There is something about this time of year. As Fr. Bill Ortt points out, the word “Lent” comes from an Old English word that means “lengthen”—for the days getting longer. It’s not the spring is here yet, but we are moving in that direction. The magnolia tree in our front yard attests to that (as do the neighbors saying, “there he is in the yard staring at and taking pictures of the tree again…”).
This week we end a long study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And we start both Zoom and in-person studies of Debie Thomas’s “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.”
Talking about Romans, Rev. Jay Sidebotham in his book, “Conversations with Scripture: Romans” writes:
“Paul offers specific examples of what a community transformed by grace looks like. It is a community of righteousness, a matter of being in right relationship with each other. That community will be marked by a willingness to forgo one’s own agenda for the better of another, most definitely a countercultural thing to do… The Christian community is to be marked by a spirit that honors the other.”
For Paul, it was the impossible task of unifying the Jewish believers in Christ with the Gentiles–something that had never been done. It’s telling that we have had more than 2,000 years to work at this, but we seem to have taken steps backwards at welcoming and honoring the outsider, the other. That is something to think about and pray on during Lent (and beyond).
In society today, we’ve decided that faith is a personal/individual thing, it’s between us and God. But I wonder what happens if we poke our individual faith with a stick.
In the first essay in “Into the Mess,” Thomas looks at Luke’s Gospel, (1:26-38) where the angel Gabriel tells Mary what’s going on with her and how God is calling her. Thomas talks about what a shocking and impossible reality was being opened up for Mary. And after the angel leaves:
“(Mary) has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites–that beyond all easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment… (leading to) it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.”
For both Mary and Paul, when they said yes to their callings/journeys with God, their lives got more difficult, harder to bear, not easier. For some of us, that kind of poking may be uncomfortable. It’s meant to be.
Thomas goes on to talk about the cost of loving, “to love anyone in this broken world takes tenacity and grit, long-suffering and great strength.” She goes from talking about Mary, to talking about us:
“The particularities of our own stories might differ from Mary’s, but the weight and cost of ‘bearing’ remain the same–and so does the grace. When we consent to bear the unbearable, we learn a new kind of hope. A hope set free from expectation and frenzy. A resurrected hope that doesn’t need or want easy answers. A hope that accepts the grayness of things and leaves room for mystery.”
Bearing the love for another in the world has its cost and its grace. Bearing the love of Christ in the world–being those who love God, welcome and love the outsider/other, those who feed the poor, heal the sick, or simply those who try to understand and love those who are difficult for us to understand or love–has its cost and its grace.
Faith isn’t an individual matter of being rescued from the mess, it is a choice to meet God in the mess, where He is, and we are, needed.
At Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill has declared this Lent to be a season of healing, a time of sharing our stories and listening to others; of helping to find and spark hope for each other.
Tell us your story about where God entered your life and did something unexpected and remarkable. Share your story of healing.
The days are getting longer. We have a season where creation around us is going green and things are starting to blossom. We can use this season to draw closer to God and to encourage each other. We can bear the love of Christ into the world and in the process expand our faith into something vibrant and textured that embraces the messiness and mystery of life.
Lead in: I am in my second year in seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. February 11-12 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.
Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.
The Gospel reading for February 12 was a rough one–Matthew 5:21-37, part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his disciples that not committing murder or adultery aren’t enough, you can’t hold onto anger or lust, or you are in the same shape, then moves into divorce and lying.
“Love Over Law”
There is a quote that comes to mind when I read this part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. It’s by Lao Tzu, a Chinese mystic philosopher. He says:
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
What begin as our thoughts, form who we become; and inform our destiny.
Our thoughts matter. Our words matter. Our actions matter. From their smallest beginnings, they can become our lives without us realizing it.
Let’s remember what Jesus said in last week’s reading, the passage just before today’s Gospel. Jesus said, “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill… not one letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
He continues on to say not to break the least of the commandments or teach others to do the same, and that your righteousness needs to EXCEED that of the scribes and the pharisees.
Your righteousness needs to EXCEED the the letter of the law.
Some of the laws that Jesus cites in today’s reading are about actions: “You shall not murder,” “You shall not commit adultery,” and then he brings in divorce and lying. These are all actions, things that people do.
Jesus is trying to head these things off at the pass before they get anywhere close to being actions. Work with them when they are still thoughts.
Since Jesus has gone there, let’s think about it in a hypothetical situation with vengeance and anger. If someone has wronged you in the worst way, so much so that you decide you are going to take action: you are seething, you get into your car, you drive to where they are, you walk up to the door.
If the law is “thou shalt not commit murder”—where is the easiest place to stop that from happening? It’s not when you get to the house looking for revenge. It’s before you even get into the car. Once you’ve started the process, you are moving down a path that the further you get, the harder it is to turn back.
Jesus is telling his disciples not to go down that path.
Murder is obviously an extreme case. Jesus dials it back to anger: if you are angry with a brother or sister or if they have something against you—and here he says something remarkable for those of us sitting in church—before you go to church, reconcile yourself with your brother or sister. Then come to church.
Why would he say that? How is that a good church growth strategy?
Jesus is trying to build a community founded on love and caring for each other. If you’ve got a bunch of people worshipping together who have grudges against each other, or who come to have real issues with each other, that’s not a loving community.
Fr. Bill pointed out last week that in relaying this teaching and these stories that Jesus is telling his disciples, Matthew is passing along those instructions to his readers and ultimately intending it for us as disciples today. Jesus’ teaching is also meant for us today.
Let’s think about things in terms of us today. I think we all have friends who aren’t church-goers, some who maybe used to be, and others who simply don’t go to church and when they tell you why, it is because they know people who go to church and then they see how they live their lives outside church, and they want nothing to do with that kind of hypocrisy. They see them out in the community, how they treat people, the masks they wear, the things they do.
Look again at what Jesus is saying: if you have issues with someone, work it out, then come to church. Have your heart in the right place and your lives in the right place when you are here. Our relationships with each other are integral to who the church is. Jesus is holding us to a higher standard.
We have to see our relationships with each other as part of our Christian calling.
Jesus is asking his disciples, and us, to be accountable. Both to God and to each other.
My grandfather, my mom’s father, lived to be 92. He was a recovering alcoholic and spent the last 56 years of his life sober. He was a director of Tuerk House in Baltimore and a program director for the National Council on Alcoholism. He ultimately made his living and his life about helping people who wanted to get sober.
He lived in Baltimore and Towson, before spending the last years of his life in Easton. When he and my grandmother moved here, one of the first things he did was to find out when and where the AA meetings were, so he could connect with people.
William Robert (Bob) Miller
We had a memorial service for him at Londonderry, where they lived, and people who knew him from AA came from Baltimore to be there and to speak. The Baltimore Sun newspaper wrote two stories about him after he passed.
He was extroverted, loved to talk and tell stories, and he was compassionate and an incredible listener. He was considered a rock for those battling alcoholism who were trying to reclaim their lives.
A saying that became his mantra was: “I don’t care whether an alcoholic came from Yale or jail or Park Avenue or park bench, I’m here to help.”
I will also always remember someone asking him if once you were an alcoholic, you could ever not be an alcoholic again, to which he said, “You can turn a cucumber into a pickle, but you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber.”
I bring my grandfather up because the 12 steps of AA became a way of life for him. And I want to look for a minute at a few of the steps and think about them in terms of accountability and in terms of how Jesus is asking his disciples to think and live. Here are a few of the steps in the program:
Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.
Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
Make direct amends to such people wherever possible.
Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.
Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
That sounds a lot like what Jesus is asking of his disciples.
There is law and then there is lifestyle. The 12 steps in AA are a way for people to live differently, to be accountable, and to stay humble.
Jesus is asking his disciples, and us, to live differently, to be accountable, and to stay humble.
It’s a way of life, not just about following the law.
We’re getting towards the end of our Bible study of Romans, which started in the fall. I won’t pull you too far into Romans, but one of the points that Paul makes repeatedly is that the law is not sufficient for salvation.
The law is prescriptive: it tells you what to do and what not to do, but by itself, it doesn’t change us.
Jesus Christ is transformative, he takes us from being stuck in the flesh, in sin, to being in Christ, in the Spirit, to becoming new creations.
Paul points out where we are stuck in today’s reading from Corinthians:
“I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you still are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?”
The law is the baby food. It’s meant to get us to the next thing. If we are stuck on the law, in jealousy and arguing, we’re not there yet.
Let’s leave the law for a minute. Let’s talk about anger.
For me, road rage is a hang up, it’s a real thing. When I am driving other people can lose their humanity quickly for me and I can lose mine. And I don’t mean in a run- people-off-the-road or get-out-of-the-car-and-start-a-fight way. I mean in a being overtaken by anger-way; a not being the person I should be-way.
I commuted from Easton to Washington, DC, and back for work for more than four years. It was a 70-mile commute, one way, which included Route 295 into DC. I mostly listened to sports radio or loud, obnoxious music, both of which helped. But I frequently felt my blood boil, my heart rate ramp up, and it wasn’t a good thing. And then when I got home in the evening, I wasn’t a horrible person or a terrible father, but I wasn’t fully present.
Some of that anger, some of that stress came in the house with me and kept me from connecting the way I should have. Jesus is warning us against this happening, he is trying to keep us from that kind of disconnect.
My life fell apart while I was making that commute. And in our reading today, Jesus warns us about divorce. He says don’t go there.
The law says, “whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” No big deal. And that’s where we are in society today. We treat marriage and divorce as if it is no big deal, almost as if divorce were expected.
Going through a divorce tore my heart to pieces. Nicky Gumbel, the pioneer of the Alpha Course, compares marriage to gluing together corrugated cardboard… and he says when you try to pull the cardboard apart, it destroys both pieces in the process.
That’s an accurate metaphor in my book. When I hear that someone is separating or going through a divorce, my heart breaks for them. It’s not something that is casual or that is meant to be casual.
It is not as simple, and shouldn’t be, as divorce papers, and divorce parties to celebrate. It’s something to mourn. It’s a death.
And that is where some of us end up, with the life that we had ending.
Thankfully, God doesn’t leave us at death. Jesus will come to know something about new life, after death. And in my experience, in giving divorce the gravity it can have in our lives, in mourning it and working through it as a death, new and unexpected life can come out of it. We need to walk through that and help others through it. That’s been part of my story and I am grateful for new life.
New life is what Jesus wanted for his disciples. It is what he wants for us. Life to the fullest.
The commandments, the laws, are not meant to make us miserable or keep us from that life. They aren’t meant to be spoilsports to take away the fun stuff. They were put in place to be guidelines for how to live in a community together without hurting each other, intentionally or unintentionally.
Murder, adultery, lying, coveting—none of these things help us love our neighbor better. Quite the opposite. And our thoughts, words, and actions can influence our lives in ways that move us in those directions.
Idols and false gods don’t bring us closer to God, they put things between us and God.
And when you add all these behaviors up and stir them up in a pot, you get what we see when we look around the world today—a world that is lost, people who are suffering from being estranged from God and each other; people who feel alone and confused.
The commandments and laws are already there. They haven’t changed or fixed things by their existence.
So what do we do? How do we fix this? We have to live differently. Righteousness has to let go of the law and point to God’s will and love.
To help us see a different way to live, a better way to live, I am going to borrow from a couple of our small groups—one of which looks ahead in Matthew’s Gospel just a bit.
Matthew Chapter 7, Verses 13 and 14 says:
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life and there are few who find it.”
We have a men’s study that just began Fr. Gregory Boyle’s book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” about his experience working with Los Angeles gang members. They have an incredible ministry and they see ex-gang members transformed and leading new lives, by virtue of finding a community that loves and supports them and who are there for them.
“Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel says, ‘How narrow is the gate that leads to life?’ Mistakenly, I think we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness IS the way.
“… Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son or daughter worth having. We see our plentitude in God’s own expansive view of us.”
And we take that in, God’s view of us. Boyle says we marinate in it.
God is vast and his love for us is expansive. But we can’t marinate in that, we can’t feel that, if we are scattered. The pharisees and scribes Jesus says we need to be more righteous than were obsessed with the law. Do you know how many laws are listed in the Old Testament? 613. Try to keep all those straight and see how narrow you feel.
We have to narrow our focus onto God’s love. If that’s what we focus on, that we are loved by God; if that’s what we take into our hearts and our lives, that we are beloved sons and daughters, ALL OF US, how does that make us feel and how does that make us want to treat each other?
If we narrow our focus to love, what does that look like?
You know who knows what that looks like? Paul knows. This coming week in our Romans study, we’ll be discussing Romans Chapter 12. Here is what Paul says in verses 9 through 16:
“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly…”
And he finishes chapter 12 saying, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
THAT’S NOT LAW, IT’S LOVE.
In his Sermon the Mount, which we are working through bit by bit each week, Jesus lays a lot in front of us. We get the blessings of the Beatitudes, we are reminded that we are salt and light, and today we get this over-the-top teaching about being more righteous than the law. Something we can never live up to or fully into.
Paul goes to a similar place in his letters—we need a Venn diagram and flow charts to get through Romans.
It’s a lot to learn and it’s hard to live.
But they both point us to the same place. To the power of God’s love. To the transformative, self-sacrificing love Jesus models for us and gives to us. To the grace that is our gift when we say yes to it.
We are God’s beloved. All of us. He wants us to know that and to live that way, with each other.
We don’t need laws to change us, we need love.
And when we have love, the laws become fulfilled, because our hearts are already far beyond them.
Our hearts are full of God’s love. And we treat each other that way.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Who wouldn’t want more of each of those in their lives? Those are the fruits of the Spirit as Paul describes them in his letter to the Galatians.
April 13-15, Christ Church Easton went to Camp Arrowhead in Lewes, Delaware, for an Alpha Weekend retreat. More than 40 people headed for the woods, the beach, cabins, bonfires, camaraderie, laughter, and discussions in small groups about our own journeys, struggles, questions, and where we are.
This is our third Alpha Retreat in the past year, running the Alpha Course in the spring and the fall, and I have been blown away each time with amazing and honest people and generous spirits. And the deep laughter that comes with spending a weekend with people in cool places, talking about stuff that matters.
When you ask questions like “How does God guide us?” and “How can I make the most out of the rest of my life?” and people get real with their stories and experiences, profound and unexpected things can happen.
It’s often the unscripted time that makes the weekend. Try showing up at a camp with cabins on the water on Friday the 13th and get ready for the Jason stories. Give people a beach, bonfire, marshmallows, hot dogs, and guitars, and you have an instant party. Break bread together on the beach and in the dining hall, gathered to talk and learn about faith, and in my experience, the Holy Spirit is present in those moments, with these people.
Some people think of worship as what happens at a church service. And it is. But worship is also much more than that. The entire weekend was a celebration, worship. Worship can connect us to God, to people, and to nature, creation. And Camp Arrowhead is a setting to allow all those things to happen. On Sunday morning, before breakfast, I wandered the camp, finding Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Cardinals, Blue Jays. I sat down to read and think about Galatians again after Saturday and read in Gary Snyder’s “Turtle Island,” which is a book I almost always carry.
the path is whatever passes–no end in itself.
the end is, grace–ease–
healing, not saving.
singing the proof
the proof of the power within.
Joining Snyder’s words, the path, the weekend was grace, ease, healing, singing–the proof of the power within.
After breakfast, and our last small group gathering for the weekend, we gather for a worship service proper, a celebration and culmination of the our time together. Jerrett Hansen, our interim pastor who joined us for the weekend points out, “When the church is in its proper place, we don’t have to go through this thing called life alone.”
He talks about the power of simple signs that we can see throughout our lives if we aren’t too busy looking for the big signs.
“We have been given the great gift in our community to be signs to each other.”
This morning (Monday), I woke up thinking about the Saturday night bonfire on the beach; of everyone coming up with the best way to roast marshmallows or hot dogs; the laughter and conversations. And I got this in a daily e-mail of Frederick Buechner’s writing:
“In the pages of Scripture, fire is holiness, and perhaps never more hauntingly than in the little charcoal fire that Jesus of Nazareth, newly risen from the dead, kindles for cooking his friends’ breakfast on the beach at daybreak.”
And that’s maybe what a weekend like this is about, what a faith community, a church, is all about. During the Easter season, post-Resurrection: being signs to each other; helping one another along the way; staying connected to God, to the Holy Spirit, to each other, through Jesus Christ.
Two of the questions everyone seems to want answers for are: “So what?” and “Now what?” Those are the questions that beget action. They need a response.
We were just talking about “mountaintop experiences,” or those experiences where something has opened up for you, you have seen (been shown) and felt something that changes you, or that changes everything. Now what? If you have this incredible experience and then just go back to things just the way they were, then what good is it? What was it for?
You’ve got to act. You’ve got to do something. What that something is is different for everyone and inherent to who we are–it involves our unique talents and passion. It is what defines us.
Over the past couple years, I’ve had St. Paul on my mind, especially gearing up for a study on Romans this fall. Most of us will never know Paul’s clarity or conviction. His mountaintop experience was an encounter with the Risen Christ that left him blind for a few days, and completely transformed his life. He went from being an all around not-so-nice guy to being a prolific letter-writing, missionary master, New Testament first ballot hall of famer. Even changed his name.
What we take from our game-changing experiences doesn’t have to involve evangelism, like Paul. It could be anything–working with kids, creating art, pushing yourself and those around you to be better, kinder; inspiring others through… what? That’s for you to decide. But it involves change. It involves action. It channels your passion. It engages your talent. It calls us to pass it on, to pay it forward.
I know I sound like a broken record at times. We’ve all got our soapboxes to stand on. I come back to a lot of the same things: being outside and experiencing God’s creation. I find peace, have some of my most profound thoughts, and talk to God when I am running, hiking, or walking. I am inspired, uplifted, and overflowing at times when reading and/or writing. And I am lit up beyond words in small groups of great people.
Over the past 10 years, some of my most meaningful experiences and relationships have been come from a group of early morning runners, which has created oddball adventures, lifelong friendships, and ultimately even helped me find a home at Christ Church Easton.
I love this notion that N.T. Wright has in “Simply Christian:”
“We honor and celebrate our complexity and our simplicity by continually doing five things. We tell stories. We act out rituals. We create beauty. We work in communities. We think out our beliefs… In and through all these things run the threads of love and pain, fear and faith, worship and doubt, the quest for justice, the thirst for spirituality, and the promise and problem of human relationship. And if there is any such thing as “truth,” in some absolute sense, it must relate to, and make sense of, all this and more.”
Drink from that fire hose for a bit. When I think through those five things and how they relate to my life, I think back on some of my best memories and look forward to meaningful experiences to come.
“So what?” and “Now what?” I feel like as individuals and as a society, these are questions we constantly ask and come back to. Sometimes they can leave us stuck in the starting gate wondering what to do. And sometimes they can call us to action.
