-Episcopalians as well as Episcopalians, and even non-Christians as well as Christians. God is not limited by our boundaries.

And then we might look more closely at ourselves. We claim the name of Christ; we come here and worship; but are we with or against our Lord when push comes to shove: when there’s work to be done, when pledges are needed, when there’s a witness to be made, when there are prayers that are needed? Are we with Jesus in a way that makes a difference, or are we actually a deadweight holding others back, claiming to be Christian but not giving much evidence of it?

It’s one thing to be generous and inclusive in regard to those outside our particular church or even outside any church. If they aren’t against us, if they don’t get in the way, if they maybe even do some of the things we should be doing, that’s good. They’re really with us whether they know it or not. But here, within the community, when there’s work to be done and some of those needed aren’t with us, aren’t there when they’re needed, that’s a negative, not a plus. Those who aren’t with us in that sense are against us; they weaken the whole body.

I heard of a church once where every member was mailed a piece of a picture puzzle of their church along with their pledge card and asked to bring both in on stewardship Sunday so they not only made a budget but they put the parish picture together very dramatically. Have you ever noticed how incomplete a jigsaw puzzle looks when just one piece is still missing – even one piece out of several hundred? There’s that hole that seems to be more important than all the other pieces; the puzzle is obviously incomplete till that last piece is there. If you aren’t with us, we’re incomplete, we can’t be the church that we need to be to serve Christ in this community.

And look at the way the gospel this morning then goes on to stress that point. Every member counts. Every member of the body counts. If your hand causes you to stumble, or your foot or eye, cut it off, tear it out, you’re better off without the member who isn’t contributing. Suddenly we switch from being open and inclusive toward those outside the body to being incredibly narrow and exclusive to those within the body. I wonder if Jesus had Judas in mind? One member of the body who destroyed the head of the body. Those not with Jesus in Gethsemane were surely against him. So the standard we hold up to others can be open and generous, but the standard we hold up to ourselves is very different. It’s fine to be easy on others, but not on ourselves. Discipline is for our children, not the neighbor’s children. What they do doesn’t reflect on us; what our own children do does. We hold our own to a higher standard.

I read reports of these new mega-churches – one of the best known is in Willow Creek, Illinois – that have no prayer books or hymnals because they throw everything up on a screen, they use rock groups for their music and actors to do a skit in place of a sermon and they preach a minimal gospel. It’s been called entertainment evangelism and I have to wonder how long the fad will last without the tradition or the creeds or the sacraments. But should we bomb the place? I don’t think so. They act in the name of Christ and they draw a lot of people who aren’t touched by the traditional churches. We can hope the small first step will lead to a thirst for something more. But that’s not our problem.

Our problem is first of all our own body, this church, and our own bodies, the kind of lives we live – and how much of that life – our life – your life and my life- is for or against the Lord who loves us and calls us to work together to serve God’s people and build up the Body of Christ.

True Words

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber  at Christ Church Seikokai, San Francisco, on September 13, 2015.

I wonder if you ever noticed that the second thing said in the Bible by a human being is not exactly true?  Or if you noticed it, have you thought about its significance?

God said to Adam,  “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree,” But when the serpent asked Eve about it,  she said, “God said we are not to eat of it  or touch it.”  Now, God didn’t say that  so what does this tell us about Eve?

You might say,  “Look at that.  Here’s comes this woman and the first words out of her mouth  she exaggerates.” Well, maybe.  But if you look carefully, you have to notice that when God said it,  she wasn’t there. At that point, only Adam had been created.  So whatever she knew, Adam told her,  and maybe he exaggerated to make sure she got the point.

One way or another,  I think it may be significant that the statement we have is made by a woman.  Eve is the one who makes a difference in the first chapters of the Bible. She’s the one who changes things. She picks the forbidden fruit  and Adam just goes along.  Some people use words to make a difference  and some just go along. So we don’t really know  whether it was Adam of Eve  who misrepresented  what God said and in the long run it may not really matter. You can call it embellishing the truth, or misrepresenting the facts,  or a lot of other things, but whatever you want to call it, it’s a way of using language that goes back a long way. Human beings don’t always tell the truth.

The Epistle we read this morning is upset about that.  It says:

“the tongue is a fire. . . . a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, . . . set on fire by hell . . . no one can tame the tongue– a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be.”

James has a point. The tongue is a flame that kindles great fires.  We can take words like “communism”  and “terrorism” and use them  to set the world on fire, to define sides in a conflict,  to divide the world between us and them,  to gain power over others.

I remember reading a sermon  by a famous Victorian preacher,  Frederick Robertson, and came across this sentence:

“Let any man cast his eye over the pages of the press, — it matters little to which party the newspaper or the journal may belong,—he will be startled to find the characters of those he has deeply reverenced, and whose integrity and life are above suspicion, held up to scorn and hatred. The organ of one party is established against the organ of another, and it is the recognized office of each to point out, with microscopic care, the names of those whose views are to be shunned. There is no personality too mean, there is no insinuation too audacious or too false, for the recklessness of those daring slanderers.”

But that was 150 years ago  and you would think he had been watching  American national television yesterday  and seeing the ads for the candidates. How much has changed? Did you ever read George Orwell’s book “1984″  and remember the way he shows words being used to shape thought, to control populations?  He wrote back in the time when we were amazed to hear China calling itself a “People’s Republic” -  as if it were a free and open society,  but controlled societies use such words  to trample down the truth. Places like North Korea and Iran  use words to turn black into white.

And we are not immune to the virus. Madison Avenue makes a living out of -  shall we say “shaping” the truth?  You can’t run for President or be President these days without an army of spin doctors to create phrases like “Make America Great Again,” “compassionate conservatism,” “hope and change”  “Believe in America” and so on. After 911, the administration  rushed a bill through Congress called “The Patriot Act”  which got a nearly unanimous vote  even though it gave our government new powers and limited our freedom. But who could vote against “The Patriot Act”?  If they had called it “The Terrorist Act” The result might have been different. But you can’t vote against patriotism. Words make a difference.

But come closer to home.  Have you ever known one member of a congregation  to say something hurtful about another? If not, you’re fortunate.  It happens.  This is not yet the kingdom of God  and these things do happen. This is a church.  It’s not a sewing circle or bridge club  in which we choose our members  for mutual compatibility.  So we are not always easily compatible  and Christians do get impatient with each other  and say things they ought to regret but Christians are also much likelier to regret it and agonize over it  than members of a political party or  bridge club.

Words can be used to hurt.  James is making an important point  in this morning’s readings:  these things ought not to happen.  But they do happen and the reason they do is that a) we are not yet perfect Christians, and b) – and this is what’s important – we have the ability to use words creatively.

Maybe you’ve actually heard someone describe someone else’s use of language as being “a little creative” – and what they meant was that it went a bit beyond the plain facts.  Like Eve in the story of the Garden of Eden  the story has been exaggerated a bit, it’s imaginative to some degree, it doesn’t exactly correspond with existing reality. But suppose we couldn’t do that.  Have you ever thought about that? Suppose our language were entirely limited  to the plain facts,  that we had no ability to use language creatively, to imagine, to conjure up visions, that everything we said was just facts.  How would anything ever change? It’s been said that the human ability to make counter-factual statements is the basis of civilization.  Or to put it more bluntly, if we couldn’t lie,  we could never change things.

When I was living in Connecticut  they started a program in the town of Litchfield  called “Transformation” with a vision of a better community – what kind of place might Litchfield be  if everyone worked together toward a common goal?  What kind of place might San Francisco be  if everyone worked together  toward a common goal? Can you even imagine that would happen? What kind of church might the Diocese of California be  if every Episcopalian worked in unity toward a common goal? Some of us see our congregations as a transforming center of life. Are they?  Is that the bare, unvarnished truth?  Well, not exactly.  But if we couldn’t talk that way,  what would happen?  Someone would ask you about your church and you would be forced to say “Well, it’s a small number  of rather ordinary people who meet once a week and go away again  and sometimes get together for pot luck suppers  and stuff like that and nobody much notices.”  And that’s probably pretty factual. Or you could say, “It’s the kingdom of God on earth;  it’s some of the most committed and faithful people  in the whole area and they are making a difference in the whole community.” Is that a factual statement?  You can’t prove it with test tubes in a lab,  But in some ways it’s closer to the truth than the bare facts.

What do you see when you look around?  Do you see familiar faces doing the same old thing or do you see the saints of God  creating the kingdom of heaven on earth?  That may be a counter-factual statement  but if it’s what we want then it’s a counter-factual statement that has the power to change things, to enable us to dream dreams  and communicate a vision  and bring a new world into being.

Now this gets to the very bottom of what it means to be human -  or as the Bible puts it  “made in the image of God” -  because what God does from the first chapter of the Bible to the last  is to create new worlds,  bring new worlds into existence.  “God spoke” and it was so: there was light and dark,  earth and sea,  birds and animals, and human beings made  in the image of God -  like God, because they could also  speak and shape worlds like God, because they can imagine a world  different  from the one we are in  and use the magic of words to create that new world.

Do you remember the phrase, “Compassionate conservative”  – goodness, that was 15 years ago; how about “Hope and Change” seven years ago?  Maybe these are just meaningless slogans to win votes  and make us feel good  but it could have been an invocation of something new, a world in which the whole energy of our society was employed to be sure that  indeed no child was left behind  and no one was left without useful work to do.  Your words and my words  could make these things happen.   A character in a play by George Bernard Shaw says, “You see things; and you say, Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’” That’s the difference that words can make.

It’s interesting, I think, to know  that the Hebrew language has one word, “dabar,”  that means both word and act. In other words, to the Hebrew mind a word is an act; a word has force;  a word changes things.  God’s words are like that. Our words tend not to be like that.  How many of our words  really change things.  How many are just idle chatter?

It’s no wonder Episcopalians have the custom of falling silent when we come into a church. It’s not the town hall,  not a club room, not a meeting house.  It’s not a place for idle chatter,  it’s a place where the word of God  is to be spoken  and when we think about that  we realize then how completely inadequate most of our words are. The words we use here are mostly Biblical words,  words chosen and hallowed for their power.  Preachers need to remember that pulpits are raised up not just for audibility  but because we are speaking God’s word,  something above ordinary language, a word meant to change lives, create worlds.

Prayer is like that too. The Lord’s Prayer especially imagines a changed world: “your kingdom come, your will be done,  on earth as in heaven.”  Those are words to change things,  invoking God’s power  to remake this world in the image of a new world,  a perfect world,  a world in which God is known  and loved and served perfectly.  You can’t pray that prayer and accept the world as it is. Jesus, we say, was the word of God, God’s word made flesh. Jesus changed things, created a new world.  We number the years from his birth because with his birth a new world began. We worship on Sunday  because it’s the first day of creation and the first Christians called it  “The Eighth Day” – the first day of a whole new creation,  a new life in the risen Christ.

Today in the Gospel  Jesus is asking his disciples about one creative word in particular:  do they know who he is?  And Peter has a glimpse of the truth  so he says, “You are the Messiah.” But that’s a word that Peter doesn’t yet understand and when Jesus begins to tell him that it means suffering and death  Peter misses the point entirely and rejects it  So Jesus tells him not to use the word again until he knows better what it means.  I don’t fully understand what that word means to our world today or exactly what kind of world  God is creating now.

The Bishop of Connecticut likes to ask,  “What is God doing now and here?”  I’m not exactly sure – and I don’t think the bishop is -what the Episcopal Church  should be doing  at this moment in its history. The preacher who tells you exactly what God is saying to us today is probably wrong.  The politician who claims to have all the answers  is probably wrong and fortunately the primaries  pretty much winnow out the people who have a really clear agenda. This is God’s world not ours, and it is God who acts in history  and it’s our job to listen carefully and try to follow along.  Human words are never adequate  and often, right from the beginning, not quite accurate.

So beyond the spoken words of our service  there’s a different kind of word to receive  and that is the word made flesh at the altar,  a word that transcends the limits of human language and acts with a power beyond human speech.  Today’s lesson asks us to watch our words. Remember the power they have to create and destroy,  to help and to hurt.  The world tells most people, “You are worthless; you’re a loser;  you don’t count.”  The world is wrong.  We as God’s people know another word that says “You have value;  you are God’s beloved and chosen children. Listen to that word.  Receive it today at God’s altar.  Take it out with you  and speak it to your family and friends and strangers alike.  When you do that  you can re-shape the world.

Loving the World

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at Christ Church Seikokai, San Francisco, on August 31, 2015.

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  James 1:27

I thought of trying a little experiment this morning but my Japanese isn’t good enough. What I wanted to do was to ask the reader of the second lesson to add one phrase at the end.  So in English it would have ended this way: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world and to stand on your head for sixty minutes every day before breakfast.  The Word of the Lord.”

I wonder whether anyone would have noticed.  What would the reaction have been? I probably should have tried it because now I’ll never know. I hope you are thinking: “That’s completely ridiculous.” But, you know, the lesson ended anyway with a completely ridiculous statement and no one reacted at all, not a peep! “Pure religion is . . .to keep yourself unspotted by the world.”  Let me put it this way: “Every good member of the church must avoid being influenced in any way by the world around us.” That is what the reading said and there’s no way you can do it.

Not that Christians haven’t tried. Very early on in the history of the church men and women went off into the desert and established themselves sometimes in solitary cells and sometimes in isolated communities. Of course, there weren’t any fatherless and widowed to visit out there, but neither could the world get them stained. I really don’t know how you can keep yourself unstained by the world except by going off into the desert – I think there’s some available down around Palm Springs. And I’ll bet every one of us has days when we would like to give it a try, but there’s just no way we can do it. We’ve got jobs to do, bills to pay, and the fact is, most of us most of the time prefer it that way.  We do want to serve God, yes, we do: but here, where we are, not in the desert.  And that means we can’t help getting stained.

So what is James really trying to say?  Is the world really that dangerous? Most of us, I think, have a pretty good relationship with the world. And why not?  It is God’s world, after all. There’s a very familiar verse from John’s Gospel that says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son . . .” If God loved the world, why should we avoid it like the plague? How can you reconcile James and John? Well, the fact is we’re talking in two different ways: one about the world God made and one about the world human beings have changed. They’re not the same world.  Christians have a funny tendency to forget the creation story in Genesis. But again and again in that story we hear how God made the light and the earth and the stars and animals and human life.  Seven times in that chapter we hear that God saw what had been made “and it was good.” The seventh time, in fact, when it’s all finished, we’re told that God saw that it was “very good.” So it’s not surprising that the Gospel of John should tell us that “God so loved the world” that God came into that world to save it.  It is God’s world.  Why wouldn’t God love it and try to save it?

But save it from what?  From us, that’s who! From us and from evil.  I was talking last week about the problem we have with the evil powers that corrupt us and last week’s reading described  the power of evil as “the ruler of this world.” The Gospel of John uses the same language. They look at the world and they see a battlefield with the forces of good and the forces of evil locked in a cosmic struggle. Sometimes it’s as obvious as the Middle East where Israelis and Palestinians both seem to be dominated by the power of evil and Iraq, where whatever good intentions there are are paving the road to hell. Sometimes it’s a lot less obvious, like the decisions we make about spending our money. How do we weigh the constant appeals to support this charity and that versus the decision to repaint the house this year or next or the decision to take a well-earned break and go out for dinner?  I looked at alternate translations of that verse from James and they don’t help. One says “not soiled and dirtied by contacts with the world.”  Another says, “Do not let the world make you evil.” “The world” still comes off as the bad guy. And then what happens is that we identify whoever or whatever we don’t like or can get along without as “the world.”

Christians have been good at that over the centuries.  First it was the Roman Empire and sometimes it was luxuries, it’s been card games and dancing and alcohol and maybe the Democratic Party – or the Republicans.  But always someone else.  But the world is us; not someone else; we’re part of it.  And it was a good world until we misused it and – here’s the essence of it -  I think the world was good until we began treating it as if we were God and it all belonged to us.

Notice that John says “God loved the world.”  So if we love the world we’re acting like God and that’s good. But love is not possession.  That’s the mistake we so often make. Love is giving, not controlling.  If more people knew that there’d be less divorce and a lot less unhappiness.  Love is giving, not controlling.  In the battle between good and evil, God gives and loves but leaves us free.  The power of evil is always taking and trying to control. To be like God is to love the world  and to give ourselves to others, but never to try to control.

We see how that works out most easily in the problem of managing money. Money is power, the ability to do things, control things. We all want just a bit more than we have, don’t we? and then a little bit more than that, but the result is that money controls us and the more we try to control it the more it rules our lives.  The more we try to control it, the more evil rules our lives. The more we try to control our finances, the more we become selfish and grasping and a lot less nice to be around. And the solution is not to give it all away.  You know, we often hear the Bible misquoted and told that “money is the root of all evil.”  That’s not what it says. It says that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Love God and then we can use money to serve God.

Using money to serve God is called stewardship, and it’s not just something that happens in the fall when the church asks for your pledge of support. It’s a year-round way of living that puts God first and exercises stewardship of all God’s gifts. Love God.  Love God’s world. But don’t try to control it. You can’t control God and you shouldn’t try to control God’s world.  Whenever we try, that’s when things get out of hand and the world does more than just stain us, it twists us and drags us down and controls us. The world controls us. And that’s the danger.

There’s so much in the world that’s good and beautiful and desirable.  Of course it is.  God made it. Even Satan loves it.  But Satan is out there trying to control it and as we read last week has pretty much succeeded so that almost everywhere we look there’s something so attractive we just have to have it – and then we’re lost. Television’s a good thing, but don’t get sucked in.  Don’t let it control your life. Food is wonderful, but it can destroy us. How much time and effort do people expend trying to get control of their weight because they lost control of food. Money is useful, but it’s not the reason for our existence. Books, travel, clothes, shopping, all good things – but all dangerous to our health, especially our spiritual health, because we so easily get obsessed with them and let them draw us away from God. If you don’t have time for prayer, if you don’t have time for Bible study, if there are Sundays you can’t get to church, those are warning signs: watch out.  Who’s in charge? Are you letting the world control you? It doesn’t need to be that way.

There’s a battle going on and all too often the other side is winning but this battle is not one we watch on the evening news it’s one that’s decided in your own life and mine every day in the decisions we make and the priorities we set. First love God, then love God’s world, but love it by giving, not trying to control.  And when you see those stains showing up, don’t wait until it’s too late and you can’t get free. Just say No. And come back to the God who loves you and who will give you freely more than you ever imagined.