What is expected of us? Year One, Proper 20, Monday

What do we have to do? Is it enough that we do just a little bit? Or do we have to be perfect, to do everything right and nothing wrong?

In the Old Testament reading for today, Naman the Syrian is cured of his leprosy by Elisha. Elated, Naman promises that he will offer no more sacrifices to the Syrian gods, but will instead worship only the God of Israel.

Except there's one problem. He has to visit the temple of the idol worshiped by the King of Syria. And he has to bow when he does. He tells Elisha all this, and Elisha replies, Go in peace.

In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus is well into the sermon on the mount. In it, He preaches what amounts to hypermoralism: you have been taught that it's wrong to do one thing, He says, but I assure you it's just as bad even to think about doing something bad.

Which one is it? Are we OK if we just sort of get some of it done? Or do we have to be perfect?

And the answer is, it's a false question. We cannot ever get it all done. We can never be perfect. And yet if we are anything short of perfect in every way, we're completely undone. And that is the crevasse that salvation crosses.

Repentance: What a concept. Year One, Proper 19, Tuesday

I've been reading the Iliad. Homer's Greeks and The Trojans often regretted, and they continually petitioned the Gods.

But did they repent? Not really.

The notion of repentance is, at least in the West, a uniquely judeo-christian contribution. Today's reading from the Old Testament illustrates one of the most important characteristics of repentance as it is typically portrayed in the Bible (and experienced in life): it is born of humility.

In the reading, Elijah visits and points out what one might have thought was obvious, namely, that King Ahab is awful. And, further, Elijah prophesies that Ahab will meet an awful end.

And, unlike a character in a greek tragedy or epic, Ahab actually listens to Elijah, even though Ahab is far the more powerful man.

Then, Ahab repents--he not only regrets his past, but turns from his ways while filled with a sense of remorse that occupies his present. God relents, at least temporarily, from most of the doom that Ahab foretold.

It is a theme that appears again and again. Throughout the Bible, weak people, people who otherwise lack authority, bear the truth that demonstrates the error of those in power. While scripture is filled with many examples of powerful persons who refuse to repent despite encounters with the truth, there are not a few examples of people who do, in fact, repent.

The New Testament reading today comes from a letter written by St. Paul, who was very much one of those powerful people before his conversion. He was well educated, he cooperated with authorities, he was entrusted with a mission to ferret out what was commonly considered a heresy: his conversion on the road to Damascus literally knocked him down and rendered him helpless. He found relief only from one of the otherwise powerless people he sought to persecute with his power.

It is scene impossible to imagine in Homer.

Why is it that, in judaism and christianity, there is this continual theme of the truth coming out of weakness? I find it impossible to say. It is, in every sense of the word, a mystery. And yet it is one that we must embrace, and one that requires faith to embrace, if we are to enjoy spiritual progress.

On the Desire to Be A Big Deal. Year One, Proper 19, Monday

Nothing tempts us like our sense of self-importance.

In today's Gospel reading, Satan tempts Jesus by asking Him to turn stones to bread. After Jesus refuses, Satan asks Jesus to leap from a high place so God will send angels to rescue him, but Jesus declines. After failing to provoke Jesus into showing how powerful he was and how much God loved Him, Satan promised, I will give you the entire world, if you will just worship me. And, of course, Jesus declines, choosing instead to be rejected, tortured and killed by the very world that Satan offered to give Him. In short, Jesus chose humility and obedience over sin.

What a contrast comes from the Old Testament reading for the day!

Ahab, the King of Samaria, has a real problem dealing with disrespect. He offered to buy his neighbor's vineyard, where he wanted to plant a vegetable garden, but the neighbor refused to sell. Now, granted, the King of Samaria was hardly the most powerful man in the universe, but you would think that he could have moved on with his life and found somewhere else to cultivate vegetables. But no! He was overwhelmed with despair!

In fact, Ahab was so distraught that his wicked wife, Jezebel, was moved to take pity on him. In her own tender way, she got a couple of wiseguys to offer false testimony against the neighbor, who was consequently convicted of blasphemy and stoned to death. And guess who got the dead guy's vineyard? Ahab the gardner.

At every turn, we are impossibly eager to demonstrate our abilities, to prove our worth, to do anything that would give us some hope of trivial gain. Jesus's stark refusal to yield to these temptations demonstrates what God expects from us. Ahab's story, ridiculous though it may seem to a modern reader, illustrates the extent to which the sin that Jesus avoided is so otherwise ingrained in our natures.

Paul wrote about this sin in today's reading from the New Testament. He observed that some of the early Christians in Corinth claimed, Oh, I belong to Paul, while others said, I belong to Cephas? What has gotten into you, Paul asked? In other words, he wanted to know, since when has what I gave you become so trivial that you can make into some cause to gratify your ego, your sense of belonging, of being right?

What do we do about it? We can always strive to imitate Jesus's humility, and we can pray for the grace to do it. We can also do what the Psalmist does time and again, that is, to acknowledge our sense of being slighted, our anger, our fear, and our injured egos, but to do it as we pour out our hearts to God. After all, He knows our real nature: and while it is hardly uplifting to pour out all our anger against other people in prayers offered to God, doing so hardly hurts those who injure us and it certainly isn't news to God. It may even empty our hearts so that we can make room for the love that he would have us enjoy.

The still, small voice. Year One, Proper 19, Sundar

If there were ever anyone who ought to have had confidence that he knew God's voice, Elijah was that man. The lone prophet of God, he challenged his competitors, the prophets of Ba'al, to a contest, and they lost. He killed them. He confronted their master, Jezebel, and escaped when she threatened his life. Elijah's life was one adventure after another, each one demonstrating God's favor towards him.

And yet, when Elijah finally heard God's voice, today's reading makes it clear that he did not do so in the hurly burly of religious competition and triumph, much less in the slaughter of Ba'al's prophets or a belligerent confrontation with Jezebel.

In today's reading, Elijah is on Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. God led Elijah there after he fled from Jezebel. While he was on the mountain, Elijah witnessed the power of God in fires, storms, and earthquakes, but he did not hear the voice of God in those powerful phenomena. Instead, after all these had passed, he heard the voice of God in what I have seen translated as "thin stillness."

There is an interesting parallel between the tumult that Elijah experienced before coming to Mt. Horeb and the wild natural phenomena he observed while on that mountain: the text is very emphatic that Elijah did not hear the voice of God in the fire, the storm, or the earthquake, even though we may reasonably assume that God caused all of those to happen. The parallel seems to suggest that Elijah did not hear the voice of God in his confrontations with the prophets of Ba'al and Jezebel: he heard the voice of God in a small still voice.

The lesson for our own lives is so compelling, yet difficult to take to heart. At the very least, we have to seek out stillness, and we have to be careful of believing that we hear the voice of God when we are doing what we firmly believe he would have us do. And, in those fortunate moments when we find that stillness, we have to listen.

Running away? Year One, Proper 18, Friday

What if God had dramatically pulled you through a horrible situation--life or death--in which all the odds were against you, and then, when life presented you with one more challenge, one that paled in comparison, you tucked your tail and ran away?

That is, more or less, what happened to Elijah in today's reading from the Old Testament. Before the episode described in today's reading, he had challenged the prophets of Ba'al to a contest: he would prepare a sacrifice, and they would prepare a sacrifice, and each would call on their respective deities to set the offering on fire. The Ba'alites prayed all day, but nothing happened. At Elijah's invocation, God set his sacrifice on fire. Elijah slaughtered all the Ba'alites, and everyone worshipped God.

And then . . .

Elijah then went to see Jezebel, the woman for whom all the Ba'alite prophets really worked. Predictably upset, Jezebel threatened to kill him. And Elijah ran away.

The passage is so rich in meaning. For one thing, it shows us that the person who stood up to the prophets of Ba'al was hardly a superman. He was completely capable of cowardice. It wasn't Elijah's strength of character that made him stand up to Ba'al: it was God, acting through Elijah.

For another, God didn't punish Elijah for being a frightened human being. When Elijah finally stopped running, he fell asleep. God awakened him, fed him, and led him way to Mt. Horeb, where Elijah had an encounter with God that was completely different from the dramatic contest with the prophets of Ba'al, but that came to define his life.

Over and over again, the Bible recounts situations in which God or his prophets urged everyone not to be afraid: and, as often as not, they were afraid all the same. The story of Elijah assures us that God takes us as we are, fear and all. And, for that, we can be grateful.

Zealotry--For What? Year One, Proper 18, Friday

In the Old Testament Reading for today, Elijah was the last remaining true prophet of God. He challenged the prophets of Ba'al to a contest, and they accepted. God favored him, so he won the contest (after some serious trash talking) and executed his opponents--hundreds of them.

The Gospel reading for today describes John the Baptist as a locust eating, skin wearing wild man who insulted the people who came to follow him. He was on the fringe because, like Elijah, that's where God sent him, and that's where he wanted to be.

Both of these stories illustrate how encounters with what is holy can drive people to radical action. They are hardly surprising in that respect: after all, if devotion to the Creator of the Universe won't inspire radical action, what will?

But to read these stories today, on September 11, 2009, is a sobering thing. When the conspirators of 9/11 decided to kill themselves and thousands of others, they did so out of a radical devotion to what they saw as a holy mission.

Nothing more plainly illustrates the importance of the question, what holy mission are you devoted to? In the New Testament reading for today, Paul describes how he abandoned everything--everything that, quite frankly, he considered holy--to sacrifice not others, but himself, to the cause of Christ.

We can have the devotion of Elijah, although we are not called to kill the prophets of Ba'al or anyone else. We can even eat bugs and dress up in leather, but we are not commanded so much as to demand repentance from others as we are from ourselves. Our zealotry ought to demand sacrifice, but it should be a humble sacrifice of ourselves, not of those who disagree with us.

Year One, Proper 18, Thursday

Work out your salvation in fear in trembling, wrote St. Paul in today's New Testament reading.

I always found that admonition troubling, inconsistent with what I had been given to understand about Christian faith. It seemed to me that the central message of the gospels was that salvation was about avoiding fear and trembling.

I'm not at all sure what St. Paul meant, but it seems to me that the Old Testament and Gospel readings for today illustrate at least two possible meanings. In the OT reading, we see an example of what can happen when God's people ignore his commandments. But I do mean to suggest that separating ourselves from God causes us to suffer, even if our pride or ignorance keeps us from recognizing our condition as suffering as such. We should fear and tremble at the prospect of what we can do to our relationship with God.

And, yet, doing what God requires may entail considerable fear and trembling in its own right. When God told Joseph to leave Galilee to go to Egypt, the mission must have seemed terribly daunting. Egypt was not just a foreign country: it was the land of slavery. Given the tradition in which he existed, and the historical reality of Jew's experience in Egypt, Joseph must have had a great deal of fear and trembling.

I think St. Paul may have meant to tell us that we should not be disappointed or surprised at the fear and trembling that we encounter: the condition is not one that faith is intended to avoid, we are not failing when we encounter it.