Sunday closest to July 13
Proper 10
Year A
RCL For the readings click here
Genesis 25:19-34
Psalm 119:105-112
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
Today I met Ariel from La Leche International, she holds a workshop here once a month to teach the importance of breast feeding. A small group of mothers come with their babies in tow, some breast feeding while they ask questions about this ancient art of rasing healthy children. Although breast has been in my mind as my wife prepares for a mastectomy on Wednesday, the topic of conversation was precisely because Ariel and myself are both care givers to our spouses. Ariels’s husband is recovering from brain cancer surgery and my wife will have hers on Wednesday. We were talking about the how often we feel the need to finish a box of cookies without any apparent reason and how sometimes we skip lunch. How our seemingly erratic behavior mirrors the monkey wrench thrown into our lives. How all of the sudden anger seems to overpower us and how sometimes we could border on neglect.
Reading and praying before my sermon writing session, I asked myself honestly how I have felt this past three weeks and the response came loud and clear, I felt like every kind of soil, path soil, packed, dry, exposed. Rocky ground, rootless and vanquished. Thorny, filled with secret anxieties, with choking feelings I do not have the luxury to express. Then I have felt very productive, so much that I felt betrayed by my own enthusiasm.
Today’s gospel reading is very familiar – the parable of the four soils. Many of us learned it in Sunday school. Easy to remember because of the vivid description, we readily envision an ancient farmer striding through a rough field with a bag hanging on one side as he casts handfuls of seed on the other. We can also imagine a wider-angle view around the field - with birds flying over a hard-packed path, rocks among shallow earth, and thorny weeds growing menacingly.
But we may have to immediately say, that similarly like the parable of the prodigal son is not about right parenting, the parable of the sower is not about farming. Rather the opposite, I am even tempted to say that God sucks at Math. Is kind of repetitive in gospel stories told by Jesus. Luke talks about a Shepherd that leave ninety-nine sheep abandoned in the darkness and goes after one lost sheep. In John a woman takes a pint worth a year’s wages of exotic perfumes and splashes it over Jesus feet and rather than taking his disciples scandalized attitude he affirms the extravagance in the deed. In Mark a widow drops two puny coins and Jesus belittles a more considerable contribution to the Temple treasury. In Matthews, a boss goes and hires workers at different times during the work day and at the end of the day he pays the same to all.
God The Sower throws seeds in unlikely places, at least not where a smart farmer would. God The Sower is wasteful and by our standards He will not be successful, since he loses considerable amount of seed, however He says that the farmer yield was astronomical. When I told this parable in Bolondron, my farming community in Cuba the local farmers reaction went from respectful disbelief to hilarious joking.
The whole purpose of the story is too be outrageous, and by scandalizing with the impossible and the unfair, to remind the audience that God’s math is not ours, that He is a wasteful God and throws his seed where he pleases since it is His seed in the first place. That the harvest success -metaphor for the work for the Kingdom- does not depend on the disciples , but solely on God. Reminds the disciples that we stand as recipients of God’s grace of which we have no control.
The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Sunday closest to July 6 Proper 9 Year A RCL
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 145: 8 - 15
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 for the texts click here
There’s a story of a man who risked his life to save a boy trapped in a burning building. The doorway was blocked, the room was filled with smoke, and the child could not find his way out. His rescuer stormed into the house with reckless abandon, retrieving the young man from certain death. As the boy was carried from the burning building into the open air, he said, “Thank you for saving my life.”
The man looked deeply into the boy’s eyes and spoke his profound reply: “Just make sure your life was worth saving.”
Just make sure your life was worth saving—that’s something for us all to think about. Is our life worthy of the risk and cost of one who would save it?
What is one life worth? At what point could it be said that too much money was spent to save a life? The answer is at no point can that be said. You cannot place a dollar amount on the value of a human life. We’ll go to great lengths to save one person’s life, because we know how precious life really is. I can’t help but wonder, though, if my life were saved, what would I do to make certain it was worth the effort?
Is it our life worth saving? Are we not, most of the time entangle in a self-spun web of falsehoods and deceit?. Sin, deceit, lies are as old as human kind. Martin Buber, philosopher and theologian believed that we are the authentic first liar in the world. Buber says: A lie was possible only after a creature, man, was capable of conceiving the being of truth.
Here in New York , the act of confession is now an artistic expression. During the first half of 2006, two performing artists named Laura Barnett and Sandra Spannan created an exhibit in a storefront in Manhattan that allowed passers-by to alleviate their guilt.
The two women dressed as 19th century washerwomen and sat in the storefront, one of them underlining the words on the glass—"Air your dirty laundry. 100 percent confidential. Anonymous. Free."—the other painting. Onlookers were encouraged to write their deepest secrets on pieces of paper. When they had disappeared from sight, the women collected their confessions and displayed it in the window for all to see.
The sins and secrets ranged from slightly humorous to sordid:
"The hermit crab was still alive when I threw it down the trash shoot."
"I want to see SUVs explode. Those people are so selfish."
"My girlfriend and I both think Osama Bin Laden has a sweet-looking face."
"I make fun of this one friend behind her back all the time. She just enrages me! But I get freaked out when I think of what she might say about me—I worry this means we're not really friends? Human relationships are infinitely confusing!"
"I haven't slept with my husband in a year and I am about to start an affair with ______."
"I haven't yet visited my dead parents' grave."
"I am dating a married man and getting financial compensation in exchange for the guilt. I'm 25 and he's a millionaire. It pays to be young."
"New York makes me feel lonely."
Barnett told the New York Times that the women are often overwhelmed by the weight of others' sins: "We go there, and the window is empty, and we're wearing all white. And at the end, the window is full, and we're covered with paint, all I want to do is to take a bath.
For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Tells Apostle Paul to the Christian community in Rome of his own inner struggle.
Have we not been there together with Paul, struggling with our own demons? How far is the hero away from the villain? Are we not capable of greatness and selfishness in the same breath? For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
Paul is living in the context of the First century Christianity when the lines of division between Judaism and Christianity were not clearly drawn yet. He was in the midst of the struggle to decide wether the new Christian converts, coming from non-Jewish background were supposed to obey the dietary and other rules of Judaism. Paul preside over the defining moment in which Christianity went from a Jewish sect among many to clearly defined new religious movement.
We always should understand Paul’s letters as a dialogue with both supporters and opponents of his views on the subject. For the Jewish-Christians for lack of a better name, if you followed the Law of Moses, that is the Torah and the rabbinical interpretations of such, you have advanced your standing in front of God. For Paul, such position does the opposite because for him, there was nothing we could do with our own efforts to be blameless in face of God. For him, we all have sinned and stand condemned, and we all who believe are justified, and this because they rest, not on their own faithfulness, in their own striving, in their inner jihad but in the faithfulness of Christ - his "sacrifice of atonement."
We are saved, freed from the self-built cage of sin not because we do anything to be saved, but because God has loved before and in the sacrifice of the cross gives the key to come out of it. Our response to God’s invitation to freedom, is to accepted humbly that without Him we could and we will not do anything.
If you go to an AA or AlAnom meeting they tel you that the way to recovery passes but admitting our inability to shake off addiction by ourselves. Paradoxical, eh? By admitting that we can not beat it, and relying on a Higher power, people have stopped drinking and taking drugs for the remainder of their lives. Here at Redeemer, I met a lady who has been sober for 60 years, she looks like a church lady, but before she was a bar lady.
If we want to come out into the light from our personal self-built dungeon, and be freed from the bondage of sin and death, we need only to hold on to the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. We do not have to practice meditation, or become vegetarians or follow a set of rules, we need only to hang on to Christ’s cross, admitting that we are entrapped and we can not come out on our own.
En mi país usted es mayor de edad cuando cumple 16 anos y me imagino que para algunos en esta sociedad americana, seria quizás ocasión de regocijo. Poder llegar tarde, fumar, tomar, todas aquellas cosas prohibidas, todo el espacio oscuro y intrigante por descubrir. Sin embargo, significaba también que existía la posibilidad de que me llevaran para el ejercito, a cumplir mi servicio militar obligatorio que entonces duraba tres años.
Y eso me llenaba de terror, aunque era hijo de militares y quizás por ello, no me gustaba el uniforme. Y había un problema mayor, cuando me llegara la bendita citación tenia que llenar el famoso cuentame-tu-vida (una planilla en papel tamaño periódico diario donde te hacían toda clase de preguntas personales) ademas de una entrevista personal con el reclutador.
Habían preguntas famosas, una de ellas era sobre religion. Yo hacia solo cinco años antes, procediendo de un hogar ateo, me habia hecho miembro de la Iglesia Episcopal. Pasó mi cumpleaños 16 y nada, y llegue a los diecisiete, y nada. Se me olvidaba por momentos que seria llamado en cualquier momento, pero la idea me regresaba a veces en una fiesta o paseando, o estudiando o trabajando.
Yo, como joven a fn, sin perspectiva de la historia, veía esa entrevista como una forma de muerte. Algo definitorio y decisivo, que habría de cambiar toda mi vida. Y por lo tanto, no sabría que seria después de la entrevista. Un humilde siete-pesos (que era lo que pagaba e ejercito a los reclutas por mes) o algo mas drástico y notorio. Quería perderme en el anonimato parcial de dos millones de habitantes en la Habana, pero parecía que la entrevista dichosa seria un partir de aguas, seria un rubicón que habría de cruzar, sabia instintivamente que nada seria igual después. Era una experiencia de muerte del Juan, sin muchas preocupaciones, sin tener que tomar grandes decisiones, viviendo una vida un poco con la corriente a un Juan que tendría que pararme en mis propios pies.
Un pecador, una enferma contagiosa y una niņa muerta.
Saturday, 07 June 2008
Un hombre y dos mujeres,
En Cuba se come un plato conocido como “quimbombó” que es la planta que aquí en los EU conocemos como okra. Es mi comida favorita, pero alguna gente en Cuba no le gusta comerlo, por que es un vegetal que produce una viscosidad, una baba, y si uno no sabe cocinarlo bien, el plato queda muy viscoso, baboso. Levi Strauss, un famoso antropólogo francés escribió un tratado sobre la viscosidad. Aquello que no es ni liquido, ni solido normalmente nos da algún asco instintivo que no podemos explicar y que ciertamente no es racional.
De igual forma el pueblo de Jesús regido inicialmente por lo que llamamos el Antiguo Testamento y las interpretaciones que los rabinos o maestros de la ley, los expertos en la religión judía habían hecho a través de los siglos también tenían similares prohibiciones en relación con cosas viscosas como el semen o la sangre. Quiero reiterar que alguna de estas prohibiciones eran derivadas directamente de la Biblia y otras eran interpretaciones de ella. La lista de prohibiciones es larga y hoy hace mucho calor, baste decir que habían muchas y la gente simple como usted y yo a veces no podía llevar cuenta de cuando había roto alguna regla.
Lamentablemente los escritores de los evangelios son muy parcos en la información que nos dan pero en el pasaje de hoy Jesús se va a fondo, no una vez, ni dos, sino tres veces.
En primer lugar se va a comer a casa de Mateo, este Mateo era un cobrador de impuestos y como tal generalmente odiado y temido. Cobraba impuestos para Roma. El pagaba los impuestos de toda una región y después se pasaba el resto del año cobrandolos, naturalmente a interés. Era como una Visa o Mastercard. Los rabinos consideraban a todos los que trabajaban en esa profesión como pecadores público y notorios y habían prohibido a la gente entrar en contacto con ellos. Mateo vivía en un pueblo chico y como mi madre dice, pueblo chico, infierno grande. Todo el mundo sabia que Jesús, el famoso maestro estaba comiendo en casa de Mateo el pecador. El solo entrar en a la casa de Mateo había hecho de Jesús alguien impuro.
Después de comer con Mateo, un sujeto sin prestigio ni honra, lo mandan a buscar de una casa importante a que resucite una niña que acaba de morir. La hija de Jairo. En camino al velorio, una mujer enferma con sangramiento interno lo toca y en lugar de insultarla, como correspondía a tanta osadía la llama hija y la sana.
¿Recuerdan las prohibiciones de las que hable?, Esta era una de ellas, ninguna mujer con sangramiento interno podía tocar a una persona sana. El mero tocar de ella había convertido a Jesús en impuro en su religión.
De ahí sigue a el velorio de la niña de Jairo y cuando llega, la gente estaba rodeando la casa y como era casa de dinero había mucha gente. En aquellos tiempos mandaba la costumbres de contratar plañideras, mujeres que lloraban profesionalmente en los velorios y también de músicos para tocar tonadas tristes.
Jesús despide a la gente y dice que la niña solo duerme y la gente se ríe de este loco que quería dejarlos sin empleo. Y Jesús va y tomando a la niña por la mano la despierta. Otra prohibición rota aquí, tocar a un cadáver era una de las prohibiciones mas graves. Jesús era impuro otra vez.
Al final de este pasaje, Jesús, el maestro que seguimos es impuro tres veces de acuerdo con la ley de la que el dice no cambiar ni una tilde. Ha comido con un pecador, una enferma contagiosa lo ha tocado y el ha tocado a una niña muerta. Jesús a violado muchas interpretaciones de la Ley (Purity Code) y lo ha hecho sin inmutarse, sin ni siquiera pararse a explicar o dar una causa justificada.
Común a los tres había un ardiente deseo de abandonar su pecado en el caso de Mateo, el ofrece devolver el dinero robado con intereses.
La mujer era una rechazada del pueblo como Mateo pero debido a su enfermedad y por 12 años había gastando todo lo que tenia en médicos y ahora era pobre, enferma y, mirada con asco y temor.
La hija de Jairo tenia solo 12 años, la edad en la que el pueblo de Jesús, los judíos prometían a sus hijas, imaginen como estaría ese padre desesperado que busca a un milagrero de fama como Jesús y se confía a el completamente.
Del punto de vista de ellos tres la fe los unía, de Mateo que se sube a un arbolito para ver pasar a Jesús, la de la mujer enferma que arriesgando un insulto o una paliza lo toca, y la fe de Jairo. Comunes eran la necesidad mas aguda y la fe mas ardiente.
Desde el punto de vista de Jesús era común su predilección por los pecadores, los enfermos, las mujeres y los niños.
¿Que aprendemos aquí?
Que a los ojos de Jesús, los seres humanos son mas importantes que las reglas y que incluso la religión.
Que a los ojos de Jesús, nadie esta fuera de su abrazo salvador, especialmente los pecadores, los enfermos, las mujeres y los niños y niñas.
Que a los ojos de Jesús, no importa lo que seas o lo que hayas hecho, que solo basta tener fe y recibirás salud de espíritu y de cuerpo, que si solo tienes fe el te devolverá tu vida.
Que a los ojos de Jesús, todos somos hijos de un mismo Padre y hermanos suyos.
Si quieres agradar a Dios, solo tienes que amarlo con todo tus sentimientos, con toda tu voluntad y con toda tu capacidad intelectual y a tu prójimo -quiere decir toda persona cercana a ti-, como si fueras tu mismo.
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