A sermon by Benjamin J. Newland on the First Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

“Therefore, keep awake-for you do not know…” The gospel of Mark is often blunt. The shortest gospel is concise, and direct, and spares not a thought for niceties. This is a good thing during Advent, when the readings assigned from scripture tell of apocalypse, the traditions of the Nativity speak of peace, and the practices of our culture scream for frantic activity. A good, blunt dose of Mark’s gospel is just what we need.
Advent, as you may have noticed, happens every year. The four Sunday’s preceding December twenty-fifth are always set aside for the season of Advent and the beginning again of our church year. Last week, the last Sunday in Pentecost, known as Christ the King Sunday, we reached the end of the cycle. Jesus was a King reigning from heaven, risen from the dead, triumphant over time. This week, a mere seven days later, Jesus is a fetus again, and we have to keep awake waiting for his birth.
The rest of the year we watch the cycle play out. Jesus will be born at Christmas. twelve days later the wise men will realize what has happened at Epiphany. The following week Jesus gets baptized and a few weeks later his parents present him in the temple. We go on like this, marking various events in Jesus’ life until Ash Wednesday when we spend forty days anticipating his death. On Easter it’s resurrection, then ascension and the introduction of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and finally a long summer of parables and stories about all the great things Jesus had to say. Finally we’ll reach Christ the King Sunday and we’re back where we started.
You might think of it as a circle, as we go around and around the cycle of Jesus’ life each year. History as a circle has its nice points. It is comforting to think that things repeat themselves, that there is a rhythm to life, and a sense of completeness when the circle comes around. There was a bump in the circle last week, where we went from the end back to the beginning. Of course, there is a downside too. If time is a circle then we have to keep doing the same things over and over again. Elementary school teachers like to say that if you don’t learn your history you are doomed to repeat it. I guess this must be true, because in fifth grade I learned about Napoleon and sure enough I have never tried to invade Russia in the winter.
My dad, who thinks mechanical engineering is entertaining, and studies the science of physics for fun, scoffs when I try to tell him history is a circle. “Time is a constant,” he says, “a straight line from the beginning point into the future.” Time is not variable, or mutable, or travelable, despite the overwhelming evidence of science fiction entertainment. Thinking about time as a line solves the problem of repeating ourselves like hamsters running in a giant toy wheel. It also leaves something to be desired, however, when it comes to the rhythmic and cyclical reality of our lives, the seasons, and the church calendar.
My solution, which I would like to propose to you today, is that history is neither a line, nor a circle. History is, rather, a slinky. I may not be the first person to propose this concept. It’s really quite obvious if you think about it. If you combine a line and a circle you end up with a slinky, for a slinky is just a line that keeps circling around, and a circle that never quite gets back to where it started from.
History as a slinky provides the best of both worlds. Imagine that time is a slinky and we are on it. We travel along the slinky and one complete rotation equals one year. We are now almost back where we stared from, but not quite. We can see last year, but we are just a bit further on. As the years go by we make progress up the slinky but we also can see where we were last year as we cycle around. The slinky model explains the cyclical nature of our lives, while allowing for the hope of progress.
It also explains the bump in the year when we come around again. There are certain points on the slinky where we are particularly likely to pause and look at the circles above or below us. Anniversaries are individual bumps, while seasons like Advent and Christmas usually bump all of us. During these times we look back to see the slinky circles we’ve come from. Some bumps, like New Year’s, also encourage us to look forward, to the slinky circles we’ve not yet reached.
We can even make our own bumps sometimes. World AIDS day, marked on December first, is such a manufactured bump. HIV and AIDS are a disease that a significant piece of this planet’s human pie has to live with every day of the year. If you are not a part of that piece of pie, then you may be able to forget about AIDS for much of the year. And so we invented this bump on December first, where everyone can wear a red ribbon, and everyone can pause and think about AIDS, and how terrible it is, and how we might do something together to help.
Advent is another big bump in the slinky. This period of waiting for the baby Jesus, of living in expectation, reminds us annually of a reality we live with all year long. The idea that God would make God’s self into a human being and spend a human lifespan living among us is not something easily understood. And so we split the idea up into pieces and spread it over a whole year and then do it over and over again. The piece we’re dealing with in this season is the waiting, and expecting, and keeping awake.
It has become traditional for preachers and ministers to make the annual soap box speech about the terrible secularization of The Season. As a priest of the church I feel that it is my responsibility to fire a few rounds in this annual and ongoing battle to recapture the meaning of Christmas. Each year we bewail the state of our holy day, asserting that Christmas is not about Santa Claus, and railing against the secularization, sentimentalization, and commercialization of the birthday of Jesus.
At the risk of sounding like a wild-eyed zealot, I would like to go on record as agreeing with the church’s rant. It’s not that I’m worried about Jesus. He’ll have a fine birthday no matter now much money we waste at the Sharper Image. It’s just that all the extraneous holiday stuff can smooth over the bump in the slinky that is Advent. If you’re not careful all the shopping and decorating and running around can make you forget to stop and look at the slinky circles of the past or to imagine what the slinky circles of the future might look like. Jesus just started his slinky circle all over again. It might be nice if we took a moment to watch how that plays out. AMEN.

An almost Friday Letter
27 November 2008
Thanksgiving Day

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Just a few words this week to say thank you to all of you. As we pause this day to give thanks for this and for that, for all the many things in our lives for which we are thankful, know that I pause this day to give thanks for you, the people of Christ Episcopal Church of Puyallup.

There is a harmony in the relationship between priest and people that is often sought and seldom found. I believe this is because we priests rarely appreciate the sheer imbalance inherent in this relationship: there is only one of us, and many of you. While we are called, hired, and ordered to care for people, it is just as often true that we are in need of care from those same people. I give thanks to God, not just today, but on many days, for the care you take of me as I seek to care for you. I give thanks to God for the opportunity to practice my faith within the context of this wonderful, loving community.

The medieval mystic and spiritual writer Meister Eckhart wrote, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” Let us offer that prayer most especially today, for all that is good in our lives, for the world and people God has given into our care, and for each other—our brothers and sisters on the journey.

In Peace and Thanksgiving,

Ben.

View archived copy here.

The Friday Letters
21 November 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,


The end of another week has come and it is time to write you another letter. The week has felt productive to me, in a helter-skelter kind of way. I got thrown off by Convention last weekend which was a much more vigorous kind of working than I’m accustomed to on a Saturday, and as a result my day-off mentality of Monday has seeped into every day since. It’s not that I haven’t been working, but that I’ve been working with an attitude of lightness; I focus on that which seems important and let go those things that I “ought” to get done but can’t do much about just now. This attitude is helped out by being out of the office a lot, meeting with people, talking about God and our church, delivering Eucharist, and just generally getting on with things in a practical way.


I’m not sure what to write you about; not because I don’t have anything to say but because I have too many things to say. Perhaps I’d better leave out the new book I’ve started, the cute thing my dog did, and life lessons learned by having my father live with us for the past two weeks. Not that those wouldn’t make nice topics, but I have to draw the line somewhere. Here we are at the end of the second paragraph already and still getting started.


I’ll share with you three shining moments from our Diocesan Convention last weekend. The first moment encloses two speeches about helping. Bishop Rickel used his address in part to speak about our efforts to help others through the two causes he has championed this past year: our partnership with St. Paul’s in New Orleans and the Bishops’ Malaria Net Challenge. I won’t say more about those projects here, because there are other places you can and will hear more. The shininess of this moment came when the Bishop’s words were brought home to me by another speaker who was reporting on the work Episcopalians were doing in New Orleans to help rebuild that community. In addressing the philosophy of his organization he said they had a two step plan: Step One: find people who need help. Step Two: help them. Everyone laughed. Sometime we overcomplicate this concept he said. It’s funny because it’s true.


The second moment I’ll share was generated by our guest speaker. I can’t remember what the official title of his sessions were, but they were essentially about evangelism. I’m not going to repeat all the wonderful things he said, partly because they would loose something in translation and partly because I intend to shamelessly steal his lines over the next few months. The shininess of this moment came from the absolute enthusiasm this man had for God and the church we are running on God’s behalf. Very energizing.


The last moment I’ll share with you in writing here, and perhaps invite you to experience it for yourself on some weekend down the road. On Saturday morning we participated in an “Emerging Church” Eucharist. This is a hard concept to define, this idea of emerging church. It is at the same time both completely different from what we normally do on a Sunday morning, and entirely familiar. If you took everything that was most important about Episcopal theology, worship, and ethos, and kept those things, while radically altering everything else, you’d get the feeling of what the emergent church is after. There is a permanent emerging church in our diocese. It is the Church of the Apostles (COTA) in Freemont, Seattle, and conveniently for those of us who are busy Sunday morning they worship at 5pm on Saturdays. Field trip anyone?


Anyhow, I need to run now. Have to get this printed out and online before lunch. I hope your week was as good as mine, and that I’ll see you tomorrow (for Evensong and dinner) and Sunday (for, you know, that church thing you may have heard about).

Peace!

Ben.

View archived copy here.

November 19, 2008

To: DIF Shareholders

From: Bob Keuhn, DIF Chair

The Investment Committee for the DIF met on October 24th to review the investment strategy and possible changes in the portfolio.  We did not change our long-term strategy of managing a balanced and diversified portfolio.   We discussed the very difficult current investment environment and reviewed the individual securities in the portfolio in light of their long-term quality and potential.  Our strategy over the previous years of maintain only the strongest fixed income positions (all U.S. Treasuries and Government Agencies) has proved to be a great decision.  The fixed income portfolio has no credit problems.

We were comfortable with the individual stocks we are currently holding and did not feel any sales were necessary.

Our long-term strategic asset allocation targets have been 2% cash, 33% bonds and 65% stocks.  At our October meeting our stock allocation was down to 56% of the portfolio and our cash position, which we had allowed to build up over the prior 3-4 months, was up to over 13% of the portfolio.  This was one of the highest cash positions we had held for some time. It turned out to be a good decision.

With the stock market down dramatically and our long-term equity allocation below our 65% target, we added to our international equity fund as well as broadening our diversification by adding 3 new individual stocks to the portfolio.  This brought the equity exposure back to 60%, below our strategic target but within our allowable 50% - 70% range.

The Committee recognizes the stress our financial system is under, but continues to believe that attempts to time the market would be inappropriate for the DIF.  We felt that maintaining our high-quality bond portfolio, broadening our stock holdings and targeting the middle of our allowable equity range (and below the long term target) were the correct and prudent strategies for the portfolio.

The cash position in the DIF is currently around 9%.  This is above our target range, but the Committee felt this would be a good strategy and leave some room for future investment opportunities.

I hope this helps explain our current posture with the DIF.

Bob Kuehn, Chairman

DIF Investment Committee

A Sermon by Benjamin J. Newland

Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

The parable of the Talents is another well known and often dissected Jesus story. It has broad appeal as it is equally good for Sunday school lessons and pledge drives. The coincidence in the definition of the word talent makes the parable a flexible one: just as applicable to financial gifts as it is to spiritual or personal gifts. Because this story is a well-known one, and because its lesson is not particularly difficult to arrive at, I’m going to break it down for you fast and then focus on two particular sentences, one at the beginning of the story, and one at the end. Hopefully we’ll learn something now along the way.


So, the story. The master is going on a journey. He picks three servants. To one he gives 5 talents, to the next he gives 2, and the next gets 1. The master goes away. Much time passes. The master returns. The 5 talent servant has doubled his money, and the master is pleased. Likewise, the 2 talent servant has doubled his money, and even though the amount of money is much less (4 instead of 10), the master is still pleased. Then comes the 1 talent servant, who has kept the money in a hole in the ground. This servant insults the master while handing over the original talent. Not surprisingly, the master is not pleased.


One clarification before we jump to the part where we figure out who these people represent. The numbers involved seem small, because they are single digits and because most of us have no idea what a talent was worth. I did some researching and found out that a talent was roughly the amount of money a laborer could expect to earn in three years. Why this was a useful denomination I have no idea; obviously laborers weren’t using it to buy bread.


A bit more research told me that the median annual household income for Puyallup, Washington was $47,269.00 in the most recent year for which US Census data is available. About forty-seven thousand dollars a year. This will either make you feel pretty good about your job or else cause you to look around the room enviously at your fellow Puyallipians. The point is that if we translate the talents given the servants in our story into dollars we get the 1 talent servant receiving $141,807.00, the 2 talent servant receiving $283,614.00, and the 5 talent servant receiving $709,035.00. Big bucks. Frankly, I’m surprised this isn’t a parable about not running off with someone else’s money.


So, to the characters. I hardly need to point out that in the parable the master represents God while the various servants represent us and our fellow human beings. The moral of the story, as any Sunday school graduate can tell you, is that God gives us gifts and we are called to use them, and to return to God more than we have received. Perhaps all the numbers in the previous paragraph will have convinced you that we’re talking about big gifts, but otherwise I bet you knew the gist of this story already.


Now for those two sentences I promised you. The first sentence comes right at the beginning of the story, though not from Matthew’s version of the story. The Gospel of Luke contains a parable very similar to the one we’re working on. It’s at chapter 19, verses 11 through 27, if you’d like to make the comparison. Whereas Matthew jumps right into the parable, Luke gives a little introduction. It goes like this:


As they were listening to this, he went on to tell a parable, because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately. -Luke 19:11


To me this is an interesting way to set up this parable, which doesn’t have anything to do with Jerusalem and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Kingdom of God appearing immediately. In order for this intro to make sense, you have to think that Jesus is telling this story not to those gathered in his present, but to his followers who would hear the story in the future. In the story, the master goes away. The master is God, so this is a story about God going away. If Jesus is the Son of God, then maybe it’s a story about Jesus going away too.


Now add verse 19 of Matthew’s text into the mix: “After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them.” Suddenly this is a story about people who were having to live in the world without God’s immediate physical presence. In spite of last week’s parable in which Jesus made it clear that no one could know the day or hour of his coming, the early Christians believed that they knew it would be soon. By the time Matthew’s Gospel was being written down some of Jesus’s original followers would have died. This is a story of the early church dealing with the fact that they are kind of on their own, at least for now.


Which makes it an incredibly powerful story for us. Most of the time, Jesus is speaking to the people around him—people of the first century. The Bible is a timeless book, of course, and even when Jesus speaks directly to his contemporaries, we have something to learn. Yet here is a parable told to those who would have not known Jesus as a living human being. Here is a story for people that had to live their lives without God’s speaking to them in English (or Greek, or Aramaic, as the case may be). Here is a parable written to us.


If you live in a time between when Jesus rose and when Jesus would come again (again, that would be us), you are in the same situation those servants were in. God has given you great gifts. Not all receive the same amount, but even the least gifted have a great deal. The measure of God’s pleasure in you is not how much you’ve ended up with, but how well you did with what you had.


The second sentence I want to share with you is that haunting one from the end of the story.


For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. –Matthew 25:29


My eyes can’t roll across this sentence without hearing Billy Holiday’s voice and translating the proper English into the Blues:


Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own


When I first heard that song I figured that Holiday had thrown the Bible in there just to make it seem sadder. Surely Jesus would never say anything like that? Jesus is supposed to be like Robin Hood, take from the rich and give to the poor. Not the other way around. I looked it up though, and the song was right. Jesus did say it that way.


What did he mean by it though? Was it an accusation? Was he saying that the world was like that because we let it be like that? Or was it just a statement of fact? Was he just observing that this world isn’t perfect, and those who have a lot tend to get a lot more? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for these questions.


I call this a haunting sentence because whenever I hear it I imagine Jesus saying it to me and then watching to see what I’ll do. It makes me take this parable seriously. Whatever I’ve been given, God expects me to multiply it. If I’ve been given a lot, and I think that I have, then I have a lot to give back. Maybe that’s why Jesus said it, to drive us to work.


May God prosper the work of your hands. AMEN.

View archived copy here.

 The Friday Letters
14 November 2008

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ,


I’m writing this letter to you from the Hilton Hotel near the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport (better known to online purchasers of plane tickets as “SEA”). A couple hundred of our fellow Episcopalians and I have gathered here to engage in the multiple day meeting/festival the we call Diocesan Convention. Your elected representatives at this gathering are Rick Tanner, Ed Miller, Gwena Hedlund, and Helen Godwin.


In addition to the formal, voting kinds of things that will take place, Convention also has a feeling of being a festival of a particularly odd kind. It’s as if the Episcopalian Fan Club had gathered for its annual conference. Instead of pointed ears and wizard staves like at a ‘regular’ fan convention, the particularly devoted here wear funny collars, robes, and pink shirts. If anything exciting happens I’ll let you know.


Many of you will already know that I have a snazzy new electronic book because I’ve used it for the past two Sundays instead of paper notes for my sermon. Saving paper for preachers is only a side benefit though; it also works for reading books! This past week I finished reading “The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of our Religious Traditions” by Karen Armstrong. It was a great book and I want to share a few thoughts before they trickle out of my brain.


Armstrong’s name was familiar to me even though I hadn’t read any of her books before. She wrote “The Battle for God,” and “A History of God,” in addition to several others. I guess her main interest is comparative religion; she seems as fluent in Buddhism and Hinduism as she is in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.


“The Great Transformation” is another comparative religion look, this time going back far before the origin of any of the three main Abrahamic faiths. She follows a concept called “the Axial Age,” a term that seems to have more to do with a change in human perception and spiritual progress than it does with a fixed period in world history. She begins at 1600BC but quickly jumps forward to the tenth century and goes roughly century by century with her chapters up to about the first.


Armstrong follows four groups of people through this Axial Age: the Greeks, the Israelites, the Indians, and the Chinese. She traces the origins of pretty much all of our religious ideas as the subtitle implies.


It was fascinating for me to read this book because part of it was very familiar (the history of Judaism) while part of it was very not (the Vedic religion in India). To link all these traditions together in a compelling way—and, I might add, in a non-simplistic way—provided a different kind of insight. Even though I have a Religious Studies degree from a Jesuit University this is the first time I’ve really appreciated the discipline of comparative religion.


Armstrong is not here to sell a simplistic “everybody worships the same God” kind of ideology, nor is she offering infusions of Eastern mysticism to improve your Western Christianity—a popular pastime of many spirituality writers. Instead she drives relentlessly towards the origins of our religious ideas and examines closely the circumstances in which they were formed and the impact on society they had/have.


In the final chapter she draws some conclusions about the current state of the world and its various religious traditions, though these are fairly brief and of more use for starting a conversation than they are for having concrete answers. While it wasn’t a page turner by any stretch, I’m very glad I read this book all the way through. If there’s anyone else out there who has read it, or would like to read it, I’d be interested in knowing what you think about her ideas.

See you Sunday!

Ben.

A Sermon by Benjamin J. Newland

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78:1-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

The lesson from Matthew’s Gospel is pretty self-explanatory today. It is also pretty well known. How many of us have not heard the parable of the five wise and five foolish bridesmaids. Some of you are probably even familiar with the more traditional and slightly spicier King Jamesian translation which features the five wise and five foolish virgins.

The story is straightforward: ten young women set out to wait for the bridegroom to bring his new bride home. This would be a traditional and very large celebration; none of the ten would want to miss out. Not only would it be a huge party, it would also probably play a part in deciding the course of these young unmarried females’ lives. Thus the wise virgins were wise indeed in that they were prepared for the wait, while the foolish virgins lost their chance at winning a husband of their choice because they were not prepared.

The moral of the story is just as straightforward: Jesus the bridegroom of the world was coming, but we did not know when, so we’d better be prepared.

Since the Gospel lesson speaks largely for itself, let us take a look at the Old Testament reading which provides many more opportunities for homiletical hyperbole. Having last week assisted the Israelites in wading across the Jordan River, Joshua is this week calling a meeting. He gathers together all the most important Israelites, “the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers”, and reminds them of how consistently Yahweh has supported their people throughout history.

Then comes the challenge. “Revere Yahweh,” says Joshua, “and put away all your other gods.” This passage recalls a time in history when Israel was not monotheistic. Yes, Yahweh was god. Most of the Israelites would have held the opinion that Yahweh was the best god, or the strongest god, but certainly not the only god. This sounds odd to us who are accustomed to thinking of the Jewish people as the pioneers of monotheism, which in fact they were, but not always.

The reason Ba’al gets into the Hebrew Scriptures so often is that people liked him. Sure Yahweh was good for conquering yourself a promised land, but Ba’al was the god of storms and rain, which made him a much better bet for taking care of your crops. The early prophets were constantly telling people to cut down the Ashirim, not because all the Israelites hated worshipping sacred trees, but because so many of them liked to.

So Joshua is asking a lot of these leaders of Israel by demanding that they recognize Yahweh as their only god, God with a capital “G” in fact, and to do without the benefits provided by all the other gods in the neighborhood. Then he lets loose with one of the most cross-stitched verses in history. He puts it as a choice actually, saying that they should revere Yahweh, or not, but, “as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

We’ve all read that verse in the bathrooms or kitchens of half the people we know, and it’s a nice sentiment when you read it all by itself painted onto the side of a countrified mailbox. Put the verse in context though, and it sounds a lot more like the choices my mom used to give me when I was a little kid and wanted to go outside to play with my friends even though it was almost dinner time: “You do what you want to do,” she’d say, “but those of us who want to eat dinner will be staying home.” This line was delivered with a great deal of implied guilt. If Joshua’s success rate was anything like as bad as my mother’s it is a wonder the Israelites ever became monotheists at all.

Fortunately for the history of religion, the leaders of the Israelites were less easily distracted than my six-year-old self; they choose to go with Yahweh. Joshua then applies the old reverse-psychology: “You can’t worship Yahweh!” he says, “Yahweh is a jealous God. If you say you want to worship him alone and then go back on your word, you are going to be in a world of hurt! Don’t do it!” The Israelites fall for it, and insist that they are fine with this plan to get rid of all the other gods. I can only imagine what the children of these grey-bearded men of Israel said when their venerable parents got home. “You fell for that?!”

As much fun as it is to poke fun at this story (and by now most of you know that I have what is probably a fatal weakness for poking fun at the scriptures), this is a story of one of the most profound revolutions in the history of human spirituality. The Israelites were coming to understand that the divine was something more than a collection of competing super-humans, each with their own area of expertise, each with their own geographical limitations.

The Israelite yearning for Yahweh is the human yearning for the divine. The people of Israel were subject to any number of little gods requiring appeasement; this god for good crops, this god for healthy children, this god to keep you safe from raiders. Joshua says no, this is not a true way to peace and happiness. There is only one God, not just one God for us the Israelites but one God for all the world—one spirit for all health, for all fruitfulness, for all safety and care of strangers. Jesus and the early Christians and we ourselves are heirs of this religious breakthrough.

Depending on how you look at it the idea of one God is either incredibly exclusive and violent towards others, or it is profoundly inclusive and loving of others. If Yahweh is the only God, does that mean that only the Israelites have a God and all others are left outside the circle of holiness? Or, if Yahweh is the only God, does that mean that all of us are equally the children of that God? Believers throughout history have seen it both ways. For me it is always the second way; if there is only one God, who am I to say that I own him? AMEN.