Temptation

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 17, 2006

You may think I should be, but I’m not on a diet. Not on a special one, like weight-reducing diet or a bulking-up diet. I ought to be on a heart-healthy diet but … well, that’s a topic for my doctor’s sermon. I’m doing the preaching today.

My late wife was a food writer. And one of the things she taught me that the best diet for a healthy person was moderation in all things. Not all grapefruit, or protein with no carbs, or whatever the latest fad is. Simply moderation.

This is easier said than done. Especially with the way folks in this parish can cook. But for a typical person—that is, someone without diabetes or high blood pressure, for example—an occasional slice of cake or hamburger is fine. Just not all the time. Temptation, of course, can lead to excess.

In Ecclesiasticus, we are told that “Wine is very life to human beings if taken in moderation.” It goes on to say, “What is life to one who is without wine? It has been created to make people happy.” (31:27) So Scripture tells us that the occasional glass of red wine is good for the spirit—and I’m told it’s good for your heart, too.

Unless you’re an alcoholic. And then that simple glass of wine is like Satan himself, pulling you down into the pit of Hell itself. That is no exaggeration, as any recovering alcoholic will tell you. What is clearly a temptation toward danger and sin is clear for some. Not so clear for others. There are gray areas.

I read an interesting story in the New York Times yesterday about how high school football teams are now being shown on national television, and the best ones are flying all over the country to play. One coach from North Carolina talked about the educational benefits. He said, “I’m putting 80 kids on a plane this weekend, and 41 of them have never flown before. But you don’t want to sell your soul to do these things.”

In other words, he recognizes the temptations that he could give in to, the bad that could lie within the good. Education versus exploitation. He’s struggling with the gray areas. We’re all different. With different temptations, with different problems, with different weaknesses, with different gray areas. And we all have temptation, because none of us is perfect.

That’s why I find it so fascinating that even the Perfect One faced temptation and was the only one who ever could fully resist temptation. The only one who could see through the gray areas with perfect vision.

Remember back at the beginning of his ministry, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” (Matt. 4:1) He turned down the chance to prove himself with showy miracles and to enrich himself with worldly power.

Jesus modeled for us how to react to temptation. In the wilderness, he faced temptation face to face and calmly rejected it. he rejected it by appealing to the word of God, by putting his strength with the strength of the Father.

In today’s Gospel reading, he does the same—modeling for us the way to confront temptation. He tells the disciples about how his ministry would end. He would die and rise again. The disciples didn’t pay much attention to the rise again part—only the promise of death.

Peter rebuked the Lord. “Don’t talk like that,” I can hear him saying. “You’re our leader. We need you. Fix it so that you don’t die.” It’s what I would have said. You probably would have said the same thing. Jesus had the power to do whatever he desired—but we mere mortals have trouble separating desire and necessity. It was Peter’s desire that Jesus remain with the disciples. But it was necessary for God’s plan of salvation for Jesus to die, to be put on the cross and then to rise again.

So Jesus says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Hard, harsh words. Calling Peter Satan. How terrible Peter must have felt. Can you imagine the impact of Jesus looking you in the face and calling you Satan?

It may help you to accept that if you realize Jesus doesn’t really mean it. You’re not Satan, even on your worst day. Peter was not Satan, not by a long shot. He was the rock on whom the church was built. Jesus knew that and had not changed his mind.

Perhaps Jesus was talking to himself. Temptation stood before him in the form of a friend. Yes, a friend can represent temptation. And it’s our Christian responsibility to resist temptation to sin, even when unwittingly offered by a friend.

In this case, Peter’s desire to keep Jesus at hand was a focus on human things. This was in direct contrast to God’s will, which had to do with heavenly things. Jesus had to say to temptation, get behind me. Jesus had to put temptation aside in the same way that we do.

All very symbolic, this passage. Peter was not Satan. Jesus is speaking figuratively. But the temptation to sin is best represented by the image of Satan, of the deceiver, of the embodiment of evil.

The person with whom we could have an adulterous affair is not Satan. The glass of whiskey that could pull us back into the pit of alcoholism is not Satan. The money that tempts us into dishonest dealings is not Satan. But in the temptation that leads us to break the commandments, that’s where you’ll find Satan.

Remember back to the beginning, how did Jesus resist the appeals of Satan in the wilderness? He appealed to the Father, for the love of God is greater than the power of evil. How did Jesus resist the appeals of Satan with the disciples? He put temptation behind him, putting his attention toward God’s will.

Who do you say that Jesus is? Some said John the Baptist. Others, Elijah. Still others, one of the prophets. Jesus is many things. I say that for me, Jesus is the one who stands between me and temptation. Who stands between me and the Evil One. Peter said that Jesus is the Messiah. The anointed one. The one who would deliver us from evil.

I ask you today, Who do you say that Jesus is?

It's a Miracle

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 10, 2006

Do you believe in miracles? On any given weekend in the fall, lots of football fans do. There are miracle catches and Hail Mary passes and miracle upsets—at least if you believe the sports announcers.

Miracle is a word that’s tossed around pretty loosely these days. Those football plays weren’t miracles. Now, if a team never bothered to practice and didn’t bother to even design any plays…now perhaps a spectacular win could be a miracle. But maybe not even then.

We tend to use the word miracle to mean something unexpected or something unlikely. The Red Sox winning the World Series? That seemed to be against the odds, since they’d been trying for a century. And the so-called ’69 Miracle Mets? Flukey and unexpected, but hardly a miracle. Both of those teams were made up of professional, highly trained, not to mention highly paid, baseball players. Call me crazy, but I’ll bet good money that this year’s World Series will be won by a team of professional, highly trained, highly paid baseball players.

You see, the odds are longer for some teams than others. But nothing’s impossible, even for the Cubs.

Even some wildly improbable occurrences turn out to have better odds than you’d think. I did an internship in hospital chaplaincy at a Catholic hospital on Long Island a few years ago. I remember running into one of the nuns I worked with in Washington, in the bookstore of the National Cathedral.
At the time, we were stunned at the coincidence—but it was only a coincidence, hardly a miracle. After I thought about it, it was a Saturday afternoon, when the tourists are out by the busload. New York and Washington are easily accessible. Washington is a big tourist city, so it’s not like we met in Omaha. And where are a nun and a seminarian more likely to run into one another, in a cathedral gift shop or a baseball park?

In our case, it wouldn’t be a baseball park. Sister Edith is a Yankees fan. Yuck. But you see, what seemed wildly improbable was actually statistically reasonable. You probably have similar stories, and while they’re fun stories, they’re not miracles.

The real miracles are the things that would take a supercomputer to figure out, if even that. Think about the percentage probabilities of your birth—once you figure in the chances of your parents meeting and falling in love, then down to the very possibility of the particular sperm and egg joining …. it’s amazing. The fact that you’re who you are and not, well, not your brother or your somebody never born…the odds of that are so high that I think of you as a miracle.

And on the other hand—well, we all had to be somebody. So maybe the miracle isn’t in the fact that I’m who I am and you’re who you are, but rather that we’re anybody at all. That God put us humans here on this earth, through that crazy evolutionary way of his creation. That God decided we were worth putting here at all, and loves us enough to keep around despite all our boneheadedness—that to me is a miracle. That’s the big-picture view of miracles. Creation as miraculous.
That big-picture view helps me in looking at the miracles in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus performs two miracles. First, he hears the plea of the Syrophoenician woman and heals her daughter, without lifting a finger. Then he heals a deaf man. Here, he does lift a finger, putting his fingers in the man’s ears. Two impressive miracles.

But you have to ask, so what? Jesus walked around healing people. He’s God! Are we supposed to be surprised that Jesus, God on earth, could heal people? How does that affect us today?

Well, if that’s all Jesus ever did, then it wouldn’t mean much to us. It would be a cute story, but not much else. But this story is more than just a cute story. It’s in Scripture for a couple of reasons. First, because these things happened. We believe that the stories of the Gospels are faithful retellings of the authentic life of Jesus.

But in addition to that, these events are in Scripture because they tell us something about the power of Jesus in relationship to our lives. They tell us that the healing power of Jesus does not just affect the deaf man or the Syrophoenician woman. In fact, if miracles only affected them, they wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else and we wouldn’t read about them today. But the power of Jesus does reach us today—it reaches you and me, everyone everywhere. All of creation. This is the big-picture view of the miraculous power of Jesus.

Both of these miracles came in response to prayer. The Syrophoenician woman came to Jesus, asked for healing for her daughter, even engaged in a back-and-forth with Jesus. Have you ever prayed that way? Not just asking for things, but truly communicating with the Holy One. Here, Scripture shows us that this is not only possible but desirable.

In the case of the deaf man, others asked Jesus for his healing. Intercessory prayer. Not only possible but desirable. We pray for ourselves and we pray for others. And Jesus listens, Jesus responds. Jesus performs miracles.

There are theologians who don’t believe in miracles, especially the sort of miracles involving delivery from certain death, inexplicable bolts of lightning, sudden physical healing—basically anything that involves nature behaving in unnatural ways.

And those theologians are wrong. I don’t want to argue with them this morning—I’ll save that particular argument for another day, because today I’m taking the big-picture view of miracles. Not the individual healing or the individual answered prayer. But rather the big-picture healings, the big-picture answered prayers.

As I said earlier, I think our very creation and continued existence on this earth is miraculous. One of the ways God upholds that miracle is through his church, the continued existence of God’s one holy catholic and apostolic church. It’s amazing—perhaps miraculous—that the Christian church has persevered for two millennia.

I am convinced that the church’s continued existence is one of the primary ways that God performs miracles in the world today is through the Church and her work.

Just think of it:

The blind are given sight—I’ve met folks from the Anglican church in Pakistan, where hundreds of Muslims pass through their hospital and eye clinic. I know it happens.

The sick are healed—You probably know of the clinic at St. Michael and All Angels, which makes tens of thousands of dollars worth of medicine available every month to those who cannot pay. You know it happens.

The naked are clothed—My seminary classmates opened a clothing shelter to do just that. My friend Chris organized fellow students into a brigade to hand out clothing to Katrina victims. I’ve seen it happen.

The hungry are fed—I’ve ladled out soup far and near, at the Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side and at the Soup Bowl in Anniston. You’ve handed out meals on Thanksgiving right here at St. Luke’s. You’ve made it happen.

Every time the folks in a church come together to make a meal for the family when there’s a funeral. When they give money to the rector’s discretionary fund, so a needy person’s power won’t be cut off. Every time a child drops a dime in the offering plate, slowly learning what it means to give.
Every time, it adds up. All these little things add up, so that every time we act through the Church in the name of Christ, we add to the miracle that is the Church of Christ on earth.

Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. Our faith is not dead. Our actions in and through the church constitute the ongoing miracle of Christ on earth. A church without works is a church without miracles.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church is a church that resonds to the needs of the world with prayer, with action, with living faith. And that’s why I believe in miracles.

Amen.

Falling in Love with Love

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 3, 2006

Have you ever been in love? If you’re married, that’s your cue to nod vigorously. I’m not going out on a limb very far here to declare that love is a good thing. A very, very good thing. There are many kinds of love. And all forms of love are gifts to us from God our creator. Scripture tells us that every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above. All of them gifts to be cherished—and gifts to be used.

Let’s take a look at love this morning. Starting from the top, there is the love that God shows for us: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

The Hebrew word you’ll hear used for this love is chesed—one word that means steadfast love. Not a love that waxes and wanes. Not a love that fades when the going gets tough. Chesed is a love that runs deep and runs forever. It is a love capable of the deepest sacrifice. It is the love of God, which God models for us and which God has for us.

We are told in the New Testament to love God in return. You will recall that Jesus described two commandments: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)

God loves us. We are to love God. We are to love our neighbor. And who is our neighbor? Pretty much anyone. That’s a lot of loving. And some pretty powerful love, especially when you consider the love of the all-powerful God. There is nothing more powerful than that love. That is why St. Paul declared, “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13:13) In our own lives, I can think of nothing more powerful than love in its many varieties.

And think of those varieties. There is the love of family. The love of children for their parents, for example. This past Sunday we had a funeral in this space, and it was remarkable to talk with the three young men of that family and to feel the love for their father, palpable in their words.

And there’s the other direction. I am convinced that there is nothing in this world more powerful than the love of a parent for a child. In that love of a parent for a child we see the difficult side of love. A parent loses lots of sleep over a child out of sight—whether it’s away at camp overnight, or out on a date on a Saturday night. A child doesn’t always understand how deep a parent’s love can run, so it’s easy for a child to hurt a parent. By not calling. By appearing ungrateful. Sometimes by just being a teen-ager.

This shows how love can seem a risk. And it is. Those we love can leave—either by choice or by what fate throws us in this life. And that’s why the next kind of love is such an adventure—the love between two adults. Now, because it is distinct from the love of God and the familial love that we’re born into, I’m tempted to call this eros-based attraction “voluntary love.” But as anyone who has ever fallen in love can tell you, it ain’t voluntary. It might happen right away—and I’m a believer in love at first sight. Or it might sneak up on you—and I’m a believer in that kind of love, too. Either way, when it happens it happens, and you don’t have any choice.

Some folks think that this kind of love isn’t talked about in the Bible. Those folks haven’t paid close attention to the Song of Songs. This is a most unusual book in the Bible, unique actually. I’ll bet most of you haven’t read it, at least not lately and not closely. Pick it up this week and read it—it’s short and one of the easiest books in the Bible to read. It reads like a love poem. And there’s a reason for that—it is a love poem. It’s not a dramatic story. It’s not scripted like a play. It’s not Wisdom literature. It’s a love poem.

Just listen to it: “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens. As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”

There have been debates for over two thousand years of just why a love poem is in the Bible. If someone tells you unequivocally that they know exactly the deep meaning of this book—well, nod and listen and say things like, “That’s a compelling argument.” Theories have abounded, many of them contradictory. St. Bernard spent 18 years and 86 sermons exploring the Song of Songs. Many have seen it as an allegory—typically of the relationship between Yahweh and Israel or of Christ and the Church.

And you know what, you can read it that way. And it works. I have read it that way and it really works. But that’s probably not the whole story.

The fact remains that it is a love poem and even the most ancient of Jewish interpreters were struggling with the possible meanings of a love poem as Holy Scripture. And one interpretation that has been around since those days is that Holy Scripture recognizes and addresses every element of our lives. Just read the Psalms. Every emotion is there, including love and hate and everything in between.

The Song of Songs is a holy recognition that erotic love is a gift from God, a gift to be accepted by men and women, a gift that God gives freely and wants us to receive and to use responsibly. It is a lovely gift, described beautifully in this lovely, lovely poetry.

The Song of Songs, of course, isn’t the whole story. It’s about the early stages of erotic love, the intense attraction, the deep longing, the physical excitement of being near another person with whom you are in love. But as all of you who have been in love know—and all of you who haven’t been in love, I’ll warn you about—there is much more to love than that first blush of infatuation.

Love doesn’t have to disappear between two people over time, but it does change. When you’re courting, flowers and candy may go a long way, but even the most thoughtless of young men have managed to get past that stage. But if you’re in it for the long haul, it takes work.

If Song of Songs was your only source of information about love, you would have only the melodramatic part of the picture. Not the focused, intentional part of the life of love that Scripture does tell us about.

As we’ve already discussed, the various forms of love are all connected. The love of a married couple is maintained and nurtured in the same way that the love of neighbor is maintained and nurtured. These are all parts of God’s life of love.

Jesus did not seem to talk about love very much—at least in so many words. He uses the word “love” a handful of times, most notably to tell us to love God and to love our neighbor. But he talks about love all the time. Not in the abstract, but in the specific. He tells us to love our neighbor not in some abstract way, but rather as the sort of person who stops by the roadside to help someone who has been robbed. Not just to love the church in the abstract, but rather as the poor old woman who gives her last coin. Not just to love freely, but to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

The Epistle of James is explicit in direction for the life of love. “Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.” This is how we are to love in specific, not the abstract. You don’t just go around loving your neighbor—you either do something about it or you don’t. You can’t love your neighbor and nurse anger at him. You don’t love your neighbor and refuse to hear what he says.

Now you don’t love your spouse and … well, you see where I’m going with this. You don’t love your partner or your neighbor in the abstract, but in the specific. You don’t love mindlessly, but with thought and care.

We’ll be reading the Epistle of James over the next few weeks and we will talk about its implications for the Christian life of love. In the meantime, take a look at the Song of Songs. And if you fall in love—well, we do weddings here, too.

Amen.