Bitterness and Regret

Good Morning!  Pastor Keven is not here today.  My name is Yehudah.  Pastor Keven talked to me earlier in the week and he felt it best if I got up and spoke to you today.  You see, I am one of the lepers.  Now, Yehuda, I understand that name may be a little difficult for you to understand.  In English, I believe, you pronounce my name Judah and in the Greek of Jesus’ time, you might have called me Judas.  No, don’t look at me like that.  I’m not THAT Judas.  You see, the Jewish people often emulated the people in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Lots of people in my time were called Judas, Levi, Joseph, Miriam (or Mary), and even Joshua, whom you now pronounce as Jesus…or Josh in some cases.  Yes, in my time Jesus’ name was pronounced Yehoshua, his name means “God Saves”, and He did, many, many times.  Pastor Keven asked me to speak today, because this story is the story of my salvation, not once but twice.  My name, however, is my shame.  Yehudah in my language means “grateful to God”, and I wish to Heaven I had been named anything else.

What’s that?  What was it like being a Jew of my time?  A Palestinian Jew in the time of Jesus?  Well… like all of you we grew up with our stories.  We grew up with our religion, of course, the stories of Moses and King David just as you did.  But also like you, we just didn’t have our religious stories, we had our national ones.  Here in America you have The Boston Tea party, the Boston Massacre, the Battles of Yorktown and Valley Forge.  Our experience was a little different.  We had a man, his name was King Antiochus IV.  Antiochus Epiphanes the IV.  Literally, “God Manifest”.  You see my friends, fter Alexander the Great conquered his Empire, conquered Greece, Egypt, Israel, and all the way the Himalayas and India, he died… so apparently he wasn’t that great.  Pretty good maybe, but “Great”?  I don’t know.  But when he died his Empire was left to his top four generals, and Antiochus was their descendant.  I had a great grandfather who lived under Antiochus – and I will never forget the look in his eyes.  Antiochus, did not like Jews very much.  On the rumor of a revolt in Jerusalem, he came.  He came with his armies and his machines of war.  He broke into Jerusalem and he killed our people by the thousands.  He stole our women and our children.  His soldiers murdered our priests and stole all the artifacts of the temple.  But, worse than that, he would do something that would leave a scar in the minds of every Israelite for centuries to come.  He broke into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the temple, in all of Israel, and erected an idol to Zeus and sacrificed a pig to it on our altar.  From that moment on, my religion was banned.  We were to worship the gods of Olympus.  He burned our scrolls and condemned anyone practicing the religion of our ancestors to death.

That was our national story.  Now, God was faithful to us.  Antiochus may have won that battle, but his actions erupted into an all out war.  Though his armies far outnumbered ours, the Jewish people were united under a man named Judas Maccabeus.  Under his leadership, we were victorious over the armies of Antiochus and we reclaimed our land and our temple.  We were free!  We rededicated the temple to Yahweh, and we called the celebration Hanukkah.  And Antiochus Epiphanes, he died pathetically of bodily inflammation and madness.  Hmmph, God Manifest (pretend spit).

But that was our story.  It was the narrative that explained who we were as Israelites, just as your Revolutionary War or your Constitutional Convention does for you.  But whereas you kept your freedoms, your ancestors kept watch to ensure their freedoms were passed on to their children, mine did not.  We did have independence for a time, but the Jewish kings proved only marginally better than the Gentile ones and when their greed and in-fighting reached its height, we were all but sold to Rome so one of our princes could depose his brother and gain the throne.  That is why shame was not new to my people.  We had independence, but our faithlessness and violent evil bought us exile.  First, came Persia, then Babylon, the Persia again, then Greece, and finally Rome.  We are a conquered people, and the only freedom we ever tasted we traded away. 

We longed for a good king.  A Jewish King from the line of David to protect our people.  We longed to return to the Golden Age of Israel, to the times of David and Solomon and we cried out to God day and night for a king that would set us free.  Free from the gentiles, free from our own corrupt leaders, and, though we did not know it, free from a backbreaking Judaism that hurt more than it healed, and most of all freedom from our sinful natures.  That king came, he came right when our desperation reached its peak, but there were many who did not recognize him.  That was to our shame, too.

I met him, you know.  I was a leper then as I said.  Now, leprosy then wasn’t what leprosy is today.  Leprosy today is called Hansen’s disease, but back in my day it was not just one but many different afflictions, and that is exactly how we thought of it – as an affliction.  Yes, we understand leprosy today as a disease but in my day leprosy was the worst of all possible curses.  For us, it was literally a living death.  Many of the writers of my time would talk about it, and it was widely known that neither priest nor magician, neither prayer nor sorcery could be rid of this terrible, terrible fate.  Because God alone had the power of life and death, only God could bestow leprosy on a person, and because only God could bestow it, only God Himself could remove it.

You don’t know what it was like, being a leper in those days.  The Jewish law declared us unclean, and so we were exiled - exiled from our families and villages, exiled from our people, exiled from life.  There was nowhere we were welcome, nowhere we could go.  That is why we hung together in groups, you see, for protection.  To be a leper was to be despised and feared, called a sinner and treated as an abomination.  We were told that God was angry with us, angry at our terrible sin, for what other reason would God afflict us so?  We couldn’t even go to the temple to atone for it!  We were lost, afraid, and hated.  Penniless and dying, even beggars could at least go into town and beg.  I cried out to God, “Why?!”  WHAT DID I DO!?  To deserve…this?  And for years, nothing.  God’s answer to me was always … nothing.

We were wandering the countryside in those days, near a village on the road to Jerusalem.  There were ten of us, and we heard of this new rabbi that was in Judea.  Oh, but he was more than rabbi.  Some claimed he was a prophet, some claimed he was a king, maybe even THE King, but all held he was a worker of miracles.  We had heard that he had even cleansed leprosy.  Leprosy!  Many Jews didn’t know how to feel about that.  God alone had the power to remove such terrible things and our stories were rife with warnings about people claiming to be “God Manifest”

I don’t know why we did it.  But we saw him enter the village and we raced after him.  We kept our distance, though; we shouldn’t have chased him into town as it stands.  We didn’t want to either make him unclean by touching him nor did we want to invite violence upon ourselves for coming in.  Not knowing what to do, we all cried out as one person, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”  Heh.  We knew what we were asking, we knew that only God himself could remove our affliction and yet we used “epistates” the word for a human overseer. Epistates?  Kurios!  Adonai! Was what we should have called him!  LORD!  Maybe it was because we didn’t want to give the villagers further excuse to hurt us.  Maybe we really couldn’t handle the idea of a Human God, but we cried out just the same.  “Jesus, Master, heal us!”

And that look in his eyes, that look of kindness and compassion.  Here we were, pitiful pathetic wretches, asking Him to do something only God could do, believing that He could do it, and we insult him by referring to him as a mere employer.  But Jesus didn’t see that.  Jesus didn’t see my sin, my terrible affliction and condemnation, he saw only people who were scared, who were forced to bear this terrible weight alone.  In his mercy he spoke to us, knowing the damage it could do to tell us to go against our religion, to act like Naaman the Syrian, he told us to obey our Jewish law, to show ourselves to the priests as people cured of leprosy were supposed to do.  And we did.  We all did.  We had dreamed of this moment every single second of every single day of our lives, when we would finally present ourselves as CLEAN.  Welcomed back into community, to hold a job, to have a family.  To be greeted with words of joy rather than thrown rocks.  We went, just as he said … and we were clean! 

But I had a problem so much deeper than rotting skin, and it took a foreigner, a Samaritan, of all people, to show it to me.  I am not Yehudah.  I was not grateful to God.  I was so concerned with the state of my flesh I didn’t see the state of rotting heart.  I asked God to heal me, insulting the Doctor by calling him an orderly and then daring to ask a favor of him in the same sentence.  He sensed our fear, the damage it might do to our faith, and then in kindness he healed us through that faith, and … I didn’t care.  I was so focused on the rules, the stupid little nuances of my people’s ruthless, discompassionate interpretation of Torah that I failed to see what a thankless, ungrateful fool I had become.  Not the Samaritan.  We traveled with this man, a man who was not just a leper but a foreign leper, and he thanked God every single day for everything he had.  However badly we were treated, however terrible the day, he began and ended it with thanksgiving.  We mocked him for it, and however bad we were treated, he was treated far worse.  And yet, when I turned back, I saw him.  I saw him openly thanking God and in the sight of all the Jews he prostrated himself, kneeling before Jesus as we would before Yahweh at temple. 

But I didn’t care.  I kept walking.  In that moment all that pain, all those years of bitterness and anger, it made me into the most selfish person imaginable.  I walked and I walked, and while walking I heard Jesus off in the distance ask, “Were not all ten healed? Is the only one to come back and give praise to God this foreigner?”  and I still didn’t care.

Don’t be like me!  I understand better now.  When I asked God what I had done wrong to receive my leprosy, when “nothing” was the constant answer, I know that that was what I had done.  Nothing.  I had done nothing to earn my sickness, nothing to deserve the condemnation of my people - it was just a disease.  But I listened to them and not God, I listened to the very people who called me sinner, threw me out into the wilderness, and kicked me like a diseased dog.  I listened to them and followed after religion when I should have been chasing faith!  I let the words of those selfish, stupid fools turn my heart bitter and when the time came to either choose gratitude toward the God who loved me ceaselessly or to obey an interpretation of the religion that beat me endlessly, I chose my abuser.  

DON’T BE LIKE ME.  Be grateful for every little thing you have, sound it out in the morning, voice it at night when you go to bed.  Give THANKS.  How other people treat you, what they say when they try convince you what to believe, dismiss it for the selfish nonsense that it is!  You listen to God!  You be faithful to Him, not obedient to them.  Mere obedience, the blind discharge of duties and human expectations will turn you into something much worse than a leper, it will turn you into a heartless fool.  As a leper I was rotting from the outside in, but as a child of God I was rotting from the inside out.  Be rid of it, be free!  Anything that treats God’s children as garbage is itself garbage.  Don’t believe in it!  I failed at being Yehuda, but that doesn’t mean you have to.  Amen.

To What End Our Religion? Sermon 7/26/15

To What End Our Religion?

A number of people often wonder why sometimes the lectionary seems to repeat itself.  The Gospel of Matthew contains some 28 chapters, Mark 16, Luke 24, and the Gospel of John has 21.  With such a plethora of material it seems strange that the lectionary would sometimes pull from the same basic set of events one week after another.  Well, there is a reason for this and that reason is they aren’t really repeats.  Each gospel has its own story to tell.  Jesus’ life was seen as so big, so incredible, that people believed that one account would simply not do Him Justice.  While many accounts of Jesus’ life were written at various times and for various reasons, the early church very quickly came to recognize four that clearly stood above the rest – each with a slightly different view.  So while it may look to us that our lesson today is simply the same story that Craig related to us last week the reality is each gospel is told for different reasons and paints a slightly different picture.

                Last week we read from the gospel of Mark, a gospel very likely written to Gentile Christians during the Roman siege of Jerusalem.  In the midst of that reality, faced with the power of the unstoppable Roman war machine Mark uses his story of the loaves and fishes to remind his audience of the power of compassion.  Sieges, after all, often meant people would go hungry as food would be rationed or indeed used up by your soldiers, but whereas War brought hunger and death, the power of this Jesus, the power of compassion, brought food and life.  Yes, whereas Rome conquered human bodies, this Jesus conquered the human heart.  That is Mark’s story to tell, but it is not John’s story.

                No, whereas Mark was writing to Gentile Christians John seems to have written his gospel to the Greek-speaking Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire.  Though Mark wrote his gospel to encourage people who were already believers in Christ, John explicitly tells his audience that his book is written that they might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing they would have life in his name.  It is not that Jesus is less compassionate in John’s gospel, no not at all!  But rather the story that John tells uses the same facts about Jesus but for a radically different people.  And it follows that if John wants to write his gospel so his Jewish audience will come to believe in their Messiah, it is also only natural to want to highlight what that belief looks like.

                In our gospel reading for today, John has Jesus on the far side of the Sea of Galilee and a great crowd of people are following him.  However, unlike the other Gospels John makes sure to tell his audience why.  They are there because they saw the miracles that Jesus performed on the sick.  They are not there because of faith, they are not there to learn anything profound, they aren’t even there to have the sick among their number healed.  Jesus had become a TV show, a spectacle to watch if you could make the time, not unlike the circus.  Still, despite this Jesus decides to work with it.  He sits down upon the mountainside and sees this great throng of people coming toward him, waiting expectantly for a miracle.

                Knowing what they are there for, Jesus decides to take this as an opportunity to reveal himself.   He turns to Phillip and says, “Where can we get bread for all these people,” knowing very well what he is going to do.  Phillip, of course, looks upon the crowds and declares that six months of a man’s wages could not by enough bread for each one to have a bite.  Another of Jesus’ disciples, Andrew, however, responds in faith.  Wishing to find any small way to respond to his master’s wishes, he comes forward saying that he has found a boy who has some small barley loaves and a small amount of fish.  “But,” he says, “how far will they go amongst so many?”

                Jesus tells the disciples to have the crowds sit upon the grass and to let them take as much food as they want.  In a miracle both reminiscent of Elisha and the man from Baal-shalishah where God declared the crowd would eat and have some left but also reminiscent of the Exodus - where the Israelites followed God into the wilderness and were fed by God with the bread from heaven - both the crowds and the disciples find that they can have as much bread and fish as they please from this boy’s small basket and it just doesn’t ever seem to run out!  Just as the Israelites did in the wilderness so long ago, Jesus has his disciples gather what is left, wanting nothing to be wasted.  When the disciples had finished, the meal that fit into one basket had grown to fill twelve!  One basket for every tribe in Israel, as it turned out.  Twelve baskets filled to the very brim.

To us, living in our scientific day and age, this tale is seen merely as an interesting yarn of how the laws of nature were somehow broken but to John’s audience it was an act steeped in meaning and rooted in the very history of the Jewish people.  But how does the crowd respond?  Is it in faith?  Is it in gratitude and wonder?  No, despite not once in its own revered Scriptures was anyone but God ever described as having these powers, Despite that Moses never fed the Israelites miraculously with bread, despite that Elisha couldn’t make the food never run out, and despite the fact John the Baptist came mimicking Elijah down to his clothing and even his diet, the crowds proclaim that here in Jesus is the Prophet that was to come into the world.  No doubt deeply disappointed and saddened by this, Jesus senses that the crowd is even coming to make him king by force and so he retreats up the mountain- alone. 

But John doesn’t end his tale there.  Later that evening, John says, the disciples go down to the lake and set off for the city of Capernaum.  John recounts that it was dark, and that Jesus had not yet rejoined them.  As was common for sea-going travel in that part of the world, a strong wind arose and the waters became very rough.  Being poor fishermen, however, it would be very unlikely that they could afford a boat meant to take the kind of weather the sea was about to throw at them.  Indeed, as the story says, three and half miles from shore they would be too far to swim to safety if the worst should happen.  The disciples must have been on nerves end and scared almost witless.  It is then, however, that they see Jesus coming toward them walking on the waters of all things!  Already frightened I could only imagine how they felt upon seeing this.  Indeed, as other gospel writers recall the disciples believed he must have been a ghost!  In the midst of those uncertain waters though, here Jesus does something very curious.  Here, in the midst of their grave need Jesus takes the opportunity to reveal himself again.  Now, our English translations often have Jesus saying, “It is I, do not be afraid” but that isn’t quite true.  Jesus doesn’t say “It is I, do not be afraid,” he says, “Ego Eimi, may phobeisthe”- “I am, do not be afraid.”  Uttering the name Yahweh, the personal name given to Israel through the burning bush, Jesus reveals his true nature to them.  It is here we come to John’s true point.  Whereas the crowds were shown Jesus’ true nature but disregarded it for an earthly political figure, the disciples are told straight out, and they accept him willingly just as he is.  And upon his acceptance into their number, they find the boat miraculously ashore at their intended destination, safe and sound.  One instance of revealing and crowds misunderstand and reject, and God Incarnate withdraws, leaving the crowds still wandering in the wilderness, the other with acceptance and gratitude followed by miraculous salvation and rescue.

                In the ancient world, you see, they didn’t have Microsoft Word, they didn’t have printing presses or even whiteout.  To make a book was a monumental expense in terms of money, effort and time.  As such, what came out of that process wasn’t just a book and it wasn’t just a story.  It was a craft, a work of art as well as history that was written because there was an important lesson that needed to be taught.  When John wrote to his fellow Jews it was not merely to impart a story they could find in another gospel, he is not throwing out an interesting anecdote to fill up space until he reaches the resurrection, rather he is deeply challenging his audience to analyze the very motives of their Jewishness.  He is asking his fellow Israelites “To what end is our religion?”  Is our beloved national identity, is our way of life, our understanding of God and the universe, is it about seeking an authentic relationship with the God who still walks among us or is this just a selfish means to a selfish end?  Do we go about doing our religion, do we quote from our Scriptures, show up at our places of worship because we seek a real encounter with God in the wilderness of our lives, or are we just sort of here for the show and hoping to get fed?  Do we seek the King because he is there to be sought, there to be with us in our darkest night and our roughest seas, or is even He just there so we can get what we want, a king that we make by force to replace the things, the beliefs, and the people that we don’t like?  These are the challenges John is placing before his audience, and they are as valid for the faithful now as they were two thousand years ago.

So the question must be asked, not only of us personally but as an American Church: To what end is our religion?  What are our motives, why do we as American Christians go about this business of faith?  Is it to be entertained?  Is it something to do when we have a day off?  When we argue our faith over against another, when we quote our Scriptures and invoke our God, is it for the other person’s benefit - or is it forcing the kind of Jesus we want to be king over their lives?

Ladies and gentlemen let it not be so!  I have been an American Christian for some 38 years and I am sorry to say that the most selfish and manipulative people I have met have never been atheists, and that is to our shame as a nation.  But is it not to our shame as a congregation.  Like the disciples, when we saw the public’s reactions to the gospel of forgiveness, an attempt to take the truth of God’s love and twist it into something it wasn’t, we left.  We looked out at those lonely waters and we struck it out on our own knowing fully the dangers those waters posed.  We went anyways.  When those waters got rough, when we were scared trying to keep the waves from crashing in and swamping what we meagerly had, we saw Jesus out on the waves and we invited him in just as he was, and those storms came and went didn’t they? 

I am not telling you this lesson because you need to learn it, you already know it well! No, I am telling this lesson because this is the lesson that disciples teach to others.  Just as John understood this lesson nearly two millennia ago and was empowered to challenge his fellow Hebrews so it is our job to learn this lesson well so we might challenge the faithful of our own era.  And let this be our message: Accept the real Jesus.  Not the Jesus that is to your liking, not the Church that puts on the best show, not the Christianity that lets you force your understandings onto others.  The real Jesus.  The Jesus who invites us to know Him and His Father in every act that they do.  The Jesus who affirms others as a good people with an honorable history worthy to be called the children of God.  The Jesus who would rather withdraw than let us make a mistake and the Jesus who comes off of mountaintops and across stormy seas to be with his own when they need Him most.  That is the Jesus of John, and may we be ever faithful to Him.  Amen and Amen.   

Post-Charleston Sermon

      

          ”Who then is this?” indeed!  A man who cures leprosy with a touch; who casts out demons, and calms the sea just by speaking to it?  It is a pity, but as modern readers of the ancient text, we often miss out on a lot that the gospel writers wanted us to know and to think about.  Indeed, in first century Judea all of these things - all of these miraculous powers - screamed of Jesus’ inherent divinity.  To a Jew, Leprosy was the worst of all possible curses: a punishment for sin that was literally living death.  As ruler over both life and death, it was believed that only God could bestow leprosy and therefore only God could cure it.  So when Luke describes Jesus as healing 10 lepers and then proclaiming to the crowds “Did only this Samaritan come back to give thanks to God?”, it is not on only a challenge to the people’s views about Samaria, but it’s also a challenge to recognize and accept Jesus’ true nature.

            And the fact is the Gospels are literally filled with these kinds of references to Jesus’ divinity.  Despite modern beliefs that ancient people were superstitious and stupid folk - believers of literally anything up to and including that miracles happened all the time - the surprising reality is that we find rather the reverse.  Many Jews of this era thought the age of miracles was behind them, and what few wonderworkers they believed were real weren’t really how we would envision them.  People like Hanina Ben Dosa and Honi the Circle Drawer didn’t really perform acts of power, they were what we would think of as just really effective at Prayer.  Much like today, yes we find the ancient world had its version of Palm readers and weavers of magic spells, but in all of ancient history the miracles ascribed to Jesus are singularly unique.  Then as today if somebody walked around our cities and towns, bringing sight to the blind and making the infirm stand up with a command, the people would not ask just “Who are you,” but “WHAT are you”. 

            As such, you can imagine my confusion when I heard a former pastor of mine said that the real Jesus was just a human being, that his divinity was manufactured centuries later and of the four gospels only John ascribes any divinity to Jesus at all.  As I was interning at a very progressive Church, It didn’t shock me that they thought that way, I simply found it tragic.  I found it tragic that even Christian clergy could know their own books so poorly.  So when Mark writes “Who is this that calms the seas with his very voice?” What on earth or in heaven could create order out of chaos with but a word?”, well, rest assured he had one Being and one Being only in mind.

            I say all this to you because I want to talk to you about the power of Jesus, and to talk to you about the power of Jesus I first need to make that power very real to you.  When the earliest Christians quote stories from Jesus’ life, it is from these gospels.  When the earliest Christians were martyred for their faith, it was over what was in these books.  We live centuries apart from the founders of our country do we not?  Even today, we would know whether George Washington was real or a  myth.  Even today, if somebody ascribed miraculous abilities to Thomas Jefferson, we would know whether or not it was true.  If these stories were false, we might laugh at them, but we certainly wouldn’t die for them.  And yet that is exactly what our Christian forbears did for the Jesus in our gospels.

Now why is this important?  Why do we need to understand Jesus’ power as real?  Because I need you to take it seriously.  I need you to take Jesus’ power seriously because we all need to take Jesus’ use of power very, very seriously.  That God became a human being and had the power to shape the very elements of creation itself and that He would sooner die a criminal’s death before using that power on another human being, this needs to be central to our Beliefs as Christians…and it’s not.

            In America, we have an addiction to power.  No, not an addiction, we are having an adulterous affair with it.  We chase endlessly after wealth, fame, and political office.  We say to ourselves as Christians if I only I can get my hands on more money, if only I were famous, if only I had a title that would make people do what I say life would be better.  Brothers and sisters, how can this be? 

Now, there is nothing wrong with these things in and of themselves.  There is nothing inherently evil with having money, there is nothing bad about being famous or holding political office.  Jesus’ life shows us that Power does indeed have a godly place, my complaint is as Americans we have absolutely no wish to find out what that place is.  We want so desperately to keep our myths that somehow power solves our problems, but the fact is it doesn’t.

            If you need proof that we do this, I can only point you to how we as a society accomplish everything.  We punish.   An out-of-work single mother thrown in jail because she couldn’t find babysitting while she went to an interview, a man thrown into jail for legally marrying his 16 year old wife because of a poorly worded statutory rape law, a twenty year old walks into a South Carolina church with a gun, we continue to believe that having power over another human being no matter the circumstances somehow magically makes the world a better place.   But it doesn’t. 

We value power to the point of insanity.  We indoctrinate our kids to value strength, to be strong and never to be pushed around - but we are outraged to find children get bullied to the point of suicide.  We insist on our rights, we demand not to have our time infringed upon, so much so that every time when see our spouses once work is done, we blow up and make all these ultimatums about their behavior -  And when our spouses finally won’t see us anymore , we have the gall to ask why.  This obsession with power, this need to force other people to do what we want even goes to the very core of the way we do religion.  When Craig (our pastoral associate) gave his sermon last Sunday, he called out our Bible Publishers and our Bible Commentators for not translating what was actually there and let me tell you I applaud him.  As a seminary graduate, I can’t emphasize enough how important a job our Bible translators have and yet despite this there is next to no accountability for what they print.  The publishers have learned how to sell Bibles and what sells Bibles to our American Culture is to fill it with words like “Obey” even when the text clearly doesn’t call for it.  Because homosexuality is such a hot topic, they make sure put in verses decrying it when anyone fluent in the language knows differently, and finally to sell Bibles they make sure to twist as much as possible to talk about the end times even to the point of ridiculousness.  Many Christians believe in a Rapture, the taking up of all true believers before God punishes indiscriminately everyone else.  Whether you believe in it yourself or not we need to realize that belief in the Rapture is very recent.  17 centuries passed in the common era before any Christian believed in the Rapture, almost two millennia of Believers pouring over the same Scriptures we have today and yet not one of them ever believed in it.  Yet we find it in our Bibles today don’t we?  Well, in actuality maybe we aren’t pouring over the same Scriptures after all.

            But this is who we are as a culture.  Publishers learned long ago what makes Americans buy Bibles and that is simply to make a product that helps us lord it over our neighbor. Bible’s that let us thrust our fingers into its pages to tell the other person to obey, Bibles that let us critique and discriminate against how God made them to be, Bibles that let us envision a world where God finally kills everybody but us.  It…has…to…stop.

            After spending two years in a very liberal church, I know I don’t agree with much of their theology, but they do have one thing over the rest of us.  A fair critique they have is that more conservative theologies make Christ into a cog, nothing but a wheel in some grand inexplicable scheme of salvation.  In Liberal Theology Christ is an example to live by.  They don’t just pour over his words looking for something that might be a command, they try to see what he was doing and the example he wanted to set.  In our gospel story for today, Power is Jesus’ last resort – not his first.  In the middle of the storm, even when it was at its worst, even when the boat was flooding and about to be capsized, he decided endurance and faith in the Father were far better choices than to simply command the world to do his bidding.  Indeed, if it were up to him he would not have used power at all.  But when the disciples cried out to him, in their panic and on the verge of their utter despair, it is then that Jesus calms the seas and brings order to the chaos of that moment.  Even then, however, it was power used for God’s children, not against, and indeed afterward Jesus still proclaims that faith was still the better option of the two.

            Power, you see does not accomplish what we think it does, and when I hear atheists from our culture scoff… when even they think so much of Force and Violence that they ask “how can you believe in an all-powerful God when there is so much evil in the world,” my answer to them is why do you think that power accomplishes anything?  A stone thrown violently into a pond brings the water down for second, but in the end the stone just sinks out of sight and the consequences of our actions end up rippling everywhere else, including back to us.   If history has taught us anything, it is that bullets and bludgeons do little to change men’s minds and forcing others to be good people in fact has never once made them into good people.  Indeed, if the goal is to create a better world to live in, Peace and Perseverance prove far better, and taking a bullet instead of spending one is a far more incredible show of strength.

            So what are we to do?  How can we, tiny and insignificant as we are, remotely take on the incredible violence and ugliness of our world?  The first step is we stop pretending it is the big and powerful things that matter.  Every big thing happens because of a multiplicity of small things.  It is the consistent little choices that build up to the evil or the good that we do.  And in that vein we come to step 2: If we are to change the little things, we must change our attitudes that are turning the little things bad.  We must do things like control our worry.  Our worries and our frets make mountains out of molehills, it makes us focus on ourselves rather than actually solving the problem.  God sees our situation and has already provided a way out of it.  Worrying about it only makes our responses to the situation selfish and poorly thought.  Worry makes us into ugly people and ugly people make ugly decisions. 

But we must not only control our worry, we must not only keep constant vigilance over our fears, we must also stop our blaming.  When we worry, when we give into our fears, we automatically concoct a reason for those fears and those reasons are usually anything but reasonable.  We saw the results of this in Charleston South Carolina, where a young man who worried that despite that white people were ¾ of the population and that we constitute 90% of the people in political office, he still felt that his race was somehow in jeopardy.  And because he believed his race was in danger he decided the only option was to shoot people praying in a church, and now 9 of our brothers and sisters have been taken away.  Parents will no longer have their children, and their children will no longer have their parents.  I am sure we don’t have the full story, in fact I am absolutely convinced that we don’t have the full story, but what I can tell you no matter the state of his mind that one act of hate will now create chances for thousands more, and that is what brings us to our final step.  We need to be involved. 

After living less than 40 years on this planet, I can tell you these tragedies have one thing in common.  Very, Very rarely are plots like this kept so secret that nobody could have truly stopped it.  We live in a society that is so apathetic to violence we have to tell our young women to yell fire when they are being assaulted, because that’s the only thing that makes us pay attention.  Jesus did not hide away his entire career, he lived amongst the people – it is why he is called Emmanuel: God with us.  He comforted and protected the wounded in his midst and He challenged the powerful that did the wounding.  He brought healing to the desperate and peacefully brought the ridiculousness of His enemies back on their own heads.  We need to learn to do the same.   Like Jesus we need to learn to have faith instead of fear, we need to learn to craft solutions instead of making people into the problem.  People will be the problem all on their own, believe me we don’t need to do it for them.  Finally, we must realize the teachings of Christ are worthless unless they are embodied.  We, too must live amongst the people and we must be the power of Christ in a world that so desperately needs it.  May we do so lovingly and in Christ’s Name.  Amen.