Make Us Instruments Of Your Peace

"If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."

--Philippians 3: 4b-14

Most weeks I unpack something that Jesus said a long time ago, trying to get at what he meant back then and asking what it might mean for us now.  This week, though, I’d like to talk about two people who were followers of Jesus, who lived more than 1000 years apart, but who both embodied what it meant to love and follower Jesus as their Lord, and who serve as examples of what that looks like even now for us.  Their names were Paul and Francis.

Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul.

I've written a good bit about Paul, how he once persecuted Christians but then became one after he had a conversion experience on the road to Damascus.  He was transformed by this encounter, and it led him to minister amongst the Gentiles, those non-Jewish folks who had always been on the outside looking in when it came to the story of God’s love and mercy.  One of those groups of Gentiles was in Philippi, a city in northeastern Greece.  The Philippians were struggling with how to live into their new lives in Christ, but there was a tendency among the faithful to lord their titles and prestige over one another.  Arguments often arose among them, thus a letter to Paul was in order.  Paul, therefore, wrote to them to quell such arguments.  He began by laying out all of his own fancy credentials: he was Jewish since birth, which made him better than adult converts; he was descended from the tribe of Benjamin, which was the Jewish elite class; he had known Hebrew all his life, unlike those Jews who lived in areas where all they knew was Greek or Aramaic; he knew the law and followed it so zealously that he was a Pharisee, the most pious and highly respected folks in a Jewish society.  That's quite a resume, but in the letter Paul told the Philippians, that he regarded all of those accolades as loss, and that he suffered their loss so that he may gain Christ so that he may be found by him.  All of the prestige meant nothing to Paul when compared to Jesus. That’s the kind of guy Paul was.

Francis and the animals.

Francis was born in 1181 in the Italian port city of Assisi.  Like Paul, he came from a high-fallutin’ background.  His family were wealthy merchants, and as a young man Francis wore the finest clothes and spent money lavishly.  He joined the military and gallivanted around, but near the age of 24 he began to lose his taste for all this fun and excitement.  He started avoiding sports and feasts with his friends, and when one of them asked him if he was ever going to get married he said, ‘Yes, to a fairer bride than you have ever seen.  Her name is Lady Poverty.’  During a pilgrimage to Rome he joined the poor in begging near St. Peter’s Basilica, and while there he had a mystical experience.  Like Paul, he heard Jesus speak to him, saying, ‘Francis, go and repair my house.’  When he got back to Assisi his father was irate, but Francis threw off the fancy garments that his father had given him, renounced his inheritance and all other world goods, and set out to live a life of poverty, penance, and peace.  Others followed him, including his sister Clare, and in 1208 the two of them established the Order of Brothers Minor and the Poor Clares, which continue in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. 

What Paul and Francis both understood was that ultimately their worldly goods and possessions, as well as the positions that they occupied in their respective communities, didn’t matter.  Both led comfortable lives before they knew Jesus.  Both could have skated by and been content, but they knew that in the end it was all vanity.  Most of us, were we in their positions, would wail and weep and gnash our teeth if we lost our jobs, our homes, our money, our titles, our families.  Not so with Paul and Francis.  For them Jesus was everything, all the rest was just stuff.  They knew that the only thing eternal, the only thing that endures is Jesus.  Truly and deeply understanding that, however, means emptying oneself of all the stuff.

That emptying is called kenosis in Greek.  Earlier in Philippians Paul wrote that Jesus emptied himself; that is, in taking human form the King of the Universe emptied himself of all divine power and prestige, and while ministering on earth he gave up all of his possessions, including his home, so that he could show others a life that knew only the love of God in a deeply intimate way.  That life was then emptied out for the whole world on the cross, so that everyone might see it and live into it themselves.

It is from the cross that Jesus offers that invitation to kenosis, to emptying ourselves of all of the things that we think make us who we are, of all of the idols that we have made.  Our jobs and money, our cars and homes, our possessions and hobbies, in the end mean absolutely nothing!  Jesus, the one who is pure, unbounded love, is the only thing in the world worth our worship and devotion, the only thing in the world that ultimately matters.  All the rest are idols and vanities.  Both of these saints exemplify what it means to empty oneself, but Francis does so in a specifically meaningful way.

This past weekend church communities of all kinds throughout the world--both Protestant and Catholic--celebrated Francis with the Blessing of the Animals. How did the connection come about between Francis and the animals?  It isn't so much begins Francis lived with and loved the animals, but more so because by emptying himself of all the stuff, Francis was able to see the world for what it really is:  one great big family of God.  He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister and often said that all of nature must honor and praise God in their own way.  There are legends that he brokered peace between an angry wolf and some townspeeople, and that he preached to the birds.  Even when disease would ravage him, Francis praised God, for the disease—also a living entity—was merely fulfilling its purpose as instituted by God. It is as if Francis never really left the Garden.  

The Garden is the place from which we all came, of course.  There humanity cared about nothing but being in relationship with God and all creation.  At some point we left the Garden, but our animal friends did not, which is how they are able to show us God's unconditional love in such amazing ways.  My dog Casey, who played a huge role in my senior seminary sermon on Saint Francis, greets people in our parish each day with the same enthusiasm and love.  She has no need of power, prestige, or possessions, and she serves as a daily reminder for me that those things are not what matter, that we are all have a place in the great Circle of Life, in the words of that great spiritual at the beginning of The Lion King.  

The one who reminds me what it means to be in the Garden.

As we look around we see a world that is not unlike the one Francis knew.  It is a world that is cold and cruel, where people place their value in objects and titles, rather than relationships.  It is a world where our pride prevents us from seeing one another as brothers and sisters in the family of God, where people’s accolades and prestige seem to be the only things that matter.  But thanks be to God for the example of blessed Francis, who invites us to empty ourselves of our pride and need to place our self-worth in the matters of this world, so that we may put on nothing but the love of Jesus Christ.  I wonder what would happen if we all could do that on some level.  So as we honor this particular brother of ours, may our eyes be opened to seeing all of our brothers and sisters—two legged, four legged, no legged—so that we may take our place on that great path unwinding.  Blessed Francis, pray for us!  

In the circle...

The Power of Fear

'When Jesus entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him."'

--Matthew 21: 22-32

When I was a kid one of the most terrifying comic book villains I knew was the Scarecrow, who is a member of Batman’s rogues gallery that specializes in fear.  He doesn’t have any supernatural powers, instead Scarecrow preys on the people’s everyday fears and exploits them for his gain.  As a kid I had nightmares about the Scarecrow because the weapon he utilized was the most real weapon of all, the weapon of fear. 

Scarecrow.  The stuff of nightmares!

Fear is incredibly powerful.  It can paralyze us, drive us into mental and emotional instability, and destroy our relationships.  So often the Scriptures show us examples of how powerful fear can be.  Adam and Eve feared God when they found out they were naked.  Jonah feared being a prophet and ran away from God.  Peter feared letting Gentiles join the church, afraid of what change might occur.  There may be no characters in our biblical narrative, however, that are more controlled by their fears than the religious authority figures of Jesus’ time. 

Whether we're talking about the elders, scribes, chief priests, or Pharisees, all of these folks fell in the same category:  religious fundamentalists who were terrified when they saw the rapidly changing religious landscape around them. Perhaps no one embodied their fears quite like John the Baptizer.  He was a member of a group called the Essenes, who had retreated into the dessert when the corruption in the cities became too much to handle.  Out there, away from security of the Temple and their Roman overseers, who provided protection in return for obedience, the religious authorities came face-to-face with their greatest fear, a madman who was calling people to repent of their sins and inviting them to do so through a new form of mikvah, the Jewish ritual bath. While the people adored him for the bold ways that he spoke truth to power, the people in power themselves were scared to death of John. 

At the end of the day, though, they could ignore John since, after all, he spent all of his time wailing in the dessert.  They could not ignore Jesus.  Unlike John, Jesus walked the city streets with the Pharisees and ate dinner with them.  He spoke among the chief priests, unpacking the Scriptures and teaching right alongside them and the synagogue elders, all the while doing so with a kind of authority that none of them had ever seen before.  They thought, because he wasn't as crazy as John, that they could control him.  They were wrong.  They thought because he was a simple carpenter from a town that was not supposed to produce a prophet--or any thing good, for that matter--that they could trick him or foil his schemes.  They could not.  Ultimately, it is they who get tricked, as we read in this passage from Matthew, which is among the last times that Jesus visits the Jerusalem Temple.  Here the great fears of the authorities come shining through. 

You see, the authorities were the kinds of folks that, because of their fears, tried to play both sides. They desperately tried to maintain their positions by denouncing John as a demon and consistently conspiring against Jesus., who they called a false prophet.  Yet their fears of losing those positions also caused them to acquiesce to the crowds who loved John and Jesus and regarded them as prophets, if not more. Their fears of change, of losing their power, of being exposed for the hypocrites that they were, drove nearly every decision that they made.  What's more, if we read through the lines of dialogue between them and Jesus we can see just how ashamed they are.  They know what they're doing.  Yet in order to keep their positions, out of tremendous fear, they maintain their front.  They lie to all sides in order to gain favor, and their shame grips them. Even in the above passage, when Jesus asks them to declare whether John’s baptisms were of human origin or divine, they are too fearful, to ashamed, to say anything; afraid of Jesus’ judgment if they say it was from heaven, and afraid of the crowds if they say it was not. They cannot even come up with an answer.  Why?  Because they are ashamed.

Shame is one of the most oppressive by-products of fear.  Shame causes us to throw up walls around ourselves, out of fear that if people see the real person inside they will hate us.  Shame tells us to pretend that everything is ok, that we must maintain our public image and put on a happy face, for fear that if we let our true emotions out something terrible will happen.  Shame forces us to lie to others, to ourselves, and even to God, in order to maintain the facade that everything is ok.  The religious authorities were shameful lot, and they projected that shame onto others—especially folks like the tax collectors and prostitutes that Jesus mentioned.  Rather than address their own fear, the authorities shamed folks like these, saying they were the real problem, stigmatizing them and forcing them out of their worship spaces, all the while reassuring folks that they themselves were perfectly fine.  That’s some mighty powerful shame that comes from some mighty powerful fear.

Yet Jesus takes that fear, that shame away, even from the tax collectors and prostitutes.  They had been shamed by the authorities and their communities, and surely they lived in fear.  In spite of all of that, they knew Jesus, the one person who said to them, "Bring that shame and fear to me, and I will give you a new life beyond all of that!"  They knew that to truly know Jesus meant that they didn’t have to be ashamed anymore, that their fear did not have to rule their lives.  They got it in a way that the authorities never could because they were able to let go of their old selves, able to let Jesus truly take up residents in their hearts.  The authorities fought this took and nail, but the "sinners" knew:  Truly loving God and knowing Jesus means they don’t have to be fearful or ashamed.  That’s why Paul says in chapter 1 of Romans that he is not ashamed of the Gospel--the Gospel was as losing story, and the cross was the ultimate symbol of shame, yet Paul rejoices in them--and why the First Letter of John, chapter 4, says that perfect love--that is, the love of Jesus--casts out fear.  If we know Jesus, really and truly, we need not be fearful or ashamed. 

What are you most fearful of right now?  Are you fearful of losing something or letting go?  Are you fearful of some great change or the uncertainties of the future?  Has your fear taken you to a place of shame, where you beat yourself up or throw on a nice face just so folks can’t get inside?  Today I invite you to give all of that to Jesus.  We Anglicans talk about "knowing Jesus" in our heads and hearts, but I'm talking about literally.  Hand off your fear, and tell Jesus your shame (he sees all of it, anyway!).  If you attend a church, the next time you come to the Communion rail, lay those burdens down as you take Jesus in your very hands. Fear is absolutely the most real, most powerful weapon there is, and if left alone it will ultimately destroy us from the inside out, as it eventually destroyed those religious authorities.  But we have Jesus!  And when we empty ourselves of our fear and shame, all that is left is him and his love.  We need not give in to fear, brothers and sisters, but merely abide in to the love of Jesus that casts out all shame and fear.