Sermon (Fr Cunningham) - February 4 2018

            I had a friend who was from a very wealthy Egyptian family.  If he was to be believed, which sometimes was a rather dubious proposition, but if he was telling the truth he was a descendent of King Farouk.  Anyway, in his rather privileged upbringing he had his own cook who would ask him everyday what he would like to eat and then prepare it for him.  He said that one day he grew very frustrated with the whole process and angrily demanded of his cook, “Can’t you figure out what I want to eat?”  And I bring this up not really to address the perils of wealth or the goofiness of my friend, but rather to have a conversation about expectations of others and what it is that we believe they should be doing.  And since this is church and since you probably knew that I would eventually get to God let me say that you were right, because I think we also need to think about what are our expectations of God and ask if those are pious and right expectations.  The reason I bring this up is because of the seemingly odd story we have today in Mark’s Gospel.  And I say it is odd because Jesus does not quite live up to the expectation that we might have for him as the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

            The story goes like this (and I am skipping the mother in law bit that started it off).  Jesus has had a very busy day of curing the sick and casting out demons and when the morning comes he is nowhere to be seen.  So Simon and his companions go out and search for him and when they find him they say, “Everyone is searching for you.”  Now we are not told why everyone was searching for him, but based on what we have in the previous few verses, it would appear that there are probably more sick to cure and more demons to cast out.  But Jesus does not say, “Thanks for reminding me, I’ll be right there,” rather he says, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”  Which on one level sounds very nice – Jesus is going to spread the Gospel a little further, but it also begs the question about the people back in the previous town who were still sick or demon possessed?  Mightn’t they want a little more of Jesus’s time?  Aren’t their sick and their demoniacs worthy of a little more curing?  And this is not really and easy question to answer.  The reason it is not an easy question to answer is because no matter what we conclude is the right thing to do, someone is not getting healed.  If we say Jesus should stay near Andrew and Peter’s house, what of the people in the other towns?, but if we say he should go out to the other towns, what of those people nearby?  No matter on which side we come down, someone in the story is not going to be healed.  And that seems unfair.  But as we try and understand this let’s first start by thinking about it with a little background on the nature of the incarnation.   

            When God became flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ, he accepted certain constraints by being fully human – he had to walk places, he got tired, he got hungry and so on.  And as a result of this his ministry in many ways was very limited.  If we are to believe the experts, the entirety of Jesus’s earthly ministry took place in an area of about 2800 square miles, which may sound like a lot but it is about the size of Metropolitan Atlanta.   And in terms of population the only major city that Jesus visited was Jerusalem which depending on who you believe had a population of somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.  Which means it had a population somewhere between that of Ashland, Oregon and Davenport, Iowa.  Both lovely cities, but hardly what we would call major metropolitan areas.  And so even if Jesus healed and preached to everyone in Galilee and Jerusalem we are still talking about a rather small percentage of the total population, when you figure the City of Rome had close to a million people at that time.  So we are not just saying that the ministry of Jesus was limited in terms of whether he chose to go to this town or that town, but in terms of its totality.  Jesus came to a rather small, relatively obscure and unpopulated area of the world.  And to top it off, he would spend only three years doing his mission.  And so we find that we are not just up against a question of where and who Jesus should heal, but an even larger question about the particularity of God.  And what I mean by that is God’s interventions on this earth are most often very localized phenomenon, to a few select people.  Just look at the Old Testament - God came to Abraham, God came to Moses, God spoke to Noah and so on.  All of these were not visits for mass audiences.  And so what are we to make of God coming to the people to whom he chooses to come and what is the lesson that we are to learn from that? 

            To get to the answer I think we need to go way back, and by way back I mean to the Book of Genesis, in particular Genesis 1:26 when we hear, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”  The key line here is that we were created in the image of God, which has lots of implications, but one of those implications is that we are to want to do the things that God wants to do.  We are to have the mind of God.  And let’s go back for a second and look at some of God’s interventions on this earth that I mentioned previously.  In every one of those instances God came and said I am going to do something and you are going to do something too.  To Moses he first said that he had heard the cry of his people and that is followed by, “Now I am sending you to the king of Egypt so that you can lead my people out of his country.”  To Abraham God promised to make of him a great nation, but also said, ““Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”  And to Noah God said he would save him and his family but also said, “Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch.”  What all of this illustrates is that yes God comes to particular people, and says what he is going to do, but then also gives them a job.  He makes everyone co-workers in the kingdom.  And rather obviously since we are created in God’s image, working along side God is divine work and something that we should want to do, because we are made to do it. 

            And so now let’s move to our original question about Jesus and why he decides to go to another town and on top of that why he came to a rather small region of the world.  The answer comes down to God loving us and to our being created in God’s image.  God wants us to work along side him and build up his kingdom, because that is what we are made to do.  God does not simply come in and tell us to sit back relax and he will fix everything, but rather he shows us a direction and asks us to “Come Labor On” as the hymn puts it.  And in our day and age where we put a premium on leisure this may sound like an almost cruel and unreasonable thing, but remember because we are created in God’s image when we do not act in accordance with our nature things can go very wrong. 

I was reading an essay by Arthur Brooks the other day entitled The Dignity Deficit which was about what happens when people who either do not work or work in fields that we deem unimportant.  He writes, “The deep problem is this: Those who are poor in our country are increasingly being told, implicitly and explicitly, that they are not needed by the rest of society. And the result of so many people not being needed is a dignity deficit. When people are told, by everything from labor markets to trends in family formation, ‘You’re not necessary, you’re not useful,’ that will attenuate any sense of dignity. And that leads to a culture and an economy of despair. It leads to opiate and alcohol abuse. It leads to an uptick in suicide. And that’s what we’re seeing in our country.”

            Being needed is part of what makes us human and part of what gives us our dignity.  God is very needed and God has given some of that “being needed” to us.  And so this morning when we see that Jesus did not get everything done, it is not a call to be disappointed in Jesus but rather an invitation for us to continue the work that Jesus has started.  For in working with God we are displaying some of the divine that is in us, we are being told that our life is necessary and meaningful.  As Brooks points out, those that are not needed sink into all sorts of psychosis.  And so we have both a responsibility to be fellow workers with God and a responsibility to show our fellow man that they are needed too, so that we may all be God’s own both now and forevermore. 

Sermon (Fr Cunningham) - January 28

A number of years ago I was teaching a seminary class on the administration of a church.  Part of the material for this class involved the students assessing a number of real world church situations, in which less than pleasant things had occurred.  These scenarios were things I had actually experienced and involved everything from excessive gossip, the feeding of feral cats within the confines of the church pre-school, to fights over the remodeling of a parish hall.  The students were supposed to come up with ways in which they would deal with the given situation.  Some of the student's answers were good and others not so much.  In the not so much category there was one student whose answer for everything was catechesis; that is comprehensive religious instruction.  In his mind, if you just gave people the right instructions and knowledge about the nature of the Christian faith, there would be no fights within the church.  In other words, as long as people knew theology and church history including the resolution of the iconoclast controversy at the seventh council of Nicaea, all manner of things would be well.  Or to paraphrase Belinda Carlisle for what it's worth catechism would make heaven a place on earth.  Now, he was young and quite pleased with himself and so we should forgive him, even though a certain less than charitable part of me would like to watch his first year in ministry through one of those one way mirrors that you see in mediocre spy movies, because the fact of the matter is people are not always rational actors, no matter how much information they possess.  The issues that generally arise in church arise not because of knowledge deficits, but rather for the reasons that they occur everywhere else and that is sin – or as St. Paul puts it this morning, "Knowledge puffs up."  You can have all the knowledge you want and things can still go very wrong. 

The impetus for St. Paul's discussion today is food, in particular food that has been sacrificed to idols.  I assume that most of us these days do not have a whole lot of experience with food that has been sacrificed to idols, although we do seem to have a fair amount of experience with food as an idol.  If you don't believe me ask yourself how many TV shows or networks, magazines, online sites and so on are dedicated to food.  But I digress.  In the time in which Paul was writing, sacrificing animals to a particular deity was fairly common.  And as a result of this frequent sacrificing, the priests at those particular temples kind of doubled as a butcher.  So you could bring your cow in on the front end and get a nice brisket out the back end.  And what ended up happening was that a lot of meat that people consumed came from uncertain pedigree.  You didn't know if the ribeye you were enjoying at the neighborhood barbeque had started as sacrifice to Jupiter.  And, as a result of this, there came an issue for many who converted to Christianity about how to handle this food that had been used in an act of pagan worship.   You see, in these converts’ previous lives the act of eating these products could be seen as an act of worship of a pagan deity or at least a tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of such a system.  Now the knowledgeable or catechetical response, to use my previous example, was to say to these people that these other gods did not really exist which meant that nothing really happened in the sacrifice that was offered to them and so eat up.  But there was another piece to this, the piece that prompts Paul to say that "love builds up." And that piece had to do not with knowledge, but rather with the spiritual life of the person in question.  That is the new Christian who was having trouble eating food sacrificed to idols.  And so what Paul is reminding his hearers is that in all things love should lead the discussion and not knowledge.  Because the fact of the matter is that even though Paul and many others knew that this was not a real issue, the other fact was that many in the community struggled with this.  They felt that in eating food sacrificed to idols they were somehow betraying their new beliefs.  And so Paul is telling those in Corinth that there is something they need to do that goes beyond mere knowledge.  They need to love and understand those who are struggling.

There is an old expression that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.  In many ways I think this is the message of Paul.  We can know all sorts of things and often voicing the things we know can be detrimental to our relationships with one another.  I mean I know which friends of mine could probably stand to lose a few pounds, but generally speaking it is not a topic of conversation in which I actively engage, because it could potentially be detrimental to our relationship.  There are bits of knowledge that can trigger things within us and others that put barriers between us and the person with whom we are in relationship.  And even more importantly, which is what Paul is discussing today, we need to be careful when our knowledge harms someone else's relationship with God.  Today in the Letter to the Corinthians Paul says that yes food sacrificed to idols is meaningless, it carries no magical juju, but some people's consciences are not at a place where they can understand this and that by eating this meat they would be distressed or confused.  So rather than saying that they need to suck it up and go pick up a rack of ribs from the Temple of Artemis, he instead asks for grace to protect these people's conscience and giving them a little room to grow in the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ.  I mean ultimately he is keeping the first thing, the first thing.  And the first thing is not a dining choice, but rather Jesus Christ and so he is asking everyone, including himself, to back off and love those who are not ready for this knowledge, so that they may grow in their love of God without being distracted by a peripheral issue. 

As most of you have probably noticed, we live in rather contentious times.  If I were to sum up our day and age on one of my more cynical days, I would say that everyone hates everyone else and the reason for this hatred is the other person's fault.  And in such an environment we revel in using knowledge as a weapon, to make the person with whom we disagree squirm.  But what if we were to disengage from this, what if we were to look at the example Paul sets for us today?  What if we made our first priority not knowledge or being right, but rather other people and what is best for that other person?  Now please this is not an invitation to throw aside knowledge and go start some neo-luddite commune, but is rather a call to get over ourselves a little bit - to engage with people in a loving and graceful way, understanding their perspectives, struggles and fears.

I remember years ago when I was learning to drive the instructor talked about being dead right.  That was being involved in a car crash that was avoidable, but happened because the driver who was in the right did nothing to avoid the accident.  An example of this would be entering an intersection on a green light, knowing that there was a car about to run the red light from the other direction.  You were perfectly within your rights to enter the intersection on the green light. You also were just involved in a major accident.  So much of our acrimony that goes on these days seems to originate from people who are dead right; people who don't care what destruction they cause, but care only for being right.  And it is a rather graceless and ugly state in which to exist. But when dealing with real people in the way that Christ calls us to, we have to make sacrifices if we are going to truly and fully love them.  We are going to have to put aside things that we may know to be perfectly logical to allow others to grow and flourish in their love of God.  And this does not mean that we set aside the truth, but rather that we speak the truth in love.  That we first worry about the person and what is best for them. 

If it helps you can think about it like training for a marathon.  A coach would not expect you to run 26.2 miles on the first day of your training, but would rather build you up to that distance over time, asking a little more each day.  When we love other people, we want what is best for them.  And what is best for them is helping them to grow in love and service to Jesus Christ.  And that is going to look different for different people.  This morning Paul would ultimately want the new converts to understand that the other so called gods are not real and for their conscience to not be troubled by them, but they are not there yet.  Just as the person who just started training for a marathon is not there yet.  Loving someone else is desiring what is best for them and what is best for them may change over time, and so we need to be ready to love and nurture each other in all times so that we may be God's own both now and forevermore. 

Sermon Jan. 14 2018-Father Cunningham

         So today, as I prepare to deploy in a few hours, I wanted to share some parting words of wisdom to sustain you in my absence.  But the only thing that I could think to say was to be on your best behavior and don’t turn the parish into a seedy nightclub with a name like The Copa Chrysostom.  So instead I will just focus on the bit we have from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, without delving too much into the prostitute bits – because that might get kind of awkward.

         There is a lot going on in this passage, but the overall theme on which Paul is focusing, has to do with our behavior and what we should and should not do and in some cases how much we can do of certain behaviors.  And this last part is really the piece I want to discuss today, because that is often the place where decision-making is at its most difficult.  For I assume most of us would not be at a loss about whether or not to become the kingpin of a Belarusian drug cartel, but how about taking that second brownie or buying an expensive watch?  The question, I think many of us run into is just how much of worldly things are we allowed to indulge in.  Where is that line between in the world and of the world?

         Paul puts it like this, “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything.”  Now the background for this probably relates to the very early Christian question about just how Jewish you had to be in order to be a Christian.  Did you have to follow the law or where you now set free?  And in that one of the things that often came up were the Jewish dietary laws – did you have to stick with the Mogen David or could you branch out a little, and maybe enjoy a nice Argentinian Malbec now and then.  And it seemed that as people abandoned dietary laws some might have been indulging a bit too much.  This is why Paul follows up the opening statement by saying, “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.”  And since we are on the subject of food it would seem as good of place as any to get this conversation started about the proper amount of worldly things that the Christian can and should partake in.  And the good thing with discussing food is that it does a very nice job of framing the question, because we all eat.  So let’s take a moment and think about our relationship with food. 

         At its most basic we need food to live or as Django said in the movie Ratatouille, “Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.”  But we of course know that for most people food is more than just fuel, it is one of life’s great pleasures (that is if it is not prepared by Norwegians).  And therein lies the issue.  If we simply looked at food as fuel we could treat ourselves like a car and fill up the gas tank when needed and avoid it when not needed.  But because it can bring such joy there is the temptation to over-indulge and to give food too great of importance in our lives.  After all gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins.  And so the question becomes; where is the line?  Where is the balance between having enough to be properly nourished and gluttony?  And this is not an easy thing to judge.  Some Christians across the ages have pushed towards asceticism arguing that food should be viewed as simple fuel and should not be tasty lest it become too tempting.  In fact, one of the Desert Fathers by the name of Evagrius Ponticus stated, “Keep to a sparse and plain diet, not seeking a variety of tempting dishes. Should the thought come to you of getting extravagant foods in order to give hospitality, dismiss it, do not be deceived by it: for in it the enemy lies in ambush, waiting to tear you away from stillness.”  In other words Satan lurks in every jelly donut and deluxe nacho platter.  But that is not a universal sentiment.  Others have not followed such an ascetical line of thinking, after all Dom Perignon was a Benedictine monk.  Now, I really don’t know how good of monk Dom Perignon was, but still it points to the fact that some Christians have been very comfortable with food for mere pleasure.  For unless I have been seeing the wrong doctor, I don’t think that anyone has ever received the medical diagnosis that they were not drinking enough champagne.  And so the point is that even in the Christian community there is no consensus on where the line is between appropriate eating and gluttony – so what are we to do?  How do we make sure that we are not being dominated by anything as Paul says?  Well since we have been on the subject of champagne, let me bring in an example that, while not providing a definitive answer, I think can help guide our thinking. 

         A few years ago in the Wall Street Journal there was a sort of humorous article about various countries and how much their government said was an appropriate amount to drink on a given day.  The funny part in the article was that there was no consensus and there was a huge variance.  Some countries said you should only have a half of a drink a day while others said that you could have as many as six drinks.  I believe the six drinks came from the Basque region in Spain or maybe it was Northern Wisconsin.  But, anyway, the author of the article’s conclusion was not so much about which one was right but rather argued that the answer was probably more personal.  That is, most people know when they have had enough and if that is one drink and you live in the Basque region of Spain you shouldn’t have five more because the government says that it is okay.  And I think finding the line in our Christian walk is much the same, the limit will have to do with our interaction with whatever we are dealing with.  We need to sort of know when we are beginning to have an unhealthy relationship with something in our lives; when something becomes more important to us than God.  And this will vary from person to person.  And while I know this may not be the most satisfying answer, because it puts the responsibility back on us, it is probably the right one. 

         Paul this morning is most likely addressing those who have said that by Christ replacing the law they could indulge as much as they wanted.  But it would seem that in this indulgence they were being dominated by their cravings.  Somehow through the death and resurrection of Jesus they found a new god as Paul states in Philippians, “their god is the belly.”  The real issue being addressed today is when something that is not God becomes more important than God.  If we use the freedom found in Christ to replace him with something else we have missed the entire point.  But beyond that the question comes down to whether or not we have made anything in our lives more important than God?  And while I know we have used food as our primary example anything can fall into this category, even seemingly pious things.   The question that we all must ask when doing anything is do we still love God above it or in our love of the worldly has God been relegated to a second position.  And I wish I could give you a step-by-step program to identify such things, but I cannot.  We must spend time in prayer and reflection so that we may see if we are loving God first, so that we may be his both now and forevermore.