Readings can be found here
25C,
2019, It’s All About Me!
I made this.
I did this.
I deserve this.
I worked for this.
It is I, I, I.
And, if others would work as hard, pray as hard, and be
as good…
They too could have all of this.
What I have is to my credit.
My credit.
So, the “have nots”? They have not because of their own
fault.
And, I am here behind the gates I have built. Secure in
the knowledge of my own superiority.
Backed up by the American mythos of boot-straps and the
self-made man.
I don’t need anything!
[pause]
And, this my friends is possibly the most heretical thing
every proclaimed from this pulpit.
Because, this, THIS is not the Gospel. This is not the
teaching of our tradition. This is not our faith.
Because,
If we have no need, do we have any need of God?
If we have all we long for, will we still long for God?
When our plates, our garages, our attics, our wallets are
full…
Is there room for God?
To whom do we give thanks and how?
And, who is declaring who “righteous”?
The self-made man is an idol because by definition this
would be someone who lives in denial of God’s presence and advocacy in the
world. The self-made man, apart from others, is apart from the body of Christ—a
body that includes haves and have nots, a body which needs both God and each
other.
It doesn’t take more than a passing glance at the news,
to see a legion of self-made men. To see that we live in the world of the
self-righteous rather than the God righteous. When the president or any other
politician declares himself right and refuses to admit error, with no regard to
the what that self-defined righteousness costs others, we see in HD and
streaming the cost of pride and the sin of arrogance. Can you imagine the
words, “have mercy on me, a sinner” falling from the lips of any of our
political leaders?
Can you imagine saying these words yourself in the face
of your own certainty?
Thank God, I am not like…
Not like…
Those that Jesus loves and loves still?
Not like…
Those that God has made?
Not so long ago, Hanna Cooper asked me to start watching
the TV show, “The Good Place”—which details the misadventures of a notoriously
self-centered woman who has found herself accidently assigned to an afterlife
in “the good place”. Desperate to not have anyone find out that she is a fraud,
she decides to study moral philosophy and to become, truly, good.
After a life spent acting only for her own good, her new
life after death is upended by her dawning awareness of good for the sake of
others…
Action, for the sake of others and for the sake of
ourselves—grounded in the humility that comes from an awareness of our
indebtedness to God and our reliance upon others. The humility that comes, when we recognize how
badly we ourselves are in need of mercy.
We need mercy. From God and from each other, we need
mercy.
Demonstrating the intersection of divine mercy and our
capacity to extend mercy into the world, Sufi storyteller Idries Shah tells a
story in his book,“Tales of the Dervishes”, that explores similar themes of true
righteousness, paralleling the Gospel we heard today,
“There was once a dervish devotee who believed that it
was his task to reproach those who did evil things and to enjoin upon them spiritual
thoughts, so that they might find the right path. [The dervish singled out a
compulsive gambler, and each day the dervish placed a stone near the entrance
of the house, to remind the gambler of his sin. The devotee enjoyed the
pleasure of his 'Godliness' in recording the sins of his neighbor. This went on
for twenty years.
Each day the gambler thought,] 'Would that I understand goodness! How that saintly man works for my redemption! Would that I could repent, let alone become like him, for he is sure of a place among the elect when the time of requital arrives!'
And so it happened that, through a natural catastrophe, both men died at the same time. An angel came to take the soul of the gambler, and said to him gently, 'You are to come with me to paradise.'
The gambler protested, saying that the angel must have mixed up his instructions, for he learned that the devotee is destined for roasting on the fiery pit in hell.
'Not so,' said the angel, 'as I shall explain to you. It is thuswise: the devotee has been indulging himself for twenty years with feelings of superiority and merit. Now it is his turn to redress the balance. He really put those stones on that pile for himself, not for you. … You are to be rewarded because, every time you passed the dervish, you thought first of goodness and secondly of the dervish. It is goodness, not man, which is rewarding you for your fidelity.'”
Each day the gambler thought,] 'Would that I understand goodness! How that saintly man works for my redemption! Would that I could repent, let alone become like him, for he is sure of a place among the elect when the time of requital arrives!'
And so it happened that, through a natural catastrophe, both men died at the same time. An angel came to take the soul of the gambler, and said to him gently, 'You are to come with me to paradise.'
The gambler protested, saying that the angel must have mixed up his instructions, for he learned that the devotee is destined for roasting on the fiery pit in hell.
'Not so,' said the angel, 'as I shall explain to you. It is thuswise: the devotee has been indulging himself for twenty years with feelings of superiority and merit. Now it is his turn to redress the balance. He really put those stones on that pile for himself, not for you. … You are to be rewarded because, every time you passed the dervish, you thought first of goodness and secondly of the dervish. It is goodness, not man, which is rewarding you for your fidelity.'”
Every time you passed, you thought first of goodness--out
of humility, the gambler extends divine mercy by seeing the good in another
rather than dwelling in a false sense of righteousness. Trusting in good
intentions and out of humility, extending mercy.
Can you imagine, if every time you passed someone in the
aisle here, if your first thought was goodness? Can you imagine, if every time
you passed someone in halls of power or in the halls of school, you thought of
goodness?
Imagine…
Now before I get too much further from these cultural and
folk tale references to divine judgement and the afterlife…
I want to be clear that scripture doesn’t actually give us very much to work with when it comes to what comes next. Biblical scholars would be the first to tell you that references to Sheol are meant to invoke the garbage heap outside of town, and theologians would jump in and add that divine judgement can only be understood through the lens of grace and redemption.
So, what do we know? First of all, love endures all
things and that includes death. Secondly, there is new life in Christ. And,
then of course there is the reassurance we find in the scriptural assertion
that we will not be left comfortless.
But, in our attempts to understand the how and the why of
evil in the world, and our desire for some form of divine judgement to befall
those we disagree with or dislike, we have imagined the good place and the bad
place, we have imagined heaven’s pearly gates and hell’s fiery pit, we have imagined
reward and punishment. All of this out of our desire that God would make things
“fair” through divine punishment—punishing those whose behavior we ourselves
find reprehensible, so that we ourselves can feel self-righteous.
Which causes me to wonder…
Why is accepting God’s love for all so hard to accept? Why
is divine mercy a bitter pill to swallow?
But, I digress…
To the question of the righteous.
And, to the question of who declares who righteous…
And, the certainty that,
it is not I.
It is not I.
It is not I.
Amen.
“It’s alright to tell a man to lift
himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man
that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” MLKJr
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