Church or jail?

Watch out if you go to Bay Minette, Alabama, and are caught doing some sort of minor crime because you will be given a choice. Church or jail.

According to WKRG-TV, starting this week authorities will give non-violent offenders in that community a new choice: Go to jail, or go to church every Sunday for a year. It’s called Operation Restore Our Community and fifty-six churches have signed on.

If offenders select church, they will be allowed to pick the place of worship but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department.

If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender's case will be dismissed.

Bay Minette Police Chief Mike Rowland says the program could change the lives of people heading down the wrong path.

We’ll see if this idea works. Church or jail? Which would you choose? Personally, I’d have to ask which church. Jail might be preferable.

Jesus tells a story about two sons who are asked by their father to go out into vineyards to work. The first son is the one who "I will not go," but later changes his mind and goes. The second son is the one who says he will go but does not go. He then turns to his critics and asks which one of the two does the will of the father? They of course say that the first son, in the end, does the will of the father. In their answer, the super-religious show that what is really important is what a faithful person does that’s important, not just what they say.

A bishop and teacher of the early church named Chrysostom wrote that the Christian is like the son who at any hour turns and chooses to do the will of the father; to go out into the vineyard and work. The Christian is the son who is the missionary.

But I think there is a deeper message that Jesus is offering. While it is certainly true that God wants us to go out into the world—the vineyard—and do God’s work…that is, to do mission… there is something else going on here.

The Good News is that it is never too late to follow Jesus and to do God’s work in the vineyard. God will embrace the son who turns and chooses in the end, no matter what they have been doing, to become a member of the community of faith.

Today’s Gospel story only appears in Matthew, and it reminds me of another one of Jesus’ stories, the one about the prodigal son that is only in the Gospel of Luke. That son squandered everything and came home expecting to grovel and scrape as a slave but instead is welcomed with open arms. Today, the son in Matthew’s Gospel who says “no” but then turns around choosing to do “yes.” He is a prodigal, too. He comes to his senses. He does the work he was asked to do. In both Gospels, a son turns around. In both cases, repentance—turning around—shows that the life of faith is as much an act of the will as is act of the heart. Living faithfully is depends on the deliberate choice to live in concert with God—especially when we don’t “feel like it.” Faith it turns out is both an act of the heart and an act of the will. And that means that we choose not only to believe but we choose how to act on those beliefs. Before long, we learn that our faith is not faith until we choose to act faithfully.

That’s something the Alabama police chief and judge may, in their good intention, may have missed. Or maybe it’s what they hope for. But try as we might, you can’t force people to believe—and the vineyard is not just for sitting and listening to the farmer talk about grapes. They’ve solved the “will” problem—church or jail—but the “heart” and the “action” part--what people do with their belief—they can’t control that. And that makes all the difference.

I wonder about the 56 churches that signed on this program. I wonder if they are ready for the local check-kiter, petty thief, or the chronic “drunk and disorderly” to actually be sitting in their pews. Because, I don’t know about you but I notice that sometimes we get nervous when someone who once said “no” and who now says “yes” to God and is trying to walk a new way comes and sits among us. We are not sure if we can believe it and we have a hard time forgetting that original “no.” And how we act towards people who are new to church…let alone faith…makes all the difference in that person’s success in living out a new-found, but hard-won, faith.

Have you ever noticed that there are two doors in many churches—ours included—a front door and a back door? Both are painted red…for welcome…which is good. And many of us come in the back door because it’s near the parking lot. But there are some people—actually quite a few—who come through those back entrances all the time who would never think of coming in the front doors…the nice carved ones that lead to this sanctuary. They are people who come to the four twelve-step groups that now meet here every week or who eat in the soup kitchen. They are people, especially in the AA groups, who are attempting one step at a time to turn their lives around. Who are attempting after a life of saying “no” to finally say “yes” to God. And yet… sometimes we “front door” Christians have a hard time accepting that those people who have come in another way really belong with “us.” Which makes sense, because they are not so sure either they are worthy to sit in here with us.

Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that we are all of us sent into the same vineyard. Sooner or later, we all have to come to terms with the fact that all of us in word or deed have said “no” to God somewhere along the way, and all of us have had to come to our senses and choose to follow him anyway. When you get right down to it, our stories are not so different after all.

Don’t be shocked by this: everyone sins. That’s because we are human. We promise that we will strive to live faithfully and we know that we will fail. We will say “yes” and do “no” At the same time, in our baptismal covenant we say that "when" we sin we will return—we will say “no” and then do “yes.” Christians more than anyone know (or should) that we are not perfect. At the same time, we Christians rejoice when the sons and daughters of God who have led life unconscious of God, or who have led lives saying "no" turn and join the other workers in God’s vineyard. It should not take a local judge to tell us this, but we, the church, exist for those who do not yet belong. We exist so that the vineyard is there ready for the latecomer and for the newcomer to join in God’s gracious harvest.

The new first day

Easter Vigil, 2010

Until now this was the empty day.

This is the seventh day. The day, we are told in Genesis, when God rested after creating everything. But if you read the Passion Story, it seems as if everything God has planned for Creation and for we creatures has completely unraveled.

Last Sunday we celebrated Jesus entry into Jerusalem in triumph. He came in through the servant’s entrance; not in the front way with an impressive procession of flags and trumpets and military hardware like the Roman governor, but through the service entrance riding on a donkey adorned with cloaks and his way paved with palms to show off his humility. It looked like God’s plan was to set up a new regime. It looked as if God was preparing to throw the bums out. But as we saw last Sunday and all through this Holy Week, things would unravel quickly.

After challenging both the power of the government and kind of religion that divided people into levels of worthiness, Jesus is betrayed, arrested, mocked, beaten, paraded around as a mockery and then finally tortured and executed. What was supposed to be the beginning of a new era quickly unraveled into disarray and chaos.

So unlike that first Seventh Day in Genesis, when God was finished bringing order out of chaos, this seventh day is the day after chaos. This seventh day has been the day after death seemed to end it all for Jesus. This seventh day was not a day of rest but has become a day of emptiness.

Until now. Until this moment.

Now we have seen light gradually replace darkness. Now we have seen life arise out of death. What looked to us like a Seventh day of dead hopes and disillusionment has become a night of light What seemed like a wasteland of solitude is now an encounter with a creating, renewing, saving God. While we were sleeping, caught up in our loss, God has been healing creation.

The Apostle Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, that people are in Christ are a new creation. The old has passed away behold the new has come. What we thought was the worst day of darkness and despair it turns out was the last day of the Old Creation, Easter, the third day, is the first day of a brand new creation. And we are a part of it.

As some of you know, I like the image of Christ on a rescue mission. This is probably because I spent a big chunk of my life working with and hanging around people who rescue or heal people for a living. You know, the kind of people who run into burning building or falling down mines when everyone else is racing to get out, and the kind of people who stay with the sick and the dying when everyone else stays away. But I like the image for another reason.

We human being have dug for ourselves a mighty deep hole. Our selfishness threatens this planet. We find new and different ways to isolate ourselves more and more from each other. We have the tools to create peace and prosperity, and we find new ways to make war and violence instead. Instead of God simply being angry at us for messing up, God instead chooses to come, be among us, identify with us, go into the darkest places of our hearts, of our psyche and our memory and he lifts us out of the tomb and grave and brings us home.

We may not want to be rescued. Like a horse that might run into the fire when the stable is ablaze, we may go the wrong way. But through the cross and his death, he has finds us in the place that we fear the most.

The resurrection of Jesus shows us that not only is the cost of sin paid by God; but, much more than that, we have been given new life, a new way of being. As Paul said, when we were baptized, we joined with Christ in his death. In our baptisms everything that was dead in us was buried with him and now we live him.

So when the women come to the tomb and find it empty, the angel that greets them is not kidding when he asks “why do you look for the living among the dead?” The living one is Christ. He is alive. He has conquered the power of sin and death.

Little do the women know that they are also the living searching among the dead. Because of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, they—and we—are among the living. Until that moment, this was a sad, empty seventh day. But because Jesus is alive, it is now the first day of a brand new creation, and we who have died and raised with Christ, are alive to God in Christ Jesus.

If you have ever known emptiness, today is your day.

Holy Saturday, 2010

If you have ever experienced your faith as being absent, today is your day.

If you have ever experienced deep emptiness from your soul to your bones, today is your day.

If you have ever known loss that cannot be filled, today is your day.

If you have ever discovered, as C.S. Lewis did, that grief feels very much like fear, then this is your day.

If you have ever gone through the motions because you don't know what else to do, this is your day.

Holy Saturday is a day very easy to jump over. Today is a gorgeous spring day. People are out planting flowers and going to the store to buy for Easter dinner. Easter dresses are being tried on and egg hunts in the parks are happening as we speak. The world is busy and alive, and here we are in a darkened church before a bare cross and it feels empty.

This is the kind of emptiness that any who has grieved the death of a loved one knows. It is like going through the motions at work, and confronting that first thanksgiving or Christmas or birthday knowing that the one we love is dead.

I will bet that the followers of Jesus had the most somber, depressing Passover meal on record. But if they are at all like a lot of people I know, they will have done it. They will have read the words, and eaten the bitter herbs and the lamb, because...because what else could they do? Even if it was by rote, it was something. Something to anchor. Something to hold on to when there was nothing else.

Holy Saturday is a day of absence, emptiness and numbness. If you have ever felt this way, this day is for you.

The thing about Holy Saturday that is special is that it is the last day of the Old Creation. It's just that we don't know that yet. Just as we won't know that we have passed through the darkest moments of our grief until we suddenly find ourselves feeling again. We won't know until we look backwards.

And here is the dreadful and true part of Holy Saturday. There is nothing we can do about it. All we can do is what I've said: slog through, go through the motions. We steer into the wave and hope that our boat is not swamped as it crashes over our heads.

But the feast tells us that as we wait, as we slog through our fear and emptiness, Easter is coming. The disciples did not know that yet. We never know when we are in it. But Easter is coming.

Our creeds and tradition say this is the time when Christ descended into hell and went among the dead. Holy Saturday reminds us that even in the emptiness, Christ is there. If we go down to Sheol, and walk among the dead, Christ is there. There is no place where we can go to escape God's love. But we don't know that now. We will know that tomorrow.

In the meantime, this day is for you.

In 10 words or less,who would you say you are?

If you had ten words or less, who would you say you are? A few weeks ago, The Washington Post explored how people named their own faith when left to their own devices. He looked at how people describe themselves and their own religious faith when they fill out their profiles on Facebook.

Facebook is at once a website and a network where people share information about themselves with people they know, or would like to know better, via the internet. To start using Facebook, one must complete a “profile” which is what your friends and, if you choose, people who might want to friend you might look at. So say for example, a long lost high school classmate finds me on Facebook and I allow him to see my profile. He would learn that I am “Christian-Episcopal.” Which just goes to show you how settled I am--or how little imagination I bring to the question.

The Post said:

Of its 250 million users worldwide, Facebook says more than 150 million people choose to write something in the religious views box.

Amid the endless trivialities of social networking sites -- the quotes from Monty Python, the Stephen Colbert for Prez groups, the goofy-but-calculatingly-attractive profile pics -- the tiny box has become a surprisingly meaningful pit stop for philosophical inquiry.

Millions have plumbed their innermost thoughts, struggling to sum up their beliefs in roughly 10 words or less. For many, it has led to age-old questions about purpose, the existence of the divine and the meaning of life itself.

Some emerge from the experience with serious answers. George Mason University student Travis Hammill, 19, spent several days distilling his beliefs into this sentence: "Love God, Love Others, Change the World."

Others try to deflect the question with humor.

"God knows," wrote Hannah Green, 19, who attended Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville. "Pastafarian," typed Maddy Gillis, 20, of Kensington, invoking a popular pseudo-religion that venerates a "Flying Spaghetti Monster."

A good many, however, tread the fine line between wit and truth: "Agnostic, but accepting offers." "I barely believe I exist."

Since the biggest and fastest growing group of Facebook users are between 45 and 65, you will not be surprised to learn that the question does not get any easier the older one gets. If you had ten words or less, who would you say you are?

One student found that 100 characters could not contain his whole story:

“...growing up with an agnostic father, an evangelical mother and a fundamentalist grandmother. There was no space to describe the terror he felt after learning of heaven and hell. Or how the hell part weighed especially heavily after he was caught breaking into a neighbor's home at age 7. He couldn't convey the profound faith and forgiveness he found in junior high after hearing the tear-filled sermons of a charismatic Baptist minister. Or the eventual dulling of that faith in college by alcohol. And he couldn't fully explain the slow reformation of that faith, now that he has abandoned the hollowness of his old party life. “

"How the heck do you fit all of that into a box?" asked the student, who sometimes attends a Lutheran church near Washington, DC.

If you had ten words or less, who would you say you are?

Jesus posed a similar question to his disciples. Jesus asked “who do people say that I am?” but even as the answers came in, they revealed more about what people believed and wanted for themselves than it did about who Jesus was. Some said: John the Baptist, some said Elijah, some said a great prophet. And even Peter when he confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, did not understand the fullness of what that meant and was certainly not ready for prime time because he did not know what "Messiah" really, truly meant. Not yet.

When Jesus said that it was necessary for the Messiah to be arrested, to suffer…that is be beaten and tortured…and then to die and on the third day rise from the dead, Peter could not bear to hear it.

In fact, even when the time for the cross came, Peter could not bear to hear it. He wanted to fight off the temple guards, he chickened out in the courtyard, hid through the crucifixion, and even as he ran to the empty tomb he was not quite ready to hear what Jesus said plainly. Even after Peter became a bold proclaimer of the Gospel, he then had to be taught that God’s grace was open to everyone, even Gentiles.

Peter’s story tells us that even with his initial affirmation; Christian formation takes a whole life. His story also tells us that none of us can do it alone. It takes a lifetime of formation and learning. And we all have to start somewhere.

If you had ten words or less, who would you say you are? Who would you say Jesus is?

Holy man? Mythical figure? Historical figure? Great philosopher? Messiah? Son of God? Lord and savior? My Lord and Savior? The one who gives purpose, meaning & direction to my living? (Good job, Father, Exactly ten words!) The one that I follow with all my heart…the best I can…and who grounds and shapes my life? (That’s 15 words. Try again.)

If you had ten words or less, what would you say?

The question is not just an exercise. Jesus says that whoever is ashamed of me in this “sinful and adulterous generation” …meaning that Jesus thought his generation to be both faith-less and wandering, too…I will be ashamed of them. If we had to write our faith down in ten words or less, would we be ashamed, or—maybe worse—speechless?

Now if the church were the only place in all of human commerce that offered values, ethics, and a narrative for living, then there we would be facing the question differently. Then we’d be the go-to place for all this and people would be knocking down doors and we could set the rules. Even though sometimes church acts as if we have a corner on the market, we don't . We live in a free-market of ideas that has over several generations has been gradually relegating the religious to the level of “life-style” or “hobby” only slightly less important than how we dress, what music we hear, what some celebrity is up to and which teams we root for.

In that free-marketplace of ideas, we can pick and choose our values. We can buy posters and send e-mails that tell us that everything we need to know to live life we’ve already learned in kindergarten. Or the things we may or may not learn on a sports field are our main guide to how to live life. The movies tell us that our dreams are the most important thing.

The point is that everyone learns values all the time from all kinds of places. And when a few of us come to a place like this to learn them or sort out which to keep and which to toss, what we do is compare and contrast the mixed messages of the culture against what Jesus teaches and does. It is often a trial and error process, best done in groups.

If you had ten words or less, who would you say you are? Who would you say Jesus is?

Every time we baptize a baby we have promised—at least for the last 30 plus years since we’ve used the current baptismal rite— “to do everything in our power to uphold this person her or his life in Christ.” In our parish, we all put that promise in writing when we all sign the really big baptismal certificate.

When we sign that certificate, are we really saying—deep in our heart of hearts—"Good luck! I hope those parents or whoever teaches Sunday School that year does a good job!" How many of us have signed off on a promise and then left it to others to work out?

Let me tell you, I am embarrassed to think of how often, in the course of my ministry, I have filled out the teaching rosters, handed off a curriculum and then checked that task off my "to-do" list. This is not something a check-list or even the best off-the-shelf program can solve by itself. The solution lies in how the whole faith community does it's job.

Every generation has a responsibility to teach the next generation what gives value, hope, meaning and direction. And all of us participate in that formation in how we are with each other, how we support the learning, how we act on our faith how well we participate in the life of this parish. All of these things make a difference. Don't ask me how I know this but kids are watching what we do and how we do it. The Epistle of James wasn't kidding when he said that what we say can get us into trouble!

The job of formation does not end when the child gets old enough to have an opinion either. Because even the most rebellious teenager is pushing us to show that we mean what we say we believe and that what we believe will make a difference. And every adult goes through a period, sooner or later, when they have to reconcile what they have lived and experienced with what they have said they believed. The question “who do you say that I am?” does not stop at puberty, or when we get a job or start a family, or when we enter middle age or even when we die. It takes a lifetime to answer. A lifetime of faith.

We--all of us together-- have the responsibility to tell the Christian story to and with our children, and help them know how that relationship with God in Jesus Christ makes a real, functional difference in their lives. How we do that? Well, that’s up to us. The program can be as creative and as different as we want to be—Sundays, weekday afternoons, small groups, big groups, home learning—the program is just a tool. But here is the most important part:

Together, we must find the ways to teach and form our children. We must live out our promise that we would help our children, and each other, answer the question “who do you say that Jesus is?”

And not just in ten words, but with their whole lives.