Married to Amazement

Proper 11C; Luke 10:38-42; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC July 17, 2016

Jim Melnyk: “Married to Amazement”

If you’re at all like me, over the years you have heard many sermons on today’s gospel lesson from Luke.  Most of them probably begin with extolling the great virtue of Mary, who sits at the feet of Jesus in quiet contemplation and admiration, listening to the Master as he speaks about the coming kingdom of God.  We hear how it was a scandalous act that Mary should be sitting at Jesus’ feet, and how open Jesus was to flaunting religious rules and cultural etiquette.

And while it’s probably historically true that women did not receive formal training in Torah in the first century, it’s a Christian fallacy that rabbis could not or would not speak with women, nor that woman might learn about the scriptures informally.  We hear about Martha’s frustration and Jesus shutting down her complaint toward her sister. 

And finally, after hearing all that, we usually hear that all too clichéd addendum by the preacher: “But we need our Martha’s, too!” After all, we don’t want to talk women out of the kitchen, do we?

And once again, like last Sunday, we need to find a way to hear today’s lesson in a new way.  We need to let go of our twenty-first century ears, and even attempts to listen solely with first century early Christian ears.  We need to try to tune our ears and eyes to what first century followers of Jesus – especially first century Jewish followers of Jesus – would have heard and seen.  We need to “see” what is going on in today’s passage with eyes that would have been looking on – not decades later, but in the midst of what sounds like a busy dinner party hosted by Martha and Mary.

And so we can try to immerse ourselves in the scene – hear the bustle in the kitchen as Martha tries to oversee the cooking and the table-setting, perhaps wiping her forearm across a sweaty brow and drying her hands on an apron.  We can smell the meat cooking over an open fire and the bread baking.  We can picture young children running about and getting in the way much as they do today when we’re trying to pull a party together.  We can imagine the frustration growing in Martha as she oversees it all on her own.

And then we notice Martha’s younger sister Mary sitting near Jesus, her imagination captured by his storytelling and passion.  We may find ourselves getting caught up in trying to hear what Jesus is saying – what it is that has Mary so enraptured – and just when we think we’re almost able to hear the conversation and BAM!  In bursts Martha – hands on her hips and a scowl on her face – “Jesus, don’t you care at all about me?  I’m stuck doing all the work.  Tell my sister to get her lazy bones back in the kitchen to help me get this meal on the table!”  "Martha, Martha,” Jesus replies, “you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."  Please note that Jesus does not add, “But we need our Martha’s, too!”

As I try to imagine what’s going on with Martha, I see her as someone caught up in a pattern of living – someone who feels like she’s been rowing against the tide most of her life – and it is so tiresome.  I can imagine her thinking words similar to those of poet Anne Sexton:

           

“I am rowing, I am rowing

            Though the oarlocks stick and are rusty

            And the sea blinks and rolls

            Like a worried eyeball,

            But I am rowing, I am rowing.”

Martha knows there is more to life than what she is experiencing in the present, but she lives her life rowing against the tide – always worried and distracted by many things and unable to stop.  She finds those who can – those who can see past the distractions – people like her sister Mary – as one more frustrating distraction in her own life.

Mary, I think, senses something greater in her presence that day – she senses Presence with a capital “P.” – and she longs to be a part of that Presence – she longs to understand the Presence that is Jesus in all its fullness.  Unlike Martha, Mary may be thinking something along the lines of what the poet Mary Oliver says about her own life:

           

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

            I was a bride married to amazement.

            I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

            I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

           

As followers of Jesus we need to do more than just visit the world.  As Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s father used to tell him – and ++Michael loves to repeat often, “Michael, you were put here on this earth to do more than just use up oxygen.”  We’re here on this earth to take the world in our arms – we’re here on this earth to be a bride or a bridegroom to amazement – we are here on this earth to live fully in the presence of Christ and share that experience with everyone who finds themselves too distracted – too anxious – too overwhelmed by the craziness of this world – feelings that are all too real for most of us these days.

The trouble is, I suspect, that all too often we feel like we’re rowing against the tide with rusty oarlocks and heavy seas surrounding us.  How are we supposed to find Presence with a capital “P” in the midst of our all-too-busy lives and the constant hammering away of the 24 hour, seven days a week, news cycle and the seemingly endless political campaigns that more closely resemble the World Wrestling Entertainment Network than a class in Citizenship 101?  How do we find Presence with a capital “P” in a world suddenly running amok with violence?

Our call as baptized Christians to follow Christ and to be Christ in the world through active, hands-on, ministry was made clear in last week’s Parable of the Good Samaritan.  But when life in general, or even our work of ministry – as vital as it is – becomes a distraction from knowing and following Jesus, we need to step back and take a breath – we need to put down the oars for a bit and contemplate the vastness of the sea around us and the fullness of God’s presence in the midst of it all.  The hard work of ministry is balanced by our willingness to be still in the midst of the Presence – balanced by our willingness to just be.

Rather than all of us needing to be "Marthas," I'm willing to bet we all have a bit too much Martha in most of us already. We go about with tiny computers on our belts or in our pockets or purses. We're constantly bombarded with emails, and texts, and news, and ads, all telling us what we need to do and when we need to do it – telling us what we need to think or believe to be on the right side – telling us what we need to buy to be successful and live up to the world’s expectations.

The Good News is that God in Christ gives us permission to – no – rather God longs for us to be more like Mary. We can do that, even if it's only a few minutes here and there at first. And once we get even the slightest hand on carving out some time to simply rest in the Presence, we can learn to be better at it.  As Julian of Norwich once wrote, “The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God.”

Perhaps an easy way to start is to take home today’s bulletin insert and make a commitment to spend 5-10 minutes a day this week sitting with Mary and Martha, or another passage that speaks to you from today’s readings – or perhaps even a verse or two from one of your favorite psalms. God will stop with you even in the midst of all the craziness of your lives.  

Take the time to quiet yourself and place yourself in the setting and pay attention to all that is happening – not just around you, but in the passage as well – and then purposely let it go – put it down – or shut it out.  Let your breathing relax, and then feel your heartbeat relaxing with you.  Know that you are in the presence of the Holy One. Then simply ask God, “How do you want to help me be more like Mary this week?”

Proper 10C; Deut. 30:9-14; Luke 10:25-37 St. Paul’s, Smithfield 7/10/2016

Jim Melnyk: “The Parable of the Merciful Enemy”

As twenty-first century Christians, we have lost – or perhaps never fully understood – the scandal of today’s parable from Luke’s gospel – the parable we know so well as “The Parable of the Good Samaritan.”  We misread the parable on so many settings – mostly because we are twenty-first century Christians rather than first century Jews.  But to hear the powerful meaning this story – this parable – was meant to evoke from those hearing it for the first time, we need to listen with first century ears – or rather with twenty-first century ears tuned to another time and place – and when this is done, we may find ourselves calling this wonderful parable by a new title.

To begin with, the lawyer in the story is less than sincere in his approach to Jesus.  He knows the answer before he asks the question, and rather than looking for a way of life that leads toward righteousness, his choice of verb tense implies a desire for an item that he can do once and get it over with – something he can check off his to do list.  “Tell me something I can do to be done with my obligations before God.”  His question, “And who is my neighbor?” is meant to limit his obligation further – to identify those with whom he does not need to interact in a righteous manner.  Jesus will give him an answer that stuns the lawyer so completely he all but loses his voice.

We know the lawyer understands the centrality of what we have come to call the Great Commandment: The command to love God with every fiber of our being, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  As someone conversant with Torah, he would also understand the fuller context of both parts of that commandment.  In Deuteronomy the command to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength cannot be separated from the understanding that nothing in our lives can stand above and beyond God, and that these words should be fixed on our hands and on our foreheads – we might say as Episcopalians, “grafted inwardly on our hearts” – and taught diligently to our children.  In Leviticus, the command to love our neighbor – that is those with whom we have immediate connections and friendships – cannot be separated from the command to love the alien in the land as if he or she were a citizen among us – for Israel knows full-well what it means to sojourn as an alien – as a stranger – in a foreign land. 

In a twenty-first century world that demands a religious-like allegiance to people, causes, and things – and in a world that embraces fear of the stranger – the alien – the sojourner – sometimes – sometimes, with good reason – we need to tune our ears differently to hear the scandalous messages of Scripture.  And all too often I’m afraid we’re unwilling or too anxious to take that risk.

Then there’s the parable itself: and in it the priest and the Levite both fail to stop for the dying man.  We often are told their failure to stop has something to do with a fear of becoming ritually impure if they were to touch what they think may be a dead body.  This is false on several levels.  First of all, they were both going down from Jerusalem, so their temple duties would have been finished and any need for ritual purification would not have hindered them in any way.  And neither Jesus nor Luke makes any excuse for the two based on a fear of “uncleanness” or “purity.”  “Nor would any excuse be acceptable,” writes Amy Jill Levine, who is both a New Testament Scholar and a faithful Jew.  The responsibility of the priest and the Levite is “to save a life; [and in this] they failed.”  Levine continues, “Saving a life is so important that Jewish Law mandates that it override every other concern, including keeping the Sabbath” (Short Stories by Jesus, 2014, p 94) – one of the very things Jesus teaches.

People hearing the parable would have expected the third person coming along the road to be an Israelite who will set right the surprising inaction by the priest and Levite.  But Jesus, as is his regular practice, throws his listeners a curve ball.  The person who stops is a Samaritan – an enemy of Israel – and it is the Samaritan who acts with the divine attribute of mercy – it’s the Samaritan who acts the way God is expected to act (ibid 105).

Perhaps the best explanation for everyone’s actions in the story was suggested in a sermon by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  He preached, “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me.  It’s possible these men were afraid…. And so the first question that the priest and the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’… But the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”  Levine reminds us that shortly after that sermon, King went to Memphis to stand alongside the striking sanitation workers, and was assassinated” (ibid 94).

Amy Jill Levine’s biting insights give us an almost perfect translation for today, updating the identity of the figures in a way that speaks to our experience.  “I am an Israeli Jew on my way… to Jericho,” she begins, “…I am attacked…and left half dead in a ditch.  Two people who should have stopped to help pass me by: the first, a Jewish military medic…; the second, a member of [The Episcopal Palestine Israel Network].  But the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas, a political party whose charter…anticipates Israel’s destruction….” (ibid105-106)

In other words, we have met the enemy – and he has showed us mercy!  Those whom we believe should know better have left us hanging – and the one we fear and despise is the one who acts with the mercy of God.  The parable concludes with this incredibly shocking and scandalous twist – and we should hear it in a way that should catch us up just as short as it caught up and scandalized the original audience. 

And so perhaps a better title for this story – for this parable – for this teaching – is “The Parable of the Merciful Enemy,” and I am willing to bet it is a difficult rendering, at one level or another, for all of us to hear.  In the end, Jesus seems to say, “loving God and loving neighbor cannot exist in the abstract: they need to be enacted” (ibid105) – they need to be embodied.

This has been a terrible week for our nation, and many of us have found ourselves weeping over the violence and the loss of so many lives. Who is our neighbor in all of the confusion of today?  Our neighbor is the person shot under questionable circumstances during police stops in places like Falcon Heights, MN and Baton Rouge, Louisiana – stops which normally don’t require deadly force.  Our neighbor is also the fearful police officer pulling the trigger.  Who is our neighbor today?  Our neighbor is the innocent policeman helping to keep the peace in places like Dallas, Texas or Ballwin, Missouri, who is gunned down in an arbitrary act of vengeance.  Our neighbor is also the angry, misguided person senselessly pulling the trigger.  Our world is broken.  In some ways it is broken beyond our wildest imaginings.  The poet Warsan Shire writes:

“later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.”

Who is our neighbor?  Everyone – everyone is our neighbor, and we, with all of our many varying and conflicting emotions are their neighbors as well.  And we need to find a place of healing in the midst of all this brokenness.  It begins with listening to one another; it begins with telling the truth; it begins with respecting one another as people created in the image and likeness of God.  And we find through this parable that Jesus wasn’t kidding when he tells us we need to love not just our neighbor, but our enemy as well.  And I, because I know my own self, I know that is scary!

It’s in this unexpected place that we find the Good News of the Gospel.  It may be likely that on more than one occasion in our lives there have been people whom we might not name as an “enemy,” but at least as an outsider, who have given us unexpected help or support.  We might find that someone whom we might never have expected to “be there for us” in a time of need, is actually alongside us.  Or perhaps even we have been the one least expected to help or support someone, and yet our hearts are moved to act.

In the midst of all the stories of great atrocities which grab the headlines these days, we miss the stories of Muslims guarding Churches in Syria during services, or Christians doing the same for their Islamic sisters and brothers.  We miss the stories of inner city neighbors hugging weeping police officers, and caring police officers watching over hurting citizens. This is grace in action.  This is Good News.  This is how we begin to heal a broken world.

Jesus teaches us over and over again that our common humanity is part and parcel of the Good News of God.  In parable after parable, or in act of mercy after act of mercy, Jesus invites us to enact – to embody – love of God and love of neighbor in our daily lives.  We might ask ourselves, using twenty-first century ears and hearts, in the days to come, “Like the wounded person alongside the road, how and where do we need God to stop and meet us?  And like the Samaritan, how is God calling each of us to stop and embody this kind of love with and for one another?”

Freedom (Reposted)

I've been reading the third Thomas Covenant trilogy from author Stephen R. Donaldson. Donaldson's epic fantasies are rich in metaphor and symbol, and as SF Site explains, deal with "themes of estrangement, despair, guilt, and responsibility." Donaldson also writes about call and vocation as well as judgment and redemption.

In the second book of this third trilogy, Fatal Revenant, Donaldson's characters explore our understanding of coercion, sacrifice and true freedom. Speaking about the centuries old act of redemption by Thomas Covenant, a constant presence throughout the many books, the character named Stave says, "The Unbeliever's surrender was his own, coerced by love and his own nature, not by Corruption's might. Sacrificing himself, he did not sacrifice his freedom. Rather his submission was and expression of strength freely wielded. Had he been fettered by his surrender in your world, Corruption's many efforts to lead and compel him would have been needless." (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Fatal Revenant,The Penguin Group, 2007. p. 374).

Is this not the story of our Lord Jesus, who though he was in the form of God did not see his Godhead as something to be grasped, but rather gave himself up to be born as one of us, and to live and die as one of us. And having freely offered himself opens the door of freedom and grace for all? And do we not claim our service to Christ to be perfect freedom (Collect for Peace, BCP p. 99)?

One this July 4th, with it's emphasis on freedom, let us not forget that perfect freedom we have in Christ - a freedom wherein our own power and control are not things to be grasped, but rather a reminder of how we are called to place ourselves in perfect submission to the love of God, which opens the way of freedom not just for us, but for the whole of creation.

Practicing Peoplehood

Proper 9C; Isa. 66:10-14; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20; St. Paul’s – July 3, 2016

Jim Melnyk: “Practicing Peoplehood”

Israel is in exile.  Jerusalem’s walls have been torn down.  The Temple – the symbolic home of God among the people – lay in ruins.  The Psalmist tells us that Israel’s Babylonian captors ask for songs about Zion.  “How can we sing songs of Zion in a foreign land?” they reply. “We would rather our hands wither and curl up and our tongues cleave to the roof of our mouths than sing for you like birds in a gilded cage.”

           

Yet in the midst of sorrow the prophet Isaiah sings out a song of hope for those bound in Babylon:

Thus says the Lord:

As a mother comforts her child,
so I will comfort you;
you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice;
your bodies shall flourish like the grass.”

God looks to a people – to a community – trying its best to hold together their identity as God’s people, even while in exile.  And God hears their cry.  God remembers God’s promise of old, “You will be my people and I will be your God.”

As we look to today’s Gospel lesson and to the witness of Holy Scripture as a whole, we begin to see that the God of Israel, who is also the God of Jesus, is a God who first and foremost calls us to a practice of peoplehood.  Peoplehood is another way of saying “community;” it’s also a way of responding to the grace and love of God in our lives.  God’s promise to Israel is to a people, not to a bunch of individuals.  Jesus doesn’t send the seventy out to create bunches of one-on-one God/human connections – Jesus sends the seventy out to reinvigorate the covenantal understanding in the hearts of the people of Israel.  Centuries earlier it took the harsh reality of exile to capture people’s attention.  In Jesus God seems to be saying, “Let me try yet another way – perhaps they will listen to my son.”  The sending out of the seventy is about reconnecting with the God who brought Israel out of Egypt.  It’s about reconnecting with the God who willingly went into exile with Israel hundreds of years before – it’s about the God who brought Israel home on a highway through the desert. 

Now, it’s true Jesus recognizes that not everyone will receive his disciples.  He even tells them to wipe the dust of the town off their feet whenever that occurs – but not without reminding them that the kingdom of God has come near.   These challenging words from Jesus must be read in light of the gospel lesson from last Sunday.  You may recall how the disciples wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume those who wouldn’t receive Jesus – and how Jesus rebuked the disciples for their intolerance.

In an article entitled The Practice of Peoplehood, author James W. Jones makes what he calls a “brief excursion into biblical history” in order to show how our faith stories reveal “the call of God as a call to a people;” and that “when individuals are called, it is to play a role in the formation of the people of God.”  “Peoplehood, community, is not an option,” writes Jones, “but is at the heart of the way God does business.” 

Jones’ understanding of Peoplehood seems to be a fitting thing to consider as we find ourselves in the middle of the Fourth of July weekend we’re enjoying.  One of the twenty-first century fallacies of our faith is any nation’s sense of some kind of favored-nation concept – an idea held by many American Christians today.  Jones writes, “The call [from God] is, however, not [only] for the sake of the people chosen but rather for the nations of the world as they are called to serve” (Sojourners: Preaching the Word). 

The greatness of any people – the greatness of any nation – is how that nation – how that people – loves and serves one another.  The greatness of any nation is not found in the power or wealth it possesses, but rather their greatness is found in how that nation treats those who are least among them.  Israel went into exile in part because they left those who were most in need in the dust.  Peoplehood does not leave anyone in the dust.  As the Apostle Paul reminds us in today’s lesson from Galatians, we are to “bear one another’s burdens, and in this way fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2).

God calls all of creation into relationship.  We are called to live in solidarity with all the nations of the world – not having a favored status before God or a more holy calling.  God’s grace is not dependent upon our form – or any form – of government, our national following of any one specific way of believing, or our economic model and financial acumen.  Nor is our wealth as a nation or our position as a superpower due to a special blessing from God because we’re better or holier than others. 

God’s grace is dependent solely upon the ability and the decision of God to love what God has called into being, and our call is a call to proclaim that love and grace for all people.  Our call is to serve one another with grace and love – and to work toward a world that will someday treat all people with the same grace and love that has been revealed to us through the Law and the Prophets, by the Spirit of God speaking through God’s people throughout the ages, and for us as Christians – through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Jones writes, “Our relationship to God is to be as close as the most intimate human friendship, and our relationship to others is to be as close as the Spirit of God dwelling in our hearts.  To be authentic,” Jones adds, “our religious experience must produce an ever deeper walk with God and an ever deeper community of brothers and sisters.”  To me that means finding a way to be connected with one another even when we believe differently from one another – and finding a way to stay connected with God even when that relationship is a struggle as well.

And so we come to today – the day before the day on which Americans celebrate the birth of a nation – each of us challenged by the Gospel to go into the world proclaiming the Good News of God in Christ Jesus – and in many places around our nation, struggling to keep both the celebration and the call in a way that allows each its own integrity. 

As we live within the celebrations of two calls – as a nation and as a faith community of God – I am reminded of the words of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin in his book Credo: “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good.  The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics.”  That goes for us as Christians and members of the institutional Church as well.  Those whom Coffin calls good patriots, and I would say also, good people of faith, carry on a lover’s quarrel with both their country and their institutions of faith which,when done properly, enlivens the spirit of transformation to which God always calls us.

Our Collect for the Day reminds us that we keep the commandments of God by loving God and our neighbor – and our neighbor certainly lives beyond the boundaries of this land as well as within, and loves with a faith outside that of the church as well as within.   And we struggle with that call in light of the harsh realities of Orlando, Istanbul, and now Bangladesh.  We live in a nation that embraces the dream of freedom, and we follow a Savior who embraces servanthood – and if that’s not a paradox of faith I don’t know what is – embracing both freedom and servanthood. 

And if we’re honest with ourselves we wrestle with both, especially when we see our way of life at risk or when we become fearful for our lives.  Yet both realities – nation and faith – freedom and servanthood – find their roots in peoplehood – find their roots in community – find their anchor in how we care about and love one another. “We the people” introduces our Constitution, and “We believe” begins our creedal statement of faith.  Peoplehood. “Our relationship to God is to be as close as the most intimate human friendship, and our relationship to others is to be as close as the Spirit of God dwelling in our hearts.”

As we pause in our hectic lives tomorrow to remember and to celebrate the birth of our nation, perhaps we can take the time to ask ourselves one very important question: “How does God long to be the transforming power in our nation, and in our lives?”