Category: Sermon

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 5:1-3
Why, Socrates, I always thought it was expected of students of philosophy to grow in happiness daily; but you seem to have reaped other fruits from your philosophy. . . I do not know whether you follow the common rule of teachers, who try to fashion their pupils in imitation of themselves, and propose to mould the characters of your companions; but if you do you ought to dub yourself professor of the art of wretchedness. . . .Thus challenged, Socrates replied: One thing to me is certain, Antiphon; you have conceived so vivid an idea of my life of misery that for yourself you would choose death sooner than live as I do. . . .As I listened to this talk I could not but reflect that he, the master, was a person to be envied, and that we, his hearers, were being led by him to beauty and nobility of soul. — Xenophon, Memorabilia

So we begin our 9 week journey through the most amazing nine  sentences of the New Testament — a veritable treasure trove of metaphysics.  This is not the story based, narrative New Testament that we like so much — the parables and the witty situational lessons Jesus is so justly famous for.
These are remarkable, pithy skeletons of ideas upon which, if we are to make any use of them at all, we must hang our experience. It may seem odd to begin these nine sentences all of which begin with the Greek word markaroi, variously translated as blessed or happy, by talking about poverty.  A depressing subject.  And just so that you do not attempt to gloss it, let me point out that the Greek language has two words for poor.  The first word is penes — it describes the situation of the working person — never quite enough to get ahead — the one who is penes is the one who lives by his own hands.  The other word is ptochos — our word — and it describes abject poverty.  It’s root is ptossein which means to crouch or to cower.  The povery we are talking about is complete.
All it takes is a moment of consideration to realize that this is not a recommendation to a life of poverty — especially since the kind of poverty referenced is so utterly abject.  Jesus lives his life, preaching about realistic ways out of abject poverty — and he loses his life in his insistence that the authoritarian regime relent on their downward pressure upon the poor.  It seems much more likely that Jesus is tapping into a bit of Middle Eastern wisdom. The same wisdom in fact that Socrates seemed to display and which he tried to teach.  That Socrates and Jesus meet the same end is not proof of their wisdom, but testimony to the fact that whatever wisdom the taught irritated the structures of power and authority enough to put an end to it.  For Socrates that startling reality was not evidence against his teaching, but on the contrary, part of the wisdom he taught to be able to see life as it is.
Now we see the line of questioning by which Antiphon queries Socrates.  It is essentially: “if you’re so wise — why you so gloomy?”
Antiphon was a sophist — a teacher of wisdom. Socrates was, of course, a teacher of wisdom too, the difference between them, though, is that Socrates was not paid.  Antiphon, according to the histories, was a rich man — he taught the kind of wisdom that people paid for –the kind that made them happy —  not the kind that might trouble the waters.
Now, the sophists were wont to attack Socrates as often and vigorously as possible because the common perception of the sophists, given that they charged for their instruction, was that they were greedy.  Socrates did not charge for his instruction.  If they were successful in any attack against him, they could have a reasonable come-back to the charges against them of greed, because they will have proved that free teaching is unsuccessful.
Socrates’ response, is longer than I have quoted.  But the gist of it is there — it is better to live a life poor in spirit and in accord with the gods requirement of justice than to be happy.   By acknowledging that the Human Condition is poor, Socrates is in fact able to life honestly, is in fact able to be happy despite the fact that he is not rich like Antiphon.  Antiphon recognizes that while Socrates is poor — he is rich in really significant ways that he will never be.
The subtext, then, with which we begin to make sense of this beatitude, is that our riches consist, as Jesus argues elsewhere, not in treasures that will spoil, but in the willingness and ability to see our true condition and to see it as part of and only part of , a greater whole, the extent of which we cannot begin to fathom.
Why is all of this important?  Because the seduction of sophistry is not unique to antiquity.  There are modern Antiphons for whom the goal of our common life is the pursuit of private happiness at the expense of the kind of happiness that comes when one’s liberties are placed in the service of others.
Today’s sophist’s go on the air and suggest that the desire to provide healthcare to every person, rich and poor alike, is really an ploy to create death panels. Today’s sophists suggest that because we invented the automobile and created the addiction to oil, we should be allowed to continue driving the kinds of cars we want — that the noise about carbon dioxide killing us slowly, is so much hock.  Today’s sophists use the bible in  distorted ways to argue that gay people should be denied a right to live, let alone seek the benefits of living in a society.
Here’s a story that describes just what I mean. The story comes out of a project run by the nonprfit group called Story Corp, whose sole mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening to each other’s stories.
The story is of Tony Perri and his wife who had been married for 17 years. After 12 of those years, he came out to her. Perri recalls telling a priest he was gay when he was 17, during a confession. “I thought there was something a little different in me, that I was attracted to other men,” Tony says. “And the only advice he gave to me was, ‘Be careful who you tell that to, son.’ ” “So I didn’t tell anyone for another 17 years,” he says. It was hard, but Tony finally told his wife he was gay. He said he knew it wasn’t fair to him or the people close to him to stay in the marriage. His wife asked him to never tell the children, but eventually, he had to sit down with the kids and “just say the word gay — I’m gay.”
Perri came to this moment of decision by a need to live honestly.  He says that part of his story is that he was simply not living an honest life.
The proudest moment of his life was not when he told his own children that he was gay, but when he told his grandson, because with his grandson, he never lied about who he was.  Perri broke up with his boyfriend, Uncle John, and at that point his grandson realized that this was a different relationships that he had previously assumed.  Perri explained that he was gay.  And he said to him that he would not lie to him — that he strives to live his life honestly.”
I think, like David Isay, the founder of Story Corps, that being acknowledged for our stories is being acknowledged for the condition we live in together.  And like David Isay, I think these are not just generic stories, but stories connected to a name.  The prophet Isaiah reminds us that God has called each of us by name — not in a kind of wishy-washy sentimentalism, but in a call to live honestly, to engage life authentically and to share it with others.
Today we begin a nametag campaign.  I call it that on purpose — much like the Story Corps is a campaign to collect stories, that does not end with the perfect story — our campaign will not end with perfect success in getting you to wear the nametags — for it is never over — this call to extraordinary welcome is a call to be neighborly in the open and honest, authentic and engaged way of the sermon on the mount.  In other words, it’s not just about knowing each others’ names — but about learning new names, about learning new stories, about being open to the kinds of things Jesus and Socrates opened their lives to, and about seeking our flourishing and the flourishing of our neighbors in just and responsible ways.
The name tag board will die, unless we see it as more than a way to be able to learn someone’s name we should’ve known a long time ago.  Eventually we will know each other’s names — and unless the name tag board becomes a way for us to extend extraordinary and honest hospitality, to one and to all, then we will no longer need the name tags.   What I find exciting about the name tags though, is that it can be a “program” of “church growth.”
I put both of those words in quotations, because I mean by them something simpler and more organic than a program, and something not at all related to the idea so common in today’s popularized picture of the Christian church that bigger is better.  I am instead talking about worship as fulfilling a calling.  And in that fulfilling of our calling, to become larger, fuller, people engaged in a wisdom that leads to blessing.
So, here we go.  There are kinks to be worked out, for sure — like how to deal with the tags themselves.  That’ll be work, no doubt.  But also how to expand it, so that people who visit us, are in turn visited, and accepted and made to feel like they can find their blessedness in this crowd who is  poor in spirit.  Amen.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a law to be obeyed, but theology to be intellectually appropriated and internalized, in order then to be creatively developed and implemented in the concrete situations of life. — Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, Hans Dieter Betz

I always hope that when you arrive here at 10 am on Sunday morning that you arrive ready to begin.  And not just begin, as in settle down to an hour of relaxing worship — but begin as in start afresh, as in re-ordering, as in getting down to the work of living with wisdom and honesty.
But I know that the reality is, for those of you with young children, by the time you’ve arrived, your ready to stop, to go back to bed and pull the covers up.  For others, the  reality is that by the time you’ve put in a full week at work, you prefer the former half of that old maxim about preaching: that  it should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  You’ve been afflicted enough, thank you.  Now, how about some comforting.
But I also know that you do come to church heeding a call that goes something like this: “Come, follow me, and I will make you  fishers for humankind.”  There is something more than seeking  a life of ease that brings you here.  Something more than seeking succor for your grief.  I would suggest that the commandment to “come follow me to be fishers for humankind,” is more than a self-help invitation to do something good for yourself, but in fact, an invitation to life itself.
I have purposefully translated away from the familiar King James language “fishers of men,” so that we might move beyond the familiar and possibly wooden hearing of it. I  propose that a compelling way to read that phrase, “fishers of men” is to read the action as action taken on behalf of humanity (For you grammarians, that’s a subjective genitive clause — humanity is not being fished, is not the object of the action,  but is actually doing the fishing — in this case through us). Let me repeat — this is not the usual way of reading the phrase, “fishers of men.” where the object of the action, ie, the evangelisation, is to catch converts.   I am proposing, by reading it as a subjective genitive phrase, that we arenot being called to a fishing expedition.
Neither way of reading that genitive phrase is “the right way.”  In the Greek, you just do not know.  But for what I want us to think about today, this non-usual way is helpful.  I want to begin at the beginning. Not with dogma; not with the doctrine you’ve been taught to think makes a Christian, but with your sense of call.  An abecedarian is someone who is beginning with the basics.  I want to begin at the beginning because if we don’t we are liable to uncritically assume that what I mean by this deep seated  call to worship, is a call to rope in believers, to snag folk on a hook and reel them in for the church.  And this is not what I mean.  We have been taught to think by the relatively superficial level of public conversation around religion that religion is all about living by a system of rules to be obeyed — on the conservative end believers might suggest that you ought to be hooked by them because the bible says that this is the way to live or else be damned.  On the liberal end believers suggest that you will be hooked on their religious hook when you see that their propositions are intellectually interesting.  Either way, the believer is on a fishing expedition.
But what if religion is not about believing, but about living creatively and honestly in the real, modern, concrete situations of life?  What if religion is not about this awful debate between conservative and liberal — but about an entirely different way of life marked by a confidence in it and a honesty in dealing with our fellow human travelers.
I ran across a nice little story that describes what I’m talking about.

A girl walked home from school, which she had many times before, when suddenly she noticed a new building.  Looking in the windows, she saw an odd sight.  There was a girl, about her age, standing in a far room, doing what looked like a dance, from the waist up.  Her feet hardly moved at all, but she swayed, holding a rod in her hands, out to her right side.  She had the other end of the rod in her mouth biting on it, or at least chewing it.  The girl outside could not see clearly for the window was dirty.  Still it was the strangest sight!  She began stopping by this building each day to watch the dance, always about the same time, and soon found herself wondering whether she wasn’t looking into the window of some kind of hospital — a hospital where they put people who did these slow dances while biting on metal rods.
One day, when she walked by, the window was open.  And now the girl could see clearly and hear as well.  And she heard the sound of a flute.  It was a flute player, not a dancer, and the point of it all had not been the movement, but the music, which the girl had never heard before.  “Aha,” said the girl, “now I understand!” Then, no longer interested by the spectacle, she turned to leave.

It’s a strange story — not all that interesting I suppose.  But it describes the way we think about religion in this country.  There are some of us for whom it is enough to observe the rituals, to follow the motions, to say the words.  I think that fundamentalism is like this.  It seems to miss the point altogether.  Others of us, persist.  And we finally get the window open, and we discover that what we saw on the surface, through the looking glass faintly, as St. Paul puts it, was indeed only part of the whole picture.  The music was the real point of it all.  We liberals read things metaphorically.
But the story is not over.  It goes on.

The flute player saw the girl and called out to her.  Surprised the girl stayed by the window as the other approached.  “Here,” said the flute player when she reached the open window, “wouldn’t you like to play?  This is yours, after all, and it is your turn now.”  With that, she handed the flute through the open window to the girl.  The flute player then disappeared and the whole building with her, and the little girl found herself standing in the street with her whole life still ahead of her, holding a flute — and trying to remember the movements and the music.

I have often asked you to look beyond the dirty glass of the window (whether that glass be our scriptures, or our traditions) and to see the whole point which lies beyond. But unless we put away the sense of  being a liberal appropriator of clever, metaphorical ways to think about God, and pick up the flute, all of this around us (the building, the scripture, the history) remains and we are not set free to make the music and live by its making. We are instead still speactators.
I’ve introduced one long word to you today — abecedarian.  One who begins at the beginning.  In the religious world there’s another long word that we who would play the music creatively should know. It’s existentialism.  If you have been a student of philosophy, you may be surprised to hear me suggest that we should know that word.  Most existentialists have been atheists.   But existentialism is simply a term some use to describe the kind of life the girl with the flute now lives — the existentialist, like the Christian, is constantly faced with a decision — shall I risk my dignity and attempt to make music with this instrument — or to put it more pointedly, and with reference to the Jesus story, ” shall I risk my life to follow Jesus?”
In other words, to follow Jesus and to be fishers for humanity, are one and the same thing in this sense.
It is not so hard to follow Jesus when Christianity remains on a wooden level, whether literally or metaphorically.  Who will persecute you when the music you make with that new flute floats in the ears of the powerful?  But Jesus asks you to do something different with his call to follow him — he asks you to play for all humanity — for in fact,  the vast majority of humankind hears only the noise of ceaseless and thankless labor, of growling stomachs and of the machines of war.  The difference between the safe making of music for the powerful, and the calling of the powerful to make music for the oppressed by putting an end to imperial practices, by seeking regenerative and renewable ways to power our economy, by regulating unfettered accumulation of capital, is the difference between honest religion and spectator religion.
Because we are existentialist abecedarians — let us choose to take upon ourselves the risk and make music for humanity. Each in our own ways along our own journeys.  Amen.

It is worth reflecting once and a while on my rather odd job of preaching.  And no better time to do that than after a long time out of the pulpit.  It’s been five weeks since we’ve been here worshipping together!   Every July I can’t wait for the break and I think to myself that the August recess is a brilliant idea.  Midway through August the luster is off of it, and by this first Sunday in September, especially if August is a long 5 week-er, as it was this year, I positively itch to be back in the pulpit again, engaging the scriptures and trying to engage you in that engagement.
Time for confession:  This year, I did not make it anywhere to worship on Sunday morning.  Between being here working on other things on Sunday morning and vacation, when I could have but didn’t go to worship, I missed it.  Perhaps my itch is related to my need to be in worship. But that itch is also related to the work of thinking about the scriptures, of writing a bulletin and of preparing a sermon.  All of these things make me happy, even if Saturday nights out with me are not so fun because my mind is elsewhere and my anxiety level is higher than normal.  The mental energy it takes kicks up a notch as the hour approaches.
The definition of energy is simply the capacity to do work. Work takes energy.   The basic laws of physics seem to apply to our psychology as well, systems tend toward dissipation of energy — toward entropy.  Working is hard work.  And yet, we’ve all experienced, to some degree or another, the joys of work, the gift of holding the entropic tendency of the universe and our minds at bay while we creatively accomplish something.
This is a central theme of Christianity: the work we do, the actions we take, are inextricable from the one who induced those actions.  Or we could say, as it is classically said, God’s grace is utterly and unconditionally given, despite what we do — but our good works, when we do them, we do them because the gift of grace, in that act of giving is experienced also as a call to respond in works.
Because these two are inextricable, God’s grace and our work,  we could say that  to talk about God is to necessarily talk about actions induced by God.  This is not to deny that we have agency and responsibility — we do — but to suggest that a change in the definition of one’s god is to change the way one wants to act.
Here’s a labor day example:
We’ve all heard about the famous Protestant Work Ethic.  The Protestant Work Ethic was a term coined by the socioligist Max Weber to give some explanation to the industrial revolution, to put it very broadly.  He drew on the thinking of two of the original Protestant reformers: Martin Luther and John Calvin.  Martin Luther thought that work was a fulfillment of God’s will for humans, and so, an obligation.  Luther’s idea of God was informed by his sense that freedom was essential to humans and God — work for him was a voling of God, depending on one’s gifts.  Calvin’s view of God was much stricter.  Calvin could not see how an all powerful, all-good, God could have created the mess he observed around him.  As a result, his God created this mess, and assigned to some responsibility for it, and therefore a place in hell.  But humans, in his scheme, do not know who is predestined for hell, and who for heaven.  That lack of knowledge functions as  an incentive to us poor fools to work harder.
While that may be a kind of solution, the solution forgets that in fact, one’s actions are informed by one’s conception of God, and a God who rules through fear, finds subjects who act fearfully, who cannot intelligently begin to solve the social ills of their day.  You might be thinking that thankfully, this kind of Calvinism is gone the way of the typewriter, but in fact it has not, it has instead simply taken on new names — and the Protestant work ethic is similarly informed.  Hence, the unlimited seeking of wealth that was seen by Calvin as a proper response to God, is today it’s own gospel.
If we were instead to base our work ethic on what seems more widely attested in the gospels, that God is love, and that that love takes the form of real relationships then the Sermon on the Mount begins to explain why and how people might want to live like the lilies of the field.  It’s a different vision of life than the one envisioned by Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic.
We have all, I daresay, experienced work as  drudgery, as demeaning and self-defeating.  I recall working in a factory after graduating from college where my job was to fold boxes and prepare them for the line.  I did not work at that job long, but long enough to recognize the self-defeating unhappiness that seemed to pervade.  All jokes seemed to be lewd and destructive, conversation at break time was similar and held only between drags on their cigarettes.  Especially for people whose livelihood’s depended on these jobs, I’m sure that some found joy in small things that an impatient young man just out of college could not see.  The two men, for example, I observed, who had learned sign language so that they could talk to each other over the din of the factory floor.
We live because such work is built  into its structure.  Again, the Calvinist solution is to bear it up — it’s God’s way.  But this cannot result in the kind of ethics we see Jesus about.  Instead:

• One-quarter of all the jobs in the U.S. pay poverty-level wages, so low that a full-time worker cannot keep a family of four out of poverty.
• Some jobs are unnecessarily dangerous. In the U.S. someone dies from an occupational illness or injury every eight minutes. Often, they (and their survivors) have not received fair compensation for their losses and they may also bear large health care expenses.
• Nearly 80% of low-wage workers do not have paid sick days so they can stay home, with pay, when they are ill and not fall further int financial trouble.
• Low-wage jobs are often dead-end jobs with no opportunities for advancement. At a poultry processing plant in Ohio, a 55-year-old man still gets just $8.10 an hour with minimal benefits after 20 years in the plant.
• In Florida over the past 10 years, seven cases of modern-day slavery have been exposed involving over 1000 workers and 12 employers. Workers are confined and if they try to leave or refuse to work they are beaten.
• All of us have purchased and worn clothing made with sweatshop labor. We have eaten fruits and vegetables harvested by farm workers who live in deep poverty thousands of miles away.

We could go on.  I titled my sermon, Stop the flagellation and be happy because of a note sent my way after the newsletter was published last Thursday in which I suggested that we need to put an end to the tag sale.  “I salute the resolution to stop the flagellation and to find other ways to serve our loving God.”
I do not doubt that our Protestant work ethic theology  also includes God wanting us to be happy — just that we get there in different ways — The Calvinists suggest that happiness comes a kind of slavery to a divine Master.  But Calvin had no idea that workers would be beaten for not working extra hours — or if he did he managed to convince himself that they were not really people worthy of the same kind of consideration as his privileged white male position was.
An ethics of work whereby we stop the flagellation and find other creative ways to be happy, and to serve this God of grace, like the ethic we find in the SM, could easily be criticized for romancing the small, rural way of life.  Jesus avoids this danger, though, by taking Calvins’ messed up world seriously.  “The beatitudes [which we’ll start reading next week, and work with over the course of the fall] detail the daily troubles: poverty, sorrow, brutality, injustice, lack of mercy, impurity of heart, war, and persecution of the righteous . . . [in the end though] what makes the world so dangerous is human folly and sinfulness.  In the face of all of this, it is due to God that the world endures despite its disasters, and that the possibility exists of finding a way through it all.  No question, every day has its own trouble, but thanks to God there is not only a way to survive, but a grace to change.  Amen.

As many of you know, last week was the occasion of the ground-breaking at the location of the newest Habitat for Humanity House.  The house will be located on the corner of Crosset Hill Road and Morse Road.  At the ground-breaking, which I’d taken to calling a mud-breaking, I reminded all of us gathered for the worship service that this is a Christian ministry.  Not Christian in the unfortunate, but not uncommon sense, of having to follow a certain set of rules, of which is included a command to “do good;” to provide shelter for the homeless. Not Christian in the ubiquitious centering of thought on the winning of heaven and immortality and not Christian in the unfortunate presentation of Christian acts as designed to win people for the church.   But definitely Christian in the sense that the Habitat’s activity concentrates religious interest on one of the great ethical problems of social life, and does so with feet on the ground and without any preconceived notion about what people need, in order to deal with their problems.
One of the healthy things about Habitat for Humanity is that it tries to engage in the ethical problems of social life in an empirical way — meaning that it does not assume what the best solution is to a problem, but meets the problem where it is lived and seeks to engage others in working on alleviating them.  An empirical method of solving problems does not try to put dogma to the rescue, does not try to argue that the solution to societies ills lies in claiming Jesus as your Lord and Savior, for example.   An empirical Christian social action is not a program to get people into the pews, but to get people off the pews and addressing real life problems in intelligent ways.  Empirical ethics embodies Rauschenbusch’s notion that the consciousness of God and the consciousness of humanity blend completely.
Millard Fuller, who is the founder of Habitat for Humanity, wrote that “Religious life and action are central to a full-bodied faith and certainly to a theology of the hammer.  Unfortunately, many people act as if Jesus had taught that the first and greatest commandment is “thou shall go to church.  And, the second is like it:  Thou shall try to get others to go to church.”  His approach to ministry together is explicitly not a modern day evangelism method whose ulterior motive in doing good is to win souls into the church.  He is concerned to discover community outside the church.  He is convinced that this common discovery transforms people — and he doesn’t care if you call it zen or salvation or fana, the Islamic doctrine of annihilation.
It seems that Jesus was this way too.  For the one who reads the gospels through the lens of Rauschenbusch’s and Fuller’s theology of the hammer, there can be no doubt that Jesus had serious issues with the religious insitution of his day.  Clearly we don’t know what he would have thought about today’s church.  But we can surmise that because Jesus’ criticisms of the temple  swirled around concerns with practises that broke social contracts, like regressive taxation,  discriminatory  standards,  and burdensome ritual his issue was not with the idea of people coming together to worship.  We can surmise that to the extant that salvation gest lost in fearful concern that it be salvation and not zen or fana, Jesus thought we were missing the point.  To come together in worship is one thing, and a good thing. But to replace the act of coming together to worship, with the commandment to worship in this way, was to lose the importance of community, and thereby lose any sensitivity in dealing with the social problems of our day.
I find much in the Letter to the Hebrews troubling for its seeming obliviousness to this point.  I do appreciate its effor to convey that we are brought together, not to recite rules, but to “consider how to stir up one another to love and to good works.”  It is troubling to me that this simple, important message, which we just read, is often lost in the letter by this basic confusion — a confusion which blurs that simple message and misleads.
Let me reiterate what that basic confusion is in the context of our reading from Hebrews.  For the author of the letter of Hebrews, Jesus was the High Priest — the one who “passed through the heavens” in a surpreme act of sacrifice, and who through his sacrifice is now able to save.  But the important thing to realize is that this was language used to explain Jesus’ continuing significance, a significance despite the fact that he was dead and gone.   People continued to talk about Jesus as the one who somehow is still relevant, still powerful, still important — that the activity of Jesus still goes on.  And so they borrowed ritualistic language that people had already used in their day to express this importance.  Over time, that language became separated from the original understanding of the words as expressions of the continuing relevance of Jesus, and because the content of what one had to believe in order to experience the contemporary relevance of Jesus.  This, however is terribly and tragically misleading.  The result of this kind of language which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews employed regularly, has been a church that turned first to doctrine as a way into the experience of Christ.  The result, of course, is that this experience is markedly different than the liberating experience of Jesus in one’s own place and time that compels someone to seek to establish God’s kingdom by righteous life and action in the shelter of a community of people seeking out of their experience God’s kingdom.
Let me conclude with a story related by Millard Fuller in his book, The Theology of the Hammer.  It’s about a from a speech by a friend of Fuller’s named Dick Fernstrum.

My first exposure to Habitat was when a group of eleven of us from First Presbyterian Church of Sarasota Florida, went to Immokalee, Florida, to spend a week working on a Habitat house.  . .  The house we were to work on was the last in a row of six on a new street.  The block walls were up, the trusses were set, and the plywood was on the trusses.
The newest Habitat family on the block was the Perez family, right next door.  They had a bunch of little kids — there must have been five or six of them.  Each morning as we began to work, out came the Perez children . . . .They were constantly underfoot and always eager to help.
As far as I was concerned, the presence of the children was unsafe, annoying and an interference we didn’t need.  It didn’t occur to me that by their willing presence they were trying to express gratitude for their home . . .  to me they were just in the way.
On our last day, we finished the roof.  I was one of four people nailing shingles.  I put down my hammer to get another package of shingles. When I returned I found this little boy up on the roof.  I told him to move away, to go back down; he was interfering with my work.  But he didn’t so I told him again — rather rudely, I suppose.
A co-worker said, “He only wants to help you, Dick.  Why don’t you let him hand you the nails?”  So I did — but still not very cheerfully.  I told him that if he could do it right and he obeyed me, he could help.  I showed him where to squat and how to get the nails out of my nail apron and hand them to me one at a time as I placed the shingles.  I was still being quite crabby, but he was very agreeable.
As we began, I said to him, “If you’re going to be my partner, I’ll have to know who you are.  My name is Dick.  What’s your’s”  He looked up at me with his round dark eyes and a big smile and said, “I am Jesus.”

The conclusion should not be may we see Jesus in one another.  The conclusion must be, instead, may we discover through feet on the ground ministry together, through community solving community problems, real blending of the consciousness of God and the consciousness of humanity.  Amen.

Today’s gospel reading relates a story about one of the three possible ways people can respond to Jesus.  In the preceding story, people respond to Jesus and his disciples’ ministering to them with enthusiasm and with welcome.
But today, we hear from those who are incensed by him and from those for whom his ministry threatens a way of life.  Today we hear about the fearful reaction of some leaders to what Jesus says and does. Their fear, like all fear is irrational.  It leads King Herod to wild speculation:  Is Jesus the  reincarnation of John the Baptist?
Most of the reading is a flashback, designed to answer that last question affirmatively.  King Herod is convinced Jesus was John the Baptist returning to haunt him for Herod’s having executed him, unjustly.  John had condemned Herod for marrying his own  brother’s wife, a clear breach of relational boundaries. Herod was upset by John’s truth-telling, and afraid of him as result.  When Herod’s wife, at an opportune moment, asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, Herod easily complied.  Each had their own reasons.  But in the end, each needed John silenced.  The flashback story is a recounting of how John had been unjustly  executed. It is also a way of saying Jesus is not John returned from the dead.
More importantly,   it is a way of saying that the issues of breached community thatJohn addressed, will not go away.  John’s message and Jesus’ were the same.  The blunt force of the prophets bears up through time and under pressure because the message is not special to the prophet but instead inheres in the very idea of the community of which these leaders are stewards.  And that message is that something basic has gone wrong.  John argued the people must repent and turn from the imperial direction of unlimited desire and power accumulation to something he called the Kingdom of God.  Both Amos and John, and now Jesus, in plain words, argue that something basic has gone wrong in the human relationship; something has gone wrong with our common sharing of the magnitude and bond of love. Steps must be taken to restore the broken relationship.

So here’s where these two readings come together, the reading from Mark and the story from Amos.  Amos was not a priest nor was he a professional religious.   Tradition has it that he worked with his hands. He knew about growing and tending and building. He’s not a philosopher.  He’s not prone to making sermons.  But he is a rare, clear voice about the fundamentals of human relationships. He uses the simplest of tools, the plumb line, to make the point:  What matters is basic.  What matters is that we are true.  When a wall is straight up and down, it is operating according to the laws of nature, and not fighting against it.  It is true.  When a relationship is true — similarly it is not fighting.
We know this — at least we know it in the sense of feeling it — we are authentic, true to ourselves, and true to the community we find ourselves in when all that we do we do to edify, to build up, to allow others to flourish.  We all recognize honesty, truthfulness, fairness, loyalty.  There is nothing fancy here about Amos.
There is one small issue that I need to address — and that is that these qualities Amos recognizes are qualities that are not only relational, they are fundamental.  What I mean by relational, I’ve just tried to express.  What I mean by fundamental is that they are what it means to speak of  God.  This is important because much of at least what I learned about God, and much of what I still read about God, might suggest just the opposite.  We learned that  God was mysterious.  But despite this mystery, we have also been told that God is outside the world, remote and passionless.  We have learned, by implication, that God is without feeling, and all-controlling, and intervenes in the world only occasionally through miracles.
Given that love requires an intimate relationship, one that is based on covenant, promises, loyalty and all the attributes that we experience with the complexities of human love, why have we embraced this God?   How can God be unmoved by our lives and yet still love us?  The idea of a passionless, omnipotent God flies in the face of the clear biblical representation of God as fundamentally relational.  To recognize this is to recognize that Jesus and John and Amos cannot be dismissed as some ancient prophets calling for a new world of socialism.  That’s not it.  That’s not what matters here.  What matters is that we come to see each other in a way that invites the ideas of the other; that digs in to find what the roots of our fears are; that understands that our highest obligation as humans in this world is to see ourselves as each other’s business, as each other’s magnitude and bond.  We are no prophets — we are simply people with a drive to worship in truth.
To be a Christian is to go the way of Jesus in speaking repentance to those in power, trusting God’s power of creative transformation, knowing that the issues are clear and the stakes are high. To pray for peace is to seek justice. To seek justice is to act against oppressive people and systems.  This way is, no doubt, risky; it is nevertheless, to live in line with the magnitude and the bond of love apart from which our lives crooked and tumbling walls.  Amen.