Rock Paper Scissors

Luke 18:9-14 (NRSV)

9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10'Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income." 13But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" 14I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.'

I found myself telling my coworker the other day that I was awesome.    I had a customer call the office about a house he was buying that day that he thought he'd already gotten insurance on.  He hadn't.  We didn't even know he was buying a house.   Fifteen minutes later, he had insurance, the bank had a binder, and, from what I heard, his closing went smoothly.    That morning, I was pretty awesome at my job.   Several days later, however, in a moment of complete and total idiocy, I did rock, paper, scissor (No lizard or Spock) to see who would take the phone customer and who would take the one in the lobby at (not with) a coworker.   Naturally, instead of seeing through this moment of total insanity to my good-natured awesomeness, our customer took offense and left.   Even revved the engine on his truck.   He came back, and told the personal lines manager (that person I had informed of my awesomeness not too long before) what had happened.  

I have a thousand excuses for that situation.   The only one that makes any sense at all being that it was the stupidest thing I've done in a long time.  Oh, I was overwhelmed and exasperated and trying to figure out how we were going to do everything all at once and I was at that point where you can either laugh or cry, but that guy did not deserve that.  

Would I have walked out in that situation?  Probably not, I probably would have laughed my butt off.   I'm a little different, though, as we have already established, and not at all normal.   I also found myself making excuses.  He was high strung.  The receptionist made it worse.  The customer had terrible timing.   Just about everything but I was having one of the most unprofessional moments of my adult life. 

I imagine the pharisee in the parable was having the same kind of day.   He found himself at the temple and instead of coming up with something meaningful to say to God he started declaring his own...awesomeness.   "God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income."  How precious!  If you never do anything wrong, why do you fast twice a week?  We're all suspicious of this guy having a body in his basement or the first century equivalent of a tax shelter in a Swiss bank account but he probably wasn't anything more evil than the rest of us.    Probably doing his best, coming along nicely even, and then he gets a little too confident.   Doesn't even realize that if it wasn't for the grace of God and even a little help from other people that he might have been a thief, a rogue or a tax collector. 

Then he prays to God about how grateful he is that he's not somebody else.  He plays rock paper scissors in the temple.  He does something really really stupid.   We need to slow down sometimes when we get good at our jobs, or start doing really well, or get comfortable in the way we approach worship and shake things up a bit.  Evaluate why we're doing well, why we're getting good at our jobs, and realize it's not because other people are losers and we're winners.   It's not even because God likes us and not someone else. Not at all.

I don't really have much of a point past that.   I don't know why some people win and some people lose.  I know the reason I'm good at my job---which I'm not doing incredibly stupid things---is because I've been fortunate enough to have good bosses who helped me learn to care about what I'm doing by making me realize that it does matter.  It mattered when I was clearing dishes from tables at the Sage Room at age 17 and it mattered when I was working at McDonald's in college.  What we does matter, whether it's big or small.   I didn't learn that on my own.  I had good people showing me how the smallest thing can turn someone's day around ---for good or ill--- and that anything from taking out the garbage to writing an insurance policy can done for the glory of God for the sake of the Kingdom.

Even if sometimes we talk to ourselves more than God in our prayers.

A heart of flesh

Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

I saw a post from a new friend of mine today on facebook that made me think about what my life was like before I was baptized.   I was a teenager.  (that sucked)  I had been a solitary practitioner of Christianity for about five years at the time and being baptized was the first step in learning how to be part of a community vs pretending to fit in just to blend in.   I should explain that I was there at the church in the first place because a friend of mine had threatened to pick me up in my pajamas if I didn't show up on my own.  I should also probably explain that I had started serving as an acolyte before I was baptized because the interim priest had no idea I came from an unchurched background and didn't think to ask.   I should also probably explain that by the time Jerry Rankin brought it to my attention that I needed to do this I'd been taking communion for months.  

And upon finding out I hadn't been baptized, that I wasn't actually Patty's kid (my friend's mother who is now my friend too), and that my parents were not members of the church, Fr. Jerry asked me to do something I found rather unpleasant.   He asked me to get their permission to be baptized, either there or somewhere else, and to abstain from serving at the alter and taking communion until I did so.   I didn't know it then, but that was the first thing in a long list of things that I would find unpleasant but see the value in during my life as a Christian.

I conned my parents into it rather easily.   They were, at first horrified I wasn't going to be immersed, and suggested I go to their church.  I countered that they didn't have one.  I told them I would go with them on Wednesday nights after they picked one out provided they came with me on Sunday morning.   I never set foot in "their" church.  They ended up liking Fr. Jerry and my mother got baptized with me.   It was about three months between the time I got found out and the time I was baptized.   I found the whole process rather strange.  I didn't feel like it was a big deal while it was actually happening.   It was anticlimactic   Church often is.  I was nervous the night before, I felt like someone who had waited too long to marry their boyfriend.  Snicker all you want---but I had been a believer for years and years--I had a healthy spiritual life.   I loved Christ and I knew that he loved me.    I didn't need that priest to tell me how to pray, or so I thought, because I already knew.  Jesus and I were tight.  We are tight.  I didn't know back then how much I needed the beloved community.

I was sixteen years old.   I had taken a class before the event.  I had been a believer for five years.   I also had no idea what I was getting into.  I don't think anyone does.   The Episcopal Church may not have introduced me to God, God did that on his own in a very real and tangible way years before, but the Episcopal Church taught me how to love him.   I learned, through liturgy, how to put prayer into my every day life.  Not just rambling on and on like a schizophrenic (who knows?) to the Almighty but how to actually pray.  To the point where those prayers and creeds and songs are probably going to be the last thing to leave if I lose my crackers.    I learned, from relationship with other people, just how wide a circle God's love draws around the human race.  How much God loves everything he has made and has pronounced it good because of the lovely horrible wonderful awful group of people called The Church.

I'm not the first person who experienced something like this.   It came up in the gospels today

.   Mark 10:35 (NRSV) James and John, the sons of Zeb'edee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." 36 And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?" 37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." 38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" 39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

I don't think that conversation turned out exactly as they had planned.   I thought I was joining a church, I was joining the Body of Christ. I thought I was going to finished after I did this.   This is it, right?  You get doused with water, make a few vows, and it's over, done, you're good, you're perfect, you're fit for heaven and you've got a ticket to ride the train to glory, right?  Wrong.   This is the beginning, it's hard work, it'll cost you tears, and fears, and change your life in ways you don't care for at the time.  It will bring people into your life that you're afraid to associate it with.  It will bring people into your life you would have never have had the clout to associate with.  It will make you laugh, make you cry, make you tremble inside, make you do things you didn't know you could do and most of all, most of all, it make you more you.   Who would James and John have been if they hadn't met a certain wandering Rabbi and kept following him?  Who would we be if they hadn't had the big brass ones to ask the question they asked?    Who indeed?

It isn't something to be entered into lightly.   Think about it, long and hard, but know that you don't know what you're getting into.  You don't know.  Six months old or sixty, you don't know.   That's okay.   We'll be there for you.

I've never met that guy

I've been thinking lately about what makes my sort of religion--the sort of religion I practice anyway--different from other peoples.  I don't mean this in a superior way.  I'm not sure what way I mean it in, actually.  I just know it's different from the way other people approach it.

I'm not afraid of God.  I'm just not.  I'm afraid of being separated from God, I'm afraid of what I'm like when the connection gets shaky, I'm afraid of disappointed sighs from Jesus, but I am not afraid of God.  I don't like it when I feel like God is angry with me, but not because I'm afraid God is going to make me pick my own switch and beat me with it.   Don't get me wrong, God the Father has soundly, metaphorically, whipped my ass before.  I deserved it.  Deserved every single bit of bad karma that came down the pipe at me like a wave of pain in an ocean of 'you totally deserved that'.

But that's not what motivates me to do the things I do.  I'm not afraid of God because I know he loves me.  I know this because I've seen it.  Time and time again, I've been blessed.   I've also believed since I was teenager that perfect love casts out fear.  I believe that God loves us.   All of us.  The whole of us.  No reservations.   During Holy Week this year I had a friend ask me what would happen if she missed Maundy Thursday at church.  Will I go to hell?  I was shocked.  Go to hell?  Over missing a service?  Really?

I would like to say I was tempted to lie straight my teeth and tell her that little Baptist girls who miss Thursday night in Holy Week have a room reserved for them in the Seventh Layer of Hell  but I was in too honest of a mood at the time.   Truthfully I was horrified she even thought Hell was an option after taking a baptism and, being Baptist, having been 'saved'.  How can someone's faith offer so little comfort?  How can that be anything but a prison?   How can that be anything but a heavy burden that someone tied up and laid on one's back?

Sunday's gospel lesson provides an illustrated point in this.  The Pharisees point out, technically correct I'm sure, that the disciples didn't wash their hands that day before eating.  I don't know what kind of grime they had on their paws, I don't know what cruel woman didn't put out a wash basin for them to clean up before dinner in, (Pretty sure first century middle eastern men could absolutely NOT take care of themselves in this regard) or what possessed them that day to dig in without scrubbing up.  I have no idea.   I do know that it's bloody nitpicking.   In this case I actually mean nits.  I mean straining out a gnat and leaving a camel in the stew.  I mean, seriously, you guys called out their rabbi because they ate with dirty hands?   That's like posting a photo shopped picture of the President of the United States supposedly flubbing up flag etiquette--- It's not important in the grand scheme of things and is probably bullshit.

In the case of the flag picture, I know it is, because that's a white hand on a brown body but I digress.   I understand that ritual is important.  I understand that the Law is important.  I get it.  You're reading the ramblings of a woman who has actually gotten down on the floor and picked communion bread crumbs up off the carpet before vacuuming a church.     I fall down when a kid carrying a cross passes by.  I don't enter a church for worship without praying first thing and I bow EVERY TIME I pass the alter.  I get it.  I'm high church with a capital HC and a charcoal incense burner in MY HOUSE.  

Those things aren't the point though.   In the grand scheme of things, they aren't even important, they don't even matter compared to this simple truth:

Mark 7:6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. 'You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

Why is he saying this?  Is he angry about people washing their hands?  Something tells me it's the picking of the nits...

 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand:
there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."  For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

 It's not the things you do!  It's not the things you don't do!  It's you!  It's what's deep down in your heart.  It's the coldness, the anger, the things that send you through the roof for no good reason.   It's your INDIFFERENCE to the suffering of other people.  That's what makes you cold to the love of God.  That's what makes you cold to your neighbor.

That's what makes you worry you're going to hell for missing church.   There is no fear in love.  Perfect love casts out fear.  It makes it go away.  Love conquers all.  It warms up cold hearts.    Fear piles up rules and defenses.  Fear takes things away because they aren't required.   Fear frightens people into chanting an incantation to make the bad go away and cowering beneath the steel gaze of a preacher who wants to scare them into salvation.  I don't want that religion and I've never met that God.  I don't know that guy.  I don't want to know that guy.   I'm saying this out of love:  God is not an asshole.  You can quote me on that.  You're not a rat in a cage he's set up so you can't ever get the cheese.   It's going to be okay.

A heart like mine

Today's topic of discussion is me, facebook, and my twisted relationship with Jesus Christ:

It started last week, when I posted the following image with the comment that, well, he did lose his shit that one time and curse the fig tree:

I only got ONE like for that comment, ONE, which proves that my friends are either more devout and reverent Christians than I am or they're just not welling to admit that they're twisted enough to think that's funny.   Cause if you think about it, making a tree wither and die because it wasn't bearing fruit when you wanted a snack? 

Seriously? 

I think I get to say that.  Saying it on my facebook wall doesn't make it worse.  He has met me.  Kind of like my friend apologizing for complaining about his parent's behavior post divorce in the nave of our church-- really?  It isn't like he doesn't know you're upset with her.   It isn't like he doesn't know I swear.

And it isn't like cursing a fig tree because it doesn't have tasty figs on it isn't at least on the surface a bit much.   I think I get to say this kind of thing by now.   Especially considering I identify with this: 

Sometimes kicking and screaming.   And I don't think God hates figs.  I think that was a case of 'whelp, might as well drive the point of that parable home a little hard today'.   I'm cRaZY, yes, but Noah was a drunk, Peter was an impetuous ass who made promises he couldn't keep, Moses was a murderer, and David was a real jerk when he decided he wanted someone.  My god ran around with whores, rednecks, crazies and government employees.  

I don't think normal is normal in the Kingdom of Heaven.   I think it's the one place my behavior would be considered toned down.   I once had someone ask me what I would do if I was drinking alcohol and watching a horror movie and Jesus came to the door.   I told her I'd do the only appropriate thing to do: 

Invite him inside and offer him a glass!

Edit:  In reference to how I think God sees people, good or bad, repentant or not, I believe with all my heart that God sees each of us and says "this is mine". 

Or see below, thank you facebook:

Dawn has broken

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

The dawn from on high will break upon us by the tender mercy of our God. Zechariah is talking about the coming of the Messiah. The kingdom of God is here, it is now, and it is actually happening, Reg! (Apologies to Monty Python) What we are supposed to be doing, as the church, is ushering in the Kingdom of God. Right here. Right now.

We don't need to form a committee to discuss the timing. We don't need to raise money in a specific fund. We don't need to hire someone to teach us how to sell this thing. We just need to do it. Right now. It's actually happening.

How do we do it? Be nice to someone. Give something away. Smile at a stranger. Stand up for people who are being hurt even if they can't do anything for you. You want to have fun? Buy someone's lunch in a drive through. Don't tell them first either. Do justice. Speak up. Let someone know that just being a child of God, by virtue of being a human being, makes everyone of us worthy of compassion and mercy. Being a human being makes everyone worthy of compassion and mercy. Even if they're a muslim, an atheist, or a pagan. Just being human makes them worthy---because they're all God's babies. Love makes them worthy.

"By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."