Tuesday, January 30, 2018

5 Epiphany B


"And she began to serve them."
We all have something about us that needs to be healed, that needs for Christ to reach down, take our hand and lift us up. How, then, can we respond to that healing?

5 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a sermon given
February 5, 2012
At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart
Mark 1:29-39
1 Corinthians 9:16-23

I used to have a really difficult time with this story of the healing of Simon’s Mother-in-law. The feminist in me couldn’t stand the thought of this woman getting up from a fever and immediately serving everybody. What’s that about?
But this time, as I’ve been working with this particular passage, I have come to a different understanding. I have thought a lot about this woman, this mother-in-law of Simon, who would later be called Peter. This story takes place very early in Jesus’ ministry. People don’t know him very well. Now I’m a mother-in-law and I have a wonderful son-in-law. He is a loving, solid person who has a good job and cares about my daughter. I try to imagine how I would feel if some strange wandering spiritual leader came along and said, “Follow me” and my son-in-law left his job and started wandering around with a group of strange people. I wonder how this woman felt about Jesus, especially since she was sick, had a fever and was lying in a back room of the house when Simon invited Jesus and all the disciples and all these people who want to be healed into their home.
Remember, they didn’t have big houses. I was in Capernaum when I was in Israel and they have excavated the town from the first century and you can see the foundations of the houses. They are tiny, tiny by any standards. They are three or four ten by ten rooms, maybe a little courtyard no bigger than that. This was not a house where she was off at the other end could have quiet. This was a tiny place. And yet her son-in-law Simon brings this entire crowd with him. I wonder what she was thinking. I don’t have any idea, but I like to use my imagination and think about how people, how characters, might have been thinking.
But then what happens is very interesting. It is very short, just one little sentence, but Jesus comes to her in her bed and he takes her hand and lifts her up. There is something sweet and tender in that gesture. He doesn’t come into the room proclaiming healing, he doesn’t do any laying on of hands, and he doesn’t make any mud or touch her ears or any of that stuff. He doesn’t demand a demon leave. Instead it is very gentle and very tender. He reaches down and takes her hand and lifts her up. What a wonderful image for healing. Christ taking our hand and lifting us up.
In the readings today we hear from someone else who was healed, and that is from Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. Now, remember that Paul had his issues, he had his demons. When Christianity started he was furious; he was filled with anger. He wanted to destroy them and he supported stoning Christians. He was so obsessed with getting rid of this heretical group that he was traveling all around searching for them. He was on his way to Damascus when Christ came to him. Maybe in not so gentle a way. He got knocked off of his donkey. But Christ came to him and healed him. Not necessarily of a physical illness, but from whatever it was that caused him to be filled with so much rage and resentment and need to control. He was transformed. What he says in his letter today is,  “I am obliged to preach the Gospel.” He has to do it. Nobody is making him do it, but there is an inner compulsion and need for him to serve - to tell others.
I think that is something that happens when we are healed, when we experience the loving, healing touch of Christ. It was thirty years ago when I had brain surgery and I will never forget that after the surgery everything looked different. The sky was a brighter blue; the trees were a deeper green, having faced the potential of my own mortality and coming through it. Even though there would be struggles in the recovery, coming through it I felt this profound thankfulness for being alive. I discovered that I started praying, “How can I serve?” At the time I wasn’t even an active Christian yet for several years I asked,” How can I serve?" There was some way in which the thankfulness for my life and my health meant I needed to give back. It was not contract. There was no sense that God healed me in order for me to give back. There was no sense of debt. It was just what else could I do with the thanksgiving that I had but to serve.
It took a couple of years, and no one was more surprised than I was when the answer was to be ordained. But I like Paul, I have to give back, because when I don’t there is no joy and when I do it is full and complete. And so when I think about this woman whose hand was lifted up by Christ - when it says she served them this wasn’t some woman who was told she should get in the kitchen, this was a person who was healed and needed to serve in whatever way she could.
We all need Christ’s healing. We all have aspects of ourselves that are not whole and complete. We may have physical ailments, we may have psychological struggles, depression, anger, fear, and we all have demons, those things that control us, our addictions, our fears, our resentments, the old hurts that still are percolating around in there. We all have demons we need to be freed from. Each and every one of us needs to be healed.
I’d like to invite you to close your eyes and think about and open up to what needs to be healed in you. Give it a word or a phrase or an image. A physical ailment, a psychological problem, an inner demon, a spiritual questioning, a sense of hopelessness, whatever it is, what needs to be healed? And then invite Christ to take your hand and to lift you up.
(Pause)

And if you feel now or in the future a sense of the healing power of Christ’s love you might find, you just might find, you might find yourself asking, “How can I serve?”

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

4 Epiphany B



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. 
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 for 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 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.
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.
The way Paul describes it is so beautiful and accurate - he says that knowledge puffs up. What a great way to describe someone who has 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.
The Gnostics 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.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

3 Epiphany B

How lost do you have to be before you are ready to follow?

3 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a sermon given on
January 22, 2012
By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

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 in half an hour when you get home. Do take out your Bible and read it. It is 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 than 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.