Relating Chaos

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on Mark 4:35-41 and Job 38:1-11. An audio version of this sermon may be found here.

Jesus rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. Jesus said to the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?"

Our gospel reading this morning tells the story of a miracle of Jesus — and one that New Testament scholars often classify as a “nature miracle”: not a healing, not an exorcism, not something we might be able to understand as psychological or psychosomatic in origin, but a demonstration of power over nature, power that is, quite precisely speaking, supernatural.

But as with all of Jesus’ miracles, the nature miracles are not just about power, they’re not just gratuitous thaumaturgy, they’re not intended just to shock and awe. Jesus’ miracles always have a point, they always have a meaning, they are always signs that point beyond this immediate earthly moment to reveal something divine. The point of Jesus’ miracles is always to reveal that Jesus does what God does, that Jesus is God doing immense, cosmic, Godly things on a human, earthly, intimate scale.

And that is true for the miracle of stilling the storm, too: this episode is intended to reveal to us that Jesus does what God does. And fortunately for us, our reading from Job this morning shows us precisely what it is that God does.

In his speech to Job, God tells about the origins of Creation, the first moments of the becoming of this world, the primordial acts that made all other acts possible. And among the first acts of Creation was God “shutting in the sea with doors,” giving it boundaries and bars, telling it how far it could come and no farther past the shore. Now, in almost all ancient Near Eastern mythologies, including the mythology behind the Bible, the sea is a symbol for chaos, for destruction, for the wild, reckless, disregarding energy that bursts out and overwhelms everything in its path, that breaks down and washes away and dissolves all relationships and all connections and all meaning. The chaos waters threaten to undo all that can be done. So in order to do anything in Creation, God must first restrain the waters, God must first give boundaries to the sea.

But notice what God is really doing here. God does not destroy the sea, God does not simply eliminate the chaos waters, God doesn’t merely impose order on chaos and make it cease to be chaos. God allows the wild, restless energy of the stormy sea to remain, but God does not allow it to remain by itself: God takes that energy that would overwhelm and dissolve all relationships and God sets it in relationship, God gives it a shore to define it, and clouds and darkness to clothe it, and earth-foundations it can energize but not overwhelm; and all the rest of Creation depends on this first relationship between the energy of the sea and the stability of the earth. God relates the unrelatable, and in doing so creates something new that never was before.

And that is the creative power of God at work in Jesus when Jesus does what God does and stills the storm. What God did in the first moments of Creation on a grand cosmological scale, Jesus does on Lake Galilee, in the weather, on his disciples’ scale. Jesus sets a boundary that the storm cannot pass, Jesus creates a relationship that the chaos waters cannot overwhelm and dissolve, Jesus takes the wild reckless energy of wind and wave and transforms it into the deep energy of peace and steady calm — and perhaps more importantly still, Jesus takes the wild chaotic energy of fear that threatened to overwhelm the disciples, and by relationship with himself transforms it into the deep energy of awe and wonder and worship and faith. In stilling the storm, Jesus does what God does: he relates the unrelatable, and in doing so creates something new.

And that is what faith in Jesus empowers us to do, too. When we follow Jesus, we do as Jesus does, and Jesus does as God does, and the creating grace of God is with us to face the storms of chaos, and by relating them to create something new.

On Friday morning Lee and I went to Temple House of Israel for the funeral of Don Chodrow. It was a deeply sad occasion: Don died too soon, and we lost someone who was an important part of this community, and a friend to many, and (among many, many other things) a good friend and supporter of music here at Trinity. During the funeral service the cantor sang a song. I don’t know a thing about the history or tradition of that song, or what the words meant, or even if they were words, or just evocative syllables for singing. But I knew that the song was sad, so sad, with a haunting melody in a minor key; and it was is if that song reached into our hearts and pulled out all the grief and sorrow and tears we all were carrying, as if it gave voice to all the sadness we would hide away; that song was a lament in the purest, simplest meaning of the word. And I thought to myself that we don’t have that sort of thing in our funerals: we don’t lament, we don’t take a moment to simply say “We are sad, and God knows we are sad, and we will sing our sadness to God.” There is something profoundly healing in that, and I think maybe our funerals could learn something from it. Because the other thing I thought about that song was that it was not only sad, it was not merely sad; it was also beautiful. Those haunting, minor-key notes tugged on my heart and lifted up my soul and gave courage to my spirit — the simple beauty of the song gave its own kind of joy, even when the theme of the song was something so sad. I think that song was a gift of the creating grace of God. I think that by God’s creative power that song faced into the stormy chaos of sadness and sorrow that threatened to overwhelm us, and it set that sadness in relationship with beauty, and through beauty with joy, and in doing so it created something new: it created a moment to experience, even in sadness — no, because of sadness, to experience yet more vividly the infinite preciousness of the goodness of life. In that song in a Jewish funeral on Friday, I learned something deeply moving, deeply important, about what my faith in the creating grace of God revealed in Jesus means to me.

And I think our faith in Jesus can mean that for all of us. Because the Good News of the Gospel is not that we will never have to face chaos-storms in our lives. The Good News of the Gospel is not that bad things will never happen to us good people. The Good News of the Gospel is not that God will rig the cosmic game so that we are always healthy and happy and prosperous and the best of the best of the best among people. No, the Good News is that the creating grace of God is with us, the Good News is that by faith in Jesus we can do as Jesus does, and Jesus does as God does — and that means that when storms and chaos and sadness and sorrow and loss and depression and grief and illness and confusion and doubt and fear rise up and burst forth and threaten to overwhelm us — and they will — when that happens, we can with Jesus face the chaos-storm, we can with Jesus say “Peace! Be still!”, we can with Jesus set that chaos in relationship with deep foundations of courage and compassion and wisdom and beauty and joy and trust and faith that can never be overwhelmed — and in that relationship we can create something new, we can create moments to experience the infinite preciousness of the goodness of God’s good gift of life.

May it be so with us. Amen.

Reading Scripture

3rd Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 4:33-34

17 June 2012

John D. Lane

Trinity Church, Staunton VA

An audio version of this sermon is available here.

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.” So says author Fran Lebowitz.

Sometimes we have to be reminded that Jesus does not draw up algebraic equations on 1st century blackboards. His scientific facts are sometimes not quite right. He speaks in parables, not allegories. Many parables begin: “The Kingdom of God is like ....”

I took a pastoral counseling course, taught by a Jungian analyst. He emphasized that it was often very difficult to be certain about reality. For instance, a patient might think that she was being followed. Was this really so? Often there was no way of knowing. He suggested using the phrase “as though.” “It is as though someone is following me, and I feel frightened.” Not much different from Jesus’ parables: “The Kingdom of God is like ....”

The Bible is much more than literature, but to read and hope to understand it, we often have to  approach it as literature. The Bible has characters–the most important of whom is God: Father, Son & Holy Spirit–plot, metaphors, similes–“the Kingdom of God is like”–irony, twists, suspense, surprises, blood and gore, mystery, physical settings, intrigue, relationships, etc.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus uses a slight variation in introducing the parable: “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” “As if,” “as though,” “like,” so on, but not is, not equals, not algebra, not arithmetic, not 1 = 1, 2 = 2, not literalism.

Occasionally, I think, we can indeed take Jesus literally, such as when he tells the rich young man to sell all that he has and give the money to the poor. That’s the kind of statement we are, however, quite willing to take figuratively. But Saint Francis took it literally. As someone noted, Saint Francis is the most admired and least imitated of all the saints. I had a friend who for many years headed up stewardship at a large parish. Part of his shtick was to speak at each of the services on Loyalty Sunday. He himself was committed to the tithe, and he made an impassioned plea to the congregation. Afterwards, one of his friends came up to him, and said, “Purnell, you were really great this year. You almost convinced me.” Despite the fact that Jesus spoke about money more than anything else, we don’t take those passages seriously.

One commentator, Eugene Boring–what a name, think of this as a Boring quote–says: “In the preaching of Jesus, parables were not vivid decorations of a moralistic point but were disturbing stories that threatened the hearer's secure mythological world–the world of assumptions by which we habitually live, the unnoticed framework of our thinking within which we interpret other data.” [Eugene Boring, The New Interpreter's Bible (Matthew), p 299, quoted by Brian Stoffregen in Exegetical Notes]

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”


The first of today’s short botanical parables threatens one of our mythological assumptions, that we are in control of our own destiny. “Be good and prosper.” “Be bad and be punished.” But we know in our hearts that this is indeed myth, actually nonsense. Bad things do happen to good people. And the wicked can prosper. When I was newly ordained, I had a bishop tell me something and then say, “If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.” I soon forgot whatever tale he told me, but 40 years later, I remember how ready he was to lie about it. He was not a great moral teacher.

The Kingdom of God, Jesus tells us, is not something we control. Seeds sprout and grow. We can try to influence this through weeding, applying fertilizer, and praying for rain, but there are no guarantees. God is the 900-pound gorilla: he does what he wants.

We can prepare for the Kingdom of God, but we can’t make it happen. Many fools have tried to predict the coming of the Kingdom, quoting the Bible but ignoring the words of Jesus: “You know not the day nor the hour.” There is no precision to understanding parables, but these are some of the thoughts that this story has teased out of me this morning.

“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

There are four things about this parable which spring out at me:

(1) Jesus was a carpenter, not a farmer. He needs to be excused for saying the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds; it isn’t. This is not a discrepancy that proves the Bible is all nonsense. Jesus is making a literary point. Poetic license, please. Get over it.

(2) Mustard may not be the greatest of all shrubs either; it only gets about 10 feet tall.

(3) What his audience knows, but Jesus doesn’t say, is that the mustard plant is an invasive weed. It grows easily and widely, like dandelions in our yards. The Kingdom of God is near you and everywhere, just like mustard or dandelions or morning glory or kudzu–whether you want it near you or not.

(4) Besides producing Grey Poupon, the mustard plant has other functions. It is good for God’s creatures, the birds. The Kingdom of God, though we don’t control it, is a good thing.

I am suggesting one way of looking at the Bible in the hope of understanding and learning from it. Look for repetition, consistency, a vision of God that is the sometimes the same in both Old and New Testaments–Hebrew Bible and Greek Bible, to be politically correct–a vision of God which develops as the stories unfold. But it is literature, not science. It has nuances. Prepare to be confused occasionally–or often. Expect to have your preconceptions challenged.

I had a very frightening professor in advanced preaching. He said that God would forgive an ineffective sermon, but would never forgive a sermon that was bad because the preacher had given little thought or time to preparing it. He had been dead several years before my Saturday nightmares ended. I would be getting up to preach my worst effort of the year, and Edmund Steimle would be in the third row. I would wake up in a cold sweat.

The parables are relevant to us, and I close with another Steimle point: A sermon should be 20% then, the time of Jesus, and 80% now, the time in which we live. I believe he meant that the reason we read, study, and preach the Bible is because it matters to us, now. It’s worth the effort.

So I end where I began:  “In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.”

The Eternal: The Things that Matter Most

Sermon- The Eternal: The Things that Matter Most June 10, 2012

2Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Trinity Church, Staunton

The Rev. Shelby Ochs Owen

An audio version of this sermon is available here. 

Outer nature vs. inner nature. Temporary vs. eternal. What can be seen vs. what cannot be seen. Earthly tent vs. a building from God. In the passage from the second letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul uses contrasting images to teach his readers to search for what matters, at least what matters in the eyes of God.

In our culture, so often it is the external, and yet temporary, qualities of a given situation that seem to be emphasized- how someone or something looks, how much money something costs, how much money someone makes, the education or vocational level someone has achieved. It is rare when advertisers suggest that we look below the surface of a situation, rare when we are encouraged to pay attention to the eternal; rare to be taught to search for the things of God, the things that matter.

Part of today’s passage from Corinthians is often used at funerals---for good reason: “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature in being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of Glory beyond all measure; because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal…” What a wonderful reminder at the death of a loved one that the things that matter most are of an eternal nature! But truly, it need not be only in death that we tune into those things that are not seen.

You probably know that the Eucharist is one of two sacraments in the Episcopal Church-Baptism being the other. And what is a sacrament? Directly from our catechism, a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” It is a powerful way to help us to focus on, to remain in, to engage with the eternal love of God, and through the Eucharist we are united with Christ and to one another.

In Hymn 51 which we sang today at the 10:00a.m. service, the final verse states, “In the Lord’s service bread and wine are offered, that Christ may take them, bless them, break and give them to all his people his own life imparting, food everlasting.” So this sacrament, this visible sign of bread and wine, while it does indeed matter, connects us to the inward grace of Jesus’ body and blood, the life eternal. The table from which we partake of the Eucharist could be seen as one end of a longer table that extends from the here and now, the earthly, the temporary, to the other end- the heavenly table, the table of the greater life, the permanent, the eternal, the really real. We can see the Eucharist as the means through which our sins are forgiven, the strengthening of our life with Christ and one another and the nourishment in eternal life.

As we are reminded that we are united with Christ and with one another, we are given perspective on and strength for this earthly life. The writer Paul was fully acquainted with the difficulties of the earthly life; he was afflicted, persecuted, perplexed. Fully aware how fragile we are as human beings, Paul says, “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.” If this is true, then there is obviously more going on around us and within us than we even know about! Paul was all about recognizing the power of God working through us as believers and as limited human beings. In the frailty of our flesh we cannot always see the full reality of the situation at hand. In fact, I would say we almost never, except perhaps in a mystical experience, see the full reality.

Many years ago, before electric refrigerators replaced iceboxes, the manager of a local ice house lost his watch, but no one could find it. Finally the manger posted signs all over town offering a substantial reward to anyone who found his watch .

The next day a young boy rode up to the ice house on his bicycle and asked if he could look for the watch. The manager said, “Don’t bother me, boy” But the boy was insistent. Finally the manager told him, “Look boy, we can’t have you underfoot while we’re moving these big blocks of ice. You can come back on Thursday afternoon when everyone is gone.” Meanwhile, the search continued, but the watch failed to materialize.

On Thursday afternoon the young boy came back to look for the watch. The manager lead him into the dark, cold room and ten minutes later the boy returned with the watch to claim his reward. The manager was amazed. He asked, “How did you find the watch? Nobody else could find it and we’ve gone over every inch of this place. How did you find it?” The boy replied, “It was easy. All I did was listen for the tick.” (The Portable Pep Talk, by Alexander Lockhart, p.167)

Tuning into the eternal is kind of like listening to the tick, the heart beat of God. When we cannot see what God is up to in our lives, when God doesn’t seem visible, perhaps we can listen and see with our hearts. The sacrament of the Eucharist reminds us of the reality of the invisible, the very realness of the presence of God, the actuality of divine love.

We as very human, human beings will experience difficulties. Some of us already have- deep disappointments that sometimes have us questioning the goodness of God. Paul related his own suffering as totally tied into Christ’s own suffering and death, and he also recognized just as we have died with Christ so will we be resurrected with him. There lay his hope! While we have these slight (even though they may not seem so slight!) momentary afflictions, we will experience a glory beyond all measure. There lies our hope as well. That no matter what we suffer, what difficulties we experience in this world our inner person is renewed every single day. To be renewed is to let the Holy Spirit take hold of us. If we can simply relax into God, surrender our own will to his goodness, we will find the fruit that the Spirit wants for us will reside in us. That fruit is love, joy, peace, kindness, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

If we can confidently expect to be raised up with Christ, to be resurrected with him, we have reason to hope. So let us remember that the external things, while they tell us something, they do not tell us the whole story. There is more to God’s story and ours than meets the eye.

Master Eckhart (13^thc. theologian)

A man

born blind can easily

deny the magnificence of a vast landscape.

He can easily deny all the wonders that he cannot touch,

smell, taste, or hear.

But one day the wind will show you its kindness

and remove the tiny patches that

covered our eyes,

and we will see God more clearly

than we have ever seen

ourselves.

So search for the things that matter, the things unseen, yet permanent and eternal. Do not lose heart. Tune yourself into the heartbeat of God. Relax in the eternal love of God until the day God removes those tiny patches that cover our eyes.

Amen.

Trinitarian Mission

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

An audio version of this sermon is available here.
Today we are celebrating Trinity Sunday — which is a pretty special day for us at Trinity Church. Today is our patronal feast; today is our church’s name-day! Trinity Sunday is a pretty big deal for us.

But Trinity Sunday — indeed, the entire doctrine of the Trinity — is for many Christians today kind of a head-scratcher. We know it’s important in our tradition; we know we use “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” language in our liturgies and prayers; we know that in the 4th and 5th centuries many of the Church’s best minds labored long and hard to work out the details of Trinitarian doctrine for the good of the whole Church. But for a lot of Christians today, the formal doctrine of the Trinity seems pretty remote from their experience. A lot of Christians today wonder why the teaching that God is one Being in three Persons really makes a difference in how they live and how they pray and how they make decisions and how they do service and mission in the world. One author on a preaching website I researched this week even said “Here’s my rule-of-thumb regarding the Trinity: People who say they understand it aren’t to be trusted. Which means, I think, that trying to explain the Trinity in a sermon is a really, really bad idea.” If that’s the kind of advice given to preachers, then is it any wonder that many people-in-the-pews don’t quite get why a day like Trinity Sunday is very meaningful for their life and work and ministry?

But lately, over the last few years or so, I’ve been seeing a kind of resurgence of interest in the doctrine of the Trinity — and precisely for its practical value in thinking about Christian life and mission. More and more, I’ve seen theologians and spiritual writers and ministry leaders saying that the Trinity is a key element in the Christian imagination, and that reflecting on the Trinity actually helps to motivate us for mission.

Their line of thinking goes like this: At the heart of it, when you burrow through all the metaphysical subtleties and unpack all the technical terminologies, at the heart of it, the doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that God is relationship. It says that at the heart of God, at the center of God’s being, the very thing that makes God be God, there is relationship. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, and the Father loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father, and the Son loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Son — and that constant and continual dance of giving and receiving in loving relationship is the way God is God. What the doctrine of the Trinity says, at root, is that the realest really real thing in all existence is relationship.

And, because it is God’s very nature to give and receive in loving relationship, God wants to expand the dance of giving and receiving, God wants to extend love to that-which-is-not-God. Therefore God creates a Universe, God brings forth a world, God makes a cosmos full of creatures that God can love, creatures that can evolve and grow and struggle and strive to love each other and to love God back. The reason God creates a Universe is so that more and more creatures in more and more ways can be drawn into the dance of love that is the Trinitarian heart of God.

So the Universe has a purpose. It isn’t just a kind of cosmic accident; it isn’t just a miserable mistake we need to get out of to get to heaven. God has a goal in the Universe, God has a mission in Creation, God is always everywhere at work in the world to create moments of giving and receiving, occasions of dancing together, experiences of genuine and joyful love. Because God the Trinity lives by giving and receiving in love, God has a mission to raise up every creature in the Universe to live by giving and receiving in love, too.

But if the goal is to raise up creatures to give and receive in love, that is not something that God can just make them do: in order to give and receive in genuine love, the creatures have to participate, they have to put their own selves into it, they have to give freely and receive gratefully for there to be genuine love. And that means that God’s mission in the world is not something that God can do all by Godself: God must call and invite and empower creatures to join God in God’s mission of Trinitarian love.

And that is where we as Christians come in. We believe that Jesus has come to us as God's embodied Word: we believe that the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus is God saying "I love you" to us, saying it in the flesh and bone and breath and presence of a real, live human being, a human being like us who shows us what it means to live a human life in the fullness of divine love. And believing in Jesus, beloving Jesus, giving our hearts to Jesus, opens the way for the Holy Spirit to give us new birth, to breathe into us a new quality of life, a new vitality of love, so that we too can love just as Jesus loves. Our believing in Jesus, our following Jesus, is our particular way to join in God's mission to create in the world moments of giving and receiving in love that reflect the Trinitarian reality in the heart of God.

And we Christians gather together in churches, we congregate in congregations, so that we can support each other, and challenge each other, and hold each other accountable, and lift each other up in encouragement, to go forth into the world and join God's mission. Our purpose for being Trinity Parish is for the community we share here to shape and form us in giving and receiving in love, so that we can give and receive in that same quality of love in all our relationships — all of them, in our families, at our jobs, on the street, in economics, in politics, in the environment — all the ways we connect with people and animals and plants and landscapes and all the other creatures God has put here to be neighbors to us.  Our mission as a congregation is to help each and every one of us, in our own ways, to join God’s mission to create love in the Universe.

As a congregation, we at Trinity Church provide opportunities to give and receive in Trinitarian love through corporate activities like Noon Lunch, or the Haiti mission, or the Honduras mission, or the United Thank Offering, or any number of ministries that are identified as part of the church’s life. But as a congregation we also lift up our members individually to create moments of giving and receiving in Trinitarian love in their own lives, quite apart from any named and recognized church program, just in the ways we be ourselves in the world. Take a moment to think of one thing you’ve done recently, one occasion when you have genuinely given and received with another in love, whether you’ve thought of it as “ministry” or not, one moment when you have helped to create an experience of love and joy and peace and right-relationship — and then I want you to realize that that moment was a glimpse of the Trinity, that moment was a tiny little portrait of the Holy Trinity, right here in the world, and every time we help God make one portrait of the Trinity in the world, we bring the world one bit closer to the full revelation of love God wants this Universe to be.

Helping God make portraits of the Trinity in moments of giving and receiving in love — that is the mission God calls us to join. That is our purpose for being Trinity Church. That is how the abstract doctrine of the Trinity really makes a difference for how we live and work and minister in our real lives. And that is what we celebrate as we celebrate Trinity Sunday. Amen.