Genesis 2:28-24
Two chapters into the bible, and we have already created the world twice. Most of you have probably heard some or all of this passage before in marriage ceremonies. What I think gets ignored when we read this passage with the intent to justify marriage is the remarkable gift that God gives man, that of naming. Sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, indeed most other fields ending in -ology know that the act of naming something brings it into reality. It isn't enough to see a cow; if you can't tell someone about the cow, you can't get help getting it our of the road. This is because we are creatures of community. We survive by common knowledge passed down through generations. This, and other stories of the Septuagint are stories that bind a people together. So first, lets look at how this story binds people into covenant with God, then we can move on to how this story is reinvented in the new covenant of Jesus Christ.
There are two creation stories in the bible. I didn't get that impression as a child, and many adults still don't know this. Sunday school, in my experience, tends to use the first creation story to explain the beginnings of Adam and Eve. I think this because “be fruitful and multiply” sounds more like homework to grade schoolers than “...a man... clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Racy stuff, and I admit, I haven't read this to my own kids either.
But what are we losing by focusing on the “And God Said” version of creation. This God is outside time, outside interaction and outside comprehension for us. True, God is all of those things, but this is our story of events, and we are not outside time, and we are not outside creating meaning from our interactions with God. The first story is like a perfectly planned pregnancy with a clear understanding of parent and child. The second is like a baby in a basket found on the doorstep; God and Adam are now in this together.
'In this together' is a much better explanation of the covenant relationship than that of parent and child. When we envision a parent-child relationship, our first image is always that of the greatest difference in power, babies and mothers, or fathers and five year olds. God is infinitely more powerful than us and to focus on the power aspects of our covenant with Him gives us the excuse to undervalue our own contribution, and it offers us the excuse to not act. This second story of creation is much more meaningful because in it, we are co-creators.
We are not just creating names for animals, we are creating relationships. And we are creating ourselves. Even before there were two of us, we were already longing for community with each other. God was too exalted, to perfect for us to be really comfortable with. And verse 20 says, “The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.”
If God was too exalted, then the animals were not exalted enough. We gain more understanding all the time about how animals can communicate with each other, but no matter that we say dog is a man's best friend, dogs can't get really excited about politics, plowing or procreating. We need each other, and God created us to need each other, even before we could know ourselves in relation. God put Adam to sleep and used him to create a match, someone with the same abilities and desires as himself. When Adam saw her he said, Finally, someone I can talk to about how stupid this dog is.
This story is part of a saga, a sweeping narrative that the Jewish people have used as part of a set of stories to set themselves apart and define their covenant with God. This story has passed through the minds of man for far more years than we can credit the bible. We are not the Jewish people but we worship the same unchanging God, and we keep their oldest stories alive in our tradition because it is our history too. This creation story is archetypal of our powers of creation. But it is formulated under the old covenant. What we really need to know is how Jesus told us we should be using that power.
In Luke 10 we meet a Lawyer, not in the laws of the land, but in the laws of Moses. He asks Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus lets him answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.” This is the Great Commandment of our faith, and it is not something new. These exact words come from God, written in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy.
But Jesus is offering us a new vision of the old covenant that God has made with the Jews and the lawyer wants to remain righteous. So he asks for clarification, “Who is my neighbor?” You know he is expecting to hear, Jews or maybe something more vague like, People like you,. This is what the church leaders would tell him; that is what his mother would tell him. But Jesus doesn't tell him that. Jesus is offering him and us another way to use the power of creation we have in the naming of a thing. He is showing us how to redefine who we think of as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
Do you remember the answer to the lawyer's question? It is the parable of the good Samaritan. A man half dead and naked on the side of the road is passed by a representative of God himself, because if he does not keep purity he can no longer go into the Temple. Likewise, an assistant to the representative of God himself passes by. This poor man is surely thinking God has forsaken him, if God's own select, the very people who spend their lives in communion with God won't help him, why would anyone else?
But along comes a Samaritan, someone who doesn't speak his language, someone his faith tells him to avoid, and that man, whom he himself would not help, picks him up, cleans him up, and puts him up to recover – for two months, and offers to come back later and pay off any extra expenses. That is some neighbor.
What just happened here? The lawyer is in a tailspin, and so are we. Jesus just took our power to name people and turned it upside down. We all use language to bring people like us close and to push away people who are different, then we use that distinction to determine who benefits from our resources. We name our neighbors all the time, based on their physical proximity to our homes, their socio-economic status in relation to ours, their political affiliations, their religious preferences. Jesus said, you have been given a power by my Father to define your relationships, to define each other, to define yourselves. Do not limit yourselves. Take this creative power and use it to break down the limits you have created for yourself.
All through the New Testament Jesus is taking the prescriptive, negative, laws God gave to his people because they could not recall their powerful relationship with Him, and turning them in to proscriptive, positive expressions of a life lived fearlessly. Adam did not start out afraid of God, he started out beside Him, asking for his needs and offering himself as a means to fulfilling those needs. But like every human life must go through a time of trial, also known as adolescence, so the whole human race must go through an adolescence. The laws of Moses, the THOU SHALL NOT's can be seen as a time of youth, where our Father, God could only speak to us by setting down the negative outlines of behavior. Jesus came through and said, grow up already. It isn't about what you can't do, it is about what you can do. Don't you remember? Don't you remember when you were a child of God and you loved Him and all the things He gave to you, all the freedom He allowed you? Remember how happy you were to see another person? Why are you treating each other as though you are not all equal in the eyes of the Lord?
Jesus is still asking us this today. Why are we adding limits to the command to Love our neighbors as ourselves. Was the parable of the Good Samaritan not clear enough? The first thing God gave us after life itself is an amazing power indeed, that of naming the things in our world. And he has given us something else, a desire to live in community with each other and the means to do so. When we put up walls, literal and figurative, in our world, we are putting up walls in our relationship with God too. Each one of us needs to look into our own lives and find the walls we are building with our words. Who are we denying a relationship with God by our defining them as other?
I challenge each of you to spend the next week listening to the words you use, and the words of those around you. Who isn't getting fair treatment in housing, in employment or in our courts because we don't see them as a neighbor? Who don't we see in our community, and so don't see in communion with ourselves. John 3:16 says “For God so loved THE WORLD.” It doesn't say for God so loved the Jews, or for God so loved the Christians, and neither should you. We are to bring about the kingdom of God, and that kingdom will never happen as long as we are using our God given powers to destroy rather than to build. Listen to your words, are you using them to be a Pharisee, or are you using them to be a Samaritan?
Amen.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Sunday, October 9, 2005
All Dressed Up, Where to Go?
The Lectionary Committee has once again left in a passage of the Bible that we would gladly never read. My first, oh 10 readings of this, absolutely confirmed my opinion that Jesus would never have said anything like that. And I really wished we could have skipped over to the Lukan version which does not include the misplaced guest. But the last, well, one of the last, nice things that John Williams did for me before he left was to tell me, hey, I think that pants aren't really what Jesus was talking about, and Pat says, of course not, its more like righteousness and good living and the sacraments and things like that. Pat doesn't really talk like that, but I remember the feeling of a stone shifting in my heart and finally being able to read this passage without revulsion. So lets take a minute to put it in its place in the story of Jesus and in the story of the Gospels, because I will always think that this is one of my most important tasks in preaching.
First, we need to remember the Gospel that we are reading. This is Matthew, written for Jewish-Christians who approached their Christian faith as the fulfillment of their Jewish traditions. If there is anything we take with us from Sunday School lessons of the Old Testament, it is that God can and will smite the enemies of his chosen people and Israel too, if she gets out of hand. The compliers of the book of Matthew read the material through the lens of their lives and their faith in God, and as much as we don't like to think about it, God does smite.
Second, we need to remember that this is from that same series of parables that we have been reading for the last several weeks. Jesus is still in the temple where his authority to teach was questioned, but he is no longer speaking to the priests, now he is turned back to the crowd. The Pharisees and priests and elders are all still standing there, so he is still speaking for their benefit, but he is no longer addressing them directly.
So lets look at this parable again with these frames of reference in our minds.
We think of weddings as big deals now, and credit cards and brokerage firms are all doing commercials about a daddy and his daughter out shopping for her wedding. They are trying to tell us something we may have forgotten with all our talk of love, but weddings celebrate marriages, which are alliance making deals, just like any other board room transaction. Marriages are covenants, just like God's covenant with Israel. We may not ever have to climb a mountain and carry big hand hewn rocks back down to make a covenant for God, but we will all likely experience a wedding. This is something we can relate to.
And if you have ever had a hand in putting a wedding together, you can feel the rage that the king felt when people didn't bother to show up. Then just imagine the lawsuits to follow if you sent out the reception staff to lead people into the reception and the guests started punching or shoving them or even pulling out guns like a Quinten Tarantino movie and shooting them?? Imagine the rage if the wedding was actually a peace accord to stop the fighting of two families or of two countries. How much greater then would that anger be if it was to unite all the people of God and no one bothered to show up?
What would it feel like to be a minor nobody invited because you are the second cousin twice removed from the step brother of the groom? You would probably be right to think your picture was never going to get into the wedding album, but free drinks and a meal are nothing to sneeze at. You would probably be cowering under the pews if the honored guests started beating up the ushers. You might start trying to work your way under the sub-flooring when the hosts started shooting back.
At this point, you are thinking, party's over, and I have not even a story to tell in polite company. But now the host, victor from the vantage of the doorway, brushes off the ushers and sends them off looking for people to eat at the reception. If the guests don't want lobster puffs, then as God as my witness, I will find someone else who does.
OK, that was fun for us, but what does it have to do with the actual story? Remember where Jesus is? He is in the temple courtyard talking to people who are compelled to attend temple, but never get to go inside. Wedding guests invited to fill in the back pews of the church so the pictures make the groom appear more popular than he in fact is. Remember who else is listening? The people who do get to go inside, who do get to sit in the front row, and who are invited to sit at the bridal party table. Doesn't seem like such a great story to them. My father sent prophets to tell you of my wedding, says Jesus, and you ignored them. My father sent more people to lead you by the hand to my wedding, and you killed them. So you are no longer invited, Jesus tells them. This marriage, this covenant, is no longer by invitation only, Jews and Gentiles are equally welcome. The rich and the poor are equally invited. The full and the hungry have equal access to the feast.
So what about that guest who get thrown out, wailing and gnashing his teeth in the outer darkness? What about the idea that many are called but few are chosen? I choose to believe that Jesus didn't say this in a red lettered sort of way. I choose to believe that this is an addition, in Mathew, of Jews who have professed Jesus, and who have been spurned by their families and friends, in those ways that Jesus says that being his follower is likely to do. I chose to believe that a people for whom the Old Testament expressions of God are still the most natural have chosen to continue expressing him in those ways.
For those who complied Matthew, and Matthew is full of parables that end in gnashing, wailing, outer darkness and the call of many and the few chosen, there is a need to confirm that they have made the right choice, we all want to know we have made the right choice, especially in a choice as hard as following the prince of peace. And if that means there is a little of the my dad can beat up your dad in this community, it only means they are human, the same as us. And if you don't think so, my dad... well, you get my point.
So what do we do with this parable? What are we supposed to take away from this story that is applicable and relevant to our lives? Maybe we shouldn't have big parties for our marriages. I didn't, but I am notoriously cheap about things like parties, all parties are potlucks at my house. Maybe we should expand our guest lists, not treat people as commodities but honor all of them as guests in our churches, in our lives, in our hearts. Maybe what this is telling us, who are not Jews being persecuted by our families for following a radical untrained teacher, is to watch what we wear.
I had a really hard time getting past the clothes and into the metaphor. Jesus was a guy in hand me down shoes who regularly gave away his coat. The only reason he had a coat to give away was that people kept giving him another one. Of all the people to associate status with clothing.... Then I extended the metaphor. OK, I didn't, but Pat explained it very clearly and slowly for my closed ears and open mouth. Jesus wasn't telling people - wear a suit or I'll be back. Jesus was telling people to participate in the sacraments, to stay in right relationship, in our hearts, with God and with the commandments. Do we love God with all our heart and with all our strength and all our mind – all the time? Do we love our neighbors as ourselves – all the time? Because if we are doing so, when someone asks us, what are you wearing? Why are you a Christian? We will not be speechless, we will have ready at our lips the proclamation that Jesus died for our sins and has freed us to be in a right relationship with God, he has confirmed our faith in God and he has cleared from our countenance the worry and the fear that result in putting ourselves and our small worries before the Kingdom of Heaven.
What are you wearing today? Do you have on your wedding garment, the certain knowledge that God loves you, that Jesus died for you, that you are adding to the Kingdom of Heaven? Did you put on a fancy hat to hide your eyes and hope no one would recognize you when you drove up to church? Are you prepared to be a defender of your faith in the same way that Jesus is prepared to defend you before the Father? Are you hoping no one will ask what a nice person like you is doing being a Christian?
The community who developed the scripture we now call Matthew never saw Jesus walk through the temple, just like us. They did not hear him with their own ears, just like us. But they complied a testament of the Gospel that is timeless. The variations in their story, like the variations in the other Gospels, give us more fuel for our faith than they could have ever intended. Last week I much preferred Luke's telling of this story, it was simple and seemed easily understood within my frames of reference, and preaching on that version would not have brought me the growth in my faith that I experienced in having to ponder a piece of clothing and the idea of speechlessness. We are always exhorting others to read the Scriptures, but while I can and do find insights in them when reading them alone, I invite you to find a partner or small group to read them together. For when 2 or 3 are gathered in his Name, He will be with us. We are a community, Christ demands that we acknowledge our community and our inter dependence. This is a great party and every day we re-accept the invitation. So break out the party shoes and when someone asks why you are all dressed up, tell them. Don't be speechless. Amen.
First, we need to remember the Gospel that we are reading. This is Matthew, written for Jewish-Christians who approached their Christian faith as the fulfillment of their Jewish traditions. If there is anything we take with us from Sunday School lessons of the Old Testament, it is that God can and will smite the enemies of his chosen people and Israel too, if she gets out of hand. The compliers of the book of Matthew read the material through the lens of their lives and their faith in God, and as much as we don't like to think about it, God does smite.
Second, we need to remember that this is from that same series of parables that we have been reading for the last several weeks. Jesus is still in the temple where his authority to teach was questioned, but he is no longer speaking to the priests, now he is turned back to the crowd. The Pharisees and priests and elders are all still standing there, so he is still speaking for their benefit, but he is no longer addressing them directly.
So lets look at this parable again with these frames of reference in our minds.
We think of weddings as big deals now, and credit cards and brokerage firms are all doing commercials about a daddy and his daughter out shopping for her wedding. They are trying to tell us something we may have forgotten with all our talk of love, but weddings celebrate marriages, which are alliance making deals, just like any other board room transaction. Marriages are covenants, just like God's covenant with Israel. We may not ever have to climb a mountain and carry big hand hewn rocks back down to make a covenant for God, but we will all likely experience a wedding. This is something we can relate to.
And if you have ever had a hand in putting a wedding together, you can feel the rage that the king felt when people didn't bother to show up. Then just imagine the lawsuits to follow if you sent out the reception staff to lead people into the reception and the guests started punching or shoving them or even pulling out guns like a Quinten Tarantino movie and shooting them?? Imagine the rage if the wedding was actually a peace accord to stop the fighting of two families or of two countries. How much greater then would that anger be if it was to unite all the people of God and no one bothered to show up?
What would it feel like to be a minor nobody invited because you are the second cousin twice removed from the step brother of the groom? You would probably be right to think your picture was never going to get into the wedding album, but free drinks and a meal are nothing to sneeze at. You would probably be cowering under the pews if the honored guests started beating up the ushers. You might start trying to work your way under the sub-flooring when the hosts started shooting back.
At this point, you are thinking, party's over, and I have not even a story to tell in polite company. But now the host, victor from the vantage of the doorway, brushes off the ushers and sends them off looking for people to eat at the reception. If the guests don't want lobster puffs, then as God as my witness, I will find someone else who does.
OK, that was fun for us, but what does it have to do with the actual story? Remember where Jesus is? He is in the temple courtyard talking to people who are compelled to attend temple, but never get to go inside. Wedding guests invited to fill in the back pews of the church so the pictures make the groom appear more popular than he in fact is. Remember who else is listening? The people who do get to go inside, who do get to sit in the front row, and who are invited to sit at the bridal party table. Doesn't seem like such a great story to them. My father sent prophets to tell you of my wedding, says Jesus, and you ignored them. My father sent more people to lead you by the hand to my wedding, and you killed them. So you are no longer invited, Jesus tells them. This marriage, this covenant, is no longer by invitation only, Jews and Gentiles are equally welcome. The rich and the poor are equally invited. The full and the hungry have equal access to the feast.
So what about that guest who get thrown out, wailing and gnashing his teeth in the outer darkness? What about the idea that many are called but few are chosen? I choose to believe that Jesus didn't say this in a red lettered sort of way. I choose to believe that this is an addition, in Mathew, of Jews who have professed Jesus, and who have been spurned by their families and friends, in those ways that Jesus says that being his follower is likely to do. I chose to believe that a people for whom the Old Testament expressions of God are still the most natural have chosen to continue expressing him in those ways.
For those who complied Matthew, and Matthew is full of parables that end in gnashing, wailing, outer darkness and the call of many and the few chosen, there is a need to confirm that they have made the right choice, we all want to know we have made the right choice, especially in a choice as hard as following the prince of peace. And if that means there is a little of the my dad can beat up your dad in this community, it only means they are human, the same as us. And if you don't think so, my dad... well, you get my point.
So what do we do with this parable? What are we supposed to take away from this story that is applicable and relevant to our lives? Maybe we shouldn't have big parties for our marriages. I didn't, but I am notoriously cheap about things like parties, all parties are potlucks at my house. Maybe we should expand our guest lists, not treat people as commodities but honor all of them as guests in our churches, in our lives, in our hearts. Maybe what this is telling us, who are not Jews being persecuted by our families for following a radical untrained teacher, is to watch what we wear.
I had a really hard time getting past the clothes and into the metaphor. Jesus was a guy in hand me down shoes who regularly gave away his coat. The only reason he had a coat to give away was that people kept giving him another one. Of all the people to associate status with clothing.... Then I extended the metaphor. OK, I didn't, but Pat explained it very clearly and slowly for my closed ears and open mouth. Jesus wasn't telling people - wear a suit or I'll be back. Jesus was telling people to participate in the sacraments, to stay in right relationship, in our hearts, with God and with the commandments. Do we love God with all our heart and with all our strength and all our mind – all the time? Do we love our neighbors as ourselves – all the time? Because if we are doing so, when someone asks us, what are you wearing? Why are you a Christian? We will not be speechless, we will have ready at our lips the proclamation that Jesus died for our sins and has freed us to be in a right relationship with God, he has confirmed our faith in God and he has cleared from our countenance the worry and the fear that result in putting ourselves and our small worries before the Kingdom of Heaven.
What are you wearing today? Do you have on your wedding garment, the certain knowledge that God loves you, that Jesus died for you, that you are adding to the Kingdom of Heaven? Did you put on a fancy hat to hide your eyes and hope no one would recognize you when you drove up to church? Are you prepared to be a defender of your faith in the same way that Jesus is prepared to defend you before the Father? Are you hoping no one will ask what a nice person like you is doing being a Christian?
The community who developed the scripture we now call Matthew never saw Jesus walk through the temple, just like us. They did not hear him with their own ears, just like us. But they complied a testament of the Gospel that is timeless. The variations in their story, like the variations in the other Gospels, give us more fuel for our faith than they could have ever intended. Last week I much preferred Luke's telling of this story, it was simple and seemed easily understood within my frames of reference, and preaching on that version would not have brought me the growth in my faith that I experienced in having to ponder a piece of clothing and the idea of speechlessness. We are always exhorting others to read the Scriptures, but while I can and do find insights in them when reading them alone, I invite you to find a partner or small group to read them together. For when 2 or 3 are gathered in his Name, He will be with us. We are a community, Christ demands that we acknowledge our community and our inter dependence. This is a great party and every day we re-accept the invitation. So break out the party shoes and when someone asks why you are all dressed up, tell them. Don't be speechless. Amen.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
This Sermon Sucks
Note: I wrote this sermon on Romans 5:1-8 and I didn't have anything to say and I didn't much want to either. So I waited for the last possible moment and made something up. My sermons can only get better from here, and after I have revised this (for homework) I will post the revision.
Everything I post is my own opinion unless otherwise stated, except this sermon, because I won't lay claim to it either.
heather
The thing about Paul is that he never met a dangling participle he didn't like. I can only hope that in the original Greek Paul sounds as passionate and clear as I hope to be in interpreting his words. In order to unpack this, however, there is one word that need some interpretation. We come into this space from our stay in the secular world and we often listen with our secular ears. Unfortunately, sometimes the secular world has taken words and twisted them to a new meaning so that the original intent is hiding within them.
I want to spend a moment looking at the word righteous. Whole books have been written on the word righteous and what it means to be righteous, but I will have you know that most if not all of those books will put you to sleep at night and you still won't know what the technical theological word righteous means. One of my favorite ways to understand the meaning of a word is to look it up in a thesaurus and see what the similar words are. Webster gives three distinct categories of righteous similes. The religious one is Holy and it includes words like devout, pious, reverent and fervent. Another definition is Self- Conscience and includes self-righteous and egotistic. The last is virtuous and it has words like noble and clear-conscience and reliable.
If you didn't know what righteous meant but that it was a religious word and you looked it up in the dictionary, would you connect it with reliable or goodhearted, or would you connect it with self-righteous and rigid?
If someone told you, “No one would die for a righteous person, but they might for a good person” wouldn't you agree? Given that in a religious context the dictionary says that a righteous person thinks they are right even to the point of hypocrisy. We can easily concede that many died following Ghandi to freedom because he was a good person, but I can't think of a single person who died bravely for the sake of Pat Robertson.
You might be thinking that the dictionary isn't written by religious people or for religious people and you would be right. All the dictionary tells us is how people use terms. And people don't use the term righteous in a good way when speaking of religion. Why? That is certainly a topic worthy of one of those long dry books I was telling you about.
The bible is not the dictionary. It is the story of a religious people creating a common record to share their religious experience. As such, we do use words with technical meanings and we then have a responsibility to keep the bible as accessible as possible. We cannot hand people a bible when they ask about God and tell them it contains everything they need for salvation. That is the experience that many people have of the bible but the bible does not come with a secret decoder ring. Not only are we required to actually know what we mean when we use words like righteous, we need to make ourselves available to explain and clarify those terms when we encounter them in our secular lives.
Let's look at that sentence again with some of our similes. Lets see if replacing righteous and even good, which is a pretty vague and technical term, can make this sentence any easier to understand.
Rarely will anyone die for a reliable person-though perhaps for a reliable person someone might actually dare to die.
It looks like the simile method of bible study breaks down here. I thought it did too, until I suddenly remembered my favorite chapter of the bible. First Corinthians Chapter One . Verse 21 says “God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” So, the technical term for our simile sentence is a tautology, which means the beginning of the sentence says exactly what the ending of the sentence says, or 'its true because it's true.”
So who would die for a tautology? This is church after all, you know the answer. Christ died for a righteous person or a good person, and most importantly, he died for a reliable person. Verse 8 says “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” which sounds prettier than the more easily understood verse 6, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
Before we can accept the absurdity of Christs death, we have to accept the truth of our own reliability. We have to accept that we can be relied on- to fail God and to fail each other. We aren't actually reliable at all – but God loves us anyway. God made a way for us to move beyond that unreliability. God made a way for us to reach beyond our humanness and experience something of his love and to share that love with each other. What Paul is trying to tell the Romans, and what he has to say to us even today, is that we do not have to become worthy to be worthwhile people. Martin Luther, in 1517, says “we do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds, but having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.” We do not have to be worthy of God's love, but we must simply accept God's love, and in doing so, we will share the love of God.
What you should do about it? Paul has an answer for that too. Boast he says. Tell everyone you know and everyone you meet that Jesus died so you don't have to. And whether they look at you funny, or they walk away, or they put you in jail, you will still have God's love, for no other reason than you believe in it. Paul is speaking from a place that few Americans have to experience, that of being REALLY persecuted for being a Christian, and so when he talks about the process we go through to reach a secure foundation of hope, well, my hope is that there are no lions.
Boasting, for Paul leads to suffering, and suffering requires endurance, and endurance leads to the personality traits we call character. I must admit, I have no idea how character leads to hope, but I do like the progression from boasting to hope. And hope that “does not disappoint” is certainly something to boast about.
Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us do so with a sensitivity to the ways in which the world will distort our message, through deliberate misunderstanding and genuine confusion. Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us keep the absurdity of undeserving grace for us ever present in our hearts as we interact with others. Let us go for and boast of God, and let us hold fast to our hope for we will neither suffer nor endure anything without the Holy Spirit which is the source of that hope. Let us go forth. Amen.
Everything I post is my own opinion unless otherwise stated, except this sermon, because I won't lay claim to it either.
heather
The thing about Paul is that he never met a dangling participle he didn't like. I can only hope that in the original Greek Paul sounds as passionate and clear as I hope to be in interpreting his words. In order to unpack this, however, there is one word that need some interpretation. We come into this space from our stay in the secular world and we often listen with our secular ears. Unfortunately, sometimes the secular world has taken words and twisted them to a new meaning so that the original intent is hiding within them.
I want to spend a moment looking at the word righteous. Whole books have been written on the word righteous and what it means to be righteous, but I will have you know that most if not all of those books will put you to sleep at night and you still won't know what the technical theological word righteous means. One of my favorite ways to understand the meaning of a word is to look it up in a thesaurus and see what the similar words are. Webster gives three distinct categories of righteous similes. The religious one is Holy and it includes words like devout, pious, reverent and fervent. Another definition is Self- Conscience and includes self-righteous and egotistic. The last is virtuous and it has words like noble and clear-conscience and reliable.
If you didn't know what righteous meant but that it was a religious word and you looked it up in the dictionary, would you connect it with reliable or goodhearted, or would you connect it with self-righteous and rigid?
If someone told you, “No one would die for a righteous person, but they might for a good person” wouldn't you agree? Given that in a religious context the dictionary says that a righteous person thinks they are right even to the point of hypocrisy. We can easily concede that many died following Ghandi to freedom because he was a good person, but I can't think of a single person who died bravely for the sake of Pat Robertson.
You might be thinking that the dictionary isn't written by religious people or for religious people and you would be right. All the dictionary tells us is how people use terms. And people don't use the term righteous in a good way when speaking of religion. Why? That is certainly a topic worthy of one of those long dry books I was telling you about.
The bible is not the dictionary. It is the story of a religious people creating a common record to share their religious experience. As such, we do use words with technical meanings and we then have a responsibility to keep the bible as accessible as possible. We cannot hand people a bible when they ask about God and tell them it contains everything they need for salvation. That is the experience that many people have of the bible but the bible does not come with a secret decoder ring. Not only are we required to actually know what we mean when we use words like righteous, we need to make ourselves available to explain and clarify those terms when we encounter them in our secular lives.
Let's look at that sentence again with some of our similes. Lets see if replacing righteous and even good, which is a pretty vague and technical term, can make this sentence any easier to understand.
Rarely will anyone die for a reliable person-though perhaps for a reliable person someone might actually dare to die.
It looks like the simile method of bible study breaks down here. I thought it did too, until I suddenly remembered my favorite chapter of the bible. First Corinthians Chapter One . Verse 21 says “God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” So, the technical term for our simile sentence is a tautology, which means the beginning of the sentence says exactly what the ending of the sentence says, or 'its true because it's true.”
So who would die for a tautology? This is church after all, you know the answer. Christ died for a righteous person or a good person, and most importantly, he died for a reliable person. Verse 8 says “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” which sounds prettier than the more easily understood verse 6, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
Before we can accept the absurdity of Christs death, we have to accept the truth of our own reliability. We have to accept that we can be relied on- to fail God and to fail each other. We aren't actually reliable at all – but God loves us anyway. God made a way for us to move beyond that unreliability. God made a way for us to reach beyond our humanness and experience something of his love and to share that love with each other. What Paul is trying to tell the Romans, and what he has to say to us even today, is that we do not have to become worthy to be worthwhile people. Martin Luther, in 1517, says “we do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds, but having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.” We do not have to be worthy of God's love, but we must simply accept God's love, and in doing so, we will share the love of God.
What you should do about it? Paul has an answer for that too. Boast he says. Tell everyone you know and everyone you meet that Jesus died so you don't have to. And whether they look at you funny, or they walk away, or they put you in jail, you will still have God's love, for no other reason than you believe in it. Paul is speaking from a place that few Americans have to experience, that of being REALLY persecuted for being a Christian, and so when he talks about the process we go through to reach a secure foundation of hope, well, my hope is that there are no lions.
Boasting, for Paul leads to suffering, and suffering requires endurance, and endurance leads to the personality traits we call character. I must admit, I have no idea how character leads to hope, but I do like the progression from boasting to hope. And hope that “does not disappoint” is certainly something to boast about.
Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us do so with a sensitivity to the ways in which the world will distort our message, through deliberate misunderstanding and genuine confusion. Let us go forth and boast of God, but let us keep the absurdity of undeserving grace for us ever present in our hearts as we interact with others. Let us go for and boast of God, and let us hold fast to our hope for we will neither suffer nor endure anything without the Holy Spirit which is the source of that hope. Let us go forth. Amen.
Do as I say, Not as I do
I speak to you in the name of the living God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. For by the authority of the father we will do what must be done, even though we will often grumble along the way. Amen.
Introduction
You will have noticed when I read Today's gospel I started at verse 23 instead of verse 28, which is where the lectionary picks up the story. I really felt that the whole story was needed to see how absolutely radical this tale of siblings was and to explain why, when we read just verses 28-32 we get all excited and just know that one of those sons is Jesus and then he starts talking not about himself but about John.
When we do bible study on Wednesday nights, the first thing we do is go back and figure out who Jesus is talking to. In this passage, Jesus is at the temple and he is teaching in the corner, mostly minding his own business. Since I don't imagine he did a very good job of being unnoticeable, the priests and elders came over and asked him what right he had to teach. Teaching, especially in the temple,was their business and they didn't want anyone to get the idea that just anyone could be a teacher or administrator in the temple.
So Jesus says he will tell them if they can tell him why they think John has any authority to baptize; to create a whole new sacrament. This is a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they don't really think he has any right but on the other hand, John is really popular and there is a disturbingly large crowd of people waiting for an answer and the officials aren't really sure they want to cause a riot. So bringing all their bureaucratic skills to bear they come up with a great answer. “We do not know.” Does Jesus give them a way out of their ignorance? Does he patiently explain why John does have this authority that they don't? No. Jesus doesn't argue the point. He says, well, if you can't even figure out John, and he is making new sacraments, I am certainly not going to try to tell you what I am all about.
Were Jesus a true disaffected youth, he would have turned his back and kept teaching the crowd. But he isn't. He is, in fact, very quick with a parable and an analogy. And he really isn't one to avoid an opportunity to teach anyone, especially people he thinks ought to know better.
What is says
So he doesn't turn around, he pulls out an analogy. Two kids are asked to go into the fields and work, one says no but does it anyway and the other says sure and goes out with his friends. In this analogy, the vineyard is the traditional metaphor for Israel, and the children are John and these administrators of the temple. We have all seen this analogy enough times to think that the priest ought to know they are being set up. But you have to remember that this is a test, and it isn't a take home test. Jesus has just rephrased the question of authority not in human terms but in God's terms. We think it is now in human terms because we are talking about children whereas before we were talking about heaven. But in the first go around, the priests are only worried about the response of the people. In the second, Jesus has rephrased the same question, about where John gets his authority, from the perspective of Abba, of the Father. And he has just done it in front of a large crowd that the priests are a little bit afraid of.
So when Jesus offers these naughty children as an example and asks his audience which child is the obedient one they go with their gut instinct. After all, this seems like a fairly simple question, one we all know the answer to. We all know, as parents, that the lip service is nice, but what we really want is for our children to do what we ask them to do.
What it means
Here Jesus pulls his best teaching trick. He pulls out of the analogy. He has gotten his answer, that authority comes from God in Heaven, not from the fear of unruly crowds. Honestly, he tells the reigning wise men, people you won't even let into the temple are entering the Kingdom of Heaven, are experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven right now, and John came by to let you in on it and you turned him away. What he is telling them and the crowd is that the crowd, who aren't even allowed into the inner sanctum of the temple have a better relationship with God than they do. This is because the temple officials are follow the letter of the law and all the while missing the purpose of it. In doing so they tell God what he wants to hear without doing what he asks them to do.
What you should do about it
Where do you think you are in this? Are you in the crowd? Are you standing in a huddle with the rest of the building administrators trying to do what is right without trying to feel what is right? I have to admit to a love of the Prayer Book for exactly this reason. It offers a nearly perfect vehicle to guide my worship and open me up to the guiding of the Holy Spirit. It also offers me an easy out when I don't want to pay attention to God and his promptings. And who will ever know, because I can recite these things almost in my sleep and put on a good show for my pew mates, and even for God.
But God knows. He knows how hard it is to follow Jesus, to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to believe the radical authority he gave to John. God is OK with our grumblings. He is OK if we tell him no. I think he is even OK if we put on our coat and make the phone call for a lunch date. God is happy with the person who says he is an atheist but then sees the truth and goes out and proclaims the gospel anyway. How disappointing for God when we show up on Sunday and recite the Creeds and Confessions and have a cup of coffee and then never think of Him again all week.
I suspect this escapes all bounds of a traditional sermon, but all the while I was working on this, one hymn kept humming through my mind and I would actually like to close this sermon with it. Not only do I promise we can sing this a cappela, I promise I won't ask you to sing any more songs this morning. So if you would pick up the blue hymnal and turn to page 490, I would like you to join me in singing 'I want to walk as a child of the light' I will even start. For by the authority of the father we will do what must be done, even though we will often grumble along the way.
conclusion
I want to walk as a child of the light...
Introduction
You will have noticed when I read Today's gospel I started at verse 23 instead of verse 28, which is where the lectionary picks up the story. I really felt that the whole story was needed to see how absolutely radical this tale of siblings was and to explain why, when we read just verses 28-32 we get all excited and just know that one of those sons is Jesus and then he starts talking not about himself but about John.
When we do bible study on Wednesday nights, the first thing we do is go back and figure out who Jesus is talking to. In this passage, Jesus is at the temple and he is teaching in the corner, mostly minding his own business. Since I don't imagine he did a very good job of being unnoticeable, the priests and elders came over and asked him what right he had to teach. Teaching, especially in the temple,was their business and they didn't want anyone to get the idea that just anyone could be a teacher or administrator in the temple.
So Jesus says he will tell them if they can tell him why they think John has any authority to baptize; to create a whole new sacrament. This is a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they don't really think he has any right but on the other hand, John is really popular and there is a disturbingly large crowd of people waiting for an answer and the officials aren't really sure they want to cause a riot. So bringing all their bureaucratic skills to bear they come up with a great answer. “We do not know.” Does Jesus give them a way out of their ignorance? Does he patiently explain why John does have this authority that they don't? No. Jesus doesn't argue the point. He says, well, if you can't even figure out John, and he is making new sacraments, I am certainly not going to try to tell you what I am all about.
Were Jesus a true disaffected youth, he would have turned his back and kept teaching the crowd. But he isn't. He is, in fact, very quick with a parable and an analogy. And he really isn't one to avoid an opportunity to teach anyone, especially people he thinks ought to know better.
What is says
So he doesn't turn around, he pulls out an analogy. Two kids are asked to go into the fields and work, one says no but does it anyway and the other says sure and goes out with his friends. In this analogy, the vineyard is the traditional metaphor for Israel, and the children are John and these administrators of the temple. We have all seen this analogy enough times to think that the priest ought to know they are being set up. But you have to remember that this is a test, and it isn't a take home test. Jesus has just rephrased the question of authority not in human terms but in God's terms. We think it is now in human terms because we are talking about children whereas before we were talking about heaven. But in the first go around, the priests are only worried about the response of the people. In the second, Jesus has rephrased the same question, about where John gets his authority, from the perspective of Abba, of the Father. And he has just done it in front of a large crowd that the priests are a little bit afraid of.
So when Jesus offers these naughty children as an example and asks his audience which child is the obedient one they go with their gut instinct. After all, this seems like a fairly simple question, one we all know the answer to. We all know, as parents, that the lip service is nice, but what we really want is for our children to do what we ask them to do.
What it means
Here Jesus pulls his best teaching trick. He pulls out of the analogy. He has gotten his answer, that authority comes from God in Heaven, not from the fear of unruly crowds. Honestly, he tells the reigning wise men, people you won't even let into the temple are entering the Kingdom of Heaven, are experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven right now, and John came by to let you in on it and you turned him away. What he is telling them and the crowd is that the crowd, who aren't even allowed into the inner sanctum of the temple have a better relationship with God than they do. This is because the temple officials are follow the letter of the law and all the while missing the purpose of it. In doing so they tell God what he wants to hear without doing what he asks them to do.
What you should do about it
Where do you think you are in this? Are you in the crowd? Are you standing in a huddle with the rest of the building administrators trying to do what is right without trying to feel what is right? I have to admit to a love of the Prayer Book for exactly this reason. It offers a nearly perfect vehicle to guide my worship and open me up to the guiding of the Holy Spirit. It also offers me an easy out when I don't want to pay attention to God and his promptings. And who will ever know, because I can recite these things almost in my sleep and put on a good show for my pew mates, and even for God.
But God knows. He knows how hard it is to follow Jesus, to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to believe the radical authority he gave to John. God is OK with our grumblings. He is OK if we tell him no. I think he is even OK if we put on our coat and make the phone call for a lunch date. God is happy with the person who says he is an atheist but then sees the truth and goes out and proclaims the gospel anyway. How disappointing for God when we show up on Sunday and recite the Creeds and Confessions and have a cup of coffee and then never think of Him again all week.
I suspect this escapes all bounds of a traditional sermon, but all the while I was working on this, one hymn kept humming through my mind and I would actually like to close this sermon with it. Not only do I promise we can sing this a cappela, I promise I won't ask you to sing any more songs this morning. So if you would pick up the blue hymnal and turn to page 490, I would like you to join me in singing 'I want to walk as a child of the light' I will even start. For by the authority of the father we will do what must be done, even though we will often grumble along the way.
conclusion
I want to walk as a child of the light...
Friday, September 23, 2005
My 2 cents on hurricanes
I wasn't going to add my two cents to the save Katrina blogs, but I saw a bumper sticker today that said "I want to be like Jesus." Since Jesus practiced what he preached, being like Jesus tells us that we pretty much only need one set of clothes and can eat or sleep wherever we are invited. You know who is being like Jesus these days? People being evacuated for hurricanes. I'm grateful I don't have to be like Jesus today.
The Devil Speaks through Potted Meat
Jean Baker asked me to consider writing about the process of learning to talk about God in the 21st century. I think this is a great idea and the next few columns will be devoted to expanding that thought. This month I want to start with what it feels like to talk TO God in the 21st century. This is a tale of two television shows that envision what it is like to talk to God.
First, I want to talk about Joan of Arcadia. Two summers ago I painted the interior of my home, mostly on Friday nights so I could watch Joan of Arcadia. The most obvious adjective for the show is sincere. Everyone was sincere and Joan was a good kid who never violated anyone's expectations of her, even God's. Sure she disappointed them but she never, even in doing God's will, turned her back completely on her social paradigm. This is the view I think we all want of God, that we will never be startled out of our comfort zone and that God wants us to comprehend his will.
As for Wonder Falls, I doubt many of you have ever heard of it. I hadn't until it showed up from Netflix but I found it far and away does a better job of depicting how I feel God interacts with me and the whole world. Jaye, our heroine had defied every expectation that her family, friends and coworkers have ever had for her. Her family is wildly successful – her mother is an author, her father is a surgeon, her brother is an atheist getting a doctoral degree in comparative religion and her sister is an immigration attorney. Jaye is nouveau poor. She has a philosophy degree from Brown University, works in a gift shop in Niagra Falls and lives in a trailer. Jaye raises self-righteous indignation to an art form; right up to telling people to stop calling her a hero for catching a baby. Unlike Joan who interacts with God through different people each week, God speaks to Jaye through clearly inanimate objects-defective wax lions, brass monkey book ends and wind-up penguins. In every episode Jaye is asked by God to defy social norms, like withhold someones mis-delivered social security checks or reveal a historical lie that has made someone famous. Every time Jaye tries to do what God asks the situation gets noticeably worse, but in the course of events, something bigger and better and beyond expectation happens for the person that Jaye interacts with.
God identifies himself to Joan and patiently guides her through the steps she needs to take, even if he won't always tell her why. God won't even admit that he isn't Satan to Jaye because she must exercise her free will. She does, and she grumbles the whole way.
This is what the bible tells us it is like to interact with God. But because we know the stories in the bible so well, they seem normative, and because we keep them in the bible, we forget how they describe non-normative events for their time. Interacting with God takes us outside ourselves, and God doesn't always or often choose someone sincere and well meaning to spread his message to us. Paul's letter to the Corinthians about being fools for God (see 1 Corinthians, chapter 1) is oft quoted but perhaps rarely understood. God is trying to break us out of our complacency, to experience a paradigm shift that embraces the other. How often do we not listen to someone because they aren't Christian and so infer that God would not speak through them? How often do we not speak or act because we do not believe we are powerful enough for God to speak through us? How often do we not do so because what God needs for us to say is neither polite nor politic?
When we are self-righteous (when we think of ourselves before others), we are not able to build the kingdom of God. Being self-righteous happens when we think we are right to the exclusion of all others, but it also happens when we think that God wouldn't work through us. Are you letting God work through you?
Joan of Arcadia had two seasons and they have a fan site www.joanofarcadia.com if you are interested. Wonderfalls had one season and their fan site name says it all www.savewonderfalls.com.
First, I want to talk about Joan of Arcadia. Two summers ago I painted the interior of my home, mostly on Friday nights so I could watch Joan of Arcadia. The most obvious adjective for the show is sincere. Everyone was sincere and Joan was a good kid who never violated anyone's expectations of her, even God's. Sure she disappointed them but she never, even in doing God's will, turned her back completely on her social paradigm. This is the view I think we all want of God, that we will never be startled out of our comfort zone and that God wants us to comprehend his will.
As for Wonder Falls, I doubt many of you have ever heard of it. I hadn't until it showed up from Netflix but I found it far and away does a better job of depicting how I feel God interacts with me and the whole world. Jaye, our heroine had defied every expectation that her family, friends and coworkers have ever had for her. Her family is wildly successful – her mother is an author, her father is a surgeon, her brother is an atheist getting a doctoral degree in comparative religion and her sister is an immigration attorney. Jaye is nouveau poor. She has a philosophy degree from Brown University, works in a gift shop in Niagra Falls and lives in a trailer. Jaye raises self-righteous indignation to an art form; right up to telling people to stop calling her a hero for catching a baby. Unlike Joan who interacts with God through different people each week, God speaks to Jaye through clearly inanimate objects-defective wax lions, brass monkey book ends and wind-up penguins. In every episode Jaye is asked by God to defy social norms, like withhold someones mis-delivered social security checks or reveal a historical lie that has made someone famous. Every time Jaye tries to do what God asks the situation gets noticeably worse, but in the course of events, something bigger and better and beyond expectation happens for the person that Jaye interacts with.
God identifies himself to Joan and patiently guides her through the steps she needs to take, even if he won't always tell her why. God won't even admit that he isn't Satan to Jaye because she must exercise her free will. She does, and she grumbles the whole way.
This is what the bible tells us it is like to interact with God. But because we know the stories in the bible so well, they seem normative, and because we keep them in the bible, we forget how they describe non-normative events for their time. Interacting with God takes us outside ourselves, and God doesn't always or often choose someone sincere and well meaning to spread his message to us. Paul's letter to the Corinthians about being fools for God (see 1 Corinthians, chapter 1) is oft quoted but perhaps rarely understood. God is trying to break us out of our complacency, to experience a paradigm shift that embraces the other. How often do we not listen to someone because they aren't Christian and so infer that God would not speak through them? How often do we not speak or act because we do not believe we are powerful enough for God to speak through us? How often do we not do so because what God needs for us to say is neither polite nor politic?
When we are self-righteous (when we think of ourselves before others), we are not able to build the kingdom of God. Being self-righteous happens when we think we are right to the exclusion of all others, but it also happens when we think that God wouldn't work through us. Are you letting God work through you?
Joan of Arcadia had two seasons and they have a fan site www.joanofarcadia.com if you are interested. Wonderfalls had one season and their fan site name says it all www.savewonderfalls.com.
Monday, August 22, 2005
The Freedom to Give
The other day at a picnic I got into a discussion with someone about homelessness, self-sufficiency and drug abuse. The premise was that people with these problems ought to take classes in taking care of themselves and not bother us by being on the street anymore. I picked up my jaw, my Christian charity, and repeated my mantra first in my head and then aloud. “There but for the grace of God go I.” The conversation revolved around the illusion of self-sufficiency and the medical status of drug abuse and concurrent homelessness. I recommended a book I just finished reading called Radical Compassion by Gary Smith, S.J.(Society of Jesus) that is about his experiences here in Old Town. It is difficult to keep someone as 'other' when you know their back story.
I was reasonably satisfied with the conversation at the time, but the person I was talking to professed Christ, as do I, and I have been wondering why she and I have such different takes on our Christian obligation to the problems of homelessness and drug abuse. I don't know what her take is, but this is mine.
It starts with the question of salvation. And what salvation really means is freedom. Principally, our salvation from sin frees us from the fear of making a mistake(a sin)- fear which keeps us from doing anything at all. Salvation theory isn't about me going to heaven and you going to hell, its about me not worrying about going to hell for a poor outcome to a good intention. Christ died, and that death is all the restitution we need.
This leads to another one of the huge tenets of Christianity; to care for the poor, the sick, the widow, and the prisoner. Salvation theory actually makes this not only possible but imperative. Christ can and does ask of us to care for those with less than ourselves, and he has made possible for us the freedom to do so. His sacrifice exempts us from the usual human interaction of tit for tat.
Christianity does not ask anyone to fulfill their side of a social contract for services. We never have to wash our hands of a problem child or keep large databases of good deeds and taxes paid in order to calculate how much help or love or money someone deserves. They deserve whatever we can give them. Free of holding others responsible for the goodness of our deeds, we are then free to care with love and patience; to come to people where they are and do for them what can be done for them. God will take care of the details, we just have to be expressions of the love that He gave us for each other.
We at Saint David's aren't keeping any databases on who gives, but we have one for who receives. The website has a whole page devoted to trying to catch all the ministries we do for others. There are links to the organizations, lists of what donations we accept for delivery(during office hours, or call for arrangements) and what activities we need volunteers for. Please express your freedom (and maybe unload things that aren't worth the trouble of a whole yard sale.) www.saintdavidofwales.org/ministries/
I was reasonably satisfied with the conversation at the time, but the person I was talking to professed Christ, as do I, and I have been wondering why she and I have such different takes on our Christian obligation to the problems of homelessness and drug abuse. I don't know what her take is, but this is mine.
It starts with the question of salvation. And what salvation really means is freedom. Principally, our salvation from sin frees us from the fear of making a mistake(a sin)- fear which keeps us from doing anything at all. Salvation theory isn't about me going to heaven and you going to hell, its about me not worrying about going to hell for a poor outcome to a good intention. Christ died, and that death is all the restitution we need.
This leads to another one of the huge tenets of Christianity; to care for the poor, the sick, the widow, and the prisoner. Salvation theory actually makes this not only possible but imperative. Christ can and does ask of us to care for those with less than ourselves, and he has made possible for us the freedom to do so. His sacrifice exempts us from the usual human interaction of tit for tat.
Christianity does not ask anyone to fulfill their side of a social contract for services. We never have to wash our hands of a problem child or keep large databases of good deeds and taxes paid in order to calculate how much help or love or money someone deserves. They deserve whatever we can give them. Free of holding others responsible for the goodness of our deeds, we are then free to care with love and patience; to come to people where they are and do for them what can be done for them. God will take care of the details, we just have to be expressions of the love that He gave us for each other.
We at Saint David's aren't keeping any databases on who gives, but we have one for who receives. The website has a whole page devoted to trying to catch all the ministries we do for others. There are links to the organizations, lists of what donations we accept for delivery(during office hours, or call for arrangements) and what activities we need volunteers for. Please express your freedom (and maybe unload things that aren't worth the trouble of a whole yard sale.) www.saintdavidofwales.org/ministries/
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