New Life in the Desert

Sermon for 5 Lent; April 2, 2017

 Wow. That is a loooooong Gospel. And this comes after a series of long Gospel readings: 37 verses a couple of weeks ago, 41 verses last week, and now 45 this week! I have started to wonder if these ever-growing Gospel readings are a not-so-subtle reminder that we are in Lent just by virtue of their length! Little endurance tests for us. Probably not, but sometimes I wonder... Our lectionary is designed, however, to take us into the Lenten desert, though probably not through the length of the readings as much as it may feel that way to me at times. Our lectionary takes us into the desert through the stories. This Lent, our lectionary has had us head out into the desert with Abraham, leaving behind all that he knew to head off for someplace unknown. Our lectionary had us wander through the desert with the Israelites, feeling their deprivation. Our lectionary had the Holy Spirit lead us into the desert with Jesus to face temptation. And this week, we are plucked up with Ezekiel, and we are plopped down in the desert of the valley of the dry bones. Another desert journey. This is not a literal journey for Ezekiel. Rather this is a vision that God gave him, a metaphor for something greater. 

 When I imagine this scene, I picture it a bit like the Elephant's Graveyard scene from the Lion King. Simba disobeys his father's orders and goes into the land he was told to avoid. It is dark in the Elephant's Graveyard: the sun does not shine on this place. It is a barren wasteland where perhaps some life - the hyenas - scrape by, but life itself does not thrive. And there in this place, he discovers the skeletal remains of numerous elephants. And there, surrounded by all of this death, he ends up confronting the possibility of his own death. And he confronts true fear and regret and shame for the first time, foreshadowing major themes of the rest of the movie.

 Here in the Valley of the Dry Bones, Ezekiel is placed in a dry, desolate place. Not a desert of uncertainty like Abraham stepped into. Not a desert of deprivation like the Israelites wandered through. Not a desert of temptation like Jesus was led into. But a desert of death and destruction, and all of the grief, pain, and fear encountered there. Surrounded by bones - the bones of his ancestors, the bones of his friends, the bones of his people - he is confronted with death - their death, his own death. He is confronted by death. Death, that thing that we try so hard to avoid, But here in the Valley of the Dry Bones, there is no hiding. God puts Ezekiel right in the midst of it all, and makes him confront it. God puts us right in the midst of it all, and makes us confront it.

 "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return," we said as we began our Lenten journey before heading out here to the desert. "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return," as dust was placed on our foreheads in the sign of the cross, a sign of that death and destruction. "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Here in the Valley of the Dry Bones, we again have to confront that dust. And confront our own anxieties about that dust. "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This is not what we are trained to do. We do not know how to sit with sorrow. We do not know how to sit in the dust, confronting our own mortality, confronting our own grief, confronting our own pain, confronting this remembrance: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

 "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return" is not the end of the story though. This line that we say on Ash Wednesday evokes our creation, evokes the creation story when God made Adam out of the dust. "Remember that you are dust." Remember that story when God made Adam by gathering the dirt of the ground together to form this human. But as you remember, earth wasn't the only element in that story, there was also wind, as the breath of God was blown into Adam to bring life up out of the dust. And here, in the Valley of the Dry Bones, as Ezekiel is starkly reminded of the dust from which we all come, the wind makes an appearance again, as God again breathes new life into these bones. "Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord."

 In this barren wasteland, in this desert, God reminds Ezekiel of hope. God reminds Ezekiel that death does not get the final word: resurrection does. This is the same reminder that Jesus offers Mary and Martha when Lazarus is brought up out of the tomb. Ezekiel's vision. Lazarus' raising. These are just little tastes of the ultimate resurrection in the one who says "I am the resurrection." These aren't Easter stories, these are Lenten stories, because they are just reminders along the journey. We are not yet to the resurrection; we are still in the wilderness. But just as God provided water to the Israelites in their thirst in the desert, and just as God provided angels to tend Jesus in his desert experience, God provides us hope. God reminds us to not just look at the death and destruction that surround us on every side here in the Valley of the Dry Bones, but to look to the horizon of hope so that we can keep putting one foot in front of the other. Look to the horizon of hope so that we can keep moving forward through life's Lent toward the new life of Easter in Jesus Christ. Remember that God will breath new life into our old dry bones and we shall live. Amen.

The Land of Unlikeness: God Crossing Boundaries

A sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent, March 19, 2017 by the Rev. Bingham Powell.  Sermon refers to hymns 463 and 464 in the 1982 Hymnal.

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I’m going to take a risk this morning. I have a sermon written out, but as I was listening to the reading of the Gospel, another sermon came to my mind. I think after ten years I can try this once. If it’s an absolute failure, then I won’t do it again for another ten years.

Jesus comes from a particular place. He is from Galilee, raised in Nazareth, and eventually moves to Capernaum when he is a little bit older. That place is a marginal place; socio-economically marginal with not much wealth. Jesus is marginal in his teaching and thinking, in that it doesn’t match any strain or denomination of Judaism. It picks up some parts, but he does his own thing, also. Jesus is also marginal in what he chooses to do: he doesn’t continue his life as a carpenter, raise a family, and do all those sorts of good normal things. He travelled around. “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head”. He has no home as he travels.

And he crosses boundaries or borders in what he does. He touches the leper, which is something you wouldn’t have done in that time. He goes to places that are crossing boundaries, from Galilee to Judea; from Galilee to Samaria, which is where we find him in today’s Gospel, crossing a border into enemy territory since the Samaritans and the Jews are enemies. He crosses this boundary into a place where he doesn’t belong, and encounters a Samaritan woman. You can hear in their conversation how odd this is for her. Why are you, a Jew, asking me, a Samaritan, this thing? He’s crossing a border, a boundary, of what is acceptable. He also crosses the boundary from a man to a woman by a well, which means, Biblically, that something is about to happen, usually wedding bells. He goes into that space and engages in conversation about water, about water in a well, and living water. He quickly crosses the boundary from physical need to spiritual need. Jesus is crossing all of these boundaries in the Gospel today, in his ministry, and in his life.

He’s doing that because that’s what God does. God moves from where we expect God to where we don’t expect God. Which is the same thing the Israelites discover in the desert in today’s first reading. In the desert, where there is no water, God is able to bring it out from a rock. In the preceding chapter, when they are in the desert where there is no food, they are able to find manna. God is in the places where we don’t expect God to be.

This past week, we lost three of our parishioners to death. I had to go to the hospital to be with each one of them. And in that place there was God: in the hospital room, in the ICU, there was God, crossing the boundary into the place that makes us uncomfortable; crossing the boundary into the places where we do not want to go. In the desert, in death, in life, there is God offering living water to the people.

We are right now in the season of Lent, moving towards Easter. We think of Easter as the place where God is: in the resurrection. We’re a resurrection people, we’re a resurrection faith. But these forty days in the wilderness remind us that God is not only there in the empty tomb, but God is also there on the cross. And God is also here in the desert wilderness, crossing into this boundary away from the temple in Jerusalem, where we try to put him in a box; here in the church where we try and contain God. But God is breaking out and going to those places of wilderness.

There is a hymn in the hymnal, a W.H. Auden poem, and it begins like this:

“He is the Way.

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.”

“Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness.” This Jesus, who crosses boundaries and crosses borders, has invited us to go with him. So the question I have for all of us together as a community, and for each of us individually, is: What is this Land of Unlikeness that Jesus is taking you into? It’s going to be desert-like, it’s going to be uncomfortable, it’s going to be uncertain, but that’s where Jesus is taking us. For there we “will see rare beasts and have unique adventures”.

Auden goes on to say that there we will find an occasion to dance for joy, if we’re willing to go out in that Land of Unlikeness, into that uncertainty, into that marginal place where Jesus is: away from our comforts, moving through the discomfort of the desert. There we will discover the living water. That living water that is so strong and powerful that we will not thirst again.

We have a choice: it is quite comfortable here in the Willamette Valley. We’ve got plenty of water. But Jesus says we have to keep drinking that water over and over and over again, but he can show us the way of living water. And that living water is only available where we follow Jesus.

My sisters and brothers in Christ, follow Him. We don’t know exactly where it is he is leading us, but follow him wherever he takes you. When you begin to feel that bit of discomfort, I suspect that means you’re on the right path, into the Land of Unlikeness, into the place of living water.

Amen

The Desert Road - 3 Advent 2016

Sermon for 11 December 2016

Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:4-9; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for You, O God.” Amen.

That famous line from Psalm 42 was not one of our readings for this week, but it expresses perfectly the Advent sentiment. Think not so much in terms of Oregon deer, which get plenty of water, but think of deer in the Palestinian badlands, where rain is rare and the only water comes from springs that bring water down from the mountains. All the land around you is parched; such plants as there are, are hardy, thorny things. You can’t really just stay by the springs because that’s where the predators are. So you have your trails on the steep hillsides and you wander them endlessly looking for the next green plant to munch and trying to stay away from the lions and jackals. Most Israelites didn’t live in the desert, of course, but they saw it from where they lived, and it represented for them the realm of chaos, of demonic powers — the realm of death. In contrast to the land made fertile by God’s grace, the desert was ever visible as a part of the world that resisted the divine gift. Nowadays we see desert and wilderness as places, perhaps, where we find God, and Israel has stories about finding God in the desert, too, but mostly the desert is someplace where God is experienced as absent, a place in need of re-creation, that needs to be made fruitful. What the poet who speaks in Psalm 42 does is makes a connection between that physical condition of unfruitfulness to the spiritual condition of feeling God’s absence.

Now I know as well as you do, or anyone does, that God is never actually absent. Yet there are times, aren’t there, when God’s absence seems almost palpable, when the “God-shaped hole in the human heart” feels like more than mere emptiness. At least that’s how it sometimes feels to me. And yet that emptiness is such an ache, such a longing, that it’s like God is present in that very absence and even by means of it. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” goes the saying, as a ravening thirst increases one’s love for cool water. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God.”

Advent is a time to feel that absence, to relish it as you relish the feeling of hunger when you smell the afternoon feast cooking on Christmas morning. It’s not just a desire to satisfy your hunger with food; there’s something delicious about the hunger itself, which serves as a sign of the feast to come.

This is the kind of feeling we ought to have as we hear Isaiah’s marvelous poem. Remember that to the ancients of the Middle East, desert symbolized the parts of the world that were in rebellion against God’s tireless efforts to make the world live. The desert was where demonic forces, predatory animals, and uncleanness of all kinds endured. If you got sick, and especially if you were infirm in a way that led to ritual uncleanness, such as being lame or blind or had leprosy, then you were of the desert, whether you lived there or not. But in Isaiah’s vision, God makes the desert fertile and lush, and all those symbols of barrenness are cured. The desert blossoms and becomes as fruitful as the greenest regions in Israel. The sight of the blind and the hearing of the deaf is be restored, those who had been unable to speak now can sing, the lame are able not just to walk but to leap for joy. The waterless wastes overflow with vigor. And no predators endanger anybody. And in the midst of this re-created land, this former desert, this place formerly inhabited by the unclean and demonic, there is now a sacred road that leads to Jerusalem and to the temple of God on Mount Zion there. This is imagery of pilgrimage to the temple. The power of God’s new creation, and of the holy road that leads to God’s presence, is so great that even fools can’t miss it, there is no uncleanness on this road because all uncleanness has been healed by God. The highway leads inexorably to the presence of God, and God’s redeemed people travel that way with joy that is so great as to drive away all sorrow and sighing. Doesn’t this vision of Isaiah just make you want to find that road and walk on it, like a thirsty deer who smells the water from afar? Walk with me through Advent; that’s our holy road and it leads to God’s own Self, who was made a human being like us for our salvation.

What I’d like to invite you to see with me is that the healing that’s needed by the desert, and which God promises, is also needed by us. Because there are things that dry us up, that make us forget who we are created to be, things that get control of us and make us who are called to be children of God into slaves. We are, as the Collect says, “sorely hindered by our sins.” I used to think of God as a stern old man who scowled when anyone smiled. That God wanted to prevent us from sinning mainly because he didn’t want us to have any fun. But the longer I live the clearer it becomes to me that that’s wrong-headed. Sins are the things we do that hinder us from living fully, that make us less than fully human, that deaden our physical and spiritual nerves so that we’re unaware of the world’s marvelousness. If you’re like me then you probably don’t have too much trouble thinking of the sins that dry up your soul, things you’ve neglected to do that you should have done; things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have done. Attitudes that cut you off from God and your neighbor. God promises to make the desert bloom again, to save us from our sins, but here we are still in the midst of them. In Advent, hoping and longing for the salvation of God to be born in us and in the world. In this Advent desert I long for God’s healing grace like a deer thirsting for flowing streams.

This the solution of the powerful riddle about how the loving God is also our judge: When God comes to be our judge, He comes to save us. God’s judgment is not a punishment for failure to be saved; it is the means of God’s salvation. That’s because what God is saving us from, is our sins, the attitudes and actions that shrivel up our hearts and make God’s world a desert. God will save us from those sins, because God is recreating everything into a new, green, fertile heaven and earth. I think myself, using Leonard Cohen’s words, that “every heart to love will come, but like a refugee.” But even if we utterly refused that salvation, God would save the rest of the world that we insisted on destroying. God’s salvation is inevitable, because life and bounty are God's way.

So what do we do while we live in Advent, in this time of expectation as we await the final victory of God? In modern Israel, the desert is increasingly being made fruitful by irrigation. That is, through a combination of human effort and God’s miraculous gift of life. Our individual lives are like that, too. The main way God frees us from our sins is by helping us to stop sinning. It doesn’t do any good to ask God to free us from our sins if we won’t walk in the freedom we’re given. The desert becomes fruitful when we irrigate it. The holy highway leads to the Jerusalem, but it is our legs that have to carry us on it. Our effort is part of the grace that God gives; it’s not good works versus grace, it’s the grace of good works. And so we remind ourselves annually, in this Advent season, to come back to the Source, to watch and pray for the Lord’s return, to do works of justice and mercy and peace. To eat and drink these signs of the banquet which we shall all eat, cured of our diseases, healed from our infirmities, and saved from our sins. This bread and this wine are the very presence of God breaking into our dried and twisted roots of our souls and beginning to irrigate the parched land. Strengthen the weak knees. Break up your fallow ground. Let streams begin to flow in the desert.

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so longs my soul for You, O God.”

A Light in the Darkness -- Candles of Hope -- 2 Advent 2016

Throughout this season of Advent, each week we hear a selection from the book of Isaiah. And I know you already know this—you’re top-notch Biblical scholars—and at the very least you’ve probably heard me preach on Isaiah before. But I think it never hurts to do a little review.

Isaiah lived in time of great difficulty for the people of Israel. The once great nation had declined; the nation of the great King David and the wise King Solomon, unified under their rule, was no more. The people had forgotten God; they had strayed from God’s ways, and they were living a life of division, corruption, greed, faithlessness, and injustice. They had forgotten to love their neighbor; they had forgotten to take care of the widows and orphans; they had forgotten to treat the foreigners in their midst as if they were citizens; they had forgotten to treat each person with dignity and respect as the image of God in which they were made. They had forgotten the ways of justice and peace and mercy and grace and love that God teaches in the commandments. And so God let them decline; God let them face the consequences of their action, even to the point of allowing the Babylonians to come in and to scatter them into exile. It was a very dark time for the people of Israel: a time of sorrow and lament and grief. “They sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept”, wrote the psalmist during these years.

And into this darkness, God sent Isaiah to do two things: first God sent Isaiah to diagnose the problem; to tell the people that the reason this had happened was because they had permitted and they had committed injustice; that they had strayed from God; that this feeling of abandonment was because of that. And second, God sent Isaiah to offer them hope, to let them know that God had not actually abandoned them; that God was still with them through it all.

“Hope—that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without any words and never stops at all”, as Emily Dickinson wrote in that famous poem. During the season of Advent we hear selections from Isaiah that are all about this hope. Hope that the world will be transformed; that this darkness was not permanent. Transformation such as the mountain of God rising up above all the mountains; the mountain the people could not see anymore in their exile; the mountain of God in which they were no longer at would rise up and the nations would stream to it. Transformation as the desert bloomed abundantly, and the sand turned to pools of water to quench their thirst in the parchness of the wilderness in which they lived. Hope that the lame would leap like deer, and that the speechless would sing songs of joy; hope that the predator and the prey would rest and play and eat together in peace, and that a little child would lead them, as we heard in today’s installment.

Each of these messages of hope that Isaiah was sent by God to deliver was a candle lit in the darkness of their exile, of their despair. And these words of hope that Isaiah preached are a light in the midst of the darkness of this season and of our own lives. We cannot control the darkness; life is full of darkness. Individually in death and pain and illness and challenge and difficulty, and collectively as a community, we do and will experience darkness. We cannot control that darkness, but we can control the light. We can light candles of hope to brighten this world. That is Advent: While the world literally gets darker and darker as we move towards the solstice, every week we light more and more candles as we approach that time. We resist the darkness with light, with hope, with love.

Several years ago my family started a tradition of eating dinner during Advent primarily by the light of our Advent wreath. That first week is dark—one candle. But by Second Advent, by tonight, we’re going to double the light at our meal, double the light in our life as we light that second candle. And by the time you reach Fourth Advent, you are basking in the abundance of light—the light of four whole candles to lighten your meal.

We are sent by God, like Isaiah, to light candles in this world, to brighten it. Each of us individually is sent out into this world wherever we go—in our work, in our home, in our lives, in whatever communities we may belong to – to bring hope to people, to bring love and grace and mercy to enlighten the darkness, to shine hope.

And that’s what we’re trying to do here as a community, also. Every meal that we serve at the Saturday Breakfast is a candle lit in the life of the darkness of someone. Every warm greeting, every smile given to our guests when we treat them with dignity and respect at that meal is a candle lit in the darkness. Every Ho! Ho! Ho! Stocking that you fill is going to be a candle brought to a little child who’d otherwise have a dark Christmas. Every time we gather together as a community, we are shining more light. Every prayer we offer is light that we are sending out into the darkness.

We are sent to enlighten the world, and as we light our Advent candles this season, and as we light our candles of hope in the world, we prepare ourselves and this world for the brightest of all the lights: the light that came into the world, the light that darkness cannot overcome, the light embodied in a person, in a child born in a manger, Jesus Christ, our Lord, a little Child who will lead us in all hope. Hold on to this hope, and continue to enlighten the world everywhere you go.

My sisters and brothers in Christ, I leave you this week to ponder a question: what candle are you going to light?

Amen.