It’s good to be back! As you know I was away two weeks ago attending my college’s reunion as well as my former parish’s 100th anniversary celebration. Then my body decided to let me know it is allergic to the Northeast at this time of year — terrible pollen and no air conditioning in several of the venues sent me off for some R&R at Baptist for a few days to get my breathing back in order. It’s good to go away sometimes to remember how wonderful things are here at home!
One of those reminders of how good home is came in a conversation I had while at my old parish, Trinity Church in Gulph Mills PA. Someone glumly told me that in that particular diocese (PA) only 40% of churches could now afford full time rectors, attendance and membership were down across the board, finances were tight, etc. etc. Having heard much of this doom and gloom at the national conference I attended in February I wasn’t altogether surprised, just dismayed, and also grateful to be here and part of a diocese that is on the plus side of the national church trends (trends which, I might add, apply across the board to mainline, evangelical, “big box,” RC churches alike).
Sometimes my inwardly devilish side takes over when I hear the predictions of gloom and the imminent death of the church. Solution? Easy! Bring back hellfire, damnation, fear! Scare the pants off of people — tell them they’re going straight to hell! And by all means reintroduce that God some of us grew up with, you know, the one with the long list, keeping score — checking to see who’s naughty and nice. Rewards for good behavior, demerits for bad — and it all gets tallied up in some big scale in the sky. Yeah — scare people to death, that’ll bring ‘em back to church, right? It worked for so many centuries, let’s just reintroduce all that hell talk and see how fast our pews (and operating budgets…) fill up again! You can earn your way into heaven if you just try hard enough, and we’re here to tell you how to do it and, especially, how you’re not doing it right!
Well, I hope you all noticed I said these are some “devilish” — read “tongue in cheek” thoughts that occasionally creep into my consciousness. And I also hope you’ve noticed that the church, at least this church as we know it, has let go of all that somewhere over the past few decades. And strangely enough, this wasn’t some new-fangled, feel good theology someone cooked up along the lines of self-empowerment and other trendy thoughts emanating from the 1970’s — this particular theology has some pretty solid roots back in the early days of the first followers of Jesus Christ.
Like St. Paul. In today’s lesson from his letter to the Galatians. He tells us that Jewish believers in Christ don’t have to do anything extra, Gentile believers in Christ don’t have to do anything extra (like, God forbid, get circumcised at an age later that 8 days old…). God’s saving grace through Jesus Christ has been extended to all, all, and there is nothing else we do to earn it or deserve it. Boom. There it is.
Now of course, the church, being some parts a God institution but equal (if not more…) parts human institution, had to come along with all these qualifiers throughout the centuries. The “yes/but’s.” Yes — grace from God, unconditional love from God etc, etc, etc — but: to really earn it you need to do stuff — like lots of good works, or nice gifts to the church (how else do you think the Vatican got built?), or that uniquely Protestant “you must accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior or else you’re going to hell.” But some folks finally responded with “but wait a minute — isn’t that also doing something, something on our part to deserve it or make it happen?” Rob Bell, author of God Wins, is even shaking up the evangelical community with the radical notion that God’s love is freely given to all, we don’t have to do anything to earn it or deserve it and we’re all going to heaven in the end.
So if we take away the guilt and the fear and the intimidation and the scaring people into believing, and we add a soupcon of — well, let’s just face it, sometimes life within the community of the church is not all a bed of roses. Sometimes there are squabbles, sometimes there are personality clashes, sometimes the demands just seem too high. “If I go today they’re just going to ask me to do something and I can’t take on another thing.” And add in a dash of some people having been truly brutalized by church or clergy. And then we season it all with a dash of, well, let’s also face it: church is one of many options on Sunday — gone are the days of blue laws and church being the only option on Sunday morning. Add it all together and go back to my original premise that we don’t have to do anything to earn God’s love, we find ourselves with the recipe for what pundits are calling “spiritual but not religious” and making some church people run around screaming “the sky is falling! The sky is falling!”.
Well, we can’t (thanks be to God!) put the toothpaste back in the tube and much as bringing back hellfire, damnation, and scare tactics may seem like a simple solution to packing our pews again it ain’t gonna happen (at least not on my watch!). I lived in fear of that list-keeping, note-taking, judgemental God for far too long and I give thanks and praise for the day I realized God loves us each as if we were the only one and includes me too.
So if we’re not scaring people into church or making them think somehow they have to earn God’s love what’s the point? Why bother? You’re giving me something for free, really? What good could that possibly be? Sort of along the lines of Groucho Marx’s quip “why would I want to be part of a club that has me as a member?” No thanks, I’d rather go for the hard stuff. The stuff I have to work to achieve, the stuff that gives me worth in this world. Isn’t that what I’ve been told all along? It ain’t worth anything unless you fight for it, compete for it, win it at all costs, and by all means beat out all the competition along the way. Isn’t that what life is all about.
Well sure it is. Until it isn’t.
At this point I need to interject a true confession. A confession about a secret pleasure I have. I know that perhaps you think that clergy fill our days with pious thoughts and good, healthy activities — like reading noble works by noble authors and thinkers.
Yes, of course this is true (ahem…). But I now confess to you my friends that I also engage in watching — wait for it, wait for it: Bravo TV. Yes, that den of “reality shows” and housewives and “Watch What Happens Live” and the like. Call it that base human instinct for not being able to look away from a train wreck. Or something like that. But I confess that I have watched the housewives of New Jersey duke it out over whose recipes are the real Italian deal and the ones in Orange County go through yet another round of plastic surgery. Mostly it’s junk food for the eyes and brains; very occasionally it’s a window directly into the soul of our times.
There’s this new-ish show, now in its second season, called “Million Dollar Listing New York.” It chronicles the lives of three young, attractive, go-getter high end real estate brokers. They have taglines about themselves at the beginning of each episode, capturing the sense that making a killing in the real estate market in New York City is the shining path which leads to wealth, happiness, love, prosperity and the like. One of the three is 28 year old Ryan Serhant, a drop-dead gorgeous, former tv actor turned real estate mogul making his fortune selling New York properties.
And then, briefly, it all comes screeching to a halt. Last week’s episode of mega-deal making was rudely interrupted by Hurricane Sandy. Ryan, who not only specializes in selling properties in Lower Manhattan but also lives there, discovered himself without power, without water, without even the ability to go to work because his office keypad lock depended on electricity to be activated. “When the power goes out,” we hear him telling the camera, “I can’t get hold of anybody. I can’t do anything. I can’t even go to work or get into my office…and when I can’t work I don’t know what to do with myself. I am in this city filled with millions of people. I have no relationships that matter.” There is a poignant scene of him saying these words as he stands on the deserted steps of the New York Stock Exchange, realizing he has no one to call, no one to reach out to, no one who really cares about him except the old fall-back — his parents in New Hampshire. And when the lights come back on? It’s back to go, go, go, sell, sell, sell, do, do, do, acquire, acquire, acquire. I was left hoping that Ryan’s dark night of the soul might be a wake up call to that inner yearning needing to be fulfilled with something of true value, meaning, depth, purpose. That whole God thing, you know? But there seemed to be little pointing to a deep metamorphosis once the lights came back on and everything in his world returned to “normal.”
St. Augustine of Hippo said “there is a God-shaped void in each one of us and our hearts will not rest until they find their contentment in God.” And yet we spend so much of our lives trying to fill that void with something else, anything else. And if what the church has to offer is given freely, no questions asked, no holds barred, no conditions — it just seems too easy to overlook. Why on earth should I waste my time going after something I didn’t have to fight to win?
Which brings us to today’s Gospel story — and a few of our broader themes in today’s service as well: the commissioning of our missioners who are leaving later this week to be with a community of fellow and sister Christians — fellow and sister Anglicans — in the Dominican Republic, the recognizing of this year’s “Man of Mission.”
Today’s Gospel story very much juxtaposes a 21st century type mindset with that of someone who is following a different call. Jesus is a dinner guest at the home of one of the local religious leaders and a woman comes in and shows an incredible outpouring of love for Jesus — going so far as to wash his feet with her tears, dry them with her hair, and anoint them with very costly oil (I’ve actually always had a little trouble visualizing this — how exactly does one do this? Maybe it’s just an over-exaggerated way to say that the woman had such an overwhelming sense of gratitude to and love for Jesus that her response was lavishly generous, unheeding of the cost, and way over the top. Also, please note: nowhere in this story does it say she was a woman of ill-repute, nor, a little later in the story when Mary Magdalene appears with the other women, nowhere does it say about her that she was a prostitute. “Thank you,” Pope Gregory the Great for bequeathing us that particular bit of historical fiction!).
The host’s reaction to this woman’s outpouring of love and generosity toward Jesus comes across as quite modern in our hearing: basically he’s saying “Jesus, you’re a chump. Letting this woman fawn all over you. Who is she? A nothing? A sinner. What value does she have?” I hear an underlying assumption in his questions — that’s she’s a nobody, a nothing — and that she’s probably after something.
And Jesus cuts him short, with one of his memorable parables about who feels the most sense of gratitude — one to whom much has been given or one to whom little has been given. Again, in Jesus’ response, I hear an underlying assumption. It’s not about who has gotten more, but rather who “got it” more. In Jesus’ response to Simon I hear the question “who more understands how much has been given? Who more knows the enormity of being loved, healed, forgiven by God? ” Because ultimately God does not portion out God’s gift of unconditional, universal love, capriciously giving some more and others less. It is given in equal, unbounded quantity to all. So Jesus’ question to the Pharisee, basically, is not “to whom has more been given?” but rather “who more gets it? Understands it? Welcomes it? Lives by it? Patterns their life in loving response to it? Who really knows at the core of their being that standing alone on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange in the wake of a devastating hurricane — whether literal or metaphorical — is a huge wake up call that we are not alone, that God’s love is at the center of the universe, and that the obvious compelling way to respond is to live our lives accordingly.
Which is why the woman in today’s story was doing what she was doing — not because she hoped to gain, impress, or wi — but simply because she could do no else.
One of the many things I love about St. Stephen’s is the lavish evidence of people living your lives motivated by gratitude for all God has given us, done for us. We have so many saints here that in addition to the yearly Bishop’s Lay Award we inaugurated two other times to publicly thank members who respond to God’s love by giving back — the “Woman of Valor” on Mother’s Day and the “Man of Mission” on Father’s Day. I can’t actually recall how far back these “thank you’s” go, but we are still basically scratching only the surface of saying thank you to so many of you who build up the Body of Christ in this community and beyond by lovingly giving back.
And then we have our missioners whom we are sending to the Dominican Republic later this week. Why are you doing this? Will there be some great, financial reward? Certainly not — in fact you are all contributing of your own resources to make this happen. Will the reward bring you status and hipness and new social standing? No, I daresay not — you’ll be hot, and uncomfortable some of the time, in a strange environment, cut off from — gasp — smartphones and social media. But you will ultimately be rewarded in ways that will surprise and astound you. Someday you may find yourself, literally or metaphorically, standing on the vacant steps of the New York Stock Exchange with no one else in sight, but you will not feel alone because you are now patterning your hearts and lives and very being after the understanding that the loving God at the center of the universe loves you unconditionally — and your response is to go forth and do the same.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the now almost 40 year old musical “A Chorus Line” in which a group of dancers auditions for a new show. We learn of their lives through song and dance during the course of the show. Toward the end, one of the young dancers hurts his leg and is told he might never dance again. The director asks the rest of the cast how would they respond if they heard similar news. Diana, another cast member responds with the following song:
Kiss today goodbye,
The sweetness and the sorrow.
Wish me luck, the same to you.
But I can’t regret
What I did for love, what I did for love.
Look my eyes are dry.
The gift was ours to borrow.
It’s as if we always knew,
And I won’t forget what I did for love,
What I did for love.
Gone,
Love is never gone.
As we travel on,
Love’s what we’ll remember.
Kiss today goodbye,
And point me t’ward tomorrow.
We did what we had to do.
Won’t forget, can’t regret
What I did for
Love
For me this captures something about what today’s Gospel story is all about, what impels us to give back lovingly and lavishly to God through our work in this community and beyond, what impels this year’s Man of Mission, what impels the 12 of you headed out to the Dominican Republic later this week. The woman in today’s story didn’t do it, you haven’t done it or aren’t doing it for some sort of earthly tangible gain; you do it instead because love, because God compels you to. And you can do no other.
Let us pray: Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN
Pent IV Year C
Galatians 2: 15-21 St. Stephen’s, Coconut Grove
Ps 32 Rev’d. Willie Allen-Faiella
Lk 7: 36- 8:3 June 16, 2013
Proper 6 Sermon # 643
