August 29, 2010
(Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 17)

(From The Lectionary Page)

Holy Connections

Photo of The Rev. Canon Joe Behen by The Rev. Canon Joe Behen

Years ago there was a song by singer / songwriter Lucinda Williams in which she described the aftermath of a friend’s suicide. The narrator’s friend Sonny had shot himself, and no one seemed to know much about why. In the song, Williams never really tries to answer why. But she points the listener to what seems like pertinent information. She is with the rest of Sonny’s friends at the graveside service, when she notices something.

I saw his mama, she was standin' there
His sister, she was there too
I saw them look at us, standin' around the grave
And not a soul they knew

Perhaps through no fault of his own, Sonny’s life had been divided. He had a foot in two worlds, which seem never to have met. To live with two conflicting self-understandings is dangerous business. It is living on the edge.

Living on the edge is one way of describing where ancient Israel understood itself to be. Being God’s chosen people means having a foot in this world, and a foot in the eternal. Jeremiah’s apparent scolding of Israel this morning, sounds a lot like much of the prophetic literature. On first hearing it, it’s hard to hear much of anything positive in this accusatory message. On the surface, it simply sounds like, “You have failed again, and you’re going to pay for it.” But if we leave it at that, we have sold ourselves short. There’s more to old Jeremiah than meets the eye.

The psalm today carries that same accusation to a new place. Scholars believe that like many of the psalms, this psalm was written for the purpose of ritual worship. It takes Jeremiah’s message of infidelity to God, and places it within the fabric of Israel’s corporate life. But why would they want such a scolding to be held before them like this? Why highlight this message of failure forever? It’s not too unlike our own inclusion of the confession in the Eucharistic celebration each week. Why do we want to assume that we’re going to fail God yet again? The answer has everything to do with what it means to be God’s chosen. Like ancient Israel, we often refer to the Church as “God’s chosen people.” But chosen…for what?

The truth is that what it looks like to be God’s people has evolved over time. Early on, Israel understood being chosen as being favored. If life was going badly for someone, it could be assumed that one had offended God somehow. When someone had been separated from God, knowingly or not, they had to be purified, or, cleansed. What was pure, holy, had been defiled, made unholy. Ritual cleansing would return this person to right relationship with God by washing away the profane, the worldly. Jesus often criticized the Temple leaders for using this concept to divide and to control.

Another vision of what it means to be God’s chosen people begins with, both Israel and the early Christian Church, seeing that their obedience to God, simply produced suffering. There developed the idea that we are aliens in a world that we don’t belong to.
What we see and what we feel in this life don’t matter, because we belong with God. This notion has been long since separated from its origin among a persecuted people trying to be faithful. In many places it is now used to justify the status quo. Among other places, we see an incarnation of this idea in some Christian responses to environmental concerns. “Unfortunate, but not our problem.” “What matters most has nothing to do with the world.” Well, this is powerful stuff. This idea can, and is, used to justify just about whatever agenda that anyone cares to justify. It has little to do with God’s choosing, but much to do with one’s own choosing. Most dangerous of all perhaps is its ability to justify doing nothing at all.

Jesus’ own challenge to his followers was quite different from all of this. Jesus called Israel to remember why ritual cleansing existed. It serves to mend relationship with God, not to separate the good from the bad, the clean from the unclean. All the gospels show Jesus to be about breaking down barriers:

Jesus taught us, that what is profane does not spoil what is holy, but in fact the very opposite happens. What is holy can infect the world, if we will let it. Earlier in Luke, Jesus was being touched by people with unclean spirits, but rather than being made unclean himself, those people themselves, were infected with the holy, and made clean. Today, Jesus would have us to touch the lives of the same people: the poor, the crippled, the blind, the imprisoned. Through us, God’s blessing would be imparted to them. They don’t have to think like us or act like us. We don’t have to “convince” them of anything. That is God’s work. Our call is to invite them, not to change them.

So it turns out that we do, in fact, live with a foot in this world and a foot in the eternal. And, it is in fact, a dangerous place to be. Being chosen by God means living with this awareness. But it also means that, as straddlers of both worlds, we ourselves become connections between the two. Rather than acting as a blade that cuts, separates, and divides, to be holy is to be a link between the two. We know that God truly is, the fountain of living water. And we see friends and strangers, and often ourselves, frantically mending dry, cracked cisterns. It’s time to make some connections. Few faces of Christianity are positioned to be this link, quite like the Episcopal Church is.

All these things open the door of possibility in this business of making connections.

We do have a foot in each place. That choice is made in our baptism, and is affirmed weekly in the Eucharist. Jeremiah’s call this morning reminds us all, that being on the edge is a difficult place to be, but he begs us to stay with it: to be a conduit between the thirsty and the water. In doing so, we ourselves remain at the fountain, and we bring the world there with us. This is the work of a holy people.