Sermon (Fr. Cunningham) February 25, 2018

    If there is a theme which runs through today's readings that theme would seem to be that God's ways are not our ways.  Today we hear of Abraham learning at the age of ninety-nine that he is going to start having a family.  In Paul's letter to the Romans we get a further reminder of that miraculous feat and then in the Gospel lesson we learn just how things are going to end up for Jesus, which is the whole being crucified and rising again business.  Now if I were writing a book and wanted to explain the birth of a great nation I probably would not start with a ninety-nine year old dude nor would I create a messiah who gets crucified.  And the reason I probably would not do this is because it just sounds so odd and no one would find it believable.  Human instinct says that when you start a nation you need to find some young virile individuals and if you are going to have a messiah they should be triumphant types, riding at the head of an army, not getting themselves nailed to a tree.  And so what should we take from this?  How are we to understand a God who does things differently than we do?  And how should this impact our lives?

    Such a discussion should probably start with just what we mean by the word "differently."  In the examples we have today, God acts in ways that we would not intuitively act, which seems as good of definition as any.  But the question that this raises is why wouldn't we act as God acts.  For the answer I am tempted to throw down the standard church response of sin and move on.  And honestly it is not a bad answer but it does need some further refinement.  The sin part of the explanation helps us partially understand why we would not pick a ninety-nine year old man for an important task or have a crucified messiah.  And the partial thing that it explains is that we as humans often look to characteristics that are not the most important ones.  We deal with the superficial rather than the whole.  A good example of this comes from the Old Testament.  Think back to the story of Saul.  The Israelites decided they wanted a king and then they decided on Saul to be their king, largely because he was really good looking - I mean you can't have a king that looks like a toad can you?  But of course he turned out to be a lousy king.  Sin blinded the Israelites to the things that God sees and made them choose someone who was a disaster.  Similarly, when Peter rebukes Jesus for having the gall to not act the way he believed a Messiah should act he is again looking at the wrong things.  He is looking at what he wanted the Messiah to look like, rather than understanding what God was doing. 

The sin in both of these instances is humanity putting its will over and above God's will.  And this is really the beginning of all sin, when we think we have a better idea than God.  And when we think we have a better idea than God we generally will miss what God is actually doing.  But I don't want this to be a "shame on you" type sermon where I tell you to be less sinful so that you can understand what God is doing, rather I want it to be an invitation for all of us to walk into some of the beauty and wonder that is God.  To look for the miraculous and to see the ways God manifests himself in our everyday life.  Because seeing God in this world is ultimately a more wonderful and more beautiful way to live.  Today Peter could not see the beautiful act of sacrifice that Jesus was explaining to him because he had preconceived notions of what the Messiah should do.  And if Peter had gotten his way and prevented Jesus from dying and rising again things would look very different for us today and by that I mean that the world would look pretty bleak because we would be without the whole salvation thing, but we can talk about that more on Easter.  Let's return to today's topic and ask how can we better see the beauty and wonder that might be right in front of us.  Well, let me offer three suggestions and those suggestions are to slow down, to keep our minds on heavenly things and to be grateful.  This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but just some things to think about and practice.

    The first thing that that I mentioned is that we could slow down.  And I realize the term "slow down" can be taken in a number of ways, but what I want to talk about it in terms of our mental processes.  Today Peter did not stop to listen and comprehend what Jesus was actually saying, but instead raced right into chastising him for not fitting into a category that Peter understood.  This is obviously not just a problem for Peter, our brains are wondrous and marvelous things but they can also do lots of stupid stuff (I spent four years in a fraternity so I know this all too well).  There is something in psychology known as heuristics (here-is-tics).  This is basically the study of mental shortcuts.  And what the term mental shortcuts means is that our minds will take previously learned knowledge and sort of shoehorn reality into that mode of thinking.  A trivial example of this happened to me years ago when we bought a new toaster.  Our old toaster was white and longish while our new toaster was black and sort of squat.  For months after I would look in the cupboard and be unable to find the toaster that was right in from of me because my brain had built a mental shortcut to look for a long white object, not something with the characteristics of a toaster, because long and white was the easier thing to see and took less mental energy.  Sometimes we need these mental shortcuts, like if we are being chased by a lion, but sometimes they prevent us from seeing something that is right in front of us, like my elusive toaster that was in plain sight.  We sometimes need to slow down and engage our brains to see what is really in front of us, not just see the thing for which we are looking.  Prayer, meditating on scripture and Bible study can all help us attain these "new eyes".  And what we might see with these "new eyes" is what God is actually doing.   

    The second thing that I would recommend is to think on heavenly things.  My reference for this comes from what I find to be one of the most beautiful verses in the Bible and it comes from Paul's letter to the Philippians.  It states, "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."  Our minds tend to want to go to places that are more in the non-praiseworthy category.  If you don't believe me watch one of those shows on cable news where people yell at each other or read the comments section on most websites.  But our minds do not have to go to the lowest common denominator; they can be raised and exalted to the heavenly things.  They can think on the things that are of God

    The last thing to think about is to be grateful.  To give thanks every day for all of the blessings in our life.  Gratitude helps us enlarge our view of life and it helps to fill us with joy.  The other thing that gratitude does is it takes us out of the center of the universe.  People who are ungrateful tend to see themselves as the arbiters of the entire world.  They judge what is right and wrong.  Grateful people see things as gifts, allowing them to be free to experience the joys in life and to see the things that are beautiful and wondrous. 

In Isaiah 55 we hear this, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."  These verses are not a call to throw in the towel and say that we will never have higher thoughts but are rather a call heavenward.  While it is certainly true that we will never be God, our goal should always be to reach higher, to ascribe to be more like God.  And part of becoming more like God is to better understand him and see what he is doing.  Some of it may seem odd at first because it can be different from what we usually see on earth, but it is the best thing.  In the person of Jesus Christ God has stooped down to us so that we may reach up to him.  Doing this will take changing some of our normal behavior but ultimately it will be a more wonderful and more beautiful way to live on this earth.  We sometimes miss things that God is doing and believe that it is because God is not doing anything.  But the case is often that we are simply missing it, because we are looking for or seeing something else.  But to see the beauty and wonder that is around us we step outside of ourselves and reach up to God so that we may be God's both now and forevermore.   

Sermon (Fr. Cunningham) February 18, 2018

I assume the main reason we hear of Jesus' forty days of temptation in the wilderness today is because we have entered into the forty days of Lent.  Seeing patterns like this must be a testament to my education, so chalk one up for the Fresno Unified School District.  Anyway, Mark's version of the temptation is, as is usual with Mark, a little light on the details, he says only that, "He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him."  In the other Gospels we pick up facts like that of Jesus fasting while he was in the wilderness and the exact nature of the temptations.  But let's stick with Mark today and not fill in any extra information.  And so what I would like to do is take a few moments and focus on the fact that Jesus was tempted and, in more practical terms, to focus on the fact that we are tempted as well.  For based on personal experience I can with a clean conscience state that I and I assume the rest of you are very susceptible to temptation.  After all if it were not tempting it probably would not be called temptation.

    So let's start by getting a definition.  Generally speaking and in the context of what we hear today, temptation is something that takes us away from living our lives in the ways that God calls us to live them.  But beyond explaining the word in such general terms, temptation is very hard to define at the granular level, because it varies from situation to situation.  If you were dying of thirst you would be more tempted to make moral compromises to find water than you would if you were sitting next to one of these giant pallets of water that seem to be everywhere around here.  And it is not just situational because different things tempt different people.  As John Donne put it, "Other men's crosses are not my crosses."  For example, I have never found anything remotely interesting about gambling.  You could put me into the middle of a casino and I would come out the other end with the same amount of money as I went in (and maybe even a free drink if I was lucky).  Yet I have known some addictive gamblers.  I worked for a guy when I was in college who would drive to Reno from the Bay Area and the first thing he did when he got there was fill up his car with gas because he knew that he would not have any money by the time he departed.  And I know this is a rather silly example, but I simply want to point out that we can all be lured away by various and sundry things.  And we should not assume that because we are not susceptible to temptations that get a lot of attention that we are not susceptible to any temptations.  Our temptations may be on the top ten list or they may be something seemingly benign, but when they draw us away from the one true God they are detrimental for us or at least not the best thing for us.

    Since we are in the season of Lent I want to talk about something that may appear unrelated at first, but stick with me for a minute.  In the season of Lent people often give up something that they enjoy, like chocolate or soda.  In recent years there has been a move in some quarters to pick up something rather than to put something down.  So, for example, I might try to regularly visit a shut in or try to be kinder.  And I am not opposed to this idea of picking something up, but I think sometimes the motivation for doing this comes from a misunderstanding of why we give up something in the first place.  The first reason why people give things up in Lent is in imitation of Christ.  He fasted for forty days and so in a smaller way we are fasting from something.  But there is a second reason and one which I think we can forget these days in which our every desire and whim can be met almost instantaneously, and this second reason is that it strengthens our resolve, showing that there is nothing more important to us then God.  Having to say no now and then in little things can be an important practice. 

    There is the old story of the smoker who said that, "quitting smoking is easy I have done it hundreds of times."  We laugh at the ridiculousness of this story because we know that this particular smoker has never actually quit.  And so while I am not saying that everyone needs to give up something for Lent, what I am saying is that now and then it might not be a bad thing to work on strengthening our will.  To say no to something that we want so that our will might be stronger when severe temptation comes.

Think about it like this, we exercise so that we are healthier and able to do certain things when required.  And so following this logic it might not be a terrible idea if we worked on resisting temptation now and then so that when we really needed it, that ability would not be flabby and out of shape.  It is interesting that in terms of physical fitness it seems very logical to exercise in ways that do not necessarily reflect things that we do in real life.  And so when we exercise we do things like lift weights or swing a kettlebells none of which are part of anyone's job description as best I know.  And for many good reasons, we believe that seemingly odd forms of exercise translate into making us better physical specimens, and better at performing tasks in our daily lives.  However, we tend not to follow this same line of reasoning when it comes to our moral lives.  But is that really wise?  Does showing some discipline and the ability to resist temptation in something small ultimately lead to our ability to do the same with something large?  I would argue that it does because the only people who truly know the power of temptation are those who have been able to resist it.  If I drop my diet every time someone offers me a cookie, I really don't know what it takes to be on a diet, because I really have never been on one.

    C.S. Lewis one time said something interesting (well he said lots of interesting things but anyway).  He said in discussing the ways we rationalize our behaviors that you often hear people say that whatever less than admirable thing they did was not so bad because it was not like they had killed a million people like Hitler or Stalin.  His retort to that was that what the person was saying was true but by the same token that same person had never been given the opportunity to kill a million people.  Most of the time we will be tempted with more mundane things in this life, things that will not be earth shattering.  And if you don't want to believe me or C.S. Lewis about the importance of small things listen to the words of Jesus in the Parable of the talents.  He says of the servant who took the money that was given him and doubled it, "Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master."  And yes I know this parable was not strictly about temptation, but it shows some of the scalability of the Kingdom of God.  God is happy when we do things correctly whether they are large or small.  The key is that we are faithful to him when we are doing them. 

    And so while in some sense the resisting of temptation may be a bit false in Lent in that we sort of cook up our own temptations to resist, the idea in our walk with God is to resist temptation no matter how small those temptations seem to be.  Some temptations are seemingly very bad, but even the small ones take us away from doing the best thing.  And so my encouragement during this season of Lent is for us to leave it a little better than we entered it.  For some this may be a massive change, but for others it might be something seemingly innocuous.  But any time that a piece of us returns to God there is rejoicing in heaven.  And so while we could say that resisting these small temptations does not matter we could also look at them as low hanging fruit.  There are small things that we could resist which will draw us closer to God - that is kind of nice.  Being a Christian does not have to be hard work all the time but requires us to be like the servant and to be faithful in the small things so that we may be God's both now and forevermore.   

Sermon (Fr. Cunningham) February 11, 2018

Today is sort of a housekeeping Sunday in terms of our readings.  What I mean by that is we are tying up loose ends so that we can get to the next place in the narrative.  And so what we see, especially with the Gospel, is the emphasis of one main point and that main point has to do with who Jesus is.  The reason for this housekeeping is this; Lent starts on Wednesday and as a result we need to have a good idea of the nature of Jesus before we get to that.  The Church Year and by default the Lectionary (that is the readings we are assigned for a given Sunday) work under the guise of a sort of Holy Amnesia, with us rediscovering the Gospel on a yearly basis.  The Church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent.  So the way that things are supposed to work is that we first learn of the coming of the Messiah back in early December, then we learn of the birth of the Messiah at Christmas.  This is followed by the idea that the Messiah came for the whole earth which we learn during Epiphany and so now in early February right before Lent starts we need to be told just who exactly this person is who will be crucified at the end of Lent on Good Friday.  As a result we get the story of the Transfiguration.  Those who put together the Lectionary did not call me, but I have always guessed that they chose this particular reading for the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany because it very compactly shows Jesus in all of his glory - the whole fully man and fully God business.

    In many ways the Transfiguration is a strange story.  Jesus takes James, Peter and John up to a high mountain.  And when they get up this high mountain, Jesus "was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them."  Then, if that was not enough, he is joined by Moses and Elijah, which apart from being pretty neat it is also wrought with symbolism.  Moses is the giver of the Law; Elijah is the prophet who was bodily carried off to heaven before he tasted death.  And so by appearing with these two we see symbolically that Jesus is both the fulfillment and embodiment of the Law and of the Prophets.  And just in case that was not enough for us to figure out the identity of Jesus, God the Father gets involved in a very overt way by announcing, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!"  And so unless we are felling particularly thick today we should have a pretty good idea of who Jesus is; not only in his relationship to God the Father but in terms of the narrative of the Old Testament and the Jewish tradition from where the idea of Messiah comes.  And so now the question comes, what are we to do?  How does the full identity of Jesus change our lives? 

    I started off by talking about the divine amnesia that we are supposed to have because of the lectionary readings of the Church Calendar and in many ways I think it would be nice if this were literally true.  If we could have a sense of excitement and wonder as if we were hearing this news of Jesus for the first time; but most likely we have heard it so much that it has become somewhat mundane. And as a result of this familiarity we can act like those that Paul talks about today in 2nd Corinthians when he says, "the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God."  In our case it is probably a case of having heard it all before that blinds us, but I think at various times and places we are all blinded to Christ as revealed in the Transfiguration by the various and sundry gods of this world.  And to understand what I mean by this let's start by defining our terms - most specifically what do we mean by god of this world?

    This may be confusing (or it may not) but I think what Paul is getting at in this phrase are not some ancient mythological god like Apollo or Athena but rather he means it in the sense of something accorded supreme importance, and that something which is accorded supreme importance is not God as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.  A god of this world would be something that we put ahead of the one true God, and it could really be anything.  Putting something ahead of God is a very real danger to all of us and may be even more of problem because of the times in which we live.  Our present times are very noisy times; times in which there are so many things that compete for our attention.  And compete may be too docile of a word because many things scream and yell for our attention.  Most of us here are from the United States, and so here is just a quick example.  You may have noticed that most gas stations back home now believe that we cannot successfully pump our gas without some sort of music playing.  In fact, a number of our gas stations back in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin have upped the ante and have now added TV screens to the gas pump so that we don't have to ever be bothered with a moment of silence for some personal reflection. 

I was reading a study the other day by the psychologist Larry Rosen who has done research on the way our electronic era has refocused our brains.  In one study he found that when people put their phones down their brains actually produce bursts of cortisol, which is the hormone associated with the fight or flight instinct and is released in times of stress.  Which means putting our phones down causes anxiety.  We are worried that we might miss something.  And while I realize this is just one example, there are so many things that fight for our attention and when we ignore them they trigger things in us a feeling that we are missing something important.  How can the one true God compete with things that cause us anxiety and stress when we try to let go of them?

I have sometimes thought that if there were real gods competing for our attention it might actually make things easier.  And by real gods, I don't mean real in the sense that they actually exist, but rather I mean things like golden calves and fertility gods.  I would guess that if you found yourself on Sunday morning sacrificing a goat at the altar of Baal instead of going to Church you would probably have a pretty good idea that you were not Christian anymore.  But that is not how the gods of this world seem to work.  In my life as a parish priest, I have found that the greatest competition to Sunday church attendance is not devotion to another religion but is rather youth sports and nice summer days.  Parishioners will happily tell me that they didn't make it because its baseball season, or it was just too nice of a day to be spent indoors at a church service.  Neither of these are horrible and evil things to do, but they are things that get placed above the worship of the one true God. 

    In 1985 NYU Professor Neil Postman wrote his famous book entitled Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that our world resembled the world laid out by Huxley in Brave New World where people take a soothing drug known as soma.  Postman argued that television served this function, essentially keeping us fat, dumb and happy.  We replaced the pursuit of great things with a sort of sedentary comfortableness.  Now I don't want to get into full cranky old man mode and say that it is even worse today and we are all numbed to reality by various distractions and amusements, but I will say that we need to be careful.  We need to always guard against things that distracts us from God. 

    Today is a day when we are supposed to be in awe and wonder of the beauty and majesty of God.  And it may be hard to do because of both familiarity and because of other things which distract us from that reality, but this is ultimately the best and most wonderful thing that we can do.  God has never told us not to enjoy the beauty and the wonder of the creation that he has given to us, but has simply told us to love him first.  And this is not because God is a megalomaniac in constant need of affirmation, but it is because God knows that he is the only being in the universe capable of being the first love.  All the rest of creation will ultimately disappoint because it is not God.  Or as Isaiah puts it, "The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever."  And so as we prepare to enter the season of Lent we need to remember who Jesus is and that he is to be worshiped and adored above all others so that we may be his both now and forevermore.