Spokane Friends Meeting

James urges us to not expect magic solutions and sudden divine interventions which will bring justice for all nor simply give assent to metaphysical claims about Jesus and God, but rather that frail, fragmented and very human people, like you and me, will receive the gospel of transforming grace, and in receiving that gospel permit our lives to be transformed into the image of that grace.   Thus James echoes Jesus’ own call to perfect obedience, to consistent truthfulness, to whole-hearted faithfulness, and to community without favoritism.  Few congregations have ever met this ideal.  But instead of writing James off as unrealistic or impractical, maybe we should consider giving these kinds of community practices a good faith effort. 

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The public had the opportunity this week of memorializing Walter Cronkite who died this last July at 92 years of age.  He was very close to my parent’s age. He attended Sam Houston High School in the same years my parents attended San Jacinto High School in Houston, Texas.  Of course my parents had the better of it, they had Lyndon Johnson’s uncle for their civics teacher and Lyndon for speech and debate.  Anyway, Walter Cronkite was, for my generation at least, best known  for instructing us about space flight, helping interpret to us the Vietnam war, explaining the political intrigue of the time and his was the voice which told us of the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy.  The closest thing to a scandal Walter Cronkite’s personal life or career was when in 1976 another television newsman reported that Walter’s name was on a  list of journalists who had worked for the CIA. In an angry confrontation with then CIA director, George Bush, Cronkite demanded that he disclose which news people had actually been CIA agents. Bush refused. A week later, the CBS Evening News reported that at least two former correspondents for CBS had secretly worked for the spy agency.  During all those years – and even there after – Walter Cronkite was often cited as “the most trusted man in America”.   He was a man of integrity. What a reputation to have.  One of Cronkite’s trademarks was ending the CBS Evening News with the phrase “…And that’s the way it is.”

In considering this week’s readings from Isaiah, Mark and James, that phrase came to mind, even before I was aware of the memorial for Walter Cronkite that was held this week.  Something about the reality caught up in these passages of scripture that speak on ministry, especially the one from James seemed to say “And that’s the way it is”.

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In times of disruption, our first reaction is to try and recover what we believe has been lost.  Do you think we can resurrect the aluminum and steel mills and automobile plants and somehow get back on track?  That argument ends in suggesting we need to open more factories to make buggy whips. There is no going back no matter how comforting nostalgia seems. The same is true for our sense of the sacred. 

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From the perspective of what “should have been”, the Jewish people were within days of entering the promised land. Had they remained focused on their mission as the chosen people they would have avoided the punishment of the 38 additional years in the desert. How is it that the closer they came to attaining their goals and ideals the more obsessed they became with their physical and material needs? Had they not witnessed the grandeur of the parting of the sea, the awesome majesty of revelation, and the constancy of God’s caring and love in miraculously providing them with shelter and sustenance? Why did they begin to loose faith and trust in God so near to the promised goal?

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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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