That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Theology (Page 68 of 95)

Drawing Water from the Springs of Salvation – Sermon for Pentecost 26, Proper 28C – November 17, 2013

November 17, 2013 / / 1 Comment

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This sermon was preached on the 26th Sunday after Pentecost, November 17, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 28C: Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6); 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; and Luke 21:5-19. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Illustration of Chinese Fifteen Buckets Idiom“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

Their placement in the Book of Isaiah suggests that these words were written early in the career of the first prophet whose writings are collected into this book (there are three), a time when Judah had been conquered by and was a tributary-state of the Assyrian Empire. In the first eleven chapters of the book, Isaiah had prophesied against the Jewish people and the nation’s leaders, condemning their failure to follow God’s Law, their failure to take care of the widows, the orphans, the poor, the resident alien. He had even given his son a prophetic name, Maher-shalal-hash-baz — meaning “He has made haste to the plunder!” — to reflect God’s judgment against them. Isaiah prophesied of desolation and loss, and those prophecies seemed to have come true. It was a time such as Jesus describes in the Gospel today, a time when nation had risen against nation, kingdom against kingdom. Yet, in the midst of it, Isaiah offers this song of hope.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

I once worked with a man who blew, as the saying goes, hot and cold. If you asked him, “How’s it going?” you’d get one of two responses. If things were OK, he’d say, “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” But on another day he’d answer, “The world’s going to Hell in a hand-basket!” There was no in-between with him, no shades of gray, no shades of anything! Either everything was great, or everything was awful. Isaiah’s message in our Gradual today is a message that even when everything is awful, even if the world is going to Hell in a hand-basket, God’s still in his heaven, God’s still in charge and eventually all will be right with the world.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

One of the things we preachers do is look back to see if we said anything about a Biblical text the last time it came up on the lectionary rotation, so that is what I did. The last time we had the First Song of Isaiah as part of our Sunday worship, it was the Sunday following the Sandy Hook School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I didn’t preach on this particular text that Sunday, but it would have been a fitting text; it is a message of reassurance for the worst of times.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

So . . . there are three themes or images in this one verse that I’d like to explore with you today: drawing water, rejoicing, and the springs of salvation. And I want to begin with the middle one because that is the way Isaiah begins.

Chapter 12 is only six verses long but, for some reason, when it is used liturgically as a canticle, the first verse is dropped off: we begin with Verse 2, “Surely, it is God who saves me . . . . ” But Isaiah began his song this way: “You will say in that day: I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me.” (v 1) “I will give thanks to you, O Lord . . . .”

This is more than a polite “Thank You” note. This is a song of praise that describes, that would accompany a physical expression of gratitude. The Hebrew word here is yadah, which signifies the stretching out of one’s hands in thanks while singing.

It’s like . . . do you know the 1964 movie Zorba the Greek? It’s based on a novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis. It is the story of Basil, a young English-Greek intellectual played by Alan Bates, and his encounter with a vibrant Greek peasant, Alexis Zorba, the title character; it is a story full of betrayal, death, and failure. But, at the end, as Basil is preparing to leave Crete (where the story is set) and return to Oxford, he asks Zorba to teach him to dance. What follows is this wonderful scene in which Anthony Quinn, who plays Zorba, lifts his hands and begins slowly to demonstrate the sirtaki. The music, by Mikis Theodorakis, builds as Quinn and Bates dance, with their hands raised, faster and faster, laughing, and overcoming all the darkness and tragedy that has gone before. That is yadah!

That theme is continued in this pivotal verse: “You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.” The word yadah is not repeated; here we have another word sawsone, which means “joyfulness,” or “mirth,” or even “giddiness,” translated in our Prayer Book text as “rejoicing.” Nonetheless, the meaning is the same: an exultant joy which requires physical expression.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing” — with dancing and singing and laughter and giddiness — “from the springs of salvation.”

The next image to consider is the drawing of water from a well. That’s not something many of us are familiar with, even if we live on farm properties with wells those wells are equipped with electric pumps and we get our water from a tap at the sink; we just turn a handle and the water comes out. Not so in Isaiah’s day or in Jesus’ time, nor even for some of our grandparents. In those days you took your bucket to the well and you lowered down, filled it, drew it up (not with a turn crank, by the way, but by brute strength), and then you carried it into the home, however far away that might be.

That day to day reality would most certainly have been in the minds of Isaiah’s first audience, but perhaps for them it would have been overshadowed by memories of an annual ritual. An important part of the celebration called Sukkoth or the Feast of Tabernacles was the “Festival of Water-drawing.” In this ritual, on each morning of the seven days of Sukkoth, a young priest would take a golden pitcher to the Pool of Siloam and fill it with water. He would then carry the water in a procession with lighted torches up to the Temple where the water was poured upon the altar, and the people broke out into jubilant song and dance.

The ritual of water-drawing was a reminder that God’s Presence is as fundamental and basic to human life as the water that falls from the sky or springs up from the earth. Life-giving water symbolizes God’s power. The image here is of water flowing with abundance, spilling over, and flowing out to the whole earth. In Isaiah’s song, the ritual of water-drawing leads directly to the proclamation of good news to all nations. The good news of God’s salvation cannot be contained; it must reach out to all the world.

Now something lost in the English translation is Isaiah’s use of singular and plural “yous,” his address is first to individuals and then to the community as a whole. In the ritual of water-drawing, it was the priest who drew the water as representative of the community, but in Isaiah’s song the “you” in this verse is addressed to each individual. “You shall draw water . . . .” — not the priest on your behalf — not the community of which you are a part — but you individually, you personally, you shall draw from the well of living water. Each of us goes to the well-spring individually . . . but what a mess it would be if we all showed up and tried to do that at the same time without any coordination!

As I thought about that, I remembered an old Chinese proverb I learned in Asian folklore course in college: Qi shang ba xia, literally, “seven up, eight down.” The full saying is, “My heart has fifteen buckets, seven up, eight down.” The image is from a folktale of fifteen people at a community well, all trying to draw water; seven with their buckets going up and eight going down, all clanging and banging against one another, spilling the water and achieving nothing. It refers to a person or a community faced with a time of uncertainty, fear, or turmoil. The English equivalent is “to be all sixes and sevens,” to be in a general state of confusion and disarray, possibly even a condition of irreconcilable conflict.

That certainly cannot be what Isaiah had in mind with his image of each of drawing out water individually! Surely there is here a lesson about working together in community! Remember that though each of us draws from the well we do so together, with yadah and sawsone, with that thankfulness and joy that expresses itself in dancing. Like Zorba and Basil dancing the sirtaki together, we work together so that our buckets are not “seven up, eight down,” not banging against one another and spilling their water uselessly, but all filled, drawn up, and poured out in proclamation of God’s good news. We never go to the well alone; we go together, and together we fill and draw out our buckets in a purposeful and concerted dance of joyful abundance.

“You” — each of you individually, but all of you together — “shall draw water with rejoicing” — with dancing and singing and laughter and giddiness — “from the springs of salvation.”

Which brings us to the last image of this verse: the springs of salvation.

While reviewing the commentaries and study guides about this text, I came across an alternative translation: “With great joy, you people will get water from the well of victory.” (CEV) At first blush, “well of victory” and “springs of salvation” seem like very different images! Salvation is something we receive, something that God gives us. Victory is something achieved, something that we do ourselves! But when I went to my Hebrew lexicon, I discovered that, indeed, the Hebrew word used here has been translated in other circumstances as “victory” (Psalm 20:5) and also as “prosperity” (e.g., Job 30:1) or as “deliverance” (e.g., Psalm 3:2). The well of God’s grace produces all of these things: deliverance, salvation, prosperity, victory.

In John’s Gospel we are told a story of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at the communal well in the city of Sychar. He asked her to draw him a drink from the well, and when she expressed surprise that a Jewish man would ask that of a Samaritan woman . . .

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:10-15)

The word used by the Prophet Isaiah, the word translated as “salvation,” as “victory,” as “prosperity,” as “deliverance,” is also a Name. The word is yeshu’ah; the name we translate as “Jesus.”

Even when the enemy (whoever or whatever that may be) has invaded and all seems to be desolation and loss . . . even when nations rise against nations and kingdoms against kingdoms . . . even when the world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket . . . even in a time of unfathomable tragedy and grief, Isaiah’s words comfort and reassure us. They are a promise of “buoyant and determined hope that refuses to give in to debilitating present circumstances.” (Walter Brueggemann)

“You” — each of you, each of us individually, but all of us together —

“shall draw water” — living water —

“with rejoicing” — with dancing and singing and laughter and giddiness —

“from the springs of salvation” — from the wellspring who is Jesus.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, you promised that you would give to any who asked living water gushing up to eternal life: Make us thirsty for that living water that we may love God with our whole heart and soul and mind, that we may rejoice in your victory and salvation with dancing and singing and laughter, that we may fill our buckets with your abundant prosperity and may pour out your good news for all the world, that we may love our neighbor as ourselves; in your Holy Name we pray. Amen.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Literature of Veterans Day — In Lieu of a Sermon for Pentecost 25C, November 10, 2013

November 11, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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In lieu of a sermon on November 10, 2013, the 25th Sunday after Pentecost at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where I am rector, I gave a report on the recently concluded 197th Diocesan Convention of the Diocese of Ohio.

In lieu of a sermon transcript, therefore, this week I offer two pieces of literature I read every Veterans Day.

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Veterans Day HonorBoth my father and my father-in-law were veterans of World War II. My father was gravely injured in France — while he was running from his position as a forward artillery spotter to convey information for the gunners (running because his radio had malfunctioned and he had vital data to convey), shrapnel entered the bottom of his right foot, exited, entered and exited his calf, then entered his thigh and damaged the bone. Wounded, he made it to a place where his information could be transmitted. He was eventually evacuated to England, underwent surgery, and was sent home to the States for therapy and convalescence. He was nearly always in pain from those injuries and frequently found relief in a bottle; it was that drinking that eventually killed him when he lost control of his car in a single-vehicle accident.

My father-in-law suffered no physical injuries. But he did witness friends and fellow soldiers die in horrible ways, and he was in the group of soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He was never able to talk about his war experiences, but I know he suffered psychic and spiritual damage.

Every year on Veterans Day, I especially remember my father and (since my marriage) my father-in-law. In their honor, since being introduced to them in college as a student of English and American literature, I make it a practice to read two pieces of literature on this day. The American piece is a short story by Mark Twain, The War Prayer:

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fulttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!

Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory —

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard the words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it —

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

The other, the English piece, is a poem from World War I by Wilfrid Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est. The title and last lines of the poem are the Latin for “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” It is a line from one of the Roman poet Horace’s Odes. In that poetic setting, it has been translated, “What joy, for fatherland to die!”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I honor the sacrifices made by those who have served. I mourn the loss of those who died. I remember the wounds sustained by my father and father-in-law. May no one ever be asked by their country to do so again.

God, our refuge and strength, bring near the day when wars shall cease and poverty and pain shall end, that earth may know the peace of heaven through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Church of England, Common Worship, Collect for Remembrance Sunday)

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Cleaning the Windshield — Sermon for All Saints Sunday, RCL Year C – November 3, 2013

November 3, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on All Saints Sunday, November 3, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, All Saints: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; and Luke 6:20-31. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

[Note: The Revised Common Lectionary Old Testament reading for All Saints in Year C is an edited pericope; I had the reader at Mass read the entire thing, verses 1 through 18.]

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Windshield with BugsToday is the first Sunday in November which means that instead of the normal sequence of lessons for Ordinary Time, we are given the option of reading the lessons for All Saints Day, which falls every year on November 1. So today we heard a very strange reading from the Book of Daniel, a to-my-ear very troubling gradual psalm (in which we sing of wreaking vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, of binding king in chains, and of inflicting judgment on the nobles bound in iron), a bit of Paul’s letter to the Church in Ephesus extolling the riches of the inheritance of the saints, and to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes in which Jesus not only blesses the poor, the hungry, and the weeping, he sighs woefully over the future plight people like ourselves – the comparatively wealthy, those whose bellies are full, and those in relatively good state of mind.

I asked our Old Testament reader this morning to read a somewhat longer lesson from Daniel than you find in your bulletin insert because the edited (or, more accurately, gutted) version there (which are the verses required for the day by the Revised Common Lectionary) includes only the introduction of a dream or vision experienced by Daniel and then skips immediately to the interpretation. We would have heard none of the apocalyptic imagery of the dream, but I think it important that we listen to and consider Daniel’s troubling vision of four strange beasts and the coming of one “like a son of man,” else how are we to understand the interpretation given by the “attendant.”

Early in my meditations and study for preaching today, I thought I would explore with you the meaning of the beasts and so on, but the more I thought about that, and especially as I began actually organizing my thoughts and writing out my sermon, I decided against doing so. It would I think be a distraction from the focus of the day. I was thinking that the reading as edited in the Lectionary presents us with a passage that makes little sense, but after reading and hearing again the full Daniel’s story of seeing a winged lion, a tusked bear, a four-headed leopard, and a ten-horned and iron-toothed monster, I guess that’s what we have in the longer reading, too! A lesson that distracts us, as so much in the Bible can do; so many people focus on these arcane details that they miss the bigger picture the Bible tries to show. As result, we get such non-Biblical nonsense as the various forms of “tribulationism” and the story of “the Rapture;” we get “one-issue Christians” who refuse to recognize as members of the same faith Christians who disagree with them. We get exactly the opposite of what the Feast of All the Saints is supposed to underscore.

So, instead of dealing with this troubling bit of the Bible right now, what I’d like you to do is come with me for a drive. Let’s just set the Bible aside and go get in our car and head off down the road. It’s a country road, a hard-pack dirt country road out in the farm country. We’re taking a country drive on a fine, beautiful spring day. It’s been raining, but it’s not raining now. Now the sun is shining and the birds are singing and insects of all sorts are buzzing and humming and chirping. In fact, there are loads of insects. It’s one of those days when the damsel flies are swarming, doing their brief romantic aerial ballets to attract mates and perpetuate their species. It’s one of those days when the grasshoppers are doing their best to eat everything in sight. It’s one of those days with yellow swallow-tails and monarchs and viceroys and white cabbage butterflies are flittering all over the place.

As we drive along, we’re traveling at a pretty good clip and, as you might expect with all those bugs around, the windshield is getting pretty messy. And since it just stopped raining and the dirt road is still a bit muddy, a lot of that has splashed up onto the windows and the windshield, as well. In fact, we can barely see through the windshield! We put the wipers on and twist the knob so the washer fluid sprays onto the glass, but the bug juice is sticky and there’s a lot of mud, so the washers only clear a little of the muck away, and the windshield is now not only covered with dead bugs and muck, it’s streaky, too!

Still, we peer through the streaks of bug blood and mud, and keep our eyes on the road ahead. Eventually we come to a filling station and we pull in. In a bygone era, a man in coveralls with a greasy rag tucked in his pocket would have run out and begun filling our tank with gas, and he would have checked under the hood, and he would have carried out a bucket of soapy water with a large sponge and a squee-gee, and he would have washed our bug-be-splattered, mud-streaked windshield and cleaned away all that distracting muck that was keeping us from seeing our way ahead.

A few days ago, I was reviewing a Vacation Bible School curriculum based on the story of Jonah and in the sales literature the publisher had written these words: “The Bible is a window that shows us God’s heart. In the stories, in the writings, and in the Gospels we see what God is like. The Bible reveals God to us, just like the windows in a car or in a building reveal what is going on outside.”

Isn’t that a great image for Holy Scripture: “The Bible is a window that shows us God’s heart.” Now I don’t know about you, but when I am driving in a car on a day like I described to you, a day when the windshield gets are splattered and messy with dead bugs and mud, I have a hard time looking beyond that cloudy window in front of me. I get distracted by the details on the window; I focus on them and not on the road out in front of me.

But so long as I focus on the window, the window is not serving its purpose. The window is not there to be the object of my attention; it is there to let me see what is happening on the other side. So it is with the Bible.

The Education for Ministry group that I have the privilege to mentor in this parish is made up of all first year students, so everyone in the group is working through study of the Old Testament. We are about six weeks into reading Genesis and Exodus now, and one of the things we’ve noticed is that the stories of the Patriarchs and the first Hebrews are not very pretty: Abraham is a liar; Jacob is a cheat; Joseph’s brothers are petulant bullies who nearly kill him; Moses whines a lot; and Aaron (Moses’ brother), although he is the first high priest, is the one who turns the people away from God and fashions the golden calf for them to worship! We are all, I think, finding it difficult to look past the peccadillos of the Patriarchs in order to see the God who is behind the stories; just like its difficult to look past the bugs and the mud on the windscreen!

And then today, along comes Daniel with his weird vision, the Palmist with his bloodthirsty delight in vengeance and revenge, and Jesus telling us that those of us who are fairly well off are destined to be hungry and in mourning! It’s hard to look past all of that understand where God is. As one commentator on Daniel noted, we who read this story in the Bible are “in the midst of bewildering events that affright and confuse.”

We find this all hard to accept and difficult to look through because we want the Bible to be clear! We want the Bible to be the answer book, to lay it all out for us in simple and easy-to-follow instructions; we want to be able to say, as our Sunday School children sang last week, “The B-I-B-L-E, that’s the book for me! I stand alone on the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!” We just want it to be clear! But the Bible doesn’t exist to be the object of our devotion; the Bible doesn’t exist to be regarded on its own and for itself. The Bible is a window through which God is reveals Godself to us and, like any window, its got some distracting stuff we have to look past.

It does so because it is book (several books, actually) full of human stories, and human stories are messy. So we end up with stories of people who are sometimes liars and cheaters; people who can sometimes whine and be unfaithful. We end up with stories of weird hallucinations and frightful dreams. We end up with poetry by someone who’s been hurt so badly that vengeance and revenge can look like a gift of God. We end up with troubling warnings that we might, probably will, face hunger and grief. How do we look past that to see, as Paul encouraged the Ephesians, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, so that we may know what is the hope to which God has called us?

Well, when we were on our drive through the countryside with our windshield spatted with bug goo and mud, we pulled into a gas station, and a mechanic came out and washed all of that away. Remember? Today is the day that we remember those who help clean away all of the distractions, the filling station attendants of the faith. Today we remember the saints who help to clear our vision of God. Broadly speaking, of course, the saints are all those who are baptized, who follow Jesus Christ, and who live their lives according to his teaching, which would include all of us here today. Church tradition, however, also uses the term more narrowly to refer to especially holy women and holy men who are heroes of the faith, who through lives of extraordinary virtue reveal the Presence of God to us, who clean that window through which we all look.

Cleaning a WindshieldThe saints whom we celebrate on this day (and the many who are given special days of individual recognition) were people who tried to live according to the Bible as they understood its teachings. Like us, they read it and encountered those troubling visions, those petulant patriarchs, those bloodthirsty psalms, and somehow looked past them and through them to see the God of faith, the God who Incarnate in Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” We extoll the virtues of those saint and we celebrate their lives and their witness because they help us to do the same. By their lives and their examples, they clean the windshield for us; they clean away the bug blood and the mud, so that we no longer focus on the window, but on the God the window shows us.

This is not to suggest that we should not study nor seek to understand the murkiness and cloudiness that we find on the window, the questionable and troublesome visions of Daniel, the lying and cheating of the Patriarchs, the bloodthirstiness of the Psalmist, or the petulant pettiness of the Prophets. Certainly, we should for we can learn thereby of the graciousness of the God who overlooked and overcame those faults, who regarded and redeemed those men and women! But following the example of the saints before us, we should not let ourselves be distracted by them so that we fail to see and appreciate that same God.

Today we give thanks for the saints, the filling station attendants of the faith, who help us clean our windshields.

O God, the King of saints, we praise and glorify your holy Name for all your servants who have finished their course in your faith and fear: for the blessed Virgin Mary; for the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs; and for all your other righteous servants, known to us and unknown; and we pray that, encouraged by their examples, aided by their prayers, and strengthened by their fellowship, we also may be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through the merits of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP 1979, Burial of the Dead, page 504)

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Open to God — Sermon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 25C – October 27, 2013

October 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, October 27, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 25C: Sirach 35:12-17; Psalm 84:1-6; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; and Luke 18:9-14. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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3rd Century Mural, Woman in Orans PositionWe are straying from our usual lectionary path today because it is one of our Children’s Sundays and we have some younger kids reading the lessons at the 10 a.m. service. So, instead of a long reading from the prophet Joel (RCL Year C, Track 1), we have a brief lesson from the Book of Ben Sira, which is sometimes called Ecclesiasticus. (RCL Year C, Track 2) We thought it would be easier for a child to read.

This is one of the books of the Apocrypha, those books recognized by the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches as canonical, but rejected by Protestants. Anglicans steer a middle course and accept them for moral teaching, but not as the basis for religious doctrine. The text is a late example of what is called “wisdom literature,” instruction in ethics and proper social behavior for young men, especially those likely to take a role in governance.

Ben Sira was written early in the 2nd Century before Christ by a Jewish scribe named Shimon ben Yeshua ben Eliezer ben Sira of Jerusalem. The Jewish nation was then under domination of the Seleucid Empire, a Greek-speaking kingdom centered in modern day Syria. Society in Jerusalem was very polarized: powerful vs. weak; rich vs. poor; Jew vs. Gentile. Ben Sira sought to guide his students through socially ambivalent times.

Among the topics he addresses is the proper forms and attitudes of worship. The Seleucid governors had involved themselves in the affairs of the Temple and, therefore, many people (especially the precursors of the Pharisees) believed that Temple worship was comprised and invalid. Furthermore, for many of the city’s wealthy participation in Temple rituals was a matter of show to advance themselves and their agenda; they offered mere lip service to God while oppressing the poor and helpless.

In this social milieu, Ben Sira offered instruction on the nature of worship, sacrifice, and prayer in Chapters 34 and 35 of the book. In Chapter 34 he describes worship that is not acceptable to God:

The Most High is not pleased with the offerings of the ungodly, nor for a multitude of sacrifices does he forgive sins. Like one who kills a son before his father’s eyes is the person who offers a sacrifice from the property of the poor. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a murderer. To take away a neighbor’s living is to commit murder; to deprive an employee of wages is to shed blood. When one builds and another tears down, what do they gain but hard work? When one prays and another curses, to whose voice will the Lord listen? If one washes after touching a corpse, and touches it again, what has been gained by washing? So if one fasts for his sins, and goes again and does the same things, who will listen to his prayer? And what has he gained by humbling himself? (Ben Sira 34:23-31)

He follows this up with the advice we heard in our reading today: “Be generous when you worship the Lord, and do not stint the first fruits of your hands. With every gift show a cheerful face, and dedicate your tithe with gladness. Give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford.” (Ben Sira 35:10-12)

Ben Sira’s wisdom would have been well known to the people of Jesus’ time. Portions of the book were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a nearly complete scroll was discovered at Masada, the Jewish fortress destroyed by the Romans in 73 AD. In addition, there are numerous quotations of the book in the Talmud, and the Anglican scholar Henry Chadwick (1920-2008) cogently argued that Jesus quoted or paraphrased it on several occasions, including in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

So when Jesus told the parable of two prayers, his original audience would have had Ben Sira’s advice as background; they would have known that Jesus was referring back to a concern about hypocritical worship, about worship that is merely for show, about worship that does not honor the commandments, a concern dating back many years. They would have known who Jesus was condemning, just like we do! They knew that Jesus was not talking about them, just like we know that Jesus is not talking about us! Thank God that we are not like the bad people who pray with self-righteousness and contempt for others . . . .

Oh . . . wait a minute! You see what Jesus has done? He’s trapped us! He’s tricked us into judging the Pharisee, to regarding him with contempt. And by judging the Pharisee we have become like the Pharisee; in order to get Jesus’ point we have to point to the Pharisee and his sin. By pointing to someone else, to “thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even . . . this tax collector,” and to their sins, the Pharisee condemns himself; by pointing to the Pharisee and his sin, we condemn ourselves.

Clever, sneaky preacher, that Jesus! How do we become more like the tax collector and less like the Pharisee? Ben Sira instructed his students to look worship with the eyes and understanding of God, with humility and without partiality.

So here’s an exercise . . . look at the other people all around you in church today. You know most of these people; some of them are in your family; some of them are your friends; you go to breakfast with some of them every Sunday. You may not know others; some are people you see here on Sunday but don’t otherwise socialize with; some may be people you don’t know at all. But about all of them, you do know two things. First, you know that God loves them; God loves every single person in this church today. God made them; God knows them; God loves them.

The second thing you know is that nobody in this church today is perfect. The religious way to say that is that every one of us is a sinner. Each one of us says and does things that hurt others; each one of us says and does things that hurt ourselves; each one of us says and does things that hurt God. Sometimes we do that intentionally; more often we do it negligently. But the simple truth is, whatever the reason for it may be, that we do it.

And here’s a third thing you know, and this you know about yourself . . . that the two things you know about all these people around you in church are also true of you. These are the two central truths of the Christian faith: that we are sinners and that God loves us anyway.

Now I’d like to ask you all to stand, as you may be able.

Raise your right hand, palm cupped up. Receive in that hand the truth that God loves you, that God loves all of us. Now raise your left hand, palm cupped up. Offer from that hand to God the truth that you are not perfect, that you are a sinner. See how your right hand is still holding the first truth; the second doesn’t change it at all. Not about you, not about anyone!

This, by the way, is called the orans position, the ancient position of prayer, standing with one’s hands up-raised, open to God; it has a rich tradition in Jewish and Christian practice, one’s body representing the spirit open to God’s grace.

The Pharisee in the parable failed to be fully open, fully honest with God or with himself. He was willing to raise the one hand to receive God’s blessing, but was unwilling to raise the other, unwilling to admit that he was imperfect, that he was like the thieves, rogues, adulterers, and tax collectors, that he was like us.

Jesus, clever, sneaky preacher that he is, tricks us into acknowledging that we are like the Pharisee. Like Ben Sira before him, he encourages us to place ourselves fully before God, fully open to God, praying with the tax collector, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

Amen.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

As Water to Stone — Sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24C – October 20, 2013

October 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, October 20, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 24C: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; and Luke 18:1-8. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Water on Stone“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will . . . watch over [the house of Israel and the house of Judah] to build and to plant. * * * I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Our lesson from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah today comes from a section of that book which scholars call “the Little Book of Consolation” or “the Book of Comfort;” it comprises chapters 30-33 of Jeremiah and is thought to be the work of an editor or group of editors generally referred to as “the Deuteronomist” because it is similar in perspective to the Book of Deuteronomy.

In it Jeremiah’s message to the post-exilic community, a message of hope and restoration, appears to have been re-organized theologically around the idea of restoration and obedience to the Torah. It is a theological reflection upon the fact that, at a time in Israel’s history when God’s People faced their darkest hour since being slaves in Egypt, God’s word to them was one of hope for the future. It voices a basic recognition that God is willing to work with humanity even in the face of its sinful rejection of God. It asserts that God’s choice for sinners is nothing short of forgiveness; “I will forgive,” says God, “with no prerequisites and no preconditions.” God’s forgiveness creates newness in the lives of people; it creates a future which will be enough different from the past that even the hearts of God’s People will be transformed.

Earlier Jeremiah had said, “The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts . . . .” (17:1) Now in the Book of Comfort, as edited by the Deuteronomist, the Prophet asserts that God will write his instruction, his law, his torah on the human heart with his own finger. So the writing involves an erasure as well: where sin was once written, now God’s own will and desires will be written — on each human heart.

This is a socially radical assertion.

If God’s covenant is written on each heart, all members of the community will stand on equal ground. If God’s covenant is written on each heart, all will be equal in righteousness. It will have a leveling effect, eliminating doubt about who can properly be called “Israel.” No longer will it matter whose ancestors stood at Sinai. The marker of the covenant binding the community together will be internal, an invisible sign that cannot be questioned by genealogy or undermined with accusations of impurity. No one can claim the authority to teach the other because each heart has God’s torah inscribed on it.

How is this going to happen?

Jesus gives us a clue in the parable told in this morning’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, parable about not losing heart.

In this reading, Jesus tells the store of a woman who demands justice; he doesn’t tell us the particulars of her case. We do not know her grievance nor what redress she believes should be hers; those details are not important to Jesus’ story. What is important is only that she has a legitimate complaint and seeks some form of amends.
However, her just cause is thwarted by an unjust judge who will not grant her the judgment. So every day she comes to the court and every day makes her plea: “Grant me justice against my opponent.” Finally, she wears down the unjust judge and he grants her that to which she is entitled. In commenting upon that eventual conclusion, Jesus asks, “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.”

This passage is usually interpreted to mean that we should persistently petition God for the things we want. If we pester God enough, goes this interpretation, we’ll receive whatever it is we are praying for. So there’s the rich man harassing God for greater wealth. There’s the young woman worrying God for a spouse. There’s the cancer patient insisting that God should intervene and heal him. If we are persistent, if we just wear God down, will God fix everything.

Is this really how God works? Is this really what Jesus meant by telling this parable?

If we believe that if we just ask enough, God will make us rich, how does real poverty in our midst answer that belief? If we believe that if we just ask enough, God will give us the desires of our hearts, what does it say when our hearts are broken? If we believe that God will heal our bodies if we only ask enough, what does it mean when our bodies or our loved ones’ bodies waste away?

Do we really believe that is how God works? That in prayer as in business, the squeaky wheel gets the grease?

If you really believe that is what Jesus telling this parable is saying, then I would ask you to reconsider and, especially, to take into account two things. First, Jesus’ assurance that God “will quickly grant justice” where it is warranted and needed. Second, that in his concluding commentary Jesus asks another much more long term question: “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

I believe that Jesus is saying something about the transformation of human hearts, hearts often described in the Hebrew Scriptures as “hearts of stone” (Ezekiel 11:19; 36:26) or as “hardened” (1 Sam. 6:6; Ps. 95:8; Isa. 63:17). The instrument of that transformation is prayer.

Why do we pray? What is the ultimate goal? Are we, as Oswald Chambers once caricatured most prayer, simply “throw[ing] our petitions at [God’s] throne and dictat[ing] to Him what we want Him to do?” Clearly not!

Through prayer we rein in our overactive, worry-prone, and control-oriented minds. Through prayer we remind ourselves of God’s sovereignty. Through prayer we align ourselves with the Spirit, allowing the Advocate to counsel us. Through prayer we eventually conform our mind to His mind – our will to his will.

One definition of prayer says that it “is the divinely appointed means through which we commune with the living God and advance God’s kingdom.” A life lived in prayer creates a relationship with God which conforms our minds to God’s. Through prayer our hearts are aligned with God’s, so that our lives are lived with the unconditional love which characterizes God’s very self. The more we pray, the more we live into God’s own life.

The Roman poet Ovid, who lived at the time of Christ, wrote “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” The Chinese philosopher Lao Tse wrote that water is patient and takes its time, so when it does carve through stone, the marks it leaves are smooth and natural. “In this world,” he wrote, “there is nothing softer or thinner than water. But to compel the hard and unyielding, it has no equal. That the weak overcomes the strong, that the hard gives way to the gentle — this everyone knows.”

Jesus is making this same point in the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge. As water is to stone, so prayer is to the human heart.

It is not that our persistent prayer wears down the Judge: we are assured that “he will quickly grant justice.” No, the persistent prayer is like water, the waters of grace, wearing down our harden hearts; through our prayers, conforming our wills to God’s will, our minds to God’s mind, God will remove from our bodies the hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh (Ezek. 36:6), hearts on which God’s torah will be written.

Let us pray:

Grant, Almighty God, that through your grace, with our constant prayer, your Word may be so engraved on the tablets of our hearts, that our wills may be conformed to your will, our minds to your mind, that we may produce the fruit of good living, to the honor and praise of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

To Boldly Go: Sermon for a Celebration of Ministry – St. Paul’s, Manhattan, Kansas – October 16, 2013

October 16, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on October 16, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan, Kansas, where Fr. Funston’s son, the Rev. A. Patrick K. Funston is rector. Fr. Patrick was installed as rector, and the appointment of the Rev. Sandra Horton-Smith as Deacon in the parish was also celebrated.

(The Episcopal Church sanctoral lectionary for the Feast of Hugh Latimer & Nicholas Ridley, bishops and martyrs: Zephaniah 3:1-5; Psalm 142; 1 Corinthians 3:9-14; and John 15:20-16:1.)

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Ridley and LatimerI bring you greetings from the people of St. Paul’s Parish, Medina, Ohio, where I am privileged to serve as rector. Nearly all the active members of our congregation know and respect Patrick, and have asked me to convey their congratulations to him and to you, together with the assurance of their prayers, as you continue together in a new ministry only recently begun. Of course, none of them know Sandy, but we offer our greetings and prayers for her diaconal ministry among you, as well.

I suppose my son asked me to preach this evening because he believes that in 40 years of church leadership including 23 years in ordained ministry as a deacon, curate, associate rector, and now rector in four dioceses, I may have picked up one or two bits of useful information to pass along. I shall strive, Fr. Funston, to make it so.

Sandy, I have never been a vocational deacon and I have had only a little experience working with deacons in the course of my ministry; nonetheless, it is my hope there may be something in what I have to say that will be of use to you.

We are gathered this evening on the feast of two Anglican martyrs — Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer. They were bishops of the reformed Church of England put to death, by being burned at the stake, during the short reign and attempted Roman Catholic restoration of Queen Mary I, eldest daughter of Henry VIII. During her less-than-six years on the English throne, nearly 300 Protestants were killed, including these two bishops, so she is known to history as “Bloody Mary.”

The bishops’ martyrdom is most notable for the probably apocryphal story that Latimer, as the fires were lighted beneath them, reached to Ridley, took him by the hand and said, “Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man, for we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.”

I’ll skip the other details of Latimer’s and Ridley’s lives and ministries; I bring them up really only to explain the otherwise incomprehensible choices of lessons for this service; one really must stretch to find anything remotely enlightening about parish ministry in Zephaniah’s “soiled, defiled, oppressing city” filled with faithless people and profane priests, or in the Psalmist’s languishing spirit and loud supplications. There may be (indeed there will be) times when both priest and people may feel like the Psalmist in the course of a pastorate (as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, the work of ministry will be tested by fire), but dwelling on that hardly seems a constructive way to begin the relationship.

I must admit that I was tempted to use the bishop’s martyrdom as a metaphor for parish ministry, but thought better of it; it would be an incomplete metaphor, at best. I think I’ve found a much better metaphor, but before I get to it, I want to digress for a moment and tell you something about our experience, my wife’s and mine, in raising our son.

When Patrick was in junior high school and high school, his band and orchestra directors said to us, “Your son is a talented musician. He could have a great career in music.”

“Yes!” we replied, “Encourage him in that!”

When he was in high school and college, his mathematics instructors said to us, “Your son is a natural mathematician. He could have a great career as a professor or a theoretician.”

“Yes!” we replied, “Encourage him in that!”

When he decided to major in business, we heard from his fellow students and his professors that he had a great mind for economics and finances, and could make millions as a financial planner.

“Yes!” we said, “Encourage that!”

Earlier in his life, from about the age of 14 on, when he was active as an acolyte, and in youth group, and in the diocesan peer ministry program, people would come to us and say, “Patrick has all the skills and the personality to be a wonderful priest.”

“No!” we cried, “Please do not encourage him that way!”

It’s not that we didn’t want Patrick to become a priest; we’re delighted that he has found his calling amongst the clergy of the church and that he has been called to be Rector in this parish. However, his becoming a priest or Sandy’s becoming a deacon is not something we, any of us, including them, have any business “wanting.” It isn’t something that we or anyone should be “encouraging.” Ordained ministry is something to be discerned and what it is to be discerned is whether the potential priest or deacon can be anything else.

Every potential clergy person is asked, over and over again, “Why do you want to be clergy?” And every priest and deacon here tonight has answered that question. We may have phrased the answer differently, but for each of us it is the same. It’s not that the person called to the diaconate wants to be a deacon; it’s that she must be a deacon! It’s not that the person called to priesthood wants to be a priest; it’s that he must be a priest!

Presbyterian pastor and author Frederick Buechner spoke for us all when he answered the question in his book, The Alphabet of Grace:

“I hear you are entering the ministry,” the woman said down the long table meaning no real harm. “Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?” And the answer that she could not have heard even if I had given it was that it was not an idea at all, neither my own nor anyone else’s. It was a lump in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring of the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and if I could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death. (Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, pp. 109-110)

Buechner’s last sentence does call to mind the martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley and so many others: “I will condemn you to death.” As a description of the call to parish ministry it is both terrifying and terrific!

The Christ we follow, the Christ we proclaim, the Christ who said, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you,” does call us, does lead us to die! To die to selfishness, to die to ego. But through that death he leads us to life. We die to self to uncover what the Quakers call, “that of God within” or the “inner Teacher” … the True Self. Your call, Patrick, to priesthood and yours, Sandy, to the diaconate … our call to parish ministry is a call to continue dying to self and, as a result, to continue becoming truly alive.

It is, as any priest or deacon here will tell you, a painful process. To be clergy in Christ’s church is, as Paul made quite clear in his letters to the congregations in Ephesus and Rome, a gift; it is a wonderful, precious, costly, and painful gift. It will take you into the deepest intimacy with God’s people, with your people. At times you will be with them in the midst of their worst nightmares – death and divorce, devastating illness and the depths of despair. At times, you will feel put-upon and misused. At times, you will feel left out and neglected. At times, there will be conflict, and it will seem like it is consuming you alive. At times, it may seem that, a bit like Latimer and Ridley, you are being burned at the stake, because people will hurt you, sometimes intentionally and spitefully, sometimes negligently, often simply because they are in pain.

But as I said a moment ago, that would be an incomplete metaphor because the source of that pain is also the source of the most exquisite joy, when that same intimacy will privilege you with sharing God’s people’s, your people’s happiest and most blessed moments – when two people commit themselves to one another for life, when their children are born, when they get that long-sought promotion, when their kids graduate with honors, when children marry, when grandchildren are born, when these people among whom and with whom you minister know themselves to be God’s beloved.

Cherish those intimate moments — both the painful and the joyful — because they are moments of grace. Each of them is unique; never fall into the black hole of thinking you’ve “been there, done that.” There may have been similar moments . . . but that couple has never been married before and never will be again, that baby has never been born or baptized before and never will be again, that teenager has never graduated from high school before and never will again, that man has never died before and never will again. Each intimate moment, painful or joyful, is unique and no one has ever been there before. Each unique intimate moment, painful or joyful, is bursting with the promise and potential of God’s grace!

Do not fear those moments of graceful intimacy; cherish them because it is in them that you and the people of St. Paul’s Parish will die to self and become truly alive, to continue growing in boldness and righteousness, in faithfulness and patience, in wisdom and even holiness. It is in those moments when we are in the presence of God, when we stand before the throne of grace.

I think you know, Patrick, that one of my favorite verses of Scripture is from the Letter to Hebrews: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” (Heb. 4:16 KJV) So . . . if I say to you that our mission in parish ministry is to boldly go into those unique moments of grace where no one has gone before, you probably know that my metaphor for parish ministry is “the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.”

I read somewhere recently that one can consider oneself an unqualified success as a parent if you have raised your child to be a Star Trek fan; by that measure, Patrick’s mother and I were successful.

Star Trek Uniform SocksIn the original Star Trek series, the crew’s uniforms were color coded: gold uniforms were command; red uniforms were engineering and security; and blue uniforms were science and medical. Parish ministry entails all three. So, Patrick, I have a little gift for you — a set of three pairs of official Star Trek color-coded uniform socks to remind you of these aspects of pastoral ministry.

Gold — command: Patrick, the canons of your diocese (with which, you may recall, I have some familiarity) provide that as rector, “by virtue of such office, [you have] the powers and duties conferred by the General Canons of the Church, and in this connection shall exercise pastoral oversight of all guilds and societies within the parish, and [you are] entitled to speak and vote on all questions before these bodies.” (Canon IV.6, Diocese of Kansas) The canons provide that you are the chair person of the vestry and that you not only chair the annual meeting of the parish, you are also the final arbiter of who may vote at the meeting.

That’s a good deal of command authority and it should not be taken lightly. Remember two things about it. First, that you share it with others. The canons specify that the vestry “shall share with the Rector a concern and responsibility for the mission, ministry, and spiritual life of the parish.” (Canon IV.5.6(a)) But not only the vestry, all the good people this parish are your co-workers. As our catechism makes clear, “the ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons;” every single baptized person, every member of this church has a ministry. The Rector does not do it alone, nor should he.

You remember on Star Trek: TOS, Captain Kirk went on every away mission. That’s a model of poor leadership; the captain should not have commanded, or even been a part of, every away team. Trust the rest of the crew — the vestry, the staff, volunteers, all the people of the parish — to handle things.

Remember Paul’s opening words to the Corinthians in this evening’s epistle: “We are God’s servants, working together . . . .” You and the vestry and people of this congregation are God’s servants, working together. You as the Rector don’t have to do it all — you do have to know what is happening; you have to be in the information loop and be privy to all the information pertinent to the running of the church and to ministering with and among its members, but you don’t have do it all!

I suspect that if Jesus were to critique Kirk’s style of leadership, he might say something along the lines of “It will not be so among you; whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.” (Matt. 20:26) That is the second thing to remember about command authority in the church. Be like the 6th Century pope St. Gregory the Great and remember that as a leader in the church you are the “servant of the servants of God.”

The red uniforms were for those doing engineering and security, and there is a lot of that in parish ministry. Much of it, knowing where the boilers are and how they work, knowing where the circuit breakers and fuses are, knowing how to fix a leaky faucet or a squeaky hinge or a broken kneeler . . . much of it falls into the category of “things they didn’t teach us in seminary.” But there is also a lot of engineering and security that they did teach us.

The ministry of word and sacrament are the engineering and security jobs of the parish priest; preaching God’s word and celebrating God’s Sacraments, for which seminary did prepare us. They are central to any priest’s ministry, and to do them well takes time and it takes prayer.

Preparing a sermon can easily consume 10-15 hours per week. Similarly, planning liturgies, not only for regular Sunday services, but for weddings, funerals, holidays, and other special events takes time and care. Many people are willing to say their clergy should put in this kind of time, but the only way the rector can have this time is if other demands are otherwise taken care of. I have admonished Patrick not to be Captain Kirk going on every away mission. So I admonish you, the people of St. Paul’s Parish, that you must not expect him to make every pastoral visit, oversee every parish activity, make every administrative decision. As St. Paul wrote the Ephesians, each member of the church is given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift and each member must work to properly promoting the body’s growth. I encourage you to claim the shared ministry of the whole people of God and join with your rector and your deacons in providing pastoral care to one another, in managing parish activities, and in administrative governance.

Patrick, this obligation of the congregation means that you must answer it with a similar commitment. Just like Engineer Scott was always adjusting the “warp coils” and tuning the “dilithium crystals” (whatever those were), you must take time in prayer adjusting your spirit and tuning your psyche. Take the time your congregation gives you to prepare prayerfully for these “red uniform” ministries — preaching and sacramental celebration. Be like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in TNG; take private time in your “ready room;” spend time in conversation with God every day. Other things can wait or someone else can do them . . . but no one else can listen to God for you. You must spend your own time in prayer.

Sandy, I would say the same thing to you. Your engineering and security ministry will be different from Patrick’s, obviously. As a deacon, you are (I’m sure) familiar with the description of the role of the deacon as bringing the world’s needs to the attention of the church and taking the church’s ministry into service in the world. Deacons exemplify Christian discipleship, nurture others in their relationship to God, and lead church people to respond to the needs of the most needy, neglected, and marginalized of the world. Those are definitely “red uniform” tasks, and they too can only be done well with careful and prayerful preparation.

Prayer is also the “red uniform” ministry of whole congregation. The early 19th Century American Presbyterian preacher and seminary professor Gardiner Spring wrote in his book The Power of the Pulpit:

[H]ow unspeakably precious the thought to all who labor in this great work, whether in youthful, or riper years, that they are … habitually remembered in the prayers of the churches! Let the thought sink deep into the heart of every church, that their minister will be very much such a minister as their prayers may make him. If nothing short of Omnipotent grace can make a Christian, nothing less than this can make a faithful and successful minister of the Gospel!

We might express this thought differently today, but Gardiner’s point remains valid. Your prayers, good people, even more than their own, are the wellspring from which flows the water of God’s grace on which Patrick’s ministry as priest and Sandy’s as a deacon so much depend. If you wish their ministries to bear good fruit, do not forget to pray for them, and let them know that you are doing so!

Star Trek:TOS CrewWhich brings us, at last, to the blue uniforms, the science and medical corps of the star ship. Mr. Spock the Science officer and Doctor “Bones” McCoy always wore blue. One of the ancient terms that we still use for pastoral ministry is “the cure of souls,” the word “cure” having pretty much the same meaning as it has in medicine. Broadly speaking, this ministry is the care, protection, and oversight of the nourishment and spiritual well-being of the souls committed to the pastor’s care; it may be shared with others, with deacons or with lay ministers, but it is truly the ministry of the parish priest. It is in this “blue shirt” ministry that those wonderful, painful, joyful, intimate moments of grace that I spoke of earlier will happen.

It is customary at these services to ask the clergy about to be installed to stand for an admonition or a charge, but I’m not going to do that this evening. We aren’t here celebrating only the installation of the rector, or only the new ministry of these two clergy; we are celebrating the whole ministry of all the People of God in this parish. So I have a charge for all of you.

I know you expect me to say something like “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before,” but that would just be too hokey, don’t you think?

No, I have rather more practical and down-to-earth advice.

Give each other time; give one another your attention; support one another with your prayers; respect yourselves and each other; and, most importantly, love one another. (Members of St. Paul’s, I can’t underscore the last one enough. You expect your clergy to remember your birthdays and your wedding anniversaries, to thank you when you perform some volunteer service, to greet you pleasantly when they see you at the grocery store. That’s only natural, and it’s right and proper that you do so. But, please, do the same for them! It is the most important thing the people of a parish can do for their clergy. Love Patrick and Sandy, their spouses and their families. Invite them into your homes. Remember their birthdays and anniversaries. Remember to say, “Thank you” once in a while. Believe me: it really is such little things that make all the difference.)

And, again, remember Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “We are God’s servants, working together.” So together represent Christ, bear witness to him wherever you may be and, according to the gifts given to each of you, carry on his work of reconciliation in the world.

If you do these things, you shall, by God’s grace, like Ridley and Latimer, light such a candle in Kansas, as, I trust, will never be put out.

Make it so! Amen!

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Word of God Is Not Chained: Adapt! – Sermon for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23C – October 13, 2013

October 13, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, October 13, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 23C: Jeremiah 29:1,4-7; Psalm 66:1-11; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; and Luke 17:11-19. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Adapt in DictionaryHow do we maintain our established convictions and carry our old confessions into new, uncertain, and sometimes unsettling circumstances? It’s an unavoidable question, one which we answer all the time, even if we aren’t aware that we are doing so. It is the question to which both our Old Testament lesson and our reading from the Pastoral Epistles offer answers and, interestingly but not surprisingly (this is, after all, the Bible), the answers are contradictory.

First, we have the prophet Jeremiah writing to the exiles taken away by the Babylonians. If you were here last week, you remember that early in the 6th Century before Christ, the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had invaded Judah, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and carted away (as Jeremiah puts it) “the elders, the priests, and the prophets,” in other words the political and religious leaders of the nation.

Now Jeremiah had absolutely no authority to write to them; he was not an official prophet; he was not a part of the establishment. Jeremiah was from a village called Anathoth in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin. He was an illiterate, small-town boy who had come to the city hoping to make it big as a prophet but things hadn’t turned out well. He had tried preaching in the courtyard of the Temple, but “when Jeremiah had finished speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak to all the people, then the priests and the prophets and all the people laid hold of him, saying, ‘You shall die!'” (Jer. 26:8) Later, when he attempts preaching again, the city “officials were enraged at Jeremiah, and they beat him and imprisoned him in the house of the secretary Jonathan, for it had been made a prison. Thus Jeremiah was put in the cistern house, in the cells, and remained there many days.” (Jer. 37:5-6) Apparently, he attracted only one follower, a scribe named Baruch who recorded his sermons, wrote down his story, and took his dictation. (See Jer. 36)

Nonetheless, Jeremiah takes it upon himself to write a letter to the exiles. Last week we recited Psalm 137 and you will recall that it was not a particular pleasant piece of literature; it voiced the sorrow and anger of a people who wanted revenge. These would not have been people very open to getting advice from an upstart, small-town prophet, especially if that advice was to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters….” And even more disturbing would have been his admonition to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf!” Not advice the original exiles would have been likely to want to hear.

But here’s the deal — Jeremiah wasn’t writing to the original exiles. Jeremiah was writing to their children — not children born in captivity, but rather those who had been taken to Babylonia as children or as youths. He is writing to the group sociologists call “the 1.5 generation,” those who emigrated as adolescents or slightly older children; they are the ones who would be getting married and building houses. In our society today, we might call them “the DREAMers.” Studies have shown that such individuals will identify with both their country of origin and the country in which they grow up. They are often bilingual and easily assimilate into the culture of their new country while continuing many of the cultural traditions of the old; in a very real sense they are bi-cultural. It is to this group that Jeremiah writes.

And what Jeremiah writes is something fundamentally new to the Jewish religion. It’s also a complete change of gears for Jeremiah. Initially, he had been something of a firebrand, uttering God’s judgments against the people of Jerusalem, their priests and their leaders, for all their wickedness in forsaking God. (Jer. 1:16) Now he radically changes his message; where he had preached punishment, he offers words of hope; where he had preached destruction, he offers a way forward. In the process of doing so, he introduces a completely new understanding of God’s presence with God’s people always and everywhere.

In the ancient Near East, there was generally a belief that there were many gods. Even the Jews believed this; they were not yet what we would call “monotheists.” Striclty speaking, they were “monolatrous,” i.e. they worshipped one God, but acknowledged that there were others. The people of that world believed that different gods had different physical domains. When one was in the Holy Land, in Israel or Judah, Yahweh was supreme. When you traveled to another land, you entered to another god’s or group of gods’ domain. Most nations had a central temple in which the local deity or deities were believed to live. The Jerusalem played this role for the worshippers of Yahweh; exiled in Babylon, they found the temples of other gods. This was not a land where you worshipped Yahweh; remember Psalm 137’s plea of grief: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song upon an alien soil?” But along comes Jeremiah and tells them to do exactly that! “Pray to the LORD on behalf [of the city where you now live], for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

How do we carry old convictions and confessions into new, uncertain, and sometimes unsettling settings? Jeremiah says to adapt, to assimilate, to build houses, take spouses, have children, but be bi-cultural; do not adopt the religious ways of the culture in which you live. Yahweh is not limited to the lands of Israel and Judah. Jeremiah encourages his readers to accept their role as immigrants in a foreign land while remaining true to the ethical and religious teachings of their heritage. He might have used St. Paul’s words from the Second Letter to Timothy: “The word of God is not chained.” Adapt, that’s what he is saying: “You don’t have the Temple anymore. You can’t offer the sacrifices anymore. You can’t do the Temple liturgy. But you still have the day-by-day rules of living set out in the Law of Moses. You still have the ethical teachings of the prophets. Stick to the ethical teachings while letting go of the Temple rituals; apply the Law and the Prophets in your new circumstances. Adapt!” In a very real sense, we could argue that in Jeremiah’s letter to the 1.5 generation of the Babylonian Exile we see the laying of the foundation of the rabbinic Judaism of Jesus’ time, the rabbinic Judaism that would survive the last destruction of the Temple 600 years later, the rabbinic Judaism with which we are familiar today.

Although Jeremiah might have used St. Paul’s words, “The word of God is not chained,” St. Paul’s message in writing those words was a very different one! Instead of counseling Timothy and his congregation to adapt, Paul is saying, “Don’t change anything!” Warn the congregation, he admonishes Timothy, “that they are to avoid wrangling over words.” They are to hold onto the established conventions; they are to preserve the received tradition; they are to avoid changing any practices or adopting new ideas. St. Paul’s advice is the complete reversal of Jeremiah’s!

And yet, he writes paints this wonderful picture for us, “The word of God is not chained.” He gives us this vision of Truth that is not bound to a historical moment, that is not written once and chiseled in stone or engraved on golden tablets, that is living and ever new. There is a great hymn on this theme that I might have selected for today (if I’d thought about it several weeks ago when I did the music schedule for the end of the year). Written by George Rawson in 1835 and in our hymnal at No. 629, the first two stanzas are these:

We limit not the truth of God
To our poor reach of mind,
By notions of our day and sect,
Crude, partial and confined.
Now let a new and better hope
Within our hearts be stirred:
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
To break forth from His Word.

Who dares to bind by his dull sense
The oracles of heaven,
For all the nations, tongues and climes
And all the ages given!
The universe how much unknown!
That ocean unexplored!
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
To break forth from His Word.

When Jeremiah wrote to the exiles in Babylon and essentially told them that God’s Presence was not limited to Israel or Judah, when he introduced an understanding of God’s protective love as with them always and everywhere, he opened up to them and to us the possibility that God’s love and care not only extends to other lands … but to other people, as well. Jeremiah specifically called upon them to seek the welfare of the city where you have been sent, to pray to the Lord on behalf of the very people who had taken them captive for in their captors’ welfare they would find their own. God’s love is there for everyone in every place at all times, even those people we might not prefer.

And so it is that our gospel this Sunday features the ultimate outsider, a Samaritan leper, as hero. No one could be more hated than a Samaritan in Israel, yet in Luke’s story Jesus doesn’t bother to ask where any of the lepers are from and only when he returns to give thanks is it made clear to us that the only one who demonstrates gratitude is a Samaritan. God’s love is there for everyone in every place at all times, even those people we might not prefer.

How do we carry old convictions and confessions into new, uncertain, and sometimes unsettling settings? We adapt, because “the word of God is not chained.” It is not limited to one country; it is not limited to one people; it is not limited to one religion; it is not limited in time or space; it is not limited by our crude, partial, and confined notions and ideas. The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from the Word! Thanks be to God!

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

By the Rivers of Babylon – Sermon for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 22C – October 6, 2013

October 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, October 6, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 22C: Lamentations 1:1-6; Psalm 137; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; and Luke 17:5-10. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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You may recognize this reggae version of a portion of Psalm 137, the psalm we recited this morning, combined with a paraphrase of verse 14 of Psalm 19. It was originally done by the Melodians in 1969, but the version I played was recorded by Boney M, a German Caribbean group, in 1978 and claimed the Number 1 spot on the European pop charts that year. It’s quite a danceable little tune; it puts a bounce in your step which seems quite at odds with Psalm 137’s words of lament and with the violent imprecation with which the psalm concludes. I’ll return to this musical version in a moment, but first let’s take a closer look at this psalm and our other lessons today.

Paul begins his letter to the young bishop, Timothy, whom he has nurtured in the faith, with these words: “I am grateful to God — whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did . . . .” I’m glad that Paul was able to do so, to worship with a clear conscience, because I think he was wrong about his ancestors! His ancestors were the ones who wrote the psalm we recited just before Paul’s letter was read, the psalm that ends with these words:

Remember the day of Jerusalem, O Lord, against the people of Edom, *
who said, “Down with it! down with it! even to the ground!”
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, *
happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, *
and dashes them against the rock!
(Ps 137:7-9)

I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time worshiping with a clear conscience after reciting such words and, I suspect, so did the ancient Jews, even though those awful words may have been as heart-breakingly genuine, as horrifically honest as possible.

There is academic debate about the authorship of this letter; many scholars believe that it was not written by Paul even though it purports to be his personal farewell address, “Paul modeling how to die” as one commentator puts it. So we don’t really know when or why this letter was written, or by whom (but we’ll call the author “Paul” anyway). We know that Timothy was in tears: “Recalling your tears,” writes Paul, “I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy.” Presumably, Timothy is distraught over Paul’s imprisonment and probable impending execution. Paul’s advice to Timothy is to buck up! “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” Please keep this advice (and the happy, danceable music to which the Melodians and Boney M set Psalm 137) in mind as we turn to the other lessons of the day.

Lessons like the reading from Luke’s Gospel in which Jesus admonishes his followers (specifically the Apostles, but also us), “When you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'” Bill Loader, an Australian theologian whose work and words I rather like, says this admonition is a slap in the face to the established order:

It deconstructs hierarchy [and] debunks the idea that we achieve value by achieving the good, as though we deserve a bonus for being decent, caring human beings. It does not let us play the game. We can’t claim: you ought to love me, because look at how good I am! Look at what I have done! The passage is probably deliberately offensive in flooring aspirations to human worth based on achievement capital. It is annoying and frustrating, and even seems mean. It gives us no credit. (First Thoughts)

Jesus’ comment subverts any system that bases value on achievement; very simply, Jesus is saying that we are valued by God (and thus should value one another), not because of what we achieve, but because of who we are! Paul’s admonition to Timothy to buck up because we have been given “a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” is grounded in the assurance of Jesus that we are loved by God not because we have accomplished anything, but simply because of who we are.

The way Jesus (who is, remember, the incarnation of God) approaches human dignity and value is hugely comforting in a world where the poor are exploited and where anger explodes in violence and terror which disregards human life, in the very world of Psalm 137 and its cry for vengeance, its imprecation that someone will ” take [Babylon’s] little ones and dash them against the rock!”

So what was the world of Psalm 137? It was the world of the Babylonian exile, the world of the destruction of Jerusalem, the world of the demolition of the Temple, the very heart and soul of the Jewish people. The year was 587 B.C.E. The armies of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, aided and cheered on by the Edomites (ancestral enemies of the Jews, supposedly descended from Jacob’s brother Esau) invaded the southern kingdom of Judah. (The northern kingdom of Israel had already been destroyed by the Assyrians 150 years or so before.) The Babylonians took possession of Jerusalem, raping, pillaging, and slaughtering with abandon. They seized the priests and the scribes, the king and the nobles, the wealthy leaders and their accountants, and took them away to Babylon. For those left behind, the economy quickly collapsed, food became scarce, water became foul, the daily life ceased to make sense. Order was replaced by chaos. Jerusalem became a wasteland. The Book of Lamentations describes the scene:

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
. . . .
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
. . . .
Her foes have become the masters,
her enemies prosper;
. . . .
her children have gone away,
captives before the foe.
(Lamentations 1:1,5)

The psalmist, speaking for those who have suffered through this desolation, curses those who have caused it. The psalm’s cries of deep sorrow (“We wept; we could not sing!”) and the dreams of horrible acts of vengeance (“Happy the one who murders their infants!”) are cathartic; they are a means of working through and overcoming the intense hurt of defeat and exile. By voicing anger to God, the exiles cleanse themselves of violent emotion, but they also give themselves a reason to persist.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, Boston, 2006), psychologist Viktor Frankl described his own experience in the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust and the lessons he and his fellow inmates learned about spiritual survival. Among those learnings was the need for a goal: “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future,” (p. 73) even if that future is one of vengeance. Without a goal, the concentration camp prisoners ceased to live for the future; indeed, they ceased to live at all, they simply decayed. “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear with almost any ‘how'” wrote Frankl. (p. 76) Their anger and dreams of revenge supplied the exiles with the why, the goal, the reason for them to survive. The provocative and hyperbolic language of the psalm expresses the horror and outrage the exiles were experiencing, and describes a future for which they could live. That it is a horrific future does not deprive it of its spiritually supportive power.

In their defense, we should note that “dashing babies” was a common practice of warfare in the international community of the exiles’ time. In the Second Book of Kings, for example, Elisha weeps in the presence of a foreign general who asks why the man of God is crying, and Elisha answers: “Because I know the evil that you will do to the people of Israel; you will set [Israel’s] fortresses on fire, you will kill their young men with the sword, dash in pieces their little ones, and rip up their pregnant women.” (2 Kgs.8:12) Babylonian armies are known to have killed babies, raped women, and blinded some their war prisoners. The Babylonians committed terrible atrocities against the people Judah so, in their dreams of retribution, they cried out to God for proportional retribution. There is, however, no evidence that the exiles ever followed through on their bloodthirsty dreams of revenge.

Psalm 137 “tells it like it is;” anger, vengeance, hatred, rage, pain and suffering are a human reality. The people of Judah believed that everything they had hoped for and everything they relied upon, their own country, their sacred priesthood, the Davidic kingdom, and the Jerusalem temple had been taken away by the bloodthirsty Babylonians. We know that faith becomes compromised when hopes of ease and comfort and success are snatched away by economic chaos, by terrorism, by personal health problems, by hunger, or by the dysfunction (or non-function) of government. Bad things happen and people react. Many, I am sure, have been guilty of extremes of thought like those voiced by the psalmist. Have you never wished someone dead, even in unspoken your thoughts? I confess that I have. Have you never told someone (even if only under your breath) to “Go to Hell”? I have! In today’s culture, that may be more acceptable than threatening to “dash babies,” but theologically speaking, it voices a much stronger sentiment than the psalm. We and our world are more like the exiles and theirs than we know or want to admit.

This is how this psalm, this awful, horrific psalm, speaks both to and for us. The Babylonians may not have attacked us, but we live in a world at least as violent as that of the exiles. Since 1900, there have been 232 wars; more than 96 million people have been killed in those wars, and it is an inescapable fact of modern history that the same barbarism described in Psalm 137 or the Book of Lamentations or the Second Book of Kings occurred in many of those wars and still occurs today. One need only think of the ethnic cleansing episodes in the former Yugoslavia, the civil war in Rwanda, and the almost daily atrocities currently happening in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Myanmar, and elsewhere.

Abandoned Train Station, Detroit, MIWe live in a country where there are cities once full of people now sitting lonely: we sit here today less than 200 miles by turnpike from Detroit, where the picture on the cover of our bulletin was taken, a city which has been described as looking as if it had been bombed in a war! Just yesterday, Salon reported that in the United States there are 14 million unoccupied residences. Six months ago, “Detroit had more than 83,000 unoccupied residential addresses. That constitutes nearly 25 percent of the city’s potential housing stock. New Orleans had 44,000, for 21 percent. Cleveland had 41,000, or 19 percent.” (Salon, Abandoned Homes) Cities once full of people are sitting abandoned and lonely. Meanwhile, on any given night in this country over 633,000 homeless people sleep in shelters, and no one knows how many may be sleeping in cars, under bridges, squatting in abandoned buildings, or simply out on the streets. (National Alliance to End Homelessness)

We live in a country where 49 million Americans live in food insecure households, including almost 16 million children; where over 29 million people rely on assistance from government programs (now sadly shut down) to obtain sufficient food; and where 6.2 million households at least once in the last year have accessed emergency food from a food pantry or soup kitchen. (Feeding America)

This is not the country of our hopes and dreams; it is not the country we want it to be; it’s not even the country we think it is! It is a strange land: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” The psalm speaks to and for us.

In this psalm, the poet and the exiles turned their pain over to God! Giving voice to their sorrow, their anger, and their thirst for revenge, they were able to let go of them and to trust in God to act as God might. They were able to follow Paul’s advice to Timothy, to buck up, to rely not on the spirit sorrow and of anger and of cowardly vengeance, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. Eventually, they came to understand that they were valued by God (and thus should value others, even their enemies), not because of what they had or had not achieves, but simply because of who they were! This brought them a sense of freedom — even in their exile — to dream, to hope, and to pray. Their prayers may have been, as Bible scholar Walter Wink said, “impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous, [and] more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the church,” and they may have offered them with far less a clear conscience than Paul claims, but through them they voiced faith and courage to hand their desire for revenge over to God; through them they started the long healing process of returning home and truly worshiping God.

And so can we. We can end the wars and put a stop to the genocides. We can rebuild the cities and house the homeless. We can provide good nutrition for everyone and end food insecurity. We can do so because, I believe, we have faith at least the size of a mustard seed, because we have been given a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline, and because we are God’s servants and we know what we ought to do. And when we have done it, we can sing Psalm 137 like a dance tune, with a spring in our step, like exiles returning home to God!

Amen!

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Better Angels – Sermon for St. Michael & All Angels Day – September 29, 2013

September 29, 2013 / / 4 Comments

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This sermon was preached on St. Michael and All Angels Day, September 29, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Episcopal Lectionary, Michaelmas: Genesis 28:10-17; Revelation 12:7-12; Psalm 103; and John 1:47-51. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Icon of the ArchangelsWe are stepping out of the “common of time,” away from the progression of lessons assigned for the Sundays of Ordinary Time, and instead celebrating the Feast of Michaelmas, known variously as the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel or as the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael, or as the Feast of the Archangels, or as the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels (the latter being the preferred Anglican name for this commemoration). The only reason we are doing so is a personal conceit of your rector; Michaelmas, the 29th of September, just happens to be my birthday. Today I am celebrating the 30th anniversary of my twenty-eleventh birthday. I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first . . . a word about Michaelmas.

It shouldn’t surprise any of us that on, St. Michael and All Angels Day, we are treated to three very familiar stories of angels in Holy Scripture: first, the story of “Jacob’s ladder;” second, the story of the war in heaven in which Michael, leading the “good” angels, beats “the dragon” (named “the Devil or Satan”) and his “bad” angels; and finally, the gospel story of Jesus telling Nathanael that he will see something like Jacob’s ladder, “ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

We know what angels are, or at least we think we do. They are a separate order of creation, beings of spiritual energy who interact with human beings as the servants and often as the messengers of God. The English word angel derives from the Latin angelus which in turn is the romanization of the ancient ángelos which means “messenger” or “envoy.” In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, we find the terms mal’ak elohim (“messenger of God”), mal’ak YHWH (“messenger of the Lord”), bene elohim (“sons of God”) and haqqodesim (“holy ones”) translated into English as angels. The first of these, mal’ak elohim, is what we find in today’s Genesis passage. In addition, there are specific kinds of angels identified in the Hebrew Scriptures. There are the Cherubim – one of whom is placed with a flaming sword to guard the gateway to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3 and who are said to flank or support God’s throne as, for example, in Hezekiah’s prayer in the book of the Prophet Isaiah (ch. 37); the Cherubs are apparently not cute, little, chubby baby angels! And there are the Seraphim – whom Isaiah describes as having “six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew,” and who sing God’s praises in the heavenly throne room.

We know the personal names of some of the angels, particularly the archangels – Gabriel, who is named in the Book of Daniel and identified in the Gospel of Luke as the angel of the Annunciation; Raphael, who is identified as a companion and advisor to Tobias in the apocryphal Book of Tobit; Uriel, who was sent to test the prophet Ezra according to the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras; and Michael, who is the leader of God’s angel army in the story of Revelation today.

We know that human beings, when they die, do not become angels . . . although lots of people say things like that in order to comfort the bereaved who have lost loved ones. Angels, as I said, are a separate order of creation, beings of immense spiritual energy. If the Book of Job is correct, they were created before the physical world: in questioning Job, God asks him if he was there when the foundations of the earth were put in place, “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (38:7; the term here is bene elohim, sons of God.)

So . . . we know a lot about angels, but why do we venerate them on this particular day? And what can we learn from them? The first question is easy to answer: the date commemorates the dedication of the Sanctuary of St. Michael Archangel built on Monte Gargano in Italy in 493 a.d. in honor of an apparition of the archangel a few years before. The second question is not so easy.

What I think we learn from angels is conscience. Whenever I hear the word “angels,” to be very honest, my first thought is not of their religious history or meaning, but of the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address given on March 4, 1861, just two weeks after Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as president of the Confederacy. Referring to that secession and the potential of war to preserve the Union, finished his speech saying:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

I love that turn of phrase, “the better angels of our nature.” I’m not the least bit sure what Mr. Lincoln meant by the phrase, but it has always appealed to me. A few years ago, a Harvard psychologist named Steven Pinker used it as the title of a book in which he named four of these “better angels:”

  • Empathy, which “prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own”
  • Self-control, which “allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses” and thus to regulate those impulses
  • Moral sense, which “sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people”
  • Reason, which “allows us to extract ourselves from our parochial vantage points.”

These are all, to my way of thinking, gifts of God. In a sense, they are a modern rendition of what St. Paul called the “fruit of the Spirit,” although Paul listed nine attributes: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) Or of those gifts of the Holy Spirit listed by Isaiah: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. It is through these fruits and gifts that human conscience is informed and moral judgment enlightened, and conscience, as Thomas Merton said, “is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.” (No Man Is an Island)

Some of you may be familiar with the Henry Fonda film from the 1940s entitled The Ox-Bow Incident. It’s based on a novel of the same name by the Nevada writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark. In the story, the narrator Art Croft is one of two men who drift into a Nevada ranching town and end up becoming part of a posse that turns into a lynch mob. They end up hanging, without a trial, three men who may or may not actually be guilty of the crimes they are accused of — cattle rustling and murder. Reflecting on what has happened, Art Croft asks, “If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience?” If the angels are the messengers of God, perhaps our conscience is the means through which the “better angels of our nature” communicate God’s will to us. As Theologian Peter Kreeft explains, the conscience as “the voice of God in the soul.”

Along those lines, in a Michaelmas sermon preached a few years ago, the Very Rev. John Hall, Dean of Westminster Abbey, said this:

We can and should then think of God speaking directly to us, out of his love and care for us as individuals. However we must understand God’s presence with us as a reality inseparable from that of God’s presence among us. Through our fellowship in the Church, Christ’s Body, God informs our conscience through his Word and feeds our soul through the sacraments, drawing us together as Christians into unity with each other and with himself. If we try to go it alone as Christians, we run great risks of going astray. The Church understands the work and role of the angels as assisting in mediating the presence of God with us and amongst us. (29 September 2010)

I don’t think I can learn much from angels as mighty beings standing guard at the entrance to Eden, or as warriors fighting Satan and casting him out of heaven, or as singers in the heavenly choir, or as the pillars and supports of God’s throne. But as the prompters and prickers of my conscience, as the “better angels” of empathy, moral sense, self-control, and reason, as the communicators of the gifts and fruits of the Spirit, as mediators of God’s presence in the Church, I can learn a great deal from them.

The Psalmist, in our gradual this morning, declared that God’s righteousness and merciful goodness endure forever “on those who keep his covenant and remember his commandments and do them.” It is these “better angels” who keep that memory alive in our consciences and to them, and to the God whose presence they mediate within us individually and among us corporately, we can turn for answers to life’s challenges.

So . . . as I said, it’s my birthday. Today, and for the next decade or so, when asked how old I am, I can answer, “Sixty-something.” (A graphic I posted today on my Facebook page says, “I’m not sixty-something. I’m $59.95 plus shipping and handling.”) In any event, a birthday is a time of taking stock, or considering one’s past, one’s actions, the answers one has developed in one’s life, and one’s future.

I mentioned in a conversation with some parishioners last week that when I’d been ten years at St. Francis Parish in Stilwell, Kansas, my congregation last before this one, Evelyn and I came to the conclusion that it was time to leave. One of the people I was talking with asked, “You’ve been here at St. Paul’s for ten years. Is it time to leave?” That’s a birthday sort of question. It’s what might be called “a big question.”

The past six decades, like everyone’s life, has been full of big questions of that sort, to be honest. Whether to study law? Whether to get married? Whether to leave the practice of law? Whether to become a priest? Move to Kansas? Leave Kansas? Accept nomination in an episcopal election? Those are big questions. But sometimes our replies to big questions are little answers, puny responses that put off meeting the real challenges.

A friend recently shared a poem with me, a poem by Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell. I wasn’t familiar with Sitwell so I did some research on her. She was the eldest child of the 4th Baronet of Renishaw Hall, born in 1887. In her twenties, she began publishing poems in the Daily Mirror newspaper. She was six feet tall and habitually wore brocade gowns, gold turbans, and (one biographer said) “a plethora of rings.” Apparently she was given to public feuds with other literary figures. One critic said of her that “wore other people’s bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve,” and another called her “an eccentric matriarch with a slender grip on reality.” Just my sort of poet! No wonder I liked what she had to say about our responses to life’s questions in a short poem entitled Answers:

I kept my answers small and kept them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bulwark to my fear.

The huge abstractions I kept from the light;
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.

But the big answers clamoured to be moved
Into my life. Their great audacity
Shouted to be acknowledged and believed.

Even when all small answers build up to
Protection of my spirit, still I hear
Big answers striving for their overthrow.

And all the great conclusions coming near.

I believe the “great conclusions coming near,” the big answers clamoring, the huge abstractions shouting to be acknowledged, are the angels calling each of us to greater ministries, the messengers of God urging us to a more audacious Christian presence in the world.

In a couple of months’ time, our construction project will be done. We’ll have a great new gallery, an expanded parish hall, a great new face presented to the community. When we broke ground here in July, the Old Testament lesson was the same reading from Genesis we hear this morning. I suggested then that this place, this St. Paul’s Episcopal Church located at 317 East Liberty Street in Medina, Ohio, is like Jacob’s Bethel.

It is an awesome place. It is a house of God. It is a gate of heaven. But just like Jacob’s Bethel, it is a place we are bidden to leave; it is a place from which the angels of God bid us go. A church building is meant to be the base from which the people of God go into the world. A church building is meant to be a place of life, a center of ministry, a place of assembly, where God’s people gather to worship, to hear the message of the angels, to celebrate the meaning of life, and to be transformed, and then “burst forth,” back out into the world to share the Good News with, and transform the lives of, others. The angels of God call us individually and corporately to greater ministries, to a more audacious Christian presence in our world.

The answer to that “big question” I was asked is, “No, it’s not time for me to leave St. Paul’s.” But it is time for all of us as St. Paul’s to leave this place, to go out from this new building we are creating, to “burst forth” into the world like Jacob and his offspring, to be “angels,” messengers of God, telling the world the Good News of God in Christ.

Amen.

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

There Is a Balm in Gilead: The True Riches of Community — Sermon for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20C — September 22, 2013

September 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 22, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 18 (Proper 20, Year C): Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; and Luke 16:1-13. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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CommunityAs you know, we now have an Education for Ministry seminar group working in this parish. Eight of us began meeting two weeks ago and we will have our first working session tomorrow night. One of the things that EFM encourages students to do is explore their personal spiritual autobiographies using a variety of formats and tools, and then share as much of that autobiography with the seminar group as they are comfortable doing. Each of the four years begins with the sharing of spiritual autobiographies, and the seminar group’s mentor or facilitator is asked to lead off.

So in addition to reading and re-reading these scriptures this past week, I’ve also been reviewing my life. The theme for EFM spiritual autobiographies this year is “Living Faithfully in Your World” and we are asked to consider a number of “worlds” or “contexts” in which we live, one of which is (obviously) family. We are asked, “Who are the people of importance in that world?” and “What events do you remember?” and “What stands out for you as you remember moving through different stages of your life?”

I don’t intend to give you this morning the spiritual autobiography that I will be sharing with the EFM group tomorrow, but as I read Jesus telling the Parable of the Manager that Luke relates in today’s Gospel lesson, I realized that money has played an interesting role in my personal spiritual development. So, if I may, I’d like to share with you three stories from my life which have impacted my understanding of what money is because that has direct bearing on what I understand Jesus to be saying in this story.

The first story has to do with my father’s death when I was 5-1/2 years old. The death of a parent, as you either know through personal experience and can pretty accurately imagine, is a real world-changing event for anyone. In my life it meant an almost complete change of lifestyle because, although my father was a very successful accountant in Las Vegas, Nevada, he was, apparently, not very good at managing his own accounts. My mother discovered that he was so heavily in debt that there was, quite literally, nothing in his estate. She had to sell our home and move us into an inexpensive two-bedroom apartment which she could only afford by taking in a lodger. She and I shared one bedroom, and another woman (who provided childcare when necessary, in exchange for reduced rent) took the other. She had to sell her car (a Cadillac Coupe de Ville my father had given her) and buy a used Nash Rambler stationwagon. As a WW2 veteran, my father was covered by a $10,000 life insurance policy, the proceeds of which paid for his funeral and the lawyer’s fee for handling his estate and settling his debts. My mother (and thus her children, my brother and I) inherited nothing from my father.

But my mother was an incredibly resourceful and talented woman who went to work, supported her children, saved and invested, and in a few years time was doing quite well for herself. She remarried, and she and my step-father purchased several homes over the years, amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, and lived comfortably.

The second story is that in 1971, my maternal grandmother, a widow, suffered a stroke and my mother and step-father invited her and my bachelor uncle who lived with her to live with them. Two years later, Grammy suffered a second, massive stroke and passed away. Shortly before her death, she advised my mother that she, my mother, had demonstrated that she could take care of herself so my grandmother had decided to leave all of her estate (which included my late grandfather’s, as well) to my uncle . . . my uncle who did not work, had never worked (although fully capable of doing so), and had never contributed the upkeep or expenses of the household. My mother’s reward for pulling herself and her children up out of poverty was to be disinherited.

The third story happened a decade later when my widowed paternal grandmother died. This happened while I was in law school. Evelyn and I were married by then, and she and I together with my mother and step-father, my brother and my sister-in-law, all traveled to Denver for her funeral and for the reading of her will. As it turned out, she (on instructions of my late grandfather which she felt unable to disobey even after he died) had also disinherited our family because my grandparents way back in 1940 had disapproved of my parents’ marriage. Never mind that there had been grandchildren who (in the case of my brother) had lived with our grandparents for six years while in high school and junior college, or who (in my own case) had spent nearly every summer for ten years with them. Those things didn’t matter. We were disinherited. Since the day my grandmother’s will was read, no one from my side of the family has had any contact with my aunt (who received the entire estate) or any of my cousins.

What I believe about money as a result of these three events is this: Money is an incredibly powerful symbol. It can be used to create and sustain relationships, or it can be used to destroy them. It can be used to help others, or it can be used to wound and hurt them. But money, in and of itself, has no intrinsic meaning or value. Think for a moment, to what do we assign value? Our money is nothing more than bits of paper and scraps of metal which are of far less actual value than we say they represent. Do we value gold or silver? When you get right down to it, they are nothing more than rocks. Do we value our homes? They are only brick and wood and mortar. Our Car? Our boat? Our books? Our clothing? Our other possessions? These are the things that our opening collect this morning describes as “things that are passing away.” Giving value to these sorts of things, and there many things we treasure, is giving value to that which in reality has no value.

There is an ancient term for giving value to that which has no value; it is called idolatry. It was the idolatry of the ancient Jews that caused Jeremiah to cry out on God’s behalf, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.” Giving value to that which has no value had hurt God’s “poor people,” so God mourned and was dismayed. Through the prophet God asks, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”

What is the remedy for idolatry? What treatment is there for giving value to that which has no value?

This is what today’s Gospel lesson answers. I’m sure you’ve heard this parable before; I know that many of you have read it in Bible study groups; you’ve probably heard other sermons about it. And you’ve probably been as stumped by it as are all the scholars and commentators and preachers who’ve ever dealt with it. I’m stumped by it. One of the things I’ve often wondered about it, as perhaps you have, is “Who is God in this parable?” and “Who am I in this parable?” Is God the master? Is God the manager? Is God one of the debtors? Who is God? And who are we?

Reading this parable this week in the context of doing my EFM spiritual autobiography and remembering those three events of death and inheritance, I came to the realization that those are the wrong questions! Parables aren’t necessarily allegories of God-and-me, and this one especially so. God isn’t in this parable; we might be but God certainly is not! If we want to make sense of the parables we have to read them in context. We have to consider where they appear in the narrative. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John weren’t just compiling collections of things Jesus said without regard to when and where and to whom and why they were said. The gospel writers were authors of narratives and we have to look at the whole narrative, not just a little piece lifted out of its context.

This parable only makes sense if we take note of who was listening to it in Luke’s larger story: some disciples, some tax collectors, and some scoffing, sniping scribes and Pharisees whom Luke describes as “lovers of money, [who] heard all this, and . . . ridiculed [Jesus].” (v. 14) Immediately before telling this tale, Jesus has told the two tales of loss (a lost sheep and a lost coin) that we heard last week, and the tale we call “the story of the Prodigal Son.” Immediately after telling this tale, Jesus reminds the scoffing Pharisees that “what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God,” (v. 15) and proceeds to tell them the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Luke, as the gospel writer, positions this parable told to lovers of money in the middle of a series of stories about possessions and wealth.

This is not a story about God! It’s a story about money! It’s a story about what Jesus calls (in the original Greek) tou mamona te adikia, “the mammon of unrighteousness,” translated in our New Revised Version reading as “dishonest wealth.”

What do you suppose he means by such a term?

Preacher and author John Ortberg tells a story about the first nice piece of furniture he and his wife bought back in the 1980s. At the time they had three children ages four, two, and six-months. Because of its color, the new sofa became known as “the mauve sofa.” This nice new sofa replaced an old couch they had called the “yaya couch” because Ortberg would play a game with the kids bounce on the couch as they called out together “Yaya!”

Well, you know what happened when they replaced the old yaya couch with the new mauve sofa. Suddenly new rules went into effect. “Do not eat on the mauve sofa. Do not bounce on the mauve sofa. Do not play on the mauve sofa. Do not sit on the mauve sofa. Do not even breathe near the mauve sofa. You may play and sit on the rest of the furniture, but on the day you do anything to the mauve sofa you shall surely die!”

One day, Ortberg’s wife found a red stain on the mauve sofa. The family was assembled. “Children,” said Mom, “look at this stain. This red stain will not come out! Now we are going to stay here until someone tells me who spilled something red on this sofa.” The wide-eyed and fearful children stood silently: no one confessed. They knew it meant death to the culprit.

Ortberg finishes his story saying, “Now that was many years ago. I still remember the old yaya couch and the mauve sofa. I have many happy memories of that yaya couch, bouncing the children, wrestling and playing together. The only memory I have of the mauve sofa was the day I ate a jelly donut on it and spilled the filling.”

Let’s be honest. Wealth changes things, and it changes us. Wealth, as Jesus said, is dishonest, and frankly it makes us dishonest.

A few months ago, Time Magazine ran an article entitled How Money Makes You Lie and Cheat. It reported on a study undertaken by some Harvard and University of Utah professors of business ethics. “[Three hundred] students were randomly assigned to think about either money or about nothing in particular by descrambling sentences; the money-related sentences included phrases such as ‘She spends money liberally’ while those unrelated to cash included ‘She walked on grass.’” In follow-up tests, “those who reconstructed the money-related sentences were far more likely to say they would do things like steal a ream of paper from the office copy machine than those who worked with the unrelated sentences. [and] Students cued to consider money told twice as many lies.”

The lead researcher commented that “small and unnoticeable reminders of money can produce lying, cheating, and essentially stealing 10 minutes later,” and that “[Money cues] trigger . . . decision [making through] a cost/benefit analysis and the significance is that we’re not considering other things like moral issues.” In the report of the study itself, the researchers conclude that “the mere presence of money, an often taken-for-granted and easily overlooked feature of our daily lives, can serve as a prompt for immoral behavior.” (Science Direct)

This is what Jesus is talking about when he asks, “If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?” This is why he draws a distinction between “dishonest wealth” and “true riches,” and why he tells us, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” True riches are our relationships — with our parents and our children, with our grandparents and our grandchildren, with our spouses, with our friends, with everyone around us, with God; these are what our opening collect describes as “things heavenly,” the things that shall endure, to which we hope to hold fast. And relationships that are affected by, possibly disrupted by, maybe even destroyed by money and what we do with it. Jesus encourages us, as a remedy for idolatry, to learn from the “children of this age.” What he encourages us to learn is to “make friends for ourselves” by means of the “dishonest wealth” so that those new friends might “welcome us into the eternal homes.” Instead of using “dishonest wealth” in ways that break relationship or exploit others, we are to use money to form relationships. Like the manager in the story, we are to form friendships that are reciprocal and egalitarian, relationships that release people from debt, relationships that enrich the lives of those within them. These are the true riches.

When my mother and my step-father made their estate plan, they insisted that their wealth be shared equally among their children and their children’s children. My brother and his family, my step-sister and her family, me and my family — we were treated equally and we received equal shares, because what mattered was not the wealth; what mattered was the relationship.

In telling the Parable of the Manager, Jesus is not teaching about God; Jesus is teaching about money and about us. We are, all of us, managers of wealth entrusted to us by God. We have been entrusted with wealth and, like the manager in the story, we must decide what are we going to use it for. The love of things, of money, of possessions? Do we treat that with which we’ve been entrusted as if we owned it ourselves? Or do we use it for God’s purposes, to create relationships and to sustain community? In the end it’s not a story about business ethics, but about a deeper level of motivation: what do I care about? What do I really care about? What true riches do I really care about?

There is a balm in Gilead. There is a remedy for idolatry. There is a treatment for giving value to that which has no value. The health of God’s poor people is restored by friendship, by relationship, by the true riches of community.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, whose loving hand has given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor you with our wealth and possessions, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Adapted from The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 827)

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A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

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