7 Pentecost Proper 12 Yr C July 28 2019

Audio  7 Pentecost Proper 12 Yr C July 28 2019

Genesis 18:20-32, Psalm 138, Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19), Luke 11:1-13

Jesus was praying, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray. Luke presents us with these three responses. First, Jesus gave the disciples words to pray with. Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial."

Then, Luke shows the disciples what that prayer looks like. Luke has Jesus tell a story about a relationship. There is a person who needs some food for a visitor, even though the visitor arrives in the middle of the night. That person goes to the door of his friend, maybe it’s his neighbor, and knocks on the door in the middle of the night and asks for some bread. The friend sounds mightily irritated to be awoken in the middle of the night, but the story suggests that he did in fact, after a little convincing and cajoling, give him some bread.

And thirdly, what we hear from Luke this morning is about boldness. Ask, knock, receive. Be bold in prayer.

So prayer is about relationship, and prayer is about sharing bread, and prayer is about being bold. Sometimes those who practice a life of prayer are accused of doing nothing. But prayer is not doing nothing, indeed, prayer is doing what needs to be done.

What we have before us is not just the so familiar words we pray as the Lord’s Prayer, but we are given those words in the context of relationship and bread and boldness. Ask, search, knock. Jesus' instruction invites trust and boldness, ask, search, knock, confident that you will receive what you ask. There is no one among us listening who would give a snake or a scorpion to a beseeching child, so how then, Jesus implies, can we not trust that God as divine parent will give us all that we need, including and especially the Holy Spirit?

Jesus seems most interested, at this point, in an invitation to a relationship rather than an explanation about the technique of prayer. Prayer is not a list, but prayer is a relationship. In this passage Jesus invites us into relationship with God through prayer, offering us the opportunity to approach the God whose name is too holy to speak and whose countenance too terrible to behold with the familiarity, boldness, and trust of a young child running to her parent for both provision and protection.

I do think that we tend to get caught up in all sorts of questions about prayer. How do we pray? What do we pray for? And the big ones, does God answer prayer and does prayer change God? Just as Jesus gave the disciples words to pray with, we Episcopalians have all sorts of beautiful prayers that have been handed to us through generations of the faithful in our Book of Common Prayer, and we have wonderful new prayers that broaden our imaginations. However, we are a little bit challenged by extemporaneous prayer. We tend to be formed as people of well thought out and constructed prayer. We tend to rely on the beautiful words of those who came before us. When we are wordless, when the feeling we have is so awesome, so fearful, so sad, so joyful that we are left wordless, speechless, these prayers of our people can lift us up and carry us along.

And there are times, like Anne Lamott writes in a book called Traveling Mercies, that our two best prayers are, "help me, help me, help me" and "thank you, thank you, thank you." Like Anne Lamott suggests, spontaneous prayer comes without thinking. We pray like that all the time.

Prayer is the work we do in building our end of the relationship God has with us. And that relationship is both personal and corporate. Each of us engages a relationship with God in a very personal way, and each of us need to discover a personal prayer life that is intentional, spirit filled and nurturing. There are myriad ways to grow our personal prayer; one size does not fit all. Personal prayer even changes over time, depending on where and when life takes us.

It’s only in the years after my children left home that I have been able to sit in quiet prayer. With young children, trying to find quiet time was near impossible, and if I tried to be quiet to begin my day, before anyone else was awake, I just fell asleep again. My prayer in those day was on the run, in the car, talking with my children. But now I have learned how through practice to spend time now in quiet prayer, without fidgeting and without falling asleep, most of the time. What kind of prayer serves your relationship with God?

We also engage our relationship with God in a corporate way. We gather together in prayer, in fact that is who we are as Episcopalians, people who share common prayer. We sing together, we have silence together, we say our prayers together, we read and hear scripture together, we eat together, and together we are sent out into the world to continue the work God has given us to do.

Bottom line though, is that prayer is a relationship, and a relationship must be worked at, it can’t be taken for granted or set aside, or it will fail. This relationship with God has at its foundation good faith and reciprocal love. It is a relationship that is transformative. "I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me," writes C.S. Lewis. Prayer is really much more about us than about God. Prayer is about our overflowing need to know our creator, and to be known by our creator.

And there is boldness in prayer. Do we ask for what we want? It seems like God should already know that. But Jesus tells us, Ask, search, knock. But I think being bold and courageous in our prayer makes us clearer about what we are asking. It is really telling the truth with God. I think being bold and courageous in prayer makes us discern what it is we really need. As we are bold in prayer, who we need to be, what we need to do, whom we need to serve, begins to dawn on us like a beautiful mountain sunrise. A sunrise that illuminates everything else.

And I know that God always responds to prayer. Often that response is, no Kathy, not now, not ever. Sometimes that response is a surprise to me. I, in my infinite wisdom, would not do it the same way God does it. C.S. Lewis has also written, “There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."”

Does prayer really work? I turn to Barbara Brown Taylor, a wonderful preacher and writer for that. In her collection Home by another way, she writes about prayer, "It keeps our hearts chasing after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers us back. There’s nothing that works any better than that.”

Be bold, be courageous in your prayer and your relationship with God. And then do, do the thing, love, forgive, heal, feed, do the thing your prayer asks. Because you are the change you ask for.

Amen.

6 Pentecost Yr C Proper 11 July 21 2019

Audio  6 Pentecost Yr C Proper 11 July 21 2019

Genesis 18:1-10a, Psalm 15 , Colossians 1:15-28, Luke 10:38-42

My mom, loved having people over to our house. She seemed in her element when she was bustling about the kitchen, cooking and baking for all of us. Like many of you, the kitchen was the center of our house. In the kitchen, the stories would be told, the tears would be shed, love was prepared and served. She actually did the same thing at church, she was the kitchen queen, she hustled and bustled around that kitchen as well as her own. But my mom also had this other side. She loved to read, and she read everything. She’d sit in her chair, feet up, reading everything from People magazine to murder mysteries. But mom was convinced she was not very smart. I think she had put herself in a box, and I think she looked for verification from those around her. There was this one thing she believed she was really good at, cooking and baking and serving, and it became her identity. Even if she had wanted a way out, I don’t think she could have found it.

All of us have beloved people like my mom in our lives, they are our siblings, our friends, our children even. Some of us are that way too. We do this identity thing to ourselves, and we do it to each other. Am I a Martha who is happiest and most comfortable serving? And do I get a little bit resentful at my sisters who seem to not be so concerned with getting the meal on the table. Am I a Mary who loves to learn and chides my sisters who can’t seem to sit down long enough to catch the deep meaning of the story? But when we construct this scenario it is filled with words like resentment, jealousy, expectation, responsibility. We put ourselves and others into identity boxes that may not be helpful and that are hard to dismantle.

I think we’ve put our sisters Mary and Martha into this same box, and it’s so very hard to dismantle that box. You see, focusing on what Mary and Martha are doing seems to get us into the same box each time. I wonder if focusing on who Jesus is encouraging them to be, and who Jesus is encouraging us to be, may help us to break out of the box, and see this story of our sisters Mary and Martha in a new way. A new way that may help us pay attention, and open our eyes to the Christ who is with us.

We are in the midst of Luke’s story, and just like the one we heard last week, the story of the compassionate Samaritan, we hear this one that is so familiar. It is so familiar that many of us, as soon as we hear the names Mary and Martha, jump to identify ourselves, or even are identified as, a Mary or a Martha. When we do that, we invoke all the stereotypes that each of those represent. So today, I want to take a deeper dive. What may we be missing when we go immediately to the question of who am I, a Mary or Martha?

Jesus is a guest at the house of Martha, who is “distracted with much serving”. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet listening to his word. There is very little other detail. So it is left to us to wonder. Mary and Martha are sisters, do they get along? Is one jealous of the other? Where are all the people who travel with Jesus? Why don’t they have anything to say about this? We’ve heard Lazarus is Mary and Martha’s brother, where is he? How is it that Martha is even hosting this single, Jewish man? What is Jesus doing at their home? The story doesn’t really suggest anything about a prior relationship between Mary and Martha and Jesus. It seems almost as if Jesus just showed up at Martha’s door. Do they know him? From what we know of this culture, that shouldn’t be happening.

But the gospel writer seems unconcerned with all of our concerns. So what is Luke concerned about? Why is Luke telling us this story about these sisters? We’ve often assumed this is a story about who or what is better, sitting at Jesus’ feet learning, or clamping around in the kitchen getting things done. I don’t think it’s a competition about who is better. I don’t think Jesus would enter us into a sibling competition. But sometimes, as we visit these two women in their home, we come away feeling like we lost. Either I’m a Mary and I’m not doing enough, or I’m a Martha and I’m not quiet enough. I’m sunk no matter what. But, I don’t think there is a winner and a loser here.

Jesus is not so much chiding Martha because of what she was doing, actually, what she was doing was the right thing to do. Martha was showing hospitality, and hospitality is one of the most important values in Luke’s gospel. Actually, the word that is used to describe who Martha is, is diakonia, it is the word that becomes deacon, one who serves.

Jesus says, Martha, you are distracted by so many things. So I wonder if Luke tells this story because being distracted was as true in the 1^st century as it is in the 21^st. We really haven’t invented distraction, it’s been around a long time. Jesus really is asking Martha to pay attention, and I think Mary hears that as well. I wonder if entering into the fullness of life in Christ is about not being distracted by all the things that circle about us, and instead, paying attention. I wonder if diakonia, serving, is really about paying attention to the Holy Presence. Because, what is hospitality but gracious attention to the guest.

You’ve seen it, you do it. I know I do. In the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a meal, sometimes in the middle of church, your phone rings, you get a text message, something on Facebook catches your attention, and off you go. You’re driving your car, your phone beeps, your eyes leave the road for a moment…Being distracted may be the greatest danger to us right now in so many ways. It surely is in driving, but it is a danger to us in relationships as well. Being distracted puts a wedge in between me and thee.

And there’s even a more insidious distraction going on today. Words, because words matter, when they are used in ways intended to cut, and bite, and chew particular people because of the color of their skin or the way they worship, or the place they’re from, those words distract us from the very fundamental truth of love. Don’t be distracted by the words and the antics of some who want to call our attention away from the very basic commandment given by Jesus, love one another, love your neighbor. Pay attention.

Paying attention is not only good for our health it is good for our heart. Paying attention to the Holy Presence right in our midst. Not thinking about or worrying about the next thing, or the other thing, or the wrong thing. Mary and Martha had Jesus right there, in their living room. The Holy Presence sitting in their most comfortable chair. And something else was more important: resentment, anger, guilt, or even arrogance. We must not let our attention be drawn from the one who says, love your neighbor, and who died for that truth. And we must not let our attention be drawn from actually loving our neighbor.

The good news is that Jesus is in our midst too, the Holy Presence is in our midst too. God is with us, we need not be so distracted that we cannot still ourselves, be present, pay attention. Jesus may be in our most comfortable chair, and most assuredly Jesus is in the person who is hurting, imprisoned, or exiled. Jesus is in the person you meet in the grocery store, the homeless woman in the park. Jesus is in the one who is sitting next to you. Pay attention, don’t be distracted, Jesus is here.

5 Pentecost Proper 10 Yr C July 14 2019

Audio  5 Pentecost Proper 10 Yr C July 14 2019

Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Psalm 25:1-9, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

Maybe you’ve heard this one, but here it is again. I only have a couple good jokes. A priest, a Presbyterian minister and a baptist preacher, go out fishing. They toss all their stuff in the boat, and push off for the middle of the lake. Once out there, the priest realizes she forgot her lures. So she stands up and steps out of the boat and walks to the shore, gets what she needs and comes on back to the boat. A little later, the Presbyterian minister gets hungry and realizes he forgot his sandwich in the car, so he steps out of the boat, walks to the shore, gets his sandwich and comes on back to the boat. Well, the baptist preacher had left his jacket in the car and it was getting a little chilly, so he stepped out of the boat just like the others, but fell right into the water. The priest said to the minister, do you think we should have told him where the stones are?

Whether or not this is a funny joke, we laugh, or we groan, because we’ve been set-up, we know the form, the pattern, and can guess at the punch line. It’s based on our common stereotypes of these three characters. It’s like the story that is embedded in Luke’s gospel today, a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan walk into an inn…. Oh, wait a minute. What’s happening here? Those who heard this story originally would have been shocked long before the storyteller ever gets to the punch line, because the 1st century hearer would think “a priest, a Levite and a Samaritan would never be in the same story.”

You see, the shocking joke in this story from Luke is that it is the Samaritan who is the compassionate one. In their time and place, the priest and the Levite shared high status in the community of God’s people. They were “temple people.” They were born into priestly families. They were very concerned with status, they epitomized the temple culture where there were those who were in and those who were out, they were in and just about everyone else was out. Within their world, their association with the temple commends them as persons of exemplary piety whose actions would be regarded as self-evidently righteous. The priest and the Levite were accustomed to being evaluated on the basis of their ancestry and their pedigree, not on the basis of their performance.

So the teller of this story has established these two holy men who have done their business at the temple in Jerusalem, and who are now traveling on the dangerous road to Jericho. They see a man by the side of the road beaten and bleeding, and each pass to the other side of the road instead of helping.

Into the story arrives the Samaritan, and everyone who is hearing this story laughs. A Samaritan, they exclaim, Samaritans are no good lazy bums. They don’t even go to the temple in Jerusalem to worship, they keep to themselves, they are just not like us. Maybe we should build a wall to keep those Samaritans out. You see, the Samaritan is a man who is in direct contrast to the holy men of the temple. He has no pedigree, he is a lowly merchant, he even worships at a different temple. It is this distinction that makes this story shocking.

You and I have heard the story of the Good Samaritan so many times we just about know it by heart. And maybe we miss the shocking punch line. The Samaritan as the one who has compassion for the beaten and bleeding man at the side of the road is shocking. And, the compassionate actions of the Samaritan man condemn the holy men’s failure to act.

So what can this very familiar story reveal to us today? The story of the compassionate Samaritan is embedded in the story about a lawyer who has come to Jesus asking about eternal life. First, the lawyer asks Jesus what he must to do inherit eternal life. Jesus answers that question with the story of the compassionate Samaritan, and then the lawyer is able to identify who in the story was the neighbor and the lawyer is told by Jesus to go and do likewise. Today I would like for you to entertain the idea that this story is not just about being good, and it's not about being a hero. I would like you to see its complexity.

The story of the compassionate Samaritan is an illustration of appropriate behavior for a person who loves God and who expects to inherit eternal life. Remember, we’ve talked about this before, when Luke uses the term eternal life, he is referring to the new creation that is a reality in the life of those who profess Jesus Christ as Son of God. The term eternal life is not narrowly defined by what happens after death. It is about the absolutely new life that is the gift of God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is about living in the here and now as much as it is about the hereafter. Therefore the story of the compassionate Samaritan is about an ethic of compassion, it is about how we are related to our neighbors, it is about the love that wins.

You see, the Samaritan is the one who participates in the compassionate and covenantal faithfulness of God, not the holy men. And, this is not just a story about a good guy who helped someone out. This parable of the compassionate Samaritan undermines the system of status and honor based on privilege that was the way things were in 1st century culture. Once again, Luke is telling us a story that shows how the kingdom of God is near; the kingdom of God is about reordering human interactions.

The conclusion of Luke’s story has Jesus asking the lawyer, who himself has a pedigree, who in this story is the neighbor. The lawyer answered correctly, and Jesus admonishes him to go and do likewise. Eternal life is about compassionate interaction regardless of honor and status, race or gender.

This is as hard a message to hear in the 21st century as it was in the 1st century. In these days I wonder if we've progressed at all. The challenge to us is to reject the sinful categories we use to turn other human beings into labels instead of persons bearing the image of the living God. Jesus shows us that we are honorable and valuable because we are God’s creation, God’s beloveds. Jesus’ life shows us that in God’s eyes everyone has a place in God’s house, in God’s kingdom. Jesus pours out his life so that we may know that truth. Jesus fills us with new life so that we may have abundant love for ourselves and for others.

The kingdom of God has no privilege, it is not about your pedigree or your status. It is not about what you have or don’t have. The kingdom of God is about compassion. And compassion has no borders, boundaries, or barriers. Compassion makes us do crazy things, like love our neighbor, our neighbors that are next to us, and our neighbors that are so very far away. Compassion will lift us up, and break our hearts. But it is compassionate that God calls us to be.