September 24, 2006
(Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 20)

The Ram's Horn is Sounding

By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Wisdom 1:16-2:1(6-11)12-22  •  Psalm 54  •  James 3:16-4:6  •  Mark 9:30-37
(From The Lectionary Page)

As the last sign of the sun disappears over the horizon, piercing the approaching twilight the sound of a horn is heard. Not the harsh blast of a car horn, or the majestic sound of a brass trumpet, but the sacred sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn. And as the local community begins its celebration of Rosh Hashanah, throughout the world the People of the First Covenant welcome the new year, this year being 5767.

The ten days beginning on Rosh Hashanah and ending on Yom Kippur are called the Days of Awe, or the Days of Repentance, a time for introspection and reflection.

Growing up in southeast Iowa, I was never privileged to observe how the Jewish calendar is kept. My first experience of the Days of Awe occurred shortly after entering seminary in Evanston, Illinois. My dorm room was in need of an inexpensive floor covering, and I set out for the nearest Builder’s Square located in Skokie, a community home to many conservative and orthodox Jews.

Through Skokie ran a small river heading to Lake Michigan, a river I crossed to do my shopping. It was a warm September afternoon, and as I drove into town I was taken back by dozens and dozens of groups of people apparently out for a walk. In fact, in Skokie that day, men dressed as Orthodox Jews were the only people walking on one side of the road, while women, children, and some men not dressed as the Orthodox walked on the other side of the road. Eventually I could see that these groups were not simply out for a stroll, but were all heading toward, or returning from, a bridge over the stream.

I watched as people paused at the side of the bridge to pray. They then emptied their pockets of what looked to be bread and threw it the stream. It was the ritual practice of "casting off". On the afternoon of the first day (or the second day if Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat), the God’s people symbolically cast off their sins, usually using small pieces of bread.

As the Days of Awe lead to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement when believers ask God for forgiveness of sins committed during the past year, forgiveness must first be sought of others. God’s forgiveness depends upon forgiveness being sought, as well as forgiveness being offered. (If I have misrepresented the rituals just described I apologize.)

This practice conjures up a powerful image for me, for by casting sins symbolically into flowing water, they are carried away, and one is unable to go back and pick them up and reinsert those sins once again into life. Circumstances change, the context changes, as do key players, but many of our sins are really different verses of familiar songs. Envy, greed, slander, gossip, sloth, gluttony as in hunger for power, control, and prestige, intolerance, and an unwillingness to forgive – any of these are sins we have grown fond of and are unwilling to truly cast off.

And I am certainly not speaking of these as solely personal sins, but as the Church’s sins, too.

Casting off sins, letting them go, should create joy and instill in us a sense of freedom, as the proverbial burden is lifted from our shoulders. But letting go of sins also means that the future is now unknown. I don’t have my grudge to guide me, I don’t have an enemy to hate, I don’t have whatever else I’ve carefully constructed to help me make it through each day. Familiar emotions and reactions are now gone, and that makes us anxious.

The collect for today petitions God that we might not be anxious about earthly things, but my gosh – the lessons for today are filled with plots, deceit, lies, ambition, betrayal of the innocent, and predictions of death – which all sound like plenty to be anxious about. And if that isn’t enough, what the writers of the Scriptures never had to worry about is now at hand, the season of election ads when all political parties exploit our individual and corporate anxiety as the tell us who to vote for.

The lessons today point us toward holy wisdom. Not human wisdom. Human wisdom cautions us against risking too much. Past disappointments help us learn to keep our expectations realistic. Holy Wisdom throws caution to the wind, and calls us to live with hope, live into hope, and help create the City of God where hope reigns.

One scholar suggests that, as told in our first lesson, the reason the ungodly plot against the righteous man is that he does not share their disappointments. They want to kill him because he reminds them of the hope they have discarded.

Holy Wisdom invites us to let go of anxiety so that we might live more fully as a child of God, as peacemakers, as those who risk much for the sake of Him who gave his life for us.

Preaching the Gospel is at the heart of the Church’s mission. In our country free speech is guaranteed. In what some see as a challenge to that right, the rector and vestry of All Saints’ Church, Pasadena, CA, are under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. In a sermon entitled If Jesus Debated Senator Kerry and President Bush, preached by the retired rector, the Rev. George Regas, on Oct. 31, the Sunday before the election of 2004, a line may have been crossed, which has resulted in an IRS investigation to determine whether the sermon constituted campaigning. If so, the parish could lose it’s tax-exempt status. The sermon began with Fr. Regas saying "Let me quickly make two statements to relieve some of the anxiety you bring to this debate. Jesus does win! And I don’t intend to tell you how to vote.” He criticized policies or positions of both candidates as stated in televised debates, and he urged parishioners to vote "all your values. Bring a sensitive conscience to that ballot box."

I invite you to visit the All Saints’ website and read this sermon, because after reading it a couple of times, it still sounds like a sermon to me.

As the parish has refused to comply with an administrative summons, the IRS will next decide whether to proceed to court. The parish leadership believes freedom of speech and the exercise of religious expression need to be defended. The IRS believes the law prohibiting a tax-exempt organization from campaigning must be enforced, and may decide that this is a case worthy investigating. The parish leadership is taking a risk. Given all the publicity perhaps the Pasadena IRS office is, too.

But if All Saints’ past history is any indication, and I think it is, they will not surrender hope.

My friends in Christ, In that pre-election day sermon, Fr. Regas closed with these words: It is a terrible day when we let our defeats and failures beat us down into hopelessness and despair. Dante knew the destruction of the loss of hope, for he placed over the gates of hell the words, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Despair is the deathblow to a new and better and more just future. It is unmistakably clear that when we lose our capacity to hope, we lose our capacity to shape our future.

I invite us all to cast away those sins which create in us despair and hopelessness. Let us learn from the tragedy of the ungodly who sought to kill the righteous man because he reminded them of the hope they had long abandoned. Let us cast away our sins and not take them back. Let us work through the anxiety of walking an unfamiliar path, and journey towards hope. For the People of the First Covenant, and for us as People of the Second Covenant, these are indeed Days of Awe. Let us seek God’s forgiveness and each other’s, refrain from taking up old sins, commit to hope and the risk it brings, and begin a new year. The ram’s horn is sounding. May God grant all the children of Abraham peace, and seal a good year for all.

Surely such language breaks no IRS laws.

 

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Choosing Hope

by The Rev. Carol Sanford, Curate

I would like to begin by saying that other than one day as a substitute in a fourth grade classroom in south Texas, a day I wish not to repeat, I have never taught school.  Even so, I want to offer some information that some -- perhaps all -- of you already have. I do this because I spent too many years in church wishing that someone would explain some of the things I didn’t know about; things that I wrongly presumed everyone else knew.

So, here’s the teaching part:

Our first reading tonight was from the book of Wisdom, also known as The Wisdom of Solomon. Wisdom is one of the books that make up what we usually refer to as The Apocrypha. The word Apocrypha means, roughly, ‘hidden things.’ Some people think the Apocryphal books were literally hidden at some point to protect them, others think they acquired the name because they were deemed to be not holy, and should be kept out of sight.

The books of the Apocrypha are not recognized by Jews as Holy Scripture, yet they are not a part of the Christian testament of Jesus. Often they are referred to as “intertestamental,’ between the testaments. Protestants don’t acknowledge these books as Scripture at all, and so Wisdom, Judith, Ecclesiasticus, and the rest are absent from most of the Bibles you’ll find at Barnes and Noble. The name Ecclesiasticus, by the way, was not even recognized by my spell check; a sure sign that we’re off the popular norm.

Roman Catholics fully incorporate the Apocrypha into the biblical canon, and these texts are a normal part of Roman Catholic Bibles. We Episcopalians, as usual, take something of a middle ground. We embrace the Apocryphal books and read them in our worship, but we accord them less honor than we give the Old and New Testaments. The Apocrypha may be found in some additions of the New Oxford Bibles, placed between the Old and New testaments. In other cases, these books are bound as a separate volume. The books of the Apocrypha are varied and surprising. Who would ever guess that we had a book called Bel and the Dragon? If you haven’t checked out this part of our tradition, I urge you to do so.

Okay, that was the teaching part. Now for the preaching part.

Here’s the basic sermon: When you’re afraid and discouraged, which we all are with greater or lesser frequency, turn as much as you can to God and to the people of God and to the life of God. Turn as little as you can to all the other stuff we hope will help us feel better or will blot out our awareness of the scary parts of life. This practice of turning toward God and away from diversionary distractions will improve your life and the world in general.

Okay, this is not exactly breaking news, but I presume that it is sometimes as hard for others to follow this principle as it sometimes is for me. Last Friday, a number of stories that I would have preferred to avoid hit the Episcopal News Service email list. I read of a group of Anglican primates who have decided that our Presiding Bishop-elect Katherine Jefferts Schori is not welcome to sit at the conference table with them. My first response was not to prayerfully consider their opinions and their struggles in reaching that conclusion. My first response was more along the lines of “aghhhh!”

In another news release, I learned that the IRS continues to investigate the tax exempt status of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, due to a sermon deemed to be over the line politically too close to an election date. This story sent a shiver of anxiety through me as I imagined disaster scenarios wherein church and state collapse together in a deadly dance of contention. I can imagine this, by the way, happening on all sides of the political and religious spectrums. In both these news stories, it is the antagonism and the issues of control that I find frightening.

So, a quick check of my email resulted in these and a number of other potential hope-crushing anxiety provokers; several invitations to just say, oh to heck with the whole thing, I’m tired of worrying about it, and to employ diversionary tactics.

Here’s where our reading from the book of Wisdom comes in handy. It was the reading where they start out wearing rosebuds and end wanting to kill innocent people. In this lesson, we are given a fine example of what not to do. These folks looked around, didn’t like what they saw, practiced some bad reasoning and then did the worst thing possible: they gave up and they ran from what would have helped them.

There is a form of giving up that can be very useful. When we are at a loss to understand or to see how a frightening situation will be resolved, giving up on our own devices and relaxing into God’s strength and trusting God’s life and light through God’s Word and God’s people, is a brilliant strategy. But they gave up on the wrong thing. Rather than giving up their efforts to reason it out and go it alone, they gave up on God and on the Holy Wisdom handed down to them; they gave up on hope.

Their starting point was a conclusion that there is no meaning beyond the immediate and no hope for the future, a sentiment that we find echoed in the present-day rendition, “life is hard, then you die.”

In our reading, a disastrous chain of thinking ensues. It’s a straight line and a short path from concluding that there is no meaning or help in life or in death, to a ghastly state of wanting to punish those who do have hope. They determined out of their fear that there was no real hope, and began reasoning from a point of hopelessness.

Let’s try a different starting point. Let’s try starting from the description in James of the wisdom from above that is pure, peaceable, gentle, and full of mercy and good fruits Let’s try beginning with the image of Jesus in Mark, holding the child, and saying that to welcome that least valued member of society, is to welcome God.

How about if we start out with our Nicene Creed, which tells us that God’s kingdom will have no end, and that it was “for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven.” Or we could begin from the assurance in our Eucharistic prayer that we were made by and for God out of infinite love.

Our choices go on and on. And it is a choice. We are all offered invitations to despair and we all have times when we want to give up and forget about the difficulties and pain around and within us. A little diversion is ok, but at some point we need something deeper than a good book or an extra glass of wine.

Those of us here have made our choice for tonight. We have chosen hope by practicing our faith, and we will practice our faith when we leave here by choosing and demonstrating hope.

Our Jewish neighbors are observing the High Holy Days, and our Muslim neighbors have entered the sacred month of Ramadan. We are not alone in our choice for God, our choice for love and our choice for hope. Thanks be to God.