​24 March 2019
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
III Lent
 
“Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” (Exodus 3)
 
            “You could write a whole book about a juniper tree. Not junipers in general, but just one—if you knew enough about it.” So wrote the naturalist Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, his account of living in the desert as a park ranger in Moab, Utah. His point was that even when it comes to something as ordinary and familiar as a juniper tree, we really know very little about it. How did it come to grow there, and not somewhere else? What has been the course of its growth through dry and wet years, through heat and cold? Who knows. And if we know so little about a juniper, Abbey reasons, how much more ignorant we are about much larger and weightier issues.
            You would think, that knowing so little about so much, would make us quite reticent about what we say. It ought to give us a certain caution about what we assert, and about the judgments we make. Yet we live in an age when an uninformed certainty about who is worthy and who is not, and who is right and who is wrong—a fixed certainty even to the point of violent extremism—has become typical. That pattern has been on full display this weekend, when many people have already formed rather strong and fixed opinions about what the famous Mueller Report says, even though none of us yet really knows. Reticence and restraint be damned!
            Do you remember the old saying that used to get brought out from time to time, in the midst of some disagreement: “There is so much good in the worst of us,” it went, “and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn't behoove any of us to speak evil of the rest of us.” I certainly heard my parents say that. But in the Twitter age, such cautionary words of restraint sound strangely anachronistic, even naïve.
            How instructive, then, to turn to Moses today and his rather hesitant encounter with God in the burning bush. At first, he merely turns aside to see what this strange sight could be. But when God speaks to him out of the fire, he hides his face, afraid even to look on God. (No Selfie here!) His response is to be reticent, to recognize that he is face to face with something much greater than himself, far beyond his comprehension, and so he must be circumspect in how he responds.
            His reticence only grows as God speaks to him again, telling him that he is the one who will lead his people out of their slavery in Egypt. “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?” says Moses, questioning at once both his ability to lead and his personal status for such a mission. “I will be with you,” God replies. “But who will I say has sent me?” questions Moses, doubting this time his own understanding of what he is being told to do. “I am,” is God’s answer. And if we were to read a bit further in the story than we did today, Moses’ reticence continues on. “But they will not believe me,” he worries. So God gives him a wonder-working staff as a sign. “Even so, I’m not eloquent enough for the job,” Moses objects. So God appoints Aaron to speak for him.
            Moses’ reticence to trust himself, and even to trust the call he hears from God, betrays a certain suspicion of his own senses, a reserve toward simply jumping to conclusions. He needs time to reflect. Has he got it right? Is it really him God wants? Aren’t there other factors to take into consideration? How unlike the pace with which we make so many judgments about ourselves and others nowadays!
            This need for time, this reticence before rushing to judgment, is echoed in the parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel reading. In this case, a man has a fig tree that for three years has born no fruit, so he impatiently is ready to cut it down. His gardener, however, urges restraint: let it grow another year, give it some extra care and attention, and see if by then it doesn’t begin to produce. Let’s not rush, let’s hold off, let’s give it another chance.
            You may know that in the very early church, many people went to the desert seeking a place of solitude where they could learn the practice of restraint. One of the most well known, Abba Anthony, is said once to have received several enthusiastic young monks who came seeking his interpretation of a difficult passage of scripture. One by one, he asked their own idea of what it meant. After they had all expostulated on their individual theory, Abba Anthony turned to ask another wise old monk, Abba Joseph, his opinion of the passage’s meaning. “I do not know,” was the response. “Then neither do I,” said Abba Anthony.
            Wisdom sometimes comes from not knowing—or perhaps even more importantly, from knowing that we don’t know. And what we don’t know, we shouldn’t act upon. Now, that kind of reticence may sound unexpected, coming from a preacher. More often, people come to church expecting it to be a place to find answers to what have been called “life’s persistent questions.” And we are accustomed to think that Christian faith is a system that’s got its answers worked out pretty thoroughly—for better or worse.
            But perhaps that assumption of a rush to judgment is itself premature. This time of year, as we journey together toward Jerusalem and the events of Jesus’ crucifixion, I’m always put in mind of the fact that when it comes to this central event in his life—and in our faith—the church is strangely reticent, silent even, about exactly what it means. Even in the creed, that ancient summary of faith, when it comes to the crucifixion—all it says is that Jesus “was crucified for us, suffered and was buried.” Exactly what that means is left for us as a mystery to contemplate, which is of course why we revisit and re-experience it year after year without ever quite getting to the bottom of it.
            It has been said that this reticence, this reluctance to rush to judgment, is especially typical of our Anglican/Episcopal tradition. Born out of the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries, our forebears in the English church developed a piety that was “freighted with a sense of the tragic” (Rowan Williams, Introduction to Love’s Redeeming Work). That is, English Christianity developed a pattern of faith and practice that was keenly aware, based on experience, of how easily people can get things wrong in ways that lead not only to indefensible judgments, but often violence against others.  
            How much we as 21st century people need to recover that kind of suspicion and reticence about ourselves! We have talked here in church before about the ways in which the Christian commitment to truth, human dignity, and fairness runs directly counter to the culture that surrounds us. To be reticent in our judgments, and cautious in our declarations, is yet another instance. Not that we should not stand up and speak out about injustices of all sorts—far from it! But we must first do the hard work of thoughtful, considered, reasoned judgment that takes time. Like Moses, our question to ourselves needs more often to be tinged with the reticence of, “Who am I?” Amen. 

10 March 2019
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
I Lent

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. (Luke 4)

    Normally, sermons on today’s gospel focus on the temptations that the devil puts before Jesus. But I want to focus on the setting itself: the wilderness, or desert.
    A desert is place of great beauty, but also of great foreboding. Its wide, endless expanse is breathtaking, but it is also seemingly indifferent to human presence. A desert speaks to us of emptiness, solitude, and silence. It is, as Edward Abbey put it in his book, Desert Solitaire, a place that says nothing. “Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, space, sparse, austere, … inviting not love but contemplation.” It is both a place that reminds us of what we most long for in the serenity that hovers over it, and what we fear most, in the dangers that lurk in its vastness.
    And so perhaps most powerfully of all, the desert is a place that speaks to us of death. It is a landscape that human beings cannot long inhabit, without provision for water and shelter. It is a place where one has to watch one’s step, for the poisonous snakes that lurk in hidden places or the hard rocks and sharp plants that lie in wait. It is a place, as today’s psalm evokes, where the young lion and the serpent await.
    How interesting, then, that immediately following Jesus’ baptism, it is to the desert that the Spirit leads him—some gospels use even a stronger word, that it is to the desert that the Spirit drives him. The pattern echoes what happened also to the people of Israel in their exodus from slavery in Egypt: at the Red Sea, they were “baptized” as God’s own in its waters as the flee the Egyptians, but then rather than turning directly toward the Promised Land (as today’s telling of the story in Deuteronomy would have it), they were driven away from it and into the desert toward Mt. Sinai and the giving of the Law. The desert, it seems, is a place through which one must pass on life’s spiritual journey.
    But why there? Why spend time in a place so inhospitable to human beings, a  topos so dangerous and threatening? Perhaps the reason is its very identification with death. The point is not just to be in the desert itself, but rather to confront the reminder it gives us of our own mortality and fragility. The early church fathers and mothers certainly knew that dimension of desert encounter: as St. Jerome once said, “The desert loves to strip bare,” even of life itself.
    Now, we are all quite accustomed to the affirmation that all people are created equal. We affirm that conviction frequently here in church, and defend the dignity of every human being as made in the image of likeness of God. But there is also at the other end of our life another equalizer about which we more seldom talk: we are also all one in our being toward death. 
    And how strange, that the two most consequential moments we experience—our birth, and our death—we have no control over. We did not ask to be born, and we cannot resist that we will die. The commonality that they both have suggests some deep connection—beyond the mere biological one—yet whereas we are quite able of talking about life and birth as a gift, we are more reluctant to use that word in regard to death.
    Yet perhaps that is the reason for the Spirit driving Jesus into the desert, into the place of fragility and death. Perhaps he—like us—has to confront the trajectory that his life is on, leading to death, in order fully to recognize and embrace the mission that he is to accomplish. Could it be, that without a robust awareness of death, life is left hollow? It has been said, that grief is the price we pay for love. Could one paraphrase that to read, death is the price we pay for life?
    And if so, well then what? In a book suggestively entitled, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Belden Lane weaves together the story of his mother’s prolonged death from cancer, and simultaneous struggle with dementia, with his own encounters of desert landscapes.  For those who struggle with the decline of physical strength that comes with aging, it is a profound study of both the physical reality and spiritual mystery of how life ebbs away. He describes his mother as gradually moving into a place where she is neither wholly alive—her mind is confused, her body weakened—nor is she close to death. She inhabits instead a kind of spiritual desert, a place where she has retreated into a silent depth that is hers alone to occupy—a paradoxically healing sickness that the author Flannery O’Conner was bold to describe as itself one of God’s mercies.
    In this day when medical science can so readily keep us physically alive long enough for us to lose our mental awareness, this passage into a place of deep interiority is more common than not. Many of you struggle with it, either in yourself, or someone you love. I face it with my own parents, now both in their nineties. And our natural first response is fear—fear of loss, fear of being overwhelmed, even fear of the grotesque.
    But I wonder if in some way, what the scripture is trying to tell us today is that having been himself to the desert, Jesus is uniquely prepared to meet us in the wilderness of our own times of physical and mental weakness. I, at least, have recently been struck while sitting with people who are in that condition, of a wide terrain that seems to open up inside them, inaccessible and invisible to the rest of us, but which they in some sense inhabit. One such person simply described that place as “resting in the arms,” echoing that old 19th century devotional hymn:

I am resting in Jesus’ arms, 
And I fear not the world’s alarms;
Tho’ its storms assail me on ev’ry side,
In this refuge my soul shall hide.

In the arms of Jesus! ’twas love divine
Made this blessed shelter of safety mine;
And I ask no sweeter abiding place
Than in Jesus’, my Lord’s embrace.
​
    So this first Sunday of Lent, and its evocation of the desert, might be thought of as encouraging us toward a mindfulness of both our origins in birth, and our destiny in death. There is a certain humility required to do that: it requires acceptance that our life is not of our own making, and acknowledgment that death is not of our own choice. But there is also a certain joy that comes through such humility: receiving both life, and death, as gift. Amen.

​St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
March 3, 2019 Message
 
 
Biblical Text: Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
Theme: We are called to engage, heal and transform brokenness in our world. 
Introduction and the Contemporary Condition 
Since today is the Episcopal Church’s Feast Day of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of what became the Methodist (and now, United Methodist) Church in the United States, and since I’m a retired United Methodist Pastor, it seemed like it might be reasonable to give a hint of Wesleyan flavor to today’s message, so I’ll look to John Wesley for that. John Wesley was an ordained Anglican priest serving The Church of England and, among many other things, he was a prolific preacher. The messages he preached were firmly rooted in Scripture, speaking what he saw as the plain truth of the kingdom of God as revealed in Jesus. Here are some entries from his journal written in May of 1738: “Sunday, (the 7th): I preached at St. Lawrence’s in the morning, and afterward at St. Katherine Cree’s Church. I was enabled to speak strong words at both; and was therefore the less surprised at being informed that I was not to preach any more in either of those churches. Sunday, (the 14th): I preached in the morning at St. Ann’s, Aldersgate; and in the afternoon at the Savoy Chapel, free salvation by faith in the blood of Christ. I was quickly apprised that at St. Ann’s, likewise, I am to preach no more. Friday, (the 19th): I preached at St. John’s, Wapping at three and at St. Bennett’s, Paul’s Wharf, in the evening. At these churches, likewise, I am to preach no more.”
 
Even without knowing the details of those sermons, I think the reactions to them that Wesley recorded give a pretty good sense of the nature of the messages he delivered. What Wesley preached was the Gospel – the “Good News” – of Christ. He was, in his time, by definition an evangelist, “a preacher of the Gospel.” But by his own account, his proclamation of the good news didn’t always elicit a good reaction; it often challenged individuals and the Church to examine the conduct of their personal and corporate lives in light of Jesus’ example and teaching. With specific regard to The Church of England, Wesley felt that the church was straying from Jesus’ vision; it had become in some ways a self-serving institution, existing to cater to and placate it’s socially advantaged members to the exclusion of those who Jesus called his followers to serve. The Methodist Movement within the Church of England was an attempt by John Wesley and his brother Charles, also an Anglican Priest, to redirect the Church to a more authentic grounding in Jesus. John and Charles sought to change the nature of their Church, not to dismantle it, through evangelism within and through the Church of England. Among John Wesley’s particular concerns was that The Church of England wasn’t properly addressing issues connected with the need for prison system reform, unfair labor practices and widespread hunger.
 
While the Methodist movement had a foundation in evangelism, I want to be clear about the context in which I’m using that word. Wesley’s evangelism was distinctly different from what routinely passes for evangelism today. In contemporary society, proclaiming the good news has become an exercise in which the news that’s proclaimed is usually only “good” if you’re a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and preferably male. The proclamation of the Gospel is no longer necessarily an affirmation of God’s grace and unconditional love of human-kind (albeit at times also a challenge to how we live our lives individually as followers of Christ and collectively as a community of faith); it’s often, at least as heard from those who receive the most air time in the public forum, an affront to the very same divine grace and love it purports to proclaim. The opinions and positions attributed to “evangelists” or “evangelicals” today are often ones of exclusion, not inclusion and doctrine overshadows practice as the basis on which one is judged worthy to claim the name Christian and join the exclusive club. In that context, neither John Wesley nor Jesus himself would qualify as an “evangelist” or Christian.

Insights from Scripture 
So what about the words from Luke’s Gospel we heard today? Is there good news to be found there, and if so, is it good news for us? When the good news of the Gospel is held up to our lives, are we a reflection of that good news, or does it make us squirm so much that we politely ask a Methodist preacher not to bother occupying the pulpit here at St. Michael’s after today? Let’s take a look...
 
The Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Jesus is, I think, one of those passages in Scripture where you can get so entangled in the question of whether the events happened exactly as described, (that is, Jesus changing in appearance; Moses and Elijah suddenly appearing, and talking with him; a voice (presumably God’s) speaking from a cloud declaring Jesus as God’s Son, the Chosen of God), that you might miss the actual message the passage means to communicate. If you ask me whether I believe the events recorded by Luke – this miracle – actually happened as described, I’ll tell you that, sure, I believe in divine miracles, but I don’t know exactly what happened on the mountaintop in the presence of Peter, John and James that day; it’s a mystery. I am sure of a couple of things, though (well... pretty sure...J ). The mountaintop experience was, I think, an Epiphany, and could have been received by Peter, John and James as such. God revealed that Jesus embodied the entire Law of Israel and all the teachings of the Prophets. Jesus was the embodiment of the entire story of the Chosen People up to that point. This was what God communicated by the presence of Moses and Elijah – in whatever way that happened – with Jesus. But that had to do with past and present. The future was communicated by God’s voice from the cloud: Jesus was God’s Son and was the revelation of God’s eternal plan; past, present and future. But what could have been an Epiphany for Peter, John and James at the time was evidently rather lost on them. I imagine they were completely overwhelmed by whatever happened in their presence, but in typical human fashion immediately tried to bring it under their control, instead of simply allowing the experience to wash over them in all its transformative power. Instead of allowing this divine encounter to permeate their being, they sought to get things under control by building a couple of lean-tos and ordering in some pizza so everyone could sit around and chat for a while before they all had to go back home. Please understand that I don’t mean to be disparaging of the disciples; I might very well have had a similar instinctive reaction (maybe not the order-in pizza part though). The point is that human instinct perhaps obfuscated what God intended to be a fundamental revelation of who Jesus was and is. And if we are too enmeshed in the details of the story we might miss the revelation too. Jesus was the perfect incarnation of the entirety of God’s will and action in human history (and perhaps from the beginning of time) and a perfect reflection of God’s eternal will for God’s creation.
 
And it’s in the verses immediately following Luke’s account of the Transfiguration of Jesus that we get a glimpse of what this revelation, this Epiphany, means for us. The next verses in this chapter of Luke are these: “On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met [Jesus]. Just then a man from the crowd shouted, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son...Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him’...Jesus answered...‘Bring your son here.’ While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father.” (Luke 9:37-42; NRSV)
 
The first act of Jesus recorded by Luke after the Transfiguration was for Jesus to heal a demon-possessed boy; a person who the society of his time  would probably have shunned out of fear born from a lack of understanding of his ailment.  Jesus, affirmed by God as the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets and as God’s Son; Jesus, the perfect incarnation of the entirety of God’s will and action in human history and the perfect reflection of God’s eternal will for God’s creation, turned immediately to embrace a boy from among those who society had placed on the margins in order to give him the healing, transformation – and transfiguration – he needed.
 
In a general sense we can consider this demon-possession as metaphor for the ugliness that manifests the demons of our world. It might be the demons of xenophobia, white nationalism and classism manifest in the ugliness of systematically devaluing, marginalizing and discriminating against people of sacred worth because of their sexuality, racial, cultural and ethnic heritage, or economic status. It might be the demon of hubris, by which those who are called to serve God place themselves instead in a position above God, carrying out human agendas while invoking God’s name, manifest as the ugliness of the church acting as gatekeeper, creating a barrier to the experience of the unconditional love of God by those the church judges to be unworthy, having brought human doctrine to bear instead of truly proclaiming – and living – the Good News of Jesus. And this is certainly not an all-inclusive list. Demons and the ugliness through which they are manifest abound, reminding us of how broken our world is.
 
Exhortation
 
And so, what are we to do?
 
The good news is that Jesus, God’s Son and Chosen One was the perfect incarnation of God’s grace and unconditional love. Jesus is a mirror for the love of God for all God’s creation, a love freely given to each of us just because God has chosen to; a love that exceeds our ability to fully comprehend. The resurrection of Jesus is our assurance that this love will always prevail, no matter how ugly the world around us might be and, if we allow it, this can be for us the source of strength we need in order to engage the world, in all its ugliness, knowing that the world will not be our undoing.
 
However...
 
The bad news is that as followers of the Way of Jesus we are called to be agents for the same grace and unqualified love of God for humankind – and all creation – God has revealed through Jesus. We are called to not only fully acknowledge the ugliness to which the demons of our world give rise, but also to confront, transform and transfigure it, with God’s help, so that at least the part of the world within our reach is a more perfect reflection of the will of God as Jesus has revealed and lived it.
 
Let us be among those who engage the brokenness of the world around us through nothing less than the unconditional love of God. Let us seek the transformed worldview – the transfiguration – that will empower us in our work. May it be so.