Trust. Follow. Believe.

 When I first saw the readings for this particular Sunday, I thought I would find myself touching on the horrors happening in the Middle East. I had heard a story the week before on NPR about the religious extremists in Israel who are hell bent (and I mean HELL bent) on seizing lands where non-Jews have been living for centuries and using God's promise to Abram in Genesis 12 as their justification. 

I was ready to talk about the dangers of taking the Scriptures literally, instead of seriously, and how that plays out in cruel and deadly ways for many people, not just Palestinians and the Lebanese. 

But that's not where I went. I kept thinking about the amount of trust it took not just for Abram...and also Sarai who didn't get a say in any of this...and also Matthew to do something they'd probably never dreamed they'd do: just drop what they were up to and follow God.

When God's Spirit gets ahold of you, good luck trying to get away. 

And the same thing is true of realizing when it's time to move on from a job, or a relationship. And so that's the path the Spirit had me follow. A path which I think was better suited for my St. Barnabas population in southwest Georgia.

See what you think. 

And while I'm at it: I will be taking a break from preaching for two weeks. My bishop is coming one Sunday, and my seminarian is preaching the following one. Yay! 

Texts: Genesis 12:1-12; Matt 9:9-13; 18-26

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When we meet someone new…and we’re first introduced to each other…after “hi, my name is”…the typical small talk conversation moves to a couple of other topics:

Where are you from?...and

What do you do?

These are probably the safest and most generalized questions to ask when we’re first getting to know another person.

They’re also questions tightly tied to our identities.

Where we’re from helps set the stage of explaining the external forces that have shaped and formed us.

Where we grew up…the north or the south…the far west…the Midwest…outside the country all together…sets the tone for what kind of culture we know…customs we’ve practiced…and common understanding of history…and even terminology for various objects.

Does the supermarket have paper bags or paper sacks?

Are you thirsty? Do you want a “soda”? Or is it “pop” or do you call all carbonated beverages “Coke”?

And are you getting that drink out of the refrigerator or the ice box?

What we do…meaning how we earn money…can serve as a springboard for more conversation…especially if we’ve had similar jobs…or know someone who did that same thing.

Maybe the person has a career that sounds interesting or fun.

Or maybe they’re in school…which gets to what grade are you in? Or what’s your major?

So much of who we are seems to get enmeshed in where we’re from and what we do…that those two things become central to our identities.

So when we strip away one or more of those things…suddenly we feel…odd or out-of-place.

I know that I went through that experience when I left journalism.

I remember once…a few weeks before my last day…waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with the question, “If I’m not Susan Gage of Florida Public Radio, then who am I?”

If I wasn’t going to the Florida Capitol building…or the State Supreme Court…or working in a production studio at the Public Broadcast Center…where am I going? What am I doing?

Leaving behind a career and temporarily relocating to a goat farm in Gainesville Florida required me to let go of what I did…and who I thought I was…as I followed a new path…trusting that it was the right thing to do.

Trust and being willing to follow is at the heart of the Genesis reading.

We hear that God tells Abram to leave his country. Leave his father’s house. Take his family with him. God blesses Abram and makes promises to him that Abram’s name will be great…and a great nation will come from him.

Let me just pause here a moment to give some background.

Up until now in the Book of Genesis…God has done all this work of creating a marvelous world…with lots of beautiful waters and land producing fruit…birds and sea creatures…and lots of critters running around in the woods.

And God creates human beings…with reason and skill and the charge to take care of creation.

And by the end of chapter eleven of Genesis…humans have shown themselves to be disobedient…and murderers.

God had flooded the world…promised Noah that wouldn’t happen again…and still…the people kept trying to be God building a tower of Babel…that God knocked down and confused their languages.

So… this moment with Abram…and these blessings…was God’s way of having something of a “do over” with humanity.

And amazingly…we hear…”Abram went as the Lord told him.”

There was no questioning.

No arguing.

No “but what if this doesn’t work out?”

Abram listened to God.

And something about God’s voice…God’s blessings…resonated deeply with this old man…that he knew to just go.

Leave behind the place…leave this land of his identity…and go.

Now he did take others with him.

Scholars suppose that Lot was along for this adventure because he was younger…and maybe Abram thought Lot was going to have all the children…since Sarai was supposedly barren.

And this barren Sarai was also an important traveler with Abram.

Without her…there would have been no future…no Isaac.

Without her…there also wouldn’t have been the Egyptian handmaid Hagar.

And without Hagar…there would have been no Ishmael…the offspring that tradition holds as a prophet of Islam.

We might imagine that when she heard the news that they were picking up and moving…Sarai probably gave Abram a side-eye…and shook her head with a chuckle and a “Really, Abram?”

And we can also imagine that God blew a soft breeze across her face and gave Sarai some assurances to trust that this uprooting from everything she’d known…and all that was familiar…would be for the good.

That same trust and obedience shows up in our Gospel this morning.

Matthew is sitting in his tax booth…doing his calculations…figuring out how much he might tack on to this person’s bill so he could have a nice take-home sum of money.

Along comes Jesus.

Jesus sees what Matthew is doing.

He walks up to the tax booth…looks at this tax collector and simply says, “Follow me.”

And without hesitation…without thinking about it…or even asking any questions…Matthew dropped his life of serving the Empire…and extorting his fellow Jews…and follows Jesus.

Something about this simple command was so strong and persuasive that Matthew was willing to trust and abandon his career to start down another path.

Maybe Matthew had been feeling uneasy about this job.

Maybe the years and years of scorn and rejection from his community had left him feeling alone.

And now Jesus looked at him…saw him…and spoke words that told him, “You don’t need to do this. You are loved. Follow the Love.”

And not just Matthew…but we hear how Jesus then sits with a bunch of tax collectors…and other outcasts along with disciples as they have a big ol’ dinner party at Matthew’s house.

The respectable ones…the Pharisees…see what’s happening and are aghast.

They don’t dare say anything directly to Jesus…so instead they want to know from the disciples why he’s hanging out with this bunch of no-good lousy creeps.

The Pharisees only knew what Matthew and the others did for a living.

They’d seen them in their tax booths…and concluded they were their enemies.

But Jesus saw in Matthew not just a tax collector.

He saw a more complete identity: a person with more potential… a man whose whole self was greater than the sum of all those external labels on him…someone rejected by society and most importantly… a beloved child of God…worthy of love.

Like Abram…like Sarai…Matthew heard the call and followed…not knowing where it would lead…but trusting that it was all going to be OK.

And in following he discovered that he had a place at God’s table.

It takes a lot for us to trust and leave behind things familiar…our homes…our families…our vocations.

There’s always a risk involved in such decisions.

But sometimes…there is a stirring inside of us…a sense that we must make a move…or at the very least attempt to change course.

And being willing to take risks without absolute certainty of success is a lot about what it means to have faith.

Again…in the Gospel reading…the synagogue leader didn’t know for sure that Jesus could bring his apparently dead daughter back to life.

But he acted on a desperate hope to seek Jesus for help.

The bleeding woman wasn’t 100-percent certain that touching was his clothing the one medicine that would stop her pain. But she reached out anyway.

Listening and trusting…following and believing.

These are the starting points of hope and faith and trust that God is a God of Love…and mercy.

When we feel moved to follow a new path…or make any major change in our current life…there’s no guarantee of success.

There will be difficulties…and some degree of growing pains that come with making a break with the old and starting something new.

But the promise that God makes is that we are never going at it alone in life…and that God is with us as we step out in a new direction.

Trust. Follow. And most importantly beloved: believe…and stick with that source of Love.

In the name of our One Holy and Undivided Trinity.

"Love: The Essence of the Trinity"

 

Even though I had a seminarian assigned to us, and he is still serving at the altar with me on Sundays, I still went ahead and preached on Trinity Sunday.

The joke is that Trinity Sunday is one of those sermons that the senior most priest punts on and assigns to the younger associate. Nobody really wants to tackle the doctrine of the Trinity in a sermon. And I'm not sure how many in the congregation are that interested. 

However, it is billed as "Trinity" Sunday; so to say nothing would also seem a little strange. 

As I told one of our members, since I am part-time and therefore don't really have the time to do all the weekly classes and other activities normally done by the priest, I use my preaching time to drop in some teaching. That's what I did here with this sermon. 

And the direction in which I moved gave me a chance to say, once more, an important truism about God in this particular moment in the life of the less-than-United States of America. See if you catch it.

Texts: Gen. 1:1-2:4a, BCP

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If we crack open the Bible…and go looking for an entry titled “The Holy Trinity,” we won’t find anything.

Yes, we find words about God the Father.

We know Jesus as the Son of God.

And just last week, we were celebrating the God the Holy Spirit.

Even though our Gospel names these three…there’s nothing that calls them the “Holy Trinity.”

Open the Book of Common Prayer…and we find in the historical documents in the back of the book that Article One of the 39 Articles adopted by the General Convention of 18-01 tells us:

“There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, the Maker and the Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.  And in unity of this Godhead is three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

Or there’s the Creed of Athanasius…which goes to great lengths to outline the Trinity…as “one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost…but this Godhead is all one…the Glory equal…the Majesty co-eternal.”

I’ve heard sermons…and I’m sure you have too…where a preacher attempts to take all that language and put it into a visual or some concrete concept.

The Holy Trinity is like a three-leaf clover.

The Holy Trinity is like water…which can be liquid, or frozen, or vapor.

The Holy Trinity is like the sun…star…light…and heat.

All this to attempt to explain and defend a doctrine first articulated by the early church father Tertullian who minted the expression of the Trinity as God in Three Persons.

Tertullian was defending the Chrisitan understanding of God’s three-fold nature against those who insisted that God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were all the same one person without distinction in their form.

Tertullian insisted that God was one with three distinctions…but what the three shared was the same one essence.

His writings on the Trinity would later become the basis for the Council at Nicaea developing the credal statement that we still say to this day.

That’s a very quick lesson on church history and where to find the Holy Trinity on paper.

Because we humans seem invested in certainty…and rationality.

But really… all of these are noble attempts to intellectualize…synthesize…and boxed-in something that ultimately can’t be “understood” in that way.

To understand the Holy Trinity comes down to how we experience and relate to God…as that one Essence:

And that one essence is Love.

Love…as the hymn writer Benjamin Webb says, “O love…how deep…how broad…how high.”

We can see that when we look at the Genesis reading from this morning with this first creation story.

And yes—we have two: this one and the one that follows with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

We hear in this version:

In the beginning…when things were all an indistinguishable mish-mash of stuff…God looked at this chaos and began… speaking.

Not with violent words…or angry commands…or even with force.

God speaks…God breathes out in quiet…gentle…tones “Let this happen.”

Let there be light and dark.

Let there be sky and sea.

Let there be sun and moon and stars.

Let there be fruits and plants.

With each breath…with each invitation…all fell into place…as one beautiful masterpiece.

C.S. Lewis in “The Magician’s Nephew” imagined this Genesis moment as a song that his God character…the lion Aslan…sings creation into existence.

Again…not with some loud clanging noises or even an especially melodious tune.

But a mostly wordless song of various tones…deep bass notes that seem to come from unknown depths…causing lush fields of grass that covered the ground and ran up the mountains…trees emerging from the earth and eventually animals and two-legged creatures appearing.

A different musical imagination of “the beginning.”

As the Genesis writer describes this work of creation…we can see God forming this world in an intentional and interdependent way.

First make the habitat…the seas…the sky…the land with vegetation.

Now bring about the life forms…sea creatures and birds…wild animals.

Finally…God makes human beings.

All of these dependent on each other…living in relationship to each other.

And it was the creation of humanity where our church father Tertullian said he could find the scriptural evidence of the Trinity.

The text…even in Hebrew…has God using a plural pronoun.

“Let us make humankind in our image…according to our likeness.”

God did not say “Let me do this and make them in my likeness.”

It’s us… and our…God the Three Persons…interdependent and in relationship.

They were there and they made humanity in the image of them.

And I don’t think that necessarily meant just bodies with faces…arms…and legs.

This creation of humankind…you and me…were made in the likeness of God…meaning we were created in God’s essence…from Love….out of Love…and for the purposes of Love…to Love.

To care for all these creatures.

Enjoy and nurture this planet with its lands and seas with the same love and support that brought us and all of creation into being in the first place.

Do this with Love for that Love that so loved the world that that same Love sent the Son into the world to live as one of us…give us a down-to-earth…incarnate…vision and understanding of Love…and to show us that no powers or principalities can defeat those who put their faith and trust in Love.

And this Love remains with us…as the breath in our bodies and that Spirit wind at our backs…so that we have the means to extend this Love to each other.

Not just the people who are sitting here in this room.

Treat everyone we encounter…with love…dignity…and respect.

Because this Love isn’t exclusionary.

No one nation or people are held as better than or more important to God.

This Love is universal…to those who believe and even those who don’t…and the ones who doubt.

It’s there for all…with no asterisk or black-out dates.

Love…this three-fold Love… is with us always…seeking relationship with us.

As we go out into the world…may we remember that this essence of Love which is in us…with us…and around us…is the way…the truth…and the life that we now share with others.

In the name of our Holy and Undivided Trinity.

 

 

 

 

 

One Love, One Language: Pentecost Year A

One of the blessings of living in an interfaith marriage is coming to know and appreciate the customs and traditions of Judaism. In turn, I can take the things that I see in our "faith parent" and connect them for purposes of deepening the understanding of Jesus for my congregation. It is also good to have been a public radio reporter in my former work life. I still listen to the news, and read news headlines, and follow news podcasts. It helps me to then point to the ways things in Scripture are still speaking to us even here in the 21st Century. Proof positive that the Holy Spirit is still with us, and poking us in the rib cage with sharp elbows, as one of my spiritual directors once said. 

Text: Acts 2:1-21

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Take a moment and imagine this scene.

The city of Jerusalem was full of people.

Jewish pilgrims from every region had come bearing sheaves of wheat for Shavuot…this agricultural festival.

They were bringing the gifts of the first fruits of their harvest to the temple in thanks to God and celebrating the moment when God gave Moses the Torah on stone tablets at Mount Sinai.

Despite the frightening and terrible killing of Jesus two months earlier…the city’s residents had lived with and become accustomed to the brutality of the Roman government.

Shavuot was a chance to carry on with their holiday rituals as normal.

In the home of Jesus’s disciples…they also had gathered with a lot of people.

They entered this celebration with that glimmer of hope that they’d received.

Jesus…who they had thought was dead…had been resurrected.

Their sorrow had been turned to joy.

They’d experienced that God’s Love is more powerful than a Roman cross…and had seen Jesus ascend into heaven.

He’d blessed them and told them that another comforter would be with them soon.

So they huddled together…they prayed and talked.

Maybe another rabbi would show up in this crowded room…another one who would keep them moving in the way of Jesus.

A strong wind suddenly blows through the whole building.

Over each disciple’s head is a flame…a fiery tongue.

And as they feel this rush of air…the disciples find that they’re speaking in a new languages.

They’re using foreign phrases…as they talk about the amazing works of God.

But this wasn’t some incoherent babbling.

The strangest thing happened: people were hearing clear as day one message: “God is love let the whole earth rejoice in it!”

No need for interpreters or universal translators.

Everyone was hearing with the ears of their hearts…the same message in the way they could comprehend and understand it.

As people looked on at this scene…listening to these Galileans speaking so plainly in other languages…the crowd was a mix of wonder …and cynicism.

Naturally there were skeptics who were scoffing at the whole thing:

“Obviously, these guys have been drinking alcohol!”

That’s when Peter jumps to his feet.

“No we aren’t drunk! It’s the middle of the morning and we haven’t been doing shots at 9am!”

They might not have been lit in that way…but they were lit.

Lit up with the knowledge…and the wisdom that had been with Jesus.

They were filled with the same juice that fueled the passion of the prophets.

And they’d been reveling in same the wind that blew over the waters and existed with God from the beginning of time.

If they were drunk on anything…it was the Spirit of God.

And Peter…the guy who had retreated in fear at the time of Jesus’s arrest…was so intoxicated that he was now standing up and speaking with authority.

He told these pessimists that what they were witnessing was the fulfilment of God’s promise as spoken by the prophet Joel:

The spirit has come…and a new promising future is possible for all people.

Even in a time of uncertainty…and living under a Roman government that killed with impunity…God’s Holy Spirit has come and will surround them always.

The Spirit that arrived in the Upper Room continues to be that powerful wind that gives breath to those who need some more encouragement to be bold…and to dream…and have visions of a future not yet realized but is still possible.

It’s the energy that keeps us from sinking into complacency and depression and holds us up when others try to drag us down.

And it’s that force that challenges us to get out of our comfort zone and give us that proverbial kick in the pants to do our part to make a difference.

That’s the spirit of Pentecost.

And there is no time greater than now for us to start showing up…and speaking up.

I was listening to an interview with Bishop Deon Johnson…the Episcopal Bishop for the diocese of Missouri. Some of you might be familiar with Bishop Deon from Facebook. He frequently publishes prayers and intercessions that get shared on social media.

The bishop and his husband…who is Mexican by birth… became unwilling participants in the brokenness of our immigration policy.

They were in Mexico in 2024…at a routine interview for green card holders…when the immigration officer told them that Bishop Deon’s husband was being detained.

They were told that he needed to stay in Mexico for a year…even though he hadn’t lived in the country since he was a child.

As we might imagine…this caused a lot of fear and stress for everyone in the family…the bishop…his husband…and their two children.

They complied…finding an apartment for him in Mexico…and finding ways to keep the family in touch via Facetime.

They lived through the trauma…only to find out at the end of it all that everything they’d just been through had been unnecessary.

After nearly a year…a different immigration official looked at the husband’s record…and said there’d been nothing wrong with his green card status in the first place.

Needless to say… Bishop Deon was understandably angry about the whole thing.

And yet…out of that hardship…not only had the Spirit kept the family together…it had started to do other work beyond their immediate struggle.

Their experience raised the awareness among Missouri Episcopalians to the fears and concerns felt by all their black and brown neighbors…especially those who aren’t native English speakers.

Some congregations moved to organize ways to help immigrants.

It also opened up important conversations with Bishop Deon.

There had been some church members who weren’t happy to have a bishop who is black… gay and a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Hearing that he was solo parenting at this time and needed to get home to his kids….and that’s why he couldn’t do all the typical activities when he would visit a congregation struck a nerve.

It helped soften some people’s hearts as they now saw him not as some scary “other” and fictionalized version of a black gay man…but as an incarnation of God’s beloved…a fellow sibling in Christ.

And the experience…as terrible as it was for their kids… turned their older daughter into an outspoken activist for her St. Louis high school classmates who worried that ICE was coming for them and their families.

The interviewer asked if this immigration trauma had made the bishop question his faith and naturally, he said no, it had not.

Sitting on this side of the experience…Bishop Deon spoke confidently of how his faith was so grounded in hope that it once more showed that resurrection and Easter follows those Good Friday moments.

As he put it…”There will always be those who are more in love with power over others than being in love with God’s Love.” But God’s love…and God’s spirit will have the final say.

And that’s the key thing for us.

When we stick close to that source of Love…and drink from the living waters of God…we not only become the witnesses of Love…but water bearers to those who are thirsty for a church that embodies mercy…compassion…and justice.

And with the power of the Holy Spirit…we are given the strength and the ability and the joy to do our part in making this a better place for everyone.

In the name of our One Holy and Undivided Trinity.