Life in Your Ways (sermon for the seventh Sunday after the Epiphany)

Mom brought home a monkey.

Back in the early sixties, after she was divorced and had moved us in with her parents in Maryland, my mother got a job in veterinary clinic that doubled as a pet shop. Mom always had a soft spot for animals. Well, there was this wooly monkey named Gus who just wasn't attracting customers and the owners had pretty much decided to put it to sleep. Mom couldn't deal with that so she brought it home.

My grandmother Almedia was horrified. People in our little neighborhood didn't have monkeys for pets. They had dogs. They had cats. They might have a bird. But they didn't have monkeys. She pulled all the curtains and watched that monkey every minute.

The monkey was extremely well-behaved, one of the best types for pets, litter-trained and everything. But when it climbed up the picture window curtains and pulled them back with its little black hand and looked out into the neighborhood, that was the end of Gus. He had to go back.

It just wasn't normal.

After the terrible ordeal of World War II, most everyone just wanted to get back to normal. But this getting back to normal went to some real extremes. It became the byword of a whole generation. Leave It to Beaver is a great example of what the country wanted to be at that time. You just couldn't be odd. Having a monkey as a pet was odd. Odd was---well, bad.

This has led us to compare our time to the golden era of the late forties and early fifties. We remember, rather selectively I think, a time when everyone was polite, white, lived in the suburbs, drove a new car, had one income from dad, a stay-at-home mom, and two blonde kids whose biggest problem was whether or not to tell the truth about breaking the neighbor's window with a baseball. We told ourselves this was the way the world had always been, except for that--well you know--that war that killed millions of people.

Today, people are neither white nor polite, they don't have new cars, they have to have two incomes because many jobs can't support even one person, much less four, mom and dad aren't married, their kids are from multiple partners, and the problems their kids have include gun violence and drug dealers. What has happened? The world is going to hell in a hand basket!

And the churches are having the same kind of issue. After the effortless explosion of churches in the late forties and fifties as a part of the great national passion for normalcy. the decline of mainline denominations since the sixties seems like a terrible loss. Lots of people think Americans have always been in church. But this is not so. There have been many times in American history when hardly anybody was in church. We're still a pretty religious country comparatively speaking, but it's more accurate to say that we are simply returning to---well, normal.

A lot of us grew up with the idea that history was a progression of bad to good, a march into a bright future, but the reality is that, while times certainly change, the amounts of good and bad stuff going on really don't. They just move around. This is really what is normal. What's normal is that certain people get on top for a time and they see the world through rose-colored glasses while all the people on the lower rungs see it as a hard and difficult place. SSDD. Same stuff different day. All very normal.

Indeed, there have been some pretty significant studies of happiness and discontent over the last few decades and interestingly enough, as far as we can tell, no matter how far we advance technologically and no matter how much wealthier we become, we don't actually get a bit happier. Everyone's just about as happy as they ever were, and just about as unhappy. SNAFU, as the soldiers used to say. Situation normal, all messed up.

But... God is odd.

(I'm stealing a bit here. Some say Dorothy Parker, one of my favorite writers, penned the famous poem,

How odd of God
To choose the Jews

Though others attribute it to other poets...)

One of the preachers I've been reading this week said that when you're singing "Holy Holy Holy," you might just as well be singing is "Odd, Odd, Odd." Holy means utterly different, utterly separate, utterly unique, so "odd" kind of gets it.

God is odd. And if we substituted this word "odd" for the word "holy" we would have the command: "You shall be odd, as the LORD your God is odd."

God is odd like a family with a monkey in a neighborhood of dog-owners. God is odd like The Addams Family in a Leave It to Beaver neighborhood.

It's perfectly normal for the world to have a handful of haves and whole boatload of have-nots. But God's realm is about sharing God's gifts so that everyone has enough. God is odd.

The world is governed by an "only-the-strong-survive" ethos. This is perfectly normal. But the realm of God is governed by a "last-will-come-first" ethos. God is odd.

It is normal to love people who love you, and people you know. In the realm of God, people are to love people who hate them, and to see aliens as their neighbors. God is odd.

It is normal for nations to defend their interests with a form of mass murder called warfare. This is normal. But in God's odd realm, the command is "turn the other cheek." God is odd.

It is normal in business to take advantage of those who are in need for selfish gain. Perfectly appropriate, even moral. But not in God's realm. In God's realm, the point of business is the well-being of the whole social order, employer, employee and customer.

The people of God are called to be odd, as God is odd. So when the psalmist prays "give me life in your ways," he is asking to be made as odd as God.

When we let the monkey move into the house, when we embrace the oddness of God, we become odd ourselves. While the normalcy of our globe will take different shapes and forms depending on what nation happens to be on top, who happens to have all the marbles, and who is going to war with whom, God will always be odd, forever and ever, amen, and so will all those who seek life in God's ways.

You all know that I often criticize the health-and-wealth gospel that is so popular these days. The idea that the whole point of the gospel is my prosperity and well-being is so obviously wrong, so completely at odds with the scripture that it rather amazes me that so many intelligent and well-meaning people are buying into it. But it really shouldn't amaze me. It is such a worldly idea, so perfectly normal, really, the idea that my interests and God's interests are simply the same. That makes a lot more sense than God being odd. It seems genuinely wise and deep and profound. Whereas the idea that God is odd seems absurd and even foolish.

Nevertheless, God does promise a kind of prosperity and well-being to those who seek God's oddness. It's not the normal kind though, because nothing about God is normal. It's an odd kind of prosperity, an odd kind of health, the kind that hangs on a cross and suffers for others, the kind that lives forever. Odd, odd, odd.

If you went out of here and started telling your neighbors how you were going to love your enemies and help strangers you will never even meet they would probably nod and smile in that way people do toward people who are developmentally disabled. If you keep at it, they might actually get mad at you. If you really make a lot of noise about it, they might even find a way to tear you down, discredit you. And if you really wouldn't shut up, you might find yourself in real danger.

Whereas if you told them about how God was fighting on our side against the infidels and would give us the victory over our adversaries, and if you told them that you were going to help that old lady down the street that everyone loves, and if you proclaimed that everyone was on their own, to sink or swim, well, then they'd probably warm right up to you. You would be normal. Perfectly normal. They know wisdom when they hear it. Their mommas didn't raise no fools.

I'm grateful mine brought home a monkey.

Amen.