Incarnational People

The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour
Madison County, KY
June 9, 2013
1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24) | Psalm 146 | Galatians 1:11-24 | Luke 7:11-17

 I'm actually going to begin by trying to engage in some short conversation with all of you, so I'm going to start with some questions. And I do hope I get at least one or two responses out of all of you, and if not, Richard told me he's got my back.

So, I wanted to begin by asking you, either from you childhood or from your adult life, which stories in the Bible are most memorable or resonate with you? They stick with you and they're always there.

Members of the congregation responded:

“The Good Samaritan.”  “David and Goliath.”  “Adam and Eve.”  “The birth of Jesus.”

“Jonah.”  I responded: “Yes, and the Big Fish...or the whale, if you want to argue.”


“Noah's Ark.”  “Jacob wresting, Jacob's ladder.”
 “Joseph's coat of many colors.” 
I said: “Yes, and I could start singing like Donny Osmond if I wanted to...”


I finished the conversation, “The Burning Bush for me too, or the Exodus from Egypt.”

These are some really remarkable stories that we remember because there's really amazing plotlines, we stick on to one or two parts of the plot.


So, in the readings this morning, what's most memorable? What stayed with you – especially in the reading from Kings and the Gospel?

“Healing." “Poverty.”

“Grain and oil that never cease.”
 
“The rains will come.”
“Right,” I responded, “because there's a great drought and that's the promise from God.”
I continued:
“

For me, what stuck with me most about those two readings was the resurrections that happened.  Usually we always think of the major resurrection in our story, of Jesus' resurrection, but this morning we heard two stories of resurrection – of Elijah raising the son of the widow and then of Jesus doing the same.


As I reflected on the readings this week, especially the reading from Kings, something new struck me. Something that at least I tend to overlook because I fast- forward to the end of the story to the resurrections.


In the reading from Kings, the widow with whom Elijah is staying is devastated by the death of her son and she lashes out at Elijah: "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!"


Elijah takes the boy's body to the room where he was staying, lays the body on the bed. And he too lashes out, and this time at God: "O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?"


This week, I wondered about Elijah. What did he feel? What anger was boiling up inside of him? He had served the one true God in the face of great opposition, Ahab's wife Jezebel makes several attempts on his life, had battled with Ahab’s priests of Baal on Mt. Carmel, which we heard last week, and in that episode, proved that God was the one true and living God. And now God seems to have abandoned him. What had he done to deserve this abandonment?


So, for the very first time in my hearing of these stories, my attention was shifting from the resurrections and to Elijah’s predicament and his pain. And I saw in his despair sentiments that probably resonate deeply with all of us … anyone who has lost a loved one, who has had a relationship disintegrate and die, anyone of us who have faced trials or doubt or despair. “Oh LORD my God, WHY HAVE YOU LET THIS HAPPEN?”

A dear friend of mine recently introduced me to the author Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl is a novelist and essayist and several years ago she became the author of an online advice column called “Dear Sugar.” She remained anonymous for a while but eventually she revealed who she was and she published a book with some of her essays from the advice column. The book is called “tiny beautiful things.”
 

While Cheryl is not a confessing Christian, it's amazing how many of her pieces elucidate parts of Christian life previously to me were opaque, that I just didn't get. One exchange of letters in particular came to mind this week as I thought about Elijah.


Cheryl responds to a letter from a woman whose daughter has been hospitalized, and she must make a life- or-death decision for her daughter. Either the daughter's life can be made comfortable, and she'll hold on for as long as she can, or she can have life-endangering surgery and she may never wake up. At the same time that this woman’s family is suffering through this ordeal, the woman confesses to Cheryl her struggle to believe in God. She has placed this ordeal on the altar. If her daughter lives, there is a God. If her daughter dies, no God exists.


She and Cheryl exchange a series of letters throughout this time. In one of Cheryl’s responses, she writes to the woman:  
“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking If there were a God, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery? - understandable as that question is – creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned."


And this week I thought, not only does it create this false dichotomy of the blessed and the damned, but it also removes categories of trust and faith and incarnation.
All of these questions are ones that, at one time or another, we scream out to God...
but they also seem to flatten our experience of God and our lives in such a way that we feel that things are happening to us, we're not free agents, we're no more than lab rats in a cage. I think that they can remove our capacity for growth, for learning, and for compassion for others who are going through similarly devastating times.
  So in this sense, if they remove our capacity for understanding and compassion, they also diminish the reality of the incarnation – of us being God's presence in the world, the body of Christ.


And even as these questions do this, they are SO are very human and they are so VERY biblical. They are at the very core of Elijah’s crying out to God. "Why have you let this happen?”
And even as Elijah is crying out, God's there. Present. And we know that at the end of the story, the boy revives.


And the widow, at the end of the story, says, "Now I know that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth."

Where, just moments before, Elijah had been saying words of doubt and abandonment.

We hear every Good Friday, "Eloi Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” spoken by Christ himself.
  So I wondered, this week, perhaps God abides in these questions and in despair and in doubt, just as abides in joy and resurrection. For, God was incarnate, and he spoke these words, too. And not only IS he there with us, but he's BEEN there. Quite literally, hanging on the cross.


Cheryl Strayed concludes her letter,

“To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists,” or, I would say, whether or not God is present and abiding with us in our despair, “constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for... compassion. AND, it fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising – the very half that makes rising necessary – is having first been nailed to the cross.”


We believe that God dwelt and dwells among us. God became incarnate and in Jesus’ life, Jesus must have experienced hundreds of tiny deaths and hundreds of small resurrections. And at the end of the story, it was not his crucifixion, but his rising.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was not the end of the story, but without it, we couldn't have gotten to resurrection.


So, as fond as Episcopalians are of saying, “We are a Resurrection people,” I would encourage you to view it in a different way. Proclaim we that are a Resurrection people, yes, but more importantly - proclaim, “We are an Incarnational People.” And that God dwells in our dyings and our risings.


Amen."




We Are Enough

Sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church

Danville, KY
1 Kings 18:20-21, (22-29), 30-39 | Psalm 96 | Galatians 1:1-12 | Luke 7:1-10

When I was in elementary school, my social studies teacher assigned a special individual project to our class. We were to artistically represent – through poetry, art, music - a story from one of the cultures we had been studying. We had been making our way through the ancient near east – through the Sumerians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and the Hebrew tribes. Some of my friends bought modeling clay at the craft store and, with toothpicks, they fashioned Sumerian cuneiform script. Others went to the “paint your own pottery” store and they painted plates or bowls to represent the beautiful colors and figures of ancient ceramic art. I, instead, went to Hobby Lobby, and purchased Plaster of Paris and some model train figures, and – with some magic markers, glue, paper towels, and a lot of imagination, Plaster became Mount Carmel and plastic train conductors and passengers transformed into Elijah and Ahab's priests of Baal. The rather expressionless passengers – who I don't think even had facial features - stood around twigs surrounded by blue putty, while the train conductor, with his arm lifted in solute, stood around a small conflagration – a larger pile of twigs with super-glued tendrils of red, yellow, and orange streamers extending higher than his tiny plastic head.

My mini “Mount Carmel” survived one move and more than ten years before my mother convinced me to throw it out. As it happens, miniature biblical scenes are very effective dust collectors. So, I went off to college, and mini Mount Carmel went into the trash.

I've wondered for years why I held onto that model for so long. For a while I attributed it to a minor hoarding habit, but realized that I was quite good at purging my closets and junk drawers of other obsolete objects.

So, I was delighted when Amy asked me to preach this morning and the readings happened to be the story from Mt. Carmel, and the letter from Paul and the Gospel of Luke Luke. I think I've found my answer to why I held onto that model for so long, and surprisingly, it didn't come entirely from the reading from Kings. It came to me from the centurion in Luke 7.

The elders came to Jesus asking for him to heal a slave of the centurion.

“He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and he built our synagogue for us.”

Later, some friends sent by the centurion approached Jesus, speaking on the centurion's behalf: “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.”

Twice in the same passage - just sentences apart - ideas of human “worth” and “worthiness” are brought forward.

Worth. I think that's what lies at the center of my interest in the Mt. Carmel narrative, and one of the reasons I was so reticent to throw this dusty Biblical diorama. Because of worth.

So, let's unpack this.

Ancient baal worship was prominent throughout the near East, and baal was not a singular god but baalim, the plural, was this large array of gods - gods of fertility and ran rand war, the harvest, and so on. And there was this never work of appeasement, to make sure you were offering the proper sacrifices to the gods so that they would give you in turn the desired outcome. This went from sacrifices of food, animals, wines, but even to women and children who were offered to the gods of rain, fertility, war, and on and on. And if your sacrifice wasn't good enough, the sacrifice had to be “upped” because you were not worthy, what you provided was not worthy – of rain, of protection, of fertility, of life. It's a rather disastrous calculus to win favor with these gods.

Despite the evolution of Israelite religious practice from devotion to many gods – as many peoples of the near east did - to the devotion and reverence for the one true God, these ideas continued to creep in, and I think we see it this morning in the Gospel, though it is very subtle, and we see it in our own lives. This appears in this morning's Gospel, where the reason that Jesus should help the centurion and his slave is because the centurion is worthy. He has, in the eyes of the elders, offered the right sacrifices – has financed the construction of the synagogue - and so in our human eyes, he should have procured favor with God. “He is worthy of having you do this for him, because he built our synagogue for us.”

Yet, something amazing happens, and the centurion's emissaries come to Jesus, and they admit that the centurion is not worthy. The centurion, though he sits in a position of such power, acknowledges he is a subordinate to Christ. A man set under the authority, and not in this case of of Rome, or the capricious demands of his pantheon of gods. He puts his faith and his trust in Jesus.

So, this mini-Mt. Carmel, this dusty thing that I was so reticent to get rid of, I think I couldn't let it go because it was reminding me of something so important. Of something VERY important about our relationship to God.

Either we worship a god we must continually appease, to whom we must continually prove our worth OR we are fully, and wholly, and completely worthy by definition. We are children of God. We are enough.

Mt. Carmel was a battle between false gods and the one true God. But I think for us today, it's a battle between the gods of our society and the gods we create to whom we must prove that we're lovable, that we're worthy of love. An eternal rat race to prove we're deserving – OR a God who knows our innate worth, who loves us because we are His children.

Discovered by a friend who heard me preach - see www.momastery.com/blog

So, either prove that you're worthy, or, put your ultimate faith and trust in God and KNOW that we are enough.

These are some of the reasons why I am so honored to be with you today and so excited about your Reading Camp, coming up here in just one week. It is because, as much as Reading Camp is about reading, about school preparedness, about building skills for academic success, it is even MORE about impressing upon the children that we serve that they are worthy. They are loved. And they are enough.

As any volunteer at a Reading Camp knows, each child brings with him a complex life story. Across the seven Reading Camp programs in the Diocese of Lexington, you'll find incredible diversity among these campers who come in all shapes and sizes, from all backgrounds.

Some children will indeed be from middle-class families, whose parents who are seeking every and all possible way to help their children achieve grade-level reading, build the skills they need.

Some children will be from low-income families, whose mothers may work more than one job to put food on the table.

Some will be foster children, some will be children who live in the mountains of our southeastern counties without running water, some will be from the inner-city in Covington who live with their grandmothers because their dad is in jail and their mother is on drugs.

Some will be poor, others will be comfortable. Some will be American-born and others will be refugee children whose families fled war and famine.

And amidst this diversity, there are two major common threads that bind them all together and make them so similar. The first is, as we know, the fact that they are struggling in school. They're really struggling to read. Before third grade, children must learn to read and after third grade, they must be able to read in order to learn, and they are without that basic skills. At risk of falling further and further behind. .

The second common thread is the despairing and hopeless prospect that many of them carry with them – even if they don't know it... I would assume some of us carry this with us too – that they are unworthy. That they're not smart enough, not pretty enough, not good enough. Part of this might stem from their academic struggles. Part of it may stem from their environment - their families, their peers, their schools. But, A large part of it, I argue, stems from our society and our media – tgese modern day false gods and idols – to whom we must prove that we are enough. These modern day false gods that applaud certain very narrow conceptions of beauty, and success and intelligence and diminish all others.

So this is where you, the people of Trinity Danville, step in. This is where the ministry of Reading Camp steps in, all of us, together. We are not only concerned with the children's reading skills, though that's core of what we're doing. More importantly, we are concerned with the children's self-perception, with their sense of worth. We want them to know that they know they ARE capable, intelligent, beautiful, worthy, and loved.

Reading Camp is first about building reading skills for academic success. But the other and far more important part of Reading Camp is Mt. Carmel – a battle between gods to whom we must prove our worth and the one true God who loves us and knows us to be innately worthy.

THAT is what you're doing with Reading Camp. You are disavowing those false gods who would make us sacrifice the best parts of ourselves to prove our worth. You are acknowledging the important truth that we are all children of God.

So, bless you. Bless you for your ministry to the children in Danville and Boyle County. You will, in gentle, kind, and loving ways, let each child know that they are loved, and they do not have to be afraid or ashamed of their struggles. That they are worthy. That you are, too. And we are all children of the one true and living God.

Sometimes I wish that my dusty model of Mt. Carmel was still around, as a reminder. But I know, all I have to do is look to Trinity Danville and to Reading Camp.

And Jesus said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

Amen.