Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus

28 September 2008 – Proper 21A / Philippians 2: 1-13
The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland
imago Dei

This is either the last in a series of sermons on what it means to be imago Dei – created in the image of God – or, the beginning of a series on the Spiritual Life and the need to empty oneself to allow God to come in.

Beginning earlier in the summer, we have been exploring week by week what it means to be imago Dei – created in the image of God. Working backwards from last week to July, we have found that being imago Dei entails the following:

• God loves and God gives – we are created to love and give
• We are to be as generous with others as God is with us
• Extend an equal measure of forgiveness to others as God extends to us
• Forgiveness must be from the heart
• Allow Jesus to lead our Great Escape from slavery to sin
• Even in our failure to be imago Dei, we are the special objects of Jesus’ attention and mercy
• We are to treat one another as we would treat Christ: Serve Christ in one another
• Remember: We are standing on Holy Ground/Take off, take off your shoes
• Each person who stands before us is imago Dei – Holy Ground
• Listen carefully with the ears of your heart
• Die to self – look outwards toward God and toward others
• Know that you are a Pearl of Great Value to God in Christ
• Allow God to thank you for what you have done for God today

In the great Hymn at the heart of the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians we find perhaps the most succinct and sublime summary of what it means to be imago Dei:
“Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” -Phil 2: 4-8

Perhaps a helpful image here is the difference in energy it takes to keep ones hand grasped in a tight fist for a long time, versus allowing it to be wide open.

This is perhaps the very heart of life’s greatest mystery; it gets at the very heart of being imago Dei. The mind of God, the mind of Christ, is self-emptying – let this mind be in us. The word for this self-emptying is kenosis. That is God willingly limits God’s power in order to become engaged in life on earth. God’s way as that of the open hand and open heart.

God is willing to limit God’s power to undergo the ultimate powerlessness so that the power and glory of God can enter the world. To effect this, Jesus gave up security, status, dominance and reputation – all attributes of living life with our hands grasping tightly to all we can get our hands on. Jesus exemplifies another way, that of being made in the image of God with an open hand and open heart.

This is at the heart of one of the most fundamental and yet misunderstood Christian truths: that in weakness is strength; in seeming folly, comes wisdom; in giving up self, self is found; in death is life. These basic life-enhancing paradoxes were later turned around to be life-denying, so that we have come to believe that the only life worth living comes after death – this is not what Jesus had in mind at all. His is a life where kenosis fills kenosis – we empty ourselves, die to ourselves, so that God can empty God’s-self into us.

Maggie Ross on her blog, www.ravenwilderness.blogspot.com, asks, “What is the life of which we are emptied? Isaac of Nineveh (seventh century) has a wonderfully exact description of 'the world' (more specifically, the 'passions'):

". . . these are: love of riches; the gathering of possessions, fattening up the body, giving rise to the tendency toward carnal desire; love of honour, which is the source of envy; the exercise of position of power; pride and the trappings of authority; outward elegance; glory among men, which is the cause of resentment; fear for the body."

Note that these passions not only induce the illusion of power and status, security and even immortality in the person who possesses (or is possessed by) them, but that they also provoke envy and resentment in others.”

[Our misunderstanding of Resurrection is also related to this kenotic vision of God. “Resurrection is not mere resuscitation, nor is the idea of the immortality of the soul, which enjoys new popularity these days, an early Christian doctrine. When we die, we die. All of us. Body, soul and spirit, if you like those distinctions. But God gives us a new life, a greater, a better. And we are prepared for this new life with the continual and simultaneous death and resurrection that takes place in our daily round…”Maggie Ross, The Fountain and the Furnace]

We rather casually discuss all of this as a theology of the cross – which theology surrounds us on all sides as we worship here beside the Stations of the Cross. Such theology of kenosis, or self-emptying, and theologies of suffering and the cross not only challenge conventional theology, but, as Walter Brueggemann observed almost a quarter century ago, “also [challenge] conventional cultural assumptions that justify our models of humanness and our practices of political and economic power. The subversive force of this theological assertion extends not only to the religious tradition, but to the derivative forms of social power justified by biblical faith. Western preoccupation with dominance and power is no doubt linked to and derived from our imperial “image of God.” Clearly when that discernment of God is challenged, the images which take public form are in deep jeopardy.” - Brueggemann in The Suffering of God, Terence Fretheim, (Fortress, Philadelphia:1984) p. xii

What is at stake in our being those people God creates and calls us to be is our understanding of God itself. If we are to be imago Dei, we need to come to a fundamental understanding of just how Christian writers like Paul understand God. Remembering that in the arena of New Testament writings Paul is the earliest witness writing the closest to the time of Christ – his letters are the first recorded writings about the nature of God in Christ. Imperial images of God come about much later in the post-Constantinian Church which allowed itself to become the legitimizing power for the Roman Empire and Empires and Nation States that followed.

This would be why this hymn at the center of the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the young community of Christians in Philippi, which hymn is thought to pre-date Paul’s own writings, is one of the, if not the most, important texts for understanding ourselves.

Again, the mind of God, the mind of Christ, is self-emptying. The word for this is kenosis. God willingly limits God’s power in order to become engaged in life on earth. God is willing to limit God’s power to undergo the ultimate powerlessness so that the power and glory of God can enter the world. To effect this, Jesus gave up security, status, dominance and reputation. Jesus exemplifies such a way of being: made in the image of God – open hand, open heart.

The most central understanding of all this is that kenosis fills kenosis. That is, we empty ourselves so that God can empty God’s own self into us, making us imago Dei – our emptiness is filled with the kenosis of God’s own life, the life of Christ.

This all sounds hopelessly technical until we look at our present economic crisis, which we are reminded hourly if not daily is a global crisis. And it is a crisis that, at least in part, derives from an imperial understanding of God rather than Paul’s kenotic vision of God. This is where the rubber of theology meets the road.

So that an inescapable dimension of the Christian Life and our being imago Dei hinges on having the courage to empty ourselves and allow God to come in. What we need to empty, of course, are the false understandings of God which accumulate like so much moss on a stationary stone, as well as a lifetime of hurt, anger, guilt, frustration, and all such notions that we must be strong, self-made and independent beings. We are to be God-made. Is it any wonder that when God in Christ looks at Jerusalem, that ancient citadel of political, economic and religious power, Jesus weeps?

(Jerusalem is of course a metaphor for the consolidation of the grasping hand. Today it might be Washington, D.C. – the epicenter of encouraged consumerism, greed, power and violence. It is the task of Spirituality to empty ourselves and distance ourselves from such consolidation so that God might fill us with God’s Love, Mercy, Forgiveness and Grace. This, by the way, is a non-partisan, bi-partisan, all-partisan critique since our entire political system and all of our power structures are enmeshed in this imperial, grasped-hand working out of the economic and ecological melt-down. )

Today we stare into the deepest mystery of what it means to be Christian and what it means to be created in the image of God. The tasks of self-emptying do not come easy. Thank God that Christ is with us, now and always to the end of the age to guide us in our search for an understanding of God and of ourselves that will grant us the perfect freedom and joy God desires for all God’s creatures and all of Creation. Amen.

God's Justice and Generosity

21 September 2008
Proper 20: Exodus 16: 2-15 / Matthew 20: 1-16
The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s Episcopal at Ellicott Mills, MD

Manna Season: Give us this day our Daily Bread
The scene in Matthew is becoming more and more familiar. People are waiting for work. Waiting to be hired. Waiting to earn a days wage. Which in those days was just enough to feed one’s family. The issue then is one of daily bread. Just like Manna in the Exodus narrative. Just as in the prayer Jesus gives us when we ask him how we should pray.

To be hired late in the day and get less than a day’s wages means belt-tightening for the entire family. Not to mention what it does to one’s sense of self-worth to be overlooked or passed-by when the hiring is being done. To not be chosen to work creates anxiety.

The lesson here is one of extraordinary generosity and fairness. Everyone got a day’s wage. Everyone could go home and feed his or her family. Just as it was with manna, everyone got enough, no one got too much, nothing was left over. “Give us this day our daily bread.”

We say this over and over again every time we say the Lord’s Prayer. Does it ever occur to us just what it is we are praying and saying? How many of us have experienced living one day to the next? People do come to our church every day hoping we have listened to Jesus tell this story – and that we believe it.

Jesus is somehow trying to engineer a return to the wilderness sojourn - a return to manna season - a return to utter and radical dependence on God and God’s daily provisions. God makes it clear to Moses that you cannot gather the stuff up and save it for a rainy day. It goes sour on you. It spoils. It becomes crawling with worms and moths. Take it one day at a time and all will be well.

So with Jesus, everyone is given a day’s provision, those who worked all day and those who worked just a few hours. Like any household with children, the cry of those hired early in the day is oh so familiar. “It isn’t fair!” they whine. “We were here first. We deserve more because we did more.” And we glibly reply to our children, “Life isn’t fair.”

Or is it? What Jesus seems to be getting at is that what is fair and what is just is established by God, not by our standards of merit, qualification and grounds for staking a claim. What is being discussed, as usual, is God’s kingdom - life lived under the reign of God - a God who is generous to a fault - a God whose generosity offends us and baffles us.

As Marguerite Shuster observes in The Lectionary Commentary (Eerdmans, NY:2001): “But grace is not grace if it is qualified by superior virtue in the recipient. Sinners are not sinners if some are less dependent on grace than others. Besides, if one has enough oneself, [as those in the story are all given], why would one even want more than someone else, unless out of some sense of pride and self-righteousness? That it seems odd to put the question that way – so normal, so natural, is our desire to want more – shows the depth of our sin. The more we insist on our tit-for-tat way of thinking, the more baffled and angry we will be at God’s whole way of dealing with us.” p.114

Again, consider what it feels like to be hired late in the day. The anxiety of going home empty handed looming more and more likely as each hour passes by. Is even laboring through the heat of the day any worse than having one’s hope of a meal for the family fade away as the sun begins to set in the western sky?

Even apart from the need for daily bread, work is an integral part of creation, and those denied the opportunity whether for disability, age or any other cause must feel a deeper sense of despair and a keen lack of purpose and meaning in life. Work can be stressful, monotonous and difficult, but to be out of work can be even worse.

I think of all the people who leave home each day, brief case or tool box in hand, pretending to go to work long after they have been laid off, downsized, outsized and resized. They cannot even face telling their families that they no longer have a job. We are tempted to say, “There but by the grace of God go I…”

The temptation is always to assume God serves our sense of what is fair, our sense of “justice.” The temptation is always to believe that somehow those who come to the vineyard first and early are more deserving to stake a higher claim on God’s generosity, love and God’s forgiveness. The temptation is to believe that we can really earn the right to more than bread that is given daily. An even worse temptation is to think that it is always too late to accept the Master’s invitation to work in God’s vineyard.

The surprising good news is that God’s grace is so great and so surprising, that it can provide enough no matter how late in the day it is. On the deathbed, in the jail cell, after repeated failures, because the recipient need not add anything to the grace, but simply receive it in order for it to do its life sustaining work. Even as the sun sets on this life, it is not too late to accept God’s Amazing Grace.

And it is never too soon for the rest of us to begin to consider that heaven’s “enough,” heaven’s daily bread, heaven’s daily wages, makes all earthly comparisons look meaningless and silly.

Jesus’ assurance that the last shall be first and the first shall be last is tied to Manna season, and settling for bread and wages that are given daily. We are called to be those people who pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and really make an effort to live that out. To live life in God’s kingdom is a journey to return to Manna Season. It is a journey that has been described in this way.

If 10 is Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei, and 1 is the poorest of the poor, Jesus seems to be announcing a great reversal of places in the kingdom. The New Testament calls this “turning the world upside down,” which is what people outside the church in the first centuries called Christians: those people who are turning the world upside down. Go figure!

So it has been suggested, that those who are really clever will live around number 5 on this scale of one-to-ten, because when it all turns upside down, they will feel the least amount of disruption in their lives!” Manna Season: everyone has enough, no one has too much, if you store it up it sours on you – the world lived at number 5!

Sounds easy! But on a global and even national scale most of us are living conservatively at number 9, except on April 15th when we attempt to argue ourselves down to an 8.5! Looked at from this perspective, the journey to number 5 looks like a long long journey! But, says Jesus, it is the journey to life lived in its fullest!

One suspects this journey begins with being as generous to others as God is with us. After all, there must be some reason that God has created us in God’s own image. And as John 3:16 states, “God so loved the world that God gave…” God loves and God gives. We are created in God’s image. We are created to love and to give. And to be as surprisingly generous with others as God is with us. Amen.

How Do You Want Your Forgiveness?

14 September 2008 - Proper 19A * Matthew 18: 21-35
The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

The Parable of The Forgiving God
This parable is called the Parable of the Wicked Servant. This title is not helpful to our knowing what this story is really all about. It is the story of an extravagantly generous and forgiving God. It is about our ability to accept God’s mercy, and accepting that God’s mercy always means being able to extend it to others. After all, we are imago Dei, made in the image of God.

If we examine the details of the story it becomes overwhelming. It was the custom to forgive someone three times in those days. Peter has correctly deduced that Jesus is looking for more than that from his disciples. So Peter suggests seven times as a generous improvement on custom.

Jesus blows that away with the formula seven times seventy! You may as well say infinity! More times than you can count would be an adequate translation. Or, you will forgive and forgive and forgive until you forget what you are forgiving.

Then the servant in the story is forgiven $10,000 talents. That figures out to be 150,000 years wages for the average worker in that day and age! Makes seventy times seven look pretty puny by comparison.

The offer of the servant to pay off the debt over time is of course ridiculous, suggesting the kind of unrealistic boldness that comes of human desperation. Most of us have been there before. Undoubtedly those listening to Jesus could relate.

To be forgiven all that debt with no conditions, no strings attached, is beyond belief.

Here we are all meant to pause. For the repentant among us, even the desperate and unrealistic among us, God wants to love us that much and to forgive us that much. It has been suggested by many more insightful than I that what is at stake here are not huge, gigantic, overwhelming sins on our part. It is all the little things that add up.

As a friend has observed upon taking a sweater out of storage, when we see one or two holes in the sweater we think, “This can be repaired.” But when we discover the moths have literally eaten dozen of holes out of the sweater, we consign it to the trash.

Lots of little holes make the garment appear worthless. Lots of little sins make repentance look ridiculous. Evidently God does not see it that way. Evidently God does not mean to consign us to the trash.

We say this forgiveness is without condition, but by the end of the story we learn there are in fact two conditions. For those of us who accept such an overflowing measure of God’s mercy, the condition is that we extend an equal measure of forgiveness to others. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” Jesus teaches us to pray.

There is a video that shows a woman alone in church saying the Lord’s Prayer. Each time she says a line, God speaks to her. When she gets to, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” she tries to sneak out. God stops her, and asks, “What about your brother?” “I knew you were going to say that,” she blurts out! “How can I forget what he has done to me?” “I don’t know,” asks God. “How do you want your forgiveness: with or without forgetting?” Long Pause. “How about you just begin to think about forgiving your brother, and I’ll do my best to forget all the times you have forgotten about me?” “You got me again,” she says, and the dialogue continues.

The second condition is that this forgiveness we extend to others must come from the heart. That is not out of duty or from some reasoned argument. If accepting such generous and extravagant forgiveness is difficult, extending it to others is even more so at times. Having it come from the heart is often beyond the pale. Yet, as Christians, this is our calling.

To put our metaphorical arms around all of this is challenging. Add to that the very challenging and complex times in which we live.

This week collectively we remembered 9/11. We are quick to want to pass judgement on those who have afflicted our nation with immeasurable hurt. Yet, we have been slow to even begin to examine all the tiny moth holes in our own garments of policy and life- style, not to mention our disregard for the global ecology. There is much for which we can all ask for forgiveness, as individuals, as a church, and as a nation. “Forgive us our sins,” teaches Jesus.

It is as difficult to grasp the measure of mercy God willingly extends to us. It is even more difficult to imagine just how we might extend the same measure of mercy to others.

Yet, our individual and collective health and security depends on gaining some understanding of this and acting on this. Holding onto all the hurt, anger, and judgment of ourselves and others just gets exhausting as time goes on. Letting go and letting God hold onto it and take care of it all in the end may be the only thing that makes any sense at all.

L. William Countryman in his little book, The Good News of Jesus, begins the book this way. “What God says to you in Jesus is this: you are forgiven. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is the message Jesus lived and spoke….There are other things God could conceivably have said to us. And we may as well face it, most of us know forms of Christianity that relay a message quite different from this one. They say things like, ‘Good News, if you are very very good, God will love you.’ Or, ‘Good News, if you ave very very sorry for not being very very good, God will love you. Or, (most insidious of all), ‘Good News, God loves you. Now get back in line before God’s mind changes!’ These messages may be good news for somebody….God might have said it more simply, ‘You are loved. I love you.’ This message is true, but it would have been ambiguous. It might have meant,’I love you because you’re good.’ It might have meant, ‘I love the nice bits of you, but I really wish you’d clean up your act.’ It might have meant, ‘I still love you and would like to go on loving you, but I won’t tolerate your behavior much longer.’ Instead God says something quite unambiguous: ‘You are forgiven.’ What this means is, ‘I love you anyway, no matter what. I love you not because you are particularly good nor because you are particularly repentant nor because I am trying to bribe you or threaten you into changing. I love you because I love you.’” p. 3-5

Turns out God does not wish to toss us into the trash bin of moth eaten sweaters after all!
The Parable of the Incredible Amazing Forgiving God! Let us bless the Lord!
Thanks be to God! Amen.

The Great Escape

7 September 2008 * Exodus 12:1-14/Psalm 149/Romans 13:8-14/Matthew 18:15-20

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

The Great Escape

All three of our lessons are about how we are to live and be the community of God’s people: Exodus details how we are to remember who we are and where we come from, Romans and Matthew get specific about how we are to treat one another.

Last Sunday Moses stood on Holy Ground before a bush that burned and was not consumed. A number of chapters and episodes later we now find him planning The Great Escape. The people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been led into a generation or more of slavery by a series of credit arrangements, mortgage foreclosures, and property confiscations orchestrated by brother Joseph – Joseph who had gone to work for the Empire and controlled the central bank.

It is the story of Passover – being protected by the blood of the lamb. Later, it would be John the Baptizer who would declare Jesus as the Lamb of God. John knew that our Great Escape, our deliverance, from our alliances with slavery, a slavery to sin in all its myriad varieties, would only come through the blood of the Lamb of God – Jesus.

So it is we say, often with a sort of perfunctory unconsciousness, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” In just what kinds of slavery do we find ourselves enmeshed?

Paul in his letter to the church at Rome, Matthew writing the Good News of Jesus to a later generation of early Christians, both boil it down to the essentials: put on Lord Jesus Christ – honor one another, love one another, as Christ loves us.

Some four hundred years later in his writing on the life of the Spirit, Saint Benedict would make the same distinction: Rather than first call us to prayer, or sacrifice, or devotions, Benedict calls us not only to see Christ in one another, but to treat the other as Christ. Love God, love the other, do no harm to anyone.

It sound simple enough, but life in community is never simple. The call to be in a church is a call to live in community. And although our Baptismal Vow is to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” it is much easier not to do so.

Paul and Jesus know it is far easier to fall into quarreling and jealousy. It is far easier to allow our anger, our certainties, our needs, our problems, our loneliness, our sadness, get between us and others in the community. And anything that gets between us and the love of God, a love God has for all persons, the Book of Common Prayer tells us is sin (BCP 302).

Paul and Jesus, like Moses before them, know how damaging and unhealthy this becomes for the community. Yet, as much as we might even know this, we become addicted or enslaved to behaviors that are as damaging to the life of the community as they are to us.

This would be why addictive disorders of all kinds are often referred to as family disorders or disease, because the disorder, the sin, damages everyone in its path. It is Paul elsewhere who writes with passion that despite his own best efforts, the sin he wishes not to commit he does. It becomes a kind of slavery.

There is the old Woody Allen joke: a man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doctor, doctor, what can we do? I have an uncle who thinks he’s a chicken!” “Very simple,” says the doctor, “it sounds like a simple neurosis. We should be able to clear that up in just a few sessions.” But the man says, “No, Doc, you can’t do that!” “Why not?” asks the doctor. “Because we depend on the eggs!”

Family systems adapt themselves to unhealthy behaviors and disorders because we come to depend on the eggs – in many cases this means that we don’t like the behaviors, but at least they are dependable.

So in Exodus, God assembles all of his powers and the spirit of his mighty wind and delivers the Hebrew children out of slavery and into freedom – The Great Escape. Where, of course, we will hear them in two weeks from now begging to return to Egypt and slavery because they had become so dependent on the eggs of slavery – three square meals, and patterns of living more predictable than waiting to listen to what God has in store for them next!

Today we gather to be with Jesus our Passover – believing that Jesus will find ways to deliver us from our addiction and slavery to all kinds of sinful behaviors. We find Matthew’s Jesus laying out a simple flow chart for unmasking, undoing and forgiving the sins to which we cling like so many dozens and dozens of eggs!

The beauty of this passage in Matthew, and the similar outline offered by Paul, is that it can be understood to apply to life in community, be it family or church; or, it could be understood as Jesus in a sense talking to himself since in the end, he is the one against whom all have sinned.

So imagine it is Jesus who comes to you himself, alone, to offer a way out, and later embodied by one or two members of the community, until Jesus surrounds us with loved ones who desire our repentance. This would be the church.

And although the procedural plain sense of verse 17 suggests excommunication for those who fail to repent, becoming to the community as a Gentile or Tax Collector, we are those people who remember. We remember that Jesus says elsewhere (a few weeks from now actually!) that Gentiles and Tax Collectors will enter the kingdom ahead of the righteous.

So if that is true, that in our refusal to repent we become in fact as Gentiles and Tax Collectors, we then become special objects of Jesus’ attention and mercy. Imagine for a moment how it feels to be the special object of Jesus’ attention and mercy.

And then imagine how this is the key to our learning how to stand on Holy ground and to honor our baptismal vow to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.” Are we capable of not just seeing Christ in one another, but treating one another as Christ – as if he is right here in our midst? Because we in fact believe he is here, now, in this place where two or three are gathered in His name. Christ our Passover is here ready to deliver us from all that holds us in bondage and set us free. He is the Great Escape for us all!

In the words of the Psalmist we sing, “Sing to the Lord a new song, sing his praise in the congregation of the faithful!” Amen.

Holy Ground

31 August 2008/Proper 17A * Exodus 3:1-15/Matthew16:21-28

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

Holy Ground

Peter’s story is compelling. Peter’s story is our story. Just last Sunday Peter correctly declared Jesus as “The Christ, the Son of God.” This week Peter is a stumbling block – literally in the Greek, a skandalon – a scandle.

It should be striking to us: the first assumption Peter, the keeper of the keys, makes about Jesus as God’s anointed one is wrong, satanic even. It is a cautionary tale for all of us and for the Church – the heart of the good news is the cross which always scandalizes us. Whenever we feel we fully understand Jesus, his relationship to God, his relationship to us, our relationship to the world , our next step, like Peter’s, is likely to be wrong.

Our rightful place is behind Jesus – not being in front trying to lead Jesus.

As Jesus made clear last Sunday, the only reason Peter answered correctly is because God had revealed Jesus’ identity to him. So also, for us to understand Jesus’ ministry, and in turn our own ministry and mission, it must be revealed to us by God through the Holy Spirit. We can never stumble upon it on our own.

We return to the denial of self, to turn outward toward God and others. It is a call to modesty and humility in our theology and moral deliberation. It takes a lifetime to grow into a full understanding of God’s mission, purpose and methodology. The road to understanding is strewn with missteps, stumblings and misunderstandings. God’s church does not have a mission. God’s mission has a church. We are that church, the body of Christ – incorporated into his body and his mission by the waters and Holy Spirit of Baptism.

As it is for Peter, so it is for us – what God demands is ongoing, complete reorientation. We are called to a life of daily Baptism. Christians, suggested Martin Luther, “are always one day old.” We are as much in need of being put behind Jesus today as on any other.

This is why we are taking one day together on Saturday, September 13 to hear what God is saying to God’s people. To take our place behind Jesus. To listen to what Mission God has for God’s church. Always remembering that any attempts on our part to cement our understandings, all attempts to root them in any kind of surety, will lead God to always confound us, turn us around, reorient us, and call us to begin again.

I believe one dimension of our misunderstanding and tendencies to stumble around are rooted in forgetting where we are. Like Jesus, and like Moses before him, we are standing on Holy Ground. All theological hubris, all attempts at surety in what God is calling us to be and to do, result from not taking seriously where we are.

We come into this place, or step outside back into the mission field, or into the woods, or even into The Mall at Columbia, and we forget that wherever we are, whatever time it is, we are standing on Holy Ground – for we are standing before God, or God’s image, God’s imago. In a moment we will promise to “seek and serve Christ in all persons.” It is a call to recognize where we are standing – on Holy Ground before a bush that burns and is not consumed.

It seems the earliest liturgical ritual around all this is taking off our shoes. Asian culture has retained this custom longer than we have! It means to adopt an attitude of humility. This is an attitude missing from much of American society and culture. We are so saturated with notions of Roman and English property law that we completely forget that this is God’s world, God’s creation, and that we are designated as God’s imago to be stewards of all this, not merely consumers.

Further, we forget that each and every person we know and see and meet is part and parcel of this imago of God, this image of God. In the language of the New Testament, each person is God’s Beloved. Yet rarely do we take off our shoes before each imago of God we meet. Rarely do we recognize the earth and all its resources as God’s precious gifts, but rather we treat the earth and everything therein as commodities. Worse still, we accept the commoditization of people – even ourselves. How else to explain our utter willingness to wear clothing with manufacturer’s logos, in effect becoming human billboards or walking advertisements? And we do so with a sense of pride mixed with a kind of smug hipness!

Some years ago, at least 60 or more, Woody Guthrie wrote this song – a modern-day psalm, really. Singing it may help to bring us back to an understanding of where we are, which may help us remember who we are and whose we are. With any luck we may, like Peter, get back to our rightful places behind Jesus and let him lead us the way to life in its fullest. Or, like Moses, against all odds, strive for justice and peace for all people, leading people out of bondage into freedom – helping the world to be a place where all people are recognized as God’s people.

May this song remind us that every day Christians are one-day old, standing on Holy Ground.

Holy Ground

Take off, take off your shoes
This place you’re standing, it’s holy ground
Take off, take off your shoes
The spot you’re standing, its holy ground

These words I heard in my burning bush
This place you’re standing, it’s holy ground
I heard my fiery voice speak to me
This spot you’re standing, it’s holy ground

That spot is holy holy ground
That place you stand it’s holy ground
This place you tread, it’s holy ground
God made this place his holy ground

Take off your shoes and pray
The ground you walk it’s holy ground

Every spot on earth I trapse around
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground

Every spot it’s holy ground
Every little inch it’s holy ground
Every grain of dirt it’s holy ground
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground

Words –Woody Guthrie, copyright Wood Guthrie Publications, Inc 2001

To hear the Klezmatics sing this song go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1PjT_QSyWQ

To learn more about Woody Guthrie and his music, go to:

http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Holy_Ground.htm

Drifting Too Far From The Shore

24 August 2008/Proper 16 – Romans 12:1-8/Matthew 16:13-20

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

God’s Mission Has a Church

It is not that God’s Church has a Mission, but that God’s Mission has a Church.

It is good to be back. Not that being on vacation was not wonderful, but it is good to be back in the fellowship of God’s People called St. Peter’s. And it is Peter’s day – the day he is renamed by Jesus. No longer Simon, but Peter. Which in the New Testament Greek makes for a kind of pun – for the word for “rock” is petra, while Peter is Petros. Petros is petra – the rock, the foundation upon which Jesus builds his church.

We say “builds” because we know His church is still under construction in so many ways. The church is always growing, changing, under construction, searching for new, more nimble, more creative, more flexible ways of being God’s people. Each time a new member is added to our rolls, each time a person is Baptized, we must be prepared to be called to new and different ways to “do all in our power to support one another in our life in Christ.”

A life which Saint Paul asserts is quite different than that of the world around us. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Paul does not envision a people focused on our lives in and of themselves. We are those people who trust that being in the right places at the right times – the places where God promises to be – God will transform. Our hope is not that our resolve will hold, but that God’s resolve will hold.

During an all too short week in New Hampshire, surrounded by family and friends, I found myself being visited by God in some unexpected places. In the Morgan Hill bookstore, a favorite haunt for the Kubiceks on vacation, I sat down in a wing chair, glanced at the books on the shelf next to me, to find The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages by Joan Chittester, O.S.B. – that would be Order of Saint Benedict.

Now Benedict lived a long time ago – just some 400 years or so after God in Christ walked this earth as Jesus. He tried to get away from the world – a world of Empire marked by power, wealth, violence, aggression. He tried to live in a cave, but others heard of his special gifts in finding a way to live with God so that he was coerced to join and lead a community of like-minded followers of Jesus. Benedict encouraged a disciplined approach to community life, work, study, and prayer. Some thought his methods too difficult and tried to poison his wine. Benedict was onto it, made the sign of the cross over the jug of wine, smashed it on the ground, forgave them for what they had done, and moved on to found a number of monasteries.

Benedict eventually put his ideas on how to know God all down on paper, The Rule of Saint Benedict. It begins with the words, “Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart….” I sat there in the book store reading Benedict’s Rule and Sister Joan’s reflections upon The Rule. In what was surely only a few moments out of an otherwise glorious day I felt I had time-traveled back to that cave on the cliffs overlooking Anio to listen to the voice of a fellow traveler whose wisdom draws one closer to a place where God can have at us and transform us.

The next morning I went bird watching. Some in my immediate family cannot understand why one would wake up before daylight and set off into the woods looking for birds. After all, Dad, we are on vacation! Sleep late! But off I go, my Peterson’s Field Guide in my back pocket, binoculars around my neck and a generous spray of insect repellent around my neck and ankles and hands.

About half way through the two hours in the field is when it came to me – bird “watching” is somewhat of a misnomer. Because watching and looking is not the primary skill necessary for seeing birds, but rather listening is what leads the eyes to see that solitary, magnolia warbler or indigo bunting. Bird watching is an apt metaphor for the spiritual life as Benedict imagines it – listen carefully with the ear of your heart and God stands ready to show you the way.

Down on the dock in Herricks’ Cove it would be another book that brought me a little further along the way – Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love. Richard O’Dell lent it to me, and it too has its origins in Italy. It is a look at how the architecture of a church, Saint Agnes’ Outside the Wall, expresses the very essence of what it means to join with Peter and say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

It is a book alive with examining every detail of what makes a church a church, a living expression of God’s will – what is good, what is acceptable, what is perfect. Visser explores how the center aisle invites one to understand the Christian faith as a journey – a pilgrim journey from the world outside in to the sanctuary of the living God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus. We move closer and closer to the Tabernacle where reside the Body and Blood of our Saviour Jesus, God incarnate.

And she writes of how it is a church is not just a pile of rocks by the side of the road, but a living reminder returning us to those times and places where we met God along the way – those mystical, privileged experiences of the Holy. She is careful to distinguish that a church is not so much meant to induce such moments of epiphany as to acknowledge the experiences its visitors have had. It is a collective memory of such spiritual insights and mystical moments.

And with the obvious sign of the cross, crucifix and Stations of the Cross we are reminded that in order to live we must die to self – choose the transcendent over and beyond the immediate present. The call to follow the Christ, the Son of the living God, is a call to look outward towards others and toward God. Only then can we know what it means to be fully alive. It is not that God’s Church has a mission, but God’s mission has a Church. And we are that Church, the Body of Christ.

The church in bricks and stone and wood and glass tells this story and invites all who would be Christians to continue this story, so at the end of the day we are sent away: “Ite missa est,” – Go, you are sent! From which we get the word mass: to turn our lives toward others and toward God. To complete the work we begin in here in actual fact we must return to the world beyond our doors. We are to live with other people and love them, just as we are to live with God and be loved by God. God’s mission has a Church. I find myself wondering, Are we willing to continue God’s story, be transformed by that story, and so become active participants in God’s transformation of the world in Christ Jesus? Or, have we drifted too far from the shore?

Listen to the Emmy Lou Harris version of the Charles E Moody song (1923):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLrI47_WyKQ

A Pearl of Great Value

27 July 2008/Proper 12A – Genesis 29: 15-28/Romans 8:26-39/Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Peter’s at Ellicott Mills, Maryland

A Pearl of Great Value!

An observation: anyone insisting that we turn to the Bible for any kind of definition as to what marriage is might want to revisit that thought after reading the story of Jacob’s wedding. We might also ask ourselves how it is that Jacob the Deceiver becomes the father and namesake of a great nation of God’s people, Israel? After all this is the younger son who stole the older son’s birthright through disguised deception. Despite the deception, God promises Jacob will become the father of numerous offspring, the same promise made to Abraham.

Act One: Jacob’s wedding: We may recall that last week God said to Jacob, “I will be with you always….” And we might note that in this narrative of Jacob’s wedding God seems to be absent. As we all ask sometime or another, “Where is God? Why does God seem to be absent?”

One answer would be that unlike his father Isaac, Jacob does not pray for God to help him find a wife. Instead he continues to rely on his own cunning. So one has to crack at least a smile when Jacob wakes up the morning after his marriage, and after seven years of working for his Uncle Laban to win the hand of Rachel, only to find out that, “When morning came, it was Leah!” As Uncle Laban observed upon meeting Jacob back in verse 14, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh.” It turns out that this means, “Jacob the Deceiver, huh? Boy, you have met your match!”

Now it helps to understand ancient Middle Eastern marriage customs just a little: the woman is veiled throughout the ceremony, at night, and wrapped in a cloak, at night, and taken home to the husband’s tent, at night. No doubt everyone has been drinking more than five cisterns of good wine! Jacob disguised himself as Esau; Laban disguises his daughter Leah as Rachel. Jacob complains. Laban replies, “You may have gotten away with putting yourself before the first born, but that’s not how we do things around here! But for another seven years, you can have Rachel too.” Lest we think this is all a tad old fashioned, rest assured that women are treated like this throughout many cultures to this day, and recent events have revealed that this kind of treatment is carried out right here in the U.S. of A.

So both Leah and Rachel move in, and we know that life is not easy or tranquil in Jacob’s tent. So where is God? Why doesn’t the Lord intercede? Well it turns out God has been there all along adjusting the plan. For in the sequel, in verse 30, God observes that Leah is unloved. So God opens her womb, and Rachel is at least temporarily barren. Leah has four children: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. The children of Levi eventually come to serve the Lord in the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem, and from Judah come King David, Solomon and Jesus. Leah testifies to the Lord’s leading even through human deception! Lowly, outcast and unloved Leah!

What the story seems to be saying is that the Lord’s plan for salvation refuses to be derailed by human failings as clumsy as Jacob’s and Laban’s. Even more amazing is the suggestion that the Lord fulfills his promises even using human deception!

As Sidney Greidanus observes, “Today we often wonder where God is when people deceive each other. Nations go to war and kill innocents; Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and all manner of people are persecuted and killed; children are abused. Is God absent? Is God not aware of what is going on? The wedding of Jacob tells us that God is not absent and is aware of what is going on. But God has also given us humans the freedom and responsibility to plan and act. Because we are sinful creatures, we often mess up, but even then we can be sure that somehow the Lord will use us to fulfill God’s purposes even with our failings.” [The Lectionary Commentary: The First Readings (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids:2001) p.60]

Act Two: In the words of Jesus, Jacob, the even more notorious Laban, and lowly, outcast and unloved Leah are Pearls of Great Value. It sounds odd, but consider this.

Years ago, long before becoming the Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, Tom Shaw SSJE, spoke to a group of clergy and addressed one of the Parables of the Kingdom, “The Pearl of Great Value.” Bishop Shaw began by saying that our God is a very frugal God and does not waste one iota, not one jot or tittle, of our life experience. Each moment we live and breathe on this fragile Earth, our island home, God values and savors who we are and what we are doing – especially the work we do for God’s kingdom – but even when we or circumstances are not so good.

Shaw went on to say that a hidden truth embedded in the Good News of Jesus, and hidden in these parables like yeast in dough, is that at the end of the day each one of us is the Pearl of Great Value. Through our Baptism, we are made God’s Beloved. To show how much our God loves us, he sends his only Son to walk among us, dwell among us, to show us the way of the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.

So much does God savor our life experience that the Lord did not let us get away with killing his Son, his only Son whom he loves, but returned him to us, so that wherever communities of Christians gather in his name, Jesus himself is in the midst of them, calling us back to the God from whence we come: We come from love, we return to love, and love is all around. We are God’s Beloved.

Bishop Shaw urged us to think of ourselves as Pearls of Great Value, hidden in this world, for which God was willing to pay a great price: the ultimate price. God sold all that God had to obtain us, to retain us, to bring us back home to him.

So precious are we in the eyes of our God, said Bishop Shaw, that we really need to take time each day in our prayers to allow God the time to thank us for what we have done for God today. Every day we are to sit in silence in our prayer time and allow ourselves to feel God thanking us for all that we do for God in this world.

Are we really capable of believing and knowing that God loves us that much? Can we feel like Pearls of Great Value? It is central to the life of faith to accept and receive God’s love – to know how much our God values us and everything that we do.

We do not need to do big and heroic things. And like Jacob, we can mess up big time. The truth is, as God’s own pearls of great value, most every little thing we do brings a smile to God’s face. And God forgives us the rest. The more we let God thank us for what we can do for God, the more confident and empowered we become as God’s own people. And soon the people around us and the people we meet begin to feel like pearls of great value as well.

It all begins with faith: Faith that God is with us even when it doesn’t look like it, and Faith that God will use all of our experience for a greater good. All we really need is faith as small as a mustard seed to make the whole creation new; to give new life to our own tired bodies; to put a smile on the face of a stranger; to plant seeds of God’s love throughout the neighborhood in which God has made his home. We are all Pearls of Great Value!

Says Paul: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Let me thank you for every thing you do

Be still and know that I am God

I am with you all the time

I am with you all the time

Let me thank you for every thing you do

I am with you all the time

I am with you everywhere

I am with you everywhere

Let me thank you for every thing you do

I am with you everywhere

When it seems like I’m not there

When it seems like I’m not there

Let me thank you for every thing you do

When it seems like I’m not there

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Let me thank you for every thing you do

Be still and know that I am God

Copyright Sounds Divine