Bad news travels fast

Bad news sure travels fast, doesn’t it? 

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us about some people who ran up to Jesus to tell him about some Galileans who were not only executed by Pilate, but how Pilate mingled their blood with his sacrifices. Jesus verbalizes what’s on their minds: "Do you think that... these Galilean were worse sinners than all other Galileans?"

It’s a common misconception. Take today’s Epistle. Please!

It contains one of the most misused passages in all the New Testament (and that’s saying something!): that God never tests us more than we can handle.

Saying to a suffering person that “God never gives us more than we can handle” backfires in three ways: first because it teaches that bad things only happen to bad people; second, it says that if we are feel as if we are buckling under the weight of grief or pain, that we somehow lack faith; and third, it teaches us that God deliberately does horrendous things as a cruel expression of love. In short, it teaches us to hate God. 

By saying that the suffering somehow deserves their fate has the dubious virtue of putting you out of my misery. It’s a platitude that creates a comfortable distance between us and the pain of the moment. It preserves the illusion of control when things are clearly out of control.

But Jesus doesn’t go there. When people ran up to tell him all the bad news, they asked him if those Galileans executed by Pilate were above-average sinners? "No," he tells the crowd, "but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did." 

When a tower in a village called Siloam collapsed killing eighteen people who were in the wrong place at the time, was that because they were all sinners? Jesus says “no.”

When Jesus is presented with a man born blind, they asked Jesus “Who sinned, this man or his parents?”

“Neither.” says Jesus. And when he cures the man, Jesus denies a correlation between the man’s problem and someone’s sin.

A long time ago a science teacher once taught me that correlation is not causation. Sometimes, he said, it’s not even correlation... just dumb luck or bad data.

And that’s true in everyday theology, too. We often act as if God keeps a big ledger and, like Santa Claus, keeps track of who’s been naughty or nice and decides to send earthly punishments or rewards accordingly! To this, Jesus says “no.”

Does God cause tyrants to kill people by dropping bombs on theaters sheltering refugees or make it so church people riding in a van on a highway are killed in a head-on collision because they’ve done something to deserve it? No!

Does God send illness or catastrophe as object lessons in behaving well? Jesus says “no!”

But while Jesus says, there is no connection between the suffering and the sin, he reminds us that the death rate for all humanity is still 100%, that is enough for Jesus to urge us to line up our lives with God.

Yes, I hear your “but”… But there is suffering that comes out of our actions! We see it all the time, you tell me!

But... sometimes we do choose to do things that harm us: like cigarette smoking, not caring for our health, exploiting others, abusing power, driving drunk, carelessly polluting our planet, or dealing with our rage with violence.

But... it is possible for us to inflict our sin on ourselves and others!

And you would be right! After all, we did just say the Penitential Order for a reason, right?

Okay... but think about it. Is God the one doing that? Or are these part and parcel of what we confess to God as sin? 

Underneath all the rationalizations there is terror. If I had a nickel for everyone I’ve heard tell a grieving person that God needed a deceased loved one more than we do, or when someone says that God only gives us what we can handle, then I’d have a Brinks truck for a piggy bank.

Listen. I get it. Life can be scary, and tragedy knocks the wind out of our sails. People say stuff like that because by giving every random calamity or violence a motive, no matter how lame, we are attempting with our heads to keep the terror in our hearts at bay.

But instead of shifting all the blame on God or even on us, Jesus invites us to go deeper. He goes to our most vulnerable spot and invites us to peer into those scary spaces in our souls. It is okay to feel the full fragility of life – but instead of staying in the place of fear, Jesus calls us to turn toward the light. And that takes courage.

Jesus invites us to turn towards God and gives us the courage to face our fear. Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from cultivating the good. You know that fearful place you feel at the pit of your stomach? That is also a holy place inside you, nurture it. 

Many years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner said in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, that God willingly gives up one of God’s three attributes—that God knows everything, that God is all powerful, and that God is all loving—in order that we might be free. I am indebted to him for this insight. Over the years, I have taken it on a different, and, I hope, a more Trinitarian track. 

Some Christians like to have God be the one behind every circumstance and every event…the cosmic manager (or puppeteer, some will sneer). Others understand God as the one who makes the clock, winds it, and walks away. That’s because we humans are binary. We like things to be either one or zero. Yankees or Red Sox. Ford or Chevy. One way or the other. Our brains cannot wrap themselves around too much contradiction. 

But instead of living in an either/or, one or zero world, I believe we live in a universe of concurrent realities. This ought not to surprise us. After all, we know Jesus to be fully human and fully God. Christians know that God is a Trinity of three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-- who contain the fullness of the one God without diluting the personhood of the three. When we say the creed or close a collect, we acknowledge in shorthand that the nature of God is a unity of concurrent realities. 

And it is true in nature, too. Physics tells us that concurrent realities are part and parcel of the created order: light is at once a wave and a particle. Today we live in a world that at once makes use of Newtonian and quantum mechanics—Newton shows us how to launch and keep things in orbit, drive your car, or play ping pong, while quantum theory helps us scan our groceries and makes our GPS and cell phones work.

And just as concurrent realities live in the physical world and in the person of God, they are part and parcel of the mystery of living. 

We see in Jesus one who is 100% God and 100% human in the same package undiluted. In the person of Jesus, we see that God is at once intimately and fully involved with every aspect of our living and in every element of creation; and, at the very same time, we and the entire universe are completely and utterly free. 

But just because we are completely free and nature happens, does not mean that God is apathetic to our suffering or distant from our reality. God is very much involved and has given us a solution.

Jesus’ incarnation shows us that God is truly with us. And Jesus’ story about the gardener who talks the householder into giving the unfruitful fig tree another chance by cultivating and watering it tells us something of how this works. In Jesus’ parable the owner is ready to give up on the unfruitful tree on and cut it down. But the gardener pleads for the tree, saying that he will care for it—give the tree another chance. Think of the ground around that tree as holy ground, manure and all!

And when God appeared to Moses in the form of another plant, a bush that was on fire but not being burned up. Moses saw this strange sight while minding his father-in-law’s sheep, and he goes to check it out. Having gotten Moses’ attention, God tells him that he is on holy ground, and God is about to directly intervene to liberate the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt and lead them to a land of promise. 

Holy ground is where God shows up, doing things miraculous things outside our expectation.

Holy ground appears to be quite ordinary, but it is ground that has been disturbed, into which is spread food, water, and manure… and a plant that has been pruned, all so that we may bear fruit and grow as God intends.

Jesus’ parable reminds us that we cannot stop suffering but we can in be attentive and caring to one another, focused in our prayer and in tune with the world around. Above all (and this is the real reason why we confess our sins in Lent) we can honest about what we know or don’t know; about what we fear; what we ignore and what we hope we have mastered; what we have tried and where we have failed. We confess not to grovel but to allow Christ into our vulnerable places so that in his passion we may accompany him to the cross. Giving God our honesty will feel like dying. Recognizing that we are not in control can feel like darkness. Cultivating the things we can do—our love, our relationships, our attentiveness— is how we discover resurrection and receive the strength that turns our frailties into our greatest strengths.

Bad news travels fast. But the good news is that God is with us in all of life…when things go right, and more importantly, when things go wrong…in Christ we know that God is intimately involved in all of it. God suffers with us, accompanies us, dies with us, and rises with us. 

+ + +   + + +   + + +

Here is a link to the bulletin for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C, March 20, 2022.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Living as an offering in a time of pandemic

In 1878 a small band of Episcopal nuns, a couple of Episcopal priests, a number of Roman Catholic sisters and priests, and a few prostitutes, were doing what they could to minister to the sick and dying in Memphis, where typhoid fever had broken out and was ravaging the city.

The Mother Superior of the Sisters of Saint Mary, an Episcopal order, had just sent two more sisters from New York, Ruth and Helen.

Sister Ruth wrote, ““The city is desolate, everyone who is not ill says, ‘It is only a matter of time.’ … Money is quite useless … There is plenty of money here, but it buys no head to plan, no hands to wash, nor the common necessaries of life. … We are helpless and do not know what to do nor how help can come … There are nearly fifty children here now [in the orphanage]; we have no clean clothes, and it is utterly impossible to get any washing done. There is no one to send for supplies, and no stores are open.”

In a city of 50,000, 30,000 fled and 5,000 died. Sisters Ruth and Constance were among the dead.

In response to Ruth and Helen being sent to assist, Sister Constance wrote the Mother Superior this:

my sense of duty in the matter is so divided between the feeling that I ought to secure all the help I can for these poor suffering people, and the fear for those who come. I will guard them to the utmost; but they know and you know that they are offering their lives.

Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time in conversation, prayer, meeting, not to mention writing and publishing how we should respond to the latest viral disease to come along, this one called “coronavirus” or COVID-19, especially now that we are in this period of extended lock-down.

Right now, the conversation in much of the church is about how we care for ourselves (washing hands, sanitizer, limit contact, common cup, intinction, etc.). Before the lockdown, I sent out two e-mail blasts, and before that had conversations with parish leaders, sacristans, and medical professionals both in and outside the parish, and consulted with other clergy colleagues just to help us form a useful, do-able, and calm response in this congregation.

Interestingly, our conversation has shifted to matters of the spiritual life: our humility in the face of what we don’t fully understand and control; meditation upon death; adoration and love as our response to fear; and, sacrifice for the common good. I have spent much more time that I imagined on the phone, on video chats and conferences, and in texts and e-mails talking with folks about things spiritual, as people seek to make meaning and find grounding in this strange times.

I find myself over and over again returning that part of the Stations of the Cross, when we say at each stop “we adore you, O Christ, and we bless you.”

The media response to the news of the spreading virus has been anxious and high-pitched. As Christians, we will struggle to find our way out of the impulses of denial and catastrophizing. Those driven by anxiety and the crisis junkies will do what they do. The rest of us need to attend to adoration and kindness, devotion and compassion, reflection and sacrifice.

We’ve are doing everything that’s prudent to do. We are holding worship services and meetings on-line, and limiting our contact in person. We are a collection point for face masks and person protective equipment that people can donate to the Lehigh Valley Health Network. We are continuing to serve walk-ups at the Ark Community Meal. The trick is change our habits and figure out how to do what we do as a parish with generating additional anxiety.

Scripture says “True love casts out fear.” (I John 4:18). We cast out fear when we choose not cater to paranoid, frightened, anxious, or conspiracy driven people.

We cast out fear when we accept where we are and don’t deny it. We’ll face the facts, and we’ll make careful prudent choices. But most important of all, we cast out fear as we remain present to each other and continue to do our work as a parish community on behalf of all whom God has given us.

So, after you’ve washed your hands and learned the best information we have, the most important thing you can do is to turn your attention to the spiritual life. As we move through Lent in this time of crisis, let us move towards adoration and awe. Say the daily office (Morning & Evening Prayer, the Noonday office, and/or Compline using resources like Mission St. Clare (https://www.missionstclare.com/), walk the Stations with us by following the link on our website (www.trinityeaston.org). Join us for our on-line live and YouTube Weekday and Sunday worship services. Join with all the Saints, like Constance and her Companions, and offer intercession, adoration, and care for one another.

Give thanks for those on the front line of sacrifice. Medical workers and first responders, and all those who continue to go to work each day to provide transportation, food and supplies, and the working of government.

Pray this Lent and Holy Week to be willing to join in the common work of sacrifice. Accept in humility any needed restrictions upon your person that are for the safety of all. 

Listen and pray through the stories of those who serve the ill and dying, those who care for the dead, those who bear their illness with patience and courage. Tell the stories of perseverance and sacrifice.Participate in the beloved community. Be kind and gentle to all. Do not spread rumors nor give into anxiety. Seek the truth. Live hopefully. Walk in love.

Written on March 22, 2020 for the April newsletter of Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, PA

Cough-Pillow Jesus

Yesterday, after the noonday Ecumenical Good Friday liturgy, the church was open for prayer and a few people stayed after the service or came in during the silence. And as I sat here, I found myself thinking about another period in my life where I would go to dark, quiet places and meet folks who were alone in their anticipation and perhaps their fear.

Way back in a time we can barely remember, surgeries were not drive-through. There was a time when we didn't do our preoperative tests in a walk in lab, and we didn't check in at Oh-dark-thirty and be hustled through a process like a surgical McDonald's. In those strange times, before managed care, and even before DRG's, we checked into hospital the day or even two before for all that pre-operative stuff. And it meant that we chaplains were in the practice of walking the halls in the late afternoon and early evening, surgery schedule in hand, to visit folks before their operations.

I found that the best time to make these pre-surgical rounds was about a half an hour after visiting hours ended, when people were in their room, curtains drawn, maybe the shared television would be on or not. It was in that quiet, semi-darkness when the chaplain could meet a person at that moment when they were alone with their thoughts and feelings... when anticipation, dread, questions, restlessness, or simply the "can we get this over with?" was most apparent. At one hospital where I ministered, we'd bring cassettes of funny movies, spiritual reading material, stuffed animals, and other things to help people manage their anxiety.

Those of you who have had abdominal surgery may know about cough pillows. They are firm little pillows that you hug about your chest so that when you cough, you won't go "ouch" from having the cough stress your incision and sutures. In the pre-operative instructions, patients were usually introduced to their cough pillow by the nurse.

Some clever unnamed nun somewhere came up with a cough pillow that was a doll that looked like Jesus...or at least our notion of Jesus. I have one here. It was a gift from the staff last hospital gig before I came here.

Cough-Pillow Jesus was tough. He could go through the autoclave and be wrapped in plastic so it would be sterile. He could be squeezed and held tightly without losing his shape. Kids would like to undress and dress him and fix his hair (sometimes even adults would straighten his outfit to make him more presentable!).

For me, Cough-Pillow Jesus is a perfect icon for what is happening on Holy Saturday.

Yesterday, during those quiet three Good Friday hours, I was sitting here in the church, while the whole world was going on without us. There were car horns, trucks, sirens. I heard people greet each other as they walked by, a shouted conversation from one side of the street to another. Some school kids were laughing as they cut through the church yard from here to there. Music made its Doppler sound procession as the car it came from drove past, the sound gradually getting louder and then suddenly fading away. In the distance I could hear a long freight train as passed through. The world was going on its merry way.

All I could think of were the Gospel lessons from Christmas. The Gospel of John says that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It also says that while He spoke the world into existence, the world knew him not.

I think that's what was happening for Jesus as he died on the cross. Sure, for the people most involved with the crucifixion, watching Jesus die, then going through the work of laying him in the grave, they were all caught up in the all that was happening. It was all their focus. Like the film we saw on Wednesday, there was drama, politics, fear, running away, covering bases, and simple horror.

But in the end, that's a pretty small circle. My hunch is that most people in Jerusalem that weekend walked by the three men being crucified wondering if they could find a place to stay, or expecting the Temple to be crowded, or if they still get a decent lamb for the holiday meal because, well, guests are coming and there are things to do.

So today, the followers of Jesus sit with the enormity of the cross asking themselves what's next But the world has moved on. Just as the community Easter Egg Hunts go on without us and without a word of cross or empty tomb, the rest of the world goes about its business.

And that's what those darkened, hushed corridors of that hospital were like long ago. Silent. Anticipating. Worried. Wondering. Mortal. And we'd hug Jesus even more tightly.

Because while all that is going on, unknown to us, but quietly, Jesus who has died has gone to the place of the dead-- and to the places of our deepest anxieties and fears, he goes to the places that we have locked away in the darkest places of our hearts, and meets us. There are no more words. There is just Jesus.

And when God meets us in that place--that sometimes scary place--and holds us, lifting us away from death and isolation and anxiety, into a new life. An Easter life.

But today, there is waiting. And we hold on knowing that in Christ, God has entered that holy, empty space.

“Son of David! Have mercy on us!”

A sermon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, Mark 10:46-52
October 28, 2018

It has certainly been a harrowing week, hasn’t it?

First comes the news of an angry, ideologically driven man who mailed bombs to people all over the country with whom he disagreed.

Then a white man in Kentucky walked into a grocery store and killed two African-American customers before being apprehended by another customer.

Yesterday, another angry, ideologically driven man entered the Tree of Life synagogue during their weekly worship services in Pittsburgh and killed at least eight people and wounding many others, both worshippers and police.

In between, over two thousand people (and many more on-line) gathered at the National Cathedral to inter the earthly remains of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was beat up by two men and left to die twenty years ago in Laramie, Wyoming, precisely for being gay.

And yet... Our highest civic leaders can’t quite bring themselves to condemn the violence—even when that violence is done while parroting election slogans.

And top it all off, yesterday I heard about a young man, an African-American who was raised in the parish, who went to a Halloween party at a bar in Easton, and was called a "snowflake" and asked to leave—they even threatened to call the police on him!—after he objected to the management that other patrons, white patrons, were wearing black-face, and parroting racist language. In my own neighborhood, there is a home whose annual Halloween display includes the representation of a lynching. Hatred, fear, division, are in the air, and it is not “all in good fun!” Not even at Halloween.

As I said, it’s been a harrowing week. I truly feel the desperation and helplessness behind today’s Gospel, where the blind Bar Timaius cries out to Jesus “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Today’s Gospel lession is very the fulcrum of Mark’s Gospel--smack dab in the middle of the Gospel. All the wonders and miracles of Jesus lead up to this, and his journey to Calvary flows from it. Mark is telling us that this incident, in fact the whole Gospel of Mark, is a story of spiritual sight. Through Christ, Mark is showing us, we move from blindness to sight.'

Even in his blindness, it turns out that Bar Timaius saw more than everyone around him. He had the sight of faith. Just as in Mark’s day, we suffer from spiritual blindness and are in desperate need of Jesus’ healing touch. But first we have do as Bar Timaus did… name it, own it, go to Jesus and act on it.

Our blindness is fear. Fear is as old as human sin, is as real as ever today. In our fear, we are willing to listen to people who stoke that fear with hatred and give us easy slogans and simplistic solutions.

After the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue yesterday, Episcopal Bishop Dorsey McConnell of Pittsburgh wrote,

The newscasts, sickeningly, are referring … to this horror as a “tragedy.” It is no such thing. A tragedy is inevitable. This was not. It was murder, murder of a particularly vile and poisonous kind. Human beings have moral agency. Someone chose to hate, and [someone] chose to kill. And now we are faced with a choice as well— to do nothing, or to reject this hatred in the strongest possible words and actions, and to refute in every way, in every forum, the philosophical foundations of anti-Semitism wherever they have gained a foothold in our churches and our society….

…This terror is added to the great heap of such crimes we have witnessed in the past. Yet our hope is not dimmed, and our obligation is clear: “Behold, I set before you this day, life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Choosing life is no small thing. It is not just positive thinking or being “nice.” To choose life means that we do not choose death; that we consciously turn away from the things that deal death. Choosing life means renouncing fear, renouncing hatred, renouncing the use of division to gain and keep power.

Jim Wallis, the evangelical preacher and founder of the Sojourner’s Community, wrote this:

Jesus says, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) The opposite of what Jesus said is also true: Without the truth we are easily enslaved by false ideologies that demand belief. Jesus clearly connects truth with freedom, and that is key here both in our personal lives and in any test of the health of the body politic. Truth sets us free, but lies enslave us. If you care about freedom, you must care about the truth….

…Timothy’s second epistle warns about people who “having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.” Those myths and lies can lead to justifications for practices and policies against “the other.” 

Wallis asks if we have “itching ears” who will be drawn into the siren song of tribalism, division, and hate, or will we follow Jesus’ mercy and so receive our sight.

Friday, Bishop Gene Robinson asked the same question of us at Matthew Shepard’s memorial. Confronting fear and hatred is not easy and is never over, but it is always what Jesus invites us to do.

Our parish community does important, but largely unsung, interfaith work. It is not just being “nice.” Yesterday’s mass shooting in Pittsburgh shows how vitally important it is.

Last night, our parish hosted an interfaith dialogue between Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and B’hai members of our community. We talked about the role of heritage and tradition in forming our sense of identity in the community.

This afternoon, at 12:30, Temple Covenant of Peace in Easton will hold a service of mourning and reconciliation to which we are all invited. If you are at all available, please go and share with our Jewish sisters and brothers at this painful moment.

And next Sunday, at least eight different faith communities will gather at Temple Covenant of Peace for Easton’s annual Interfaith Choral Festival. 

Now more than ever, this kind of public interfaith and ecumenical work is essential to our community’s spiritual and civic health.

In these violent, dangerous times, people of faith must daily choose to overcome hatred with love, to choose companionship over division, and peace over violence.  And that is just in our community.

Our Ark Community Meal, and two of our local social service agencies, ProJeCt and Safe Harbor, were all founded when the several faith communities joined together to address the unmet needs of the poor, the homeless, and the dispossessed.

Each of these remind that service in Jesus’ name required us to stop, confront our blindness and fear so that we may be agents of healing and blessing.

If we are going to allow Jesus to heal us, we must first acknowledge the blindness of hatred, violence, and fear that infects our culture. Having acknowledged it we must stop and seek both forgiveness and healing. This is why Friday’s internment of Matthew Shepard in the National Cathedral is so important because that space, the same space where Dr. Martin Luther King preached his last sermon, brings symbolic and real safety to everyone who has been cast out, and stands as a beacon against a culture that uses division and falsehood for the sake of power.

When we talk about Trinity being “a church for all people,” we are not just talking about a place that does great coffee hours. We are responding to Jesus’ healing ministry and choosing to call out and condemn racist, homophobic, and sexist hatred whenever it appears. We must, as people of faith, hold accountable leaders, celebrities, and politicians who choose the language of division over unity and love. As followers of Jesus, we offer a spiritually hurting world another way… the way of love, the way of Jesus.

Bar Timaius’ cry is our cry: “Son of David! Have mercy on us!” And we are not silenced. His healing is also our healing. As we go with Jesus to confront evil, we also bring healing and blessing to all God’s people.

Jeremiah 31:7-9, Psalm 126, Hebrews 7:23-28, Mark 10:46-52

When thoughts and prayers are more than just thoughts and prayers

As a parish priest, I am in the business of “thoughts and prayers.” 

We hear that phrase gets tossed around a lot. Especially after a mass casualty incident, whether it’s a hurricane that decimates Puerto Rico or one perpetrated by a man with as many guns as he can buy and modify and who kills nearly five dozen people in just a few minutes.

And we’ve heard many people rage in frustration that all our leaders seem to be able to offer are “thoughts and prayers.” I have heard many people rightly dismiss that phrase as nothing more than an empty, distracting platitude.

The popular mind has a point. It’s not just annoying. The misuse of “thoughts and prayers” does real harm to both thought and prayer.

For one thing, when confronted with traumatic news, especially when it is repeated over and over again from every possible angle, and when it intrudes on us from every which way, the last thing we want to do is think about it! Which is why when, in moments like this, we say “you are in my thoughts” we are not telling the truth.

The truth is that we want to keep the trauma as far away from us as possible in any way we can. So in order not to feel overwhelmed by all the news, we put the shooter, all his victims, and how they died or were injured as far from our thoughts as possible. We can do this when we are far away from the event, or when it has not touched us or someone we care about. On some level, we all know trauma when we see it, and so if we can we reach over and change the channel, if not the “off” switch.

Don’t feel guilty about that. From our safe distance, we can turn it off. The actual victims and their loved ones would dearly love to.

As for prayers, the truth is that most of us say it, but few of us do it. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t, it just that it does neither us, nor the victims, nor their loved ones, nor, for that matter, prayer, any earthly (or heavenly) good to reduce prayer to “good wishes.”

Certainly, we want to wish the victims and their loved one well. And we certainly want God to embrace, comfort, and strengthen the injured and bereaved. We want to dead to be cared for with dignity, and—if we are people of faith—we want them to be embraced by God.

If our “thoughts and prayers” do not inform what brings meaning, hope, and purpose to our living it is not doing us any spiritual good.

And if our “thoughts and prayers” are not urging us to act not only more mercifully, but more firmly towards the end of violence, the curtailment of easy public access to weapons of mass-murder, then our “thoughts and prayers” will do us no earthly good.

Our “thoughts and prayers” require discipline and work if they to do any earthly or spiritual good. They must be formed in the context of a community that takes faith seriously, and which—even on a secular level—takes seriously the hard work of ethics, accountability, and relationship.

Without that kind of community, then our “thoughts and prayers” can become the occasion for evil. Even the Las Vegas gunman has his own thoughts and prayers… but they were apparently tuned for evil.

Fr. Anthony Clavier noted that 

“People are trying to diagnose what was wrong with the Las Vegas killer. His brother says he had no religious or political opinions. His life centered on beating the odds at the casino and amassing money, property and weapons. There seems to have been no altruistic impulse motivating his life. In Christian terms he was open to evil, and had no built in responses to counter its malevolence. This horrific event should remind us all that the discipline of daily prayer for the world, the church, the poor, the suffering, our friends and families, and lastly ourselves, in that order, is vital if we are to be protected from evil in all its seductive and self-serving reality.”

If we do not want to feel helpless in the face of that kind of evil; if we do not want to return that kind of evil when it falls upon us; then we need to turn our thoughts and prayers in more than a distancing mechanism. It must rise above kindly meant platitudes.

In undertaking the discipline of prayer, we will find ourselves motivated to action.

Our prayer must cause us to stand up to evil, to no longer accept platitudes, and confront the impulse to return evil for evil. We must name and confront those who would exploit our fears for profit and turn our hapless “thoughts and prayers” into a market for more and bigger firearms. Instead of giving in to our fears, our thoughts and prayers should open us to the power of God to confront and name evil, care for the victims of evil, and call upon our society to turn from platitudes to action.

Our “thoughts and prayers” must lead us to act for peace and justice. Our “thoughts and prayers” must move us to demand an end to violence and the propagation of the tools of violence for profit.

Our thoughts and prayers must end the hypocrisy of making firearms easy to buy and a prize worth keeping, while making quality community mental health hard to obtain and shameful to use. If our “thoughts and prayers” do not lead us out of fear and into action, compassion, and community, then they are nothing more than empty words. 

As one in the business of thoughts and prayers, I look for these to become the catalysts for community, action, and change. If our thoughts and prayers lead to changed hearts and compassionate, functioning communities, then they will become compassion that heals and faith that looks forward. 

On fig trees and holy ground

Bad news travels sure fast, doesn’t it? 

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us about some people who ran up to Jesus to tell him about some Galileans who were not only executed by Pilate, but how their was blood with his sacrifices. Jesus verbalizes what’s on their minds: "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?"

It’s a common misconception. Take today’s Epistle. Please! It contains one of the most misused passages in all the New Testament: that God never tests us more than we can handle. But saying to a suffering person that “God never gives us more than we can handle” backfires in three ways: first because it teaches that bad things only happen to bad people; second, it says that if we are feel as if we are buckling under the weight of grief or pain, that we somehow morally and spiritually deficient; and third, it teaches us that God deliberately does horrendous things, or willfully looks the other way, because God loves us.

In short, it teaches us to hate God.

My saying that the suffering somehow deserve their fate has the dubious virtue of putting you, the hurting person, out of my misery. It builds a comfortable distance between me and the pain of the moment. It preserves the illusion of control when things are clearly out of control.

But Jesus doesn’t go there when people ran up to tell him all the bad news. Were those Galileans sinners because they were executed by Pilate? "No," he tells the crowd, "but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did."

Or when the tower of Siloam fell and eighteen people were killed, crushed because they stood in the wrong place at the time, is that because they were sinners? Jesus says no.

There was another time when some people asked Jesus about a man born blind. “Rabbi,” they asked. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” “Neither.” says Jesus, and when he cures the man of his blindness, Jesus denies a correlation between the man’s problem and someone’s sin.

So does God a big ledger and, like Santa Claus, does he keep track of who’s been naughty or nice and decide to send his elves, er, angels!, to send earthly punishments or rewards? The answer is no.

Does God allow tyrants to kill people or tsunamis to drown people because they’ve done something to deserve it? No.

Does God send illness or catastrophe as object lessons in behaving well? Jesus says “no.”

Jesus says, there is no connection between the suffering and the sin, and yet the death rate for all humanity is still 100%, that is enough for Jesus to urge us to line up our lives with God.

Underneath the rationalizations there is terror. If I had a nickel for everyone I’ve heard tell a grieving person God needed a deceased loved one more than we do, then I’d have a Brinks truck for a piggy bank. Or when someone says that God only gives what we can handle. People say stuff like that because by giving every random calamity or violence a motive, no matter how lame, we attempt with our heads to keep the terror in our hearts at bay.

Jesus refutes the illusion that we can protect ourselves from harm by giving God all the credit for success and sinner all the blame for disaster. Jesus does what he does best, he goes to the vulnerable spot that their fright has opened up. He goes there because we can’t go there alone. It is not a bad thing to feel the full fragility of life. It is not a bad thing for us to count our breaths in the dark – but instead of staying in the place of fear, Jesus calls us to turn toward the light.

Jesus invites us to turn towards God, which is why he tweaks their fear. Don’t worry about Pilate and all the other things that can come crashing down on your heads, he tells them. Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from cultivating the good. That fearful place you feel at the pit of your stomach? That is also a holy place inside you, nurture it.

The conundrum of suffering becomes unsolvable when we expect that God is completely active and in charge of absolutely everything, and that we expect God to always act benevolently. Many years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner said that willingly gives up one of God’s three attributes—that God knows everything, God is all powerful, and God is all loving—in order that we might be free. I have always been indebted to him for this insight. Over the years, I have taken it on a different, I hope more Trinitarian track.

Some Christians like to have God be the one behind every circumstance and every event…the cosmic manager (or puppeteer, some will sneer). Others understand God as the one who makes the clock and perhaps even winds it up every now and then, but lets it tick away on its own. That’s because we humans are pretty binary. We like things to be either one or zero. Yankees or Red Sox. Ford or Chevy. We want it one way or the other. Our brains cannot wrap themselves around too much contradiction.

But Christians ought to be accustomed to concurrent realities. Realities that appear contradictory or impossible to contain but which cannot in fact exist except in a kind of concurrent, interrelationship where one truth cannot exist without the other even if they appear to be at odds.

We know Jesus to be fully human and fully God. Christians know that God is Trinity of three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-- who contain the fullness of the one God without diluting the personhood of the three. When we say the creed or close a collect, we acknowledge in shorthand that the nature of God is a unity of concurrent realities.

And in nature, (and here I know just enough to be truly dangerous...!) physics tells us that complimentary realities are part and parcel of the created order: light is at once a wave and a particle; today we live in a world that is at once makes use of Newtonian and quantum mechanics—Newton shows us how to launch and keep the International Space Station in orbit or drive your car, and quantum theory helps us scan your groceries and makes your GPS work.

Concurrent realities don’t just live in the physical world or in the person of God. They are deeply embedded in the mystery of living.

You see, the incarnation of Jesus, who is 100% God and 100% human in the same package undiluted, tells us something about how God addresses this eternal conundrum: in the person of Jesus, we see that God is at once intimately and fully involved with every aspect of our living and in every element of creation; and, at the very same time, we and the entire universe are completely and utterly free.

God is involved in everything we do, and natural laws and phenomena happen. God intimately knows and love us, and we are completely and utterly free. Not either/or but both/and.

But just because we are completely free and nature happens, does not mean that God is apathetic to our suffering or distant from our reality. God is very much involved and has given us a solution.

First of all, Jesus’ incarnation shows us that God is truly with us. And Jesus’ story about the gardener who talks the householder into giving the unfruitful fig tree another chance by cultivating and watering it tells us something of how this works.

Today we heard another story of God appearing to a person through a plant…when God appeared to Moses in the form of a bush that was on fire but not being burned up. When Moses sees this strange sight while minding his father-in-law’s sheep, he draws near to check it out. But God tells him that the place where is standing is holy ground. And God is about to directly intervene to liberate the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt and lead them to a land of promise.

This is what have come expect God to be doing. Showing up. Acting decisively. Knocking heads and taking names. God’s liberation will be much more complicated and subtle than that, but that’s what we remember.

But Jesus tells the story of another plant, an unfruitful fig tree that its owner is ready to give up on and cut down. The gardener pleads for the tree, saying that he will care for it—give the tree another chance, he says. Think of the ground around that tree that has been dug up, watered, and around which manure has been spread also as holy ground.

There is holy ground where God shows up, doing things miraculous things outside our expectation.

There is also holy ground that is appears quite ordinary but in which is in fact ground that has been disturbed, into which is spread food, water, and manure… and a plant that has been pruned, all so that we may bear fruit.

Jesus’ parable reminds us that we are not helpless. We cannot stop suffering but we can in the meantime be attentive and caring to one another, focused in our prayer and in tune with the world around us. Above all (and this is the real reason why we confess our sins in Lent) we can honest about what we know and what we don’t know. We can be honest to God and ourselves about what we fear, what we ignore and what we hope we have mastered, what we have tried and where we have failed. 

We confess because know that Christ goes to the most vulnerable places possible in his passion where they will go with him to the cross where all this that separates us from God, each other, ourselves, and nature will die. Giving God our honesty will, in fact, feel like dying. Recognizing that we are not in control feels like darkness. By cultivating the things we can do—our love, our relationships, our attentiveness—this is how we discover resurrection and receive the strength that turns our frailty into our greatest strength.

Bad news travels fast. But the good news is that God is with us in all of life…when things go right, and more importantly, when things go wrong…in Christ we know that God is intimately involved in all of it. God suffers with us, accompanies us, and rises with us.

A sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C - February 28, 2016
Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9