Lent 4B, 2012

“God did it for Love,”A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 18, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being a panelist at two workshops at the Global Citizenship Conference held at Nazareth College for high school students in the greater Rochester area. 435 high school students from 21 different high schools and representing many different religious traditions – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Bahai, Mormon, Agnostic/Atheist - converged on Nazareth College’s campus to learn about world religions and to receive training in techniques for interfaith dialogue, conflict transformation, peacemaking, restorative justice and nonviolence. To see hundreds of young people enthusiastically engaged in learning about one another and developing the skills to build bridges of understanding and compassion where there has so often been discord and mistrust, offered all of us a vision of a very hopeful, redemptive future for our country and world. Then, while still in the glow of that mountaintop experience, I began to reflect on our lectionary texts for this week and what do I find when I open the Newer Testament but the famous passage from John’s gospel that is both a beloved and beautiful Christian proclamation of faith but at the same time what I call a “clobber text” from the perspective of interfaith dialogue and interreligious relations.

The Bible is full of clobber texts. There are those verses in Leviticus and Romans that people have used for centuries to condemn and excoriate the gay and lesbian community, there are passages from the pastoral epistles, particularly the letter to Timothy that have been used to silence women and prevent them from serving in leadership capacities in churches, there are many references in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian testament that condone slavery and were used by slave owners and their advocates against abolitionists during the 19th century controversies over the abolition of slavery. If you know your Bible well and look hard enough you can almost always find some text to justify treating another person or group of persons with contempt, ridicule, judgmentalism or violence if you so choose, particularly if you lift the text out of its context to suit your own needs. Ironic, isn’t it, that these sacred scriptures, that the Episcopal church believes to be the Word of God containing all things necessary to salvation and to which we look for moral and ethical and spiritual wisdom and guidance, these scriptures that teach us that all humankind is created in the image of God and that our God is a God of love who reaches out to embrace all of God’s creation, extending grace and reconciliation to all, should be used as the basis for exclusion and judgmentalism and condemnation of millions of God’s beloved children?

This particular section of John’s gospel is one of those texts that many Christians use as a justification for some of the most arrogant prejudice against people of other world religions, and for formulating a theological position that excludes all non Christians from the embrace of God’s love and salvation. “John 3:16” appears on bumper stickers, signs and banners, t-shirts, sweatshirts and aprons and bracelets, all of which are typically worn by Christians who are quick to suggest that only those who believe in Jesus are “saved.” Notwithstanding that the text also says unequivocally, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world” many Christians use this line to do just exactly that. The justification, of course, is the next few verses, where the author writes, “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” This is one of those Biblical texts that contradicts itself as it moves from one verse to the next. First it says God did not want to condemn, then it says that those who believe in Jesus are not condemned while those who do not, are. How do we responsibly interpret this section of John’s gospel in our pluralistic and multi-religious society in a way that does not condemn our co-religionists from other traditions to some place beyond where God is?

First of all, we have to understand the context of this fourth gospel. This gospel was the last of the four canonical gospels, written around the year 110 CE for an emerging Jewish Christian sect that was in conflict with the existing Judaisms of the early 2nd century none of which accepted the idea of Jesus as incarnate Word of God. As these very early Christians wrestled to establish themselves, a minority sect within a minority religion in the oppressive Roman Empire, they struggled to justify their own existence and to define themselves against the other religious options of their culture and particularly against other branches of Judaism. The language of “condemnation” needs to be understood in light of this tense and conflicted context. In the midst of the sometimes caustic turf battles between this emerging Jewish sect and the established Judaisms of the times, these early Jewish Christians wanted to set themselves apart and make an argument for the veracity and superiority of their own position. For 21st century Christians, living in a context where our religion has risen to world prominence and has been a religion of empire and colonialism and domination for centuries, with a rather bloody history for which we must take responsibility, the kind of exclusivist and judgmental rhetoric that is so much a part of John’s gospel must not be perpetuated in our very different cultural context. To do otherwise runs completely contrary to the heart of the gospel we purport to proclaim.

The overarching image in the gospel of John, the image with which the gospel begins, is that of Jesus as incarnate Word of God. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This concept of incarnation is central to the theology of John’s gospel and later became central to Christian religious doctrine. The idea that the divine would choose to enter human existence was not entirely new with the advent of Christianity. Hinduism teaches that periodically God has entered human history when necessary to get the attention of human beings who have strayed from the path of righteousness. There are several Hindu stories of God becoming incarnate in human existence at different points in human history. Indeed, it is because of this tradition that Hindus have no problem at all accepting the idea that Jesus was both human and divine. Their only problem with Christians on that issue is our claim that it only happened in Jesus.

As I wrestled with this difficult text, I consulted an extensive commentary on the New Testament written by a Hindu swami, Paramahansa Yogananda. Sometimes it is enriching to see what religious thinkers outside of our own tradition have to say about our texts because these writers are not burdened by centuries of theological tradition and interpretation of these texts and are therefore able to come at them with a truly fresh eye. Yogananda has this to say about this gospel passage:

Recognition of the immanence of God can begin as simply as expanding one’s love in an ever-widening circle. Humankind condemns itself to limitation whenever we think solely of our own little selves, our own family, our own nation. Inherent in the evolution of nature and humankind back to God is the process of expansion. The exclusivity of family consciousness – ‘us four and no more’ – is wrong. To shut out the larger family of humanity is to shut out the infinite Christ. One who disconnects himself from the happiness and welfare of others has already condemned himself by isolation from the Spirit that pervades all souls, for she who does not extend herself in love and service to God in others disregards the redeeming power of connection with the universality of Christ….Pure love in human hearts radiates the universal Christ-love. (Yogananda, The Second Coming of Christ, Vol. 1, Discourse 14, p. 276-77)

Our Hindu friend here gets the point of the gospel passage better than many a Christian commentator. He echoes a basic tenet of the Benedictine Rule that counsels monks to see the face of Christ in every stranger they encounter. The universality of God’s love for all of humankind, for the whole world (Greek – “cosmos”) is central to John’s gospel and to this problematic passage. Sadly our Christian tradition has too often chosen over the centuries to act on the condemnation language in this gospel, while paying mere lip service to the love language.

God so loved the world says the writer of John’s gospel. God came into the world as a human being because God loved the world and did not want to condemn it but to embrace it and heal it. The message is unequivocally universal. Believing in Jesus in this context does not mean having certain intellectual ideas about him, but rather, giving our hearts to him, loving him and trusting in him as our access point to God. In all his humanity, Jesus embodied the divine in a way we could see, touch, hear and taste. He came to witness to all people, Jews, Gentiles, all nations, not just a chosen few. Love, not condemnation is the message. Love for all the world, not just for Christians. If we choose to emphasize the love message in this passage rather than the condemnation language I suspect we come closer to living out the will of God for all God’s beloved creation.

Much religious language, particularly the language of faith is “love language” meaning that it makes hyperbolic claims about exclusivity that are really more about exclusivity of love and commitment than exclusivity of salvation in any absolute sense. The intimate, personal relationship that Jesus invites us into, like any love relationship, lends itself to language of exclusivity. When one spouse tells the other, “You are the only person in the world for me” he or she is not stating an absolute objective truth. It is a true statement about one person’s love and commitment to another. This is what we who follow Jesus say about him when we affirm that we believe in Jesus. And when we talk about what God has done in Jesus, it is all about love, not condemnation. It is about inclusive and all embracing love, not judgmental and exclusive favoritism. It is a love story between us and God that does not suggest that God’s love for people who approach God differently is any less than God’s love for us. We are invited, as our Hindu Swami suggests, to expand our love out beyond our own little corner of the world. It was witnessing that love incarnate in our world amongst those eager and excited 400+ teenagers at Nazareth this week that touched me so deeply and gave me hope that we can create a future where the love principle reigns and the condemnation and exclusion principles become artifacts of history.

God so loved the world. God still loves the world, all of it, in its diversity and color and beauty. We honor God and show our love for God when we live our lives as reflections of that love in the world and for all the world in its religious, racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. Why has God done anything that God has done? Because, “God so loved the world…” Amen.

Lent 3B, 2012

“Saved from Religion”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 11, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

15Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

One early spring evening, a priest in an urban area was returning to her rectory after a meeting, when a robber, brandishing a gun at her, demanded “Your money or your life.” The priest had very little money on her but as she was reaching into her purse to get her wallet, the robber noticed her clerical collar and dropped the gun, saying, “Oh, you’re a Reverend! Never mind, you can go.” The priest was a bit taken aback by this display of respect for her religious position and offered the robber a candy bar from her purse. “No thanks, Reverend,” the thief replied, “I gave up chocolate for Lent.”

This amusing little story might make us chuckle, but it is also a pointed reminder about the place of religion in human life as it directs our attention away from institutional or outward religious practice and towards an examination of how our religious faith affects the way we actually live in the world. It is the sort of misplaced religious piety exemplified by the thief in the story that Jesus so abhors and it is against that kind of superficial adherence to institutional religious rules that he directs his rage and fury in the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that we heard in today’s gospel.

Today’s story of Jesus having a temper tantrum in the Temple in Jerusalem is a famous one and is told in all four gospels. In John’s gospel this incident takes place right at the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, a full three years before his crucifixion. The synoptic gospel writers place the incident during the week before he died, and imply that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and got him in trouble with the authorities, which ultimately led to his execution. In John’s gospel, this story comes right at the beginning of his ministry, after the story of the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water to wine. For the author of John’s gospel, this story is yet another incident, like the miracle at Cana that points to Jesus’ identity in a bold and unambiguous way. Jesus’ identity as God’s incarnate Word is explained by the author’s description of Jesus as the new temple of God on earth.

When talking about this particular story, Christians have a tendency to see it as a story in which Jesus is angry because the Temple had degenerated from a place of worship into a marketplace where money was defiling the true worship of God, or religious authorities were extorting the faithful with mercenary and ungodly practices. Scholars believe that what was going on in the Temple on the day Jesus threw his fit was not at all unusual, nor was it necessarily sacrilegious or inappropriate. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was a religion centered in the cultic worship of the Jerusalem Temple. It was customary in the religion of the Temple for priests to offer animal sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people during major religious holidays. There were several pilgrimage holidays each year, during which time Jews from miles around made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the holiday and while there, were expected to offer sacrifices in the Temple. Passover was one such holiday.

Since Jerusalem was a major urban center and the pilgrims who came for the Passover were often traveling miles to get there, they could not always bring animals with them for the priests to sacrifice. So, in the outer court of the Temple, religious officials would sell animals to pilgrims so that they could make the sacrifice while they were in Jerusalem. Furthermore, since the Jews worshipped only Yahweh and were forbidden by the Ten Commandments and the Torah from worshipping foreign gods or graven images, coins with the face of the Roman Caesar engraved on them were forbidden in the Temple. Therefore, booths were set up so that religious Jews could exchange their secular currency for religious coinage to be used to purchase the animals for the sacrifices.

It was not the buying and selling of animals in the Temple, nor the exchanging of currency in the Temple that upset Jesus. His rage was directed more fundamentally at the entire structure of Temple worship, at the very institutionalization of religion that the Temple exemplified. When he makes reference to himself as the temple that will be destroyed and then raised again in three days, he is making a profoundly radical statement. He suggests that God comes to humankind in him, Jesus of Nazareth, a person who seeks relationship, not through a complex corporate and cultic structure with hierarchies and rules and regulations and rituals and fancy buildings. His action in overturning the tables and driving out the animals was desperately radical because it challenged the very institution that was believed to witness to God and to be God’s residence on earth. Jesus was angry and frustrated because concern for the necessities of institutional life had blinded the people to the presence of the living God in their midst.

Jesus issued a wake-up call to the religious folk of his day, which is as important for us to listen to in the 21st century as it was in the first. When we invite others to join us in our institutional faith we need to be mindful of what they will find here when they come. Will they encounter the living God here, or will they see a corporate entity, more concerned with its own survival than with spreading the love of God to everyone around it? Will they meet people like the robber who gives up chocolate for Lent but steals from people, or will they meet people who are alive with the love of God in their own lives and eager and willing to spread that love around to anyone who comes through the door? In our modern day we have many people, particularly the younger generation, who refuse to affiliate with institutional religion because they consider themselves to be “spiritual but not religious” which often is a code phrase that signifies mistrust in the integrity of religious institutions to be places where people can encounter the sacred. Many of those who so designate themselves have been hurt or turned off by the institutional church because it has failed to meet their spiritual hunger or to connect them in any meaningful way with the sacred.

We humans need our institutionalized forms of religion as containers for God, the living God who is so far beyond our comprehension. For this reason, from the dawn of time, across cultures and traditions, human beings have erected religious structures and engaged in religious rituals and handed down religious stories and practices from generaton to generation. But when the container becomes a substitute for God, then we are in trouble.

God in Christ calls us into a personal and loving relationship with the living God which relationship has no need of buildings or liturgies or priests, or bishops even though those things can be helpful to us. The lively and dynamic faith to which Jesus calls us is not one that gets stuck in rigid moralistic or bureaucratic systems. None of the trappings of our religious tradition or any other will save anyone’s soul or bring anyone closer to God simply by being there. God’s love, God’s grace alone is what brings us from loneliness, isolation, and despair into abundant life. As Christians we experience that grace in the person of Jesus the Christ. Today, Jesus reminds us to be careful not to become so embedded in a given religious system with its rituals and practices that we are no longer open to a fresh revelation from God, which revelation may come from outside that institutional system, through people or events which are unusual, unexpected or downright unorthodox or even shocking. I personally have found my interreligious work to be spiritually enriching for exactly these reasons. I have been wonderfully fed and surprised when I have encountered the sacred in rituals and stories and practices that are very different from my own Christian tradition. God is much broader, deeper and expansive than any one religious tradition can contain.

The Episcopal Church as a national institutional body is beginning to grapple with just this dynamic concerning the appropriate role and function of the institutional church. At this summer’s General Convention in Indianapolis there will be considerable discussion surrounding some proposals to radically restructure the national church, moving away from putting resources into a church bureaucracy and buildings and committees. The Presiding Bishop and her senior staff are inviting the whole church into a conversation that could result in a special convention in 2015, prior to our regular General Convention that year, to completely restructure the national church in such a way as to preference ministry at the local, congregational level and to encourage resources to flow towards mission in local communities, shifting the focus towards nurturing spiritual growth and away from supporting buildings and institutional systems. This entire discussion is fueled by the recognition that our institutional churches are in decline in part because they have preferenced the needs of the institution over the spiritual needs of people in our modern culture. Jesus was on to something in the first century, and apparently, we could use him here to overturn some desks in our modern day churches, both locally and nationally as well.

Jesus calls us Christians to a personal and intimate relationship with God, through him, and in so doing he saves us from religion. In him we are free to live abundantly and love with abandon, making wise use of religious institutions for the wisdom, community, rituals and traditions that they do offer and which do promote spiritual growth and maturity, while not elevating the institution and its rituals to divine status. Jesus focuses us on that important first commandment – I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods beside me. In Christ we are free – free to live and love God eternally. And that is very good news indeed. Amen.

Lent 2B, 2012

“Divine Priorities in a Human World”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 4, 2012 at Grace Church, Lyons, New York

But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mark 8:33)

This week the scenes of the devastation in Harrisburg, Illinois in the wake of the powerful tornadoes that struck that city, tore at my heart. While I have not ever lost a home to a tornado, I did lose one to a devastating fire three years ago and when I view scenes like those on the news this week, my heart goes out to the people who’s lives have been so radically changed in a matter of moments. Those Harrisburg residents went to bed in their comfortable middle class homes, and awoke in the wee hours of the morning to sirens, high winds and then found themselves clinging for dear life to door frames or anything else they could get their arms around. The stories of folks being sucked right out of their houses and deposited hundreds of yards away were mind boggling. And, sadly, some people didn’t make it through the storm. Those that did have spent this week sifting through the rubble, trying to salvage some fragments of the lives they had before the storm, knowing viscerally that life has changed irrevocably for them.

Life is often like that, as we all know. A biopsy shows cancer, the pink slip shows up in the pay envelope at the factory, a spouse walks out the door, and all the careful planning of our lives suddenly comes to naught. The fragility of human life and of the material things we create to buffer ourselves from that vulnerability drives much of how we manage our lives and of the activities we engage in as we go through our daily routine. At some point, however, we all hit the wall of some crisis that tosses all our plans into the air and leaves us breathless and disoriented. Our priorities are suddenly re-directed and what once seemed important often pales in the light of the trauma. Divine priorities in a human world are a challenge for us, but we are forced to confront them whether we want to or not.

Being a disciple of Jesus is like that. Today’s scene from the gospel of Mark is an example of the challenges and opportunities of discipleship, and of the full bodied commitment that being a disciple of Jesus brings with it. Discipleship is not about comfort and serenity and predictability in life. Quite the contrary. The life of a disciple is as filled with unexpected and disorienting surprises as were the lives of those in the path of the tornado this week. And unlike the tornado victims, who did not choose to put themselves in the path of the cyclone, a disciple of Jesus takes up her cross voluntarily, willingly subjecting herself to the unknown, becoming vulnerable and available to God in ways that might not feel comfortable or even rewarding in the moment.

Our lectionary reading today begins at the point in the exchange between Peter and Jesus that occurs just after Jesus has been quizzing his disciples about what they hear other people saying about him. They tell him that some people think that he is Elijah, others that he is John the Baptist, still others that he is one of the prophets. He asks them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “you are the Messiah” at which point, Mark tells us, Jesus strongly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. Having done that Jesus then proceeds to predict his passion and does so quite openly, which unnerves Peter who quickly grasps that Jesus is walking on thin ice with the religious authorities and this kind of talk could get him in big trouble with those authorities and the officials of the Roman Empire for whom they worked. It is in the wake of that understandable warning to him to be careful, that Jesus rebukes Peter and accuses him of setting his mind on human things rather than divine things.

Now one could ask, in Peter’s defense, what on earth is wrong with having one’s mind set on human things? And how is being concerned for Jesus’ safety a human concern and not a divine one? Hasn’t Jesus’ ministry to this point been a study in caring about human things? He has cast out demons, healed sick people, given sight to the blind and fed hungry thousands. Sounds like a lot of ministry focused on this worldly things like food and physical health and housing and mental health. Isn’t it possible that Peter is simply concerned that if Jesus gets on the wrong side of the Roman authorities his ministry will come to a grinding halt and that of his disciples with it? Isn’t Peter just being practical and realistic and savvy to the ways of the world? Is that a bad thing?

Jesus’ response to Peter, directed at the disciples and the crowd around them, is so well known and well worn in our Christian tradition that I suspect it’s lost it punch. The phrases about “take up your cross and follow me” and “those who lose their life for my sake will save it” and the challenge to those who gain the whole world and forfeit their life have been so often repeated and lifted up in our tradition that I fear we simply don’t grasp the spiritual wisdom about ourselves and our God that are embedded in them. What does Jesus invite us to in these stern words directed to the crowd, the disciples and impetuous Peter?

Often I hear folks talk about the crosses they have to bear in terms of having to deal with some kind of affliction or suffering that is completely not of their making, like a serious illness or disability, or the loss of a loved one or a catastrophic loss of home or job or property. But as I reflect on Jesus’ life and ministry, I don’t see his suffering on the cross as something that just happened to him and that he had to simply bear up under. He chose to go to the cross. He chose to engage in ministry to the outcast and marginalized and he chose to speak truth to the powers of the Roman Empire that were oppressing his people, knowing that such actions could and probably would get him into big trouble. He provoked those authorities with statements like the one he makes in today’s reading that gets Peter so unnerved. Maybe he rebukes Peter because he senses that Peter is more concerned with human measures of “success” and “power” as they continue their ministry than he is with divine values of compassion and love and reconciliation.

So taking up one’s cross is not so much about the fact that we suffer, often due to things beyond our control, but about how we react when the events that cause suffering hit us. And how we react will be a product of the extent to which we have trained ourselves in the ways of “divine things” like the love of God, and compassion for ourselves and others whom we encounter in our daily life. The extent to which we can maintain a commitment to divine priorities in a human world will determine how well we weather the suffering that life sends our way. Jesus summed up the Torah as “love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” When that kind of love is the foundation of all we do in our lives, then the material losses that we may endure, and even the emotional pain of grief, illness and broken relationships can be weathered because of the solid foundation we have in our loving relationship with God and neighbor. And if we have a solid relationship with the loving God whom Jesus called “Abba” we are far more likely to be capable of the love of neighbor that Jesus modeled so completely in his life and ministry.

When Jesus calls us to deny ourselves he calls us to a radical process of self-examination and self-awareness. He asks us to take responsibility for ourselves and our desires and to grow into mature adults of God able to put our own needs aside in order to serve others. In our tradition this has often been described as the virtue of humility, which is not self-denigration or self-loathing or low self esteem, but rather a mature and sincere appreciation of our own gifts and those of others and a willingness to share our gifts for the good of others. Our Christian monastic and contemplative tradition has long advocated regular self-examination, prayer and confession for the purpose of growing in our capacity to give ourselves away for the sake of others, out of genuine compassion that grows in the course of an intentional, prayerful life.

Jesus calls us to follow him not to believe in him. This is a call to a life of active contemplation modeled on Jesus’ own life. Jesus is pretty clear in today’s passage that if we make our life all about gaining the whole world in a material sense we will forfeit our life because nothing material endures for eternity. When he rails on about the “adulterous and sinful generation” he places himself in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, calling God’s people back from their love of material comforts and worldly riches and earthly power to love of God and God’s call to them to be a light to the nations, living righteously by caring for their neighbors. Jesus was not against worldly human comforts, as his willingness to heal and feed and shelter the downtrodden repeatedly shows. But he is quite clear that how we use and how we value the human things matters greatly to God and to the health of our souls.

As I listened to the news reports from Harrisburg, one story caught my attention. The CNN reporter said she had just come from the local McDonald’s, where she had stopped for coffee, and in that McDonald’s there was a prayer meeting going on. She described a circle of men, several of them pastors from local congregations and the rest neighbors, friends and concerned citizens who were on their way to the scene of the devastation to help victims. For twenty minutes they prayed together, as she described it, heads bowed in silent prayer in a circle around the tables at McDonald’s. That, my friends, is what it is to take up one’s cross and follow Jesus and to be about divine things not merely human things. I suspect those men knew that in order to help the neighbors they had come to help and in order to bear what they would see that day and the pain they would have to carry with and for the victims, they needed that time in the presence of their loving God to ground them in the divine things so they could help folks cope with the loss of so many human things. The invitation to discipleship comes in the most unlikely of places at the most unexpected times….even in a McDonald’s in Harrisburg, Illinois on a windy Thursday in March.

Amen.