Proper7B
June 20, 2021 Church of Our Saviour
Intro
I wasn't drawn to the ordained ministry because I relished standing in front of people and speaking.
In fact, after ordination, when I quickly realized that the whole future trajectory of my life was going to be involved in just such activity, I could readily sympathize with the data that someone told me at the time, that 80-90% of the population would rather die than speak in public.
In the light of that, I have often said through the years that my goal in preaching was to speak in complete sentences. It was intended as a ludicrously low bar overcome.
I do, of course, recognize that the technique of effective public speaking does not depend on complete sentences the way, say, a middle school English teacher might.
I suppose that what I really mean is that rather than complete sentences, my goal is to be cogent. Not to speak nonsense or an unintelligible jumble. That is, in fact, challenge enough. Still a fairly low bar.
In the years since that beginning, I have added a couple of other basic rules.
One of them is to seek to never ever say something that I don't believe. Or in another sense to be as honest as I know how to be.
I have often experienced sermons that I felt were saying what was somehow supposed to be said. I have regularly thought of the advertising slogan of the 90's that went: "Church is too often a place where you are expected to turn off your brain." From the beginning, Jesus famously railed against hypocrites. I have thought if I can just be honest, that's a good start.
In the last 20 years I learned another principle that guides my prayer every time I preach. I learned it from a famous preacher, the late Peter Gomes, chaplain at Harvard.
He came to Honolulu and presented a workshop for the clergy of the diocese. Here was somebody at the time lauded as one of the "great preachers of our generation" and he said to us gathered around the table that he had one prayer that he prayed every time he preached. It was taken from the ancient Hippocratic oath. It was that "he do no harm."
Perhaps because of my advancing years there is another layer. In addition to:
- Speak in complete sentences
- Never lie
- Do no harm
I have tended to add a 4th:
- If not now, when?
Hillel
Part of the inspiration comes from a rabbi who lived about 100 years before Jesus. His name was Hillel. His influence on Rabbinic Judaism was very large. It's possible to conclude that he even influenced Jesus, as he is probably best known for having taught an inversion of what we call the Golden Rule
Once there was a gentile who came before Shammai, and said to him: "Convert me on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot. Shammai pushed him aside with the measuring stick he was holding. The same fellow came before Hillel, and Hillel converted him, saying: That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it." - Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a
At least in part what Hillel clearly appreciated was the infinite importance of the present for our lives. There is no time like the present. He said, e.g.
“Do not say: ‘When I have leisure I shall study,’ perhaps you will never have leisure.”
The reason I thought of him today was because of the one saying I have most identified with him. It is from a part of the Talmud.
“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when ?”
Two things that I honestly know:
So today, with those guiding principles, I am particularly aware of 2 things that I hear from today's scripture readings. Two things I honestly know.
- God has a special preference for the underdog.
- There is no time like the present.
Preference for the underdog
Sports metaphor
Several weeks ago when I first noticed that our reading from Samuel featured the story of David and Goliath I remembered something I hadn't thought about in many years.
When I was a pre-teen, I spent several summers living with my grandmother, my father's mother, in the small Mississippi river town where he had grown up. I remembered seeing something in my grandmother's home that took me by surprise.
There was an advertisement, a flyer, that had accompanied something that my father had purchased from an ad at the back of a comic book or magazine.
Charles Atlas ad comicbook 1949
It featured Charles Atlas and was promoting some kind of weight/strength program that was "guaranteed" to turn you from a scrawny kid on the beach to a dominating handsome, dashing ... well, a "Charles Atlas."
The thing that impressed me at the time when I was 10 or 12 years old, was that my father must have felt the same kind of things that I felt. I felt like the scrawny kid at the beach, wanting to be like all the strong handsome types. And my father, who at that age still seemed like a virtual god to me, once upon a time felt that too? Who would have thought.1
Numerous surveys have shown that most people root for the underdog.
David and Goliath
Most of us, it turns out are rooting for David in this iconic combat between the underdog and the Philistine, Goliath by name.
Rooting for David, the underdog scrawny kid at the beach, seems to run deep in the human condition.
It seems amazing to me that the narrative has resonated through the ages, right up to the very present day with headlines involving Israel and the Palestinians.
Perhaps a principle embedded for mediating the middle-east conflict -- one of the touchiest and difficult places in the world today. We could simply ask, "Which party is the underdog?" and then we would root for that side.
The difficulty, it seems, is that both Palestine and Israel appear as underdogs, depending on the frame of reference. Looking at the past few years it's apparent one side is the skinny kid getting sand kicked in their face at the beach. From the perspective of 70 years or 1,000 years one sees it differently.
It's even richer when we consider that rooting for the underdog is a trait of God's very self. Underdogs like:
- the 2nd born in many of the Old Testament narratives
- Ruth and Naomi
- Gideon
- Moses compared to his more talented brother Aaron
- the concern for widows and orphans, prisoners, and the sick and needy of every kind that is prominent in ancient Jewish law as well as millenia of Christian practice
Really I could go on and on. But if we're all underdogs when looked at from the right perspective, what are we to do?
And that brings me to the 2nd thing that I honestly know.
Urgency of Now
Holy men and women through the ages have known the truth that the present moment is what matters in life. It is not a measure of irresponsibility but the exact opposite.
Sr. Joan Chittister wrote a book a couple of years ago with the title: The Time is Now: a call to uncommon courage. One reviewer said of it:
Joan Chittister offers a compelling vision for readers to combat complacency and to propel ourselves toward creating a world of justice, freedom, peace, and empowerment. For the weary, the cranky, and the fearful, Sister Joan's energizing message invites us to participate in a vision for a world greater than the one we find ourselves in today.
Paul, writing to the Corinthians as we heard read today, appreciates the intensity of living the faith that we proclaim, precisely in the context of the life we are living today.
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!
What is God speaking to us here?
David was chosen over all the other more obvious choices. The rightness of his being chosen by God is illustrated by his surprising victory of Goliath.
David receives a covenant from God, in fact, and it is the very model of the covenant that is seen as fulfilled in Jesus, born in the City of David.
But David is not a Charles Atlas kind of hero. He is not a hero riding in on a stallion. He is deeply flawed -- as we learn later in the text.
David is for us the flawed chosen one, charged with doing what needs to be done. So are we. Now is the time.
Jesus is chosen
Jesus is chosen by God. Today we hear of him so calm in the face of storms that he is sleeping. It is his disciples who are anxious and fearful, thinking of what might have been and what might yet become. The storm is all around their awareness. "Teacher don't you care that we are perishing?" they cry out.
Well, no, says Jesus. There is no time like the present to rest in God's glory and wonder. It brings peace and calm. That's really all there is.
But I see your anxiety. And sure I'll calm the wind and still the water. There.
And they ask:
“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
But as Elijah knew many centuries before, God was not in the wind or the fire or the earthquake. God was in the still, small voice.
Peace! Be still!
Be still and know that I am the Lord.
Jesus is not the chosen one because he is powerful enough to still the waves and wind. He is not chosen of God because he is mighty.
Quite the opposite. He is chosen because he represents the lowly. His disciples do not yet know with the urgency of their lives that Jesus is Lord not because of his miracle works but because he knows the "Peace of God that passes all understanding" even in the midst of storms.
Let us -- today -- lift up and praise:
- the forgotten
- the unlikely
- the unexpected
- the ones left behind
- the ones regarded as "not good enough"
- the ones we have ignored
Today is the only time we have to act. Now is the time. It's sufficient. Today is the acceptable time.
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