Sermon notes on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7. For expats everywhere

Interesting, isn't it, that God (through the prophet Jeremiah) does not say to the exiles in Babylon that they have been merely hard-done-by and captured by an evil King. He tells them that he, God, is the one who has sent them into exile there. These would have been bitter words for them to hear. They might have wanted more sympathy.

Last week we heard the words of the Psalmist (Psalm 137) from the same epoch asking "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" This week the question is answered.

God says: You will take your sojourn in Babylon seriously. It's where you live now. Your health depends on the health of the city and your prosperity on its prosperity. Allow your family life to be touched by the community you live in and extend your own hand upon your surroundings as well. Let genuine relationship flourish.

Above all pray for the city in which you live and lift up its life to God.

France is not Babylon. America, Canada and Great Britain are not the promised land. One should hesitate to make too direct a comparison between our world and the Biblical world we happen to be reading about. Nonetheless we ought to examine which reflections herein might apply to us:

1) While there are accidents of history (work or family necessities) which move us hither and thither we are involved, as people of God, with a Creator, Redeemer and Inspirer who has always uprooted and replanted his people. He does it for their good and he does it for the good of the world he sends them into. It should not surprise you that you are here with a purpose.

2) The world in which we feel like aliens or visitors is a beautiful world. God wants something for it and you are a partner in that work. You - and not someone else. Here - and nowhere else.

3) Even the symbols which God, through his prophet, recommends - the building of houses, planting of gardens and the contracting of marriages - may mean something for us. What is the visible sign we do, or could, exhibit which shows that we want to belong to the society in which we are presently living?

At the very least let us be curious about this and consider it.



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Sermon Notes on Luke 16:1-13 Proper 20 Year C

This parable stumps rather a lot of people. Jesus seems to be praising a manager who plays fast and loose with his employer's money. I believe it makes the most sense when the character of the Dishonest Steward is set alongside the characters introduced in last Sunday's lectionary reading:

- A shepherd has lost a sheep and must search for it.

- A homemaker of modest means loses a valuable coin and must spend her day looking for it because she is poor.

- A king, who has committed himself to waging war, is outnumbered and outgunned by an opposing army and must sit down with his foreign minister and figure out what peace negotiations might look like.

I can put this character of the Dishonest Steward shoulder to shoulder with these three individuals and make the greatest sense of this difficult story while squinting only a little bit.

Jesus seems to be plumbing the depths of human behavior in individuals facing threats. In a world where a thing of value risks being forever lost, the human organism rebounds with great energy to face the threat. The shepherd combs the valleys, the woman sweeps out her house, the king sits down to settle his dispute and the Dishonest Steward fiddles the books. Faith's analogue, then, would be this rising up of the organism in the face of disaster - girded for action, thinking quickly on his or her feet and unwilling to take no for an answer.

Jesus poses questions to his followers: Are you willing to follow me? Will you forsake family for me? Will you drink the cup which I drink? Will you leave the confines of your religious subset? Will you endure the scorn of your friends for doing so? If you are serious you will not allow the opportunity of following to pass.

What, then, would the faith of such followers look like? Well, Jesus says, you'll find it in a plethora of ordinary human dynamics. Take this woman, for example - this shepherd, this King or even this steward. See how ordinary people clutch this valuable thing like it was their last and only hope.

Such a valuable thing is God's Kingdom. Such a clutching is the faith of the Church.

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An older sermon on the same text (and with some of the same conclusions) can be found here.

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Sermon notes on Luke 14:25-33

The word “decide”, coming to us from Old French and beyond that from Latin, means to cut something (caedare) off (de) - hence, decaedere. It means to fall on one side of an ambiguity by turning away from the other option. There’s that poem by Robert Frost you read in school about the diverging paths in a forest. If you are a truly decisive person, you will have any number of roads behind you which were not taken and travelled.

It depends what you want. As a salesman, in this week’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus seems not to want to make a sale at all costs. He reminds us, his hearers, that we can have what we want. If we want him, however, and to be a member of the Kingdom which he is ushering in, there will be a cost to that decision. Jesus does not cajole them (or us) with false promises. He doesn’t anesthetize them (or us) with respect to the risks and the costs. He wants us to decide.

Some of us spend rather a long time in those woods looking at the two paths and even attempting to place a foot on each without doing ourselves an injury. We will need to say our “yes” and our “no” to something if we ever hope to get anywhere. We need to come to terms with the fact that decisions are costly.

Being husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, members of a local church and members of God’s Kingdom requires of you a positive affirmation of the life that goes along with that. You might have been surprised at what these roles required - but you suspected all along that there would be a cost.

All your pursuits - your jobs, your family roles, your engagement with the world and your fellowship in this parish church - require, as a first step, not an immediate application of work and energy but, rather, the answer to that nagging question about what you want. Disfunctions may stem less from our lack of native ability than they do from a lack of positive desire. Do you want any of these things enough to walk out of the woods and follow the path?

Jesus puts it plainly: It’s up to you. What do you want?


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Sermon Notes on Luke 7:36-50

Luke 7:36 - 8:3
(cf. Matt 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9 and John 12:1-8)

This Sunday's Gospel takes three slightly different forms in Matthew and Mark and Luke and a completely alternate retelling in John's Gospel:

A woman of ill-repute breaks into a dinner party made up of worthy people. She anoints Jesus with costly and fragrant ointment and weeps. The onlookers are aghast that Jesus should allow someone so sullied to have physical contact with him or (in Mark and Matthew's version) that expensive ointment has been so extravagantly wasted.

Is it only my imagination or do notorious sinners secretly save things up: money in numbered accounts or bodies buried somewhere? They accumulate people - confederates to keep their secrets and friendly policemen to turn a blind eye. They keep a pot of expensive perfume at home to make their world smell better. They save up alibis or excuses which they rehearse. They must even convince themselves. They collect a series of routes home which bypass the people who know them and could denounce them. In the long run the lies they tell to hide their misdeeds become complicated and interlocking and hard to maintain.

Even those who may not consider themselves particularly notorious sinners will recognize this accumulated burden which they bear around in secret upon their shoulders. It may all become too much - as it did for this woman who, one day, decides to end the pretense. She hears the buzz in the market that Jesus is in her neighborhood and will be eating with Simon the Pharisee at his house. She knows the place and that Jesus is a perceptive prophet. There she will be known and exposed. She will come clean. It will all come pouring out.

When we love, testify or confess we spread our riches about. We empty our account. And rather than leaving us bereft, the perfume fills the room. Until this point the road has always carried us away from community, away from friendship and away from confident commerce with strangers. Jesus’ very presence can coax us from the tree where we've been hiding, up from the beggar’s corner that has been our lot in life - into community, into friendship and into forgiveness.



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Sermon Notes

John 20:19-31

God takes his time with us.

He converses rather a long time with Abraham about his plans for his family.  He reasons with Moses, he endures the complaints and the expressions of uncertainty from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.

And so it should come as no surprise, when Thomas sets the challenge that he will not believe until he himself sees the marks of the nails in Jesus' hands and the wound in his side, that Jesus should condescend to appear to the doubtful disciple to clear the matter up.

God desires faith from his people.  Given that all the best things in life are invisible - love, purpose, community - we will not avoid having to, at various points in our life, throw our efforts and our actions behind things we cannot see or quantify. Them's the breaks! 

In order to live lovingly or courageously we need to take a leap of faith.  Otherwise we'd never marry or have children or aspire beyond a small enclosure of assured results.  It would be poverty.

But it hurts a bit - the uncertainty.  We can foresee the possibility of abject failure. 

While God desires such faith from us - in particular our faith in the one he has sent to be a bridge between himself and his creatures - the faith he requires of us is not blind.  We will, I believe, look back upon our years and recognize those moments when God drew near to us in our weakness and made such belief possible and reasonable.  We were not left simply to figure it all out for ourselves.

Doubt is not the absence of faith.  Faith comes in response to hearing the Gospel proclaimed and it is the fruit of a long conversation in which God stirs the pot - filled as it is with the fears and doubts which are proper to human beings.  Faith is the response which issues when the doubts have been discussed and disclosed.

As it was with Abraham.  As it was with Moses and the prophets. As it was with Thomas.

Sermon Notes

John 2:1-11

When the wine ran out at the Wedding at Cana, Mary turned to Jesus and told him about it.  

Folks are a bit divided on whether Our Lady was among the angels at this point in the story.  Was she, knowing who her son was, simply letting him know that he would need to intervene in this unfortunate turn of events - or was she was doing what we all have a tendency to do when an over-planned event reveals a fatal glitch.  We comment out of one side of our mouth to the person sitting next to us:

"They missed that detail, didn't they?"  

The technical term is schadenfreude.  Its not a pretty thought. Come to think of it, it's not even a very pretty word.

Its all quite accurate, though.  The emperor truly has no clothes, the diva does have a busted zip at the back of her dress, and the preacher did, in fact, forget his notes.  All these aspired to great things while being, essentially, quite ordinary and fallible.  The Scots have a particularly memorable phrase which sums up such a state of affairs:

"Fur coat and nae knickers"

But do try to be both humble and bold.  It is no credit to the Gospel that we fail to reach beyond our abilities.  

We will continue to ask, undeserving as we are, for our Lord to involve himself in our lives' projects, which are the best we can produce given who we are - overreaching and too big for our boots.   As a congregation here at Christ Church, Clermont-Ferrand, our services will contain moments of confession where we acknowledge our brokenness and the fragmentary nature of our faith and ability.   They will also, however, contain reflections on stories such as this week's Gospel reading which point us to the person of Jesus, who touches and transforms the very matter which fails us and who declares himself, in his actions at the Wedding at Cana, to be the master not only of thoughts and reflections but also of the very ordinary resources we require for life and ministry, health and wholeness - for provision for ourselves and for the world we serve. 

Sermon Notes

Mark10:46-52  

A recurring character, in stories concerning Jesus and in the parables which Jesus told, is the man or woman who will not shut up - even when they’ve been told to.  

In the Gospel parables we meet such characters as the widow who hammered on the judge’s door until he delivered justice to her (Luke 18:1-8), or the neighbour who arrived at midnight asking for bread to feed a traveling friend and would not be turned away until the door was opened (Luke 11:5-8).  

In stories concerning Jesus there is the Canaanite woman looking for healing for her daughter who shouted out even though she’d been told to stop disturbing the master (Matthew 15:21-28) and, in this Sunday’s Gospel reading, blind Bartimeus who, when he heard that Jesus was walking by, made a complete spectacle of himself in spite of the disciples’ protests until Jesus walked over to him and healed him.

Politeness and goodness we oftentimes conflate with the idea of silence when we are educating others - particularly children.  With respect to ourselves, do we perhaps worry that we might appear dependent or lose face in the community if we expressed our needs openly and passionately?  

And yet Jesus seems to find that this very importunity - this same honest expression of need is something akin to faith - some part of faith - an example of faith on the part of those who come to him openly and honestly and even loudly.

Tell someone, then, what you need.  Go ahead.  Tell God what you need.  

Not all silence is golden.