Sermon for Sunday, June 22, 2008 (Proper 7A)

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Anthony De Mello tells this story in his book, Taking Flight:

A wealthy farmer burst into his home one day and cried out in an anguished voice, “Rebecca, there is a terrible story in town – the Messiah is here!”

“What’s so terrible in that?” asked his wife. “I think it's
great. What are you so upset about?”

“What am I so upset about?” the man exclaimed. “After all these years of sweat and toil, we have finally found prosperity. We have a thousand head of cattle, our barns are full of grain, and our trees laden with fruit. Now we will have to give it all away and follow him.”

“Calm down,” said his wife consolingly. “The Lord our God is good. He knows how much we Jews have always had to suffer. We had a Pharaoh, a Haman, a Hitler – always somebody. But our dear God found a way to deal with them all, didn't he? Just have faith, my dear husband. He will find a way to deal with the Messiah too.”

I tell you this story, not to disparage Jews in any way, but to commend this farmer and his wife for their wisdom and insight: the coming of the Messiah – the recognition of the Messiah – is a disruptive event. It upsets the status quo. Things can't stay the same.

The first disciples discovered this when they left their nets lying on the beach, or got up from the tax-collecting booth, to follow Jesus, going around with him as he taught and healed and spoke of God’s forgiveness and grace. And now he has them going out, too, teaching and healing and talking about the nearness of God’s kingdom. But he tells them: Not everyone will be pleased with this good news. Not everyone will experience the coming of God’s reign as a good thing.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” Jesus says. “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

Bishop Mark Hanson of the ELCA preached a sermon at the recent Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis. He said that when he visits congregations, he always asks them to tell him why, if he were new in the area and looking for a church home, he should come to their church. He said the answers were almost always the same. “We're a very friendly church. We all like each other, and we love our pastor.” He goes on to say that getting along should probably not be the primary goal of a church community. Avoiding conflict keeps a community from moving forward in any meaningful way in mission… in naming and addressing the needs of the world around us… in taking a stand for justice, peace, and unconditional love for all people.

Because the status quo, the way things are, may seem really good to some people, but unless we have really achieved heaven on earth, there are issues, things we need to work out – about how to respond to the Messiah, the Christ, who has come and is among us. And if we take Jesus seriously, we will probably disagree on what that looks like and how we can and should move forward.

There's a revival on Broadway now of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. I heard an interview on MPR this week with Kelli O'Hara, who plays Nurse Nellie Forbush in the current production. She talked about the scene where she discovers that the man she’s in love with, Emile DeBeque, has 2 bi-racial children from his previous relationship with a Polynesian woman. In the play, she recoils in disgust. She calls the children “colored,” and feels she must break off the relationship, that she can’t help the way she feels about the children. Then follows the memorable song, “You've Got to be Carefully Taught”:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be carefully taught

When the play first opened, in 1949, this song was so controversial that Rogers and Hammerstein, and even James Michner who adapted his own stories into the screenplay, were urged to remove it. Apparently Michner was even accosted on the street by an agitated man, who insisted that the song should be removed or the show would flop. “Your play will fail if you leave that song in about racial prejudice” he said. “It's ugly, it's untimely and it's not what patrons want to hear when they go to a musical.”

Perhaps not. But telling a sweet, non-controversial story would have removed the heart and soul of the show. Telling the truth was more important than maintaining the peace, and the result was a show that still speaks to audiences today, about prejudice that still exists among us.

In the interview I heard, Kelli O'Hara talked about what it was like to feel the audience reaction to her on-stage bigotry. She said she could feel their disgust at her. This was not the reaction in the 1950’s original production. Back then, audiences completely understood why Nurse Nellie felt she had to break off the relationship. According to the blog, “Gratuitous Violins”, when the show toured in Atlanta in the early 1950’s, it was denounced on the floor of the Georgia legislature. “One Georgia state legislator claimed that a song justifying interracial marriage was a threat to the American way of life.”

Sound familiar? As gay couples got married in California this past week, protesters cried out that marriage is threatened, that the American way of life is in jeopardy.

I know we still have racial prejudice to deal with and overcome. But the thing that's causing division in our family – our Anglican communion family – right now is the issues surrounding full inclusion and honoring of people of all sexual orientations. A Hope College classmate of mine, Gene Sutton, was just elected bishop of Maryland. The fact that he is African American is not causing public debate about his suitability to be a bishop in the church – although not so long ago, that would have been an issue. But 5 years ago another Gene, Gene Robinson, was elected bishop of New Hampshire, by people who knew and loved him, and saw his gifts for ministry and leadership in the church. The fact that he is gay is for many in our Anglican family a deal-breaker. All over the world, members of our family are outraged. There’s talk of schism.

At the upcoming Lambeth conference – the every-10-years gathering of Anglican bishops in Canterbury, England – Gene Robinson (and the most vocal critic of his election) have both been pointedly excluded. Other bishops are boycotting the gathering. Division in the family. Just as Jesus had said would happen.

In his new memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, Gene Robinson writes:

[The Holy Spirit] is the part of God that refuses to be contained in the little boxes we create for God to live in, safely confined to the careful boundaries we set for God's Spirit. The problem is – and the miracle is – God just won't stay put. And God won't let you and me stay put, content to believe what we've always believed, what we've always been taught, what we've always assumed. Change isn't just something to be wished on our enemies – but something God requires of us as well.

He goes on:

Think of the things we believe and think today that we couldn't have imagined years ago. There was a time when we weren't outraged that black folk were made to drink from separate water fountains, that women were banned from serving at the altar or the boardroom, that differently-abled folk couldn't get into our sacred spaces. Our change in thinking didn't come as a result of our own work, but the work of God's Spirit, blowing through us like wind, calling us away from our narrow thinking and more nearly into the mind and heart of Christ.

Telling the truth, standing up for what is right, reaching out in love to all people, respecting the dignity of every person – even if it upsets some people – is part of following Jesus. Jesus warned his first disciples that when they went out into the towns and villages with good news of healing and love, there would be some who experienced them and their message as bad news – threatening in some way to their life and livelihood. There would be division in the family.

And so it is, and so it ever shall be, until God’s reign is fully realized on earth as it is in heaven. Our task, our calling, is not to avoid conflict within the family, but to tell the truth… to love even our enemies… to forgive and embrace forgiveness… to reach out in love to all people… to honor Christ in every person… and to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. And don't be afraid, for God is with us.


-- Lydia Huttar Brown

Preached at Saint Anne's on June 22, 2008 (Proper 7A)

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Welcome

“Welcome to the spinning world,” the people sang,
as they washed your new tiny hands.

“Welcome to the green Earth,” the people sang,
as they wrapped your wet, slippery body.

And as they held you close
they whispered into your open, curving ear,
“We are so glad you’ve come!”

-- On the Day You Were Born


We have a new little one among us. What a blessing. Welcome, welcome, little one, fresh from God, full of light.

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This Wild and Precious Life

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

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

-- Mary Oliver


Oh, the whole family is out for a ride! smiled the man we passed on the trail.

Not quite the whole family. Some of us spent this afternoon of our one wild and precious life eating a Father’s Day brunch. Some of us spent it preparing for the birth of a sweet new baby. Some of us were up at cabins on the lake. Some of us spent it reading or snoozing or gardening or maybe playing Guitar Hero. Some of the family might have gone on a picnic. Hopefully none of us spent it cleaning out the garage. The afternoon was too beautiful for garage-cleaning.

But some of our Saint Anne’s family did, indeed, spend this wild and precious afternoon out for a (not quite so) wild ride.






Some of the more brilliant among us found a way to combine the riding and the snoozing.




Wishing you days filled with falling down into the grass, being idle and blessed. Days filled with grasshoppers with complicated eyes. Filled with gratitude for this one life that is so wild and is so precious.

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Reflection on Matthew 9:9-13

Preached as a sermon at St. Anne’s on June 5, 2005
by Lydia Huttar Brown

Matthew was a tax collector.

It wasn’t exactly something he had chosen. No-one grows up thinking “I want to work for my people’s enemies, and have a job that will make people despise me.” But there it was. The opportunity had come to him and he had grabbed it. After all, he had a wife and children to support, and they deserved to eat and have a few nice things.

When he was younger, he had not minded so much the scorn of his fellow Jews. "They’re just jealous,” he would think to himself. He felt lucky to have this job, lucky to be in a position to set his own salary by deciding how much extra he would charge each taxpayer. He felt important, knowing the power he had over people. And he had not minded being excluded from the temple, or being considered “unclean” – like certain animals or forbidden foods. The security of wealth had seemed to him more important than friendship, more important than the respect of his countrymen, more important than the health of his soul.

There’s no risk to my soul anyway, he thought. I haven’t really changed inside. I can quit this racket as soon as my future is secured. But as time passed, he found it more and more difficult to even think of quitting. In fact, little by little he found that he was charging more overhead, hardening his heart when paying him created a hardship for others. He realized that he was no longer a good man doing a despicable job, but he had become the despicable: He was a tax collector, a mercenary, a tool of the occupying Roman government in the oppression of his own people.

And his heart cried out: Is this all there is? Does my life have any meaning? Is there any goodness left in me? Oh, if I could do it all over… if I could have a new start…

Around this time, Jesus was traveling around the country, teaching and healing and gathering quite a following. News of this itinerant preacher came to Matthew, and so when Jesus came to town, Matthew went with the crowds to listen to him. He stood at the edge of the crowd, a little apart, noticing the mothers drawing their children closer as they glanced at him.

For days he observed and listened from a distance. He saw sick people become well, and lame people get up and walk. He heard Jesus say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And another time “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” And Matthew felt as though Jesus could see right into his soul and was talking just to him.

So when Jesus saw Matthew sitting at his tax booth, and their eyes met, Matthew felt as if Jesus knew him – knew that he was a despicable and despised tax-collecting cheater, knew his hardness of heart and pride and greed. Matthew had a strong sense that Jesus knew all that about him – and that it didn’t matter.

Jesus knew there was more to Matthew than what others saw. Jesus understood that no-one is all good or all bad. And that very often what looks like righteousness is a disguise for what is really in the heart. Jesus always was one who saw the possibilities for good in a person.

And when he said to Matthew, “Follow me,” Matthew was ready. He stood up and walked away. Just walked away. He left behind his lucrative career, and his wealth, and his hardness of heart, and stepped forward into the adventure of a lifetime.

The adventure began with dinner, at Matthew’s house. Maybe it was a celebration dinner – celebration of courage, of new beginnings, of new friendship. Matthew invited all his colleagues – tax collectors and sinners – like him, outcasts – “Come to my house and eat with me, and meet the person who gave me courage to change my life!”

There were so many people there, eating and drinking, and telling stories and sharing hopes and dreams – that some of Jesus’ disciples had to sit outside.

And some of the people who would never be caught dead associating with Matthew came near the house. These were the Pharisees – the righteous good people, who believed everything they had been taught, quite literally, and who followed every commandment and every rule. And the rules said: Don’t eat with the unclean! If you hang around with bad people, then you are bad.

Oh, those Pharisees! trying so hard to be good. And they were good. So good that they fooled themselves into thinking that there was no bad in them. They were blind to what they had in common with everyone else – the complexity of the human heart, full of good and bad, clean and unclean…

They wouldn’t even go into the house to speak with Jesus directly, but instead they questioned his disciples outside: Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?

Jesus was listening at the open window. He realized the ironic truth: These Pharisees were the ones most in need of a new start! Their pride in their own righteousness was the greatest disease of all. It kept them from recognizing their own shortcomings. It made them sit in judgment over their fellow human beings – and that judgment was a wall that divided them from others just as surely as Matthew’s status as unclean had separated him from the community.
Their pride in their righteousness had hardened their hearts so that they didn’t even know they needed forgiveness. Didn’t even know they needed to leave their old life behind and start anew.

Jesus thought back to what he knew of ancient Hebrew scriptures. The words of Hosea came to mind. God says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

The words of the Psalm echoed, too: Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving…
Without a humble and loving heart, rituals of worship and outward shows of righteousness are meaningless to God.

Although the Pharisees had not spoken directly to Jesus, he spoke directly to them in answer: Those who are well don’t need a doctor. But those who are sick do. Go review your scriptures, that you claim to know so well. Read: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. And when you know what it means, you will recognize that you have much in common with these tax-collectors.

I hope you will want to join the party.

Welcome!

Caribou Coffee on 110 turned out to be the perfect place to create St. Anne's first blog. Jennifer McNally navigated and I steered, and here it is - TA-DA!! - a forum for information and conversation about anything and everything that is on the minds of St. Annians and our friends.

This is where we can have our "Virtual Book Club" conversations, and where you can comment on sermons, or offer your wisdom on what we're doing or could be doing at St. Anne's.

Please leave a comment below to let me know you visited, and give your suggestions for themes and topics. Let's blog!!

blessings and love,
Lydia