Sermon for the 15th Sunday after Pentecost (International Day of Peace)

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on Sunday, September 21, 2014

Scripture text: Jonah 3:10-4:11

It’s no secret to anyone that we live in troubling times. Despite massive gains in the stock market, many if not most Americans are experiencing less economic security than at any time in the past several generations. An Ebola epidemic threatens West Africa, and even here in this country the idiocy of the anti-vax movement has allowed long-dead diseases like measles and whooping cough to surge anew. Our politicians cannot agree on event the most elementary parts of governance. Climate change threatens the very existence of our civilization. It’s all rather frightening.

But perhaps, most troubling of all in these times is just how quick we humans are to see violence as a response to the troubles we face. ISIS brutally murders pretty much any Westerner they can get their hands on, while we gear up for yet more military action in a portion of the world many Americans are tired of hearing about on the nightly news. A study this week revealed that on average the LAPD has killed one civilian each week for the past 14 years, nearly all of which are black males (And we wonder why Ferguson, MO exploded into protest a few weeks ago.) Anita Sarkeesian and other feminists, as I’ve mentioned before, find themselves under constant threat of rape and murder by people who disagree with their critique of our society. One congressional candidate suggested this week we should go to war with Mexico over the immigrant problem. Constant violence, either actual or threatened, and so much of it fueled by hate and fear of those who are different from us.

These are disturbing trends. It sometimes feels like the very fabric of our society is on the verge of unraveling and maybe it is. I am often reminded when I discuss these sorts of issues of a quote I read in a book some years ago. Robert Howard was the pulp author in the 1930s who created the character of Conan the Barbarian and in one of those Conan stories, he had this to say about the nature of humankind: “Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph.” If the news we see each day is any indication, we may be dangerously close to his fiction becoming our fact.

Fear, hate, violence, these are emotions of the barbarian. And, let’s be honest, those barbaric emotions are within each one of us. I’ll admit I’ve had my moments when I responded in fear to someone different than me. Moments when my rage at my wounded pride has nearly exploded into violence. Moments when I have hated those who have wronged me. We all have them. We all struggle against them. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the problem is that we’re not struggling against them like we should. Perhaps, for too many of us in our world today, we’re giving them free reign.

Of course, we feel justified in these feelings. We’re the wounded party. We’re the good guys and they’re the villains. But life is never that simple. People do not choose evil for its own sake; they choose it because they confuse it for good. And are we not making that very mistake here?

We would not be the first to let hate, anger, or fear to blind us to the truth about our world and about the people around us. These are lessons that are central to one Old Testament book in particular, the book of Jonah.

Jonah is a parable about hate. Many of us who are familiar with the story don’t realize that. We think it’s a miracle story about a man who got swallowed up by a large sea creature and miraculously survived.

Or we think it a moral lesson: better do what God says or something will eat you. But the book really isn’t about either of those things. It’s about Jonah and the foolishness of his hate and, by extension, the foolishness of all our hate.

Jonah is told to go prophesy to the city of Nineveh, which at that point in history was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the sworn enemy of Israel. They were the villains, the black hats, the enemy.

Jonah wants nothing to do with this calling. He’s afraid, but he’s not afraid of what you might think. He’s not thinking that they’re going to kill him or something like that. No, he’s afraid that God is going to forgive them. That’s the worst thing that could happen. This cannot be. Far better to let them be ignorant of God’s will. Far better to force God’s hand to smite those monsters. Let them burn! They deserve it. Kill them all.

So he flees to the far side of the world. Of course, he doesn’t make it. He has that unfortunate run-in with some manner of sea creature and gets turned back around. Realizing God isn’t going to give him a choice in this, he goes and he delivers his prophecy. And then, he sees his worst-case scenario unfold before. The Ninevites repent and God forgives.

Our first lesson today is Jonah’s response to God’s mercy and it can be summed up quite simple as a “temper tantrum.” He’s ticked off that God relented from punishing these vile people. He’s infuriated that nobody’s going to die, that there will be no fire and brimstone today. God comes to him and says quite simply “Don’t you get it? Open your eyes and see what I see. There are 120,000 people in this city. My people. People that I have created. People that I have fashioned in my image. People that I love. Why can’t you see that?”

Why can’t we indeed?

We live in a sinful world. But often times the sin that drives things closer to the brink is not the sin of others, not the sin of our enemies real or perceived. It’s our own. Jonah would have done anything to see Nineveh destroyed and what he doesn’t realize is that singular obsession makes him a far worse monster than any Ninevite. When our impulse in any encounter with those who are different from us is violence or hate, we don’t just stoop down to the level of our enemies, we make ourselves worse that they could ever hope to be.

Today is the International Day of Peace and later this morning we will gather outside to pray for that peace. But there’s a better prayer than the one we’ll speak together outside. It’s the prayer of surrender, the prayer where we let go of our hate, anger, and fear at others. It’s the prayer where we ask God to open our eyes to see the people of the world the way he does. Not as good guys and bad guys. Not as heroes and villains. But each one of us imago dei, fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God himself. To look upon others as Christ looked from the cross, not with hate, but seeing each one, even those that killed him, as worth dying for. If we do that, and if we show the world how to do that, we will have peace. Amen.

Mission Trip Presentation

Delivered at Canadochly Lutheran Church on September 14, 2014

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I was asked to put together a presentation on our mission trip in July. Over the weekend of July 27, four members of St. John’s and two from Canadochly set off to the mountains of West Virginia, my home state, for a mission and cultural immersion experience. I had two goals in organizing that trip.
To tell a bit of the story of the mountains, their history, their culture.
To offer an opportunity to serve others in a context different from one that we might have here.

In many ways, those goals are informing the way I want to do this presentation today. So I want to begin with a question. What image pops into your mind when you think of Appalachia? Of West Virginia? What do the people who live there look like?
 

That’s the stereotype. The one we’ve all heard. The one we’ve all seen. The redneck. The hillbilly. Backwards, inbred, primitive, poor. But that is not reality. The people of my home state, my people, are a people of deep culture and passionate feelings. They take pleasure in family, faith, and beauty. They craft and build wonders.
 

This is Tamarack. One of the sites we visited during the trip. This is a marketplace for WV crafts and artistry.
 

We stopped there for lunch (It was delicious).

 Here’s a bit of WV culture already. Ramps are a wild onion that grow in the mountains and we West Virginians make everything out of them. So Ramp Salsa is available for sale at Tamarack. A literal taste of WV.

Here’s some more.

 Glasswork
 

Quilting.

Sculpture. This odd fellow was our neighbor while we ate lunch. I’m still not sure what it is exactly.

This is Charleston, the city that hosted us. This is a view of Capital Street with its shops and storefronts. Doesn’t look all that different than any other city anywhere else in the United States.

Our capitol building. Tallest of all capitols in the 50 states and taller than the national capital. That’s real gold filigree on the dome, by the way. We’re passionate about our artistry, as I said.

Our cultural museum. Sadly, we did not have the time during our visit to go inside.

 WV Artistry extends to the performing arts as well. This is a shot of Mountain Stage, a popular radio program of mountain folk music.

Of course, we have this passion for beauty because that’s what we see around us. Everywhere. This is Hawk’s Nest, one of our stops.

The New River Gorge with its famous bridge. Once the tallest standing bridge in the world, it spans almost 900 feet above the river below.
 

More of Hawks Nest

 Kanawha Falls. We passed this on the way home on Monday.
 

Some of our esteemed group at the New River Gorge.

 This was not one of the places we visited, but I slipped this in anyway (Call it personal privilege). This is Blackwater Falls. This is where I used to live when I served in WV for 11 years.

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Just astounding natural and cultural beauty. But there is a dark side to all this. That dark side is summed up nicely by a word we use a lot in the church: sin.

Our faith teaches that we humans, when left to our own devices, will act in ways harmful to ourselves and others. Sin has been a part of the WV story as well. And this is what it looks like.

Poverty. Destitution. Environmental destruction. Exploitation. This is the dark side of the Appalachian story. And much of it can be laid at the feet of one business in particular: Coal.

You cannot talk about WV without talking about coal. The coal that powers the very electricity we use throughout much of this country was mined in the mountains of Appalachia. In the early 20th century, a miner could get a $0.20 wage per ton of coal that he mined.

And this is how he did it. On his belly, in the depths of the earth.

The ceiling could collapse. Poisonous gases could be released. He could get caught in an explosion. And all he got was twenty cents per ton of coal. The coal company sold that same ton of coal for around $5.

Some of that profit went to build schools like this one we visited.

It went to build towns, churches even. But most of it went into the pockets of the robber barons of that era; Only twenty cents of that $5 went to the miner and his family.

Scratch that, because that family had to buy most everything at the company store. His gear to do his job. The food you fed your family. Books for your children to use at school. All bought here and all at wildly inflated prices. Of that $0.20, the company got back pretty much all of it.

And all of this used to be legal.

The sin of the mountains is the sin of greed. And it is an insatiable sin at that.

Things are different now. The mines are safer…mostly. The wages are much higher. We toured an unused mine as part of our trip and this is our guide.

Even today though, our guide was adamant that being miner is NOT a job anyone truly wants. The greed of the coal business has been tempered somewhat, but it has not gone away entirely.

Now they do this to the land. This is what they call mountaintop removal.
 

Once they get the coal out, it is not unheard of for them companies to leave things looking like this.

Whatever they can get away with, they will. Greed doesn’t care about beauty. It doesn’t care about people’s lives.

This is Buffalo Creek. The site of the nation’s worst mine-related disaster. In 1972, a reservoir filled with waste water from local coal mines burst and rushed down into the Buffalo Creek valley. Over 100 people lost their lives and hundreds more were driven from their homes.

The sign makes clear that someone dropped the ball on Buffalo Creek. Neglect of safety practices. Safety costs money and that’s something the mine owners are not willing to spend. As a result, every year, people die from “ignored safety practices” in the mines and in the supporting industries.

This is a Google Street View of Freedom Industries. Last January, these chemical tanks, which stored chemicals used in the coal industry, leaked 10,000 gallons of poison into the drinking water of the very city we visited. Half a million people in WV had to use bottled water to even bathe for several weeks. And yes, it was due to “ignored safety practices.” Note however the billboard. Nothing unusual about a political advertisement, but this one is decrying the President and the EPA for having too many regulations. Too many safety rules.

Life, it seems, is not without a certain sense of irony.

That’s the history. The background. The legacy in this day and age of this sin, this greed, is rampant systemic poverty. Not only did we look at the causes of misery in the mountains, we got to see some of it first hand.

Trinity’s Table is a food ministry run by our host congregation, Trinity Lutheran in Charleston. Each Sunday, they prepare a meal for whoever walks through the door. Most of those who do are the poor and homeless of the city of Charleston. And they are numerous.

The program was started by congregation with the support of this gentleman, former Pastor Ron Shlack (right).

Some years ago, Pastor Ron and two other pastors took a bicycle ride across the whole United States to raise awareness for hunger and poverty issues. When he returned to his congregation in WV, the members proposed Trinity’s Table as one small way they could address the concern of hunger in Charleston.

Under the current pastor, Randy Richardson (who is somewhat camera shy, it seems. I do not have a picture of him.), the work has expanded. Each week, this church, whose average attendance is around 100 persons, puts together over 700 meals for those who come.

The meal is free to all comers. And you can get multiple servings. The Sunday we were there, we made burritos. 740 meals of burritos.

These are shots of us preparing those meals. A certain portion are set aside for people to take home with them, so they have a decent meal at some other point during the week.

The food is donated by congregation members and local businesses. Panera Bread, for instance, provides bread each week. The work is all volunteer.

Desert is included, of course.

740 meals. That number still staggers my imagination, even though we were there and we did that. And for the two hours we served, the line was constant. Unfortunately, that means I don’t have any pictures of our guests, of the people who came to eat.

It was quite a mix. There was one fellow dressed to the nines; tried to charm Shannon with a flower. Another fellow that looked like he’d stepped out of one of my vampire stories: Goth with the trench coat and makeup to match. Families with kids. The whole gamut.

St. Frances was said to have instructed that we “preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words.” In many ways, that’s what we did. We stared evil in the face; we saw the legacy of greed that has pillaged its way through a beauty land and a beautiful people. But the Church was there, showing that evil does not have the last word. That there is Gospel in a hot meal and a cold drink even in the midst of poverty and suffering. We were a part of delivering that good news to hundreds of people, just as the congregation of Trinity does every week.

This is what the Church does. In West Virginia, here, and everywhere in the world. Bring light into darkness. Sometimes, it can all seem very abstract. Sin, redemption, salvation. It’s not. It’s real. And on the front lines, you see that.

Sermon for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on September 7,2014
Scripture text: Matthew 18:15-20

By all rights, I should not be up here. I should not be a Christian, let alone a pastor.

It is said that “the leading cause of atheism in America is Christianity.” I know what they mean by that. Many people who have fallen away from the faith have done so because they have been witness to the people of the Church behaving in the least Christian ways possible. I have been witness to that as well.

Between the years 1975 and 2000, my home congregation had 5 called pastors and 4 interim pastors, none of whom served longer than 4 years. Among them were two closeted homosexuals who cheated on their wives with other men, a harsh legalist for whom morality was absolute, unyielding, and cruel, an insurrectionist determined to withdraw the congregation from the larger church, and a sexual predator who had an enthusiastic fondness for the young ladies of the congregation. Flawed people, everyone of them.

And that’s just the clergy. Let me tell you about the lay people, the folks in the pews. Among them were families and individuals who believed their money, their name, or their position in the informal hierarchy of the congregation gave them privilege to bully and abuse the other members of the church. There were often constant battles between these individuals and the pastors, and quite frequently between these individuals and my own family. I have seen the mechanism of church discipline outlined in our Gospel lesson today used more often than any person in the Church ever should.

It’s very easy to become cynical and bitter when that’s your experience. Despite their flaws, I loved, respected, and admired many of those people about whom I just spoke, clergy and laity. It hurt to see them attacked. It was disappointing to see them fight back with the same ugliness as their opponents. It’s hard to blame someone for becoming discouraged by witnessing all that hostility and hypocrisy.

But despite the unpleasantness of all this, the truth is none of this should be any surprise to any of us. It’s been going on forever, since day one. But most of us don’t realize that.

One of my all time favorite songs is “Here’s Where the Story Ends” by The Sundays, a song whose chorus includes the words “It's that little souvenir of a terrible year which makes me wonder why. And it's the memories that we shared that make me turn red. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” There’s a lovely paradox in the words that describe both a “terrible year” and yet an affection for those times. It’s not an unusual impulse. We all have a tendency to look back upon the past with a nostalgic fondness and even longing, often forgetting that they were “terrible years.”

The history of the Church is no different, hence our blindness to just how divisive and often disagreeable things were in the first generations of Christianity. The Scriptures bear this out. Paul and Peter argue over the place of Gentiles in the Church. Paul and Barnabas have a falling out that causes their partnership to end.

I learned the origins of the insult “moron” from reading the Scriptures in Greek. Paul calls the congregation at Galatia moros which is often politely translated as “foolish” but really means “idiot.” Hardly the kindest way to describe a fellow Christian.

There were a lot of terrible years in the first decades of the church and little has changed since.

None of this was any surprise to Jesus himself. That’s why we have this Gospel text. He knew we were going to disagree. He knew our nature as humans, that disagreement can easily become hostility anytime you have human ego and pride involved. I spoke last week of the dangers of the words “You’re wrong” and it seems that reality is at play here as well. There needed to be a system, a mechanism, to handle this sort of thing if the Church was going to survive its own membership.

But even in the midst of this bit of law, grace abounds. When all other efforts fail, Jesus counsels that we treat those who have wronged us and remain unrepentant to be “as a Gentile and a tax collector.” What does he mean by that?

Well, let’s consider a bit of context here. This is a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. And what did Matthew do for a living? Oh, yeah. How did Jesus treat tax collectors? “Follow me.”

As for Gentiles, Matthew quotes Isaiah 42 in his own 12th chapter. “he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles...and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

Jesus’ counsel for discipline in the church is not a passage of rejection or of banishment. This is a call to start over, to go back to the beginning. Because if a believer is still unrepentant after going through all the steps of this process, it is then clear that something just has not taken hold. They don’t get it. They don’t understand what it means to be a Christian. They have not embraced the values and principles upon which the Christian community is built. Therefore, we start over. Treat them as a new convert and begin the process again.

But you never give up on them, no matter how hard it may be. And it is hard. It is hard to deal with people who are hurtful or hurting (often times, they are the same thing.) But it’s worth it and no one ever said that being a Christian was an easy thing.

It’s about going back to the basics. That’s how you deal with conflict. Gospel, good news, joy, freedom, and mercy. Go back to these fundamental things. To treat another as a Gentile or tax collector is to preach the Gospel to them, to tell them good news, in the hope that it will be heard and believed.

It is no less than what God does for all of us. After all, we are the Church and we are still human. Each of us has our flaws, our weaknesses, our vices, and our egos. Even within our little community, as tight knit as we are, there are quarrels. Nothing ugly, I am thankful to say, but we don’t always agree with one another. We are far from perfect. We sin.

And sometimes we sin a lot. And sometimes we’re not all that sorry we’ve sinned. But God continues to shower his blessings upon us, to grant us good news in the hopes that we will listen. That we will understand. That we will believe and turn our lives around. Each week, both here and elsewhere, we come to receive God’s graceful bounty: wine, bread, and word. He treats us as Gentiles and tax collectors, calling to each of us again and again “follow me.” Amen.

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on August 31, 2014
Scripture text: Matthew 16:21-28

“So, is President Obama the worst president ever or the greatest?”

This was question was posed as a joke by one of the people sitting with us at my cousin Phil’s wedding reception a few weeks ago. We all had a good laugh. You see, all of us at that table realized that we were exact same group of people who had sat together at my other cousin’s wedding a few months before, with one exception. The exception was an older man and his wife who started off the conversation that night with that very question about the President, only that time, it wasn’t a joke. He was dead serious and it led to a very awkward evening.

There’s a reason you don’t bring up politics and religion in mixed company. This is a long standing rule of social etiquette. Politics and religion are things about which we humans are passionate. We’re passionate about them, because these are things that are often regarded as the core of our identity. They’re deep down, an integral part of how we see ourselves, how we understand who we are as people. And that’s very dangerous territory to tread into. It’s a virtual minefield, because when we bring up those two things in conversation we are dangerously close to setting off one of those mines. And we do that by saying the two most offensive words in the whole English language. No profanity, no curse or cuss words, no insult of any kind is as offensive to us as this simple phrase in a political or religious conversation: “You’re wrong.”

Nothing, I am convinced, will make a person angrier than to hear those words, either spoken aloud or implied. Doubly so, if they’re true and the person is wrong. Nothing is as offensive. Nothing is as infuriating. Nothing is as enraging as being told we are wrong about the things that matter most to us.

Politics and religion are probably the two best examples of this dynamic at work, but it’s really anything that we regard as core and central to our identity. We gamers for example are a passionate lot. We love our hobby. We love our games. But that passion can turn just as ugly when it’s threatened.

Anita Sarkeesian is feminist blogger on the Internet who has done a series of video articles on sexism in video games. I’ve watched several of these and I have to admit she makes some really good points. But many of my fellow gamers have responded to her with vile behavior unbecoming of anyone in the civilized world. They have threatened to rape her. They have threatened to murder her. They have threatened to kill her parents, her siblings. They have posted her home address, her parent’s address, all because she dared to tell them that they were wrong about something. And they are. There is a problem with sexism in gaming and those internet trolls have just proven it.

So it’s not just religion, or politics, but anything that we regard as central to our core self, our very identity. And we are tempted to do most anything, even the most brutal violence, to silence any voice that tells us we’re wrong.

ISIS murders and pillages through Iraq and Syria because they cannot stand even the very existence of Muslims and other religious groups that do not ascribe to their narrow interpretation of their faith. Pat Robertson and Richard Dawkins, two sides of the same bigoted coin (one Christian, the other atheist), keep saying one inflammatory and offensive thing after another because they cannot stand the existence of anyone who does not ascribe to their narrow viewpoints.

They are threatened, all of them, down to their very core by others who say they’re wrong and those others just might be right about that.

And Peter can’t believe that Jesus is going to be murdered on a cross by those he’s offended. The same Jesus who has spent the last several years of his life walking around telling all sorts of powerful people, scribes, Pharisees, priests, and so forth, about how wrong they are when it comes to God, morality, people, and just about everything else. Practically every time Jesus opens his mouth in one of his debates with those groups, he is practically asking to be silenced permanently, asking to be killed. And at Calvary, they oblige him.

We Christians, of course, understand the cross theologically, recognizing it as part of God’s overall plan for the salvation of the world. But I think it sometimes helps to remember the practical and the pragmatic behind it as well. Jesus provoked people. He made them angry. He told them they were wrong, because they were. He did the most offensive thing possible in order that they would kill him and complete God’s plan. In many ways, he played us. He got us to do exactly what needed to be done and he did it in a way that revealed the true depravity of the human species.

Ain’t none of us look innocent at the foot of the cross. Not when we realize that deep down we have the same rage at those who threaten our identity as those who nailed Jesus up there. How often are we tempted to just knock the tar out of that Republican or Democrat or Muslim or atheist or fan-of-a-TV-show-we-don’t-like or whatever? Beat the crap out of them so they’ll just shut up! Or shout them down! Call them names and insults! Whatever it takes to get them to stop telling us we’re wrong, even if we’re not. Or worse, when we are and we’re too proud to admit it.

Pride. It’s what this is really all about, isn’t it? Roman Catholics name it the deadliest of the seven sins with good reason. From it stem all other sins. Pride is what drove Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the garden, seeking to supplant God. And it was pride that drove Jesus to the cross; our pride and our refusal to see that he was right about us. And it was pride that led Peter to rebuke Jesus when Jesus admitted there really was only one way this was going to end.

But Jesus doesn’t care about pride. It’s not on his radar, except as a tool for his own ends. No, what matters to him is truth and what he came to do. He came to save the world. He came to show that God is love and mercy and compassion. He did not silence his opponents with violence or with insults, but with truth they could not refute. Pride would have blinded him to his goals, would have kept him as far away from that cross as he could manage.

But love is what drove him and to the cross he went. For you, for me, and for all of us foolish wrong-headed humans. He let us kill him, because it’s really less about who’s right than it is about whose we are. And through the blood of the cross, God has claimed all of us as his own.. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about (and it’s always been about) love and sacrifice for others. That is who Jesus is and it is who he calls us to be. Amen.