vPROPER 20C – Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Psalm 79:1-9; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; John 16:1-13 –
19 September 2010 – A sermon given by The Rev. Peter A. Munson for St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado

Living an Authentic Life

INTRODUCTION – These lessons? Really?

When I first looked over the lessons for today, I though to myself, “Oh, boy! Jeremiah lamenting that Jerusalem and the people of Israel are about to be destroyed by the Babylonians. In Psalm 79, that destruction has now occurred, and the psalmist is grieving, begging God for help and for revenge against the enemy. And in Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells a hard-to-understand parable about a dishonest manager who is commended by his master for his shrewd actions. Really? What am I going to do with these?” A few days later Kristy Weprin told me that the 10:30 music team had been looking over the lessons, trying to determine what music would go best with them. “They’re all rather depressing,” she said. Does that mean we should be singing some funeral dirges today? (Fortunately for us, that’s not what they picked out.) Maybe the lesson from 1 Timothy becomes the winner by default: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” (1 Tim. 2:1) A sermon about praying for our leaders… a good thing for all of us to do, surely, but a whole sermon about that? I’m not feeling it.

So I must return to the lessons, and wrestle some more, even though I don’t really want to face these lessons. That was what was true for me – at that moment. “Ugh! I don’t want to wrestle with these lessons! Give me the lost sheep and the lost coin from last Sunday. I can do something with that!”

FACING THE REALITY OF OUR LIVES

So I read them again, and one common thread seemed to emerge, at least in most of the lessons – people facing into the reality of their situation. People “keeping it real”, as Randy Jackson, the American Idol judge, might say.

Jeremiah, as prophet, sees what is happening in Jerusalem and, in fact, throughout Israel. The people have not been faithful to God and they “weary themselves with iniquity” and there is “oppression upon oppression, deceit upon deceit”. (Jeremiah 9:5-6) He sees that Jerusalem and the Temple are about to get destroyed by the Babylonians, and he cries out, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (You know where the old African-American spiritual comes from now. “There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul…”) “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people.” (Jer. 9:1) He can’t cry enough tears for what is happening in Israel, and for what is about to happen.

That was the reality of the situation for Jeremiah, and all the rest of them, really.
And after Jerusalem was destroyed, and their beloved temple was leveled, what can the Psalmist do, but describe the terrible destruction he sees – people dead everywhere, Jerusalem in ruins, the temple not just defiled but destroyed, the people all mocked for having faith in a God who would allow these terrible things to happen. What can he say, but “How long, O Lord?” How long will all this last? And where are you, Lord? “Pour out your wrath upon the heathen who have not known you…, for they have devoured Jacob and made his dwelling a ruin.” (Ps. 79: 6-7, The Book of Common Prayer)

This is America after December 7, 1941 and America after September 11, 2001, only worse, because most of the nation has been destroyed and the spiritual center of the country has been annihilated, and people have been sent into exile, to live in a foreign land. So in addition to crying out, “How long will you be angry, O Lord?”, he also adds: “… let your compassion be swift to meet us, for we have been brought very low. Help us, O God our Savior, for the glory of your Name; deliver us and forgive us our sins, for your Name’s sake.” (Psalm 79:5, 8-9, The Book of Common Prayer)

The Psalmist and those around him could only cry out to God, pray for mercy, and ask God to vanquish their enemies, because this is what they were feeling. This was their reality.

And in Jesus’ parable of the dishonest manager, when he realizes that he has been found out, when his boss comes to learn that he has been stealing from him, he has to face the truth of the situation, which is that after he turns in all his accounting books, he no longer has a job.. There is sort of an “oh, shit” moment which Jesus narrates in this way: “Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? [Not exactly taking responsibility for what he did, is he?] I am not strong enough to dig [he’s a wimpy manager who never worked out, evidently], and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’” What did he do? He eliminated his personal commission from what each debtor owed his master, and suddenly what each one owed was 50% less or 20% less, just like that. Was he going to have friends who would help him out still? You bet!

Jesus makes it clear that the point of the story, ultimately, is about which master you serve – God or wealth. But here’s another point that I don’t want us to miss: the manager did not deny what a fix he was in. He faced into the reality of what life was going to be like without a job, he did some quick thinking, and he came up with a plan. He may as unlikely a “hero” in all the parables of Jesus as the Good Samaritan was. It’s also true that he did not deny what was going on in his life.

THE TEMPTATION TO DENY, TO BE DISHONEST WITH OURSELVES

There are times in our lives when you and would rather not face the things that, on a deeper level, we know we need to face. We don’t want to say to anyone that we have been feeling sad, or angry, or depressed, or maybe drinking a little bit too much, or that we are in a place of deep grief.
We walk around as if everything is fine, and when people ask us how we are doing, that may be what we reflexively say, without even thinking. “I’m fine.” Perhaps we even add a smile. Would you like a smile with that “fine”?

We want to walk away from a conversation that we know that we should have with someone, because we’re scared of conflict, and the butterflies in our stomach are going so crazy that even thinking about the conversation makes our knees shake and our heart race. We really need to have the conversation if we’re going to have an ongoing relationship with that person, but we put it off. We think and pray, “Maybe things will just get better somehow!”

Denial comes with a huge cost, of course. We could toss that around for a few minutes, you and I – what all the costs are. Sometimes keeping the false front going makes us physically sick, for example. But probably the biggest cost associated with being inauthentic is that the juice gets sucked right of us, and we move through our days as half-dead people. People who live in denial end up living flat, low-energy lives.

Jesus calls us to something else. He calls us to authenticity. He challenges us to go make peace with our brother or sister who we’ve offended, and to speak the truth in love to those who have stepped on us. He challenges us to not under-utilize our gifts, but to let our light shine. He challenges us to follow him into unknown territory, and be transformed along the way. He says the journey will involve some dying to old ways, and the giving up of patterns or behaviors that we think are part of our real selves, but which really aren’t the essence of who we are. He challenges us to be brutally honest with ourselves – to remember that when we are judging others, we usually have a log in our own eye, and that when we think a little too highly of ourselves because we haven’t killed anyone or committed adultery, perhaps we should remember those times when we’ve practically killed another person with our words, or leered at another person with so much lust that we no longer realized that was a real human being standing in front of us.

In other words, be authentic. Be real. Develop this capacity in spades: to be honest with God, honest with yourself, and honest with others. None of us will do it perfectly in this lifetime. But strive to be authentic.

Why? Well, because our Lord was authentic, for one thing. He didn’t tell the Pharisees they were God’s gift to mankind when they were totally full of themselves. He called them hypocrites and vipers. And when people thought they had fallen so far that they were beyond the reach of God’s loving arms, he sat down and ate with them.

And here’s another really good reason to be authentic. It is the path to being fully alive. When we share our feelings with another, when we speak the truth, when we have the conversation – the difficult conversation – with the person that we know God wants us to talk to, we discover (or maybe re-discover) our aliveness, or that the relationship is alive again. We learn what it means to have the life-juices really flowing to us and through us. We learn something about what the abundant life looks like and feels like.
And when we start to discover that, we don’t want to go back to the life of denial, and being half-dead, because suddenly Jesus is showing us what being alive looks like and feels like.

CONCLUSION

So if you have suffered a severe loss, don’t spend too much energy trying to “put on a happy face.” Let the tears come. It takes way too much effort to hold them back. And in the grand scheme of things, who really cares is someone sees you crying? Maybe your children, or someone here at St. Ambrose, will learn something about being real, thanks to you.

If you are happy, sing or shout for joy. If you are angry, let yourself feel the anger. Let that anger out at God, if it is God you are angry out. God can handle it. God knows that you will not be angry forever. And if someone here has really hurt you in some way, speak up. Where are we going to learn how to be authentic, if we don’t learn how to be authentic in our homes, or in this community? You’d rather practice on your boss? Well, yes, come to think of it, we need to learn how to be authentic in the work environment, too. But what I am suggesting is that we’re all trying to grow into maturity here, into the full stature of Christ. Let’s help each other learn how to be authentic, by doing our best to appreciate the feedback that we are given, or the feelings that are expressed, even if we don’t think it has been done perfectly.

If we’re consistently scared to say anything because we might not say it “just so”, life gets really boring. So go for it! And remember that the person to whom you are speaking might be just as authentic in return, and give you some feedback, too. And when we get really good at doing this together, it’s not going to seem like a very big deal anymore. It’s going to feel like conversation flowing, and relationships flowing, and folks might come in and say, not just, “Wow, look how they love one another!” but also, “Wow, look how honest they are with each other!”

And that… that, my friends… would be as refreshing as a cool, mountain breeze.