[Propertalk] proper 23 a rcl homily

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Here's this week's offering - up for editing now 8 - )

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY       THE SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY 
AFTER PENTECOST – A
EXODUS 32:1-14		 	           		    PROPER 23 A
PHILIPPIANS 4:1-9				                 9th OCTOBER, 2011
MATTHEW 22:1-14					    PSALM 106:1-6, 19-23

	Were the Hebrews at the foot of Mt. Sinai being prescient when they 
said to Aaron and the assembled crowd, “These are your gods, O Israel, 
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”? What about God, talking 
to Moses, reporting to the prophet the exact same words?

	I doubt if what’s described in today’s first scripture reading is a 
record of the first protest rally or act of civil disobedience. That 
would have occurred soon after the first ever election. But you can see 
echoes of what’s happening around the world this week in what took place 
at the foot of that holy mountain.

	The contrast is deliberate. All mountains were sacred places to people 
of those days – pretty much as they are to some of the more sensitive 
among us today. Sinai, however, seemed to have a special significance. 
It was in the midst of a huge, barren stretch of land. It reared up in 
the midst of unrelieved dryness – a huge, solid finger stretching 
towards the heavens. If God had called Moses to his vocation on the 
valley floor, now God and Moses were checking in apart from the noise of 
everyone else. And THAT’S where the problem began.

	Oh, I’m sure it had begun long before that – the first person grumbling 
about picking up and getting out of Egypt; the first family to complain 
about how the kids were whining and asking if they were there yet; maybe 
even the company distressed that they no longer had temples, or statues, 
or other solid depictions of a higher power. Whatever had happened 
leading up to that point, the thoughts and feelings of the Hebrew people 
all coalesced into one common thought while Moses and God were wrapped 
in thought about how to lead a nation that had forgotten what commitment 
to God – to righteousness, to justice, to community building and support 
– what these were all about.

	Simply put, the people were tired of the fact that they probably hadn’t 
had a good party in a couple of months; they were missing tangible 
things and had lost sight of the promises that had been made to them; 
and they blamed Moses – and his God too.

	A newspaper reporter wrote last week about something he saw down on 
Wall Street in New York. The “people (were) dressed in costume, carrying 
lightsabers, and some guys (were) driving around a truck with a ‘Top 
Secret Wikileaks’ sign on the side.” Peter Catapano asked the people in 
the truck “if they were affiliated with the (Wikileaks) site, and one of 
them responded with ‘That’s what the Secret Service asked’. 	Most of 
all, (Catapano commented) people there (were) having fun.”

	In an interesting turn of phrase – and this is what drew my eye to the 
newspaper article – Catapano wrote, “What these people are doing is 
building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a 
march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even 
a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create 
a public space seeking meaning in their culture.” 1

	That sounds just like the Hebrews at Mt. Sinai, and all the other 
groups near all the other holy places of their culture.

	They’re confused; they’re angry; they’re hurting; they’re not sure 
whether they’ll have a job to which to report the next day, or how long 
it will be till they get one. They simply see things all around them 
that they don’t understand, so in their desperation they try to define 
what might give them comfort. Nothing at all wrong with this. We all 
need to have something concrete on to which to fix our emotions, not to 
mention our spiritual longings. We may have a favourite photograph of a 
loved and important person; a letter from someone special; a book with 
an inscription that ties you closely to another. But what IS wrong is 
the way in which they elevate what they have in front of them to the 
status of the divine.

	So quickly they forgot that miraculous escape from the things that 
bound them up. The tendency among humans is to settle for a “church of 
dissent”. After all, that’s how most of our denominations started.  It’s 
so easy to latch on to what’s wrong – with our neigbour or family 
member; with the person across the aisle from us; the folk who work in 
Salem; and don’t forget those whom we hold accountable for all the woes 
we’re experiencing right now. We take the negative in life and we pile 
it high, and we criticise, and then we use that on which to build 
something to stand at the centre of our lives, to be the focus of our 
attention.

	Let me share a comment someone sent me in an e-mail a while back.

	She wrote, “The economy is so bad that I got a pre-declined credit card 
in the mail. CEOs are now playing miniature golf. Exxon-Mobil laid off 
25 Congressmen. Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America. Motel Six 
won’t leave the light on anymore. A picture is now only worth 200 words. 
They renamed Wall Street ‘Wal-Mart Street...’ Finally, I called the 
Suicide Hotline. I got a call center in Pakistan and when I told them I 
was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck!”

  	Whom did I NOT offend or defame right now? It’s so easy to pick on 
someone. We look for the easiest way out of any frustrating situation. 
We’re lonely, we’re tired, we’re sick, we’re just plain bored – it 
doesn’t take much before we turn on all those things which we’ve learned 
are what enable human beings to rise above animal instincts – you heard 
that list from our friend Paul: “whatever is true, whatever is 
honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, 
whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is 
anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the 
things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and 
the God of peace will be with you.”

	But so often that’s taken as a sign of weakness. We feel much more 
comfortable being backed by the gold standard. We put our trust in 
tangible things and if some others get in the way, then that’s just too 
bad for them. It’s a case of me first – whether it’s ourselves, or OUR 
congregation, or  OUR State, and so on.

	We make gods of what we think will suit us; we make gods of what might 
seem to give us the least trouble and the most benefit; we make gods 
even of ourselves and we worship our own desires. Somehow in so many 
cases we don’t have time or place in our lives to reach beyond ourselves 
– whether it be to other people or to the one God who’s already freed us 
from so much that has bound us up and prevented us from experiencing the 
joy of living in God’s realm.

	But look what happens when that portion of Paul’s letter to the 
Christians in Philippi are taken to heart.

	“The earthquake and tsunami that walloped Japan left much of its 
coastline ravaged, but left one thing intact: the Japanese reputation 
for honesty.

	“In the five months since the disaster struck, people have turned in 
thousands of wallets found in the debris, containing $48 million in 
cash.

	“More than 5,700 safes that washed ashore along Japan's tsunami-ravaged 
coast have also been hauled to police centers by volunteers and search 
and rescue crews. Inside those safes officials found $30 million in 
cash. One safe alone, contained the equivalent of $1 million.”  2

	That’s over $78 million! And it wasn’t all found in one huge lump. It 
was made up of single wallets. Some with average amounts of cash in 
them. Imagine walking the banks of the Calapooia or the Willamette and 
coming across debris that had washed ashore. Imagine finding even one 
wallet. Picture yourself and how you might react, and ask what sort of a 
god defines what your next step might be – and the step after that, and 
all the others you and I take each day.

	Or picture this – “Hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children 
plod across barren cracked earth. Dead cows and human corpses litter the 
roads, revealing to us evidence of two things: 1) the hottest summer on 
record in Somalia, which caused the worst drought and famine in 60 
years; and 2) twenty years of a truly failed Somali government swallowed 
up in cycles of violence. …

	“Picture this: One Somali family walks across cracked earth and 
carcasses for two months in search of food. They outsmart bandits, 
thugs, and rapists. They sleep wherever they can find safe shelter. They 
arrive at a refugee camp in eastern Kenya only to find cholera and 
measles sweeping through the malnourished and immune-suppressed camp.

	“Picture this: The U.S. House of Representatives votes on a proposed 
budget for FY2012 that would cut emergency food aid by seventy-five 
percent compared to FY2008 levels.

	“Last week, (Lisa Sharon Harper) interviewed Ambassador Tony P. Hall 
just after he had returned from a trip to the Dadaab refugee camp in 
eastern Kenya. He told me about his encounter with a family that had 
walked for two months in order to find food. ‘I can't get them out of my 
mind,’ Ambassador Hall said.

	“Now picture this: A woman walks into her neighborhood church on the 
Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the richest zip codes in the United 
States. She leans in close to the person working the front desk and 
whispers, ‘I have no food.’

	“In an article titled, ’Five Myths about Hunger in America,’ The 
Washington Post reported the results of the U.S. Department of 
Agriculture’s most recent study on hunger in America. The first myth 
was, ‘No one goes hungry in America.’ As of November 2010, more than 
14.7 million American families struggled to put food on the table. This 
is approximately 15 percent of all U.S. households.”  3

	Picture this – a group of people with the promise of one of the richest 
lives imaginable – and they throw that over for a golden calf.

	There is enough, enough and to spare, not only for that woman in the 
Upper East Side of Manhattan, not only for the folk who live under the 
bridges in Albany, not only for everyone in this country – but for the 
people in Haiti, the people in the Sudan, the people in Libya – ALL the 
people.

	There is enough for everyone as long as we don’t insist on hoarding and 
turning it into golden calves of all shapes and sizes. As long as we 
accept that’s God WILL care for everyone – and that the way to put this 
into practice is to live into the way of life suggested by Paul. “LET 
your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry 
about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with 
thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

	By living in this trust – even in the trust of questions, and 
ambiguity, and mystery – by living in this trust we will discover that 
we are already in the realm of God, indeed we’re part of expanding it to 
include everyone on earth. And THAT’S what the Gospel is about for the 
people of this congregation.

NOTES:

1 	Opinionator September 30, 2011, 8:58 pm “Can You Hear Them Now?” By 
PETER CATAPANO
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/can-you-hear-them-now-3/

2	 “Honest Japanese Return $78 Million in Cash Found in Quake Rubble” By 
AKIKO FUJITA (@akikofujita)
TOKYO Aug. 17, 2011 
http://abcnews.go.com/International/honest-japanese-return-78-million-cash-found-quake/story?id=14322940

3	“Picture This” Sojourners 18th August, 2011. Lisa Sharon Harper is 
director of mobilizing at Sojourners and author of Evangelical Does Not 
Equal Republican ... or Democrat . 
http://go.sojo.net/site/R?i=FUzMpZZskPeWxG2FTntLhQ





Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)