Sledgehammers and Crowbars and the Kingdom of God

Lent 3C; Exodus 3:1-15; Luke 13:1-9; St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC 2/28/2016

Jim Melnyk: “Sledgehammers and Crowbars and the Kingdom of Heaven”

“The disciples of a rabbi came to him, and they asked him about the zaddick, a zealous people who work themselves into a frenzy to reach ecstasy and religious enlightenment.  So [the rabbi] told them this [parable]…

‘Once a king created a great maze of complicated passageways.  He then sat in the center of the maze and told his followers to come to him.  The first group entered the maze with sledgehammers and crowbars.  They forced their way to the center.  The second group came in very quietly and gently, wandering around the maze.  Whenever they came to a complicated, twisted turn, they wrote out a little message and left it there for those who were to come after them.

The rabbi said that those of the first group were obsessed with the command of the king to come to him.  Those in the second group, conversely, had faith that the king would magnetically draw them to himself’” (Edward Hays, The Lenten Labyrinth).

This is certainly a story about God.  It’s a story about a God who is patient, who calls for us and waits for us, and who trusts us to find our way home to our Creator.  This rabbinic parable is also a story about humanity – about a people who choose many ways to seek the God who calls.  The parable is about a people who can be obsessive, single-minded, and violent in their search for God; and about a people who can be patient, thoughtful, and caring toward others, as they seek the heart of God.

The hammer-wielders of this world boldly and heroically smash their way toward the kingdom, trying their best to push or pull others along the way and crush those who get in their way.  The quickest route between here and heaven is a straight line with the gas pedal pushed to the floor, and God help (or consign to hell) anyone who doesn’t jump on board or gets in their way. 

The hammer-wielder’s God is not always patient, and their God’s quality of mercy is often strained.

The wanderers of this world know their final destination, and trust God to see them there.  They are the ones who stop for others in need along the way.  They are the ones who leave little messages along the way for those who follow after.  They hear the voice of God in the stranger as well as the friend and neighbor.  The wanderers know that heaven can indeed wait, and will wait.  They know that God will honor their faithfulness in the journeying.  The wanderers’ God is constantly calling, correcting the wayward, and embracing the whole of creation. 

The God of those who wander is the God who claims the name “I Am”, or perhaps better translated, “I Will Be Who I Will Be”, or “The One Who Causes To Be What Comes Into Being.”  This God is a God of process – this God is a God of becoming – who has left sledgehammers and crowbars behind long ago.

Our Gospel story today shares a theological reality with the rabbinic tale.  It’s a story about the patience of God in a situation that seems to beg a more expedient solution.  The comments by Jesus about the Galileans killed by Pilate, and those killed by the falling tower, tell us that Jesus is very conscious that time is running out – especially as he nears Jerusalem and what awaits him there.  There is a tension between the seriousness of people closing their eyes and ears to the Good News, and Jesus’ hope for humankind.  We can sense our Lord’s frustration as he tells his listeners, “but unless you repent, you will perish just as they did.”  By this pronouncement from Jesus, we are reminded of our own sinfulness, a nature shared by all humanity.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there.  He goes on to tell a story of his own.  It’s a story about the mercy of God – about the steadfast love God shows to God’s people.  The owner of a vineyard comes to the gardener wanting a barren fig tree cut down.  Fig trees exact a great toll on the soil, and to have one taking up the soil’s nutrients without return seems wasteful.  But the gardener stands between the owner and the fig tree and asks for patience.  “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”

One cannot help but see the promise of the Risen Christ in the words and actions of the gardener.  It’s a powerful image given to us in this story – it’s an image of God, who in the person of Jesus, kneels in the dirt and mud, digging about the roots of an unwanted, unfruitful, tree, in an attempt to bring about new life.  Think of the image of a God who is willing to get scratched and muddy, hands and arms manure-streaked and bruised, for the life of one tree.  Going even further – consider the image of those who managed to cut down a bothersome tree – only to see it rise again three days later.  Oh, what a wonderful God we have – who shares so much with us – who’s passion for us runs so deeply.

We might ask, “What of the next year?  What if there’s no fruit on the fig tree after all that work?”  Surely the owner of the vineyard has a limit?  Surely the mercy of God has its limits?  But I’m inclined to ask, “What if there’s the slightest bit of new growth?”  Wouldn’t the gardener find a way to give that tree one more season, then another, and another?  Would the Christ we claim to have descended to the dead to proclaim Good News not accept our turning at any point?

When we, or God for that matter, draw a line in the sand and say, “No more!” doesn’t our love – doesn’t God’s love – become conditional?  Maybe it’s our inability to love with the heart of God that demands a deadline for the barren fig tree – and some sort of “holy deadline” for humanity. 

Maybe it’s our own need for God’s love and forgiveness that makes us more concerned with the plight of the barren fig tree, or the other person’s sin, instead of the love of God which calls us each into new life.  The hammer-wielders of the rabbi’s parable see the barren fig tree as a lost cause to be cut down and thrown into the fire, or an obstacle to be ignored and slammed out of the way.  There is little patience on their part for those who cannot or will not get with the program – which coincidently matches their own belief systems.  The head-long, hammer-wielding, rush to the king at the center of the maze has no time for those who are left along the way, or those who don’t fit neatly into compact, set-in-stone belief systems.  Yet in another Gospel story, this one by Matthew, the hammer-wielders who find themselves before the throne of God are at a loss when they hear, “Depart from me… for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me” (Matt. 25:41-42).

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all face the world as the rabbi’s wandering disciples faced the king’s maze?  As wanderers we would stop for that barren fig tree.  Heaven can wait – God will wait – while we dig about its roots with the gardener’s help, and offer it care and nourishment along the way.  As wanderers we will risk getting run over by the hammer-wielders or caught upside the head by a stray crowbar every time we stop to care for those in need of help and love – every time we stop to leave a little message of encouragement or direction along the way – every time we stop to offer the Good News of God in Christ rather than a word of judgment.  And stop we must as followers of the One who stopped for us on Calvary’s tree.  Wanderers are vulnerable in this world – but then again, so was our Lord.

The hard truth is that each of us is often as much a hammer-wielder as a wanderer – Lent reminds us that sometimes we take up a crowbar instead of the cross.  The wonderful promise – the Good News – is that God gives us the power and the heart to become more and more the wanderer we see and know in Jesus.  And as wanderers, we know that heaven can indeed wait – that heaven will indeed wait for us – that God will indeed wait for us – as we journey among our sisters and brothers with the love of Christ enfolding us – as we journey into the heart of God.

The Virgin Day - By the Rev. Dr. Otis Hamm

Lent 2C; Gen. 15:1-12, 17-18; Phil. 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

St. Paul's Episcopal Church Smithfield, NC

The Rev. Dr. Otis Hamm: “The Virgin Day”

Episcopal scholar Alan Jones wrote, “In the waters of baptism we are reminded that we are not born in a vacuum, nor do we journey entirely alone (although loneliness is often part of the burden). Being reborn, being made alive, involves being born into a community. So there are strings attached to this adventure. Far from being the spiritual journey of the solitary individual in search of God, it drags a people, a church, a nation, and the human race, along with it.”[1] Jones has touched on something powerful to ponder not only during this holy time, but also as we contend with ecclesial life. Traveling through the season of Lent can seem like such a personally reflective time, a time of almost monastic proportions. We fast, we take on exercises and other ascetic practices, which are all intended to draw us as individuals into a deeper and more profound place with our Creator. After all, isn’t that what Lent is supposed to help us realize? But at times it can seem a little one-dimensional. As if the heart we are attempting to fulfill is really just our very own and not so much the One that truly seeks fulfillment. We are sometimes more interested in self-help than reflecting on the image of Christ. For whatever reason life has presented us with challenges and the ascetical practices of Lent provide us with the necessary tools to meet them head on. Or we wear these same practices like a badge, displaying our well-groomed piety. Nonetheless, there are cautionary markers to recognize. Consider our friend from the Old Testament reading this morning, Abraham was more than concerned, some have suggested that he was anxious about his situation. He had been promised an heir and yet, only an adopted son and a culturally illegitimate son was all he had been “blessed” with. Poor guy? Kind of reminds me of someone I know who’s waiting patiently for exam results, and I use the term patiently in a relative sense. The weight of the world is on our shoulders just as it was on Abraham’s; that tends to be our embedded psyche. Whether one is involved in a faith tradition or not, the world we live in bombards us with a multitude of issues daily that channels a variety of anxious emotions.  Alone we are, alone we must be, only if we know not the work of the Creator—a poor attempt at Master Yoda humor. The work of God far excels humanity’s compulsory nature and at times lackadaisical nature. That almost unexplainable dichotomy of “got to have it now” verses “I’ll do it tomorrow.” In an excerpt from Marcus Borg’s Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teaching, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary Borg writes:

“Does participatory eschatology mean that Jesus thought the kingdom of God, God’s dream, would come about through human political achievement? By no means. I do not imagine that he thought that. It is always God’s kingdom, God’s dream, God’s will. And it involves a deep centering in God whom Jesus knew. So did he think God would bring in the kingdom without our involvement? I do not imagine this either. Indeed, the choice between ‘God does it’ or ‘we do it’ is a misleading and inappropriate dichotomy. In St. Augustine’s wonderful aphorism, ‘God without us will not; and we without God cannot.’”[2]

Borg is speaking to the incontestable image of God within humanity. Abraham had yet to realize the image as it reverberated throughout his life. The very son he adopted and the one in which he considered to be that of a slave were both products of the image of God within his own life. Abraham was blinded by his own vision of what he perceived to be the will of God and replaced it with his own.

Nineteenth century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach believed that humanity used religion as a fantasy to escape the harsh realities of life. According to Feuerbach, “people tend to see themselves as helpless and dependent when faced with the challenges of life. Therefore, they seek to overcome their problems through imagination; they imagine or project an idealized being of goodness or power that can help them. Humanity is not created in the image of God, but God is created in the image of {an} idealized humanity.”[3] 

Perhaps Feuerbach makes a valid point in some cases, at least on the surface. One could certainly contend that Abraham might be taking matters into his own hands and attempting to at best manipulate the situation. Our gospel reading today has similar overtones. The Pharisees are attempting to manipulate the actions of Jesus, which is interesting considering pharisaical life and extant readings regarding some of the roles they did or did not actually play. And then there is the ‘fox’, a master manipulator who seemingly just desires to see Jesus. Frankly, scholarship speaks to more than one possibility here, but the real story is Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Where oh where is Jerusalem? For Christ Jerusalem was home, the center of his earthly work and life, his desire—desire, was to go home. It would be at home where Jesus would complete the work of the Father.

Our epistle reading points to whom we are to become, imitators of Christ. For Christ the home of the heart is Jerusalem and it is there that all things for humanity have the ability to become new. Not the image that Feuerbach paints at all, but the true image of God living in the incarnate Christ in all his vulnerability as he died on the cross and rose from the dead. Our Jerusalem is our hearts and our hearts lie in the crucified Christ.

A wonderful image of our own vulnerability and daily virginity comes from a work written by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

How the valley awakes. At two-fifteen in the morning there are no sounds except in the monastery: the bells ring, the office begins. Outside, nothing, except perhaps a bullfrog saying ‘Om’ in the creek or in the guesthouse pond. Some nights he is in Samadhi; there is not even an ‘Om’. The mysterious an uninterrupted whooping of the whippoorwill begins about three, these mornings. He is not always near. Sometimes there are two whooping together, perhaps a mile away in the woods in the east.

The first chirps of the waking day birds mark the point vierge of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light, a moment of awe an inexpressible innocence, when the Father in perfect silence open their eyes. They begin to speak to him, not with fluent song, but with an awakening question that is their dawn state, their state at the point vierge. Their condition asks if it is time for them to ‘be’. He answers ‘yes’. Then they one by one wake up, and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing. Presently they will be fully themselves and even fly.

Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to ‘be’ once again, as it did on the first morning that ever was.[4]

Merton speaks to the dawn of a new day and the life of all creation as being that of something new. In his view, one that I happen to agree with, it is a virgin day, one that has not occurred before and should be considered as one that belongs to both creation and Creator working together. Lent draws upon an awakening within, which on the surface is an individual matter. However, the journey is not solely individualistic, Jones spoke earlier of our connectedness to one another through baptism, our journeys’ are most certainly manifest representations of the incarnate Christ working within the community not only in an ecclesial setting, but also in an ecumenical one. By carefully reflecting upon Lent and being mindful of the markers that derail us from the journey where we are created in God’s image rather than God created in ours’, the season as well as our journeys’ take on new life.    As Merton resounds with his lovely prose it is not of our own, but that of our Creator that life happens, that we emanate the light of the incarnate within the world around us as each day begins anew and the Creator of all gives us breath, it is our path and God’s dawn.

Amen     

---

[1]
                        [1] Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for A Christian Spirituality, (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 111,

[2]
                        [2] Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 2006) 260.

[3]
                        [3] Lewis M. Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward, Religions of the World, Eleventh ed. , (New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc, 2009), 7.

[4]
                        [4] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander, (New York: Image, 2914), 127-128.

Journeying Through the Dark Nights of the Soul

Lent 1C; Deut. 26:5-11; Lk. 4:1-13; St. Paul’s Smithfield, NC 2/14/2016

Jim Melnyk, “Journeying Through the Dark Nights of the Soul”

In the late 1980s The Last Temptation of Christ opened in theaters challenging audiences with what many people saw as an all too human Jesus – a Jesus who struggled deeply to understand his identity, and what it meant to be both Son of Man and Son of God.

And it seems that every year at this time I hearken back to some rather foggy memories of a scene from the movie.  Taken from today’s Gospel story, Jesus has just been baptized by John and led out into the wilderness by the Spirit of God – though in the movie the Spirit speaks to Jesus through John the Baptist.  There, in the wild solitude, in the best tradition of ancient Jewish mystics, Jesus takes a stone and traces a circle in dirt.  He then steps into the center of the circle asking God to speak to him, and waits for whatever will come his way – and it is indeed a long wait. 

Hungry and tired, nearly spent with days of fasting, meditation and prayer, Jesus finally comes face-to-face with the Tempter who in the movie wears many faces and speaks with many voices; one who offers Jesus quick and easy answers to the difficult journey that lay ahead.  Years later I would hear about the Native American practice of Vision Quests – and that movie scene would come back to me – Jesus alone in the circle seeking God’s will for his life and facing the one who would challenge his willingness to follow the Holy Spirit’s lead.

In the movie, and in the Gospel lesson for today, Jesus actually does embark on a Vision Quest of sorts.  Beginning his own journey into the promise of God, Jesus is faced with the same temptations which faced the mothers and fathers of his faith tradition in the wilderness so long ago and which Moses speaks to this morning in our lesson from Deuteronomy.  

Sticking more with the Gospel now, we hear the temptation for Jesus to depend on himself rather than on God for his immediate needs – “command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”  There’s the temptation for Jesus to turn from God and embrace something false – “worship me, and I will give you the world.”  And finally, there’s the temptation for Jesus to put God’s promise to the test – “throw yourself down from the heights, for it is written, ‘God’s angels will protect you.’”  Tired and vulnerable, Jesus faces what must surely seem to be perfectly plausible choices, stemming from Jesus’ most immediate emotional and physical needs.

For Jesus – as for us – the wilderness is a place “where things fall apart and where things may come together for us in unanticipated ways. ... The wilderness, in short, is a place of threat, vulnerability, and danger. Yet it is also the place where, incredibly, we encounter a love we never could have imagined” (Belden C. Lane, Synthesis Today, 2/13/2016). 

Jamie Sams is author of a book about Native American Spirituality titled Dancing the Dream: the Seven Sacred Paths of Human Transformation.  She might refer to this moment in Jesus’ life as a “Dark Night of the Soul” – a phrase borrowed from the 16^th century poet and mystic, Saint John of the Cross.  This dark night of the soul is a time when chaos and confusion, heartache and hunger, threaten to overwhelm him.  Seneca and Cherokee traditions describe these moments as “periods [which] force us to reevaluate what we think, how we feel, what is really important, which values give us strength, and what to let go of that no longer serves us.  These Dark Nights [of the Soul],” Sams writes, “create [in us] major reality adjustments that force us to reevaluate our priorities” (p. 256). 

Jesus faces the temptation to feed his belly, his brain, and his ego rather than accept the challenge to follow a path of transformation that feeds his heart and his soul. 

The temptations speak to us of the fullness of Jesus’ humanity.  His Spirit-awakened response shows us the depth of God’s presence in the person of Jesus – and awakens us to the promise of that very presence in our own lives. 

Those of you who were here on Ash Wednesday heard me share what I believe to be an incredible insight from Dancing the Dream.  Sams writes that the turning point on the first path of human transformation occurs when we sense that our lives have purpose – that we are here for a reason we may not yet fully understand.  That sense of purpose unfolds “when we finally turn and face the Creator, the Great Mystery, God, and acknowledge that our life cannot be lived fully without [being connected] to the Divine Presence that made all life.”  Sams tells us that we must be “willing to acknowledge that we are spiritual beings who happen to have human bodies,” and that we are connected in some unknown way to the Great Mystery, who is God.  Jesus is the sacramental exclamation point of this incredible mystery of creation: that we, like Jesus, are spiritual beings who happen to have human bodies.  Our humanity is an integral part of who we are – but it can never stand apart from the spirit within, which in us is the image and likeness of our Creator God. 

The season of Lent is a particular time for us to be aware of our journey in this world, and our journey into the heart of God.  It’s an opportunity for us to check in with ourselves and check in with God – to get a sense of our anxieties and fears – our failures and victories – our hopes and our dreams.  Like Jesus before us, we journey in the wilderness of this world – challenged by our own Dark Nights of the Soul.  We may be tempted to think the journey doesn’t matter, but that’s not true – the journey is part of what defines the destination.  

As our Monday Night Study Group read about the Gospel of Luke the other day, “To make decisions for the future requires us to take our hopes into account.  As soon as we do, decisions come into play that will also change our present; [and] once the present has been changed, nothing will ever be the same again” (Frederick W. Schmidt, Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of Luke, p 86).  God’s hope for us, I believe, is that our hopes and decisions will be shaped by the Dream of God that seeks to draw all humanity into the heart of God.  

That said, we are constantly challenged to give into our own temptations – to give into chaos and confusion, to heartache and devastating experience, to satisfaction of the belly, the brain and the ego, rather than nurture our own hearts and our souls, and the hearts and souls of all around us – we often find ourselves overwhelmed by the challenges and struggling to experience God’s dream for each of us. 

Like Jesus before us, we are called on this journey to be faithful to the God who gives us life – and faithful to those who journey with us along wilderness paths.  And like Jesus before us, we get to choose which path to follow through the many experiences of wilderness which surround us.  And like Jesus before us, the Spirit of the Living God enfolds and fills us – and will always be our true and constant companion along the way.