Seeds of Hate Or Seeds of Love?

St. Paul’s Church in Bergen & Church of the Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

June 17, 2018

Year B, Proper 6: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Psalm 20

2 Corinthians 5:6-17

Mark 4:26-34

Seeds of Hate Or Seeds of Love?

            If we’re Facebook friends, you know that pretty much every weekday I post a Scripture verse or a quote from a great Christian, past or present.

            I don’t remember when or why I started doing this, but I’ve been at it for a long time now, and enough people have told me it’s meaningful and helpful for them that I’m reluctant to stop – plus, this seemingly small act early morning searching through Scripture and reflecting on the words of holy women and men has evolved into an important part of my own spiritual practice.

            Sometimes the Scripture or saint of the day don’t quite offer what I’m looking for, so my next stop on the search for inspiration is a website that lists the names of prominent people who have died on that particular day.

            Maybe you think that’s a little weird or morbid, but I find it really interesting!

            Anyway, that’s what I was doing this past Tuesday morning – scrolling through the names of the dead - when I saw a name that will probably be completely unfamiliar to all of you but that I know well:

            Michael von Faulhaber, a Roman Catholic cardinal, who died on June 12, 1952.

            Faulhaber was the Archbishop of Munich, Germany, for a very long time, from 1917 until his death, and he also happens to have been a distant relative of mine – my great-grandmother’s cousin. (If you google him, I think you’ll see a resemblance to my father.)

            I’ve been interested in Faulhaber because of this family connection, and also because he found himself leading the church during what the psalmist calls a day of trouble – a very real day of trouble during the rise and fall of Hitler and the Nazis.

            As I’ve mentioned here before, the sad truth is that there were relatively few German Christians – and relatively few German Christian leaders - who heroically resisted the Nazis.

Instead, most Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, either enthusiastically followed Hitler and his inhuman agenda or chose to keep a low profile to save their skin, and to save their churches.

I’ve often wondered what I would do in such circumstances.

            For his part, Cardinal Faulhaber steered a middle course.

            As a patriotic German, he appreciated Hitler’s call to restore Germany’s greatness and seems to have even managed to convince himself that Hitler, this profoundly immoral man, was in fact a faithful Christian.

            Faulhaber was well aware of what was happening to the Jews. At first there were seemingly small acts limiting their freedom, then destroying their businesses and livelihoods, and eventually ripping them from their homes and sending millions to misery and death – but, at least at the start, Faulhaber’s attitude seems to have been that the Jews were strong enough to take care of themselves – that it wasn’t his problem.

            The Church was his problem, and he was able to see the Nazi threat to the Church. His main goal, no surprise, was protecting the institution and its people.

            One of the threats he saw was the call among some Nazis to deny the Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers – there were even demands that the Church delete the Old Testament from the Bible.

            If Faulhaber is remembered at all today it’s for a series of relatively bold sermons he gave during Advent in 1933, insisting that the Hebrew Scriptures formed the foundation of the Christian faith – and that the Church would die without those Jewish roots.

            He should get some credit for that, at least, but unfortunately, during the day of trouble, Faulhaber wasn’t able to translate his concern for the holy book of an ancient people into care for the Jewish brothers and sisters suffering so terribly in his own time and place.

           

            In today’s Gospel lesson, we heard Jesus tell two parables about seeds, and as I hear them today, I hear Jesus teach us about their enormous power – the enormous power and potential of small things.

            God seems to have been interested in the power of the small for a very long time – long ago choosing a small and insignificant people as God’s own – and, as we heard today, choosing David, choosing a youngest son, choosing the one so insignificant that his family left him out in the field tending the sheep when the prophet Samuel came to anoint Israel’s king – surely God wouldn’t choose the youngest and least experienced, the smallest, to lead God’s people!

            The power and potential of small things.

            Unfortunately, the power and potential of small things cuts both ways, doesn’t it?

            A tiny seed can produce food for many – a tiny seed can produce what Jesus calls “the greatest of all shrubs,” providing a shady home for the birds of the air.

            But, just like a how few rogue cells can produce powerful life-threatening cancer, bad seeds can produce great destruction.

            That’s why Jesus is always so concerned with what’s going on inside our hearts.

That’s why Jesus still shocks us by saying that what’s going on inside our hearts is just as important as what we actually do – something as small as just a feeling can produce great goodness or terrible destruction.

            So Jesus offers the still shocking teaching that we’ll be judged for the anger in our hearts just as sure as we’ll be judged for murdering someone – that we’ll be judged harshly for even just saying to another person, “You fool.”

            Jesus offers the still shocking teaching that if we look at another person with lust, it’s as if we’ve committed adultery.

            Jesus offers the still shocking teaching to remove whatever small piece – a hand or an eye – to remove whatever small piece of us causes us to sin.

            Jesus teaches that what’s going on in our hearts is just as important as what we actually do.

            The power and potential of small things.

            As I’ve thought about Cardinal Faulhaber and his day of trouble, I’ve thought about how the Nazi menace started with such small seeds of hate.

            At first, the Nazi Party was a fringe group, seen as unimportant, led by a man who was seen by most serious people as a joke, someone who could be easily controlled by wiser statesmen, who could use this ridiculous man to hold on to their own power and carry out their agenda.

            And, then other small seeds of hate were planted.

            The transformation of aimless young people into Nazi thugs.

            The rallies with their mindless chants of hatred.

            The passage of laws limiting the freedom of Jews, and others like gays and the disabled and even Jehovah’s Witnesses, all those who were seen as undesirable, those seen as the cause of the nation’s troubles.

            And, sooner than one would have imagined, one of the most civilized lands on earth, the country that produced magnificent literature and sublime music, that country and those people launched a massive project to round up and kill millions of people and instigated the most destructive war the world had ever seen.

            It all started so small, with such small seeds, that perhaps we can understand how Faulhaber and so many others, concerned with their daily business, could have missed it, and eventually found themselves morally compromised and even fighting for their own survival in the day of trouble.

            And now, you and I find ourselves living in our own day of trouble.

            And, it’s not too hard to see the small seeds that have grown quickly into noxious weeds that threaten so much today.

            After September 11, our country was briefly, beautifully, united but also so very terrified – that was the whole point of the attacks, after all – and our government quickly began taking unprecedented actions, planting many small seeds that have brought us to this point:

            Among other things, our government created the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – better known as ICE – an organization with a cool name but often brutal tactics – ICE, whose officers frequently defend their actions, including as we all know now separating children from their parents, defend their actions with the chilling and all too familiar claim that that they are just following orders.

Our government planted many small seeds by launching endless wars in faraway places, and torturing captives at Guantanamo Bay and at secret sites all around the world.

Our government became even more secretive, limiting the freedom of the press.

            All these small but powerful seeds – all these small seeds that most of us missed, or if we paid attention we accepted them because we were led by people we rightly or wrongly believed were decent, humble, honest, and well-intentioned, never considering what might happen if we ever found ourselves led by people with obviously less noble traits.

            And so now, in the day of trouble, we seem to be getting very friendly with  “Hitler” and turning our back on “Churchill.”

            Now, in the day of trouble, truth itself is under daily assault.

            Now, in the day of trouble, children are being forcibly taken from their parents and warehoused – and the Attorney General of the United States quotes Romans 13:1 to defend that policy, using the same out-of-context verse about obeying the government that was much beloved by Christians who justified slavery and, yes, Christians who supported the Nazis.

            Just like Cardinal Faulhaber and so many others in the past, now, in the day of trouble, you and I, we Christians, face some big choices, some big questions:

            What kind of powerful seeds do we allow to be planted and to grow in our hearts?

            And, what kind of powerful seeds do we plant in the world?

            Seeds of hate?

            Or, seeds of love?

           

           

           

           

God's Peculiar People

St. Paul’s Church in Bergen & Church of the Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

June 10, 2018

Year B, Proper 5: The Third Sunday after Pentecost

1 Samuel 8:4-20; 11:14-15

Psalm 138

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Mark 3:20-35

God’s Peculiar People

            If you were here last week you may remember that in my sermon I mentioned in passing how a small group of progressive evangelical Christians recently went right into the capital of conservative evangelical Christianity – Lynchburg, Virginia – the home of Liberty University.

            This small group of progressive evangelicals went to Lynchburg offering to pray with their conservative brothers and sisters, to pray for healing and peace.

            They went there carrying a hand plow that had been made from a melted handgun, making real the biblical dream of a sword beaten to a ploughshare.

            And, they went there knowing that almost certainly the leadership of Liberty University would turn them away, which is exactly what happened. In fact, this little group of Christians was warned that if they stepped onto the school’s campus they would be arrested as trespassers.

            I have to admit that I love seemingly hopeless, seemingly waste of time, seemingly doomed to fail stories like this: the big, powerful, politically-connected university against a ragtag bunch of “Jesus people” carrying nothing but their bibles and a symbolic hand plow.

            One of those Jesus people in Lynchburg was a guy named Shane Claiborne.

            Maybe some of you have heard of him.

            He’s written a couple of books, including one called Jesus For President.

            Back in 1998, Claiborne and five other young people took radical Jesus at his word: they gave up their possessions, and in the toughest neighborhood in Philadelphia they started a new religious community, calling it “The Simple Way.”

            There they live and pray together and have planted community gardens and, of course, fed people – fed people even when the authorities have tried to stop them!

            A couple of weeks ago I came across a quote by Shane Claiborne that I like a lot. Here’s what he said:

            “Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.”

I love that. That is truth. Listen to it again:

“Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.”

We Christians are not meant to be powerful and popular in the eyes of the world.

No, you and I, we are meant to be… strange.

We are meant to be God’s peculiar people.

That’s true for us – and it’s true for our Jewish older brothers and sisters in faith, too.

Throughout nearly all of their history, the people of Israel were small, weak, and divided.

They were almost constantly threatened, and often occupied and enslaved, and even sent into exile, by more powerful neighboring empires who scoffed at the idea that this small, insignificant people with their weird dietary rules and bizarre customs like circumcision could have possibly been chosen by the one true God.

If that were the case, why were God’s chosen people overrun, over and over again?

Or, maybe this God wasn’t so powerful after all?

And, even the people of Israel themselves wondered about that, often tempted by other seemingly more powerful and successful gods, forcing the prophets to work overtime as they called God’s people back to faithfulness, over and over again.

In today’s reading, we hear God’s peculiar people of Israel giving into the temptation faced by most peculiar people – the temptation to be just like everybody else.

The elders of Israel demand that the prophet Samuel give them a king.

Samuel doesn’t want to do it.

And I love God’s response in this story: God interprets their demand for a king as a rejection of God’s kingship, a rejection of the unique relationship between God and God’s people – and that’s exactly what’s going on.

But, here’s the best part: God says to Samuel, give them what they want.

And, so the people of Israel made the big mistake of becoming a little bit less peculiar. From now on they’ll have their kings, some will be better than others, but, like all kings, they will scoop up a lot of the nation’s wealth for their own benefit, they will become the center of attention and devotion, they will assume the law – even God’s Law – doesn’t apply to them, and, like all kings, they will send the young to die in battle.

Israel made a big mistake, rejecting God’s kingship and putting faith in men, just to be like everybody else.

The truth is, we are not meant to be powerful and popular in the eyes of the world.

It’s not easy, but you and I, we are meant to be God’s peculiar people.

In today’s gospel lesson, it’s clear that the people around Jesus, including the scribes and even Jesus’ own family think that he’s beyond peculiar.

The scribes accuse Jesus of having an evil spirit, while others, including, it seems, even his own family, think that he is out of his mind.

There is something very endearing about Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters trying to take him away – in my imagination I see them desperate to get him back home to Nazareth – back to the carpentry shop – back to a normal life.

Jesus, please just be normal! Be like everybody else!

And, I’m pretty sure that this was a very real temptation for Jesus. Listen to his harsh response about who is his real family – not his biological kin, but anyone who does the will of God!

Pretty harsh, especially considering Jesus’ family was so worried about their beloved son and brother – so worried that he is making a fool out of himself, so worried that something terrible was going to happen to him.

And, let’s face it, they had good reason to worry, right?

Jesus is peculiar.

It’s peculiar to say that in God’s kingdom, it’s the poor and the hungry and the weeping and the hated who are truly blessed.

It’s peculiar to hang out with all the wrong kinds of people – the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and the lepers.

It’s peculiar to surround yourself with a highly unreliable group of followers, knowing full well that they will chicken out and abandon you in your moment of need.

It’s peculiar to teach that we are to love absolutely everybody, even the people we absolutely can’t stand, to love even our enemies.

It’s peculiar to teach that we are to turn the other cheek, that we are to forgive not once, not seven times, but seventy times seven times, an infinity of forgiveness.

It is peculiar to reveal the bottomless depths of God’s love by dying a shameful death on a cross.

And, there’s nothing more peculiar than rising from the dead, revealing once and for all that God’s love is stronger than everything, stronger even than death itself.

All very strange, indeed. Peculiar.

And, as the Body of Christ in the world, this is the peculiar life that we’ve signed up for – this is who we are meant to be and how we are to live.

Even just a glance at church history or at today’s news teaches us that, like the people of Israel demanding a king, we Christians have often given into the temptation to be just like everybody else, to chase money and power and popularity, to hold onto our grudges, to fear people different than us, to be… not so peculiar.

Big mistake.

But, the good news – the best news  – is that God is the most peculiar of all, choosing a small and weak people as God’s very own, and never giving up on them or any of us, no matter how many times we mess up, forgiving us no matter how many other kings we choose to follow.

Thanks be to our peculiar God.

Amen.

            

Hardness of Heart

St. Paul’s Church in Bergen & Church of the Incarnation, Jersey City NJ

June 3, 2018

Year B, Proper 4: The Second Sunday after Pentecost

1 Samuel 3:1-20

Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Mark 2:23-3:6

Hardness of Heart

            One of the best parts of serving here in Jersey City has been the blessing of working with some truly outstanding clergy colleagues.

            There’s “Team Episcopal,” of course. I mean, you’re just not going to do better than Laurie, Gary, and Jill, right?

            And then there are the clergy from other Christian denominations and from other faiths, too.

            One of the very best, one of my favorites, was Rabbi Debbie who until last year served at Temple Beth-El, the Reform Jewish synagogue just a few blocks away from here.

            She’s super-smart and also deeply faithful and compassionate – one of the best pray-ers and preachers I’ve ever heard.

            One of the advantages to having good clergy colleagues is that these relationships are already in place when a crisis arises, as they inevitably do here in Jersey City and everywhere, right?

            A couple of years ago we faced an issue that could have escalated into a real crisis when a significant number of Hasidic Jews began moving from Brooklyn into Greenville, into the southern part of our city.

            It’s an old, old story in this place, as wave after wave of people have come to Jersey City, looking for a new start, looking for a place where they can provide a better life for themselves and for their children.

            That’s why my own ancestors came to Jersey City place a couple of generations ago, and that’s why people – including a good number of our own parishioners – come here today.

            It’s a beautiful story – the most American of stories – though, as you know, sometimes it can get a little rough as people from different cultures, people speaking different languages, find themselves living side-by-side.

            In the particular case of the Hasidic Jews in Greenville, as some of you know firsthand, the trouble was certain people pestering current residents about selling their homes.

            Since the danger of sparking anti-Semitism was very real, this issue eventually came to Jersey City Together, where we naturally turned to Rabbi Debbie – who was certainly willing to help, but I remember her pointing out to us that her Reform brand of Judaism is so different from the way the ultra-Orthodox practice their faith that her rabbi counterparts would see her as belonging to an almost entirely different religion.

            It was a reminder that Judaism of today is diverse, just like Judaism of two thousand years ago, just like Judaism during the days of Jesus, was diverse, too.

            Back then, there were Jews who believed in the resurrection of the dead and those who didn’t – Jews who tried to get along as best they could with their Roman overlords and others who rebelled and those who fled into the wilderness.

There were Jews who debated the finer points of the Law, like what you can or can’t do during the Sabbath – and there were Jews who believed that a certain teacher from Nazareth was the messiah and those who said no way.

            In today’s Gospel lesson we hear a little bit of that Jewish diversity and disagreement, as Mark presents a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees about the Sabbath – about the lawfulness of plucking grain or healing on the sacred day of rest.

            There are some problems with this text – the story of David and the “Bread of Presence” is not accurately retold and, more important, the truth is that the rabbis were pretty consistent that, yes, saving a life overrides the Sabbath command to rest.

            So, this disagreement between Jesus and the Pharisees might actually be more about later divisions between the Jews who accepted Jesus and those who didn’t.

Reflecting on this passage there is one phrase that I keep coming back to.

            We’re told that Jesus is angry at these religious leaders because of their “hardness of heart.”

            “Hardness of heart.”

            Just like Judaism, Christianity has always been diverse, too. Over the centuries, Christians have argued about big stuff like the precise nature of Jesus as well as ridiculous things like… should there be candles on the altar.

            But, I have to say, today as I look at most of our Evangelical brothers and sisters today, just like Rabbi Debbie and the ultra-Orthodox, I wonder if we are even part of the same religion – and, I suppose, if they were to look at me – look at us - they would wonder the same thing.

            We see these deep divisions, these wildly different worldviews, in so many areas.

            The oldest, most American of stories, is people coming here because life at home had become unbearable, coming here for a better life.

            And while there are certainly legitimate disagreements about legal and illegal immigration, there was a recent poll asking if America has a duty to accept refugees fleeing oppression and violence – and white evangelicals overwhelmingly said no.

            And whatever disagreements we may have about undocumented people entering the country, it would seem to me that Christians who profess to love the family so very much would be horrified and outraged by the practice of forcibly taking children from their parents and placing them into “foster care, or whatever” as the White House Chief of Staff said so coldly.

            It should be noted that at least some of these families are doing exactly what they’re supposed to – arriving at the border and presenting themselves for asylum, and yet still they are treated this way.

            I’m also puzzled by white evangelical support for politicians whose whole lives have been seemingly devoted to the Seven Deadly Sins – pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth – and have continued to support those politicians despite, well, despite a lot – mostly it seems because they want Federal judges who will promote the Evangelical anti-abortion and anti-gay agenda.

            These white evangelicals seem to forget “Rule Number One” in Christian Ethics: the end does not justify the means.

            I have a hard time understanding all of this – I really do - I’m dismayed by the hardness of heart – but the issue I find most difficult to understand is guns.

            I don’t understand how Christians who profess to follow the Prince of Peace, who profess to follow Jesus who taught us to turn the cheek, who profess to follow Jesus who told Peter to put down his sword, who profess to follow Jesus who taught us to love one another – yes, to love even our enemies – I don’t understand how Christians can follow this Jesus and still support flooding our country with military-style weapons – weapons that so often end up shattering the lives of the innocent, weapons that turn some of our own city streets into war zones.

            I don’t understand how, time and time again, after these weapons have destroyed lives, Christians can offer only “thoughts and prayers,” not recognizing that thoughts and prayers are the beginning of action, not the end.

            I don’t understand how people can look at the faces of these children, the faces of the heartbroken parents, and offer nothing but empty words.

            Hardness of heart.

            To their credit, some of the white Evangelicals recognize the inconsistency of some of their positions, especially supporting some politicians who frankly seem to embody the exact opposite of Christianity – but they defend their support by pointing out that throughout the Bible and throughout history God has chosen some very unlikely – we might even say inappropriate – people to do God’s will.

            And, that is absolutely…true!

            From the stuttering Moses to the boy Samuel who, as we heard in today’s first lesson, was called to be a prophet and who would later anoint the very flawed and deeply sinful David to be Israel’s greatest king, to the peasant girl Mary who carried the Son of God into the world, God seems to delight in choosing the people we wouldn’t look twice at, even the people we would flat-out reject.

            So, who knows, maybe God has indeed chosen some of our current leaders, maybe in order to enact a certain agenda – or, maybe, to reveal to us so clearly the lies we’ve been telling ourselves all these years, maybe to reveal to us the ugliness that we’ve refused to address and instead have worked so hard to cover up.

            I don’t know.

But, I strongly suspect God has in fact been selecting at least some unlikely leaders in our midst – like the small band of brave evangelicals who recently went to the capital of white evangelicalism – Lynchburg, Virginia - trying to “reclaim Jesus” and offering to pray together for peace and healing, and even bringing with them a hand plow made from a melted-down handgun – making real the biblical dream of a sword beaten into a ploughshare.

            And then there are those kids from Parkland, Florida, those amazing kids whose ordinary, anonymous lives focused on things like getting the yearbook done and what college to attend were upended by all too common senseless violence - and rather than retreating into their own grief and trauma – which would’ve been totally understandable – instead they spoke out with power and eloquence, and have continued to speak out and organize, even as our attention has moved on to other matters.

            So, there’s hope.

            There’s always hope.

            We know for sure that Jesus is not too pleased with hard-hearted religious people – and we also know that Jesus is not pleased with people who are quick to judge – quick to cast the first stone – quick to point out the speck in our neighbor’s eye without removing the log in our own eye.

            So, while we may be puzzled and even infuriated by some of our Christian brothers and sisters, it seems to me that this difficult moment in our life together is an opportunity – an opportunity to look inside our own hearts, searching for the hardness that’s there, searching for the ways we dismiss and even hate certain people, the ways we let our fears and prejudices get the best of us.

            Today, we have an opportunity to ask God to soften our hard hearts and allow us – allow all of us - to truly live the way of Jesus.

            May it be so.