Fourth Sunday in Lent

It's just not fair!!!

4 Lent C - 2010

Transcribed from a sermon given by

Rev. Valerie Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Arroyo Grande, CA

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

2 Corinthians 5:16-21

It’s not fair!! It’s just not fair!!

You giggle? How dare you laugh at me when I say it is not fair?

Sounds like you’ve heard that before, or perhaps you can remember times in which you have said that.

We as children have all had moments where we said “It’s not fair” “I’m the eldest that has to do all the work around here and my younger brothers don’t have to do anything.” Or “It’s not fair, I’m the youngest and I have to go to bed earlier then everyone else does.” Or “It’s not fair, I’m an only child and I don’t have any brothers or sisters to play with.” It doesn’t really matter what the situation was, when I was growing up there was always some way in which it wasn’t “fair.” And of course if you are a parent or a grandparent or a teacher you have heard children say this to you.

One of the darker days as a parent is when the children learn to say “It’s not fair.” Because it’s always not fair, one kid says that the other got a larger slice of cake. Another says you spent more time with one child than the other. .

It’s not fair. We know what it feels like to have that feeling inside that it’s not fair. And even as adults, even though we don’t say it out loud, we think it, “It’s just not fair.”

When we look at this Gospel reading it’s all about fairness. It begins with the Pharisees critiquing Jesus because he is speaking with and eating with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners of all types. And that’s not fair! Because while they’ve been out having a good time the Pharisees have been following all these rules and laws. And it’s not fair that they get all the attention. They should be being punished in some way and the ones who have been following all the laws should be getting some goodies for it, some acknowledgement for how hard they have worked.

So Jesus responds to them by telling this wonderful story of the father with two sons. And if we didn’t have anything else from the gospels except that story it would teach us about the nature of God.

Now you can understand the older son’s perspective. The younger son has said basically to his father “I’m going to treat you like you are dead, give me my inheritance.” And back in those days inheritance was not split 50/50, the eldest got a large chunk and the younger ones didn’t get as much. So, for a younger brother to be asking for his share before the father even is dead is an incredible insult to his father. And then he goes off, leaves his father, basically abandoning him. You can imagine how angry the older brother was right from the beginning that his younger brother would do this and leave him having to take care of the farm. We can all kind of understand why the older brother was so angry when “that son of yours” returns.

(I love the little nuances in this story, they are so great. The older brother refers to his brother as “that son of yours.” He has pushed him out of the family. “I have no relationship with that one any more.” And the father responds “Your brother.”)

He represents the Pharisees. They were talking about fairness and justice, while what Jesus was talking about was mercy and love. If you have been a parent or a teacher or in other ways work with children you know that you love them all. They are each unique and your relationship is unique with each one, but you love them all. When you pick up a little baby and you feel that overwhelming sense of love you don’t love that baby because it is being so good. That baby is screaming and throwing up and going in its diaper. It’s being a baby. But you love it because that is it’s nature and your nature is to love. And that is the way God is. God doesn’t love us because we’re so good.

Most of us spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves loveable. You know. if I get one more degree, if I work a little harder, if I lose some weight, if I go to church ever Sunday. Something that we do that we think will make us more loveable. That’s not the way love works. Love is.

It is just like the father in the story who loves both of his sons. There was nothing that the younger son could do that would destroy his father’s love and there was nothing that the elder son could do, being good, that would make the father love him any more. The love was complete. Unconditional, and that’s the love we have from God that Christ is trying to tell us about, to show us, to demonstrate. Not about fairness, but about mercy. That we are all loved by God, and that God wants to be in relationship with each of us. It’s called reconciliation, healing of the relationship. God wants each one of his children to come home. And God will run outside to meet us when we decide to come home. And it makes all the difference

This wonderful little passage from 2 Corinthians is just beautiful because it says we regard no one from a human point of view. Think about a family. How the brothers and sisters perceive each other and how the parent perceives them. The parent perceives them with love. The brothers and sisters are in competition. What if we were to see everybody else the way God sees them. With the sense of mercy and love and acceptance that God has for them. If we could see the person that’s hurt us and instead of seeing them as an enemy we could see them as a child of God, loved by God, regardless of what they have done. That would change things, wouldn’t it? If we could see one another the way God sees us. That’s what Paul says here, “We regard no one from a human point of view.” Not seeing what’s fair, but seeing with the eyes of love. He goes on to say “So if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, everything old has passed away. See everything has become new.” This new creation comes when we realize that we are dependent upon the mercy and love of God and when we are reconciled to God. When we know that love, that totally underserved love of God that fills us and heals us, we become a new person. We see things in a new way. It becomes much harder to hold on to our resentments of other people when we know how much we have been forgiven by God.

Paul goes on to say, “All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” Has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Once we are reconciled to God, God empowers us to be instruments of God’s love in the world - the ministry of reconciliation. Our jobs once we know that we are forgiven and loved is to help others to know that they are forgiven and loved by God. To help others to be reconciled to God. And to help others to be reconciled to each other. And it all begins with us. It all begins with us acknowledging the fact that we have not lived a perfect life. We do not deserve God’s love, no one deserves love, love is given as a gift. And when we acknowledge that and accept God’s mercy and forgiveness and we then do the hard work of acknowledging how we have hurt other people, working to forgive others and be forgiven. Those who have gone through the 12 steps know that process very well. We become a new creation - instruments of reconciliation. That’s our job, or ministry. Our job is not to make the world fair, our job is to bring people together and to bring people to God through Christ.

Paul continues and says, “so we are ambassadors for Christ because God is making his appeal through us, we entreat you, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” First step, to be reconciled to God, and that is why in almost all of our services we have a confession, we have a way in which we acknowledge we need to be healed and reconciled to God. Then that is the foundation upon which we are sent out to be ambassadors for Christ and to bring reconciliation, love and mercy to the world.

Amen

Third Sunday of Lent C - Sermon

Psychologists call it the "Just World" phenomena.

The Third Sunday of Lent C

Transcribed from a Sermon

Given on March 7, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Arroyo Grande, California

In the mid to late 1960s when I was in graduate school, there was a news report that came out. It was an interview with a member of a jury. This member of the jury said, "Well, she was dressed in a short mini skirt, and a tight green top, and didn't wear any underwear.  She was asking for something to happen."  And that is why the man who had taken her in the parking lot of a restaurant, at knifepoint, kidnapped her and raped her, was acquitted - because she was "asking for it" as they would say. I was studying social psychology and a social psychologist at another university was fascinated by this story. Along with of course being somewhat appalled, he wanted to know what it is that people do in their minds to end up blaming the victim. 

He did some studies.  In one of them there was a woman behind a one-way mirror, and the subjects of the experiment were watching this woman who was supposedly taking a psychological test of some sort. Half of them saw her shocked with an electric shock when she made a mistake, and for the other half, she wasn't shocked, she was just told that she did the wrong thing.  Well sure enough the ones who saw that woman shocked thought that she was less attractive, less intelligent, and less competent than the ones who had just seen her taking the test.  There's something in us that has to have things balanced out. Melvin Learner called it the "Just World" hypothesis. There's some way in which we want the world to be just. You see it in all our fiction and all the movies.  In the end the good guys win, the bad guys get hurt. 

If you came out of a movie and the good guy died a horrible death and the bad guy was celebrating, you'd feel disappointed I think. And we have our fairy tales, and we have our stories, and in all of them the good win, the bad lose.  But that's not the way life is.  We look around us at the world and it seems so arbitrary of who does well and who gets hurt.  So how do we put it together?  One of the ways people react is by putting down the victim.  We saw that after Haiti and that horrible earthquake there. There was a televangelist who came out and said the reason that happened is because generations ago they worshipped Satan.  Do you remember that?  That same person after Katrina said that it was because of the immorality that happened in New Orleans, not realizing that the main neighborhood where the "immorality" took place was the one part of New Orleans that wasn't destroyed. 

We have a tendency to want to justify things, and I've heard it recently.  I was talking to someone about homelessness, and how there are so many people that are on the edge of homelessness, who if somebody loses a job or gets ill, or the balloon payment comes through, and all of the sudden they don't have a home, they have nothing.  This person responded, "Well, when they were taking out the mortgage they should have thought of those things."  Maybe, but nobody expected that the value of houses was going to crash the way it has.  Many of us may be right on that edge ourselves, but there's something about us that wants it to all come out fair.  You see it in scripture.  There is the wonderful Book of Job, in which we are told at the beginning that Job was a righteous man, and yet the worst possible things you can imagine happened to him, including having his three "friends" come and tell him "You must have done something wrong. This wouldn't have been happening to you if you hadn't done something wrong.  Get over it, acknowledge what you've done, and then God can be nice to you again."  The whole point of the Book of Job is that's not the way it works.  That's not the way it works, and that's what Jesus is saying in this Gospel reading.  Some people tell him about this horrible thing where the Galileans were offering him sacrifices and Pilate came and killed them all.  There's some reason to believe they might have been planning a revolt, or participated in a revolt, but that we wont go in to. Jesus' comment is, "Do you think they were worse sinners than everyone else in Galilee?  And do you think that these ones who had this building fall on them were worse sinners than everybody else in Jerusalem?”  He's not saying that they were innocent.  Notice he doesn't say they're innocent victims.  What he's just saying is they're no worse than all the rest of us. 

So how do we make sense of this?  There are two ways to respond to injustice, two ways to respond to the fact that things don't work out.  One is to find a way that the victim deserved it, and sometimes that gets to be pretty complex.  We have in India and other parts of Asia the idea of reincarnation, so even if you've been good in this lifetime, if something bad happens to you, you did something in another lifetime, or if you're born in to extreme poverty, that's because you deserved it from something from the past.  It's a nice way to keep justice, and not have to do anything about injustice. But the other response to when things don't seem just is to put forth the effort to change them.  When people are suffering and they don’t deserve to be suffering, because no one deserves to be suffering, we can get out there and try and change it.  We can try and help the homeless, and feed the hungry, and care for those in need.  We can speak up when society isn't fair. 

Those are the two choices.  Which do you think Christ would want us to do?  He certainly doesn't want us to justify injustice, but he isn't saying that the world is fair. And he isn't saying that God follows a kind of justice that we can understand. Sometimes Christians try to get around this injustice thing by saying, "Well, he'll get his after he dies, and the one who's hurt will end up having better things happen in heaven, and it will all balance out in eternity."  Jesus doesn't say that.  Jesus never promises the disciples if they're good, things will go fine for them.  He tells them to take up their cross.  He tells them they're going to suffer.  He tells them it's going to be hard, and it was.

Then after saying that he has this interesting little parable about the fig tree.  Odd little parable. There was a fig tree that was planted, and after three years there was no fruit. It usually takes about three years for a fig tree to produce fruit. So the owner of the vineyard says, "Cut it down.  We can do something better with this piece of land."  And the gardener says, "Give it another year.  Don't get rid of it yet."  Now most of the early interpretations of this parable have involved that the fig tree represented Israel, and it wasn't bearing fruit, and God was going to cut it down and bring in some other country to do that, but I'm going to stay away from that allegorical interpretation, and think about, and focus on, the vine dresser's mercy.  The vine dresser's says, "Don't do it now.  Give it another chance.  Have mercy on it."  Because in God's justice and in God's power, there's no reason any one of us doesn't "deserve" something.  None of us are perfect.  None of us have born the fruit that God has wanted us to bear.  We have done things we shouldn't do and we haven't done things we should have done. We haven't brought about justice, and we've hurt other people.  We say it every Sunday when we confess our sins and we all know it's true.  When we start thinking about a just world, we have a danger of pride, of somehow thinking we're better than somebody else, and that will keep us safe, but it doesn't work that way.  What we do have, we can't keep ourselves safe.  We can't be sure that bad things aren't going to happen to us, but what we do have, and what Paul said when he talks about bad things that have happened to the people of Israel, and so he says, "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone."  So if you're having a tough time, yeah, it's tough, it's hard, and it happens.  God is faithful, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so you may be able to endure it. 

It's kind of a tough message.  It's a message that bad things are going to happen, hard things are going to happen.  Our life is not going to be easy, and if you look back at the Christians and the faithful, and the saints, they didn't have it easy.  Quite the contrary.  But what we are told is that we don't face it alone, that Christ's mercy, Christ's love will help us get through it, that although none of us deserve anything, God's love has sent Christ to show us mercy, to walk with us in our sorrow, to be with us in our pain, to help us in our confusion, and to have mercy upon us, a mercy that we don't deserve, but is our great, and wonderful, and abounding hope.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent Year C

What are you afraid of?

2 Lent C

Transcribed from a sermon given on

February 28, 2010

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By the Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Psalm 27

Luke 13:31-35

What are you afraid of?  We’re all afraid of something.  What are you afraid of?  Are you afraid of the dark?  Are you afraid of spiders?  Are you afraid of snakes?  Maybe you’re afraid of earthquakes.  No, you probably wouldn’t be living here if you were afraid of earthquakes, but you might be afraid of hurricanes, which is why you’re not living in Florida. And your friends in Florida probably can’t understand how you can live in California with all those earthquakes.  We’re all afraid of something. 

Abram, who is later named Abraham, was afraid.  He was afraid that he was going to die and have no one to carry on.  He had worked hard.  He was rich and powerful.  And his wife had had no children.  All that he had was going to go either to a slave or to some relative that lived in a far off city, and his name and his tradition and his life would die away and no one would remember.  It was all for naught.  That was his fear.  That’s what he was afraid of. 

He had a vision and that vision starts as many visions and visits by angels begin, “Do not be afraid.”  “Do not be afraid.”  That’s the phrase that comes up more than any other phrase in all of scripture.  If you read the bible you’re going to find lots of places where an angel or someone says, “Do not be afraid,” and yet we are afraid.  We’re all afraid of something.  We all live in some fear, but God says to us, “Do not be afraid.”

What are you afraid of?  Are you afraid you’re going to lose your job or maybe afraid you’ll never find one if you’re looking right now?  Or maybe you’re afraid you’re going to be stuck in the job you have forever.  Are you afraid that you’re not going to have enough money to retire or are you retired and afraid you’re not going to have enough money to last?  If you’re a youth, are you afraid that your parents are going to embarrass you?  If you’re a parent, are you afraid that your youth is going to embarrass you?  We all have our fears.  We’re all afraid of something. 

Herod was afraid.  Herod was afraid of Jesus.  Herod was afraid because he was a puppet king; he didn’t have any real power.  He was a king just because he was serving the Romans.  He knew that if someone inspired the people, there could easily be a rebellion because the people didn’t like him very much. He didn’t have any power from the support of the people.  He was afraid.  He was afraid that he would lose his authority.  He was afraid he would lose his palace.  He was afraid he would lose all the perks that came from power and he knew that he wasn’t standing on a solid foundation. 

What he was afraid of is what leaders in Jerusalem and all over the world are really afraid of - he was afraid of the truth.  You see, Jerusalem killed its prophets because Jerusalem represented not just where the temple was, but also it was the temporal material power center, the political power center.  And those who have power, most of the time, are afraid of one thing and that’s the truth. And prophets, they don’t predict the future, they tell the truth.  Usually people who are comfortable and in positions of power and authority don’t particularly like the truth.  There are things they would rather not have said, and we know that today. 

Look what happens to the people we call “whistleblowers” –  the ones who speak the truth about a company, or an agency in the government, or what’s happening in Congress, or what’s happening at a school.  What happens to the one that speaks out and says the truth that everybody else can see but won’t speak?  They usually end up, maybe not being physically killed, but they certainly are feared and an attempt is made to silence them. 

The prophets spoke the truth to Jerusalem.  A prophet speaks the truth to power and authority, so that’s why the prophets were killed in Jerusalem.  Jesus was speaking the truth to people.  Jesus was telling them about God’s love.  Jesus was teaching them to care for one another.  Jesus was teaching them that the people in the temple were leading them astray. And Herod was afraid, but Jesus wasn’t afraid of Herod. 

When we read that the Pharisees come and tell Jesus, “Herod’s out to get you,” we need to remember that first of all the Pharisees were not Jesus’ friends so they probably had another agenda to be saying that.  Secondly, Jesus already knew Herod wanted him dead.  Herod had killed John the Baptist, and Jesus at this point in Luke’s Gospel, is on His journey to Jerusalem.  He’s made it very clear to the people around him that He’s on His way to Jerusalem and that He’s going to die there.  What the Pharisees are doing is presenting a temptation.  They say, “Be afraid and respond to your fear.  Live out of your fear.”  But Jesus wasn’t afraid.  Jesus looked at this artificial power of Herod’s and said, “That fox.”

Fox, huh.  A fox can be annoying.  A fox might even grab one of your chickens and kill it, but a fox is not really dangerous to a human being.  They might be wily and clever, but they’re not really to be feared.  Jesus knew that Herod had no power and when the time came for Jesus to be arrested and He was brought before Herod, He wouldn’t even respond to him.  He said nothing.  And Herod could do nothing to Jesus and had to pass Him on to Pilate.  But even to Pilate who looked at Jesus and said, “I have the power to have you killed,” Jesus responded, “You have no power unless God is giving it to you.” 

Now we do know that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus had fear.  Jesus knew what fear was, but that didn’t keep Him from doing what God called Him to do.  And when we read about the saints and when we hear about great heroes who have risked or given their lives, we have to know that they had fear, but the fear did not keep them from following God’s call.  The fear did not keep them from telling the truth.

Are you afraid of telling the truth?  Is there some truth that you need to say that you’re afraid to say because of how the person might respond?  Perhaps there’s a friend that you might want to tell about God’s love, but you’re afraid that they’ll think that you’re one of those.  What would they think of you?  Or perhaps there’s a family member that you know who needs to be told they’re going in the wrong direction, but you don’t want to cause any problems in the family?  Perhaps there’s a friend who needs that kind of truth?  Perhaps you need to tell the truth at your work or your school or your neighborhood.  Are you afraid?  I know I get afraid.  We all get afraid. 

I’ve just been watching the Winter Olympics, every one of those sports terrifies me.  I can’t imagine being at the top of a hill and going down and then up over a ramp at 30 feet up in the air, and twisting around with my head down and crash into the bottom, because I know I would crash into the bottom if I try that.  Or going down the bobsled run after someone has already died on that whistler course, flying down at 90 miles an hour head first, I’d be terrified.  I’d be terrified to get on that fast track if I actually could skate.  I’d still be terrified to be out there.  And I’d be terrified to be skating up in front of thousands of people who are watching your every move and just waiting for you to fall down.  But the Olympic athlete, I’m sure they’re afraid sometimes, but that doesn’t keep them from doing what they feel they need to do.

So how is it that we’re to get over our fear and not give in to the very real fears that we have?  And that’s where this wonderful psalm comes in.  And if you memorize one verse in scripture to hold onto in your life make it this one. The first verse of Psalm 27, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear.”  “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear.”  Remember that.  Hold on to that.  And when you feel afraid and when you feel there’s some truth you need to speak or some action that God is calling you take, and you feel that fear come up in you, remember, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear.”  Amen.