1st sermon at St. John's

Year C - Pentecost, Proper 16
Readings: Isaiah 28:14-22; Hebrews 12:18-19,22-29; Luke 13:22-30; Psalm 46


This is a difficult passage - it's really harsh in some parts, especially in the way the owner talks to the people knocking on the door.
Once the door is shut, the owner of the house refuses to open it when people ask to come in. And not only that, he says he doesn't even know them: 'I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!"
But - Just a few chapters earlier in Luke, Jesus was saying 'Ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you."
Which is it?
If the people come and ask to be let in, the owner of the house should let them in - that's the compassionate thing to do. Just because they're a little late ... they shouldn't be thrown out - especially when you're talking about 'weeping and gnashing of teeth!'
This is what I want to focus on - what is going on between the people at the door and the owner of the house?
I found this story really hard to take. It didn't seem fair. I was stuck for what to say about it.
I read the passage again and again in different ways. I wrote it out and noticed certain words that stuck out or seemed important. I copied the passage on a small piece of paper and carried it around with me, reading it in different places. I tried imagining how I would stage this scene if I was a theater director. I read it again imagining different emotions and thoughts could be under the surface of each person's words - I tried a lot of things, but I was still stuck.
The last exercise I tried involved asking someone else to look at the passage and give their reaction. I took my piece of paper over to my friend Janeal's apartment and asked her to read it.
Her reaction to it suprised me. She saw it from a completely different perspective.
In the passage, the people come to the door and ask to be let in, and the owner refuses to let them in. In fact, he says he doesn't know where they come from and tells him to go away.
I drew a picture of this, trying to imagine it. In my picture, a stick person stood outside a house, with his hand up to the door, his eyebrows up, looking anxious. Inside, the stick-person owner sat in a chair, his back to the door, his eyebrows down, scowling, and his arms crossed.
When Janeal read it, she thought the people outside were whining, making up stories and excuses, and the owner of the house just wasn't falling for it.
Suddenly, the passage had a completely different feeling.
Instead of a sincere, earnest Prodigal Son type figure, the person outside the door becomes a bad salesman. 'You remember me! We go way back...'
And instead of a mean father holding a grudge, the owner of the house seems perfectly reasonable.
Did you ever get a phone call from a telemarketer who couldn't pronounce your name but pretended to know you anyway?
One of my friends recently got some strange calls from a lady wanting to apply for a job. 'Oh, I know your parents!'
Her parents both said, 'We've never heard of her.'
If the situation in the passage is like this, it suddenly makes a lot of sense for the owner of the house to refuse to open the door - and for him to say, 'I do not know where you come from; go away...!'
One thing about reading the Bible is that you're not likely to find THE ONLY WAY to read any passage. That's not to say that anyone can make it say anything they want; there are limits to interpretation, but within what's possible, there can be some variation.
For one thing, there's a lot of background meaning that we all assume - and assume differently - when we read scripture. Without even realizing it, we fill in all sorts of randome little details that become the background for how we read the passage, sometimes that can help and sometimes it can get in the way.
When I read the passage at first, I assumed a lot of things that weren't specifically stated. For example, I assumed the people who knocked on the door were telling the truth, that they really did know the owner and they were sincere and earnest.
But there's a problem.
The people say the owner knows them, and the owner says he doesn't know them, so who's telling the truth?
Since I first assumed the people were truthful, it had to be that the owner did know them; he was simply denying it.
That creates another problem - Why?
The story doesn't say anything about this - so I assumed there was no reason - he just must be arbitrarily vindictive.
All of a sudden, the story is terrible. Here are these innocent, pleading people asking to come in to their friend's house, and he cruelly throws them out, pretending to not even know them. Now, if we imagine that the owner of the house represents God - what an awful image! How scary! You think God knows you, but what if someday, you come to heaven and knock on the door and he tells you to go away and pretends like he's never even seen you before?
That didn't seem right at all.
But what about from the other perspective?
The people are cons, pretending to be friends of the owner, and he doesn't fall for it - he sends them away. When he says he doesn't know them, it's because he doesn't know them.
This doesn't say anything about how the owner of the house treats his family or his friends. Most likely, he would have a very different response if it was his family or his friends knocking on the door, because he knows them.
With this in mind, the passage started to fit in better with my experience of God and other descriptions we read in the Bible - Especially if you combine this with some of the other stories from Luke's gospel - the Prodigal Son, the repentant thief on the cross, and the passage including the Lord's Prayer, where we're invited to pray, 'Our Father...' - this passage goes on to say, 'ask and you will receive... knock and the door will be opened for you.'
I think, in interpreting what we read, it's important to bear in mind what we know about God - what our experience of God is.
This passage still fits in with the others. It makes a difference, though, how you frame the images.
For example, after hearing Janeal's response, I also imagined this story in light of a student/teacher interaction. I teach ESL writing at Lamar, and just this week, a student came in - on Thursday, the first day of the fall semester - to question her failing grade in the spring semester.
"I don't understand what a 'U' is."
"It means 'unsatisfactory' - you failed the class."
"No, I couldn't have failed the class, because I know I was passing."
I pulled up her grades for the semester and printed them out - "You had a passing grade for your quiz average, but you had only half credit for each of your essays, and you failed the exam."
"But I thought I was passing - you didn't tell me I was failing."
"I gave you your grades at mid-term, and I told you that you should re-write some of your essays."
"I know, but you didn't say that I was failing."
"I told you your essay grade was a 50."
Whether you are a teacher or a student or a parent or ever have been, you can probably imagine similar situations from your own experience - think of the he said/she said dilemma parents have in weighing a child's version of why he got in trouble with the teacher's version. You have to decide who's more credible - and who's more likely to exaggerate the story.
In this passage, who's more likely to be exaggerating - the owner of the house or the people outside?
When you compare this dynamic to today's passage, you can imagine the people at the door like students protesting, 'You didn't tell us we had to know that,' and the owner of the house like a teacher responding, 'You know everything this course requires - it's in the syllabus.'
It's not like we don't know what's required of us in this 'course' we're taking in life. As we read in the well-known passage from Micah, 'and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?' In the New Testament, it's summed up in Matthew, Mark and Luke as essentially 'Love God... and love your neighbor'
A main point in this passage is the response Jesus gives to the person who asks, 'Will only a few be saved?' He doesn't answer that question directly, because it's not about a number, it's about doing what's right - what we know is right already. "Strive to enter through the narrow gate." Try your hardest; do your best, but don't worry about who's first or last; it's not a competition. It's not about who gets the highest grade - it's about learning what the teacher is is trying to teach us.
And good teachers want their students to learn; they'll do everything they can to help their students succeed. Good teachers are not out to make their students fail - but they're not going to be duped or bullied either.
So,
- come to class
- do the readings
- do your homework
- ask the teacher for help when you need it
Strive to enter through the narrow door - then don't worry about whether you come in first or last. Just make sure you know the owner of the house - and the owner of the house knows you.

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Given to St. John's, Silsbee
Aug. 26, 2007

Not peace but division

Year C - Pentecost, Proper 15
Readings : Jeremiah 23:23-29 Hebrews 12:1-7(8-10)11-14 Luke 12:49-56 Psalm 82


"Do you think that I have come to bring peace?
No, I tell you, but rather division!"


These are Jesus’ words… but they don’t sound like they should be.
They don’t sound right. How can this be the Gospel?
How can this be good news?

"From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three;
they will be divided:
father against son and son against father
mother against daughter and daughter against mother
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

"Do you think that I have come to bring peace?
No, I tell you, but rather division!"

Division doesn’t sound like good news – it doesn’t sound like something Jesus should be involved in.
But it does sound like our experience.
It sounds like my family's experience anyway.
We have conflicts and estrangements and divisions. That's not all we have, but we do have some of that.
Not peace, but division - Does it sound like your family?
It sounds like St. Marks these past couple of years.
It sounds like the Episcopal Church, too.
It sounds like the whole Anglican Communion.
It sounds like every denomination in the holy catholic church in every place and time throughout all our histories.
Not peace, but division -
How is this good news?

It’s good news because there’s more to experiences of conflict than just division.
Division is not where a happy, healthy, peaceful story tragically ends; more often, it's where a real story of honesty, brokenness and healing begins.
What might it mean for Jesus to say, ‘I come to bring division?’I don’t know exactly. I think it’s a strange and confusing thing for him to say.
But I did think of a story in my experience where it seemed to work like this – someone bringing division in order to lead to wholeness.I remember participating in a team-building exercise with a mission group just before heading to North Africa for a month - right after I finished college and before I moved here. Our group included four different nationalities, so a facilitator led us in a get-to-know-you discussion. She began by asking what we knew of each other’s cultures, and she wrote down what we said:'Canadians are quiet and avoid conflict,'
'It's hot in west Africa,' 'Caribbean Islanders like music,'
'Americans mainly want money and power.'
At first, it seemed like kind of a shallow exercise, but tension started up as stereotypes and misconceptions emerged. Strangely, our facilitator didn't try to reverse this - instead, she asked more questions and stood listening as we started arguing with each other, becoming defensive and angry.
‘If you think Canadians are quiet, maybe it's because Americans talk so much they never listen!’
‘What are you getting mad at us for? People in other countries are always dumping on Americans, and we have to apologize for everything anyone wants to blame someone for – it’s like we have to apologize for existing, and even that doesn't satisfy you!’
The tension got thicker, and the words got faster and louder,

and then it got very quiet.

I was staring at my feet. The room felt like it might either melt or explode.

Then, over to my left, I heard Adam Farenholz speak up. "What are you doing to us?! We were getting along fine until you came in and started turning us against each other!"


We had assumed the discussion would be simple and peaceful, not divisive. It was a horrible suprise to be suddenly stuck in all that anger and not know the way back. There didn't seem to be a way back - so somehow, we kept going ahead – we kept talking - and after many tears and apologies and an awkward but beautiful ceremony of washing each other’s feet, we were a whole group again – but much more so.
We had moved – very painfully - from assuming we knew each other to actually knowing each other. We went off on that trip with our eyes more open to our own and each other’s weaknesses, and we held each other up better.
An important point here –
The lady who started the discussion and drew it out didn’t create the divisions that emerged between us.
They were already there. They had just been invisible before, like tiny, hairline fractures in a piece of stone or steel - where the right amount of force can break it apart or cause collapse.
Maybe when Jesus said he came to bring division, he was not creating division, but simply laying bare divisions that already existed, which had been hidden or unknown, so they could be addressed.
In the reading from Jeremiah, the Lord asks 'Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? ... Is not my word like fire... and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?'
Possibly that’s something of what happened when ‘the hurricane and the storm’ cracked our foundation here at St. Mark’s, or when some of General Convention’s decisions pushed rival factions to separate. Maybe it’s part of what we’re looking at in September, when the Archbishop comes to New Orleans to figure out how to relate to the Episcopal Church.
Now, please don’t misunderstand – I’m not saying it’s a good idea to intentionally break things apart with the idea that this will push the healing process along faster.
As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, "Should we sin more that grace may abound? May it never be!"
But I am saying that where we’re cracked and broken now, if the fractures were already there, it wasn’t primarily the added pressure that broke us.
We were already broken; we just couldn’t see it.
In the Gospel reading today, Jesus' description of division references a passage in Micah.
The prophet outlines God’s charge and indictment against the people for acting unjustly, and he describes what life was like at that time.

"Put no trust in a friend, have no confidence in a loved one; guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your embrace; for the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; your enemies are members of your own household."

"Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise;
When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.
I must bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him,
until he takes my side and executes judgment for me."

Micah then prays to God, and here’s where we find the Gospel – here is the good news about division and judgment – it’s that mercy and forgiveness can come afterwards.

"Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession?
He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency.
He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot.You will cast all our sins

Into the depths of the sea."
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Given to St. Mark's, Beaumont
Aug. 19, 2007 But he goes on – and we begin to hear some hope."Do you think that I have come to bring peace? No, I tell you, but rather division!"