theology | Grace Episcopal Church (Sheldon, VT)

Good Friday 2 March 29, 2013

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Beth Crane

In his Cross, Jesus showed us another way. He could have destroyed the jeering crowd. He could have marshalled armies, launched missiles, detonated a hydrogen bomb. He could have fought hatred with hatred, violence with violence. He did not. Jesus, Immanuel, God with us, confronted the destructive religious and secular powers of his day with one thing and one thing only—love.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God who suffers. It is not that popular an idea, even among Christians. We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God’s power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them—not from a distance but from right close up.”

Taylor continues, “By entering into the experience of the cross, God took the manmade wreckage of the world inside himself and labored with it—a long labor—almost three days—and he did not let go of it until he could transform it and return it to us as life, That is the power of a suffering God, not to prevent pain but to redeem it, by going through it with us.” (God in Pain, p. 118)

Writing of Jesus’ word on the cross, “It is finished,” Taylor states, “There was one more thing that was finished that day, and that was the separation between Jesus and God. The distance was mostly physical, according to John, and it was only temporary, but when Jesus gave up his spirit his thirst was slaked. He dove back into the stream of living water from which he had sprung and swam all the way home.

Taylor continues, “Those who he left behind saw nothing but his corpse. He was not a teacher any more. He was a teaching—a window into the depths of God that some could see through and some could not. Those who held out for a strong God, a fierce God—they looked upon a scene where God was not, while those whose feet Jesus had washed, whose faces he had touched, whose open mouths he had fed as if they were little birds—they looked upon a scene in which God had died for love of them.”

The Cross tells us that God loves us so much that God suffers for us and with us. Our God knows what it is to feel alone and abandoned, to go through the worst thing that anyone can go through. When we are going through these things, God is with us, and God is enduring these trials with us.

God moves through our darkest times with us, our times of greatest weakness and brokenness, and transforms those experiences into life on a new level. What may appear to be weakness is the power of God at work, the self-giving surrender that ignites grace and opens the door to new life right here and now.

May we walk the way of the Cross, the way of Christ, the way of love that leads to life.

Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: Good Friday, Gospel of John, the way of the Cross, theology | Leave a comment »

Lent 4C RCL March 10, 2013

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Beth Crane

Joshua 5: 9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

In our first reading today, the people of God have just gone through a purification ceremony. They enter the promised land and celebrate their first Passover in the new land. The manna no longer falls from heaven. They now live off the produce of the land. Their wanderings have stopped. After all their wanderings and their tendencies to turn to idols and build golden calves as soon as Moses’ back is turned, they are once more in a covenant relationship with God under their new leader, Joshua. They are reconciled to God and ready for the next steps in their life together.

The theme of reconciliation continues in the epistle. Paul calls us to be reconciled to God, not only as individuals, but as the Church, as a community of faith. We and the Church are a new creation. We are being transformed so that we can be ambassadors for Christ, sharing his love and forgiveness with the world.

I want to focus on our gospel for today, the beloved parable of the prodigal son, or, as many folks like to say, the parable of the loving father. This morning, I want to try to help us to look at this parable through the eyes of Jesus’ first-century listeners.

First, the context is that the Pharisees and Scribes are accusing Jesus of being very close to sinners. He eats with them, and in that culture, eating with people meant that you were close to them, you were friends with them.

So Jesus tells the parable, and we all recognize the opening line, “There was a man who had two sons.” The younger son asks his father for his inheritance, his share of the property. This was an agrarian culture. These were farmers. Your land was everything. You tried to amass as much land as you could so that your family could live on the land and support all the coming generations. To ask your father to sell some of the land while he was still alive was almost like killing your father. It was a disgrace. It was something that a son was never supposed to ask

Now, if we look at the father, in that culture, the father was a powerful patriarch. He told everyone else what to do. If he said, “Jump,” you were to say, “How high.” Period. Any self-respecting father of that time would have had to say, “There is no way I am going to sell any of our land.” But this father sells a portion of the family land. This brings disgrace on the family, It simply isn’t done. The whole village knows that this had happened. You know how word gets around. In that culture as now here in Vermont, you depended on your neighbors for help. People were close. When folks threw a party, they invited everyone in the village.

After this disgrace, they would no longer invite this family.The son goes off to a far away land and spend his entire inheritance. A famine comes to the land. He gets a job tending pigs. Pigs are unclean.No good son would have gone near pigs. This is a disgrace. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “… he loses everything, and he loses it to Gentiles– Roman citizens, pagan pig owners, complete strangers to the God of Israel. He might as well have used his birth certificate to light an Italian cigar.”

Taylor says that losing the family inheritance to Gentiles is “so reprehensible” that there is a ceremony, the qetsatsah ceremony that is designed to punish such a person. If he ever returns to his village,“the villagers can fill a large earthenware jug with burned nuts and corn, break it in front of the prodigal, and shout his name out loud, pronouncing him cut off from his people. After that, he will be a cosmic orphan, who might as well go back and live with the pigs.”

The young man “comes to himself.” He is hungry. He begins to rehearse what he will say to his father. “Father. I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.; treat me like one of your hired hands.”

Scholars tell us that most of the folks who were listening to Jesus were farmers. They knew all the rules about how to behave. I imagine that they were wondering what ailed that son that he would do such a horrible thing and disgrace his father and his whole family. And they surely wondered why the father didn’t act like a proper strong patriarch and keep the son from breaking up the family land. Nobody was doing what they were supposed to do according to the rules of those days.

So here is the son rehearsing his confession. He has gone off to seek his fortune. He has been entirely self-centered. He has sunk as low as anyone in his culture can sink. He will ask his father to employ him as a hired hand.

While the son is still far off, the father sees him, and what does he do? He runs out to the road to meet him. A patriarch was not supposed to run. He was supposed to proceed with dignity and deliberation and show himself to be worthy of respect. Several scholars tell us that, in running to meet his son, the father is now acting like a mother. Susan Bond writes, “only a woman in the ancient Near East would defy macho expectations and race down the road.” Robert Farrar Capon says that, by their aberrant behavior, the father and the prodigal son commit suicide. They die to self and are raised to new life. The only one in the story who does not die is the elder son. He has done everything perfectly and is stuck in the prison of his self-righteousness. The older son shames his father by refusing to go to the banquet. Custom says that the father should stay at the head table and not leave his guests. But he goes out to try to explain to the elder son and welcome him to the celebration.

I share these insights to allow us to see how shocked Jesus’ hearers must have been as they listened to this parable. Rules are being broken. This father loves both his sons. This father loves everyone. God loves everyone. The banquet is for everyone. But we have to be ready to be reconciled to God, We have to be willing to admit our sins and shortcomings. We have to be ready to die to self, to be transformed.

Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: 2 corinthians 5, parable of the prodigal son, theology | Leave a comment »

Lent 5C RCL March 17, 2013

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Beth Crane

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8

If we were to choose a theme for today’s readings, it might be that our lessons today focus on three victories that were won at great cost. Isaiah is writing to the exiles in Babylon to tell them that God is about to set them free. He compresses some of their earlier history into just a few words. but these well-chosen words create a clear picture of what is happening. The people of God are escaping their slavery in Egypt. They are running as fast as they can, traveling light. They have left everything. The Egyptian horses and chariots try to follow them but they are too heavy. They bog down in the waters of the Red Sea. They cannot rise and the waters flow over them.

God is doing a new thing. God is making a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. Over and over again, God brings us out of slavery into freedom. God brings us home from exile. God builds God’s shalom. But at a great cost.

Paul is writing to his beloved community at Philippi. Some of the people want to continue to observe the law, and they want to make circumcision a requirement for being a Christian.

Paul is trying to get across to them what Isaiah said, that God is doing a new thing. the fulfillment of the law in Christ, the freeing of God’s people. Paul lists his qualifications to speak about the law and freedom in Christ. He was circumcised on the eighth day, he is a member of the tribe of Benjamin, he is a Hebrew, he is a Pharisee, but then he painfully and honestly states that he persecuted the Church. Under the law, he was blameless.

He met the risen Christ on the road ro Damascus, and, when Jesus asked him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me,” the whole landscape of his life changed. Everything that had mattered so much before became as rubbish. He let go of all of it because he wanted to know the Lord Jesus Christ.

He wants the righteousness, that is, the right relationship with God, that moves through faith in Christ. He wants to know Christ and the power of Christ’s resurrection, and the sharing of Christ’s sufferings, and he knows that he must share in Christ’s death if he is going to share in the new life. We all have things we need to die to in order to live anew in Christ.

And Paul says that he has not yet reached the goal, but he presses on to make it his own as Jesus has made Paul his own. In baptism we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, and then we make the eternal journey of living into that resurrection life.

But then Paul says something that is so honest, so humble, so refreshing to us who are on the journey and may be wondering if we can hang in there. He says, “Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” From time to time, we all have questions. We all have some things, some decisions we regret.

It is important to reflect on the past in order to learn from it. But then it is necessary to let go of the past and put it into God’s hands. We need to let go and let God. We need to press on toward the light of Christ. Paul gave up all his former power and privilege. He also gave up being part of a system that was based on power and privilege in order to follow Jesus.

In our gospel, it is six days before the Passover. Jesus and the disciples go to the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. These three people were close friends of Jesus, and their home was a sanctuary for him. I think Jesus visited there whenever he could and these four people loved each other very deeply.

Martha serves. After supper, Mary, Jesus’ first women disciple, anoints his feet with perfume made from nard, which comes from the Himalayas and is extremely expensive. This story is told in the other gospels. In Matthew and Mark, the woman is not named. In Luke, she is called a “sinner,” and she has been associated with Mary Magdalene. When we have more time, we will look at that issue, but there is nothing in Luke’s gospel that would link this woman with Mary Magdalene and nothing in the scriptures that would imply that Mary Magdalene, another of Jesus’ disciples, was a sinner.

Here in John’s gospel, this woman is clearly Mary, whom Martha chided because she was sitting at Jesus’ feet in the classic posture of a formal disciple. She is honoring Jesus. She is also showing forth the love which we as Jesus’ followers are called to show, the love which Jesus will give us as an example when he washes the disciples’ feet.

Judas makes his comment. John gives his opinion of that. But then Jesus says that Mary has bought the perfume to anoint his body. Amid the devotion of Mary and the duplicity of Judas, we are now headed for the cross.

Think of the courage Jesus has. He knows where he is going and he is going to see it through. There is no greater victory than this and no greater cost. To follow Christ, each of us has to let go of certain things. Each of us with God’s help, has to fight certain battles unique to each person. Each of us has to take on certain disciplines. These pale in comparison to what our Lord has done for us. Nonetheless, we struggle with these things. We struggle to live into the wholeness and health of life in Christ’s kingdom.

Our models for today are God’s people traveling light and running to freedom; Paul, giving up his status and a system based on status in order to spread the good news and press on toward the goal of new life in Christ; and, most of all, Jesus himself, who will now set his face toward Jerusalem, have his own struggle in the garden, undergo a mock trial and a criminal’s agonizing death, and come back to us even more alive than before.

When we let go of things that get in the way of our journey toward Christ, we fall into the abyss of God’s love and we are transformed. And when we come back from that experience, we are even more alive than before.

May we follow him every step of the way, in faith, hope, and love.

Amen.

Filed under: Reverend Janet Brown, Sermons | Tagged: Flight from Egypt, Isaiah 43, Philippians 3, theology | Leave a comment »

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