Jesus Goes Slumming (Proper 26C)

Jesus Goes Slumming
Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 26 Year C RCL)
30 October 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings: Isaiah 1:10-18; Psalm 32:1-8; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12; Luke 19:1-10

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

“It is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God than to put a rope through the eye of a needle.”  “Go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor.”  “Woe to you rich, for you will one day go hungry.” 

Jesus apparently did not care much for the rich. 

Neither did his followers.  The early Church Fathers were pretty unsparing.  St. Basil the Great said that the riches common to all are held by the wealthy not because the wealthy earned them, but because they were the first to seize them.   St. John Chrysostom said that the rich do not enjoy what is their own, but what belongs to others.  St. Jerome said that every rich person is either a thief or a thief’s heir.

Yet in today’s Gospel, Jesus invites himself to dinner with a rich man who everyone knows got his money all the wrong ways. Zacchaeus is an architelones, an “arch-toll collector” of Jericho, a wealthy trading center where collaborators with the Roman occupiers could make good money by serving as customs agents, extorting fees, customs, and tolls from their fellow Judeans and skimming from the proceeds.  

The crowd criticizes Jesus: “Can you believe it?  He is actually having dinner with one of those sinners.” 

The toll collectors, called publicans or tax farmers by various translations, were universally seen by their compatriots in Palestine as quislings, collaborators with the Evil Empire, blood suckers who profited from the misery of God’s people, or anyone kind and good. To let one marry into your family meant being expelled from Synagogue and the society of all decent folk. 

Jesus saying he would have dinner chez Zacchaeus would be like one of us saying we would go out partying with a Nazi, or a Mafioso, or a Terrorist.   

There is irony here.  Zacchaeus’ name, Zakkai’, means “innocent” or “pure,” and often appears in poetic pairs with Tsedek, or ‘righteous’ or ‘just’.   But he is a toll collector, a traitor on the make looking out only for number one.   

But when the crowd tries to dissuade Jesus by telling how bad his intended dinner companion is, this diminutive wealthy man replies, using the present tense, “Look, I give half of my possessions to the poor.  And if I have defrauded anyone, I repay quadruple the sum.”  He is not boasting.  He knows he is an outcast and labeled a crook.  He is only trying to explain that he tries to do the right thing, despite the odious profession he has found it necessary to pursue to get by. 

This scape-goat, who most people think is a scape-gallows, is basically just trying to say he is not a scape-grace.   While he is not beating his breast like his fellow toll-collector in that parable last week and saying “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he most definitely is not following the lead of the Pharisee in that parable and saying “I am better than others.” He is just saying, “See here, I’m not the rotten crook you think I am.” 

And Jesus praises him for it.  He even calls this short man’s standing up for himself “salvation.” 

Who are the scape-goats we like to point fingers at?  What does it take for us to identify someone as “one of THEM,” beyond the pale, and hopelessly outside of grace? 

We hear scape-goating in various ways. 

“I just couldn’t take it any more.  On Facebook, I had to unfriend one of my old pals from high school.  He was just beyond the pale: racist, sexist, and wholly inappropriate remarks about the political campaign.” 

“A basket of deplorables.” 

“Evil, demonical, Muslim Jihadists who torture and kill people for any reason, however, slight.” 

“That sounds a lot like Hitler to me.” 

“You people stole our country from us.  You have ruined it.  No punishment is too harsh for you.” 

We can accuse each other of a great variety of really wrong and rotten things.  Such accusation is scape-goating when we reduce the person to that one thing. And label them that and nothing else.  It is when we see only the bad, and none of the good. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the Gulag Archipelago, talks about the moment during his decades in Stalin’s prison camps that he recovered his Christian faith, and began to heal even while in prison. In the chapter, “Resurrection,” he notes that he realized that no matter how tightly his interrogators pressured him, he still had some choice, however limited, however constrained. While tortured, he was always forced to tell his tormentors what they wanted, but he still could do this willingly or unwillingly, hatefully, or with empathy. This led him to realize that even his interrogators themselves were constrained. They too enjoyed, even within the constraints placed on them by their roles, small choices between good and evil.

He realized that it wasn’t an issue of good people on this side versus bad people on the other side. The line between good and evil does not lie between interrogator and prisoner, between political parties, between economic classes, countries, or religions. It does not lie between any groups of people, however defined. It lies in that small space of choice, no matter how tightly constrained, in each person.

He writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Solzhenitsyn understood the principle behind Jesus’ praise of Zacchaeus.   We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. We are all in this together.  “Treat others as you would have them treat you” for Jesus means that we should give others—especially those who are deplorable to us—at least the same benefit of the doubt that we expect for ourselves. 

In this season of partisan division and mutual reproach, I pray that we can be fair-minded to each other and see God’s hand at work even where we least expect it. 

In the name of God,  Amen.

Basic Faith; Basic Religion (mid-week message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Basic Faith; Basic Religion

October 26, 2016

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  (James 1:27)

It is easy to get wrapped up in the inside baseball of Church.  It is easy to be distracted by differences that people have on doctrine or moral teaching.   And since Church itself is a gathering of broken people, it is easy to focus on failings and annoyances rather than the love of God—the good news of Jesus—that brings us together. 

But at the heart of it all is Jesus’ teaching that we must love God and each other.  The phrase from Micah says it all:  DO JUSTICE, LOVE KINDNESS, WALK HUMBLY. 

Grace and Peace,  Tony+

False Friends (Mid-week Message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

October 19, 2016

False Friends

In learning any foreign language, we often run into a phenomenon called a “false friend,” or “false cognate”:  a word that looks similar to one we know in our mother language, but which in fact has a very different origin, meaning, and usage.  An example is French attendre.  Beginning students think it means “to attend to,” but learn quickly that it means “to wait.”  Another is French ancien, which means “former” or “old,” rather than “ancient.” 

In our spiritual life, too, there are false friends—things that look similar or identical to values and aspirations, but in fact are their opposites.  Many of Jesus’ parables aim at sorting such confusion out. 

Buddhist thought explains the phenomenon well, I think.  In mainstream dharma teaching, there are four principal divine emotions:  Loving-kindness, Compassion, Joy with others, and Equanimity. Loving-kindness is selfless good will and love for others.  Its polar opposite, obviously, is hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy looks like love, but is distorted and sick:  it is selfish attachment or the so-called “love” that seeks to control and establish dependence.  Compassion is empathy and sympathy for others.  Its far enemy is cruelty.  Its near enemy is pity.  Where compassion looks on a suffering person as an equal, pity looks down on the sufferers, sees them as inferiors.  Joy in others is opposed by resentment or envy, while its near enemy is mere exuberance in social settings.  Equanimity is the ability to see and feel about yourself as you see and feel about others, and is what I would call humility.  Its polar opposite is envy or jealousy while its near enemy is simple indifference, not caring about yourself or others. 

When reading Jesus’ parables, it is very useful to ask what single point of comparison he is making.  Avoid allegorizing a parable by asking what are the possible extraneous points of comparison that are misleading or false?  When seeking an application, it is useful to ask for definitions:  what is the polar opposite of what he is talking about, and what is its near enemy? 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+

Hold on! Hold on! (Proper 24C)

Jacob wrestling with the Angel, Marc Chagall

Hold on, Hold on!
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24 Year C RCL)
16 October 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was in my basic training course after being sworn in as a Foreign Service Officer, I had an experience that has helped me throughout my adult life.  Amid all the technical training, regulations and policies, operations and culture of Embassies and State Department Bureaus, learning about effectively operating foreign environments, near the end of the course we had a week’s retreat in West Virginia, an offsite designed to work on our leadership, human relations, and social skills.  There was a dance.  Now, having been raised as a Mormon boy, I had received plenty of dance instruction in youth groups: waltz, fox trot, swing, cha-cha, and square dancing.  But we were on our own to learn what we called “slow dancing” and rock and roll fast dancing.  By the time I  had been to college and grad school, I had learned to think of myself as a poor dancer.  I was often too embarrassed to get out on the dance floor, much to Elena’s exasperation.  But here at this offsite, we had no accompanying spouses.  We were expected to dance and to mix, and to have a good time.  I noticed one of my classmates, a young man from upstate New York just out of college: he was GREAT!    Thinking that I had missed the new dances of his younger cohort, when we got back to Washington, I asked him to show me some steps.  He was flummoxed.  He had seen me dance and knew that I actually probably knew more dance steps and rhythms than he.   He wasn’t interested in showing me his “moves”: “You saw ‘em on the dance floor.  That’s all there is to it.  You just mimic, if you want.”  Then he added the important bit:  “The trick to being a good dancer, Tony, is to get out there and enjoy yourself.  You have to get rid of any idea that other people are watching you.  You have to lose all shame and fear, and just get into the music and your partners.  You have the moves, but you don’t have the heart.  And all you really need is heart.” 

This revelation made a big difference for me.  I learned to dance as if no one else were watching.  And dancing has been one of the joys of Elena and my life together ever since.  Even now, with her disability, we often dance:  a few rhythmic steps to my singing as we make transfers from her wheelchair to other places is one of the smoothest ways to get her Parkinson’s bound limbs to unlock.   And it always helps if we do it with abandon. 

 

Today’s scriptures tell us about hunger and yearning in engaging God.  Luke tells us Jesus’ parable of the widow and the unjust judge is to teach “persistence in prayer.”  The story of Jacob wrestling with God has become a commonplace for unrelenting effort in prayer, known to many of us through the words of Charles’ Wesley’s hymn “Come O Thou Traveler Unknown”:

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.

Jacob, now named Israel (God struggles), limps away from the scene.  And indeed, both of these images—bad judge and wrestling angel—both of these images are limping, imperfect images of prayer. God is not worn down despite himself because of our long prayers.   And it is God who wrestles with us, holds on tight, and wins, not the other way around. 

Derek Olsen, in his recent book Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as a Guide to a Spiritual Life says that the most basic question we should ask ourselves in finding spiritual practices is this:  what do you wish to be formed as? 

“What will be our tool set and perspective for engaging life in God?  … Christianity offers a wide array of spiritual tool sets, some complementary to one another, others more exclusive.  There are a variety of Roman Catholic schools of practices as well as [Eastern] Orthodox ones; the Protestant array is even larger.  Once we are outside of Christianity, there is even a broader set of possibilities.  In the face of the vast multitude of options, one possibility is eclecticism, a sort of cafeteria spirituality where we take a bit from here, a bit from there, and not too much of any one thing.  In the modern, consumer-driven marketplace of twenty-first America, this option seems popular and is the hallmark of the spiritual but not religious set.   But what do you want to be formed as?  The trouble with eclecticism is that its specialty is forming spiritual dilettantes.”

Prayer and work in a loving and experienced community rooted in a tradition that beckons us onward and teaches us to welcome more than we already know, accept, and like, is the antidote. 

The image I prefer for prayer is dancing.  We learn to follow, take the rhythms and steps from the One with whom we dance. We lose our self-consciousness, and don’t worry about who may be watching or listening.   When the music gets a bit hard to follow, or too vigorous for our feet, we learn to follow more closely, and hold on for deal life.  That’s what “persistence in prayer,” the annoying widow and the bad judge, and the wrestling angel in the night are about.  Hold on, hold on.

It’s not really about staying at it until God hears us and gives us what we want.   The point here is that is that we persist in a practice of prayer, regardless of how things “turn out.”   In the process we find God’s rhythm, and take his lead.  We lose ourselves and learn the joy of praying with abandon.  We are changed and our will becomes closer to God’s.  We are able to say, with Jesus, “thy will, not mine, be done.”    Through prayer we gain acceptance of what we can’t change and strength for the truly intolerable. 

Persistence in prayer is not just about asking for things. As we pray, we learn that we need not just prayers of petition, but also ones of thanksgiving, adoration, and intercession for others.  As we persist in prayer, we often find that these other forms of prayer begin to predominate. 

Again, it is like dancing. We let ourselves be enticed into doing, and then loving something modeled and taught by someone else.  In the baptismal covenant, we promise to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”  Losing our self in the prayers passed down to us, finding true grounding and joy in them, teaches us the truth in the Eastern Orthodox teaching that the Holy Trinity itself is one great dance.

I try to recite the Prayer Book’s Morning and Evening Prayer office every day.  This creates a rhythm in my life that has helped me grow closer to God and better serve those around me.   It makes me part of a great dialogue of prayer of the Christian Church that has been going on more than 2,000 years.   But it takes time, about 20 minutes in the morning and 10 in the evening.  In prayer, as in so many other human endeavors, you get what you put into it.  But just throwing yourself into it, without worrying about how silly or inept it might make us look to others, is the point of departure for a real prayer life of joy. 

I invite all of us to pray daily, and to put some effort and thought into it.  If Daily Morning and Evening Prayer is too much, then start small—look at “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” on page 137 of the Prayer Book and start there.   What do you want to be formed as?  God wants us to learn the dance from him. The important thing is to set the time aside, create a regular practice of it, and joyfully abandon yourself to dancing with God.

In the name of God,  Amen.

Jacob wrestling with the Angel, Paul Gaugin, 1888

Consecration and Sacrifice (Midweek Message)

Jan Van Eyck, Adoration of the Lamb 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Consecration and Sacrifice

October 12, 2016

Often when we offer the gifts of bread, wine, and plate receipts in Eucharist, we recite together a line from 1 Chronicles 29:14 (and the 1928 Prayer Book), “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”  The idea is that whatever we offer as thanksgiving gifts to God are in fact already God’s, since God gave them to us. 

But this phrase focuses mainly on what we give back to God.  The more general idea upon which it is based is that all things belong to God, already, including us.

Jesus tried to make the point clearly when he taught the rich young man to go, sell everything he had (not part of it) and give the proceeds to the poor.  Jesus lived what he taught.  He perfectly submitted to God, and wholly aligned his will and actions with God’s ultimate purposes and love.   In the words of Celtic spirituality, he was the thinnest of “thin places” between our world and the Ultimate. In “emptying himself” to God (Phil 2:1-13), and submitting fully to God, the Man Jesus is an exemplar for us.

Seeing such emptying of self as the heart of growth toward God, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of The Society of Jesus, wrote the following prayer as part of his Spiritual Exercises:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and call my own, you have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me. Amen.

The idea is also expressed in a poem by Frances Ridley Havergal, the text of number 707 in the Hymnal 1982:

Take my life and let it be
consecrated, Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
let them flow in endless praise,

Take my hands and let them move
at the impulse of thy love.
Take my feet and let them be
swift and beautiful for thee.

Take my voice and let me sing
always, only, for my King.
Take my lips and let them be,
filled with messages from thee.

Take my silver and my gold;
not a mite would I withhold.
Take my intellect and use
every power as thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it thine;
it shall be no longer mine.
Take my heart it is thine own;
it shall be thy royal throne.

Take my love; my Lord, I pour
at thy feet its treasure store.
Take myself, and I will be
ever, only, all for thee.

If we would be followers of Jesus, we must consecrate all we have and are to God.  Giving up all, intentionally getting rid of the attachment we have to things and placing them in the service of Jesus, is at the heart of Christian spirituality.  It is only by giving all to God that we find our true selves and anything becomes truly our own. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+ 

 

Returning to Jesus (Proper 23C; Holy Baptism)

 

Returning to Jesus
Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 23 Year C RCL)
9 October 2016--8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist, 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist with Holy Baptism

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c; Psalm 111; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel is a familiar story to most of us:  Jesus heals ten lepers and only one returns to him to thank him.  It is used in many Sunday Schools as a teaching tool for basic politeness:  being nice and following Jesus means always remembering to say thank you.  And that is what most of us remember about the story. 

But many things in the story suggest such a reading is too simple.  It story starts with the puzzling “Jesus was going to Jerusalem, and was in the territory between Galilee and Samaria.”   The two territories abut each other; there is no corridor between them. But the storyteller wants you to know from the start that this story is about something that happened between two opposing lands.    It is a story of what happens on the border, the metaphorical space in between. 

Jesus heals the ten men and women with the contagious skin disease. Keeping with the teachings of his Jewish faith, he tells them to go to the Temple, and seek out a priest to inspect them, perform a ritual, and declare them healed or clean.  All go, but one returns to thank Jesus.  The one who returns is a Samaritan.

The nine are following Jesus’ instructions because they can:  they are Jewish and, even if leprosy keeps them at a distance, they can go and do exactly what Jesus asks them.  But the Samaritan is in a fix:  he cannot go to Jerusalem, and a priest there would most certainly not perform the ritual and declare him clean.   Samaritans were considered to be permanently unclean and forbidden access to the holy sites.  The Samaritan, hearing Jesus say, “go to a priest,” hears Jesus commanding him to do the impossible.  He has nowhere to go.  But when he realizes he is well, the joyful gratitude that overwhelms him drives him to turn back, go to Jesus, and thank him.   Jesus notes ironically:  what about the nine others? 

How often do we find ourselves in a like situation, where we find we are just completely unable to do what Jesus tells us, what God commands?  Usually this makes us feel unworthy to come back into Jesus’ presence.  It makes us reluctant to want to engage him, since it looks like it’s a losing proposition.     But then grace happens and we return to Jesus, if only out of gratitude and thanks. 

At the conference of my religious order, the Society of Catholic Priests of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, in Atlanta this last week, former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold shared with us this quote, from French poet Charles Péguy:  “Grace is insidious.  If it doesn’t come straight, it comes bent.  If it doesn’t come bent, it comes broken.  If it doesn’t come from above, it comes from beneath.  Grace is insidious.” 

If it doesn't come bent, it comes broken.  Broken is how God gets in.  The ground is broken before you plant it; then when you harvest wheat, you break the heads of wheat and then the grains themselves as you  grind flour and meal.  You use the broken grain to make bread.  And the broken bread is what feeds you.  Brokenness lets God in. 

It doesn’t matter if you can’t do what Jesus asks you to do.  Just think of all the blessing and good he has given you.  He still comes through and gives you grace and love, and if you take time and be quiet, you’ll notice.  And you will be thankful.  And gratitude will drive out fear, guilt, and, one way or another, whatever it is that made you feel guilty in the first place.   If grace doesn’t come in just the right, expected way, it will come, nevertheless.  That’s because grace comes from God because of the way God is, not the way we are. 

That’s why in today’s collect we ask God to send us grace, both to precede and to follow us.  The grace that comes before—prevenient or, as the old Prayer Book calls it,  “preventing” grace—makes us able to yearn for God and love Jesus despite ourselves.  The grace that comes after—what theologians call “effectual” grace—is what empowers us to actually accomplish God’s will and accept the limitations that God gave us when we were created.  

It’s one of the reasons why we baptize little children like we baptized George today:  we recognize this is not just about how we feel or think, or how well we have made decisions.  We all rely on the grace of God, and the grace of each other.  It takes a village to make a Christian, just as it takes to raise a child.    On our own, without help from the community and from God, we cannot make it.  This is not because of ingrained contamination passed on by birth, it is just the way we are.   We talk about baptism as a sacrament, an outward sign of an inward reality, and not just a sign pointing to something else, but in some ways actually accomplishing it.    It is the beginning of our life in Christ, a life which is nourished and fed by the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.  Again, this is all in community, the body in which the Spirit takes flesh. And this body itself is composed of broken people.  We help each other; and we cannot expect perfection or an absence of brokenness.  The Church is made of us, but as the embodiment of Christ, it helps us as we help each other.  

When Jesus says “and where are the nine others?” he is saying that sometimes it takes the feeling of being rejected—of not being able to do what we ought, not able to make it on your own—to awaken us to the presence of grace and kindle gratitude in our hearts.  And gratitude, once burning, is what lights the fires of service and generosity so that we become means of grace to others. 

What has Jesus asked you to do that has proven impossible so far?   How can you turn this into yearning for him, and awaken your sense of the grace that is being poured out upon you?  How can you let it turn you back to him in gratitude?   

In the name of God,  Amen. 

Beloved Sister Death

 

 

Beloved Sister Death

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

October 15, 2014 

 

 Fr. Tony is on retreat at the annual conference of his religious order, the Society of Catholic Priests (of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada).  He sends a reposting of a message from this time of year from a couple of years ago

We started the month with the Feast of St. Francis, and the Blessing of the Animals.  St. Francis’ Day brings to mind for most of us the hymn “All creatures of our God and King.”  It is based on the great Tuscan language poem praising God for all God’s creatures written by Francis in the last year of his life. 

I have had the great blessing in the last two weeks of being able to give last rites to two parishioners, and of simply being with their families and friends.  Death of a loved one is hard, not least because it reminds us that each and every one of us will one day die.    The month will end with the fall Triduum of All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls, which each in their own way talk about death. 

Just before his death, St. Francis added a final verse to his great hymn of praise.  In it, he sees death not as an enemy to be feared and overcome, or an aberration ruining God’s creation, but rather as a fellow creature of God, made by God for his own mysterious purposes: 

“Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister, Bodily Death,

From whom no one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

But blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,

For the second death shall do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord and give him thanks,

And serve Him with great humility.” 

In the metrical translation we usually sing as “All Creatures of our God and King,” the verse reads thus:

And even you, most gentle death,

Waiting to hush our final breath

O praise Him, Alleluia!

You lead back home the child of God,

For Christ our Lord that way has trod,

O Praise Him! Alleluia!

The Prayer Book’s rites for what we normally call a funeral clearly identify it as a celebration of the resurrection, based in our faith in the Risen Lord.  While death is painful, and a time of sorrow and grief at separation for us the living, it is part and parcel of the life cycle God made when he created us.  Though we must not seek it out, or minimize its mystery and the fear it inspires, in a very real way, Death is our beloved brother or sister creature. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

What's Expected (Proper 22C)

What’s Expected
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22 Year C RCL)
18 September 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Readings: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Last week, a member of the altar guild approached me before service and said with emotion, “I need more faith!”  “What?” I said.  “I need more faith!” She repeated.  “How so?” I replied.  She answered, “I am totally angry and tired of dealing with messes, drama, and scary stuff when I come to Church in the morning. I know I should love the homeless and be gentle and welcoming.  But when they cause problems I just can’t muster it.  I need more faith!”  

My heart went out to her.  Many of us in the parish have had to deal with “messes, drama, and scary stuff” due to people without shelter overnighting in the Church courtyard.  This good woman had been doing so admirably for months, only occasionally saying something when someone really went outside the boundaries.  But here she was, dealing with a major case of guilt and self-reproach for not “being nice” enough, for not “following Jesus” and forgiving.    All I could say was, “you have faith, and you don’t need to beat up on yourself for other people’s faults. We must keep reminding people of the rules, and if it doesn’t work, we might have to close the campus reluctantly, like all the other houses of worship in town.” 

“I need more faith.”  We all run into this, from a variety of quarters:  a feeling of being overwhelmed by demands on our time and emotional energies, and a sense of guilt and self-reproach when we don’t seem to be able to meet the requirements of what is expected of us, of what we expect of ourselves, or even muster a moderate amount of graciousness to help cover our shortfall.     

The Gospel reading for today is about this.  Jesus has just told the disciples that they need to forgive people who harm or hurt them even “seven times a day.”   The disciples respond with today’s line:  “Increase our faith!”  They are saying, “Yikes!  Forgive someone who does us wrong over and over again?  I need more faith.” 

Jesus answers,  “If you had even just a little tiny bit of faith, say the size of a little seed, then you could do impossible things!”  Elsewhere, it is “you can move mountains just by telling them to move.”  Here it is “you could tell that huge Mulberry tree over there to plant itself in the middle of the ocean and it would thrive there!” 

Jesus is being a little sarcastic here.  It sounds like he himself has had a bad day and might be saying to himself, “You need some faith here, Jesus!”  But what he means, stripped of the sarcasm, is clearly, “You already have enough faith.  Just put it into practice.” 
 

He gives a parable saying it’s all about expectations:  “Does the household staff get to rest and have dinner just because they’ve worked hard in the field all day? No.  They must first feed the Householder in proper style and only then can they take their meal and rest.  Don’t expect any better.  Do what’s expected of you, and then some, and don’t worry about getting nice thank you’s or attaboy’s or attagirl’s.  You’ve only done what was expected.”  

As most of Jesus’ edgier parables, this parable in its original setting may be a criticism of the economy and society of exploitation around him.  But in Luke’s context it means:  “Lower your expectations and you might find that just doing what’s expected of you is enough of a reward.” 

What’s expected.  It sounds like a bad joke from that torment that most of us have encountered in our professional lives, the performance evaluation.  Cartoonist Scott Adams in one “Dilbert” strip pictures Dilbert’s officemate Alice seated across from her boss.  He begins, “Alice, your performance this year ‘meets expectations.’ You get a two percent pay increase.” Alice replies, “Meets expectations? I worked eighty hours every week!” The boss replies, “Yeah ... Well, I expected that.”  Alice adds, “I earned three patents this year! The company will make millions!”  The boss: “Really? Wow.   … I mean ... I expected that too.” Alice adds, “I donated bone marrow to our biggest customer! Twice!”  To which the boss replies, “I noted that under ‘attendance problem.’”  Later, Alice is in the cafeteria, clearly sobbing. Dilbert says, “I told you the bone marrow thing would haunt you.” Another officemate opines, “I'm starting to think the time I worked through my lunch hour was for nothing.”

Jesus says, “When you have done all you were ordered, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what was expected!’”  Sounds like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss from hell.  “Meets expectations?” Really? 

When reading the Gospels, we must constantly remind ourselves that the historical Jesus is to us a foreigner who speaks an unintelligible language.  His life and work was sparer and harder than any of us have seen.  They make the hardships of today’s third world look gentle.  His culture and religion are alien, with values and world-views that often seem narrow, inhumane, and even bigoted.  So we must carefully interpret his words or risk getting the wrong point.

In the chapters of Luke we have been reading over the last few weeks, Jesus has told shocking stories about people receiving rewards and recompense.   The loving father of the prodigal son welcomes the disrespectful and dissipated ingrate home.  He runs out to him, embraces him, and throws a big expensive party for him, much to the annoyance of his older brother who has met the expectations of his father and culture.   The householder praises the shrewdness of the dishonest manager, who retires to a gentle life being hosted and funded by those who benefited from his departing from expectations.    The homeless wretch Lazarus, no doubt ridden with messes, drama, and scary stuff, is welcomed to Abraham’s bosom, while the wealthy man who exceeded the expectations of society must suffer in the afterlife.

The disciples may well be thinking, “If moral reprobates, crooks, and those who sponge off of others are going to be blessed by God, just think of what good people like us are going to get!” 

And then Jesus tells them to forgive, forgive, forgive:  seven times a day for repeat offenders who seem not able to change.  And with the rest of us, they say, “I need more faith.”    Jesus, in clear exasperation says, “You want more faith?  Just a tiny bit of faith would work miracles for you, if you had any.  Let me tell you about some slaves who don’t get any extra praise or reward when they simply do what is expected of them.”

Jesus is giving them a Zen koan:  a saying hard to understand, that draws forth from us a change in perceptions and attitudes.   Like most of his parables, the saying turns everything on its head, and reverses expectations.   The first will be last; the last first.  The leader must be servant of all.

He is talking about faith in a loving God, a God of grace, a God like that loving father of two wayward boys.  If you want faith, you have to have faith.  And that means faith in God.  And God destroys our petty expectations by exceeding them. 

Jesus grew up reading and quoting from the Book of Sirach, which says, “My child, if you want to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal” (Ecclesiasticus 2:1). Ordeal—dealing with the messes, the drama, and the scary stuff—is part of the job description of serving God.  It is part of the job description of being a disciple of Jesus. 

But faith in God—faith in the living, Jesus’ expectation-overturning Abba—faith even in tiny tiny amounts makes it better.  It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.  It’s about whether it’s real trust in that loving God. 

When we trust, when we are deeply thankful and grateful, well, we stop keeping score.  Many things that once were intolerably hard become easy.  We seem to know the right thing to say at the right time.  And we no longer have a grudge against God or anyone else.  True faith—even in tiny amounts—is like that. 

Thomas Merton wrote, “[Concern about] means and ends... is not the way to build a life of prayer.  In prayer we discover what we already have.  You start where you are, and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there.  We already have everything, but we don't know it and we don't experience it.  Everything has been given to us in Christ.  All we need is to experience what we already possess.  The trouble is, we aren't taking the time to do so.”

May we strengthen our life of prayer, and exert trust and faith—even just a little, because that is all it takes to work miracles—in that living, loving God.

Amen.