Lord, oil the hinges of my heart’s door, that it may swing gently and easily to welcome your coming.
The gospel of Mark wastes no time getting down to business, after the preliminaries of birth, baptism, temptation and disciple recruiting—subjects that consume whole chapters of the other gospels—are gotten out of the way. No, Mark is in a big hurry to let us know that this Jesus story is going to be different—it’s not business as usual, with scribes lecturing and proof-texting, leaders negotiating and equivocating, people heckling and hounding while secretly hoping this guy will be different from the ones who came before. Mark doesn’t have time for all of that, because the world he lives in is going to hell in a hand basket, and the people he calls “home” are hiding in the hills, harried and hounded by the war machine that was Rome, but even so, still longing to be whole.

What makes Jesus different? What makes his story worth telling, his teaching worth following? Mark says: he taught them as one having authority.

What does that mean? When I became moderator of the presbytery some years ago, the outgoing moderator handed me the gavel that is used to keep order during our meetings and said: this gavel is the symbol of the authority of your office. If you have to use it, you don’t have it.

That’s genuine authority—to know who you are and what your work in the world is, and neither to need to win the validation of others, nor to make “Others”—that is, enemies—out of those people who don’t approve of you. In this month of January, I have spent many evenings travelling to four neighboring churches, from the Keys up to Palm Beach, for meetings with sessions and congregations who are seeking dismissal from our denomination because they think the “big tent” of the Presbyterian Church is too big, too inclusive theologically and socially, and because of that diversity, too scary to be any longer a part of. As I have listened to their concerns and perspectives, as I have been invited to speak from my own perspective, I have prayed to speak and listen with this kind of authority; neither being afraid of “Them” nor proud of “Us,” trying to speak the truth in love, and honor the fact that someone else’s truth is different from my own. I have wondered, on long drives home, why our big tent cannot shelter all of us. Then, on other evenings this month, I have listened to presidents and would-be presidents, listened for them to speak and listen with authority; and wondered why we can’t as a body politic, as a nation, get our acts together, and address the needs of our poor and marginalized and the rest of us without all the opposition and fear. Doesn’t seem to matter which party we cleave to, we’re all in it together, and we are all of us infected with this polarizing anxiety that makes us point the finger and blame, all the while wishing we could be better, we could be whole. Mark wants us to know that Jesus had that kind of authority that we are longing to experience from our leaders and feel within ourselves.
In two stories that take place at “home” in Capernaum, Mark shows us what a game-changer a person of authority can be.

In the first, Jesus showed up to teach in the synagogue. It didn’t matter what the text was, or the subject for the week—what mattered was he taught as one having authority, he was different from the other teachers who sought their authority from the crowds or from having the symbols of the office. He spoke his truth from the heart, and connected with the hungry hearts of his listeners. He served them by bringing his best self to the people: And when a heckler from the crowd—well, Mark calls it a man possessed with a demon—tries to change the subject and create a climate of Us against Them (have you come to destroy us? I know who you are!) Jesus doesn’t get distracted or defensive or buy into the premise that someone has to be destroyed for someone else to move forward—he just rebuked him and stopped him from destroying the holy space that had been opened up by the teaching and listening and genuine communication in that synagogue. He didn’t destroy his opponent; rather he gave him a way to experience healing by refusing to allow him to harm himself and his neighbors with his verbal abuse and fear-mongering.
In our second story, it was reported that he was at home. It was a homecoming so longed by the people of Jesus that immediately it drew a houseful of friends, a gathering of us so joyful and intent that the gospel story reports there were so many gathered around that there was no longer room for Them, not even in front of the door. Just stop for a moment and think about this, about how true it is: we are welcomed home, into the arms of our own; and almost as soon as we have received that embrace that says you are one of us, the camera lens widens to reveal Them, outside the door, looking in. Whenever we find ourselves comfortable, secure, at home….there is the world, and others, ready to challenge us and make their claim for our attention, for their fair share.

Then some people came, bringing to Jesus a paralyzed man, carried by four of them.

Unless we just refuse to see, we don’t get to be at home for very long before we are made aware that there are people outside, people outside who may want or need to be inside, where we are. They may be the “them” to our “us.” The system we live by—and let’s be honest, we’re not just talking about our global system or our system of law or culture of success, we’re talking about our faith and family systems as well—these systems set boundaries, erect barriers that protect us and our peace of mind from being overwhelmed by the needs and the smells and the noise and the accents of those who are crowded outside the door. And we use those systems every day by whom we invite and whom we ignore, who we see and who is all but invisible to us. The paralytic was one of the unlucky ones in this story: a man who needed what Jesus had to offer as much as, if not more than, any of us already crowded inside the house. . . a man who had less ability than many to position himself favorably to get what he needed. He was a paralyzed man, but he could be anyone outside: a gay teenager, a downsized business man or woman without prospects or insurance, a soldier trying to do the job he has been ordered to do and maintain his humanity, a colleague whose ideological affinity group has just lost the majority position, if only by one or two votes. You know who they are, or at least who “they” are for you, for us: people paralyzed by fear or circumstance by who they are or who they aren’t, people waiting outside the doors and windows we have inadvertently or deliberately locked and barred, because we need to feel at home, and there is simply, unfortunately, no more room. That paralytic was in no position to help himself. . .but others were. Inside the house, plenty of us didn’t notice, or didn’t care, or couldn’t figure out a way to help or were too busy meeting our own needs to see him lying outside on his bed, yearning for a chance to come inside, to belong. Apparently, Jesus himself didn’t even notice! but four men did. Out of that whole crowd of outsiders, four looked beyond their own needs, chose to become a community of healing, decided to tear down some walls, rip up some boundaries, make the tent bigger yet. It was not a solution most people would have thought of. It was neither pushing into the house nor taking turns; not shaming those who had arrived first nor blocking the streets, windows and doors with protest or appeal. It was a curiously creative solution. A humane solution. A solution at once gentle, humorous, effective, and inclusive. A solution that permitted four strangers to become community with one man who needed to be healed, and with a whole household of oblivious or even regretfully impotent people, people who needed to see beyond their refuge to the wide open sky and smell the fresh air of new ideas and loving solutions. No one had to leave. No one gave up much. Everyone moved a little bit, and the room turned out to be a whole lot larger than anyone had thought possible. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic: your sins are forgiven.
Now this is an interesting thing: right here, right at this place in the middle of what is really a typical miracle story, everything changes. You know the formula: Jesus teaches. People come. One comes needing healing. Jesus responds: your faith has healed you, rise and walk, open your eyes, and see. And they do. They see, walk, speak, regain their health, praise God and go their way. That’s the way miracles happen, right? But this story from this point on is no longer stock stuff, and I’ll tell you why. Jesus doesn’t say, your faith has made you whole, rise, take up your bed and walk. Instead he says: your sins are forgiven. What is that about? Did Jesus believe that a person’s sin caused their illness? No. Jesus didn’t believe that illness or infirmity had anything to do with the judgment of God, but his neighbors did. His friends did. His teachers did, and his culture did. And what they believed sustained the system, the rules that let some people be at home, inside, and kept the Others out.
So when Jesus saw their faith (not the man’s) and said your sins are forgiven, this is what I think he meant: sometimes, an entire society, a prevailing world view, a typical way of being, can be blown to kingdom come because one or a few people see another possibility, another vision and act with authority to bring that vision into reality. Rosa Parks sat down in the last seat on the bus and wouldn’t give it up to a white man because she was tired, and it wasn’t fair. A couple in California went to the county court and registered to be married, carefully crossing out the word “husband” and firmly inserting a second “wife” because there wasn’t any good reason, really, why they shouldn’t have the marriage their heterosexual next door neighbors had. “Sin” isn’t the condition of the people crowded outside the door; sin is the ways we keep the rooms of our home so full of us that we won’t or can’t make room for the Others. Sin, after all, can be defined as separation. Sin is the breakdown of relationship—between God and us, between us and them, between the spark of the divine that gives us a soul, and the soulless, demonic powers that sneer, I know who you are and what you’re trying to do, and then do everything in their power to kill the possibility of health and life together. And people who are possessed, paralyzed, separated or fearfully excluded can be restored to wholeness-they can be!— if and when some people—be it four or forty or forty thousand , get off their butts and do something about it, for God’s sake.
Jesus saw their faith, that is, their authority, saw that a few people were willing and able to think outside of the box, and then he acknowledged publicly and for the sake of that paralyzed man what was already patently obvious to him: that divisions had been torn down, the power of sinful separation broken by the healing actions of four strangers and a guy in need. The family room got bigger, and the family had five new members, and whenever that happens, there’s a little less space for sin in the room.

Changing Our Mind
(lose your mind and come to your senses.)
–Fritz Perls, gestalt therapy founder

Why are you on this planet?
What principles do you choose to practice in service of this purpose?

How many of you have ever breached those principles, or failed to live, even for a while, in consonance with your personal code of honor and covenant?

Those of you not raising your hands, go straight to heaven—do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The rest of you—that is to say, the rest of us– listen to this tall tale, this fable, this parable from the bible: the book of Jonah.

In the Israel of the fifth century before the birth of Jesus, things were complicated. It was the time of the return of the Jewish people from exile—a time to celebrate a newly reconstituted nation, a time to affirm national identity. People who had maintained their religious and cultural integrity throughout seventy years of captivity were coming home in triumph to restore their heritage; those who had remained behind to keep the candles of Judah’s faith dimly burning rejoiced with hope and energy renewed. But times were hard, resources scarce. Natural disaster and the depredations of wartime created a situation of endemic poverty and widespread discontent. It was a difficult time—a time that needed vision, and unprecedented national unity. But then, as now, fear and anxiety drew the people, individually and as a nation, away from their purpose and principles—to be a light for the nations, seeking justice, loving kindness, and showing mercy—and made them far less than their best selves. Then, as now, in seasons of perceived scarcity and polarizing, paralyzing fear, a national consensus was built upon a politics of negativism, exclusivity, and hatred.

The fable, the satire that is the book of Jonah was, for those who wished to recover their practice of what Paul later called a more excellent way, the strong medicine of self-examination; a mirror held up to the inevitable effects of our devolving into our smaller, meaner selves. For Jonah, our reluctant hero, it was a lesson grudgingly learned, if at all. The story is set in a period of history when Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian nation—by the way, the land now occupied by the nation of Iraq. Commissioned to preach to that despised nation, Jonah, a righteous and God-fearing Israelite, is filled with horror and revulsion at his task. Assyrian power had brought Israel to her knees. Assyrian atrocities had deeply embittered the Jewish people. For hundreds of years following the fall of the Israelite nation, the name of Assyria and its capital city were the very expression of evil incarnate, the perpetrators of holocaust.

And the God who could not stand silent in the face of the suffering of his people spoke, and said, go, and inform Nineveh that their wickedness has become known to me. And Jonah went—the other way. Called to travel overland to the limits of the civilized East, Johan hopped a ship and went West, as far as any soul could go. We all know the fish story that followed, the storm on the deep and the bed in the belly of a great fish; and how Jonah was compelled at last to fulfill his call, and burped up on the shores that were the gateway to the great and terrible city of Nineveh. He would fulfill his call—and how.

Stalking a day’s journey into the city, burning with rage and humiliation, with resentment and fear, Jonah found a likely spot, unpacked his striped tent,
cranked up the sound system to its highest volume, , raised his big black bible in his clenched fist and roared: yet forty days, and God will destroy Nineveh!!! . Eight words, and what an opening line! Lord, did it feel good. He paused to gauge the effect of his words, and licked his lips in anticipation. Sucking in another great breath, he prepared to go on but—wait, what was that?

Before Jonah’s unbelieving eyes, an entire nation fell to its knees in sorrow and hope. Cattle and other beasts, men and women and children alike, tore their clothes, threw ashes over their heads, and prayed as they had never prayed before to a God that they scarcely had known existed. And the hope of that enemy people in the heart of a God not their own was a sobering and holy thing to behold: let us all repent, the king said, for it may be that God will relent, and spare the people.

And God did. And Jonah? Jonah stood dumbfounded in the midst of the empty tent, tears filled his eyes, and he bowed his own head in prayer. Lord, he began,. And as bitterness filled his heart, he went on, almost spitting out the words, I knew you were a God, rich in mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. I knew you would repent, and permit those disgusting people to live… And then, in the last round of the story that comedians refer to as the rule of three, Jonah disappears into the wilderness, cries in the best Borsht-belt joke tradition oy, you’re killing me!, rests in the broiling heat, receives with entitlement the shade tree God “causes to grow up above him” and then, when that shade is destroyed by the worm of his own bitterness and fear, begs for mercy for an inanimate plant! But God asks him, as God asks us,

Do you do well to be angry? If you want mercy for a dying tree, can’t you find room in your heart to have mercy for another human being, and for yourself?

Let us turn to the words of philosopher, theologian and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who lost his entire family and was forced into degrading and dehumanizing circumstances in Auschwitz: We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves. ….It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation but in right action and in right conduct. …Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

Why are you on this planet?
What principles do you choose to practice in service of this purpose?

Don’t you want to change the world? Don’t you want to change yourself?
If you, like me, are tired of the rhetoric, sick of the paralyzed polarization of our nation and our Christian tribes, join me and MJ in looking at the man in the mirror Jonah holds up for us. Join me in believing the good news of the gospel, even the gospel of Jonah: God wants a better life for us than we want for ourselves. God can bring about renewal, redemption, shade and blessing, even in the midst of hard circumstances, even despite our worst efforts. God wants us to go into the heart of our fear with faith and hope. To confront our worst selves and the way we project that yuck onto others, and experiences forgiveness for our shame and hopelessness, and reunion with those who we thought were our enemies but who are really just another version of our selves. To live without regret and undivided. God has given us the resources to do this: and to remain centered in our mission and filled with joy, peace, hope and purpose—regardless of the circumstances. Those of you who participated in our compassion fatigue and resiliency workshops a couple of years ago, and those of you who remember our compassion fatigue sermon series will recognize those God-given resources as the 5 antibodies for a resilient life: 1. Know your purpose in life and practice it.2. Relax your body, have a soft body and relaxed muscles when you perceive yourself in a circumstance of threat or danger. 3. Grow up and stop making others responsible for your actions! Know with Viktor and Jonah that we alone are responsible for the way we choose to react and respond to the circumstances that challenge us. No one can make you be less than your best self—you have that choice. 4. Look around you. Know that you are connected to people who believe as you do, who love you and pray for you and who are willing to be a community of accountability with you. 5. Take care of yourself. Eat right, exercise regularly, drink moderately, enjoy activities that give you peace, creativity, and pleasure. Even and especially when you feel you don’t have enough time. To paraphrase Jesus in the gospel of Luke: do this, and you will live. Amen.

Riviera
Presbyterian Church                                                                           Isaiah 40:1-11

Laurie
Ann Kraus                                                                                                 Mark 1:1-8

Gospel Changes

“the beginning of the gospel of Jesus
Christ, the son of God.”

Well I listened to what the good book
said, and it made good sense to me

Talkin’ bout reapin’ what you’re
sowin’, and people trying to be free

Well, we’ve got new names and faces
this time around…

Gospel changes, Lord, still going down…

gospel changes, Lord, still going down.

In
only twelve terse words—five, if you were reading this book in its original
Greek—the writer of Mark’s gospel tells us that everything is about to
change  the beginning of the gospel of
Jesus Christ, the son of God. No embellishment, no set up.  No story to help us understand, to make it
pretty, to soften the rough edges and give us a chance to get warmed up.  Just twelve terse words that meant
everything—but really made no sense at all.

It was
a strange place to start–especially then—when the man whose story it purported
to be was an itinerant teacher who had been executed forty years earlier.  And especially when those people whose story
it aspired to be were suffering through the catastrophic collapse of the mixed
community of Jews and Gentiles who had called Palestine home in the first
century BCE. Where is good news for these?–who had existed in uneasy
submission to the power of Rome; whose peoples were being hounded and harried
into the hills and caves of the desert, whose heritage and culture was
collapsing like the smoking rubble of the 2^nd Temple and the walls
and homes of Jerusalem, who in every way you can imagine were experiencing not
a beginning at all, but the end of all things.

Give
us angels, give us shepherds.  Give us
Magi and Stars in the East…but for the love of God, really, don’t hand us back the rubble of the life we used to have
and the uncertain, scary future, along with some old stories about the way
things used to be and have the temerity to call it the beginning of “good
news.”   It’s not that we’re not
listening, it’s just that we can’t hear anything beyond the alarm bells going
off in our heads.

Here’s
something I have experienced myself, and been told countless times:  when you pick up the phone, (are you sitting down?) when you go to
your supervisor’s office, or to the doctor (I
‘m sorry to have to tell you this …)when you know you need to listen with
all of your heart and all of your mind and all of your strength, no matter how
hard you try you can’t hear a word beyond the word that shatters the world you
thought you had:

We’re sorry, we have to let you go.
There’s no movement in the womb. You’re being served. It’s malignant. It’s
Alzheimer’s. You need surgery.  The words go on and on, and you try to
take them in, write them down, understand—but inside you, the wind is howling
and the world has become a wilderness.

See, I am sending my messenger before
you who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

If it
seems to you that this take on the gospel of Mark is perhaps a bit overwrought,
know this:  I pray for nothing more than
that your own world will remain safe and blessed.   But in this past week alone, I have received
three such phone calls—ending one story line in some person’s life, some
family’s narrative—and opening for them a twisted path in the wilderness, from
which a glimpse of the future can scarcely be seen.

The
story of “the good news of the gospel” begins in the wilderness, Mark tells us:
in a

place
of plot twists and dead ends; a place of confusion and uncertainty.  John
the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance
for the forgiveness of sins.   I’d
like to address three questions, briefly, in helping us to mine Mark’s stark
and startling “Christmas story” for “good news.” 

First, How can “good news” come from
the wilderness?

In the
bible, all the important stories begin in chaos, in the wilderness.  Creation happens when earth is “formless and
void.”  The birth of the Jewish people
came in slavery, exile, and poverty.
The gift of the Law, the Way of the Golden Rule— a communal life ordered
around love of God, neighbor, and self—was born in the midst of peoples whose
world was shaped by contention, mistrust, deprivation and poor leadership.   The new understanding that God was for
everyone, and beyond anyone’s parochial understanding or ownership, was birthed
after the destruction of a nation, in Exile, by displaced persons who had
nothing to call their own. And the story of redemption by Love, which shapes
our Christian community, was birthed in betrayal, bloody death, and abandonment
and shaped by people who, once again, were fleeing for their lives from vicious
imperial power. The best stories of our lives are forged in catastrophe—if we
can find the patience to wait for the long view, remembering our past, we will
see it.

Second,  What
should be our spiritual attitude and perspective in such times?

John,
the gospel says, preaches a baptism of
repentance for the forgiveness of “sins.”
Unpacking that theologically loaded phrase, we recall that
“repentance,” metanoia in the Greek
and t’shuvah in Hebrew, means to turn
in another direction.  When we drive a
car into a dead end, in order to get where we are going, we have to turn the
vehicle around and go in a different direction.
And “sins” at their most basic are not merely the things we do wrong or
don’t do right, they are those stances, attitudes, and actions which separate
us from God, from each other, and from our truest self.  When we are lost in a wilderness of fear,
anger, grief, anxiety…we need to keep moving, through those emotions, and turn,
turn, to come round right, into a different perspective, and a place of less
isolation.  If we are lost, as Gillian
told me she was lost in New York City this past weekend, you have to look in
alternative directions to get your bearings and get on the right path, and
reunite you with Love. Trying to meet up with her in Manhattan, even cel phones
and numbered streets didn’t do it.
Where are you?  9^th and something.   Go South. Which way is South? Can you see the Chrysler building?  Oh.  Head that way.   Now where are you?  49^th
St, where are you?  Same.  Which
way should I go.  East.
Toward Broadway?????  No. Do
you see the big white lit trees?  Do you
see the giant Christmas Tree? That’s East.
My phone is dying.  It’s okay, I’ll be standing there, waiting for
you.

Speaking
with a friend who is facing a hard diagnosis and some changes in life, I said,
“we will hold you in prayer.” And he said, I’m
reluctant to ask for prayer, as what will be will be.  And I said:  I believe prayer changes us:  it draws your circumstance, so hard and
isolating, into the midst of community, where you are not alone.  It calls upon healing power, and deep love,
to surround you and those who tend to your well being, so that the clarity and
wisdom you need to find the right path out of this wilderness will be clear to
you.

Finally, What is the source of our hope,
that the beginning we are in might become “good news?”  Put another way, where
is God in it?

But–  Jesus
was baptized by John in the Jordan, and when he came up out of those
unexpected and uncharted waters, something happened.  John didn’t see it, no one else heard a
thing, but Jesus did:  he heard a voice,
he saw a violent vision of heaven being ripped in two just as, much later, the
Temple’s curtain would be ripped in two at the moment of his death—he saw heaven
and the Spirit of God brooding over him, their new creation, and in that moment
of startling vision, Jesus began to know, perhaps for the first time:  come what may, he was God’s own child, then
and forever.

And
what did that mean?  Did that mean that
Jesus, more enviably than most of us, came up out of the waters of his baptism
with supernatural clarity and magnificent purpose, a life map writ in the
stars?  I’m not sure—but I don’t think
so. I think Jesus may have come up out of his baptism much like we come up out
of ours—mostly wet, and knowing that the life he had was over—but somehow
choosing to believe that, whatever it might be that we’re going to end up in
the middle of—God will somehow be there in the middle with us.

Where
does your story of the gospel begin?
What is the beginning of the gospel—the good news of how you are God’s
child in God’s right place and time?  Can
you remember? Can you claim it?  Or will
you at least find a place to begin—even if, like Mark, it is virtually in the
middle of the story? The point is, to begin.
If Mark’s Jesus didn’t need angels, a miraculous birth, a star or wise
men…your story of the gospel doesn’t either.
If Mark’s Jesus didn’t always know who he was and where he was going—but
found his vocation, his calling, at the right moment, God’s moment—so can
you.  When does the gospel of your life
begin?

Choosing
a place is not a matter of right or wrong, –as if we were to say that the
gospel of John is right  (in the
beginning was the Word) and Luke is a liar
(In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that all the
world should be taxed.)  It is your
place, your story, your time, and no one else’s.  There is no right place to begin for
everyone….but there is a right place to begin for you.

One of
the privileges, the blessings, of being church together is the chance we
have to witness such beginnings. To bear witness with each other, to celebrate
or grieve, to stand shoulder to shoulder with one another during the birth
pangs of the gospel as it is born in us. Wherever that place might be, we claim
in faith that it is emmanuel, God with us.  Where does your Christ-story begin?  When?
Pick a place—any place, and know:
it is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ—for you.  Amen.

Riviera
Presbyterian Church

Laurie
Ann Kraus                                                                                                Mark 13:24-37

…a bride, married to amazement

Jesus’ injunction in the gospel of Mark to “keep
awake” took on an ironic new meaning this weekend when I learned that many of
the stores that used to open at six am on the day after Thanksgiving, then
midnight, actually opened Thursday evening before some of us were done with
dessert.  I don’t imagine the term Black Friday was meant to evoke
apocalyptic imagery—and yet, when securing a bargain becomes such serious
business that you pepper spray the neighbors who are blocking your access to
aisle where your product is displayed….well, I think the cultural observance of
Christmas has left Miracle on 34^th
Street behind forever and changed the channel to something more like Nightmare on Elm Street.  If “apocalyptic” scriptures like this one
in the gospel of Mark are meant to put us on notice that the world is not a
very nice place…we got the message, already!

The season of Advent points toward the birth of
Christ, but, paradoxically, begins with images of the Final Judgment, using
texts harvested from a kind of literature known as Apocalyptic. “Apocalyptic” which
can be translated from the Greek as “uncovering” or “revelation,”  commonly is understood to be dealing with the
End Times. How was God at work in the world? How will Divine Purposes be
revealed, when all is said and done? The book of Revelation, the book of
Daniel, and a chapter or so each in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Mark,
take the context of present-day suffering and use it as a lens to point to the
revealing of God’s reign at the end of time. Its wisdom is hidden, its context,
catastrophic. What is revealed about God in the end is nearly always learned at
the point of the sword, in great peril.

So the Christian liturgical year, which begins this
Advent Sunday morning, is less about fireworks than firepower. The old Anglican
prayerbook begins Advent Sunday with this prayer:  O God, who makest us glad with
the yearly expectation of thy coming: Grant that we, who with joy receive thine
only begotten son as our redeemer, may without fear behold him when he shall
come to be our judge, Even thy son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and
reigneth with thee and the holy ghost, one god, world without end. Amen.

To use a more homely example, wait till your father gets home had two entirely different meanings
when my mother uttered them:  one, when
we anticipated his safe and joyful return from a long absence serving in the
Air Force….another entirely, when I watched and waited for his car to drive up
after I had cut all the pictures out of the leather bound World Book
Encyclopedia collection, or my little brother had glued the cat to his
bedspread so he could keep him from coming to my room.  Both “comings” created a sense of wakeful
watching—one, to joy…another to judgment. And when my father came in judgment,
it wasn’t to punish (well, not only
to punish!) but to help me understand my actions, and their impact on my
family’s world.  Pay attention, he would say, I’m
doing this for your own good.

In Preaching Mark in
Two Voices, Brian Blount, who teaches NT at Princeton Theological Seminary,
draws our attention to the two different words used by the author of the gospel
for the phrase we translate pay attention
or keep awake! 

The first word, blepo,
is used throughout the early part of chapter thirteen.  Jesus tells his followers—pay attention!
Watch carefully!  He asks us to use
spiritual perception, to engage our prayerful discernment, to understand what
is happening around us, and to see where God is in it.  And that is good advice for Advent, as it is
for everyday.

The thing is, Jesus changes the ending of the apocalypse,
which by tradition concludes with judgment and woe. Apocalypse blames
destruction on a cosmic battle between God and Evil. Jesus tells them no, it is human hands that wreak havoc, not
God’s: pay attention. Pay attention! Keep awake!  You thought you knew the meaning and the
ending of this story, but you don’t. In the midst of catastrophe, when we fear
we are about to be destroyed, the cosmic battle is reduced to the actions of
frightened but mortal men. Jesus, about to face his own death, does not
despair, but invites other men, women and children,are no less frightened,
perhaps, but more self-aware, to see the potential for starting over. What has been torn
down can be built again. Every sad story has a “nevertheless,” and God
is just around the corner, a householder finding her way home from a journey.

In the middle of his discourse, Jesus suddenly switches
words for “seeing” and “watching out.”
The new word, gregoreo, means
more than developing correct spiritual discernment so that we will not be
misled by external appearances.  Gregoreo tells us:  don’t
just stand there, do something.  It
is not just correct discernment we are called to practice; we are called to practice.
That is, the correct stance for Advent is not watchful waiting, but
watchful action while we wait.

Once upon a time, a woman in this church, a nurse, watched
young man after young man come into the trauma unit of her hospital with
catastrophic gunshot wounds.  Watching
was hard, and not good enough. Watchful action developed a program to reach
those boys before they were brought in by an ambulance…and GATE continues to
teach, mentor, and graduate young men who have changed their lives, turning
away from gun violence and toward lives of service and meaning.

Once upon a time, a pastor and his wife watched while the
epidemic of AIDS and teen pregnancy stunted the futures of young girls in
Coconut Grove.  Watching was not good
enough.  Watchful practice built the
Thelma Gibson House, and changed the lives of many of those young women through
education and mentoring.

Watchful action has sent 20 people from this congregation
to partner with a small school in Kenya…made this congregation a welcoming
place for LGBT persons and their families…raised environmental awareness and begun
congregational practices of earth care…taught children that God is in the world
if they are willing to be God’s feet and hands and heart…sat by the side and
tended to the needs of men and women who otherwise might have died forgotten
and alone…put roofs on houses for Habitat, promoted fair trade, supported
communities stricken by disaster… put clean, dry socks on the feet and
toiletries in the hands of the homeless…fed countless families, week by week
through this long season of economic hardship that has targeted our city’s most
vulnerable poor.

Not watchful waiting…but watchful action while waiting.  The Church’s teaching says we are waiting for
Christ to come again, like a bridegroom to his bride, the community of faith in
the world. I know there are as many ideas about what that means as there are
bodies in this sanctuary this morning, but I hope that at least a part of your
belief involves gregoreo, watchful,
prayerful, attentive action.  How hard a
place the world can be, filled with war and dying and mean, small actions that
chip away at our joy and the common wealth.
How amazing it is, how wonderful, really, that such a small thing as one
or two people paying attention and acting with prayerful intention can change
lives, families, neighborhoods, the world. How grateful I am to pray and
practice in the company of such people…and how deeply I hope that this year
brings us even more moments to reflect the path of Christ at his coming…and
coming again.

The title of this sermon is a line from a poem by Mary
Oliver that is its own kind of apocalyptic…a moment in which the poet considers
her life in the light of its inevitable ending.
I invite you, on this Advent Sunday, to pray this poem with me, and to
begin this holy season grateful for the gift of life, attentive to the
opportunities we are given, and amazed at what we can do to bring Light out of
darkness, if only we will act.

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins
from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity,
wondering:

What is it going to be like, that cottage of
darkness?

And therefore
I look upon everything

as a
brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look
upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider
eternity as another possibility,

and I think of
each life as a flower, as common

as a field
daisy, and as singular,

and each name
a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as
all music does, toward silence,

and each body
a lion of courage, and something

precious to
the earth.

When it’s
over, I want to say:  all my life

I was a bride
married to amazement.

I was the
bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s
over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made
of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want
to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of
argument.

I don’t want
to end up simply having visited this world.

Riviera Presbyterian Church
Laurie
Ann Kraus                                                                                                                               Matthew 25:14-30

The Gospel’s Got
TALENTS!

Whenever I go to get my hair cut,
the wonderful young woman who repairs my nails always asks me, did you watch American Idol last night?  I don’t watch television talent contests, I
reply. Oh, she says, then did you see The X Factor? No, I
say, I don’t watch television talent contests. Then, what about Dancing with the Stars? No, no and no, I say—not
the Sing Off.  Not Dancing With the
Stars, nor  Idol, nor America’s Got
Talent. Huh, she says wonderingly,
and files just a wee bit more aggressively than I think is strictly
necessary.  It’s clear she thinks there’s
something wrong with me, and probably there is. The only non-performer in a
family of artists, I cringe when I think of anyone being rejected, voted off
the island. I have the same reaction to this story in the gospel of Matthew—I
don’t like it, I don’t want to read it.
I cringe when it comes up on the lectionary as much as I cringe when
some poor, hopeful wretch sings or dances their soul out only to be told—you wicked and lazy servant! Give what she
has to the one who already has everything, and be cast into the outer darkness
where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

And so do many of you—at least,
the representative sample polled this past Wednesday felt this way, likening
the master in the story to, variously, Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme,
Shearson Lehmann, the Agribusiness Industry, The Man.  Nobody likes the Master in this story, and
the suggestion that this parable, like the two that come before it, represents
the nature of God and implicitly begins and
the kingdom of heaven is like…. sent almost everybody listening into a
state of oppositional defiance.  We spent
the next hour, in fact,  proving out why
this parable couldn’t possibly say what it seems to….and how gentle Jesus, meek
and mild, the Lover of our Souls, was obviously, even maliciously misquoted.

Sadly, I’ve come to understand
that whenever there’s this much
resistance to scripture…there’s something there we need to sit with and pay
attention to, however much we might wish to watch and read something else entirely.

What, exactly, is a parable?
 Is it a religious bedtime
story, meant to scare or to charm God’s children into restful sleep?   Does it describe the world we live in, or
the world God wants for us?   In literary
terms, there are two kinds of ways stories teach us about the world and our
place in it:  myths, and parables.

Myths can be defined as stories
that sustain or explain or create a way of understanding the world.  The myth of George Washington and the cherry
tree sustains a world view in which honesty is rewarded and exhibited as a
characteristic of leadership.  The mythic
poem of creation in the first chapter of Genesis describes not a scientific
view of the world’s beginning, but a religious one:  the world is a creation of God’s devising, in
which God’s holy attention shapes meaning out of chaos and God’s loving regard
provides beauty, relationship, and sufficiency for human survival.  The Greek myth of Pandora’s box explains how
inordinate curiosity and an ability to practice restraint unleashes woes in the
world for which all of us must pay.
Myths support the world view we have, or ought to have.  And sometimes, myths support the status quo.

Jesus didn’t teach with myths,
though most of us do.  Jesus taught in
parables.  So what is a parable?  A parable is the opposite of a myth:  it does not support a world view, rather, it
sabotages it.  It does not reassure us
that the way we see the world is right and good, it undercuts our belief
system, it threatens the status quo.
Jesus taught in parables; and parables are dangerous and slippery
things.  When we hear a parable, we never
quite put our finger on what we were supposed to learn.  We feel uneasy, threatened.  We’re not supposed to go away satisfied when
we are taught in parables, we’re supposed to be confused, unsettle.  So, the story of the talents is indeed a
parable.  Not revealing the way we are
supposed to see the world, but revealing rather the way the world already is,
and asking us, really?  Really, is this the God you want and the
world you want to make?

The man with one got the God he
feared and the ending he feared.  He
believed the Master was hard, and the world harder….and lo, it was.  What he hid, what he failed to act on, what
he withheld from imaginative investment and courageous, hopeful living was
taken away from him, and because he wouldn’t risk anything, he lost everything.

The guys with much—even though
they were slaves, acted like free men and women, using what they had been given
with thoughtful, reckless courage:  they
were all in, and out of their courage
and trust and investment of everything, came amazing abundance and joy, and a
transformed relationship with the Master:
those who once were obedient slaves became joyful, free partners.  The Master doesn’t change in this story:  he is mostly absent from the day-to-day
decisionmaking of his people.  He is a
blank slate, becoming whatever each servant projected onto him.  The Master, God, asked for nothing, demanded
nothing.  He merely gave: and then waited
to see what they would do with the gifts they had.

Sometimes I hear us talking about
ourselves—as individuals and as a church—as if we were that man with one
talent, hurrying to bury it in the ground before someone snatches it away or
punishes us for not doing or being more.
We talk about how small we are, rather than how much we have, and how
much we can do with it.  We talk about
how few resources we have, how hard the economy is, how difficult to raise a
balanced budget and find people to invest in our projects and our
committees.  And it turns out that like
the man in the story, what we imagine each other and our church and our God to
be is reflected in the life we have together, and the impact we have on our
community and our world.  If we think
we’re too small and don’t have enough to share and to make a difference:  then that is what we will be—a shrinking
congregation that cares only for its own self protection and spiritual
wellbeing that will in the end be neither safe nor spiritually healthy.  But if we look at what we have, and what we
can dig deeper for and raise—if each of you do that, and look at what you have,
dig deeper and invest with joy and trust in our work of healing the world
here—we can expect and experience a wild return on our investment, and be
transformed from servants to partners in the kingdom, transforming our lives
and our world.

This year, we are talking about
the life of this church and our budget in the way Jesus suggests:  We believe the Master believes in us, and
expects us to use your (and my) money thoroughly and well.  We are going to celebrate what we have, ask
for more, expect more, and invest whatever we are given in joyful, intentional
ways, because the needs of the world are many, and the people who are willing
to work to change the world for the better by investing themselves, their
family’s financial resources and their time are few, fabulous, and
faithful.  I don’t want to play it safe
and be the kind of church that only cares cautiously for itself; I want to keep
on being a church that matters in Miami. Your time, your money and your
spiritual energy are precious, amazing resources to me and to the leadership of
this church:  we and we intend to use
them wildly and wisely.

When I was wandering around the
mission fair last week, speaking with our outside mission partners, I was
worrying about how little we seem able to give and how much is needed—but our
mission partners were excited about our congregation’s generosity, eager to
promote their own work of building homes for the poor and nurturing at risk
teenagers and transforming schools in Africa and changing our culture of
abusing the earth and its resources, member by member and church to community.
They weren’t looking at what we don’t have—they were rejoicing in what we have
and have to give, and urging our passionate, reckless and full-hearted
investment in making our community and its people safer, cleaner, richer,
better.  To offer only one example among
many, Merlene from Thelma Gibson House said,
you wonderful people at Riviera
have been working with us for a few years now, and from those gifts of money,
and the trays of cookies and juice, and from the time your members have spent,
eleven girls have already turned their lives around, graduated from college,
and are leading rich and productive lives.

I have a clergy woman friend who
also went to the salon recently, to have her hair cut and styled.  Her stylist, wielding scissors with a
vengeance, looked fiercely into the mirror at my friend and said, you’re a minister, right?  Well, I think the bible is hooey.  I believe that when you die, they put you
into the ground and worms eat you. To which my friend replied, with a
nonchalance that was truly stunning in view of the fact that the woman was
holding a sharp pair of scissors on her, well,
if that’s what you believe, that’s what will happen to you.

 What do we believe?  About
God, about people who have more, and people who have less?  About what we have, and what we’re doing with
it?

Let us worship—that is ascribe
worth to and work for—a God who is not the fearsome master of slaves, but
instead, the freeing Lover of our souls, calling us to a kindom that is just on
the other side of our best dreams.   Amen.

Riviera Presbyterian Church

Laurie Ann Kraus                                                                                                             Joshua 3:1-17

“reformed, and always
reforming”

Today is Reformation Sunday—a
protestant kind of observance which, I confess, I have not always treated with
spiritual enthusiasm. allowing it (if you’ll permit me a sports analogy) to
languish liturgically in the back field of team Presbyterian while choosing the
more buff and burly All Saints Day as my starting line up. It was not always
so.  A newly minted Presbyterian when I
enrolled in seminary, I regarded the “mysteries” of Presbyterianism
and the Reformed heritage with a spirit of awe and expectation, especially as
those mysteries were embodied in the architecture and the aura surrounding my
seminary campus.  I remember with
particular clarity the two great seals that were embedded in the floors of the
hallowed halls of Princeton:  Reformands, said the first, Reformands et semper Reformanda.  The church is reformed, and always reforming.   The other one, I’ll tell you about
later.

Reformed, yet always reforming.  It has a steadfast, persistent kind of ring
to it:  and I love persistent
people.  In fact, I come from a family of
persistent people, where the ability to hang on interminably in an–well, let’s
call it a “conversation”– was regarded with deep respect.  In my family, if you had to be wrong, well,
best to repeat yourself several times over; and if you were worn out, keep on
at it until the eyes of the competition had glazed over.  It will come as no surprise to most of you
that, even among my very tenacious kinfolks I’m regarded as particularly gifted
in this area–I think relentless is
the word I overheard– but even so, I have studied with some true masters.

Of course, anything repeated
long enough and shrilly enough becomes a caricature of itself, losing both its
freshness and its power, and that is why I suspect the celebration of
Reformation Sunday has become a matter of indifference not only to me, but to
most Christians of Protestant heritage as well. But a Reformation heritage is a
worthy one; far more substantial than a Sunday of kilts, bagpipes and hymns
written by Martin Luther. (Even though the template for carving a Reformation
jack-o-lantern featuring the scary visage of John Calvin was inspiring.)  As Lutheran pastor and process theologian
Bruce Epperly has asserted, Reformation
faith is forward, rather than backward looking, evolving rather than static, at
home in this world, rather than in a previous age or a heavenly realm.[1]

But if we were to look
forward, what might the core values of the Protestant Reformation look like
today, in a global, post-modern,
scientific, and pluralistic age?  Epperly
proposes we examine for ourselves the five pillars that shaped the makers of
Reformed faith:   sola scriptura, sola fides, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo
Gloria. (scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, for the glory
of God only.)

Sola Scriptura.  Reformed preachers
always begin with scripture!  And the
lectionary has offered for our consideration this morning one of the opening
stories of the book of Joshua, located for Christians at the beginning of the
so-called “historical” books, and by Jews in the Nevi’im,  or the
prophets.   The book of Joshua picks up where the core of
the Hebrew scriptures, the Torah, the five books of Moses, leave off.  The season of wilderness wandering for the
newly forming Jewish people is drawing to an end.  Moses’ long years of leadership (and his even
longer farewell sermon—twenty-five detailed, exacting, exhausting, mind-numbing
chapters in Deuteronomy) have concluded, Moses having died on a mountaintop
overlooking the promised land. He conferred on his assistant Joshua the
authority and the obligation to lead the people forward.  The story we read this morning marks the
formal liturgical “crossing over” of the people from their old world and ways
into the new age.  The priests hold up the
Ark of the Covenant—containing the tablets of the Law—and while the people pass,
the waters of the Jordan are held back, a miracle reminiscent of the parting of
the Red Sea.  From that day,  Joshua leads the people forward, following
the Torah or Way inscribed on those tablets, in a way, the first written
scriptures of our heritage. Sola
scriptura means “scripture alone,” and for many of us, that has become a
real problem.  Some Christians who assert
the primacy of scripture have trended toward a literalistic, close-minded and
hurtful interpretative practice in their churches. Some of us are refugees from
such churches—who have used the bible as a cudgel to beat up on the divorced,
the LGBT community, the sciences, and anyone who thinks people other than
Christians have access to divine love.  Scripture alone sounds to many of us like
a battle cry for  fundamentalism and in
wary retaliation, we instead leave scripture alone for the most part.  And that’s too bad.  Because people reading scripture
contextually, in a critical, thoughtful and spiritually open way, is exactly what the Reformation intended.  Let me use Wednesday morning’s bible study
class as an example of this kind of reading.
The text from Joshua was read aloud. We paused to ponder it, and then I
shared some historical, cultural, and social-location comments about the material.  What
did you notice?  What did you feel?  are our usual opening questions.   Well, said
one of our members,  it’s nice to inherit the Promised Land, but
what about the people who were already there?
Was it really GOD who told them they should kill everyone off?  We began to discuss the American history of
Manifest Destiny, and the extermination and impoverishment of our own native
peoples. We talked about how the Church misused—and continues to misuse–this
story to justify war-making and national policies that presume we have the
right to determine how other peoples live, and enforce those ideas with
military aggression when necessary.  We
agreed that the God we worship would not have glibly ordered the extermination
of the Jebusites, Hivites, Perezites, and Hittites….and that it is all to easy
for people on a mission to invoke God’s Will as their justification.   A Jewish midrash on this text suggests that
contained in the Ark of the Covenant were not only the tablets of the Law
written in God’s hand, but also the fragments of the broken tablets that Moses
cast down, when he saw how the people would rather worship an idol than a
mysterious, living, changing God.  Sola
scriptura for today invites Christians like us to remember that the bible is both
the broken tablets—what we have needed to take apart, examine, and
relinquish—as well as a unique and living document that helps us find in our
own stories, a path toward faithful living.

Sola Fides.  And that leads us into
the next core value of the Reformation:  sola fides, faith alone.   In Reformation days, faith alone inspired Christians who were utterly dependent upon the
Church hierarchy for their ultimate and daily destiny to begin to believe, that
is, to believe in their own believing as a path to God. A very non-reformed
understand of the Christian way has led some to believe that “faith alone”
means everyone must become a Christian or else perish, and every Christian must
adopt a life devoid of questioning.  In my
own fundamentalist high school days, I inscribed these words in my bible, and
tried to live by them,  God says it. I believe it. That settles
it.   But of course, it didn’t…and that belief
system, so unyielding and rigid, quickly became a prison, not a faith at
all.  These days, my faith is enriched
and informed by the revelations of science, the understandings of other
religious traditions and the doubts and disputations of pretty much
everyone.  Faith alone means that a way of doubting and affirming, and being
in hospitable conversation with others whose doubting and affirming is
different than my own, is grounded in my Christian faith story, but not locked
in the closet.  Faith alone is an expansive way to live our lives in community and
religious practice—not a cage to contain our questions.  These days, the motto I might write inside my
bible’s flyleaf comes from a father who brought his gravely ill son to Jesus
for healing.  When asked, do you believe? this suffering parent
said to Jesus:  Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

Sola gratia.   When we cannot see how what we know is helping
us, and cannot believe that even God can make a difference in the places we are
trapped or troubled, grace alone gets
us through hard days and endless nights.
In Reformation days, sola gratia
was meant to cast away all dependence on human efforts and hold the believing
church firm by the anchor of God’s intentions for humanity.  For ages of ages, many in the church have
struggled with the shadow side of this value—asserting the total depravity of
the human creature and the utter uselessness of religious practice as a way to
God.   But “grace alone” does not mean to
deprive us of our God-given nature—which is not totally depraved at all, but
rather, as the book of Genesis asserts, made
in the image of God. The truth is, we human creatures are both deeply
flawed and richly endowed—and the flowing of grace in us and through us, in the
world, depends on our willingness to acknowledge and address our flaws as well as acknowledging and acting
decisively upon, our inherent divine giftedness.  As the new age teacher Marianne Williamson
says, our deepest fear is not that we are
inadequate, it is that we are powerful beyond measure….We were born to make
manifest the glory of God that is within us.

Solus Christus.   And
how do we do that?   The Reformers
believed that the saving work of Jesus Christ was central to human
salvation.   Today, as we receive
hospitably the revelational understandings of other religions, we see “Christ
alone” somewhat differently. To us, as theologian John Cobb has put it, the way of Jesus is a saving story.
Evangelism is to share our experience of that saving story with those persons
who lack one.   And what is the Story
that Christ brings us?   In the words of
Rob Bell’s new book,  Love Wins.
Violence can be met with peace.
Injury can be transformed with pardon.
No matter how strong the powers of darkness, the path Jesus taught and
practiced and gave his life for was Love.
Only by that way, no matter
what we call it, can we repair the world and ourselves.

Soli
Deo Gloria.   In the end, we Protestants believe that
glory is a part of the world God made, a part of us, who are formed in God’s
image, and the Light that illuminates our path.
We choose as our way of living to be open to and shaped by a sense of
mystery, delight, and glory.

A reformation faith, rooted
in the glory of God, opens the ears of our ears and the eyes of our eyes to the
holy in our midst.

Now I’m ready to tell you
about that other seal in the floor of
Hodge Hall at Princeton Theological Seminary, the one that had a defiant rat
painted in the middle of it–a rat that was, by the way, repainted in the dark
of night by tenacious students as often as the status quo-loving authorities
removed it.  It said:  Illegitimae
non carborundum, which, being tastefully translated, says:  Please
don’t permit persons of uncertain parentage to trouble you.  Don’t let them get you down, don’t get
stuck in old ways and rigid theological cages.
Be reformed– and keep on reforming., so that God’s glory can shine out.
e e cummings said it this way:

i thank You God for most
this amazing

day: for the leaping
greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of
sky; and for everything

which is natural which
is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am
alive again today,

and this is the sun’s
birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love
and wings: and of the gay

great happening
illimitably earth)

how should tasting
touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted
from the no

of all nothing—human
merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears
awake and

now the eyes of my eyes
are opened)

e e cummings,  1950

Riviera
Presbyterian Church

Laurie Ann Kraus                                                                                Exodus 32:1-14

…the hole where God should be

What pushes you off Center, these days?  Makes you edgy, sends you scrambling for
something, Anything, to fill the void or silence the restless, anxious voices
that keep you awake at night or worry you out of a sense of well-being through
the day?  And what are you willing to do
to make the Empty go away?

Up in New
York City, on Wall Street, the people aren’t dancing
around the golden calf so much as they are trying to beat it to death, as the
saying goes, with their tiny ineffectual fists.
I was intrigued to watch on television earlier this week; reporters
wandering around the financial district, trying to get a good quote from
someone—anyone, really—who might be able to voice the heart of protest.  Well, said
one young man, dressed like an angry zombie, it’s the Man.  Said another, a plump older woman with a
permanent sitting in a lawn chair, knitting,  it’s everything. We have rights.
We aren’t being treated as we should. Things need to change. Everyone
there, it seems, has a different story, a different fear, a different target
for their conviction that someone needs to pay. And like the Israelites in this
story from the book of Exodus, they are dancing as fast as they can, dancing to
make the fear go away, dancing to make things right. But what’s wrong—with Wall
Street and the economy, with the government, with the country, with us, if you
want to get right down to it—is difficult to pin down.

In the old story, as in our own, when
leadership seems to be in a vacuum,  when
our way forward is confused or obscured, there rises in a people a general
sense of dis-ease, and along with it, a determination to blame it on someone,
or something….  Something—something they
just can’t quite put their finger on—has gone missing, and without God, without
Moses, Israel has become an anxious, angry
people with a big hole where God should be. And so have we.

It’s not always wise, I think, to act out of
our emptiness; to make our decisions based on trying to fill a void—especially
when that void is the place where God ought to be in our lives. But we do: for
living in the Empty, living in-between, is so difficult, and so painful, that
we find it hard to resist the notion that all we have to do is latch onto
something—anything—good, and we will be filled.
Hoping in this way, we place an impossible burden on our work, our
friends, our lovers, our exercise regimen, our stuff:  A better job will make us less anxious.  A husband, a wife, a partner will make us
less lonely. Going out and working out will make the anxiety go away. And those
are just some of  the healthy ways we try to fill the hole!

It reminds me of that picture some pilot
snapped while joyriding over the Everglades a
couple of years ago:  of the headless,
bloated body of an enormous Burmese python with half a dead alligator exploding
from its ruptured stomach.  Sometimes, we
are so starved for anything to quiet
our hunger that we will devour the biggest thing we can find—we will swallow
whole what is lethal for our well being—all claws, and teeth and scales, and
keep on trying to get it digested down to the last moment, until it kills
us  Anxieties. Bitterness.  Resentments.
Regrets.  Addictions—to alcohol,
drugs, food, stuff, work.  These things
are wrong for us, especially when we are trying to use them to fill the hole
where God should be:  they are too big
for us to digest and will not nourish us even if we succeed in getting them
down.  In the short term or in the long,
they explode our soul, blow our mind, end life as God intends it to be.  There’s a reason Jesus said that the greatest
commandment was to love God with our whole heart and our whole mind and
our whole purpose—because if we love anything else that much, even for a little
while, even something good, it could kill us.
What are we using to quiet our cravings or fears?  What are we putting in the place God should
be?

This is what the story of the making of the
golden calf is all about:  it is about
managing anxiety, hiding our fears and insecurities, and trying to fill the
hole where God used to be with anything, anything at all that might make us feel
stronger, better, more sure.  It’s about
the lengths to which most of us will go in order to maintain a false sense of
security…and the consequences we pay when we give our highest allegiance to
anything less than God.

A commentary from
the midrash, the body of Jewish teaching on scripture, suggests that the people
of Israel
never had understood that it was God who had taken the initiative to enter into their
lives and save them. That God had chosen to be with them. They
believed it was Moses who had the power to summon God, to call down God’s
generosity.  They didn’t get that each of
them, that all
of them, had the power to
be with God—and because they believed they were powerless, that their lives
didn’t matter to God:  they turned to
Aaron, a man who wanted more than anything to make the people happy, to make
the people feel safe and secure; and together, out of a haunting sense of
inadequacy and a common desire to feel better at any price, they made a golden
calf.  They made a Less-Than-God
Something that they
could summon, that they could control.  What a tragedy—all along the way, God was willing, waiting, ready to
be summoned:  but the children of Israel thought
they were of so little value in the divine scheme of things that they settled
for a god of trinkets and trivialities. To change their habits, give up their slave-ways,
risk being unfinished and empty for long enough that the dust could settle and
a new Way begin to take shape—this was for them, as for most of us, too much of
a risk.

The novelist Goethe once said: everyone wants to be someone, but no one
wants to change. The people don’t.
And God, the story would have it, doesn’t, either:  he tells Moses he is over these people…if Moses will just get out of the way, the
smiting can begin, and we can start over again fresh.  If the past is any predictor of the future,
we may imagine, Moses won’t change, either:
he has already protested more than once that staying in the life he has
with the people he has chosen is too much work, hopeless.  But someone must change, become someone, if we are ever to find our way out of the
wilderness….and this time, Moses steps up.

Why Moses, and why now? When every time
before he was the first to give up, to get mad, to beg God to forget about it?  In the book of Exodus, Moses had been gone
from the people a long time—forty days and nights on the mountain, in the cloud
and the silence and the emptiness, alone and waiting—for what, he could not
imagine. Below, he was a leader without much of a plan and with barely enough
resources to keep his people moving forward.
Above, there are not quick fixes:
just silence, waiting and more waiting, and in the end, on the tablets
of the Torah, a way to live while on the journey.  I think Moses came down the mountain able to
step up and bear with the hard times a little longer because in the long time
before, when he had only his own thoughts and prayers to keep him, he learned
to refrain from throwing a bunch of stuff at his problem, he learned to be
patient, he learned to be. So he said to God—Maker of Life, Living One, you can change, too.  You
don’t have to smite, you can let go of your anger, you can be your Best Self,
you can yourself follow the Way you promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Come, let us change together.  And the story says, God changed his mind
about the disaster he planned to bring on his people.

Henrietta Jones, about to become 96 years
old, has lived through more change than anyone in this congregation, and is one
of the wisest women I know. She said this about this story earlier this week:  The
world is changing. If God didn’t change, God would be left out in the cold.

So
God changes.

And if God can, and at human invitation no
less, why can’t we? In these strange and restless times, why can’t we take the
time to be, and listen in the silence and bear faith in the midst of the
occasional emptiness, so that something really new, not just a melt-down rehash
of what we already had, can begin to emerge among us and through us?

This
is not a how-to list:  this is a prayer
for patience, for looking within, for trusting the Way that has been given us
by the child of God, Jesus, who faced what we face in this world and more.  This is not a prescription for filling the
hole where God should be; but a prayer that we refrain from dumping our useless
junk into that hole, filling our lives, our communities, and our world with
something less than God’s purposes for humankind.

How is God changing in your life, as you
yourself change, experience challenge, and grow?

What do you need from God, that you didn’t
need before?

What can you let go of, in your ideas about
God, about the world, about yourself, so that there can be room enough, space
enough, for you to practice the Way and wait for the next steps to reveal
themselves?

May the strength of God
pilot us, may the power of God preserve us. May the wisdom of God instruct us,
may the hand of God protect us

May the way of God direct us, may the
shield of God defend us. May the host of God guard us against the snares of evil  And the temptations of the world  May Christ be with us, Christ before us,
Christ in us, Christ o’er us   May our
salvation, O Lord, be always ours this day and forevermore.  Amen
.–from the Breastplate
of St. Patrick, 389-461

Riviera
Presbyterian Church                                                                            Genesis
50:11-17

Cycle of Violence

This Wednesday marks a tenth anniversary for Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi immigrant from Dallas, Texas. Ten days after the 9-11 disaster, he was at his convenience store job when Mark Stroman, a white supremacist, walked in and began to shoot, killing two other immigrant co-workers and wounding Bhuiyan so severely he nearly lost his right eye.  Though his physical wounds healed,  he endured flashbacks that defined his life in America by fear, and kept him reliving the story of the shooting long after Mark Stroman was arrested, tried and imprisoned  for his actions.  Those moments of trauma  that had shattered his life became his entire story—not merely describing a  part of his past, but defining his present with a perception of fear, and  narrowing his future to one shaped by anxiety and threat.  No less than the American people ten days  before, Bhuiyan’s life was changed forever by a hate crime, an act of violence  planned and perpetrated by someone who believed in justice shaped by vengeance  and retaliation.

Let us look  for a moment at the last story of Joseph and his brothers, which closes the  book of Genesis. After years of bitter conflict, vicious acts of terror, lies  and subterfuge, at last for this family of God’s choosing there was a day of reckoning, a hopeful moment of reconciliation, when Joseph, having tricked his brothers into bringing their father to Egypt, reveals his now-powerful self and  promises to act with kindness, for his father’s sake, and keep his brothers  safe in the days of famine and scarcity that are upon them all.  It seems too good to be true, but life goes  on—a truce, if not a true peace—until the patriarch Jacob dies, and the balance  of power dies with him. After his burial, his ten oldest sons, stripped of  their security, remember with fear and guilt what they did to their brother  Joseph.  The habits of the heart they  have practiced all these long years are so rooted in deceit and manipulation  that they concoct a story using their father’s name, to trick Joseph once again  into sparing their lives. Do not kill us
for what we did, they beg, and we  will live as your slaves.  What turn  will this story take now, this story that concludes our “in the beginning,” and  lays the foundation of our core values and our faith narrative?  Will it be a story of vengeance, retribution and exile, or a story of hospitality, mercy, and redemption?

Joseph wept, the bible tells us, when he heard his brothers’  story and received their plea-bargain.   And well he might have done, for even after all those years, nothing has  changed.  Brothers who feel threatened devise stories and tell lies that even they themselves have come to believe,  stories to justify the game of winning and losing, the realities of a world  shaped by retaliation and retribution.
It is the only kind of justice any of them know, the lex talionis, an eye for an eye.   In my imagination, Joseph weeps, as well,  for himself:  remembering that long-ago  dream where his brothers and his parents bowed down to his young, brash, arrogant  self and knowing in his secret heart that a part of him is glad that this dream  has finally come true.  Through suffering  and grace, he had become a wise leader—but the hurt, betrayed little boy was  still inside him—rooting for payback, rejoicing at the thrill of anticipation  he kept hidden beneath robes of privilege and respectability.  Joseph wept, because after all that time, all
that suffering and all that loss, nothing really had changed for this family at  all.  Joseph wept, as generations later  one of his descendents, Jesus, wept:  saying no more of this,  I’m tired of the killing and the fighting, and  the game of winning and losing….is there not another way?

Mark  Stroman was on death row in Texas when Rais Bhuiyan finally had enough of fear  and began to suspect that even justice would not make the pain go away.  He is a Muslim, and the Qur’an that shaped  his faith, while just as vulnerable to ideologies of violence as our own bible  can be, was also a story which invited him into a life of mercy and peace.  The Qur’an teaches forgiveness, he believes,  and said: God gave me a chance to do  something more. Killing is not the answer. If you take revenge, you are  increasing the cycle of violence. He joined forces with anti death penalty  activists to get Mark Stroman’s sentence reduced to life in prison, and soon  became an international advocate for human rights and non-violence.  Mark Stroman, having just penned the lines, premeditated hate, I await my faith,  died on death row on July 20 of this  year.  Four hours before his execution,  Bhuiyan reached him by phone, saying Mark,  I never hated you….and the next day, went to call on Stroman’s 25 year old  daughter, bringing his condolences to a devastated family.

Am I in the place of God? asked Joseph, and we might join with people of  faith like Rais Bhuiyan to ask the same.   Monday night, I watched the Tea Party debate on CNN and heard Wolf  Blitzer ask candidate Ron Paul what should be done about a 30 year old man who  didn’t buy insurance and then was stricken by life-threatening disaster.  Who should pay for his medical costs? What
should be done?  Paul looked troubled,  but began, this is the risk of freedom,  the choice that young man made…but what made me want to weep were the  voices from the crowd of well-dressed people in Tampa, shouting, let him die!

 Ten years  later, I fear that the season of fear inaugurated by 9-11 has taken root in us,  and the weeds of small-mindedness, fear of the Other, and partisanship are  threatening to choke out our older stories of welcome and hospitality, our  better American selves.  I fear that our  own tentativeness about speaking our faith in public is not so much showing our  respect for pluralism as it is silencing a necessary and powerful alternative  voice, one that needs to be speaking up while others are shouting from the back
of the room.

Who is in  the place of God? How do we decide whether we will be slaves to our fears and  guilts, as Joseph’s brothers were; or step away from taking the place of God  and choose instead to co-operate with divine Love, working for the good that  can arise out of even the most evil circumstances? I know that forgiveness is  hard, when we have been truly wounded: a long unfolding process, not merely a  decision made by people who wish they were better than they are.  But in pondering the future of the children
he called your little ones, and  maybe, by looking into a mirror and seeing for real, the full shape of his own  true, sad self, Joseph came, if not to full forgiveness, to a wisdom that  allowed him to desire to live by a different family story.  His great-grandparents, Abraham and Sarah,  were exiles and immigrants; who embraced a call to become a blessing to the nations, and even in the midst of their own  suffering, showed hospitality to strangers. Knowing and loving that story  allowed him to remember he was not God—it permitted him the freedom to live in  the better story, and to show to his brothers the grace and hospitality none of
them had been able to practice on their own. Joseph held both the evil that had  been done him and the good that God brought from it and chose for his best  practices,the actions that gave God’s good intentions the most room to grow.

Ten years  later, what are we remembering about the attacks of 9-11?  What are we forgetting?  On what part of our national narrative have  we been building the future of our little  ones, and the world’s?  In these hard  times, when shadows of fear, terror, economic hardship and disaster are still  over us all, what practices of our common faith, what themes of our national
narrative can we remember, to place in the service of divine light, so that God  can continue to bring good out of what others intended for evil?  What parts of our faith story are we  learning, teaching our children, and putting into practice, in the service of a
different future?

Progressive  Christians tend to fall silent when others use the bible to support ideologies  of retaliation and small-minded  moralities that constrain the freedom and  dignity of others.  We don’t use the  bible that way, and in truth, a lot of us have ceded the bible to the  proof-texters & the so-called literalists, and don’t use it at all! But if  ever there was a time for us to take seriously the call to learn our  Presbyterian history and culture, to immerse ourselves in adult faith learning  and bible study, to take up the opportunity to become teachers of our little  ones, and practitioners of the church’s missions and ministries—this is that  time. We always have choices about which stories will shape us, our  communal narratives and our actions in the world—our personal stories of loss  and joy; our national story of freedom and justice for all, our faith story, so  rich and complex and hopeful— and not to learn, claim, and teach those stories  is also a choice. My prayer for myself, and for all of us, this season of fall  beginnings, is this: We are simply asked to make gentle our  bruised world. To tame its savageness.To be compassionate of all, Including
ourselves. Then in the time left over from these ministries of justice and  care, to repeat the ancient tales, And go the way of God’s foolish ones. Amen.

Riviera
Presbyterian Church

Laurie
Ann Kraus                                                                                                 Exodus 3:1-15

“it is what it is”

In our bible study group on Wednesday morning, we had
taken a moment to stop and notice—where was our attention being drawn, by this
old, familiar story in Exodus?  What
phrases stood out?  What images?
Characters?  We were pondering the many
and varied translations of what scholars sometimes call “the Tetragramaton,” that
is, the four Hebrew letters yod, he, vav,
he, or eyeh asher eyeh, revered
as God’s most sacred name for godself, spoken here in the wilderness to Moses
by God from a burning bush.

Is it, I am that I
am?   Or, I will be Who I will be?  Or,  I am
the one who causes to be? or, I am
whatever I choose to be/become?

As we were pondering, suddenly Chuck said–  you
know what it sounds like?  It sounds like
that phrase I hear all the time now, that I never heard at all before a few
months ago–  “it is what it is.”   Huh.

It is what it is.   I know I have begun using those words, way
too often.  Like Chuck, I don’t know
where I first heard it, but for the past months, that phrase has been on my
lips whenever I speak of my parents’ situation—my mother’s battle with
Alzheimer’s and bladder cancer; my father’s life as a caregiver.   It is
what it is, I say, and shrug, when people ask, and then offer their concern
and prayers to me.  It is a fatalistic
kind of phrase—meant to convey that nothing can be changed, nothing done, only
endured, until…..

I’ve heard others use these words, this phrase, in much
the same way—about work, about a relationship, about one engagement or another
with political entities or bureaucracies or the many and varied disasters in
the world that wear on and on…

It is what it is.

This was the life of Moses in Midian,  A sad, short step in the bible from the
tingling promise of the baby Moses to the tired reality of a washed up prince
of Egypt, bitter and in exile. One moment, it is the child of promise, drifting
down the Nile in a basket, while the world watching and the hopes of a people
are bobbing gently on the water …the next, the man Moses is an empty husk;
burned out from his attempts to be a force for justice between the people of his
birth and the people of his nurture. He had fled across the Sinai to the
far-off land of Midian to mark his days in the mind-numbing boredom of a job
that kept the body alive, but left the soul to languish. Legend has it that
Moses, like the Hebrew people a few stories later, wandered in that same
wilderness for forty years—bible talk for “a long time,” shorthand for an
unbearable trial of endurance.  We all
have these seasons, I know.  Seasons of
joblessness, or enduring a job we hate so we can feed our family and
ourselves.  Seasons of caregiving for a
person we love and are losing, inch by terrible inch.  Seasons of struggle in an important
relationship where no intervention seems to change what is; seasons of grief or
loneliness or even, simply, boredom and numbness, when nothing we are or have
or have to do seems to matter in the least.

In this season,
Moses aptly described himself as a
stranger in a strange land:  and so
he is. alienated from his true identity, his core self; estranged from his family
and friends, cut off from a life of meaning and service to others, lost to
himself and to the divine source of life, God.

Is there for Moses, for us, any real
alternative to mere survival? When we are fatalistic, bored, numb and
hopeless—can anyone do anything, or is it, indeed, what it is?

I have quoted before the words of
Viktor Frankl, the philosopher-theologian who survived the death camps and lost
his entire family in the Holocaust. He said: everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human
freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose
one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are
challenged to change ourselves.

It took a burning bush for Moses to
recognize that he was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, that it is what it is is no creed for a life
of meaning, intention, and purpose. What does it take for us to leave the paths
of mere survival and turn toward Life?

This story tells us—when we are ready
to stop enduring and return to living; the presence of God will reveal itself
to us, and in us.  Again at bible study
Wednesday, one participant said, how
wonderful it was that God chose to give Moses a burning bush at that moment and
place in time.  And you think
about—what happens to those who don’t get give a burning bush?  What happens if we don’t get the burning bush
when we need it, or even at all?  But
legend has it, the burning bush was there all along—every day of those “forty
years,” that unendurable age of mere surviving.
God didn’t choose that day to give the burning bush:  Moses chose that day to stop believing it is
what it is, and to begin hoping that his life, and his future, could be
different than the regrettable past and more than his hopeless present.

Captivated, Moses stared at the bush,
burning merrily, its light flickering over his dark and brooding face—and in a
moment of mindfulness, the Voice spoke: Moses,
Moses.

And he
said:  here I am, sick and tired and heartsore,
remembering the man I used to be.

The Voice said: Take off your sandals, the place where you are standing is holy
ground. Take off your sandals. In the Torah and the Midrash, this line is understood another  way:
“change your habits.”  Moses, this is holy ground . . .change your
habits, your attitude, your life.  I will
be who I will be…. and so can you.

It
isn’t what it is, at all:  God, the one
who is always becoming, the One who will be what God will be, is with us and in
us. God will help us to help ourselves to a new life.

Whenever we believe that the past does not
define our future, whenever we embrace that the hopeless present is not the
only reality, that is Holy Ground, where God meets us with burning passion and
Light that clarifies our world and our way forward. God will be who God will
be:  and each time our understanding of
God is challenged by circumstance, and we give up what we thought we believed
in service to something a little bigger, God becomes what God becomes, and we
receive a larger God, and become a greater self.

Our lives are holy ground. The ways we
give of ourselves and are privileged to live out our mission in our daily
lives, and as a community of faith, is holy ground. The place where God calls
your name, and knows what your soul craves, and creates a space for our heart’s
deep yearning to serve the world’s deep need. Holy ground, and grace, is the
place in our lives where we suddenly understand that it is possible for us to
be used, but not used up.

What habits do we need to change in order to keep that ground holy, to be able to
get up each morning with a grateful heart, and know that in the day to come we
will, like God, be holy agents of transformation, of change, in our own lives
and in the lives of the world that are touched by our presence?  We, like God, can become what we will become,
regardless of circumstance.

What is holy ground?  We are holy ground—the place where God meets
the world in our lives, no different than once God met the world in the eyes of
Christ.  We are holy ground, and God is
in us, with us, and for us.  We must
change our habits, and hallow the holy ground of our lives, which are God’s and
God’s gift to the world. Let us pray: You
shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills shall
break forth before you. There will be shouts of joy and all the trees of the
field will clap their hands as you go out in joy….

An
Invocation:

Our
true home is in the present moment.

To
live in the present moment is a miracle.

The
miracle is not to walk on water.

The
miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment,

To
appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.

Peace
is all around us—

In
the world and in nature—

And
within us—

In
our bodies and our spirits.

Once
we learn to touch this peace,

We
will be healed and transformed.

It
is not a matter of faith, it is a matter of practice.

                                                                                                                        Thich
Nhat Hanh

Laurie Ann Kraus                                                                                                                                  Genesis 37

The Great Pretenders

Up close and textual, there’s nothing
particularly amazing about Joseph or his technicolor dream coat, let alone his
father and the rest of this lot of Jacob’s brothers.  The author Madeline L’Engle said this about
this story: I try to listen to the story
of Joseph and his brothers…because it is a story of human beings becoming more
human through their adventures and misadventures. The story of Joseph is the
journey of a spoiled and selfish young man finally becoming, through betrayal,
anger, abandonment, unfairness, and pain, a full and complex human being. I
have much to learn from his story.[1]
What do we have to learn?

It was tempting to leave the unlovely
Joseph and his dreadful brothers heaped up on the side of this sermon, and find
someone else to talk about. But I think that would be too easy. Of course God
can work—through people who are naturally good, brave, thrifty and courteous. But
does God work despite and through the sinful human condition? Or, not at all
until we somehow, by grace or by gosh, get better?  Do we become human in spite of our horrible
ways, or because of them?  Is our best
hope to be pretending our way into redemption…or living as we are, trusting
beyond hope that God, that those we love, see us already and love us just the way we are?

Thinking about Joseph and his gift for
seeing anything but himself, I can’t help viewing this story through the lens
of our debt ceiling debate “process” which the Daily Show’s Jon Steward aptly
called Dealaggeddon. Except for
Arizona representative Gabby Gifford’s touching and heroic re-appearance in
Congress last Friday, there was nuttin’ and noone to point to with pride as our
Congress and president postured and threatened their way into “compromise,” and then had the fairly unmitigated
gall to hail their “work” as a shining beacon of bipartisan governing.  Ahhhh, you
have to love the dog days of August, filled with harsh light, violent storms,
and relentless draining hot air. And the weather’s not that wonderful,
either!

Pondering the sins of others, we
prefer to pretend that we are better than we are.  Maybe we need to pretend. For as long as we
can’t really believe that God works
in all things for good…that God uses ruined things, for good, that God works
with us and loves us just as we are,
not waiting for us to achieve a higher level of humanity,  or manifest a state of visibly sanctified
grace….we won’t find the ground to stand on, from which we must begin with
humility and trust to become the graceful people we wished we already were.
Could Congress, bad as it is, be viewed by Divine Hope as holy ground?  Could our own lives,—even when we are petty
and problematic, be holy ground, beloved to God as a real place, a real place
to begin the holy work of becoming authentically human?

We find it hard to believe this about
ourselves, though secretly we might hope to.

I’m wondering…is it possible that
being known as we really are, working and praying from that hard place of truth, might give us and God, more to work with
than when we are great pretenders?  Is it
possible our relationships with those we love and those we ought to love might
be more likely to grow and to succeed if we didn’t try to pretend we were
better than we are, or our beloved, or our child or our parent, better than he
or she is?  If we would set ourselves to
do our loving and our learning from the ground floor, rather than from our
preferred imaginary self?   Is it
possible we might have a better chance of being changed if we accepted
ourselves and others as we are, and our world as it is, not as we would have it
be?  Could we be brave enough, reckless enough,
trusting enough to try?

I know a lot of ministers prefer
presiding over funerals, rather than weddings.
I’ve wondered for a number of years why that is. And here’s what I’ve
come up with:  Sometimes, weddings bring
out the fairy tale endings in us…but the truth is usually a little more
“Grimm’s” and a lot less Disney!  Pushed
by a culture that wants happily-ever-aftering, young couples strain to pretend
they and their beloved are better than they are, and the strain of sustaining
that fantasy is hard on everybody.  I try
to ask couples—what do you dislike about your partner? And hope for the Real to
show up…I’ll never forget the young bride who said to me sotto voce when her
fiancé excused himself for a glass of water
I can’t tell you that!  I still excuse myself to the bathroom when I
have to pass gas!

But when someone dies, somehow, the
truth will out. Grief strips away facades; it attenuates our energy for
pretense. Even while trying to construct a eulogy or put together the montage
of life-photos to be displayed, even in the midst of receiving condolence
visits, the real stories, the real feelings come out…. the good and the bad of
the one who has died, the genuine ambivalence loved ones feel when there is
unfinished business, and we all have unfinished business. Funerals are often a
chance to speak the truth in love, and to learn to live with what is. Me, I’ve
come to love weddings just as much, now that I am old enough and wise enough to
fish in deeper waters, and to wait for the beauty of the real to emerge when I
get to know couples in the marriage preparation process. I love nothing better
than to sit with a couple after I have asked, what do you fight about?  What
can’t you stand about your beloved? and watch their quick grins of
acknowledgement, and the relaxation of their bodies from wedding cake figurine
perfection into the real, sometimes rude and occasionally smelly human beings
they really are.

So, our sacred texts and the sacred
texts of our lives give us opportunities to tell the truth about ourselves in
church, and to see what God, and we, will do with it. So, Joseph is an arrogant
twit.  His father is selfish and
clueless.  His brothers are a hissing and
a reproach. And God is going to do something with this family. God is going to
save the world through these unlovely and unlikely characters.  God won’t wait for a perfect Christ figure to
step forward….God is going to make a
Christ figure out of the materials God has to hand. And if God did so once
upon a time…why not today?  Why not
now?  Pray with me: God, grant me the serenity to
accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and
wisdom to know the difference, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at
a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this
sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that you will make all
things right if I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in
this life and supremely happy with you in the next.[2]
Amen.