Spokane Friends Meeting

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians puts me in mind Margie McAdams, the wife of a pastor I once knew.  It was her heart felt concern that Christians who before their meal in a restaurant bowed heads and said grace must leave a decent tip.  How simple.  To pray that Christ would strengthen another’s inner being, that Christ would dwell in another’s heart and then fail to make the connection to the practicalities of life gives a lie to one’s profession of faith and diminishes Christ’s work in the world.  All life and all good gifts come from God. Jesus comes to open our hearts and our hands to those around us. We can do that only because he also comes to open our eyes to his own presence among us as the grace-and-peace-filled “I am”.

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Like snow melt filling the ponds and streams and then the tributaries of mighty rivers, the demands of God’s kingdom continue to grow.  And the ice dams, like that that held back the Missoula flood for untold years, will break under the growing pressure of God’s reign on earth.  And when it breaks out it will change the landscape of human relationships.  But many more hearts will have to tendered to the compassion of the kingdom.  That is the work of Christ and our work today, a work a tendering hearts, first breaking down the resistance to the coming of jubilee values.

So the question is “Got Chutzpah?”

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word for brazenness. The classic description of chutzpah is a person who kills his parents and pleads for the court’s mercy on the ground of being an orphan.  It means shameless audacity.  The word made its Supreme Court debut in a recent opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia as he expressed his exasperation with the National Endowment for the Art’s attempt to defend as non-discriminatory practices that are by definition discriminatory.  Four Jewish guys who would clearly understand chutzpah are the focus of our scripture readings for today.  The first is David.

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Today’s texts Ezekiel 2:1-7; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13 present three examples of individuals called out and then sent out by God to speak to their communities. One thing we learn is that the quality of a gospel proclamation cannot be measured by its immediate acceptance.  What is important is the mission entrusted to them and their fidelity to it.

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Lament happens when we experience suffering that seems inconsistent with God’s hesed, when the door to God’s presence seems locked and barred from the inside. When circumstances cause us to question God’s hesed, we invariably reach out through lament. And somehow, through the mystery of lament, we find it again. Which is to say we again find God.   And there we  experience the true character of God: “the consistent, ever-faithful, relentless, constantly-pursuing, lavish, extravagant, unrestrained, furious love of our God!” 

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Of course you heard about Continental’s flight #61 that arrived in Newark Thursday morning from Brussels, a flight on which the pilot died.  Can you imagine your stress level had you been that young co-pilot as he took into his hands control of the Boeing 777 and the lives of 250 passengers?  It is a perfect segue into our Gospel reading from Mark 4.

What the scriptures call the Sea of Galilee is a relatively small lake, thirteen miles long by eight miles wide, barely 65 square miles and none of it deeper than one hundred and fifty feet and sitting almost 700 feet below sea level.  It is encircled by the mountain range marking the east end of the Mediterranean with the elevation of some of the land mass over five thousand feet.  It has warm, moist air in this deep trough covered by cool, dry mountain air.  But when the cool air drops and the warm air rises the lake becomes treacherous for small boats. As I read this passage what I envisioned was one of Jesus’ followers gently kicking him in the ribs and handing him a bucket and saying: “…bail!”  Being in such an intense storm is an anxiety generator.  And yet the story is that somehow the exhausted Jesus was sleeping through it.

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We struggle with the question of how it was that what Jesus had to say was so upsetting to the leadership of the Judaism. It is hard for us to imagine the challenges these people heard in what Jesus shared.  What could it have been about these two simple parables that so ignited a conflagration of national anxiety? Our temptation is to judge those spiritual and political leaders as some how blind, cruel or insensitive.  We need first to try and understand what motivated their rejection of Jesus and his message.  And as to the parables themselves, as people of the enlightenment we have this notion that if we take them apart piece by piece and look closely at what holds them together we will understand them.  An understanding of these two parables only grows out of a conscious attempt to understand the context in which these parables of the kingdom were shared. The good news is that we are left in pretty good company.  Mark tells us that Jesus had to take the disciples aside to explain these parables to them.  What Jesus did with these parables was to challenge the official understanding of what was the Kingdom of God.  I think it’s still timely.

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Debra Murphy of the Ekklesia Project in writing to clergy persons trained and able to elucidate the fine distinctions between, say, Augustine and Origen or Moltmann and Marshall suggests that they may not be up on the latest treatise on the Trinity to capture the popular imagination: a little self-published book called The Shack. She suggests, they should be, not because it’s a good book— that’s debatable. But because its sales are in the stratosphere and it is loved—fiercely loved—by an astounding number of Christians of all stripes.  She believes The Shack has struck such a chord with people because most people have not learned much about the Trinity from their participation in church life.  This may be particularly true for we Quakers who seem to be, at least  by other’s standards, liturgically deficient

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Text: Acts 2: 1-21: Pentecost

Kate Huey wrote of our story from the Acts of the Apostles: it must have felt like creation all over again, with wind and fire, and something new bursting forth. Then there was the amazing linguistic experience of speaking in other languages yet being understood by people of many different languages and lands, the names of which represented the known world at that time and have caused no small concern to worship leaders in every time. No matter: in that moment, all the people were one in their hearing, if not their understanding of the deeper meaning of what they heard. Despite their differences, they could all hear what the disciples were saying, each in their own language. Fire, wind, and humble Galileans speaking persuasively in many tongues were dramatic signs that God was doing a new thing that would transform the lives of all those present, and far beyond, in time and place.

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Ascension Sunday

Title: “Stay!”

Text: John 17: ¹¹And now I am no longer in the world,….

Friendswood Lumber and Hardware was the first real job I ever had.  Gene Greathouse ran the business, ordering hardware and doing “take offs” from contractor’s blue prints for the bills of materials.   Gene had only recently come to Friendswood and was something of a celebrity because he had an air conditioned office, the only direct long distance telephone line to Houston, some twenty miles away, and a coke machine. Fred Martinez was the year round yard man who knew where everything was.  He mixed paint, cut glass and delivered lumber to a community just beginning to grow with the promise of the Johnson Space Center being built ten miles away.  While in High School I worked there on Saturday’s and then full time in the summers.  I learned to cut glass, mix paint, cut keys and do take offs using what, before computers, was called a comptrometer – a complex adding machine.  I marked hardware stock with a code for the price the store paid and then the retail price calculated from the invoice, wrote out sales receipts and at times drove the truck into Houston to pick up creosote fence posts or other things.  Fred taught me everything I needed to know – including how to dust the sales room.

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Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well-pleased with ourselves,

When our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little,

When we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess

We have lost our thirst for the waters of life;

Having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity

And in our efforts to exploit the richness of this earth,

We have allow our vision of the earth restored to dim.

Disturb us Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas

Where storms will show Your mastery;

Where in losing sight of land, We shall find the stars.

(with apologies to Sir. Francis Drake, 1577)

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