– Fr. Don & H.E.
Since Christmas is in the middle of the
week, thus no Sunday morning service to worry about like last year, we would
like to do this service together at 1:30 p.m. This should give us plenty of
time to get back to Grace for an evening service there.
All In, All the Time
10 November 2024
Christ Episcopal Church,
Year B, Pentecost XXV
1 Kings
17:8-16; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44
One of the courses I
taught to communication majors at
The principles of design
include such things as “balance” and “unity.” By and large, the students
grasped these concepts pretty quickly. They had seen illustrations of “blind
justice” holding her balance scale, and so they had a mental image for that
concept. Here in
In a similar vein, students have long been taught that when they write a story or an essay, it must have a unifying theme. And so they already had a sense of what unity looks like and how it functions in design.
Another of the principles of design is “proportion,” and for some reason, students had a hard time wrapping their minds around the concept of proportion. We’d be looking at examples, say of full-page ads from popular magazines, and they’d be chattering away explaining how balance and unity work in the ad, and I’d say, “So.., what about proportion?” And they fell silent.
I wonder what it is about proportion that made it so difficult for them. I wonder what it is about contemporary culture, or today’s political climate, that made students so unprepared to grasp proportion.
And maybe us, too. So many things seem so out of proportion today. Indeed, I wonder if my students had ever heard the story of the widow’s mite, or if we today have heard and understood. It is a lesson about proportion.
Jesus often taught with parables—little stories he made up to illustrate a point. But it is especially interesting and powerful that the story of the widow’s mite is not a parable. Instead, Jesus’ lesson about proportion is based on direct observation of human behavior. And, as usual, his take on that behavior turns our human expectations upside down.
He has been teaching in
the
Then Jesus sits down in view of the treasury to watch the faithful drop in their tithes and pledges and offerings. Many do, among them rich folks who put in large sums.
Then along comes the widow with her two copper coins. Widows stand in for the poorest of the poor throughout the Bible, for in Jesus’ day, only males owned property and thus the loss of a husband’s support guaranteed poverty to the women left behind.
The widow of Jesus’
lesson has little, but she gives what she has to the
“Look,” he says, “she has given little in absolute quantity, but the small amount she gave is a very high percentage of what she has. The others have given a greater absolute amount than she, but a much smaller percentage of what they have. Therefore SHE… has actually given more… than they.”
Proportion: The relationship among parts within a whole. Perhaps it is our devotion to numbers—quantities and amounts—the bigger and more the better—that makes proportion a challenging lesson.
We hear that Bill Gates of Microsoft fame and wealth, or a famous football player or pop star who makes millions give a million to a worthy cause.., and we’re amazed. It is so-o-o much greater than any amount we will ever be able to give.
We cannot comprehend that the $500 the teacher gives to his or her church, or the $50 the custodian gives, or even the $5 the waitress gives… might actually be more than the million the wealthy philanthropist gives.
We can’t comprehend it because we live in a world in which bigger is better and more is.., well, MORE. And the more the better!
But Jesus tells us that the absolute amount given is not what matters. What matters is proportion—the relationship of the part to the whole, of the gift to the total resources of the giver.
In other words, sometimes more is, in fact, less.
The widow’s mite reminds us that the absolute amount we give or pay matters less than the proportion of what we have that we give or pay. Proportion is why Jesus tells us over and over again that those who have much are expected to give more.
But however important proportion is, this story offers us something more. It is revealing that Jesus goes straight from teaching about self-importance and showy piety to his lesson about proportion.
It is often the case that the more we have, the less satisfied we are and the greater our desire for yet more. We hoard and strive, and become obsessed with quantity and size. Most damaging of all, we come to measure our worthiness and that of others by the bottom line.
Even our charity becomes tainted with our prideful performance of piety. Please do not misunderstand; charity is a necessary thing. But I fear that the devotion of our society to charity as the preferred solution to systemic and structural inequities that ensure a widening gap between the richest and the poorest, is more about comforting and salving the conscience of the already comfortable than it is about helping the afflicted.
Charity is rarely enough to change lives, which is why I
think our bicycle project through the
But, finally, I want to go one step further with this story. It’s not just about money and it’s not just making sure you give a healthy proportion. It’s about going all in for Jesus! Now that’s a bit jingo sounding: All in for Jesus! Not my usual style but I kinda like the ring of it!
The widow shows total commitment; she’s all in for God. Jesus asks the same of us. We might give a certain percentage of our income to the church, but that is not all God asks of us. God asks for our time, our talent and our treasure.
And even more so our love. The command that we love God and our neighbor as ourselves does not come with a caveat—like 10% of the time, or just when we’re in church, or only when our neighbors look like us or worship like us and believe the same things. When it comes to sharing the love of God by loving others, God asks for a 100% commitment.
The widow was all in for God. God wants us, all in, all the time.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.
What are you doing about it?
Christ Episcopal Church,
The Rev. Deacon Dr. Bette Kauffman
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8. 14-15, 21-23
So here we are in this time of Covid resurgence—and if you haven’t been paying attention, you should be, because it is happening! I personally did not have a piano lesson this past week because my piano teacher has Covid, again. I think this is the 3rd time she’s had it! And in this time of Covid resurgence our Gospel lesson features Jesus seemingly saying people don’t need to wash their hands. Oooops!
Fortunately, Jesus is making a much larger point here. He is definitely not saying we shouldn’t wash our hands! We should and must, with great care and discipline. So we will come back shortly to Jesus’ larger point.
But first I want to back up and come at this homily from another direction. Some of you might recall that September 1—today—is World Day of Prayer for Creation, which kicks off the Season of Creation, which runs until Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. Some of you might even recall that a year ago, on the first Sunday of September 2023, I warned you that as long as you had me on first Sundays, you would hear about the Season of Creation every September and probably October.
So… today I will approach the lessons offered to us, first by Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, then by St. James in the Epistle, from a Care of Creation point of view. That is why I chose for our Canticle today the Invocation and Part 1 of Canticle 12, A Song of Creation.
But we didn’t say all of the Canticle! Please grab your prayer books and turn to p. 88 and notice that Canticle 12 begins with an Invocation, then offers three stanzas: the first one The Cosmic Order, the second one Earth and its Creatures, and the third one the People of God. Then it ends with a Doxology, and if you read the rubrics at the beginning (p. 88), you’ll see that it is acceptable to say only one stanza, but we were supposed to say the Doxology as well.
I have always wanted to have us say the whole darn thing at once: Invocation, all three stanzas, Doxology. But… like most of us most of the time, I have yielded to the god of hurry up and git ‘er done, don’t keep the people in church too long because they might get bored and, besides, they have other things to do, lunch is waiting, etc., etc.
And that takes me straight to Jesus’ point: You can make a god of almost anything. And that’s exactly what the Pharisees in today’s lesson were doing. They were not concerned about the disciples getting sick from eating with dirty hands. They were concerned that the disciples weren’t following the rules that they, the Pharisees, had elevated to the level of gods.
Jesus goes right to the heart of it. He blasts them for having completely lost sight of what is important. Eating with dirty hands might not be the best idea, you might indeed get sick from it, but, Jesus says, sickness of the heart is the far greater sickness.
We humans tend to put ourselves, our pleasures and satisfactions, our needs and wants, our desire for more and more stuff, our convenience, and our addiction to busy, busy lives, right at the heart of our existence. This, above all else, disconnects us from God and from the world around us, from our sisters and brothers around the world, and also from the remainder of creation. We act as if everything revolves around us, just as once we believed that the universe revolved around Earth.
This past week, I participated in a webinar called Singing God’s Family: Rediscovering the Radical Beauty of Franciscan Ecospirituality. Greek Orthodox priest Jim Pappas spoke at some length about St. Francis’ theology of creation, and he said that Francis used the term “kindred” to talk about our relationship to all of creation.
Francis’ point is that we are not separate from but embedded in and part of creation. But just as we once believed that the universe revolved around Earth, we tend to see ourselves as separate from and on top of a hierarchy of creation. Even so benevolent a term as “caretaker” puts us outside of creation rather than embedded within it. How different would our attitudes toward creation be if we thought of all of it—plants, animals, mountains, seas—as kindred spirits?
Jesus says, the universe does not revolve around rules and rituals that the guardians of the social and religious order treat like gods. Jesus says, you pay lip service to God, but your hearts are full of deceit and pride. Your piety is hollow.
And that brings me to James and being doers. James is often accused of not understanding the concept of grace and of preaching that we must earn our way to heaven with good works.
Not so. James calls out our empty piety. James points out that when we wear Jesus on our sleeve, or a cross around our neck, but disrespect each other and all of creation, our worship is in vain. James tells us that true and genuine love of God must and will affect how we live our lives.
Likewise, we can pay lip service to caring for creation. We can say all the right stuff and wave the conservation flag, but ultimately we must ask, What are we willing to DO? How are we willing to change our own lives so as to nurture creation and to join all of creation—as today’s Canticle suggests—in loving and praising God and each other, God as the source of all life and each other—all of our kindred, human and otherwise—as bearers of divine life.
I do get discouraged at times. At another church I serve, I think the only progress I have made in preaching this Gospel of Care of Creation is that the Styrofoam cups have disappeared from coffee hour and we now use compostable or burnable paper cups for those who refuse a ceramic mug. Ok. That’s something.
And we have a commercial
strength dishwasher there! I am always heartened when I come to
Don’t just tell me about your appreciation of a beautiful sunset or sunrise. Don’t just tell me about your enjoyment of wildflowers. Tell me what you are doing—in your church, your home, your workplace--to turn from participating in the degradation of our kindred creation through consumerism and addiction to convenience toward everyday practices that first, do no harm, and second, actually help Earth heal from our wanton behavior. Tell me what you are doing.
Let us end this homily together by saying the Canticle 12 Doxology:
Let us glorify the Lord: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit;
praise him and highly exalt him forever.
In the firmament of his power, glorify the Lord,
praise him and highly exalt him forever. (BCP p. 90)
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
Here I come, ready or not!
I have an acquaintance I’ll call “Vic” for convenience. Vic has spent his life putting things off, not getting things done, because he’s “not ready.”
Vic writes and sings songs, but few have ever heard his music. His friends have encouraged him to put it out there, to go play for tips at a local establishment to see if others like his music. He could use the money. “Yes, yes, good idea,” he’ll say, “but first I have to put together a play list and practice.” But that never seems to get done and so putting his music out there has never happened.
Vic inherited his mother’s belongings, including some artworks that might be worth something, and Vic could sure use the money. His small apartment is full of stuff, reduced to walking paths due to all the stuff, but if you ask if he has explored avenues for selling the art or any of the stuff, he says he has to “get organized” first.
I don’t know exactly what “getting organized” involves for Vic. I just know that he has never “gotten organized” enough to actually DO any of the things he says he wants to do. Vic always seems to put a barrier between himself and taking action, a barrier substantial enough to prevent him from ever getting to the action stage. And then the barrier becomes the excuse for not having acted.
With Vic, the inability to act, the forever not being “ready,” is at the level of illness, mental illness. But most of us, at one or many times, have used “not ready,” “not able,” or “I have to do such and such first,” as an excuse to not do something. Maybe we’re afraid of trying something new, afraid of failing, afraid of embarrassing ourselves, or maybe we just don’t want to do something we’re being called upon to do.
Here's an example. I’m a writer. Or, at least I say I want to write. I don’t particularly like the process of writing; writing is hard. But when I’ve written something that turns out to be kind of good, I definitely like having written!
But I haven’t written much and for years my excuse was “too busy, I just can’t seem to find time to write.” Then along came the pandemic and I was stuck at home with time on my hands. Did I write? Nope! So at that point I had to give up the excuse of “no time” and figure out the real reason I wasn’t writing.
All of this is true of much more mundane things as well, and I think especially when it comes to serving God and the church. How often have you heard, Oh, I can’t serve on the vestry or the altar guild. I can’t lead Morning Prayer. I don’t know enough, I have no credentials to do that, I’m afraid to stand up in front of people. On and on our excuses go.
It takes courage to put yourself out there, whether it be in something like music or art or writing, or something more every day, like standing up in front of the congregation, or even loving your neighbor, whom you don’t even like!
There is always the risk of failure. Maybe people won’t like what we produce. Our attempt to love our neighbor might be rejected. So it takes courage.
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus sends out the disciples. Ho hum, right? I mean, of course Jesus sends out the disciples. He does it a couple of times, so what’s the big deal?
I want you to think about the timing here for a minute. This particular sending out happens in the midst of Jesus’ ministry. They’ve been hanging out with Jesus now for awhile, but… they have not yet experienced the Lord’s supper. Peter has not yet declared, “You are the Messiah.”
They’ve been listening to Jesus teach and preach for some months, but clearly they still often do not understand what he is talking about. They have not received the Holy Spirit. They did not have the New Testament to help!
And who are the disciples in the first place? Well, one of them was a tax collector. He might have had some education, but would have been an outcast among his own people. Several of them were fishermen, among the least educated of the population.
In sum, they are rank amateurs in the evangelism business. They have little relevant education and have experienced none of the aspects of the Christ story that we know so well and take for granted that most people know. But Jesus sends, and they go.
Paul gives us a clue as to how it works in the passage we read from Corinthians this morning. He has learned through prayer that God’s power is made perfect in human weakness.
"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness," God said to Paul. And so now Paul is content with his weaknesses, and whatever people who reject his message throw at him. Moments of human weakness are opportunities for us to experience God’s power, for God’s grace is sufficient.
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard addressed this issue of daring to put yourself out there knowing that your effort might be rejected. He put his conclusion this way: Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm and confidence in God. I have not dared: that is a woeful thought, a torment in eternity.
I am the kind of teacher who always dared my students to dare. A number of years ago, as she was graduating, one of those students—an honors student who completed a daring honors thesis, gifted me with a framed poem by Peter McWilliams. I do not remember the whole thing, but here’s part of it:
Come to the edge, [the
teacher] said.
[The students] said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them…
And they flew.
The punch line of this homily is this: God does not send the prepared. God prepares the sent. You’ve probably heard that before. I didn’t write it and I don’t remember where I heard it. But I remind myself of it often.
God does not send the prepared. God prepares the sent.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
Christ Episcopal Church,
Tim provided the following schedule of services for June 2024:
Sunday (6/16) is Morning Prayer at 10:00am with Jane Barnett officiating.
Wednesday (6/19) is Holy Eucharist at 5:00pm with Fr. Don Smith and Deacon Bette Kauffman officiating. The quarterly vestry meeting will follow after the service in the Parish Hall.Love the Law
Many years ago, sometime in the mid-70s, I drove about halfway across the country from southeastern Iowa to Philadelphia to get my graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Along the way, I stopped in Ohio to spend a couple of days with my elderly grandfather Abe Kaufman, who lived with my spinster Aunt Sarah, the youngest of my father’s eleven siblings.
I arrived on a Friday and the next morning, Saturday, Aunt Sarah informed me that it was “wash day” and asked if I had anything that needed to be washed. I understood that by “wash day” she meant “laundry day,” but I had just left home and my clothes were all clean.
What happened next almost caused me to laugh out loud. You see, my father was raised Old Order Amish. That’s the Christian denomination that takes very seriously Jesus’ admonition that we, his followers, are not of this world; we do not and should not “belong to” worldly things.
One of the ways they live that commitment is by not electrifying their homes. That powerline that would have to come from the “worldly” power grid onto their property would be a permanent connection to “the world,” and therefore was prohibited by Old Order Amish law.
So I was actually quite curious about how Aunt Sarah was going to “do the wash.” I suppose I expected tubs of water, a washboard, and so forth. Instead, she wheeled a generator out of a closet, poured gasoline into the tank, fired it up, and plugged in the washing machine.
I tell you this story not to make fun of my relatives or of a religious institution that forbids powerlines but allows plugging into gasoline powered generators--although that indeed takes creative law-making!
Rather, I tell the story to help us reflect on the relationship between “the Law” and all religious rules and standards, and the Good News of God’s love for humankind that Jesus came to embody and deliver.
It would be easy—and fun—to conclude from today’s Gospel story, that Jesus came to obliterate the law. This story, in conjunction with other New Testament teachings that God loves us and is always ready to forgive, indeed forgives before we even ask, seem to add up to “anything goes.” Therefore, you can do anything you please! Whoopeee!
I have indeed heard Christianity criticized for that very thing: What’s the point of a religion that bases everything on the concept of mercy and unconditional love and forgiveness? Why would or should anyone “behave”?
But that’s of course not really the point of the story. How appropriate it is that on the very day we read the story of Jesus invoking the wrath of the Pharisees by allowing his disciples to pick grain to eat, and he himself healing on the Sabbath, we also read from Deuteronomy God’s institution of the Sabbath as a holy day of rest.
Jesus says, the Sabbath is made for us, NOT us for the Sabbath. What’s not to love about that? Far from being a burdensome mandate that we must grudgingly keep to avoid the wrath of God—or, more likely, the Pharisees among us—God established the Sabbath for our benefit.
Here’s the point. The law is for us to love, not to hate. Because the law is made for us. It is to remind us to do things that are good for us, like rest, and give a rest to all those who work for us or to our benefit. The law recognizes that every person and thing—even the land and the critters—needs rest.
The law recognizes that it is not good for us to steal from one another or exploit one another for our own personal gain. The law recognizes that it is not good for us to lie to one another or bear false witness against one another. The law recognizes and upholds many things that make for a better social order for humankind.
But the law is not God and is not perfect. Never confuse the law—even God’s law—with God. God is bigger even than God’s law, which is exactly what Jesus means when he says, The Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.
The law must always be applied with love and compassion and mercy and sensitivity to different situations and circumstances. That is how Jesus fulfills the law: by showing us how to apply it with love and compassion and mercy and sensitivity to different situations and circumstances.
What Jesus is arguing against in today’s Gospel story is not the law per se, but “legalism,” which is using the law as a cudgel. Legalism is taking a line of scripture out of context and using it to beat up people.
Now to revisit the story of my Aunt Sarah and her generator for a moment, it’s important to note that not all “legalism” is the same. Yes, it is “legalism” to have a rule against powerlines and then an exception to the rule that allows gas-powered generators.
But that’s a pretty harmless—I would even say “silly”—form of legalism. It hurts no one. Moreover, the Amish are a pretty loving, compassionate and merciful community. They help each other, they care for their elderly and anyone else who can’t care for themselves, and they are known to be more forgiving than most of us could manage.
The legalism that Jesus speaks against is the legalism that does harm, and not only that which does harm, but fails to do the good God has put within our reach to do. Jesus healed people, thus for him to fail to heal the man with the withered hand because it was the Sabbath would have been a form of harmful legalism.
Sadly, some of our Christian brothers and sisters seem to think that our job is to use the Bible to beat up people. And it is certainly possible to do that. The Bible says many things and can be made to say many things by how a given reader selects and uses various passages.
But beating up people with the Bible is not our job. Our job is fierce, unending, ever-compassionate, ever-empathetic love. Our job is calling ourselves and others to live a life in accordance with the law out of pure gratitude for the love bestowed upon us. Love is our response to the law. Love is how we live the law.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
(Deuteronomy 5:12-15; 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-3:6)
