There is no Sabbath from mercy

I suppose I should give the guy a break. After all the leader of the Synagogue in today's gospel would tell us that he was only trying to maintain order. Sure, he was unhappy that Jesus healed the woman on the Sabbath in the middle of a local synagogue but I guess he was trying to do the right thing.

Of course, he went about it in completely the wrong way.

Instead of going to Jesus and asking him directly what he was up to, he goes to everyone…well, probably every man in the congregation…and complains. By doing that, he draws everyone around him into what essentially a beef between him and Jesus--something we call triangulation.

He does something else. He succeeds in drawing everyone else into his conflict by making the focus of their upset the woman. Here is the trick: Get Jesus in trouble my making the woman both the victim and the troublemaker. “Could she have not waited until another day to be healed?” they ask. “Could she have not gone someplace else besides the synagogue?” Never mind that she didn’t even ask to be healed in the first place! After 18 years, she was basically used to being stooped over like a bent matchstick. Jesus invited her to come over to him. It was all his idea.

So the Leader of the Synagogue does three things wrong: he triangulates; he focuses on the wrong person; and, oh yeah, he stirs up everyone else in the process. All in all, he brings out the worst in everyone except maybe Jesus and the woman who was healed…who was apparently too busy praising God to notice all the grumbling.

You may not have noticed this, but this gospel story ends a section of Luke’s Gospel about repentance which begins with the question of whether it was God’s will that Pilate executed a number of Galileans or if God was the one who caused a tower in a town called Siloam to fall down and which killed 18 people. Jesus said it was not God’s will…God didn’t even do it…life happens…towers fall…and it all the more true that people sin and cause the deaths of other people...but these are all the more the reason to focus on God, God’s love and grace, and to do God’s work while we have the time.

Now we come to the other bookend on this little section of Luke’s Gospel, a woman with an ailment that has her bent over for 18 years. Get it? 18 years with a crooked back. 18 people killed when the tower fell. Coincidence? I don’t think so. I think that the Gospel of Luke and Jesus are trying to teach us something.

So let’s cut through the triangulation, the grumbling and the blame-game, and go right to the Leader of the Synagogue and ask him some questions. We can’t do it face-to-face, but let’s pretend.

When would be a good time to show mercy? Tomorrow, maybe? After all, today is a day of rest. We don’t want to do work on a day of rest. After all, even God rested on the seventh day, right? But as Jesus said, even the most observant of first-century Jews will lead their animals to the feeding trough and to water on the Sabbath. Why? Because animals don’t know about the Sabbath and they don’t care. If you don’t believe me, come to my house at about 5:30 or 6 in the morning and ask my cat. All animals know is that it’s time to be fed or watered or milked and they don’t know or care about our customs, calendars or our need to sleep in. So feeding, watering and milking farm animals on the Sabbath was allowable because it was the right and sensible thing to do. So, Jesus asks in effect, if it is okay to show mercy to your animals on the Sabbath, then why can’t we show mercy—heal—a daughter of Abraham on the Sabbath?

When is a good time to show mercy? Now is a good time to show mercy. Right now.

And I have another question for this Leader-dude. Where is a good place to show mercy? Underneath his complaint about the Sabbath, the man who stirred up the people in the congregation with his grumbling was also complaining about the place of the healing. This is a house of worship, not a clinic. This is sacred ground, where sacred words are said in sacred ways. Take it outside.

So where is a good place to show mercy? Jesus’ invitation to the woman and his healing of her brokenness says that showing mercy, compassion and healing what binds and breaks us is as much the worship of God as all the sacred words and ritual we can muster. In fact, one without the other is pretty much empty. If our worship doesn’t drive us to mercy, then we are not really worshiping God. If our compassion doesn’t show us the face of God, then we are not listening. If our rituals only reinforce our fears then we are only huddling against the cold instead of turning ourselves to God.

Where is the place to show mercy? Here is the place to show mercy. Right where we are, right now.

Finally, I turn to the story which started this section of Luke’s Gospel, this section about repentance and turning our focus towards God: the question of the tower in Siloam and the 18 people when it fell down. Jesus reminded us that God does not work by knocking down towers, or causing car wrecks, or making flimsy hearts or runaway cells. These are part of being free people in a created order that runs on rules like gravity, time and creatureliness. What we can do is be better: build better towers, work to care for and find cures for the people who are sick, be more attentive to the people in our lives, take better care of ourselves and…getting to story at the other end of the section, the one we heard today…we can show mercy where we can.

The Leader-dude of the local synagogue was upset because he thought the sacred Sabbath was violated in a sacred space by the showing of mercy to a woman in pain. He was so upset that instead of taking it to Jesus, he tried to get as many allies on his side as possible as fast as he could. Jesus tells him that the time for mercy is now and the place for mercy is here.

Luke’s Gospel tells us that Jesus’ words were so effective that the Leader-dude and his cronies were shamed into silence. Of course, the silence did not last long. People still challenge Jesus right down to today. They still grumble. They still blame the victim and look for scapegoats. One of the reason that Jesus was condemned to death and went to the cross was because human beings will look anywhere, anyplace—except in their own hearts—to keep what scares them at arm’s length. And it still happens today.

This summer’s extended flap over the Muslim community center in lower Manhattan is not really about sacred spaces or preserving the feeling of victims or even about safety. We hear the same complaints: why here? Why now? It is all about fear. Fear is the opposite of faith. And, you know, there are people who use our fears to build up their own power. You know there are people who love to only feel big and strong when everyone around them is terrified, or angry, or shouting. Just like the Leader in today’s Gospel who stirred up the crowd with his grumbling—except that these days they use the internet and the media to make for a much bigger crowd—they build themselves up by bringing out the worst in everyone else. And apparently those who would set Americans against Americans and encourage hatred between people of faith show no shame. They only tell us how dangerous the world is, and encourage us to make any one who is different into a hated "other". These people gain power by keeping us in our fear.

Yes, it’s true. We do live in an uncertain and often dangerous world, and we do everything we can to maintain some order and create some safety. But as Jesus demonstrates, while we might not be able to keep the towers from falling, we can show mercy where we can. We might not be able to prevent disaster, but we can care for people in trouble. We may not understand our neighbor but we can walk with them. We can't cure every illness or heal every division but we can reach out with healing to the person right in front of us.

When is the time to show mercy? Now is the time to show mercy.

Where is the place to show mercy? Here is the place to show mercy.

(Updated: The photograph originally used on this post has been removed at the request of the owner of the original piece. My apologies to Paris Parfait who brought this my intention today. 6/11/2013. atg+)

Reunion

Updated: Monday, August 16, 2010, March 15, 2017

When I share my faith story I sometimes give it a title:

I Was a Teenage Baptist!

Besides trying to evoke a few chuckles by conjuring the image of a young Michael Landon as a Bible carrying werewolf, it refers to being a part of a group of young people in the first half of the 1970s who had a deep impact on my life.

A few weeks ago, this group had a reunion. Imagine that. A youth group reunion. What drew us together again taught me a lot about Christian community and how we friends and apprentices of Jesus are a living Gospel story.

It all started when my family moved to a new town in the middle of the school year. I arrived in a new Junior High in December, 1971 and for a few long months had a hard time getting used to the place. Then one day before school, two people from my home room invited me to come with them and to “see something.” What? I asked. You’ll see, they said. These kids were friendly to me and went some distance to make me feel at home, but I can’t say I really knew them yet. What they invited me to was a before-school prayer meeting in a far corner of the empty cafeteria.

I was invited to Bible study in the home of some older high school kids (some of whom included The Coolest Guys in their classes) and where we sang songs, studied the Bible and prayed. We’d go on hikes, picnics and to the beach, go bowling and hang-out. Our group ran two—yes, two—Christian coffee houses, the first in a tough neighborhood in the city and another in our own town.

It was not all church all the time. We also took part in all the normal high school rituals of sports, social life and clubs—and in this context we worked out all the same questions of identify, belonging, sexuality, relationships, and sense of self that all adolescents must negotiate. Here I must stop and tip my hat to my parents, God rest their souls, who endured having a teen-aged son who chose to work out his adolescent rebellion by becoming a Jesus Freak.

Early on, a new, young pastor and his wife came to a tiny Baptist Church in town and adopted this little group, which eventually grew to over three dozen—sometimes more-- kids crammed into their living room every Tuesday night.

This group was and remains the foundation of my Christian story. To the extent that my preaching, pastoral care and way of thinking about Christianity affects how I go about my ministry today, this group of high school aged Christians has had an effect on everyone I've ministered with since.
So it was with some anticipation and, yes, even a little dread, that I returned to Connecticut and took part in a reunion of this group of people who so much a part of my life in high school—and my walk with Christ. I wondered how a big-tent, progressive Episcopalian would fit in. I wondered if the group would feel safe to those who have left the fold. I wondered if our diversity of experience would trump our common origin, or if God’s Spirit would draw us together again in a new version of an old community. Of course, not all of us were there, but those who were able to make it represented a healthy cross-section of the original group spanning several years.

The Good News: God’s Spirit swept away all anxiety. What was old was made new. Imagine that!
What was amazing was how many different directions we had taken. Some of us have gone through some very stormy times. I heard many story of many challenges in many lives: childbirth outside of marriage, divorces, the death of a spouse, changes in careers...a few of us have been kind of beat up by life. A few people brought their kids, who looked on this whole exercise with patient bemusement and open curiosity. Some came with their spouses and partners and everyone brought their stories. In short, we represented all the things one expect of a cross-section of people your basic American suburban high school after 35-plus years apart except for that one unique connection that usually does not show up at a typical reunion. Our time shared in Christian community.

In terms of everyone’s spiritual life there has been just as much variety of experience. Some folks are still part of that same Baptist Church—heck, that young pastor is still there forty years after he arrived fresh out of seminary!—others have joined churches very similar to it but in other places. Some of us have slightly tweaked their stance in a variety of Christian traditions. One person shared with me their connection to a breakaway Anglican church, whose preaching reminds her of home but whose liturgy is a rich, new experience. Some don’t go to church at all, but came back anyway and later talked of how refreshed and renewed they felt just the same.

Two weeks later I am still thinking about our reunion and what it meant to re-connect with these folks after so many years apart. One thing I’ve asked myself is, besides mere nostalgia, was there anything that can be learned from this group that can still inform the Christian walk of a 50-something Episcopal priest and his congregation, friends and family?

I know I am not alone in the kind of experience I had. Once, not long ago, I was visiting a parishioner in the hospital. As I was talking to her daughter, I mentioned that I was going from the hospital to meet with the youth group at the bowling alley. This brought a flood of stories of her own time in our youth group when she was young. She recalled the people, the fun…and the encounters with God in the middle of all that.

In my parish, we recently completed a building project that has expanded our parish house and made the church fully accessible. As we have re-opened the hall and started using the new addition, one thing I’ve also noticed is the way in which our own stories have played out in new ways. One long-time member of the parish just glowed when she said, not about the building but about the community, “I just love this church!” Another one of us was able, because of the new ramp, to enter the hall for the first time in decades. She told us the story of when she was last here, and from there it became a story of how her love for Jesus has grown through many, often difficult years. These moments are blessings that remind us that God is at work now.

Our faith-stories aren’t just dusty old scrapbooks of spiritual nostalgia but the keys to knowing how God is at work in and around us today. The real challenge is, having strolled down this spiritual memory lane, what do we do with it. How might this feed us now?

Getting in touch with our own Gospel-story reminds what it was that made us Christian in the first place. Touching again the time when our faith was new can recall for us how much God has done for us, and while we might smile at our youthful idealism, we will also discover how God’s Spirit transformed at key moments in our living.

Recalling our Gospel-story helps us interpret where we’ve been and gives us hints as to where we are going—both what we want to continue and what we seek to change. Instead of just being a phase or a distant past, we can begin to see the times when we have walked near to God and far from God both in terms of our own choices and responses to circumstances, but also see in new, perhaps unimagined ways, how God has walked with us in all we’ve done.

Perhaps the most important way we can make use of our story is to say it out loud. Hearing ourselves tell the story of our walk with Christ, hearing the words we use, the images we have, and even hearing the gaps in the story will do two things: it will feed and encourage others who are On The Way, and it will help us learn, reflect and deepen our faith. We may find that what we thought was a dormant or routine spiritual life is in fact The Holy Spirit going before us, doing remarkable things, preparing the way for something new.

Afterwards, one of the people at the reunion commented on Facebook that our gathering was like “a little piece of heaven.” She’s right. I see our time together as an illustration of what it means to be in communion. I suspect that if we filled out questionnaires or answered a survey, we’d find that our theological positions on many things have changed over the years. Some have locked down, some have become more flexible, but we have all adapted that first encounter with Jesus and Christian community to wherever we find ourselves today. Some of us are still quite active in churches (even the same church) and others have left religion altogether. We’d look around the group and say on the one hand “You haven’t changed a bit” and on the other “My! How you’ve grown!”

Still we gathered, we sang, we prayed. This is communion: that despite our variety of changes, perspectives and beliefs, we gather around the same Christ—who promised both to be with us always and to be present even in the smallest gathering—we listen and we dare to pray.

Updated March 15, 2017 to correct the dates. It was on March 15, 1972 that I was invited to that prayer meeting.

Whatever you call it, keep speaking of faith

Brand change is in the air. Radio Shack wants to be called just "the Shack". Never mind that that really smart phone in your pocket, not to mention your laptop connected to the world without wires, is a very complex, very talented radio. Two-way, even.

The restaurant with the funny red roof is now simply "the hut". Jobba can still meet Cousin Pizza there, I am sure.

The YMCA has been reduced to "The Y." Most people I know have always called it "the Y", but now they won't have the burden of the M, C or A to carry around--unless the DJ at wedding receptions has something to say about it. The reason is that The Y is recognizing something that everybody has known for at least a generation: the Y has not been about Men for a very long time; it is a dues-paying health club and community agency and not an association. And Christian? Uhm, not.

Heck even NPR is just that. It is no longer National, Public, or even Radio.

Now I find on Facebook (no doubt, soon to be called "FB" or "the Face") that one of my favorite shows on the radio is re-branding itself. "Speaking of Faith" will no longer speak of faith. It will speak of "being." The show is going to be called "Krista Tippet on Being." Not 'bing'...that's something else. "Being." Two syllables.

Here is what host Krista Trippet says about the change:

We believe that Being is also a title with room to grow into, while Speaking of Faith has taken us as far in public media as it could. As much as we filled it with new meaning, the program’s title remained an obstacle for many programmers and listeners. The story we have heard again and again is that people have had to get over the title, or find themselves listening to the show by accident, before they were ready to give themselves over to our content. We have heard that, for religious and non-religious people alike, the title Speaking of Faith makes it hard to talk about the program with friends and family — to spread the word “virally,” as word spreads in our time.

Part of me wants to be flip, and say "well, at least you can change your brand." Wimp.

But I understand that this was a serious process for them, and I do respect that. It's just that a change in the brand can only take one so far. Come to think of it, to the extent that brand defines mission, then maybe the name change reflects a certain reality.

Which is why I am disappointed.

First of all, the loss of a good public pun is never a good thing. But most of all, I am sad because one of the few efforts that understood and talked about faith in the best sense of the term has now caved into the culture's anxiety about, well, faith.

Here is what I wrote as a comment on the SOF Observed blog (with typos fixed):

I am sorry that you have joined the bandwagon and decided that "faith" is anathema and uncommunicative. In choosing the name change, you have cut out half the equation of faith and cut the heart out of the matter.

While I am a Christian and a member of a main-line denomination, I agree with all the writers who commented upstream who say that "faith" has nothing to do with religion, organized or not.

Faith has to do with how one understands their place in the universe, their hope, their fears. Faith to a person's sense of purpose and place. As such, faith lives where "being" and "doing" meet. That meeting can look like collision or feel like tension. When "being" and "doing" meet faith happens and it is dynamic.

To be a person of "faith" is to be a person of hope and this is not an easy thing. A person of any faith, must contend with the things that snuff out faith: fear, cynicism, greed, ignorance, to name a few. The things that work against faith may be found in both religious and secular settings because they too are part of what it means to be human. To be a person of faith is to contend with what is worst in us so that we may free and nourish what is best in us.

That means that faith is much more that what we believe or think. It is much more that how we are. Faith is also what we do.

Much of the critique against traditional religions in all their forms is that so often our behavior is contrary to our words and stated beliefs. This is a fair criticism. It is also an obvious one.

Spirituality that does not act, that is neither ethical nor compassionate, is a poor faith indeed. To avoid speaking of faith because we are afraid of the mistakes we might make--that we might be confused with the many who have made mistake and done harm in the name of their faith--is to retreat from the risk of acting for the better. Sooner or later a mature faith requires us to change, which in itself is an act of faith.

Spirituality becomes faith when beliefs and longings become action. When what we sense, or hope for, or pray is translated into change that cause us to act, then we are living our faith. Acting on the change is in itself an act of faith because we never know where it will lead us. Choosing to rise out of privatized belief, choosing to see faith as a gift instead of personal possession, is to move into a life of faith. And it will be public because it will affect our relationships, our work, our creativity. Having faith is by definition risky business.

When prayer, meditation and a sense of inner well-being translate into actions that care for people, cherish our planet and work for justice and integrity, then we are living a life of faith. Where our being affects our doing. Faith made real in such ways is a demonstration of love.

So my disappointment is that choosing to say in "being" sounds beautiful but it is also safe. By reducing faith to an idea we avoid the constant prompting and the disturbing challenge to rise up out of ourselves and step out into this troubled, imperfect and beautiful world in faith.

Ms. Trippet went to Yale Divinity School, so I know she knows this: Faith is not just about "being". Even the existentialists of the last century figured that out (or should have). "Being" and "Doing" both comprise faith. If faith that acts badly, unethically or does harm is the enemy, so is a complacent existentialism, that is stuck in the head or reduces belief to a mere self-improvement program on the level of good diet and regular exercise...or worse, to the level of the couch potato.

Looking back, I should have seen this coming. The ads that WHYY-FM put up to promote "Speaking of Faith" bent over backward to say what it is not. They almost apologized for the very idea. One announcer would say something like "it's not a sermon, but..."

I should have seen it coming when the same station took a home-grown stab at imitating Edward R. Murrow's great "This I Believe." They put out a pleasant, but not very deep, reflection on what caused people to feel personally fulfilled or at least better about themselves. They were mental potato chips for people like me who listen to public radio. The challenge of faith, the decision to stand for something and struggle to live out a belief in a complex world was to be avoided.

And keeping the program stuck at 7 am Sunday morning doesn't help. No matter what you call it, if you keep "Being" stuck in a religious ghetto you are not going to get very far. Don't ask me how I know this.

After I wrote my comment on SOF Observed, and looked again at the picture above, I am sorry (but probably grateful, too) that I did not mention that the person with whom Ms. Trippet is pictured is perhaps today's best known embodiment of faith that speaks. The faith that overturned apartheid and the faith that led a divided people to begin to tell the truth, was a Christian (!) faith that transformed people's being and guided, motivated and challenged their action. To speak of faith, Archbishop Tutu has shown us, is to challenge evil and to incarnate hope.

I believe that faith lives at the intersection of 'being' and 'doing'. Faith by definition challenges. Faith also has content, and as a Christian I believe that content is important and life- (world-!) changing. But outside of my own beliefs and tradition, I believe that way we find unity and real understanding between persons of many faiths is not to make what we believe generic, general and genial but to say what we believe and listen carefully to each other. The other part of the soon to be missed public pun was that within faith there is something of substance of which we can speak.

We can talk about what we believe, how it motivates us, changes and challenges us. We can ask questions of each other about the content of our beliefs, inquire not only about the gaps but listen also for the richness. We can learn from each other about how we pray, how we see and listen, and how what we believe...and what we question...changes us and impacts those around us. My work as a chaplain and parish priest and my life as a Christian has shown me over and over again how, through my faith, I am drawn not only towards the fullness of God but towards the fullness of each other.

That dialogue itself requires faith, which can be stormy, and it will change us for the better.

Maybe I will get used to the new name of the program, but I hope I won't become too comfortable with it. Whatever you call it, whatever you do and wherever you are, keep speaking of faith.