This is the Gate of Heaven!

Sermon for the 10^th Sunday after Pentecost, July 17, 2011

Texts: Genesis 28:10-19a;  Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30,36-43.

Norquay, Saskatchewan is a small farming town populated mostly by native peoples and immigrants from Sweden and the Ukraine. They all had their own places of worship.  About forty years ago I joined my father and my uncles on a drive through the Saskatchewan countryside. We stopped to see an Anglican church on the Key Indian Reserve.  It was white clapboard, and about the size of the smaller Carpenter Gothic churches in our diocese. Gold letters inscribed on the archway between the sanctuary and the rest of the nave read: “How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  My uncles pointed it out, and my dad reminded me that these were the words of Jacob, the starry night he spent outdoors with a stone for a pillow, when he awoke from his vision of angels ascending and descending the heavenly ladder.   We spent a few more minutes, and then we climbed back into the truck and drove back to the farm.

I have often thought about that tiny Anglican church when I’ve read the story of Jacob.  How is it that, sometime, somehow, it becomes clear that God is present?  That God is present, gloriously present, has been present all along, and we did not know it?

A lot of us are like Jacob.  We are going about our business, living life with its messy relationships, frustrating living conditions, challenges and triumphs, trying to reach our goals.  And it may not be the best life, but it’s the best we know how to do.  We’re not hostile to God.  But we don’t really spend a lot of our time in religious devotion. 

And then…so unexpectedly… we have an awakening.  God explodes into our lives, and we are in total awe of a world that looks so different, now that we see God’s presence in it, realizing God was there all along, but we weren’t aware.

It is a nearly universal human response to mark the place and time of that exceptional divine intervention in some way.  Jacob built an altar incorporating the stone that had been his pillow the night before, when heaven opened up to him and he saw God’s messengers moving back and forth between heaven and earth, between God’s realm and ours. 

It’s this impulse that is behind building churches, and behind identifying some places as sacred, or recognizing what the Celtic Christians called “Thin places,” places where the membrane separating heaven and earth has a small hole for us to peek through.

And of course the question becomes: once you’ve become aware of God’s awesome presence, how, as a person changed by an encounter with God, do you go on with your daily tasks?   God appeared—or let himself be glimpsed—for just a moment, and wants a relationship.  How do we keep it going from our end?  I’d like to suggest to you that whatever we do from our side in this God-initiated relationship may be called prayer.

There are lots of different ways to pray.  Some involve slack-jawed awe at the beauties of the world, right there in front of us.  Some involve seeking to set aside everything else that is going on in our hearts and minds so that we can simply be in God’s loving presence so that, as one of our prayers says, “we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in God’s eternal changelessness.”  This is a rich and nourishing way to pray.

But there is also the sort of prayer that people come to priests to talk about.  People come and they say:

§  “I don’t quite know what to say.” 

§  “I feel like I’m talking to the ceiling.” 

§  “I feel like a greedy three-year-old and God is Santa at the mall.” 

§  “How do I know if it does any good?”

§   “I’m just an ordinary person.  What business do I have bothering God?”

Many of us were taught to pray when we were very small.  If we were lucky, we learned to say “Thank you.”  Thank you for the food.  Thank you for Mommy and Daddy.  Thank you for the sun, the moon, our pets, our house...  We don’t have to give that one up!  We still say “Thank you!”

We also learned to ask God to bless the people we love:  “God bless our parents, our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles, our grandparents, the goldfish, the trees…”  You never know what you’ll hear a child pray for.  When we learn, as a child, to ask God to bless someone, it is a wonderful thing, because it is so open-ended.  You will find as an adult that it is still an appropriate way to pray. It is a way of holding that person in our hearts and knowing that they are beloved by God, even if, as our collect says, we don’t or can’t ask for specific things for them.

We may have learned as well to ask God for forgiveness.  “Forgive me  for punching my brother…for eating the last five pieces of pie…for forgetting to do my homework…for talking back to Dad…”  We don’t outgrow a need to pray for forgiveness and long for reconciliation.

And we may have learned to ask God for help. “Help Grandma to get better.”  “Help my lost dog to find her way home.” “Help me to do well on my test tomorrow.”  I seem to remember that it was George Will who said: “As long as there are math tests there will be prayer in the public schools.”  These prayers become more problematic as we get older and realize that Grandma does eventually die, that sometimes the dog gets run over, that God helps us most on our math tests when we’ve studied hard. We hedge our bets: “God, if it is your will…”  But maybe it’s more than hedging our bets.  It’s acknowledging our finitude and limitations, and it’s being conscious that God is good, just, and loving.

 And we may have learned to ask God for things.  One of my friends calls these the “Red fire engine” prayers.  “God, for Christmas I want a red fire engine that you can sit in and pedal.  Please! Please! Please! I’ve been good and I deserve it!”  Some people never grow out of this way of praying.  There’s even a line of thinking that says that it’s a sign that God loves you if you ask for and receive financial success and wealth, even expensive cars and houses. It’s hard to imagine Episcopalians falling for the Prosperity Gospel.  (Perhaps that’s because we are egotistical enough to conclude—dangerously-- that we’re successful on our own.)

But today’s Collect assumes that we will ask God for things, for specific help—and that such prayers are appropriate, even though, being finite, we may not always know what or how to ask. 

You may find that there are prayers that others have put into words that express what you are feeling.  If they help, use them.  If your own words or more direct, non-verbally mediated prayer come forth from your heart, that is also wonderful. Make time.  Do whatever it takes to remember every minute that “surely the presence of the LORD is in THIS place.”   There’s no place where this is not true.  Where we are right now, God is here.  Some of your prayer life will go on as a background to your daily activities.  Sometimes you will want to schedule time to be intentional in prayer.  You may find that the habit of praying Morning and Evening prayer with the help of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer keeps your prayer life strong.  You may want to read what other servants of Jesus have said about their prayer life.

Anne Lamott said in a recent interview on Beliefnet:[1]

My prayer life is pretty automatic and is mostly three important prayers: "Help me, help me, help me"; "Thank you, thank you God"; and "Wow"—which I say almost every time I step out of the house, and when everything’s worked out in a way that makes me smile or that surprises me, and whenever I think God is being a show-off.

To Anne Lamott’s list I might add “Why?”  “Why, God, why?”  We may cynically dismiss such praying as whining.  But if that’s what it is, it’s whining in good company.  The psalmist asks God “why?” –or the related question: “How long…?”—with surprising regularity. 

And that takes us to two of our readings today.  Both the parable in the Gospel of Matthew and in the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans that we heard read today are motivated by prayerful thinking about why things are the way they are, and longing with some impatience for God’s decisive intervention.

In the Gospel parable, Jesus is offering a way to understand that as we experience it now, weeds and wheat are growing up side-by-side, and that often you can’t tell them apart until they ripen.  An enemy has got into the fields and planted weeds all mixed in with the wheat.   A very important thing to remember about this parable is which roles are ours to play in the allegory.  We are the seed planted in the field. We are not the owner of the field, or even, in this parable, the workers who might be able to do some judicious weeding.  Our role is simply to grow, to do what seed does when it’s planted in a well-prepared field, in the presence of rain and sunshine.

Paul, also, is concerned about the unfinished nature of God’s business with the world.  Jesus, the Son of God, has come.  He has set us free to live as God’s children.  And yet we still see the painful results of sin and death.  Paul uses the very apt metaphor of being in labor.  The whole created order is in labor, longing for the new birth of the Kingdom of God.  Those of us who have been in labor can tell you a few things about it: You can lose perspective in the intensity of labor. A loving hand holding yours helps. You sometimes think that it will go on forever.  When you think it’s impossible, you get a little break. But it’s back to work in a minute or two. You can not ask to quit for today and finish in a week or so.  The only way out is through.  And how you get through is by hope, by remembering that every minute is getting you closer to the joy and glory of new birth. 

What an apt description of how God is at work in our lives! Paul helps us to pray even when pain and sorrow and suffering are an inescapable part of our life.   And so, we are like Jacob.  Or we are like Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote the marvelous poem that begins “The world is charged with the grandeur of God!” Pray like the proverbial Chicago voter, early and often!  Because God is here, now, and THIS place is awesome.  Awesome even when we still see some weeds in the field and can’t do much about them.  Awesome even when the way forward seems hard.  We’re just around the corner from greater glory than we can even imagine.  THIS place—Mulberry, Florida—is the gate of heaven!

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[1] http://www.beliefnet.com/story/192/story_19235.html

Giving the way God Gives

 

Sermon for the 19^th Sunday after Pentecost, September 21, 2008

Episcopal Church of the Holy Family, Jasper, Georgia 30143

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Rector

Texts:  Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16.

One of my colleagues talks about “wheelbarrow sermons.”  He says sometimes he has an agenda for a sermon.  So he takes his wheelbarrow and wheels the agenda up to each of the lectionary readings, in turn, to see if they can give him any help in carrying the load in his wheelbarrow.  He admits that this is not a good method, generally.

But it’s what I’m doing today.  I have loaded the parish pledge drive, which begins this weekend, into my wheelbarrow, and I am going to take a little tour of the Bible readings appointed for today.  How nice it would be to read in one of those readings that God will reward those who work hard and give generously, so that, as they are increasingly financially successful, they have more to give and share.  There are Christians who talk about a Gospel of prosperity.  Sometimes it sounds like a tithe to your local church is something like a franchise fee in a scheme to get rich.

But that’s not exactly what I get from today’s readings.   Let’s see what we do learn. What we learn is both more complicated than that, and radically simpler.

We wheel the wheelbarrow up to the reading from Exodus.  For the Israelites, so recently liberated from their slavery in Egypt, the fun was wearing off.  What they thought would be a brief journey back to the land of their fathers was turning out to be something quite different.  The food they’d brought with them was giving out.  They began to complain to Moses and Aaron.  How quickly they’d forgotten their sense of relief, their joy at being liberated.  Now they looked back at their time in Egypt and it didn’t seem so bad after all.  Like all of us, the Israelites had a very selective memory. They seem to have completely forgotten about the slave labor that had seemed so endless, so heavy, so disheartening.  They seem to have forgotten that Pharaoh had commanded that they kill their babies.  They’d had virtually no control over their lives. Now, a couple of months later, what they remembered was the bread they would eat at the end of the day, and the pots of stewed meat they could dip it into.

God heard the complaints, and arranged for the Israelites to be fed.  By night he sent a flock of quails sufficient to satisfy everybody’s taste for meat.  And in the morning he caused a flaky substance to appear as the dew evaporated.  It was so strange and weird that they asked: “What’s this??” in Hebrew, “ Ma nah?”  and so it got its name, manna. 

Listen to the instructions about this bread that God gave them:

         Moses said, “This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Gather as much as each of you needs, an omer to a person according to the number of persons, all providing for those in their own tents.’”  The Israelites did so, some gathering more, some less.  But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.  And Moses sid to them, “Let no one leave any of it over until morning.”  But they did not listen to Moses; some left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and became foul.  …And on the sixth day Moses said, ”tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD; bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.  So they put it aside until morning, as Moses commanded them; and it did not become foul, and there were no worms in it.  Moses said, “Eat it today, for today is a Sabbath to the LORD; today you will not find it in the field.”

What we see here is a sort of divine leveling of the playing field.  The weak and the strong collect exactly what they need.  Nobody can get ahead by selling extra food at a profit.  Nobody can hire somebody else to get their food for them. Everybody gets a rest on the seventh day. There is no rewarding of the ambitious.  There is no penalizing the weak, or even the lazy. This is not about efficiency. This is purely and simply sustenance of daily needs by God.

It is the opposite of the society they left behind in Egypt, where the Israelites labored for the benefit of Pharaoh, where they could never work hard enough, where meeting their productivity quotas resulted in the quotas becoming more stringent.  In this wilderness, the people have to be totally dependent on God for their every need.   And they have to depend on God one day at a time. 

Furthermore, even though they are only a day away from hunger, the Israelites still were commanded to rest on the seventh day.  It was not a day to get ahead, but a time to rejoice in God’s presence, to share time and food together, to do less in order to rejoice in simply being in the loving care of the Creator, to slow down and look around and be grateful.

From the very beginning, Christians have seen in the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites an analogy. Christians have seen the Church is the New Israel.  As we wander in a wilderness that is sometimes hostile, we are able to trust that God will provide what we need, and we know that those provisions come on an as-needed basis.  In fact, every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to provide for us, as God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness: bread for the day.  And we ask, not “Give ME this day MY daily bread.” We ask, “Give US this day OUR daily bread.”  This petition can seem silly in a context where many of us are on diets, not usually from eating too much bread, but from eating too much of much richer, more expensive, and less healthy fare.  But we are not praying for ourselves alone.  We are praying for ALL of God’s children, many of whom are very hungry.  And I don’t think we can pray that prayer without also repenting of greed and of hoarding resources that, like extra manna, turn wormy and stinky.

So what do I put in my Stewardship Wheelbarrow here? Perhaps the truth that, ultimately, God is the only source of sustenance.  Perhaps we can put into the wheelbarrow a conviction that even the Church of the Holy Family doesn’t need to worry about our future.  It’s in God’s hands.  

Now: if the lessons of the society of Israelites fed on manna is not problematic enough, let’s drive the wheelbarrow with our parish pledge drive in it down to the Gospel reading. The landowner is paying the customary wage to the folks he hires first thing in the morning. That denarius is about enough to meet the workers’ most basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing.    I’ve heard people say all kinds of things about this reading.

§  It’s silly!  (What kind of boss isn’t going to know how many people to hire at the beginning of the day? He should have hired enough people right from the start.)

§    It’s not fair! (It’s not fair to the people who worked all day to be paid just like the folks who hung out in the market place.)

§  It’s unrealistic!  (That vineyard owner is going to have a really tough time the next day when he heads out to hire employees.) 

Remember that whenever we listen to one of Jesus’ parables, we probably have to try on several roles and see how they fit us. These concerns make sense if you cast yourself in the role of the conscientious, hard-working employee who started work at 8 o’clock.  They make sense if you cast yourself in the role of the employer.  But what if you take the perspective of those workers who showed up at the marketplace at 7 am with all the others, who tried to look employable each time the hiring bosses came by, and who feel like they must have “Failure” written on their foreheads as they’re just about ready to head home and tell their children that there’s no money for food?  But at the last minute they DO get to work, and then the most amazing thing happens.  The boss pays them as if they’d been in the fields all day!

Of course we all know that the Landowner is God.  Of course we know that everything the laborers receive belongs to the Landowner.  Of course we know that everything belongs to God. And here is good news!  The Good News must be seen from the perspective of the worker hired at the very end of the day.  If we know that apart from God we have nothing, then we can see that God is generous!  God is the only source of what we need to live.  The Israelites in the wilderness also learned that they were utterly dependent on God to provide for their needs. 

God is generous!  If we seek to live by the values of the Kingdom of Heaven, might it not be fair to say that we, too, are called to be generous?  Might it not be fair to say that, if we give generously and sacrificially to the work of God through Holy Family, we should expect our parish budget to reflect those values?  Giving to God’s work through Holy Family should support God’s values.  Our buildings here are beautiful and inspiring.  Are we making them available to serve the needs of the lost and overlooked members of our community?  We see needs that we cannot meet directly.  Do we make sure that a healthy chunk of the monies that come in go out to alleviate suffering, to make people know they are created by a loving God who has a purpose that they are uniquely created to fulfill? 

Finally, we circle the wheelbarrow back to Paul’s letter to the Philippians.  We pick up where Paul is saying: “For to me, living is Christ.”  This is a perspective that sees our relationship with Jesus Christ as knit in with absolutely every breath we take, every step we take, every word we speak, all that we do. 

God has set us free; God provides all that we need; God is generous!  These are the truths that are in the wheelbarrow.  What does this imply for the number you should write on a pledge card?    I guess it depends on whether or not you believe that Holy Family is the place where you can derive strength and receive encouragement to live by the values of the Kingdom of heaven.  All that we have belongs to God anyhow.  And God will take care of us here at Holy Family as we seek to be conduits of his generosity and love to one another and to the world around us. 

Historically, ten percent has been a starting point, the place where the Bible’s stories, examples, and instruction have directed God’s people.  That may not be enough for us in this affluent country where we have been blessed with so much.  I know, in the bottom of my heart, that God will enable you to be generous as God himself is generous.  Please pray for me, for your Vestry, for the finance and steward ministry members, that we may be faithful stewards of what you entrust to God through Holy Family, so that we may be effective and loving agents of the Kingdom of Heaven.