To desire a better country

Proper 14C

“They confessed they were strangers and foreigners on earth, for people who speak this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”

In the letter to Hebrews we heard today, the author alludes to the story of Abram, who believed God’s assurances and answered God’s call to go into another country. In return, he becomes the father of a new people—the people of God, the first citizen of new country conceived of entirely as a dream of God. The author of the letter tells the story of Abraham to comfort the Hebrews, amidst their own turmoil and persecution. In their fear and uncertainty they no doubt yearn for concrete and tangible safety. To be free from harm and persecution; to be warm; to be fed; to be clothed; to be together. 

They appear to be struggling, therefore, with the message that the things of this world do not matter at all, that they should not place their trust in anything that is familiar or comfortable to them, and that there is another country, on no map anywhere, waiting for them, on some date that is not on any calendar. 

There’s a problem in the dualism of both readings today. They are apocalyptic, anticipating a cataclysm between the earthly and spiritual realms.  We reject this dualism, allowing for the spiritual and earthly as both/and. We believe in the incarnational God that was first realized in Jesus, who showed us that God’s values of justice, and mercy require intrusions and disruptions to our human-created order—disruptions, in fact, that Jesus encouraged us to aid and abet. Not unlike the Hebrews, sometimes we would rather stay exactly where we are, trusting in what we know, drawing from experiences familiar to us. 

That’s why the the image Jesus uses of a homeowner’s care for his property is so provocative. He wants to illustrate what fortress behavior looks like on earth. If there is anything that symbolizes security in a concrete and tangible way, it is our household--so much so that we often refer to our homes as havens, or sanctuaries. 

While Hebrews makes clear that such status as a homeowner remains out of bounds for most people, for most of us in the Episcopal church, our context is of relative comfort. So using the compelling image of God breaking into our houses like a thief is to suggest a disruption that hits us literally and figuratively where we live. This isn’t Godzilla—smashing my West Elm sofa or your Samsung smart TV into bits. But it is a God who is challenging us to question the real and spiritual cost of our attachments. 

Jurgen Moltmann wrote that if make earthly possessions our heart’s desire, we will be disappointed.  They simply can’t deliver on that demand. “Only a love of God that has gone wrong deifies what is human and absolutizes what is worldly, thus destroying it,” he said.  

Trust is a mutual affair, he points out, and today’s readings are concerned with whether we reciprocate God’s trust in us. The Bible is full of stories that disconnect people from their familiar and trusted environments, calling them and place their faith instead in the things that God promises. Paradoxically, this kind of faith does not make their environment familiar, but alienates them from it. It loosens their hold on what they have, and its hold on them, freeing them to embrace the future and accept God’s promises. 

For trust in what we know binds us to the past and to the present. Another way of looking at trust is confidence, the ability to trust beyond what we know. The North Star of this trust is the future; this trust has the power to help us face challenges with openness, curiosity, and creativity. “In faith, trust in God does not mean the comfortable protection and safekeeping of our mother’s womb,” Moltmann wrote. “It means the risky freedom of the wide spaces and ever-new coming of God.” 

Now William Temple was someone who grew up steeped in tradition. Born in 1881 “into the purple,” as they say, he lived in Bishop’s palaces for most of his childhood. The father was Bishop of Exeter, and later Archbishop of Canterbury himself. The son followed, becoming a priest, then Bishop of York, then Archbishop of York, finally returning to Lambeth palace as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. 

I’ve never been to Lambeth, but I am assured it is--well, palatial--and rooted in things of the past. And there was not even a question in those days that the Archbishop of Canterbury would have come from the British upper class. The appointment is made by agreement between the Prime Minister and the British monarch, most assuredly of someone well known to them. Nevertheless, William Temple was to become a disruptor of the human-created order in England. 

You see, it seemed he had been paying attention. To Britain’s stultifying class system. A trickle-down system of charity rooted in patronage and rural parishes ill-suited to a country that was now urban and industrial. Despite meager social reforms, there were terrible slums, oppressive factories, child labor, and grinding poverty. He had come to maturity in the gilded age, where the gap between rich and poor was more dramatic than ever. Then, the carnage of the Great War, a stain on nations who claimed to lead the civilized world--and a great leveler of social classes. Then, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism in Europe. 

In boarding school, one of Temple’s teachers encouraged students to spend their summers in the London slums. This experience was one of several that exposed him to experiences he simply couldn’t unsee. First, he couldn’t unsee the poverty and misery, and the structural barriers that kept people from rising out of it. 

Second, he couldn’t unsee that the ordinary people he encountered were made in the image of God as surely as he was. Above and beyond their material needs, Temple saw that poverty and class barriers robbed them of the dignity of participating in and contributing to their communities. 

Finally, he couldn’t unsee the distant, ineffectual role of the Church of England in light of these concerns. The Church was inwardly focused, spouting a bland public morality concerned largely with gambling, sex, and drink. As Hitler came to power, its position was a detached pacifism. The Church was a fortress, disinclined to work with other Christian denominations, and across faiths. It was reflecting very little light into the world. 

And so, Temple acted. He made all of England his parish. He reached out to people in unprecedented ways. He offered others a seat at his table; he wrote articles in popular magazines, and had his own BBC Radio broadcast. Never lofty or distant, he took up approachable topics such as:  What Christians Should Do Now. He set down principles for Christian social action–affordable housing; education for all children; a sustainable income for all; sufficient leisure; a voice for every worker in the workplace. He used his platform to influence social discourse, as a convener, moderator, preacher, and teacher. He formed the first Council for Christians and Jews and inveighed upon English leaders to take in Jewish refugees. For all this, it’s a wonder that the conservative prime minister Winston Churchill chose him to be Archbishop. No doubt it was because in one of his broadcasts, he called for England to join the war against Hitler. It is said that popular opinion in Britain changed overnight.  

William Temple, London. Source: Getty Images 

He was a tireless worker and neglected his health, but was known for his boundless energy. And, for his faith. An attendee at an ecumenical convening he hosted wrote that the deepest impression Temple left was not his considerable intellect, or keen understanding—but his holiness. Reinhold Niebuhr said of him, “few of us have known any person whose life and personality were so completely and successfully integrated around love for Christ as their focus and crown.” 

I have no doubt that Temple’s confidence to forge into unchartered waters came in part from his privilege--his sense of himself as one among a class of men who were ordained to lead. But I think it was primarily that he came to share the dream of God. He heard the call, he grasped his privilege, and he set out to use it, for he desired a better country—not for his sake, but for others. He died in 1944 and was mourned as “the People’s Bishop.”  I believe William Temple singlehandedly pivoted the church’s consciousness of itself as an actor in the world and in relation to social justice.     

Richard Spencer talks of faith eluding those who would tame it, by art or by dogma. It is “not a thing or reality that exists in itself outside the human heart,” he wrote. “It is an action of the human heart, an inclination of the deepest part of the soul. It is the behavior of someone who allows God to be God... It is a sureness in the soul, not that things will probably work out as we planned them, or ‘as they should,’ but that behind and beyond everything there is a God who is good and trustworthy.”

Christians who think of Satan as the “god of this world” depreciate the world; and those who think of heaven as the realm of God are preoccupied with heaven. We seek the reality that lies behind the symbols.  Like William Temple, we open our eyes to the stark contrast between the unfulfilled reality of this world and the dream of God, and we seek to reconcile the two. Perhaps the dreamed-of homeland is not another world, but one that with God’s help, we realize here. We hold our gifts and our possessions lightly; we use them as salt, and light, and leaven, and we find ourselves where we belong—that is, in the service of Christ’s disruptive work in the world, not knowing always how, or when, or if we will effect God’s vision in our own lifetimes, but knowing most assuredly that the heavenly country Christ is working for the completion of God’s loving rule everywhere.

Prepared originally to be preached as a guest at St Michael All Angel's Parish on August 10, 2019, in conjunction with a visit as William Temple House chaplain. The visit was cancelled due to the tragic death by suicide of a parishioner on Saturday. My heart still breaks to remember that awful day. May her soul rest in peace and rise in glory.

Lectionary:  Genesis 15:1-6; Psalm 33:12-22; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40.

God doesn't care too much for money...

 Proper 13C 

"Say you don't need no diamond rings
And I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of things
That money just can't buy
I don't care too much for money
Money can't buy me love
Can't buy me love, 
Love, oh…"

You guys, it’s not just the Beatles Art Camp that made me do that. I saw the movie Yesterday this week.  Yup, I called my sister on Wednesday and said, “Nell, I’m calling Today to ask you if you want to see Yesterday. Tomorrow.” Anyway, Yesterday, the movie, is named after the Beatles song—and it’s a lot of fun. It’s about a struggling musician called Jack Malik who’s talented to a point, but not really getting anywhere. He’s just about to give it all up. Through a certain blip in the space-time continuum, he wakes up in a world where nobody has heard of the Beatles. They just never existed. And Jack just happens to know all the Beatles songs. So, he starts singing them. And people go nuts. I mean, of course they do! And they assume he wrote them all, and because he’s loving the attention--he lets them think that. Before long, he’s the biggest phenomenon to hit the music world in decades. He’s about to get the fame and attention he’s always wanted. And he’s about to get really, really rich. 

But--he’s not really happy. It’s partly that he doesn’t feel right getting rich on songs that aren’t his. But Jack realizes, too that with the astonishing amount of money he’ll come into, he will have to give up a lot—including someone he loves. And there’s this scene where he’s starting to go rogue. He’s starting to walk away from this opportunity. And his manager -- who will make a TON of money in the bargain, is chasing after him, trying to stop him. She yells: “For the love of money!!! Stop!!”  

That’s it. For the love of money, or for the love of God? That’s the crux of our lesson today.  

In one way, we all know it. We’ve sung that Beatles song. We know money isn’t everything. Money can’t buy love or homegrown tomatoes. It’s hard to preach on a platitude. Furthermore, I’ve noticed that people in church really don’t like it when the preacher talks about money. Maybe it sounds uncomfortably like the preacher is ASKING for money. Yet money problems are a principal reason why people get divorced. And fully one-third of Jesus’ parables are about money. So we might ask ourselves: why DON’T we talk about money more?  

Luke certainly has a lot to say about the right use of wealth in his Gospel. And in the parable of the rich fool in our reading today, he portrays wealth as neither an absolute good or an absolute bad. Instead we are judged by what we do with what God gives us. It’s not the having of wealth, but the role that it plays in our lives, that determines our relationship with God and our happiness. Jesus wants our decisions about money to be based in spiritual values, not the values of the world. To remember that all good comes from God. To remember the poor. Quite simply, as it says on our currency: In GOD we trust. Not in money.  

Our Ecclesiastes reading reminds us that the pursuit of money can be fruitless; a vain pursuit. It is vanity to obsess over what we have acquired and to puff ourselves up over our wealth, especially since we won’t enjoy it for long. Likewise Paul, in the letter to the Colossians, emphasizes that greed—the never having enough of something—can make money an idol which we serve. Instead, we are to set our mind on things above—on God’s values. If you spend all your time striving for wealth, you are focusing only on the future, fretting about what you don’t have. Meanwhile, a life of real meaning will pass you by.

I mean, that’s it. That’s the sermon. Pretty easy, right?  

It’s not, though, is it?  I just got done with a garage sale, and quite frankly, I couldn’t believe how much stuff I got rid of. And still have. I like stuff. I used to make a bunch of money and I got a lot of nice stuff along the way. Now I make--well, not a lot of money--and I still. Like. The Nice. Stuff. 

And while monks may literally give away all their earthly possessions, the rest of us live in the “real world,” don’t we? We need money to buy stuff—like food, clothing, and shelter. We need to provide for others—our children, or family members. We have community obligations which unless we move off the grid, we can’t and shouldn’t ignore. Then there is the beautiful world given us to live in, full of things to enjoy and discover.  It takes gas money to go to the coast. It takes resources to get a college degree, to go to museums or concerts, or plays. It takes equipment, and lessons, or tickets, to enjoy sports. Heck, even a pet costs money. 

Our Gospel starts with a question from a man who’s a younger brother, meaning, in the Jewish tradition, that he will NOT get his father’s inheritance—that will go to his older brother. Doesn’t Jesus agree that he should get some of that inheritance?, he asks. Jesus doesn’t answer him directly. Instead, he tells him, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” He’s saying, what if you DID get your brother’s inheritance? Do you really think that would make you happy? And he tells the parable of the rich fool. 

The rich fool is pretty pleased with how successful he is. He’s so successful, in fact, that he can’t figure out what to do with his treasure. Pay attention to how Jesus portrays him here, with some humor. Notice how many times the rich fool says I, and my:  “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops…I will do this:  I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods, and I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

Quite the self pep-talk. Quite the rationalization. But this is not a bad man. He is not the rich crook, after all. He is the rich fool, because he is living only for himself. And that, my friends, is his folly.

Where the man is putting himself and his possessions at the center, Jesus wants us to put God in the center of our whole conversation about money and what we do with it. He wants us to use our resources toward a life rich toward God. And so we are not to be greedy for the stuff of this world. We are supposed to be greedy for the stuff God cares about.  

Now, we can hear this as a message of judgment. I’m pretty sure the man who asked the question may have. I think our individual consciences might tell us whether we need to feel a prick of discomfort about our relationship with our possessions. I know I do. But really it’s a message of hope. For God loves us, and wants what’s best for us. God wants us to have bigger hearts, not bigger barns.   

I remember when my nephew was about four, he was really enjoying some Doritos, which his mother, deciding he had had enough, had taken away. So he is whining, “I want Doritos. I want Doritos.” His mother said, “Charlie, I’m not going to give you any more Doritos. I won’t always give you what you want. I will always give you what you need, but not always what you want.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “I need Doritos. I need Doritos.” Jesus cautions that what we want may not be what we truly need. He uses the word “greed,” but this is also translated as covetousness, or, as I prefer, craving. Charlie craved Doritos. Having money can make us crave money. Having nice things can make us crave nice things. And when we realize that what we truly crave is something rooted in money, we’re on a slippery slope. 

Money Can't Buy Love...or Homegrown Tomatoes
Painting by Mark Satchwill

So I say, let’s start talking about money. St Augustine once said, “God gave us people to love and things to use, and sin, in short, is in confusing the two.” Let’s start talking about the good use and also the abuse of material life in our homes and in our community. Let’s wonder together how our faith community and our tradition can help us live an abundant life that material wealth can support, but cannot produce. 

Let’s start naming our blessings—those aspects of abundant life that Jesus describes throughout the gospels—things like relationship, community, love, and purpose. These are the things that are, literally, priceless. When we heighten our focus on them, we learn what it means to be rich toward God. 

Finally, let’s be counter-culture. Let’s support each other in resisting messages that highlight inadequacies in order to sell us solutions. Let’s start re-using, sharing, and giving away more. Let’s remember to highlight the gifts we see in each other and are to each other—gifts that come from our very being: our hearts, and our God-given talents--not from a store. Let’s invest in relationships and laughter, and companionship, and consider how the wealth we do have can make more of that, for the love of God, and for the sake of the world. 

John Lennon once said: “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the most important thing in life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.” 

Jesus said:  “I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.” That kind of abundance cannot be bought with money. It can only be received, gratefully, and it grows only when it is given away. 

God never cared too much for money anyway.

Preached August 11, 2019, St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR

Lectionary: Ecclesiasties 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-11; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21  

Jesus loved the afflicted, including the mentally ill.

Soooo behind on posting sermons. This is from June, 2019. Catching up!!

Proper 7C 

You know, sometimes the Holy Spirit gives you Auntie Mame, as she did on Pentecost Sunday, and you’re inspired to laugh and sing and celebrate with joy. And sometimes she gives you a story about a crazy man and a herd of swine being driven off a cliff and says, “put that in your pipe and smoke it!” That’s how she rolls. But I promise, even in today’s strange and disturbing Gospel story, I think I found some good news. 

What spoke to me this week was the torment of the poor demoniac in that story. Most of you know that at William Temple House, where I work, we offer some of the only free or low-cost mental health counseling in the greater Portland area. Of course we don’t look at mental illness in the same way today as in Jesus’s time; we now understand it as related to imbalances in certain chemicals or neurotransmitters in the brain. So when someone comes to us in torment, like our poor demoniac, our Counseling group doesn’t call me and say, “can you perform an exorcism? The demons are back.” 

But I know this: when certain types of mental illness are at play, it can feel like demons. I’ve heard it described to me, and it is something like the agony that man described to Jesus:  voices and destructive urges that seem to come from somewhere else and just won’t go away. So, as much as things have changed, I don’t see our Gospel story as rooted in a context so different from our own that it has nothing to say to us in the here and now.  

I thought about what would have happened to this man if he hung out at 3^rd and Burnside in Portland. Like our demoniac, his clothes are not clean, and neither is his body. He is homeless, for he is too disordered to live with his family, and too disturbed to earn money for his own housing. There’s a good chance he has been a victim of violence; a smaller chance that he himself is violent. He likely self-medicates, and suffers from terrible addictions. So chances are at some point, someone has called the police; and he has been taken to jail if he has committed a crime—or, if he’s lucky, to a hospital. He might stay there for a while, and get his meds stabilized; detox; and get some group sessions. A while later he will be discharged in a more stable condition—“in his right mind,” as our Gospel says. The hospital would be eager to discharge him--they are equipped to respond only to crises, and they never have enough beds. And I can picture the discharge meeting. Someone expresses concern about whether there are support systems around him to keep him stable. And the doctors say, “that’s not our business: we’ve done our part.”

Sadly, like the demoniac, many people with untreated mental illness are in chains. Jails and prisons are the new asylums. Outdated treatment laws and the prolonged failure by states to fund their mental health systems has delivered too many over to the criminal justice and corrections systems, rather than into community-based public health systems where they belong. 

It’s a depressing picture. But it points to a particular truth in our Gospel reading: community matters. For Jesus “treats” the demoniac—he heals him, but the question looms: What’s next for him? The man wants to stay with Jesus. Jesus says, essentially, “No. You belong to your community. You need to stay here, and be a light to them.” 

But they don’t really want him back, and they want Jesus to leave them too. He has made them anxious. Jesus wants the healed demoniac to live in a changed relationship with his people. He wants him to reflect to them the grace of God’s healing power and for them to find in him the one he was created to be:  their brother, their neighbor, their selves. 

It’s the message we find in Galatians—God’s love extends to people the world shuns, the lesser ones along with the privileged. For there is nowhere—even the farthest side of the lake, where Gentiles live, a tribe of people who will even eat pork--that Jesus will not go. And there is no one—not even a naked, man, living in chains in a tomb and ranting and raving—that Jesus does not see, and does not love, and cannot heal—sometimes with our help. Jesus’s healings always have the quality of restoring people to their community. He is not interested in just the body; not just the mind:  but body, mind, and spirit. 

One out of every five families today experiences mental illness. They are our brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, and parents. They are our neighbors—even our fellow congregants--as are those who wrestle with the challenges of caring for them:  who worry about them; who agonize when they are not able to help them. And so Jesus calls us to address this together, as a community. We are part of his healing team.   

Many of you know that Rod MacDow has been active in our parish’s connection to NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which helps families and communities who are affected by it. He regularly visits the adult psychiatric unit at St Vincent’s, and asks patients what they are going to need to re-enter the world. What he hears most often from them is, “I feel isolated. I want friends. I want a social life.” Rod told me, “People who are mentally ill suffer from isolation and loneliness as much as anything in their lives. They would love to connect, and be just another person in the room.” 

            I’m proud St Gabriel supports NAMI. They are truly doing the Lord’s work. Still, it’s hard to ignore that the mental health problem is worsening, and a recent study found that our own state of Oregon is the worst in the country in terms of treatment options. So where do we find inspiration?  

 I found it in a town called Geel.

Geel is a Belgian town of about 40,000 souls, in whose center is a medieval church dedicated to Dymphna, a saint believed to have the power to cure mental disorders. For more than 700 years, it has been a shrine where pilgrims suffering from mental illness come for healing.  In the 14^th century, nuns opened a guest house to care for pilgrims who could not be cured. Once the guest house filled up, the town itself was inspired to accept people with mental disorders into their homes and care for them. And they’ve been doing it ever since.

They are not mental health professionals, but they receive training, and a small government stipend, and they have support from a local hospital if they need it. A psychiatrist examines each person before placing them in a home. One couple has taken in six boarders over the years, each of them different. One was too affectionate with the wife in the family; one would lock them out of the bathroom and wash his hands furiously; another had terrifying visions of lions coming out of the wall. The hosts have adjusted to them. Acceptance of mental differences is natural there, and the residents have come up with creative ways to manage the disruptive or eccentric behaviors that may come with their guests. They found a female companion for the overly affectionate one. When the other boarder would cry out about the lions, they would pretend to chase them away. “It worked every time,” they said.   

As large insane asylums came on the scene, and then went, the ancient Geel model persisted. Over time, boarders became such a part of the normal life of the village that the distinctions between them and the nonboarders blurred. “When we see people with mental illness,” said one host, “we know how to react. So do the shopkeepers, bartenders, and bus drivers. No one really notices them, at least not in a negative way.” As one local tour guide says, “There’s an expression: instead of saying you’re crazy, you can say you belong to Geel.”  

I think Geel is a little closer to the kingdom of heaven. I wish that demoniac had lived in Geel. I wish the man on 3^rd and Burnside did!!  

A Geel boarder

It’s fitting to me that the Geel concept – a 700-year-old idea that is now recognized as cutting edge—came as a response to a call from God. And there is no doubt that the citizens of Geel prayed over this very Gospel reading and looked for the lessons Jesus taught, and put them into action. So why can’t we? 

I think Jesus is telling us to let go of our fears, to learn about mental illness, and to find resources around us. And Jesus is telling us to work together. To hold up the humanity of people who are mentally ill. To advocate to our governments--local, state, and federal--for better mental health treatment options.  To consider how we can accommodate their difference, and to liberate them; to fight systems that merely criminalize them or lock them away. To stand with and offer help and support to those who bear the burden of care for them. 

Our lesson also is a call for us to take care of our own mental health, to pay attention to our own body, mind, and spirit. And so I pray that we, all of us, rid ourselves of any shame we feel about our struggles; to care for ourselves and seek counseling when we need it. It has helped me immeasurably. And I pray that we resist stigmatizing those around us who struggle with depression or anxiety or despair, and to consider how we can accommodate ourselves to those whose difference is their mental illness.  For we cannot be a healing presence to others if we are not ourselves whole.  

The gift Jesus gives to those with mental illness is to say, “You matter. Even when you are disordered, you belong to me.” And then Jesus turns to us and says, “they belong to you, too.” 

So let us pray:  

God of wholeness, we pray for light in the darkness. We pray that those who suffer with mental illness will find hope and help among followers of Christ who will love them and point them toward what they need, while letting them live with that need. We ask for the courage to seek help for our own souls when we are in darkness. We pray for acceptance and grace–the amazing grace you offer so freely to all. And we pray for hearts to embrace the opportunity for the messy and sometimes thankless ministry among those who suffer, in the name of the one whose love knows no margins, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Preached on June 23, 2019 at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland OR 

Lectionary:    Isaiah 65:1-9; Psalm 22:19-28; Galations 3:23-29;  Luke 8:26-39