Proper 16A Proclaiming the Messiah

Have you ever been nervous giving the keys to your car to a teenager?  I was blessed with a very trusting brother, who when he went to war in the Army Nurse Corps left his mustang convertible to me to drive while he was gone. When I look back on that act of trust, I am amazed at my brother. 

So it seems when Jesus is proclaiming the giving of the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter, it is an amazing act of trust.  Look at the track record of Peter’s deeds—he fails to understand, he lacks enough faith to walk on water, and we know that he will deny even knowing Jesus at the last.  But Jesus has trust in the rock that is Peter, his ultimate steadfastness, not because of what Peter does but because of what Peter says.  Peter proclaims Jesus as the messiah.

Testimony is a word used in Christian churches to describe the people’s proclamation of what and who the Christ is to them personally.  In more evangelical churches, personal testimonies are key to being part of the church. Altar calls are made to ask people to come forward to proclaim and be saved.  Here in our church, we tend to have testimonies about the meaning of a person’s faith and especially what this parish means, at times of stewardship, to be a sort of cheering section for pledging and giving time and talent.  So maybe we are missing something important.

Proclamation about our faith may seem undignified.  Some of us don’t like to talk about ourselves.  And meditating on our faith seems self-indulgent or not useful.  When I began the process for the priesthood, I was asked to write about my faith journey (also called a spiritual autobiography) several times—for the parish discernment committee, the diocesan ordination committee, and the seminary, and after I was ordained, to write a spiritual autobiography again for each parish to which I was applying for a job.

The first time, this proclamation was hard, took some time; and even though it may seem that it should have been easier the more times I wrote about myself, this kind of introspection continues to be hard.  For you don’t merely decide what your faith story is and be done with it. Your faith story continues in parallel with your life story. When you come through different phases in your life, your faith takes on meaning particular to the life you are living. 

That’s because God continues with us in our life, making meaning out of babies being born, graduating from school, new jobs lost or gained, marriage or divorce, health, sickness or even death that happens to us and around us.  We are fully engaged with our faith when we acknowledge God’s presence in all we do and are.  Our proclamation of the messiah with us, of God with us, is colored by our experiences, our hopes and dreams, our sorrow and disappointment, our joy and celebration, and our faith grows as we grow into our lives.

It is that experience of Jesus that Peter proclaimed.  Peter was paying attention to the encounters he witnessed—of the baskets of fish and bread left after feeding 5000 people, of the healing of a Canaanite, the walking on water.  Peter, in experiencing the life and healing presence of Christ, saw that the messiah was part of his own life and death. In a way, Peter was writing his own gospel of who this messiah was.

Each of our proclamations about our faith writes our own gospel. We tell the story of how we were comforted, given courage, healed, upheld in our pain, and made bright shining as the sun in our own glory as Christians.  The embodiment of Christ in our lives gives us the words for our own story of faith, our own gospel.

It is this personal faith, this story, this personal gospel that our family, friends and neighbors and even strangers see as we live our life.  We are witnesses of this story in our actions, our prayer life, our church life, the very way we see how god leads and guides us.  This witness, this personal gospel, then becomes the world’s way of understanding what Christians are and how they are in the world.

We live in a time of faith cynicism, when people say they can’t be Christian because of what Christians have done and said that do not jibe with the teaching of a loving messiah.  So our personal gospel is even more important to the world, to setting straight what Christianity means and how Christians act in the world.

What is your gospel going to say? Will you be hard pressed to say where your faith is in your life? Are you paying attention to the little ways God leads you, guides, heals you?  How will your gospel be read by the people around you; are you ready to be a witness?

Jesus is ready to trust the keys to heaven to every Christian who can tell the story, proclaim the messiah.  Are you ready for your keys?

Proper 15 A A Change of Heart

In today’s gospel an amazing thing happens—Jesus is caught by a Canaanite woman in his knee-jerk reaction to her as a non-Jew, from a tribe different from his own and so not worthy of his pastoral response to her sick daughter.

This passage shows that Jesus was indeed human. That he was a member of his own group of people, steeped in his own folk lore and family stories, that included stories about how the others were not like him, not as worthy of God’s attention.  Jesus is a Jew from Nazareth, not a Gentile Canaanite. Jesus is descended from the Hebrews who pushed aside the Canaanites when they entered the promised land.

This woman could have responded with anger at the Jewish rabbi’s treatment of her, perhaps she even expected. But instead of anger, she asserted herself.  Even the dogs get the crumbs under the table, she wittily shoots back at his ethnic slur.  She doesn’t start a fight, she starts Jesus thinking about his prejudice, and when he does this he has compassion and heals her daughter.

It can be shocking to see how Jesus is caught with his compassion down.  How a Canaanite woman, not even a Jew, must teach him, through her own trust in a merciful God, that God has enough grace even for her. 

Has this happened to you?  Have you ever reacted with instant disdain to someone not in your little in group, only to have your reaction challenged. You may have been embarrassed later by your knee jerk statement or behavior, after coming to realize that the person you are demonizing has your own needs and desires for acceptance and love.

Why do we categorize people, put them in little boxes and call them names?  Does it make us feel better about ourselves that there are others we can say are less worthy than us?  Does it make us bigger, safer, more in control of our environment to cubby hole all Hispanics, all black or brown or yellow people, all short, or fat, or thin, or blond people, or everyone from Chicago, or the south, or…the list could go on. Does it keep us feeling good to think that God’s merciful net does not include everyone?

Challenging our prejudices whether big or small, brings us freedom from bitterness, anger and comparative living—looking at our lives through the lens of those around us.  Often we are taught by those we associate with who is in the in group.  Have you challenged your in group by including someone new?  Have you opened up your heart to someone new, someone you wouldn’t normally associate with?

Opening our hearts to the new, the other, can be challenging, but as you know when you have done so, it opens up your whole world, makes it more loving, more accepting, both of yourself and the ones in the other group.  And you know that when something opens up love, it is a sign that it comes from God.

Jesus’ encounter with the out group today challenged him to reconsider and open up his heart. May we all be challenged in our prejudices, however big or small, to open up ourselves as a channel of God’s mercy and love. 

Prioer 13A Finding Abunance

The news these past few weeks may have filled you with anxiety about our nation’s financial situation, or made you wonder at the acrimony and fighting across political parties while our national programs for the poor and sick are teetering on the edge.  It seems that since the economic crash that our nation as well as the individuals in it have been struggling to get back on its feet. We delight in hearing that the Chrysler plant production has outpaced the last three years and we look for stronger indicators that the US economy is bouncing back.

Elsewhere in the world, especially in poor countries of Africa, there is famine and hunger, the natural disaster of Japan, bombings in Oslo, unrest in Sudan.  The world does not seem to be living the life of abundance of the crowds seeing Jesus.

Jesus meets the crowds in a deserted place where night is beginning to fall, without any meal available.  The disciples want to send the crowds away, but Jesus instead tells them to feed the crowd.  Jesus blesses the few bits of bread and fish the disciples can find, and a miracle of abundance occurs, with more than enough food left over.

Why, you may ask, isn’t our world like this, with enough left over to fund all our programs, meet our debts, feed the hungry of the world?

Maybe we don’t know where to look for this miracle occurring right in our midst.

For instance, in Capron a woman living on the financial edge has been bringing food for a Monday lunch at the Lutheran church for many years. She bakes wonderful pies, cakes and breads, and brings abundance from her garden every week.  Two weeks ago, this woman fell and sustained a serious head injury and has been hospitalized ever since.  When the Lutheran pastor went to visit her last week, the woman did not recognize her because of her brain damage.  Monday lunch has not occurred at the church since the woman’s injury, and people have suddenly realized what her presence has meant for the abundance shared every Monday.

You might think this woman is a faithful member of the Lutheran church, but no, just the opposite. She does not like and never attends church.  She nevertheless lives the life of Christian hospitality, sharing her skills at baking, sharing her garden with others in her community because it is her particular calling.

This miracle of abundance may seem small in the face of the trillions of dollars of US debt, the millions dying of hunger in Africa, and the thousands of homeless in Japan or Joplin MO.  Jesus fed only 5000 men and perhaps another 8000 or more women and children in the deserted place, but his compassion not to send them away made a difference in their lives that day.  The woman of Capron has touched hundreds of lives every Monday for years. 

The arithmetic of compassion adds up.  When anyone receives compassion from another, the love adds up—it is spread in goodwill, in thanksgiving, in abundance that then overflows to others in a geometric progression. Think of a pebble dropped into water, how it ripples to reach the shores—this is the power of sharing abundance.

How did the miracle of the loaves and fishes happen, what made the five loaves and two fishes turn into enough to feed the crowd with twelve baskets of bread left over? We could surmise something as mundane as people in the crowd each sharing whatever they had with them and the total was overwhelming.  However you want to think of this miracle, we do know that Jesus blessed the food before the people ate, and his blessing made all the difference.

I believe that whenever Jesus blesses our work, it becomes powerful. The blessing of God assures of us God’s never-failing love and therefore of the abundance that love brings with it:  Abundance of care for each other and our neighbor, abundance of sharing what we have, however meager, giving of ourselves for others and not counting the cost.  God’s blessing makes the small seem big, the little person stand tall, those without courage do brave acts, and small acts of compassion into sweeping changes. 

God’s blessing turned a single woman in Capron into a wonder worker there.  We don’t know how what each of does each day in small acts of care and compassion impacts those around us, but we are assured that if God is in our acts and our speech, then that compassion will flower all around with more compassion.

May God bless our parish and its acts of love and compassion,  that the small ways we share our abundance may ripple into our community and beyond. That others will see and want to do as we do. That those lives we touch will be filled with the abundance of the love of God and spill throughout their own lives.  May we see the miracle of abundance in each of our lives.