Category: Eucharist (Page 31 of 36)

The Lord Helps Those . . . . — Sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17C — September 1, 2013

September 1, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 1, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 15 (Proper 17, Year C): Jeremiah 2:4-13; Psalm 81:1,10-16; Hebrews 13:1-8,15-16; and Luke 14:1, 7-14. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Portrait of Benjamin Franklin Finish this verse: “The Lord helps those . . . .”

Congregation responds: “. . . . who help themselves.”

Do you know where to find that in Scripture?

You won’t. It’s not there. But a lot of people think it is. A survey done by the Barna organization within the past few years showed that at least 80% of American Christians believe that old saying is a biblical verse! It’s not.

“God helps those who help themselves” is probably the most often quoted piece of “Scripture” not found in the Bible. This saying is usually attributed to Ben Franklin because it was quoted in Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1757. In reality it predates Franklin by several centuries! One of the earliest forms of this saying goes back to Aesop’s fable, Hercules and the Waggoner, where the moral of the story is “the gods help them that help themselves.” The modern variant, “God helps those who help themselves,” was first coined by the English political theorist Algernon Sydney in a posthumous essay published in 1698 entitled Discourses Concerning Government. It is not a religious sentiment at all; it comes from moralistic politics! And it carries with it an implied negative corollary – that God will refuse to help those who (for whatever reason) don’t help themselves!

It also demands that we consider the truth of what happens to those who do help themselves . . . those who help themselves to too much . . . those who, as Jeremiah put it, “go after worthless things, and become worthless themselves.”

But for now let us consider, instead, the simple and straightforward statement we find in the Letter to the Hebrews: “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?” The writer of the Letter is quoting from Psalm 118. In the prayer book this declaration is phrased: “The Lord is at my side, therefore I will not fear; what can anyone do to me?” This is a theme we find again and again in the Psalms: the nearness and unconditional nature of God’s aid.

When my mother planned her funeral (something I encourage everyone to think about doing; it is a real gift to your survivors!) she chose Psalm 121 to be read; that psalm is also appointed for the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, and so for two reasons it is one of my favorites. That psalm reads:

1 I lift up my eyes to the hills; *
from where is my help to come?
2 My help comes from the Lord, *
the maker of heaven and earth.
3 He will not let your foot be moved *
and he who watches over you will not fall asleep.
4 Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel *
shall neither slumber nor sleep;
5 The Lord himself watches over you; *
the Lord is your shade at your right hand,
6 So that the sun shall not strike you by day, *
nor the moon by night.
7 The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; *
it is he who shall keep you safe.
8 The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, *
from this time forth for evermore.

The graphic on the front of our bulletin this morning is a quotation from the King James version of another psalm, Psalm 46. In the prayer book, the first few verse are rendered:

1 God is our refuge and strength, *
a very present help in trouble.
2 Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, *
and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea;
3 Though its waters rage and foam, *
and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.
4 The LORD of hosts is with us; *
the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

Psalm 46 was the inspiration for Martin Luther’s great hymn, a favorite of this congregation, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

Nowhere in these psalms, nor anywhere else in the Bible will you find anything that provides a Judaic or Christian basis for the sentiment that “God helps those who help themselves” and its negative corollary that God refuses to assist those who don’t. In fact, the Bible teaches the opposite. God helps the helpless, the poor, the weak, the needy! The Prophet Isaiah, for example, declares, “For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; the song of the ruthless was stilled.” (Isa. 25:4-5) In the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul declares, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”

Jesus once told a parable that underscored the unconditional nature of God’s help:

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” (Luke 15:4-6)

We human beings are the lost sheep of this parable, the completely helpless sheep, in need of God’s saving help.

God does not help those who can help themselves, simply because no one can do so! We cannot help ourselves; we cannot free ourselves from slavery to sin and death. Our own power fails us when we rely on it, rather than God.

As another psalm (Psalm 118) says:

16 There is no king that can be saved by a mighty army; *
a strong man is not delivered by his great strength.
17 The horse is a vain hope for deliverance; *
for all its strength it cannot save.
18 Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon those who fear him, *
on those who wait upon his love,
19 To pluck their lives from death, *
and to feed them in time of famine.

To believe that God’s help is conditioned on our helping ourselves is foolish. It is not only unbiblical, it is prideful! Pride and arrogance motivate us to believe that we can do everything through our own effort and with our own merit, that we can pick ourselves up by our own spiritual and moral bootstraps. However, the clear warrant of Scripture is that “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” (James 4:6)

I got to thinking about the contrast between that popular aphorism and the teaching of Scripture because of the Gospel lesson. In the Gospel lesson for today in which Jesus gives the advice:

When you are invited [to a banquet], go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, “Friend, move up higher”; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

It occurred to me that Jesus is, indeed, addressing that second corollary of the old aphorism, that question I suggest at the beginning of this sermon: what happens to those who do help themselves . . . those who help themselves to too much? “All who exalt themselves will be humbled” is a pretty clear answer.

We live in a world dominated by those who have helped themselves to quite a bit. We live in a world where there are a few (“the 1%” we have come to call them), who have helped themselves to much, much more than they will ever be able to use, to the detriment of those who could make very good use of it. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews clearly counseled against such acquisitiveness: “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’” And he said, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

Trust in God. Everything else will fade; everything else will let you down. Over and over again the Bible teaches this lesson that we humans have a hard time understanding. Our tendency is to put our trust in and help ourselves to things, money, stuff. Somebody once asked John Rockefeller how much was enough; he answered, “Just a little bit more.”

I hate to say it, but we are all like that. We accumulate stuff at an incredible rate. We can’t seem to let go of what we have and we are always gather just a little bit more. We build extra garages for our stuff. I read recently that there are now more than 35,000 self-help storage facilities in the United States, with something like 1-1/2 billion square feet of extra storage because our houses and apartments can’t contain it all. I confess – Evelyn and I rent one of those units: it’s full of stuff we haven’t visited in a couple of years. I don’t really know why we keep it! I guess because we’re just like other people. The more we have, the more we need; the more we have, the more we worry about it. We have become like those against whom Jeremiah prophesied, like those who “went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves.”

But, says the Letter to the Hebrews, “be content with what you have; for [God] has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’” And Jesus, continuing the imagery of the banquet, said to his host in today’s Gospel story (and to us):

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.

Give the stuff away. Give it to those who need it. Help yourself by divesting yourself of all that stuff.

If there is any truth in that old saying that “God helps those who help themselves” it is in this, that God will repay those who give their stuff to the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind; that God will help those who help others. God will help those who help themselves by getting rid of the accumulated possessions we have but do not need, the accumulated wealth that can be of use to others. We don’t need it! And we needn’t be afraid of losing it. “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” Those with whom you share may not be able to repay you, but “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

So now, let’s finish that verse differently: “The Lord helps those . . . who help others!”

Amen.

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

Be Dressed for Action — Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14C) — August 11, 2013

August 11, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, August 11, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 12 (Proper 14, Year C): Isaiah 1:1,10-20; Psalm 50:1-8,23-24; Hebrews 11:1-3,8-16; and Luke 12:32-40. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Children in British Slum, circa 1955 We are used to thinking of the Book of Isaiah as the work of a single prophet, but it is really three books: First Isaiah, comprising chapters 1-39; Second Isaiah, made up of chapters 40-55; and Third Isaiah, chapters 56-66. These three prophets did their work in three different and distinct periods in Jewish history: the late 8th Century BCE; the mid-6th Century BCE, and the late 6th Century BCE, respectively. This is clear from evidence in their writings: their themes vary and each prophet speaks from a different location. First Isaiah is clearly set in pre-exilic Jerusalem; Second Isaiah was obviously written in Babylon; Third Isaiah speaks from post-exilic Jerusalem. Nonetheless, there is a sense of unity in the writings that make up this book. Phrases and themes recur, and there are linkages later and earlier passages. Today’s reading is from First Isaiah and introduces a topic which will be taken up again by Second and Third Isaiah: what constitutes proper worship?

Ritual worship in First Isaiah’s day was centered at the Temple in Jerusalem. Prof. James T. Dennison, Jr., of Northwest Theological Seminary, in an article about today’s reading from Isaiah describes the cultic activity:

At the temple, there were throngs of people. Multitudes trampled the courts of the temple – hustle and bustle, service upon service, activity upon activity. On the Sabbath; at the monthly new moon service; at the appointed feasts – Passover, Pentecost, Yom Kippur, Tabernacles. Why you couldn’t keep the good folks away. And offerings – did they bring offerings! Burnt offerings, peace offerings, grain offerings – why what more could you ask? All that Moses prescribed, they brought. Piety by the bushel; holiness by the herd; sanctity by the sheepfold. And the fellowship – oh, the friends they met and the people they talked to, the news they caught up on and the gossip they passed on. And the motions – why they spread out their hands in prayer. They lifted their arms to the sky – what a pious sight, the smoke of their offerings ascending and the ascension of these holy hands. What ecstasy! What piety! What religiosity! (A Tale of Two Cities: Isaiah and Worship)

“What liturgical hypocrisy!” cries Isaiah. Isaiah condemns this worship as so much theater in the absence of care for the weakest in society; God, he says, rejects liturgical activities devoid of the pursuit of justice and righteousness. The stinging critique of worship that we heard in today’s Old Testament lesson is not an indictment of worship in general. Rather, the prophet tells us that God takes no joy in the pomp and circumstance when it is accompanied by unjust behavior, when in fact it covers up injustice:

When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil. (Isa. 1:15-16)

It is a cry his successor, Third Isaiah, will take up two centuries later condemning hollow, hypocritical ritual fasting: the fast that God chooses, he says, is “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.” (Isa. 58:6) The worship offered those whose hands are full, metaphorically, with the blood of the oppressed will not be accepted; the blood of animals offered in sacrificial worship will not atone for the injustice in the community. The emptiness of the ritual reminds the Divine Judge of society’s crimes against its weaker and less fortunate members.

Isaiah calls on his listeners, the worshipers of ancient Judah and worshipers in modern America, to hear the word of the Lord, the torah of God: “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isa. 1:17)

This is precisely what Jesus says in today’s Gospel lesson: “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Lk. 12:33-34) And then he gives his famously imprecise warning of the Second Coming: “Be alert, be ready, be dressed for action, because you don’t when it will be.” How does one do this? By doing the things Jesus has already mentioned. As Lutheran pastor John Petty puts it:

If one’s treasure has been kept to one’s self, one’s treasure is always at risk. If one’s treasure has been given to the poor, it is “unfailing.” If your treasure is with yourself, your heart is directed toward yourself. If your treasure has been given to the poor, your heart is with the poor — or, in other words, with God. (Progressive Involvement)

“And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” (Matt. 6:28-29) If you have clothed the naked, you are dressed and ready to go. It’s like Jesus said at another time:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. * * * Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. (Matt. 25:35-36,40)

The answer to the “how” question begs the next inquiry . . . when? That the tough one because we are dealing with what has been called “the uncertain certainty of Christ’s return.” Remember, Jesus said no one, including himself, would know when that day would come; like the old television show Candid Camera, it will happen when we least expect it. A ministerial colleague of mine in a more conservative evangelical tradition once commented, “We have focused so much emotional energy on the expectation that we have not done the work to be done before Jesus returns.” It’s just so much theater in the absence of care for the weakest in society. God takes no joy in ritual liturgy or any worship unaccompanied by righteous behavior and justice.

In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, our own Anglican tradition was divided between those who favored a more ceremonial, ritual style of liturgy, commonly called Anglo-Catholics, and those who favored far less ritual in worship. The latter, generally referred to as Evangelicals or as “the Low Church Party” would have said that liturgy such as we usually celebrate now is “hollow and unsatisfying, ceremonial . . . in place of the life-giving Word.” In an Evangelical Australian publication it was denounced in terms nearly as prophetic as Isaiah’s:

We never read once of Paul, or Peter, or of any of the other apostles having lights and swinging censers and vestments and copes and mitres and chasubles, and elaborate processions, and so forth. * * * Seen in the clear light of the Word of God, [ritual worship] is not only blasphemous, but idolatrous. It is absolutely opposed to Scriptural teaching. (The Signs of the Times, August 27, 1923)

Eventually, as common Prayer Book liturgy makes clear, we Anglicans arrived (as is our wont) at a compromise encompassing many styles of worship and settling into the broad liturgical practices of today. But the concern of Isaiah for ritual worship accompanied by social justice was not lost on the Anglo-Catholics.
At the Second Anglo-Catholic Congress held in London in 1923, the Bishop of Zanzibar, the Right Reverend Frank Weston, closed the meeting with an address entitled Our Present Duty. The last words of Bishop Weston’s address, which could as easily be spoken to 21st Century Americans, are these:

I say to you, and I say it to you with all the earnestness that I have, that if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.

Now mark that — this is the Gospel truth. If you are prepared to say that the [Christian] is at perfect liberty to rake in all the money he can get no matter what the wages are that are paid, no matter what the conditions are under which people work; if you say that the [Christian] has a right to hold his peace while his fellow citizens are living in hovels below the levels of the streets, this I say to you, that you do not yet know the Lord Jesus in his Sacrament. You have begun with the Christ of Bethlehem, you have gone on to know something of the Christ of Calvary — but the Christ of the Sacrament, not yet. Oh brethren! if only you listen to-night your movement is going to sweep [this nation]. If you listen. I am not talking economics, I do not understand them. I am not talking politics, I do not understand them. I am talking the Gospel, and I say to you this: If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly — it is madness — to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.

There then, as I conceive it, is your present duty; and I beg you, brethren, as you love the Lord Jesus, consider that it is at least possible that this is the new light that the Congress was to bring to us. You have got your Mass, you have got your Altar, you have begun to get your Tabernacle. Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.

(Our Present Duty, slightly amended. Bishop Weston said “Anglo-Catholic” rather than “Christian” and “England” rather than “the nation” – but with those simple amendments this statement applies as well to church members in the contemporary United States as it did to Anglo-Catholics in the England of a century ago.)

Another Anglican a century and a half earlier summarized the Christian duty somewhat more succinctly. Although it is disputed that John Wesley ever actually uttered what is now known as “John Wesley’s Rule,” it certainly accords with his preaching, with today’s lesson from Isaiah’s prophecy, and with the Gospel:

“Do all the good you can,
by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can,
at all the times you can,
to all the people you can,
as long as ever you can.”

This understanding and appreciation for the meaning behind Isaiah’s prophecy, his condemnation of worship not connected to a ministry of social justice has been a part of our Anglican ethos from the very beginning. Shortly after the Church of England separated from Rome, when Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and his collaborators produced the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549, they included at the end of the rite of Holy Communion a closing prayer which included this petition:

We therfore most humbly beseche thee, O heavenly father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy felowship, and doe all suche good woorkes, as thou hast prepared for us to walke in.

That prayer, or one very much like it, has been used to end Anglican services of the Holy Eucharist for nearly 500 years. In our current American Prayer Book we have a descendent of that prayer in contemporary English which includes the modern version of that petition:

And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.

Floating around the internet recently, being “tweeted” on Twitter and “shared” on Facebook, is a “meme” which also echoes Isaiah. A “meme” is a photograph over which has been superimposed, using Photoshop or some other graphics application, a caption. (Often the caption may seem to have nothing to with the picture.) This particular “meme” shows a man sitting on the floor of a work bay in an auto repair facility. The caption reads: “Sitting in church for an hour on Sunday morning doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.” A bit snarky, perhaps, but the message is clearly the same as First Isaiah’s.

Whether that prophet eight centuries before Christ, or Third Isaiah two centuries later, or Christ himself in the First Century, Cranmer in the 16th, Wesley in the 18th, the Evangelicals or Bishop Weston in the early 20th Century, or a snarky Facebook “meme” in the 21st, the message is the same: worship devoid of social justice and righteousness is unacceptable!

“Sell your possessions, and give alms.” (Luke 12:33)

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean. * * * Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. ” (Isaiah 1:16-17)

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” (Luke 12:35)

Amen.

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

God Our Mother — Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13C) — August 4, 2013

August 4, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 4, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 11 (Proper 13, Year C): Hosea 11:1-11; Psalm 107:1-9, 43; Colossians 3:1-11; and Luke 12:13-21. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Drawing of Mother Holding Baby, Artist Unknown This passage is one of my favorites in the book of the prophet Hosea. Hosea’s major metaphor for the relationship of God with Israel, as we learned last week, is that of marriage. Hosea portrayed God as Israel’s “husband” and condemned the nation because of the “adulterous” relationship it had had with other gods. As a “prophetic act” Hosea married a prostitute named Gomer, with whom his relationship parallels that of God with Israel. He tells of Gomer running away from him and having sex with another man, but he loves her and forgives her. Similarly, even though the people of Israel worshiped other gods, Hosea prophesied that Yahweh continues to love his people and does not abandon God’s covenant with them. This passage, however, departs from that metaphor and presents, instead, an image of God as Divine Parent, an image which is surprisingly feminine and maternal.

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
* * *
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.

In these verses God is portrayed as an adoptive parent. God’s lovingly brought Israel out of Egypt, cared for Israel, taught, comforted, healed, and nurtured Israel. The Divine Adoptive Parent nurtured this child, taught the child to walk, held this child in times of suffering and anguish, offered healing when he was injured. But just as Hosea’s earlier metaphor likened God to a cuckolded husband, God is now an abandoned parent.

Israel’s disobedient and defiant nature becomes clear as God offers a general indictment against Israel’s idolatry.

The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals,
and offering incense to idols.

The Baals are competitor gods to Yahweh. They were local gods, represented by fertile fields, jars of olive oil, the smell of baking bread, the aroma of roasting meat. They appealed to the senses and to one’s immediate sense of satisfaction and well-being. In the Spring, the followers of the Baals would cry “Baal is alive” through the villages, and the worshipers of Yahweh would joined; they were hedging their bets hoping to ensure a bounteous crop and a satisfied family. The cult of Yahweh demanded worship in sometimes far-away sacred places. Sacrificial worship hadn’t yet been centralized at Jerusalem, but there were only a few places where it cold be offered. The Baals were more immediate so many Israelites would take out a little insurance and serenade Baal along with the neighbors. After all, where was YHWH anyway and what has he done for you recently?

These Baals of satisfaction and well-being are precisely the “gods” which got the attention of the rich man in the Gospel parable Jesus tells today.

The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.

And so it was with the people of ancient Israel:

They shall return to the land of Egypt,
and Assyria shall be their king,
because they have refused to return to me.
The sword rages in their cities,
it consumes their oracle-priests,
and devours because of their schemes.
My people are bent on turning away from me.
To the Most High they call,
but he does not raise them up at all.

It was not the Baals who accomplished those things that many believed they had done; it was not they who were nurturing Israel; it was Yahweh! And like a spurned husband, like a rejected parent, Yahweh was angry! God, rejected and spurned, is furious and, frankly, vindictive. God will throw Israel out of the promised land. God will send them back to Egypt or turn them over to the invading Assyrians. God will allow war to consume the people and their lying priests. God is disgusted by their schemes. They think they have ample goods laid up for many years, so that they can relax, eat, drink, and be merry. God will show them what fools they are! God feels the indignation and rage that any parent might toward a disrespectful child.

Bu then, God rises above this anguish and anger; we are privileged to witness Yahweh’s churning emotional conflict commitment, the turmoil deep within God’s heart:

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?
* * *
My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.

At the heart of this passage are two Hebrew words, one of which is translated as “heart”; the other, as “compassion”. The first is leb and in Judaic understanding it refers not merely to the body’s physical heart, but to the innermost being of the human person. It refers to the center of personal life, to a human being’s psychic and spiritual energies upon which the whole moral and religious condition of a person completely depends. Here, it is God who has this sort of inner core of being, and the center of God’s Being is inextricably linked in Hosea’s prophecy with God’s compassion, not with Yahweh’s righteous anger and wrath . . . God’s essential Being is eternally and indelibly characterized by love and compassion.

Our English word compassion derives from the Latin for “suffering together”; compassion is the ability to share in the suffering of another, to be empathetic. There are two Hebrew words translated as “compassion;” Hosea uses them both. Although in this passage he uses is nichuwm, which has its root in the concept of regret or sorrow, elsewhere he describes God’s compassion using the synonym rechemet, which comes from the Hebrew root rechem which literally means “womb”. The Hebrew understanding of compassion is deeply maternal, rooted in a profound metaphor of birthing and motherhood; compassion in Hebrew thought might best be conceived not as “shared suffering”, but as “womb love”.

This word applied to God conjurs a beautiful image of God as our mother doing all the amazing and miraculous things a life-giving, nurturing mother does. She protects her child; she nourishes, cradles, and prepares her child. Whether she gives birth to the child or adopts the child, how can she give up or forget her child? “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?” asks God in book of the prophet Isaiah, “Even these may forget, yet I will never forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15)

The 14th Century mystic and saint, Dame Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), wrote of God our Mother with these words:

It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good.

Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother. We received our ‘Being’ from Him and this is where His Maternity starts And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never ceases to surround us.

Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother.

And He showed me this truth in all things, but especially in those sweet words when He says: “It is I”.

As if to say, I am the power and the Goodness of the Father, I am the Wisdom of the Mother, I am the Light and the Grace which is blessed love, I am the Trinity, I am the Unity, I am the supreme Goodness of all kind of things, I am the One who makes you love, I am the One who makes you desire, I am the never-ending fulfillment of all true desires. (…)

Our highest Father, God Almighty, who is ‘Being’, has always known us and loved us: because of this knowledge, through his marvelous and deep charity and with the unanimous consent of the Blessed Trinity, He wanted the Second Person to become our Mother, our Brother, our Savior.

It is thus logical that God, being our Father, be also our Mother. Our Father desires, our Mother operates and our good Lord the Holy Ghost confirms; we are thus well advised to love our God through whom we have our being, to thank him reverently and to praise him for having created us and to pray fervently to our Mother, so as to obtain mercy and compassion, and to pray to our Lord, the Holy Ghost, to obtain help and grace. (From “Revelations of Divine Love”, LIX, LXXXVI).

We may, like the ancient Israelites or like the man in Christ’s gospel parable this morning, be tempted away from God by those things which seem to satisfy our immediate needs, by fertile fields, jars of olive oil, the smell of baking bread, the aroma of roasting meat; we may believe that we have ample goods laid up for many years, and so be tempted to relax, eat, drink, and be merry. But let us never forget the source of all those things. As the Psalm today recalls to us, it is God who puts our feet on a straight path; it is the Lord who does wonders for his children; it is God who satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. Hosea reminds us that we are God’s children and that at the center of God’s Being is the womb-love of a mother for her child, for us.

Whoever is wise will ponder these things,
and consider well the mercies of the Lord.

Amen.

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

God’s Faithfulness Prevails — Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C) — July 28, 2013

July 28, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, July 28, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 10 (Proper 12, Year C): Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-19; and Luke 11:1-13. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Baptism “Name this child.” That’s what I say to parents of infant baptismal candidates as I take their children from them. The words are not actually written in the baptismal service of The Book of Common Prayer as they are in some other traditions’ liturgies, but there is a rubric on page 307 that says, “Each candidate is presented by name to the Celebrant . . . .” so asking for the child’s name is a practical way of seeing that done. It’s practical, but it’s also a theological statement.

There is a common religious belief found in nearly all cultures that knowing the name of a thing or a person gives one power over that thing or person. One finds this belief among African and North American indigenous tribes, as well as in ancient Egyptian, Vedic, and Hindu traditions; it is also present in all three of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The naming we do at baptism echoes the naming that takes place in Jesus’ tradition as a faithful Jew. In Judaism, when a male infant is circumcised on the eighth day after his birth, the mohel who performs the brit milah prays, “Our God and God of our fathers, preserve this child for his father and mother, and his name in Israel shall be called ________” and the prayer continues that, by his naming, the infant will be enrolled in the covenant of God with Israel. The same thing is done when a girl is named in the ceremony called zeved habat, or “presentation of the daughter” at the first formal reading of the Torah following her birth. In baptism, we do the same; the church says to its newest member, “This is who you are: washed in the waters of baptism, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever,” a brother or sister in the church, a fellow member of the household of God.

To give a name to anything, especially to another human being, is a powerful thing! In the first verses of Genesis we are told, “God said ‘Let there be Light’ and there was light.” (Gen. 1:3) God named the light before it was created; this process continues through the rest of the story. God says, “Let there be” and names the thing which will come into existence; the naming seems a necessary first step in creation. There is a sense in which the name given shapes the future of the thing, or of the person, named.

So this morning I will ask that question of Danny and Nikki ___________ (parents) and of Peter ___________ (Godfather) who will name Ryan George __________ (infant) as a child of God, and of Mary __________ (sponsor) who will name Jacqueline Ann ____________ (adult) as a child of God, and through baptism we all will welcome Ryan and Jackie into the household of faith, into a covenant relationship with Almighty God and with each of us.

In today’s lesson from the Prophet Hosea, we find God instructing the prophet to give strange and bewildering names to his children as powerful, prophetic signs of Israel’s broken relationship with God. Hosea’s firstborn son is to be named Jezreel, which refers to the location of a particularly brutal and bloody massacre of Israelite royalty; his daughter is to be called, Lo-ruhamah, which means “no pity,” as a sign that God will have no compassion for his people who have gone astray; and a second son is to be named, Lo-ammi, which means “no people,” to let the Israelites know they are no longer God’s people.

Preachers often use their children as sermon illustrations, but what God demands of Hosea seems a little extreme. These poor kids aren’t going to have to live merely with the embarrassment of a single sermon, they are going to live with these names, these prophetic, judgmental names for their entire lives! But as bad as that is, giving these awful names to his children is not the hardest thing God demands of Hosea. No, the hardest thing is marrying their mother, Gomer.

Hosea is ordered by God to (in the words of our NRSV translation) “take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.” He is to marry a prostitute who will continue in her scandalous and adulterous behavior, even though Hosea will be faithful to her throughout the marriage. Why? Because it is a prophetic sign, a prophetic action symbolizing the way in which Israel has dealt with God: because “the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” God loves Israel with all the passion and loyalty of a faithful husband, but Israel, like a promiscuous wife, has been unfaithful to God.

It is an unfortunate prophetic metaphor, for it is misogynistic to the core! Portraying God as a faithful (but dominant) husband and Israel as a supposed-to-be obedient (and submissive) wife perpetuates a patriarchalism that is inappropriate to our society. As a metaphor it may have communicated clearly to its ancient Israelite audience, but it doesn’t communicate quite so clearly to us, clouded as it is with its ancient cultural bias. So as we read and seek to understand Hosea’s message in our day and age, we must extract the meaning from the metaphor and then, perhaps, cast the metaphor aside, separating the kernel of truth from the chaff of historical baggage.

In the modern world, marriage is not the patriarchal, male-dominated institution it was in Hosea’s time, but the metaphor can still work for us. In our Prayer Book, the meaning of marriage is summarized in the introductory comments with which the presiding minister begins the ceremony. We are told that it is a bond and covenant established by God in creation and that the union of the parties “in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy [and] for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity.” (BCP 1979, page 423)

Later in the service, just before the Nuptial Blessing is given, we pray for the couple that “each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy,” and that “their life together [may be] a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.” (Page 429) In such a relationship neither party dominates the other, neither is submissive; it is a mutual and interdependent bond of covenant obligations, one to the other.

When Hosea’s prophetic metaphor is understood in these terms, it emphasizes that God is angry with God’s people for abandoning the covenant obligations they had to God, even as God remained faithful. What Hosea’s marriage metaphor communicates to us, as it did to his ancient audience, is that it is divine fidelity, not human inconstancy, that will ultimately save the relationship. It is God’s faithfulness, not our own, which prevails and redeems our relationship with God.

This is also the message of the author of the Letter to the Colossians, an epistle traditionally said to have been written by St. Paul, but which is now no longer believed to be of his authorship. The reason for that is in the very part of the text on which I want to focus our attention, the sentence where the author writes: “When you were buried with [Christ] in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” The author seems to echo Paul’s understanding of baptism in the Letter to the Romans, particularly a section we read every year on Easter Sunday. Paul writes, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? . . . . If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (6:3,5) The theology is similar, but note the significant shift: in Romans, Paul writes that we will be raised with Christ, whereas the author of Colossians asserts that our resurrection with Christ has already happened by reason of baptism. These two passages reflect the wonderful here-but-not-quite-here mysterious paradox of Christianity; we both celebrate the present reality of and anticipate the future consummation of our salvation in Christ. The victory has already been won, but not yet.

Now, what I really want to focus on is why our resurrection, our salvation, whether it is a present reality or something yet to occur, should happen at all! In Romans, Paul says that it happens “by the glory of the Father.” (v. 4) The author of Colossians asserts that it is “through faith in the power of God” according to our translation; that would seem to imply that our faith is somehow responsible for our salvation, that the means for our resurrection is our fidelity. But there is a growing body of scholarship which suggests that this is a misunderstanding of the original Greek of the text. The Greek is dia te pisteo te energeia tou theou . . . literally: “through the faith the working of God.” Traditional English translations add the preposition “in” into the interpretation which would imply that this powerful, operative faith is ours, but the Greek can also be understood to mean not “faith in” but rather “faith of” – in other words, it is God’s faith!

The 18th Century Lutheran translator Johann Albrecht Bengel suggested exactly this in his Annotations on the New Testament when he translated this text to say that our salvation, our resurrection comes about through faith which is a work of God. This text, he says, is “a remarkable expression: faith is of Divine operation.” (Gnomon of the New Testament, A. Fausset, tr., Clark:Edinburgh 1858, page 171, emphasis in original) Our resurrection with Christ is not brought about because of our faith; it is not because of us, or anything we do or believe! We are saved through the faithfulness of God who, by his glory and power, raised Christ from the dead.

It is also God’s faithfulness to which Jesus alludes in the parental metaphor which he uses in his instruction about prayer: “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” God is the faithful parent who always responds when we ask, who is always there to be found when we search, who always opens the door when we knock. It is God’s faithfulness, not our own, which prevails and redeems our relationship with God.

On this we can rely; in this faithful God, we can have faith.

So let’s go back to Hosea’s marriage metaphor. The Lutheran Book of Worship, used by our brothers and sisters in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with whom we enjoy a relationship of full communion, says this about marriage: “The Lord God in his goodness created us . . . and by the gift of marriage founded human community in a joy that begins now and is brought to perfection in the life to come. Because of sin, our age-old rebellion, the gladness of marriage can be overcast, and the gift of the family can become a burden. But because God, who established marriage, continues still to bless it with his abundant and ever-present support, we can be sustained in our weariness and have our joy restored.” (LBW 1978, page 203)

It is into the household of God, the community of joy restored, the covenant of mutual help and comfort sustained by the faithfulness of God, that we welcome Ryan George and Jacqueline Ann this morning. They (and we together with them) will make the statements of belief and the promises of action set out in the Baptismal Covenant (BCP 1979, pages 304-04), and they (and we) will try faithfully to keep them. Fortunately, however, it is God’s faithfulness, not theirs (nor ours), which will prevail and redeem them (and us), and their (and our) relationship with God.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, by our baptism into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, you turn us from the old life of sin: Grant that we, being reborn to new life in him, may live in righteousness and holiness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP 1979, page 254)

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

The One Thing Needful in a Market Economy – Sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11C) – July 21, 2013

July 21, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 9 (Proper 11, Year C): Amos 8:1-12; Psalm 52; Colossians 1:15-28; and Luke 10:38-42. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Fruit Basket In last week’s sermon I talked about the first three prophetic visions God reveals to Amos: a plague of locusts devouring the crops of ancient Israel, a catastrophic fire destroying everything in the nation, and the plumb line set in the midst of the nation’s people demonstrating that they were not upright. This week Amos is shown a fourth prophetic vision.

The eighth chapter of this prophet opens with God showing Amos a basket of summer fruit, such things as peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums, and figs. We aren’t told the condition of the fruit, but some commentators suggest that it may be fruit that is over-ripe, maybe on the verge of going bad. They suggest this because God tells Amos that this vision means that “the end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by.” God’s explanation continues with visions of dead bodies in the street, wailing and lamentation in the temples, the nation destroyed, and the survivors wandering lost.

Well, it may be that the fruit is going bad, but in truth what God is doing is making a pun in Hebrew, a play on words that simply doesn’t translate into English. In Hebrew, the word for “summer fruits” is qayits; the word for “the end” is qets. The are spelled differently, but pronounced almost identically. Qayits . . . qets . . . God is making it clear that with respect to Israel, God is calling it quits! The finality of the passage is clear; Israel has no recourse.

And why has it come to this? Again, God is very clear, it’s because of economic injustice. God will punish the nation because its upper class, its wealthy merchants “trample on the needy.” They can’t wait Sabbaths and holy days to get over so they can resume their fraudulent business practices. They sell partial measures of wheat weighed on false scales that are overbalanced so that what is shown as a sheckel of wheat is far less. They measure ephahs of grain that are less than the regulation 35 liters. They “buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” That they are described as “selling the sweepings of the wheats” suggests either that they are selling chaff as if it were good grain, or that they are selling even the gleanings which are required by the Law of Moses to be left for the homeless and the beggars. In short, God is more than a little unhappy about the disparity between the wealthy merchants and the poor who must buy from them.

In our world, as in ancient Israel, the overriding organizing principle of society is the market economy, profit at the bottom line: the measure for nearly everything is profit and how it can be increased. It is a principle which works on paper, yet it is not helpful when we encounter the most pressing issues in our society. By “society” I do not mean simply our nation, I mean our entire global society, but we do see this played out in our local and national communities.

We are concerned when our local superintendent of schools seems to abuse his financial privileges because we see our education system not keeping up in a world market. We complain about the cost of salaries and benefits for those who teach our children, and yet paradoxically use the superintendent’s apparent misuse of funds as an excuse to vote against school levies or otherwise reduce school budgets, as if cutting costs will improve our children’s education.

We have all witnessed the damage done to our environment by the continuing use of fossil fuels, and there is plenty of good scientific research indicating that it has resulted in man-made global climate change that is costing billions of dollars in storm damage, and disrupting (if not ending) the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. However, when solutions are proposed, the objection is always that it may impact the profitability of business.

The truth is that profitability is the wrong measure, that the market is unable to deal with these issues. The gap between rich and poor, between haves and have-not is huge when measured in dollars-and-cents; it is even more staggering when measured in education and quality of life, and it is continuing to grow.

Are we able to hear God’s word of justice spoken to Amos as applying to us? Do we even understand how clearly it applied to the ancient Israelites? Do we even remember that what was prophesied by Amos against them did, in fact, come to pass?

God’s word was given by Amos in approximately the year 750 BCE during the reign of Jeroboam II of the Kingdom of Israel. This is not the united monarchy of Saul, David, and Solomon; this is the northern kingdom which rebelled against Solomon’s son Rehoboam in about the year 930 BCE and set up Jeroboam I as a separate monarch in the region we now know as Samaria. These rebels included the tribes of Reuben, Simeon, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim, and Manasseh, ten of the twelve tribes. Only the tribes of Benjamin and Judah remained loyal to the House of David.

Ten tribes. Ten tribes. That ought to ring some bells; that ought to tickle something in your memory. These ten tribes are legendary, known to history as “the ten lost tribes of Israel.” Lost because less than twenty years after Amos prophesied that “dead bodies shall be cast out in every place,” it came to pass. Less than twenty years after God told them through Amos that their end would be bitter and that any survivors would “wander from sea to sea and from north to east . . . seeking the word of the Lord” and never finding it, that is exactly what happened. The Assyrian Empire invaded the northern Kingdom of Israel in 732 BCE and wiped . . . it . . . out . . .

Are we able to hear God’s word of economic justice spoken through Amos as applying to us? Not us the nation, but us the global economic society which cannot seem to divorce itself from the organizing principle of profit no matter what the issue may be, even when that organizing principle cannot address the issue. If we believe the witness of Holy Scripture, the ten lost tribes were lost, utterly destroyed, wiped from human history because God will not tolerate economic injustice!

Let’s leave that question for a moment and turn our attention to the Gospel lesson which seems at first glance to have little if any relationship to our Old Testament lesson. It is the familiar story of Jesus visiting his friends Mary and Martha of Bethany. He arrived and, like good friends and hosts, they held a dinner party. Luke does not tell us that others were present, but it would have been very much out of the ordinary for Jesus to have been alone with these women, so we can assume that others, at least their brother Lazarus, were there for the meal.

Martha, anxious for the comfort of their guest, busied herself with all the details of hospitality — setting the table, cooking, filling the glasses, bustling about will all of that sort of thing. Her sister Mary, however, did not pitch in to help. Instead, she sat with the other guests at Jesus feet, a student attentive to her teacher, listening to his words.

Martha, seeing Mary seeming not to care, became annoyed and ungracious. A word to her sister would probably have been sufficient to secure her help, but rather than do that Martha impatiently complained to Jesus: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”

Jesus answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” This text is commonly understood to contrast Mary’s attention to Jesus words — good — with Martha’s busy distraction — bad. But that’s overly simplistic and isn’t true to the spirit of Jesus teaching.

Martha has done the right thing; she has invited Jesus into her home and busied herself with the obligations of hospitality, something that Jesus values. The problem is that, as a hostess, she hasn’t been gracious; she hasn’t spent time with Jesus, her other guests, or even with her sister. She has let these tasks distract her. And worse, rather than speak with Mary directly and ask Mary directly for help, Martha did what we are all warned against; she dragged someone else into her tiff with her sister. It’s called “triangulation.” Like a school girl angry with a friend, she won’t talk directly to Mary, even when she’s in the same room: “Jesus, tell Mary (who was right there in the same room) to help me.” It’s a contentious move; it creates conflict.

It isn’t her busyness with hospitality and hosting, or her sister’s attention to his conversation, that Jesus referred to when he said, “There is need of only one thing.” Putting Mary to work at Martha’s task wasn’t what was required. It was something else. And to understand what it was, we have to step back from the gospel lesson and see this episode in context.

This visit with Mary and Martha happens immediately after Jesus has told the story we heard last week, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Remember that that story came in response to a question from a lawyer, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

In answer to that question, Jesus asked the lawyer what the Law of Moses says, to which the lawyer answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. ”

Jesus told the lawyer that his answer was correct and then said, “Do this, and you will live.” The lawyer had given a two-part answer: love God — love your neighbor. But to Jesus it was not two things, but one. He did not say, “Do these.” He did not say, “Do those two thing.” He said, “Do this” — singular — one thing. Love God, love your neighbor. To Jesus, it’s one thing, one needful thing. (And, please, remember! This is not sloppy, emotional romantic love! This is Biblical love – chessed in Hebrew; agape in Greek – love which respects the dignity of human being, which promotes peace, and fosters justice.)

For Jesus, love is above and beyond all else. It takes precedence over every other consideration, every other organizing principle, every other motive. He will live by, and die because of, this one needful thing. He will stay true to this one thing even though it will mean his sacrifice on the cross of Calvary. “Through him,” writes Paul to the Colossians, and through the fullness of God, which is Love, which dwelt in him, “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” Love is the one thing needful.

And that one thing is the answer to the economic injustice against which the prophet Amos railed. The answer does not and cannot lie within the context of the market economy itself. Just as taking Mary away from the conversation and putting her to work at Martha’s tasks would not really have answered Martha’s complaints and reconciled what had become the bitterness between them, simply taking money away from the rich and giving it to the poor will not correct economic injustice; it simply perpetuates it, giving the money a new owner, and making a new non-owner filled with resentment. Revolution, elevating the working proletariat above the rich merchant class, switching Mary for Martha, also is not the answer; it simply perpetuates the disparities by reversing the roles. The answer does not and cannot lie within the market economy; it must be found in a different context.

Reducing people to commodities — “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” — being eager to sell on the Sabbath, shorting measures, and cutting corners were commonplace, if not integral, to the economy of ancient Israel; they are commonplace, if not integral, to all market economies. But these practices and attitudes of markets, like Martha’s bustling busyness, lack one thing needful. They lack love — love which respects dignity, promotes peace, and fosters justice. And because they lacked love, the ten tribes of the northern kingdom became lost, utterly destroyed, wiped from the human history because God will not tolerate economic injustice!

We must come to the realization as a society, as a global economic society, that we are no different from the lost tribes of Israel. That for many aspects of our modern life — health, education, clean air and water, public safety — profitability is the wrong measure, just as it was for them. The market was and is unable to deal with these issues; it was and is the wrong context within which to solve these and many other of society’s ills. As the Psalm for today says, we must stop trusting in great wealth; we must stop relying upon wickedness; we must, instead, trust in the mercy of God. In these areas of our common life, we need to change society’s organizing principle from market economics to gospel values, from profit as the bottom line to biblical love – dignity, peace, justice – as the bottom line.

It is the one thing needful. Amen.

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

Who Is My Neighbor? And Who Is the Good Samaritan? – Sermon for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10C) – July 14, 2013

July 14, 2013 / eric / 1 Comment

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This sermon was preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 8 (Proper 10, Year C): Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; and Luke 10:25-37. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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The Good Samaritan, engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld The nation’s legal system is corrupt; justice is for sale to the highest bidder. The guilty go free while the innocent suffer and die. The rich are crushing the poor. The affluent, the 1%-ers, are living a lavish life, with their costly perfumes and cosmetics, and their vacation homes with expensive furnishings, pleasure palaces where they can throw extravagant parties with music in every room. They revel in sexual debauchery of all sorts, but try to enforce a puritanical moral code on the rest of society. The poor are at the mercy of predatory lenders who exploit vulnerable families. The rich have more than enough to eat and to waste, while the poorest in the society go hungry. And government and religious leaders not only allow this to happen, they help it happen.

Just a brief summary of Chapters 1 through 6 of the Prophet Amos.

Some of you probably thought, “There he goes again, spouting his liberal politics from the pulpit.” But I’m not; as I said, it’s simply a paraphrase the Prophet Amos’s critique, of God’s critique, of ancient Israel at the time of King Jeroboam II. We just heard most of chapter 7 beginning at verse 7, in which Amos tells of the third of three prophetic visions. In verses 1 through 6, Amos tells of God showing him locusts devouring all the crops of the land and then another vision of fire destroying everything in the nation. Amos pleads with God not to let that happen. Most scholars interpret those visions as omens of what God might do to the nation, but I think perhaps they might instead be striking visions of prophetic judgment against the wealthy of ancient Israel and the rulers and religious leaders of the time. These are not visions of what God might do; they are visions of what those in power will do if not stopped. And God’s judgment spoken twice to Amos is, “This will not happen!” (vv. 3, 6)

So God shows Amos a vision of a plumb line. Do you know what a plumb line is? There’s a picture of a plumb line on the cover of the bulletin this morning. A plumb line is a string with a metal weight, or “plumb bob,” at one end which, when suspended, points directly towards the earth’s center of gravity so that the string hangs perpendicular to the plane of the earth’s surface; it is used to test the verticality of structures, how true to straight up-and-down they are. It sets the standard for up-rightness. God tells Amos that God is setting a metaphorical plumb line in the midst of God’s People and if they don’t measure up to the standard, “the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and [God] will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

Well, you say, that’s ancient Israel. What’s that got to do with us?

Let me read you a news item from the past week. This is from the July 9, 2013, issue of the Florence, Alabama, Times-Daily:

Police Chief Lyndon McWhorter said Monday morning’s bank robbery [in Moulton, Alabama] was among the most unusual of his law enforcement career.

“I’ve been involved with several over the years, but none like this,” McWhorter said. “It’s one for the books.”

McWhorter said Rickie Lawrence Gardner, 49, of 7667 Alabama 33, Moulton, was arrested Monday morning while sitting on a bench outside the Bank Independent branch on Court Street in Moulton, minutes after he supposedly walked in and robbed the bank.

“When the officers got there, he was just sitting on the bench, waiting on them,” McWhorter said. “The money was locked up inside his truck, which was parked in the handicapped spot in front of the bank.

“He had a handicap sticker on his vehicle so he even parked legal.”

McWhorter said Gardner told authorities he robbed the bank because he had hurt his leg and wasn’t able to take care of himself.

“So, he decided to get arrested to have a place to live and someone to take care of him.”

Minutes before the arrest, McWhorter said, Gardner walked into the bank just off Alabama 157 and handed a teller a written note explaining that he had a gun and she was to give him money.

Authorities said no weapon, other than a pocketknife, was found when Gardner was taken into custody.

“The only thing he said to the teller was when he asked her to give him a bag to put the money in,” McWhorter said.

With the money in hand, McWhorter said Gardner walked out of the bank, laid the money inside his vehicle, locked the door and walked back to the bench. The chief said Gardner sat down on the wooden bench in front of the bank and waited on officers.

“When officers got there, he did not offer any kind of resistance. He was just waiting on them,” McWhorter said. “This is the first bank robbery I’ve ever worked where the robber was waiting outside the bank for the police to turn himself in.” (Times-Daily)

The Associated Press later reported that Gardner “mentioned the weapon in the note — even though he didn’t have one — because he thought it would get him a longer sentence;” he thought he’d get more time, which would mean more shelter, more food. (AP Story)

The reason you may have thought my opening paraphrase of Amos sounded like an indictment of our own society is simple. It does. The word of prophecy spoken by Amos to ancient Israel speaks directly to us.

You know the interesting thing about Amos’s prophecy is that we can’t even be sure it was heard by the rulers of the nation to which it was spoken. We know Amos wrote it down; we know that someone told the story of Amos delivering his prophecy to Amaziah (who was the high priest at Bethel the religious center of the northern kingdom), but we are told that Amaziah never delivered it to Jeroboam II, the reigning king.

Amaziah instead told the king that Amos was part of a conspiracy to kill him, and then Amaziah told Amos to return to his home which was in the southern kingdom. “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah,” he says, “earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” And this is where Amos speaks one of my favorite lines in Scripture, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.”

Amos’s answer was to indicate that he was not a prophet by profession; he was not a member of one of the official “prophecy schools.” Indeed, as part of the official religious establishment, Amos thought those full-time prophets were as much a part of the problem as the priests, the king, and the wealthy! Amaziah proved that he was part of the problem by failing to communicate Amos’s prophecy to King Jeroboam, so our reading today ends with Amos’s personal prophecy against him: “Your wife shall become a . . . and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword . . . and you shall die in an unclean land.” A pretty pointed prophecy, if ever there was one!

But we, who hear in Amos’s condemnation of ancient Israel at least a bit of a word of warning to our own society, what are we to make of this prophecy of the plumb line? The standard for the People of God in Israel was the ancient law of Moses, the religious, ethical, and social rules we find in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers (Deuteronomy was unknown at the time of Amos). What is it for us? How are we (as Paul wrote to the Colossians) to be “be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding?” How are we to “lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him?” How are we to bear fruit in every good work and . . . grow in the knowledge of God?”

Well, that standard is easily stated. A young lawyer does so in today’s Gospel: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” It’s easily stated; it’s not so easily understood.

The young lawyer says as much when he asks his follow up question, “Who is my neighbor?” He wants to know what we want to know: are there limits? Is it sufficient to love only the people of my community — for him, Israel; for most of us, white descendants of Northern European immigrants? Does it include Mr. Gardner, the bank robber in Moulton, Alabama? Might it also include other undesirables, Samaritans and Gentiles, the Irish, descendants of African slaves, recently immigrated Asians, Hispanics? Does it include women, people with disabilities, lepers, and others frequently excluded from society? Do we get to define who is our neighbor, or does Someone else?

Ultimately, the answer to our question is the answer to another question: “Who does God love?” Jesus answers the question by telling a parable, the oh-so-familiar story of the “Good Samaritan.” In analyzing this story, Lutheran theologian Brian Stoffregen asks an important question: “Why does Jesus make the hero of this story a Samaritan?” In answering this question he writes:

The idea of being a “Good Samaritan” is so common in our culture, that most people today don’t realize that “Good Samaritan” would have been an oxymoron to a first century Jew. Briefly stated, a Samaritan is someone from Samaria. During an ancient Israeli war, most of the Jews living up north in Samaria were killed or taken into exile. However, a few Jews, who were so unimportant that nobody wanted them, were left in Samaria. Since that time, these Jews had intermarried with other races. They were considered half-breeds by the “true” Jews. They had perverted the race. They had also perverted the religion. They looked to Mt. Gerizim as the place to worship God, not Jerusalem. They interpreted the Torah differently than the southern Jews. The animosity between the Jews and Samaritans were so great that some Jews would go miles out of their way to avoid walking on Samaritan territory. Previously in Luke, the Samaritans had refused to welcome Jesus — the “bad” Samaritans. I’m certain that in the minds of many Jews, the only “good” Samaritan was a dead Samaritan. Note that the lawyer never says “Samaritan.” He can’t call him a “good Samaritan” (a phrase that doesn’t occur in the text). Anyway, we are still left with the question, “Why a Samaritan?”

If Jesus were just trying to communicate that we should do acts of mercy to the needy, he could have talked about the first man and the second man who passed by and the third one who stopped and cared for the half-dead man in the ditch. Knowing that they were a priest, Levite, and Samaritan is not necessary.

If Jesus were also making a gibe against clerics, we would expect the third man to be a layman — an ordinary Jew — in contrast to the professional clergy. It is likely that Jewish hearers would have anticipated the hero to be an ordinary Jew.

If Jesus were illustrating the need to love our enemies, then the man in the ditch would have been a Samaritan who is cared for by a loving Israelite.

One answer to the question: “Why a Samaritan?” is that we Christians might be able to learn about showing mercy from people who don’t profess Christ. I know that I saw much more love expressed towards each by the clients at an inpatient alcoholic/drug rehab hospital than I usually find in churches. Can we learn about “acting Christianly” from AA or the Hell’s Angels? (CrossMarks)

But Stoffregen proposes an alternative response: “Another answer to the question: ‘Why a Samaritan?’ is that we are not to identify with the Samaritan. A Jew would find that so distasteful that he couldn’t identify with that person. He wouldn’t want to be like the Priest or Levite in the story, so that leaves the hearer with identifying with the man in the ditch.” And that raises the further question, “Then who is the Samaritan?” to which there can only be one answer, “The Samaritan is God.”

If the Samaritan represents God, that means that God loves the penniless, the stripped naked, the beaten down, the ones left half dead, the ones passed-by by the leaders of society, by the rulers, by the punctiliously correct, and (I’m sorry to say) by the religious. It makes us realize that God is no respecter of position or wealth, God does not care about social class or religion. The man in the ditch had been stripped of everything that might have indicated his social standing, his religious faith, even his nationality; he was simply a person in need. That is who God loves, and that means that God loves everyone. In the human community, every person is potentially a person in need; truth be told, every person is a person in need.

Who is my neighbor? Who does God love? Everyone. No exceptions. No exclusions. That is the standard, the rule, the plumb line by which God judges society. This again and again is what the prophets of old told us; it is what Jesus told us; it is what our own modern prophets have said over and over. For example:

In the 18th Century, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell quoted him as saying, “A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” (Boswell, Life of Johnson)

In her book My Several Worlds (1954), Pearl S. Buck, wrote: “The test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.”

In his last political speech, Sen. Hubert Humphrey said, “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

And Mahatma Gandhi said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”

Who is my neighbor? Who does God love? Everyone. No exceptions. No exclusions.

Every person is potentially a person in need, and every person is potentially a caregiver, a supplier of that which is needed. When we conclude our worship this morning, several young people and a few adults accompanying them will depart for Franklin, Pennsylvania, to be suppliers of that which is needed. At this point, they don’t know whose needs they are going to be supplying; they don’t know what those needs will be. All they know is that there are people in need and they are going to care for them, because they are our neighbors.

So at this point, let’s get on with the business of commissioning them for the ministry on which they are about the embark.

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

What Is A Church Building? – Sermon for a Ground Breaking on the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9C) – July 7, 2013

July 7, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 7, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector. The worship that morning included breaking ground on an expansion of the church’s parish hall.

The lessons were taken partially from the readings suggested in the rubrics of The Book of Occasional Services for a ground breaking liturgy and partially from the Revised Common Lectionary for Pentecost 7 (Proper 9, Year C). The Old Testament reading was Genesis 28:10-17; the Gradual was Psalm 132:1-9. The epistle was Galatians 6:1-16; the gospel lesson was Luke 10:1-11,16-20. The latter two lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.

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Church Interior with Superimposed Question Mark What is a church building? It’s a holy place. It’s a place where people gather to worship. It’s a place where people encounter God. It’s a place where God’s people enjoy one another’s company. It’s a place where people get married, where babies are baptized, where funerals are held, where memories are made and lives remembered. It’s a place where the stories of faith are told and retold. It’s a place we teach and it’s a place where we learn.

Our reading from Genesis this morning is a small part of the story of Jacob, the son of Isaac who will later be called “Israel.” Jacob is the least likely of patriarchs. Of all the biblical patriarchs, he is the most enigmatic. He never exhibits either the awesome faith of Abraham or the level-headedness of Isaac. He is, in fact, a scoundrel. He’s tricked his father and cheated his brother out of the blessing of the first-born; his character emerges through a series of deceptions, intrigues, and conflicts. He will wrestle with God and be given the name “Israel,” the name that will identify his descendants for the rest of time. He must be taught by God; he has some learning to do.

In the story we heard today, he is on the run. He is afraid of his brother, whom he has cheated, so he has taken off. His father has told him to flee to Haran (his grandfather Abraham’s original home) and there find a wife. Along the way, he camps near a town called Luz and has this dream that we have all heard of before, the vision of a ladder on which angels are traveling back and forth between heaven and Earth. He learns that, like Moses before him, he is standing on holy ground. He says, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven,” and so he renames it, Bethel, “House of God.” A lot of sermons have been preached about Jacob and his character flaws, or about this vision and what the angels coming and going might mean.

But, today, what I want to call to our attention is what God says to Jacob: “Your offspring [God says] shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.”

The descendants of Jacob would go forth from that place to spread blessing to all the corners of the earth – to west, to east, to north, to south. They would go out from that place to change the world.

I’m particularly fond of an Orthodox Jewish translation of this text: “Your seed shall be as the dust of the earth; and you shall burst forth to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south; and in you and in your seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” I love that image – Jacob and his descendants would not, could not stay in that awesome place; they could not stay in the house of God or at the gate of heaven. They had to leave, to spread from the Holy Land, to “burst forth” bringing a transformation to the world that would be explosive and dramatic.

We are not gathered in a desert wilderness. We have not gone to sleep on holy stones. We have not seen angels climbing to rocks to heaven . . . but we have gathered in a church building, a place that for many for generations has been an awesome place, a house of God, and a gate of heaven, a place where children have been blessed, where children have been told the stories of God, the stories of Jesus, where hymns of joy have been sung. We are gathered in this place to reaffirm our commitment that heritage and that ministry, to renew this place and to renew the ministry done here.

But like Bethel where Jacob camped for the night, this is not a place to stay; it is a place to leave. It’s a place from which the people of God are sent into the world.

Church buildings are centers of ministry, places of assembly, where God’s people gather to worship, to hear the good news, and to be transformed, not for themselves but in order to be sent back out into the world, to “burst forth” and change the world. Jesus’ last words to his followers were, “Go . . . and make disciples!” (Matt. 28:19)

In our gospel lesson today, Jesus gives his followers their marching orders. “The Lord appointed seventy [followers] and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Some commentators suggest that seventy disciples were chosen because in rabbinic tradition, seventy represents the total number of nations in the world. Just as the children of Jacob were to spread to every corner of the earth, the disciples of Jesus are to go to every nation in the world. As the descendants of Israel are to be a blessing to others, the disciples of Jesus are to go into the world and announce that “the kingdom of God has come near.”

Church buildings, worship spaces and fellowship halls, are the bases from which the church is sent out to do that, as the disciples in today’s reading from Luke were sent out by Jesus. The Rev. Edward Markquart, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington, writes this about our gospel lesson today:

What happened is that those disciples first went to a village or town. Those first disciples planted a church, and then went to a second village or town, and planted a church. They went to a third village or town and planted another church. They … whoops. We have to go back to that first village or town and look more carefully. We have to go back to that first village, because before the disciples went onto the second village, they left a group of people in that village who were committed to Jesus Christ. The Greek word is “laos.” They were called the “laos,” which means, “the laity,” “the people,” “the people of God.” The Apostles always left common and ordinary townspeople and villagers whose hearts were on fire, whose tongues were on fire, who hadn’t gone to the seminary, who hadn’t seen Jesus face to face, who hadn’t talked with him in the flesh. These were not the Apostles. These were not the twelve disciples. These were the people of God in each village who spread the Gospel from house to house, and neighbor to neighbor and friend to friend and family to family. That’s the way it always is. That fundamental principle is always true; it is the laity, the people of God, who become inspired by the Holy Spirit. They are the ones, not the twelve, not the Apostles, not the pastors. It is the laity, the people of God, who go about winning souls to Jesus Christ and nurturing those souls into maturity. (Sermons from Seattle)

Church buildings don’t change the world. They may be awesome; they may be houses of God; they may be gates of heaven. But by themselves, they don’t win people to Jesus, nurture souls to maturity, or change the world. Church buildings are meant to be the bases from which the people of God do that. Church buildings are meant to be places of life, living, breathing, growing, exciting places of life. Church buildings are meant to be centers of ministry, places of assembly, where God’s people gather to worship, to hear the good news, to celebrate the meaning of life, and to be transformed, and then “burst forth,” back out into the world to share that life and transform the lives of others.

We have broken ground today on our Inviting the Future project; after four years of visioning and planning, we have, at last, begun this project to improve this center of ministry, not as a monument to ourselves, but as a place from which we might better serve the world, that we might “burst forth” and tell the world that the kingdom of God is at hand.

Poet and priest Sheila Nelson-McJilton, offers a poetic retelling of our Old Testament reading in her poem Who Sleep on Holy Stones: A Meditation on Genesis 28:10-17.

Bearer of curse and blessing,
I left home to stumble into the desert,
Exhausted and empty
I watch fierce sun set over silent stones.
Stars ascend toward midnight,
The wind moans through desert canyons,
And clouds drift across a full moon like shimmering angels.
Broken and empty I come to you, O Lord God.
In a desert midnight,
There is no smell of blessed fields
No grain
No wine
No fatness of earth
No sweet dew of heaven.
Alone I sleep on holy stones,
Under stars that blaze fierce and countless as dust.
The wind moans high above me, through desert canyons.
Clouds veil the moon.
Strong shining faces of angels appear.
Michael Gabriel Raphael
Lean down to earth.
Their glittering swords carve stones into steps to heaven.
Angels descend in silence to gaze into my face.
Angels ascend in silence to bear my deceit away.
Then in a shimmering celestial dance
Of turning wings,
Swirling wings
They sweep aside clouds.
I see a heavenly host as countless as dust.
I hear a heavenly host, their voices joined by joyous stars.
Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth . . . peace.
Their alleluias echoing high above desert canyons,
The Holy One descends from the gate of heaven
To stand beside my stone pillow.
To wrap my empty fears
In an eternal mantle of blessing.
To hallow the ground on which I sleep.
Michael veils the moon with his wings
And the only light I see is God.
I left home, soul that raged with wild emptiness
And in this desert wilderness, angels carve holy names for sleep.
They dance a path between me and You, O Lord God.
You have found me, broken and empty,
On holy stones that ascend to the very gates of heaven,
And you have not cursed me.
In a desert midnight, I know the smell of blessed fields, grain.
I will tell of you, O Lord God,
To laughing children who bless my tent,
To strong children who become tribes as countless as dust.
I will tell them of desert midnights filled with blazing stars
Of fierce angels who carve holy stones
And dance with glittering swords among clouds
Of hymns sung by joyous stars over Bethel
And over Bethlehem.
(from Anglican Theological Review, Winter, 2000)

What is a church building? A church building is a place to leave. From this place, this improved place, this living, breathing and growing place, we will leave. We will “burst forth” to tell in story and in song, in words and in deeds, in actions and in ministries, of the love of God. We will tell of God to laughing children, to strong children, to hungry children, to mourning children, to children in need, to all of God’s children; we will tell them of desert midnights and blazing stars; we will tell them that the kingdom of God has come near!

As we do so, let us never forget the prayer which has guided us throughout this project, a prayer written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu adapted from an original by Sir Francis Drake.

Let us pray:

Disturb us, O Lord
when we are too well-pleased with ourselves
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little,
because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, O Lord
when with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the water of life
when, having fallen in love with time,
we have ceased to dream of eternity
and in our efforts to build a new earth,
we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.
Stir us, O Lord
to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas
where storms show Thy mastery,
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes
and invited the brave to follow,
our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

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

Legion . . . Silence: A Contrast – Sermon for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7C) – June 23, 2013

June 23, 2013 / eric / 1 Comment

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

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 5 (Proper 7, Year C): 1 Kings 19:1-15a; Psalms 42 and 43; Galatians 3:23-29; and Luke 8:26-39. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Schizophrenia Illustration from Vimeo At the beginning of the sermon, following the reading of Gospel lesson, five readers scattered among the congregation, rose and loudly read the following five passages simultaneously:

Voice One: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Voice Two: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Voice Three: “You can’t do anything right and never will be able to. Everyone hates you. You have no friends. You are the most useless, worthless human being on the planet. You know this is true, and you are powerless to change it. You should just end it right now. There’s no reason for you to keep living.”

Voice Four: “In a large bowl, beat together eggs, oil, white sugar and two teaspoons vanilla. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Stir in carrots. Fold in pecans. Pour into prepared pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.”

Voice Five “Mr. Dursley, a well-off Englishman, notices strange happenings on his way to work one day. That night, Albus Dumbledore, the head of a wizardry academy called Hogwarts, meets Professor McGonagall, who also teaches at Hogwarts, and a giant named Hagrid outside the Dursley home. Dumbledore tells McGonagall that someone named Voldemort has killed a Mr. and Mrs. Potter and tried unsuccessfully to kill their baby son, Harry.”

One of the many ways in which modern scholars try to make sense of the story of the Gerasene Demoniac is the suggestion that he was, in fact, schizophrenic. For example, the Dean of St. Alban’s Cathedral in England, Jeffrey John, writes:

Anyone presenting the symptoms of the Gerasene demoniac today would be rapidly committed for treatment of multiple schizophrenia – and quite rightly. It would be very foolish to do otherwise, or to discount the huge, God-given progress that has been made in our understanding and treatment of mental illness since biblical times. (The Meaning in the Miracles, p. 91, Eerdmans:2004)

A Roman Catholic writer who identifies himself only as “John” tells of accompanying a priest making his Eucharistic ministry rounds at a psychiatric hospital. He describes what happened when they arrived at the ward where the most seriously disturbed patients were housed:

My friend began to say the prayers and all was relatively calm until he raised the Eucharist. This very motion acted like a trigger for one of the patients who began to shout expletives, spit and hiss. This set off most of the others; he had to be restrained while we administered the Eucharist to those who wanted it and lined up to receive it. Amidst the cacophony I heard one thing that he shouted which remains with me to this day; he shouted “why are you coming in here tormenting us?” (John’s Ramblings)

He then comments, “It wasn’t until some time later that when meditating on the Healing of the Gerasene Demoniac . . . that I shuddered to a halt and recalled that event in the psychiatric hospital.”

Schizophrenics hear voices. This is the most common type of hallucination in schizophrenia. The voices may talk to the person about his or her behavior; they may order the person to do things; they may speak warnings of danger. Sometimes the voices talk to each other; sometimes they talk over one another, several voices speaking at once. What we experienced as these five people read these differing texts was a crude demonstration of what some schizophrenics experience, or what the Gerasene Demoniac seems to have suffered.

The great English author, C. S. Lewis, once wrote that we human beings are a “myriad of impulses, a cauldron of evil desires.” The Gerasene Demoniac certainly was. When Jesus asked him (or the demon within him) his name, the answer was, “We are legion.”

That is a very scary answer! That word, legion, is a Roman military term. In the Roman army, a legion consisted of six thousand men. We heard only five voices in our little demonstration. Can you imagine what it must have been like to hear thousands upon thousands of demonic voices? No wonder he would break his chains and shackles and run into the wilds to live in the cemetery among the tombs!

John, the Roman Catholic blogger, suggests that “all disorder, all conflict whether we call it civil, political, doctrinal, psychiatric, psychological, social or personal disorder, . . . anything that creates or contributes to disorder or conflict is the presence of evil at work in the world.” I believe he is correct, the message of the Prophets is that that disorder, that chaos is not, and never will be, the last word.

As dramatic counterpoint to the Gospel story today, we have another story of the Prophet Elijah. The Lectionary, as you remember, has had us bouncing around in the First Book of Kings reading stories of Elijah, but not in the order they are presented in that book. Instead, we have been getting the texts from First Kings as they may relate to the stories from Luke’s Gospel; today’s pairing seems to be a good example. What we see here is the stark difference between the chaotic disorder of evil, represented by demon possession (or schizophrenia), and the order of holiness, represented by the “sheer silence” in which Elijah encounters God.

You recall the story. Elijah has just killed the 450 prophets of Ba’al, which has royally angered the wicked Queen Jezebel. She has sent word to Elijah saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” In other words, “Look out, Dude! I’m gonna kill you!” So Elijah, in fear, flees into the desert and in a fit of depression prays that God will take his life. However, an angel appears and tells him that’s not going to happen. He is instructed to eat something and then travel to “Horeb, the mount of God.” This is understood to be the very same place where Moses received the Tablets of the Law. When he gets there, God asks what his problem is: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah answers that all the prophets of Yahweh have been killed (by Queen Jezebel and her army) and only he is left. So God tells him to stand at the mouth of his cave because God will pass by.

He does so and there is a storm, and then an earthquake, and then a fire. All of these things represent that disordered chaos which the Demoniac in the Gospel experiences, and God is in none of them. Instead, God is in the “sheer silence,” as the New Revised Standard Version translates the Hebrew. A literal translation of the Hebrew would be “the sound of gentle blowing,” and the King James Version translated this by that wonderful turn of phrase “a still small voice.”

So we have this wonderful juxtaposition of an image of loud, confusing, demonic chaos — the Gerasene Demoniac, a person in a situation which is overwhelmingly evil, permeated with and being buffeted by a legion of devils, thousands of incoherent voices, pulling him in every direction, ruining his life — with an image of calm, peaceful, gentleness — the still small voice of God present in sound of sheer silence, the sound of gentle blowing.

We, I hope, are not possessed of demons, nor suffering from schizophrenia or some other form of delusional mental illness. But we all inhabit a world of many, many voices, all talking to us, all telling us what to think, or do, or say. No matter how old we are, we will always have the voices of parents and grandparents playing in our heads; we have the voices of politicians, news reporters, bosses, spouses, our own children, their teachers, doctors, lawyers, tax advisers . . . and occasionally preachers . . . all telling us what to do. There are times when all of that noise can get us down, when we can all relate personally to the lament in today’s gradual psalm: “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?”

Several years ago, there was a job opening on a cruise ship; a new communications officer was need. There were several applicants seeking the position and all were told to come to a particular office at the same time on the same day. They arrived and were shown in to a waiting room. While they waited to be interviewed, the conversed with one another and soon the room was filled with the sounds of conversation. After quite a long wait, another applicant who was late came in and sat down; everyone else was busy talking, so she just quietly waited for a few minutes, but then suddenly, she jumped up and walked through a door marked “Private.” A few minutes the personnel manager walked out of that door and announced that the position had been filled; the late-arriving applicant had been hired. The other applicants were extremely angry, “We were here first! How could she go ahead of us and get the job?” To which the personnel manager replied, “Any of you could have gotten the job if you had just been quiet long enough to pay attention to the message on the intercom.” “What message?” “All the time you were talking the intercom was broadcasting in Morse Code, ‘A ship’s communications officer must always be on the alert. The first person who gets this message and comes directly into my office will get the job.'”

I believe that God’s still small voice is like that coded message. It’s there if we will but take a few moments of silence and listen for it. And if it seems like we do not have the power to do so on our own, if we are unable to still the storms, the earthquakes, the fires, the voices . . . the story of the Gerasene Demoniac reminds us that Jesus can, because personal exorcism is not what this story is really about. “Rather,” as Jeffrey John reminds us, “it is about the promise . . . of God’s ability to defeat and re-order the disordered powers that afflict both individuals and communities.”

Life can sometimes, indeed, life can often be permeated with great evil that is almost beyond human comprehension and beyond our ability to handle. In those moments, we may be tempted to just give up and give in to the intensity of evil around us. Like the Psalmist we may cry out, “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?” Like Elijah we may be tempted to just sit down in the desert and say, “Let me die.” But God does not give up; Jesus does not give up. Jesus faces the demons with his healing and his peace. There is no situation so bad that Jesus cannot or will not bring his healing power.

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?
and why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God;
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
Amen.

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

Honoring Women on Fathers’ Day – Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6C) – June 16, 2013

June 16, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 16, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Pentecost 4 (Proper 6, Year C): 1 Kings 21:1-21a; Psalm 5:1-8; Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Today, I would like to talk about women. I know it’s Fathers’ Day but as my friend and colleague (someone known to many of you) the Rev. Jennifer Leider recently remarked, “The lectionary is no respecter of secular holidays.” On this 4th Sunday after Pentecost, looking at the lessons for Proper 6 in Lectionary Year C, we have some readings from Scripture which draw our attention to women: women as active agents in the world of men, as subjects who act rather than as objects which are acted upon. Given the cultures, the political realities, and the social mores of the times and places in which these stories happened and were recorded, that’s really quite amazing! So, it may be Fathers’ Day, but let’s take a look at these biblical women.

The first woman to consider is the wife of King Ahab of Israel, Queen Jezebel. Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal, king of Tyre, the Phoenician empire. She was a powerful woman who commanded her own army and had considerable control over the religious establishment of her homeland. According to the Scriptures, she converted her husband to the worship of Ba’al and convinced him to have many Jewish prophets killed. As we heard a couple of weeks ago, she brought 450 prophets of Ba’al into Israel and the Jewish prophet Elijah challenged them to a competition, which he and Yahweh won, and he then had the prophets of Ba’al slaughtered. This made Jezebel his enemy and, out of fear for her, he fled the country. In today’s lesson from the First Book of Kings we see her wielding this power and manipulating her husband’s acquisition of a vineyard by getting the legitimate owner, Naboth, falsely accused of and executed for blasphemy. This was not a woman to be messed with; she had political, military, and religious power.

This was not so with the second woman we meet in Scripture today, a woman described in Luke’s Gospel as a “notorious sinner” who interrupts a dinner party to wash Jesus’ feet with her tears, dry them with her hair, and anoint them with costly oil poured from an alabaster jar.

In all four of the gospels there is a story like this. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all relate a tale of a woman who, at a dinner party, comes and anoints Jesus with a jar of balm described as extravagantly expensive. In each story someone objects to the waste of the valuable ointment (or the money spent on it). In each story someone questions Jesus’ credentials as a religious person. In each story Jesus defends the woman’s action.

In Matthew’s Gospel the event happens “while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper,” just a few days before the Crucifixion; “a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table.” When the action is challenged by the disciples, Jesus defends it as an anointing for his burial. (Matt. 26:6-13) Mark’s version is essentially the same as Matthew’s.

John says that it was Jesus’ feet that were anointed, rather than his head, but agrees with Matthew and Mark this event took place just a few days before Jesus’ execution. Like Luke, John describes the woman as washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. But John identifies the woman as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Luke is the only one who doesn’t put relate this story as part of the narrative Jesus’ passion and death. In this version, Luke takes the story of anointing, places it in the house of a Pharisee, adds the parable of excused mortgages, and gives us a story forgiveness, not a story of preparation for death.

In each of the other stories, especially John’s telling, there is some suggestion that the woman has a legitimate right to be at the dinner, or at least in the house. This is not the case here. As I said a moment ago, this woman is described by Luke as “a notorious sinner.” She is clearly not an invited guest; she is not a member of Simon the Pharisee’s household. She just comes in off the street and does this remarkable, surprising thing. We might wonder how this could have happened; how could she have gotten all the way into the dining room to do this? To answer that question, we need to imagine ourselves in First Century Palestine.

Imagine that world for a moment. There are no telephones, neither cell phones nor land lines. There is no air conditioning. There is no refrigeration. Nothing electric at all. Furthermore, there is no credit; lending or credit are forbidden in the Law of Moses. Whatever was needed for daily life, especially food, had to be purchased with cash everyday. Whatever communication there was need of had to be done in person or through a messenger, usually a servant or slave employed specifically to run messages around town. Whatever business was done was usually done from the home, not from an office somewhere else. There were no schools; whatever education a child may have gotten was done at home by parents or, if the family was wealthy, by servants or hired tutors.

So people were constantly coming and going; members of the household going out to shop everyday and returning with their purchases. Messengers from others delivering family or business communications; the households own messengers taking messages to others. Servants coming and going.

Houses of the sort a prominent man like Simon the Pharisee would have had had a central courtyard with a number of rooms opening off it. The courtyard would have been separated from the public street by a wall and a gate, the gate usually open to all that coming and going.

The other three sides of the courtyard was surrounded by rooms, which would have been open to the courtyard to provide ventilation and cooling. Their inner walls would have been finished with a smooth coat of clay or plaster, decorated with elaborate frescoes. Wide benches of stone for sitting and sleeping, and shelves for storage would have been built into the walls. Stairs or a ladder would have led up onto the roof, which was used as an outdoor room most likely for bathing and laundry during the day and for sleeping at night during summer heat.

These rooms tended to be small and dark, so the courtyard and the roof were the important parts of the house; here those activities needing good light, spinning and weaving, food preparation, and dining would have taken place. In the courtyard of a First Century house you might find:

the mikveh, a pool of clean rainwater used for ritual cleansing
a kitchen area where food, purchased day by day, was prepared
a covered area where people worked and socialized, where they ate

This was the center of activity and socializing; it was here that all that coming and going took place. It was here that a woman might enter the gate right off the public street and interrupt a dinner in progress.

And that is what this woman did. A “notorious sinner,” an outcast, one of the lowest of the low, took matters into her own hands. Knowing that Jesus was there and knowing that he might be able to help her do something to end her abject abnegation, she felt herself empowered. She had heard, no doubt, about the several times he had healed and forgiven others even when others thought it violated the Law in some way (Luke, Chapters 5 and 6). She might have heard about (or even been present at) his Sermon on the Plain. When he said:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. (Luke 6:20-23)

she might have understood that he was speaking to her. And when she heard him say:

Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back. (Luke 6:37-38)

she may have made her plan to give everything she had, to spend whatever she had on that costly jar of oil, to give him her best in thanksgiving for the forgiveness she felt had been given her. So she took matters into her own hands, bought that ointment, and walked through that gate and into that dinner party. Jesus rewarded her boldness and confirmed her forgiveness in the parable he told the Pharisee and in the words with which he thanked her and sent her on her way, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

The last image of women we have in today’s lessons is not a single woman, but a group of women. Luke tells us that, shortly after this extraordinary dinner party, Jesus went on through cities and villages, proclaiming the good news, and that with him where the twelve and “some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.” (Luke 8:1-3) Here we have a picture of women of who in one sense are like Jezebel: they are independent women of means, some married, some unmarried, who own their own property and resources, women who have the authority to do as they wish. But in another sense they are like the woman with the alabaster jar; they give from their resources to provide for Jesus in his ministry.

So these are the three pictures of women in today’s scriptures: a woman of wealth and power who used who wealth and power to corrupt and manipulate; a woman of absolutely no status whatsoever who felt empowered to give probably everything she had in gratitude for the forgiveness brought to her by Jesus; and women of independent means who made their own decisions to work for the betterment of the world, who (in this particular instance) supported Jesus in his ministry of forgiveness. It is certainly not like Jezebel, but like the others that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion encourages and hopes to help women to become through our adoption of the Third Millennium Goal: to promote gender equality and empower women.

Not only in this Gospel story, but again and again in the Gospels we see Jesus meeting and interacting with women in ways that honor them, raise them up, and empower them. There is the woman who argued that “even the dogs get to eat the crumbs under the table” as she begged for healing for her daughter, whose faith Jesus applauded. There is the widow he observed who gave all she had to the temple treasury, whom Jesus praised for putting the wealthy to shame. There was Mary Magdalene, who became the first witness to the resurrection, the first evangelist of the Good News of the Risen Christ.

These are women whom Jesus empowered to be something other than the role their society would have put them in, to act with confidence that they, like the men around them, were created in the image of God.

Many women around the world today live in circumstances that make it difficult, if not impossible, to act with similar confidence. News reports daily document the level of violence against women: rape as a weapon of war (or as a possible danger of military service), so-called honor killings, sex trafficking, and other horrors suffered by women simply because they are women. In the United States today, homicide is the third leading cause of death for girls aged 1 to 4 and also for young women, 15 to 24, and most are killed by someone they know.

We are called by Jesus and by the church to emulate his ministry of forgiveness and empowerment, to offer women throughout the world the opportunity to choose life in a world ravaged by war, hunger, disease, and death; to promote gender equality so that women and men have equal opportunities and equal roles in decision-making throughout society. To promote equality between the sexes is to promote the healing of our world and to further the church’s ministry of reconciliation.

Yes, it’s Fathers’ Day, and as Jennifer Leider said, “The lectionary is no respecter of secular holidays.” But as it happens, Time Magazine decided to celebrate Fathers’ Day this week by asking some famous fathers to write open letters to their daughters, and those letters echo remarkably the message of today’s lectionary readings. Senator Marco Rubio wrote to his daughters Amanda and Daniella: “My hope for my daughters is that they will grow up to be strong, confident women who understand that they can be whatever that want to be in life.” Chicago mayor Rahm Immanuel wrote to his daughters Ilana and Leah his hope that they would be “smart, fearless, independent . . . strong, trailblazing women.” And producer Aaron Sorkin wrote this advice to his daughter Roxanne: “Be brave and know that the bravest thing you can do is be willing to not fit in. Never take pleasure in someone else failing. Dare to fail yourself. Be the one who doesn’t care as much about clothes as the person wearing them. Be kind, be compassionate and be humble.”

Our call as Christians, the message of today’s lessons, is that we are to help build a world where that is possible, where no woman need be as conniving and manipulative as Jezebel, where no woman should be as put down and subjected as the woman who interrupted the dinner party, where every woman can be as independent and resourceful as those who followed Jesus and supported his ministry of forgiveness.

Today’s Gospel teaches us that the best way to honor fathers is empower their daughters.

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

Removing the Distraction of Personality – From the Daily Office – June 14, 2013

June 14, 2013 / eric / 2 Comments

From the Book of Jesus Ben Sirach:

He exalted Aaron, a holy man like Moses
who was his brother, of the tribe of Levi.
He made an everlasting covenant with him,
and gave him the priesthood of the people.
He blessed him with stateliness,
and put a glorious robe on him.
He clothed him in perfect splendour,
and strengthened him with the symbols of authority,
the linen undergarments, the long robe, and the ephod.
And he encircled him with pomegranates,
with many golden bells all round,
to send forth a sound as he walked,
to make their ringing heard in the temple
as a reminder to his people;
with the sacred vestment, of gold and violet
and purple, the work of an embroiderer;
with the oracle of judgement, Urim and Thummim;
with twisted crimson, the work of an artisan;
with precious stones engraved like seals,
in a setting of gold, the work of a jeweller,
to commemorate in engraved letters
each of the tribes of Israel;
with a gold crown upon his turban,
inscribed like a seal with ‘Holiness’,
a distinction to be prized, the work of an expert,
a delight to the eyes, richly adorned.
Before him such beautiful things did not exist.
No outsider ever put them on,
but only his sons
and his descendants in perpetuity.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Ecclesiasticus 45:6-13 (NRSV) – June 14, 2013.)

Jewish High Priest in His Ceremonial Vestments Wow!

And some people think an alb, stole, and chasuble are “fancy!”

There are a lot of essays out there on the history, origin, function, and purposes of vestments. Every writer has a slightly different take on the matter.

Here’s what I think: vestments obscure the minister. In a sense, vestments “democratize” the priesthood. Vestments symbolize the office of the priest, minister, or elder. No matter what the denominational tradition – whether they are the richly decorated, colorful vestments of the Orthodox or Catholic traditions, or the simple black Geneva gown of the Reformed tradition – the ceremonial garb obscures the personality of the individual wearing them. Personal differences among and between clergy can be a distraction, and there should be no distractions in worship. The focus should be God, not the presider.

Suppose we didn’t wear vestments (and there are traditions in which the preachers and worship leaders do not). And suppose one worship leader is dressed in a very stylish, well-tailored, custom-made, $3,000 Brooks Brothers suit. Suppose another is dressed in a $150 off-the-rack, polyester suit. Another, in t-shirt and jeans. Each participant in worship will react differently to these three clergy, based solely on their appearance. This difference in reaction may rational or non-rational; it may be volitional or non-volitional. But it will be there.

Now, suppose we have these same three leaders. But over their street clothes all are wearing an alb, a stole, and a chasuble. One cannot see any difference in their attire. That distinction between the clergy is erased.

Whatever the other reasons may be that we wear vestments, I think this obscuring of differences amongst the clergy is the most important. Vestments, fancy or plain, remove the distraction of personality.

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

Category: Eucharist (Page 31 of 36)

The Lord Helps Those . . . . — Sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17C — September 1, 2013

Be Dressed for Action — Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14C) — August 11, 2013

God Our Mother — Sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13C) — August 4, 2013

God’s Faithfulness Prevails — Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C) — July 28, 2013

The One Thing Needful in a Market Economy – Sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11C) – July 21, 2013

Who Is My Neighbor? And Who Is the Good Samaritan? – Sermon for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10C) – July 14, 2013

What Is A Church Building? – Sermon for a Ground Breaking on the 7th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9C) – July 7, 2013

Legion . . . Silence: A Contrast – Sermon for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7C) – June 23, 2013

Honoring Women on Fathers’ Day – Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6C) – June 16, 2013

Removing the Distraction of Personality – From the Daily Office – June 14, 2013

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