June 29, 2008 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK

Acts 12: 1-11 + Psalm 34 + Timothy 4: 6-8, 17-18 + Matthew 16:13-19

A fisherman and a tent maker are put before us by the universal church on this date every year. They are an “odd couple” just as unlikely a pair as the characters portrayed by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon in that film, “The Odd Couple” that came out in 1968, forty years ago! One is a neat-freak and the other a slob. Separated from their wives and families, they end up sharing an apartment together. At the risk of trivializing Peter and Paul, it strikes me that the two of them are in some ways quite like the characters in that film. Peter, the neat freak wants everything done by the book and according to the rules. In a conflict overrule keeping, he appeals to James in Jerusalem to settle a dispute. It’s a classic conflict: keep the letter of the law or bend the letter to discover the spirit and purpose of the law. Then there is Paul, who in some ways is the other character. He stirs up things, brings in gentiles and gets everything confused for those who liked things neat and orderly.

It strikes me that the two of them a still a good image of our church today: a people who are both Peter and Paul, a people who need things neat and yet a people who can live with a little mess; a people who lean to the right and lean to the left; rule keepers and makers, and rule benders or breakers. Regardless of those differences, there is a fidelity to Jesus Christ and His mission that is indistinguishable, and we find in them both a passion for the Gospel’s Good News, and the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it and as they experienced with him; a kingdom of forgiveness and mercy, of justice and peace.

They are real people, this fisherman and this tent maker. They both spent time in prison, but as Paul points out in one of his epistles, “nothing can imprison the Word of the Lord.” So, in spite of the extra ordinary precautions of double chains and a large contingent of guards, Peter gets out. No force of this world is stronger than the force of the church at prayer says the story we’ve just read in Acts of the Apostles. What we see here is that the prayer of a Spirit filled community is greater than Herod’s soldiers. Perhaps Luke in recording this incident would want us to get that point.

It also occurs to me that there is much of Peter and Paul in each of us as well as in our church. We are, every one of us, a people not terribly consistent nor perfectly tuned to the mission to which we have been called in faith. Peter with his denials, his inattentive dozing while Jesus is in agony, and Paul with his outright persecution of believers fairly well describe the kind of people who have been entrusted with the mission of Christ so powerfully suggested by the image of the keys. Neither Peter nor Paul got off to a great start, but it’s how they ended that matters. We find in their story the truth that it is never too late to change, there is nothing we have done that is so awful or unfaithful that God’s grace cannot help us move beyond, and when we do wonderful things can happen in and through us.

Peter and Paul are in the end, nothing more than you and me. Human beings, graced, touched by God’s hand. Like Peter, we sleep too much, and sometimes we have to shaken awake. Who knows, it might well be an angel that does so: an angel that looks like a tragedy or a near calamity, or maybe just a sudden insight and moment of clarity. The truth we proclaim here is not about historical figures of Peter and Paul; but about you and me, called and chosen by God formed by the blood of Christ into church for the sake of sacrifice and service, reconciliation and healing.

God is at work in us no less than in Paul and in Peter. These men call us today to make their lives and their deaths worthwhile by continuing the mission for which they gave all. We are the Timothy Paul so treasures and instructs. We testify to the world and to one another. We speak always for the holiness of life – of all life even in a world where it often seems impossible to effect much change.

If we have even a portion of the same Spirit that filled these two, we do not and cannot be silent in the face of injustice. Our deeds must match our words, and our values must match our vision. The Spirit of the Risen Christ will break any chain and open the door of anything that imprisons us. By that Spirit, we can and we must become attentive to the consequences of our decisions every minute of every day. Our lives will be the sermon we preach. We shall begin to question and cry out when price of gasoline takes food away from hungry children whose parents work hard while oil companies post record incomes and pay dividends from their profits leaving out those who have nothing with which to buy the stock and share the profit. We shall pass up cheap shirts that put others out of work, and we shall pay attention when people like animals are exploited for the profit of those who need no more profit. The unemployed and the uninsured are the concern of everyone when the Spirit of the Risen Christ has seized the hearts and minds of faithful people who are awake and not held captive by the powerful of this world.

A fisherman and a tent maker stand before us today as the freest people on the face of this earth. They were not rich, and they had no power. Yet they did not succumb to feelings of helplessness, and they never found silence convenient. It should be so for us: a people who share their faith, their humble beginnings and stumbling efforts. They lived and died in Rome – the seat of all earthly power. It was the most powerful and most wealthy nation on earth. They stood in the face of that power, and two thousand year later all that power is gone but the Spirit they shared, that unlikely pair still lives in you and me regardless of the superficial differences we may have about what’s neat and what’s messy, what is good and what is better.

There is a power that can change the world in us, and it will do so even as it changes us from within. For that Spirit we should give thanks, and then be set free.

Exodus 19: 2-6 + Psalm 100 + Romans 5: 6-11 + Matthew 9:35 – 10:8

You can almost sense the pace at which he is moving. There is no suggestion that he was on a stroll around the countryside enjoying the scenery. He was motivated and on the move. He was not in some of the towns and villages, he was in them all, and Matthew tells us what kept him going: compassion. He saw something wrong and set about the business of doing something about it. What he saw, he knew should not be happening. Those who should have been doing something were not, so he did. That is what is going on here. This is what Matthew leads us into – a revelation of what one’s identity as a follower and disciple of Christ must be: people of compassion who see something wrong and make it right.

What is revealed here is not the mission of Jesus Christ, but the mission God has planned for God’s people. Jesus is clever when he invites these people to pray for laborers. He knows that if they do so, it will gradually dawn upon them that they are the laborers for which they are praying. It will finally become clear to them that blaming someone else for the way things are while doing nothing about it oneself is more of a problem than the fact that no one is doing anything.

We have become a culture of blame; our children learn it early on. Our leaders do it all the time, passing the blame from one party to the other, and from one country to another. The consequence of all this blame is all the more problematic because we are becoming numb to the disasters and problem around us. The media brings a typhoon one day and an earthquake the next. The homeless in our country because of mortgage failures is eclipsed by the homeless in another place because of floods, and the more we watch, the more numb we become and then caught up in that numbness, we do nothing except wonder: “Why doesn’t someone do something?”

Into that mess of paralysis comes Matthew chapter nine and what it reveals. The “someone” who can do something about almost everything sits in this church in the presence of the Lord, being taught by his Word, and called by his grace. Our prayer here must not be for the Lord to send laborers unless we are willing to get up and labor. What the disciples discovered is what we must also discover: we are the ones called and sent, disturbed by compassion and strengthened by grace.

We think about vocations to the priesthood as though it should be someone else’s job, as though it should be some other country or culture who should come here and provide for us what we will not provide for ourselves.

We look at the failure of health care, of education, of transportation, and it’s failure we are looking at: and at best we wonder whey someone will not fix the problem. At worst, we have become so paralyzed by the complexity and conflicting solutions that we don’t even ask anymore.

We do have that luxury. We do not have a call to be served or be waited upon. We have no privilege except the privilege of faith, and it’s call to service, to responsibility, and to an identity that in every life bears some obvious and serious resemblance to the life of Jesus Christ. We cannot allow ourselves to be anesthetized to the pain of this world. Compassion must still and always stir in the depths of our hearts, and when it does, we shall be moving around to all the towns and villages and know that we have what it takes to experience the Kingdom of Heaven. We find here, we celebrate here and live it out there today and everyday.

June 8, 2008 at Saint Mark Norman, OK

Hosea 6: 3- 6 + Psalm 50 + Romans 4: 18-25 + Matthew 9: 9-13

By the time the prophet Hosea is writing and preaching, the Hebrews had taken the revelation to Moses on Mt Sinai and made a fine system of law and ritual that was complex and detailed. They had pretty well put out the fire of that burning bush. In place of some real fire, they simply had their rules and an ethic and creed that shaped their morality. No wonder they could walk past a fellow human being that had been beaten, robbed, and left to die on the side of road.  They put all their confidence in that law and shaped morality around it; but Hosea tells them that this falls short of the radical morality in God’s design. Through Hosea, God complains that he is tired of their superficiality and the formalism of their law-keeping. It was as though they thought they could save themselves by keeping the law, as though not killing, not making idols, not dishonoring one’s parents, or stealing was the whole heart of morality and goodness.

Hosea was marginally effective, but only for a time. It was and still is easier to be law abiding than merciful; easier to just keep the rules than trouble oneself about misery or the suffering of another. Enter Jesus Christ, the Word Made Flesh! He troubles the rule-keepers who question his judgment about Matthew; and he quotes Hosea back them when they question his company. The morality, the ethics with which Jesus of Nazareth teaches and by which he lives are not rooted in law, but in mercy, for this is the face of God he reveals, a face of mercy.

This message and story bears frequent repetition until we get it right. In our retelling of this story, we find ourselves reliving this behavior hiding in this superficial morality with an ethic that is self protecting and self serving. It is easier to keep the rules than look past them or look into the face of suffering. Easier to just go to church, get it over with, and go home rather than learn the meaning of mercy. It is easier to lock up drug offenders and single moms than figure out the cause of their misery and suffering that led them to the drugs in the first place. It is easier to say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys than make a significant change in ones life, attitude, or thinking.  It’s easier to throw some pocket change, a couple of bucks into that basket than make a life changing loving grateful commitment to stewardship’s tithing. It is easier to break up families and deport the so called “illegal” than do something about the misery they flee.

This Gospel today is Mercy in your face. “Go and learn the meaning of it.” says Jesus to the good rule keepers. Matthew, a sinner like any and all of us, is invited into the school of mercy. “Follow Me.” is not an invitation to go for a walk. It is an opportunity to learn mercy, and if we kept on reading Matthew’s ninth chapter, we would get the point. For as soon as the conversation ends here a synagogue official rushes up and begs Jesus to come and save his daughter. The disciples follow Jesus to that home where Jesus is ridiculed and laughed at by a crowd who are more interested in their wailing than the presence of mercy. He puts them out – because they have blocked themselves off from life. Imagine, they laugh and scoff at mercy. Opponents of the death penalty know what that’s like, but we have been invited to learn the meaning of Mercy, so we must not laugh, but learn.

Those disciples who have tagged along are not put outside, but they stay in the house and see what happens when divine desire follows the cry of suffering. They learn there not only how to desire mercy; but how to become mercy. Yet it does not end there, for immediately Jesus returns to the crowds outside and a woman of suffering touches the hem of his garment to teach one more time the lesson of mercy. It’s about desire. It is a quality of the divine that Jesus reveals in these verses of Matthew’s Gospel.

What we must learn is that mercy is not a single act, my friends. It is a way of life. It is like the sea in which we swim. It gives us hope every day, all day. The stories of this chapter on mercy suggest that what brings mercy is desire.

We are a Matthew people, busy at our jobs, sitting at our desks, moving money around, taking all we can get however we can get it. I think that Matthew was just waiting for Jesus to come by. He gets up all too quickly. I think he was ready and waiting for the call, and when invited to follow Jesus it was no invitation to go somewhere, but an invitation to learn the meaning of mercy which is not an intellectual exercise or a rational argument. It is a matter of following along watching and listening to Jesus in action and then ever so slowly becoming mercy filled ourselves. When that day comes, and this could be it, we will put down the rocks with which we might righteously stone others and cease the laughter that mocks mercy remembering that we are all in need of mercy, and there is plenty to go around if we will just give what we expect and so desire to receive.