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Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost – Song of Solomon – the Church of St. Michael and St. George

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Proper 17 – Year B

One of the things a person faces when they move somewhere new—not speaking from personal experience, of course—is that she knows that her influences will change.  For example, in North Carolina, I used to get up at 6 a.m. a few times a week to run with my dog, Ben, before heading to Morning Prayer and school.  I loved the quiet time in the morning, it felt like I was alone with my university—no one was around when I would pound down Chapel Drive and I could enjoy the gothic towers by myself.  I’d been living under the shadow of Duke for almost a decade and I could hardly imagine life without them.  Knowing that I’d graduate soon and move somewhere—who knew it would be a move to other Gothic towers—the lonely runs were all the sweeter.

The first Saturday that we lived in our apartment, I hoped that keeping to my early running schedule would provide some familiarity and make the jarring transition a bit smoother.  I eagerly woke up at 6 a.m. and laced my running shoes.  I grabbed the leash and we were off.  Except, as you well know, a 6 a.m. run on Wydown, even on a Saturday, is not a quiet, lonely, soulful experience.  There are myriad other dogs, runners, bikers, and walkers—I wondered if I’d read the time-change wrong.

If you’ll allow me a bit of a stereotype, I think you’ll see my point: around the southern-cuisine-soaked North Carolina paths, I was a standout, I was bucking the norm.  Around active Missourians, I was at most, the norm, and more likely, I was trailing the crowd.  In the last months, my influences have changed.

In the same way, our relationships influence how we think, and how we talk, and how we behave.  We not only pick up other peoples’ way of talking, but we pick up their habits, good and bad, and we pick up their perspective on life and belief.  Some of it is peer pressure, and some of it is just how we humans work—we mimic those whom we like and with whom we spend a lot of time.

Jesus longs to spend a lot of time with us, he longs for us to be changed in our speaking and habits, and in our belief by spending time with him.  He says, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”  Song of Solomon is a curious book in the Old Testament, and its original purpose was probably as love poems between two human lovers.  It is still instructive to us in that meaning, but our God, author of all good things, provides more than one level of meaning in his Word to us, and today, he says to you in the words of this poem, get up from where you’re seated, stagnant, and move with me.  Follow where I am leading you, hold my hand and let me be your companion—spend your life’s journey walking with me, and let me be the most significant influence in your life.

What God invites us to do in the Scripture reading this morning is the same exact thing that we prayed for in our opening collect this morning.  We said, “graft in our hearts the love of thy name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and bring forth in us the fruit of good works.”  We’re echoing what God has already said to us; we are praying that our desires would be aligned with what God desires for us.

This prayer acknowledges that we need God’s grace even to accept the offer he gives us to arise and come away with him.  We need God to develop in our hearts a love for him, we need God to plant and grow the seed of true religion, we need God to nurture goodness in us, and we need God to bring these changes to bear in a transformed life, evidenced in new God-centered perspectives and behavior and language.

So what does it look like when God is doing all this work on us?  The collect calls it “true religion.”  By implication, we’re only capable of false religion on our own—which might be another name for what the Pharisees were up to in the Gospel lesson, fastidiously washing their hands and their kettles, careful to not allow anyone, especially Jesus, to influence or change their well-defined religious practice.

“Religion” has become a touchy word in our culture, it carries baggage of intolerance and carries the whiff of meaningless but complicated rules and regulations.  But if we think about the way that we use the word “religion” in our daily lives, another meaning, perhaps a more faithful one, emerges.  Consider: “she religiously packs her lunch.”  “He gets up at 5 a.m. religiously in order to run.”  “That family does yard work every Saturday religiously.”  These more everyday uses of the word refer to habits, and most often, to good ones, at that.  Religion, then, must be about our habits and the things that we do that hold our lives together.  So what makes our practices, our habits in our relationship with God, “true”?

Throughout the Bible, God reminds us that he desires obedience, not burnt offerings, and he wants us to be of the right mind and heart, not of the right clothing and mannerism.  We humans continue to worship in ways that Christians and Jews have for centuries because we know that it is not all about what we think is trendy in 2012, but what Christians throughout all of history have discerned about how to be faithful through their own lives of prayer and habit.  We are joining in the habits of the Church by worshipping this way on Sundays and throughout the week.  Part of how we know what true religion is is from looking back at what faithful people who spent at least as much time, if not more than we do, in God’s presence, allowing themselves to be transformed by him.  We know that there is wisdom in old generations, and we should listen, both to the voices in the Bible, and the voices of saints throughout the centuries.  The Church is so much larger than just St. Michael and St. George, and larger than the Anglican Communion, and larger than all the Christians living in the world today.  Our history tells us some of what true religion looks like.

As we’ve been considering passages throughout Scripture this morning, we’ve found that we can also see some of the shape of true religion through Scripture.  The Pharisees are a cautionary tale, for example, and the disciples are sometimes shining examples and sometimes illustrations of mistakes we ought not make.  The Old Testament shows us through the Hebrews how God communicates to his people, of whom we’ve become a part, and how we can best respond to God’s call.  Scripture also details God’s ultimate call to us—Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  We are shown by example exactly how it is we can grow in true religion by mimicking and habitualizing Jesus’ words, attitudes, and behavior.  We are invited into true religion by our Baptism following in the footsteps he trod to the river Jordan.  We encourage and submit ourselves to God for growth as we seek the Eucharist every Sunday, just as Fr. Andrew & Fr. Jed have explicated in the past weeks.

Finally, God inspires our minds and pricks our consciences as he draws us to himself and continually makes his invitation.  It is a lifestyle of habits that can be painful and difficult at times, and is almost always inconvenient to our lifestyles in this culture, but deep down, we know that it is the way of everlasting life—it is the true religion.

Perhaps a way of rephrasing God’s invitation to you this morning can be found in a modern-day love poem:

Baby, why don’t we just turn that TV off?

Three hundred fifteen channels

Of nothing but bad news on

Well, it might be me, but the way I see it

The whole wide world has gone crazy

So baby, why don’t we just dance?

Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost – Jesus Teaching in the Synagogue – the Church of St. Michael and St. George

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Proper 14 – Year B

Do you remember Magic Eye posters?  They are those multi-colored vertical or horizontal repeating patterns that look like a busy piece of fabric until you stare at it for a minute or so, and your eyes relax and unfocus–and suddenly, before your eyes, pops a vivid, moving picture, like, antelope stampeding, or a gyrating, psychedelic version of Mona Lisa.

I hated these posters.  They adorned our art rooms in school, and I could never quite get the hang of them.  It felt like everyone was in on the joke except me.  What was most frustrating was that these pictures were right in front of my nose!  I could see them, but I couldn’t see what everyone else was seeing, I couldn’t see the part that really mattered about them, I could only see the visual noise.

Though I missed out on African safari scenes and fanciful recreations of old classics, the Jews of whom John writes lost out on their Messiah.  Jesus was Joseph and Mary’s son, the punk kid with gangly arms who had walked around their town many times before—what was it that all these ignorant crowds saw in him?  Further, how could Jesus say such outlandish things and get away with it?  These Jews from Jesus’ hometown knew better, they knew where he had come from, and it surely was not the sky—it was Nazareth.  However, as often happens with humans generally, and especially in the Gospels, they miss what it is that Jesus is trying to tell them.  They take the shallowest meaning they can concoct, and when, after trying for the least amount of time requisite to solve the puzzle and they find that the pieces don’t fit together the way that would like, they throw up their hands and say, “See, Jesus?  This is nonsense.  You are talking about the sky and bread and all kinds of ridiculous things.  Come off your high horse before you start to do real damage.  We are looking for the Messiah, you know, and you’re just confusing things.”

They think they want someone to overthrow Caesar and end their oppression once and for all.  They think they’re waiting for the most amazing political figure ever, who will conquer divisions in government, balance the budget, lower taxes, provide for the needs of the marginalized, and oust all the crooked-types from their positions of power in Washington—I mean, in Jerusalem.

Jesus does not make sense to them because Jesus is not meant for that sort of power.  The Jews of Jesus’ day are thinking within the system, so to speak—they’re operating out of what they know about social and political challenges, and though they seek good things, they are not seeking the greatest good, which is to know and worship the one living God.

Jesus does not make their dreams come true.  He makes much more vital dreams come true—dreams that they haven’t had the imagination to construct because they’ve been distracted and constrained by the sort of socio-religious system they’d constructed.  They were staring at the Magic Eye picture, but their eyes couldn’t focus on Jesus.  The educated, religious people were convinced that the visual noise, the messy pattern of shapes, was all that there was.  There was nothing else to do but try to categorize and organize this mass of shapes.  To carry the analogy a bit further, Jesus came to make the noisy shapes in front of them fall away and reveal himself as the answer.  Jesus wants to conquer sin, not congress, and he wants to build his kingdom in human hearts, not in marble halls.

Jesus was not what the Jews were expecting.  As St. Augustine puts it, “they saw, and stood blind.”  They were so certain of what they were looking at and for—they were looking at Mary’s strange kid and they were looking for a mighty gladiator, that they missed who was in front of them—it was God.

Last summer, a movie came out entitled “The Tree of Life.”  It was something like one of these Magic Eye posters—in the months before Jordan and I managed to watch it, we received two reviews over and over, by critics and laypeople alike: either, “It was brilliant.  I have no words.  It was the best movie ever made.  I am going to watch it for the rest of my life.  It was just, beyond.”  Or “Oh yeah…  Well, uh, there were some pretty pictures in it, but man, it was just cheesy and overdone and in the end, kind of pointless.”  Some saw the image that jumped in front of their eyes after staring for awhile, and some just saw noise.

Brad Pitt plays the father in the movie’s flashbacks, which comprise most of the narrative plot for the film; near the end of the movie, as his character has grown, he says, “look at the glory all around us.  It was here all along, and I never saw it.”  This character had spent his life looking for a certain type of glory, teaching his children to be strong and to fight, to strive against the world and bring as much as possible under their submission.  In the end, he discovered that he and his children—all humanity—had not been created for that kind of life.  The mother in the film life faithfully with a vision of this glory throughout her life; she plays a foil to the fierce father, treating her children with a gentle love, teaching them to approach the world and all people with awe and dignity.

For the father in the film, who spent most of his life under the impression that he needed to beat the system, the world was a harsh place that needed to be guarded against.  Some interpreters of the movie have called him an embodiment of nature—what we humans do when we’re left to our own devices.  The mother, from the first scene, is an embodiment of grace, living with patience and gentleness for her children and her neighbors, showing them by example and by direction that the world is created by God to be good and full of wonder—the mother tries to teach her children the glory that God created for them.  The movie is interspersed with many fantastic scenes of nature—reefs, waterfalls, volcanoes—they say the collecting of these shots took more than two decades.  The amazing thing is that the mother is not raising her children in a particularly beautiful place—they’re in rural Texas.  Yet, she is convinced that God’s glory and grace is overwhelming and transformative, even there.

God came into the world as the exact opposite of what the Jews expected, because God’s glory is different from what we humans imagine and anticipate.  It could be no other way—if God was just as we suspected, if he looked and behaved just the way we or the Jews calculated that he would, then God would just be a creation of our minds, nothing more than what we could comprehend and put together.

The movie’s epigraph came from the book of Job, and it echoes what Jesus tells the Jews in John’s Gospel, and what we are reminded of today: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – David & Bathesheba – the Church of St. Michael & St. George

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Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 12 (Year B)

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you ask Siri about something with more depth than how to get to Jilly’s Cupcake Bar, she get cagey.  For example, if you ask her whether there is a God, she will often tell you, “I eschew theological disquisition.”  Siri knows her limits.  As an electronic assistant, she has many talents—I can ask her where to get ice cream, and she’ll show me a map of 15 options close to me, organized by the positivity of their online ratings.  She can pull up and call my husband’s cell phone number with just a two-word cue.

However, she realizes that answering life’s big questions is beyond the scope of her ability.  Siri won’t get anywhere near the issue of a greater power in our universe.  She’s not curious to inch her way toward a metaphysical cliff; she’s actively pushing us back from letting her near the edge.  Siri is not interested in being tempted.

King David could learn something from Siri.  The writer of Second Samuel provides many clues leading up to the climax of today’s Old Testament lesson to let us know that David is inching his way out of his safe zone, tip-toeing his way toward catastrophe.  “In the spring of the year,” Second Samuel says, “the time when kings go out to battle,” dot-dot-dot “David remained at Jerusalem.”  He sent out his whole army to fight the battles of Israel, but instead of accompanying them, he stayed on the home front.  He seems to say, “I’m strong enough to resist the ladies prowling the streets.  I’m not some undisciplined fool!  The women’s husbands may be gone, but I know they’re married.  That’s no problem for me.”

Then, late one afternoon, David struts around the porch of his palace, enjoying the scenery from the highest point in the city.  The passage continues, “He saw from the roof a woman bathing”–semi-colon–“she was very beautiful.”  Of course there aren’t semi-colons in ancient Hebrew, but it seems clear that he didn’t just accidentally glance and Bathsheba’s body flicker across his field of vision; he looked carefully enough to take in her beauty.  His gaze was intentional.  It was long enough to do harm to them both.

You know what comes next.  David finds he’s not strong enough to avoid temptation.  He’s edged himself up to the cliff, staying home from the battles, walking the roof at a particular time of day, looking intently at a beautiful, but private moment.

David thought he could handle the temptation that was cropping up in his life, but he out of his depth, and he refused to admit it until he’d gone so far to cover up his sin that he’d killed Bathesheba’s husband.

In the Gospel lesson today, we hear two well-known stories about Jesus’ ministry that tell us much about who he is.  But there’s something else revelatory about Jesus wedged between these two pericopes:  “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”

The people had been fed, physically and spiritually from Jesus’ hand and he had healed their sick.  They realized, as the lesson says, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”  Having witnessed the work of the Promised One, having been in Jesus’ presence, they could think of no better thing than to have him rule them—just as the prophets of old had said that he would.

Though Jesus often tells crowds who surround him that an earthly ruler who would save the Israelite people from the hand of Rome is not what the prophets had in mind, in this instance, with the people so stirred up with his popularity, he runs away.  Jesus doesn’t stay to try to explain, allowing the mistaken people and their delusions of grandeur seep into his mind and heart, he turns his back to the adoring people and goes to the place where he often retreats when the crowds and the demands of ministry press in on him.  He goes to the mountain, and he goes by himself.

Jesus knows that the power of temptation is almost undeniable.  When he sees the first hint of temptation, Jesus does not stick around in order to fight the good fight or tell himself, “Hey, I don’t need to worry that I’m going to get a big head and fall off-course, I’m God!”  Sure, there are times in his ministry when he does stick around, but more often than not, John or Matthew or one of the other Gospel writers sticks in a sentence, “He went off on his own.”  Or “He left that place.”  Here, in between two famous miracles, Jesus takes time to check himself before he wrecks himself.  Jesus removes distractions, seeking stillness and God’s presence in order to remember his purpose on earth and to remind himself how to most faithfully and effectively carry out that call.  Filling our attention with God assures us that we won’t find ourselves out of our depth.  Temptation works to make things cloudy before our eyes—causing us to forget exactly what we are meant to be and to do.  As we allow our vision to fog we lose our way and end up mired in sin.

But really, it’s easy to notice when fog starts to collect, isn’t it?  Things like what Jesus and David faced are easy to guard against in our own lives—don’t think too much of yourself, and don’t think that you don’t need accountability.  But what if the fog has been collecting for your entire adult life?  What if the path is at so slight an incline that we can completely ignore the descent?

This is one of the questions that Peggy Noonan asks in her Wall Street Journal column this week entitled, “The Dark Night Rises.”  Noonan points out the evermore thrilling—evermore graphic—development of action movies in the last few decades.  Gradually we’ve moved from villains who are meant to be cautionary, but ultimately amusing, toward characters who are evil to their core, so dark as to intrigue, in some cases.  The power of these stories, these images, and these characters desensitizes the population to violence, such that children and young people—all of us, begin to see a more violent way of life as the norm.  She cites studies that prove that violent media, when exposed to children, produced children who engaged in more violent acts, hitting and fighting with their peers.

So, I wonder, what is so ingrained into our everyday habits that we haven’t even noticed that it has slipped into the realm of temptation and sin?

I close with words of G.K. Chesterton, from his hymn, “O God of Earth and Altar,” let us pray:

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

Amen.

brave people make intimidating congregations

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Often, while sermon-writing, words come slowly, and when they come, they seem like little clods of dirt that break apart into dust the moment you try to grasp them. This exercise sends me running through my cycle of google reader-facebook-twitter.  Having just completed the circuit a few minutes before, there was nothing new on my reader, but when i typed in “fac” in my browser bar (the fewest letters necessary to bring up my worn “facebook.com” link) and arrived at the top of my newsfeed, a new photo had been posted by one of my oldest friends:

She wore a white sundress, her blonde hair was down, and the big white posterboard she held up read, “Shh… just go back to sleep.”  It was a photo taken for Project Unbreakable, a website dedicated to survivors of sexual assault.  I’d known about the event she referred to for a few months, but seeing her brave face meeting the camera’s eye humbled me–what good were my fancy sermonizing words to her?

I’d asked that question of myself before, thinking of a friend of mine who is a veteran of Afghanistan.  With all that he’s seen and survived, what can a sheltered, charmed, suburban Midwesterner say that has any weight?

Of course, the answer is that the Gospel is the most powerful thing we can describe to anyone, but the rub is describing it faithfully and articulately, both with our words and with our lives.  These friends of mine make me a better preacher, because I know that sitting in the pews each Sunday are others who have been abused, assaulted, witnessed and survived war, and continue to fight for their lives; keeping them in mind as I search for language keeps me honest and humble (and makes me pray more often).

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost – Beheading of John the Baptist – Church of St. Michael & St. George

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In October of my sophomore year at Toledo Christian High School, the class of 2004 experienced a monumental event.  A new member joined our ranks.

For the terribly diverse group of 50 fifteen-year-olds from rural and suburban Ohio that we were, new blood was enough to keep us humming for well into the spring semester.  This particular teen was especially up for the job: from the exotic state of South Carolina, Dan Strickland sported a fittingly attractive Southern drawl, matched by his barely-regulation haircut, what I think would now be considered the Bieber ‘do, and his strange-but-wonderful accessories, including hemp necklaces and bracelets, an illicit earring, and Rainbow-brand sandals.

We approached him as if he was from another world, asking him questions about what South Carolina was like, equally awed and confused by his use of “y’all” and “Ma’am.”  He was so un-like us, though now we shared classrooms and meals and sports practices with him.  We were curious about what life was like in the South, and how it had made him who he was—the way that he responded to our teachers with “Yes Ma’am” and “No Ma’am” instead of our “yeah” or “nah” and how he seemed to be able to work himself out of detentions and discipline with his ferociously persistent but ever-polite way of speech.  Still today, ten years later, his fiancée continues to be frustrated by his uncanny ability to consistently talk himself onto earlier plane flights—a method that never seems to work for her, straight-talking woman that she is.

Dan was someone we Toledoians were enamored of because his way of being, who his environment growing up had formed him to be, was so foreign to us.  We couldn’t quite figure him out, he wasn’t like us—but that was a good thing, we thought.

Of course, you should remember that I myself ran to North Carolina as soon as I graduated high school and was only tempted out of the state by a much sought-after job offer here.  I am not an unbiased source when it comes to a love and awe of Southern living.

My point is that Dan’s difference drew us to him, his was a lifestyle that we did not completely understand, but it seemed somehow more glamorous for its incomprehensibility.  We liked his gracious Southern manners, easy-going drawl, and sometimes-foreign way of reasoning.  We wanted to understand him and learn how to claim those manners, easy-going attitude, and novel perspective for ourselves.

That’s a little like what I imagine Herod felt in the Gospel passage today.  Mark describes it this way, “Herod respected John.  He regarded him as a righteous and holy person, so he protected him.  John’s words greatly confused Herod, yet he enjoyed listening to him.”  John’s ascetic lifestyle was totally foreign to Herod, but this stinky man in camel hair with locust-breath struck Herod as intriguing.  Earlier in the passage, you’ll remember, Mark recounts that John the Baptist had pronounced judgment on Herod on account of his ill-gotten wife.  This woman had been his brother Philip’s wife, but Herod divorced his own spouse in order to take on his brother’s.  Despite John’s damning, Herod had a soft spot for him—these two men from very different socio-economic situations, with very different worldviews, found companionship under an umbrella of truth.  John was in jail because of the truth he had told about Herod and his new wife, Herodias, but Herod’s affection kept him from allowing mortal evil to befall John.  Later in the passage, of course, Herod is caught between his word to his wife’s daughter, and his desire to protect John, but what I want to look at more closely this morning is why he had any desire to protect John in the first place.

This man who had denounced the ruler’s lifestyle choices was being protected in prison because despite the damning, Herod “enjoyed listening” to John.  He was admittedly confused and unsure of whatever it was John was trying to communicate, and what those convictions might mean for Herod’s own lifestyle, but there was a ring of something irresistible in John’s being.  That ring, we know, is truth.  John brought with him the truth of salvation to the world, heralding Jesus’ imminent arrival.  John’s lifestyle was strange, even to the people of that time and place.  He looked and acted in a way so foreign to Herod and his ilk, behavior unfamiliar even to Jews of the era, that everyone could tell, just by John walking down the street, that he was coming from a different place all together.

It’s no accident that in recent years, television reality series showcasing various veins of American life have developed an obsession with those whose lives are defined and formed by their religious convictions.  Shows like “19 Kids and Counting,” “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding,” “Sister Wives,” “Amish: Out of Order,” give us normal people a window into the lives of groups who have allowed their religion to change who they are.  It’s hard to imagine an Episcopalian reality show, though some might argue that “Downton Abbey” is pretty close.

But I wonder, it is to be a point of pride that our practice of religion does not change us into people who are considered ab-normal by society?

John the Baptist “lived in such a way that his life would not make sense if God did not exist.”[1]  John had allowed himself to be completely transformed by his interaction and relationship with Jesus, and though his life didn’t make sense to Herod, and he said things that sounded ridiculous, John was beloved of Herod and beloved of God.  Herod saw the Truth in the way John lived his life and how John was empowered to carry out the convictions he developed on account of his transformation—Herod wasn’t turned off by how different John seemed because of his faith, Herod was drawn to him because of John’s confidence in the salvation Jesus offers.  Though the pagan Herod was not well versed in what it meant to be religious and to live a life faithful to God, because he was human, and because humans are wired to seek truth and to desire faith, Herod recognized truth and faith when he saw it.  Mark, as well as Matthew and Luke, tell us that Herod knew John was a righteous and holy man—these attributes were obvious just from seeing or talking with John, and those were the things that drew Herod to him.

Though it was John’s bold words of truth that landed him in jail, it wasn’t the bold words specifically that drew Herod and other unbelievers to himself; it was John’s entire lifestyle—his way of treating people, his manners, his perspective.  John was so completely transformed, his self was so hidden in who Jesus is, that when people looked at John, they thought they were seeing Jesus—the beginning of today’s Gospel passage says exactly that!  People, trying to figure out who Jesus was, thought he was John, and sometimes, when people met John, thought he was the Messiah.  His mother Elizabeth and his father, Zechariah, must have been no small part of his formation in faithfulness.  They helped to create a home and a community in which John’s faith was supported and encouraged to thrive.  John’s complete, single-minded commitment to the God made incarnate in Jesus Christ made him live his life in a way that was easily distinguishable from the culture around him.

John’s life was worthy of a reality tv show on Herod’s network.  Let us pray that our lives, too, may be confounding to those around us because of Christ’s work done for his Church.

[1] Cardinal Suhard, via Stanley Hauerwas