[BACK to CURRENT SERMONS]

12 Pentecost

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
12 Pentecost
26 August 2001
Pastor Kevin R. Maly

I’ve heard all the excuses under sun as to why people don’t like to go to church; I’ve heard that church is boring, that the pews are uncomfortable, that it’s too hot or too cold. But the excuse I hear more frequently than all the other excuses all put together has to do with HYPOCRISY -- as in "The church is full of it: HYPOCRISY." You know how it goes: "All you see on Sundays is hypocrites." I hear that some pillar of the church or another is a crooked businessperson. I hear about another person who looks so pious on Sunday but who acts the slut every other day of the week. I have heard who is a mean old gossip, who is a bully, who can’t stand their neighbors, and who is greedy — of course I’ve not heard any of these about people at St. Paul Church . . . yet. And yes, I’ve heard about pastors who are the picture of humility on Sundays who turn into power-hungry dictators on Monday. The church, I’ve heard over and over and over, is filled with hypocrites.

I love that word: hypocrite. Jesus liked it too. You can tell from the first reading that Isaiah was pretty fond of it too. Hypocrisy. It sounds the same in the Greek the Scriptures as it does in English -- LB@6D4F4F. In Greek it’s meaning nearly leaps off the page — hypo — under, krisis — judgement. You are under judgement Jesus declares to those who begrudge the healing of this daughter of Abraham, who legalistically use Scripture to judge both Jesus and a woman so weighed down by her demons that her back has become bent. You are under judgement because you treat your animals better than you do your neighbors.

Now as for those who observe that on any given Sunday the church is full of hypocrites, right on. From the pulpit to the farthest pew, there isn’t a one of us who isn’t under judgement. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t this week, if not this very day, thought ourselves better than someone else. If I were into gambling, I would bet with confidence that more than a few of us have since walking in here this morning had some sort of judgmental though pass through our minds about one of our brothers or sister in Christ.

And there isn’t anyone here, from the poorest to the most ridiculously privileged who doesn’t daily, by virtue of living in the world today and participating in the global economy as consumers, who hasn’t benefited from a system that rapes the environment, that thrives upon labor practices bordering on outright slavery, that tramples and degrades people here and throughout the world. And if we are truly honest, we cannot say, any of us, that our relationships with one another are whole and filled with integrity, that we haven’t been unfaithful to one another in thought, or word, or deed.

If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

Yes, we are all hypocrites, under judgement. We are in bondage to sin, and cannot free ourselves. Every single one of us is weighed down by a spirit every bit as heavy as the spirit that so severely bent the woman in today’s Gospel. We are all of us bent over by the load of judgement under which we, every last one of us, stand. We are those whom Satan has bound these long years, desperately in need of a healing. But may the church be filled to the rafters with hypocrites.

Yes, we enter here under judgement. But right away as we come through those doors in back, we begin the encounter with our healing.

I’ve heard stories about some parishes where people have complained about the font being in their way when they enter the worship space. Indeed. May we all begin our time in this place by tripping over the thing and getting ourselves all wet so that we may be reminded that in baptism we were adopted as daughters and sons of God’s covenant promise to be with us always.

Like the woman in today’s Gospel, we are daughters and sons of Abraham, and like the woman, we don’t even ask to be healed; hell, some of us don’t even want to be healed. But it happens anyway. It happens when we hear the words of absolution, spoken by Christ’s command and by Christ’s authority as from God’s Own Self. Healing happens when we hear the Word of God; a Word spoken to us by Christ just as surely as Christ speaks to the daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years but who is set free from this bondage on the Sabbath Day: woman, man, child, you are set free from your ailment. And healing happens when we receive in our bodies the very essence of God’s healing and salvation for us, the Body and Blood of Christ.

Yes, this place is filled with hypocrites. But it is also filled with healing, so very, very much healing that for a brief few moments we visit that farther shore, that farther country. For a few fleeting seconds we are engulfed by the Holy Mysteries, and we are brought, as the reading from Hebrews says, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word.

Here in this place that farther shore breaks in upon us, telling us that one-day we shall be fully healed and the burden of judgement under which we stand will be completely and forever healed. There shall be no more the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil; there shall be food for the hungry and the needs of the afflicted shall be satisfied and then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs . .. and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

And speaking of water, may the font get in your way this morning as you leave this place, that you may be reminded on your way out of the healing that has taken place here this day, so that you might live healed in the world that awaits you.

Oh, and when people ask you why you go to church, tell them it’s because you’re a hypocrite and church is where you hear the word and are being healed.

[back to top of page]

9 Pentecost

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Proper 13
Psalm 49:1-11
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21
Pastor Roy Smith
August 5, 2001

It's just a rumor, but I have heard that before they decide when they are going to take their vacations, some pastors will check out the lectionary readings that are coming up—and if they see some particularly tough ones, they'll decide to conveniently be gone on those Sundays. Now I want you to know that I never did that when I was a pastor—and, I never in the world would have suspected that Pastor Maly would pull a trick like this; that is, until I looked at the lessons for today!

Really, these are about the toughest three lessons I can recall ever having encountered on a single Sunday. In the First Lesson, we heard the despairing lament of a worker who was totally bummed out because "sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it." (Ec. 2:21) The Second Lesson admonishes us to "put to death whatever in us that is earthly" which requires us to "get rid of anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language." (Col. 3:5,8) And then in the Gospel for the day, Jesus tells the poor guy who had tried to store up a little something for the future so that he could have a little fun, that because of what he had done, his soul might well be required of him. Curiously, I have no recollection whatsoever of what I did with these passages the last time they came around while I was still an active pastor. Hmmm—maybe I was on vacation!

The timing of these passages couldn't be worse, either. Here we are in the dog days of summer—and it always seemed to me that the people who were still coming to church during this part of the summer and were willing to endure the heat of a hot sanctuary, probably weren't coming to be confronted with anything this heavy—in fact, I always felt that August homilies should be short and sweet!

Well, I guess the best I can do is to try to be short—although I think I should warn you that brevity is not my strong suite! The central issue, obviously, in all of our lessons, concerns MONEY—and how we relate to and use and manage our possessions. Although a lot of people complain about preachers talking about money all the time, my guess is that if we were to do a content study of contemporary preaching, we'd find that most preachers talk about this subject a whole lot less than the Bible does.

Furthermore, it's hard to think of any issue that people think about more than money. From the time we first begin to get an allowance until we die, we spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about money. The child asks: what shall I buy with my $1.00 a week allowance? Young people, as they decide what they want to do with their lives, have to decide how important the amount of money they will make is to them. Once we get to the point where we're entering the "real world," we find ourselves confronted with a host of money issues: what kind of house shall I /we buy? How much money should we put into our 401Ks? If we end up having children, how do we deal with the issue of balancing careers with parenting responsibilities? How much shall we spend for entertainment? How much should I give to the church? How do I deal with political issues that may impact on my income? Etc., etc. etc. Latter in life when you get old like me, you begin asking another set of questions: are we/am I going to have enough to live on for the rest of my/our life. What happens if I contract an illness that requires drug therapies that cost thousands of dollars a year? Should I be buying long-term care insurance? Will the stock market recover, or is our nest egg going to continue to shrink? And again: Etc., etc. etc. But guess what? All of these questions--not just the one about how much we should give to the church—are theological issues.

I don't want to overstate the case, but at most every stage of life it seems like we are almost preoccupied with financial concerns of one sort or another. And often, in addition to being a source of stress and anxiety in our lives, these issues can be the cause of a great deal of conflict between and among people—which can be the source of excruciating pain, particularly within families. So I suspect many of us experience a certain amount of ambivalence about the role that money plays in our lives; that even though we may not see ourselves as being greedy, we secretly wish we weren't quite as caught up in the dollars signs as we are.

We live, of course, in a vastly different socio-economic culture than the people of Jesus' day. Probably the Palestinian Stock Exchange didn't amount to a whole heck of a lot—and certainly Jerusalem didn't have any malls to compare with Cherry Creek or the new Flat Iron Crossing shopping center out near where we live. Similarly, without TV and slick magazines and daily newspapers constantly whetting their appetites, people back then were probably even able to distinguish between wants and needs. But even in that environment, Jesus warned the people to "be on guard against all kinds of greed"—and he called the successful young farmer who was storing away some grain and goods so that he might enjoy his retirement, a fool! And among the things Paul said those who have been "raised with Christ" must "put to death," was greed—which he said was idolatry.

These are not, I concede, easy words for us to hear. Talk of this sort seems so incongruous with the values of our day, so unrealistic, and so idealistic. Yet I suspect, as I indicated a moment ago, that deep down we'd like to be less wedded than we are to money matters—we'd like to be able to worry less about our lives, and what we will eat and wear, and be able to show more convincingly through how we live that we know that our lives do not consist of the abundance of our possessions.

But how do we get from here to there, if we're not altogether comfortable with "here" and think we would be richer toward God if we were "there?" Well, Walter Brueggemann, who is one of the finest biblical theologians and cultural analysts of today's church, argues that we have been seduced by what he calls "the dominant religion of consumerism." Shopping centers are the temples of this religion—and advertising gives voice to its theology. More substantively, this religion claims that we are autonomous, self-made creatures—and that what we have and where we get in life is solely a function of how we apply ourselves. This, as Brueggemann says, is what is behind much of our drivenness and our insatiable desire for more. We are not, you see, just depending on money as a way of meeting our needs, but rather, we expect it to give us a sense of worth—and that's something it's simply incapable of doing. In short, this is a religion that puts the individual and his or her wants at the center of the universe.

The only antidote to this self-centered, death-dealing religion, according to Brueggemann, is the construction of an alternative religious approach—an evangelical perspective which emphasizes, among other things, a memory that "affirms that our past has originated through and been kept for us by a faithful, sovereign God who calls into being things that do not exist." (Rm. 4:17) So unlike the religion of consumerism, the faith which grows out of and is nurtured by this memory, asserts, affirms, and celebrates that God is the center of the universe—and thus "the human self, each precious one, me and all my neighbors, is a product of God's majesty, power, and generosity."

This faith perspective challenges the claim that we are autonomous, self-made, self-sufficient creatures; it asserts, instead, that we are people created in the image of God, who become what we've been created to be, not by ourselves, but through the Spirit at work within and among us. This, I submit, represents a radically different way of accounting for "where we are and what we have," than that put forth by the religion of consumerism.

How we view ourselves in relation to others is another place where the difference between the religion of consumerism and a faith perspective which asserts that we are the products of God's goodness, surfaces in a dramatic way. The former invariably and inevitably emphasizes people's inequalities with all the insidious inferior/superior comparison games that go with this approach, whereas the latter underscores our equality and oneness with others. As Brueggemann puts it: "In the presence of the inscrutable mystery that the Lord is maker of us all, all are equal. One has no cause for leverage over another. But note well, on the other hand, it is our notion of self-sufficiency that leads us to imagine our superior worth."

So nothing less than our ability to live together in peace and the integrity of our souls, as measured by our capacity for generosity, is at stake here. And curiously, memory becomes the key to extricating ourselves from the idolatry of greed in ways that will enable us to be less anxious and free us to use our energies and resources to love and serve others, and thereby experience life in its fullness. Remembering the odd claim that we have all "been birthed by God's gentle providence" is an invitation to let go of the lie that life consists of the abundance of our possessions and all the fears that accompany this view--and through this "letting go," we become rich toward God.

Sevanteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Proper 12
Luke 11:1-13
Pastor David Stubbs
July 29, 2001

Let us pray . . .

"Lord, teach us to pray . . . . . " There are as many ways to pray as there are people in the world. Prayer is like breathing—like thinking—it’s a very personal thing.

Some years ago, a friend and I agreed to spend one day a month in prayer together. In addition, we also agreed to set aside one week a year for a prayer retreat. So we scheduled time to be together that one day a month and we actually fulfilled our promise to do it—then we arranged to spend retreat time each fall at a desert monastery which we also accomplished. A product of that discipline was that I found myself guided to a more consistent daily prayer life— time spent in contemplation, prayer, silence and writing.

Years later, my friend entered a doctoral program and chose for his thesis, spiritual formation—prayer. A requirement of the program was that the thesis be reviewed by several peers. Dan chose me as one of those to review his thesis on personal prayer. I found his thesis to be helpful, but absent what I believed a significant point.

I had come to believe that our experience in prayer together had produced results I didn’t expect. Therefore, I suggested an addition to his thesis. I believed he should add that if we engage in sincere prayer, we must be prepared for unexpected results. No matter the form of our prayer—or how frequently we pray—or how long. The results may be surprising. My own experience was that prayer guided me to be honest with myself—a result of prayer was that my life and career were completely turned around and I was sent in a different direction. That’s one of the more significant things I have been taught about praying.

Another thing I’ve learned about prayer is, there are all kinds of prayer. There is appropriate prayer and inappropriate prayer. There is prayer and there is announcement to God and to others what God already knows. There’s also preaching, disguised as prayer. Prayer that sounds a great deal like theological discourse.

For some people, the only prayers they know are memorized—or read from a book. And we don’t make light of those people or their prayers. The most widely used written prayers among Jews and Christians are the Psalms, in the Bible.

But there can be "bad" prayer. In fact, the kinds of prayer we use most commonly—the prayer of asking—the prayer of petition—can be turned into a kind of quid pro quo. "I’ll read the Bible every day, or go to church the rest of my life, if I get this job—or partner I desire—or win the lottery." Bad prayer!

Some years ago, Robert Schuller wrote a book of prayers entitled, Positive Prayers for Power-filled Living. One reviewer said Schuller’s prayers tend to be plastic slogans rather than prayers (e.g., "faith stimulates success", "hope sustains success", "love sanctifies success") Can you imagine Job who’s lost everything and whose life is a shambles, praying this one: "But great things happen when ‘possibility thinkers’ run into mountains!" Or imagine Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane shortly before he is to be nailed to the cross: "I’d explode with enthusiasm if I could think of all the positive thoughts waiting to come out of my God-inspired brain." What about a Nazi prisoner riding on a death train to Auschwitz: "Inch by inch./Lord,/ anything’s a cinch." Prayers like these conjure up a nightmare of a positive religion with no God.

But, in spite of the fact prayer is misused—misunderstood—ignored all together, Jesus tells his disciples to pray. And the prayer he teaches is the prayer of petition, the prayer of intercession. The prayer so easily misunderstood and misused.

But does it work? How does it work? In other words, when Alice prays for John’s recovery from illness, is there a real possibility Alice’s prayer will help John get well? Is she asking God for a miracle? Or for God to help the doctor do her best? And if John dies—or if the operation is a failure, what does that say about Alice’s prayer?

In the prayer of petition we hear Jesus teach today, he says:

Give us each day our daily bread

do not bring us to the time of trial

All of these are rather urgent petitions. We pray them every day. Do we do it because it’s personally or psychologically helpful to us?

A child is seriously ill—her mother doesn’t want her to die. The doctor says: "I’ve done all I can. Now we must wait to see what happens. The mother doesn’t believe the doctor. She won’t listen to those who try to reason with her. Instead she says, "You’re all giving up too easily. I won’t abandon my child like you are. I’m sure she can still be saved. So she goes to church to pray. She tells God her daughter must not die—she can’t—she doesn’t want her to die—God can’t permit such a thing. She keeps on praying—she doesn’t quit—her prayer is sincere and long. Then something begins to happen. Almost unaware, her prayer moves slowly but certainly to a deeper level. She’s amazed at her thoughts: "My God, I entrust her to you. From this moment on she’s your child, much more than mine. You’re responsible for her—you’ll care for her—your will be done."

Does that last petition sound familiar? Jesus also prayed that way. At first he pleaded: "Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup away from me." But he stayed the whole night through, praying. He entered a deeper prayer. In the end he prayed, "However, not what I want, but what you will." "Your will be done."

Letting go. That’s what it is. Remember the story about Mary and Martha. Mary—in touch with herself—connected to her world—hungering for the presence of God—aware of God’s dwelling in her. Martha, busy with many things—being a good host—but, most of all, needing to be in control—afraid to let go.

In my grandmother’s parlor was a piano. I don’t recall that piano was ever tuned. You can guess how it sounded. The grandest tune became a discord on that instrument. If a skilled craftsman had tuned that piano, the same tune, once grating, might soothe and lift the spirit. Prayer is the "piano tuner." In prayer, we can "let go," unafraid of the changes the tuner can make, changes that will harmonize and make life a joy to live and a pleasure to behold.

"Let your will be done, not mine." If we pray like that we’ll feel ourselves being changed as we pray. We’ll become aware of God’s dwelling in us—of our being in God—everything will change, yet remain the same. Questions are answered—healing occurs—lives are turned around—we experience new direction. Because God takes God’s rightful place—in us. And we’re returned to our rightful place—in God.

Dan and I prayed at a time in my life when I wanted answers about who I was and what I should be doing and the direction in which I should be heading. The answers came—they were frightening and challenging. I came to terms with the fact I am a gay person and as such must be honest with my children and my spouse. Life’s journey took an unexpected turn.

What will happen for you? I don’t know! You and your life are different from anyone else in the world and, at the same time, we are connected to each other in God. In community we share life with each other. In each other we meet God. In prayer, we communicate with God and with our sisters and brothers about life—about ourselves—about our hopes—about our needs.

Never be afraid to ask God for what you want . . . even at the risk of abusing the asking. But keep praying, praying into that deeper level of prayer in which we finally "let go." That prayer in which we’re able to say—God, I place myself in your hands. I desire your presence—hold me—walk with me—as you hold every creature that lives—as you walk with all beings—as we hold and walk with each other. Singing, laughing, crying, caring, holding, loving. In prayer, God can tune us to that life, that living.