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1 4 Epiphany, Yr. B, Feb. 1 , 2009 Church of the Epiphany, Glenburn Rev. Craig C. Sweeney Soli Deo Gloria I read two things that ‘shook me up’ this week. The first was from Barbara Browne Taylor, an Episcopal priest and renowned preacher. I gobble up whatever she writes for she is somehow vastly more in tune with God than I think I am. She wrote (and I am paraphrasing), ‘we don’t need more intellectual information about God, we need more God.’ Now, that takes some unpacking, and I hope that I can do that this morning. The other thing that rather dovetails with what she is saying, I think, is from St. Paul this morning: ‘Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge.’ And that made me say, ‘ouch,’ for I tend to think that I’ve got things figured out all too often. Now I come to this sermon with my heart rather burning. In my life, I’ve never seen such a confluence of amazing things taking place. America, whose history has been both built on and torn apart on the issue of slavery and racism, has just elected a black man as our President. I came of age during the ‘race wars,’ and the election of Barack Obama just astonishes me. I’m pleased he is of my party, but I’d feel the same way if we’d elected Colin Powell. So on the one hand I am thrilled with this affirmation of our best American belief - that all persons are created equal, and the potential for a new age of amity and the slow death of racism. Then on the other hand, I’m nearly terrified by the ugliness of our economic status. There have been recessions in my adult life and stock market reversals, too. But I’ve 2 never experienced anything like we are seeing now. I won’t recount the litany of misery about foreclosures, layoffs, plant and store closings. We’re all aware of those things. But I can’t somehow conceive that 2.7 million people who want jobs can’t find them, and that experts think that will be closer to 3.5 million by year end. And when we dig into why this has happened, it sadly points to basic human greed is anyone surprised? And how did it happen that we are spending $3Billion/week on two foreign military engagements? How did it happen that over 35,000 American men and women are casualties of these wars? I am a patriot - but I must say that this all grieves me deeply. And what, you may fairly ask, does this have to do with this mornings readings? I recite these things, because my heart is full of joy, anger, sadness and fear. And I do so in the context of today’s Gospel because I think that the solution to our national - nay, international crises - is Jesus. My mentor priest back in Kansas used to say that he really only had one sermon: the world is all messed up and Jesus is the answer. I used to josh him about that, but more and more I come to see that he is absolutely right. We need more Jesus, and less talk; more action and less argument. And more and more I come to see that my intense yearning to understand all of this theology and christology and ecclesiology and epistomology all those other ‘ologies,’ is a symptom of my own sin, the sin I preach against the most, self-centeredness. For I find that when I think I have something figured out, when I convince myself that I understand something, 3 then that makes me smarter than you. How much more selfcentered can one get then that? St. Paul is writing to one of his earliest church plants, up in Corinth. Corinth was a trading center, a home to many retired Roman soldiers, known as a wealthy and very sinful place. Paul going into Corinth was much like Jonah going into Nineveh. If you examine Paul’s 2 extant letters to the church in Corinth, they both spend a lot of time putting out fires, settling the squabbles that have erupted there between factions. Even the earliest churches had disputes! This morning he is focused on whether Christians can eat food that has been offered up to idols or not. Now you have to know that all of the false gods had their temples and their own priests. The way the temple staff lived was that people would give food and grain and wine to the god at the temple. The priests would take enough to live on and sell the surplus. Thus, anyone could walk by the ‘outlet store’ at the back door of the temple and by some cooked meat, or whatever. By the way, the Jewish priests did the same thing back in Jerusalem. Apparently some ‘holier than thou’ types in the Christian community decided that this, buying this food offered to idols, was blasphemy - for it somehow supported false gods, and that was - at least indirectly - idolatry. Paul is trying to be pastoral here as he discusses the issue, but what he is really saying is, ‘get over yourselves!’ If we don’t believe that those false gods even exist, how can it be harmful to eat meat that has been offered to them? ‘We are no worse off if we do not eat and no better off if we do.’ That is, it makes no difference. But Paul then goes on to speak to what is always his greatest concern: building up the 4 community of believers. He says, ‘But when you thus sin against members of your family and wound their consciences when they are weak, you sin against Christ.’ I paraphrase this thus: ‘But when you ‘beat up’ on fellow parishioners and hurt them over non-critical things, you are sinning against Christ.’ Take this remark in the context of what Paul says earlier: when anyone claims to know something he does not yet have the necessary knowledge. We may be certain that we KNOW the right answer, and if we are convinced of that, we truly don’t have the necessary knowledge to make judgments. I long ago decided that there is only one thing that I know with absolute certainty - and that is that I do not know the mind of God, and, by the way, neither do you. I think that fits with Paul’s remarks, because I try to remember that whenever I am tempted to judge and condemn someone else. And that speaks, I am more and more convinced, to the great national illness we have suffered lately - absolute certainty. People on the left and on the right are absolutely certain that they know how we should function and act as a nation, and all too quickly demonize and condemn those with whom they disagree. We all suffer for this, and thus I daily pray for a new national mood of cooperation and listening. And above all else, we are to listen to God. If you read the Gospels, you might conclude that Jesus never listens, instead he simply states that he is right. He says, ‘you have heard this, but I say that.’ However I think we need to remember that Jesus spent over half of his life listening - he didn’t begin his ministry until he was 30, after all. Jesus listened to the people he grew up with. He listened 5 to the folks in the communities where he was working. He listened to the Torah scrolls and the Prophets at the Synagogue. And above all else, he listened to God as he prayed. Whatever else we may believe about Jesus, we can be certain that he had a sustained life of prayer, for whenever he can he goes off by himself to pray. And one of the greatest challenges, for me, anyway, is to listen for God in prayer. I spend way too much time telling God what to do and asking for forgiveness: I am pretty sure that God already knows what needs to be done and his endless mercy is apparent in my life minute by minute. Listening to God is the real art of prayer. It is the sin of my over-intellectual-ness to presume to advise God what to do, who to heal and who to comfort and who to protect. And it is, perhaps, the sin of my ego that I spend so much time attempting to explain God to you, my parish family. And if this is so, I pray for God’s mercy. But I am haunted by what Barbara Browne Taylor said: we need less intellectual explanations of God, and more God. By that I am certain that she means we need to see God at work and grasp how it is that we are to BE God at work in the world. As I have said before, we do not find our faith in rational thought, we find it in metaphors, in revelation. And revelation is shocking to us and it immediately makes us humble, for we are aware we have been somehow in the presence of the Other, the all powerful, and that we are not worthy. Revelation ravishes us, it astonishes us. And so I am drawn to this one phrase in our Gospel this morning: They were astounded at his teaching. Now on the intellectual and boring side of this is easily explained. In 6 those days and to this day, rabbis study Torah and all the great history of Torah commentary and will interpret a bit of Scripture, attempting, as preachers always do, to illuminate it with their own insights. But these talks of the rabbis would be full of citations and quotes, they would refer endlessly to what an earlier rabbi had said. Thus when Mark says that Jesus spoke ‘with authority’ and not as the scribes did, he means that Jesus just came out and told the congregation what he thought, with no referential citations or quotations. We can read Mark’s passage to mean that this ‘speaking with authority’ is what astounded them. But I rather think that something else occurred here, I think that they heard Jesus speak and had a revelation, a revelation of God before them, of God speaking directly to them. And that was astonishing, indeed. For I suspect that Jesus was still using his ‘maiden’ sermon, the one he used in Nazareth, when they rejected him. If you recall, it’s the one where he cites Isaiah, saying that he is to fulfill the prophecy that the lame would walk, the blind would see - that one. But instead of rejecting Jesus as the Nazareans had the folks in Capernaum had their hearts strangely warmed, felt the power in those images and metaphors, were lifted up into a sense of wonder and newness and possibility. For Jesus didn’t give them some dry, intellectual explanation of how God makes miracles happen, it was God that they heard, in their hearts, in their souls, and it filled them with wonder, it gave them joy. Not all of them, though. The congregation was muttering 7 to themselves, ‘who is this guy?’ But the man with a demon, the sick man speaks up. We hear that it wasn’t actually him that spoke up, but the demon who possessed him. That demon cries out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ And Jesus rebukes him demanding that the demon depart, and he does. Now, the lesson I take from this is that we mostly don’t recognize Jesus - or God - at work in us or around us. But the demons know immediately who confronts them. The good people at the synagogue who have come to hear a few lessons and a sermon have no clue who is before them speaking with authority, but the demon knows who this guy is. Now I don’t believe in gremlins and goblins but I do believe that we each of us have our own demons - those demonic forces that hurt us and hurt others: I know mine all too painfully. And so when I hear God in prayer and in worship, I cringe - or my demons cringe. All my intellectual explanations only comfort me: being confronted by God makes me cringe at my sinfulness. I need less intellectual exercise and I need more of God. And I find more and more that I discover God in you and all the other people I meet - in the hospitals, when folks are grieving, when I go to see lonely people. That’s where we find God. What are your demons? I guarantee you have some. Go out into the world and find God all around you. You may cringe, but you will have begun to expel those demons. AMEN