Tongues of Fire

Psalm 19; Proverbs 1:20-23; James 3:1-9

September 16, 2012

Do y’all know Godwin’s Law? It’s the dictum that holds that any internet debate will devolve within about six comments to the point of invoking Hitler and the Nazis. I call my corollary David’s Rule for Internet Serenity and it goes like this, “"Never ever ever read the comments on any even vaguely political article on any web site. Ever."

If you break my rule – as I do with regularity – you will discover all too quickly that most folks out there were not raised by my mother, who told us often, “if you don’t have anything nice to say about a person, don’t say anything at all.”

My mom is not a Quaker, but she does seem to have grasped one of the singular pieces of Quaker wisdom: speak only if your words will improve the silence.

Now you might think – and you wouldn’t be wrong – that this is a sermon particularly suited for a political season. I do, in fact, wish that I could share this message directly with Misters Romney and Obama and, especially, their surrogates and all the more so the partisan talking heads who fill the airwaves with wave after wave after wave of vitriolic, vituperative, and vicious broadsides.

But the truth is I’m a lot more concerned with what comes out of my own mouth than with what comes out of theirs. Moreover, I think we all share and bear responsibility for a culture in which we almost instantly and universally recognize Godwin’s Law and understand the need for a rule of internet serenity.

While the means and speed of communication have changed mind-bogglingly in the past 2,000 years, it’s clear from the concerns underscored in the various passages of scripture that we’ve read together this morning that every age has struggled with civility.

The author of James felt compelled to remind his readers that the tongue is a fire, and to warn them about the blazes ignited by small tongues of fire. Clearly, the very early church was not immune from the damages inflicted by such blazes.

Where we might just have trumped our forebears is in the related struggle with cynicism. We’re not only incredibly good and fast at destructive speech, but we’re deeply cynical about the speech even of people we say we admire.

Thus we find ourselves living in an uncivil age of deep cynicism, and the source of that sad reality becomes abundantly clear all too often when we open our mouths to speak.

Against that sad reality, the psalmist lifts up in contrast the song of creation itself: “the heavens are telling the glory of God, the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.”

Recalling such wisdom, Jesus was able to declare that if his disciples should remain silent, “the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!”

In the midst of our inability or unwillingness to sing praise, creation itself sings out. Not only that, but as the lines from Proverbs tell us, God speaks even when we remain silent, even when we speak destructively, even when we remain mired in uncivil cynicism.

“Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. … I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.”

God speaks a creative and loving word and the rocks and stones and birds and trees, the heavens and the firmament respond telling the glory of God.

Meanwhile we call each other names and set the world in flames with our overheated rhetoric.

Perhaps the Quakers were not quite right. Maybe the advice should be, “Speak only if your words will improve the symphony of creation’s praise.”

Now it will perhaps amuse you – I know it does me – to hear these words spoken. I have no great confidence that I am improving that symphony or even, for that matter, improving a blessed silence. My own doubt is born of knowing full well how often I not only fall prey to “reading the comments,” as it were, but also I give in to the temptation to add to them my own cynical commentary.

I all too easily forget the admonition of James about tongues of fire. At the same time I forget as well the very wisdom that I have oft repeated here: that gratitude is the common birthplace of all authentic religious expression.

Out of anger, or fear, or grasping, or cynicism, or hurt, or grief – from all of those places where each one of us sometimes finds ourselves – out of those places it is often hard to find, much less to express, gratitude, and so the default expression becomes white hot anger, ugly hate, deep despairing cynicism: none of which improves the silence much less the symphony of creation.

So here’s an invitation – one that will probably come as an incredibly difficult one to receive during a political season, but one that I know I need to heed. From now to mid-November, for a start, let’s refrain from cynicism and hate-filled rhetoric, let’s find gratitude in every possible moment, and let’s keep silent unless our voice improves whatever context or conversation we find ourselves in.

As a first step in this practice, I invite you now to take a few moments in the silence and beauty of this time and place to think about things for which you are grateful. I invite you to think about gratitude on several levels: begin close in – family, friends, neighborhood, then expand your circles of gratitude to school, workplace, community, then expand those circles even more broadly, to the metro area, the region, the nation and the world. For what are you grateful in those spheres of our lives?

Keep the silence, and after a few minutes, I’ll invite you out of it into a song of praise. Let us enter a time of silence.

A Poverty of Imagination

September 9, 2012

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

I was standing on F Street the other day, talking with a friend, and a guy walks up and asks, “would you help a homeless brother?”

How does the love of God abide in us if we have this world’s goods but refuse to help someone in need?

That’s not my rhetorical question; that is the gospel of Jesus Christ demanding a response.

When I was thirsty you gave me something to drink.

That’s not some preacherly flourish; that is the gospel of Jesus Christ demanding a response.

If a brother or sister lacks food and you say to them, “go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” but don’t feed them, what good is that?

That’s not a social worker talking; that is the gospel of Jesus Christ demanding a response.

Would you help a homeless brother?

That’s not just some guy on the street; that is the person of Jesus Christ demanding a response.

It’s also one of the most difficult social situations we navigate. I know that I don’t like to hand over cash to a stranger with a hand out. My best self is reluctant because I know that lots of folks on the street are struggling with addictions and I don’t want to fund that. My worst self is reluctant because I’ve bought into the great American mythology of equating money with value and I don’t want to give away my “hard-earned” cash to someone who “doesn’t deserve it.” Somewhere in between is a wounded self who doesn’t want to be scammed and victimized by a well-told lie about some horrible circumstance.

Nowhere in me is a self who actually wants to give away money.

Which is odd, if you think about, given an increasingly massive amount of social science research that shows us that giving makes us happier than receiving. That research simply affirms the wisdom captured in Proverbs: “those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.” (Notice how that is phrased: we are not talking about prosperity gospel stuff here. There’s no notion in this that if you give you will be blessed by receiving back even more, as if it is all some kind of investment scheme. No. For the author of Proverbs the blessing comes in the simple act of sharing bread with the poor. That is the blessing: that I get the opportunity and the experience of sharing bread with the poor.) Still, there does not seem to be in me a self who actually wants to give away my money.

And that is, first and foremost, a problem of faith. Let me put that a bit more directly: the fact that I do not want to give away money is a matter of faith. It might, on the face of it, seem like a matter of ethical action or, to use the language employed in the book of James, a matter of “works.” But when I dig a bit deeper, I begin to see quite clearly that it is a question of faith.

I hold on with tightly clenched fists when I do not trust in any provision beyond what my own hands can grasp. It’s a funny thing that when my fists are clenched tightly closed so is my mind. Sometimes, the only thing I cannot grasp is the obvious.

You see, as Richard Rohr puts it, “Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, inclusive, and loving. We made it, however, into a formal established religion, in order to avoid the demanding lifestyle itself. One could then be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain at the highest levels of the church, and still easily believe that Jesus is ‘my personal Lord and Savior.’ The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.”

Yet, I am happy to remain trapped within the limits of my own imagination when it comes to questions of faith that touch on how I actually live day to day in the presence of that suffering, in the presence of others who are wounded by an unjust economic system, by violence, by racism, by homophobia, and so on.

Really, it is a poverty of imagination that I suffer most often when confronted by human brokenness, perhaps most of all when I confront it in myself.

I’m in good company, though. Jesus seemed to suffer the same thing in the challenging text that is today’s gospel reading from Mark. It’s the story of the Syropheoenician woman, and it’s one that lots of preachers avoid because it does not shed a kindly light on Jesus.

Listen, then, for a word from God:

From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet.

Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

This is the word of the Lord.

Jesus is pretty darn rude to a woman who is doubly and perhaps triply marginalized. To begin with, she is a woman who dares to speak to a man in a culture that condemned such speech categorically. On top of that, she is a Gentile and thus not a member of the chosen people. She was the mother of a demon-possessed child in a culture that understood disease in terms of ethical judgment so she must have done something terrible to deserve such an unclean daughter.

Yet she dares to speak to Jesus, and, not only that, she dares to challenge him when he, also breaking cultural taboos, speaks to her.

In the exchange, Jesus is changed. Because he is willing to let go of his own cultural assumptions, because he trusts ultimately in God’s good provision, because he is willing to open his hands and his heart, his own imagination is forever expanded, and in the gospel of Mark, from this moment forward, the message, the good news, is for everyone.

Nothing defines our place in this culture more than money. In Jesus’ time, while wealth was clearly a significant cultural marker, gender and tribe were even more important. Jesus lets go of the presumptions that held the most power over him, and his imagination was enriched such that his world was suddenly limitless. He could see possibilities previously cut off to him and his ministry, and he was able to live into them faithfully when he let go of his own privileges as male and Jewish.

As I ponder this challenging text and the equally powerful ideas in the other readings I am left wondering what privileges I cling to, and how that clinging limits my own imagination. Can I imagine a self that gives away with authentic joy, and finds blessing in the giving? What privileges bind me and blind me? How do these privileges get in the way of living fully into the Christian lifestyle that I claim? How does this get in the way of our being the church we feel called to be?

I want to take just a moment now, to open that question to all of us. What are some of the privileges we carry? How do these privileges impact others? What limits might these privileges place on those of us who hold them?

* * * * *

So, I was standing on F Street the other day, talking with a friend, and a guy walks up and asks, “could you help a homeless brother?”

And my friend and I asked the man what he needed. He told us he wanted to get some personal care items, shampoo, a razor, shaving cream, because he wanted to get clean for a job interview. There was a CVS around the corner so I walked with him. We talked along the way.

His name is Joe. He is a Vietnam vet, happy to have been too big to be a tunnel rat during his tour in 1968.

He’s also a Nats fan, and hopes someday to get to a game.

I got him the simple stuff he was looking for. Cost less than 10 bucks, and I was blessed in the sharing because my own imagination was expanded in the encounter.

Indeed, after the conversation I wrote a letter to Ted Lerner, owner of the Nats, thanking him for fielding such a fun, exciting team, and acknowledging his clear commitment to honoring returning vets.

To tell the truth, I find the over-the-top, borderline jingoistic patriotism on display at Nationals Park off-putting, but my encounter with Joe expanded my own imagination enough to turn my personal gripe into a suggestion for Mr. Lerner. I simply asked that he consider doing some outreach through DC shelters to enable vets living on the streets of the capital to enjoy an afternoon or evening at the ballpark.

It’s nothing like a systematic solution to the problem of homelessness. I know that. That’s not the point. What is the point, then?

Simply this – simply this lesson that Jesus, himself, learned, that when we break down the barriers of our own privilege and encounter one another as human beings across all the lines that would seem to separate us from one another, then there’s no limit to the ways we might imagine sharing the commonwealth of God’s incredibly abundant provision for all of creation.

The rich and the poor have this in common: the same God made us all. As the psalmist insisted:

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.

As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds the people, from this time on and forevermore. Amen.