Sunday, July 17, 2016

Ora et Labora



A Sermon preached on July 17th, Pentecost IX at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Genesis 18: 1 – 10a, Colossians 1: 15 – 28, Luke 10: 38 – 42

I am not entirely sure that I like today’s Gospel. I feel a little too like Martha, often distracted by many tasks and things, prone to checking my Smartphone whenever it rings, or buzzes or beeps, and sometimes even when it doesn’t. So Jesus’ criticism comes a little close. It makes me worry that, like Martha, I may be missing the one thing I need. What might that one thing be that Jesus mentions, the one thing that Mary has chosen and apparently her sister, Martha, has not? 

I have heard the two sisters Martha and Mary often used as examples of different vocations. Mary then stands for prayer and spiritual practice, for contemplation. Martha, on the other hand, stands for action and service. So much so, that she struggles with all the demands of life in the world, perhaps only praying on the run, if at all. This distinction between Mary and Martha, between contemplation and action, between prayer and service, comes across as a very tidy distinction. For that reason alone it should be treated as suspicious. Life is rarely neat. Issues of faith are rarely simple. Christianity is hardly ever a matter of “either/or,” but much more often a case of “both/and.”  Contemplation or action, prayer or service is a false contrast and it is definitely not Anglican. Our spirituality, our practice is rooted in Benedictine spirituality and the Benedictine motto is “Ora et Labora,” pray and work. 

Why do I say that our practice is rooted in Benedictine spirituality? As most of you know from your history lessons, even before the Church of England severed its ties with Rome, all the monasteries in England were dissolved, including the many Benedictine monastic houses. But many of our cathedrals, including Canterbury, were Benedictine foundations. And Henry VIII even turned some former Benedictine monasteries – Chester, Gloucester, Peterborough - into new cathedrals. So as the monks became canons, and the old abbot often became the cathedral dean, much of the Benedictine ethos remained and the cathedrals influenced the newly independent English Church as it tried to find its new, “Anglican” identity. The other Benedictine influence is on our pattern of worship. Thomas Cranmer took the daily monastic offices of Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline and turned them into our two daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, Matins and Evensong. In recent years, our Church has put Midday Prayer and Compline back again, and for our opening prayers at our Vestry meetings we are currently using Daily Prayer for All Seasons[1], a modern reworking of the eight Benedictine monastic offices. So yes, Benedictine spirituality and practice really is part of our Anglican DNA.

This week was also Saint Benedict’s feast day. It is his rule, his book of precepts written in the 6th century, that forms the basis for what we call Benedictine spirituality, and the spirit of St. Benedict's Rule[2] is summed up in the traditional motto ora et labora, pray and work. Prayer and work were for him inseparable, one was not possible without the other. “And first of all, whatever good work you begin to do, beg of Him with most earnest prayer to perfect it,” he wrote in the prologue to the rule. A monastery was to be a “school for the service of the Lord,” and the pattern of work and reading; prayer and worship established by the rule was what would help the monks, and all others who use this structure, to learn and grow into that service. 

Benedict’s Rule refers to the regular, structured daily worship as the “Work of God” or Opus Dei in Latin – which is not just a conservative, semi-secret catholic society! The purpose of the worship was, and still is, to “bring our tribute of praise to our Creator and to glorify him.” Benedict was careful not to restrict God’s presence to churches and chapels – “We believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that "the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and the evil in every place" (Prov. 15:3). But we should believe this especially without any doubt when we are assisting at the Work of God.” 

But, while it looks as if Benedict agrees with Jesus, and he should, that Mary’s choice of listening to our Savior is the “better part, which will not be taken away from her,” he still places a high value on daily work, which in the 6th century was mostly daily manual labor. Just as prayer was work, so work could be an opportunity for prayer and study. According to Rule 48, “Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore, all should be occupied at certain times in manual labor, and again at fixed hours in sacred reading. ….. Let all things be done with moderation, however, for the sake of the faint-hearted.” 

Now one thing I have never seen here at St. Augustine’s is idleness, on the contrary. We are busy, and I believe we are mostly busy with God’s work. But we live in times where we are susceptible to multiple distractions. There is always a task to be done, and we – I – are in danger of multi-tasking our way from fully experiencing anything were doing.  Being busy does not necessarily make us more successful; but too often our accomplishments and self -worth are measured by how busy we are. That goes for churches too – when the number of  programs, ministries, and forums become a measure of success.

Now I am not arguing for only offering one Sunday service a week, and nothing more. I am not letting the hospitality, Sunday school, outreach or formation teams off the hook. Everything you do is God’s work too. But I am arguing – using St. Benedict’s words – for “doing all things with moderation,” for balance. And I think that is the point Jesus is making to Martha too. The issue is not that she is working – probably by providing Jesus, his disciples, and her sister with food and drink as a good host – but that she is worried and distracted by the many things she is doing, she has lost sight of their purpose. She is so annoyed in fact that we can see a very early attempt at triangulation, when she complains to Jesus about her sister:  “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” Jesus avoids that trap as elegantly as he avoids the traps that Pharisees, Scribes and lawyers set him. Martha, he says “there is need of only one thing.” 

The Gospel reading invites us to stop being busy long enough to be present with ourselves and with God. The passage also invites us to recall or notice where we seek and find God in our lives and in our work. I try to take a time out now and again to focus. Just two weekends ago I went to a nearby retreat center –Franciscan, not Benedictine - for a day retreat, mostly spent in silence. You don’t have to go to a religious house to do this. You can use your summer vacation, as a Sabbath time, as an opportunity to come closer to God. 

Benedict’s rule and Jesus’ lesson for Martha are all about balance and purpose. About ensuring that we do not lose sight of who we work for or why we pray, about ensuring that we have the energy, focus, and the power we need for all of God’s work: ora et labora, prayer and action, worship and service for one reason and purpose only, to the glory of God.  
Amen.



[1] Daily Prayer for All Seasons, Church Publishing, 2014
[2] http://www.osb.org/rb/text/toc.html

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Surprises!



A Sermon preached on July 10th, Pentecost VIII at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden


Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10: 25-37


Today’s Gospel reading was full of surprises for the original listeners, though we have grown so used to the story that they are not so obvious to us. There were certainly surprises in store for the lawyer, who was perhaps not as smart as he thought. If he had been really smart, he would have stopped when Jesus told him that he had given the right answer, rather than asking his follow on, mister clever question, “and who is my neighbor?" and then getting more than he expected and – to be positive – being transformed in the process.

So what is surprising? Well for one thing, it is a surprise that the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho was on his own in the first place. He was literally going down. Jerusalem sits on top of a ridge and the ground slopes gradually all the way down to the Jordan valley. Part of it is the Judean wilderness and having been there, I can tell you that it is beautiful but also not without danger. It is arid, and mountainous. To get from Jerusalem to Jericho you would follow a narrow valley path lined with caves that made good hideouts for robbers and bandits. At the site we visited, the caves are now part of a Greek Orthodox monastery, perched on the cliff face, and offering the safety and hospitality the man in the story sorely missed. While we were there, we were harassed only by some Bedouin kids trying to sell us bags and shawls, not by robbers. But back in Jesus’ day, you really would always try to travel in a convoy or a caravan. If you didn’t, as we heard, danger threatened.

The next surprise is that the Priest and the Levite passed him by. I suspect that when Jesus’ audience heard him say, “now by chance a priest was going down that road,” they thought. Phew, great, he’s saved. If a priest won’t help him, who will! They thought very highly of priests, as I hope you do too! After all, a priest was sworn to obey the Law and according to the Law, as we heard, taken straight from the Book of Leviticus, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy – containing the other half of the great commandment, to love the Lord your God, we heard Moses tell the people “this commandment … is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not … beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it? No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." (Deut. 30:12-14) That may be the case, but the priest, and the Levite, another good law abiding Temple officer, do exactly the opposite, they cross over the road to avoid helping and keeping the Law. 

I have sometimes heard this explained away by the laws of ritual purity, that by touching a dead man they would become ritually unclean and unable to serve in the Temple for a while. Well, there is one major problem with that – the man is not dead, and the least they could do is to check and see. Moreover, even if he were dead, burying the dead was a very important commandment. Love and compassion would always trump ritual, every day. No. I think they were just afraid and so afraid that they, the insiders, moved on as quickly as possible to save their skins. Getting involved is costly and dangerous and the investment was just too high for them. 

The next big surprise, for the listeners and certainly for the lawyer who was hoping for a very narrow definition of the neighbor, is that the hero of the story is a bad guy. A Samaritan, a half-breed, a heretic, an enemy is the very last person they would expect to be hailed as an exemplary neighbor. Now the Samaritans were not a good, but oppressed minority. The antagonism between them and the Jews was mutual. Back in chapter 9 (51-56), the Samaritan villages had refused Jesus passage through their region because he was a Jew and on his way to Jerusalem, they had rejected him. But surprise, surprise it is the Samaritan who helps the Jew, and who helps him generously. God’s word was clearly in his mouth and in his heart.

Look how Jesus uses as many words as he used to describe the activity of the two Jewish leaders, to detail all the Samaritan does to save the man—six actions in all. He comes up to the man, binds his wounds, anoints him with oil to comfort him, loads him on his mule, takes him to an inn and cares for him, even paying for his whole stay. In fact, given the amount the Samaritan leaves with the innkeeper, the injured man probably has about three and a half weeks to recover if he needs it, since the going inn rate was one-twelfth of a denarius and two denarii was two days' wages. So, while getting involved was too costly for the priest and Levite, the Samaritan spares no costs at all to help. 

Just to make clear how surprising his and their actions were, here is a modern day retelling of the story, taken from a book, “The Misunderstood Jew” by Amy-Jill Levine about Jesus and Judaism. It is set in the occupied West Bank, where the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is today:
“The man in the ditch is an Israeli Jew; a rabbi and a Jewish member of the Israeli Knesset fail to help the wounded man, but a member of Hamas shows him compassion. If that scenario could be imagined by anyone in the Middle East, perhaps there might be more hope for peace.”[1]

Jesus' question to close the story does not require a degree in ethics or theology to answer correctly: "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" Until our Bible Study this Wednesday, I would have interpreted the lawyer’s reply, "The one who showed him mercy," as his unwillingness to even pronounce the name of the hated Samaritan, that he cannot even bring himself to mention the man's race. But Susan, one of our participants, thought the opposite. She thinks the lawyer had got the message, that his transformation had begun, and that therefore he was no longer willing to refer to him as “The Samaritan,” using a divisive ethnic identifier, because he recognized him as a positive universal role model, simply the one who showed mercy. The lawyer now realizes that each of us is to be a neighbor to the other that neighbors can come from surprising places, and that even “enemies” can love God and be examples. That would be the last and biggest surprise in the story.  

It should not be a surprise to us. In Matthew’s Gospel (5:43-47), Jesus is much more explicit: “You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you …. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? …. And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” Loving God and loving our neighbor are two sides of the same coin; we love the neighbor not because we are told to, but because we want to as an expression of our love for God, whose image is in every person. We cannot rule out any people as neighbors. Neighbors are not determined by race, creed, class, gender, or orientation. Neighbors are anyone in need made in the image of God, and anyone who helps those in need.  

I said that this story is full of surprises. Why don’t we surprise the world by making it a true story? Today, as the definition of neighbor seems to becoming narrower and narrower, as more and more countries and people turn their back on the world outside their borders, and on those in need within their countries, we need an inclusive, generous, and extensive vision more than ever. Jesus last words to the lawyer are as relevant as ever: “Go and do likewise!”
Amen.


[1] Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, Harper Collins 2006, 149