Sermon for Proper 5 B – St. Mark’s    7 June 2015     
The Rev. Carol Tookey        

My Franciscan community has been doing some discernment around the theme “Rebuild my Church.”  If you know Francis’s story, you know that “rebuild my church” is what Francis heard from the crucifix as he prayed at the little church of San Damiano after his conversion.  As part of this process, our own fellowship group in Albuquerque has been looking at the life-cycles of communities. 

That’s the situation we see in the story of Samuel. The people of Israel were delivered from slavery through the vision and leadership of Moses – the charismatic leader who spoke with God.  When they entered the Promised Land, Moses died, and left the leadership to his assistant Joshua. They wandered around the desert for 40 years, and as they did so, they started the process of fleshing out the Law of Moses with lots of rules and regulations that would establish themselves as a community separate from the surrounding culture.  But they continued to be led by men and women – judges and prophets – who listened to the Spirit of God.  But now they are disillusioned. They look to the countries around them – strong and stable with kings for leaders – and that’s what they want. So they come to Samuel – the latest prophet – and tell them that they want a king. Samuel warns them what happens when a movement becomes an organization – but they don’t see it.  So Samuel and God let them have their way. And it’s just 3 generations of kings before all of Samuel’s predictions come true under the rule of Solomon – conscription, taxation, stratification of society.  One of the themes I see in this story is discernment and choice. People try to discern for themselves what’s best for them, and they make a choice to go with the culture of the world. And the results are predictable.

The story made me think of a gas station out by the little community on the reservation where Les and I occasionally go. The guy who owned the gas station applied for a liquor license. The people in the Navajo community nearby pleaded that he not sell alcohol there. There was, and still is, such a problem with addiction in that community, and they didn’t want to have the temptation within walking distance. But the owner of the gas station knew he had a lucrative proposition, and if he could keep the ‘spirits’ available, he would make money. To the owner, making money was a good thing. To the local community, the ready availability of alcohol was an evil spirit.

I don’t know if the scribes had some kind of interest in keeping people enslaved to the demons that Jesus was casting out.  But what is clear is that Jesus’ accusation against them is that they discern wrongly – they are calling what is good, evil. By saying that Jesus has an unclean spirit, they are blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. And somehow, if people are that deeply confused about good and evil, they will find forgiveness hard or impossible to receive. 

What if we could free people from addiction, not only to intoxicating spirits, but to over-consumption? What if we could free people from having to do work that was demeaning, poorly paid and unsafe? What if we could free people from the power of soul-destroying institutions like government bureaucracies? 

Discernment is the key in being able to see these structures – or in Biblical terms – these principalities and powers – for what they truly are.  But discernment isn’t easy. It can be tricky.  A business like tobacco is a good example (and less controversial than some others I could name). We know now that smoking is dangerous and costly. But, as poet and philosopher Wendell Berry admits, it was a life-saving economy for small communities in the southeast where other forms of agriculture just didn’t work, and there weren’t many options for making a living.  When the people of Israel went to confront Samuel, they saw an old man who couldn’t hold things together much longer, and no future in his sons who had been corrupted by power and position. So they made a choice they thought would be better – a king, like the nations around them.

We, as a church, are surrounded by a culture that doesn’t do that – that makes decisions based on convenience and the bottom line.  But I think these passages are calling us to be more discerning in the decisions we make. Not to make them based on values that are not in keeping with our own tradition. Not the values of the market but the values of family. To be thoughtful and prayerful about how we live together and make decisions as a community, and for that matter, as individuals and families – in line with the kingdom of God.  Our communities, like my Franciscan family, often do metamorphose from being a spirit-filled community to an organization.  But God calls us to continual reformation. And the only way to do this is prayerful 
discernment.

I’d like to read you a few verses from today’s gospel – but from the Authorized (King James) Version rather than the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

In the fall of 1968, after graduating from High School, I drove one thousand miles from Prescott, Arizona to attend Abilene Christian College (ACC) in Abilene, Texas. The problem, of course, was that I left a pom-pom girl named Nellie Whittington back in Prescott. And ACC was a pretty weird college campus for the late 1960s. Female students were forbidden to wear shorts or pants on campus (with the exception for pants when going to or from a PE bowling class). Skirt lengths were measured. Freshman females had an 8 p.m. dorm curfew – unless they were attending a campus or church function. Male students were not allowed in female dorm rooms – and vice versa. Male students could not have long hair or facial hair beyond well-trimmed sideburns and a tasteful mustache. I couldn’t play tennis on campus courts without my shirt. The campus, town and county were “dry” with respect to ethyl alcohol – and none of us could drink any of that substance anywhere without risking expulsion from the college.

After my second year, for a number of reasons (mostly having to do with the pom-pom girl) I decided to transfer back to an Arizona school – the University of Arizona in Tucson. When I arrived on that campus, I discovered that it was very different from ACC. I kept falling off curbs and running into palm trees because women were wearing not only very short skirts and shorts – they were wearing tank tops (and only tank tops) on their upper torso. The hair and beards on many of the guys made them look like the characters on the inside of a Dutch Masters cigar box. Students drank beer in their dorm rooms and smoked reefers under the bushes on the grounds. My first few weeks were filled with sensory input overload – to include tear gas that wafted over to my dorm one evening from an anti-Vietnam War protest being dispersed by police near the campus entrance.

The Vineyard had purchased the building of a defunct Greek Orthodox Church. The pews, altar and icons had all been removed. The floor was covered with donated carpet scraps. The walls on the sides were covered with stained, rough-sawn boards, and a painting depicting an apocalyptic scene from the biblical book of Revelation covered the wall behind the stage in front where an altar had once stood. When I first walked in, I envisioned myself as young prophet who had spent two years at a Christian college and was fully equipped to lead these Christian beginners from their spiritual naiveté to real Christianity. But I found out that they were also giving “street people” a place to sleep, and they were finding jobs for drug addicts. And the folk group which lead the singing were really good musicians – especially a couple of the guitar players. We sang contemporary Christian folk music and a few praise choruses. A speaker, who sounded like he was a counseling student, led a Bible study – and his message made a lot of sense. By the end of the meeting, there were tears running down my cheeks, and I knew I should be listening to “Jesus People” – not trying to fix them. And of course, they were talking about having been “born again” – and they were asking me whether or not I had been so born.

Sadly, since the late 1960’s, Jesus’ language (especially the King James version thereof) has been popularized, politicized, hackneyed, clichéd and misused. It has been used as a Christian code for someone who is a “true” Christian – not just a nominal Christian; for someone who has a certain interpretive view (usually literalist) of the Bible; for someone whose life has been dramatically changed for the better by religion; for someone who has received the “gift of the spirit” (usually speaking in tongues); for someone who has had a dramatic conversion experience; for someone who has been baptized by immersion; for someone who has said the sinner’s prayer; for someone who is saved from Hell and locked-in on a trajectory for Heaven when he dies; for someone who agrees with me about what constitutes “real” Christianity; or for someone who incorporates any combination of the characteristics above.

The final message of this morning’s gospel is that God, the Creator, actually loves the world – and demonstrated that love in Jesus: “for God so loved the world . . . .” In a beautiful line from a short story about his parents, Don Snyder writes, “Let us hope that we are all preceded in this world by a love story.” If Jesus is actually God’s revelation to the world, such a hope is fulfilled for each of us, and there is every possibility – even for us skeptics – that our lives could be reinvented by that love story, could be “born from above.” What could be better news than that?