St. Peter's By The Sea

July 27, 2008 - Parables of the Kingdom

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Good morning. Last week I shared some thoughts with you about the meaning of Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching to heaven with angels ascending and descending and I talked about the spiritual reality of the “angels of our being,” about each of us having a Guardian Angel to protect, care for, and look after us.

In last week’s Gospel lesson from the Gospel of Matthew a very different image of angels was presented. We are told that at the end of the age, “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and evil doers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:42)

And in this morning’s Gospel we hear a number of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God and again it concludes with the warning, “So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:50)

Contemporary New Testament scholars believe that this teaching about the end of the age and the angels separating the good from the bad comes from Matthew and one segment of the early church and not from Jesus. They say it “reflects the concerns of a young Christian community attempting to define itself over against an evil world, a concern not characteristic of Jesus.”1

However, that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as judgment, or that there won’t be a time of weeping and gnashing of teeth. The saints and the mystics tell us that when we come into the presence of the divine light, all of who we are and have been and have hidden within us will be revealed and our judgment will be seeing and knowing ourselves as we really are. Yet this judgment is tempered by God’s mercy, by the love of God which forgives us and welcomes us home.

But this morning I would like to consider briefly Jesus’ teaching, his parables about the Kingdom of God, and the presence of God in our lives. These parables are very well known to most of us – we have heard them over and over, they are familiar to us and we experience a certain zone of comfort with them, because we all know the right answers and we imagine ourselves responding to them in the correct way.

However, the parables are not meant to pat us on the back, but to give us a kick in the pants. They are not meant to comfort us, but to challenge us, to change us. They speak out against the status quo. They challenge our traditional ways of experiencing and responding to God.

There is a poem by the Sufi saint Hafij which makes me imagine what it was like to hear one of Jesus’ parables for the first time. Hafij says,

Pulling out the chair
Beneath you mind
And watching you fall upon God

What else is there
For Hafij to do
That is any fun in this world!

And this is what I think Jesus is doing in his parables – he is pulling out the chair beneath our minds so that we might fall into God’s presence – we might discover the Kingdom.

And we might find the kingdom because it’s within us and all around us, hidden, waiting to be discovered. Take for instance the parable of the mustard seed. Jesus said “The Kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-33)

As with most parables there are several levels of dimensions of meaning here. Speaking of the most obvious level of interpretation Andrew Harvey says … “Jesus is speaking in this parable about the vast hidden power of the Spirit, of the ‘tiny seed’ of Godhead within each of us, which once sown grows rapidly and becomes a large ‘tree’ capable of sheltering and nurturing others.”

But to the farmers of Jesus’ time, the tiny mustard seed was a shocking image of God’s kingdom, because of the danger it represented to the grain fields. The New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan says this: “The mustard plant is dangerous even when domesticated in the garden and is deadly when growing wild in the grain fields. And those nesting birds, which might strike us as charming, represent to ancient farmers a permanent danger to the seed and grain. The point, in other words, is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three, four or even more feet in height. It is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control where it is not wanted, and it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas, where they are not particularly desired. And that, Jesus said, was what the kingdom was like. Like a pungent shrub with dangerous take-over properties.”2

The power of the Spirit is like the mustard seed, pungent, fiery, and wild and impossible to contain, and it threatens to upset all of our well made plans, all of our structures, all of our usual ways of seeing things and behaving. For once the power of the Spirit brings with it an abundance of life and love, we find ourselves in a reality, in which we are to love our enemies, and do good to those who hurt us, and to take care of our neighbors; to share whatever we have, not judge others, but to look first to our own behaviors and short comings. To love each other as he loves us. In short, in the Kingdom of God it’s not business or life as usual.

Once the mustard seed takes root, our lives are turned upside down. Now Jesus also said “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again the Kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

The kingdom of heaven is like finding hidden treasure that has been buried in a field. Who among us has not imagined such a thing happening. I know as a child I was always thrilled hearing about buried treasure and the possibility of being the one who found it. And in Jesus’ time this was a very real possibility. For in those days there were no banks where ordinary people could store their money. One of the common ways of safely storing one’s fortune during threatening times was to bring it in a location known only to the owner. It was not unusual for the owner to die without revealing the location of the buried treasure. It was therefore not uncommon for there to be an unexpected discovery of a fortune, for instance, when a farmer was plowing his field. It was this accidental discovery of gold, silver, or jewels that Jesus compares to finding the kingdom of heaven.

Who among us would not thrilled by finding buried treasure? Several points stand out here. First is that the Kingdom of God is, as Jesus tells us over and over, all around us, it is part of our ordinary reality. Secondly … even though it’s within us and around us, and readily available it is also hidden from us. It is here right now … even if we can’t see it or feel it. Third, we can stumble upon the Kingdom even when we’re not looking for it … like the man in the field we can be just going about our lives and there it is.

That’s what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, … and I know of others who were going about their lives and suddenly without warning the reality of the Kingdom found them. And the fourth and most obvious point: that the joy of the discovery of God’s presence is like that of finding buried treasure, or even more that the presence of God is the great treasure that in our hearts we all are hoping to find.

Jesus’ teaching was an attempt, as Hafij says, to pull the chair out beneath our mind, in order to communicate the amazing power of the Spirit, and God’s desire that we come to know our divine identity as children of God, and to transform the world into a place of divine love and justice. On a merely human level an impossible task; but not impossible to the Spirit of God once we have embraced it and allowed its power to be unleashed.

My prayer this morning is that each one of us might find the hidden treasure and know the joy, and the beauty, and the love that Jesus came to give us.

In His Name. Amen.
1 The Five Gospels, p. 194.
2 Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.

Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:53 pm
Category: Sermons

July 20, 2008 - Jacob’s Ladder

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Good morning. It’s good to be back from vacation and it’s good to see you.

In our Old Testament lesson this morning from the Book of Genesis we heard the well-known story of the dream of Jacob’s ladder, and this morning I would like to share a few thoughts with you about Jacob’s dream and its possible significance for us today.

In many ancient traditions and in modern depth psychology a distinction is made between “little dreams” and “big dreams.” Little dreams are those dreams that seem most ordinary and seem to relate to the events of the day, while big dreams are of a more archetypal nature and seem to have a larger or more collective meaning. These big or archetypal dreams then can speak to us across the ages, and I think Jacob’s dream is of this nature and it is why it is still remembered today, thousands of years later.

Now, when we look at a dream and seek its meaning we often start with looking at the dreamer’s personal situation, with what is going on in his or her life, in order to try to understand what the dream is saying.

When we look at Jacob’s situation we find he is in great turmoil. You will remember that Jacob was a difficult character who had earlier refused to share food with his brother Esau until he got Esau to give him his birth right. And then when their father Isaac was old and close to death and he wished to give his blessing and all his earthly goods to his first-born son Esau, Jacob tricked Isaac and deceived him into thinking he was Esau and he received the blessing instead. So basically, he stole the inheritance from his brother. When Isaac died, Jacob’s mother told him to flee to the land of his Uncle Laban and there to seek a bride, and to stay away long enough for Esau to forgive him and not kill him.

And it was while Jacob was fleeing Beer-sheba and on his way to Haran that we read: “He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. Then the Lord appeared to him and told him this land would be his and then God told him ‘know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.’ ”

Now, I think several things stand out about this dream right away. The first and most obvious one is a point that is hard for many people to accept these days: the fact that we sometimes get messages from God in our dreams, that God can appear to us in our dreams. This was accepted as a fact in biblical times, but is a reality of the Spirit many have lost touch with.

The second obvious point is that God comes to Jacob when he is in great personal turmoil, he’s running away from home to save his life. And in fact, it is often when our lives are falling apart in some way that we can hear what the Spirit is saying to us.

And the third obvious point is that Jacob didn’t have his dream and a divine visitation because he had been so good and deserving. No, Jacob, like the rest of us, is at best a very mixed character and not at all a model of good behavior.

Jacob, however, does show us how to respond to and value our dreams and our spiritual experiences. Jacob paid attention to his dream and he acted upon it. When Jacob woke from his sleep he said “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

And to honor and acknowledge what had happened there, he “rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up on a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the place Bethel,” which means “House of God.”

So Jacob shows us the way to relate to our dreams and other experiences of the Spirit by first paying attention to them, by acknowledging them, and by acting on them. You see, one of us might have had this dream and said in the morning “Oh, I had a strange dream last night” and then gone on about our day and forgotten all about it.

But the deeper question is, what does the dream mean and how might it speak to us this morning. When we have the so-called little dreams we can usually get associations with the elements of the dreams because they come out of our daily life. However, with the big dreams it is more difficult because they often speak to us in a more universal symbolic language, and to understand that we often need to look at the history of religions and the universal symbolic themes.

The ladder is an archetypal image of ascent and descent, and it symbolizes the opening between our ordinary consciousness and the world of the Spirit; it connects heaven and earth. As Jacob says … “This is the gate of heaven.”

The ladder is part of a large complex of symbols, such as the various cosmic mountains found at the center of the world, or mountains of revelation between God and man. The classic example of this is the experience of Moses at Mt. Sinai; then there’s the symbol of the cosmic tree at the center of the world, which early Christians believed to be the Tree of Life, the wood of which became the cross of Jesus. And the tree in ancient Shamanistic tradition is both a tree and a ladder which the holy person climbs to go into the Spirit world or into the underworld.

In all these examples and many others, the great historian of religions, Mucia Eliade, tells us that these various symbols say to us that any place can be the center of the world, the gate to the Spirit. I think as a big dream, Jacob’s dream was not only for him, it was a dream for us also – it is telling us that the place where we are right now, or at any moment, is of significance – it is where we are supposed to be, and it is the gate of heaven. It is where you need to be to meet God.

In the novel the Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber, the main character is a woman named Emmylou who experiences a call from God. In the novel, Emmylou is being examined by a state psychiatrist and Emmylou tells her, “Dr. Wise, I know you want to help me and I appreciate it, but … you’re thinking of all the bad things that happened to me as traumas, leaving psychological scars that grew into a mental disease, which you think I have. I look at them as afflictions sent by God to attract my attention to him.”1

Then Emmy Lou tells the doctor a “big” dream she had. “I dreamed I was getting a guided tour of heaven” Emmylou says. “I was wearing a jumpsuit and a hard hat and my tour guide, he was an angel, of course, but he looked just like a regular man, dressed the same as I was, and we were in this giant building, kind of an industrial shed like in those boring old movies they used to show us in high school, how they make paper or ice cream. And there was this big huge machine in it, whirring and clanking away, and there was a conveyor belt coming out of one end of it, and on the conveyor belt were rows of golden bricks, but softer: they looked like giant Twinkies, row after row of them, and when they got to the end of the conveyor belt they fell off of it. I looked to see where they were falling to and I saw that there was a big hole in the floor there and through it I could see clouds and blue sky and the earth far below. I asked the guide what the Twinkie things were, and he said they were blessings, and I remember thinking, in the dream, how marvelous is the Lord showering all these blessings down on us. Then we moved on, across an alley and into another big huge shed with the same kind of machine cranking away, the same conveyor belt, the same giant Twinkies falling down, and I said to the guide, ‘Oh, these are more blessings,’ and he said, ‘No, those are afflictions,’ and I said, ‘Oh, but they look just the same as the blessings,’ and he said, ‘They are the same!’ ”2

Later, quoting the French saint Simone Weil, she would tell the doctor that the “pure love of God means being exactly as grateful for your afflictions as you are for your blessings.”3

St. Paul advises us in this to “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.”

The dream of Jacob, and even the dream of Emmylou, is for all of us, and it says to us that all of our life, all the good things and even all the bad things are from God. It is a very difficult and even at times an unwelcome suggestion; but the key is that this point of view will open out to the divine, and the gate of heaven will open for you as it did for Jacob and you will know the presence of God in your life.

Jacob’s dream has at least one other important aspect, and that is the angels that he sees ascending and descending on the ladder. This image is such a common one it is easy to take it for granted and not realize what it shows us. For Jacob was experiencing in his dream the presence of God, but also the presence of angels in his life. For it is often the angels of God who bring messages, like the three angels who appeared to Abraham.

The Sufi mystic, Ibu Arabi, says we all have a personal angel, which he calls the “angel of our being.” In the Christian tradition we call this our Guardian Angel. The concept, of course is that each of us actually has an angel assigned to us – to look after and protect us. When you really think about this, though, it’s amazing: that there are spiritual beings in the universe whose job it is to care for us. In fact, an anonymous French monk once wrote that angelic “geniality,” so to speak, shows up only when a human being has need of it. Thus, if we fail to call upon our angels and ask for their help, they languish in a kind of twilight world, unable to fulfill their divine function.

So if we view both our afflictions and our blessings as gifts from God, and call upon our guardian angels to help us understand and work with those gifts, we will in our own way be fulfilling the promise of Jacob’s dream and drawing ever closer to God.

In His Name. Amen.
1 Michael Gruber, The Valley of Bones, pp. 202-203.
2 Ibid, p. 203.
3 Ibid, p. 263.

Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2008 8:16 am
Category: Sermons

June 29, 2008

St. Peter’s Day

Good morning. It’s good to see you all and to welcome you to the celebration of the Feast of St. Peter. It is especially meaningful to me this morning because it will be my last St. Peter’s Day with you, and next year at this time there will be a whole new exciting thing happening here.

I’ve had the privilege of preaching on St. Peter’s Day twice before. The first time was in 2004 and it was my last Sunday here as an Assistant Priest with Russ. It was a special day for me and it was difficult to leave a parish and a people who had opened their arms and hearts to me, and who had come to mean so much.

However, the Spirit works in strange ways, and after two years as Priest-in-charge at St. John’s Ashton and St. Martin’s in Pawtucket I found myself back here as your Interim Rector. And last year on St. Peter’s Day we had a very special service, as Russ came back for a visit and for the formal dedication of Ruffino Hall, and we celebrated and remembered his 17 wonderful years here as your Rector.

So this is my 3rd St. Peter’s Day with you, and it too is special in it’s own way.

You may notice that the altar looks different this morning than it usually does for St. Peter’s Day. Some years ago Russ started the custom of having bowls with live fish for St. Peter’s Day. However, last year after the service and after the fish were returned to the fish store and the bowls were cleaned and just sitting in the kitchen, suddenly one of them simply burst apart.

Now, I believe that God or the Spirit speaks to us in many different ways and even in simple things or strange coincidences – what the psychologist Carl Jung calls synchronistic events, which is the meaningful significance of causally unconnected events. In this instance I took it as a sign that it is time to move on – so there are no fish bowls this morning.

Now, that may annoy some of you, or even anger you, and I can understand that change is difficult and often emotionally very painful, and sometimes it is the small things, like no fish bowls, that trigger those feelings.

It was a real privilege and honor for me to work with Russ at a key time in my life when I was returning to parish ministry. I will always be indebted to him for his many kindnesses and for all that he taught me, both directly and by example. I treasure Russ as many of you do, so believe me that I mean no disrespect here.

So this morning I would like to share a few thoughts with you about change and about the Spirit working in our lives and in the midst of us here. And about the future of St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea. Now, as I’ve said, change can be difficult, but what is coming is so exciting.

My three year old daughter Ava captured this wonderful sense of anticipation of what is to come when she announced at dinner the other day, “I don’t want to eat too much of my dinner, so I don’t spoil my treat.” Now there is a girl with priorities.

And the treat that is coming is the new thing that God will be doing in this place, and even more than that, Jesus’ whole life and ministry was to tell us and to show us the treat that is coming, the Realm of God, the Kingdom of God.

We read in the 43rd chapter of the prophet Isaiah, “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters. Who brings forth chariot and horse, army and warrior: they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.” (Isaiah 43:16-17)

Clearly the reference here is to mighty acts of salvation that God has done in the past when he led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and he parted the waters of the Red Sea so that they could escape from the army of Pharaoh that pursued them. This is one of the most significant events in our sacred history – but then God goes on to say to Isaiah: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18-19)

What a remarkable statement: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.”

Does that mean we are to forget the history of God’s relationships with mankind? Does it mean that we are to forget what God has done in our lives, and specifically what he has done here at St. Peter’s in the past?

I think the answer is both yes and no. On the one hand, of course we are to remember the past, to honor it, learn from it, and be guided by it. Not to remember the past is to forget who we are and where we came from. Can you imagine God telling us to forget about Jesus, or the crucifixion and resurrection? Or, on a more personal and parochial level, are we to forget the past here at St. Peter’s? Of course not!

Yet as it says in Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” (Eccl. 3:1) What the Lord is telling us in Isaiah is that, as there is a time to remember, there is also a time not to: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.”

That doesn’t mean to disrespect or to diminish in any way what has gone on before. No, it means that there are times in our life when we need to make the effort to let go of the past for a bit so that we can look to the future, we can anticipate with hope what is to come, and we can begin to perceive a whole new thing.

For God said to Isaiah and he is saying to us today, both individually and as a parish, “Behold I am doing a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19)

I believe the reality is that God is always doing a new thing in our lives, but we get stuck in the past, or in the way things are, or worse, we may think we have all the answers, or even worse, we become like those who Ezekiel calls “The fat and the strong.” The fat – that is us when we fill ourselves with everything but God; and the strong, that is us when we are temporarily in positions of power, and we think we are somehow better or more deserving than other people.

The new thing that God is doing, that God is always doing, is seeking us out, seeking the lost, the injured, and the strayed, and calling us back into relationship with Him.

This is what is so wonderful about the example of our patron saint Peter. Peter is a lost soul. As Jesus told him he would do, he denied him three times, and he goes back to his old life as a fisherman, all his hopes and dreams shattered by the death of Jesus and his own personal failures and humiliations.

But Jesus seeks him out, Jesus comes to him and calls to him from the beach while he’s fishing and he says to Peter “Come and have breakfast.”

In our reading from Ezekiel this morning we heard “For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out … I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep.” (Ezekiel 34:11, 14)

So God is always searching for us. Jesus, our shepherd is always here and he is always calling to us and issuing an invitation to come to him. “Come and have breakfast” or “Come to me you who are burdened and heavy laden and I will refresh you.”

But the problem is, we have to recognize that we are lost, and injured, and weak, or we never hear him calling. When we think we are okay you know, on top of things and pretty pleased with ourselves, well then that’s being fat and strong, and as God tells Ezekiel, “The fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.”

Sounds scary and awful, but necessary. You see, our illusions of superiority have to be destroyed. Then we see we are all of us in the same boat – we’re all a bunch of Peters – screw-ups who are in need of being found, and loved, and fed.

So I think that’s why we have to at times forget the former things, so we can see the new thing that God is doing in our lives right now.

And I think that is where we are at St. Peter’s right now. God is here, and God is already doing a new thing, and our job is, like my daughter Ava, to save some room for the treat that is to come, even if we have no idea what it will look like.

In His Name. Amen.

Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 7:15 am
Category: Sermons

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