Christopher L. Webber's Blog, page 14

A Sober Word to a Drunken World

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at St. Luke’s Church, San Francisco, on June 8, the Day of Pentecost, 2014

When we go out the door this morning,  when we go out onto Van Ness, will people think we’re drunk? My guess is that they won’t stop to notice  and that’s the difference 2000 years make.

But you know it isn’t easy.  Two weeks ago we heard about St Paul on Mars Hill in Athens. Paul was visiting Athens for the first time,  Athens the cultural capital of the ancient world, and Paul had prepared for it carefully. He had walked around the city  and studied their monuments and temples  to see what they cared about  and he quoted their leading philosophers and poets in an effort to get their attention  and connect his message with their own familiar teachings and we read the story of what happened two weeks ago.  They laughed at him. They said “See you later.” He made only two or three converts that day.

I think it’s fair to say that Paul was the greatest evangelist  in Christian history but he got laughed at in Athens. The apostles got called drunks in Jerusalem.  So don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy. It’s not easy.  We’re asking people to change their lives. God is asking us to change our lives. And you know that isn’t easy.  I mean, have you ever tried simple things like losing weight,  or to stop smoking, to stop drinking, get up earlier, pray daily, read the Bible regularly,  give in proportion to your income,  take part in an outreach ministry,  to so live that God is central, truly central in your life? Have you tried any of that? It’s not easy. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy.

There are people who build box churches,  “mega churches,”  and hand out donuts as you come in and put rock groups on the stage  and provide cushioned chairs and throw the words of the hymns on a giant screen  and build big congregations but does it make any difference?  Do lives get changed? Well, to be fair, I’m sure some do, somehow,  but we live in a country that likes to think of itself still  as a Christian country  but is no longer recognizable as such to many of us.

Is this a Christian country?  It’s one that kills more people with guns  than any other country on earth,  just ten days ago in Santa Barbara, three days ago in Seattle. This is a country that still uses the death penalty,  at least in the poorest parts of the country and with its poorest citizens; we’re the only western democracy that does that. This is a country that still can’t provide decent health care  for its poorest citizens. Is this really a Christian country?  Where’s the evidence  that faith is making a difference?

So how do we preach the gospel  to a country like this? What would Paul have done?  What would he have done  if he looked to see where our values are,  what unknown gods we worship? He might ask us how much tax payer money goes into not temples to worship carved idols but the building of football and baseball stadiums to follow idols who are all too human?  Would Paul have commented on that?  What would he have made of the way we dig ourselves deep into debt to get the best education available  for our children and yet find half or more of the population rejecting what our colleges teach? How do you address a population that claims to be Christian  but rejects what our best minds tell us  about the world God made?

If you think we Christians have trouble communicating the gospel think about the trouble scientists have communicating their knowledge about the evolution of species, for example. The latest poll I found showed that just 19% of the population, only one in five,  believe the Darwinian theory of evolution.  That’s up, however from 9% 15 years ago. 99% of all scientists believe that climate change is real and happening before our eyes  and that it threatens the world,  threatens our civilization,  threatens not just our children and grandchildren but threatens us.  How much longer will there be water available to keep California fertile?

I went to a fruit tasting ten days ago  put on by an organic farm not far east of here. They brought their best fruit into the city  and spread it out on a table for us to sample and they had apricots and peaches that were wonderful  but they said they don’t have cherries this year because the climate is changing and they didn’t get enough cold weather last winter  for the cherry trees to get recharged  for this year’s crop.  Do you remember how good cherries used to be? Do you remember?  You may need to have a good memory because they may not be available next year either.

99% of all relevant scientists believe the climate is changing and have issued papers  to get the word out while there is still time but it’s thirteenth on the list of American concerns in the latest Gallup poll and less than half the population is much concerned about it.  Listen: if scientists can’t get people to pay attention  what chance do the theologians have? I take great comfort in these polls.  Science and religion are on the same side  on one thing anyway:  battling scepticism, battling doubt, battling ignorance,  trying to persuade people to change their way of life before it’s too late.  Isn’t that a great thought: scientists and theologians united in crying out  repent and change your way of life while there is time? We have one thing going for us though as Christians  and that is that God is merciful. I’m not sure the climate is that forgiving.

I admit I’m baffled by this culture.  I want to say, “Look at the marvels of creation that science is showing us.” I read about new discoveries  in medicine and astronomy and I want to sing another chorus of “How great thou art.” But I read in the news about people who claim to be Christian – I actually haven’t met any of these people myself – but I read in the news  or see stories on television about people who believe in a God so much smaller,  so much less believable, that I don’t know how to talk to them.

And maybe I don’t have to because  maybe most of them don’t live around here anyway. But they certainly make our job harder  with the people who do live around here and who know almost nothing about the Christian church except what they read in the papers or see on television.  It’s people here who weren’t brought up as Christians who read or watch stories that identify Christians  as people who deny evolution and question climate change and vote down spending for health care and take their guns with them when they go out.

It’s the people out there -  I do know some of them and so do you -  who read this stuff in the papers and ask,  Why would I want to be part of that? The people today who think we’re drunk  are the ones who read about churches at war with the modern world  and wonder what we’ve been drinking and why they should be a part of it.

Do you know that the number of people who identified their religion as “none”  has tripled in the last twenty years? The number has gone from 14 million to 46 million  in twenty years and that number is large than all those  who belong to the principal Protestant churches. I don’t call myself a Protestant  but I think that includes us. It would include Roman Catholics,  if not for immigration. But these people are not rejecting God,  they don’t call themselves atheists,  they just haven’t heard a version of Christianity that made sense to them. And we haven’t found a way to tell them.

There seems to be a theory out there still that science and religion are separate realms:  that there’s a realm of science based on facts and a realm of religion based on feelings.  Who was it that said, “You’re free to have your own opinion  but not your own facts”?  How absurd is it when leading candidates for the Presidency answer questions about climate change  by saying, “Well, I’m not a scientist, so I don’t have an opinion.”?  Would they feel free to say,  “I didn’t go to West Point so I have no opinion  on military matters;  I’m not an economist, so I have no opinion on government spending; I’m not a doctor, so I have no opinion on health care?”  but vote for me anyway. If you intend to run for office,  it’s surely your duty to inform yourself about matters that matter, that are critical to our national survival  and surely climate change is one of them.

Now, someone might say, “You’re a preacher  so you shouldn’t talk about  anything except religion.”  The word religion, however,  comes from a Latin word  that means “tying things together.” This is the place, this pulpit, that needs to bring things together bring together every aspect of God’s creation  and point out our need  to be good stewards of the whole. God created a world, not a church,  sun and moon and stars and the deep oceans and soaring mountains and fragile coral reefs and Monarch butterflies and cherry trees, the redwoods and glaciers.

“This is my Father’s world, . . . .”  Do you know that hymn?   There’s a radically shortened version of it in our hymnal.

“This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears

All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.

This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought

Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;

His hand the wonders wrought.

“This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,

The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.

This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair;

In the rustling grass I hear Him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.

“This is my Father’s world, should my heart be ever sad?

The Lord is King—let the heavens ring. God reigns—let the earth be glad.

This is my Father’s world. Now closer to Heaven bound,

For dear to God is the earth Christ trod. No place but is holy ground.”

“No place but is holy ground,” and we are charged to be  good stewards of this world, to bring together the best information we can get  about this changing world and act before its too late.

We read a prayer ten days ago with a phrase  from the Epistle to the Ephesians that says of Christ that he “ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.”  We celebrate today the gift of the Spirit  and the Spirit also fills all things. It is perhaps the Spirit  that binds together the so-called Abrahamic faiths  that confess the unity of God but Buddhists also have a deep sense of unity  and Shinto sees the divinity in all things. And surely the work of science  that begins with a firm belief  in the unity of creation,  in laws and principles we can understand, revealing wonders unimagined, is the work of the Spirit: wonders unimagined, the amazing work of creation,  showing us a God  far larger than we had ever imagined. That’s the work of the Spirit  guiding us on to new and fuller understanding of the world God made  and the mission we are given to care for it.

How do we get word out that Christianity as we understand it  respects and encourages science  and cares about those in need?  How do we get word out that Christianity is not narrow-minded and self-centered but open to the best in our culture,  open to the best in others, responsive to human need? How do we find words people will listen to  and respond to and act on?

The problem is that an intelligent faith  doesn’t grab headlines  the way ignorance does, the way denial does.  Sometimes I want to change the name of my faith so as to make it clear that if that’s Christianity  I don’t believe that either.  What I want to be able to do in San Francisco  is exactly what Paul did in Athens:  to wander around the city and be able to say as he did, “I see you are very religious: I see your governor taking new initiatives to save the environment, to be good stewards of creation. I see you working to enhance your God-given bodies  in a Bay to Breakers race.  I see your Department of Public Works  urging you to be good stewards of your water and your scientists working on renewable energy  to conserve our air  and keep the climate livable. I see your botanical gardens  and art museums and concert halls  and amazing schools of every kind and I give thanks for the way you respond to the amazing diversity  of this  God-given world and God-created life  and I would want you to know how  to give thanks  for all these gifts by coming to know its Source and its Savior.

Now maybe that’s a step too far  for many  whose upbringing or natural inclination  left them too far away to come so far very easily  but let’s try as St Paul did to find the contact points that are there,  the concerns we share and the things we can learn from each other  and reach out and try  to come together as a society  in which we respect each other and find whatever common language we can to praise God. You and I were created to be God’s word to God’s world. You and I speak that word daily  by being who we are – shaped by our worship here and the life poured out on us here.

How do we it?  Let me count the ways.

We speak God’s word to the world  when we support River in his ministry.

We speak God’s word to the world when we host Sister Helen Prejean with her message of life.

We speak God’s word to the world  when  we send clergy and lay members to the Philippines in ministry.

We speak God’s word to the world when the conversation  turns to climate change and you and I say what needs to be said.  and practice good stewardship of creation in our lives.

We do it when we give in proportion to our means and worship regularly  and pray frequently and maybe they will say we are drunk,  high on the Spirit but maybe also, as on that first Pentecost,  some will listen to a word that transcends the barriers of language:  God’s word to God’s world, the Spirit in you  speaking the sober truth to God’s world and making known the Word that can save us.

Talking to the Greeks

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on May 25, 2014, by Christopher L. Webber

Whoever decides what the readings are each week -  and it’s an international, ecumenical committee – left off three critical verses today in the first reading. We were reading a portion of the Book of Acts  and the chapter ends with verse 34,  but the reading we had stopped at verse 31, and I know why they left off those last three verses.  I don’t think they should have.

We heard in the reading what Paul said about Christian faith  and about resurrection but we didn’t hear the response and I think we should have. Let me read you what they left out:

When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” 33 At that point Paul left them. 34 But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.  Acts 17:32

Now the point is this:  We heard a story about Paul’s first visit to Athens. We’re talking about the cultural capital of the Roman world and this was Paul’s first visit. The Book of Acts tells us that Paul,  like any other tourist, wandered around the city admiring the same tourist attractions people go to look at today. He undoubtedly went up the Acropolis – the high point in the city – and admired the Parthenon with its marvelous sculptures. Maybe some of you have been there, done that.  And here and there around the city he noticed, of course, a lot of statues and altars for the various Greek gods and goddesses. And that upset him a lot.

Paul found it hard to imagine  a civilized and cultivated people  worshiping a lot of carved images and he got into some debates about it  in the market place  the way, I suppose, you might get to talking  with someone you run into at the Safeway about the weather or the Bay to Breakers run  or the latest craziness in Washington. But Paul had a serious agenda  and finally some people said,  “Look, let’s go to the areopagus  and have some serious discussions.”

Now the areopagus is not the acropolis.  It’s another hill in the middle of Athens and the place where the ancient law courts had been. It was used in Paul’s time  for public discussion of issues so the idea was to give Paul  a serious chance to present his story and Paul took it very seriously. He proceeded to preach a sermon  about the nature of God and the purpose of human life.

What the Bible gives us, of course  is nowhere near the full story. We have less than 300 words – not even 20%  of what I would consider a reasonable sermon by today’s standards and probably not even 10%.  It’s a Readers Digest version  of what Paul actually said. But Paul did something in that sermon  he may never have done before or afterward. He tried to reach out to his audience  by quoting, not the Bible, but their authorities, their philosophers, their poetry.  It’s as if he went to UC Berkeley today and quoted – well, who would you quote  to get attention at Berkeley? Maybe there aren’t any authorities today!  But Paul quoted recognized poets and philosophers to talk to a cultivated, intelligent audience.

What’s most interesting in this reaching out is a clever reference Paul made to an inscription he had seen. Somewhere as he wandered around the city  he found an altar dedicated “to the unknown god.” It’s not quite clear what it was for.  Maybe it was a way of hedging their bets.  Maybe the Athenians were saying, “Hey, we have all these statues and altars for all the gods you ever heard of but here’s one more in case we left anyone out.”

Some historians think the inscription actually refers to an incident years earlier when a plague was devastating Athens  and nothing worked. They made offerings to every god they had ever heard of  but nothing worked. So they thought maybe there was another god  unknown to them and they made offerings to that god — and it worked:  the plague came to an end.  So the Athenians put up an altar  to that unknown God: “Whoever you are: Thank you.”

But Paul took that inscription to refer to the God of Israel,  the true God, unknown to them, and he said he was there to tell them about that true but unknown God. That may have been effective.  It may have gotten attention. We can’t tell from the Bible record.  What we can tell is that Paul apparently segued too fast  into talking about the resurrection.

The reading this morning stops at that point. Paul says, in effect, “Up until now you were ignorant  and God was OK with that but the time has come to repent  because judgment is coming and we know we will have to face judgment after death  because Jesus was raised from the dead.”

Well, yes, but it was too much too fast  and in the assigned reading we didn’t hear what happened next.  And that’s why I read it to you just now. Here’s what happened:  They laughed at him and said, “See you later.”  The people who chose the readings, that international, ecumenical committee,  didn’t want us to hear the part where Paul gets laughed at. But Luke, who wrote the story,  gives us an honest report:  he admits it didn’t go very well,  but he puts a positive spin on it anyway by telling us that Paul  got two converts out of it that he can remember  and maybe a few more whose names he forgets.

Now you can look at that as pretty discouraging:  here is Paul, the great evangelist and missionary, going into the center of the ancient world  and using all his erudition and learning to try to reach out  to a pagan audience and being laughed at and coming way with only two converts. If Paul himself can’t do any better than that,  what chance do we have?

But look at it the other way round: not the glass is half empty  but the glass is half full. If we don’t make much of an impact,  it might be helpful to remember that neither did St. Paul himself. If you get laughed at when you try to get someone  to come to church with you, so did St. Paul.  So, Point One: don’t be discouraged.  It was never easy.

But Point Two:  Paul used all the information he had, any approach that might work.  He studied the culture. He saw that even pagans had contact points, ideas in common with the Biblical God. And he tried to make contact on their ground, not on his.  In other words,  he didn’t just quote scripture to them, but he looked to see what books they were reading,  what sort of things appealed to them, “where they were coming from,” and he started there: on their turf, not his.

And surely we need to do that  and are doing it. Why do we have a healing center here  except for that reason: to try to make contact with people  who don’t know much about Christianity but are very interested in “spirituality.” So here we have a place  where people can make contact with their concern for physical health  and spiritual wholeness  and maybe one thing will lead to another –  and maybe not. Maybe they will be interested in the next step:  not just some vague “spirituality”  that reflects an inner emptiness and need  but a living relationship with a living God that will not just assuage that emptiness but fill it. If so, that’s wonderful.  But maybe it won’t go that far. Maybe it will simply give them something more than they had and they never will come all the way. Paul only came away with two converts  but he probably gave the rest  something to think about and maybe it gave them a new depth of understanding  when they went back to their heathen shrines. As Paul said, “God is never far from any of us:”  not far from the Buddhist or the Muslim or even the atheist,  maybe closer to some of them than to some of us.

There was a day, you know,  when evangelists liked to threaten their hearers with being lost for ever – eternal punishment and all that. Well, maybe.  Maybe they have a point  and we ought to worry more than we do.  Better safe than sorry. But there’s an old hymn that says,  “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea . . .” So it’s not our job to judge;  it’s our job to offer, not threaten.  It’s our job to open doors, not close them. It’s our job to provide whatever help and guidance we can to others on their own road  which may be different from ours.

Let me suggest also another way of looking at it.  Paul was trying to make contact between a Hebrew God,  who had been, we might say,  recently widened, “repurposed,”  to embrace the Gentiles,  and Paul was trying to make contact somehow  between that God  and an utterly different pagan culture. And he found contact points:  something here that a philosopher once said, a line of poetry there that might be familiar. It didn’t get him very far on that first try,  but it was a first try and others who came after would expand that opening and widen it more and more  until the pagan empire became  in name at least  a Christian dominion and they put the pagan shrines and altars  in museums for tourists to gaze at.

So our job, too, is to proclaim the gospel to a heathen culture but maybe one harder to reach  than Paul’s audience in Athens because it’s one which has all the words and phrases  of Christianity and likes to think of itself still  as part of a Christian country but is barely recognizable as such  to many of us.

Is this a Christian country?  It’s one that kills more people with guns than any other country on earth,  that still uses the death penalty, that can’t provide health care for its poorest citizens.  That doesn’t sound like a Christian country to me. So how do we preach the gospel  to a country like this? What would Paul have done? What would he have done  if he looked to see where our values are, what unknown gods we worship?  How much tax payer money goes into  not temples to worship carved idols  but the building of football and baseball stadiums to follow idols who are all too human? Would Paul have commented on that?  What would he have made of the way  we dig ourselves deep into debt to get the best education available for our children  and yet find half the population rejecting what our colleges teach? How do you address a population that claims to be Christian but rejects what our best minds tell us  about the world God made?

I admit I’m baffled by this culture.  I want to say, Look at the marvels of creation that science is showing us  and sing another chorus of “How great thou art.”  But I read in the news – I actually haven’t met any of these people myself – about people who believe in a God so much  smaller, so much less believable,  that I don’t know how to talk to them. And maybe I don’t have to because  maybe they don’t live around here anyway. But they certainly make our job harder  with the people who do live around here  and know almost nothing about the Christian church  except what they read in the papers or watch on television. It’s people here who weren’t brought up as Christians who read or watch stories that identify Christians  as people who deny evolution and question climate change and vote down spending for health care.

How do we get word out  that Christianity as we understand it respects and encourages science  and cares about those in need? How do we get word out  that Christianity is not narrow-minded and self-centered  but open to the best in our culture, open to the best in others, responsive to human need?  The problem is that that doesn’t grab headlines the way ignorance does, the way denial does. Sometimes I want to change the name of my faith  so as to make it clear that if that’s Christianity I don’t believe that either. What I want to be able to do in San Francisco  is exactly what Paul did in Athens: to wander around the city and be able to say as he did,  “I see you are very religious: I see your governor taking new initiatives  to save the environment, to be good stewards of creation.  I see you working to enhance your God-given bodies  in a Bay to Breakers race. I see your botanical gardens  and art museums and concert halls and amazing schools of every kind  and I give thanks for the way you respond to the amazing diversity of this  God-given world and God-created life and I would want you to have a way to give thanks  for all these gifts by coming to know its Source and Savior.”

Now maybe that’s a step too far for many  whose upbringing or natural inclination  left them too far away to come so far but let’s try as St Paul did  to find those contact points and reach out and try to come together as a society in which we respect each other and learn from each other  and find whatever common language we can to praise the God who has done such great things  and make known the God who has given us so much.

Turning to the Light

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on March 30, 2014, at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco. 

A friend of mine who lives down toward West Portal has recently written a book titled: The Election of 1864: Our Greatest Victory. And people have been puzzled by the title.  Completely baffled. The election of 1864? Who was running? What difference did it make?  How could it be “Our Greatest Victory”?

Well, I’m sure you all know that the Democrats that year nominated George McClellan, General George McClellan, and the Republicans nominated – wait, wait, don’t tell me – right, Abraham Lincoln.  And the prospects for his election were not good. So on August 23, 1864, Lincoln wrote a memo to his Cabinet anticipating that he would lose the election. The war had been going on too long and people were tired of it. It was time to make peace; let the South go. Lincoln’s wisest advisors told him he was certain to lose.

So Lincoln wrote a secret memo sealed until after the election, saying that if he lost as expected, he would cooperate with the winning candidate to preserve the union until the new president was inaugurated, but after that the Union would certainly be dissolved.  Of course, if that had happened, we would have had two countries, and slavery would have continued indefinitely. Can you imagine?  Still slaves in Texas and the southern states? But if the South had gone its own way, what would have changed it? And more than that, if the country had become divided, there would have been no powerful American armies to win the First World War or the Second. Can you imagine that world?  We would be living in a different world entirely.

In fact, of course. the tide of the war turned:  Sherman captured Atlanta and suddenly things seemed very different. In fact, Lincoln did win re-election, the Union was preserved, slavery was abolished, and the world history you learned in school happened the way you learned it. Looking back, it’s impossible to imagine the alternative world that might have happened. it’s impossible to imagine two or three or more disunited collections of States.  it’s impossible to imagine that sensible people 150 years ago would have voted – indeed fought – laid down their lives – to divide this country and preserve slavery. But that’s exactly what happened. It’s impossible to imagine that people could have been that blind – but they were. So the election of 1864 really was our greatest victory and you can read all about it.

Now, I tell you all this because the things we take for granted as obvious to anyone with eyes to see were not always obvious or easy to see. Were not and are not.  If our great-grandparents were that blind, how sure are we that we can see any better?  What will our grandchildren think about the way we have dealt with climate change and health care and poverty? The readings today are about blindness: not visual blindness but mental and spiritual blindness, the kind that afflicted Americans in 1864 and still does in 2014.

Now, the readings today give us first the story of Samuel and Saul and David. Saul is a towering figure in the Old Testament.  Literally. When they wanted a king to unite the Jewish people they lined the men up – just the men, of course – and Saul was head and shoulders taller than anyone else so they all cheered and said, “Saul is our King.” And he was.  He was a natural leader and he united the Hebrew people and he defeated their enemies.

Saul was a great leader. He also was a bit psychotic. Sometimes the two go together. Vladimir Putin is a great leader, so was Stalin, so was Hitler, so was Napoleon and Caesar and Attila the Hun. So, for that matter, were Roosevelt and Eisenhower, and Kennedy – great leaders – but not one of them is an example to hold up to your children. They were great leaders but their personal lives were a mess. Saul too. Saul was a great leader and people couldn’t imagine life without him but there were traces of paranoia.  And they used to get David in to play the harp for him and calm him down.  But God saw that Saul was destroying his country. The same qualities that enabled him to do great things were beginning to destroy him and divide his country. But even Samuel didn’t see it.  Samuel didn’t see it, but God made it clear to him that it was time for a change and Samuel followed orders and began to look for a new king to replace Saul.

Today’s story brings us to the point at which Samuel has narrowed the search for a new king down to one tribe and one family. And son by son, the candidates are brought forward and they look just fine to Samuel but God says “No, look deeper; not this one either. Look deeper.” And finally Samuel finds David and says “This is the one” and Samuel anoints him heir apparent and eventually David does become king and the greatest king in the whole Biblical story – until Jesus. But David had his faults too.  There was his relationship with his son and heir apparent Absalom that got so bad it led to open rebellion and then there was Bathsheba. But even Samuel, a prophet, a seer, God’s spokesman, can’t help looking at outward appearance and God has to tell him again and again, Look further, look again, look deeper.

So that’s the first lesson for today.  Look deeper.  Don’t go by first impressions and surface appearance.  Look deeper.  The second lesson for today is a meditation on light: “Live as children of light.”  Well, yes, we should. But how do we connect this to Samuel and Saul and David? Well, the first lesson was about leadership and the second one is about discipleship – leaders are out front and disciples are following – they’re not unrelated, but different.  Yes, but we need more light either way. Light to know whom to choose;  Light to see the way to follow. Light to make decisions; Light to find the way.  You and I get to chose leaders every couple of years and I wish Samuel was available to help us; because we do need help.

But we need more than Samuel. Even Samuel guessed wrong; even Samuel got fooled by appearance and reputation. They chose Saul because he was tallest and that didn’t work out so well. Even so, Samuel looked at David’s older brothers because they were bigger and stronger.  Do you know that in almost every presidential election, the taller candidate has won? How much has changed? Theoretically in a democracy an enlightened electorate makes wise choices. We have newspapers and radios and television and computers to enlighten us but with all that light to enlighten us we still look to see who’s tallest – in almost every presidential election the taller candidate has won. And it shouldn’t be a surprise. Half the population doesn’t believe in climate change thinks American health care is just fine and increasingly doesn’t go to church or believe in God.  No wonder we make bad choices.

Look again at this morning’s readings.  I’ve been talking mostly about the Old Testament reading because it shows us how hard it is to get the light we need. The people made bad choices and Samuel almost made another bad choice. Fortunately he said his prayers and paid attention to God’s guidance. But even then, when he chose David and anointed him, it was years before David became king and David wasn’t perfect either – a great leader, yes, but far from perfect.

So, yes, live as children of light but the Bible shows us again and again and again that our light is often pretty dim – that it’s hard to choose well, and the best choices available are often not that wonderful.  So is that an inspiring message to take home with you?  Probably not. Fortunately there is still the Gospel. And the Gospel also has to do with blindness and light – real blindness and real light. There’s a man blind from birth and there’s Jesus and there are disciples and Pharisees. But the man blind from birth is the easy problem, the easy fix.  He knows he’s blind. The real problem is the disciples and the Pharisees who are also blind but don’t know it. They think they already know the answers.

The disciples create the story when they see the blind man and ask Jesus “Who sinned? this man or his parents?” You see, they assume they know what’s happening: there’s a blind man, so someone must have sinned.  There’s a problem, so someone must have done something wrong. But Jesus doesn’t see it that way.  He’s not really interested in the cause anyway. What matters is the cure.  What matters is the opportunity to glorify God. Who cares why he’s blind; let’s find a solution.

When the election of 1864 was over Lincoln meditated on the situation in his inaugural address and he said:

Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered.  That of neither has been answered fully.  The Almighty has His own purposes.

Yes, exactly.  God has a purpose and it may not fit with our hopes or expectations.  Let’s always be ready to look again, look for more light, look for a better light, recognize our blindness and trust God to work through us when we recognize our need.  Let’s come down to cases.  Why is the Episcopal Church not growing?

The House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church met last week in Texas and took as their theme, Psalm 137:4 – “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” My first reaction was “how appropriate for people visiting Texas.” But on second thought, I think they were focusing on some larger objective than trying to understand Texas. I think what they were really asking themselves – and God, I hope – was what’s happening in our world and our church. How can we sing our hymns and say our prayers and proclaim the gospel in the strange new world of the 21st Century.

The new bishop of Connecticut likes to ask, “What is God doing?”  We look at the state of the world and the church and it’s all too easy to say, “Who sinned?” And we can play the blame game: its those liberals or it’s those Tea Party types.  I can imagine Jesus’ disciples – that would be us – doing exactly that.  Things aren’t going well: whose fault is it? But that’s not what Jesus did.  He didn’t even try to answer that question. He seemed to think that it doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is what light do we have to find a way forward.

I was very interested in the little graphic in the annual meeting report for this parish that showed declining attendance for a number of recent years and set it in parallel to the diocese as a whole which is following exactly the same downward path.  Well, you could set it alongside the same data for the national Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists and the charts all look the same. What’s depressing is that we have so much better answers than the Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics but still get the same results!

So what is God doing?  Let’s blame God. I’m quite serious: blame God. That’s what Jesus did in today’s gospel.  He said in effect, God did this to create an opportunity to show God’s glory. Who cares why the man is blind; healing him is an opportunity to glorify God.  Here’s a blind man.  Let’s heal him and give God the glory. Here’s a sick church in a sick society.  Let’s look for healing.

What’s wonderful about this parish church is that for all the discouraging news I haven’t heard the blame game being played. No, on the contrary, I see a church doing what Jesus did: reaching out to heal. Not asking, “Who sinned?”  but asking, “How can we serve this community.”  And that, it seems to me, is being obedient to the light we’ve been given.

Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.”  The blind man said, “I believe” and he worshiped him. It’s just that simple.  We need to keep our priorities straight: believe in Jesus and worship God.  Read the Bible, say your prayers, support each other, reach out to the needs around us. Don’t waste time now asking  “How did we get here?” but recognize the opportunity: not for a charismatic leader, not for a great new diocesan program, that may work or not. All of that tends to draw us away from what we need most of all, which is very simple but demands all we are and all we have: to turn to God.  To turn to God. To turn to God with all that we are and all that we have and look for ways to serve and to heal.

We aren’t here to glorify plans or programs or leaders but to glorify God. Father Lui put it very well last week when he said we can plant seeds. God gives the growth; maybe not on our schedule but we aren’t in charge.  God is – and our job is to plant and to trust. That’s the great opportunity we have.  Let’s use it in such a way that we learn more than ever to turn to God’s light and make that light visible here.

The Fame of the Name

Finally today came a revised cover for my next book with my middle initial in place.  It’s the second time this publisher has tried to put my name out there in incomplete form.  Why does this matter?  Because I’m not the only Chris Webber out there and – in some circles at least – not the most famous!

Now, maybe you follow the NBA and want to tell me that Chris Webber retired six years ago.  Yes, but he’s back – selling hamburgers.  I will not use this space to advertise the product but with this sponsorship my alter ego is likely to be more famous than ever and the resulting confusion even greater as I set out to sell my new books and he sets out to sell an alternative product.

So here’s what you should know.  HE is Edward Mayce Christopher Webber (really! Who knew!) and I am plain and simple Christopher L. Webber.  He’s also taller than I am.

(Of course, if people looking to buy a burger from Chris Webber wind up at my web site and buy a book instead – who am I to complain?)

What book(s)?  Stay tuned

This Too Is Not God

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at Christ Church Sei Ko Kai, San Francisco, on the First Sunday of Lent, March 9, 2014.

Four thousand years ago the Hebrews were a nomadic tribe wandering in the deserts of the middle east. All around them were people who were farmers: Egyptians, Babylonians, Canaanites who raised wheat and barley and melons and other good things to eat. And because they depended on the sun and the rain and the rivers, the soil and the seasons,  and because these were not always favorable these agricultural people prayed to the powers that they thought determined success or failure, abundance or hunger, and they made statues and images as a focus for their prayers.

The Hebrews, however, were nomads.  In all the years they had wandered in the deserts with their sheep and goats they had no crops to raise, so no need for gods of that sort. For them there was one God, invisible, all-powerful.  But when the Hebrews came into the promised land and tried to learn farming themselves they naturally looked to the Canaanites for advice and they were told, “Well, here’s what you do: you set up a pillar or carve some statues of wood or stone and you make offerings, and you cry out to Baal or Astarte or whichever god you need at the moment for rain or sun or whatever crop it is.” Some of the Hebrews tried it out and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t but they thought it was better to do it than not do it. Hey, you never know. But others resisted and said, “No, the God of our ancestors commanded us to make no statues because our God is beyond all possibility of representation. And our God also cannot be influenced by the size of our offerings or anything like that.  We can try to line up with God but no way we can get God to line up with us.”

That was a conflict that went on for centuries. The Hebrews were divided by it with prophets and their visions on one side and the practical people on the other. The prophets said, “It doesn’t matter where you are or what the agenda is; there is one God, no other. You can serve God, but God can’t be bribed to serve you.” But the practical people said, “Look, the Canaanites have the experience and the smart thing is to hedge your bets, not put all your eggs in one basket, always backup your computer, don’t take chances.” .

But the prophets didn’t give up; always there were prophets who insisted, “God is beyond all this and if this becomes an idol, God can and will destroy it and God can even destroy you, the chosen people, if you turn to your own ways, because God is always beyond, always greater than we can imagine and God asks us to respond in a freedom that lacks the apparent security of walls and borders and images and festivals and buildings and laws. God is not limited by our constructions.  God is free. And God calls us to respond in freedom giving ourselves without limit to the God who loves us without limit.”

Well, that’s what Lent is about: it’s a reminder that we are by origin a wandering people with an unconfined God, a God who is free and calls us to freedom. Lent summons us to remember who we are and respond to that challenge.  For forty days every year we are challenged to follow Jesus back out into the wilderness of our nomadic ancestors where there is none of the security of plowed land and settlements and walls and well-traveled roads. The Prayer Book speaks of Lent as a time of “special acts of discipline and self-denial.” It asks us to find out whether we can get along without the images and the idols – the things, the possessions, that give us a feeling of security. Can we put them aside and learn to live with God alone?

All the old traditional disciplines of Lent giving up candy and movies and television – the images of Canaan and Babylon – are basically about that: how addicted are you to the local idols? how dependent on material things?  What is it that takes the time you might have used for prayer or the energy that might have been used to help someone in need or to work to change a society that seems indifferent to the needs of others?  It’s probably not something as simple as candy or computer games. It’s things that have become part of the very fabric of our lives and it will hurt to tear them out. The idols are where they are because we’ve learned to love them and depend on them and believe we need them.  Lent asks us to focus on the question: who is your God? One of the old mystics used to say, “This too is not God.” It’s a good line to remember. “This too is not God.”

I think some of the most divisive arguments in our public life, church and state, are about idols – not God. Do you remember back a month or two ago the annual Christmas fuss about Christmas in public places. Every year some mayor or public official seems to try a new way of putting up a creche to see who will complain. And someone always does. But, you know, I used to live in New England and back in Puritan days it was illegal to celebrate Christmas because I think the Puritans knew that so much of the celebration was pagan in origin and a distraction from the worship of the God who is beyond all images. But now their descendants, calling themselves Christians, demand that they be allowed their images, their creches and Christmas trees, and the very name of Christmas has become an image, as if by saying “Merry Christmas” out loud and in public instead of “Happy Holidays” the God who cannot be named is somehow honored.  We still want our images, things to hold onto; still afraid of the desert.

The Anglican Communion is being torn apart by those who insist on this reading of the Bible rather than that one, my way of reading the law and the security it gives me rather than your way which makes me nervous. And not enough of us are prepared to stop and say, “Let’s really listen to each other; let’s admit that my way and your way both are inadequate images, neither one is an absolute and final and complete picture of God and never can be. So let me hear how what you have to say honors God and let me try to explain why I believe my views honor God and one way or another let’s recognize that we both are seeking to honor God and God is not honored by our anger or by a narrow clinging to images. Let’s confess our limitations and try still to love each other even if we no more understand each other than we truly and fully understand God.”

The church I served for the twenty-two years before I retired followed the old English custom in Lent which wasn’t purple but monks cloth. You came into church on Ash Wednesday and the crosses and pictures were draped in simple sack cloth and it felt like spring cleaning – the visual distractions covered and a sense of simplicity and cleanness. The Russian Orthodox have a custom called pustina, which has to do with going into a bare cell, a room with four walls and no more, to spend a day or two days or more – with nothing to see, nothing to hold on to – “sensory deprivation,” I think might be the modern phrase, removal of distractions.  And who needs some such practice more than 21st century Americans whose lives are so full and whose souls are so empty?  Lent is a time to clean house, to be rid of idols and images and preconceived notions and start fresh.

Now, let me ask you to look at it another way: You know, we speak loosely about Jesus going into the “desert” or “wilderness” for forty days, but years ago, when I was in Israel, we had a guide who took us down from Jerusalem to Jericho – down through the barren land where Jesus spent those forty days – and along the way he showed us a bright splash of green down the side of a steep cliff and he said it came from a break in a conduit taking water to an ancient monastery and he said it shows you that this is not truly desert but wilderness.  There is a difference. Desert, true desert, he said, is where nothing can grow.  Wilderness is where growth can take place if only it has water.  When the spring rains come the wilderness bursts into bloom.  When the aqueduct springs a leak, the barren land turns green.

Think about that this Lent.  Yes, go back out into the desert, get rid of the idols, but then ask yourself this: where I am, can anything grow? Am I in the desert or the wilderness?  Go out onto the street outside the church and pour some water on it and watch for awhile. Probably that’s desert, not wilderness.  Probably nothing can grow there. Try it in your office or place of work.  Pour some water in a corner near your desk or work place and watch for a week or so and see what happens. Try it at home.  Pour some water on the television set, maybe a quart or so every day for a week. Does anything grow there?  Does any life emerge? Did it ever? But it might do good things for you anyway if you water it well. I will guarantee that if you do that you will wind up with a short-circuited TV but you will have a better social life, your thinking will clarify, and you will lose weight.

But seriously, Lent is a time to ask whether I’m in a place where life can come or not: desert or wilderness: which is it? For all the visual richness of our society a lot of it is desert: dead as it can be and deadening to those who come there.  But we are not like the wilderness plants; we can move; we can pick ourselves up and put ourselves in a place where life can emerge and develop – real life, the life of the spirit, life that can transcend even death itself. And we can carry that life with us and make things bloom where we are.

I trust this church is such a place.  I trust your home and place of work can be such a place.  But it depends on what you bring to it from here, from the sacraments ministered here, from the Word of God read and proclaimed and taught here.  I suspect that this city, the places you work in the places you live in are wilderness needing what you can absorb here and take there and capable of real life. But it’s not automatic and it won’t happen unless you want it to happen.

God twists very few arms. God wants us to respond in freedom.  But God does want us to grow.  God does want us to focus on life. God does want us to turn away from all that which is not God to come to the One who is.

Ashes to Go?

So here we are again: Ash Wednesday on the calendar and a number of Episcopal clergy standing on street corners offering “ashes to go.”  It’s hard to imagine actions in more direct conflict with the Bible readings for the day:

(Jesus said), “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.  But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret.”   St. Matthew 6:5-6, 16-18

So what do we have?  Clergy standing on street corners where they may be seen by others disfiguring by-passers faces so they may appear to others to be fasting!  Can someone explain this to me?

Seeing the “Kami”

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at Christ Church Sei Ko Kai (the Japanese heritage congregation in San Francisco) on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, 2014. 

Have any of you, I wonder, climbed Mt Fuji – Fujiyama – Fuji-san?  I did it many years ago and I bring it up because this morning’s gospel takes us to a mountaintop in Israel and I’ve been there too. But when I climbed Fuji-san, I walked and arrived peacefully at the top.   When I went up the mount of vision in Israel, I went in a car driven by a man who had done it so often that he went zooming around hairpin curves on the edge of a cliff as if he were driving along on Interstate 80 in Kansas and arrived at the top in a nervous state.

So there are two mountains, each with a commanding view, but getting there makes all the difference.  They were two very different experiences.  But there’s a more important difference in the way you approach the mountain.  Again and again as you approach the summit of Fuji-san, you encounter “torii”, the traditional gateway that frames not simply the entrance to a sacred site but often the site itself so you have it framed to contemplate.  You look at it through a doorway, a window. It concentrates your vision.  It asks you to look at this scene, look at it deeply, and appreciate what it is. This is not just a mountain, not just a pile of rock, but a place capable of speaking to you, showing you something more than itself, something beyond itself, something you ought to see more deeply with an inner eye of vision.

What the “torii” does, as I understand it, is to give definition to something basic to being human.  Human beings seem to have an innate sense of something more to life than biology. We live, we reproduce, we die.  So do other animals. But so far as we can tell,  animals generally go about their assigned job without worrying a lot about questions like “Why?” We have a cat that eats two meals a day, lies in the sun when it hits her favorite window sill, climbs into our laps occasionally when she feels lonely, tears paper apart if she can find some, and otherwise just naps.  Dogs do what dogs do and cats do what cats do and whales do what whales do but human beings do zillions of things that have nothing to do with our material, animal existence. We play golf, we listen to music, we read books.  We do things that are inexplicable, counter-intuitive, that are useless In terms of their material well-being. We elect members of Congress.  We go to church. And we do these things because they are satisfying in some strange way. We human beings apparently have a sense of something more, something beyond, something that gives life a larger meaning.

So the “torii” frame places, objects, scenes that awaken that sense of something more.  Some use the word “numinous” or the more familiar word “holy.” The “torii” frames an entrance to the holy. It can, of course, be simply the gateway to a shrine and you pass through it on your way into the shrine, the holy place, but also it may frame a scene that is evocative, that holds your attention, that makes you thoughtful. The snow-capped volcano, Fuji-san, is a one such place that inspires awe and wonder. So does a tree, especially a gnarled and twisted tree or a bansai, or a lake or a rough stone.  Every human society, so far as I know, has developed some way of responding to that sense of something more that seems to be a deep part of our nature.  We develop patterns of worship, some way of recognizing, developing, and institutionalizing that sense of what we call “the holy.”

“”Kami”” is the Japanese word for that sense of the holy and it’s a word that has a broad range of meaning.  It troubled the early missionaries in Japan because in translating their faith into Japanese they needed a word for “God” and “kami” seemed too vague, too impersonal, too general. The God of the Bible is not vague at all.  The Biblical God gets involved very specifically in human events: God acts in history. The first Roman Catholic missionaries finally imported the word “deus” from the Latin because it was specific and it was what they were used to – but “deus” has problems too. All the Roman and Greek deities also were “deus” or “theus” so, yes, it’s specific but it can be specifically wrong. It might just mean one of those mythical deities that the Hebrews refused to honor even if it cost them their lives.

But the Nippon Seikokai and most other churches have been content to go with “”kami”.” It has its problems, but it can be redefined to connect with the God of the Bible, to take on that more specific meaning. And also it creates common ground with Shinto and that’s important too.  After all, the “kami” of Japanese tradition is a sense of the holy and the sense of the holy connects us also to the God of the Bible who calls us to be holy also. Christians and Jews and Moslems also respond to the holiness of God.  So “”kami”” can be Fuji-san but it can also be Jesus.  The point is that we have a sense of something beyond and it’s as if you were in a closed room and had a sense of something outside and needed a window to see it. The “torii” is such a window; it frames some earthly thing that has the ability to point beyond, to open our minds, our souls, our selves, to the other, whatever you want to call it – “the wholly other” – the numinous – the sacred – the transcendent – the ultimate reality – the ground of being – or just plain “God.” God, the ultimate reality, is always visible in some way here – more so, perhaps, in some places than others, more evidently to some people than others. Some people talk about “thin places” where the separation between this world and another is less thick, less opaque.  I don’t like that myself because I don’t like to imagine any division between this world and another. It might be better to say that a “torii” reminds us of a holiness that is in all things but too easily lost sight of or forgotten.

The “torii” reminds us of an ultimate reality we might otherwise forget. In the west, I think we are likelier to build a church or a cathedral to remind us, to create a holy place rather than recognize one.  But many of the ancient cathedrals in Europe were built on top of pagan holy places. The first cathedral at Salisbury in England was built near Stonehenge.  I think they couldn’t move Stonehenge – they’d lost the ability to move stones that big – but that place seemed as thin to the Christians as it had to the pagans a place where a sense of the holy was stronger so they built a cathedral not far from those ancient stones.

I think that sense of holiness can be built up in places that have been used for prayer to the point where we sense it, feel it.  T.S. Eliot spoke about such a place in England, in his poem Four Quartets, a place called Little Gidding where a small group of men and women kept up a pattern of prayer for many years in the seventeenth century and made it a place of pilgrimage and prayer – which it still is. If you go there, there’s not much to see: a very small chapel and, of course, a souvenir shop, but Eliot says:

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report.

You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Yes;  prayer is communication with the holy and it takes place at Shinto shrines as well as in churches.  But it’s more than places, and the gospel today moves us from a place to a person.  The place is a mountain somewhere in the mid-east.  One gospel account places it just north of Israel but another puts it in the center of Israel. Either way, it’s a commanding height, the kind of place that literally changes you, transforms, transfigures.

I think you can get something of that sense even in San Francisco – or is it that I’m still new here? – but I know when I’m in a car or bus or walking and I come over a rise, a hill, and see a part of the city laid out below me it makes an impact. A few blocks from where I live, I can climb Golden Gate Heights and see the ocean to the west and the city to the east and the Golden Gate Bridge to the north. And that’s somehow special.  Can you be blasé about it? Maybe you can. Maybe after a while you stop really seeing it and responding to it with some sense of awe and amazement.  But the higher and more dominating the mountain the greater that sense of being raised up – and we may know intellectually that heaven is not literally up but we can’t help feeling that way, feeling that whatever the tensions and problems of the world may be we can rise above it all in a place of serenity and peace.  It’s no wonder we instinctively talk about heaven as “up.”

But the gospel this morning is about more than a mountain climb and a sense of exhilaration, separation, bring lifted up and separated, because the three apostles in the story are not looking down at the world or even up toward heaven but looking at Jesus and seeing him as if for the first time.  It’s as if he becomes for them the gateway, the “torii”, the door through which, or through whom, we come closest to the “kami”, the very specific, holy God: Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, Savior.  And this is critical. Yes, there are places and buildings that give us a sense of the holy but the holy God we worship is not an object or a force but a personal being, a God most fully revealed and known in a human life, in Jesus, who calls us to respond with the full offering of our life to a living God whom we can call Father, or Mother if you prefer, but to a being beyond any idea of person we can have but none the less, at the very least, personal – a God to whom we respond as person to person – possibly more than that, probably more than that, but nothing less than that, personal at the very least and made known most fully in the person of Jesus Christ.

It’s too bad, I think, that we can’t put the gospel reading this morning in context by reading on to see what came next. When they came down from the mountain, two things happened: they came to Jesus with a paralytic boy and asked for healing and they came with a question about taxes.  The next two stories in the gospel are about taxes and health care – it sounds like the evening news. And that’s exactly the point.  If God is present to be encountered in Jesus, then Jesus is not here to separate us from the world, to give us a break from all that, but to transform that too by entering it, coming into it to heal and transform – to transfigure not Jesus alone but this world also with all its narrow and limited agenda.

Can you imagine what would happen if the members of Congress would pause for a moment and think about what they are doing in the light of the Transfiguration, if they would come down in that light and with Jesus on their minds to deal as he did with the reality of human need, not politics as usual, but the reality of human need? And what difference would it make if we did?

What difference would it make if we tried more consciously to live in that light and not just on Sunday morning when we have shaped this place to make it easier but on the street and in stores, in Safeway and Walgreen’s. Try thinking of the checkout counter or parking lot as one of those thin places where the glory of God is visible. Think of the glory of God in the Safeway parking lot.  The gospel, after all, is not primarily a story of magic moments like the one in the gospel this morning but of gritty, day to day encounters with suffering and doubt and death and it is not at last the mount of transfiguration that best expresses our faith but the mount of Calvary, Jesus lifted up not on a mountain top but on a hill top on a wooden cross.

“I, if I be lifted up,” he said, “will draw all people to myself.” And we are called to be his agents.  What we are called to do is to be people who carry God’s light and peace down from the mountain top, out of our churches and places of prayer, into the dark places, the hard places, where the holy God is most needed and also very often found. So we ground our lives, yes, in times like this when we can come away briefly from all that as the disciples did and see the glory but we go back out through the doors of this place as if we turned the “torii” around or as if we passed through it from the other side with the “kami”, the special holy place, behind us and moving out in us into the world.  Then, you see, we will be coming through the “torii” in the other direction so that what is framed now is not the set apart sacred space but the everyday world.

There’s an old tradition, you know, of painting church doors red but we should, perhaps, especially paint the frame of the door red and red on both sides so that we go out, as if through the “torii,” into sacred space, the created world, with the cars going by, the stores open, the bicycles and taxis, the satisfied and the sick, the happy and the homeless, and Christ there in all of it, especially the places of need, the thin places of need, and recognize the “”kami”” there, divinity there, God present there, present in you and in me.

 

The Martyrs of Japan

The Martyrs of Japan: a sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at Christ Church Seikokai, San Francisco, on  February 9, 2014.

They say one picture is worth a thousand words so this is probably the longest sermon I have ever preached. You may have heard the story before of the martyrs of Japan but some stories need to be told and retold, again and again, so that they become part of our story and their story continues to live in us. There are many stories from Christian history that deserve retelling like that but none more compelling than the story of the martyrs of Japan.  I’ve known that story for many years and I’ve told it a number of times but I learned more about it just this last week.   I’m sure there’s still much more to learn. But here’s what I know now.

I know that the story begins in 1549 with the arrival of the first Christian missionaries.  I know that they were led by Francis Xavier and at first the mission went well and thousands of Japanese became Christians.  I know also that things went well for a number of years but then Franciscans showed up and Dutch traders, and the Japanese authorities realized that these Christians and Europeans were divided, that the Dutch and the Spanish and the Portugese and the Jesuits and Franciscans were competitors and taught different kinds of Christianity – and the authorities began to worry.  They began to worry that these foreigners might be a divisive influence in Japan. At that point persecution began.

It was almost fifty years from the arrival of Christianity to the time when 26 Christians were arrested in Kyoto and marched 600 miles south and west through the cold and snow of winter, being tortured as they went, to the southern port of Nagasaki, which was the center of Christian influence, and there they were crucified, tied to crosses and speared, as a warning to others.

Now, there are several aspects of this story that always seems surprising. One is the early success of the Christian mission: hundreds of thousands had been converted and 20 Japanese Christians were willing to die for their faith. One of them, Luis Ibaraki, was only twelve years old and was given an opportunity to abandon his faith but he declined. Three of the martyrs had become Jesuits which involved long and intensive training. Christianity, in other words, in less than fifty years, had put down deep roots.

I’m impressed also by the diversity of the group of twenty-six: twenty of the them were Japanese but four were Spanish, one was Mexican, and one was Indian.  Just 105 years after Columbus discovered America the Spanish were traveling around the world so easily and had made converts in so many different cultures that a Mexican could be traveling westward across the Pacific to work with Spaniards in Japan and an Indian convert could be traveling eastward to help convert others.  Already the roots were deep and the crucifixions didn’t stop the spread of Christianity, if anything they accelerated it.

It was still over thirty years before the worst persecution began and by that time there may have been 300,000 to 500,000 Japanese Christians, probably more in relation to the total population than there are today.  But when the Japanese authorities put their minds to the subject they carried out the most intensive persecution in the history of the Christian church.  For well over two hundred years any known Christian was arrested and killed. For two hundred years, if Christians were found, they were crucified, or they were burned alive or they were tied to stakes at low tide and left to be drowned when the tide came in, or they were hung upside down with a hole drilled in the forehead so they would slowly bleed to death, or they were buried up to the neck while samurai on horseback rode back and forth over them until the horse’s hooves crushed their heads.

After about 1630 every village where there had ever been Christians was visited every year by the authorities and every villager was required to tread on an image of the Virgin Mary or a crucifix to prove they were not Christians. If they refused, they were tortured and killed.  For over two hundred years the persecution continued but here and there, especially around Nagasaki and on the islands of the inland sea, little communities of hidden Christians somehow maintained their faith. They had no Bibles and no priests but in every community there was a teacher and a baptizer and they passed on the faith by word of mouth generation after generation.

Japan not only made Christianity illegal, it closed all doors to the west for over two centuries but when Japan was reopened to the west in the middle of the 19th century and permission was given to build a church in Nagasaki to serve the foreign community a little group of Japanese came into the church and looked around and approached one of the priests and said “We too are Christians.” Unknown to the authorities and in the face of the most thorough persecution ever visited on Christians they had kept the faith for over two centuries. It’s one of the great stories in the history of the church and evidence, if any were needed, that Christianity cannot be extinguished. The Russians later tried and failed.  The Chinese tried and failed.  It can’t be done. The church will survive. Of course, that’s a kind of negative bottom line.  The church to be the church needs to do more than survive. I wish I knew more about that hidden church and the difference it made in those communities: but that’s the basic story.

Now, last week I asked whether any of you had seen the memorial to the martyrs in Nagasaki and I think none of you had. It’s a marvelous memorial because it draws you in and changes you as the Lincoln Memorial does in Washington. So many memorials, you know, show a man on horseback or someone staring off into space but in the Lincoln Memorial, Lincoln is seated and looking down at the viewer and so too in Nagasaki, while most of the martyrs are shown looking up in prayer one or two are shown looking down at the visitor, looking down at you, looking, perhaps, into your mind and heart and questioning you, asking you to respond, to make a decision as they did about your ultimate commitment. What about you?  Does it matter to you? Where is your life going? Are you with us on our journey?

It can be a frightening thing to look into someone else’s eyes and to see someone looking at you and looking into you. There’s the story in the Gospel of Jesus and Peter.  Do you remember? Peter had told Jesus he would never betray him; others might betray him, but not Peter.  But then Jesus was arrested and someone looked at Peter and said, “He also was with him,” and Peter denied it and then Jesus turned and looked at Peter, not just looked at him, but looked into him. Not a word was said but Jesus saw who Peter was and Peter knew that Jesus knew him, knew who Peter was better than Peter did.  And Peter wept.  The sculptor who designed the Nagasaki Memorial has the martyrs look into us and question us.  Who are you?  What is your ultimate commitment? I wonder whether we know. I wonder whether we can answer that question.  I wonder whether we can meet the gaze of the martyr, or Jesus.  I wonder what they would see as they look at us.

I wonder whether it would be useful to reverse the situation. Suppose we were to look up at the martyrs and say, “You know, I admire you, but I live in a different world and it’s not that easy.  I don’t envy you and I have no desire to join you but you had only one simple question with a yes or no answer. Are you a Christian? Are you a follower of Jesus? Is that your ultimate commitment? Yes or No?  That was your challenge; mine is different. The questions I face are not that clear.  And the answers are not “Yes” or “No.”

You and I, whether we are aware of it or not, are making choices constantly and most times we barely think about it as even a question at all. You and I are part of a society facing ultimate questions.  And they don’t get any easier. When I was growing up there was a war on and the choices were clearer and after the hot war there was the cold war, there was communism on the one side and democracy on the other and atomic weapons on both sides threatening the end of civilization. There were books written portraying atomic warfare and its aftermath and the questions had to do with the survival of free societies, indeed of any society.

Today, it seems to many that we find ourselves facing forces more powerful still.  Now it’s not just atomic bombs, not just weapons controlled by a few national leaders but now it’s each of us making daily decisions that seem tiny and almost irrelevant but they have to do with the survival of civilization.  Today there are record-breaking blizzards in the east, devastating drought in the west, hurricanes and tornadoes more savage than ever, rising sea levels, air pollution such that in major cities of China and India the whole population is being slowly poisoned.  We have to ask ourselves whether life as we know it can long survive.

I suppose we can tell ourselves that it’s all a matter of decisions made in corporate offices and you and I have no impact on them but when California is threatened with the worst drought in a century we hear requests that we not leave the water running when we brush our teeth because a million people can use a million gallons of water in no time and the decisions I make or forget to make make an enormous difference.  Call it global warming, call it climate change, It’s a result of the life-style we’ve created that’s changing the air we breathe and the water we depend on every time we start the engine of our car or turn on a light bulb or visit Starbucks or McDonalds.  And the trouble is that no one is standing over me and asking me to tread on a crucifix or not. I will not be impaled on a samurai’s sword if I leave the water running. But the daily decisions I make impact my brothers and sisters in San Francisco and the central valley and Nagasaki and Africa and my children and grandchildren and yours too and it’s hard even to remember that the decisions I make matter that much, but they do.

In the beginning of creation God took the man and the woman and placed them in the garden and told them to have dominion, lordship, over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and everything that moves on the face of the earth and to take every plant bearing seed and every tree bearing fruit and to have them for food.  And for thousands of years that lordship was easy because the decisions made very little difference, seedtime and harvest continued and human beings were born and lived and died and the earth continued.  Not any more. Now the questions have to do with the survival of human life on this planet but still they aren’t put at the point of a sword. We’re free to deny, as many do, that there even is a question.

So, too, in matters more directly of faith.  No one usually will ask you for yes and no answers about your beliefs but you have choices to make, for example, about your use of time: do you pray daily, read the Bible daily? Or do you choose to use your time to watch a basketball game or read the paper? We hardly think of these as choices but they affect our relationship with God as surely as the choices made by the martyrs of Japan in their very different world. We can ignore them, evade them, never think of them and, as I said, no one will require our life of us — not now at any rate, not right away.

So in one sense at least, we can look back at the martyrs and say, your choices were easier, you had no way to evade them.  We do. I’m tempted to go on and make some comments about stewardship, the choices we make about our money and our time but that’s too big a subject for now.  So let me just make one final point.

The sculptor had a choice. The martyrs obviously arrived at Nagasaki in terrible condition. They had been marched, as I said, 600 miles in the dead of winter, maltreated all that time. Bruised and beaten, their clothes reduced to rags, they looked nothing like the neatly garbed people carved into the monument. There are smaller pictures on the sheet of paper you were given that are probably more accurate. But there’s historical accuracy on the one hand and there’s spiritual accuracy on the other and the artist chose the latter. How did they look to God?  How do they look to us when we think about their witness? The artist has shown them as shining witnesses, as role models, as garbed for heaven. And we have choices in that respect as well.

It always amuses me to look at pictures of major league baseball games in the 1930s and 1940s with their rows and rows of gentlemen in jackets and ties and fedoras sitting there “dressed for church” to go to a ball game. We don’t necessarily dress that well today even for church. And if we dress better for Sunday morning, we go home afterwards – I do anyway – and dress down.  We’re a lot less particular these days about attire.  Stores may still insist on shoes and shirts but the standards are about as low as they can be.  Many places have a “dress down Friday” but often you wouldn’t notice a difference.   I’m not sure of the sociological reasons for this change but we don’t see a need apparently to impress anyone with our attire. We are who we are, and except on very special occasions we don’t try to fool you with the way we dress. Nor can we fool God.  God knows who we are and if God sees the martyrs garbed for heaven I wonder whether God sees us that way or in rags and tatters.  It’s something to think about as we remember the martyrs of Japan and give thanks to God for their witness.

Filling a Niche

A sermon preached at Christ Church Seikokai, San Francisco, on the Feast of the Purification February 2, 2014, by Christopher L. Webber. 

There’s a little verse about niches  that I like.  It goes this way:

The niches in the Hall of Fame

Are usually full;

Some got there through the door marked “Push”

And some through the door marked “Pull.”

I want to talk about some niches that need filling one way or another.  So take a look at this picture of Wells cathedral.  This is the west front of a not-untypical Gothic cathedral with row over row of niches usually filled with statues of saints and Biblical figures. Here at Wells as in many other English cathedrals,  you may see a good many empty niches  because in the uproar and tumult of the Civil War in the seventeenth century  some zealous reformers decided to remove the images of Biblical heroes and  legendary saints, knock them down, break them up, and they have remained empty. So you see the empty niches along the bottom, just the ones they could reach without too much effort, and one actually very high up – maybe never filled?

Now what this is all about is this: I want to suggest that we look at  this morning’s readings  as three niches filled  and then I want to suggest  that we might think in terms of a fourth niche that’s still empty -  “space available” as they say in advertising.

Actually, you could probably approach every Sunday morning that way: you will hear three readings,  three perspectives on God’s way with us, three perspectives raising that same question:  if God worked in these lives or these situations in this way,  how does God work in my life and my situation?

I suppose you could think of it also in terms of a triptych, three panels showing three related scenes and perhaps you could imagine a fourth panel still blank. What do you call a four panel triptych? a quartych?  Anyway, we have three readings, three panels, three niches to look at and they have to do with expectation, experience, and understanding:  the experience of God’s people in the past, the expectation of God’s intrusion in human life,  intrusion in this world, intervention in human affairs,  and the reality of God at work here, and then the understanding of God’s purpose and God’s way with us.  The experience, expectation, and reality,  human desires and God’s purpose – which are not always the same thing and, to be honest, don’t always separate neatly into three niches quite as neatly as we might like.   Preachers are always looking for three points and God doesn’t always provide them, but we do our best with what we have..

So look at the first niche:  expectation.  Niche One comes to us from about 500 BC  – 2500 years ago -  give or take a century or so, but who’s counting? It’s a period in Jewish history  of frustrated expectations.

You know about frustrated expectations?  Maybe you had high hopes for President Obama and are feeling frustrated  that the result has not met or exceeded expectations. Now, you could argue that actually a lot has been  accomplished – finally, after sixty years, a national health plan, for better or worse. But many of those who wanted a national health plan  had great expectations and the reality so far is rather different  so there’s a lot of frustration. I’m not taking sides but just wondering whether  we can get a feel for a society 2500 years ago.

They were frustrated.  They had been in exile in Babylon and they longed for the day when they could go home, back to Jerusalem, back to the shining city,  where life as they remembered it was always wonderful. For seventy years they had lived in exile in Babylon  singing to themselves,

“I want to go

Where there ain’t no snow

And the rain don’t fall

And the winds don’t blow

At the lemonade springs

Where the bluebird sings . . .”

In Jerusalem, Jerusalem,

the big rock candy mountain of Jerusalem.

I’ve only been eight months away from Connecticut  where we had twenty acres of land on a dirt road  but looking back I remember how  it was that wonderful place where I could pick apples year round and cut asparagus whenever I was hungry  and the snow was soft and fluffy and almost warm to the touch and it never rained  when I needed to go somewhere!

Now you may tell me that San Francisco  is really the big rock candy mountain and for sure the snow and the rain don’t fall on us here  and if I got exiled to New Jersey or Atlanta I might begin to imagine San Francisco  as the new Jerusalem. But anyway, the Jews in Babylon  remembered Jerusalem as super-wonderful. And at the center of their imaginary remembered city was the temple in Jerusalem  where it was always Passover and Hanukkah and never Yom Kippur and the incense never made you sneeze  and the menorah candles never burned down.

But Malachi in this morning’s first reading  writes after they returned and after the disillusionment set in and it wasn’t always perfect and people wanted God to set it right,  and Malachi tells them, “You want God to set things right?  Well, you better duck because the Lord will come, he will suddenly come, indeed he is coming and who can endure the day of his coming,  who can stand when he appears? You want God to come and set things right? Well, watch out! Because God doesn’t fool around.”

So here’s the picture for the first niche,  panel one of the tripych: I actually can’t carve it for you myself because you would need the skills of a Rodin or Epstein or for the triptych the skills of a Picasso.  I’m thinking of Picasso’s Guernica – the most terrifying modern imagery I can think of:  people covering their heads in fear and horror. Like that, Malachi tells us, In sudden terror, God will come – so watch out! Like a refiner’s fire or like fuller’s soap. Two very different images but both concerned with burning and beating things into shape. If you have silver or gold that isn’t pure, you can burn out the impurities  with a very hot flame If you have freshly woven clothe  that’s picked up bits of stuff in the process you can use an alkali solution to purge it.

God, in other words,  will not be focused on making life nicer for you but on making you nicer for life. Why are things not what they used to be?  Maybe you aren’t what you ought to be. So start there – and be prepared,  because God will come and you may be the target in God’s agenda.

OK, let’s look at the second niche, second panel:  this is actually the third lesson. We always read the three lessons out of sequence. In historical terms, the epistle comes after the gospel.  So the gospel tells us what happened. Malachi said the Lord would come to the temple  unexpectedly  and look what happened. Not a cataclysm but a baby. You want God to come?  So God came -  and Malachi was dead wrong.  Well, no, not completely wrong.  God did come and what happened was surely unexpected – but not an apocalyptic drama -  just a mother and child, coming to the Temple to carry out the traditional ritual on the fortieth day from the birth of the child.

We need to think about that for a minute.  Why do we have prophets in the Bible who got it wrong? Well, a prophet is one who speaks for God  when God wants to send us a message. And God sends us messages through human  intermediaries who have their own agendas. God doesn’t just take over the prophet  and use him as a robotic mouthpiece: that would be a medium – someone who just  passes on messages with no input. But God respects the prophet’s integrity  just as God respects the prophet’s language.

I don’t know whether God always speaks Hebrew  but if you want Malachi for a messenger, it has to come through in Hebrew.  If you want me for a preacher, it’s going to be in English because my knowledge of Japanese isn’t up to it.  If I had to preach in Japanese, it would be a very short sermon.  But there are things I could say in Japanese  that I can’t say in English, like: Wasuremono o wasurenaide kudasai.  There’s no equivalent to that in English.

More important, there’s no future tense in Japanese,  so I can’t say, “I will be here next week” only “I hope to be, I plan to be.”  So a Japanese Malachi couldn’t say, “The Lord whom you seek will come . . .”  He can only say, “He plans to come, he’s likely to come, he hopes to come . . .”  But he can’t say, “He will . . .” And that limits the messenger and it limits God because God can only give us messages that we’re capable of hearing. So Malachi couldn’t imagine a sudden dramatic coming of – a baby.  Sudden and dramatic, he got; but not the baby.  Some of us haven’t quite figured it out either.

So what we have in the second niche, the Gospel niche,  is what actually happened. In niche one we had a prophet trying to communicate  but he couldn’t quite hear what God was saying.  And God couldn’t quite get the message through  because even the prophet couldn’t hear it – couldn’t hear the full message. The message is that God will suddenly come to God’s people. And the people generally can’t hear it  -  they don’t even really want it – they just want their festivals back with all the old-time trimming.  Why would they want God to intervene in that?  Why would Christians want God to get involved in the way we keep Christmas? Hard enough to get presents for everyone without having to think about serving God.

So Malachi got a message: God is coming,  suddenly, unexpectedly, drastically.  Malachi got it and passed it on, but as it passed through him it changed.  Malachi read it as world-shaking in human terms: a sudden, drastic  shaking of society and who could disagree that that was needed,  who could disagree that it IS needed. Malachi knew it, we know it -  but God operates on a different schedule. Yes, something drastic is needed.  Yes, we need to be shaken, Yes, we need to be refined and purged. But Malachi’s people were obsessed with what used to be. And Malachi was obsessed with what could be. And we’re not obsessed at all.

Do we have a vision we’re committed to, that we support as our first priority, that we ever even mention to others? But look what happens,  look what God does: drastic, yes;  unprecedented, yes; transformative, yes. Put it in the second niche:  a human infant, a child to be subject to human laws and human conditions, to be presented in the Temple like any other child.  Here, God, take this child and use this child  for your purposes. Remind us that you did and can and do come into human lives and use them to change the world. So we have Niiche One: the Prophet.

And Niche two: possibly a young woman holding an infant. We’ve all seen that statue, that image on Christmas cards  and even postage stamps to the point that we’ve forgotten  what a radical, unexpected,  life-changing message it sends:  God comes, where we expect it least.  As a child in a manger, as a man on a cross, God comes.

Niche three:  same subject: God coming among us but the Epistle to the Hebrews is looking back, not forward,  looking back to what really happened when God did come  and trying to put it in perspective,  trying to understand it, trying to bring it into a focus that we can look at and understand. Here’s an author, a sculptor, who sees  that a one-time tsunami is no solution – sure, God can come and purify the temple, sweep it clean, get rid of the mold and the muck  with a lasar beam, a nuclear explosion, a raging fire – choose your imagery –  but what really needs doing is a much longer,  slower, quieter process – one by one by one by one – the transformation of the human race, one by one, beginning with one.

He had to, the author tells us:   “He had to become like his brothers and sisters  in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and  faithful high priest, and because he himself was tested he is able to help those who are tested.  God is no remote, unapproachable being.  God has been here, God is here, still at work in the sacrament  and in your life.

There are Christians still who look for the sudden,  dramatic, born again moment, and some probably need it, but what matters in the long term is a much quieter, persistent faithfulness, much less dramatic, much less a Malachi moment than a Mary moment that happens, needs to happen, because God took the unexpected initiative and identified with us, here, flesh and blood, here, bread and wine, here, in us and working through us to continue  what began in those unobtrusive events  that changed the world. So the third niche holds a teacher, an interpreter, a figure holding a Bible and pointing to the words we need in order to understand.

And then the fourth niche,  the fourth panel of the triptych, quartych,  is for us.  Actually there are lots of empty niches left for us  and they need to be filled with all sorts of people so that others can look up and see  that indeed lives can be changed not by push or by pull, not even by forcing our way into the empty space on the cathedral front but by opening the door to the empty space in our hearts and minds, opening the door to that same quiet, unexpected event that began to change the world when Jesus was born and presented to God in the Temple and when at last he is born again, present again, in every one of us.

The Age of Reason

GOETHE

Mercy, Goethe, its sort of

unfortunate

you lived when you did.

The Age of Reason they called it

and people felt really smart

– some of them –

because they knew a few things

and thought they knew lots

Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson

thought they were pretty smart too

- smarter than God -

free to edit their own Bibles

tell others what was true

and what not

and so on, Johannn,

tough to be alive

at such a time

and be so smart

and know so little

(but you didn’t know how little)

now we know enough

to know how little we know

and envy your ignorance

except when we walk past

your statue in Chicago and see

you up there clad in

nothing but wisdom

and sat on by pigeons