Sunday, November 15, 2009

Hour by Hour
Louise Burnham Packard
Mark 13:1-8, Hymn 665

Ever since I ran Trinity Church Boston’s capital campaign to restore its landmark building, I’ve felt a bit queasy hearing today’s gospel lesson.

“Do you see these great buildings?” Jesus says. “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”  Or, as the hymn we just sang says, “tower and temple fall to dust.”

We are nearing the end of the church year – next weekend is Christ the King Sunday, after which we’ll start all over again in Advent preparing for the birth of Christ.

So this week our gospel is apocalyptic and talks about the end times.

If you were hoping for a sermon about the apocalypse or when it is going to come, I’m afraid I will disappoint you.  

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The truth is, I just can’t get very interested in the end time. Like you, I can rattle off the response, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”  But when I say that Christ will come again, I always think about how Christ comes again and again. Not the final coming but the constant intermediate comings. 
 
And that’s how this sermon is going to go as well. Not the apocalypse but today, now. What are the choices we will make about our lives in the present moment? Where will we encounter Jesus today?

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But first, let’s think about that business of towers and temples falling to dust.

My kids and I spent a week in Italy last April and had a great time wandering through the ruins of the Forum in Rome. And also the Coliseum. And I kept thinking about how all that wealth and civilization must have seemed so permanent at the time. Yet 20 centuries later the Forum is grass dotted with white rocks, the bleached bones of a long dead era.

Tower and temple fall to dust.
Not one stone will be left here upon another.

The Romans thought the Forum would be around forever. Don’t we feel the same way about Boston? Imagine tourists walking around the ruins of Fenway Park someday with guidebooks that show how it looked way back in the 20th and 21st Centuries. ‘And over there,” some tour guide will say, “was the wall they called the green monster.”

It sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it?

And of course, much as we don’t like to think about it, we’re mortal, too. There will come a day when someone will point to our picture and talk about us in the past tense. Tower and temple fall to dust – and so do we.

Is anything permanent? 

This past year we watched the stock market plummet. And although it has risen again, those of us with retirement accounts or other investments no longer feel confident that money we have put aside will be there for us. Job security is elusive as unemployment hits record highs across the country.

Does anything really last?

The Church has an answer -- that what lasts in our lives is Love. The love we’ve been given and the love that we’ve given. The ways we have cultivated our generosity of spirit and of how we have given ourselves to others and to causes great and small. What lasts in our lives is meaning – where we find it and how we make it.

Our sermon hymn says “God’s great goodness aye endureth.” 

If I have learned one thing in my journey of faith, it is that our number one job is to build our relationship with God, to get connected to and participate in that great goodness, in that enduring Love.

Putting our relationship to God at the center of our lives grounds us in deep meaning and purpose--  so that no matter what happens with our job, the stock market, our possessions, and even our relationships, we are tethered to what lasts.

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So here’s the tricky part. The way to connect to what is eternal is to stay awake in the present.

Let me say that again. The way to connect to what is eternal is to stay awake in the present.

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Building a relationship with God is not a once a week job. It doesn’t work for us to go off to live our lives and then check in with God on Sunday mornings – as important as corporate worship may be.

The hymn says it well:   But God’s power, hour by hour, is my temple and my tower.

Hour by hour. The way we connect to God is hour by hour.

So what are we supposed to do? You know this --  

Pray. Talk to God and keep enough silence to listen as well. Not just when we can set aside time for focused prayer – though that’s essential. But hour by hour, keeping the channel open. I pray a lot in my meetings at work – the voice inside my head says, “God, tell me what you would have me say.” Or “God, keep me patient and open to listening to this person.”

Look for Jesus. Not the final coming but the daily ones – where are you finding Jesus, experiencing Jesus? Notice all the moments of grace. Notice when your heart opens – hearing someone’s story or listening to a beautiful piece of music. Stay awake.

Recognize that it is all a gift. Take the time to remember that we didn’t buy or earn our way into the world. People loved us before we were able to love them back. We didn’t invent beaches and sunsets and full moons and the leaves turning red. It was a loving God who did all that. And somehow thanks to that same loving God, we got born and we inherited all that beauty and all that love.

Say thank you with our lives. What we do hour by hour is the way we say thank you for the gift of our lives and the opportunity to be in relationship with God. Do we stay grounded in gratitude and love?  Are we cultivating our generosity of spirit? Are we investing in our relationships and in causes large and small?

Recognizing that everything is a gift and saying thank you with our lives are deeply connected. There is a rhythm to it and when we get it right it makes all the difference:
I notice all that has been given to me, I feel grateful, and I respond by giving back. 

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This is a lot to keep track of hour by hour – keeping the channel open, looking for Jesus, grounding ourselves in gratitude and saying thank you with our lives.  If you are like me the best we can hope for is a continual process of forgetting and remembering. Asleep and awake. But every time we remember to do these things, every time we reconnect to God, we build another strand in the relationship and over time that strand becomes stronger and stronger.

And the stronger our relationship to God, the more we trust God.

Let’s look at the whole first verse of our hymn:

All my hope on God is founded;
he doth still my trust renew,
me through change and chance he guideth,
only good and only true.
God unknown,
he alone
calls my heart to be his own.

Maybe you are someone who has built that strong relationship with God and learned to trust. But there is always another, deeper level to get to and that this is a job for a lifetime.

Maybe you are someone who is at the beginning of this journey, wondering how to get started.

The very good news is that we get to take this journey together.  That is what the church is all about and that is what you, as members of Trinity parish, offer to each other.

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Today is Consecration Sunday. At the end of the service all of you who are part of the Trinity Parish Family will be given a chance to write down on a card an estimate of how much you will give each week to support the church’s ministry.

So here are a couple of thoughts about how your giving relates to everything I’ve just been talking about.

First, notice that the church is not asking you to make an annual pledge. The church is not asking you to write a check once a year. Instead you are asked to estimate your weekly giving to the church. And here’s why. How we use our money is a spiritual issue. It is a weekly issue, a daily issue, and it can be an hour by hour issue. The amount we write down on the card should affect how we otherwise spend our money. That’s the purpose of the practice of tithing – to order our financial priorities so that God receives the first tenth – and we then figure out how to live on the rest. If we stretch in our giving we will need to be mindful – week by week if not hour by hour – of how we are spending our money and where God is in that practice.

Second, notice that we are making our financial commitments to the church together, as one parish family. We need each other as we travel the road of faith and we need our parish – the clergy, the worship, the committees, the Sunday School – to be our spiritual home. Although what you write down on the card is an offering to God, you make the offering on this altar, with dollars that will support this church, and in the company of your brothers and sisters at Trinity Parish.

Let me end as our hymn does:

Christ doth call
one and all:
ye who follow shall not fall.

Amen.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009
St. Martin of Tours

The story of St. Martin giving half of his cloak reminds me of a priest I once knew, now a bishop, who gives away half his income.

As I consider how much to give, I have the inspiration / challenge of this bishop and St. Martin.  There is inspiration and challenge, but also fear.  How would my life need to change to give ½ away?

We did give 50% once, for 40 days during Lent.  We were living on my salary and my wife’s TA stipend, and she was pregnant.  We were worried we wouldn’t have enough money; so we did a counter-intuitive thing and gave half of our income away for 40 days.  We absolutely loved it!  And we had plenty.  But could I give half away for a year?

I am going to pray about this.  “Lord, I’d like to give more, but I’m afraid.  I’d like to give more because I remember the great feeling of freedom, unity and purpose that our Lenten experience gave us.  I’m afraid because my life will have to change for me to give so generously.”

What about you?  I have a hunch that many of you are in the same boat:  we are inspired by St. Martin, yet afraid of the consequences of such generosity.  I invite you to pray about it, too.  Tell Jesus of your desires.  Tell Jesus of your fears.  See what he says.

Sermon for Sunday, November 8, 2009

23rd Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 12:38-44 

This past week I received feedback on last Sunday’s sermon.  As you may recall, last Sunday at the baptisms, I preached about how we were initiating these young people into the community whose role was to harness the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection and bring it to bear for the transformation of human life.  “This is what we do,” I said, “No more, no less.”  After the service a person came up to me and said, “I was hoping you would say something about how our transformation has to do with the deliverance from sin.  There are any number of ways that we can hear ‘transformation.’  What the church does, and what I need, is transformation that is a deliverance from sin.”     

“Yes,” I thought.  “I didn’t say enough.”  It’s not just any kind of transformation that Jesus’ death and resurrection brings about, it’s transformation that is a deliverance from sin.  And so, “What we do in the church, what we initiate people into in baptism, is a community that harnesses the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection and brings it to bear for human transformation, delivering us from the power of sin.”  This is what we in the church do, no more, no less.  This is our role. 

There are any number of ways that each of us is held captive by sin, that we are kept – the Hebrews of old – in slavery in Egypt:  pride, anger, refusal to believe we are loved, a refusal to believe we can be forgiven.  This morning’s gospel text tells us of one of the ways in which we are most powerfully held captive by the power of sin:

He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.

One of the ways in which we are most powerfully held captive is through the sins that surround money.  We know that these sins are there, they betray their presence, because, for the vast majority of us, money is never dissociated from fear, and fear is the opposite of freedom and love.  Lynne Twist, the author of The Soul of Money, though not intending to speak theologically, yet speaks rather theologically about fear and money:

Everyone is interested in money, [but] rarely is money a place of freedom, joy, or clarity. Almost all of us feel a chronic concern, or even fear, that we will never have enough… No matter how much money we have, the worry that we don’t or won’t have enough of it quickens our heart.  The harder we try to get it, or even try to ignore it or rise above it, the tighter money’s grip on us grows.

[We put ourselves] under day-to-day pressure to earn more, buy more, save more, get more and have more.  Not even the wealthy find the peace and freedom with their money that you would think comes with having so much…  No one escapes the powerful push and pull of money. Money is like an iron ring we put through our nose:  it leads us around wherever it wants.

When it comes to money, all of us here today have fears.  To some degree or another, money is an iron ring in our nose, and through it the powers of sin and death lead us around.  The good news of the gospel is that Jesus, by his death and resurrection has set us free from the power of sin.  Because of Jesus Christ, we need not live in fear, and we even have the possibility of having freedom, clarity and even joy in relation to money.   

As you may recall from last week, the way that we harness the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection is by we ourselves first dying.  We need not literally die – Jesus has done that for us. But we are called to share with Jesus in his death.  We share in Jesus’ death ritually in baptism, and we share in Jesus’ death daily in the circumstances of everyday life.  When it comes to money, we can share with Christ in his death by giving it away. There are two kinds of giving that Jesus identifies in today’s gospel lesson: what I’ll call “abundance giving,” that is, giving to God of what we have left over, as the wealthy did in today’s gospel lesson; and there is what we might call “sacrificial giving,” giving out of our substance, as the widow did in today’s gospel lesson.  Note that it is the widow whom Jesus commends.  When we give sacrificially, we share with Christ in his death and have the chance to be raised to new life. When we give sacrificially, we discover that money need not be a ring in our nose that leads us wherever it wants.  When we give sacrificially, we discover that money can be a source of freedom, a strategic tool to help us make progress in the spiritual life.  When we give sacrificially, our giving can lead us to a place of freedom in which we are free to choose God.

 

As many of you know, Andover, Massachusetts – one of the wealthier communities in the state – is immediately next door to Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the poorest communities in the state.  When my family and I lived in Andover, less than a mile from Lawrence, and when Ashley and I were discussing if we could tithe our income – “tithe” means giving 10% to God – we learned that the mean household income in Lawrence was $16,000 / year.  When we learned that the mean household income was $16,000 / year, we said to ourselves, “If we can’t tithe our income, we are living beyond our means.”  And we started tithing.   

I can’t tell you how our life has changed for the better since we started tithing.  We used to worry about not having enough money; now, we never worry about having enough money.  We used to have conversations filled with fear about money; now fear, though still present, is manageable.  Money used to be a source of anxiety in our household; now, we have choice around money, and we delight to give it away, or choose to spend or save it.  Money used to own us; now, not only do we own it, but we use it as a tool for deepening our life in Christ. There are not many things that I will promise you, but I can promise you this – that if you give sacrificially of your income, 10% is the biblical standard – and note that I’m not saying if you give 10% to the church, just that if you give away 10% of your income (I’m less interested in the church receiving your money than I am interested in the state of your soul.  I have never met a tither who wasn’t joyful, who didn’t have peace, who didn’t revel in the sense of purpose and meaning in their life. I want us all to know the joy of Christ, the peace of Christ, the sense of purpose that comes from being a disciple of Christ.  Can you imagine what Trinity would be like, if we were a parish of tithers?) – I promise you that if you give of your substance like the widow did, your life will be transformed; you will be set free.  Yes, to give as the widow did, we will make some hard choices.  Jesus did not say that being his disciple would be easy; he said that the gate is narrow and the road narrow that leads to life.  But if we choose the narrow gate and the difficult road that leads to life, if we choose to give, the powers of sin that hold us captive like a ring in our nose will be overpowered, and we will walk in newness of life.  I guarantee it.   

This week, I invite you to pray about your giving.  Consider the ways in which you feel held captive by money; all of us in some way feel held captive to money. Imagine what it would be like to live free from that captivity.  Be in conversation with Jesus about your giving.  Tell Jesus of the transformation and release you desire.  Lay before him all the circumstances of your life that influence your giving.  Ask Jesus how much he would have you give.  And if you think it is too much, tell him. See what he says.   

Money need not be a ring in your nose that leads you wherever it wants you to go.  Indeed, money can be a source of freedom and joy, a tool we can use to deepen our spiritual life.  As we are willing to follow Jesus on the way, to take the difficult road, to give of ourselves as Jesus gave himself, then we can harness the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection and bring it to bear to transform human life – not just any transformation, but a transformation that will release us from bondage in Egypt, that will take us through the wilderness, and that will enable us to stand, not with the goats on his left but with the sheep on his right, and we will know the freedom of the Promised Land. 
 

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Romans 13:8-10 and Luke 14:25-33 
 

Owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. – Romans 13:10 

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:26 
 
 

Scripture is filled with inconsistencies:

• “Whoever is not against me is for me” vs “Whoever is not for me is against me”
• Did those around Saul hear the voice but not see the light, or see the light but not hear the voice?
• Tonight’s passage, too
• Abelard’s Sic et Non.
  

Tempting to try to explain these away:  “Well, what Jesus really meant to say was…”

Though it is tempting to wipe away difficulties with explanation, heresy often results!  (e.g., remember the Trinitarian controversies.) Truth is at once simple and complex.  The diversity of scripture strengthens truth and keeps our faith honest. 

What do we do with these passages?  Both are true.

• We as Anglicans perhaps have a better chance at accepting opposites as both true
• Image of two sides of arch holding up weight
• We are to “hate” those around us, renouncing all to be Jesus’ disciple…
• AND, We are to owe no one anything except to love them.

Challenge for us tonight:  be a community that loves one another and finds Christ in the other, yet never loses sight that we are not here for each other, but for Jesus Christ. 

Invitation:  Take these two passages home and pray with them.  Ask Jesus to help you live into them both.