Tuesday, April 5: Josh Hosler

Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? - Romans 7:13-25

I remember hearing this passage in church when I was a kid. My best friend Trav and I sat in the front row and giggled throughout, much to the annoyance of my parents. At home, we got out a Bible and read it again. We challenged each other to read it five times fast. We couldn’t make head nor tails of it, but we knew it sounded hilarious. We wanted to shout, “Wretched man that I am! Who will save me from this convoluted sentence structure?”

The passage continued to elicit giggles from me well into high school. One night at summer camp, each of the campers was asked to share a passage of scripture that was meaningful to us. I thought I’d lighten the mood a bit, so I read this passage and received, to my delight, many more chuckles from my fellow campers. But Father Phil, the head of the camp, smiled knowingly: “You may think it’s funny now, but once you understand it, you won’t find it funny at all.”

When we’ve lived long enough, we do understand it. No matter how hard we try, we can’t “be good.” We continue to do things wrong. We continue to mess up—not only by accident, but even willfully—all the time. We justify our actions one way or another, and then we feel awful when we suffer the consequences. Are we sorrier for the action, or for the consequences?

Yet the most important line in the passage is this one: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” We have nothing to fear, because Jesus knows our hearts and understands our struggles. Each time we fall down, we can get back up again, not with groveling, but with dignity … because we are God’s beloved children.

—Josh Hosler

Monday, March 28: Joanna Fuller

What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? - Romans 4:1-12

A few weeks ago while watching the news, I saw a sobering item appear on the crawl: ‘OJ Simpson beaten in prison.’ While the report was later revealed to be false, I have to confess that seeing it, I felt a measure of satisfaction, much as I had when Simpson was arrested for robbery some years earlier. Both occasions granted me a sense of justice, a comfort that no matter how events in the world play out, what goes around really does, ultimately, come around. Rather than feeling compassion toward Simpson for the suffering he’d endured at the hands of a prisonmate, or sadness at how his life has unfolded, I was relieved—relieved that his actions had finally caught up with him, relieved to see him paying in some way for what he’d done, relieved to find that he couldn’t truly get away with murder, even if he’d escaped the more severe consequences that I believed he truly deserved.

But Paul’s letter to the Romans stands as a rebuke to my attitude. Like many Christians, I’ve read it many times and have been fairly certain I understood the theological teaching that we are justified by faith and not by works. I was pretty sure that I “got” the concept—that none of us is blameless, that we need a perfect Savior, that the only way we are made clean and holy before the Father is by the grace, mercy, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But my fixation on justice (or my interpretation of it anyway) is evidence that I hadn’t completely grasped the larger truth: that God, in His compassion for us, doesn’t give us what we deserve. He gives us what we need, if only we’ll trust in Him.

Paul reminds me that inasmuch as Abraham was called to be the father of the Jewish nation, not to mention the father of all believers, even he was far from perfect, particularly when standing before a holy God. Abraham displayed courage and obedience (Gen. 12:1-7, Gen. 14:14-24). On other occasions he demonstrated doubt and faithlessness (Gen. 12:10-20, Gen. 16:1-6). But it was neither his acts of obedience nor his shortcomings that God counted when regarding Abraham a righteous man—it was his willingness to believe in God and all that He promised (Gen. 15:1-6). God called Abraham righteous years before he called him to circumcision; circumcision was simply the outward manifestation of his belief.

It’s significant that Paul, of all people, champions this teaching. By his own account (Phil. 3:4-6), if anyone could feel they were justified according to the law, it would be him. He was a self-described ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’: he’d been circumcised on the eighth day, he was of the tribe of Benjamin, and he was a Pharisee, the order of Jewish adherents who strove to follow the law so closely as to be in a constant state of purity. What’s more, while Paul was from Tarsus, one of the most prosperous and prestigious cities in the Roman empire, he was raised in Jerusalem and studied under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), the grandson of Hillel, one of the most famous rabbis of all time. Paul’s zeal for the law was so great, he viewed Christ’s followers as blasphemers and persecuted them, even to their death.

But on his way to Damascus (Acts 9:1-9), God appeared to him saying, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.’ For all his adherence to the law, it had led him to persecute God Himself. Despite his accomplishments and pedigree, Paul would later call himself the least of the apostles (1 Cor. 15:9) and acknowledge that only the grace of Christ had saved him.

So as we enter Lent and prepare to celebrate Easter, I’m moved by the fact that God doesn’t appear to be nearly as preoccupied with justice as I’ve been. When I stand before him, he doesn’t catalog my flaws and misdeeds (not even the really, really ugly ones). Instead, he looks at me with unspeakable tenderness. He’s able to see beyond my actions to the struggles that drive them. He wants to attend to my healing, not to my punishment, and he extended that grace to me long before I made any outward demonstration of faith.

Mark Fuhrman, the detective who investigated the OJ Simpson case, was recently interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Toward the end of the interview, Oprah asked him what he would say to Simpson today, if he could interview him. Fuhrman’s reply was surprising. He told Oprah the first thing he’d say would be, “‘I know you didn’t mean to kill two people and I know you didn’t go there for that.” He then said he’d want to find out what happened, and how Simpson got caught up in the events of that evening.

Over the years, I’ve had mixed feelings about Fuhrman’s own character and actions. But whatever I think of him, I’m humbled by the fact that this person, who knows far more about the case than I ever will, whose life has been forever changed by it, and who has far more right to comment on it than I, could have such a  thoughtful and compassionate answer. As horrific as he believes Simpson’s actions to have been, he’s not blinded by his desire for justice. He can see beyond the actions through to the pain and pathology that must have driven them.

Throughout the Bible, we encounter a God who not only sees and understands our pathology, but who wants to heal it. His promise is that while we can never earn salvation through works of the flesh, good works will  result as the natural outpouring of our salvation by faith. As I allow God to transform my heart, I’m not only freed to become the person He intended me to be. I can begin to truly see others not with a judging eye, but with the grace and compassion that’s been shown to me. What’s more, as I grasp my own brokenness and healing, I have the amazing chance to play a part in God’s work, and to be used by Him to help others experience that same forgiveness and peace. May God heal us all.

—Joanna Fuller

The Narrow Door

sermon preached at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Medina, WA
by the Rev. Karen Haig, Priest Associate
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

“Lord, will only a few be saved?” - Luke 13:22-30

I recently flew to California, and because I booked my flight so late, I found myself in a middle seat, sitting between two rather large men. The man by the window had on a ball cap sporting the words “Man of Faith” on the front, and in very large letters, “Jesus” on the back. The man by the aisle was a bit imposing – very sure of himself and seemingly used to being in charge. Squeezing into my middle seat, the space between those two big men felt very, very narrow.

Settling in, I pulled out my prayer book, and no sooner had I done that than the Man of Faith exclaimed, “Amen sister, I’m praising God because we are all believers!” Being the good Episcopalian I am, I smiled at him and replied that yes, that was lovely, and quickly returned to my prayer book. The man on the aisle began to ask questions of the Man of Faith, who by now had spoken enough for me to recognize a significant slowness in his speech, and an inability to completely formulate his words. “God is awesome, man!” he drawled. “God saved my life and I’ve been a believer for 20 years.” He reached into the seat pocket in front of him and pulled out two cards, handing one to me, and one to the man on the aisle. “Look, this is my Mom, this is her ministry.” I read the card, which conveyed a brief version of the story of this man’s near-fatal car accident 20 years earlier, and of his recovery and the entire family’s conversion to Christianity.

“Oh my,” I thought. “I’m in for a long ride …”

As I tried to read my prayers, the two men talked back and forth, each of them leaning in a little toward one another in order to more closely converse. It was a funny feeling … as though I wasn’t even there. And my narrow little middle-seat space was becoming increasingly narrow. I invited either of them to change seats so that they might more comfortably converse, but the Man of Faith wanted the window seat, and the Man in Charge needed the leg room of the aisle.

Understanding clearly that this was not a circumstance conducive to reading my prayers, I closed my book and paid attention to these two men. “What do you do?” the man on the aisle asked me. “Uh-oh,” I thought. I hadn’t planned on a theological debate. I had planned to pray.

As I had been trying to read my prayers, the Man of Faith told the story of his accident, his recovery, his journey to conversion and his beautiful life as a Christian. This man had very certain and specific knowledge of God and of God’s plan for every person on earth. I would venture, in fact, that he would have had an answer to that question posed to Jesus in our Gospel reading today: “Lord, will only a few be saved?” “YES,” I imagine him saying with absolute certainty! “Only a few will be saved.” He’d already made known his very narrow definitions about who would be saved, what all of us must do to be saved, and how if you look at specific verses in the Bible and take them seriously (which to him meant taking them literally), you would know what you had to DO to be saved. Quoting scriptural passages popular among fundamentalist Christians, the Man of Faith described a god I do not know and certainly don’t believe in: an angry, vengeful god whose primary job it was to sort the good from the bad, casting aside all those who did not see the world through the same very narrow lens as did this Man of Faith.

I don’t think this is the way Jesus wanted us to understand the narrow door. This is a difficult passage, though, especially for those of us who understand God to be expansive and compassionate, a God of self-effusive and overflowing love. While we know Jesus often answered specific questions with expansive stories and parables, it is hard to understand his response in today’s Gospel. Why must the door be so narrow? Why will it be closed to many? Why would a gracious God make the doorway so narrow and the path to salvation so difficult? We know the answer to this question. Our good and gracious God did not make the path so difficult. WE make the path difficult.

We make the path difficult every time we exclude someone from God’s love. We make the path difficult when tend to ourselves at the expense of others or turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. We make the path difficult when we lose track of our prayer life or forget that all we have is gift from God. We make the path difficult any time we allow anything in the world to separate us—or any one of God’s beloved—from the God who loves us all.

That’s why the doorway seems narrow. Because when we’re not paying very careful attention, we find that we’ve gone off the path – perhaps missed the doorway all together.

I think this is why Jesus tells us we must strive to take the less traveled and narrow way – because God knows that which is ugly in the world is indeed powerful. Jesus isn’t saying that what we DO brings us salvation or that our striving will bring us to the banquet feast. Rather, he is saying that being a Christian is big work, that it requires deep attention and intention and that we can’t rest once we’ve self-identified as a woman or a man of faith. We need to be mindful. We need to be prayerful. We need to be humble.

Sitting in that narrow middle seat on the airplane, I knew I needed to honestly engage the conversation that surrounded me. And because it was such an important conversation, I knew I needed to choose my words with great love, real attention, and deep prayer. One cannot proclaim the Good News of God’s all-encompassing and redeeming love in the world by telling someone he is narrow-minded and wrong!

This is a real story of the Christian life, isn’t it? A life where there are always choices. We can choose to take the easy way of disengaging, pretending not to notice the need for God’s love all around us and so not offering that love. Or we can choose to lovingly engage, and do the hard work of squeezing ourselves through that narrow door, choosing our words and actions with great love, real attention, and deep prayer.

What narrow pathways are you negotiating? Where are the very narrow doorways in your life? How are you striving? Take a few minutes of quiet. During that time, I invite you to reflect on these questions and to offer them to God, whose guidance and grace will surely sustain you and help you find your way through that narrow door.