Lists that Help Us: Abhor Evil and Bring Water to Your Enemy

I like a list. When I am anxious and out of sorts, making a list of what needs to be done, it helps. I have a friend who keeps Excel spreadsheets of everything she owns. It brings her peace. I am glad there are people in the world who keep things in such fine order. I am glad she showed me how to use Excel many years ago, And I like lists, but not that much. Some people see a list and it creates anxiety The very judgment of the list seems to foster a stranglehold of panic. Where do you land regarding making a list? For me a list is A breath of order, a vision of possibility beyond the anxiety. 

Our reading from the letter to the Romans could be made into a list. A full-time job description kind of list for the genuine Christian community - both as solo organisms and as a collective. Let us review some of that list. Abhor wickedness. Pursue Hospitality Feed your enemy. Vanquish evil with good. Be at peace with all. Love with fidelity. Provide Rejoice Endure Devote Weep Listen. Paul is diving deeply into what it means to be people of the Way, exploring the attributes of the movement that clings to Jesus as the Messiah. This Romans lesson is a tremendously helpful list. A working active Christian practice should rely on just such a growth and service mindset. Too often people say I like your Jesus, but I am not so sure about your Christians. And when they say that, it is probably because this list is what we are stumbling at living into. 

My guess is that there are some of these that many of us find to be at least reasonably achievable. Cling to the good sounds like coasting downhill. And each of us has different ones that are hardest. Bless those who troll and trample you? Ignore them sure. Not actually try to cause them grief? Yeah. Bless - pray for their well being- give water to those #$%#! ? Oh oh oh that is hard. Both when it is big impersonal evil and when it is the bully next door. Bless and feed my enemies?  It goes against so much in my personality and enculturation. 

So I am returned to the list - and I wonder what if we were to take this list and focus on one a day. Practice it in your life, and go one step further - take the time to reflect on your life and history and identify the name of one person who exemplifies each Christian duty. Hold them in prayer, wherever they might be. The list also can serve us as a mirror, a confessional prompt. Where have we not met this list? I was recently thinking about a different old friend.  She was certainly much more a friend than an enemy, but in my judginess and by silly issues where I thought we were divided, I had turned her into a frenemy in my mind. Sometimes offering water to an enemy is offering water. Sometimes it is having empathy. I  knew enough about her life to have done so. But back then I was much more on board with the do gooder part than the listen and forgive part of Christian-ness. 

Part of why the struggles of the early Jesus movement speak to us Is that we are still wrestling with what they struggled with. And some of our burdens are not that this way of life is new, but that it has over a thousand years of crud collected on it- what a friend calls the Constintinian hangover. In some ways even for some of us who have always been church people, we are meeting Jesus again for the first time. In the beginning, sometimes it is good to have a list. Pursue Hospitality Feed your enemy. Vanquish evil with good. Listen. Learn. Share. Follow Jesus, the Christ, the one Lord God of the Universe, who loved and served and died and rose again. We strive to live this list, we check it off, and fail to check it off, and we try again. 

This is the way Jesus loves & saves. This very list. What is the job description of those who love God? This very list.

Proper 17 RCL A

CCRP 

#diopalove

Not a Feeling Question: Who Do You Say that I Am

In our prayer for the pandemic era - Jesus stills stormy frantic hearts. Many of us connect who Jesus is with feelings - experiences of relief, connection, challenge. I am not sure that the sacred storyteller of Matthew is having Jesus ask us a feeling question. Nor is it a why do you like me question, but the life saving invitation of: who do you say that I am? 

Simon Peter excitedly answers - You are the Messiah, You are the big deal chosen hero who is gonna fix this chaotic storm of death and anxiety. Please do it now. This is Christ Church. Christ is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew and Aramaic word we heard transliterated as Messiah. Saying Christ Jesus is like saying Queen Elizabeth - it is a role and a title, not a surname (or a curse word). Messiah, and therefore Christ, It sort of means oily head - as in one who has been anointed on their forehead by an ancient sacred rite One that marks an individual’s loyalty to God. Usually this is with olive oils steeped in resins and essential oils - what we would think of as chrism. This anointing is something you could see and smell. 

The Hebrew people hardly ever were a safe and sovereign nation. Their biblical history is one of constant threat and entanglement with the cruel grind Of this empire and that. Exploitation, despotic manipulation, humiliation, lies, death and destruction were constant. So too were the various hopes for a fix, a change, a messiah, a superhero to rise up and powerfully save the day. Powers that be don’t like messiahs. It was a dangerous nametag to be marked with. Some imagined a savior who would return everything to self-governing sacred order and conservation. Others dreamed of the One who would push us into a moral reckoning and the establishment of a just society for absolutely everyone. Messianic hopes were as varied and intense as the pandemic ending visions and conspiracy theories and strategies that circulate these days. Even the denials of the pandemic are in their own way a hear no-see- no evil shade of messianic hope. 

There is almost no part of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that matched any concoction of what his contemporaries were expecting in a messiah. So, of course, there were questions, and we are still wrestling with them. The paradox of Jesus being salvific through less violence, and his requiring our dutiful way of love for all to participate in this rescue - it isn’t the easy bake recipe we were searching for. 'Who do you say that I am?' is an invitation to consider:  how does Jesus change everything? How does he save? Plenty of people have been radical revolutionaries, or sacred healers, or sage prophets, or controversial rabbi’s. But I don’t know any of them by name or in my heart. 

It is the holy self-sacrificial servanthood of Jesus is his messiah-ship. It is the love That holds fast even as it is crushed by the weight of the falsehoods of the powerful and shamed by the bullying terror of the cross. So the question 'Who do you say that I am?' isn’t about memorized answers, it isn’t about our wish list so much as it is a challenging invitation. Do you get that this is not about a superhero swooping in and making everything easy? Jesus is your Christ - your messiah - not because he is yours, but because you are his. 

He gives us not blindfolds or battle plans but his way, truth, and life. I wonder - who do you say that Jesus is? If you haven’t ever been asked that before - give it some time…. But spend some time with the question. Journal or craft or research your response. 

Furthermore, what does it mean that the name of this congregation is Christ - that our name is ‘’Expectations-turned-upsidedown- Healing-feeding-learning-servant-leadership- Marked-by-God Church”? Christ Church, Ridley Park is many things but all of them should be one with Christ Jesus. The best of them should be informed hopeful and lifechanging for the last, least and lost. What does the name of Christ - Messiah Jesus - say about who we are called to be in this pandemic era? 

To hold to Jesus as messiah - the christ means to find ourselves in the company he would keep, the love he lived into, the servanthood he practiced. What if the rescue someone is looking for is the ways of Jesus they encounter in you? Jesus stills the storms, Jesus rocks the boat. Hear him ask your whole life The question once more: Who do you say that I am?

Proper 16 RCL A

CCRP  #diopalove

Brought to you by the Number 3: Egypt and Joseph and Holy Mercy

Egypt. Pyramids and the mighty Nile river. Early innovators Of centralized governance and writing and organized religion. The people, the lands, they are a crossroads of humanity with a long tangled history with every tribe and empire to ever set foot in the region. Usually in scripture, Egypt is either the big bad, or the neighboring power offering “help” against mutual enemies, an offer with more than questionable motives.  

Sometimes Egypt is Egypt (1). Sometimes it is metaphor: metaphor for any human power structure, in any age, human power structures that operate contrary to God’s intentions(2). Sometimes Egypt is a kind of euphemism, it might say Cairo, what it is referring to is Babylon or Rome (3). It can be all three in one paragraph of the Bible. Regardless, the reference isn’t usually a delight. When the holy family flee from Judea to Egypt it isn’t something that the knowledgeable hearer understands as a good thing. It is leaping from the fire to the frying pan. 

The story of Joseph is the longest and perhaps most detailed of all the sagas of Genesis. That 2-hour musical barely scratched the surface. The coat of stellar beauty and value stokes his brothers’ jealousy so fiercely that while they are deciding which sin to commit against him, Joseph is abducted and sold into enslavement in Egypt. Most of the story isn’t much of a virtuous example, that is why it made a good musical. God does not speak from a bush or come to anyone in a dream. God is only given a few directly attributed actions in the whole saga. Yet this is sacred scripture, a story given lots of precious parchment. Why? 

Part of the story it is telling is ‘how we became refugees’. Jacob and Leah and Rachel and Joseph and his brothers dwell somewhere in what today we know as Syria and Israel and Palestine. The twelve tribes of Israel - Jacob’s sacred renaming - are from there - so how did the primordial story of faith become their liberation from enslavement in Egypt? What the saga of Joseph tells us is that it is because of a mixture of soul-selling misbehavior topped off with natural disasters of drought and famine.  1. Some of that is a straightforward morality tale. 2. Some of that is metaphor. 3. Some of that is geo-politics;  some of that is all three at the same time. 

Here today in this critical slice of the Joseph saga we have a deeply sacred story about the easy path of wrong choices that lead to disaster, and the long journey of truth and reconciliation: both on earth with each other, and in eternity with God. Has there ever been a moment in your life where you were stunned by a reconciliation as Joseph and his brothers were? How do you notice God leading you and your neighbor towards such mercy? 

This week I hope you find a bible, or a children’s bible and revisit the saga. I hope you notice and reflect on something unusual about Joseph. 1. He is spoken of as Abba -like when Jesus says Abba - that friendly name for fathers and God.  2. He is referred to as lord - one who is in charge of the activities of an area.  3. He is even called a ruler, because he is one. Father, Lord, Ruler: lets say FLR. FLR should remind you a bit of the way scripture describes the one God of the Universe. 

The brother's relationship with this FLR was dismissive and dysfunctional, and at the start, consistently turned away from love and fidelity towards FLR. And here now - this FLR stands in tremendous earthly authority: and forgives. This FLR is overcome with emotion, he cries. Joseph - this FLR - acts toward reconciliation and acts toward feeding and acts directly to welcome his wayward brothers. 

Perhaps this drama-dey saga of Joseph is also a type of sacred contemplation about God and his mercy. In this wondering, God acts with and through everyday means and encounters: dreams opportunities failures droughts and motivations. God keeps working and leading the family of humanity even when our choices are contrary to what God intends. God’s frustration with his people is not without warrant, yet God’s steadfast love for humanity, the tears of mercy and compassion, the delights of reunion and reconciliation those have no end.

August 16, 2020

CCRP

Proper 15 RCL A track 1