Tag: Faith

5 Years: The County Fair

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
This June is the 5th anniversary of Wherethewind.com, and we are celebrating by looking back at some of the best of the last five years of this website. Today we have a post from the first couple months of the blog. I was at a county fair in West Virginia with a couple of friends and the following encounter happened. (Originally posted August 12, 2008)

tractorpull2The smells of sweat and fried dough hung in the air, mixing with the burned oil of the tractor pull. He was sitting with hands clasped, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a challenge on his deeply lined, leathery face. She was standing, looking all the world like a Grant Wood painting, and thrusting matchbook-sized pamphlets into the hands of passersby. I walked by out of reach, but I couldn’t help looking at the booth, one of many at the county fair. “How sure are you of going to heaven? Are you 50% 75% 100% sure?” read the banner. My friend wondered aloud about how one arrives at a 75% surety of heaven. I chuckled, but I was unable to keep walking by the booth. On the table, a wooden contraption with three small doors read: “Do you know the three things God CANNOT do?”

I stopped. The Grant Wood painting saw my furrowed brow and handed me a pamphlet. It looked like a doll’s magazine. A smiley face decorated the cover along with the words: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” I closed my hand around the pamphlet and pointed to the three doors. I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice, but I failed miserably: “So, what are the three things God can’t do?” I said.

She opened the first door: “God CANNOT lie.” She opened the second door: “God CANNOT change.” She opened the third door: “God CANNOT let people into heaven who have not been born again.”

We talked for fifteen minutes. I told them I did not disagree with the first door, but that I preferred to state the sentiment in positive terms: “God always tell the truth” or “God is trustworthy and faithful.” I said that a “lie” is the absence of the “truth,” and that I’d rather talk about God’s goodness shown in God’s truthfulness than to try to hook people with the trappings of sensationalism. After five minutes, the man commented that I was very intelligent. I took that as a compliment, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was not meant as such.

As our conversation continued, I realized we weren’t conversing. We were sparring. I’ve never had a taste for theological pugilism, but I was already three rounds deep, so I kept jabbing and blocking. I’ve had this same conversation with county fair proselytizers, but never as an ordained person. After the man commented on my intelligence, he asked me what I did. I said, “I’m a priest.” Without another word, he thrust another pamphlet in my hand. It was about how Roman Catholics aren’t real Christians and are going to hell.The same thought kept jumping to the front of my mind: “People like these, no matter how pure and ardent their intentions, make my job harder.”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Roman Catholic. It didn’t matter that I agreed with the man and woman several times during our bout. The only thing that mattered was that I didn’t buy into the way they framed the Christian faith–as a bottom-line venture whose only goal is to “save souls” by following the instructions in the smiley-face doll-sized magazine. Surely, there’s more than that. Surely, the abundance of what God has done and is doing is more important than a “what’s behind door number 3″ marketing scheme concerned with what God CANNOT do.

As I walked away, I wondered what had been accomplished during our boxing match. In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus says that when two or three are gathered in his name, he will be in the midst of them. Were we gathered “in his name” or in our own names, intent on KOing the other’s theological stance? Was Jesus there? Was I 50% 75% 100% sure of his presence? Looking back, Jesus was there, but he was not in my corner and he was not in their corner. He was there trying to get us to leave the ring.

Faith-ing

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments

Sermon for Sunday, June 2, 2013 || Proper 4C || Luke 7:1-10

Here’s a common situation in this day and age. For one reason or another – say, you’ve got to figure out how many packages of plastic cups to get for a party – you find yourself needing to do long division. Your phone’s battery is dead, so the calculator app is gone too. You flip over your shopping list and put pen to paper, and then you stop and realize that you have no idea how to do long division. You learned in fourth grade, but (wow) was that a long time ago. Has anyone else had that experience?

So, if basic math escapes us sometimes because we haven’t thought about it in a long time, I’d hazard a guess that we sometimes also lose sight of the basics of being followers of Jesus Christ.

Today, I’d like to get back to the basics. I’m going to talk about faith – specifically about how faith works in our lives. Hopefully, at the end of this sermon we will all rejoice that, while faith seems like an abstract, ephemeral concept, faith is in truth the fuel that fires our lives.

To start this little discussion about faith, we need to clear up one minor issue. In the English language the word “faith” is a noun. This grammatical construction makes it normal for us to ask a question like “Do you have faith?” Faith here is the object of your possession: “Yes, I have faith.” This sounds like completely correct and acceptable English, right? The trouble is, while faith is a noun, it should be a verb. I should be able to say “I’m going faith-ing today” or “We faith-ed yesterday and we’re going to faith again tomorrow.” But those sentences sound really strange, don’t they? I wish they didn’t. The word “faith” is a noun but whenever you use it, I hope you will remember it should be a verb.

Here’s why. We can possess things like concert tickets and hiking boots, but such possessions just sit on the counter or in the closet until we need to use them. If we have faith in the same way we have concert tickets, then we run the risk of storing our faith in the kitchen cupboard until we think we need it. But faith doesn’t work like that. Faith cannot be stored up or hoarded. We might get into situations where we say, “If I just had a little more faith…” But this turns faith into a commodity, something we can trade for something else. That’s not how faith works.

Thinking of faith as a verb removes it from the kitchen cupboard and puts it in our actions. We cannot store up or hoard our actions like we can our possessions. Rather, each action tumbles into the next in a never-ending stream. The problem we run into here is that, since the word faith isn’t actually a verb, we have trouble imagining what faith as action looks like. You know exactly what I mean when I say, “I saw someone running on my way to church this morning.” But you’d have difficulty conjuring up the image if I said, “I saw someone faith-ing on my way to church this morning.”

VitruvianMan(featured)Because of this difficulty, I’d like to invite you to imagine with me a reality that we don’t often think about. When God created animals, God gave us all sorts of biological systems that allow us to live. The respiratory system lets us breath, the circulatory system cycles our blood through our bodies, the digestive system turns food into nutrients. There’s the nervous system, the endocrine system, the lymphatic system and so on. But we were made in God’s image and likeness, which means we have one more system that other animals don’t have. We have a spiritual one to go along with all our biological ones. We have a faith system.

The faith system works a lot like our muscular system. We all have muscles (yes, even scrawny guys like me). We need our muscles to do simple tasks like getting out of bed, standing up, even smiling. We also need our muscles to do more difficult tasks like running a marathon or lugging a couch to a third floor walkup. Exercising hones and strengthens our muscles, making them more durable and less likely to fatigue. But whether we exercise or not, our muscles still put in work day in and day out.

So, too, with our faith system. The faith system spurs us to seek out life-affirming relationships, to support one another in our daily walks with God, to reach out to those in need, to welcome anyone into our midst, and to share with them the good news of God’s love. The faith system also sustains us through dry, desolate periods, giving us enough endurance not to give up quite yet. Like our muscles, our faith can get weary and fatigued. But also like our muscles, we can exercise our faith to hone and strengthen it, to make it more a part of our actions and less a thing sitting on the shelf in the kitchen cupboard.

If we’re going to exercise our faith, then we should figure out exactly what we mean when we say the word. We’ve already said how faith is a noun that should be a verb. Faith then is the action that happens when we participate in our relationships with God. Faith borrows the best parts of trust, confidence, and humility and molds them into our response to God’s presence in our lives. From trust, our faith borrows the willingness to give ourselves over to the power of another. From confidence, our faith borrows the courage to take the leap into God’s waiting arms. And from humility, our faith borrows the recognition that God (and not we ourselves) initiates the action that results in the giving ourselves up to God.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Roman centurion actively engages his faith system. He trusts that Jesus can help him. He has courage actually to do something about that trust. And he shows his humility when he sends friends to Jesus to tell him he need not come all the way to the house to heal the slave. The centurion displays such strong faith that even Jesus is amazed. But no matter how strong or how weak our faith is, we each have a faith system that God gave us so we would be able to join God in relationship. The more we exercise our faith system – the more we act out our faith – the deeper can we go in our relationships with God.

Imagine if we exercised our faith in the same way we exercise our muscles. Going to the gym once doesn’t do much, but going every other day can work wonders on our bodies. God yearns for us to have this kind of dedication to our lives of faith. When we are serious about exercising our faith systems, we build time into every day to be in prayer with God. We start with faith and allow it to motivate all our other actions. We take part in the act of worship, both on Sunday mornings and in the moments of our days when our faith shows us special signs of God’s presence that our eyes alone might not see.

I invite you today to remember that faith is a noun but should be a verb. Faith is not a commodity or a possession. Faith is the active component of our relationships with God. God loves us and we love God. What could be better than cultivating that love everyday? What could be better than exercising our faith system so that we resonate deeper and deeper with God’s movement in our lives?

Antagonists

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, July 15, 2012 || Proper 10B || Mark 6:14-29)

Today’s Gospel reading gives us an entire story about one of the antagonists of the Gospel. Antagonist. This is a tricky word because often in current culture “antagonist” is simply synonymous with villain, enemy, or bad guy. Famous antagonists – a Jeopardy category, perhaps? Darth Vader. Javert. Lex Luthor. Vader wears black, breathes heavily, and uses the “Dark Side” of the Force – definitely a villain. Javert hunts for a man whose crime doesn’t warrant such obsessive and destructive investigation – a perfect enemy for Jean Valjean. And in the first Superman movie, Lex Luthor attempts to destroy California in order to raise his land’s property value – total bad guy.

Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor.

But dismissing these fellows as mere villains ignores their roles as the antagonists of their respective stories. A good antagonist doesn’t simply serve as the proverbial immovable object against which the hero’s unstoppable force must contend. A well-drawn antagonist helps reveal the good things about the protagonist. Often, facets of the main character remain in shadow until a skeptical or adversarial or malevolent character brings them to the light. Lex Luthor’s greed stands in contrast with Superman’s selflessness and so on and so forth.

The antagonist in our story today falls into the same Jeopardy category as Vader, Javert, and Lex Luthor. He is none other than King Herod, to whom Mark dedicates a precious fifteen verses of his short account of the Gospel. If you thought today’s reading felt a bit weird and out of place, then you’re not alone. The Gospel writer Matthew greatly abridges the tale, and Luke and John give the story a miss entirely. But Mark, who usually barrels his narrative ahead at a breakneck speed, oddly stops for a massive chunk of Chapter 6 and treats us to a banquet with one of the bad guys. So, my question is, “Why?”

Well, I think that Mark is a good storyteller, and good storytellers understand what antagonists are for. If antagonists exist to shed light on the good things about the protagonist, then we can ask ourselves, “What does Herod teach us about Jesus?” The easy answer is without Jesus, innocent people get beheaded at dinner. But I think we can go a little deeper than that. Jesus’ absence in this passage is truly conspicuous. Indeed, if the Gospel of Mark were cut up into a season-long television series, the actor playing Jesus would get this episode off. But still, I’m pretty excited because for one week, we get to look at the story from the other side. We get to see the actions of the bad guy and contrast them with the actions of the good guy. And boy, do we have some contrasts to make.

What Mark gives us is really a flashback to an earlier event. Herod thinks that Jesus is John the Baptist come back from the dead, which is bad news for our bad guy because Herod wound up signing John’s death sentence in the first place. Mark tells the tale of why Herod found himself in such a predicament.

The story begins at dinner. And at dinner is where we make our first contrast between the good guy and the bad. This isn’t just any dinner, either. This is Herod’s birthday dinner, and when you’re a puppet king of the Roman Empire – a lackey, really – you don’t have much power beyond spending your citizens hard-earned tax dollars on extravagant banquets for you and your friends. Mark describes these friends in detail: Herod’s guests are “his courtiers and officers and the leaders of Galilee.” Not a bad turnout for the red carpet. You can see them in your mind’s eye, right? There they are reclining at table and congratulating each other for being part of such an impressive coterie.

Of course, if Jesus had been hosting such a banquet, whom would he have invited? That’s right: the outcasts, the sinners, the tax collectors – those people who wouldn’t have a chance in a million years to be on Herod’s guest list. The very people at Herod’s banquet are more than likely the ones who excoriate Jesus for eating with the unwashed poor, the street urchins usually labeled as “bad.” And yet, we know who the good guy in this story is.

So the who’s who of society arrives for Herod’s birthday, and his little daughter dances for the assembly. Her acclaim is so great that Herod swears to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” With the girl’s conniving mother in the background, we know this cannot go well. Swearing an oath was a big deal back then, akin to a legal contract today, but with more honor at stake. And swearing a blind oath was like writing a blank check.

Of course, if Jesus had watched the little girl’s ballet, what would he have done? Joyfully praised her for her creative expression, no doubt, but he sure wouldn’t have sworn an oath. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Do not swear at all… Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” In other words, there’s no need to swear an oath; just be trustworthy all the time and you won’t need to make guarantees.

And still, we have one more contrast to make – the biggest one yet between the good guy and the bad. On her mother’s prompting, the girl asks for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod is deeply grieved, Mark tells us, but apparently not too deeply grieved because he goes through with his oath anyway. In order to save his honor, his pride, his standing in society, Herod has an innocent man killed.

Of course, when Jesus was in a similar situation, what did he do? When he could have saved himself from public humiliation, scorn, pain, and death, what did he do? He gave himself up willingly. He gave no regard to his own honor and pride, but emptied himself and humbly chose the road that led to the cross. Society mocked him, the empire killed him, and yet he won in the end, and yet he won in the end when God raised him from the dead on the third day.

Our antagonist today, foolhardy and power-drunk King Herod, shows us the other side of the story, the shadow side, the side that exists in the darkness when the light of the world is offstage. He prizes his standing, his honor, and his pride above all else, even to the point of committing homicide.

I don’t know about you, but I suspect that all too often I place myself on the wrong side of the story. I look at myself in the mirror, and I wonder when the good guy decided to take the episode off and let the bad guy take center stage. I ignore Jesus’ dinner guests because they are so much easier to ignore than to include. I swear oaths to myself about how I will live my life, and then I fail to live up to them. I let my pride stand in the way of doing the right thing. If you’re anything like me, then we all occupy the antagonist’s role in our own lives far too much of the time.

But the good news is this: even when we occupy the bad guy’s role in our own stories, there is always and forever someone occupying the role of the good guy. Our protagonist is Jesus Christ, and as any good guy would, he calls us to come to him, to shed ourselves of our antagonism, and to live our lives as his followers. When we confess our sins in a few minutes, when we once again give up to God our villainy, we will be ready to recognize Jesus as the protagonist of our stories. And as he nourishes us with his Body and Blood at his dinner banquet, we will be strengthened to go out as the good guys and serve the world in his name.

High Noon

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, March 4, 2012 || Lent 2B || Mark 8:31-38 )

I’m sure we’ve all watched this scene unfold in a film, a Western, perhaps starring John Wayne or Gary Cooper. The sheriff checks the rounds in his six-shooter, puts on his Stetson and shiny, star-shaped badge, and walks bowlegged out of his tin-roofed station. His spurs clink as he walks, and his shoes kick up the dust of the main street running through town. At the same time, the batwing doors of the saloon swing outward, and the gun-slinging outlaw swaggers down the steps into the street. The outlaw wears a black bandana and black chaps and keeps his Colt .45 slung low in his hip, the better to draw quickly. They face each other at high noon out on the street. They are alone, though the whole town is watching from windows and roofs. A tumbleweed skitters across the road between them. There are no shadows. And the sheriff says, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

With these words, the sheriff gives the outlaw the chance to turn himself in or to leave town before the inevitable shootout. But the shootout is inevitable for two reasons: first, the movie-going public would be disappointed in a Western without a shootout; and second, the outlaw’s very nature and personality won’t let him go quietly. If today’s Gospel reading were staged as a Western, you and I would be cast as the outlaw. And a Stetson-wearing Jesus would be the sheriff, who says to us, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

But Jesus wouldn’t be talking about a town. He would be talking about us, about our souls, about our lives. “This life ain’t big enough for the both of us” is the Western film version of what Jesus actually says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.”

With these words, Jesus gives us the same choice that the sheriff gives the outlaw. We can surrender ourselves to Christ or we can fight in an attempt to keep control of our lives. We cannot, however, do both.

At first glance, the second option seems quite appealing. Who wouldn’t want to remain in control of his or her own life? Is that not the American dream – self-determination, self-preservation, pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps? Do we Americans not prize the entrepreneur, the independent thinker, the individual who defies the odds to become someone? Of course we do. In and of themselves, these things are not bad. But they can lead us down some wrong paths.

Let’s take self-preservation, for example. As infants, this is the only thought in our little brains. We cry whenever we perceive that something is being withheld that will help us thrive. We are incapable of taking care of ourselves on our own, so we induce through love and tears others to take care of us. At this stage of our life, self-preservation is not a choice. Keeping ourselves going is a hardwired imperative of our biology. As we grow up and become more self-sustaining, the affinity for self-preservation that we displayed as infants stays with us. The biological imperative keeps us seeking things that will help us survive.

Again, this is not a bad thing at all. The problems begin when the “self” we are trying to preserve starts wandering away from those life-giving things that helped us thrive as infants. Some of those life-giving things – such as family and love – can remain throughout our lives, but other, life-taking things can crowd them out. In middle school, we define ourselves based on the insecure input of our peers and the warped input of the consumer culture. In young adult life, we define ourselves based on our (never quite good enough) physical attractiveness to prospective mates. In adult life, we define ourselves based on our work and our need to be comfortable.

When these definitions lead us down life-taking paths, we humans have a tendency to follow such paths to the extreme. We become addicted to alcohol or drugs or gambling or video games. We pursue what marketing experts define as success. We take on the lone wolf persona, ignoring the welfare of others because we perceive that we are not faring well enough ourselves. Pretty soon, the selves that we have become look so very little like the selves that God created us to be.

The farther down the life-taking paths we go, the deeper the need to preserve these false selves becomes. We know no other way to live. We have no idea what another path would like, and the unknown is the scariest reality of all. So we cling hard. We preserve these so-called lives. And we become outlaws in our own bodies, betrayers of the abundant life that God desires for each of us.

To these outlaws, Jesus says, “This life ain’t big enough for the both of us.” But instead of drawing his six-shooter like the sheriff, Jesus unbuckles his holster and lets the belt drop into the dust. He spreads his arms wide and starts walking toward us. We keep our hands on the hilts of our guns, too bewildered by his behavior to draw and start firing. When he reaches us, he takes the gun from our belts, empties the bullets, and pulls the bandana away from our faces. Then, with his arms once again outstretched as on a cross, he beckons us to him. He calls to us to take one step toward him, one step down a new life-giving path, one step that will find us close enough for his arms to embrace us.

And in that embrace, our need to preserve those false selves starts fighting. But our gun is in the dust. Our arms are pinned to our sides. The only thing left to us is to surrender those false selves into Christ’s care and to begin to let Christ’s life replace the half-lives we were leading. In the embrace, Jesus leans close and whispers, “If you want to become my follower, deny yourself and follow me.”

And so we deny the false selves that we have become, the small, scared people who stubbornly walked down the wrong paths. We lose the half-life we had because we stopped trying to save this old life. And instead, we take on Christ’s life. We step into the life of Christ as Paul says to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

As Christ lives in us, there is no room for the old life to hold sway. This life just ain’t big enough for the both of them. But Christ’s life is big enough to encompass and redeem the old life. The new paths we tread don’t start out new, but as the old, life-taking paths we followed. We just travel them in the opposite direction. And as we journey back up the life-taking path, Christ gives us the opportunity to repair and reconcile with those we’ve hurt and to reject and abandon the system that defines self with stuff. As Christ’s life takes hold in us, we find that this new life is worth preserving, and not only preserving, but rejoicing in and sharing with others.

Surrendering our outlaw lives and living Christ’s life is not easy. That’s why Jesus uses the imagery of the cross – not just because of his own impending execution, but because the cross is a symbol for suffering. Living Christ’s life means sharing in the suffering of the world, and also working to change the world to alleviate some of the suffering. But the good news is this. When we no longer live to preserve our false selves, but allow Christ to live in us, then we are never alone. We never have to face the joys and sorrows of this life alone. We never have to encounter suffering alone. The shootout ended without a shot fired. Our false selves are dead. And Christ is alive in us.

Be Silent, and Come out of Him

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

 (Sermon for Sunday, January 29, 2012 || Epiphany 4B || Mark 1:21-28 )

I don’t know about you, but if I were the unclean spirit in today’s Gospel reading, I probably would have kept a lower profile. I would have lain low, kept my mouth shut, perhaps donned a pair of those Groucho Marx glasses with the big eyebrows and moustache. Then, after Jesus left the synagogue, I would have slunk home, incessantly cackling and cajoling, coercing and enticing, whispering, persuading, coaxing, craving, swaying, squeezing, luring. I would have slunk home, still embedded within my “patient,” as C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape calls you delicious people. I mean, us delicious people. I mean, us people.

*shakes head vigorously*

What I’m trying to say is this unclean spirit doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of self-preservation. If the unclean spirit knew that Jesus was “the Holy One of God,” and therefore had plenty of authority to command said spirit, then why did the spirit make a peep? And not just a peep, but a scene? And not just a scene, but a scene in the synagogue, which would be like the event taking place right now during this service. As I said before, I probably would have kept a lower profile.

However, maybe I’m not giving the unclean spirit enough credit for trying. Perhaps, this thing afflicting the guy in the synagogue did attempt to keep his lips zipped. Perhaps, the unclean spirit knew that Jesus would make the spirit’s existence rather uncomfortable if Jesus caught wind of the afflicting presence. And perhaps, the spirit just couldn’t help but cry out when Jesus was nearby.

The unclean spirit is caught in Jesus’ gravitational field. Like a satellite in a degraded orbit falling to earth, the spirit succumbs to Jesus’ gravity and reveals itself. The gravity – the authority – of Jesus’ presence compels the unclean spirit to cry out. And by this same authority, Jesus pulls the spirit from the man with the words: “Be silent, and come out of him!”

Now, I know that dismissing this kind of Biblical story is easy in our day and age. We look to psychology for a comfortable, modern lens with which to interpret unclean spirits. Demonic possession belongs to horror films and to currently popular fantasy worlds populated with vampires, zombies and werewolves. But for all the science and science fiction that we can use to explain away stories like today’s Gospel, the fact of the matter remains that Jesus took this man, who was afflicted by spiritual uncleanness, and made him well. The thought of unclean spirits may make you uncomfortable – sure makes me uncomfortable. But the reality of Jesus standing near and cleansing the filth within replaces my discomfort with wonder and awe and thanksgiving.

“Be silent, and come out of him!” says Jesus. He says this to the unclean spirit within the man at the synagogue, and he says this to the unclean spirits within us at St. Stephen’s church. Our afflictions may not look like the ones depicted in Renaissance frescos or horror film special effects, but that doesn’t make our unclean spirits any less real or damaging to our walks with God and one another. The question is: do we want to stand close enough to Jesus for his gravity to act on our uncleanness?

Whenever I ask myself this question, an overwhelming sense of lethargy strikes me out of nowhere. The status quo may not be perfect or even ideal, but I’ve gotten along well enough so far, I tell myself. May as well stay the course. “If it’s only somewhat broke, don’t fix it!” But honestly, this lethargy doesn’t strike out of nowhere. The lethargy comes from the unclean parts of me that want to be left well enough alone. I hear a voice within that sounds like mine, but I know deep down this voice is not the one I should listen to. The voice coaxes me back: back to bed, back to sleep, back away from the Holy One of God, whose gravity is always seeking to pull me to a closer orbit.

To this voice, Jesus says, “Be silent, and come out of him.” For me this voice belongs to pride and self-sufficiency and self-importance. Jesus calls the owner of this voice to leave me so that I can follow Jesus more closely. That’s mine. I wonder what your unclean voice is coaxing and coercing from you?

Perhaps, yours tells you that if you do just enough to get by, everything will work out. Your life might not be great, but your life will be easy, and that’s good, right? You don’t study for the test because you know you can scrape a C-minus, and that’s good enough. You don’t practice the piano piece because you can hit most of the notes most of the time, and that’s good enough. “Good enough, good enough” says the voice, which belongs to the indolent drifter within you, the slacker who’d rather just play video games all day. To this unclean spirit, Jesus says, “I never promised life would be easy, but I did promise life would be abundant, not just good enough. Be silent, and come out of him.”

Perhaps, your unclean voice tells you that working all those extra hours shows your dedication, and you never think to ask, “Dedication to what?” You stay late at the office most nights and the tonnage of missed dinners and little league games and ballet recitals piles up around you. You burned out a year ago, but you’re still plugging away because you’re no quitter. “You’re giving your family a better life, no matter if you’re not around,” says the voice, which belongs to the petrified consumer within you. To this unclean spirit, Jesus says, “Your relationships are more important than your money. Be silent, and come out of him.”

Perhaps, your unclean voice tells you that you are unattractive, unlovable, and doomed to a lonely existence; or that you should just shut yourself in your house so others won’t see that the years are taking their toll on your faculties; or that your challenges are too insignificant to ask others for help; or that others will laugh at whatever you say; or that whatever you do, nothing will be enough for God or anyone else to love you. To each and every one of these unclean spirits, Jesus says, “Be silent, and come out of him.”

These unclean spirits are familiar to us. They are comfortable, even though they demean and debase and shackle us. The overwhelming feeling of lethargy happens when they sense that we are moving nearer to Jesus Christ, when we are circling at a closer orbit. The unclean spirits feel the pull of his gravity, and they try to escape, to keep us for themselves. But they can never escape, because we were made not for them, but for God. And the Holy One of God has the authority, the mercy, and the grace to cleanse us.

When you give in to the unclean spirit within you, the enticing voice that speaks of lethargy or apathy or anger or fear, listen also for a second voice, the voice of Jesus Christ speaking from the depths of your soul. His is the voice of freedom from the filth that keeps us from living into the fullness that God desires for each of us. His is the voice filled with the gravity and authority of the Holy One of God. His is the voice that cries out: “Be silent, and come out of him.”

First Words

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, October 16, 2011 || Proper 24A || 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 )

Any spherical object! (that's me at age 2)

Did your parents ever tell you about the first word you ever spoke? More than likely, your first word was “Da,” which is short for, “Daddy, go get Mommy so I can have lunch.” Perhaps, your first word was “Ma,” though this is unlikely, considering the “M” sound is much more difficult to make than the “D” sound. Perhaps, your first word was “No,” which you probably heard your parents say many, many times when they asked each other if the other had slept last night. My first word was “ball.”  And thus began a lifetime of me kicking, catching, and throwing any spherical object I could get my hands on.

Christianity has some first words, as well; at least, they’re the first words that we still have a record of today. They aren’t as hesitant or half-formed as are the first words of infants. Rather, they spring from the pages of the New Testament with remarkable (even uncanny) clarity, vitality, and comprehensiveness. We heard these words a few minutes ago when we listened to the first ten verses of Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians.

Now, before we get to some of Christianity’s first words, we need to clear up one spot of potential confusion and talk for just a minute about the similarities between Thessalonica in 50 AD and the United States in 2011. First, the potential confusion.

If you pull up the Bible on your smartphone, you will notice two things: number 1, the New Testament begins with the Gospel according to Matthew; and number 2, Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians is actually eighth on Paul’s depth chart, not first. So how could these ten verses from First Thessalonians possibly be the oldest recorded words in Christian history?

For starters, the folks who put together the New Testament put the four accounts of the Gospel up front because the rest of the pieces didn’t make a lot of sense without first hearing the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But the people who wrote the Gospel didn’t start doing so until probably 15 to 20 years after Paul wrote to the Thessalonians. As for Paul’s depth chart (and this is a little strange) – his letters are actually in order by length, from longest to shortest, and First Thessalonians is one of the shorter letters. But if the New Testament were ordered chronologically by when the texts were written, our reading from Paul today would be on Page 1. Okay, confusion averted? Great. Let’s keep going.

Our modern moment shares several things in common with mid-first century Thessalonica, the community to which Paul writes the first words of Christianity. Like the modern United States, Thessalonica was a diverse, cosmopolitan place, with a plurality of religions and cultures all rubbing shoulders. As the capital of the region of Macedonia, there were plenty of things to do, not unlike the glut of stimulation that assaults us at every turn. And the Thessalonians had not received the good news of Jesus Christ before Paul arrived, just as people in modern America have lost contact with this great story of the Gospel.

To these people in Thessalonica and to us here on the Interwebs, Paul sends these first words. He, of course, had no idea we would consider them the first words of Christianity, which lends a special kind of authenticity to his message. These are words written to people who hadn’t read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. These are words written to people who lived in a society that knew very little about this faith that Paul brought with him. As such, these are words that can serve us as we practice sharing our faith, as the Thessalonians did, with people outside the walls of this church.

In these first ten verses of the first text of Christianity, there are six words in particular that shimmer for me: grace, peace, faith, love, hope, and joy. Notice how Paul uses each of these special words: “Grace to you and peace,” he writes. “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ…You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

These words are special because each has a meaning outside the church and a greater meaning inside the church. The secular understanding of these words can give followers of Christ like you and me a place to establish common ground as we share with others how God is present in our lives.

Let’s quickly look at each of these words to see how we can expand the secular definition to fit into the greater reality of following Jesus Christ.

“Grace” is a perfectly lovely word. We use this word to describe ballet dancers because they move with poise and precision. They throw their bodies into the air trusting that they will land on their feet, and if they don’t they get back up quickly and keep dancing. How easily can we take this understanding of grace and elevate the grace of the dancer to the Grace of God, this grace that picks us up when we fall and teaches us to find beauty in everything.*

We hear the word “peace” when conflict ends and “peacekeepers” enter the recently warring region to monitor the new situation. We use this word to describe a calm ocean after a storm or an infant who has finally dropped off to sleep. We can expand this to the Peace of God, which takes situations of conflict and infuses them with possibilities for unity, justice, and new beginnings.

“Faith” is the trickiest word on this list because all human attempts at “faithfulness” fall short. We put our trust in banks, in governments, in products, in each other, and sooner or later we are always let down. But when we expand the definition of faith to include the Faith of God, we find the one example in all of creation that will never fail. How wonderful to tell someone about this kind of faith!

“Love” is tricky, too, because we use the word in so many different circumstances, from our shoes to our spouses. But when we find that most authentic use of the word, when the word “love” springs unbidden from our lips and doesn’t describe an emotion but a state of being, a state that we entered unwittingly and never want to leave – then we begin to see the edge of the extraordinary Love of God. And we can celebrate that love with each other.

“Hope” is about the future. All people have used this word to talk about what they dream for the days and years ahead. I hope to have children and to teach them to play soccer. These human hopes are safe hopes, the kind that we can see in our mind’s eye five or ten years down the road. This understanding of hope elevates to the Hope of God when God releases us from the boundaries of the merely possible and shows us the realms of glory that exist far beyond our sight. And then we have a greater hope in which our everyday hopes can dwell.

Finally, we talk about “joy” most often when we have “enjoyed” a dinner party or a new film or a ballgame. We mean that we had a good time and might want to come over again. What we don’t realize is that this “joy” we feel is more than happiness. The Joy of God is a feeling of wholeness, of completion that comes when we discover that we are exactly the people who God created us to be.

Each of these words, these first words that Paul used when he wrote to the Thessalonians makes sense outside the context of the Christian faith. But within the greater reality of following Jesus Christ, these words shimmer with new facets of meaning.

I invite you this week to take these first words of Paul and try them out for yourself. Pray with this question in your heart: how has God encountered you when you have had an experience of grace, peace, faith, love, hope, or joy? Then find someone from within your own faith community and try out these words. Practice sharing with one another before you go out and share your Christian life with those outside your church.

Like the first words of an infant, our first attempts in sharing the first words of our faith will be halting. They will be hesitant. They will be half-formed. But they will be ours. And God will take them, shape them, and elevate them into God’s own words.

Note

*I wrote “Grace…teaches us to find beauty in everything” and then realized that I stole those words from U2. Thanks, fellas.

Cloudburst (Davies Tales #8)

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Aidan Davies stepped onto the platform of South Station. He looked left, then right, then left again. The trickle of passengers disembarking the commuter rail train turned left, and Davies joined them. As he headed for the terminal, a drop of rain hit his nose. He quickened his pace, but the drop only brought along a few dozen companions. Davies looked up and frowned at the sky. The sun shone through the clouds’ ragged edges, gilding them with light but failing to penetrate the bulk of the cloud, which was becoming increasingly darker. It’s a good thing the subway stops at the hospital, Davies thought.

Today would be his third day in a row traveling into the city to Mass General. The accident had happened late Saturday evening, and he had arrived at the hospital bleary-eyed but alert early Sunday morning, wearing his clergy clothes and the “I’m supposed to be here” expression that he saved specifically for the ICU. The family had been on a nighttime sail when nine-year-old Janice stood up at the wrong time. The boom hit her full in the back of the head, knocking her simultaneously unconscious and overboard. The rescue chopper brought her straight to the hospital in Boston, leaving her stricken parents on Nantucket to await the ferry the next day. Janice was brought up to the ICU from the OR an hour before Davies arrived. A patch of her dark ringlets was cut away at the base of her skull, revealing a dozen hasty sutures. He held her hand gingerly so as not to disturb the IV until midmorning when her mother pelted into the room. Davies then melted into the background, feeling suddenly inadequate in the face of the mother’s frenzy.

Two days later, Janice was still unconscious in the ICU, and her mother had not left her bedside. The doctors had not used the word “coma” but Janice’s mother feared the worse. With her husband at the office for a few hours, that fear was her only companion until Davies arrived. Fat lot of good I’ve done the past two days, he chided himself. An unconscious girl is one thing. A desperate mother is something else. I wonder when she’ll figure out I have no idea what to do.

He checked his mobile phone. Plenty of time to get there, he thought. Just a few stops up the Red Line. He swiped his card, jogged down the stairs, and flung himself aboard an idling subway car. Perfect timing, he thought, beaming around at the passengers as if he had just landed the dismount. A few of his fellow travelers smirked at him, shook their heads, and looked away. Just then the PA system crackled to life, and the man next to him pointed in the general direction of the indistinct voice coming over the speaker: “Due to a fire at Charles/MGH station, the Red Line is delayed. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

Chagrined by his train-catching heroics, Davies shared a shrug with the man, leaned nonchalantly against a pole, and called up a mental map of downtown Boston. MGH isn’t too far a walk from South Station, he told himself. Just through the Common and over Beacon Hill. He looked around at the waiting passengers and wondered how long the train had been stuck at South Station. Just then two young men, frat boys by the looks of their untidy hair and polo shirts half tucked in to display massive belt buckles, launched themselves into the car as Davies had done. He smirked at them, shook his head, and exited the car.

He walked back up the stairs into South Station. There’s a buck seventy I’ll never see again. He ordered a panini and ate it quickly as he walked out of the station onto Summer Street. Davies oriented himself toward the Common and trudged up the sidewalk, hands in his pockets and his laptop bag bouncing against his back. He looked up at the sky again and the amateur meteorologist in him told him he would have been better off with the train delay. The sky had darkened considerably while the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority had been thwarting him below ground. Licking his fingers, he tossed the remains of his hurried lunch into a trashcan and strode toward a store a few blocks from the station.

Five minutes later Davies emerged with a new umbrella under one arm. It’ll never rain now, he thought triumphantly, assured that reverse psychology works quite well to influence colliding low-pressure systems. Davies licked his lips, suddenly thirsty from his sodium-laced sandwich. I wish I had bought a bottle of water at the store. “Too late now,” he said aloud to no one in particular. Just then, he walked past a van painted in violently neon shades of green and orange. Two college-aged women, wearing shorts and the kind of socks that basketball players wore in the 70s, stood at the rear of the van, each holding a case of violently neon sports drinks.

“Have you Thrust today?” one of them asked Davies as he walked by, and he could tell she enjoyed asking such a seemingly provocative question to a guy wearing a clerical collar.

“No, I can’t say I have,” Davies said.

“You should try it,” said the other, and she held out a bottle sporting the word Thrust in lightning bolt-shaped letters. The bottle was filled with a liquid that looked like it was distilled from traffic cones.

“Thanks.” Davies took the drink and continued up the street, trying to resist the urge to look over his shoulder at the nubile Thrust promoters. He chugged the neon fluid, hoping that it would quench his thirst before he noticed how awful it tasted. He crossed Tremont Street and entered Boston Common as he emptied the last drops of the traffic cone flavored beverage into his mouth. Then he heard the rain.

With the sound of a thousand car washes a solid sheet of water was approaching rapidly from across the Common. So much for tricking the weather, Davies thought. At least I have this handy thing. He opened the umbrella and hunched beneath it just as the deluge reached him. After a minute of slogging across the open green space, his trousers felt like they had just come out of the washing machine. Davies reached the far end of the Common and looked through the rain for the street his phone’s GPS had told him to take over Beacon Hill. He walked one block down the Hill hoping for a street sign. No such luck. This city, apparently attempting to stymie foreign military occupation, keeps signage to a minimum, he mused ruefully. Davies took the next right and walked fifty yards. This isn’t it, he thought, seeing the street terminate in a row of brownstones a couple blocks ahead. He turned to retrace his steps. Then the rain did the impossible and worsened.

With the same vigor he had used flinging himself into the subway car, Davies dove for the relative dryness of a sheltered doorway. He squeezed the excess water out of his pants, dried his glasses, and oriented himself. I am one street down too far. Davies waited out the worst of the rain hunkered down in the doorway. After ten torrential minutes, the sun blazed through the spent clouds, raising steam from the street. Davies left the shelter and continued his charge up Beacon Hill.

Taking a left on Cambridge Street, he walked the last few blocks to the hospital. The imposing complex of parking garages and mismatched hospital buildings rose up on his right. He stopped to cross the intersection at Cambridge and North Grove. The cars navigating Boston’s surface streets glistened after the downpour. There it is, he thought, storm clouds forming in his mind as they had done in the sky. Through the main doors, down the hall, up the elevator, around the ward, into the room. Davies shivered. I’m just cold from the rain, he told himself, though he knew it wasn’t true. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? I am so ill-equipped for this that it would be laughable if the situation weren’t so serious.

The traffic light changed and the walking person blinked across the road, telling him to cross. Davies stayed put. After half a minute, the light changed again, and a red hand replaced the person, warning pedestrians not to cross. Davies stared at the hand. He closed his eyes and the blurry afterimage of the warning signal danced across his eyelids. He took a deep breath and held it. The hand fixed itself in his mind, a symbol of something he told people everyday but often forgot to believe himself. The hand slowly dissolved into a voice in his head, his own voice but with deeper resonance and greater clarity. You were thirsty and I provided drink. You were drowning in the rain and I provided shelter. Do you honestly think that I will break this pattern when you enter that hospital room?

Davies exhaled slowly and opened his eyes. The red hand shone from the signal across the street. The voice echoed faintly in his mind. You are always in the palm of my hand. Yes, even you, Aidan. The hand changed back into the walking person, and Aidan Davies crossed the intersection. He pushed through the main doors of the hospital, strode down the hall, rode up the elevator, paced around the ward, and walked into the room.

Vision and Action

Published on 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.

Facing Fear

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

(Sermon for August 8, 2010 || Proper 14, Year C, RCL || Luke 12:32-40)

The Bene Gesserit test Paul Atreides at the beginning of Dune. (1984)

Many years ago in a dusty volume, I read an old Bene Gesserit litany against fear, and this prayer has stuck with me every since. “I must not fear,” says the litany. “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Now that dusty volume was Frank Herbert’s Dune, the best selling science-fiction novel of all time, but the words of the litany ring true nonetheless. “I must not fear… Fear is the little-death… I will face my fear.”

From the time we are young children, our parents echo these words and tell us to face our fears. Perhaps you were afraid of the dark. So you mother let you sleep with the lights on for a while. Then she turned the lights off and left the bedside lamp on. A few days later, she turned off the bedside lamp and plugged a nightlight into the wall near the door. Pretty soon, you didn’t even need the nightlight. Your mother helped you face your fear of the dark, and you overcame it.

Or perhaps you were afraid of the monsters under your bed. There they were: always lurking, rumbling, slurping, ready to pounce – until you summoned up enough courage to dangle your head over the side of the bed and chase the monsters away. You faced your fear, and you overcame it.

We look back on these childhood fears and chuckle at how intangible worries grew into monstrous fears. The shadow of your own feet under the covers cast a winged creature on the wall, and the creature moved the more you shook. Under your bed, a pair of shoes and a couple of tennis balls made the ears and eyes of a monster peering up through the floorboards. The fears were nothing really. Our imaginations ran away with us, that’s all.

At least, this is how we adults dismiss those childhood fears. We dismiss them as fanciful or as attention-seeking or as the fruits of overactive imaginations. But hidden within this easy dismissal is also a tacit dismissal of our parents’ advice. “Face your fear,” they said, and we did, and everything got better.

But those were our intangible, childhood fears. That advice couldn’t possibly work on our concrete, grown-up fears. Our fears are too immediate, too relentless, too real. Of course, we forget that this is exactly how our childhood fears felt, as well. Perhaps our parents’ advice, the same advice that I learned reading science fiction, really might work in our lives today. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to take our parents’ advice. He asks them to face their fears.

But before we get to that, we first need to address where fear comes from. The root of fear is deprivation. We fear when something has the potential to become scarce. We fear when we perceive that there is not enough of a certain something. Supply and demand economic theory is based squarely on this reality. The root of fear is deprivation. You can trace all fears to this specific cause, even though specific fears may appear quite differently. Fears manifest themselves one way or another depending on the nature of the deprivation. If you are afraid of the dark, you fear a scarcity of light. If you are afraid of contracting a terminal illness, you fear being deprived of a long, healthy life. If you are afraid of how you will live when you retire, you fear that you will not have enough income to sustain your manner of living.

You can trace all fears to specific deprivations, and by confronting the sources of scarcity, you can face your fears. Jesus identifies the disciples’ source of fear when he says to them, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms.” Jesus assures them that their fears are baseless because their accumulation of stuff will not help them enter the kingdom of God. This assurance runs counter to the fashionable reasoning of the day, which stated that the more stuff you owned, the more blessed you were. “God obviously favors that person,” ran this line of thinking. “Just look at all the stuff he has.” Not too much different from today, I’m sad to say.

But Jesus changed the rules. Remember last week’s Gospel? Jesus told us the parable of the rich fool. His land produced more than his barns could hold, so he decided to tear down those barns and build larger ones. The more stuff the rich man had, the more secure and comfortable he would feel, he told himself. Surely, this man would have been considered blessed in his society. But he died the very night he planned to erect larger storehouses, and he surely couldn’t take his barn-loads of stuff with him. The rich man’s folly shows the misguided lengths to which people will go to ward off deprivation, the root cause of fear.

But Jesus shows his disciples another way to face their fear. Rather than accumulating stuff, give it away, he says. Face deprivation by depriving yourself of the things you think you can’t live without. And you’ll discover pretty quickly that you can, in fact, live without those things.

I’m sure that you’ve heard this interpretation before, perhaps so many times that you tune it out now. And if you’re like me, you really aren’t any closer to facing the root of fear than you were the last time you heard someone talk about this. I know for myself that I used to be able to fit all my possessions in a 1992 Mazda Protégé. When I moved to Massachusetts, I needed every square inch of a 14-foot U-Haul. With more stuff comes more fear of loss, more fear of that stuff not being enough.

And the more fear that we have, the more we deprive ourselves of fear’s antidote. That antidote is trust. When we were children, we faced our fears because we trusted our parents’ advice. We believed that they would not lead us astray, and they didn’t. The darkness did not frighten us to death. The monsters did not pounce.

So how come we have so much trouble trusting in God? How come fear tends to trump trust more often than not? I think the answer is this. Trust takes energy. While fear creeps along, keeping us from action, trust derives from the kind of sustained relationship, which establishes and nourishes fidelity. God always keeps God’s promises. God is always trustworthy. The trouble is we have to trust that God is trustworthy. We have to practice the faith that God has given us in order to maintain our ability to trust in God.

And fear constantly diverts this ability. But when we practice trust, when we believe that God’s keeps God’s promises, we can face our fears, we can keep at bay the gnawing dread of deprivation. Our grown-up fears may be concrete and relentless. But I am convinced that they are no match for the power of trusting in God.

This week, I ask you to take some time to be silent and to turn your thoughts inward. What do you fear? What kind of deprivation is at the root of that fear? And how will practicing trusting God help you face that fear? In your reflection, remember this good news. When Jesus says, “Do not be afraid,” he is not just giving a command. He is giving a promise that when we face our fears, we will not be alone. When we face our fears, they will pass through us, and when they are gone, only God, holding us in the palm of God’s hand, will remain.

Why I Love Camp

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

The following post appeared Friday, July 16th on Episcopalcafe.com, a website to which I am a monthly contributor. Check it out here or read it below.

* * *

I love camp. I love being surrounded by more trees than buildings. I love singing Grace to John Williams’ theme from Superman. I love seeing the half-exhausted, half-excited faces of the campers at breakfast. And I love conversing with children and teenagers because every once in a while they will say something unexpected and profound amidst all the buzzwords and canned phrases that they know will be considered “correct” answers during afternoon Bible studies. Invariably, the profundity of their unexpected contributions comes in the form of the simplest, most direct response to a question.

Here’s why this practice is so profound. Over the years, we adults learn to hedge, to inject some wiggle room into everything we say in order to maintain some deniability later on. We prevaricate, deflect, and obfuscate because we’ve learned from the incessant 24-hour news cycle that a juicy sound byte can tank a career. We’ve learned that a verbal defense mechanism is a necessity for survival.

And with our deniability glands working at full capacity, we say, “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant,” or “I’m not sure you heard me correctly” (when, of course, I purposefully didn’t say exactly what I mean). But the problem with speaking equivocally creeps in over time: prevarication erodes the truth that has been in each of us since God knew us in our mothers’ wombs. When we hedge, we atrophy the muscles that store the truth, and we cut ourselves off from bits of the truth that is within us.

Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t monitor our words to make sure we always speak hospitably and graciously. Hedging is simply a cheap and ultimately ineffective way to achieve what hospitality and grace achieve naturally – namely, speaking in a way that keeps conversation open and kind. Hedging achieves this end by leading us to speak obscurely so that no meaning can quite be pinned down. Hospitality achieves the same end by leading us to speak truth uncoupled from judgment. One of the epic failures of our time is the withering of this graceful truth when we bury it under our own insecurity and our need to conform to society’s agreed upon level of appropriate vagueness.

Okay, let me get back to why I love camp. I love camp because for a week I get to ascend into the clean and invigorating air of youthful wisdom. The young people just haven’t lived long enough to acquire toxic levels of prevarication. They say all the things that were the first to erode in us adults. God will always be with me. You are my friend. Jesus is awesome. And after a few days of rubbing elbows with the young people, I remember the need to nourish the root system within myself that keeps the truth from eroding.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to preach until Tuesday. I had enough time to drink in the campers’ wisdom, so that when it came time for me to speak I was in less danger of hedging and wiggling. (This was a good thing, too, because children can spot phony commitment a mile away.) I had five minutes to talk about Moses and Aaron, and I had played with several ways to approach the story as I thought about speaking to the campers. When I stood up to speak, I knew my direction of travel, but I was unsure where I would end up.

I began to talk about how Moses was making excuses to God, about how he’s no good at public speaking, about how God might as well get someone else. I looked out at the campers, and then I told them to look at each other. Just then, I realized where the direction of travel was taking me. “God gave everyone special gifts,” I said. “A few of those gifts are within us, but most gifts come wrapped in the people around us. Just because we aren’t good at something doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. It just means we have an opportunity to invite a friend to help us.” These words rang true as I said them, but I didn’t feel them within myself before speaking them. I felt like I was absorbing these words from the young people staring up at me. What a gift.

Of course, as usually happens, I spoke the words aloud, but I’m probably the one who benefited from them more than anyone else. I needed the injection of youthful wisdom to find that truth again, the fundamental truth that I forget more than any other. I am not alone. I am with God. And I am with other people. We are God’s gifts to each other. This is the truth, and it leads to another true statement.

I love camp.