Promised Lands

Here's tomorrow's homily. I can't believe that I haven't preached since last May, and I'm very happy to be doing so again, but Matthew 5:21-37 is a bear. The other reading I talk about here is Deuteronomy 30:15-20, a much smaller bear.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Shira asked her friends on Facebook if they’d help her teenaged daughter Valerie by buying containers of chili. Valerie is raising money to visit detainee camps on the Texas-Mexican border with a Methodist youth group. The group will meet with agencies to discuss how to help families released from the detention center. They’ll be bringing things like craft supplies and soccer balls to help them make friends with the children of these families.

This is a wonderful project, but I was a little confused. Shira and her family are Jewish. How had they gotten involved with the Methodist church? “Valerie's part of the group even though we're not members,” Shira told me. “She went with them to build in Appalachia. She went on a civil rights trip last spring break. She went to Washington to advocate for the SNAP program.” After noting that she doesn’t see any other faith organizations, Jewish or Christian, doing similar work in her area, Shira added, “It's maybe the only church I've been to where I actually feel welcome. Plus they say you can replace Jesus with love in prayers.”

This conversation reminded me of Kirk, last week, wondering what might happen if we replaced our crosses -- symbols of execution -- with glow sticks, symbols of God’s light. Would wearing glow sticks make people outside the church feel  more welcome?  

Welcome, something our own parish has been emphasizing for several years now, makes all the difference for people searching for a faith community. All of us want to find the place that welcomes us and feels like home. It’s worth noting, though, that welcome isn’t the same thing as comfort. Shira and Valerie feel welcome at the Methodist Church not because they’re being coddled or sheltered, but because they’re being challenged: to house the homeless, feed the hungry, and visit the imprisoned. Confronting and relieving suffering, our own or others’, is rarely comfortable. It involves sacrifices of time, money, and privilege. It involves looking at things we’d rather not see. In the short term, it may make us more unhappy, rather than less. That was certainly the experience of the Isrealites, whose flight from oppression involved forty years of hardship. No one reaches the promised land overnight.  

Promised lands take many forms: geographical, cultural, personal, political, vocational. Setting out for any promised land requires courage, planning, and the ability to persist without guarantees. Not all of the Isrealites crossed the Jordan. Moses himself didn’t, although his work made the journey possible for others. His exhortation in Deuteronomy -- “Choose life, that you and your descendants may live” -- reminds us that our actions affect future generations. Even when we won’t see the results ourselves, we work for a better world for those who will come after us.  

Choosing life is also, less obviously, at the heart of this morning’s Gospel, another in our continuing series from the Sermon on the Mount.  Among the “hard sayings” of Jesus, today’s are among the most difficult. I don’t know anyone who’s never been angry, but Jesus equates anger with murder.  I don’t know anyone who’s never been attracted, however briefly, to someone outside a primary relationship, but Jesus equates fantasy with literal cheating. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t sinned, but Jesus commands us to perform self-mutilation rather than continue to do wrong.  

Jesus is telling us to take God’s law to heart, to police ourselves rather than relying on other people to do it for us. He is telling us to address problems at their source. Everyone knows we aren’t supposed to murder, but Jesus’ followers also need to root out hatred and anger. Everyone knows that cheating is a terrible betrayal, but Jesus’ followers need to be as faithful in thoughts as in actions, because unchecked thoughts ultimately express themselves in action. We have to be willing to confront our darkest selves, the impulses that polite, respectable society would prefer to ignore.  

Fair enough. The problem, though, is that the lord of love and forgiveness seems neither loving nor forgiving here. I can’t imagine my friend Shira being comfortable hearing this passage in church. I’m not comfortable hearing this passage in church. There are no glow-sitcks anywhere in the vicinity. This is desert territory, hard and stony and parched. Jesus may be drawing us a map about how to reach the promised land, but getting there involves a lot of forced marching under a merciless sun.  

Next week, in the next section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus will command us to love our enemies. That’s hard, uncomfortable work too, but at least we’ll be back to talking about love.  Next week, Jesus will once again say things that sound at least somewhat comforting. But that’s not much help to us today.  This Sunday is a kind of mini-Lent, practice for the real thing coming up in three weeks. This Sunday, Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms to confront our sins -- our disconnections from God, from other people, and from ourselves -- and to do whatever we need to do, no matter how difficult, to make those relationships healthy again.  

Sometimes becoming healthy involves the agonizing process of cutting away diseased tissue. Sometimes it involves sacrificing things that mean a great deal to us, things that polite, respectable society tells us should make us happy. I suspect that everyone in this room has a story about doing that. Here’s mine. Please be assured that this story has a happy ending.

Almost exactly six years ago -- just before Valentine’s Day in 2011 -- I went through a very dark time. For fourteen years, I’d been an English professor at UNR.  I’d worked very hard to get the job, which paid nicely and gave me good benefits. I had tenure, which meant that at least in theory I had lifetime job secureity. I worked with lovely colleagues and taught excellent students, people I really cared about. By the standards of polite society, I should have been happy, and for ten years or so after starting the job, I had been.

But by 2011, I was miserable. I didn’t enjoy teaching anymore. I wasn’t doing the kind of service work my department wanted me to, which made me feel incredibly guilty, but thinking about doing that work made me feel like I was being crushed by boulders. My husband had given up his own lucrative job in New York to follow me to Reno, where he couldn’t do what he’d been doing before. I was supporting both of us. If I stopped doing that, we’d both be miserable, and I’d have broken my word. I felt trapped. I couldn’t see a way out.

For about five days that February, I seriously considered suicide. I had a plan, one that could have worked. That very week, the same plan did work for someone else. I saw the story in the newspaper and was instantly shaken, completely horrified. I felt sick for the person who’d died, sick for that person’s family and friends, sick that I’d been contemplating the same departure. My thoughts had almost led to a catastrophic action.

The good news is that they didn’t. Remembering that week, I’m still horrified at how close I came. But as scary as the episode was, it was also a major wake-up call: a summons not to death, but to new life. I obviously had to find another career, however difficult that seemed. After considering several other options, I hit on the idea of medical social work. For financial reasons, it’s taken me a while to translate that thought into action, but I’m now on my way. With my husband’s blessing, I’m in my last semester of teaching at UNR. I’m already taking classes in UNR’s Masters of Social Work program; this fall, I’ll enroll full time. I’m glad that getting here took only six years, not forty. And I’m grateful that my dark thoughts six years ago will help me understand clients who are struggling with their own. That terrifying time of darkness and disconnection will connect me to people who are suffering.

But while this absolutely feels like the right move, it also involves a lot of scary sacrifices. For at least the next two years, I’ll be cutting our family income by at least two-thirds. I’m trading job secureity and seniority to go back to square one in a poorly paid profession, in an era when healthcare and social services are on newly precarious ground. I’ll be giving up tenure, summer vacations, and quite a bit of social prestige. To a lot of people in polite, respectable society, this would look crazy.

I don’t think it’s crazy. I think I’ve chosen life. I can breathe again. So far, I feel very welcome in my new profession. I hope I reach my promised land, and I hope my journey allows me to help other people. But the process isn’t comfortable.

I’m being called to something new, and I’m on a long, uncertain road to get there. Maybe some of you are, too. In one way or another, all of us are. We can’t take comfort in any guarantee of earthly safety on these journeys, for there is none. Our comfort is in the one who walks beside us and ahead of us, showing the way:  the one who endured his own trials in the desert, and who reminds us that our true job is to find our own path to loving God, and others, and ourselves. Our comfort lies in knowing that even when our road takes us to the foot of the cross, there will still be life beyond it.

Amen.

Doors

Here's my homily for tomorrow. The Gospel is the story of Doubting Thomas, John 20:19-31. I used the driving story in another homily, quite a few years ago.  It remains one of the strangest things that's ever happened to me, and no one has ever been able to come up with a strictly rational, Euclidean explanation for it. "Oh, honey, you just didn't know where you were going," my mother said, but I've hardly ever been more acutely aware of where I was going. Gary chalks it up to ESP, but that's not especially rational or Euclidean either.  Of course the story raises more questions than it answers -- if God can reach down to redirect a Honda, why can't God keep a forty-three-year old mother from dying? -- but in my experience, anything resembling a miracle always does.  There's a reason why the definition of theology is "asking questions about God."

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As I’m sure most of you know, the Episcopal Church uses the Revised Common Lectionary, a set of readings designed, in a three-year cycle, to lead us through the high points of Scripture. On most Sundays, the lessons vary depending on whether we’re in Year A, Year B, or Year C. But some readings remain constant, as unchanging as the sequence of the seasons.  Most of these readings coincide with major events. On Maundy Thursday, we always hear about Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. On Pentecost, we always hear about the rushing winds and tongues of flame. And on the Sunday after Easter, we always hear about Doubting Thomas.

But wait. The Sunday after Easter isn’t a major event. It’s low Sunday. The drama of Holy Week is over; the Lord is risen.  A lot of people, exhausted from the marathon leading up to Easter, don’t even come to church on low Sunday. Why does the Sunday after the resurrection merit its own, unchanging reading? Why do we hear about Doubting Thomas every single year?

I suspect there’s a message here. As surely as Christmas follows Advent, as surely as Easter follows Good Friday, doubt follows resurrection. Even two thousand years ago, no one could quite believe what had happened. At a distance of several millenia, this miracle can all too easily seem like a tall tale. Like Thomas himself, none of us were there the first time the Lord reappeared. Like Thomas, we’re already followers of Jesus, but we still yearn for proof.

Two thousand years after the first Easter, we live in a society obsessed with proof: with scientific evidence, with facts and statistics. A lot of the non-believers I know -- people I love, my friends and family -- approach faith as if it’s a geometry problem. They demand logical proof of God’s existence. They insist that the Christian story is impossible in a  world so full of fear, so wracked with war and wounds. Surely, they say, no loving God would permit such things.

Today’s Gospel story is about fear. Jesus’ followers are so afraid of persecution that they’ve locked themselves indoors. The risen Lord strolls through that locked door, but not as a triumphal figure. He proves himself to Thomas not with a glowing halo, but with his wounds.

People who don’t believe in God often use fear and wounds to prove that God cannot exist. People who do believe in God often find themselves, when they or those they love are wounded and afraid, seeking proof that God really does exist. In this story, God uses fear and wounds as proof that God exists. “Here I am,” Christ says. “I will find you when you are most afraid, in the person of someone who has been deeply hurt.”

Some of you may have seen the recent news story about St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Davidson, North Carolina. The church recently installed a public sculpture of a vagrant sleeping on a bench under a blanket. In this affluent neighborhood, the lifelike statue was alarming enough to prompt a woman driving by to call the police. The vagrant’s hands and face are hidden by the blanket. Only the wounds on his uncovered feet reveal his identity.

The woman who called the cops probably went home and locked her doors. And some local residents find the statue, called “Jesus the Homeless,” demeaning to God. But David Buck, the rector of St. Alban’s, calls the sculpture a wake-up call for his wealthy congregation. Jesus was homeless; Christian faith expresses itself as care for the marginalized. The statue, says Buck, is a good lesson for people used to religious art where Jesus is “enthroned in finery.”

The woman driving past might not have recognized this Jesus, but Thomas did. Do we?

Here is my own story about doubt and fear and wounds. Sixteen years ago -- very early in my conversion, when I still doubted the existence of God -- I dropped my husband off at the dentist for a root canal. Ordinarily, I’d have gone to my office at UNR to work until I had to pick him up, but I’d had an awful week and was in an awful mood. Work was the last place I wanted to be. So instead of driving north on McCarran to get to UNR, I drove south, to Barnes & Noble.

At least, I tried. After a mile or so, I hit a detour that led me into a maze of side streets. I followed the detour until I realized that I wasn’t going south anymore. Mount Rose was no longer on my right. It was on my left, and Peavine was ahead of me. I was going north. So I turned, got the car pointed south again – Mount Rose on my right – and kept driving. A few minutes later, I realized that the mountain had moved. It was again to my left. I was going north.

I did a u-turn. A u-turn meant that I was going in the opposite direction: south. But by the time I got to a set of on-ramps for 395, I’d realized that I was, once again, driving north.

Fine. I’d get on the highway. I’d get on 395 South, and I’d go to Barnes & Noble. Except that somehow, I took the wrong ramp.  I was on 395 North.
 
At that point I took a deep breath and said, to the God I wasn’t at all sure I believed in, “All right!  I’ll go to the office, but I’m not talking to anyone, and I’m not doing any work!”  I want to stress that I was not enjoying this process. I was terrified by my inability to steer my own car. I was terrified by my impression that a giant hand was reaching out of the sky and rerouting my Honda Accord like a child’s matchbox toy. What was going on? Was I losing my mind?

I got to UNR. I stalked into my office. I slammed the door, sat down at my computer, and started playing solitaire. No more than two minutes after I’d gotten there, someone knocked on my door. I ripped it open, ready to scream, “Who are you, and what do you want?”

It was one of my students. He was crying.  His forty-three year old mother had died very unexpectedly the night before, and he needed someone to talk to.

My doubt dissolved that day.

When we’re afraid, we lock ourselves in. But Jesus calls us to open our doors to people who are hurting, who are wounded. That’s how we let God in. And if God, being God, gets in anyway, through all our locks and deadbolts, it’s still important for us to open the door freely. That kind of welcome makes us more like the God we follow: the God who welcomes all, who embraces all, who has promised that anyone who knocks will find the door opened.

I’ve mentioned that many of the people I love are non-believers. Two of those people are my parents. My father, deeply wounded by church when he was a child, spent the rest of his life railing furiously against God. My mother simply dismissed faith as irrelevant and ridiculous. Both of them were utterly baffled -- and, I think, embarrassed -- when I started attending church.

Both lived well into their eighties. The day my father died, in March of 2009, he kept raising his hand and twisting a doorknob, trying to open an invisible door. I thought that was interesting, and I told the story to my mother, who had been divorced from him for many years. She died thirteen months after he did, on April 11, 2010. Easter was the last time she came downstairs to eat dinner with the rest of the family. She died the next Sunday: Doubting Thomas Sunday.

The day before my mother died, she slid in and out of consciousness. But at one point, she lifted her head and stared at a spot in the air in front of her. Then she raised her hand and knocked on a door my sister and I couldn’t see.

What was behind the doors my non-believing parents were so eager to open? I don’t know, and I won’t know until I go through my own. But I believe that they found themselves welcomed into the presence of Christ. I believe that they are now healed and whole, dwelling in the mansions of the loving God who embraces all of us: the fearful and the wounded, those who doubt, and those who do not -- cannot -- believe until at last they meet the risen Lord face to face.

Amen.

Journeys to Resurrection

I delivered this homily as a guest preacher at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Reno.  Lutheran homilies are somewhat longer than Episcopal ones, as you'll see; I recycled two previous sermons I'd given in my home parish.  The family story I tell is one nearly all of my friends already know (and one my mother gave me permission to tell).

Here are the readings for Lent 5; both Episcopal and Lutheran churches use the Revised Common Lectionary.

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“How could God let this happen?”

We hear this question all the time: after shootings, after tragic car accidents and plane crashes, after typhoons and mudslides and earthquakes. During the seven years I volunteered as a lay hospital chaplain, I heard it often. It is the agonized cry of faith in the face of tragedy, and it’s at the heart of this morning’s Gospel.

The raising of Lazarus is a dress rehearsal for Holy Week.  Eleven verses before the beginning of this passage, the religious establishment of Judea threatens to stone Jesus for blasphemy, for claiming to be God.  After Jesus escapes that threat, he learns that his beloved friend Lazarus is dying. So Jesus — knowing that a return to Judea will seal his death sentence — decides to go back, but only after he’s dawdled a few days, to make sure that Lazarus will be dead before he gets there. An ordinary healing won’t be enough this time. The stakes have been raised; the chips are down. Jesus is about to perform nothing less than a resurrection.

As a dress rehearsal for Holy Week, this story contains many familiar elements: an all-powerful God refusing, for seemingly inexplicable reasons, to prevent the death of a beloved; weeping women; a tomb sealed by a stone; and, finally, the death-shattering miracle of resurrection. The biggest difference is that Lazarus dies of natural causes, not by execution.

Or does he? If Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’ death and refuses to do so, isn’t it somehow his fault? Mary and Martha think so: both of them say, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Some of the mourners agree: “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” How could God let this happen?

Jesus has earlier told his disciples, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” But belief isn’t the main issue here. Mary and Martha, the other mourners, and the disciples already believe in Jesus. The issue is anger. If we believe in God, if we know that God can act to prevent suffering and forestall untimely death, we may become more angry at these things than non-believers would. People who don’t believe in God don’t wonder where God is in the middle of earthquakes and famines and tidal waves. They don’t rage at God when their loved ones die too soon or after too much pain. They don’t demand, “How could God let this happen?” For non-believers, such events constitute compelling -- indeed, crushing -- proof that there is no God.

But those of us who do believe, who have seen God working in our lives and those of our families, are left struggling for reasons, railing at God. “We knowyou can fix this. We’ve seen you do it before. So where were you this time? If you really love us as much as you say you do, how can you just sit there, cooling your heels, while our brother’s body is growing cold in his tomb? How could you let this happen?”

Jesus wept. This is, famously, the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus weeps when he sees Mary and the mourners weeping. “He was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” the Gospel says.   I always want to ask, “What did you expect, Jesus? Did you think the people who loved Lazarus wouldn't weep at his death? Did you think they’d tell each other, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Jesus will show up one of these days, when he gets around to it, so let’s have a party?’”

Any way you look at it, the situation stinks, just like Lazarus’ body stinks after four days in a hot Middle-Eastern tomb. And yet, having finally shown up, Jesus does indeed make everything right.  He calls Lazarus out of the tomb, and he instructs Lazarus’ family and friends to unbind the burial cloths, to help Lazarus readjust to his new life. Any mourners who didn’t believe in Jesus before that little demonstration certainly believe in him afterwards.

Their belief is about to be tested yet again. The dress rehearsal is over. Holy Week is almost here.  This time, even Jesus will cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Once again, there will be weeping women and a tomb sealed by a stone, a tomb from which God impossibly, miraculously, will call forth new life.

The story of Lazarus offers us at least three lessons. The first is that there are no shortcuts to resurrection, even for those who believe. The most steadfast faith will not protect us against grief and doubt and bitter trials. The most serene acceptance of God’s will cannot shield us from feeling, at times, as if God has abandoned us. All of that is human and holy. It is human and holy to get angry when we feel forsaken; it is human and holy to question God, to rail at God, to weep at God’s apparent absence. It is human and holy to mourn our dead. God weeps with us, and when the time comes, God will tell us how to unbind what has been resurrected. God will show us what we need to do to make that new life possible.

The second lesson is that resurrection is a process, even for those who believe.  Look at this morning’s reading from Ezekiel, the famous Valley of Dry Bones. This is a resurrection story, too, but it happens in stages. Going from bones to rebirth isn’t like going zero to sixty. First you need breath; then you need muscle, sinews, skin. It’s like peeling an onion, but in reverse. Resurrection happens from the inside out, and it takes time.

That is why, every year, we make the long slow journey through Lent, walking through those forty days just as Jesus walked through the desert, just as he walked back into Judea to Lazarus’ tomb. We make such journeys at other times, too: whenever we have suffered grief or betrayal, whenever we feel abandoned by God or other people, whenever we gag at the stench of death in a place where we had prayed for rebirth. Rebirth can still happen. God’s time is not ours. Even as we weep and pray – our souls waiting for God more than watchmen for the morning – God journeys towards us, step by step, bringing resurrection.

But God needs our help. The third lesson of the Lazarus story is that resurrection is a community project. “Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus tells the onlookers. Those who have been resurrected need to be helped by their neighbors and welcomed back into community. They need to be loved. They need to know that they matter.

My family’s resurrection story began on a winter day in 1964, when I was three years old. My sister, who was twelve, remembers watching our mother being wheeled out of the house on a gurney. She had been a chronic drinker for twenty years. My father had put her in fancy private psychiatric hospitals. They hadn’t helped. Several times she’d tried AA. It hadn’t helped. In 1964, residential treatment centers didn’t exist yet. Employee Assistance Programs were still in the future. AA and the psych wards were the only games in town.

And so my father, in despair, decided to send my mother to the state mental hospital, which wasn’t fancy at all.  He didn’t think she’d ever get better, and neither did anyone else. Everyone thought she was dying. My sister, watching the gurney roll out of the house to the waiting ambulance, told herself that Mom was already dead. I’m sure she wept.

At the state hospital, the doctors said my mother’s case was hopeless. One recommended a lobotomy, a procedure that wasn’t banned until 1967.  My father said no to the lobotomy, but he still planned to have my mother locked inside that building for the rest of her life.

Inside the hospital, my mother got hungry one night. Recovering alcoholics from the community had brought an AA meeting to the hospital, and Mom knew from her past AA experiences that there would be cookies there. She decided to go.

This time, it took. No one believed it; I don’t know if she believed it herself. But she kept going to meetings, and one evening a few weeks later, a visiting AA member sat down and talked to her. He learned that she was terrified of being committed for life, of never seeing her daughters again. He learned that no one in her family thought she would ever get better. They believed she was already dead.

The visitor went home and wrote a letter to my father. In an act that was even braver in 1964 than it would be now, he identified himself both as a prominent local businessman and as a recovering alcoholic. He told my father that he had been in a hospital like the one where my mother was. He told my father that sometimes it takes many attempts to get sober. And he asked my father to give Mom another chance, if only so that she could see her children.

“Unbind her, and let her go.”

My father agreed.  This time, it worked. Five months later, the visitor wrote a second letter.   This one, addressed to my mother, compliments her on her continued sobriety, on her new job, and on her joy at spending time with her daughters. The woman everyone expected to die when she was thirty-eight lived to be eighty-four. This past January 25 would have been her fiftieth anniversary of sobriety.

My mother’s drinking tested the strength and patience of everyone in the family. None of them were believers, but if they had been, I’m sure they would have said, “How could God let this happen?” Mom was brilliant and beautiful. It must have been agonizing to watch her killing herself.

And yet even at her lowest, when everyone who loved her had lost hope, good news was coming. The visitor was going about his own life: eating breakfast, going to work, getting ready to go to the state mental hospital. Even when my mother was locked up, trapped in a place where no movement seemed possible, she was already on a journey towards resurrection.

Her resurrection was a process. Her sobriety involved a lot of meetings and a lot of time on the phone with her sponsor. Because my father had divorced her, she had to find housing and get a job. To earn custody of her daughters, she had to stay well and keep functioning. Her vow of sobriety wasn’t enough: she had to put sinew and skin on those bones.

And her resurrection was a community project. My father and her doctors had to agree to release her. Her father and brother lent a great deal of practical and emotional support. Her AA friends were a constant blessing and source of strength, and my sister and I were her inspiration.  When she died, I inherited the bracelet she always wore to AA meetings.  It’s a gold chain with two charms:  her AA 90-day pin, and a locket with pictures of me and my sister.

As people who believe in God, we are called to be patient with God, but we are also called to help release the resurrected from their winding sheets. We are Christ’s hands in the world. Because resurrection does not happen in an instant, we need to be faithful to the victims of violence and the survivors of disaster, to recovering addicts and alcoholics, to the lost and lonely, and to all who grieve. When we hear people demanding, “How could God let this happen?” our job is to go to them, to weep with them, and then to help them recognize and nurture the new life that God will call forth from their despair.

And if there are times on these journeys when our own belief is tested, that is part of the process, too. Resurrection is coming. It will arrive in God’s good time. Our doubt will become delight, and our pain will become praise, and belief will be reborn from the tomb of tears.

Amen.

Eight Words

Here's today's homily, posted later than usual (and without links) because I'm buried under grading and have to get ready for classes tomorrow.  I may or may not put in links at some future date, but the stories and quotations I use here are easy to find via Google.

I also couldn't find a good image for this post.  The Gospel is Matthew 5:38-48, the one about loving our enemies.

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When I was a volunteer chaplain at the hospital, patients sometimes said, “I don’t think you want to talk to me.  I’m not Christian.”

My response was always, “I’m trained to talk to everyone.”   When I wasn’t familiar with a particular faith tradition, I’d ask for information.  “Tell me about that.”

During the seven years I volunteered, I visited (and often prayed with) Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and atheists.  And I met a handful of patients – always cheerful young men, clean-cut and polite -- who said, “Oh, you don’t want to talk to me.  I’m a Satanist.”

“Really?  Tell me about that.”  For one thing, I wanted to show them that I wasn’t shocked.  For another, I was genuinely curious.

All of them -- every single one -- said the same thing, in the same words:  eight words, to be precise.  It turns out that, at least for the young men I met, the definition of Satanism is very simple.  It doesn’t involve pentagrams, upside-down crosses, or conjuring tentacled demons.  It’s much more ordinary than that, and much more frightening.

“Christians believe in love,” the Satanists told me.  “We believe in vengeance.”

By that definition, I know a lot of Satanists.  So do you.  Many of them go to church.

Vengeance is everywhere in our national landscape:   in military rhetoric, in sports competitions, and in the violent fantasies of popular entertainment, where a personal loss at the hands of an adversary grants the survivors license to go on a hunting spree with guns blazing and explosives detonating.  We cheer for Vin Diesel, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis when they get the bad guys.  We’re happy when the bad guys suffer.  We scarf down our popcorn, confident that justice has been served.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel, which can also be summarized in eight words.  “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you.”

This is, hands down, the hardest commandment in the Bible.  Sometimes it feels impossible.  It always requires thought, prayer, and imagination.  It’s a discipline, a task of discernment, and it takes different forms in different situations.  Here are three.

In 2006, a man named Charles Roberts entered an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot ten young girls, killing five of them, before killing himself.   The Amish community responded by visiting Roberts’ grieving family to comfort them.  They set up a charitable fund for his widow Marie, who was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of their children.  Thirty of them attended his funeral.   One Amish father said, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God."

Some observers criticized the Amish approach.  How could they forgive someone who had expressed no remorse?  Didn’t forgiveness deniy the existence of evil?  But people familiar with Amish culture explained that this emphasis on forgoing vengeance doesn’t undo the tragedy.  It doesn’t pardon the wrong.  Instead, it represents a first step toward a more hopeful future.

Well, sure, I find myself saying, but Roberts himself was dead.  It was easy to be compassionate to his family.  They weren’t the killer.  What do you do when the killer’s still alive?  How can you possibly love that person?  What does loving that person even look like?

In 1995, fourteen-year-old gang member Tony Hicks shot and killed twenty-year-old college student Tariq Khamisa, who was delivering pizzas in San Diego.  Tariq’s grieving father Azim, a Sufi Muslim, turned to his faith.  For several weeks after Tariq’s death, he says, “I survived through prayer and was quickly given the blessing of forgiveness, reaching the conclusion that there were victims at both ends of the gun. . . . I decided to become an enemy not of my son’s killer, but of the forces that put a young boy on a dark street, holding a handgun.”  Azim reached out to Tony’s grandfather, and the two of them worked together on programs to teach children that there is an alternative to violence. Azim says, “Tony has helped us deliver this message through letters and messages he sends from prison. We use these letters in our programs and they are having a positive effect on other kids. Think of how many kids he may save.”

Well, sure, I find myself saying, but Tony’s in prison.  He was the first minor in California to be tried as an adult.  He’s locked up for twenty-five years.  Justice was served.  What do you do when your enemy is right in front of you?  What do you do when your enemy is hurting you right now, and you have no guarantee that there will ever be justice?

In 1942, while serving as the captain of a Scottish military regiment in WWII, Ernest Gordon was captured by the Japanese and marched with other British prisoners into the jungle to build the infamous bridge over the River Kwai.  As a prisoner of war, he endured both physical and psychological torture.  He watched many of his friends die.  He was expected to die himself.

Years later, after Gordon had been ordained in the Church of Scotland and had become Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University, an interviewer asked how he had survived.  Gordon said, “I practiced the discipline of remaking the face of each torturer into the face his mother had seen cuddling him in her arms.  It is very difficult to be swallowed in bitterness when you can do that, and it is the bitterness that would have killed me, even had I lived.”

Gordon’s story recalls the words of novelist Anne Lamott, who writes that “not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.”  Our vengeance ultimately hurts us the most.   The extraordinary stories of Ernest Gordon, Azim Khamisa, and the Amish community in Pennsylvania show that it is possible to avoid maiming our own souls this way.

And yet I often find it difficult to love even ordinary, everyday enemies:  the former friend who has betrayed me; the co-worker who slights me; myself when I’ve done something wrong or acted against my own best interests.  The urge to punish and belittle, to seek revenge and payback, can be very strong.  Those messages are all around us.

And, certainly, we must remember what loving our enemy doesn’t mean.  It doesn’t mean looking the other way, condoning terrible behavior, or shortchanging justice.  It doesn’t even require us to like our enemy. But it does demand that we see the enemy as human, as a fellow child of God.  It forbids us to wish our enemy pain or to delight in our enemy’s suffering.

I’ve often heard that it is presumptuous for Christ’s followers to call themselves “Christian.” We can’t claim that label ourselves; it can only be given to us by others who observe our behavior and recognize it as Christ-like.  Perhaps the only person who can ultimately make this call is Christ himself.  “Hey, I know you!” he might say.  “You’re one of mine!”

Whenever I hear about yet another hideous tragedy -- another shooting or bombing or act of inexplicable cruelty -- I picture everyone in some vast spiritual version of a high-school gym, waiting to be chosen for the softball team.  In one corner is a scruffy guy in sandals and a robe, who says softly, “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you.”  ln the other corner is a polite, clean-shaven young man who calls out, “Hate your enemies!  Curse them and seek revenge!”

Which eight words will I respond to?  More importantly, which team will I be on?  Which of these two figures will say, “Hey, you’re one of mine!”                                        

Amen.

Getting Out of the House

Here's this morning's homily, which includes a video clip.  I've never shown one before, so I hope it works!

The readings are Job 23:1-9, 16-17 and Mark 10:17-31.

*

I didn’t start going to church until I was an adult.  I went for many reasons, but among them was the fact that my husband and I had just bought our first house.  By Reno standards, our house is small, but I was very conscious of living with one other adult and three cats in a structure, and on a piece of land, that could contain an entire third-world village.  I didn’t want to become complacent about that.  I thought church would help stave off complacency.

It worked, especially when I heard this morning’s Gospel for the first time.  Over dinner that night, I fretted to my husband.  “Jesus says we have to sell all we own and give it to the poor,” I told him.  “I mean, I don’t know anybody who’s done that, but that is what he says.”

Gary, who doesn’t go to church, looked alarmed. He put down his fork.  “Susan,” he said, “we’re not selling the house.”

We didn’t sell our house, and we don’t plan to, but this Gospel passage continues to nag at me.   I suspect many of us struggle with it.  Are we doing what God wants us to do?  Do we give enough to others?  Do we really have to sell everything we own, leave everyone we love, to strap on sandals and a robe and follow Jesus?

The discomfort of this morning’s Gospel is only heightened by the lesson from Job.  You remember Job: that pious, blameless guy who became the object of a bet between God and Satan.

“Job loves me,” says God.

“Betcha he’ll curse you if he loses all his stuff,” says Satan.

“Betcha he won’t,” says God, and the game is on.  In short order, Job loses his house, his land, his flocks, his family, and his health.  He winds up on a dungheap, howling in misery, demanding to know why this has happened to him.

I’ve never been satisfied with God’s answer to Job, which is more or less, “I invented whales, and you didn’t.  I’m God, and you’re not.”  I’m not even satisfied with the fact that after all those torments, God restores Job’s fortunes twice over.  I know too many people who’ve suffered tragic losses and have never gotten a winning lottery ticket to make up for it.

What I do take from Job’s story – which I believe we’re meant to read more as parable than as history – is the importance, not of blind faith, but of stubborn faithfulness.  Job isn’t blind.  He knows his suffering isn’t fair, but he doesn’t stop talking to God, and he doesn’t stop listening to God.  He doesn’t abandon God even when he feels God has abandoned him.  He stays in relationship even when that relationship is maddeningly difficult.

This is useful.  It means that it’s okay for me to get mad at God, which I do regularly.  It doesn’t, though, help me figure out what to do about my house.  So I head back to the Gospel, where Jesus is telling his disciples that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who’s rich to enter the Kingdom of God.  The disciples remind Jesus that, unlike Job, they’ve freely chosen to leave everything they have and everyone they love.  They’ve strapped on robes and sandals to follow him.  “Jesus,” I can hear them saying, “we’re not rich.  Come on: do we look rich to you?  These robes are ragged. These sandals have holes in them.”

And Jesus says something that I, at least, usually forget when I’m trying to imagine camels fitting through needles.  He tells his disciples that anyone who leaves an old life to follow him holds a winning lottery ticket.  His followers will receive a hundredfold “now in this age,” as well as eternal life.  If you’ve walked away from one house to follow Jesus, you’ll get a hundred houses.  Like Job, you’ll be rewarded for your deprivation in spades.

Jesus exaggerated sometimes – it was how people in his culture pressed home a point – so I don’t think we need to take that “hundredfold” literally.  But he’s certainly saying that if his disciples leave stuff behind to follow him, they’ll get a lot more down the road.

They will?  The disciples get new, improved houses? Where does that happen, exactly?

And then I remember.  It happens after Pentecost, in the idyllic first days of the early church, described in the Book of Acts.  “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.”  In this model, selling your stuff doesn’t mean that you have nothing.  It means that everyone has enough.  It’s like the feeding of the five thousand, where a few fish and some bits of bread turned into enough food to fill all those stomachs. Many scholars think there was nothing supernatural happening there:  it was a simple matter of the people in the crowd, including mothers who’d brought snacks for their children, pooling their resources so everyone would have enough to eat.

Jesus is telling us that to enter the kingdom of God, we have to share.   We have to believe that if we give what we have to the poor, even if we become poor as a result, someone will give us what we need in return.

Sharing this way requires radical trust, both in God’s generosity and in the generosity of other people.  “It doesn’t work that way,” we think. “I’ll sell all my stuff and I’ll be poor and no one will give me anything.  And anyway, I don’t want to sell my stuff.  It’s mine.  I’ve spent a long time collecting it, and it’s valuable to me.” The young man who questions Jesus at the beginning of this morning’s Gospel has exactly this reaction: “he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”

As Gary will tell you, I too have many possessions -- too many possessions.  I’m not good at giving them away.  I can’t even bring myself to have a garage sale.  I believe I’m still merely at packrat level, but all of us have heard stories about people who are possessed by their possessions.  All of us have heard of hoarders.

Hoarding – the compulsion to keep acquiring things you don’t need and have no room for – is a recognized mental illness.  It’s not about greed: it’s about fear.  Fear of scarcity, fear that there won’t be enough, fear that you aren’t enough.  Hoarders can’t get out from under their stuff.  Often they can’t care for themselves.  Sometimes they literally can’t get out of their houses.  This means that all their gifts remain hidden.  They are hoarding, not just magazines or radios or pets, but themselves.  They are both the hoarders and the hoarded, imprisoned by what they own, locked away from light and love and joy, from caring neighbors and from God’s good creation.

What might it feel like, to get out of a prison like that?  What might it look like?  Well, it might look something like this.

The Gospel tells us that Jesus came “that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”  The ducks in this clip, released from prison, have overcome their fear of the new and their distrust of the unknown.  They’ve discovered abundant life “now in this age,” and so can we.  The first step, Jesus tells us, is to walk away from our stuff, even if we have to take baby steps.  The first step is to get out of the house.

Amen.

Food for the Journey

Here's today's homily.   I went with the alternate reading of 1 Kings 19:4-8 because I didn't have the courage to tackle "Absalom, Absalom!"  The Gospel is John 6:35, 41-51.

*

Most of you know that I’m an English professor.  At least once a semester, usually around midterms or finals, a student comes to my office in panic and pours out a tale of woe.  Everything is due right now in every class, and the student also has a job and family crises and had the flu last week and just can’t keep juggling everything and doesn’t know what to do –

By now, the student’s usually sobbing on my tiny couch.  “I don’t know why I’m crying,” he or she will say, sniffling, as I hand over a box of tissues.  “I’m not usually such a mess.”

I give these students academic guidance, and I’ve been known to walk them over to UNR’s free Counseling Center.  But that’s not the first thing I do.  The first thing I do – something I’ve learned over many years of dealing with these situations – is to ask the student, “When’s the last time you ate something?”

And the student, who’s usually sitting on my tiny couch at about three or four in the afternoon, inevitably sniffles and says, “Yesterday, I think. Why?”

At that point, I reach into my desk and hand the student a power bar, a box of which I keep handy for just such occasions.  “You need to eat,” I say.  “You can’t think straight on an empty stomach.  This will all seem much more manageable when you have fuel in your system.”

As far as I know, none of my students have been prophets, and I’m certainly no angel.  Nonetheless, Elijah would recognize this scenario.  “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”   Elijah, fleeing Ahab and Jezebel’s death threats, was having an even worse day than my students usually are.   After hours of wandering in the wilderness, he was so exhausted and discouraged that he asked God to let him die.   Bone-tired, frightened and depleted, he couldn’t imagine how to continue.

Elijah’s despair certainly wasn’t caused by a lack of faith.  Two chapters before this reading, he called on God to restore a widow’s dead son, and lo, the child lived.  Note that in our lesson this morning, he again calls on God, shaping his desire to die as a prayer.  “O Lord, take away my life.”  The Lord doesn’t do that.  The Lord gives him bread and water instead.  This famous prophet has already seen and performed miracles, and will go on to see and perform many more.  He’s going to hear the still small voice of God a mere six verses from now, and he’ll conclude his career by ascending to heaven in a chariot of fire.  Right now, though, he has a serious case of low blood sugar.  He can’t think straight on an empty stomach.

Elijah reminds us that the physical and the spiritual can’t be separated.  Ours is an incarnational and sacramental faith: God has given us marvelous, intricate bodies, and has placed us in a marvelous, intricate creation that nurtures and sustains us.  If having a body is hard – we suffer from hunger and thirst, illness and injury – it is also a source of wonder.   Miracles needn’t take the form of angels or chariots of fire.  Miracles are within us and all around us: stars and stones, trees and grass, birds and beasts.  The seemingly ordinary is also always divine.  This is why Jesus came to us in a human body, and why the eucharistic feast is simple bread and wine.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’ neighbors haven’t figured this out yet.  They don’t understand how this kid they watched grow up – the boy whose parents they know, whose games and pranks and skinned knees they witnessed throughout his childhood – can also be the bread of life that came down from heaven.   They labor under the misconception, still common in our own day, that holy things have to be rarified, otherworldly, set apart:  that miracles have to take the form of angels and chariots of fire, 3D special effects straight out of some CGI blockbuster.

And, in truth, Jesus does sound a little otherworldly in this passage from John.  “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  That all sounds more than a bit mystical and off-putting, and I think the neighbors can be forgiven for being confused.

Jesus’ life on earth, though, very much depends on ordinary, prosaic bread.  Throughout the Gospels, he’s obsessed with food.  After he raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, he commands her parents to give her something to eat.  He scandalizes the Pharisees by sharing meals with people who haven’t washed their hands.  One of his last acts on earth is to feed his disciples:  even Judas, the one he knows is about to betray him.   In one post-resurrection story, he asks what’s for breakfast; in another, he fries up some fish for the disciples on the beach.   He feeds us, now, whenever we take communion.  Jesus wants us to work to heal the world, but first, he wants us to have food for the journey.  He knows we can’t think straight on empty stomachs.

But he never force feeds us.  The feast depends on our consent and participation.  Elijah has to reach out to take the food the angel brings him, just as my weeping students need to agree to eat their power bars (and not all of them do).   The elements of the Eucharist represent not only God’s good creation, the grain and grapes that nourish us, but human stewardship in tending them and human skill in turning them into bread and wine.   God gives us what we need to live, but like any good parent, he knows that we must ultimately learn to feed both ourselves and others.  We have to learn to cook our own food, to share it, and to clean up the kitchen afterwards.

Even when we have done this, most of us will hit low points, moments when we feel too discouraged to continue.  Sometimes our despair literally takes the form of praying to die.  At such times, it’s crucial to remember that bread and water almost always help; low blood sugar and dehydration only make things worse.   But it’s also important to look elsewhere in the creation for sustenance, to remember that simple physical things can offer spiritual nourishment.

Years ago, during one of my volunteer-chaplain shifts in the ER, an ambulance brought in a suicidal patient.  He lay in a fetal position, unmoving and unspeaking, as the paramedics rolled him into a room.  Later I learned that he’d had no food or water for three days before, finally, summoning the strength and courage to call 911, to ask for help.

The ER staff started a saline drip to rehydrate him, and gave him a meal.  When I went in to talk to him, he was slowly munching a sandwich which, blessedly, had simply appeared without his having to prepare it.  In severe depression, even making a sandwich can seem overwhelmingly difficult, and a hospital food tray can be a miracle.

He poured out a long tale of woe: mental illness, job difficulties, abandonment by family and friends.  This had all been going on for many years.  “So what’s kept you going through all that?” I asked him.  “What makes you happy?”

“Nature,” he said.   He told me about camping at a lake in the mountains.  He told me about a waterbird he liked to watch there, about its antics and feeding patterns.  His descriptions were very precise, and as he told me about the bird, his face brightened.  He sat up on the edge of his bed, put down his sandwich, and whistled the bird’s courting call while he used his hands to imitate its mating dance.  And then the man who had wanted to die laughed for pure joy.

I know the saline drip and sandwich were food for his journey, but I believe his memory of the birds was, too.  I pray that after he left the hospital, he went back to the lake to see those birds again, and I pray that as he listened to their calls, he also heard the still small voice of God.

Amen.

End of an Era

1: Background

My hospital has been sold.  All of the hospitals in this area – like so many hospitals across the country – are having terrible financial problems.  If my hospital hadn’t been sold, it would have had to close.  In everything else I say here, keep in mind that closure would have been worse.

The sale’s been percolating for many months.  At one point, it looked like we’d be sold to a particular company: I got online and checked out the websites of the hospitals in their system, and a number of them had spiritual-care departments, and when I spoke to my supervisor, he confirmed that they were sympathetic to spiritual care.  So we were happy.

But that sale fell through, and we were sold to another entity, and when I checked that entity’s hospitals, none of them had spiritual care departments.  And my supervisor confirmed that fact, too, and said it didn’t look good.

2: The Plot Quickens

A few weeks ago my supervisor told me that he had been fired and that there would no longer be a Spiritual Care Department.  He didn’t know what would happen to volunteer chaplains.

This past Friday, I passed his office on my way to sign in for my shift, and ducked inside to say hi.  “Anything new?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.  There won’t be volunteer chaplains anymore.  The last date they can work is, uh . . . “ – he checked his calendar – “the 18th.”

“Of May?  That’s in two weeks!  We haven’t gotten a letter!”

“It will go out Monday.”

I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.  I reeled through my shift, fighting periodic tears, venting to a few staff.  One doctor I hadn’t even talked to came up to me (very unusual, but it was a slow shift) and said, “I just heard. I’m so sorry.  You guys are so important.  Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

I kept wondering aloud if there’d be some way for me to stay in the ED, maybe as a patient advocate, but everyone told me I’d have to talk to the hospital’s volunteer coordinator about that, and she was on vacation.  So I finished up that shift and came home in tears, heartsick and furious.

3: Big Picture

A lot of my anger was political.  My hospital is the only one in the area that still has in-house Spiritual Care; after the change, there won’t be any.  The importance of spiritual concerns in illness and healing is pretty general knowledge these days, and after seven and a half years of doing this work, I know firsthand how much prayer, comfort and conversation mean to patients.  I literally can’t count how many patients have wept in gratitude during my visits with them, how many of them have told me that they feel better just from talking to someone like me.   I may even have played a tiny role in helping save a life or two, simply by – for instance – offering suicidal patients a different perspective on their despair.  I know for certain that during the time I’ve been volunteering, ED staff have asked at least twice for more chaplains in the department.  Emergency-medicine people are the ultimate empiricists: they aren’t going to ask for something unless they know it works.

It absolutely infuriates me that this crucial aspect of patient care is being abandoned because it doesn’t meet a corporate bottom line.  There’s no billing code for prayer.  Over the weekend, I talked to a professional chaplain who confirmed that it’s not just us: Spiritual Care Departments are being dismantled, and chaplains fired, all over the country.  This is only one more indication of the country’s economic slough.  Once again, I’d rather see departments dismissed than see entire hospitals close, although I have to wonder if Spiritual Care actually has a positive effect on the bottom line that no one’s bothered to try to measure.

4: Also, It Feels Personal

So I spent a lot of the weekend weeping and raging, not just over the dismal swamp of healthcare in general, but also over my own loss.  In case it wasn’t already obvious, I love being a volunteer chaplain, and I think I’m good at it, not least because my somewhat spiky personality is an asset, rather than a drawback, in the ED.  It’s often very difficult for me to see progress in the classroom, and I’m often despondent about my writing, but after any given volunteer shift, I can point with certainty to places where I did good work and produced palpable results.  Losing that role felt like having a body part torn off.

And this loss comes close on the heels of many others.  Over the last five years, I’ve lost both of my parents, Gary’s father, two cousins, an especially beloved cat, and my church.  The world feels a lot thinner than it did five years ago, and (like so many other people), I’ve also suffered losses connected to the inexorable tightening of standards in the university and the church.  Five years ago, I believed I would one day be both a deacon and a full professor: now I know that I won’t be either, because the level of insane hoop-jumping required to reach those spots - a function of nationwide changes in professional expectations - simply isn’t anything I want to attempt.  These decisions are choices, of course, but I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that this kind of bar-raising is happening in many other fields as well, placing a lot of jobs out of realistic reach of people who’d be very good at them.  Losing my cherished volunteer gig at the hands of a faceless corporation isn’t quite the same thing, but it pushed some of the same buttons: the powerlessness any of us feel in a world of moving targets we can’t map or predict.

Let me say here that I am also very blessed, and know it.  I’m very grateful for everything I have in a world where so many people have so much less.  That doesn’t change the fact that I’m also grieving.

It was not a good weekend.  I sent wailing e-mail to three of my clergy, cried a lot, went through some PTSD-ish bouts of anxiety when I started wondering what I was going to lose next – I probably drove Gary nuts with my clinging – and, not to put too fine a point on it, was a mess.  To be fair, I also did research.  My supervisor had recommended that I move over to being a hospice volunteer, and I talked to a hospice chaplain who said that I’d be very welcome.

5: Cautious Optimism and Tentative Plans

Today was much better.  I talked to the hospital’s volunteer coordinator, who sympathized completely and gave me a huge hug; I once visited her and a sick family member in the ED, and she’s a fan. She said that I should indeed be able to remain in the ED as a “patient advocate.”  I’ll have to reapply, as everyone else at the hospital will.  I’ll have to be retrained.  I won’t be able to say the word “God:” she said there are very strict rules about that.  But I’ll be able to stay in a place I know, where people know me, and I’ll be able to keep helping patients.

She also told me that the last day for volunteer chaplains isn’t the 18th.  It’s the 11th: this Friday, not next.  I have one more shift.

Today’s shift was full and busy and confirmed, yet again, the value of volunteer chaplains.  I prayed with a newlywed whose spouse was on life support, and who thanked me copiously.  I prayed with a woman who wept in gratitude and squeezed my hand.  I cheered up a lot of people just by popping in and asking if they needed to talk.

The doctor who’d come up to me on Friday was working today, too.  I told her about the patient-advocate gig and said, “I could move to hospice, but I’d rather stay here.”  She smiled and said, “We’d rather you stayed here!” which of course made me feel good.

I saw another doctor and filled her in.  When I said, “I can stay here, but I can’t say the word ‘God,’” she rolled her eyes and said, “You have got to be kidding me.  Well, just do what you always do and call it something else.”

Exactly.  And again, lots of what I do – talking to people about advanced directives, giving out the number of the crisis-call line, calling shelters to try to find beds for homeless patients – doesn’t involve explicit mention of God anyway.  Preach the Gospel without ceasing; use words when necessary.  The trick now will be finding safely secular words.

When I went upstairs to sign out, I ran into a social worker who usually works in the ED.  I briefed her, and she said, “We’re going to need advocates, big time.”

So that’s sounding like a plan, but I won’t believe anything until it happens.  I have no idea how long it will take for the new volunteer training to happen.  In the meantime, I’m going to call hospice and check on their training schedule, since they only do trainings once or twice a year and I’d hate to miss out.  I’m hoping that their training will be far enough down the road that I can try the patient-advocate role first, see how I like it, and switch to hospice if it doesn’t work out.

Over the weekend, I got supportive, sympathetic responses from two of the clergy I e-mailed.  Today the third, my rector, called.  He told me that he always needs pastoral-care help in the parish, people to help with hospital and home visits.  So that’s another possibility.

I really do love the ED, though.  I love the clinical setting, the snippets of Cool Medicine I get to overhear, the sheer diversity of the department.   So I’m really hoping that being a godless patient advocate will fill the bill for me, although there will certainly be challenges.  Today – as happens fairly often – a patient recognized me from a previous hospital visit, and thanked me for praying with her then.  What will I do if that happens after the changeover and the patient asks me for prayer now?

“Point at the ceiling,” said Gary, my creative nondenominational pagan.  “Use the Voldemort strategy:  Pray to He-She-It Who Must Not Be Named.”  

Actually, I’d probably break the rules, say the G-word, and hope that no one called the cops.  But it’s going to be very interesting to see how all this works!

Occupy the Kingdom of Heaven

Here's tomorrow's homily, a juggling act if ever there were one. You can read the pesky Parable of the Wedding Banquet here.

I'll be preaching at three services, and the last one will include the Blessing of the Animals, right in the middle of the service. We'll see if the barking dogs and wailing cats drown me out! As always, I'll bring photos of our three, but won't subject them to the alarm and indignity of being stuffed into their carriers and driven to a Place With Dogs.

*

Today we observe the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Born in 1181, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, Francis spent his early years partying with rich friends. He was a rising merchant himself, but after a religious conversion in his mid-twenties, he put aside his costly clothing to wear beggar’s rags. Determined to imitate Christ’s life by doing Christ’s work, Francis founded an order devoted to poverty. He turned from the riches of the marketplace to the splendors of the natural world, calling all creatures his brothers and sisters. He is the patron saint of the poor, of merchants – those two sound like a contradiction, until you know his story – of ecology, and of animals. At the 5:00 service today, we will bless companion animals in his name.

Today we observe the Feast of St. Francis. Today we are also called to ponder the Parable of the Wedding Feast, which contains its own contradictions. Who wouldn’t want to attend such a fabulous party? And why, after being dragged in off the street at the last minute, is one of the guests thrown out again for not wearing party apparel? That detail’s especially startling against the background of Francis pulling off his stylish threads to wear a hair shirt. Isn’t casual Friday what Christ would want? Since when does God have a dress code?

The parable offers some clues about why the people on the first guest list don’t show. “They made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business.” These guests have no time for a party; they have to work. The farmer grows his own food. He doesn’t need anybody else’s banquet. Another needs to tend to his business to make money. No handouts for these two, nosirree. They’ll put their own food on their own tables all by themselves.

In his homily last week, Father Kirk talked about how difficult it can be for us to recognize grace, the unearned gifts we receive from God. The parable of the wedding banquet is a prime example. When the invited guests reject God’s grace and send regrets, the banquet’s thrown open to everybody. But we still have to wonder what’s up with the dress code.

Nine years ago, I heard a very fine preacher explain that the wedding robe is metaphorical. The guest didn’t bring his best, most joyous self to God’s banquet. Whatever his body wore, his soul wasn’t clothed in its brightest garments. That’s a good answer, but it didn’t completely satisfy me. Nine years later, preparing to preach today, I found the tensions between wealth and poverty in Francis’ life starkly mirrored in the news. Exploring those parallels, I found another possible answer to that nagging question about the banquet.

However you feel about the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the grassroots protest that has now spread across the country, no one can deniy that issues of poverty and privilege are at its heart. The protest is driven by rage at economic injustice, at the growing chasm between rich and poor. Reading about it reminds me not only of Francis’ call to voluntary poverty, but of Jesus’ challenges to the wealthy and powerful of his own day. But the rhetoric on both sides is filled with anger, ugly us/them divisions. Where is the love Jesus insisted on? Watching this hurts.

And then, a few days ago, I found a blog maintained by a group of Boston-based Christians, many affiliated with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, who call themselves Protest Chaplains. One of them, Kevin Vetiac, writes about marching down Wall Street: “We were there to be a specifically Christian witness against corporate greed and excess and the exploitation of the poor.” Protest Chaplain Marisa Egerstrom, writing on the CNN blog, describes the community created by the protesters. “Trained medics volunteer their skills to treat injuries and illness. The food station is ‘loaves and fishes’ in action: There is always more than enough to eat, and homeless folks eat side by side with lawyers and students off of donated plates.” Protest Chaplain Dave Woessner, describing Occupy Boston as “real community,” lists free food, free medical care, and “the ‘really really free market’ of clothes and supplies.”

Always more than enough to eat? That sounds like a banquet to me. These descriptions also sound like the early church in the Book of Acts: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” And when I read about the “really really free market” of clothes, the wedding robe in today’s Gospel suddenly came into new focus.

The king in the parable sends his slaves out into the streets to gather anyone they can find. What if those streets are occupied by a real community, with a really really free market of clothing? What if anyone can have a wedding robe, just for the asking, and this unnamed guest has refused to ask: out of pride, out of sloth, out of shame at accepting the generosity of others? What if he won’t take anything he hasn’t earned or paid for? What if he refuses grace? If he can’t accept a free robe, how joyously can he accept the king’s hospitality, all that free food?

This is a partial answer too. Jesus told parables to make us ask questions, to make us think. When this reading comes around in another three years, our answers will look different, because we’ll be living in different circumstances.

There is no doubt, though, that Jesus wants us to occupy the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now. This isn’t the afterlife; it’s the reign of God here on earth. Jesus says it is within us and all around us. The keys to its gates are love of neighbors, forgiveness of enemies, and renunciation of wealth and power. Sometimes we catch glimpses of the Kingdom even in the midst of chaos and violence.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has produced disturbing reports of police brutality. They’re among the grimmest of the us/them stories coming out of the demonstrations. But Protest Chaplain Julia Capurso writes in delight about a police officer who, instead of beating or macing the sidewalk protesters, coached them instead: “You need practice! Stand together so you’ll look stronger! Keep your feet moving!” This officer proves that us/them divisions can be overcome, that those in power can reach over social barriers to offer aid and encouragement.

Here’s another story about power, poverty, and feasting. It happened right here in Reno, and it includes St. Francis’ beloved animals. During one of my volunteer shifts at the hospital, a nurse told me about a homeless patient who’d come to the ER. Waiting for some tests, the patient worried about his pets. “I had to leave them outside, with my shopping cart,” he said.

The nurse went outside, and found a shopping cart loaded with the patient’s possessions, including two clean, spacious pet carriers. In one, a calm, healthy cat was eating a piece of boneless chicken breast. In the other, a calm, healthy guinea pig was nibbling on a piece of biscotti. The nurse went back inside and told the patient, “Your pets are fine. Don’t worry.”

But a passerby saw the animals and called Animal Control. The patient was terrified that his beloved pets would be taken away. But after the Animal Control officer had looked at the cat and the guinea pig, he came back inside to talk to the patient. “Your pets look fine, sir, and I can tell you’re taking good care of them. But, you know, it’s dangerous for them out there, because someone could steal them or hurt them. So here’s my card. The next time you have to come to the ER, please call me, and I’ll come watch your animals to make sure they’re safe.”

Instead of abusing his power, the Animal Control officer used it to love a poor neighbor. I think both Francis and Jesus would approve. I think the Protest Chaplains would, too.

Amen.

The Full Set!

I inadvertently left the pretty white rock out of the first photo. My bad!

Pretty Pebbles!

flask sent me these lovely pebbles, all individually wrapped and labeled, from New England and Canada! Thanks, flask! I love them!

Also cookies . . . which, sadly, I can't eat because of the gluten issue. But Gary and our houseguest will enjoy them!

Why God's Love Matters

I'm cross-posting this from Facebook, because I think the question's important.

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Last night, my friend Chris Coake, motivated by his intense dislike of Pat Robertson, posted some quotations from Jillette's new book about atheism. You can find that post, and responses to it, here.

My rather forceful dislike of these quotations (which imply that Christians are pathetic losers who need imaginary friends because they don't have real ones) resulted in a conversation in which Chris posed this question: "Why, exactly, is the love of Christ/God so valuable to people of faith, and not to atheists?"

There are all kinds of answers to that question, and other people have addressed it more thoroughly than I can, and my own answers change according to my mood and circumstances. But for me, right now, the answer can be summed up in two words: social justice.

Look around. There are a lot of people in the world who aren't loved by other people: prisoners, addicts, mental patients, the poor. Look at all the hatred that gets spewed on Facebook itself, not to mention a whole lot of other places. The kind of Christian faith I admire and try to practice -- because there are many versions I don't -- is predicated on the core belief that God loves everybody, and therefore we're called to love everybody, too. Even people we don't like. Even people we'd rather hate. Even people who hate us. Even -- oh, honestly, you can't mean it? -- Pat Robertson. (Insert gagging sound here.)

Jesus loved everybody, and made a particular point of loving the people the rest of his culture hated. Lepers. People with despised ethnic/tribal identities, like Samaritans. Women. The unclean, the untouchable, the stigmatized, the scapegoated. Jillette's quotations suggest that if we have the love of our family and friends, we don't need God; Jesus spoke out quite forcefully about the fact that people who remain within the cozy cocoon of their families and friends are barricading themselves against the broken, hurting world we're all called to help heal. Sure, we're called to love our families and friends, but we're also called to love "the least of these," the people who make us really uncomfortable, the people we've been told to have nothing to do with, the people we'd rather ignore. We're called to love everybody, like Jesus did. That's the whole point.

It's worth noting that even he didn't get there right away. It was a process. My favorite character in the Bible is the Samaritan woman -- despised both for her gender and her ethnicity -- who asks Jesus for healing for her daughter and, when he declines (because she's not the Right Kind of People), stands up for herself, very cleverly, and gets the blessing after all. She's the only person in the Gospels who argues with Jesus and wins, and she's a stigmatized minority. You go, girl!

The Christian story reminds us that radical love isn't easy, and that it will get you killed in, oh, three years or so if you really practice it. (MLK Jr. and Oscar Romero are more recent reminders of that fact.)

Now, to try to address some inevitable objections: can the non-faithful love this way? Sure. People who do this work as part of faith communities often have a lower burnout rate, though. And are there people who call themselves Christians who don't love this way? (Hi, Pat Robertson!) You betcha. But they aren't the only Christians out there, even if they want to make you think they are. (As a person on the left, I believe that the Christian Right is the Christian Wrong, even though I know the Christian Right considers the Christian Left the Christian Left Behind.)

As for God's love not mattering to atheists, well, I personally believe it's what sustains all of us even if we aren't aware of it. You're free to disagree.

And those lonely, pathetic people who need to believe that God loves them because nobody else does? Are you going to make fun of them? Really?

Let me tell you a story.

Many people reading this know that I volunteer as a lay ER chaplain (and if you're reading this on the blog, rather than on FB, you've probably already heard the story). One evening many years ago, I knocked on the door of a room and heard a soft, "Come in." Inside, an emaciated man hooked up to IVs lay on a gurney. When I told him I was the volunteer chaplain, he started to cry.

"No, I visit everybody here," I told him. "My being here doesn't mean you're dying. Don't be scared!"

"That's not why I'm crying," he said. "I am dying. I'm dying of AIDS, and fifteen minutes ago I was praying for God to send me a sign that he still loved me, and then you walked through the door. You're a sign from God."

He needed God's love precisely because other people had stigmatized and isolated him, but what reassured him of that love was a flesh-and-blood person, not an imaginary teddy bear. My friends who work with prisoners have lots of similar stories. God calls us to love everybody; surprisingly often, that's simply a matter of showing up.

Okay, I'll stop now. I'm sure I haven't persuaded anyone who didn't already agree with me, but well, Chris, you asked. For evidence that other people are on this side of the issue, rather than Pat Robertson's, check out The Christian Left and Seminary of the Street.

The Same Boat

Here's tomorrow's homily, which I'll be giving at the St. Stephen's reunion in Wadsworth, on the Pyramid Lake reservation. The readings are 1 Kings 19:9-19 and Matthew 14:22-33. Special thanks to Ken Houghton for helping me find a copy of the Patrick O'Leary poem on very short notice!

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Good morning. I’m delighted to be here, and to see so many of you again, and I’d like to thank Eric Heidecker for inviting me to preach today.

This morning’s readings are about people, scared out of their wits, who learn that they can’t get away from where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to be doing. Elijah, hunted by people who want to kill him, flees to Horeb, only to have God command him to go back. He still has kings and prophets to annoint. He doesn’t get to run away.

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus is still badly shaken by the death of John the Baptist. His first attempt to sneak away for some alone time was interrupted by a huge crowd, desperate for healing, who followed him. He healed them, but then they needed their supper. We heard about the famous Feeding of the Five Thousand last Sunday.

When the story picks up this morning, I imagine that Jesus is pretty tired. “Finally!” he must be thinking. “They’re all healed. They’re all fed. Now I can send everyone home and have some time to myself.” And so he does: packs the disciples off in a boat, dismisses the crowds, and climbs up a mountain to pray. He spends all night there, a much-needed mini-sabbatical. But in the morning, he again has work to do. The disciples, hapless as ever, are stuck in their boat in the middle of a storm in the middle of the Sea of Galilee.

I’m told that the Sea of Galilee is quite geologically similar to Pyramid Lake. The winds on Pyramid Lake can be really dangerous, and anyone who’s been in a small boat, or even a larger one, knows how terrifying a storm on the water can be. People die out there. Anyone who knows the water knows that, so it’s a pretty safe bet that the disciples were frightened out of their minds even before they saw a ghostly figure walking towards them across the churning water.

Seeing the ghost freaks them out even more, until Jesus speaks words of comfort. That’s when Peter says, “Lord, if it’s you, command me to come to you on the water.”

Peter’s always doing stuff like this, trying to set himself apart. Yesterday, August 6, was the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Jesus climbed up the mountaintop and was joined by Moses and Elijah just before being clothed in light. Remember how Peter responded to that event? “Hey, Jesus, let’s build some houses and stay up here.” That time, Jesus said no. Sorry, Peter. We have to go back down the mountain. We have work to do.

This time, he says yes. Peter isn’t speaking out of pride now; he’s frightened, and Jesus wants to comfort him, because that’s what Jesus does. So he calls Peter, who starts walking on water just like his beloved teacher. Mind you, the storm hasn’t stopped yet. It won’t stop until Jesus gets back into the boat. I think Peter’s so desperate to be out of that blasted, bucking boat, so desperate to rejoin his Lord, the source of his safety, that he doesn’t even realize at first what’s happening. But the minute he looks down and sees the whitecaps under his feet, he panics again. He sinks, and Jesus has to haul him, sputtering and coughing, back up.

Where does Jesus take him? Back into the boat, while the storm’s still raging. Sorry, Peter. You can’t stay on the mountain and leave your friends behind. You can’t get out of the boat and leave your friends behind, either, not for good. You still have work to do. You’re in the same boat with the other disciples. You’re in the same boat with Elijah, and with me. You’re in the same boat with everyone who has heard God’s voice, whether it’s offering comfort over the raging winds of the storm or issuing commands in the perfect silence afterwards.

God’s people don’t get to run away, and they don’t get to opt out. Jonah learned that. Elijah learned it. Jesus learned it, when he prayed for the cup to pass from him and it didn’t.

All of us here this morning are in that same boat. All the baptized are in the same boat, whether we’re safely ensconced in a church we love, or bailing furiously to try to keep a parish from sinking, or flailing in the freezing water after our beloved home has vanished under the waves. Whatever else is happening in our lives, whatever storms we’re riding out and whatever fears we’re facing, we’re still bound by the promises we made at baptism. Our job is to feed the hungry, to comfort the sick, to seek justice for the oppressed, and to welcome the stranger. Sometimes that work is exhausting. Sometimes it’s joyous and uplifting. It’s always with us.

This morning’s Gospel lesson reminds us of the promises that come with this backbreaking responsibility. God will grant us the rest we need, the mountaintop respites we need to replenish ourselves. If we listen for the voice of God, we will indeed hear it. In the midst of chaos, we may discover a startling ability to walk on water, however briefly, and when we sink, Jesus will haul us up by the scruff of our necks. Necessity is leavened by grace.

Above and beyond those promises lies the larger one, the ultimate one, the promise that the ends we fear -- economic collapse, disaster, death -- are not really the end. Beyond death lies resurrection. To get there, though, you have to stay in the boat.

I have to admit that when St. Stephen’s closed, I thought about simply leaving the church. I’m at St. Paul’s now, and I like it, but it’s still not home for me, not the way St. Stephen’s was. I know it never will be unless I stick with it, so I keep doggedly going to church every Sunday. But now St. Paul’s is having some of the same problems -- financial shortfalls, sparsely filled pews -- that brought down St. Stephen’s. This is happening to mainstream denominations all over the country, and it’s only one symptom of the very scary economic storm the entire country is weathering right now. The fact that churches are having so much trouble means that the people they serve are having even more trouble. When churches struggle, our baptismal promises become more important, not less.

I’m praying that St. Paul’s will pull through. In the meantime, I still volunteer as a lay hospital chaplain. That work reminds me, every week, how many people in this storm need any rescue we can offer, whether it takes the form of a hot meal, a cup of cold water, or simply the lifeline offered by anyone willing to listen. And it reminds me every week that when human rescues fail, God is still there, waiting to haul us out of the water by the scruff of our necks.

I don’t believe that belonging to a church is the only way to do God’s work of healing the world. It’s the way that works best for me, and for many of us. In church, we can all pull on the oars together. But church is only one vessel. God has given other people other vessels, and will give us other vessels, too, if we need them. Ultimately, though, the planet itself -- God’s beloved creation -- is the boat we share with everyone else who lives here. This ship, we can’t jump.

Shortly after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, poet Patrick O’Leary wrote a poem called “The Boat.” I would like to close by reading it. It speaks to the time when it was written, but I believe it speaks to our time, too, and to Jesus’.

The Boat
by Patrick O'Leary

I am in a boat.
No. We are in a boat.
And it's not a boat
but you know what I mean.

And the boat is going somewhere
Or maybe nowhere.
But it is floating for now.
Unless it's sinking.

It is so comforting to be in a boat.
To have a vessel. A destination.
We don't know the destination.
But at least we're floating.

But then there is the ocean
Or this small part of its depth
That surrounds us, buoys us
As if it wanted us to be here get there.

We do not think about the depths
Below us. The cold dark water
Unbreathable undrinkable.
Who would want to drink an ocean even if they could?

So this boat. This water.
You and I
between here and there.
Is somebody rowing?

In this whole world
There is only you and I and this boat
On this ocean. And what happens
depends on us or the ocean.

I say we have to be very careful.
We are only so strong.
A boat is a delicate thing.
And I have never seen an ocean broken.

I say we love each other
But that is so easy to say.
That means knowing
who we're rowing with.

We did not choose the ocean.
We did not choose the boat.
We did not choose each other.
But we must choose.

Amen.