The Life of "Thelo"

You will find this hard to believe, but after last week’s service, someone approached me in the Parish Hall and told me she appreciated my sermon because I made references to the original Greek language in the text.  Yes, she was a visitor, but that little bit of encouragement means I have more Greek for you this week.  Don’t worry, it won’t be too painful. 

In the five verses from Luke’s gospel we read this morning the Greek word thelo is used three times.  Thelo means ‘longing’ or ‘desire’.  Herod longs to kill Jesus, although the text translates it “wants to kill.”  Jesus longs to gather the people as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.  But Jesus says this is not Jerusalem’s thelo.  The text says they were “not willing”, but a more accurate translation would be they did not long for this.

We get why Herod longs to kill Jesus.  He is a brutish thug who will do whatever it takes to preserve his place and power.  Notice Jesus does not refer to Herod as a bear or a lion (both strong, ferocious, respectable animals), but as a fox – a weasely, little vermin that is more a nuisance than a threat.  Still, he understands just how dangerous Herod can be, after all, Herod had John the Baptist beheaded.  It is no coincidence Jesus refers to himself as a hen and the people as a brood, because these are the exact creatures foxes are most likely to target.

We get why Jesus longs to gather the people.  Deep in our hearts we trust God wants to hold us, care for us, protect us, nurture us, guard us, and guide us.  And, at some level, we get why the people did not long for Jesus because we too often turn away from God and follow the devices and desires of our own heart.

Here is what I wonder: if the people of Jerusalem did not want to be gathered up by Jesus, what exactly did they long for?  What did they desire more than being embraced by God’s own Son? 

We know what Simeon longed for.  When Mary and Joseph presented their newborn son in the Temple, the elderly Simeon took the infant Jesus in his arms and said,

Lord, you now have set your servant free,

for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior

whom you have prepared for all the world to see.

Over the course of his entire service in the Temple, Simeon longed to see Jesus, but others associated with the Temple – not so much.  They longed for liberation from Roman oppression via the restoration of the royal line of David’s kingship.  They romanticized a time some thousand years earlier when Israel was at its peak and they longed from those good old days.  They also longed for the rule of law – the Torah, to be specific.  They longed for a society regulated by the minutia of hundreds upon hundreds of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” 

They did not long for Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, which was born not out of the Torah, but out of the prophetic movement.  Jesus longed not for rules but rather for justice and healing.  He longed for forgiveness and compassion.  He longed to break down barriers in order to build up our common humanity.  He longed for every person to be a part of his family of faith – no matter how good or bad they may be, no matter how rich or poor, no matter if they were highly placed or humble fisher folk.  But Jesus knew his longing was not their longing.

What do you long for?  What is your deepest yearning, your most heart-felt desire?  Unlike last week’s question “Who are you”, I suspect most of us have an answer or two at the ready for this one.  We long for a restored relationship or a better job or a deeper faith.  We long for forgiveness or healing or deliverance.  What do you long for?

Let me make two observations about the thelo in our lives.  First, you can only long for something you do not have.  You may spend all winter longing for a warm vacation, but once you are sitting on a tropical beach your longing comes to an end.  That’s when you say “I have been waiting for this for a long time.”  A husband longs for his wife to be home from deployment only while she is away.  If you received what you long for, the spiritual challenge is to be grateful for it and to be a good and wise steward of it.

The second observation is the quality of our longings can vary greatly.  The priest and poet John O’Donohue wrote, “One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.”  By this I think he is saying we all long to matter to someone; we all long to lead a life that is meaningful, and we all long to be appreciated for what we do.  Taken in this way, being “seen” is deeply significant.  But in our society today, there is a different kind of longing to be “seen” best summed up by the phrase “going viral”.  People long for notoriety; a shallow and superficial experience.  Yes, they are being “seen”, but it is not significant and it doesn’t really matter.  The quality of what you long for can very greatly. 

What do you long for?  What is your thelo?

I have always liked CS Lewis’ book The Great Divorce because it is imaginative, evocative, and challenging.  In it, a group of people is taken by bus to heaven.  When they arrive, each person is given an escort to help them make sense of where they are and what they are to do.  One person’s escort murdered her husband years earlier and she refuses to go anywhere with him.  It was Lewis’ way of highlighting the importance of forgiveness and how truly difficult and demanding it can be.

A mother gets off the bus and is informed by her escort they are going to see God.  But the mother, who lost a child years earlier, insists on seeing her child first.  The mother’s deepest longing is to be reunited with her child.  It is an understandable desire.  But the escort persists the woman first must see God.  The two carry on quite a conversation about this.  The escort is not saying God demands we put God before everything else.  Rather, God is to be our deepest longing.  All else flows from this.  Lewis writes:

“No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves.  They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein.  They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.”

What do you long for?  Perhaps a more appropriate way to ask the question is “How are your deepest longings grounded in God?”  The problem for the people of Jerusalem was their longings – whatever they were – had been divorced from God.  They were grounded only in their own hopes and aspirations with no reference at all to the Holy One.  Lewis wrote this:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.  Those who seek find.  Those who knock it is opened.

When we want a biblical example of longing we need look no further than today’s reading about Abraham.  He is old and he is troubled.  He has no heir to follow him, to carry on his name, and more importantly to carry on his beliefs.  No person at the time was like Abraham.  Everyone else believed in the existence of multiple gods making manifold demands for blessings such as fertility and rain for the harvest.  Abraham was the first to hold a belief in one God; a God who directed him to do away with superstitious practices and inhumane ways.  But he and his elderly wife were childless.  They had no realistic hope of this changing.  Can you imagine the depth and varicosity of his longing?

God promises Abraham will have a son and Abraham believes.  It seems like a simple transaction, but what really is going on here?  God embraces Abraham’s longing and asks him to trust God to bring it about.  In this case, faith looks like resting in God.  It looks like letting go of anxiety and tension in order to embrace assurance and hope.  More than once Abraham will stray from this to take matters into his own hand, supposing God’s plan is to give him a son through his wife’s servant Hagar.  As you know, God comes through and Isaac is born.  But at some point, in an episode so difficult to understand it is never once commented on anywhere else in the bible, God requires Abraham to sacrifice his son to demonstrate his longing first and foremost for God.

At my worst, I think that I am supposed to have all the answers not only to your questions, but also to the questions raised by our biblical texts.  I long to have the answers.  I must confess I have never fully understood why God choose Abraham or how his acceptance of God’s promise – an acceptance which he wavered on from time to time – constitutes the ultimate example of faith found in the original covenant.  There is something there, but I think it is elusive.  We, like Abraham, have our own thelo and there is something in him for us to learn.  Perhaps it is as simple and straightforward as God’s love for us is steadfast and faithful even in the face of our doubts and missteps.  I long to know this love in my own life and I long to know what it is to live as one of a brood gathered under the wing of God’s never failing, never faltering love.

A Tempting Identity

“If you are the Son of God…”

“If you bow down and worship me…”

“If you are the Son of God…”

Three temptations.  At their core they challenge  identity – Jesus’ sense of self, his self-understanding, his acceptance of who God proclaimed him to be at his baptism.  And they challenge allegiance – who or what is most important to him.  Put succinctly, the temptations raise two basic questions: Who are you? and Whose are you? 

In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis reminds us the devil is, if nothing else, an opportunist, but it would be a mistake to think this wilderness event is a kind of drive-by temptation; a quick attack and retreat.  The text tells us the Spirit “led” Jesus into the wilderness, “where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”  The verb form used here for to tempt is a present, passive participle, which means the action is ongoing, continuous.  Jesus is being tempted in wilderness throughout the forty days.  At the same time he is being led by the Spirit; the form of to lead is passive, imperfect which also implies continual, ongoing action. 

So as Jesus is being tempted he is being led and as he is being led he is being tempted.  He experiences both simultaneously, as we do.  As we are living into who we are we are being tempted to be someone we are not.  And as we are staying true to whose we are, we are being tempted to belong to something or someone else.

The Presbyterian minister and popular writer Frederick Buechner makes this observation:

After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus.  During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

So who are you?  It seems like a simple, straightforward question, doesn’t it.  You can answer in any number of different ways.  You can tell me you name, where you are from, and what you do in life.  You can tell me about your parents, siblings, spouse, children, and extended family.  You can show me your driver’s license and give me your Social Security number.  All of these things tell me something about who you are, but they are not what I am asking for.  Who are you – the ‘you’ uniquely created by God to be.  Just as no two snowflakes are the same, neither are any two human beings.  There is only one you. 

Who are you?

  What energizes you?

  What drains you?

  When do you feel most alive?

  When do you feel most loved?

  What do you do that gives you deep satisfaction?

  If you could do anything – anything at all – with the rest of your day, what would you do?

  What was the greatest risk you took in life that led to the deepest payoff?

  When do you feel useful?

  What experiences cultivated in you a sense of self-worth?

  When and how do you experience authentic communion with God?

  How is your life oriented around the reality of God?

These, and questions like these, have answers, but typically not at the ready.  We have to sit with them over time – perhaps forty days – in order for an authentic response to emerge.  It is from what emerges you can begin to answer the question of identity – who am I?

I am looking forward to our Wednesday evenings in Lent as we use a resource called “Growing a Rule of Life”, which was created by the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic community in Boston.  Typically, most of us are not looking for any more rules to follow than we already have, but monastics use the word rule in a different way.  For them a rule of life is “a plan, discerned over time, to cultivate practices that lead to flourishing of body, mind, and soul.” 

I suspect every person here unknowingly follows some kind of a rule of life.  I suspect you have an established routine you follow over the course of the day.  You get up, make a cup of coffee, and check the internet while eating a piece of chocolate.  You clean up, dress up, and get off to work in much the same way Monday through Friday.  Work has its own established routines, even if there is little about the day you control.  You come home at night, settle down, and settle in in a way that has its own established patterns. 

These patterns (called practices in the monastic tradition) have a way of shaping who and whose we are.  They emerge over time and develop out of our specific context.  For most of us, our practices have come into being unintentionally, not as a result of thoughtful discernment to aid who we want to be.  As a result, the ongoing experience of being tempted looks like drifting along through life in the same old way, never knowing who we are and doing little to live into whose we are.

I have said before how much I appreciated the gift of the conference I attended in November where we were given the time, space, and guidance to discover ourselves again.  I identified many things I already knew about myself and landed on a couple of new insights. 

Here is something I already knew: I am not one for large, social gatherings.  Crowded parties with voices all around me, people standing shoulder to shoulder, moving from one conversation to another, is not my thing.  However, I really enjoy small, intimate gatherings with family and friends.  I recognized that, other than evening meetings at the church, I live largely alone so I set a goal to cultivate intimacy in my life.  Who am I?  I am a person who prefers intimacy to crowds.  I committed to four practices to live into this aspect of who I am:

  Once a week I make a lunch appointment with a clergy colleague, even if I have to drive several hours for it to happen.

  I invite 5-7 people to my house on Friday evenings from 5:00-7:00 PM.

  I set out but have yet to join or create a clergy group for mutual exploration and support.

  I adopted a dog.

These practices form a part of my new rule of life.  They support who I am.  I will want to revisit my rule from time to time to see how I am doing with it.  Have I drifted away from it and, in the process, lost something of who I am?  Are there new practices I can cultivate to lead to a greater flourishing of my body, mind, and soul? 

“Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus.  During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.”  Someone once said if you can’t answer the question “who are you?” the world will give you an answer.  The single most difficult, ongoing temptation we face is to define who we are in ways others or the world wants us to be, as opposed to being who God created us to be. 

I was given several tasks to complete prior to going to the conference I attended last fall.  One was to work through a booklet titled Becoming Ourselves Again.  Let me conclude this sermon with the first two sentences in it:

When we get in touch with what truly matters to us, we discover what makes us most alive.

When we find that which rests at our core and gives us life, we rediscover the value God intended in us and for us.

I invite you into the wilderness of Lent to search yourself as Jesus searched himself – to learn who you are and to learn whose you are.

Ashes as We Age

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

We gather tonight to do something with deep, historical roots in our Scriptures and tradition.  In the Book of Esther, when Mordecai learns of the king’s decree to kill all the Jewish people in the Persian Empire he dons a garment woven from a course fabric known as sackcloth and covers himself in ashes.  Both are visible signs of his deep mourning, awareness of mortality, and heartfelt repentance.  After Jonah proclaims God is going to destroy the city of Nineveh, its king and citizens repent with sackcloth and ashes and are spared. 

Jesus, aware of this tradition, told skeptics that if the gentile towns of Tyre and Sidon (located in modern day Lebanon) had witnessed his miracles and heard his message, they would have put on sackcloth and ashes and reformed their ways.  Tertullian, a second century leader in the early church, directed penitents to “live without joy in the roughness of sackcloth and the squalor of ashes.”

By the eighth century, a dying person was placed on a piece of ground covered with sackcloth and then sprinkled with ashes.  As the priest blessed the dying person he said, “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.” The priest then asked, “Art thou content with sackcloth and ashes in testimony of thy penance before the Lord on the day of judgments?”  The dying person answered, “I am content.”  

We have a copy of a sermon by the Anglo-Saxon priest Aelfric dating to around the year 1,000.  In it he connects this ancient tradition with tonight’s liturgical moment, saying, “Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we skew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.”  And as a warning to those who snubbed his counsel, Aelfric goes on to tell the story of a man who refused to attend Ash Wednesday services and therefore did not receive ashes, who then was killed by a wild boar a few days later.

All of this talk of dust has its beginning in the beginning.  After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit and God finds them hiding, God punishes first the serpent, then the woman, and finally the man.  God’s last words to Adam are these:

“By the sweat of your face

you shall eat bread

until you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken;

you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.”

As we gather tonight we are doing something profoundly counter-cultural.  We enact a ritual born of their wisdom of hundreds of generations before us.  We come together to acknowledge our brokenness, our regret, and our mortality.  And we believe by doing so two things happen.  First, we believe it helps us to amend our lives so that we can be rightly aligned with the realities of our mortal nature.  And second, we believe our actions are pleasing to God.

A boy attends an Ash Wednesday service with his family.  That night, as his mother is putting him to bed, he asks her, “Is it true we are made of dust?” “Yes, darling,” she answers.  “And do we really turn back to dust again when we die?” he inquires.  “That’s right, dear.”  “Well, earlier today I was playing in my room and don’t look now,” he whispers, “cuz I’m not sure if he is coming or going, but someone is under my bed.”  Tonight I am aware of how differently I receive the Ash Wednesday proclamation as I live closer to my dusty ending than my dusty beginning.

In the 1990’s, economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald set out to determine the relationship between work and happiness.  Their international study turned up something quite unexpected: a recurring pattern in every society.  They learned that people in their twenties reported the highest levels of happiness, but satisfaction with life begins a steady decline in the 30s, through the 40s, and into the early 50s.  The lowest levels of happiness bottom out at this point and then steadily increase (on average) as a person moves through the mid and late 50s and into the 60’s.  It may surprise you to learn that people in their 70s report levels of happiness and satisfaction comparable to or better than that experienced by people in their 20s.  These findings, reinforced by subsequent studies, are now described as the U-Shaped Curve of Happiness. 

Think about why this is.  Our whole life lies ahead of us when we are in our 20s.  The world is full of possibilities.  We are young and strong and optimistic and free.  Setbacks are little more than an opportunity to start over, to begin a new and more promising adventure.  We take on responsibilities such as marriage and parenting in our 30’s, which come with both blessings and challenges.  People in their 30s work harder for less pay than at any other time in life.  In our 40s we must manage teenagers, stale marriages, aging parents, declining personal energy, and a sense of being stymied at work.  It is at this point we begin to ask of life “is this all there is?”  It is the age of the classic mid-life crisis.  And it is no coincidence, I think, that George Orwell was 40 when he wrote: “Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”  He died six years later.

Somewhere in our mid-50’s, with our children either grown or off to college, our marriages either over or re-invigorated, and with an emerging awareness that all our years of work have paved the way for a good life, we look around and realize where we are, what we have, what we do, and who we are with is not so bad after all.  We come to feel everything has worked out OK and we will be fine.

One person, reflecting on this phase, writes:

What really changes as we hit 50?  Perhaps most importantly, our time horizon changes.  I’m not sure when my career will end, but I know I can see it from here.  This means my goals change.  I want to do something significant, but I’m realistic, circumspect, about what that might be.  I cannot pretend the possibilities are infinite; the constraints are obvious, with ‘time’ at the top of the list.

To me, this person sounds like he or she is coming to grips with the realities of brokenness and mortality and is better for it.

From this point forward, well into our 70s and beyond, we become wiser, which is defined as growing in “compassion and empathy, social reasoning and decision making, equanimity, tolerance of divergent values, and comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity.”  All in all, we become more satisfied with life, calmer, and more grateful.  We experience every new day as a blessing.

Reflecting on where he is and who he is in this phase of life, the religion writer Arthur Farnsley II writes:

My definition of “significance” has changed...  I have a clearer sense of what matters to me, of whose opinions matter to me.

Finite time constraints and a clearer sense of values combine to offer the greatest gift of all: an improved ability to live in the present.  At a certain age, you realize that clinging to past mistakes is futile.  Even better, you stop yearning for some ideal future because experience teaches us the ideal is probably not forthcoming.

All of this is to say our experience of the ashes changes as we age.  In our youth it is something most of us most likely received with a healthy dose of denial; believing we can do anything and will live forever.  As we head to the bottom of the U-Curve it is something we experienced with a deep sense of dread because it reinforces the feeling nothing works out as it should.  But moving forward from there, we receive the ashes as a message of life.  Once we stop denying we are broken and mortal, and once we stop fighting it, and once we give up being depressed about it, only when we learn to embrace it do we find we are liberated by it.

As I worked on this sermon yesterday, the women of the Suffolk Garden Club held a lunch in our Parish Hall followed by a 75-slide PowerPoint presentation on succulents (of all things!).  A person in her teens or 20s would have felt she was being held hostage at such an event, texting friends constantly about how she was losing her mind.  A person in her 30s or 40s would try to have a nice time and pay attention, but in this brief, rare, quiet moment, all she really could do is think about the overwhelming demands on her time once she leaves.  But, from the sound of it, those ladies, all 55 and older, were having a grand time doing something that adds only joy and goodness to their day… and they were satisfied. 

Where are you in life and what do the ashes say to you this night?  I hope they speak to you of the limited nature of time.  I hope they motivate you to determine what matters most to you and help you to focus your energies on those things.  I hope the ashes empower you to let go of those things you no longer need to carry on your journey.  I hope they invite you to come before God with your sorrows and regrets; that they witness to God’s deep, unfathomable, unshakeable love for you, and remind you God bids you to let go of the burdens you bring in order to be new and whole again.  And finally, I hope the ashes give you hope that the best is yet to come, not only in this life, but also in the life to come. 

Telling Enchanted Stories

The season of Epiphany always comes to a close with the breathtaking story of the Transfiguration – that moment on a mountaintop when, before the eyes of His closest followers, Jesus’ appearance transforms.  His face changes (we are not told how) and his clothing becomes dazzling white.  As if this was not enough, suddenly there appears with Jesus the two most significant figures from the Hebrew tradition – Moses, the giver of the Law, and Elijah, the founder of the prophetic movement.  Then God becomes present to the group, but, as it often happens in the Scriptures, a cloud masks the Holy One’s Majestic Being so as not to overwhelm the human beings who are present.  And, as if this spiritual cake needed even more frosting, the Transfiguration does not end until the very voice of God is heard proclaiming Jesus as the Son, the Chosen One. 

Wow!  This is a BIG event.  It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Can you imagine being Peter, James, or John?  What would you do with an encounter like this?  Well, according to Luke, the disciples kept silent about what they had heard and told no one about what they had seen… and (as many people have quipped) this makes them prime candidates to lead the Evangelism Committee of just about every congregation in the Episcopal Church!  Our diocesan council speaker asked what you get when you cross an Episcopalian with a Jehovah’s Witness.  The answer: someone who rings your doorbell but has nothing to say!

Why do we struggle so much to tell our stories about God’s presence in our lives?

There is no simple answer: 

· We live in a culture where talk of God or politics does not make for polite conversation.

· Even in settings where ‘God talk’ is acceptable, often times our deepest experiences of the Holy One defy description.  They are so profound, so entirely other, that words fail us.   

· But not all of us.  Think of the ‘evangelists’ you hear on TV, encounter in the workplace, or know from your neighborhood.  We listen to the stories they tell about their faith and often recognize our experience has little in common with theirs.  The ease with which they share their faith and the language they give to it has the effect of silencing us. 

Who tells faith stories similar to our own?  Who speaks a language we can use to share our faith?  For many of us the answer is no one.  It is not that we do not know God, sense God, and experience God.  We simply do not know how to speak about it.  But the world is starving for us to find the words.

In her book The Practicing Congregation, Diana Butler Bass tells the story of man on an evening flight out of Los Angels:

As the plane lifted off the ground, it moved through this noxious layer of particulate, and suddenly, as it rose above the clouds, he and his fellow travelers became aware as if for the first time of a world of translucent beauty, filled with a quarter moon, stars, and distant lightning.  Not until he moved above the smog did he realize how the by-products of our industrial system had closed his whole perception of the world, and that his understanding of his experience was subject to such a degree to the system in which he lived.

Commenting on the story Butler Bass writes, “People want to soar.  They want to see.  They want to find an enchanted world.”  If we know the world to be enchanted with God’s presence then why do we struggle to tell others about what we see when we rise above the smog of everyday life?

I suspect the primary reason we find it difficult to tell our stories is we sense a disconnect between the fantastic narratives of the bible and the experiences of our ordinary our lives.  We believe God acted in those BIG stories, but fail to see how God is involved in the relatively little, common events in our lives.  One of my fundamental convictions is God is just as present in our daily life as God was present in the lives of the people of the bible.  True, it may not be as dramatic, but it is no less real and no less valuable – valuable for us and for those who might hear us speak about it.  It is how we describe what lies beyond the smog of life.  No matter how vanilla the details, it has value because it speaks of a world enchanted with God’s presence.

Last summer, in preparation for next year’s celebration of St. Paul’s 375^th anniversary, I began to read through the last 100 years of Vestry minutes.  Most of our really old records were lost in various Suffolk fires, but the materials we have from this site moving forward are remarkably full and well-organized.  Here are just a few entries to give you a flavor of what they contain:

From the Vestry meeting in December, 1922:

Regularly moved and seconded that the bill of Brothers-Pruden Company, Inc., amounting to $10.50 be deferred, to investigate the balance there on of $1.50 item for the year 1919.

These folks knew how to make every penny count!

From the April meeting in 1925:

Mrs. A.S. Eley requested that she be permitted to replace fans with advertizing thereon with plain fans, free of advertizing, for use in the Church.  On motion, duly seconded, granted, and Mrs. Eley was extended a vote of thanks.

We have always been a people with certain sensibilities and a willingness to do our part to make things right.

To appreciate fully this item from June, 1925, keep in mind that until the 1960’s only men served on the Vestry.  Still, the women of the parish did much the ministry of the church through an organization called The Randolph Society:

“The Randolph Society voted unanimously that it should go on record that a request be made The Vestry to offer the use of the Assembly Room to the Memorial Library Association in order that a public library may be started in Suffolk.  Said library to be opened and continued with proper supervision – the Association to be responsible for the proper care of the Church’s property.”

After discussion of the foregoing resolution, the proposition is, on motion, duly seconded, unanimously rejected by the Vestry deeming it unwise to grant the request.

We have always had a strong connection to the common good of our community, but I am thinking more than one Vestry member slept on a couch that June night in 1925.

One final record I will mention comes from a February, 1931 meeting where the Vestry expresses concern for the rector’s health:

Motion was made… that the Registrar be instructed to advise the Rector, Rev. H.N. Tucker, that is was the entire desire and wish of the vestry that, in his present condition, he not feel that it was necessary and obligation on his part to conduct the weekly Lenten services during Lent.

Rev. Tucker remained in poor health until he retired from St. Paul’s and Vestry minutes reflect the parish’s desire he rest and take days off on a consistent basis.  You care for your priest who cares for you!

Diana Butler Bass suggests congregational stories like these often “recede into the background like familiar wallpaper, taken for granted [and] unexamined.”  A while being nowhere near as dramatic as, say, the Transfiguration, these are for us powerful stories that have shaped who we are and how we practice the faith.  They tell how God has been present with us and how we have interpreted God’s desire for us.  The more intentional we are in telling our stories the more vital we will be as a faith community.  It is our way of telling others about the times when we have seen the enchanted stars.

And while St. Paul’s has a story to tell, so does each one of you.  Protest if you like.  Say to yourself “Not me!”  But the God who is present in your life beckons you to find the words to speak about it… not the words of a fancy-pants evangelist, not the words of your born-again coworker, and not the lofty words of some theologian – your words. 

Can you find your words to speak about your experience of God?  Can you find your words to speak about how God is present in our common life at St. Paul’s?  Please try.  We want to soar.  We want see.  We want to find an enchanted world.  And you have experiences of God that will help us. 

Peter, James, and John did not keep silent forever about what they experienced on that mountain.  Eventually they found the words to describe what took place.  Their story helps us to soar.  It helps us to see Jesus as the Son chosen by God to walk the way of Cross.  It helps us to recognize the world is enchanted with a Holy Being in whose presence we live and move and have our being. 

Thank God the disciples eventually found a way to speak about what happened.  And thank God for every time one of us finds the words to speak about our own experiences of the Holy One.

From Breeding Contempt to Embracing Warts

Do you remember Aesop’s Fable The Fox and the Lion?

When first the Fox saw the Lion he was terribly frightened, and ran away and hid himself in the wood.

Next time however he came near the King of Beasts he stopped at a safe distance and watched him pass by.

The third time they came near one another the Fox went straight up to the Lion and passed the time of day with him, asking him how his family were, and when he should have the pleasure of seeing him again; then turning his tail, he parted from the Lion without much ceremony.

Written around 600 years before the birth of Jesus, this fable gave rise to the proverb familiarity breeds contempt, wryly amended by Mark Twain to say familiarity breeds contempt – and children.  The fable and proverbs arising from it assert “extensive knowledge of or close association with someone or something leads to a loss of respect for them or it.”  In other words, we value least what we know best.

Several Boston researchers conducted a series of clinical experiments to determine if there is any truth to this.  In one study they showed a number of folks pictures from a dating site with three descriptive statements about each person.  When the subject showed interest in a particular photo they asked if he/she would like to know more about the person.  Most subjects believed additional learning would lead to greater liking, but the opposite took place.  On average, more information led to less liking.

Listen to this statement from their study paper:

We propose that the relationship between knowledge and liking within individuals is in fact negative: that more information about any one person leads, on average, to less liking for that person.  We further suggest that this relationship is due to the lure of ambiguity. At first acquaintance, individuals read into others what they wish and find evidence of similarity, leading to liking.  Over time, however, as evidence of dissimilarity is uncovered, liking decreases.  In short, the present investigation shows that “less is more” in interpersonal affinity.

Jesus, of course, did not know of this study and there is no way of to know if he knew of Aesop’s fable, but he was most certainly aware of the wisdom behind it.  “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.”  If you had lived with Jesus for thirty years, watched him grow up, skin his knees, go through the awkward teenage years, struggle to master a craft, and do just about everything else any ordinary person does, you too might react adversely to his claim to be the fulfillment of scripture.  To them he was common.  Their familiarity with Jesus breed their contempt for what he claimed to be.

And it seems to go both ways.  Yes, they know Jesus, but Jesus also knows them.  He knows their small town, narrow-minded, provincial ways.  He knows their ideas are uninformed, yet rigid.  He knows they will not receive his message unless he performs some kind of miracle to back up his assertions, but miracles don’t work that way.  They never occur to create faith.  They always emanate from a faith that is already present. 

By citing biblical stories of the widow at Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, Jesus states unequivocally that his ministry will be offered to strangers and outsiders, to people who do not know him and therefore have no preconceived ideas about him. 

As with anything we read in the bible, it is tempting to divide this one into us verses them.  The ‘them’ would be the people who think they know what Jesus is all about and have dismissed him.   The ‘us’ is us good folks here who have received Jesus’ message and based our lives on it.  But I am aware of the presence of both us and them in me.  There are parts of me that are oh so familiar with Jesus.  I have heard it and seen it so many times that it has become ‘familiar’ – something I have grown cold and callus to over time.  And then there are those parts of me where Jesus and his message is a total stranger; places I have yet to hear the Gospel, but desperately need it.  I suspect the same is true of you.  You, like me, have grown tone deaf to some aspects of discipleship while being totally unaware others.

I think the terminology of the study – similarity, ambiguity, and dissimilarity – is helpful.  The more we see Jesus as being similar to us the more we like him.  This becomes much easier as we foster ambiguity by limiting our knowledge about what Jesus teaches, asks, and demands of us.  Ambiguity keeps dissimilarities to a minimum.  We see dissimilarities not between us and Jesus, but between us and other followers of Jesus who recognize in him what we do not see, do not acknowledge, and do not like.  Mainline churches do not like evangelicals’ passionate, personal commitment to bring Christ into every aspect of their lives.  Evangelicals don’t like how mainline churches focus on social justice.  But the truth is, Jesus does both… and even more.  When we proclaim Jesus as Lord we are saying we cannot reject the ways Jesus is dissimilar from us.  We are saying we must conform ourselves to him.  We must be transformed into his likeness.

Someone once quipped “Familiarity breeds contempt and absence makes the heart grow fonder – just means that when you go away I really miss hating you.”  The fable of the Lion and Fox reminds us being in relationships is challenging.  The more we know a person the more we find not to like.  Our faith tells us why this is: each of us is a fallen, broken human being.  None of us is perfect.  If we are looking for the perfect partner or the perfect friend or the perfect boss or the perfect neighbor or the perfect teacher or the perfect president we will always, always be disappointed. 

In the 17^th century Sir Peter Lely was commissioned to do a portrait of Oliver Cromwell.  Cromwell, knowing that Lely’s style was to create embellished depictions of his subjects, said the artist, “I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it”.  From this emerged the expression “warts and all”. 

Our faith holds Jesus loves us warts and all.  Perhaps this is the greatest dissimilarity between us and him.  Whereas we loath what is not like us in others, Jesus loves all that is unlovely about us.  We are called to be who he is, but it is not something we can achieve on our own. 

Today’s New Testament lesson often is read in the context of a wedding, but was written to a deeply fractured faith community.  In either setting, the qualities of love Paul describes are both a goal for each person and a gift from beyond.  Both work hand-in-hand.  As I set out to love I find God’s Spirit moving in and through me.  As God’s Spirit moves in and through me I determine to embody a love from beyond.  For us, familiarity should not breed contempt, but rather compassion and a Christ-like love.  Liking is something we have little control over.  You either like chocolate chip cookies or you don’t.  But loving is a decision, an action, an attitude.  We choose to love – not in a romantic way, but in a Christ-like way.  How well we do it depends on our commitment and our connection to Christ’s love in our own lives.

Sunday is Our Custom Customers

 

“Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom.”

If you are in church on this snowy, icy, cold morning it is your custom to be here!  Art Bunton used to pull me aside after the late service and tell me I needed to preach about the importance of coming to church every week.  “But Art,” I would say, “the only people who will hear me are the people who don’t need me to say it!”  Most likely you are familiar with the phrase “preaching to the choir”.  Well today I want to coin the phrase “Sunday is our Custom Customers.”  You folks are to church services what letter carriers are to delivering the mail… neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will keep you from getting to church within eight minutes give-or-take of when the service begins.

We are learning more about the synagogues Jesus attended.  Because archeologists had never found their ruins, for a long time it was thought the synagogues around the Sea of Galilee were small, simple structures that did not stand the test of time.  It made sense because the rural, poor agrarian communities of the region would not have been able to afford to build something significant and, in fact, did not need to because the Jerusalem Temple was only a week’s walk away.

But just a few years ago a dig uncovered a synagogue from the time of Jesus in the hometown of Mary Magdalene on those shores of the Sea of Galilee.  It was big enough to hold over 200 people and, considering the era and location, was much more opulent than anyone ever expected.  It had a mosaic floor, multi-color frescoes on its walls, chambers for private reading and study, a room to house the scrolls, and a bowl at the entrance for ritual washing.  In the center of the sanctuary, archaeologists unearthed a mysterious stone about the size and shape of a small chest.  Various images were carved on its flat surfaces, including a seven-branched menorah and a chariot of fire, along with symbols associated with the Temple.

Given Luke’s report that Jesus went throughout Galilee preaching and teaching in various synagogues, it is most likely he did so at least once in this very location.  Far from back-water, country rubes, his audience was well-educated and steeped in the Hebrew scriptures.  They knew how to find a particular passage in a specific scroll.  They shared the tasks of reading in public and expounding on the meaning of what was read. 

We can imagine the synagogue functioned much the way our church does.  It was a place to encounter God and to rehearse cherished traditions.  It provided a space to offer prayers of thanksgiving, contrition, and concern.  It was where one went to question and to learn.  It was a communal gathering point to talk about the events day.  No matter where he was, it was Jesus’ custom to attend a synagogue on the Sabbath day.  We Sunday is our Custom Customers understand why.  We get it.

There is no word if synagogues held annual meetings.  Still, they, like we, had to manage budgets, address issues of building maintenance,  line up volunteers, and get word out about births, marriages, burials, and other life events to be celebrated.  In the days prior to his baptism, Jesus no doubt did his part to tend to these mundane tasks.

And while it was his custom to go to synagogue on the Sabbath, the gospels reveal once Jesus began his public ministry his experiences in these houses of worship became more and more contentious.  He heals a person in a synagogue on the Sabbath, forgiving that person’s sins, and this sets off a firestorm.  Today’s reading, with its sermon in his hometown synagogue in front of those who knew him best did not go well either.  Congregants are enraged when Jesus claims to be the fulfillment of prophecy.  They want to throw him off a cliff, but he slips away.

So Jesus increasingly takes his message to the streets, the lakeshores, and the hillsides, while not neglecting to attend synagogue.  His mission is not dependent on his popularity.  Luke tells us Jesus engages his mission because he is filled with the Holy Spirit.  It is the same Spirit you and I receive at baptism; the same Spirit we invite to live in us, to move around us, and to work through us. 

It is my observation that we Sunday is our Custom Customers are Spirit filled/Spirit fueled people.  We show up out of more than habit.  We sense how God has called us, how God has equipped us, and how God has placed us here in Suffolk at St. Paul’s.  It drives who we are, what we do, and how we are in relationship with one another.  Thank you for being a blessing in my life and for blessing so many others in and through this place – as is your custom!