The Friday Letters
26 September 2008
Lancelot Andrews

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Fall was in the air this week as cooler weather and a lack of fair traffic made it feel like the season was finally coming together. The dog and I both really appreciate the lower temperatures, as we both carry an excess of insulation around with us. Hers is a natural layer of fur while mine is more french-fry derived, but the effect is the same and cool nights with the window cracked open are a blessing of Fall.

We enter weekend two of our Fall Stewardship Campaign today. Our theme for the week is Spiritual Giving. I’m excited about this theme in spite of the financial news we’re being bombarded with the past couple of weeks. In one sense, having a fiscal crisis of the caliber of the savings and loan meltdown of the early 80s or the stock market crash of the 1920s (depending on which expert you’re listening to) seems to be a pretty bad backdrop for asking people to make charitable donations to the church. I disagree. In a practical sense, perhaps this timing is bad, but practical giving was last week’s theme.

In a spiritual sense, giving has never had anything to do with how much money you gave. Perhaps the recent financial crisis has eroded the value of your retirement account and your fixed income from that source is less? That only makes your gift to Christ Church all the more valuable, even if it is less than it was last year. The harder it is to give, the more precious that giving becomes in a spiritual sense.

Remember the story of the Widow’s Offering (it’s from Mark 12:41-44): after several affluent people had made ostentatious gifts to the Temple treasury, a widow approaches and drops in the box her last two coins. Look, says Jesus to his disciples, her gift is the greater, for she has given out of the little she had.

Practical and Spiritual giving have to live side by side of course. If the whole church was made up of poor widows giving a few coins we’d need a whole bunch of coats because we wouldn’t be able to pay for heat. On the other hand, a church that gets by on the generous donations of just a few has an even worse problem, despite being able to pay the gas bill. God does not call us to be good payers of bills. God calls us to be giving people.

May this Friday in Fall be a gift to you.

Peace,

Ben.

View archived copy here.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland
Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

The lessons today from Exodus and Matthew represent an amazingly auspicious confluence of lectionary rotation and parish life. Normally, when it comes time to run a Stewardship Campaign and ask people to support the church financially, we are already well into October or November. Nothing wrong with that—we’re just a bit early this year because I’m planning to take some vacation in October—but the consequence of talking about giving during October and November is that the lectionary has by that time already begun revving up for Advent. The lessons tend towards the end of the world, which doesn’t make that great a backdrop for asking for pledges really. I guess you could go for the, “the world is going to end and you won’t need your money anyways so give it all to the church” line, but that’s been done before on television to a bad end. Besides, if you don’t need your money why would the church? I don’t like to talk about heaven in terms of specifics, but one thing I’m pretty sure of is that there will not be budget reports there.
Being that I’m so used to having less than ideal scripture lessons to work with during Stewardship season, imagine my happy surprise when I read the lectionary for today and discovered both the story of Moses and Aaron and the Manna from Heaven, and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard who are paid the daily wage. Two stories about money! Or at least stories about God providing for people in the way that God does.
The Exodus story begins with a truly wonderful sentence: “The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.” Don’t you just know Moses wrote that sentence? Oh, woe is me, everybody is complaining. Sure, Moses had led his people out of slavery in Egypt, but that was like months ago! What have you done for us lately Moses? I’m not surprised that the people were losing confidence; I’m only surprised that Moses seems so bitter about it. Surely a leader such as Moses knew enough about human nature to understand that hardship suffered in the past was nothing compared to hardship suffered immediately. Yes, being slaves in Egypt was bad, but it is hard to remember it as being worse that wandering lost in the wilderness with not enough food. We have short memories, we human beings, especially when it comes to our own comfort and safety.
None of that, however, is the point of this story. The manna in the morning and the quails at night both are not meant to feed the people, although they have that happy side effect. The point that God is attempting to make is that these people, this nation of Israel, is utterly dependant on God. It is a point God has been at pains to teach all people at all times and in all places, but I think maybe God was hoping that by being so specific and obvious to these particular people in that particular time and particular place they would really absorb the lesson and pass it on to the rest of us. Unfortunately, I’m guessing they just made roast quail stuffed with manna stuffing for dinner and went to sleep full.
The story Jesus has to tell contains the same lesson wrapped in different packaging. The story of the laborers in the vineyard is a great parable because, like all great parables, there are many aspects to it—different ways to hear it and different lessons to be learned. The lesson that goes along with Moses, Aaron, and the Manna is the one in which the owner of the vineyard is God and we are the laborers. At the end of the day we are given one days wages, no matter how long we worked. This is clearly not fair, and the laborers in the story point that out to God in no uncertain terms. God replies, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” There are echoes of Job here as God’s answer to the accusation of unfairness is not to dispute the unfairness but to reply basically, that God is God and God is going to do what God is going to do, and if we cannot understand that then that is just further evidence that we are not God. That still doesn’t make it fair, so allow me to say what God didn’t think worth saying: thinking that the world is fair after about age five is just refusing to grow up.
It would be nice to think that even if the world weren’t fair that God would be, and the realization that God might not be gives this parable its uncomfortable edge. Fairness doesn’t always play well with justice and mercy however, and who knows, maybe God is completely fair in a way that we just can’t understand. The story isn’t really about fairness, just like the story of the manna from heaven wasn’t really about food.
The Israelites cannot survive without God’s gifts. Without the manna, they will starve. The laborers cannot survive without the owner’s wages. Without money, their families will starve. We cannot survive without God’s gifts either, be they physical or spiritual. Without God’s presence, our souls will starve. That’s as clear as I can say it.
The theme for this first weekend of Stewardship season is “Practical Giving.” To be perfectly honest with you, I’m looking forward to the next two weeks’ themes. I’d much rather talk about spiritual giving and visionary giving than practical giving. Not because I think practical reasons to give are bad reasons. They just aren’t as exciting to priestly types like myself.
Here’s the practical reason to give money to the church: we operate in the real world, we need a certain amount of money to pay the utility bills, to maintain this structure, to fund the salaries of our employees. No money, no church. Pretty simple, very straightforward. As true of this place as it is of NPR, the Humane Society, or any other non-profit organization that exists at the pleasure of its contributing members.
There are very good practical reasons to give to the church. There were very practical reasons why sending flocks of quail and mysterious flaky substances to the Israelites was a good idea. You can’t appreciate the spiritual nuances of depending on God’s gifts if you are worried about starving to death. We can’t become spiritual givers as a church community if we are constantly worried about the budget. We are the laborers in God’s vineyard, and while God’s salary structure may not be clear to us, it is clear that we are called to be thankful for what we are given and to make return payment on that thanksgiving. AMEN.

The Friday Letters
19 September 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

For some reason known only to a select few (of whom I am not one) September 19th is International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day. In a pastoral letter to a church this is apropos of nothing at all, but I wanted to wish you a happy pirate day nevertheless. Make sure to greet your friends and neighbors with a hearty “Arrrr!”

This weekend is the first of three weekends in our Fall Stewardship Season. The Stewardship Committee and I have come up with themes for each weekend. This first weekend is “Practical Giving,” next weekend is “Spiritual Giving,” and the final weekend’s theme is “Visionary Giving.” You’ll hear from a few different people on each theme; there will be an article in The eClarion, a short testimonial on Sunday morning, and of course my own Friday Letter and Sermon each week. Anything you miss out on will end up on our website, so you can catch up there.

Our kick-off dinner is tomorrow night at 6:30pm. We’ve been a little lax about asking for RSVPs, but if you’re free we want you to come. The usual suspects have taken charge of the kitchen and it promises to be a delicious meal. Unfortunately the entertainment for the evening consists of myself, but I’ll try to make it worth your while anyways.

In case you haven’t heard through the grapevine, I’ll be taking three weeks off in October. My youngest brother is getting married during that time, a ceremony I get to perform. Then my dad is planning to move out here so I’ll be helping him look for a place to live. I’m very much looking forward to the time off, but it sure makes the next couple weeks look full. A wise man once observed that if we worked every day like we worked the day before we went on vacation we would get an amazing amount of stuff done. Of course, we’d probably die early from overwork too. For now I’d better get back to it. Have a wonderful piratey Friday, and I hope to see you Sunday.

Peace,

Ben.

View archived copy here.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland
Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

You’d think that by now Peter would have learned to not ask the first question. In the past couple weeks of our lectionary Peter has been called by Jesus both “The Rock”, and “The Devil.” Peter habitually spits out the first thing to come to his mind, and apparently Peter’s mind is not a bus stop where wise though carrying express buses like to stop. Most of us learn in elementary school that if we don’t have the slightest idea what answer the teacher is looking for it is much safer to wait until one of your classmates sticks his neck out first. Then again, there was usually that funny kid who would always say something idiotic, and we’d all laugh at him; even though we might have been thinking the same thing and just lucked out that he said it out loud. I guess Peter was that kid.
When Jesus comes to a pause in the parable telling, Peter speaks up and says, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” It might seem as if Peter has pulled the number seven out of his unreliable hat, but this number actually represents some progress on Peter’s part. Jewish tradition at the time said that you were to forgive your neighbor three times. By upping the ante to seven, Peter demonstrates that he has at least been paying attention. Whatever answer Jesus is going to give, to any given question, is not going to be the answer you thought it was.
Perhaps Peter and the other disciples expected Jesus to nod and express his pleasure that they were finally getting it. Not so, unfortunately. Once again Peter and the others have failed to grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ commandment. Not seven times, but seventy-seven times, which is another way to say as many times as it takes, stop counting, because we aren’t going to keep score any more.
Then Jesus tells another parable, this one pretty straightforward, about a king, and a slave, and a lesser slave. The slave owes the king big time, but when he asks for forgiveness he gets it. He then leaves the king’s presence and runs into another slave, one who happens to owe him a debt. If you translate the debts into common coin instead of talents and denarii, it comes out that the first slave owed the king a debt approximately six hundred thousand times greater than the second slave owed him. Which makes it all the more despicable when the slave sends his fellow slave to prison over the much more minor debt. Those of us hearing the parable cannot help but agree with the king when he puts down that first slave of whom so much was forgiven, because he would not show forgiveness in return. “Yeah!” we think, “you show that ungrateful slave! Stand up for the little guy! Isn’t it great to see God kicking butt and taking names?” Jesus then ruins the story by making it pretty clear he regards us as the middle slaves and not the “little guy”.
It is ironic, I think, that the religion we practice is essentially defined by forgiveness, and yet we don’t seem to be all that good at it. Surely Jesus had to have known how hard this was going to be? I even wonder if there is some biological reason for how difficult it is for human beings to forgive and forget. I couldn’t have used this example in a sermon even a couple years ago, but I’ll use it now, because I think that in order to really understand the human bias against forgiveness you have to be married. How many of you who are married know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that any time you have an argument with your spouse—any time you feel that you’ve been wronged—you instantly have access to every single wrong that person has ever perpetrated against you at any single point in the past? These are things that have been “forgiven,” but as soon as it’s time to argue again they come right back out of the forgiveness pile.
I know this is true for me. As soon as it becomes clear that Jieun and I are going to have a disagreement, I instantly have access to every single occasion where she has done anything that can even remotely be construed as mean. I don’t even want the list! Even when we’re fighting I know that there is no person on this earth I love more than her, and I don’t want to bring up things from the past because I know that will only make it worse because I’m supposed to have forgiven her those things. But the list is there anyways. Even if I have the courage to not use anything from the list, it is still hanging right there, burning away in my mind. Jesus asks for forgiveness from the heart, and I can barely manage to fake it by keeping my mouth shut.
Too bad it only gets worse. If forgiveness is that difficult with people we love, how much more difficult is it going to be with people we don’t? How much harder is it going to be when that which we have to forgive is more than just a casual slight?
Perhaps you remember a few years ago there were stories in the news about a man who had taken a gun into an Amish community and killed several of their children. And the Amish people forgave him. They invited him to the funerals, and they cared about him, and they forgave him, and I don’t know if that is amazing or if they are crazy. I remember one person I knew at the time who was furious with those Amish people for what they did. My own reaction was more along the lines of stunned incomprehension, but I could kind of understand the anger too. They only did it because they are Christians, and Jesus said to forgive, but I’m a Christian too, and I just cannot imagine, and I know I’m that middle slave and God has forgiven me incredible things while I cannot forgive hardly at all.
The tit-for-tat implied by Jesus’ parable is fairly terrifying. Just as the king took vengeance on the slave who would not forgive, so will the heavenly father not forgive us unless we forgive others. I don’t know about you, but I was pretty much counting on the fact that God was better at forgiving than I am. And I think God is better at forgiving. There is enough scripture on this subject that is clearly in favor of God having leveraged the system so that even our efforts to fake forgiveness by keeping our mouths closed might yield the transcendent forgiveness of God. We should not be surprised, however, that there is some accountability involved: we say it every week that we’re here:
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
It’s a little bit cloaked because of the King James English, but I’m sure you’ll remember that trespasses can also be translated as debts or sins. The thing we miss though, is that the prayer (the only prayer Jesus bothered to teach his disciples) does not say:
“Forgive us our trespasses and we’ll see if we can’t half-heartedly make some attempt to maybe forgive someone else’s trespasses, as long as we like them and they haven’t really done anything that bad to start with.”
That line isn’t nearly as poetic as the original, but I’m afraid it is how we tend to translate it inside our own heads. The keystone of that original sentence is the little word, “as”. Forgive us, as we forgive. Does this mean that if we’re just faking it and trying to keep our mouths shut, so too will God just be faking it when we are forgiven? I hope not. I don’t believe so. But I’m going to try and get better at forgiving just in case. AMEN.

View archived copy here.

A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland
Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

I have to begin this sermon by admiting that I am not fully qualified to preach on the lesson from Exodus. This story is well known to most people. It is the beginning of the Exodus itself. It is the story of the night when God finally gave up negotiating with Pharaoh. It is both a horrific story (from the perspective of the Egyptians at least) and a stirring call to freedom. Too bad I’m not really qualified to preach on it. It’s not that I don’t have the education, precisely. I took introduction to the Old Testament my first semester in seminary. Three years of graduate study ought to make me pretty well informed, along with the various books that reside on my shelves. That’s not the problem. The problem—the reason I’m unqualified to preach on this particular story—is that I have never seen a movie with Charlton Heston in it.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that every preaching guide I looked up this week referenced a movie, but it is certainly a thing one way or another. The story of the Exodus has been a part of Christian influenced cultures for hundreds of years, and that’s only getting more so since the invention of movies. God’s deeds in Egypt are foundational for the understanding of the Jewish faith, and therefore of the Christian faith, but they also happen to be some of God’s most cinematic deeds as well.
As Christians we tend to talk most about the Passover and Exodus around Holy Week and Easter, and frankly I’m going to save my best bits of sermon material for that time of year. Good luck for today though, that Jesus has something just as interesting to say to us.
I like to refer to this passage in Matthew as the Jesus Guide to Conflict Resolution. You’ve most likely heard this bit of scripture before. The system goes essentially like this: if you have a problem with someone, first go to them yourself, and try to reason with them. If that doesn’t work, get a friend or two to help mediate, and try again. If you still cannot resolve your differences, get the whole community involved. In human resources language this would be called a confrontation—negotiation—arbitration model. (Good thing Jesus wasn’t a human resources guy.)
When Jesus first gave this advice, it was likely meant for his own small community. When Matthew got around to writing it up in his Gospel, it was likely meant for the still fairly small Christian community. For this early church community, a method of internal conflict resolution was probably very necessary. It wasn’t as if they could always go to the synagogue to air their grievances, as the non-Christian Jews would not always be friendly. And taking their differences to the Roman courts would likely end in persecution, not resolution.
The Jesus Guide to Conflict Resolution has been employed in various ways throughout the history of Christianity. Monks and Nuns in religious orders would adapt this bit of scripture to come up with their own system of internal peacekeeping. This scripture can also be employed in an aggressive manner, forcing a dissenting member of a closed community to fall in line with the thoughts of others who come first alone, then with a couple of witnesses, then with the pressure of the whole group.
Conflict resolution is one of the things you get to do when you’re a priest, so I guess I’ve done it before. I’ve even attended a workshop on the topic at least once. Most vivid memory of actually engaging in conflict resolution from within a conflict happened when I was a junior in High School. Somehow, a situation arose where a certain Freshman decided that I had greatly offended against him and began telling all of our mutual acquaintances how he was going to start a fight with me. I can’t reconstruct now what the source of trouble was, or how I offended this guy, but I do remember clearly how the situation came to a head. I was eating lunch in the performing arts building with my fellow band geeks, when this guy comes walking in posturing like only a teenage boy flooded with testosterone can. “We need to talk,” he says. Well, since I also was a teenage boy flooded with testosterone, I stood up and coolly walked toward the door. “Outside,” I said. Out behind the building we stood facing each other.
I remember thinking that I could very likely beat this guy up without too much trouble. I’ve always been a pretty big guy, and even though my last physical fight had been in the fifth grade, I had been playing hockey for three years whereas this guy was only a wrestler. I guess you have to be fairly strong to be a wrestlers, but hockey players fight dirty as part of the game. We argued for what seemed like forever, trying to establish who said what to whom about what and why. The details escape me, but eventually something came over me and I said, “Look, I honestly did not try to make you angry. I don’t know what I’ve done to make you so mad, but I apologize anyways, OK. I’m sorry. For whatever I did to you, I’m sorry.”
I’m still not sure what made me do that. It would have been far more satisfying to beat the crap out of this kid. Apologizing when I knew I was not in the wrong felt horrible. It was nearly stomach-turning. But it did the job. He couldn’t start the fight after I’d apologized, and I wasn’t going to. So there was no fight. I went back to lunch and he went back to class. A few days later he called me up and apologized for the whole thing getting so out of hand. I told him it was no big deal, but I still felt like it would have been more satisfying to punch him in the face.
I think that’s why Jesus’ method of conflict resolution isn’t more popular It’s usually much easier to exert your own will—by force, or by cunning—than it is to negotiate, or talk, or listen. When Jesus told his disciples, and us, to go to those with whom we have some trouble, he was not suggesting a method for us to get what we wanted from the situation. The Jesus Guide to Conflict Resolution does not begin with the premise that you are right, and that you will get your way if you bring enough people with you. That’s not what the extra people are for.
The key to the Jesus Guide to Conflict Resolution comes in the last sentence of today’s reading. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.” Get it? That’s what the extra people are for. You don’t bring the others to be hired goons, or even to support your side of the issue. You bring the others because the more caring people you bring into the negotiation, the more likely it is that someone will notice Jesus there in your midst, and make a decision that may not be easy, but that will loose a part of the Kingdom of God here on Earth. Bring the others, and bring the Spirit of God. It isn’t easy, but it is what Jesus is asking us to do. AMEN.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
5 September 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Looking forward to next Tuesday and the first meetings of the Finance Committee and the Vestry following our long summer break has got me thinking about analogies for church life. Because the Finance Committee and the Vestry are arguably the most business-like of all our church groups, the particular analogy that comes to mind it that of the church and a business; the church is like a business.

I have felt different ways about this analogy over the years. I started off thinking that this was a terrible analogy, that nothing about my beloved church could be compared to such an evil, greedy, compassionless entity as business. This was a normal thing for the son of upper-middle-class liberal parents to think, especially upon graduating from a seminary located in (The People’s Republic of) Berkeley, CA.

Fortunately, my first job took me to downtown Kansas City, Missouri, the heart of a business district nearly as old and venerable as they come in this country. I quickly learned that not all businesses were the corporate monsters I’d heard tell of. In fact, I discovered that the huge majority of businesses were very small affairs, smaller than most Episcopal Churches. Further, these small businesses were usually made up of people that cared very much about what they were doing, worried endlessly about their employees and communities, and took a great deal of deserved pride in what they were accomplishing in the world. Even the large (occasionally giant) businesses in KCMO showed me that the power of their concentrated monies could be wielded for good, compassionate, and charitable causes under the right circumstances.

The U.S. system of capitalism is not without its problems and is open to abuse, but what human system isn’t? Of course we should strive to make it more humane, more compassionate—to limit its potential for inflicting harm. Again, of what human institution is this not true? You could say the same things about the Church and while you’d be talking about different problems and different abuses, it would still be true. Perhaps saying that the church should be run like a business is not the insult I had always thought it was.

My feelings about this analogy changed again when I worked in Connecticut and heard from the Bishop there the idea that the church ought to be better than a business. He was talking specifically about the diocesan policies towards their non-clergy employees. His reasoning was that, as an institution that attempted to represent the compassion Jesus sought to teach us, we as a group ought to work not only to meet the best practices of business in this area, but to exceed them.

It’s not a perfect analogy. The church isn’t exactly like a business. That doesn’t make it a bad analogy though. There are ways in which our church communities could be improved if we managed them in a more business-like manner. There are things we can learn from the business community; I hope the reverse is also true.

The other popular analogy for the church is family. This isn’t a perfect analogy either, but it sheds some light on where other analogies break down. However business-like (in the best sense of that word) we manage to be, our community will always be more like a family. This makes our life together somewhat more challenging (have you ever heard of a family without problems?) but it is also one of our greatest gifts: to extend that most intimate of human groupings to a larger community under the guidance of a God we often call Father—a God who chose to explain the ultimate expression of love for us in terms of a parent-child relationship—through the example of the Son.

As a church, my prayer is that we would always seek to live up to the best parts of whatever analogy might get applied to us.

Peace,

Ben.