The House of Love

I'm way behind on posting sermons preached in 2018; here's the start of a dozen or so I need to post while catching up. 

You know the family car trips, where you all sing something or do something when you go under a bridge, or see a cow, or whatever. In my family, when we saw one of those road signs warning about ice, with the black skid marks behind the tires, we would yell, “Snakes bite your tires! Snakes bite your tires!” For a few years at least, my older siblings had me convinced me that that sign really was a warning about snakes. Snakes are scary.   

         So here is this confusing snake story in our Old Testament reading, about God visiting snakes on the complaining Israelites, and they are in terror, legitimately. And when Moses intervenes for them, God tells him to put a brass snake on a pole, and that the Israelites will be healed when they look at the snake on a stick.

         The reason this weird snake story is in our lectionary is because Jesus refers to it in the Gospel lesson, and I’ve always wanted to get to the bottom of it. In the Bible, snakes sometimes symbolize evil and deceit, but also wisdom: “Be as wise as serpents…” Jesus says in Matthew. In Greek religion, Asclepius, the God of healing, is depicted as a snake entwined up a staff—still the symbol of medicine today. Ancient peoples observed that snakes went under the earth to hibernate for months at a time. In Jungian analysis, the serpent is a representative of the lower worlds, of what is inside, or beneath, that cannot be seen from the surface. Dreams about snakes are seen as carrying messages from our shadow side. So perhaps God had Moses put the snake on a stick so the people could reflect on what they were really afraid of. God does not take away the snakes—the source of their pain. Instead God asks them to imagine a world where there are snakes--where they might get bitten--AND where God is with them, and where God’s mercy is sure.

In our Gospel story, Jesus is talking to Nicodemus (a Pharisee, and leader of the Jews) who comes to him in the dark of night, not wanting to be seen. And in the verses before these ones, he is asking Jesus, “What kind of Messiah you do claim to be. What is behind the things you do? What is the path to salvation you hold out to the people?” Our passage opens as Jesus is answering him. He says:  “You know, just like the snake in the desert, the son of Man will be lifted up on a tree.” (That must have been illuminating.) And then Jesus says those famous words, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  

God “so” loved the world—we often hear this as “God loved the world SOOOO much…” But Jesus is saying—This is the way that God loved the world.  God loved the world like so:  God sent his only Son. And the only way that the people could be saved was for the Son of Man to be lifted on a tree, to be crucified. And God did that, not because God wanted to punish people, but because it was the only way they would get the message.

It’s significant that Jesus says the “Son of Man” must be lifted up. The Son of Man hints that Jesus is the pattern for all of us. Jesus came to take up our human experience, to live and die as one of us.  So the Son of Man must die, because we die.  God’s saving action was not to take away death, but to transcend death, to make possible eternal life. And in order to receive this new life, we must look at the cross in faith. We must trust that this symbol of death is to us a symbol of new life. So in a world where death is everywhere, there is the hope of life.  Just like that snake on a stick:  “Snakes are not your enemy,” God tells the people, “your fear is your enemy. And your fear is keeping you from seeing that I have liberated you from slavery, and am leading you into the promised land. I am giving you new life!”

The Israelites were fearful. And so are we. And so, we organize our lives around avoiding that fear. Henry Nouwen talks about Jesus as God’s invitation into the House of Love. But we have to move into the House of Love, from that other house—the House of Fear. And it’s hard. The Israelites struggled to do it. That’s why Jesus was still talking about the snake on a stick, many hundreds of years later.  

Welcome Home, by Carol Aust

To be honest, today’s Gospel passage makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean, John 3:16, has been trivialized, turned into a bumper sticker, a screen saver, a sign in the end zone at a football game. And some of the language in this passage, and in our Epistle, seems like TV preacher talk. This talk of being saved. Conquering death. Eternal life. But Martin Luther called this passage “the Gospel in a nutshell,” and I respect that. So let’s talk about those words.

Being saved:  Security, being healed, restored to wholeness and the kind of innocence that life has beaten out of us. As to death: our fear of actual death, yes, but also the fear of lesser deaths:  Failure. Loss. Losing our vitality. And being spiritually deadened, a life that is just going through the motions, living for ourselves alone—as our Epistle described.

What is eternal life?  It is life in communion with God, life in Christ. And it starts now, as the life in the spirit Paul writes about. It is living in the now, in gratitude, in ease and contentment. It is not a life immune from danger, but it is not captive to fear. It is not without pain, but it is not defined by it. It is feeling we are where we are supposed to be, doing what we were born to do--“for we are what he has made us…” This life is eternal because Christ is eternal. So our life in Christ continues when we die--it merely changes form.

And this promise -- being saved, conquering death, having eternal life -- is the gift that is offered to us in Jesus—a gift of pure grace. And it is available to everyone. Everyone that is, “who believes in him.”

That’s what I think John 3:16 says. But there’s this other word.  I was grateful that “believe” was one of the words in our Lenten series, because the word “believe” is a stumbling block. It must be, because people have been reading John’s Gospel for millennia, and struggling to believe it. We don’t accept the gift we have been offered. So how we are believers?

John uses the word “believe” dozens of times, usually in this sense:  “to place confidence in,” to “trust in.” The proposition is this:  “If you trust that this impossible promise is possible, and is meant for you—yes YOU; if you trust that the God of love is stronger than your fears; if you trust that being alive in the spirit is better than where you are right now—then you can have a new life, a life in Christ, a life that does not end, even in death.” If you really trust that.

Many who claim to “believe” in this proposition, still live in the house of fear. Because even though we don’t like fear, if we are looking for evidence to support our fears, we will find it.  So maybe we visit the house of love from time to time.  But a lot us still hang out in the house of fear. It may be our primary residence.

Snakes are our fears. They remind us of the things we’re afraid of, things perceived and what is in our unconscious. In the desert, God left the people to be confronted with their own selves, with the evil within and without them. They had hoped God would make the snakes go away—they were being asked to live with them, and to put their trust in God. When we do not “believe,” or put our trust in God, we put our trust in something else, in the things or values of the systems of this world.

We cannot on our own banish the snakes of our own nature, of our own fears, failings and shortcomings. Nor can we banish the evil around us. But we are not left alone to them, either. The house of love is not in La-la land. It is not in the sweet bye-and-bye. It might even be in a dodgy neighborhood.  But it has a “room available” sign on it right now.  So let us lift our hearts to God, let us place our trust in God. The door is open. The path is lit, and there is strength there, strength that will do for us what we cannot accomplish for ourselves. 

Preached at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland OR, March 11, 2018.

Lent 4(B) readings:  Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Proper:  Epiphany 3B

Last weekend I attended two interfaith events celebrating the legacy of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one at Temple Beth Israel, and one at Vancouver Ave. First Baptist Church, the site of the only speech Martin Luther King made in Oregon. At both events, I heard a portion of one of his speeches, in which he said: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”

“The fierce urgency of now.” This echoed in my mind all week as I considered today’s texts, which are full of imminence, and immediacy, and urgency.

The words spoken by Jesus in today’s passage are Jesus’s first in Mark’s Gospel---and Mark being the oldest Gospel—they are Jesus’s first words in the entire Bible! The words are, “the time is fulfilled.” The four fishermen recognize the urgency in them. They hear the call to repent and respond.

Now. Immediately.

Our reading from Corinthians reflects the belief at that time that Christ would return at any moment. Paul tells them, “the appointed time has grown short.” Get your priorities in order, he is saying. The Corinthians are called to respond.

Now. Immediately. 

“For the present form of this world,” Paul says, “is passing away.”

Mark uses the word “immediately” 27 times in his Gospel. His Gospel is the one that really cuts to the chase. As Mark sees it, God has a plan for God’s people. God has sent Jesus, the Word incarnate, because the time is fulfilled. The time is now.

And our response is required.

The Greek word for “time” as used here is kairos. Kairos is not about chronological fact. When Jesus says “the time is fulfilled,” he hasn’t just looked at his watch and said, “Yikes it’s 8:20!! The bus leaves in 5 minutes.” He is talking about an important moment in time.  Kairos shares a root with the word for head, as in:  Things are coming to a head. Time in this sense means opportunity. Now is the time, Jesus says, for change. He calls us to to repent—to change direction, to help close the narrowing gap between this world and the kingdom. 

We’re still being called to that repentance. We’re still being asked to respond by doing kingdom work here on earth. And there is still no time like the present.

Boy that’s easy for me to preach. It’s easy to grasp, too—in our minds. So what makes it so hard for us? I think it’s partly because God’s time and our time can be two competing forces. We are caught up in the timetables of our lives, of our family’s lives, of the world’s institutions. Or we are caught up in our personal ambitions and goals--we are dancing to our own drummer. 

God’s call to us, then, can be really inconvenient. Really disruptive. 

Imagine how the families of those fishermen felt!

“Has anyone seen Andrew?”

“I thought he was fishing.”

“Well, I found his net over there…”

“Great, there goes dinner...”

So we may hear God calling, but our fear of disruption or change is like—we see God’s number on our cell phone…and we send it to voicemail.

 “I hear you God. But not now.”

And we spend a lot of cycles in psychological time. That’s what Eckhard Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now, calls our mind’s activity whenever we are NOT focused on the present. We’re in psychological time when we’re stewing over the past:  nurturing a past slight, or regretting something done or not done.

We can spend a lot of our “now” in the past. 

We're in psychological time when we're worried about the future: we’re going over scenarios for what might happen. We’re marshaling our response. We’re trying to predict what will happen, so we can have maximum control over it.

We can spend a lot of our “now” in the future.

Of course we need to face our past, and we need to look toward the future, but only insofar as there are meaningful implications for us in the present. To dwell on the past, or live in daydreams (or nightmares) about the future, is to forfeit our present opportunity to respond “now.” We have only now—to use our past to propel us into a new way of thinking, a new direction, so that we may help bring about a different future.  So psychological time can keep us stuck.

Another reason we don’t hear the urgency of God’s call is that we don’t always like the work God calls us to do. And this is where we meet ourselves in Jonah. 

Oh, how I love the book of Jonah. It’s way more interesting to take in the whole story than just the little snippets in our lectionary. This book is less about prophecy, and more about the prophet. The prophet who did not want to answer God’s call.

Notice that our reading today says, “the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time…” Let me recap the story (I boned up by watching it on Veggie Tales). The story begins with God’s first call to Jonah to prophesy in Nineveh, and Jonah’s response is to hop a boat for Tarshish – as far in the other direction as he could go. And, short story shorter, God gets Jonah back to Nineveh by way of a big fish, which swallows him up and vomits him back on the shore—right by Nineveh--after three days in that fish’s belly.

No, Jonah did NOT want to prophesy to Nineveh.  

You see, he forgot that he was God’s prophet. And this was God’s agenda. And God had judged that this was Nineveh’s time—its kairos. When God first called Jonah, he said: “Go AT ONCE to Nineveh…and cry out against it.” 

Go at once, God said. Immediately.

"La la, la," said Jonah, his hands over his ears.

Jonah is bummed that the Ninevites are not smitten.
(from VeggieTales)

Oh, he agreed with God that the Ninevites were evil. You see, Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, an enemy of Israel. The Assyrians were not only brutal; they were really sinful. Jonah didn’t want to warn them—he just wanted God to wipe them out. So yeah, he prophesied, but really, really reluctantly.

And darned if they didn’t repent. And as Jonah feared, God was merciful! God gave Nineveh a second chance! Boy, did Jonah hate that.

I would never be like Jonah!!! Never. 

Today’s texts move quickly. Jonah’s prophecy is all of eight words, and the Ninevites go from sin to repentance in one paragraph. The fishermen don’t even ask Jesus any questions—they just go. So these fast-paced texts, presented to me during the week of the first anniversary of my ordination, had me reflecting on how I responded to God’s call. Did I hear that call truly with “the fierce urgency of now”? Did I respond “immediately”-- like the fishermen?

Nope. More than once, I struggled against the interference of God’s call with my other plans, and at times, like Jonah, I wanted to run the other way.

Thank goodness God didn’t send a fish for me. But I got here.

So I have learned that most of us are not so nimble. Sometimes when we hear God’s message, and begin to change direction, we are so weighed down by life’s complications that we turn more like an ocean liner than a sports car. The changes may be gradual. We don’t always set off in exactly the right direction. In fact, sometimes we can’t even see where we’re going. And that’s ok. Sometimes our experience acts as a course corrector along the way. Sometimes, the journey teaches us where to go next.

So our first step may be to confront where we are. To get ourselves ready. Maybe to begin by letting something go. What is important is that we turn, that we move. Because God’s agenda is urgent. We are invited to participate with God in bringing the kingdom closer, and each moment matters.

Response begins with one step in a new direction—feeling, turned into action. If you're frustrated with the political situation, vote. Speak out. If you’re harboring a grudge, extend forgiveness. If you’re feeling burdened or heartsick, ask for prayers. Just turn, and begin.

            In that same speech, Dr. King said (paraphrase): “Our sisters and brothers wait eagerly for our response. Will our message be that the forces of our American life simply work against their arrival as full citizens, and send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of our shared longing, of hope, of solidarity, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though—like our friend Jonah--we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose.”  

King preached that in 1967. A lot of present moments have passed since then. A lot left undone.    

The time is fulfilled. Kairos is here. The kingdom is at hand. We are given us the precious gift of life, and every day unfold fresh opportunities of the present moment. 

God-given opportunities. 

May we consider them mindfully. May we dedicate them to God.  And may we respond with the fierce urgency of now.

Amen.

Preached at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR. Jan 21, 2018. 

Lectionary Readings:  

Jonah 3:1-5, 10

1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Mark 1:14-20

Psalm 62:6-14