Sermon at the Monastery, February 9, 2014

Why are you here?
Why do you come to this place?
Some of us are here for the weekend.  Some of us are here every Sunday.  And some of us are here every day, several times a day.  Some of us - some of you - may be wondering if you might become one of the people who comes every day.
Whether we come once, or regularly, or every day, we need to stop and ask ourselves why we come.  Our motives shape our experience, and they shape our relation to God in this place and every other place we go.

When I entered religious life, I told a friend that it was the first totally selfish thing I had ever done.  I meant by that that I was no longer trying to please my parents, or measure up to others’ hopes or expectations.  I wanted to pray, and to help others pray.  I had no sense of ministry or mission beyond that.  As Isaiah would have it, I sought God and wanted to know her ways.  And I thought that meant days in prayer, serving the community however I was asked, living a quiet simple life.
I wasn’t thinking about serving the poor.  I wasn’t thinking about spreading the Gospel.  I was thinking about soaking up God’s love, and loving God in return, in the comfortable confines of the convent.
And, I must confess, I was like the people Isaiah is castigating.  I wanted to fast, to be silent and austere, but in the meantime I quarreled and judged.  I no longer had an income, so I no longer gave to others.  I was treated as holy, wearing my habit, but I was a scribe, a Pharisee.  I knew about purity, but not about charity.
Soon enough, however, my horizons started to expand.  I experienced it as restlessness, as needing to get out of the enclosed life I was living, but as soon as I began to go out I encountered the world I had left in all its need.  I began working with teenage drug addicts, and later serving in a parish.  I realized that my intensive prayer had borne fruit, and that now I was becoming salt and light.

Now here’s the thing about salt and light: they do not exist for themselves.  No one sits down to a dinner of salt.  They use the salt to bring out the taste of the food.  And no one just sits and stares at a light.  They use the light to see what is around them.
Being salt, being light, means being the background that makes other things shine.  It means that my work, my ministry, is not about me.   It is about letting other people encounter Jesus, helping them to see God at work.  God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, is the point.  If I shine, when I shine, my light exists so that others may see God at work around them.
Even when we do good works, as Jesus prescribes, the point is not to show how wonderful we are.  It is not to earn points with God, or with our neighbors.  The point of good works, Jesus tells us, is to give glory to God.
Now, if you think of God as distant and other, this sounds cold.  Shouldn’t good works spring from compassion, from love of our neighbors?  Yes.  But this is not separate from giving glory to God, for the God we seek is incarnate in Jesus, and in us, and in those around us.  We give glory to God by treating others as Christ.
But being salt and light is not just about good works.  It also changes why I worship, and how I worship.
For many people, their only connection with church is on Sunday.  They come into the spiritual filling station, they “seek God and delight to know God’s ways,” but their worship is for them.  They may do good things during the week, or they may not, but the time of proclamation of the Gospel is only in church, and it belongs to the clergy.
Now, we need that refueling.  I need it so much I’m here every day!  And neither Isaiah nor Jesus are condemning that.
The question is: why are you here?  Are you here for yourself alone, or is worship part of your mission in the world?
We can worship for ourselves alone, but we can also worship as salt and light.
Sometimes I don’t want to come to worship, but others need me there.  They don’t need me just when I’m presiding or preaching or serving; they need me in a seat so they aren’t alone in the congregation, so that my prayers resound with theirs, so they know they have companions on the road.
Wherever we go and whatever we do, we are either living for ourselves or for God.  No wisdom, no eloquence, no disciplines, and no service, set the standard for our relation with God.  Devotion to God, in all spheres of our lives, makes God visible and audible and tactile among us.  Then indeed we shall be like gardens, like deep springs whose waters never fail.
John Henry Newman wrote a prayer that expresses this truth beautifully.  I leave you with his words.

Dear Jesus, help me to spread Your fragrance everywhere I go.
  Flood my soul with Your spirit and life.
  Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly,
 that my life may only be a radiance of Yours.

Shine through me, and be so in me
 that every soul I come in contact with
 may feel Your presence in my soul.
  Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
  Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as You shine,
 so to shine as to be a light to others;
 the light, O Jesus will be all from You; none of it will be mine;
 it will be you, shining on others through me.
  Let me thus praise You the way You love best, by shining on those around me.
  Let me preach You without preaching, not by words but by my example,
 by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do,
 the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to You.
  Amen.

Sermon at Christ Church Poughkeepsie, February 2 2014

Two of our texts for today have inspired beautiful, powerful music.  The Nunc Dimittis, the song of Simeon in the temple, is sung at the end of every day by monastics.  Malachi inspired Handel to write some of the most beautiful, most-loved sections of the Messiah.  We know the words, and some musical settings.  But what are we to do with these messages?

Malachi anticipates the day that God returns to the temple in Jerusalem.  This will not be a day of simple joy, however.  It will bring testing and cleansing, a painful process.  The goal is not punishment, but purification so that we can truly rejoice in God’s presence.  Still, the imagery suggests a big, powerful, maybe angry God who will come and shake us to the roots.

How does this relate to the lovely picture of the infant Jesus in the temple?  Simeon’s song is peaceful, comforting.  Anna, named as a prophet, praises God for this gift.  If this infant is the Messiah, the Savior, then perhaps we don’t have to fear the day of the Lord’s coming after all.

And yet.

Tucked in between Simeon’s song and Anna’s praise, a darker note appears.  “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” 

 Jesus’ coming looks like a Hallmark card, but in fact it is the light in which our own characters and souls become visible.

It’s not an accident that this sign appears as a child. How we respond to children, what we see in them and how we treat them, shows who we are in critical ways.

Alice Miller, the noted Swiss psychoanalyst, once said that Jesus became the man he did because of the way his parents raised him.  She wrote, 

“Jesus was respected, admired, loved and protected, his parents saw themselves as his servants and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him.  Did that make him selfish, arrogant, covetous, high-handed or conceited?  Quite the contrary.  Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic and wise person able to experience and sustain strong emotion without being engulfed by them.  he could see through hypocrisy and mendacity and he had the courage to pillory them for what they were.  He had no need of power over others because he was entirely at one with himself.”

Jesus came to the Temple and was named the Messiah.  His parents were likely confused.  But they had to choose.  

They could raise him as if they were raising the Messiah, a gift from God for them to steward.  Or they could raise him as their property, or their problem.

Given how he turned out, it’s likely they raised him as the Messiah.

It’s not just Jesus who rises to expectations, who grows through being treated as holy. Another story illustrates the power of expectations.  

Once, a small monastery in the woods was dying.  People no longer came for consultation or prayer.  No new brother had come in years.  The brothers continually bickered and blamed one another for the hard times.  The abbot had become friends with a rabbi who lived in the woods.  One day he went to the rabbi’s hut in despair.  The rabbi greeted him, and listened to his troubles.  Then he said, “I have great news.  One of you is the Messiah.”  But he didn’t say who it was.

The abbot rushed home and told the brothers what the rabbi had said.  All of them were shocked.  One of us?  But who?

They quickly realized that playing it safe meant treating every brother as if he were the Messiah.

As time went on and they lived this way, people started to visit again.  Men began to ask to join the community.  Everyone noticed the peace and harmony that radiated from the monastery.  And the rabbi rejoiced.

We know this is true.  In our hearts we know it.  It is Gospel truth.  We will be judged, we will be known, by how we treat one another.  We will be most clearly seen in how we treat the most vulnerable among us - children, the poor, the oppressed.

In this country, in this world, our record is not strong.  22% of U.S. children live below the official poverty line - and most experts say that the official poverty line should be twice that, so that 45% of our children are endangered in this way.  

Every year 3 million children are reported as victims of abuse, and 1.8 million are reported missing.  One in five will be sexually abused by the age of 18.  Many of them will run away, and become the victims of human trafficking.  Some of them will become parents and abusers in turn.

I suspect that matters were no different in Jesus’ time.  Children were a resource.  If they were lucky, they were a treasured resource, but many, especially girls, were seen as a burden to be disposed of as soon as possible.   In the meantime they were to be worked.  Even if the family was privileged, there was no guarantee of safety or respect.

This is the world Jesus came into.  But somehow he became who he was.

Somehow Mary and Joseph knew how to raise a Messiah.

How would our world look if we saw each child as the Messiah?

This is not only a matter for parents and children, though it is that.  How do we vote on funding for our schools?  

How do we reach out to children whose parents cannot care for them adequately?  

How do we share our faith with them, and learn about faith from them?

The nation that neglects its children neglects its future.  Our children will become what we expect them to become, what we show them we believe them to be.

May our hearts be shown to be purified, to be cleansed, to be turned toward one another when God comes among us today.