Download 4Epiphany.Yr.B.Feb.1.2009 - The Church of the Epiphany

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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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