Proper 7B
June 21, 2015
I had a whole sermon written. It talked about David and Goliath, about David’s faith, and Saul’s fear. All the build-up in that story. The 31 verses dedicated to how scared the people were, and how hard the fight was going to be. About the one verse, where David takes out Goliath with simply a small stone, and large faith. I was going to talk about Jesus calming the seas, and the disciples' fear, doubt and faith. About Jesus asleep at the back of the boat. But present the whole time.
And then Thursday morning, I awoke to stories of the attack at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where nine people were gunned down during their prayer service. In their house of worship. Because they were African American.
Most of the day Thursday, I had the deep honor to organize the prayer vigil that was held Thursday night downtown. Our vigil, thousands of miles away in a different place and context, could seem like a powerless statement. But rather, it was incredibly meaningful and right. What we did that night can be a model for what we do as a community moving forward, providing some direction when we otherwise don’t know what to do and don’t know how to start.
While we cannot know of the horrors and tragedy to the victims and their families, we too are grieved. It was a Christian church service, like this is. That makes it a little more personal. Being a Christian is dangerous. Being welcoming to all makes us vulnerable. And we are called to do it. This is perhaps what persecuted Christians have known throughout time and throughout the world today. It’s dangerous business, being welcoming and loving to all. We should take the opportunity to bolster each other up in the hard work of being loving, welcoming, vulnerable. Share your faith with other believers. Share tears and fears. And stand with them when the very act of being a Christian believer makes life hard.
We can also see the pain and trouble in our African American friends here. We are all beloved children of God, and it makes no sense that there is violence against some, solely because of the color of their skin. Eric Richardson, local director of the NAACP was troubled by the events in Charleston, of course. In addition to the tragedy itself, he had another thing to grieve. When he told his school-age kids of the tragedy, his son shrugged his shoulders, expressing an apathy and resigned acceptance that was heartbreaking for his dad. What have we become, that this targeted violence has become so normalized that it result in shrugged shoulders? Being a parent, it was heartbreaking for me too. We never want to see our kids experience or encounter the dark side of life.
The next day, I was talking to my daughter. She said she was afraid that someone was going to try to hurt her, because she’s African American. People might target her because of her skin. That’s tough to hear as a parent. What’s tougher is not being able to dismiss her fears, or explain it, or do much of anything. Except sit with her.
This is not about THEM. It’s about US. Our lives. Our friends. Our family.
So what can we do?
As a people of faith, we can cry to God, and pray. Like the disciples in the boat with sleeping Jesus, we can feel terror. We can feel abandoned. And God is with us. We need to call out, and ask God to calm our storm. To give us peace.
We can pray for the peace and grace shown by the family members of victims of the shooting. Several families went to the bond hearing for the shooter, and expressed words of forgiveness. You have hurt me deeply. And I forgive you. I have no room for hate. Grace and love like that are from God.
Finally, we can take a stand and take steps towards saying that this cannot, should not and will not happen in our community.
This is hard, because Oregon, Eugene and St. Thomas are predominately white, and there is a pervasive misbelief held by whites that makes progress hard.
We tend to believe two important falsehoods. First, there are only a few racist individuals in society, like the shooter, and they are bad, very bad. Second, we believe that racism is a conscious dislike. Since I’m neither really bad, nor consciously disliking, any conversations about racism cannot be me.
Rather, we need to talk about and think about racism as the set of beliefs and practices that are so insidious and invisible that we cannot see them. Things that over time result in a higher incarceration rate of African Americans, resulted in the prohibition that African Americans could not own property in Eugene until the mid 1960s. We in the dominate culture are part of the system that lets that happen. That result in shootings, and police racial bias. Unless I am constantly working to fix this, challenging every joke, policy, belief, I am racist. We all are.
The hard thing is that with the two fallacies – racists are uncommon and bad, and racism is a conscious dislike – the universal response from whites when discussing racism is something like “How dare you suggest I’m a racist, or that I’ve done anything racist”. I apologize if this is where you’ve landed this morning, and I want to reiterate that this isn’t about you personally. Racists aren’t infrequent, bad or intentional. And we need to begin to get over our sensitivity to the topic and our defensiveness. Because our African American brothers and sisters need us at the table. Need our voice. We need to begin a conversation about race in this community and in this church.
All of this talk about race and shootings might leave you wondering where the Good News is.
Jesus is in our boat. Jesus will calm our seas, and give us peace. We need to ask. We need to ask for ourselves, for our community, for the victims and their families, and for the shooter.
Churches around the country today were asked to pray the Prayer attributed to St. Francis. In concluding, I would ask you to join me in reading this prayer, on page 833 of the red Book of Common Prayer.
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
Easter 7B
Today we hear the story of the replacement of Judas as the twelfth apostle. This story takes place immediately after Jesus’ ascension, which we celebrated Thursday night.
By way of a brief diversion, a little bit about Ascension, for those who didn’t make it. It’s included in the Nicene Creed which we pray weekly. He ascended into heaven. It is one of the major feast days of the church year.
So the question is why? Why is it a major feast day, and why do we talk about it weekly?
It was explained to me this way. Through Jesus’ presence and involvement on Earth, the divine was brought us. We have the opportunity to see and experience the divine in this mortal world. In a rather simplistic analogy, but also one that worked for me, through Jesus, God rode the down escalator, to share divinity with us, here on earth.
Continuing with the analogy, Ascension is the up elevator. Ascension is when Christ takes our humanity back to God. Having fully experienced humanity’s best and worst, our love and tears, our sadness, our spite, and meanness, Christ returns to God with that first-hand human experience. Through Ascension, God who created the heavens and is eternal has experienced our finite earthly lives.
Today’s story of the replacement of the twelfth disciple occurs after Christ has ascended to the father.
Like the other first readings during Easter, today’s reading is from the book of Acts, rather than from the Old Testament. During the Easter season, we catch a glimpse of what the world was like for those first people who were xthat first church.
The eleven remaining disciples are waiting, unsure what to do, but waiting. Their first order of business is to replace the twelfth disciple. After prayer and consideration of the possibilities, there were two men left for the job, Joseph called Barsabbas, and Matthias.
As a decision maker, bureaucrat, and planner, I imagine how we would make this decision in modern times. We’d build spread sheets. We’d review resumes. We’d check references. We might check their Facebook page, build lists of pros and cons. Hire a head hunter. We might hold a convention and a complicated election process.
But that’s not what they did. To make this major decision, they prayed and then cast lots, an entirely random game of chance, similar to flipping a coin.
On its surface, this flies in the face of everything I professionally know about good planning and decision making. And yet, here it is. They cast lots.
This reminds me of a lesson I learned in grad school, about the value or accuracy or purpose of a decision making tool or process. I clearly remember the opening of one journal article about decision making. It talked about an ancient tribe that made decisions by consulting the shaman who would take chicken bones and put them in the sun. His decision was based on the way the chicken bones cracked. If they cracked this way, do this. They cracked another way, do that. We smart grad students thought this was absurd. Who could predict the future based on chicken bones?
But as the article continued, it became clear that the author was likening our tools and methods to the chicken bones. Our ways may have changed and gotten more complicated, but the certitude of the outcome had not. We, with our fancy spreadsheets, and analysis could not KNOW whether one path is ultimately going to be better than another. We might be able to reduce certain risks, or increase the chance of a better result, but it was ultimately a game of chance.
If the decision about the disciple vacancy were made today, we’d rely, or try to rely on our human ingenuity to make a good decision. But as much as we’d like to make decisions that are the best for the future, we cannot know which option is best. We cannot know for certain if this candidate or that candidate will serve us better. If voting for an initiative or not will be better for me individually or for us collectively. We contrive complicated decision making tools, and conduct predictive analysis, and in the end, we still don’t KNOW. What we do dknow is that our best thinking, predictions and convincing went into the outcome. We gave it our best effort.
But anyone who’s struggled with unexpected loss, or a bad turn of events knows, our best efforts do not protect us from a bad outcome. Bad things do happen, regardless of our best efforts. It’s not caused by or the result of our efforts. You can do everything right, and marriages fail, children are hurt, jobs collapse. It’s not you, or the decisions or plans you made.
While casting lots may seem like a reckless decision making tool, it accomplished something important for the apostles, and would for us too. Casting lots, or flipping a coin or eenie meenie strips away all pretense that we are in control, or that we can plan, analyze, or worry our way to a clearer, safer future. And in our hearts, we know we are not in control of much, least of all the future.
But here’s the thing, with God, we don’t need to be in control. God is already in our future, whichever future happens. And God is with us today, and can see a much bigger picture of our current and future than we can begin to imagine. For us to presume to predict or analyze or decide about that future is like the fish that doesn’t know it’s in water, because water is all it knows.
We only know what our human blinders and experience allow us to know. God is not constrained by time or space or place.
That’s the second thing I take from this reading. When we invoke God and invite him into our decisions and our future, God is there. And whatever happens, God will be there. Not my will but thy will be done. We need to have faith that thy will be done.
In the selection of Matthias, the apostles’ prayer wasn’t complicated or lengthy. “Lord you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen”. That’s a novel decision making process. Do a little work like the disciples did to narrow it down, pray and invite God in, and then decide. Decide with your spreadsheets, or resumes, or cast lots. It does not matter, and you cannot indemnify or protect yourself from the future, just by worrying about the choices you make today, so don’t.
Do we have the faith to trust that God will be with us regardless of the outcome, regardless of the decisions made by our kids, by our elections, by us? If so, we don’t need to worry quite so much, and we certainly don’t need to stress about how the decision is made, even if it’s a random game of chance.
While decision by chance may seem archaic, it is still used in some orthodox traditions. When I was in Seattle, my church shared its space with a Greek Orthodox mission. After being with us for 7 years, they moved to another site, and they needed to pick a name for their new church. They talked about many options, and in the end, they put the names on slips of paper, and pulled one out of a hat to decide. Their reasoning was that it was in God’s hands, not theirs, and God would make it right.
I’m not suggesting that Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox Church or Mathias were hand picked by God through the random chance of casting lots. I do believe God could do that. But by invoking God into decisions and into your future, God is present, working through you and your world, regardless of decision We can have that faith because God knows our hearts, knows our past and future, and because we have a great advocate in Jesus. The Gospel reading today is part of Jesus’ farewell discourse. The apostles overhear him praying to God. They hear Jesus, their great Lord and teacher, praying to God to protect them, as they are sent into the world. To protect us as we are sent out into the world.
We are not protected by being sheltered or removed from the world. On the contrary, we are squarely in this world. Not only in it, but sent even further out in it. Out into a world with danger, and risks, decisions and chance, and the Evil One. And God is with us today, tomorrow and next year. Out in the world.
As always happens, much has happened this week that relates to this morning’s readings.
This week, there was a second devastating earthquake in Nepal. When the ground can unexpectedly shake and kill thousands of people, and weeks later, the same thing happens again, why do we presume to try to make good predictive decisions about our future? Regardless of what happens, here or in Nepal, God is there. We cannot know our little future, or the world’s. We are not removed from the world, but expected to go out in it. Go boldly. God is already there, regardless of which path you take to get there, or how you decide which path to take, or the if the destination isn’t all you dreamed it would be.
This week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for his part in the bombing at the Boston Marathon. From a Gospel perspective, I am not sure what this death will accomplish. There were lots of people involved and affected in this tragedy. The brothers and their plans. The runner victims, who’d trained and worked hard to get to the point of running 26 miles. The spectator victims, who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. The judges and jury who deliberated and decided the life or death fate of the teenager suspect. It’s hard to sort through all of the people, their motives and if they deserve what they got. The runners and suspect, who trained perfectly and had their future planned. The spectators who arbitrarily stood in the wrong spot.
It’s made even harder because this story is wrapped in two very sensitive politically charged topics, terrorism and the death penalty. It’s easy to have strong opinions about this tragedy, with very different perspectives. It’s easy to believe we can see clearly enough to render an accurate picture of right and wrong. Honestly talk and listen to your brothers and sisters in Christ who see this differently, and you discover one of two things. Either you’re right, and they’re stupid, or maybe this isn’t as clear as you thought.
What we know from Jesus’ prayer is that God is present and protecting and loving in the midst of all of this. God is present with the victims and their families. God is protecting the judges and jury. God is loving Tsarnaev.
God is present, protecting, and loving us, as we make our way into the world. And this protection and presence should give us peace.
So, Go in Peace, to love and serve the Lord.
Amen.
