Sermon on Glory and Mercy, 2 Lent

Between field ed, the VTS chapel, and class, I have preached seven times in the last six weeks. That's all in six weeks' work for the average parish priest, but this seminarian is definitely ready for the break ahead. In the meantime, here's my final effort, from Sunday's readings (and collect!).

Many, many thanks to David Schlafer, who talked through it with me on Thursday and basically gave me all the good ideas.

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“O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy …”¹ So begins the collect for this, the second Sunday in Lent. It’s characteristic of our liturgical tradition that such a profound insight into the Christian faith and life—and indeed into the divine life—be relegated to the role of dependent clause in one of our common prayers. But perhaps that’s the charm and power of sticking our best theology in as asides in the sacred syntax, because it allows us to be surprised in the Spirit when we do stumble across them. That’s what happened to me this week when I read those words: “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy.”

I was surprised because glory and mercy are two words we use a lot in church but seldom use together. Let’s spend a few minutes thinking about what they might mean. When I hear the former word, I think immediately of something like “fame and glory,” the glory of renown, of being thought of highly by others, of possessing admirable and perhaps enviable fortunes. Plenty of God’s servants possess this kind of glory in our Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the great kings David and Solomon. Of course, the biblical witness also speaks to the spiritual danger that accompanies such glory: the temptation to forget that we can possess it only partially. We learn, sometimes the hard way, that whatever glory we may come into should ultimately be ascribed to God, the source of all good gifts. The kings of Israel lost touch with that important truth, to their own detriment and, we are told, to their nation’s.

So there’s a second, related sense of glory for us to consider then: God’s own glory, to which Solomon’s temple and our modern-day cathedrals and basilicas are meant merely to point. Indeed, the image of God being worshiped for all eternity in the heavenly temple by choirs of angels and the communion of saints is the ultimate expression of this idea. We need “sounding trumpets’ melodies”² to wrap our hearts around this idea of glory, plus the best poetry we can muster. My fallback association, perhaps somewhat modest by St. Paul’s standards, is Calvin Hampton’s shimmering setting of Canticle 18, a text that reads, in part:

Splendor and honor and kingly power

are yours by right, O Lord our God, …

And so, to [you] who sit[] upon the throne, …

Be worship and praise, dominion and splendor,

for ever and for evermore.

Another song of God’s glory is the well-known hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,

almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Hopefully one of these associations puts a glorious melody in your head. If not, rumor has it there’s a music lover or two in this parish, and perhaps they can help you out with another possibility. But they might hesitate if you asked for their help today, wouldn’t they? These aren’t exactly Lenten melodies we’re talking about. Surely this notion of glory is the stuff of Easter and Ascension. In our current season of examination and repentance, we’re not too likely to sing anything triumphantly, jubilantly, or—here’s my favorite, from a poem by Edward Taylor—“seraphic-wise.” It somehow wouldn’t feel quite right, all that glory. Not right now.

Mercy, on the other hand, is never far from our thoughts this time of year. We heard of it in Genesis and Romans this morning. Though Sarah’s womb was barren and Abraham’s body “already good as dead,”³ these two great ancestors nevertheless “hop[ed] against hope”⁴ for the mercy of God’s deliverance. And God, in turn, promises them bounty beyond their wildest dreams. Part of Paul’s point in our reading from Romans is that Abraham and Sarah’s story is our story too. By God’s mercy, we Christians too claim an inheritance in God’s promises of covenant loyalty. Of each of us, then, can it be said, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”⁵

Of course, the mercy we receive from our Lord is wider by far than just this sense of deliverance from need and despair. Probably the aspect of God’s mercy that is most with us in this season is mercy as regards our guilt from “dust and sin.”⁶ And more often than not, we reflect on our state in a minor key, and the emotional tone of our reflection is the humility of a “troubled spirit” and a “broken and contrite heart.”⁷

In that vein, I’m grateful again for the musical witness of Calvin Hampton in a different composition. He re-set a profound meditation on God’s mercy with a dignity of melody and tempo that better matches the emotional character of Lent than the more well-known tune it replaces:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;

there’s a kindness in his justice, which is more than liberty.

There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good;

there is mercy with the Savior; there is healing in his blood.

If you know it, you know it’s an almost haunting tune, insistent but understated. And indeed, mercy as the gospels understand it is a very humble thing, seemingly disconnected from the grandeur and the splendor and the trumpets. Quietness and trust are the name of the game in this forty-day celebration of God’s loving mercy. Perhaps most of all, the saying that springs unbidden to my mind on the subject of mercy is from the calling of Matthew. The disciples are taking some flack for Jesus’s habit of associating with tax collectors and other riff-raff, but Jesus overhears them and says this: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’’’⁸

Go and learn what this means. It’s an odd thing, really, telling them to go when the best place for them to learn the lesson would seem to be that very meal, with those very sinners, from the very man who said, “Blessed are the merciful.” But maybe his telling them to go has a different meaning. That’s the sense I get from our gospel reading today, on this day when we celebrate the God whose glory it is always to have mercy. The story comes from the great pivot point of Mark’s gospel. Immediately before our passage from today, we hear Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah. And so the curtain falls on Mark’s Act I, because finally even the thick-skulled disciples get it. When the curtain comes up today, we first hear this: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”⁹

It is simply not in Jesus’s vocation to hang around reveling in the glory of messiahship. Once the disciples understand that he is the Christ, he strikes out toward Jerusalem on his final journey, his great errand of mercy. In case we don’t get the point, Mark says practically the same thing again in the next chapter in the story of the transfiguration. “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings.”¹⁰ No, Jesus says, it is not yet time for me to reign in glory. Or, if you prefer, from today’s lesson: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”¹¹

You can’t understand glory until you understand mercy. That’s what Jesus says to us again and again and again. And so he tells us to “go and learn what this means,” just like he went and showed us for himself. I love trumpets and temples and the transfiguration, but I am also convinced that the glory of the Almighty and Everliving God cannot exist apart from the humility of the ever-merciful one who became obedient to the point of helplessness and death.¹² And so at the heart of Mark’s gospel lies the paradoxical truth that is at the heart of our faith and the heart of our God: blessed are the merciful, exalted are the humble, worthy is the lamb. We can’t understand glory until we understand mercy because there is no greater glory than to have mercy. This Lent, as we follow Jesus on the road to complete his glorious act of mercy, may we listen to his charge: “Go, and learn what this means.”

1Book of Common Prayer, 166.

2Edward Taylor, “Meditation Twenty,” Sacramental Meditations. See also the stunning Gerald Finzi choral setting.

3Romans 4:19.

4Romans 4:18.

51 Peter 2:10.

6George Herbert, “Love,” The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

7Psalm 51:18.

8Matthew 9:12–13.

9Mark 8:31.

10Mark 9:5.

11Mark 8:33.

12See Philippians 2:6–8.

First Sermon on ... Sex and Beer ... ?

I've complained a lot in seminary that we don't talk enough about sex. We talk around it a lot. We talk about its implications (or rather, sexuality's implications) for church polity a lot. But we don't actually talk about sex, about desire, about pleasure. At least not very much, at least not in the Episcopal Church. This is a shame, I think, because I think we have a word of good news to speak on the subject. At the same time, there are pitfalls. The things that "charm us most" are the hardest gifts for us to use responsibly, to have a healthy relationship with. So when I had the chance to preach on James 1:12-18 for my VTS senior sermon, I had to take it.

I usually try not to introduce sermons like I'm doing here, but I wanted to give the background because this was a very special (for me) sermon given to a community that knows me and knows I'm generally not a puritanical or finger-pointy person. But I wasn't sure if the words on the electronic page would communicate that the same way my in-person words to my friends and colleagues hopefully did. So to be clear: My point in this sermon, is that, on the one hand, the things that give us pleasure are good gifts from God that we can and should enjoy. On the other hand, as we mature by God's grace, we can and should expect to be changed, to experience life's gifts in healthier and more positive ways.

So, without further ado ...

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Allow me to share a song with you. I heard this strange little nursery rhyme at a National Gathering of Episcopal Young Adults in Estes Park, CO, during my junior year of college. It goes like this:¹

There are no Episcopalians down in Hell

There are no Episcopalians down in Hell

They’re in Heaven up above

Drinking beer and making love

There are no Episcopalians down in Hell

It’s tough to know where to begin with that. I myself can’t help but imagine someone like John Wesley’s utter disbelief at hearing this particular “spiritual song.” Presumably the Methodists up above have given themselves over to worthier pursuits under his continued guidance, and so perhaps he would take some comfort in that.

Now I’m no prude, and certainly no teatotaller, but even this Milwaukeean was a little taken aback on first hearing that song. More shocking still was the way this mentality was espoused that week by some of the best and brightest Episcopal young adults in the country. Indeed, when I arrived back at the dorm on New Year’s Eve after a lovely but sparsely attended Taize prayer service, my reverie was broken by the revelry of a much larger and rowdier crowd; let’s just say that this group had started in on the song’s idea of the heavenly banquet a little early. I felt like I was back in Madison at the nation’s top party school.

I kid because I know no other way of beginning to reflect on these stern verses from James: “Blessed is anyone who endures temptation …One is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.”²

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that my friends in Colorado were reacting against a certain kind of puritanical Christianity that they encountered among many fellow college students back home, a Christianity all too happy to cite verses like these. I think they were partly right to react against it. We Christians have to stop demonizing desire if we’re to have a healthy relationship with it.

On the other hand, surely we cannot think that the author of the Letter of James is wholly on the wrong track. Surely there are temptations we are to endure rather than submit to. If C.S. Lewis is right that God is “a hedonist at heart” and that we are called to live into that heavenly vocation,³ then surely we and the Holy Spirit still have some work to do figuring out how exactly we should experience life’s pleasures, how we can rightly order our desires for beer, sex, the perfect cup of coffee, our favorite TV show, the companionship of family and friends and partners and spouses and sweethearts, or that job that will challenge and nurture and delight us. Surely we are being tested. And as Lewis points out in The Screwtape Letters, we’ll fare worse if we believe it isn’t so.

I think it’s the idea of never-ending testing that scares us off from these kinds of New Testament writings and leads us to respond with these kinda fun but kinda childish jokes about whiskey-palians or sex and beer in heaven. It’s not primarily some inability to speak the word “sex” or “alcohol” or “lust” or “pleasure of the flesh” that speeds us on to the next pericope. No, what really doesn’t preach in an Episcopal pulpit, I believe, is this language of the ceaseless test, the cosmic battle of good and evil taking place in microcosm in our every moral deliberation. I think we’re afraid life might really be like the street-corner preacher says it is. We’re afraid sometimes that not even that table, not even that cross, can give us a rest from the shackles we call striving.

But I think we’re wrong if we choose to either run away from these passages about desire and temptation and struggle or to treat them as if they were the whole story. After all, James knew that the Christian life is more than striving in the face of temptation. James knew that the devil and the angel are there on our shoulders, but he also knew that by God’s grace and by training in righteousness we learn to tell the difference: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights …In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.”⁴ By God’s grace, we come to know the good gifts God has given us, to use them as God wills, and to give them to one another. By God’s grace, we become part of a new creation.

So maybe James knew what C.S. Lewis knew, that “Out at sea, out in [God’s] sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure.”⁵ As the demon Screwtape laments, “everything has to be twisted before it’s any use” to the cause of evil.

So I submit to you that our task as faithful Christians is not to pretend that we don’t get ourselves good and twisted up from time to time. Nor, I think, should we make light of that twisting in act or in song. Nor should we let what sometimes feels like a cosmic struggle to stay untwisted convince us that the struggle and the twisting is all there is.

No, our task is to have faith that the Father of lights is there illuminating our path, that the Holy Spirit is leading us to a more perfect love and a keener sense of discernment, that Jesus is walking with and redeeming us even at our most twisted and confused. Now that’s a vision that James, John Wesley, C.S. Lewis, and—I hope—those friends I made in Colorado can all get behind. So cheers to them and to all the faithful, who in Christ are becoming the “first fruits of [God’s] creatures.”

1To the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it.”

2James 1:12, 14.

3C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters in The Complete C.S. Lewis: Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002): 249.

4James 1:17–18.

5Lewis, 249.

First Sermon on Evangelism

This is the first evangelism sermon I've ever preached. I'm grateful to David Gortner here at VTS and to so many of my classmates for their help shaping my heart for this ministry.

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Our hearts have to go out to Jonah. He’s a tough prophet to admire, but an easy one to love. Who in the Bible can we better relate to than someone one who, a couple chapters earlier, receives “the word of the LORD” …and promptly runs away.¹ You may remember that he hops on a boat headed for Tarshish, which means he’s fleeing west when God had sent him east.² I can think of a few times I’ve tried a similar move. Here too is a prophet who knows what it’s like to have a bad day. Shortly after boarding that westbound ship, he gets thrown from it by a cowardly but discerning crew who want nothing to do with someone trying to flee from the presence of God Almighty. And as you know, that’s where the story truly takes a turn for the bizarre: Jonah is swallowed by a giant fish. But he doesn’t rail against God or pout about this most recent indignity. No, instead, he undergoes what has to be the most distinctive conversion story in the entire Bible: he sings a psalm of thanksgiving “from the belly of the fish,”³ praising God’s name for delivering him from the depths of the sea. And after the fish vomits him out on dry land, the story picks up as we heard it a few moments ago: “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’’’⁴

What he finds at his destination is “an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across,”⁵ and we are told he walks a whole days’ worth into it. Keep in mind that he spent his whole trip preaching—not in quiet confines like these but out in the streets. As he walks, he cries out “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! ”⁶ And then the most remarkable thing of all happens, remarkable at least if we consider the success rate of the biblical prophets. Unlike with so many of his colleagues the people actually listen to Jonah! The citizens of Nineveh declare a fast, put on the garments of mourning, “turn from their evil ways,” and are delivered as God decides not to bring disaster upon them.⁷

Three chapters, three nights in a fish, and a city three days’ walk across is saved from destruction. I wondered this week about how Jonah could have strength for his assigned task because now we are called to go about ours. The gospel lesson we heard calls it leaving our nets.⁸ Indeed, as we prayed in this morning’s collect, this week’s readings are about “answer[ing] readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim[ing] to all people the good news of his salvation.”⁹ Because the Greek for good news is euaggelion (yu-an-ge’-le-on), we call this proclamation, in English, evangelism.

Now, Jonah wasn’t proclaiming the euaggelion of Jesus Christ; he wasn’t an evangelist as we use that word. But as I said at the start, he is a highly relateable prophet, at least for me, and our work as evangelists shares much in common with his prophetic office and his example of service to God.

For starters, the story of Jonah reminds us that we do not need to be perfect to speak the word that God has put in our hearts. Like me, and perhaps like some of you some of the time, Jonah is whiney, self-satisfied, inconsistent, overly dramatic, and seldom sufficiently grateful for what he has been given. Yes, he bravely and tirelessly preaches repentance to a vast and ultimately responsive metropolis. But then he resents their good fortune at being spared and tells God, a few verses after our passage, it would be “better for me to die than to live.”¹⁰ So too, then, should we be comfortable being imperfect bearers of the good news. We don’t need to be super-Christians to be good evangelists. Jonah manages to do his God-given work despite a host of flaws and frailties. Talking about our faith, giving an account of our hope in Christ—this task is about honestly naming what we think God is doing in our lives, not about convincing others that we have everything figured out.

If anything, it’s the telling of our faith story that helps us figure things out. I believe this is part of what Episcopal evangelism expert David Gortner is getting at in his book Transforming Evangelism. Early on, he writes,

Evangelism is a spiritual practice: active—and receptive. Just as in prayer, study, and acts of compassion, in evangelism you experience a sense of your movement not being entirely your own. Receptive to the Holy Spirit’s activity within you—and trusting that the Spirit is active in others all around you—you move into action as the Spirit’s partner.¹¹

So just like in prayer, study, or service, in witnessing to Jesus Christ we are gradually transformed by our consistent practice. We become better evangelists each time we seize an opportunity to say, “Hey, that reminds me of something I realized when talking to my spiritual director,” or “Actually, I’m here serving at the shelter because I believe we meet Christ when we serve people in need.” There are any number of ways we show others, and remind ourselves, about the meaning God gives to our lives, about how the Spirit has been moving. So we don’t need to be “advanced in the faith,” to be evangelists. On the contrary, evangelism is one of the practices that helps our faith to grow.

I think there’s a second lesson we should take from the story of Jonah. I believe this short book tells us something really vital about where all our best service to God will come from. Recall that Jonah is most obedient and effective in that moment following his unlikely psalm of thanksgiving. When he accepts the work God has put before him, his decision comes from a place of joy and gratitude. Of course, we will sometimes treat prayer, or study, or evangelism like a duty or divine command—and we will sometimes run away from that command. But these practices are transformed when we find ways to delight in them. Dr. Gortner continues,

Energized by your active and practiced gratitude for all that you have received as gift from God, you enter your public life daily with a readiness to share your gratitude and wonder with others—and to hear their own experiences of God’s abundant goodness. This kind of evangelism, the giving of your delight, returns to you abundantly as you are nurtured and strengthened by listening for and sharing good news.¹²

I don’t know about you, but I first heard these words as a breath of fresh air: Evangelism can be “the giving of [our] delight.” When we view it in this way, the word evangelism loses all the connotations that many in our tradition tend to recoil against. In this light, heavy-handed attempts to scare or coerce others into Christ seem not so much misguided as sad. What a missed opportunity to celebrate the good news, to grow in one’s faith by daily giving away the love that is “drained in making [others] full” and “bound in setting others free.”¹³

Now, this has all been a little abstract. What does it look like to, as Gortner writes, “enter [our] public life daily with a readiness to share [our] gratitude and wonder”? If you’re looking to hear some ideas, I suggest you talk to parishioners involved in some of the more formal evangelism efforts at St. Paul’s. They’ve had some practice. Better yet, seek out a chance to hear people who live with great need talk about what God is doing in their lives.

As for my own practice of evangelism, joy and thanksgiving well up most strongly in me when I hear God’s call for compassion and promise of steadfast love. I hear it most clearly in these words by Anglican thinker F. D. Maurice:

The acknowledgment of a God who beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,—who has been long suffering with all His creatures and long-suffering with us,—[that acknowledgment] will make us tremble to deal harshly with the struggles and doubts [and especially] convictions …of our fellow human-beings.¹⁴

We should “tremble” to “deal harshly” with others’ doubts and convictions? That sounds like good news to me. So my witness to our compassionate and long-suffering God often comes in the form of a call to civility or the defense of another’s convictions. When opponents in a conflict are demonizing each other, I try to speak up and say that the Christian faith has taught me that no one is beyond the pale and that we are all called to respect the dignity of every human being. In our polarized society, there are a lot of opportunities to share this part of my gospel hope with the people I meet. That’s a lot of opportunities for evangelism, especially during election season, when it’s so easy for us to hold other people’s convictions in contempt.

So what about you? What aspect of the gospel lights a fire in you? How has the Word of God come to you and made your life richer and more joyous? How has the good news of salvation in Christ set you free from the guilt of imperfection and sent you out to share what’s in your broken but healing heart? The more we ask and answer these questions, the easier it will be for us to witness to the grace of God wherever we are—at home, at work or school, at a political debate, in the city of Nineveh, or in the belly of a providential fish sent to deposit us wherever God is calling us to minister.

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation. Amen.

1Jonah 1:1–3.

2See note at 1:3. Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Jonah” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford, 2007): HB 1322

32:1.

43:1–2.

53:3.

6See 3:4.

73:10.

8Mark 1:18.

9BCP, 163 (The Collect of the Day).

104:3.

11David Gortner, Transforming Evangelism (New York: Church Publishing, 2008): 2.

12Gortner, 2.

13W. H. Vanstone, “Morning glory, starlit sky” in The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Publishing, 1985): Hymn 525.

14F. D. Maurice, Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings, ed. Ellen K. Wondra (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 210â“211, emphasis added.

A marathon, not a sprint: General Ordination Exams

Tomorrow through Saturday I will be taking General Ordination Exams administered by examining chaplains appointed by the Episcopal Church. My buddy Mike wrote a nice summary last year, comparing the test to OWLs. The comparison that springs to mind for me, though, was the Ph.D. qualifying exams I took in my first year of grad school. The scope is similarly comprehensive, though the stakes are not as high. In this case, failure in a subject area generally means a meeting with a local examining chaplain and maybe a supplementary paper. Not, you know, getting one more chance to pass it or being asked to leave with a master's degree.

In any event, I swore after that exam (for which I studied full-time for two months and managed to squeeze by on the first go, thank God) that I would never again get that worked up about a test. Some nerves that set in yesterday notwithstanding, I've managed to stick by that pledge. The only systematic review I've done is re-reading three quarters' worth of church history lectures--more than 400 pages in all. It was a bigger project than I'd first thought but also fun and probably worth it. Today I've set up my examination files and will do some light review of my notes. And then I will watch the Rose Bowl (go Badgers!).

I appreciate your prayers and good wishes for me and my classmates during what I expect will be a long, but perhaps also kinda fun, week. Catch you on the flip side.

Support me, O Lord, in my examinations; and, that I may make the most of the knowledge I possess, grant me confidence, steadiness, honesty, and a quiet mind. Amen.

(Prayer courtesy of fellow test-taker Jo Belser.)

Sermon on Waiting, Proper 28

Here's today's sermon in PDF form (inspired by my recently encounter with some old Hacker Within pals, I'm back to using LaTeX for sermons--Milad Fatenejad's "radhydro" package, no less), in audio form, and pasted below (via latex2rtf).

****************

Waiting is a perilous business. Perhaps you don’t need to be convinced of this. Perhaps you can remember, or indeed are in the midst of, just such a time of waiting—for a new job, for the healing of a loved one, for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for the strength to forgive. And as you are no doubt aware, times of waiting are ripe for many of the most painful experiences we humans must endure, including anxiety, self-doubt, and even paranoia and despair. My own reflections on waiting have been shaped by meeting regularly with incarcerated men at the Alexandria City Jail. I remember one who spoke candidly about how the dread of waiting to be caught by the authorities was as difficult as waiting to be released by them. Another gentleman spoke about the strange interior world he entered during months of twenty-two-hour-per-day solitary confinement.

Waiting is a perilous business. If you still don’t believe me, just ask the least “talented” slave in today’s parable from the Gospel According to Matthew. “Afraid”¹ of a master who reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he does not scatter seed,² the slave buries the money he’s been “entrusted” with³ and waits out the “long time” it takes for his master to return to “settle accounts.”⁴ Imagine what it would be like for him, watching his colleagues go about their bold business maneuvers and wondering if his choice to play it safe would prove to be wisdom or folly. We can’t help but feel for the guy, especially when we learn that his one measly talent actually amounts to many years’ worth of wages for a day laborer.⁵ That’s some kind of pressure, and it’s this kind of high stakes that bring out the worst in so many of us waiting to see how things will turn out.

We realize the stakes are high indeed when we recognize the purpose to which Matthew puts this parable.⁶ It’s not hard to see if we look at where he places the story. Matthew 24 and 25 are an extended reflection on “The Coming Judgment,”⁷ which culminates, immediately after our parable, in the separation of the sheep from the goats, of those who cared for people in need from those who ignored them.⁸ And so Matthew uses this parable to comment on the nature of the Christian life: waiting⁹—waiting for the coming of Christ, waiting for the full realization of his kingdom, and waiting for the perfect justice that his kingdom will establish.

So what do today’s readings have to teach us about the nature of our Christian waiting? What lessons might we sit with as we pass the time before our final deliverance unto and into Christ or while we wait for relief from our own personal crises and unfulfilled longings?

The most obvious lesson, I think, is to cast off fear! The one-talent slave is quite self-aware that it was fear that stifled his creativity and stayed his hand. It paralyzed him, and it led him to misjudge his master’s wishes. It can do the same to us, if we let it. However natural and tempting it may be to act out of fear while we wait, we can hardly expect our best efforts to come from such a place of anxiety. And, on the contrary, when we learn to hold our fears in their proper perspective and ultimately give them up to God, remarkable things can happen.

Think about the demographic of middle-class, American young adults who are coming to be known as the “Boomerang Generation.” They’re so named because the challenges of a stagnant job market are forcing them to move back in to their childhood homes after college or unsuccessful employment. At first, the prospect of moving home seems the ultimate humiliation and defeat, and many would sooner suffer malnutrition or rack up debilitating credit card debt in an attempt to avoid it. The experience of fear in the midst of disappointing fortunes can be very strong, and anxious questions begin to set in: “Was all that studying even worth it? ” “Will I ever be able to support a family? ” and, maybe most importantly, “Will I be stuck in my parents’ basement for the rest of my life? ” But many who conquer their fears and make the move home discover something they didn’t expect. The momentary respite from endless worry about cover letters and grocery bills, and the chance to be re-immersed in unconditional love, creates a space for them to think creatively and optimistically for the first time in months or even years. They get back in touch with the hope that will motivate them to re-launch their journey and the personal strengths that will help bring those hopes to fruition. Waiting is a perilous business, but it’s harder than it needs to be when we face it from alone in the solitary confinement of our own anxious minds.

It’s better to become, as Paul says to us today, “children of light”¹⁰ and to remember that our Savior and our loved ones are our greatest weapons against the fear of waiting for whatever end. He writes, “For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ …Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.”¹¹ That’s good advice from an apostle who we sometimes forget was a spiritual master.

OK, so we need to cast off fear: easier said than done, but manageable with God’s help. Another way these passages might speak to our reflections can be summarized in three words. Those three words comprise instructions that I would probably need to hear from my own parents in the days following a boomerang journey home: “Kyle,” they’d say, “Do something useful.” This advice echoes the words of the master in the parable, who says, “You could have at least invested the money with the bankers! All you did was bury it and then twiddle your thumbs! ”¹² However excruciating our times of waiting can seem, they are still limited, and this prods us on to action. So Christian waiting is about using the talents we’ve been given in the time we’ve been given. The inclusion of Psalm 90 in our service today is a reminder that that time is short. How can we afford to wait idly when we will soon return “back to the dust,”¹³ when we will “fade away suddenly like the grass” that withers,¹⁴ when God will “sweep us away like a dream”? Listen to that last one again: “You sweep us away like a dream.” What a lovely and terrifying expression. After hearing that, I think we’re quite right to pray with the psalmist that God might “teach us to number our days * that we may apply our hearts to wisdom”¹⁵—and indeed to other tasks as well.

Here, too, there are lessons from the Boomerang Generation and from many others suffering from joblessness. I’ve been humbled and inspired by many unemployed friends, both of my age and much older, who have combated the boredom and hopelessness of their waiting by staying active, especially by stepping up their charitable volunteer work. In this way, they witness to the fact that our part in God’s mission in the world is not just to put food on our own plates or even just our families’ but those of every man, woman, and child on God’s green Earth. So however we read today’s texts on waiting, we should remember that they are not just therapeutic but also missional. They offer us comfort and advice but also demand from us the response of action. Waiting is a perilous business, especially if we think that waiting is the only task put before us.

But even action is not the most important aspect of our waiting. No, our highest calling is to wait expectantly and open-endedly, two things that are sometimes hard to do at the same time. Here the lectionary does us a great disservice in omitting the final two verses of today’s psalm, which speak to this very point. The psalmist writes, “Show your servants your works * and your splendor to their children. / May the graciousness of the LORD our God be upon us; * prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork.”¹⁶ So first we recognize God’s works, and then the “work of our [own] hands” can be blessed. First we take account of the promises of God and the hope we have in Christ Jesus. Only then should we survey the landscape before us, because only then can we see it with the eyes we need.¹⁷

In other words, part of why waiting is so hard is that we get too rigid an idea of what we are waiting for. Our gazes are so fixed on a certain picture of how things should turn out that we miss the way unfolding before us if it doesn’t conform to our parameters. This is certainly true in our own personal circumstances. But I believe it is also true for groups of people who wait, like cultures waiting for boom times to return. It’s perhaps especially true for the Church’s collective waiting for the full fruition of God’s kingdom on Earth. God stubbornly refuses to give us what we expect. Stubbornly, and mercifully. Because I would guess that most of us can point to that time in our lives where things turned out better than we could have hoped precisely because they turned out differently from what we knew to expect. I know what that moment was for me, but no example I can give you will have the power of your own memory of God’s surprisingly generous and creative shaping of your life. I invite you this week to identify and reflect on such a memory and to hold it gently as an almost sacramental token of God’s faithfulness. You’ll need it the next time the waiting gets tough, as it surely will. Waiting is a perilous business, but it’s the business we’re in.

References

Keck, L. E. (Ed.) (1995, June). The New Interpreter’s Bible: Matthew - Mark. Abingdon Press.

Keck, L. E. (Ed.) (1996, January). The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke - John. Abingdon Press.

Moltmann, J. (2010, May). Theology of Hope. SCM Press.

1Matthew 25:25

225:24

325:14

425:19

5Keck (1995), 451

6Luke’s telling of this parable, which portrays the master in an even harsher light, makes our sympathy for the slave explicit; his version includes bystanders who shout “Sir, he already has ten! ” when the master gives away the fearful slave’s dutifully protected sum in Luke 19:25 (NIV). But Luke is using this parable to contrast the free and easy ways of a rich and unjust ruler with the constricting plight of the poor and needy. Keck (1996), 334-335

7Keck (1995), 438

8Matthew 25:40, 45

9Keck (1995), 453

101 Thessalonians 5:5

111 Thessalonians 5:1–11

12It might also remind us of the warning we heard from Zephaniah about the dangers of “rest[ing] complacently on [our] dregs” (Zephaniah 1:12).

13Psalm 90:3

1490:5–6

1590:12

16Psalm 90:16-17

17See also Juergen Moltmann’s opening meditation in Theology of Hope: Moltmann (2010).

Presentation: “Faith Seeking Understanding”

[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]

An invitation to those in the Washington DC area: Kyle will be giving a short presentation on faith and reason at St. Mary's Court on 24th St. NW tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 10) at 7 p.m. Please contact him if you are interested in attending. See below for more information!

Faith Seeking Understanding: Three Christian thinkers reconcile reason and religion

Much has been made in recent years about the so-called conflict between science and religion. But the issues involved in this conversation are neither new nor hopeless, and countless religious thinkers throughout the centuries have held a lively faith engaged with the best in contemporary knowledge and scholarship. Find out about three of them in this presentation with discussion.

Kyle Matthew Oliver is a senior at Virginia Theological Seminary and holds a B.S. and an M.S. from the department of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently writing on providence and science in thesis work with VTS's dean, the Very Rev. Ian Markham, and he is the creator of Into A Wider World, a free online course introducing the science-and-religion conversation.

Motorz Skills

The line in my bio about doing some freelance writing and editing "when circumstances allow" is not completely outdated. I wrote, during some time off in August, this article about Chris Duke and his Motorz.TV operation, and it's in the print version of EventDV going out to subscribers now. I had a blast working on this story. Duke is a fascinating and really talented guy. I could generally care less about cars, but even I like his show.

Last week's sermon

I keep forgetting to post last week's sermon. The main text is Ezekiel 18. All in all, the experience of preaching for the first time at St. Paul's, K Street, was a good one.

Like so many readings from scripture, our lesson from the Book of Ezekiel this morning can be summed up like this: the people are grumbling, and God has had just about enough of it. Now, to be fair, Ezekiel's contemporaries did have plenty to complain about. They lived in a time of “never-ending crisis,”¹ resulting in year after year of “generalized anxiety”² about the events taking place in the world around them and about what this news meant for their personal and national security. Perhaps this is a familiar feeling to us as we struggle to make sense of an increasingly volatile world. In any event, the people's exhausted complaint, as described by Ezekiel and also his fellow prophet Jeremiah (13:29), was that their ancestors had gotten them into this mess. “The parents have eaten sour grapes,” went the proverb, “and the children's teeth are set on edge” (2). “It's not fair that we've been taken into exile in Babylon,” they seem to say. “And it's unconscionable that God would abandon the temple city of Jerusalem. This can't be because of something we did. We must be getting stuck with someone else's punishment.”

And so the the word of the LORD that comes to Ezekiel contains a series of responses to the people's pessimism, responses that have some bearing, I think, on our own occasional feelings of self-righteous despair during trying times. What we first hear from Ezekiel is a reality check about the relationship between God's power and divine justice: “Know that all lives are mine,” says the LORD. “The life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (4). In other words, we hear God say through Ezekiel, “Let's be perfectly clear. I am Lord and Sovereign over all creation and each generation of my children. If my beef was only with your parents, or only with one particular person or group, then I'd have taken it up only with them. Don't be so quick to assume that you yourselves are without blemish.”³

But notice that, in this particular discourse, the prophet leaves aside the question of how exactly the people's current problems are a part of God's judgment. In the verses that the lectionary omits from this reading, Ezekiel speaks in only general terms about righteous living and personal responsibility. He says that a person who is “righteous and does what is lawful and right … shall surely live” (5, 9) and that an unrighteous person “shall not” (13). He gives some examples of righteous and unrighteous behavior, but he doesn't directly connect them here to what the people of Israel have done. For Ezekiel, all the people need to do going forward is take note of God's ways. The rest is fruitless speculation and fingerpointing. “Don't dwell on how we came to be in this situation,” he says. “Rather, turn from your ways in the present and live.” It's not the last time he will say it.

In the next part of this prophetic discourse, God makes a second point through Ezekiel. “[Y]ou say, 'The way of the Lord is unfair.' Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” In this second section, it's as if God is saying, “But as long as you brought up the subject of fairness and justice, let me say that you have fallen terribly short, O my people.”

As I said, Ezekiel does not get specific in this passage about how Israel has failed, though we can of course piece together the story based on his principles of justice and the transgressions he names in other chapters. But one of Ezekiel's general admonitions seems particularly poignant in our situation today. In verses 12 and 16, he recites that God's people are not to “oppress[] the poor and needy” but instead are to “give[] [their] food to the hungry and provide[] clothing for the naked” (12, 16 [NIV]). Over the past several months, we've watched with a sense of déjà vu the horrifying consequences of drought and famine in Somalia and throughout the Horn of Africa. On the ground in Somalia, unchallenged militants are engaged in just the kind of oppression Ezekiel names, blocking desperately needed aid from international agencies within the territory they control. Domestic medical officials say the lack of assistance has made things worse than in 1992, when 240,000 people died, with another 110,000 saved by the American-led intervention.⁴ Meanwhile, on the ground in America today, a weary and cash-strapped nation is reluctant to intervene again. After almost ten years of war, it's not hard to understand why. But this time the death toll could be even worse, the UN warns perhaps as many as 750,000 Somalis. “Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” How can the global community live into and up to the commandments Ezekiel confronts us with, not just the imperative to feed the hungry but all the demands of God justice? How can we face such immense problems? Such intractable problems. Such heartbreaking problems. God only knows.

Actually, I think “God only knows” is precisely the mantra we might take away from Ezekiel's advice for living a resurrection life. Let's review: Ezekiel first assured the people of God's sovereignty and justice. He then called them out on the basis of their own individual unrighteousness. Finally, in today's last verses, he extends to them God's word of hope: “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live” (31-32). The hopelessness that set in for the Israelites in captivity in Babylon and that threatens each one of us in difficult times, this hopelessness ought to be a sign for us. Sometimes God's commandments are too difficult, and the world's problems so painful that we change the channel whenever they are talked about—if they are talked about at all. It is in those moments that we most need the word that Ezekiel uses 53 times in 48 chapters: (in Hebrew) שׁוּב, turn. From the depths of despair comes a voice that calls us to turn ourselves in the direction of God. To align our wills to the Lord's own. To wade deep in the waters of God's justice and get caught up in the current. To “look not to [our] own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Now, it has been widely observed throughout the course of Christian history that turning is no simple thing to do. Sometimes it seems impossible, this taking on of God's will and mission as our own, this getting ourselves “a new heart and a new spirit.” Yet I think if it's true what God says elsewhere, that this life is “not too hard for [us], nor is it too far away” (Deuteronomy 30:11), then it must be that this ability comes to us as St. Paul described in today's Epistle: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” he says. “[F]or it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12b-13). I believe Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill summarized this idea more succinctly still in a line puzzlingly inserted into one of her journals. It's a line that carries with it the benefit of two thousand years of Christian argument over exactly what Paul meant, and it never ceases to help me when some ancient or modern-day prophet is calling me to something I feel powerless to undertake. Here's the expression: “Not grace alone, nor us alone, but [God's] grace in us.”

We encounter despair in this life when there seems to be no good options available to us, when we seem, like the exiles in Babylon, to have “nowhere to turn to.” But Ezekiel reminds us today that little if any good comes from desperate searches for how we got ourselves into a particular mess or especially how our ways can get us out of it. More importantly, he reminds us, as St. Paul does, that we always have someone to turn to, someone who is already mysteriously at work inside us and will lead us where we could never have imagined, someone whose ways are not our ways. Thanks be to God.

1Von Rad, Gerhard, The Message of the Prophets (San Francisco: Harper, 1968): 229.

2The Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo used this term to describe our post-September 11 world in a sermon at Virginia Theological Seminary on Holy Cross Day, 2011 (Sept. 14).

3To be fair, Ezekiel's view here makes him a somewhat unusual biblical prophet, especially when compared with earlier prophets. See Von Rad, 229-232.

4See “Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/world/africa/02somalia.html

An "experiment on ourselves": The German energy picture

So Germany has decided to make permanent its decision, post-Fukushima, to shut down its eight oldest nuclear reactors. Today's New York Times has a story analyzing Germany's energy situation, and the sense one comes away with is partially captured by a quotation from Jürgen Grossmann, who runs the utility that owns two of the deactivated plants: "Germany, in a very rash decision, decided to experiment on ourselves,” he said. “The politics are overruling the technical arguments.”

Actually, I think that's a bit overstated, which is no surprise given the weight of the decision on Grossmann's company. Certainly, the decision seems to have something of an emotional ring to it. But I think it's tough to argue anything other than that the Fukushima accident merely accelerated (albeit for partly non-technical reasons) the timeline of a project Germany had already more-or-less decided to pursue. My guess is that this "experiment" was going to happen either way.

What is that experiment? In short, it's to set aside nuclear energy and continue aggressive expansion in renewables to make up most of the difference. (But do note that the energy gap they're creating is dynamic and requires diversified assets to fill it: "To be prudent, the plan calls for the creation of 23 gigawatts of gas- and coal-powered plants by 2020. Why? Because renewable plants don’t produce nearly to capacity if the air is calm or the sky is cloudy, and there is currently limited capacity to store or transport electricity, energy experts say.")

Now I'm obviously partisan about whether eliminating nuclear is a necessary or even advisable part of plans to make our energy use and production more environmentally responsible. I (still) happen to think that, by and large, we're going to need more nuclear plants, not fewer, if we're going to keep this planet habitable and continue to improve our ability to feed, clothe, and shelter a growing population. The trick, it seems to me, will be keeping affluent people content enough with their shrinking (but still ample) lot that they won't react by simply blocking efforts at reform. That tenuous situation is part of why I believe in nuclear power: it's cheap (like gas and especially coal), but it still allows us to actually deal with the waste stream rather than pumping it into the atmosphere (unlike with gas and coal). The cheapness keeps us energy-addicted types plugged in, while our secure possession of the waste prevents carbon emissions and gives the planet (and the people living in the most vulnerable places) a fighting chance in the globally warmed years to come.

So what caught my eye in this article is Germany's willingness to go "all in" on what is, by almost all accounts, a technically ambitious plan, in order to bring desired change about. It's a plan that is rife with uncertainty. There seems in Germany then a mandate for making a certain amount of sacrifice, or at least potentially doing so, in order to make ends meet while using (even) cleaner energy. I very much doubt there will be any tenable long-term solutions that don't require still more significant sacrifice (or what will at least feel like sacrifice for a while).

Thus, whatever I think of this plan as an erstwhile systems analyst and as a nuclear power proponent, I'm encouraged as a wannabe Christian ethicist by another super-rich country's willingness to take on a little collective uncertainty for the sake of bringing about a desired change. I think much of our fate as a planet will ride on the willingness of the first to be last (Matthew 20:16) in just this way. I hope my own country will find ways of taking analogous moral leadership in the face of the crisis ahead.

Publication in The Living Church

I recently won second place in a student essay contest sponsored by The Living Church. I've heard from some friends who get the print mag that it is now available, so I feel comfortable posting the excerpt from the digital copy I got from the publisher. The essay is called "The Wisdom of (Small) Groups: OT Visions for Decentralized Life and Ministry," and I originally wrote it for Dick Busch's VTS course on small group ministry. Many thanks in particular to Dr. Cook for pointing me in some useful directions.

Click here to read. Enjoy!

[Cross-posted at IntoAllTheWWWorld.org]

As I mentioned briefly when I live blogged the Francis Collins presentation at the Christian Scholars Conference, some evangelicals do not accept the scientific conclusion that the human race descended from a pool of not less than about 10,000 distance ancestors rather than from one historical couple, Adam and Eve. NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports that this scientific and theological argument has come to a head in some evangelical circles. Hagerty writes,

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

It’s distressing to me that Hagerty would use the phrase “no longer believe the Genesis account” without further qualifier. I believe the Genesis account, I just don’t think it literally describes our genealogy. But, as is clear from the remainder of the article, such are the (I believe, sad) terms of this debate.

In any event, it’s a good article, and an important one. Perhaps most intriguing is the section exploring whether or not this is “a Galileo moment” for Evangelical Protestantism.

Hat tip to The Lead at Episcopal Cafe for bringing this article to our attention.