February 24, 2019 Sermon

On August 31st 1939 a small group of German operatives, dressed in Polish military uniforms seized a radio station in Gleiwitz, Germany near the Polish German border.  The reason for this action was what conspiratorial types call a false flag operation, which is defined as, “ a covert operation designed to deceive, creating the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility.”  In this case the Germans wanted it to appear that the Poles were attacking Germans on German soil.  The next day, September 1st the Germans invaded Poland.  Part of their justification for this action was that great line of reasoning from our childhood - the Poles had started it (even though they hadn’t).  But in official declarations Hitler and his National Socialists claimed that as a result of this Polish provocation the Germans needed to send in 3,472 tanks and 1,500,000 Wehrmacht infantry because you couldn’t have the Poles interrupting some Wagnerian Gotterdammerung on Radio Free Gleiwitz to blast Gus Polinski’s polka music throughout the Vaterland.   There are some lines that a nation cannot let be crossed. 

This false flag operation has always been interesting to me because it shows that on some level even the Nazis for all their goose-stepping and Aryan bluster thought they still needed some justification for their aggression.  It could not just be about lebensraum and master races.  No, the Poles had to have started it (even if they didn’t).  And I want to take a minute and think about why the Nazi’s thought that the civilized world would want to see a provocation, in order for their aggression to be justified.  And the reason for this seems to be part and parcel of the cultural milieu in which we live.  Most people have a sort of half-baked Code of Hammurabi floating around in their heads, which says that if they hit me I get to hit them back.  So the Germans made up something that would meet this criterion and could safely invade Poland because the Poles were the initial aggressors.  That is often how the world likes things to work.  I remember in the run up to the Iraq war one of the main criticisms was that Iraq had not attacked the US and so we were therefore not justified in attacking them.  Now, maybe if Saddam had taken over WKRP in Cincinnati some of those people may have come around - but enough of this.

For fun lets see how this understanding of war, and aggression fits into what Jesus tells us today when he unleashes some of the most difficult commands he put forth in his ministry.  He says this; “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  These are very difficult sayings because they essentially posit that we are to do the right and Godly thing no matter what the other person does to us.  We are told that we need to act in this world as God bids us to act despite the circumstances and despite what other people may do or say.  It is not about us, but rather it is about God.

         Since I had to take a class on just war theory while I was deployed you now get stuck with a discussion of it.  Just war theory is actually made up of three pieces, which usually go by their Latin names, because that makes people feel smarter.  I won’t pretend that I am proficient in Latin, so I will just give it to you in English.  The three pieces of Just War Theory are this:  Just Cause, Just Conduct in war and Just Conduct after war.  They are pretty self-explanatory but basically they mean you need to have a good or just reason for going to war, you need to behave justly in that war (i.e. no bayoneting the wounded) and when the conflict is over you need to work toward a just settlement (i.e. you can’t enslave your enemy and make them massage your bunions).  The overarching theme is that in going to war, when it is all said and done, you need to have created a more just world.  Or put in cooking terms at the end of a just war there needs to be more justice in the pot than there was before it all started.  And so I want to think about Just War in light of what Jesus says.  For it would seem that what Jesus is doing is laying out a system by which justice would increase in this world in the same way that Just War theory argues.

         When we look at the ministry of Jesus he often comes along and reinterprets or strengthens the law, getting it back to what its original intent was.  A famous example of this is when Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.”  You see in statements like this Jesus is pointing out that the sin begins long before we actually kill someone.  So if we are looking to follow God’s will it must start at the source, the place where sinful action begins, which is in our hearts and minds.  People do not kill someone and then afterward decide that they were really mad at them.  Instead the anger is what leads to the killing. 

So going back to Jesus admonition about loving those who hate you and not striking back at someone who strikes you, this is about getting to the source of the problem and not allowing justification for sin.  In other words if I do something wrong it is not made less wrong because the other person started it.  On a slight side note this seems to be where most of our political arguments play out these days.  If person A says that Donald Trump is bad because he has had extramarital affairs person B will respond by saying well so did Bill Clinton.  Both are true and both are wrong.  We do not get off the hook because we can prove that someone else also did something bad. 

         And so looking to wrap up this sort of meandering sermon that I have given you about why we should love our enemies.  The answer to why Jesus tells us to do it is because it is the right thing to do.  In other words hating someone does not become justifiable because someone hated you first.  As I stated earlier when thinking about responses to unjust action most of us have a sort of half baked Code of Hammurabi floating around in our heads which says; if they hit me, I get to hit them back.  But historically we must remember that an eye for an eye was actually a dialing back of how things worked.  Before Hammurabi came up with this code in 1754 BC if someone took your eye you could burn their house down, kill their children and take their fondue set.  Hammurabi came up with this to add some proportionality to people’s responses.  But Jesus dials it back even further. 

         Just like just war theory requires a net increase in justice Jesus no longer allows other people’s misdeeds to justify our own.  Because responding to injustice with injustice will ultimately add more ill feeling or harmful actions into this world; i.e. it adds more injustice to the pot.  Since I seem to be on a roll of quoting our mothers it is also known as two wrongs do not make a right.  And I know what Jesus tells us today is a very hard saying because our sense of justice often depends on another person suffering at least as much as we do, if not more.  But in the cosmic sense, that is from God’s perspective, we are all his creatures so making another suffer, even we feel they have it coming, grieves his heart.  God does not want more hate and vitriol injected into the system.  So if we respond to evil with evil all that we have done is create a more evil world.  It is a hard way to live, but one which ultimately puts us closer to the mindset of God so that we may be his both now and forevermore.

February 17, 2019 Sermon

               I have recently noticed something a bit alarming and I probably should not take it seriously because I have seen it mainly on the internet, but I need an introduction to this sermon so you are stuck with it.  The alarming thing that I have noticed is the tendency of Christians to become utopians.  What I mean by this is on the internet there will be a quote from a supposedly Christian source, which tells us that if we just did such and such the world would be perfect, no God needed.  I saw one the other day which said, “If the Church followed the example of Jesus in how he treated women, it could heal the world.”  Now please don’t think what I am about to say in anyway implies that we should mistreat women or that I think we should discourage people from acting in the way that Jesus did.  I am sure the person who said this had good intentions, but what I want to point out is that we should never believe that solely through our own actions or the actions of humanity in general, we can fix the entire world.  The reason for this is first because we are not actually God and second because there is evil in this world and quite frankly some people don’t want to be fixed.  Yes we should certainly treat women in the way that Jesus did, but to say it will fix everything is sort of like saying that if you are nice to your mother ISIS will stop beheading infidels.  Certainly we should be nice to our mother, but honestly I don’t think ISIS cares. 

The problem with statements such as this is that while purporting to be Christian they are really nothing more than the faith in mere mortals that Jeremiah warns against today.  It is the same kind of faith that Thomas Jefferson had when he took a penknife to his Bible and left only the sayings of Jesus of which he approved.  Or in his words once he finished his surgery what remained was, “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”  Jefferson created a philosopher Jesus who was not divine but rather offered people some good advice.   What Jefferson and modern day utopian Christians have in common is that they believe through the actions of humanity and humanity alone the world can be fixed.  And that is really the crux of all utopian ideals; it is up to us.  If we just do the right actions then everything will be perfect.  But if the twentieth century taught us nothing else it is that utopian experiments and faith in the behavior of man leads to a lot of dead people be it in the killing fields of Cambodia or in the blockading of food supplies in Venezuela.   

         I was talking with someone the other day and they asked me what the difference was between faith and superstition.  I said that my understanding was that faith places power in God while superstition places power in people.  The faithful person prays that “Thy will be done” whereas the superstitious person throws salt over their shoulder to ward off evil spirits.  In superstition we are in control and God, the gods or whoever wait for us to perform certain actions after which they are obliged to do something in return.  I bury St. Christopher in my front lawn and he has to sell my house.  And this mentality can be very prevalent in Christianity.  It argues that if we do certain things God will reward us with what we want.  But that is not saying thy will be done but instead my will be done. 

         So let’s get back to the Bible.  I hinted at Jeremiah’s proclamation a minute ago, so let’s take a second to look at the part I was talking about.  Jeremiah says (well actually he is quoting God), “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.”  This is a problem for Jeremiah and a problem for Christians who seek utopia, because ultimately God will not fit into such agendas, largely because God does not promise utopia in this life.  So the only way to even make an attempt to achieve utopia is through trust in mere mortals and by making mere flesh our strength.   And like superstition this is very attractive because we are in control, we just need to come up with the right plan and we can make heaven on earth – no Jesus needed.  But it never works because heaven on earth can only be implemented by God, it cannot be implemented by us because we are mere mortals and we cannot do God’s job.  No matter how many plans and snappy Facebook posts we initiate.

         I read a horribly tragic story last year concerning the world’s most prolific murderer Mao Zedong.  It happened during The Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958.  For those of you who do not remember this, The Great Leap Forward was a campaign to move China from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse, so that it could become a worker’s paradise or utopia if you like.  One of the first actions taken in this quest was something known as The Four Pests Campaign.  As the name indicates it sought to eradicate four pests, which were rats, flies, mosquitos and sparrows.  Why sparrows you may ask, well it is because Mao thought they ate too much of the grain.  So if you got rid of the sparrows there would be more grain for the people to eat in their worker’s paradise.  An account written in Time magazine in 1958 describes how this campaign played out: “At dawn one day last week, the slaughter of the sparrows in Peking began, continuing a campaign that has been going on in the countryside for months. The objection to the sparrows is that, like the rest of China's inhabitants, they are hungry. They are accused of pecking away at supplies in warehouses and in paddyfields at an officially estimated rate of four pounds of grain per sparrow per year. And so divisions of soldiers deployed through Peking streets, their footfalls muffled by rubber-soled sneakers. Students and civil servants in high-collared tunics, and schoolchildren carrying pots and pans, ladles and spoons, quietly took up their stations. The total force, according to Radio Peking, numbered 3,000,000.”  No one knows how many sparrows died but they do know what happened the next year.  Mao must have been sleeping that day in ornithology class or forgot the other things that sparrows eat besides grain.  And the other things that they really like to eat besides grain are insects, especially locusts.  So the locusts, with no natural predators, came in droves and had free reign over the countryside.  They went to work on the fields eating all that they could stuff into their little locust mouths.  What followed next was the worst recorded mass starvation in the history of the world with somewhere between 15 and 78 million people starving to death.  China put their faith in a man and his utopian ideals and he rewarded them by starving to death somewhere around 10% of their population at the time. 

         Now I am obviously not saying that every time we forget God and put our trust in man that millions of people are going to die, but I am saying that it will be worse off than if we entered into the situation with humility and relied on God.  Our salvation is never going to come from a man, a government program for a Great Leap Forward or a catchy slogan on Facebook.  Should we follow the teachings of Jesus, certainly we should, but we must also remember to rely on him in all things.  Jesus final words were not I have told you everything you need to know so just follow these instructions and all will be well.  Rather after he tells us to follow his commands he says, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  If we did not need Jesus but just his words why would he continue to be with us?  We can only follow his commands in his strength not in our own. As Jeremiah tells us today God can never be eliminated from the equation.  We must rely on God’s strength in everything so that we may be his both now and forevermore. 

February 10, 2019 Sermon

          A number of years ago I spent an unpleasant evening at a dinner party.  The main reason for the unpleasantness was that one of the guests took it upon themselves to be responsible for the entire conversation, the rest of us were invited to simply sit back, relax and listen to the musings.  I quite frankly cannot remember much of what was said because after a while it sort of turned into the conversational equivalent of elevator music, I was vaguely aware that words were being formed and put out into the ether, but like the Muzak version of “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” it became unmoored from meaning at some point.  The funny follow up to this story was that I ran into this person months later and they asked me if we had ever met.  Which was a fitting conclusion.  It sort of reinforced the notion that there was no real need for me to have been there at all, the important thing was the production of words, not the human interaction that is supposed to take place in a conversation.  I could have been replaced with a cardboard cutout of Lenny Kosnowski from Laverne and Shirley and the results would have probably been the same. 

I bring this up not only to report that through years of therapy I have come to peace with the situation and am once again able to attend dinner parties, but also to have a discussion about words and how and when we should use them.  And I don’t do this just out of my own indulgence, but rather because of something we hear from the Prophet Isaiah today.  The setup is that Isaiah has seen God and various other things having to do with the heavenly realm and his response is to say, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" 

This is rather interesting because on one level the reaction is natural, or at least should be natural when one enters the presence of God, that they realize how far short they fall.  I assume it was like one of those nightmares we have where we show up to class and realize that a 40-page term paper is due that day - or that may have really happened to me.  But in these dreams there is a sudden and frightening realization of just how unprepared we are.  However, the thing I find most curious and also most enlightening is what he chooses to focus on, that being his lips.  He does not say that he is unclean in general, or perhaps that his thoughts are unclean, but his lips – the thing through which he conveys his voice to the outside world.  There is something special about our lips and the words they produce that we should all ponder for a moment.  In the Book of James we get something of the power of the lips (although he uses the word tongue) when he says, “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!  And the tongue is a fire.”  

We live in a time where it is pretty safe to say that we have more access to more stuff springing forth from people’s lips than at any other time in history, and sadly it is also true that we live in a time where the vast majority the stuff that comes from people’s lips is not edifying or even all that interesting, we live in a world of unclean lips.  A world that does not even recognize that it is a place of unclean lips.

         One of my favorite stories from the satirical newspaper The Onion is titled, “Drunk Will Show You, Everybody.”  It concerns a Youngstown, Ohio man named Todd Stenerud who after consuming eight bottles of Miller Genuine Draft and six shots of Jim Beam says in response to what he “knows everybody has been saying about him” says, “I'll show you. I'll show everybody."  The story continues with various drunk rantings by Todd including boasting about how he physically picked up a guy.  I assume that most of you, even those who were not fortunate enough to have lived in a fraternity house have had the experience of being around someone who has had a bit too much to drink.  There behavior is often marked by a lot of nonsense spilling forth from their lips.  But here is the thing, they are drunk and on some level have an excuse, what is the excuse of the rest of society?  Why do we so enjoy showing off our unclean lips?  I mean Twitter seems to be a museum for them.  So what are we to do?  Let me go about answering this in a bit of a roundabout way.

         Sometimes those from different faith backgrounds criticize those of us from more liturgical traditions because of the stuff we have.  That is they think it is a waste to have nice vestments, silver chalices and beautiful stained glass.  The argument is basically like the one Judas offers when Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with costly ointment.  He asks, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”  They believe we are misappropriating funds.  The response to this criticism is that when we come to God we want to bring our best, that is why we have beautiful things because we want to offer God the best that we can offer.  This I think should be the same answer that we give when we use words, we want to bring our best. 

And what I mean by that is not that we should always speak in iambic pentameter but rather that what we do with our words brings glory to God.  In 1st Peter we are told, “He that would love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking guile.”  It seems that our words are not just things that we launch out to a public audience that have no further meaning but they are also part of who we are.  Or as Jesus puts it, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”  That is what causes Isaiah such anxiety because perhaps he has not been bringing his best, perhaps it is reflecting an impure heart.  As you have heard me say before, if you hang out in a barbershop long enough, you will eventually get a haircut.”  We can only use our words in ways that are against the will of God for so long before they eventually infect who we are as people – unclean lips eventually spread the disease of sin. 

         And so here is my challenge to not just you guys but to myself as well.  Let’s take some time and think about using our best words and using them in ways that glorify God and make the world a better place.  For some this may mean speaking less or gossiping less, while for others it may actually mean speaking more.  We need to remember to tell people something we like about them, perhaps we could say something nice to a stranger.  We should thank those who help us and thank people who have been there for us.  We need to think of our words as not just something that floats out in the ether but as part of who we are.  Meaning not only do we need to glorify God and praise his creation but we also need to avoid those words that are destructive or are just noise.  As St. Paul tells us in Ephesians, “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.”  Or in the words of our mother, “If you can’t say something nice, then don’t say it.”  Our words are one of the main ways that we convey ourselves to the world.  And we need to ask if what they are conveying will bring glory to God or will they make us lament that we are a people of unclean lips?  I would encourage us to chose the former so that we may glorify God this day and forevermore.