August 26, 2007 At St Mark Church in Norman, OK

Isaiah 66: 18-21 Psalm 117 + Hebrews 12: 5-6, 11-13 + Luke 13: 22-30

I performed a little unscientific experiment this past week. I asked twelve children between the ages of nine and thirteen what it was that they wanted most out of life, and what it was that they feared most when making a decision. Now a couple of them messed up my survey by simply looking at me for a moment and then shrugging their shoulders and changing the subject. I guess they couldn’t figure out what I wanted them to say, so they said nothing. But from the others, I got a variety of responses all of which left me somewhat stunned and amazed at how these children are growing up differently than I did.

I am sure that at their age had someone asked me what I wanted most out of life, I would have said: “I want to go to heaven.” If they had asked what I feared most when making a decision, I would have said: “Going to hell.” At their age, I was thinking about eternal life and all that sort of thing, and so were my friends. It was not just because of the sisters in my catholic schools either. It was because of my parents and the community of friends with which we lived. Although I have heard stories for ages about how the fear of hell scared boys and girls of my generation, I was never traumatized by after life prospects. Heaven and Hell were just apart of my universe. The project was to learn how to play the game of salvation.

What I confirmed by my experiment this week is that this game has been replaced by others, that the universe of many of our children does not seem to include either heaven or hell. It just isn’t something they think about. My distress rises when I begin to wonder what it is they think about. “Hell” for them is a bad word you’re not supposed to say until you’re old enough.  “Heaven” for too many of our children is a vague goal that may or may not follow being rich, famous, successful, and pretty.

Into that kind of thinking comes this odd question from an anonymous person Jesus meets on the way to Jerusalem. “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” From the way Luke handles this incident, it looks to me as though this question and questioner are an interruption. Perhaps something else was going on – perhaps Jesus was speaking of something else, and this guy runs up with a question out of the blue. None the less, it is a curious question raised as Jesus nears Jerusalem and the end of the Journey and the conclusion of his formation program for disciples.

In response to the question, Jesus either simply returns to what he was saying, or stuns everyone there with a clever story about crowds, doors, and a master who challenges accepted ideas about inclusion and exclusion. The story raises two important questions to ponder:  What is this strength required to enter the narrow door and If eating and drinking in the company of Jesus (think Eucharist) and listening to his words (think bible study) are not enough to get in, what is? “I do not know where you are from” he says twice in this passage! Here is the real issue. In simple terms, what Jesus announces here on the way to Jerusalem is that it does not matter who you knowwhen it comes to having a place in the heavenly banquet, but who you are. But of course, that assumes that someone is thinking about it getting to heaven which in our time might be even more an issue than how many will get there.

This Gospel on this late summer weekend might just serve to do that:

challenge and re direct our energies, our focus, and our goals in this life. I recognize in my own reflection, that the passion and youthful fervor of my childhood years is not what it used to be. Getting to heaven used to seem really important when I did not have to worry about getting to the grocery store or getting my tuition paid. Even when I began seminary studies, I used to think that my whole purpose in becoming a priest would be to get to heaven and bring along everyone I could find. There are moments now when I get distracted and think my whole purpose is keeping the rain out of this building or the debt payment made this month.

What has really happened in the meantime is a subtle shift. I have not been conscious of it, and I certainly have not been in control of it. It is not that I have become lax, nor have you necessarily. It is certainly not that we have lost religious focus even though we sometimes get confused about what is really important. Getting the love of heaven and the fear of hell back into my soul is something to think about, but I’m not sure that it is something I must do today.  I still believe in the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. But they are not center stage and I am not obsessing about them. Perhaps what clarifies this best is a smart aleck quip made by a feisty psychologist who was asked the question: “Are you saved?”  He said in response: “I am trying to figure out how to be spent.” Here is the wisdom we may uncover within this Gospel.

Salvation flows from a life of self-giving: What we are, not who we know.

Trying to figure out how to give our lives to something bigger than our ego ambitions and petty schemes for getting rich and famous is the issue.

When we figure that out, the master of house will know where we come from.

August 19, 2007 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10 + Psalm 40 + Hebrews 12: 1-4 + Luke 12: 49-53

“The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, tides, and  gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire.” I wish I had written those words! I remember the first time I read them.I remember where I was, and what I was feeling.It was in the 60s, and the book I was holding had a pictureof a nuclear bomb explosion.That all too familiar mushroom cloud with its shock wavelooking like the ripples in a glassy pondafter throwing a rock off the shore.The war in Vietnam was out of everyone’s control.We were polarized as a nation.A young Jesuit scholastic had just set himself on fire in Washington DCand the Archbishop of that place had scorned his self sacrifice.I was his age, trying to figure out what my life was all aboutand what faith and God was asking of me.In Spiritual direction one dark Indiana winter’s evening,feeling alone and helpless I sat with an old Benedictinewho handed me a little book called: “Toward the Future”  by Teilhard du Chardin.

Since that time, I have understood this passage from Luke’s Gospel in a profoundly different way than I had heard it before. I always wondered how the preacher of love, this peaceful, generous, compassionate Jesus of Nazareth should find himself saying these things. I was learning in class how to read Luke, with his symbols, his images, his focus and perspective on the life, words, and deeds of Jesus.

Luke, you remember is the fire breathing writer who has powerful winds and tongues of fire descending upon the apostles in that upper room. Luke is the writer who has disciples with burning hearts in the presence of a stranger who breaks bread with them. Luke is the one who has John Baptist promise one who will Baptize with the Holy Spirit and Fire. We have read today from Jeremiah the prophet who said:
”There is within me something like a burning fire shut up in my bones.” Jeremiah who hears God say to him: “I am now making my words in your mouth a fire, and this people wood, and the fire shall devour them.”

At the same time, it is a constant challenge to understand and reconcile the passion of Jesus Christ for unity, tolerance, respect, and love with his words about the inevitability of family conflict. There are not many parents in this church who have not felt the sting and experienced the sadness of child’s refusal and share faith and worship, to share prayer and a sacramental life in this tradition. It is painful, and a profound feeling of emptiness helplessness sweeps through this place and every heart when another gifted life is seduced by the lure of pleasure and materialism, consumerism and shallow ambition.

Between here and the exits for Moore, palaces of entertainment are going up as fast as the steel and concrete can be set in place. In the other direction a casino bigger than any Cathedral of Europe bears witness to our need to be entertained. The truth is we are entertaining ourselves to death, and it will be a painful, lonely kind of death.

Old Zorba in the musical bearing his name called domesticity the “full catastrophe.” The drag of sedentary life, the temptation to settle down, relax and take it easy is the greatest of all temptations because it keeps us from growing, changing and realizing what God has called us to become. In this kind of life there is no fire, no passion, no burning desire, and no vision of things to come. There is only nagging loneliness and a cold empty fear that this might be all there is.

The fire Jesus came to ignite is more than excitement about our children’s soccer league or OU football. Would that there could be as much passion, interest, and commitment to Christ as there is to our contests and entertainment. The kind of Faith Jesus calls for makes us face reality and see ourselves as we really are, citizens of God’s kingdom, not really at home here, and always feeling just a little out of place. If you ever have even a hint of that feeling, the embers of the fire Jesus came to ignite are still smoldering and filled with promise.  The wind of God’s Spirit will stir these embers and warm us back to life. On that day we shall be bold enough to risk scorn and disapproval by choosing peace in a world that has been persuaded that violence, bombs, and power can ever somehow make people love us, believe us, and want what we dream of.

There is a fire yet to come that will purify, warm, and make us bold. Like the fire that Moses found in a bush, it will not consume as much as make us holy. For that fire, for that love, we ought to pray.

August 15, 2007 at Saint Mark Church Norman, OK

Revelation 11:19; 12:1-6, 10 + 1 Corinthians 15:20-27 + Luke 1: 39-56

For centuries Christian people have believed what we celebrate today. At some point in the seventh century, the western church, ours embraced this feast already celebrated by the eastern church. Mary’s transition from this world to the next was celebrated by Christians centuries before November 1, 1950, when Pope Pius XII put his pen to the Apostolic Constitution which articulates our faith on this matter. In it, he offered a survey of the history of the Church’s belief in Mary’s assumption down through the centuries and mentioned the way in which the Church’s awareness of faith developed this truth from the basic data of revelation about Mary.

What is curious and worth some thought today is why 1950? If our faith about this matter of Mary’s passage into glory had been around so long and was celebrated so widely, why did it take until 1950 for a Pope to say something about it and confirm our universal belief.

As I have thought through that matter, I am beginning to see something very important and worthwhile that has everything to do with this Feast and what is means to us. Think for a minute about the world of 1950, or about the years just before 1950 when the Pope would have been putting together this Apostolic Constitution. An entire continent had been fought over, bombed, ransacked, and destroyed. In the aftermath of that war, great crimes were made known, including the systematic murder of more than six million during the Holocaust. Relief and refugee agencies struggled to deal with the hordes of displaced people while a new terror took hold of the western world as the Iron Curtain of Communism divided the continent and the city of Berlin. The sweet taste of victory over the tyranny of fascism was quickly turning into the bitter gall of the Cold War. At that moment in history, a Pope turned our thoughts to the Blessed Mother as a gift of hope and a reminder of God’s fidelity to the faithful.

Seen against the backdrop of that history, this is a feast of Hope, a feast that invites us as two of the readings suggest today to look up. But looking up is tough to do when there is so much to get us down. This feast reminds us that when we are confronted with great trials and seemingly endless despair about the world as it is, we can still have hope. This Feast is not so much about Mary as it is about God a God who is with us to the final end, leading us to the eternal city in which he reigns and in which Mary dwells. This God would have no more death or mourning, no more crying out or pain, because death is swallowed up in victory, the victory of Jesus Christ who subjects everything — even death — to himself. This is what the Assumption is finally all about. It is about what hope there is for us; and what awaits those who listen to God’s call,and give flesh to His Word.

August 12, 2007 at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Wisdom 18: 6-9 + Psalm 33 + Hebrews 11:1,2, 8-19 + Luke 12:32-48

That kingdom promised so convincingly by Jesus was a long time coming. Those whose faith in that Kingdom were brought to hope for it by eyewitnesses. Luke preserved their stories and memories, but they were beginning to die off. Stories of healing, of the dead being raised to life, and memories of how he fed huge crowds helped for a while. His instructions about forgiveness, trust, generous kindness, and mercy were still fresh in their minds. But their expectation that it was all going to come together and sweep them into glory was beginning to fade. It was a long wait, and some began to wonder. If they had it wrong about how and when it would come to be, perhaps they had it wrong about the whole thing. Maybe none of it was true.

Into that thinking comes Luke’s Gospel and the parables of today. The building of that Kingdom was obviously not going to be by the hand of Jesus. Rather, it would come pass slowly built by the patient conscious effort of the people over generations of time.

The story of these parables is not too far from the truth. In the face of what seems to be the absence of the Lord, and what seems to be His reluctance to build the Kingdom he promised; the great temptation to build one’s own kingdom is great. The thinking goes like this: If this is all there is, and if this world is where we’re going to live, and if it really is just our world and not God’s, we had better carve out a chunk of it for ourselves. If we look around and see that what really makes a difference in this world is power, possessions, influence, then we would be fools not to put our reliance on those things as well.

The silence of Christ leaves all sorts of opportunities to fill that silence with our own voice. The risk is that we might begin to sound like the man of last week’s story and talk to ourselves and substitute Christ’s design of the Kingdom with our own. Luke’s Gospel fills that silence for us and for those who would be disciples of Jesus, it is possible that the silence is really an invitation to listen.

We do not live with the absence of Christ if we listen for his voice. He is present for people of faith, present in the church where those first disciples found him when they thought he was dead. What is discovered in the waiting is the gift of faith, but that faith is not something we have. It’s something we do because of our relationship with God. This faith is not a kind of token we save up and use to get something, but a sign of shared responsibility.

Those who wait with that kind of faith are not waiting with some vague notion of Christ’s return but live with a very real sense of his presence in the needs of our world. Rather than begin to build our own kingdom in the absence of Christ, these parables suggest that we might busy ourselves with completing His work. Doing so might raise in us a new sense of urgency because we have been entrusted with so much and there is a growing consciousness of the acute need for redistribution of this earth’s bounty and for just stewardship. These parables suggest that the proper time for justice and for right distribution is not some future time when the “master” suddenly arrives, but rather it is the work already being done by faithful stewards when the critical moment comes.

It is a long wait for the Kingdom and for Christ’s return, but not because he has failed to be present and not because he has been silent. The wait is made all the longer by failing to see that what God has given us is sufficient for the building of that Kingdom and the completion of God’s creation. While we wait for God to do something, God is waiting for us to be something: good and faithful stewards, busy every day not with “just doing good” but with life as it shall be in the Kingdom of God which has already begun.

August 5, 2007  at Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Ecclesiastes 1:2 2:21-23 + Psalm 90 + Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 + Luke 12:13-21

In many ways, he is a good man. He is lot like many of us. There is nothing here to make us think he has mistreated his workers, cheated anyone, manipulated the market, or been dishonest in any way. In fact, it is just the opposite. He clearly has worked hard. His land produced bountifully; the soil, the rain, the sun joined in making him a wealthy man. He makes an economic decision and replaces his barns with bigger ones. He is not wasteful. He is not careless. There is no suggestion here that he is unjust. But he is fool! In a rare and sudden outburst, God speaks out like no where else in the scriptures. God says what we are in the scriptures forbidden to say: “You fool!”

The problem here, the behavior that merits this outburst is revealed in the man’s conversation. He speaks only to himself. Listen to that text again. “He asked himself” it says, and then, what’s worse, he answers himself. “What shall I do? I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones.” I shall store all my grain and other goods, and I shall say to myself, rest, eat, drink, merry.” It’s all about him. His individualism has isolated him to the point that he converses only with himself and answers his own questions. He really is a fool. Has he no family? Has he no servants, no obligations, no God? There is his foolishness.

Because he lives for himself, he falls into greed, and the appetite of greed is always the same: it eats yet remains hungry. Greed is that endless search for more that always leaves the searcher with a desire for more rather than with fulfillment. Greed was seen as particularly vicious in the culture of Jesus’ day in light of their perception of limited good. This notion asserts that there is only a limited amount of any good thing; anything that one acquires is someone else’ loss. Contrary to capitalistic notions that all can increase in wealth, in first-century Palestine the operating assumption is that everything is finite and cannot be expanded. It remains to be proven that capitalism’s claim is correct. In fact, the days in which we live with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer would lend more credibility to the old idea from the time of Jesus

If someone’s share gets larger, someone else’s decreases. At the time of Jesus, desiring more for oneself was the most insidious of vices, because it was utterly destructive of village solidarity. Look at that family torn apart in a dispute that started this response from Jesus. Riches in themselves are neutral; it is what is done with them that reveals the allegiance of one’s heart. The process of amassing wealth is colored by the intent driving it. This fool accumulates, not the better to serve others out of love for God

but, rather, to finance his own anticipated extravagant leisure. What’s wrong with this picture?

The dire consequence of greed is the destruction of community as it brings conflict between brothers and sisters over ownership. It makes an idol out of possessions, so that one who stockpiles has no thought of the One to whom all things truly belong. It feeds a delusion that power and salvation rest in one’s own accomplishments.

That is foolish thinking, says Luke at the stop on the way to Jerusalem. Since we began Gospel readings from the Journey Narrative, Jesus has said again and again that it is not what we do that matters, but what we become. Today he says that it is not what we have that matters, but who we are as revealed by what we do with what we have.

Again and again, Luke raises the subject of possessions for disciples.  The simple truth he teaches is that wealth brings privilege and duty, never one without the other. As Jesus reveals the nature of God, he invites us deeper into that image in which we have been made. To be true to the image in which we were made, we give like God gives.

So many of you work so hard to leave so much to your children: it leaves me to wonder what it is exactly you want to teach them and what you really want to leave for them.

Perhaps more than anything we might simply  teach our children to be in this world and not of this world; teach our children to put their trust and the future in the hands of God, teach our children how to be good stewards, not good consumers, and teach our children that their value and their identity is not in what they have or what they do, but in who they are as children made in the image and likeness of God:

a God who gave up his only son for the sake of others.