"Beyond the Ordinary" [Pentecost Season Sermon]

Spring Concert in front of the Pasadena City Hall.

Proper 4, Year C [1]

1 Kings 18:20-21, (22-29), 30-39
Galatians 1:1-12
Luke 7:1-10

Psalm 96

Have you ever watched as the ordinary turned into the extraordinary?

Two weeks ago this happened to me.

I was in Southern California where we have a family home in the foothills above Pasadena and it was a quite ordinary spring day.

The weather had been pleasant, the sky was that cerulean shade of blue, and small blooms were beginning to appear on the cactus plants that dot the neighborhood.

As the day drew to a close, I finished packing my laptop and a few books to get ready for an early flight back to Portland the next morning.

I saw that I had time to attend a pops concert that evening in front of Pasadena’s City Hall, perhaps the most beautiful public building in America.

(If you’ve ever watched that TV show, “Parks and Recreation” you’ll recognize it immediately.)

Arriving early, I rented a folding chair for three dollars and found my place amidst a few friends and a growing crowd in what was usually the middle of Garfield Street, the street that runs in front of City Hall but sometimes for special occasions is corralled off and is transformed into a civic plaza.

The concert featured the local pops orchestra joined by several guest soloists who had sung on Broadway and the chorus from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—the folk who gave us the space program.

Over the course of the evening we listened to a series of familiar show tunes from productions such as West Side Story and Phantom of the Opera.

But after sitting for almost three hours, I was getting tired.

I glanced at my watch—and mindful of my early flight—I was about to surrender my folding chair and leave before the concert had concluded.

But just then, I heard the conductor announced what he said was to be the final number of the evening, so I decided to remain.

All the soloists returned for the finale to stand in front of the orchestra and the choir.

And then suddenly the night air was filled with the most majestic music.

It was an anthem by Andrew Lloyd Webber—I’d never heard it before—“Love Changes Everything.” [2]

The words and music cast a magic spell over the crowd. People in the audience exchanged knowing glances and smiles as we listened:

“Love, love changes everything: hands and faces, earth and sky.
Love, love changes everything: how you live and how you die.

“Love will turn your world around, and that world will last forever.
Yes, love changes everything . . .
Nothing in the world will ever be the same.”

And then the music and the evening ended in a soaring crescendo:

“Love will never ever let you be the same.
Love will never ever let you be the same!”

The anthem became a benediction.

It was a very public, a very “holy moment. “

The entire crowd of thousands rose to their feet amidst prolonged cheers.

And what had begun for me as an ordinary day had suddenly become quite extraordinary indeed!

Ordinary Time

Today we gather for the first Sunday in what is known in the church as “Ordinary Time.”

Beginning last November with the first Sunday of Advent and continuing through the seasons of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter, ending with Pentecost and Trinity Sunday we have been on a journey into the dramatic—dare I say extraordinary—heartbeat of our faith:

the powerful stories . . .
the deep seasons of reflection . . .
the dramatic moments.

Now we begin that long trek in Ordinary Time through the summer months and into the fall until the church’s year begins all over again.

During the past few weeks I’ve been watching some of those old Columbo TV mysteries, you know the detective stories where we know who committed the crime from the outset. We then watch as that seemingly bumbling detective—Columbo—in his rumpled overcoat and rundown car, step-by-step comes to a discovery of what we already knew.

We see the art of detection at work.

As we enter this season of “Ordinary Time” we already know how our story comes out.

We have seen who Jesus truly is in the transformative events of Holy Week,

We have witnessed that magnificent, death-defying love story, the greatest love story of them all.

It’s the story of a God whose love fully embraced the world in Jesus and who says to each one of us without exception—“You are my beloved. In you I am well-pleased.”

This is the “Love that changes everything.”

We already know the ending and now we watch as the Jewish Rabbi offers us clues to living an authentic life through his words of wisdom and deeds of power.

We have a chance to learn how love connects to our everyday life encounters.

Jesus had just finished giving what we have come to call his “sermon on the plain.”

And on the surface today’s Gospel seems to be yet another healing story, the kind of story that’s become quite familiar to those of us who spend our Sundays in church.

But I believe today’s Gospel lesson offers us some unique insights for how we can translate love into action.

The story has two principal characters—Jesus and a Roman centurion.

Jesus, of course, we’ve already met.

But here we encounter for the first time the centurion—we don’t even know his name—but we do know he’s part of the militia of Herod Antipas.

We also know that he was friendly to the Jewish people—he was a financial supporter of the synagogue and was likely one of those known as “God-fearers”—non-Jews who attended Jewish services and adopted many Jewish practices but didn’t take that final step by becoming circumcised.

He was still an “outsider.”[3]

But he was someone who had authority.

He could say a commanding word—“Go” --and those under his authority would go.

And what he was seeking in return was a commanding word—a life-giving word—from Jesus.

One thing that makes the story astonishing is that these two figures—Jesus and the centurion never meet.

But you see this story is about more than commanding words and authority.

For the centurion had a servant—someone he cherished highly . .

and this servant was ill, close to death.

The urgent request of the centurion was driven by more than the possibility of losing the services of a valued worker, this plea came from a much deeper place, it was born out of love and compassion.

The centurion first sent Jewish elders to testify to Jesus—and they gave witness to the love this Centurion had for the Jewish people, helping to pay for a synagogue.

Later the centurion sent friends to Jesus with the message:  “Only say the word and my servant will be healed.”  For the centurion didn’t believe himself worthy to come under Jesus’ roof.

So what then did Jesus do?

Did he go to the ill man?

Did he reach out to him with a healing embrace?

No, Jesus never met the suffering man.

That was not necessary.

For the Centurion knew Jesus was in touch with a boundless source of healing love—

“Only say the word and my servant will be healed.

But the real miracle here, I think, goes beyond an act of physical healing.

For in this story we see a whole community has become mobilized and connected through Jesus to the divine source of compassionate and healing love.

The centurion, the elders, the friends, the ill man are all bound together into a web of compassion.

And this is exactly the place, I believe, where the story speaks to what we are called to be about as people of faith—we are to become communities of connection, connected one-to-another and connected to the source of all compassion—

connected to God’s healing and restorative love,

a love that was so fully embodied in Jesus.

On this Memorial Day weekend we are keenly aware that each of our lives has been graced over the years by those who have extended the gift of love and compassion to us.

And so at this time we hold them in our sacred memory.

And we turn again to them for strength and inspiration for the living of these days.

But as we look to the past, we must also look to the present and to the future.

As we see our divided nation and our convulsing world, polarized into camps and venomous enclaves of distrust and hostility.

Only the force of healing love—compassionate love—can set us upon another path, and can help to turn the human race into the human family.[4]

Like the centurion and his entourage of friends we too need to find our way across the boundaries and divisions of our time.

Tattoos on the Heart

Not long ago, I met a teacher who has inspired me by his example of taking compassionate love to the streets of a city.

You see on the other side of City Hall from where I sat several weeks ago for the concert is the church I attend while I’m in Pasadena.  On a Sunday last November they had a guest speaker.

I don’t know why it took me so long discover him, but on that Sunday morning I heard and met for the first time Fr. Gregory Boyle.

This Jesuit priest is the founder of Homeboy Industries in the City of Los Angeles.

Homeboy Industries is a place that has transformed the lives of hundreds of gang members on the city’s Eastside.

Fr. Boyle’s book, Tattoos on the Heart—a title that should have a ready audience in our well-inked town of Portland—is a volume (salted with the language of the streets) I now keep next to my Bible on a bedside table.

It has helped me to translate the Gospel into our contemporary life.

You might look upon it as a continuation of the Book of Acts.

This is a book on the power of boundless compassion and it’s filled with stories about how lives and neighborhoods have been transformed by the force of God’s healing, boundary-crossing love.

“God,” Fr. Boyle writes, “is compassionate, loving kindness.  All we’re asked to do is to be in the world who God is. Certainly compassion was the wallpaper of Jesus’ soul, it is who he was.” [5]

Did you catch that central phrase?  Let me say it again slowly.

All we’re asked to do is to be in the world who God is.

“The strategy of Jesus,” Fr. Boyle goes on to say, “is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.”[6]

And while for most of us this will not mean standing with gang members, but it might mean standing with the immigrants and the refugees who are filling the neighborhoods here in East Portland.

It might mean standing with those whose religion may differ from our own.

But just how do we do this?

Here Fr. Boyle suggests that we might begin with Wendell Berry’s injunction:

“You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.”[7]

Or to put it another way, it’s about seeing through the eyes of “the other.”

This is something we can practice at home, or in the office or even at the coffee hour.

And this kind of compassion is not a one-way street.

“Compassion,” Fr. Boyle is clear to state, “is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals. . . .

“Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship of true kinship.”[8]

In Tattoos on the Heart Fr. Gregory tells of taking along Julian and Mateo—two young men from the streets who had become part of his program—to help give a university talk in Helena Montana.

They were both what he called “YA babies,” (the YA stands for Youth Authority) for they had essentially grown up in youth authority facilities. They had come from different gangs, and at nineteen years of age, he wrote that they had missed a lot of life by being incarcerated for the last four to five years.

At the talk Fr. Boyle spoke, followed by the two young men .

They received a standing ovation.

As it happened there was a mass after the talk.

Fr. Boyle writes, “To my great embarrassment the chaplain at the university ends the liturgy by inviting the congregation to come forward and lay hands on me for healing of my leukemia.  This, as they say is not my cup of tea. Mortified, I stand there as, one by one, folks come up. Generally, they lay hands are silent. Some say things, a blessing or a prayer. Matteo comes up. My head is inclined and eyes closed, he has my head in a vice grip, and he’s trembling and squeezing it with always might. He leans right into my ear as he does this and can barely speak through his crying.

“’All I know,’ he whispers, enunciating with great care, ‘is that I love you . . .  so . . . much.”

“Now,” Fr. Boyle concludes, “I’m crying.”[9]

Communities of Compassion

Communities of kinship are communities of equals, communities of mutuality—

They are people bound and connected to one another even across lines of extreme difference.

This is one reason I believe why Jesus was amazed at the centurion and exclaimed of this outsider, this non-Jew:

“Not even in Israel have I found such faith.”

In reaching out to Jesus though religious leaders and friends, the centurion was forging link-by-link, a chain of kinship, helping to build a community of compassion.

In our troubled time, this is the most life-giving thing we can do—it’s a Christian “counter-culture” at work—forging chains of kinship, striving to create communities of love-in-action, communities of boundless compassion.

Even if we are only able to make a small beginning with those nearest to us—

those at the dining room table, across the aisle, those who live in the house next door—it’s an opening.

And the world around us will begin to notice.

And then we will start to witness in the midst of our quite ordinary lives, something that is truly extraordinary.

We will experience the boundless love of God . . .

And that’s a “love that changes everything.”

_______________________

Endnotes

[1] Sermon given on May 29, 2016 at St. Aidan Episcopal Church in Gresham, Oregon.
[2] If would you like a soundtrack for this sermon, versions of "Love Changes Everything" are available on YouTube. Michael Ball who stared in the original production performed the song in 1999 at Royal Albert Hall.
[3] David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (editors), Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), p. 92.
[4] I am indebted to the Rev. Ed Bacon and All Saints Church in Pasadena for this phrase.
[5] Gregory Boyle, S.J.  Tattoos on the Heart:  The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York:  Free Press, 2010), p. 62. (Italics are mine.)
[6] Tattoos, p. 72.
[7] Tattoos, p. 74.
[8] Tattoos, p. 77. (Italics are mine.)
[9]Tattoos, p. 77-78.