Robert Farrar Capon

This past month, the Episcopalian priest and author Robert Farrar Capon died after a long, passionate, and good-humored life. I got to meet him once, during a weekend retreat when I was in seminary. He gave a series of lectures on the parables of Jesus in which he showed how the theme of the parables is the overwhelming grace of God. He said that God’s work to forgive and redeem the world is already done, even if it is not yet complete. I remember how he smiled as he addressed the view that we needed to do something to receive God’s grace. Don’t we need to ask forgiveness, or to believe, or to turn our lives around? “No,” he said. “God’s work of salvation is done. It’s Done. IT’S DONE!”

Here’s an excerpt from his book The Parables of the Kingdom, in which he expands on his short answer to the question of what the Bible is about:

If scripture has a single subject at all, I said, it is the mystery of the kingdom of God.

…I can think of no better way of reformulating my answer than to lean heavily on the imagery of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. Accordingly, my new version of what the Bible is about reads as follows: it is about the mystery by which the power of God works to form this world into the Holy City, the New Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

Note, if you will, how much distance that puts between us and certain customary notions of the main subject of Scripture. It means that it is not about someplace else called heaven, nor about somebody at a distance called God. Rather, it is about, in all its thisness and placiness, and about the intimate and immediate Holy One who, at no distance from us at all, moves mysteriously to make creation both true to itself and to God.

Capon spent a life reminding people to give up the idea that it all depends on us. It depends on God, and God can be trusted.

Sermon - Everyday Encounters

Preached on September 1, 2013 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Scripture: Hebrews 13:1-2

Let mutual love continue. ²Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

Sermon

Is it possible to be in the presence of God and not know it?

You'd think that you would know, right? You'd think that to be directly in God's presence would be an overpowering, majestic, unmistakable experience. You'd think that it would be impossible to encounter God directly and have there be a chance of missing it, or misinterpreting it, or confusing it with something very ordinary.

But that's not necessarily the case. And the mistaken idea that encounters with God are always mind-blowing has, sadly, left too many people thinking that only other people have experienced God, or even that no one has experienced God because God doesn't exist.

But what if you could meet God and possibly not know that you had?

An anonymous writer of the very early church sent a letter to a group of Jews who had become followers of Christ. We call it the book of Hebrews, and at the end of this letter, after writing about how to understand Christ in relation to the history of the Hebrew people, the writer starts to review the kind of practices that shape a life of following Jesus. Here is the reminder to remember and visit with those who are in prison or being tortured, as happened a lot to followers of Jesus. And there are these words: “let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

It's actually a reference to what often happened Abraham and Sarah, the founders of the Hebrew people. They were at home in their tent when Abraham saw three men approach on foot. Now, living in the Middle East has never been easy, and travelers depended on others for hospitality. Abraham and Sarah had depended on others along the way, so they welcome these strangers, give them drinks to rehydrate, make up some food, give them a place to rest. And then, as any Hebrew child knew, the strangers told them that Sarah would become pregnant even though she and Abraham were by now quite old. And that’s what happened. It turned out that the three men were messengers of God, or angels, or God's way of meeting with people (those all mean about the same thing in the Bible, by the way. Angels were a way of God appearing to people, so the presence of an angel is the presence of God). Abraham and Sarah encountered God when they showed hospitality to those strangers, and they had no idea until they learned something that put their own lives in a new perspective. They had entertained angels without knowing it.

The Biblical scholar James Kugel writes that there are many of these instances in the scripture in which people are temporarily unaware that the stranger they have met is God (from Kugel’s The God of Old, 2003, chapter one). When they realize the truth, what they are surprised by is the message that God gives (“Sarah's going to be pregnant?”) or they are surprised that they didn't realize it sooner, as when Jacob says “surely God was in this place and I, I did not know.” But what they are not surprised by is the fact that they would encounter God in a way so ordinary, so everyday, that they might not even have noticed. They are not surprised that a God encounter could seem like an everyday encounter because they expected to encounter God in everyday life. They are not surprised, Kugel writes, because there was once a time when people did not think that there was such a strong border between the regular world and the world of divinity. Today we think of the natural world and the supernatural world as very separate (if there is one). For them, there was one world which was both natural and divine at every moment. In such a world, a person can encounter God and later say “it was just an ordinary, everyday thing that was happened, except for what I now know.”

You can encounter God in a way that seems perfectly ordinary, everyday, except that you will learn, as Sarah and Abraham did, something that puts your life in a new perspective.

Storms

Driving into the entrance of a park among the hills and gorges around Ithaca, New York, I was astounded by what the water had done. This was the morning after a heavy summer rain and the road was covered in mud, sticks, brush, debris of all kinds from the surrounding forest. A work crew with several heavy trucks and machines had already cleared most of the road and were now working to unclog pipes that run under the road to accommodate the many narrow mountain streams that had backed up and washed over the roadway during the night. Although the rain had stopped, the water continued to run down the mountains at high volume.
It was early August, and Betsy and I and our son James were in Ithaca to visit our younger son, Sam. Sam was spending the summer with the Finger Lakes Land Trust, and he had discovered many new hikes that he wanted us to see.  Sadly, most of the park’s hiking trails were closed until the damaged paths could be repaired. But first, the crew was busy clearing the way for the water to flow safely under the roads, joining with larger streams and flowing eventually into the Cayuga Lake.The water needs a place to go.It got me thinking about the storms of our lives. When our lives meet with sadness, pain, loss and anger, we can be overwhelmed by the deluge. These painful emotions wash over our lives, and, like the flood water, they have the power to do great damage to us. Our storms need a place to go. We need a safe place to direct and take the hardship that threatens to hurt us, to upend and distort our lives. We are in danger of taking out our emotions on others, or deadening our emotions with distraction and addictive consumption, or steeling ourselves away in bitterness.When storms hit, we have a clear path to take them to God. The storms are too big for us alone. We need the safety of God who can bear to know and hear all that we share in anger and confusion. The God who was there for Job, the God who wrestled with Jacob, the God who heard the cries of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt is a God who can receive our sorrow and our anger and our grief. When storms hit, we have the memory of the cross and the empty tomb. Our suffering is shared by God. Our pain is understood by God. With God, we can unleash the torrent of our misery and know that it will be safely received. And then, somehow, it will be redeemed. 

Sermon - Peace and Division

Preached on August 18, 2013 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC.

Scripture: Luke 12:49-56

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

Sermon

When Jesus was born, the gospel of Luke tells us that the angelic host proclaimed “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth.” When Jesus rose from the dead, he came to the room where the disciples had hidden away and greeted them with the words “Peace be with you.” Jesus is “the prince of peace” we proclaim in scripture and hymns. And yet, what peace followed in his wake? The disciples faced persecution and often violence, and Jesus himself saw conflict and cruelty rise up against him leading finally to his arrest and his execution. What gives? Is the way of Jesus a way of peace or is it a source of division? Even Jesus seems to contradict that he is the prince of peace when he says “do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No I tell you, but rather division.” And the division will go down even to the most basic of relational ties: households will be divided, parents against children and children against parents.

To get behind this question of peace and division I want to look more widely at the teaching of Jesus, and in particular one of the parables he told which is remembered in the gospel according to Luke. It is the well known parable of the prodigal son, and it’s a story we can't tell often enough. A wealthy landowner has two sons and the younger one comes to him and says “give me my share of the inheritance.” He takes his share and he leaves. Well, usually the inheritance is distributed upon the parent's death, so not only has the young son forced the family to sell off a portion of land and assets in order to give him cash to leave, he has also treated his parents as if they are already dead. This son goes off to a foreign country where he wastes all of his life's inheritance while still a young man.

He hires himself out on a farm to care for, of all things, pigs, an unclean animal among his own people. Could he fall any further than this? He’s a poor man in a foreign land caring for unclean animals, and he’s so hungry that the food they eat looks good to him. Even the most menial workers on the old family farm ate and lived better than this.  So he decides to go home, knowing he has given up rights to be the son, to at least be a hired hand. He composes a speech: “father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be your son, but take me on as one of the hired hands.” Have you ever practiced a speech? Can't you picture him walking the long way home, practicing... “father, I have sinned. Father, I'm no longer worthy. Hire me on.”

But you remember what happens. While still a long way off, the father sees him (has the father been looking for him all this time?) and he runs off down the road (running down the road is not what respectable landowners do – but he runs) and he throws his arms around his son. The son begins his speech “father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be your son, but...but...” but that's all he gets out before the father is telling his people to get a robe and shoes for this haggard son, and to put the family ring on his finger, because he was lost and is now found, and he will be restored as a son!  Not because he deserves it, but because the grace of God, the justice of God, does not work according to what we deserve but according to what will restore us as people, whatever we have done.

This kind of grace, this kind of welcome, this kind of love is what the peace of Jesus looks like. Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth. Indeed.

Except: do you remember what it does to the older brother - the brother who has stayed with his parents on what's left of the land, all of which should one day be his portion of the inheritance? The grace and peace of God which we celebrate in the father's restoration of the prodigal son is the very act that brings division between father and elder son, between son and father, brother and brother. And Jesus leaves the story unfinished. Will the elder son come in and join the party to welcome his brother home, or will he continue to act as if his brother is dead? Will there be peace in the house or will it remain in division?