Chaos in the Midst of Order

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5B, June 7, 2015

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Dove of the Holy Spirit

Do you find it a little unsettling that, to many of those around him and even to members of his own family, Jesus appeared to be insane? Never mind that his very presence could heal lifelong diseases. Never mind that his quick wit kept turning his critics’ judgments back on themselves. It just didn’t compute. How could this regular guy from Galilee be doing these things?

In the past 2000 years, we have seen the followers of Jesus do some pretty amazing things. We also have seen Christians behaving badly. But look at the ripple effect that Christianity has brought to our world. Among other things, once the Roman Empire got hold of it, Christianity set about ordering the world, for better or worse. And many of us here are old enough to remember a time when Christianity and the very best of life in the United States seemed to be cut from the same cloth. Today, many Americans long for a simpler time, a time when Christianity was the assumed religion.

It’s very different now. No longer can we assume that the person coming into St. Paul’s from off the street has had any exposure to the most basic teachings of Jesus. I don’t know about you, but I find this pretty exciting, because it means that the people who are here really want to be here! But we are also in uncharted waters, and that will require both patience and imagination.

I imagine that every period in history seemed bizarre and unsettling to the people living in it. And I do think we live in a time more unsettling than many others. But if so, then Jesus’ time was another of these. Around the year 30, Greek, Roman, and Jewish influences were about to collide in Galilee to create a new kind of chaos in the midst of a very uneasy order.

In this passage we have Jesus’ family coming to take him home, to remove the embarrassment and shame of this crazy person from the marketplace, this favorite son now rumored to be possessed by a demon. But Jesus’ wit and stories win the day here, as usual. Jesus tells us that a house cannot be plundered until the strong man living there is tied up. So if Jesus’ power to heal comes from a demonic source, then the demons are now doing good things, and Satan’s army has switched sides!

From this story Jesus goes on to assure people of the forgiveness of their sins, but the big fat asterisk that follows is just as shocking as the breadth of his assurance. First, “people will be forgiven” is not a great translation. The Greek word here is actually “all.” So Jesus states that ALL sins and blasphemies will be forgiven—and then comes the asterisk. All sins and blasphemies will be forgiven, except for “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”

If the universality of Jesus’ forgiveness shocked us, we might think, “At last! Here is an unforgivable sin. It’s good to know that Jesus has at least some standards. After all, he can’t just forgive everyone of everything! There can’t be a get-out-of-consequences-free card! Now then … what is it exactly that can’t be forgiven, so I can demonstrate that it’s something only other people do?” Hmmm. What exactly is “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”?

Well, as usual, Jesus puts the burden of interpretation on us, to move us beyond individualistic rules and into relationships with each other and with the living God. If we really want to know what “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” means, we have to entertain the notion that we might just be the guilty ones. We need to let that worry us, and we need to wonder how any sin that hasn’t been defined for us or of which we’re not aware can possibly be unforgivable.

Now, when dealing with this passage, it’s all too easy to get caught up in our preconceived notions of what words like “demon,” “Beelzebub,” and “Satan” mean. Much of our unease with these terms comes through the filter of a century of bad horror movies. So I want to invite you to let go of the image of a man in a red jumpsuit, with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. We tend to make Satan either too tame or too terrifying. On the one hand, we might recruit the little red man to be our scapegoat, as in, “the devil made me do it.” On the other, we might come to think of Satan as a sort of anti-God—all-powerful and locked in an eternal struggle we don’t know who will win.

I don’t believe either of these things to be true. Rather, my experiences and knowledge lead me to understand Satan as whatever force in the world causes real destruction of human lives and relationships, but which is ultimately powerless in the face of love. Someone said to me once, “We know that evil is a real force, because it takes energy to resist it.” Amen to that. Even people who don’t believe in God are forced to acknowledge the reality of evil.

But the Christian counterclaim is that whatever war evil was waging, it has already lost. It takes audacity to look at all the evil in the real world—executions, molestations, natural disasters, greed, hoarding, terror, neglect, disease—and to claim that there’s an even realer world, sitting right on top of the one we usually see, in which all of these horrible, painful things actually come to nothing on the scales!

The force working against evil in the world is what we call the Holy Spirit. She doesn’t get much press. Her holiday, Pentecost, has yet to be discovered by marketers. Sometimes she leaps out from behind a bend in the road and shows us unimaginable beauty. At other times she puts people in our path and urges us to show them compassion and human connection. At times she brings us healing, comfort, or reassurance, against all evidence to the contrary. And sometimes she holds a mirror up to our actions and reveals them to be inexcusable, even when we thought we were carrying out some necessary evil for the sake of the greater good.

Grace is her artistic medium. Surprise is her secret weapon. She exposes what is evil and shouts it from the housetops. And, like it or not, chaos is her fertilizer.

Yes, chaos—not order—is the ground from which the Holy Spirit usually springs. Ever since that Day of Pentecost when many languages were heard and understood, as if the Tower of Babel had come crashing down and etymology were working in reverse, the Holy Spirit has thrilled to be at work in the wreckage of our lives. She shatters our carefully constructed categories.

Did you happen to catch the news story last week out of Phoenix? Hundreds of angry demonstrators carrying lots and lots of guns surrounded a mosque just before weekly worship—Christians behaving badly yet again!* So what did the Muslim worshippers do in response? They invited the protestors in to worship with them. Some of protestors took the Muslims up on their offer, too. One man told the press afterward: “They made me feel welcome, you know. I just think everybody’s points are getting misconstrued, saying things out of emotion, saying things they don’t believe.” Another demonstrator, who had been wearing a deeply offensive T-shirt, was seen after worship shaking the hand of a Muslim and saying, “I promise, the next time you see me, I won’t be wearing this shirt. I won’t wear it again.” These two men, at least, were open to the Holy Spirit, and boy, is she sneaky!

I believe it is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit to look at the situation in Phoenix and say, “What we call the Holy Spirit cannot be at work in Islam. Therefore, no reconciliation actually happened there.” To say this is to limit the scope of God’s action, simply because we fear the consequences of not possessing the entire truth.

But it’s not fair to call out other people’s blasphemy and leave it at that. At this point I have to stop and ask, “Have I ever stood in the way of other people’s grace, comfort, and healing—ridiculed them instead of honoring them, simply because they worked against my limited understanding of the way the world works? Have I ever been guilty of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?” And I can barely finish the sentence before knowing that I have, of course I have, many times in my life. So what are the consequences?

Jesus tells us that such blasphemy is eternal and cannot be forgiven. But I don’t attribute that to God’s unwillingness to forgive. I think it’s about getting ourselves stuck. If we would rather ridicule the Holy Spirit than honor her work, how can we possibly accept forgiveness when she extends it to us? Yet such blasphemies do not define our entire lives. I may be guilty of an eternal sin, but I am also the recipient of so much love and forgiveness I don’t know what to do with it all. When I choose to rest in that love and forgiveness, instead of in the guilt of my past, I find that the Holy Spirit really is at work in me. And so I pray that my favorite sins, the ones I shield from God’s forgiveness, may be placed alongside God’s mercy. In short, I trust that there may yet be grace, because in my best moments I know that’s how God works!

If you have ever experienced the chaotic force that brings good out of evil, the Holy Spirit has brought grace to you. If you have ever been healed of an illness, the Holy Spirit has healed you. If you have ever been called up short, forced to acknowledge that you were wrong, and thus found your worldview expanded, like that tiny minority of protestors in Phoenix … that’s the Holy Spirit! The Holy Spirit is not safe, but she is good. She is not bound by the church, yet wherever she goes, she invites the church to be.

Wherever Satan sets up shop, the Holy Spirit breaks in and ties him up. She invades our homes, too, calling us beyond mere tribal loyalty into compassion for those to whom we bear no obvious obligation. She sees our urge for a monarchy, for a recognizable nation like other nations, for a king who will fight our wars for us, and she invites us beyond it into the mess of democracy. Then she sees the disintegration of our democracy through greed and anemic self-interest, and she calls us even beyond that into worlds we don’t yet understand. She throws conventional wisdom out the window and adopts a new blueprint, plans for building the Kingdom of God out of the ruins of over-functioning religion and human tragedy.

The Holy Spirit is holy trouble, trouble that may well leave our lives in a shambles. But then we will see that our carefully ordered lives were always a sham, that we have never been in control, and that we can breathe a little easier knowing that God’s vision is much larger.

I hope you hear today that the Holy Spirit really is at work in you, too, that God loves you more than you can possibly imagine, and that chaos and disorder do not contradict that basic fact. Satan’s house is plundered. The prison doors are open, and we are set free to follow the Holy Spirit wherever she may lead us. Amen.

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* For the record, somebody did take me to task about this line. Were these Christians really behaving badly? They were operating within the bounds of the first and the second amendments of the Constitution. To which I reply, yes, I bet they were. But I would point out that there’s a huge difference between what is legal and what is moral. And it seems to me that showing up armed to the teeth and threatening worshippers of any religious community is just plain evil. That’s why the Holy Spirit went to work there.

On Being Pruned

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2015

Compline at JYC, May 1, 2015

It has been quite a weekend. I have slept on the floor for two nights—something I don’t recommend for the faint of back. Many of you may think I’m young, but I’m not as young as I used to be!

This weekend at St. Paul’s, we have welcomed sixth to ninth graders from Episcopal churches all over Western Washington. This is the twice-annual JYC (Junior High Youth Conference), which rotates from one congregation to another and has been going on in our diocese for decades. (You may also have heard of the high school equivalent, HYC. A little trivia, to show you how long this has been going on: before HYC stood for “High School Youth Conference,” it stood for “House of Young Churchmen.” Yes, times have changed!)

Our theme for the weekend was this: “Are You There, God? It’s Me, ________.” If you have ever been able to put your own name into that blank, you know the longing that comes with a life of prayer. We wanted to impart that longing to the young people who have spent the weekend here at St. Paul’s. And we wanted to give them tools to engage that longing as fully as possible, in many different ways.

We also wanted to get across to the youth that prayer should never be a matter of guilt or shame. This is important, since I know that I myself have often fallen into bemoaning, “Ah, God! Forgive me for not praying enough.” But berating ourselves is never the point of prayer. God wants a relationship with us, and every time we drift away, that’s a fresh opportunity to return. In other words, there is no such thing as a bad prayer session.

Furthermore, we wouldn’t pray if God weren’t already calling us. Prayer isn’t about going to the divine vending machine and inserting a holy quarter. And it isn’t about going to a divine Santa Claus and asking for what we want. God is our creator—not just in the past tense, but in the present. God is creating us. And a vital part of that process is God seeking us out, chasing us down, sometimes having to shout, “Hey! What does it take to show you I love you?” Once we understand this love, then we can truly ask for what we want, knowing that it comes from a deeper place than our own selfishness. And Jesus assures us that our wishes, coming from a place of union with God, will indeed be granted.

But in prayer, as in so many things, it helps to have a teacher, and so we have been teaching methods of prayer this weekend. Like the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, any one of us might ask, “How can I know how to pray without someone to guide me?” We have tried to be guides to our middle school youth this weekend. And of course, as it predictably turns out yet never fails to surprise us, the youth have been teaching the adults how to pray as well.

I have staffed a lot of these diocesan conferences—probably 60 or 70 of them over the past 20 years. Our gospel reading today reminds me of a high school event many years ago in which we gave the youth various gospel readings and invited them to present skits about them. One group performed a skit on the gospel reading we just heard. Unfortunately, the end result went something like this:

Girl pretends to be a tree. Another girl comes up behind her, pretends to chop off her branches. Narrator: “If you go far away from God, you’ll get pruned. If you stay close to God, you won’t get pruned. So always stay close to God. Don’t get pruned!”

I remember wincing and wishing there were some discreet way, in that moment, to set these kids straight without shaming them. Oh, well—we learn by our mistakes and misinterpretations. I learned from this skit that we can’t assume that all young people, or even all adults, know what pruning is. But pruning is not punishment! And according to Jesus, not only is pruning inevitable, but we can also look forward to the growth that will come from it. Pruning may even be one of the ways God shouts at us to get our attention.

I’ve been pruned many times in my life, and it has usually come through someone calling me up short. A painful breakup shortly after college gave me space to meet and fall in love with my wife. When I was laid off from my dream job, I found my way into church employment and eventually, through the pruning of seminary, into ordination as a priest. And in lots of little ways, even since my ordination last summer, I have had humbling experiences, and gratifying experiences, too—all sorts of experiences that have helped deepen my understanding that God loves me, is always with me, and wants me to keep becoming more like the man I was made to be.

Yesterday afternoon, through the wonder of the internet, Bishop Greg met with us on the big screen in the Great Hall. Traffic had prevented him from coming to see us in person, but he was just as warm and receptive as always, despite the distance. He talked about his own prayer life, and the youth peppered him with questions: What prayers have been especially helpful to you? Are there prayers that just haven’t worked for you at all? What do you pray when you feel down and depressed? Is singing a form of prayer? There were many more fabulous questions like these, and I greatly enjoyed watching the transfer of wisdom from one generation to another, from one order of ministry to another.

We also split into various workshops to explore different methods of prayer: the labyrinth, journaling, prayer beads, active prayer with our bodies, musical prayer, prayer through art, and centering prayer. I hope every youth with us this weekend learned some new prayer practice to take home and … well, practice. (Of course, we also found lots of time as well just to play games and enjoy each other’s company.)

Pruning vines -- image from
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/32/04/320499_c97bd612.jpg

When I take the experiences of prayer that I witnessed this weekend and set them alongside this gospel reading about pruning, what jumps out at me most of all is that adolescence is a distinct form of pruning. We all have to go through it—losing the branches of our childhood so that adult branches can grow. There’s no avoiding it, even when it hurts. God will cut off all of our branches that do not bear fruit, and those that do, God will prune to make them even more fruitful—but God will never destroy us. And most of the time, a habit of prayer makes the pruning easier.

God prunes all sorts of things from our lives: not just unhealthy relationships and dead-end jobs, but also things inside us, like selfishness, insensitivity, coldness of heart, and meanness. Most often, pruning means finding out we were wrong and living with the consequences. This is true not just in adolescence, but at other stages of life, too, and perhaps most of all in old age. The pruning that happens in our final years means letting go not just of unhealthy branches, but of literally all our branches, trusting nevertheless that God will graft us onto the eternal vine and preserve us forever.

When we abide in Jesus, we can rest easy. And what does it mean to abide in Jesus? To be. That’s it: just to be. No agenda. No expectations. No guilt, no pressure. Just presence. In the method called centering prayer, the only goal is to show up and be still. Although you can keep getting better at it, you can never do it wrong.

But Christianity, by definition, can never be a mere individual exercise, as if Jesus and I were the only people in the universe. To abide in Jesus also means to love our neighbors. We don’t love out of fear of pruning, but out of the experience of having been pruned to bear good fruit. We reach out to people who are in pain because they are going through their own pruning experience. We can’t rush them through it, but we can love them through it.

On Friday night, the youth having just assembled, we shared a modified service of Compline by candlelight. One by one, seven youth came to the altar and lit candles as a prayer for friendship. They prayed for friendship with people who are different from us in age, in wealth, in color, in ability, in the ways they pray, and in the ways they love. Finally, one youth prayed in the spirit of uniqueness, since each of us is an individual in need of prayer and friendship.

Because Jesus has taught us how to love, whenever we come to God in prayer, we bring others with us. We bring our concerns for the world. We’re about to do that now: to stand up and share ancient words defining our faith, and then to pray.

And whenever we ask, “Are you there, God? It’s me, Josh,” we must know that we can also expect to hear, from time to time, “Are you there, Josh? It’s me, God.” Amen.

The Wrath of God

homily preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate

April 16, 2015

Happy thirteenth day of Easter! Only thirty-seven left to go. Revel in the Easter joy.

That’s what our readings do during this season. We hear a lot about the early church from the Acts of the Apostles, that second volume of Luke’s gospel that traces the time from Jesus’ ascension to Paul’s final journey towards Rome. In this scene, the earliest apostles are already in hot water and already learning how to make their case—that following Jesus does not represent a betrayal of their Jewish faith but rather, in their belief, its joyful fulfillment. The reaction is that the authorities are enraged and want to kill them. And that’s the flipside of engaging with a joy this all-encompassing. It may demand our very lives.

We also hear a lot from John’s gospel during Easter season. This is because, of the four gospels, John’s gives us the most fully developed theology of the Risen Christ, tried and tested over a number of decades within Christian community. Often what we find in John’s gospel are not necessarily Jesus’ original words, but words that attempt to set Jesus within a larger context. Jesus starts by talking to one specific person, and then John uses this conversation to get us to a place where we’re all ready to hear some larger teaching.

In this case, though, the words we hear come from a scene in which Jesus is absent. The verses we have here may be intended to be those of John the Baptist, but since there are no quotation marks in biblical Greek, we’re not sure. John has just been saying that Jesus is the Messiah, and that John is stepping back to make room for him. Then come these verses, either meant to be spoken by John or by the narrating gospel writer. Either way, these words sum up a passage about Christ’s role in the world and in our lives: “the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all.”

One thing that can easily bug us about John’s gospel is that he often portrays things in stark, black-and-white, contrasting terms. This is a great method if you want to convince people to agree with you—you’re either this, or that—and John tells us right at the end of his gospel that his goal is to make us agree with him. Indeed, quite often in life we do have to make decisions between precisely one thing and precisely another. Specific situations call on us to decide something definitively.

But hypothetical situations do not, and this is why black-and-white pronouncements are not a great way to do theology in general. So when, in the Bible, we hear earth contrasted directly with heaven, or flesh contrasted directly with spirit, it’s a good idea to slow down and notice the import of what is being contrasted, and what is being asked of us personally.

The most striking contrast I see in this passage is one that we might not assume to be a direct contrast. I’m talking about the contrast between believing in Jesus and disobeying Jesus. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath.” The stakes are pretty high here: belief leads to eternal life, while disobedience leads to an inability to “see life,” and to “God’s wrath.”

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath

What is the meaning of “God’s wrath” for us, who are Easter people, who understand Jesus to have drawn all to himself, who revel in the joy of the resurrection? When, as John of Chrysostom said, “forgiveness has risen from the grave,” how can there still be talk of God’s wrath?

The “wrath of God” is a very specific phrase that sees specific use in Scripture. The Greek word we translate as “wrath” is “horge,” “a vigorous upsurge of one’s nature against someone or something” – “anger, wrath, indignation; as the divine reaction against evil, bringing judgment and punishment both historically and in the future; as a future culmination of judgment in an outpouring of the stored-up anger of God.” It is usually mentioned in the New Testament in relation to God’s attitude towards human sin.

We might not be comfortable talking about the wrath of God against us. But what about the wrath of God against our enemies? Is that easier to grasp? How about the wrath of God against terrorists, against exploiters and abusers, against the greedy and the dishonest? In these cases, we might want very much for God to show some wrath, because we harbor some wrath of our own. And why shouldn’t we? Injustice should make us very angry.

So if God has some wrath to dish out on the day of judgment, we have some idea who deserves it, right? Not so fast, writes Paul in his letter to the Romans. He tells us that when we judge others, we bring God’s wrath on ourselves. In other words, whatever “the wrath of God” means, nobody is immune to being at the receiving end of it.

Some corners of Christianity use passages like these to develop a theology that God’s very nature is so repulsed by our sinful actions that God cannot bear to be near us. Jesus is the one who washes our sin away and makes us able to come close to God again. The problem with this is that it seems to show Jesus to be a completely different entity from God. God can’t be near us, but Jesus can? This isn’t in keeping with our asserted theology that the three persons of the Trinity share one nature and are the one God.

I would say instead that while we can describe some actions as sinful, it is not the actions themselves that are sinful in black-and-white terms, but rather the quality of the relationship. Sin refers to our turning away from God, and I think this most often comes through our shortsightedness. God comes to us to be helpful and loving, but if we do not understand that we want God’s help or need God’s love, then we will turn away from it.

And so we come back to this strange contrast between belief and disobedience. We don’t normally think of these two things as opposites. But what might it mean if they are? Think of a parent-child relationship. What does it mean for the child to believe in the parent? I think it means trust. The child might say, “I trust that my dad will not leave me at the grocery store. I trust that my mom will come in and kiss me good night, even if I’m already asleep. I believe in them.”

In the same parent-child model, disobedience might have something to do with mistrust. A teenager might say, “I no longer trust that my parents understand my needs. I want to go out on the town with my friends, and I refuse to be prevented from doing so. So I’m going to swipe the car keys when they’re not looking, and just go.” The result will be a damaged relationship between child and parents.

We are in constant need of reminding that God always understands us and always has our best interests at heart, even when it hurts. No matter how much we talk about the “wrath of God,” we must never lose sight of the fact that God will never harm or destroy us. Any harm or destruction that does come to us does not come from God. Rather, God “gives the Spirit without measure.” God offers us more love and joy than we could possibly know what to do with.

What, then, does it mean for the “wrath of God” to be revealed on the day of judgment? Well, when the kid straggles in at 3:00 a.m. with alcohol on his breath and the car wrapped around a telephone pole, I can guarantee you there’s going to be some judgment and wrath! But why? Because of the damage to the car? No, of course not. It’s because of the parents’ worry about their child having been in danger. Whatever it takes to redeem this damaged relationship, then, the parents and the child will have to go through it. And that begins with judgment: accurate assessment of the damage, because it may seem at first that the relationship, not just the car, is totaled.

Maybe it’s a quirk of human nature, but I think that God’s judgment must just feel like wrath to us. Because judgment demands that we change. God demands that we grow beyond what we believe to be our limitations. We never have to worry about earning God’s love—that’s not even a question. But being in a loving relationship with God is hard work.

And so our Easter joy can even survive an encounter with the wrath of God, because divine joy is large and deep and comes to us as an ocean of grace. There is always more of God to love us back into life again, no matter how far gone we are, no matter how much it demands of us, no matter how long it takes. God is Love, and Love is calling us home. Amen.