Sermons – Page 61 – Where the Wind…

Attempted Temptation

Published on March 14, 2011 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

(Sermon for Sunday, March 13, 2011 || Lent 1, Year A || Matthew 4:1-11)

At dinnertimes growing up, I was often accused of having “a hollow leg.” I kept piling mashed potatoes on my plate and polishing them off and by the time I was on my third helping, my grandmother would be commenting on the vacancy in my lower extremities. In eighth grade, I weighed all of 85 pounds soaking wet, and still, I could put away the food. It has to be going somewhere, my relations would say. “He must have a hollow leg.”

During my overly literal early years, this commentary on my anatomy confused me terribly. Both of my legs seemed full of bone, ligaments, and muscle tissue. How could I have a hollow leg? And even if I did, wouldn’t the appendage fill up with mashed potatoes over the course of a few meals? Over time, I learned about metaphor and imagery, so I stopped wondering about the mutant connection between my stomach and leg. Then sophomore year of high school and my growth spurt hit simultaneously. My already ravenous appetite doubled, and my mother began saying that I had not one, but two hollow legs.

Every day, I filled myself up with carbs and fruit and sweets and the odd vegetable. And the next day, I had to fill up again. My hollow legs got longer, which was a good thing, considering all the food I was packing into them. My metabolism was so high that I often found myself parked in front of the refrigerator half an hour after dinner looking for a post-prandial snack.

In our society, we consume as if we have not only hollow legs, but hollow arms and hollow torsos, not to mention, hollow heads. We fill ourselves up with fast food and fast cars, all the while buying stuff that we tell ourselves we need, but we really don’t. We fill ourselves up with anxiety over making sure our lives and livelihoods are secure, all the while ignoring the vast majority of people who will never have security. We fill ourselves up with the sensational, yet banal, details of the lives of the rich and famous, all the while daydreaming about what we would do if the paparazzi followed us into a restaurant.

We fill ourselves up by hoarding stuff, by worrying about our security, by coveting fame. We fill ourselves up until there’s no room left within us for anything that we ourselves didn’t squash in there, until there’s no room left within us for God.

In the Gospel reading this morning, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness immediately following his baptism. After more than a month in the wilderness, Jesus meets the devil. And the devil can’t pass up such a juicy opportunity for temptation.

“See that rock over there,” says the tempter. “I bet you could turn that rock into bread and fill yourself up.”

“See the ground way below,” says the tempter. “I bet you could jump and be secure in the arms of angels who would never let you hurt even your foot.”

“See the kingdoms spread all over the world,” says the tempter. “I bet you’d be the most famous ruler of those kingdoms who ever lived if you first swore fealty to me.”

These three attempts at temptation are the industry standard. Worrying about getting stuff, getting security, and getting fame – they’ve worked for centuries, thinks the devil. Surely, they will work on this Jesus fellow. Not to mention, Jesus has been out in this wilderness for forty days. I’ve got him right where I want him, thinks the devil. Surely, the industry standard temptations about stuff, security, and fame will work on a guy who has been living out in the elements alone with no food for forty days!

Of course, the industry standard temptations fail. Jesus isn’t worried about getting stuff or being secure or finding fame. Why not? Well, the easy answer is that Jesus is the Son of God and therefore more than a match for temptation. But that’s not much help to you and me, so try this on for size. Rather than being a benefit to the devil in the devil’s attempted temptation, Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness actually help not the tempter, but Jesus himself.

You see, Jesus wasn’t just killing time during those forty days. He wasn’t twiddling his thumbs waiting for the devil to turn up. Jesus was fasting.

A fast is a way to make a space, to open up a hole within ourselves. A fast is an active and difficult denial of something that has influence over us (traditionally food, though fasts certainly are not limited to that area). When we fast, we forego the things that we usually use to fill us up, the things that we depend on to keep us going. And when we cease to fill ourselves up with all the junk of the world or all the anxiety about our own security or all our envy of the famous – when we cease to fill ourselves up with these things, we make room within ourselves for God.

Fasting intentionally opens up a hole for God to fill. When Leah and I moved into our new place a few weeks ago, we had boxes piled up all over the living room and dining room floors. But each day, we unpacked a bit and tidied up a bit, and now, we can walk around the house unhindered by all our stuff. This is what fasting does for us. When we clear away the rubbish that has piled up in our interior selves, we make a space for God to come in and dwell. And the more interior square footage we devote to God, the better we will be able to listen and respond to God’s movement in our lives.

This is just how Jesus fends off the devil in the wilderness. After forty days of fasting, he’s not empty, but full – full of God. Notice that each time the devil attempts a temptation, Jesus dredges up from within himself words of scripture that speak to the believer’s relationship with God.

“Bread alone can’t sustain you,” Jesus says. “But every word that God speaks gives sustenance to creation.”

“I’m not going to jump off the temple,” Jesus says. “I don’t need to test God to trust God.”

“I’m not going to bow down to you,” Jesus says. “I serve God, and only God instills in me the desire to worship.”

Jesus combats the industry standard temptations of stuff, security, and fame. He beats off the tempter by filling himself up with God. And he fills himself up with God by emptying himself through fasting. During our own forty days this Lent, how will we make spaces within us for God? How can we clear away the rubbish so that God can move in and walk around? We can make a start by choosing to fast.

If you tend to fill yourself up with stuff you don’t really need, then don’t buy anything beyond basic necessity. If you tend to fill yourself up with worry about the security of your livelihood, then stop and pray when you find anxiety setting in. If you tend to fill yourself up with desire to live as the rich and famous do, then skip the grocery aisle magazine racks and E! Entertainment Television for the next six weeks.

As you deny yourself the things that normally fill you up, actively invite God to enter the newly cleared space. Choose to fast. Clear away the rubbish, hollow out your insides, and give God a place to fill.

Never Wear Your Collar on an Airplane

Published on February 27, 2011 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, February 27, 2011 || Epiphany 8, Year A || Matthew 6:24-34)

A few weeks before he ordained me to the priesthood, the Bishop of West Virginia gave me one truly inspired piece of advice. You might imagine that this piece of advice dealt with the delicacy of liturgy or the intricacy of theology or the intimacy of pastoral care. No. Rather, his advice was quite a bit more practical and worldly. He said to me: “Adam. Never ever ever – no matter what you do – never wear your collar on an airplane.”

In the three years that I have been snapping the collar on, I have discovered the unerring truth behind this advice. There are two reasons why a priest like me should not wear his collar and black clerical shirt on an airplane. First, I will undoubtedly attract the attention of the one person on board who will feel compelled to sit next to me and tell me his or her entire life story. While this isn’t necessarily awful, I’d much rather read Ken Follett’s new book while in the air. I admit that this reason is a bit self-serving, but the second reason is more convincing: I’m not really all that great a flyer.

There’s something about traveling at six hundred miles per hour, thirty thousand feet in the air in a glorified hollow, metal cylinder that tends to rattle me. And there are not many things worse for passengers’ morale than a priest in his clerical collar who is having a mild panic attack during takeoff.

Better to travel incognito: a guy in a t-shirt and jeans having a mild panic attack during takeoff is much easier to ignore. Now, I’ve heard all the statistics. You’re more likely to have a vending machine fall on you, more likely to be struck by lightning, more likely to die in a motor vehicle collision than you are to be involved in a plane crash. But the statistics have nothing to do with my dislike for flying. I don’t have anxiety over that fact that the plane might do something as unlikely as crash. I’m not anxious that a bird might get sucked into a turbine or that the landing gear won’t deploy.

My anxiety comes from the simple truth that there’s nothing I can do if one of these things happens. I’m anxious because I have no control. I’m anxious because, once the cabin doors are sealed and the tray tables and seats are in the upright and locked position, I have absolutely no ability to determine the direction of my fate.

And this is most unnerving. When I connect the two metal parts of the belt buckle and the plane starts taxiing to the runway, my anxiety takes over. I bow to the anxiety and all I have left to me is an expected bout of intestinal distress. But you know what? Anxiety, as a state of being, is (when you get right down to it) a sin, a distortion in our relationships with God.

Anxiety happens when we give in to the temptation not to trust. Trust is a fundamental building block of any good relationship. When (for any number of reasons) our trust for one another evaporates, we lose the foundation of the relationship. The same is true in our relationships with God. When we give into the temptation not to trust that God fulfills God’s promises, our relationship with God becomes distorted. And anxiety is one of the unpleasant byproducts.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus continues his Sermon on the Mount by looking up into the air and speaking about the birds and looking down the hill and seeing the wildflowers poking up through the grass. God, he says, gives to these birds and flowers what they need to flourish. The birds have enough food, even though they do not plant, grow, or store their sustenance. The flowers display great beauty, even though they are here today and gone tomorrow. If God sustains these small, passing things that have no worries at all, then why are you worrying, why are you anxious, Jesus wonders.

On our honeymoon last week, Leah and I saw dozens of examples of Jesus’ illustration. Bumping along in the open air Land Cruiser on our safari in South Africa, we took in the grandeur of God’s creation and witnessed hundreds upon hundreds of animals eating and sleeping and wallowing in the mud. The trip was truly spectacular. I found myself agreeing with Jesus all the more. Of course, God’s relationship with me allows me to flourish as the elephants and buffalo and giraffe and zebra do.

Then we got into the propeller driven plane back to Johannesburg, which kept threatening simply to fall out of the sky, and my trust abdicated once again, only to be replaced by anxiety. Notice the odd reality at work in this example: I am less anxious on the ground because I have some semblance of control over myself. In the air, anxiety reigns because that control is gone. Now, if anxiety is the temptation not to trust in God, why would flying trigger my anxiety while being on the ground does not? In neither situation am I relying particularly on God. On the ground, I rely on myself. In the air, I don’t have that option, so I quickly notice the absence of my self-reliance. Cue the mild panic attack.

The loss of control confronts us with the stark truth that our tendency to rely on ourselves overwhelmingly trumps our tendency to rely on God. When we are in control, we can ignore the fact that we aren’t carrying our weight in our relationships with God. We aren’t opening ourselves up to God’s movement. We aren’t filling the role of trusting children. But when we go up in the air, our self-reliance vanishes and we cannot ignore our failure to join God in right relationship. We cannot ignore the fact that anxiety, rather than trust, fills the hole, which is left when self-reliance is not an option.

So, how do we fill the hole with trust instead of anxiety? Well, the short answer is that we can’t. Whenever our self-control or self-reliance or self-determination is threatened, anxiety will be the byproduct. Therefore, removing things such as self-reliance from the equation is the only way to move toward trust and away from anxiety. After Jesus talks about God’s care for the birds and flowers, he tells his disciples not to be anxious. And then he gets to the punch line: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Striving for God’s righteousness means devoting ourselves to living in right relationship with God. This relationship acknowledges that we are never really in control, whether we are on the ground or in the air. A right relationship with God is predicated on relying on God first, so that we can be open to God working through us. Holding up our part in this relationship means making an effort to take stock how much we rely on ourselves, how often we maintain lone wolf attitudes, how quickly we fail to trust when things get bumpy. Flourishing in this relationship with God happens when we notice ourselves falling into old patterns of anxiety, and, instead of giving in, we pray, we surrender our self-determination, and we trust God.

This is not easy. God knows my success rate is quite low. But over a lifetime of spiritual practice, of walking with God, of following Jesus’ path rather than our own, I believe that we can, with God’s help, overcome the temptation not to trust, the temptation that leads to anxiety. In today’s reading from the Prophet Isaiah, an anxiety-ridden Zion cries out: “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”

But the Lord responds: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.”

God has each of us written on the palm of God’s hands. God will not forget us. God is here and always will be. When we begin to trust this fundamental, immutable basis of our existence, we will find our right relationship with God. We will move from the floundering of anxiety to the flourishing of trust. Who knows: when I find this trust, perhaps I’ll be able to wear my collar on an airplane.

462 Years

Published on January 31, 2011January 31, 2011 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, January 30, 2011 || Epiphany 4, Year A || Matthew 5:1-12)

I preached this sermon on a Sunday in which the church had Morning Prayer for the first half of the service. We timed the service a little long, so my rector encouraged me to shorten the sermon, hence this 900 word piece rather than my normal 1200-1400 word ones.)

Four hundred and sixty-two years ago, the first edition of a certain book went to the printing press. The year was 1549, the author was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and the book was the Book of Common Prayer. In this original Book of Common Prayer (or BCP for short), Cranmer compiled, crafted, codified, and composed the prayers that became the central structure of a new expression of Christianity known as Anglicanism. A decade and a half before this publication, the King of England, Henry VIII, had officially broken away from the Roman Catholic Church. However, in the years immediately following the split, very little changed about the English church besides the pope no longer being the supreme earthly authority. Two years after Henry’s death, Archbishop Cranmer published the first BCP and ushered in the unique expression of Christianity that we at this church continue to practice today.

cranmerburning — Queen Mary (Henry's daughter) didn't like Cranmer much. She had him burned at the stake.

This unique expression of following the way of Jesus Christ creates a structure, a framework of prayer, around which we organize our lives. Cranmer borrowed from the monastic example when he created this framework. Benedictine monks framed their days around an eightfold worship cycle; they prayed formally in church with one another about once every three hours. Cranmer wanted all people, not just monks, to frame their days with prayer, so he took the monastic practice and synthesized the eightfold structure into a twofold one. In his new structure, people prayed formally in the morning, then they went to work, and then they prayed formally again in the evening. Thus, the uniquely Anglican worship experience of Morning and Evening Prayer was born.

Every morning and every evening to this very day, Anglicans around the world have gathered to observe these two rituals. During them, we sing psalms and songs of praise to God. We read scripture. We pray and confess our sins. I would be willing to bet that, thanks to time zones, there is a service of Morning or Evening Prayer happening at every hour of every day all year long. When Cranmer developed this dual service, he did so in order to give his flock a method by which to order their lives around prayer and praise to God. This morning, we are participating in a cycle of worship that envelopes the whole world in constant prayer, a prayer that runs all the way back 462 years.

Whether or not we personally practice Morning and Evening prayer ourselves, the example, which Cranmer set, still guides us. Episcopalians prize the order behind our worship because the structure gives us a way to organize our lives around the things that are most important. The framework of prayer allows us to participate in God’s movement not just when we remember to or when we need to, but at all times.

When we adopt this structure and begin to practice our awareness of God’s presence, we can also begin to access another structure, a framework that lies beneath the one we normally witness with our eyes. This deeper structure is the one that Jesus speaks about to his disciples in this morning’s Gospel reading. The beatitudes, or statements of blessing, give us a glimpse of the deeper framework of reality that exists beneath the misplaced priorities and distorted vision of the world at large. This deeper reality is the one that God infused into creation from the beginning, a reality in which communion overrides isolation, peace quells domination, and love bests fear. Of course, humanity has ignored this deeper reality from the word go, preferring instead to set ourselves up as petty lords of our own destinies, oblivious to the fact that we have never really been in control of anything. Humanity’s greatest sin throughout history has always been setting up structures and systems that bury the deeper reality of God’s presence in all and through all. The ordered life of prayer gives us access to this reality.

Jesus’ beatitudes show us how the deeper structure of creation works. The poor in spirit, the grieving, and the persecuted are blessed. The meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, and those passionate about peace and righteousness are blessed. These are not mere moral platitudes spoken to console a downtrodden people. They are not future promises that will be fulfilled someday in heaven if you can just endure long enough to get there. They are not hopes for what could be coming down the road. These statements of blessing are ways in which the deeper reality of God’s presence breaks through the distortions of the world – then and there on the mountainside with Jesus and here and now in our midst.

When we participate in an ordered life of prayer like the one that Archbishop Cranmer developed, we practice the presence of God every day, not just when we remember to or need to, but every day. This practice is a spiritual workout, which strengthens not our muscles, but our vision and our ability to respond to God’s call to serve. When we take on the framework of daily prayer, we train ourselves to see the deeper reality of God’s movement, to which the beatitudes point us. And then we leave this room, our spiritual gym, and we go out into the world to begin uncovering that reality and showing that God’s presence is, indeed, here.

What are you looking for?

Published on January 18, 2011 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

(Sermon for Sunday, January 16, 2011 || Epiphany 2, Year A || John 1:29-42)

The hospital was a maze. Children’s Medical Center had several buildings, and they were all connected somehow, but getting from one part of this building to another part of that building always involved multiple corridors and elevators. During the summer of 2006 between my first and second years of seminary, I was learning how to be a chaplain at this sprawling medical complex. One of the first things I learned was the hospital policy of refraining from giving directions to visitors. The hospital was just too confusing. Instead, if little Jimmy’s grandmother asked me how to get to the oncology unit, the hospital policy directed me to take her there myself and to make sure she knew her way back to the parking garage (which happened to be two elevators, three corridors, a skywalk, and two Starbucks away). In effect, hospital employees said, “Come and see” to their visitors and then accompanied them all the way to their destinations. These words – “Come and see” – make up Jesus’ second line of dialogue in the entire Gospel according to John. We’ll get to them in due time. But right now, let’s talk about Jesus’ first line of dialogue.

His first five words would not have been out of place in the labyrinthine hospital: “What are you looking for?” You might hear this question at any hospital elevator as any lost visitor stares helplessly at the building schematics printed on the wall. What are you looking for? Jesus speaks these words to two of John the Baptizer’s disciples after he notices them following him. At this point in the Gospel, Jesus has no followers of his own. He is the new guy in town. John the Baptizer owns the market on charismatic fellows who say compelling, challenging things. But John knows who Jesus is, so John encourages his disciples to begin following Jesus. Right away, Andrew and an unnamed person – quite literally – begin following Jesus.

When Jesus turns around and challenges them with his question –“What are you looking for?” – his words speak on two levels. This dual-layered dialogue is a common occurrence in the Gospel according to John. The first layer speaks to superficial, surface meaning. This layer is easy for Jesus’ listeners to access, and so they become drawn in. Then the second, deeper layer of meaning presents itself. Many of Jesus’ listeners resist this deeper level. But those who do dive deeply find rich, life-giving substance in his words.

With Jesus’ first words in the Gospel, he challenges Andrew, the unnamed disciple, and us to dive deeply to this second level of meaning. At the first level, John’s two disciples probably interpret Jesus’ question as a straightforward query into their present intentions. Do they happen to be going his way by chance or are they following him purposefully? But at the second level, Jesus’ five words penetrate to the deepest places of the human heart. What are you looking for? His question beckons an answer from those same deep places within us. The trouble is there are so many potential answers to this question that digging through them to find the ones that exist in those deep places can become problematic to say the least. Here’s what I mean.

What are you looking for?
A mid-sized sedan with good gas mileage and a high safety rating.
A doctor who understands my symptoms and actually seems to care for my wellbeing.
An assisted living facility for my parent whose mind is rapidly deteriorating.

What are you looking for?
The right greeting card to express my feelings.
A college that’s not too big but still has my major.
A quick hit to forget the day.

What are you looking for?
A boyfriend I can bring home to mom.
A scrap of meaning in a dead end job.
My car keys.

What are you looking for? John’s two disciples seem to understand that the “car key” type of answers will not suffice because Jesus’ words penetrate right into their hearts. So instead of answering his question, they ask one of their own: “Teacher, where are you staying?” Now, Jesus apparently does not hold a monopoly on dialogue with dual layers. At the first level, they want to know just what the question appears to ask: “In what house are you going to rest your head tonight?” But on that deeper second level, their question seeks a much more profound answer. Where are you staying? In Greek, the word that is translated as “staying” means quite a bit more than the English equivalent. Rather than the connotation of “staying at a hotel” or “staying on a friend’s futon,” the Greek word means to “abide” or to “continue to be present.” Thus, at the deeper level, the disciples ask Jesus where he dwells, where he abides, where he is present.

Their question, then, is the best response to Jesus’ own question. What are you looking for? Lord Jesus, I’m looking for where you abide. I’m looking for where you are present in my life. I’m looking for where you dwell in this particular situation I’ve gotten myself into.

When we receive Jesus’ question at the deeper second level, we can feel his words penetrating our hearts. We can hear his voice whispering up from the very depths of our beings: What are you looking for? Paying attention to his words rising from those depths helps us locate our own responses, the ones that originate in the same deep places of our beings. The transient, daily, car key type answers to the question fall away when we search deep within.

The best way to begin this search is with the disciples’ question: “Where are you staying?” When we ask this question, we open ourselves to finding Jesus dwelling somewhere in every facet of our lives. We open ourselves to hearing his voice whispering his presence into and out from our souls. We open ourselves, and in doing so, we turn the depths of our beings outward. The hidden deep places, where our responses to Jesus’ question lie dormant, become the pieces of ourselves that we display to the world. These pieces of ourselves are our callings from God. They are our personal, individual discoveries of Jesus beckoning us to find him in everything we do, in everything we say, and in everyone we meet.

And this brings us back to Jesus’ second line of dialogue in the Gospel according to John: “Come and see.” What are you looking for? Teacher, where are you staying? Come and see. Jesus invites us to see where he abides, where he is present in our lives. He invites us to dwell with him, no matter the situations we find ourselves in. Finding his presence means we have found those deep places within ourselves. Abiding in his presence gives us the grace to be vulnerable and to show the world the deepest yearnings that God has put in our hearts, the callings that God has blessed us to follow.

And the good news is this: “Come and see” means that Jesus will be with us, to take us where we need to go, to show us what we need to see. Just like the hospital employees accompanying a lost visitor to her destination, Jesus remains with us throughout our journeys. He dwells in our hearts whispering his question: “What are you looking for?” And when we ask him in return where he is staying, where he is abiding in our lives, he walks one step before us, saying, “Come and see.”

The Expendable Crewman

Published on December 30, 2010December 31, 2010 by Adam Thomas3 Comments

(Sermon for Sunday, December 26, 2010 || Feast of St. Stephen ||Acts 6:8—7:2a, 51c-60)*

guy — In 1999's Galaxy Quest, Guy Fleegman (far left) is an actor who once portrayed an expendable crewman on the show. When the cast finds themselves on a real space ship fighting real aliens, Guy is convinced he's going to die "to prove the situation is serious."

There’s an old joke about Star Trek concerning “expendable crewmen.” When members of the main cast beamed down to a planet, the away team always seemed to include one extra person whom the audience had never seen before. Predictably, the writers killed off this extra a few minutes later to show the dire urgency of the crew’s predicament. Seemingly, Luke (the writer of the Acts of the Apostles) and the writers of Star Trek have this in common. Luke introduces Stephen in chapter six, and he’s dead by the end of chapter seven. The patron saint of this church appears in all of two chapters of one book of the Bible. And his death shows that the situation for Jesus’ followers is, indeed, dire. Could the founders of this church have possibly named our parish after an expendable crewman?

At first glance, Stephen sure looks like a prime candidate for this expendable crewman status. We know nothing about him besides the fact that he was among the first seven deacons chosen by the apostles. Also, his feast day happens to be the day after Christmas, which is like having your birthday and Christmas right near each other and only getting one set of presents a year. And furthermore, the framers of our lectionary readings effectively gutted Stephen’s story. We just heard the beginning and the end, but we missed Stephen’s epic sermon in the middle. These three reasons all but confirm Stephen’s expendable condition. I might as well stop right now because Stephen was never part of the main crew anyway.

But wait just a minute. Let’s look a little bit closer at this by going backwards through my three reasons for Stephen’s supposed expendability. If you look at your bulletin, you’ll notice that we skipped from verse two to verse 51 of chapter seven of the Acts of the Apostles. The stitching up of the hole between these verses happens so seamlessly that you’d never ever notice. Here’s what I mean: “And Stephen replied, ‘Brothers and fathers, listen to me. You are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do.’ ”

Did you catch the break between verse two and verse 51? Stephen says, “Brothers and fathers, listen to me,” and then he launches into a beautiful and concise summary of a sizable chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures. He recounts the stories of Abraham and Joseph and Moses. Finally, he arrives at David and Solomon and the building of the Temple. All the while, Stephen teaches about the history and traditions of Israel, and his audience is the very group of people, who are supposed to be the most knowledgeable about those topics.

Now, I can’t find hard data to support this, but I’m pretty sure that besides Jesus, Peter, and Paul, Stephen has more dialogue than any other person in the narratives of the New Testament. And all in the space of two chapters! He seems less expendable now for sure. Stephen’s epic sermon (which I’m assigning as homework for next week – just kidding) serves as a link between Stephen’s witness as a follower of Jesus and the oldest traditions of the Hebrew people. His accusers brought him to the council on trumped up charges of blasphemy against the very tradition that his speech confirms. But buried in his sermon is something that shows that Stephen, though a courageous Christian witness, doesn’t quite have everything figured out.

Nine times during the speech that we didn’t read this morning, Stephen refers to the folks in the old stories as “our ancestors.” We all come from Abraham, our common ancestor, Stephen says. Our ancestors were enslaved in Egypt. Our ancestors made the golden calf. Our ancestors brought God’s holy tent into the land of promise. Nine times, he claims kinship with his accusers and with the angry council members.

But then, when the reading we heard this morning picks up again, Stephen switches. “You stiff-necked people,” he says, “uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?” When Stephen accuses his accusers of persecution, he removes himself from the group. Because he is now being persecuted himself, he claims no complicity in the sins of “your” ancestors, who, of course, are his, as well.

With this switch from “our” to “your,” Stephen severs the connection he had with his accusers and the council. A few minutes later, they violently drag him out of the city and stone him to death. Of course, their act of murder is the greater sin. But by removing himself from the corporate sin of their common ancestors, Stephen ignores the negative effects, which that sin has on his life. He turns a blind eye to the fact that the sins of the ancestor have somehow shaped, or better yet, misshaped him.

And this is where we come back to reason number two for Stephen’s supposed expendability. His feast day is today, the day after Christmas. Many saints have their feast days on the anniversaries of their deaths, but we don’t know on what day Stephen died. There is, however, a blessing hidden in this seemingly unfortunate placement of Stephen’s feast. Stephen’s death and Jesus’ birth are linked by virtue of our calendar. In both Matthew and Luke, the Gospel writers take great pains through lengthy genealogies to plant Jesus squarely in the line of Israel’s succession going back to Abraham and beyond. And in his birth in that little town of Bethlehem, the town of king David, Jesus marks the culmination of the tradition of David, as well as the other folks Stephen mentions in his sermon.

Thus, Jesus’ Incarnation happens as part of Israel’s history in order to redeem Israel’s history. By removing himself through his judgment of the council from the negative pieces of that history, Stephen removes himself from the need for that redemption. Of course, no one, not even a man “full of grace and power” (as Luke names Stephen) is above the need for redemption. Even the first martyr of the church, for whom our parish is named, is misshapen by the corporate sin of this world.

The good news is this: through Jesus’ Incarnation as a flesh and blood person and through his death, which Stephen’s martyrdom recalls, Jesus accomplished that redemption and gives us the chance to be reshaped into new and better forms. And this is where we come back to reason number one for Stephen’s supposed expendability. We know next to nothing about this man who died for the love of his Lord. But we do know that, at the end of his life, he did not add to the world’s cycle of violence by wishing vengeance on his attackers. We do know that he loved and served people in need as one of the church’s first deacons. We do know that he was a man “full of faith and Holy Spirit.”

And finally, we do know, that whatever his misshapenness and his sin, whatever his success and his witness, Stephen’s life and death find redemption in the love of God, made known in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.

—

* At church, I preached this text to three gracious and attentive women at the 8:00am service and decided it didn’t work read as a manuscript. So, at the 10:00am, I preached this content without the text and it worked so much better.

Names

Published on December 20, 2010December 20, 2010 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

(Sermon for Sunday, December 19, 2010 || Advent 4 Year A || Matthew 1:18-25)

When my mother discovered that she was going to have a second child, she began thinking up names for the tiny person growing within her. Since she didn’t know until I was born if I were going to be a boy or a girl, she tried all manner of names on for size. She spoke them loudly and softly, lovingly and reprovingly. She paired them with my sister Melinda’s name. She let them roll off her tongue, and she wrote them down to see how they looked on paper. Finally, she settled on a boy’s name – a real winner. Lying in bed one morning, she struck up a conversation with my father: “I think we should name him ‘Tristram.’”

My father sat bolt upright in bed. “Absolutely not,” he said. And so with a mixture of brainstorming, cajoling, and bargaining, my parents settled on “Adam,” thinking the name to be a good, strong one. (Just a side note: if I had been a girl, and I’m not making this up, my mother would have named me “Meriwether.”)

Sometimes, I wonder what my life would be like if my dad had agreed with my mother’s initial offering. “Tristram” is certainly less common than “Adam,” not that “Adam” is on a top ten baby name list. “Tristram” comes from the word “sad” in Latin or “tumult” in Gaelic. The variant “Tristan” was one of King Arthur’s knights, the subject of stories and songs, and Wagner’s great opera. You know where “Adam” comes from. When God sculpted the dust into a form and breathed life into the body, what God made was my name. Originally, my name wasn’t a name at all; rather, “Adam” – ha adam – was the word for “human being.” “Man of earth” might be the most expressive translation, though my friends who studied Hebrew in seminary took to calling me “dirt boy.”

Would my life be any different if I had been named “Tristram” rather than “Adam?” Could I have traced a different path with a different name? Does a name really matter in the grand scheme of things? Judging by today’s passage from the Gospel according to Matthew, the answer is “yes.” The right name is significant enough for an angel to tell Joseph just what to call the child growing in his fiancé’s womb. But just one name won’t do: Matthew recalls a second name for this child from the words of the great prophet Isaiah. And these names – Jesus, Emmanuel – these names are more than just names. They are mission statements. They are explanations of the life that God sent God’s only Son to live.

The angel in Joseph’s dream tells him to name Mary’s child “Jesus,” because “he will save his people from their sins.” “Jesus” (Iesous) is the Greek way of writing the Hebrew name “Yeshua,” which we render in English as “Joshua.” In the Hebrew Scriptures, Moses grooms Joshua to be his successor because Moses knows that he’s not going to reach the Promised Land. After Moses dies, Joshua leads the people of Israel out of the wilderness, which had encompassed them for forty years. This hero of the old stories, which were told at the Temple and around the dinner table, finishes the work of bringing the people into the Promised Land. Forty years from God’s initial rescue of God’s people from slavery in Egypt, Joshua helps God close that chapter of Israel’s history.

God saves Israel. This is the mission statement found in Joshua’s name, which means “God saves.” The life that Mary’s child will live years after Joseph gives the boy Joshua’s name accomplishes the same mission. Jesus, the angel says, “will save the people from their sins.” Jesus takes the people out of the new wilderness in which they are wandering. This new wilderness takes up no space on a map. There is no Promised Land a month’s hard trudging through the desert. Rather, the wilderness from which Jesus saves the people is the emotional, psychological, and spiritual desolation that they wrought for themselves. They created deserts around and within themselves through misplaced priorities and apathy toward the less fortunate and worship of all manner of idols, including the very law that was supposed to connect them to God.

Sound familiar? The desolation that the people of Jesus’ time brought upon themselves is the same desolation that affects people today. Our idols might be shiny and new, but our deference to them is unchanged. Notice, however, that the mission statement found in Jesus’ Hebrew name is not “God saved,” but “God saves.” With his resurrection, Jesus signals to people of all times that nothing in all creation – not even death – can keep God from bringing people back to God. We are some of those people. Nothing in all creation can keep Jesus from being in relationship with us. When we embrace this joyous truth, we can participate with Jesus in turning our desolate deserts into Promised Lands.

This constant relationship, this promise kept through the power of the resurrection, brings us to the mission statement found in Jesus’ other name: Emmanuel. Matthew helps out his non-Hebrew readers by translating this name right there in the text. Emmanuel means “God is with us.” Just as God was with Moses and Joshua and the rest of Israel during their forty-year journey through the wilderness, God was still with the people of Israel during their own self-imposed desolation. After all, God is the God of the desert and the Promised Land. But their desolation kept them from seeing the truth that God was with them. In Jesus’ life, the reality of Emmanuel – God with us – found flesh and blood. 17^th century poet Richard Crashaw describes Jesus’ Incarnation in this way:

“Welcome all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span!
Summer in winter! day in night!
Heaven in earth! and God in man!”

After centuries of captivity, after the life-giving words of the prophets had begun to fade from the collective memory, God’s people needed the immediacy, the physicality of the Incarnation to bring them back to God. This flesh and blood reality of God-with-us shocked some folks out of their desolation. They told others and those others told more, and pretty soon, followers of Jesus Christ were spreading to the ends of the earth his good news of abundant life lived for God.

But just as “God saves” is not simply a past event, “God-with-us” emanates from Jesus’ life on earth through the presence of the Holy Spirit down to us. His “eternity shut in a span” breaks free of the constraints of time, and so we too can encounter Emmanuel in our lives. Jesus promises to fulfill his name’s mission statement even after he ascends to heaven. In the very last line of the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus echoes this name when he says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28:20).

Every moment of every day, we have the opportunity of encountering the presence of God-with-us. We have the ability to participate with the God who saves in turning our desolation into a place of springs, where the “wilderness and the dry land shall be glad” and “the desert shall rejoice and blossom” (Isaiah 35:1). In the very names of our Savior Jesus Christ, we find the good news of God for all people. When we discover the presence of Emmanuel and embrace the forgiveness and salvation of Yeshua, of Jesus, we can then begin to ask God what our missions shall be. We can pray, “O God, what would you have our names mean?”

Shaking Off the Dust

Published on November 22, 2010 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, November 21, 2010 || Christ the King, Year C, RCL || Colossians 1:11-20)

Ever since I bought my piano a little over two years ago, a stack of music has sat atop the instrument gathering dust. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy – the keyboard works of these great composers continues to fulfill the lackluster role of impromptu lamp stand. To make matters more pathetic for this stack of music, the lamp, which I purchased at the same time as the piano, was bulbless until a few weeks ago when I finally remembered to pick up a bulb at the grocery store.

You might wonder why I bought a piano at all, if I never get around to tickling the ivories. Good question. At the time, I had grand designs, which have since descended through the realm of simple designs and the land of hope and settled comfortably in the valley of pipe dreams. Perhaps, my future children will learn the instrument one day and redeem their father’s purchase. Recently, my fiancé has sat down and played for a few minutes here and there. But mostly, the piano simply takes up space. And the stack of music atop the instrument gathers dust.

But this stack of music gathering dust isn’t really music at all. The books of Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s waltzes and Debussy’s preludes are simply bound pages adorned with groups of five lines and thousands upon thousands of cryptic markings. We might call these pages by the name of “sheet music,” but the “music” exists wholly apart from these “sheets.” Only when a person, who is trained to decipher and articulate the cryptic markings, sits down with the intention of translating the notes into sounds does the music ever have a chance of happening.

Our lives follow this same pattern. We have the capacity to make beautiful music with our lives, but mostly we keep our lids closed, content to exist as furniture taking up space. Mostly we keep our covers closed, content to sit in a stack of unread books. Mostly we sit around gathering dust.

Of course, this manner of existence is not the life that God yearns for us. Today, on the final Sunday of the church year, we celebrate the reign of Christ. We give thanks for the reality that Christ is our sovereign, our ultimate authority. And in our celebration and thanksgiving, we acknowledge that Christ does not reign over a world full of inanimate furniture and closed books. Rather, Christ reigns precisely to pull and push and prod us out of the state of dust gathering.

To start shaking off the dust, we must first examine just what we mean when we claim that Christ reigns. As the One who reigns over us, Christ is our ultimate authority, but we encounter trouble when we link Christ’s authority to the paltry earthly authority we encounter on a daily basis. Certain people have authority over us based on their roles. Teachers and principals have authority over students. State troopers have authority over motorists. Judges have authority over those indicted of crimes. This earthly authority has its roots in a punitive system, where citizens cede a portion of their personal sovereignty to certain offices in order to make the society function more smoothly. People recognize that if they break the rules of the society, the Authorities have the right and the ability to punish.

tolkien — Detail from "Descent into Rivendell" (2003) by John Howe, who is the best Tolkien illustrator of all time.

We may use the same word, but Christ’s authority is of a wholly different sort than the kind we encounter in our principals, state troopers, and judges. Far from being simply punitive in nature and bound by office or title, Christ’s authority arises from Christ being the author, the writer of the great script of creation. Think of it like this: before J.R.R. Tolkien put pen to paper, Middle-Earth had no ability to capture the imagination of readers. But over forty years, Tolkien authored story after story, character after character, slowly building a world of dark forests and misty mountains inhabited by elves and hobbits and wizards. Tolkien is the authority behind Middle-Earth because he authored the fantasy world into existence in the minds of his readers.

In his letter to the Colossians, Paul speaks of Christ’s authorship in similar terms: “In [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

As the author of all things, Christ has reigned since before the first things were created. And the script of creation continues because Christ has never stopped writing. And now Christ has authored our lives into being. We are small stories that help make up the great script. At the end of the Gospel according to John, the narrator concludes: “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). What the narrator doesn’t say is that all the other things Jesus did have been written down. Christ, the author of each of us, wrote those things down in us. We are the books that the world itself cannot contain.

The problem is that too often we are the books sitting atop the piano gathering dust. Too often, we fail to remember that we are not our own authors. Too often, we fail to acknowledge that we are not in charge of our own lives. Today, we proclaim that Christ reigns in each of us. Christ is in charge of our lives because Christ continues to author us into being. The author has written the words of life within us, the special words unique to each of us. When we begin to seek for those special words, when we look inside ourselves and begin to read the story of how Christ reigns in our lives, we start to shake off the dust.

Like the sheet music, we are just closed books until we begin to participate in the telling of our own stories. As the author of each of those stories, Christ has penned a work about himself, a work which we proclaim in the living out of our stories. We could choose to stay atop the piano gathering dust, but what kind of forlorn existence does this entail? How could we read the words of Christ in the lives of those around us if we remained dusty, closed books? There is far too much love and grace in the pages of our lives for us to waste them by staying closed. There is far too much that Christ is doing for us not to participate in Christ’s reign. There is far too much beauty to bring to the world for us not to let the author spill the words of life from our stories into creation.

And so, as one book trying to shake off the dust, I ask you: how does Christ reign in you? What words has the Author of each of us written in your hearts? Or, to use the words that close Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”

Esperanza

Published on October 18, 2010April 23, 2011 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, October 17, 2010 || Proper 24 Year C RCL || Luke 18:1-8)

On August 25, 2010, a crucifix traveled 2,300 feet down into the earth. The Apostles’ Creed tells us that Jesus, after he suffered and died on the cross, “descended to the dead.” This crucifix, this representation of the cross supporting the weight of the crucified Lord, descended to the living. Twenty days had passed since the mine collapsed, trapping 33 miners nearly half a mile beneath the soil of the Atacama region of Chili and nearly ten weeks from rescue.

Backing up to August 5^th, the day of the collapse, a single thought began to spread from the miners’ families to the community to the city to the country to the world: Oremos por nuestros hermanos, “Pray for our brothers.” On August 22, a note scrawled in red marker came to the surface: “We are fine in the shelter, the 33 of us.” The message was a glimmer of hope. And over the next several weeks, the glimmer turned into a beacon of hope shining in the depths of the earth.

That crucifix, that image of the suffering Christ, which descended to the living, was a physical representation of the hope that was already present in that shelter half a mile down. The persistent, unceasing prayers of the world – from the pregnant wife of miner Ariel Ticona to the bus driver coming off a double shift in Boston – sustained the hope of the miners. And so, in a fit of divine synchronicity, the Gospel reading for the Sunday following the miners’ rescue would, of course, begin like this: “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

Rarely, if ever, in the Gospel does the writer tip his hand while introducing a parable. Every once in a while, the writer will explain a parable once the story is over. But most often, parables stand alone, with neither introductory material nor closing explanation to help the reader. Indeed, Jesus seems to enjoy speaking in parables for the simple fact that parables make his audience dig deep into his words and find meaning for their lives by searching for meaning in his stories. So, when Luke prefaces Jesus’ parable today with the story’s apparent meaning, we’d be justified in being a bit indignant toward our Gospel writer. Luke doesn’t give us the chance to figure this parable out for ourselves. He tells us the meaning of the parable like a teacher going over the answers to a test before passing out the exam.

But while our indignation toward Luke might be justified, I think we should let him slide just this once. He has our best interest in mind, after all. Luke doesn’t want us to miss the meaning of this story because living out this parable makes our lives fundamentally better. Living out this parable helps us live lives full of God. “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” To pray always and not to lose heart. In other words, the story is about praying always and never giving up, or to put the meaning in positive terms, to have the stamina and fortitude to pray persistently and to hope all the time.

We’ve seen over the last seven weeks in Chili that prayer and hope are linked together. In the midst of disaster, prayer and hope rose to the surface and sustained the people affected by the mine’s collapse. Now, let’s be clear. We use the word “hope” for simple, everyday situations such as “I hope the train is on time” or “I hope this week’s episode of Glee is better than the rest of the season, which has been pretty dreadful.” This everyday use of “hope” is of a different magnitude than the hope we are talking about here.

Hope (you might call it capital “H” hope) is the active component of not losing heart. In a world that excels at distracting us from following Jesus Christ and seducing us with the ease of apathy, hope keeps us relying on God to direct us down the right paths. Hope in God allows us to take the long view of our own futures, trusting that God, like a master chess player, has already seen twenty moves ahead. Hope in God opens us to possibilities for our lives that the urgent need of now simply dismisses offhand. Hope in God tells us that God will never lose heart in us, and therefore, we should never lose heart in God.

Hope is the active component of the heart’s steadfastness, and prayer is the active component of hope. Prayer nurtures hope by reminding us that, despite the world’s distraction and seduction, God is present. The Catechism at the back of the Book of Common Prayer says this about prayer: “Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deed, with or without words.” Notice how this definition adds much needed depth to the popular understanding of prayer. The popular understanding simply makes God the recipient of our prayers: if I pray for my cat to stop scratching me, and the next day she does anyway, I am liable to think that God is not present. But the Catechism’s definition goes back a step in the process of prayer. Prayer is “responding to God.” Therefore, each and every time we pray, we are participating in the life-changing act of acknowledging that God is present in our lives. God calls prayer forth from us. We respond by praying. Each time we enter this exchange of call and response, God fuels our hope with God’s steadfast and eternal presence.

This is why Jesus tells the disciples a parable not just about the need to pray, but the need to pray always. A continuous life of prayer, of response to God, offers us continual awareness of God’s presence. This awareness leads to hope, which, in turn, enables us to live lives open to all of God’s possibilities and to trust in God’s directing creativity.

The widow in the today’s parable exemplifies this need for continuous perseverance and dedication. She keeps coming to the judge, and, in the end, her persistence pays off. Her unwavering commitment to obtaining justice moves the judge, who grants her request simply to get her out of his hair. If she had gone to court once, been dismissed, and never returned, the judge wouldn’t have given her a second thought. But her persistence changes her situation.

This persistence, this dedication to a life of prayer changes our situations, too. Like the persistent widow, our commitment to prayer signals our commitment to respond to God in every situation. The more we commit to prayer, the more apt we are to invite God into our lives and our decision-making. And opening ourselves to God’s presence allows us to soak up the hope that radiates from God’s movement in our lives. Seen from this angle, prayer works very much like food. If your mom or your husband calls you downstairs for meatloaf, you don’t call back, “No thanks. I ate last month.” Prayer leads to openness and trust and hope in God only when we integrate prayer into our daily lives.

The miners surviving 2,300 feet below the surface fed off of the hope generated by God’s presence, a presence proclaimed by the vast multitude of prayers descending on Chili from around the world. Upon his rescue, miner Mario Sepulveda spoke haltingly about his own persistence and hope: “I was with God and I was with the devil, but God won. I held onto God’s hand, the best hand, and at no point in time, how do I explain this, at no point in time, did I doubt that God would get me out of there.”

Sepulveda’s persistent awareness of God’s presence allowed him to survive for 69 days beneath the earth. The parable of the persistent widow teaches us that a life of prayer leads to hope, and hope leads to renewed lives lived in the fullness of God. I invite you to enter into a life of prayer, to find the hope that proceeds from that life, and finally to share the joy of our hope in God with everyone you meet. This happened in Chili: Elizabeth Segovia, wife of trapped miner Ariel Ticona, did not lose heart that her husband would be rescued. She joined her prayer with the prayers of millions. And halfway through the seven-week ordeal, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. And she named her “Esperanza,” which means “Hope.”

Note

Quotations and dates for the mine rescue from CNN.com.

Vision and Action

Published on October 4, 2010 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon Notes for Sunday October 3, 2010 || Proper 22, Year C, RCL || Luke 17:5-10

(This Sunday was our first family service, at which I preached a sermon without notes. I gleaned the sermon out of the following brainstorm, which also made for the basis of the sermon for the early service.)

I’m really glad I got to preach this Sunday because the prospect of preaching makes me sit down and think long and hard about the words I am going to say, about the words I believe God is calling me to say. This week I sat down with our Gospel passage from Luke and thought long and hard about faith. And very quickly, I realized that – even with all my schooling and sermons and work in the church – I hadn’t really thought all that much about faith. I knew I had faith. I knew that my doubts didn’t cancel out my faith. I knew that God’s faith in me gave me the ability to have faith in God. But when I dug a little bit deeper, I found myself at a loss for words about how faith works in my life.

My confusion mirrored that of the disciples in this morning’s Gospel. Right before the passage we read today, Jesus tells them that if someone wrongs them seven times in the same day, they should forgive all seven times. The disciples don’t think they have enough faith to do something like that, so they say: “Increase our faith!” Jesus’ responds that a tiny amount of faith is enough to do amazing things. I must confess that the words about the mustard seed and mulberry tree have always seemed rather quaint and comforting, but with no real applicable meaning – like words your great aunt cross-stitches into pillows. But this week, the statement vexed me.

Jesus seems to be saying that an increase in the quantity of faith is not necessary – you can’t get much smaller than a mustard seed, after all. By using such an exaggeratedly small thing, Jesus says that measuring the amount of faith is unimportant. Indeed, thinking of faith as a unit of measure makes no sense. I wouldn’t say, “Last year I had 25 faith, but this year I have 27.” Faith isn’t a statistic.

So when the disciples ask for an increase in faith, I think that Jesus makes the hyperbolic statement about the mustard seed in order to make the disciples see that it’s not an increase in the quantity of faith that matters, but an increase in what faith does. When my thinking brought me away from the static notion of quantity of faith, I realized that I needed to bring my focus back to two simple concepts having to do with faith. First, faith in God sharpens our vision. Second, faith in God motivates our action.

I’ve had blurry vision since middle school. My parents brought me to the optometrist, who noticed my nearsightedness right away. He prescribed glasses, which I hated wearing, as any eighth grader would. Indeed, my desire to keep people from knowing I needed glasses was so great that I skipped trying out for the high school baseball team. I couldn’t see fly balls without my glasses, but I was unwilling to put them on.

You’ve probably noticed that at some point during the fourteen years since my original diagnosis of myopia, I’ve gotten comfortable wearing glasses. And now I finally have a pair that, thanks to Doctor Who, I know are pretty fashionable. But there is another sort of lenses that I fail to put on just as often as I did with my glasses in middle school. These are the lenses of faith. My glasses sharpen my vision of objects in the world around me. The lenses of faith sharpen our vision of the God who is present in and around all things.

Indeed, my glasses don’t give me the ability to see; rather, they give me the ability to see well. When we put on the lenses of faith, we see the world with clearer eyes. Our sharp vision allows us to see God’s directing movement between us and those people, places, and things with which we interact. We stand forever in God’s presence and God moves with us down the paths of our lives. Faith sharpens our vision to catch glimpses of this movement.

Here’s an example. I was standing in Boston’s North Station not too long ago during morning rush hour. I was trying to figure out from which track my train would depart. As I stood there looking up at the departures board, several trains unloaded their passengers at once. I watched as hundreds of people queued up on the platforms and, as one, began trudging toward the glass doors of the station. As they reached the doors, I was spellbound. The intricate, random choreography of the morning commuters was beautiful. They crisscrossed and hurried and meandered and loped along. And not one person ran into another. They passed me as I stood still, and I felt like I was watching a slow motion scene from a film. Each of these people was connected to me and to one another. I could all but see the wispy threads of a tapestry linking us. Faith sharpens our vision. That morning at North Station, the lenses of faith helped me see clearly the reality that God connects each of us to one another.

But sharp vision isn’t quite enough. When we see the world through the eyes of faith, we become aware of how we can participate in God’s work in the world. When I saw clearly my connection to all the people at North Station, I remembered once again that I am called to serve God in all people. Thus, the first thing that faith does – sharpen our vision – leads directly into the second thing that faith does. Faith in God motivates our action.

In many of the stories about Jesus healing various people, Jesus speaks of their faith making them well. Now if we subscribe to the “quantity” notion of faith, we might be tempted to think that Jesus healed these folks because they reached a certain statistical threshold on the faith scale, which qualified them for healing. But the mustard seed reminds us that the quantity of faith is less important than the action of faith. The healing stories, therefore, are really about people whose faith motivated them to the action of seeking out Jesus in the first place. The Gospel writers recorded those healings because of the sometimes heroic, sometimes simple action of faith.

Again, when Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed,” he is not speaking about quantity. We do not have a collection of faith in the same way that we have collections of baseball cards or teapots or old comic books. Faith is not something we can store up in a safe deposit box. Rather, we have faith the same way we have energy. Energy propels us to run and work and play; faith propels us to love and serve and forgive. Indeed, faith is the energy that motivates us to participate in God’s work in the world.

And like energy, faith unused can begin to fade away. Like Langston Hughes’s “Dream Deferred,” unused faith can “dry up like a raisin in the sun.” This is why we come to worship. This is why we meet one another at the table for the nourishing food of Christ’s Body and Blood. This is why we do spiritual practices that keep us in contact with God and with other faithful people. God gave us faith to motivate us to love and serve God. As exercise is to energy, our participation in God’s work is to faith. And the more we allow our faith to motivate our action, the more resilient is our faith when we are confronted with difficult and demanding situations.

Faith in God sharpens our vision. Viewing the world through the lenses of faith shows a deeper layer of reality, the eternal reality of God’s presence. Then faith in God motivates us to act, to live lives full of God’s love and grace, to bring God’s gifts to other people and call God’s gifts forth from those people. Faith in God motivates us to participate in God’s healing and reconciling work in the world. Faith is not a static thing. Faith is not a statistic. Faith is the great gift from God that shows God’s faith in us. Faith is the catalyst that kindles all of our other God-given gifts to shine. Thanks be to God for faith.

The Sweepings of the Wheat

Published on September 20, 2010 by Adam Thomas2 Comments

(Sermon for Sunday, September 19, 2010 || Proper 20, Year C, RCL || Amos 8:4-7)

Imagine with me a fellow of no particular consequence, an Israelite who lives in the capital city of Samaria. The year is 752 BCE, thirty years before the Assyrians conquer Israel. Through the words of prophets such as Amos, however, we know that the people of Israel lost themselves long before the Assyrians came. Our fellow of no particular consequence knows first hand the truth behind Amos’s words. His name is Dallim. This is his story.

He said I was free. He said I had paid my debt. He said I no longer had to work for him. The steward said these things as he walked me to the front of the estate. He opened a postern door in the baked clay walls and gestured to me. I shuffled through the small doorway, and without another word, the steward began walking back to the main house. I was about to call out to him when the guard shut the door in my face. I slumped against the warm, looming wall. He said I was free. But as I crouch here…now…on another forsaken threshing floor, searching for scraps of wheat to lessen my hunger, I know one thing for certain. I may no longer be indebted to his master, but I am unquestionably not free.

It all started six years ago. I wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. But I wasn’t poor either – not like the beggars in the street. I got by. We got by – my wife and I. I ran a small stall in the marketplace selling whatever I could get my hands on. I called my stall a “specialty” store; everyone else called it “Dallim’s Junk Shoppe.” But I did a fair bit of business. I was the guy who could find things – a scrounger.

The day my wife told me she was pregnant was the happiest day of my life. I started trading for all of the things I imagined new parents would need – swaddling clothes and wooden toys and a woven bassinet. Then one day, something went wrong. She shouldn’t have gone into labor for three more months. She delivered our little girl on the floor of our hut. The baby never opened her eyes. My wife took to bed and a week later closed her eyes for the last time. For months, I didn’t leave the hut.

When I finally came back to myself, I had next to nothing. My family was gone. My landlord kicked me out of the hut. I went to the stall in the marketplace and found that my “specialty” store had truly become the junk shop. The thieves left a few baubles and trinkets, the things not worth stealing. They took everything else, including my scales, a gift from my wife’s father. That made me miss her all over again. Those scales were priceless, and not just for the memory. They were weighted perfectly – my father-in-law was no cheat. I used the scales so much that I nearly stopped needing them: I could weigh a shekel in my hand.

As the shock of the theft of my merchandise subsided, I realized how badly I needed food. I had been subsisting on dust and grief for too long. I put the worthless trinkets in a sack and slung it over my shoulder. I walked through the marketplace until I found a grain merchant. I tried to trade him the trinkets for some grain, but he would have none of that. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll give you an ephah of grain and you can pay me next week, eh?” I was amazed. How generous he was. He handed me a sack of grain and asked for my sandals as surety that I would come back. You can’t eat sandals, so I readily agreed. I was so relieved that I didn’t notice how small this merchant’s ephah really was.

The week went by, and I still had no money to pay him. “No problem,” he said. “You can pay next week.” I went away with another sack of grain. This happened several more times – I’m not quite sure how many. I planned to sell my stall to repay him, but I just couldn’t find a buyer. The last time I went to see the merchant for grain, I told him my plight. His smile faded from his face. “You have no money. Then I will take your stall.” Again I was relieved. “But your stall,” he continued, “is not nearly enough. No. No. I will take you, as well.”

The genial merchant was gone. He was a hard, grim man from that moment on. I was indebted to him, and I worked and I worked. But I rarely saw him, and he didn’t even know my name. The steward gave me my orders. I filled the grain sacks and noticed them shrink year after year. The moment the sun set every Sabbath day, I hitched the horses to the grain carts so my master could immediately go back to market – no doubt to seduce more helpless people like me. What’s a few sacks of grain to half a dozen years of free labor?

In those years, I often thought of the life I could have had – with a wife and children and a small, successful business. That was my dream, and I woke to my nightmare. I was a nameless drone, a slave to a corrupt man, whose corruption seemed to be rewarded at every turn.

I lost count of the days working in that estate. They ran into each other and made weeks. The weeks made months and the months years. So I was surprised the day the steward walked me to the postern door. The guard shut the door in my face, and I slumped against the warm, looming wall. I thanked God for giving me my life back. I was Dallim again, not the grain merchant’s debt-slave. I was free.

At least, I thought I was free. But I had nothing. The beggars had more than I – they had begging bowls. But I promised myself I would not fall into debt again. I used to be good at finding things. I used to be a scrounger. I could do that again. But oh, I felt the darkness creeping in, the same heaviness that gripped me after the deaths of my wife and baby girl. I started sleeping in doorways and alleys. I could not make myself get up. My world shrank to the space within reach of my prone position. I wasted away.

When I finally came back to myself, I was beyond hunger. In my reflection I could see where each of my ribs met my breastbone. I went to a windswept hill near my old master’s holdings to find a threshing floor. The floor was bare. I went to another. It, too, was bare. And here I am now – crouching on a third bare floor, swept clean of the scraps of wheat that are supposed to belong to the poor. And driving away I see the distinctive cart to which I hitched the horses for so many years. My old master: stealing the poor by loaning them the very grain that is rightfully theirs. Ours. Mine.

I’m trying to muster some righteous anger or indignant surprise. But I simply feel…ragged. I will never be free while the threshing floors stay bare, while I’m stuck in this soul-rending poverty. How can I exist in a world where corrupt men like my old master trample on the needy? How can I live when they bring to ruin the poor of the land? How can I find a morsel of food when they sell the sweepings of the wheat? They move through life making collateral damage out of everyone that can’t afford to get out of their way. They see only what they want to see and the poor fade into the scenery. They consume and consume with no regard for the welfare of those that they have taught themselves to ignore.

But God: you know I’m not collateral damage, don’t you? In your eyes, the merchant and I are the same, right? You won’t ignore me like they do. God: you still know my name. My name is Dallim. And I matter.

I matter.