But First

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 26, 2016

8 Proper C

          One of the occupational hazards of being a priest is that I tend to spend more time than the average person thinking about funerals.  At our best, the Episcopal Church does funerals very well and those services are wonderful opportunities to proclaim the good news of God in Christ.  Whatever the circumstances, we can celebrate the workings of God in the life of the person who died and commit that person to their new life with Christ.  I have experienced glorious funerals that celebrated a long life well lived, such as the funeral we had here not long ago, with thoughtfully chosen hymns and scripture readings and people gathered from all over the community and even the country.  I have experienced very small services in funeral homes that have none of the trimmings and trappings of a church and rely solely on the liturgy to proclaim the good news.  I have experienced funerals for individuals whose lives were cut way too short by tragedy or illness and where pure raw grief was held gently by the liturgy in the promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  Funerals are important for the loved ones of the person who died as they provide an opportunity to celebrate a life, mourn a death, and hear Jesus say “I am resurrection and I am life.”  Funerals are important for the church as we have the opportunity to show God’s love and proclaim the gospel to those who are grieving.

          So, what does Jesus have against a good funeral this morning?  To a potential follower who simply wants to bury his father before he leaves to follow Jesus, Jesus says “Let the dead bury their own dead.  But as for you, go proclaim the Kingdom of God.”  That makes no sense on several levels. The dead cannot bury the dead.  And what about the commandment to honor one’s father and mother?  Would that not include providing a decent burial?  One of the curses the Old Testament prophets invoked upon those who strayed from the covenant was that their body would not be buried.  So to tell a grieving person to let the dead bury the dead seems downright heartless.  To another potential follower who wants to say farewell to those at home before he leaves, Jesus says “No one who puts the hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  What does Jesus have against relationships that merit a good good-bye?  Does he want his followers’ loved ones worrying that someone has simply disappeared?  How does Jesus expect to draw any followers when he is so utterly unrealistic and demanding?

When Jesus demands an all or nothing response, I tend to respond in one of several ways.   One option is to romanticize the passage and wax eloquently about giving up everything to follow Jesus, and then look for someone else to do that. Another option is to simply blow Jesus off as unrealistic. After all, he did not have bills to pay or a family to care for. A third option is to think of following Jesus as a worthy goal once the bills are paid, the kids are out of school, and our other obligations are satisfied, which, of course, will probably never happen. Taking Jesus seriously is difficult when he is so demanding.

          I believe Jesus is responding more to two little words this morning than he is responding to what his potential followers want to do.  Those two little words are “But first." "But first let me go bury my father." "But first let me say farewell to those at home." Neither burying one’s father nor saying farewell to those at home are bad things. The problem was not the acts themselves. The problem was the "but first." Jesus calls us to turn our "but firsts" upside down, and to follow him first, rather than following once there is room on the calendar. If we wait to follow Jesus until the time when all our obligations are fulfilled, we are not really following Jesus. We are asking Jesus to follow us. Following Jesus means going where Jesus goes, and making Jesus our "but first." Yes, we have important obligations to our families, to our jobs and education, and to our communities, but Jesus asks that our commitment to follow him be the "but first" not vice versa. Jesus calls us not to abandon our responsibilities, but to radically reorient our lives so that he is our "but first" and to trust that all the obligations of our earthly life will follow and fit into place when we follow him. 

             In the reading from Galatians, Paul reminds us that this life of following Jesus and making Jesus our "but first" is actually a life of radical freedom. Freedom, says Paul, is not an opportunity for self-indulgence. True freedom, according to Paul, is not the freedom to do whatever we please, whenever we want to do it. That kind of freedom actually holds us hostage to our calendars and our earthly obligations. The freedom Jesus offers is the freedom to become servants to one another, through love. For Paul, the test of whether or not Jesus is our "but first" and we are truly free is whether our lives produce the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, faithfulness, and generosity. 

               Jesus is not looking for followers who are irresponsible with regard to their earthly obligations, nor is he asking his followers to go anyplace he is not willing to go first. What Jesus is asking of those who wish to follow him is that they make him their "but first" and say to all of our earthly obligations "But first, I follow Jesus."  

                                                                      Amen.

          

What Are You Doing Here?

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 19, 2016

7 Proper C

          My heart has been heavy this week.  Forty-nine innocent people were shot, with fifty people dead, in yet another mass shooting.  I have talked with some of my gay friends who tell me that gay bars and nightclubs are sacred spaces for gay people.  Those spots are the one place where they can go, be who they are, and be accepted and safe.  I, of course, would love to believe that church can be such a safe place for all people, but I know that is not always the case.  The senseless loss of life made my heart heavy enough, but the vitriol which followed about how to control gun violence has deepened the pain, if that is possible.  Civil conversation about the topic seems impossible.  Fear and anger are rampant, and safe places for honest thoughtful dialog seem few if not non-existent.

          On the other hand, this week Don and I attended two more of our Neighborhood Gatherings last week.  The conversations are filled with your love for this parish, each other, and all that you have accomplished together.  Our hearts have been touched by your care for each other and for the world around us as you reach out to people who are hurting or struggling.  Our hearts are full of joy at the opportunity to be part of that work with you.

          Neither the stories from I Kings and Luke nor the reading from Galatians seem to have much to do with safety or civil discourse this morning, nor do they seem to have anything to do with the joy of doing ministry together.  The story of the Gerasene demoniac does have something to offend just about anyone, however.  For those who prefer that the gospel not sound like a scene straight from a horror movie, this is a difficult reading. In as much as this reading appears to equate mental illness with demon possession, we are likewise offended. For those who work to protect the rights of animals, the thought that Jesus would cast a legion of demons into a herd of pigs is offensive. For those who are concerned about the livelihood of workers, with the loss of the pigs, Jesus has put an end to the income of the swineherders. All the way around, this is a difficult story.

          The most curious part of the story, however, comes at the very end and has little to do with demon possession. If we put aside our reservations about demon possession, our concern for animals, or the known causes of mental illness, we hear a story about a man who is healed of a terrible affliction that causes him to be completely cut-off from his community, his family, and even himself. We see the man who once could not be contained with chains and shackles sitting calmly at Jesus’ feet, fully clothed and his dignity restored. And we hear the man who was healed ask, even beg, to follow the one who has given him this great gift. And the logical answer to this understandable request is "yes." But Jesus says "No." "No, return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." When the demons beg Jesus to let them enter the herd of swine rather than be ordered back into the abyss, Jesus says "yes." When the people in the surrounding country were seized with great fear and ask Jesus to leave, Jesus says "yes." When the healed man begs to follow Jesus, Jesus says "no." How does Jesus expect to get more followers if he won’t let people follow him? 

          I think the healed man wants to follow Jesus because following Jesus is safer than returning home. No doubt his wife had left him, and his children wanted nothing to do with him. We are told that the people were seized with great fear and there is no telling what they were saying about him. The owners of the pigs could not possibly be happy with him as they had just lost their livelihood on his behalf. The reality is that there is no happy homecoming in store for this man. The safe option is to leave his country and follow Jesus. 

             Elijah is also looking for the safe option this morning. Unlike the man in the gospel story, Elijah’s life has been going pretty well until recently. God had sustained Elijah through a drought, used Elijah as a vessel through which God raised a widow’s son from the dead, and led Elijah to victory in a battle with 850 priests of Baal and Asherah. Elijah’s resume is looking pretty good at the moment. This morning we hear Jezebel pledge to her husband, King Ahab that Elijah will be dead in 24 hours, so Elijah flees for his life, first into the wilderness, then to a cave on Mount Horeb, where Moses had long ago spoken with God. When God says "What are you doing here, Elijah?," God is not asking a polite question about Elijah’s travel plans. God’s question is more like catching your child at the lake when he is supposed to be at school. Full of self-righteousness and more than a little self-pity, Elijah tells God that he is the only faithful Israelite left and that his life is in danger. God tells Elijah to go stand on the mountain, but Elijah cowers in the cave during a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire. Finally, the sound of sheer silence draws Elijah out of the cave. We are not told what Elijah was expecting God to say, but God asks Elijah again, in the same tone of voice, "What are you doing here?" And again, Elijah tells God that he is the only faithful Israelite left, and they are seeking his life, to take it away. If Elijah is expecting any sympathy from God, he is sorely disappointed, for God says "Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus." Elijah is not being sent back to the country from which he came, but he is being sent on, away from the safety of the mountain, to continue the work God has given him to do.

              Both Elijah and the man once possessed by demons were trying stay safe on the pretext of being faithful.  Elijah goes to the holy mountain on which Moses spoke with God. That is certainly a faithful place to be. The healed man wants to follow Jesus. That, too sounds like a quite faithful option. But in both cases, the answer was no, and both men were sent off to bear witness to God’s work in the world.   We, too, can want to play it safe in contentious and difficult times and avoid difficult conversation and actions on the pretext of being faithful and stay entirely focused on our church life.  We can pretend that we live in a community where such violence does not affect us.  When we do that, God says to us “What are you doing here?” and God sends us out into the world to be faithful people there. I am quite sure we don’t all agree on how to end gun violence, even if we agree that the violence must end.  What God calls us to do is to live our life together, in this place, as people who believe Paul’s words that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.  In other words, God calls us to live as people who believe that in Christ nothing divides us.  We can disagree and still be one.  Then God sends us out into the world to model that kind of behavior so the world can see that love and affection for those with whom we disagree is possible.  Only then will we be able to have the kind of civil discourse that can bring an end to God’s heartbreak and ours.  God sends us out, as God sent Elijah and the man once possessed by demons, to show the world what is possible.

                                                          Amen.

          

Gratitude

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 12, 2016

6 Proper C

When I was a child, my mother insisted that the thank you notes for all of our Christmas presents be written by New Year’s Day. The notes needed to be thoughtful, specific, and at least three sentences. To an 8 year old, that felt like being required to write a book! If someone brought us a casserole, the dish had to be returned filled with cookies or some other treat so we wouldn’t appear ungrateful. An invitation to dinner needed to be reciprocated to both show gratitude and prevent the host from thinking that we did not enjoy ourselves….even if we didn’t. My mother was from the Deep South where the rules around gratitude were clear and utterly inflexible. The theory was that if one expressed gratitude, whether or not it was heartfelt, one would learn to be a grateful person.

While gestures of appreciation seemed to my mother’s children like a mere act of reciprocity, I think there was more at stake. Each year we received a birthday and Christmas gift from our Aunt Rhoda. Actually, she was my mother’s great aunt, so she was our great-great aunt. Aunt Rhoda was a widow and lived in Hastings, Florida, and we thought she was probably very old. Maybe even 60. We only met Aunt Rhoda once when I was about 11 years old. But we always felt like we had a relationship with her because each year she would send us gifts, we would write thank you notes, and often she would respond with a note herself. Somehow, that act of gratitude, forced though it might have been, forged a relationship between a child and a delightful older woman.

The rules around gratitude are a little messier in today’s gospel reading. When Simon invites Jesus to dinner, he has no idea what he is in for. The dinner has just begun when a woman, known to be a sinner, arrives and begins an embarrassing display of public affection for Jesus, anointing his feet with oil and wiping them clean with her tears and her hair. Simon is mortified, as most of us would be if this happened to a guest in our home. But Jesus is unfazed by the woman’s actions. Jesus tells Simon a parable that connects gratitude with forgiveness. The parable leads us to believe that the woman is showing her gratitude to Jesus for the abundance of forgiveness she has received.

When Jesus tells the parable about the debtor who was forgiven 50 denarii and the debtor who was forgiven 500 denarii and asks Simon which person will love the creditor more, Simon answers that the person with the greater debt will love the creditor more, and Jesus tells him that he has answered correctly. That seems quite logical. And that is where we should become very suspicious that something else is going on. Gospel logic tells us that the first are last, and the last are first; the rich are poor and the poor are rich. So, when Jesus goes logical on us in a recognizable way, something else is up. Jesus then points out the lengths to which the woman has gone to offer Jesus hospitality and the lack of effort Simon had put into hospitality. Simon, who is presumably the one with the lesser debt to be forgiven, and hence logically the one with lesser love, is being called on the carpet for lack of hospitality. Simon does not come out of this conversation looking good, whether he is the greater sinner or the lesser sinner, and I imagine he comes out of the conversation very confused. The woman, a known sinner, has been forgiven and told that her faith has saved her. Simon is no doubt a man of deep faith. What does she have that he doesn’t? And what is faith?

If faith is right belief, then Simon clearly has faith. The Pharisees had a lively and active faith. He, like all Pharisees, knew his scriptures, worshiped in the synagogue, and worked to keep all of the laws. The woman did none of that. If faith is right behavior, then Simon, like all Pharisees worked hard to model righteous behavior. Simon is not like King Ahab in the reading from Kings, who flagrantly disregards the law of God. Simon is a good man. Jesus’ parable seems to make that clear. Whatever the woman’s sin was, since she was a known sinner, that sin must have involved behavior of some sort. So faith does not seem to mean consistently righteous behavior.

What the woman did have that Simon did not have was a deep and genuine relationship with Jesus. Her relationship with Jesus freed her from her sin. Her response was a deep and overwhelming gratitude. The result of her gratitude was behavior toward Jesus that modeled the absolutely outrageous love of God. When Jesus tells the woman that her faith has saved her, he is not telling her that she did something that earned her salvation, or that because she believes correctly she has been saved. Jesus is not even telling her that, because she has been forgiven, her faith has saved her. According to the parable, Simon has also been forgiven. What has saved the woman is her relationship with Jesus that shows itself in demonstrating God’s extravagant love.

As my brother, sister and I learned from writing thank you notes to our Aunt Rhoda, gratitude fosters and builds relationships. That is certainly true of the woman’s gratitude to Jesus. And relationships heal, as the woman also experienced. And healing produces more gratitude. Real gratitude produces behavior that imitates God’s abundant love for us. Jesus calls us to be people of deep gratitude who can love the world with God’s abundant, outrageous love for us. That’s what gratitude does.

Amen.

The Circumstances of our Lives

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

June 5, 2016

5 Proper C

          Last Sunday night I had the pleasure of attending our Welcome Table for the first time.  If you are unfamiliar with this ministry, the Welcome Table is a place where everyone is welcome to gather in our Parish Hall on the last Sunday of the month and enjoy a meal together.  The tables are set with real plates and flatware along with flowers taken from the Sunday morning arrangements.  Because last Sunday was during Memorial Day weekend, the group was only a dozen or so folks, but they had come from surrounding communities as they do the last Sunday of every month.   The people who come have formed their own little community around the tables in the parish hall.  Each person is welcomed by one of our parishioners by name and those who are not there are missed by name.   The community includes both our guests and our parishioners who serve them, and I was welcomed into the community by our guests who told me their stories and asked me about my life in Hudson as easily as if I had been coming to Welcome Table for years.

          As I was chatting with one woman who was there with her two grandchildren, her husband, and her mother, she told me about something she had read recently.  She had read that we should interpret the circumstances of our lives through the lens of God’s love, rather than interpret God’s love through the lens of our circumstances.  She and I talked a bit about what a difference that makes in our attitude and in our faith. 

          I thought about this conversation when I read our scripture lessons for this week.  In the story from I Kings, the widow’s son becomes so ill that there is no breath left in him.  In the story from Luke, the body of a widow’s son is being carried to his grave.  In both cases, the loss of the son meant not only heart break and grief, but also the loss of the widow’s only source of support.  In the story from I Kings, the widow was preparing to fix her last meal and lay down to die when she meets Elijah.  She was already in desperate straits.  The widow in Luke’s gospel was likely in no better circumstances. In both cases, the son was brought back to life. 

          When I read stories like this one through the circumstances of my own life, I can easily think “Why did my loved one have to die?  Where was Jesus then?  Where was my miracle?”  We have all lost loved ones who we had prayed and prayed for.  Or we lost them suddenly without a chance to pray for their healing.  But when I read the stories through the lens of the love of God, I see things differently.

          In the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, the obvious miracle is that the son was brought back from the dead.  But there is another miracle that we can easily miss.  In the beginning of the story, the widow, who is not an Israelite, is gathering sticks to prepare a final meal for herself and her son before they lie down to die.  When Elijah appears on the scene, he has been on the run in the wilderness.  He is dirty, smelly, and obviously lacking in the social graces.  Think John the Baptist, but worse. When the woman tells him that she has only enough oil and meal to make a bit of bread for herself and her son before they lay down to die, we might expect a word of encouragement from this man of God. But no, he asks her to first make him a little cake of bread and bring it back to him.  Elijah makes what to me would have sounded like a ridiculous, empty promise: that her jug of oil will not be emptied and her jar of meal will last until the drought, caused by the evil actions of King Ahab, has ended.  The easily overlooked miracle in the story, especially if we are interpreting the story through the lens of our own circumstances rather than the love of God, is the miracle of hospitality.  That the widow was willing to engage Elijah, then did make him some bread from her scarce amount of oil and meal, is nothing short of miraculous. 

          When we see our lives through the lens of the love of God rather than vice versa, we see miracles in unlikely places.  I know this to be more than hypothetically true.  My friend Rachel was diagnosed with ovarian cancer 21 years ago.  Her children were young.  The youngest was in kindergarten.  She set her mind and heart on seeing all 4 of her daughters graduate from high school.  She endured more chemotherapy and surgery than one person should be able to tolerate and she did so without complaining and with deep gratitude.  Before all four daughters had graduated from high school, the cancer spread to her liver.  More surgery. More chemo.  More setbacks and more painful procedures. And more gratitude for the medical people, the support people, and another chance at life.  All four daughters did graduate from high school, went to college, got married, and three of them now have children.  And there was more surgery and more chemo and many more setbacks.  And more deep and constant gratitude.  Rachel saw miracles where most of us would only see misery.  Before the last set back which finally took her life, Rachel told me that all of life was icing at this point.  She was savoring every moment.  This while she could barely breathe, was pretty much confined to a wheelchair, and could do almost nothing for herself, and yet gratitude was oozing out of every pore of her being.  God had been so good to her.  When she died last week, her death was not due to the lack of a miracle.  Her life, hard fought though it was, was a whole series miracle and she knew it.  She interpreted her circumstances through the lens of God’s love, and not vice versa.

          This morning the Psalmist calls upon us to praise the Lord as long as we live, and reminds us that God gives justice to those who are oppressed and food to those who hunger, opens the eyes of the blind, cares for the strangers and sustains the orphan and widow.  If we look at the world through the lens of the circumstances of our lives and the lives of those around us, God’s work is sometimes hard to see.  We can get cynical about the words of the psalmist and praise can be hard to come by.  But if we look at the world through the lens of God’s love, we will see the many ways God is at work, often in places we would never have noticed, and praise will be the obvious response.

                                                Amen.