| Note: No sermon is quite the same when you read it. You miss the inflections, the expression that you gain in the hearing. The words below are only a close approximation of the sermon, taken from handwritten notes. Nevertheless, the words (as best as can be deciphered!) are shared with you here. The Webmeister |
Third Sunday after Pentecost St. Paul felt that God had not only given him a second chance, he felt that God had reached into his life and changed him into a different person. You have heard it said that the leopard cannot change his spots nor the tiger his stripes meaning that people generally cannot change their nature. But, I also know that mostly slowly and every once in a while with shocking suddenness—people do change. And usually I find that those who seem to suddenly change have been inwardly changing and quite often some destructuralizing experience gives them a sudden new perspective, a new way to see something that was right in front of them all the time, but they could not see it. These moments of sudden shift in perspective happen to us all the time. Jimmy Grace and I were driving back to the church several weeks ago after visiting someone at Memorial Hospital and I-10 and Gessner. We were stopped going south on Gessner in a long line of traffic at Bellaire Boulevard in front of Strake Jesuit. Up ahead I saw an older man staggering along holding out a baseball cap to car windows. I asked Jimmy if he had a dollar with the thought that if I lived on the street I might want to drink also. I waved at the man who came over and put the dollar in his hat. He looked at both of us in our collars and took out the dollar bill and handed it back saying "I can't do it, I can't do it, I'm Catholic." I have never had a pan handler give me money back regardless of what they were. Jimmy and I drove on with a shift in perspective that has stayed with me about just who might be out on the street. Well, perspectives change. What you expect sometimes does not happen. Within my lifetime women were not allowed in this denomination to be acolytes or serve on a vestry or "God forbid" be ordained. When I began my ordained ministry 28 years ago, women had just begun to be ordained to the priesthood. 22 years ago, my beloved sister Alice was ordained a priest. I remember Barbara Harris, an Africana American woman priest being elected to be the first woman bishop. Now a woman has just been elected to be the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. It's like the wonderful map of the world I've got handing outside my office. The map's orientation looks upside down. Australia and Africa and South American are at the top and Russia, Europe, and Canada are at the bottom. Well, after all, who decided that north was up and south was down? So suddenly life can seem upside down. A beggar can be giving me money, a woman can be Presiding Bishop. Texas can be above Oklahoma. Paul must have felt his life had suddenly been turned upside down. He had traveled full of intense righteousness indignation to stamp out a small but irritating heretical sect of people who claimed that they had found God's Messiah. On a sunny day some where to the southwest of Damascus everything changed. Paul was forced through blindness to reconsider his life and he was given his sight back by the healing hands of one who should have hated him, but because of Jesus called him brother. In today's reading from Paul's letter to the church he founded in Corinth many years later, I am so moved by the words he wrote: "From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view." I wondered last week as I ready this passage what did Paul mean? What point of view can any of us have except our individual "human" point of view? How can I find any "other" point of perspective? What would it be like to see as God sees? What does God see when he looks at me? How does God want me to see? In the first Old Testament reading today we heard the majestic and cosmically disorienting words of God to a mortal man named Job. The Book of Job has been called the greatest existential poem ever written because it is so brutally honest about what a human being faces when life seems to take everything you hold dear away. Job's cry of defiance and agony are lifted to God. And finally a reply comes that puts personal pain into a larger perspective. God asks Job, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the abyss of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Have you understood the totality of everything that happens within the earth?" And Job like us must be silent; we do not ever keep the whole in mind because we cannot. It's like someone who says they can't believe in God because of the Tsunami or the Holocaust or Katrina. Do we weep for life that might be lost in every Super Nova's unimaginably vast explosion? Much closer to home, do we really feel the pain of those lives lost in Iraq or the Southern Sudan, or the nighttime streets of Houston? Do we even being to know what we are really saying when we complain to God about how we have been screwed? The problem is we can't help it. We regard everything from a fragile, limited and self dominated "human point of view." Of course! We have to. We speak about what we have experienced, our prejudices, our fears, our joys, our sorrows, our pain, our hope. We regard everything from a human point of view, specifically "our" human point of view. What counts to me is what I think is important and God help my limited human heart that usually doesn't include the life of the planet or the people outside of my daily concerns. And furthermore, I want any God worthy of my worship to see the world from my human point of view. But you know what, the Book of Job is not about everything in life being fair from one human point of view. It's about faith. It's about knowing that above the howling wind of the storm on a rickety boat above deep water you can always hear the voice of God. And I admit there is a post enlightenment Western voice within me that says "I think therefore I am" but on some deeper level there is another voice that says "God thinks, therefore I am." And if God is the ground beneath my existence, then I need to find out how God sees things. A lot of my life has been a steady and inexorable assault on what I thought I knew. All the childish prejudices and cherished opinions which I harbor are continually being eroded like a beach on some shoreline that is being swallowed by the sea. St. Paul, out of the limited experience of his life thought he knew exactly who God was. He was born to a Jewish family in southern Turkey that had achieved the upper middle class status of Roman citizenship. As a young man and adult, he lived in Jerusalem, the epicenter of the history and culture of his people. He was trained by the most brilliant Rabbi's as a Pharisaic lawyer. He associated with the most powerful religious authorities. From a human point of view, Paul was golden. Who was Jesus from that same human perspective? He was a peasant. He lived in an up country town far from anything important. He was trained by his father as a carpenter. He associated with doubtful characters. he often disregarded the letter of the law. He appealed to the ignorant and the oppressed. From a human point of view, Jesus died a painful and criminal death after a pointless and heretical life. So who was Paul after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus? From a human point of view, Paul became a wandering itinerant Rabbi. He lived wherever people would listen to the message of Jesus. He associated with whoever would listen. He often disregarded the letter of the law and he appealed to the ignorant and the oppressed. This is how the world would have seen Paul. But from God's perspective? This is the man who wrote after he had met Jesus on the road to Damascus: "In Christ there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. You are all one being in Christ." Maybe this is how God sees us. St Paul said, "From now on we regard no one from a human point of view." Well, I'm working on it. As St. Paul knew, if you have experienced the generosity of God, then you can't see things the same way ever again, our fellow human beings or the entire universe that surrounds us. God has been so generous with us, how can we not be generous with others? When we begin today to pray for Katharine Jefferts Schori as our Presiding Bishop, we do not pray for a woman or a man, we pray for a fellow Christian called to be our Bishop. So, may God reach into all our lives and change us into his people. May we never again see life as anything less than sacred. The Reverend James T. Tucker June 25, 2006 *Past sermons may be found here. |
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