Tuesday, January 27, 2015

4 Epiphany B Sermon

What does it mean that Jesus spoke with authority? What is wisdom? I explored these questions taking from the Gospel, Psalm and New Testament readings.


4 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a sermon
By Valerie Ann Hart
At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
January 29, 2012
Mark 1:21-28
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13

I wonder what it was about Jesus that touched the people in Capernaum. Mark writes that they said that he spoke with authority, not like the scribes.” I wonder what that means.
Now I understand that the scribes back then were a lot like my college professors when I was getting my Ph.D. When I was working on m Ph.D. anything you wrote had to be footnoted. You couldn’t write your own idea. It had to be an idea that somebody else had written and then you applied it. I am sure you have read that sort of thing or been to a lecture where someone is analyzing what someone who lived twenty years ago thought about what someone who lived a hundred years ago had to say about something that was written five hundred years ago. You’ve been there. You know. Today’s version of that is, “And this is my first slide of 123, let me read it to you. ‘Slide Number 1’.” That is how the scribes taught. 
Now Capernaum was not a backwater, it was right on the intersection of two major trade routes, and the synagogue in Capernaum was famous for the scholarly work that was done there. In fact it is believed that much of the Kabala was written in Capernaum. So the scribes there were intelligent and well known, but also had a style of looking to others rather that speaking from themselves. Jesus was different. They said he spoke with authority.
I wonder if what he spoke with might have been described as wisdom. Wisdom is an odd thing. It is kind of like great art. You can’t really describe what it is, but you know it when you see it. The same is true of wisdom. It is hard to say exactly what wisdom is, but when someone is speaking or writing with wisdom we recognize it. Think in your life, did you know anyone that you would say was wise? It could have been a teacher, it might have been a grand parent or an aunt or a neighbor. It could have been a book you read or someone you saw on TV, but somehow you just sensed that that person spoke with wisdom.
Now we know that wisdom is more than intelligence. We have all met very intelligent people who aren’t very wise. It is that absent minded professor kind of thing. People who you know have brilliant minds but somehow they haven’t translated that brilliance into how they interact with the world.
We also know or have known people who have a lot of knowledge. They know a lot about a lot of things but we wouldn’t call them wise. In fact that is what Paul says in the reading today. That sometimes people with some knowledge who think they know say too much. Today we might say - TMI - too much information.
The way Paul describes it is so beautiful and accurate - he says that knowledge puffs up. What a great way to describe someone who takes their knowledge but doesn’t apply any wisdom to it, as being puffed up.
In this letter he is probably talking about people who were part of the Christian movement called Gnostics. Gnostic is spelled with a Gn and it comes from the Greek word to know. The Gnostics believed that there were some things that some people knew that other people didn’t know. And of course the Gnostics believed that they were the ones who knew. There are people around that might described as Gnostics today, but I won’t decide who they might be. I’ll leave that to you.
Now they believed, they were certain, that there were no idols so there was no problem in eating meat offered to an idol. You have to remember that back at that time animal sacrifice was the source of meat. You didn’t just go and kill an animal and eat it, it was always sacrificed to something. So, they said that there is nothing wrong with eating meat sacrificed to an idol because idols don’t exist. Paul writes, “Yes, you are right. Idols don’t exist, and so eating meat sacrificed to an idol is really not a big deal. But, some people don’t know that . Some people still think that idols are relevant. So if they see you, someone who is so knowledgeable (Paul had a wonderful way of writing letters) eating food sacrificed to an idol it might hurt them. They might feel that it is okay to worship an idol.” So knowledge can puff up.
But where does wisdom come from? If wisdom isn’t intelligence, if wisdom isn’t knowing a lot, what is wisdom? And how do we recognize it?
The psalm for today says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But what does fear of the Lord mean? Now there are many books and articles written about the words that are translated from Hebrew and Greek into fear and exactly what they mean. They all have an aspect of the kind of fear you might have if there was a lion that escaped from the zoo or you knew that there was a problem and there was someone who was dangerous out in the world. There is an aspect of that kind of fear but it is much more than that. If you look at the psalm where it says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom it also says, “Great is the Lord.” So there is a fear of the Lord because God is so great. Then it says in the fourth verse that God is gracious and full of compassion. We don’t need to be afraid of something that is gracious and full of compassion. Later it says that he gives food to those who fear him. We have to assume if he gives food to those who fear him it is not those who are scared of him. There must be something more. And then in the seventh verse it says that the works of his hand are faithfulness and justice. Done with truth and equity. So this fear of the Lord is much more than being afraid of him, it is about respecting God. Acknowledging how great and powerful and wonderful God is.
 One of the places where the fear of the Lord is talked about is with Abraham. Paul at one point wrote that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son was seen as righteousness because of his fear of the Lord. In that case fear of the Lord was doing what God wanted him to do, even when it wasn’t something that he particularly wanted to do himself. And yet Abraham is described as a friend of God. He is called God’s friend. He is the only person who is described as God’s friend. God and Abraham had a particularly intimate and close friendship. So we can’t say that Abraham was afraid of the Lord. He had an intimate friendship with the Lord. So fear of the Lord has to do with not wanting to disappoint. Respect, revering, fearing the Lord. So that is the beginning of wisdom.

There is another thing to consider here. Where Paul says that knowledge puffs up, the next line he writes is, “love builds up.” So wisdom is not about knowledge or intelligence, but definitely has a lot to do with love, with relationship with God, with love for the people around you and love for God. We recognize wisdom, the wisdom that comes from a deep walk with God, a respect for God and a love for God and for people. That is what we see with wisdom. That is what we recognize in a wise person, and that is the wisdom that we should seek for ourselves.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

3 Epiphany B Sermon

Imagine you are lost in the backwoods in Yosemite, do you follow the ranger in the funny hat? Or what if you are told to preach in the capital city of your country's sworn enemy, do you go or head in the opposite direction? And if life is not going the way you planned and you feel powerless, do you know who really has the power?


3 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a sermon given on
January 22, 2012
By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Mark 1:14-20
Jonah
Psalm 62

I’d like you to imagine that you have gone to Yosemite and you decide that one day you are going to take a day hike into the backcountry. You are hiking and having a great time. It is after lunch and getting into the afternoon so you start to head back, but nothing looks quite right. You begin to suspect, “I don’t think I’ve ever been on this path before. This doesn’t look like what’s on the map and where we should be.” Of course you are smart enough to never go hiking by yourself so the person you are hiking with is saying, “We should have turned left back there.” “No, no,” you respond. “We should turn right here.” You begin arguing about which way you are supposed to be going. Finally you are certain that you have found the right path, and you are following it, but it gets narrower, and narrower and stops at the edge of a cliff. It is at that point that the nagging little thing that is in the back of your mind burst upon your consciousness and you realize that you are lost. You are lost in bear country, and it is afternoon, and it is going to get dark soon.
All you know to do is to retrace that trail because that is not going anywhere and you turn around and you see coming down the trail this guy in a funny hat. Sure enough it is a park ranger. Well, what a relief. He comes and he greets you and he looks at you in a way that you know, disdain is not the right word for it, but he knows you are lost. And he has seen this before. So he just looks at you and he says, “Follow me.” Then he turns around and heads on down the path and you follow doing your best to keep up. But then he starts going through some hard territory. Some of those paths are kind of hard to climb up over and he seems to be going up hill, not down hill. You are certain that he has made some mistakes along the way. He is not going where you want to go. Finally decide that you just can’t follow this one any more because he is not taking you where you want to go. So you head off on another path. Of course you follow that for a while but sooner or later ends up at the edge of a cliff. So you take a deep breath and you turn around and you start heading back. And there he is just calmly looking at you and says’ “follow me.”
And you follow him again. This happens several times because if you are anything like me you think you know where you are supposed to be going. But ultimately you end up having to follow him because there is no other way. And the problem is that you don’t really know where he is going. You know where you want to go, you want to go back to your car so you can go back to your hotel so you can get out of these shoes and you can just relax. He may be going on a circle to check for all the other hikers that are lost and you are just part that journey. Or maybe he knows you don’t have enough time to get back down to your hotel and he is taking you to a shelter. You don’t know. You end up having to trust that somehow he knows better than you do.
That’s kind of how it is with God and with Christ, even for the disciples. When Jesus comes and says to Simon and Andrew, “Follow me,” they drop their nets and follow right away. But even they at one point question where he is going.  When Jesus tells them that now it is time to go to Jerusalem they look at him and say, “Jerusalem? They’ll kill you in Jerusalem.” Of course they were right but Jesus still had to go to Jerusalem. And they all did ultimately follow him there.
Probably the person most famous for disobeying God was Jonah in our first reading. We only read a little part of this wonderful little book. It is when he has gotten the second call from God. Many of you may only know Jonah as the one who got swallowed by the whale, so I am going to tell you this wonderful story.
It is a very short book of the Bible. You can read it half an hour when you get home. Do take out your Bible and read it. It is a wonderful.
The first thing to know is that it is not a historical document. It is a fable. And the way you know it is a fable is that it has all the aspects of a fable. There are amazing animals, there is exaggeration, there is irony and there is humor. Also historians have tried to identify who this person Jonah was, but he doesn’t occur anywhere else. So we will treat it as a fable, but it is a wonderful and profound story.
Jonah is a prophet; he has dedicated his life to God to be a prophet in Israel. Then God speaks to him. It is presented in the same format as the one used for all the prophets, ”God said to Jonah.” He is told to go to Nineveh and that God will tell him what to say. That’s pretty simple and clear - go to Nineveh. The problem is, Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria and Assyria was Israel’s mortal enemy. It was an empire that had destroyed Israel several times. It was kind of like having God go up to someone in Israel right now and tell them, “I want you to go and preach in Tehran, the capital of Iran.” Right? Now you’d have lots of reasons to not do that. You might think that it is dangerous. You might think that they won’t listen. You might have all kinds of reasons not to go. But none of those were Jonah’s reason. You’ll learn at the end for Jonah’s reason for not wanting to go.
So Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. Jonah would have gone east to go to Nineveh instead he goes west. He goes to the coast and gets on the first ship going as far away as possible. Probably to what is today called Spain. Can you hear him saying, “I want to get as far away from here as possible. I want to get away from Nineveh, away from God, I’m going to run away.” (Have any of you felt like running away from God?)
He gets out in the boat and a big storm comes up. Now remember Jonah is the religious person. Everybody else on the ship, all the sailors on the ship, would be considered gentiles or pagans, believing in all kinds of different gods. But on the ship when the storm comes up Jonah is sleeping in the bottom and all of the other guys are praying to their gods. Each one is praying to his own god trying to stop the storm. Finally they decide somebody on this ship must have done something to anger some god to have a storm like this. So they pull lots. It turns out that Jonah gets the lot and they all look at him and say, “What did you do?” cause they know that he is a follower of Yahweh. Well, he explains he is running away and he says it is my fault so throw me overboard. These gentile pagans say we can’t do that. We can’t throw you into the ocean. Well the storm just gets worse and finally the crew says, “Okay, it is not our fault, we are not responsible for this blood.” And they throw him into the ocean.
And the storm stops and Jonah sinks down into the ocean. Along comes a giant fish, sometimes translated as a whale. The giant fish comes and swallows him. Now he is inside the body of the whale or giant fish, and you know what he does? Now if I were thrown off of a boat and swallowed by a fish I would probably be pretty upset. Jonah however then sings a song of praise to God for God’s faithfulness. Go figure.
And then the fish takes Jonah to the shoreline and lets him out. And that’s when we hear the reading for today. God says for a second time, “Jonah, go to Nineveh and I will tell you what to say. Tell them that I am going to destroy them in 40 days unless they repent.” So this time Jonah realizes there is no way to escape God so he goes to Nineveh. He gets there and he has the most phenomenal ministry! He goes and he spends just one day in this huge city walking around telling people that Yahweh is going to destroy them. Even though this city is the center of worship for a goddess and they don’t have any belief in Yahweh. When he goes around and he tells them that they are going to be destroyed everyone goes, “Oh my goodness, we did… well yes” They all get their ashes and sackcloth. When the king hears about it they have a fast and nobody, including the animals, are suppose to eat or drink all day as a sign of their penance. What an amazing ministry. Now you have to remember that in the normal story of the prophets in the Bible they go and prophesy in Israel to people who are supposedly followers of Yahweh they are never listened to. But here in this gentile evil city they repent!
You’d think that would make Jonah happy. It’s the most amazing ministry anywhere. But he’s not. He goes up on the hillside and looks over Nineveh and God decides not to destroy Nineveh. And you know what? Jonah is ticked off. Jonah is really angry at God. He says, “That’s why I didn’t want to come here. I knew they would repent and I knew that if they repented that you are a God of mercy and then you wouldn’t destroy them.” He was angry at them. They are the enemy. He wants them destroyed. He doesn’t want God to save them. And then the whole little book, with all the humor in it ends with God talking about his love for all the people and how wouldn’t destroy them, and the animals.
So it is a story of how we as human beings sometimes have a different idea of what we want to have happen then what God does. Sometimes our plans are not God’s plans. And sometimes we get really angry with God because God’s not doing it the way we think God should be doing it. Sometimes we feel really powerless. Sometimes things in our lives overwhelm us. We feel that we have no control, that we have no power. When we have those times where we feel powerless we need to remember the psalm today. It is one of my favorite psalms. There is a lot in it that I like, but the one line that stand out today says, “and power belongs to God.” God is the one with the power and when we find ourselves lost, and powerless there is only one thing to do, to acknowledge our powerlessness.

Now sometimes the thing that we have the least power over is our own habits. To acknowledge that and realize that it is only God, it is only Christ, that can lead us to sanity, to health, to wholeness and to deal with whatever situation we are in. It is then that we need to give our lives over to God and to follow wherever God is taking us. No matter what the path looks like and even if it is not what we think it is supposed to be. We follow and have faith and trust.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Sermon 2 Epiphany B - Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2012 on the weekend closest to Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday I talked about how varied people's calls from God can be - the still small voice heard by Samuel, the direct call to Phillip, the somewhat humorous call of Nathanael, and the call of the community for King's leadership.


2 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a sermon by
Rev Valerie Ann Hart
January 14, 2012
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Martin Luther King Jr.
1 Samuel 3:1-10
John 1:43-51

We are in the season of Epiphany that celebrates Jesus making himself known in the world. It began after Christmas, on January 8, with the celebration of Epiphany and the coming of the wise men. Last week we remembered Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan. After he was baptized he went out to find the people who would help him, his disciples, so this week and next week we read about the call of some of the disciples. The readings this week from the Old Testament and the Gospel are both about calls. We read about three different people who were called by God.
In the Old Testament we hear about Samuel. Now to give you a little context about Samuel, this is during the time of the judges before they built the temple in Jerusalem. At different times God was worshiped in different places. At this time God was being worshiped in Shiloh and Eli was the priest of the Lord. The story of Samuel begins with Samuel’s mother who is getting on years and hasn’t had any children. At that time it was a terrible thing for a woman because the most important job of a woman was having children. So she had come before God and prayed desperately at Shiloh to give birth to a child, especially to have a son. When Samuel was born, since she had promised that if she had a son she would dedicate him to serving God, as soon as Samuel was weaned and able to be on his own she brought him to Shiloh to have him serve under Eli the priest. In the story we read today it is clear that he was a boy, but how old he was at this point is not clear. Perhaps he was 11 maybe thirteen, we don’t know.
We do know he was helping at the shrine and he had been dedicated to God. Evidently he is sleeping in the same room as they kept the Ark of the Covenant. As he is sleeping he hears a voice saying, “Samuel, Samuel.” He doesn’t know what that is so he gets up and he goes to Eli and says, “Are you calling me?” Eli answers, “No, I wasn’t calling you.” Samuel goes back to sleep. He hears the voice again calling him. Once again he goes into Eli who once again responds, “No, no, I wasn’t calling you.” Finally the third time Eli realizes that this voice that Samuel is hearing is the voice of God, so Eli says, “Next time tell God you are listening and see what God has to say.”
It was kind of a long reading with all that God had to say. To sum it up, at that time the priesthood was passed on from father to son, it was an inherited position. Earlier in the Book of Samuel it tells about how Eli’s sons were not behaving very well. They were kind of skimming some off the top of the contributions that were being made to God. See it started a long time ago. It is nothing new.
So God was saying to Samuel that Eli’s family is going to be destroyed. That is God’s way of saying the priesthood is not going to be handed on to Eli’s sons, but it is going to be Samuel who is going to carry on the spiritual tradition, which indeed he does. This was a call to Samuel to be the great prophet and judge that we remember. It is interesting to me how Samuel doesn’t recognize the call of God is at first. He needs someone else to help him understand what is going on.
In the Gospel we have the call of two different people, who have very different responses. The first is Phillip. We don’t know whether Phillip knew Jesus before this, but when Jesus says to Phillip, “Follow me” Philip just gets up and starts following. In fact he doesn’t just start following, he starts telling other people about it. He is so excited to follow Jesus that he goes to tell his friend Nathanael. When he says Jesus is from the town of Nazareth we get this wonderful comment.
(I am so delighted that someone laughed while I was reading that, because to me this is one of the most humorous passages in scripture. We don’t realize how much humor there is in scripture, because if you read Mark Twain the way we read the Bible it won’t be funny, right? There is a lot of humor here and there is some sarcasm on Jesus’ part. He can be pretty cutting sometimes if you read it looking for the humor. So I love this little interaction with Nathaniel.)
Phillip goes and tells Nathaniel “We found him. The one we have been searching for, the one who is going to save us, the Messiah, the one we have been promised.” He is all enthusiastic. When Nathanael hears he is from Nazareth he says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” It would be like if you have just heard that there is this wonderful teacher/preacher in Bakersfield. You go to hear him and return and say “Come, come to Bakersfield with me to find God.” And your friend says, “Bakersfield?” And if anybody here is from Bakersfield, I apologize. It could have been Lompoc, it could have been anywhere. The thing is, it was more than just a place because then the town that you came from was part of your identity. He was insulting Jesus’ whole family. It was a terrible insult to Jesus to speak that way about his home town.
Then you get this scene where Nathaniel comes and Jesus just beams “Oh, Nathanael, well there is a real honest Jew. No deceit. You are a wonderful person, what a fantastic person you are.” Now Nathanael, unlike most of us who whether we felt good about it or not would at least pretend to be humble and say, “Oh, not me.” But Nathanael goes, “Well how do you know how great I am?” It is just hysterical to me that someone would respond to Jesus that way. And then Jesus does the little hook and says, “I saw you under the fig tree.” Well, if Jesus saw him under the fig tree, that means Jesus also heard what he said under the fig tree. Which must have been uncomfortable for Nathanael. So that is when Nathaniel over reacts and says, “This must be the son of God.” The whole thing is so overblown it is a wonderful little snippet.
Nathanael’s call is a different kind of call. It is the type of call in which you have heard about it from someone else and you are not too sure. You don’t know whether to believe it or not. Nathanael doesn’t believe it until he has an experience of Christ. A lot of us who are called are like that. We are not too sure until something personal happens within us.
Now the man that we are remembering this weekend, Martin Luther King Jr., also had a time of doubt. His grandfather and his father were both preachers. When he was in High School, even though he was extremely bright, he didn’t live up to his capacity, and he wasn’t sure about God. He didn’t know what was true and what was real and he didn’t want to be a preacher because he wasn’t sure about Christ. He went off to college and he did okay but not really well at first, and then something happened to him. The books I was reading don’t indicate what, but something happened to him in the middle of college where he began to believe in Christ personally and he started to study hard and get such good grades he got a scholarship to go to Boston College and get a Ph.D. He also decided to become a preacher. And he came to Alabama, to Montgomery Alabama as a new preacher, a new person to lead this church. He hadn’t bee there very long when Rosa Parks refused to get up when there were too many white people in the bus, and since there were so many white people they wanted the colored people who were in the front of the colored section to get up and stand so the white people could sit. Rosa Parks refused. Some of us, we remember that time, for some of us it is history. But we all know of Rosa Parks.
After that some of the black leaders in Montgomery said, “We need to do something, “ and they gathered together. Martin Luther King Jr. offered his church for them to gather and decide what they were going to do. He wasn’t the leader at that point. He just offered his church for a gathering place. As they gathered and they talked they decided that it should be Martin Luther King Junior who would lead them. One of the reasons was he was new in town and didn’t have very many enemies. He also had a wonderful gift of speech, could communicate well, and a certain presence. They decided and elected him to lead the Montgomery bus boycott. And then everything else is history after that.
Martin Luther King’s call was not God saying to him, “Go out there and set my people free and lead them.” It came because there was a situation and he opened his church to it and then the community lifted him up and said you are the one to lead us. He stepped into a role he couldn’t possibly have imagined when he started his ministry. There are lots of different ways of being called.
One of the interesting things about people who are called, like Martin Luther King Jr., is that none of them are perfect. Sometimes people say why are we celebrating him? He wasn’t perfect. If you read the Old Testament you’ll discover that all the great leaders of the Old Testament were highly imperfect. We have David who sends Bathsheba’s husband off to be killed because he is attracted to Bathsheba. We have Solomon doing things that are not appropriate. Even Moses and Abraham did some questionable stuff. The Old Testament heroes were not perfect, but they were faithful. In our church we have this book called Holy Women, Holy Men that describes different people that we remember who were great in one way or another in the church. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of them. In this it says that we don’t remember these people because they were perfect, we remember them because they were faithful. We remember them because they lived a life that was an example of Christian life. To me that is a very comforting thought. It means I don’t have to be perfect. It means that God can use me flaws and all. As long as I listen and I am faithful to what I hear.
God calls us in many different ways. Sometimes it is a still small voice in the back of our minds that we are not quite sure what it is saying, and maybe we need someone to help us to understand what that voice is. Recently I talked to a parishioner who said, “I have had this thought in the back of my mind to start this thing going, but I just kind of ignored it because I was too busy. It was kind of back there and then one day at church in the middle of the service, out of nowhere, it was like a load voice saying, ‘Do it!’” Sometimes if we don’t listen to the still small voice we get a louder voice. Sometimes, like Samuel, we have somebody else try to explain it to us. Sometimes we have someone who sees a gift in us that we don’t see in ourselves and comes up to us and says, “You know, I think you’d be really good at ….” We have someone here who is really good at doing that with Sunday school.  Sometimes we get the call from God in church, sometimes we are watching TV and all of a sudden it is real clear what we are supposed to do. But we all have things we can do to serve.
We all have a purpose in life. Once you are baptized, once you have said, “Yes Lord,” then it is time for God to tell you how God can use you. And it varies. Sometimes it seems like it is nothing significant. “Who cares that there is somebody who puts out coffee every Sunday” but when visitors come it makes a huge difference that there is coffee put out. It may seem small to you, but it can be major for someone else who feels welcome.
Sometimes people are called to great things, but someone like Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know it was a call to greatness when he was being called. He was just called to organize a boycott. We never know, but we are to listen.

We are part of a community because in a community we can help one another listen to what God is calling us to do and be. God has a purpose for us. And once we find that purpose, when we say yes, here I am, we find a satisfaction and a joy and a peace that we couldn’t have imagined without it.