Inequality Spurs Righteous Anger

This is Year B, the Year of Mark's Gospel. But the original evangelist doesn't always give us enough meat on the bones of the Jesus story. And so, this week (and next) we will have stories from the Gospel of John. And John's Gospel puts Jesus in Jerusalem right away...in Chapter Two...and he's already geared up and ready to challenge the system of Empire that has permeated everything...including religion. 

And--oh my--what a difficult text to have on the same weekend that an important commemoration was happening on the Georgia coast to remember the largest slave auction in the 19th century!

This was a moment of "Come Holy Spirit" as I wrestled with how to say things that need saying in a way that they might be heard...understood...and taken in with the hope it might make at least a few people do some self-evaluation and make a turn toward a way of striving for equality and equity.

That is my prayer.

See what you think.

Text: John 2: 13-22

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Most of the Episcopal Churches I’ve been to in my lifetime have something we don’t have here:

a plethora of stained-glass windows.

The sunlight streams through them creating beautiful and mesmerizing patterns of golds…blues and reds on the floors and the walls.

Often times…the scenes depicted in the stained-glass feature one of the Gospel stories about Jesus.

Sometimes….he’s the surprisingly Northern European white Jesus with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Other artists have captured him with darker hair and a darker complexion more reminiscent of people from the Middle East.

Frequently…Jesus is shown lovingly cradling a lamb in his arms.

Or he’s washing Peter’s feet.

Or talking with the Samaritan woman at the well.

In more majestic imagery…he’s either ascending into heaven…or we see him in his dazzling brightness of the Transfiguration through his bleached white robe.

Those are all great.

But once…just once… I would love to see a Jesus in a stained-glass window…his nostrils flaring…his muscles flexing as he’s flipping tables…sending money flying everywhere and chasing people and animals with a whip of cords!

I want to see the human Jesus…the one who knows what it means to get angry and be fed up.

I think a lot of people would be able to maybe see themselves in such an image of Jesus.

I think it’s important for us to understand why Jesus has this massive hissy fit in the Temple that seems so un-Jesus-like.

One of the shortcomings of the church…at least in this priest’s opinion…is that we’ve allowed our Sunday schools…especially for children…to cast this scene as “Jesus cleanses the Temple.” We’ve stopped the lesson at a simple, “Jesus was angry about the House of Prayer being a marketplace.”

That’s really only half right.

And that half-truth has fed into some of the anti-Semitism that we see raise its ugly head… especially in this time of year…and is becoming prevalent in this country and around the world.

It’s that whole ugly idea that Jews only care about money and controlling commerce.

So what’s “the more” going on here in the Gospel?

To understand Jesus’ anger…we need to look at both the where and when that this happens.

This Second Temple…built by Herod the Great over the course of 46 years…was an enormous structure….the size of five football fields…. a massive stone building taking up several city blocks…with many entry gates.

It was the center of everything in Jerusalem.

There was an area for prayer happening in the Jewish section of the Temple…and there was also something like a shopping mall.

Along the Temple’s outer courtyard was the place reserved for Gentiles.

This is where the money changers would have worked…taking in Roman coins with the image of Caesar…in exchange for the Jewish currency which had no graven image.

Think about those Ten Commandments we recited in the Decalogue and heard in our first reading.

The Roman Empire treated Caesar as a God.

Jews would never attempt to make an image of God…so the money used to pay the Temple tax had no face on it.

The time that this scene takes place is just before Passover.

Lots of Jews would have come from all over the countryside into Jerusalem to commemorate the festival of their deliverance from Egyptian slavery…and liberation from oppression.

They would be needing to come into the temple to get their lambs for sacrifice…or doves if they didn’t have money.

Doves were reserved for the poor.

Even Mary and Joseph had to buy a pair of doves for their sacrificial offering.

Doves were also used by lepers and menstruating women.

So all the activities going on in this part of the Temple were normal.

Sacrifices and getting the right coinage were part of the religious practice. 

That’s not what was sticking in Jesus’ craw.

What infuriated him…and it was the thing that sent John the Baptizer out to the Jordan River in protest… was that the Roman Empire…and its religious cronies…had so profaned the religion within this structure that the poor were especially exploited and oppressed by the system.  

This is why in the Gospel accounts…we hear that Jesus particularly targeted the tables of money changers and dove sellers.

And…since this is the Gospel of John…Jesus is making it explicit that his body…his own flesh and blood… is replacing this temple of massive stones.

That the religion of justice is in him and not the ginormous edifice with demands of taxes and sacrifices by the poor.

What Jesus could not abide by was this conflation of religion with the privilege and wealth…and how it oppressed the poor.

His protest was against an unjust system.

Such systems still exist.

In fact…it’s something that has haunted the Episcopal Church.

At the founding of our United States…a number of the most powerful men who crafted and signed the Declaration of Independence and created our U.S. Constitution were affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

One of those men was General Pierce Butler…a South Carolina Senator and veteran of the Revolutionary War.

General Butler was farmer and landowner.

He held property in several states…including much of St. Simon’s Island.

His Butler Plantation in Darien, Georgia, was left to his grandson Pierce Mease Butler.

The Butlers owned the land in Darien are where St. Andrew’s and St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Churches stand today.

Owning so much land had made the Butler family quite wealthy…. growing sea island cotton and rice.

But with that generational wealth comes the truth about how they were able to become one of the richest families in the country during the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The Butlers owned slaves.

Hundreds of them.

When Pierce Mease Butler’s English wife…the actress Fanny Kemble…came to the States and stayed on one of the Butler plantations…she was horrified by the treatment of the slaves.

She couldn’t accept the arguments her husband and others made to justify the institution.

She became an abolitionist.

As you might imagine…the marriage fell apart and she went back to England.

Maybe she threw over a table or two.

One of the saddest moments in the history of Georgia and the young country…happened on this date in 18-59.

Pierce Butler…having squandered 700-thousand dollars of his wealth…sold 436 African men…women and children at a racetrack outside of Savannah. 

It was the single largest slave auction in the nation’s history.

It took two days…and it poured down rain from the start to the finish.

They call it The Weeping Time.

The thought was that the heavens wept… watching families being sold like cattle.

There are commemorations and vigils of this travesty happening on the Georgia coast in Darien this weekend.

Pierce Butler regained some of his wealth…about 300-thousand dollars’ worth.

But at what cost and pain inflicted on others?

To benefit from a system that dehumanizes people?

And at what further cost to us?

Because sadly…we’ve been handed this legacy…wealth gained on the backs and bodies of other people.

This is the heritage we have…all of us…as a people.

Fortunately…the Episcopal Church is doing the work this weekend by participating in the vigil in Darien to own its part of that heritage.

This is how we begin the work of repairing the breach of history.

We can’t change what has happened in the past.

But we can acknowledge that it happened.

And then we can metaphorically work toward flipping over the tables of systems that have benefitted some… at the great expense of others.

One small but helpful step is to pay attention to where and how we spend our money.

Maybe instead of eating at a chain restaurant…perhaps we go to a local one owned and operated by a black or brown family.

That’s one simple and yet conscious way to make a difference.

Our Gospel is giving us permission to see inequality…and to get angry about it.

Our God calls us to not just get angry…but to flip the script and to take actions to address injustices in the system.

Perhaps one day…I’ll finally see a stained-glass window in an Episcopal Church of a blonde blue-eyed Jesus turning over tables in the temple.

That’ll be a church ready to live into our Baptismal Covenant: resisting evil, striving for peace and justice, and respecting the dignity of every human being.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

Christ the King: A Sermon for the Last Sunday After Pentecost Year A

 

At long last, we've reached the end of this very long season of "After Pentecost." Ready or not, Advent is coming...and that means new projects to run alongside that idea that we're supporsed to be "waiting with anticipation" the coming of Christ. Seems the way of the church is to get as busy as possible before Jesus shows up!! 

I'm taking on a fun, and ambitious, project of doing a staged reading of the Gospel of Mark. The script is almost 90 pages, meaning that this will probably take anywhere from 90-100 minutes to do this reading. I'm hoping we'll get an audience for it. It's slated to go up on Saturday, February 10th. So we'll see what happens.

OK...back to today. I found myself this year bothered by the idea of "Christ the KING." It isn't the Christ part that was troubling; I'm really cool with the idea of Jesus being the head of things. 

It's this "King" business which was troubling. There are a lot of political leaders these days who think that they are the King of the country, or the city, or the state. The Matthew Gospel has the king deciding who are sheep and who are goats...something that...again...our political leaders have engaged in this behavior way too much lately. 

So most of this sermon was really me wrestling with these questions...and taking the congregation on a ride with me. See what you think.

Texts: Ephesians 1: 15-23; Matthew 25: 31-46

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Good morning! And welcome to the Last Sunday After Pentecost…also known as Christ the King Sunday.

It’s odd to call this Christ the King Sunday.

One could argue that in any Christian Church…Christ ought to be King every Sunday.

And it was relatively recent history that this last Sunday following Pentecost became Christ the King Sunday.

This whole idea started in 1925 with Pope Pius XI.

At the end of World War I…there was growing secularism in Europe and fascism was beginning to take root.

The Pope decided the best way to combat these dual pressures on the church was to declare…emphatically…that Christ is King and to mark a particular Sunday…the last one in October right before All Saints’ Day… as Christ the King Sunday.

In 19-69…Pope Paul VI thought the Last Sunday After Pentecost…and right before Advent… was the better placement for the celebration of Jesus as Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

And so that’s where we are today.

This celebration of Christ the King does raise some interesting questions for us in our time...particularly when we think about that whole history of how this day came to be a special day on the church calendar.

Just as in the era of the 1920s…we here in the 2020s are living at a time when more and more people are identifying as “Nones.”

That’s N-O-N-E-S.

They’re not interested in Christianity or any religious group.

In this country and around the world…our politics are skewing in the direction of authoritarianism…a system which centralizes power to a few and demands loyalty to an ethic that runs counter to that of a God of Love and Prince of Peace.

Perhaps we need to make a renewal of our commitment to this idea of Christ as King.

But then that poses another problem.

We live in a pluralistic society…one where we must contend with the idea that not all people who profess a faith in God also understand Jesus as the Son of God…let alone believe in a God who comes to us as the Holy Spirit, too.

We have a very particular understanding of who Jesus is.

And our thoughts on Jesus are not the same as our fellow descendants from our Biblical ancestor Abraham.

And then there are Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans: oh, my! They too live in our society…and they worship in a faith that calls them to a higher good for all creation.

It might then seem a bit arrogant for us to assert Christ as King.

Here’s the good news: we don’t have to diminish Jesus or shy away from our belief in Jesus as Christ the King.

We can have our beliefs about Christ as King and love and accept our siblings of other traditions or no-traditions at all.

Because they’re not excluded from the kingdom of God in Christ…even if they don’t profess Jesus as the Son of God.

One of the early church fathers…Irenaeus… found this hope for inclusion of all in the Letter to the Ephesians that we heard this morning.

For Irenaeus… this passage reiterates the idea that Jesus’ life, ministry, and death was in fact for all of humanity…and not just an exclusive few believers.

Jesus came into the world to be a Second Adam… restoring all people to the right relationship with God that was lost in the Garden of Eden.

The twentieth century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer also emphasized that point. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison,” Bonhoeffer says that Christ wasn’t just a person; he was the person who represents all of humanity…no divisions between people. He is all people…and came as a savior for all of the world.

Karl Rahner…another twentieth century Jesuit priest and theologian…put forward an even more radical and controversial theory.

Rahner suggested that people who never heard the Gospel are “anonymous Christians”…having benefitted from Christ without even knowing it. His theory was highly influential on the Roman Catholic Church’s Vatican II statement. The Roman Church had to struggle with its antisemitism following World War II and the Holocaust. Rahner’s theory helped them find their way toward issuing an apology.

All this sounds fantastic, right?

It keeps asserting that Christ is King.

But then what about this passage from Matthew’s Gospel?

Aren’t some people sheep and others goats?

Doesn’t this sound like a more exclusive…only Christians get eternal life…talk?

I suppose one could read it that way…. if we believe that only Christians do the clothing of people, feeding them, offering them water when they’re thirsty, being kind to strangers, visiting the sick and those in prison.

But we know that’s not true.

In fact, we know plenty of people who call themselves “Christian” who not only don’t do these things; they have invested more time and energy in attacking fellow followers of Christ.

We can see that playing out right now with our siblings in the Methodist church.

And even the Southern Baptist Convention has turned on some of its own.  

The English hymnwriter and minister Samuel John Stone captured this well with these words in the old standard “The Church’s One Foundation”:

“Though with a scornful wonder men see her sore oppressed

By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.”

Thank goodness Stone completes that stanza with “soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song!”

When we sit in judgment of each other…deciding who is a sheep and who is a goat…we’re putting ourselves in that seat at the right hand of God…and making ourselves King or Queen of the universe.

I think if we are honest with ourselves…we’re all bouncing back and forth between being a sheep and being a goat.

There are days when we get it all right… and others where we fall short of this expectation that we will care for the least and lowest among us…either out of ignorance or exhaustion or both.

What I think is so telling about this vision of the kingdom is that those who Jesus declares as “righteous” and even those who are “unrighteous” are totally taken off-guard.

Both groups are like, “Huh? When did I do all that?” or “We never saw you in need? When did we miss that?”

The message seems to be that we can’t know which group we’re in.

Nor should we be so quick to assume which camp we belong to.

What we can do is take in the lessons Jesus teaches through the Gospels…trust in the power of God’s love…and then do our best to emulate Christ…both in our giving and receiving.

By making that our priority…and our ethic of living…we establish Christ as the King of our hearts and minds.

In that way we can only hope for a world where God’s kingdom will not only come on earth as it is in heaven…but will be seen and experienced through us.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

God's Faithfulness: The Story of Hagar

 After two straight Sundays of Matthew 10, I decided I wanted to put my attention on another reading. And then I opened the First Reading text and saw it was the troubling story of Hagar. This is one that I imagine other priests using the Episcopal Church's Track One probably thought, "Ummm...let me talk about Paul's Letter to the Romans...or I'll stick with Matthew."

But not this preacher! I couldn't help it. I read the exile of Hagar and Ishmael, and I felt I couldn't ignore her, the Egyptian woman, who was used and then rejected. 

There is simply too much happening in the United States these days with the way women...and most especially black women...have had their bodies ruled by others. 

And the assault on the teaching of history...with concerted efforts to erase the experiences of different groups in the United States...made this story, which we share with our Islamic cousins, an important text to be lifted up on a Sunday morning. 

I wish I could say that I got rave reviews for this one. I did hear a few positive comments. But most said nothing. Oh, well. Perhaps reading the text on your own will make it better. 

Text: Genesis 21:8-21

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Humans love to tell the stories of our lives.

We like to tell the ones where we are the heroes of our stories.

And we try to forget the ones where we aren’t so heroic.

When it comes to the stories in the Scriptures…we get the proverbial good…the bad…and the “oh no, we didn’t do that, did we?”

That last category applies to our first reading from this morning…the account from Genesis of what happened to Hagar and her son…Ishmael.

Those of us who have been raised up in our Judeo-Christian culture and churches know the couple Abraham and Sarah as our biblical ancestors.

We probably remember that from this elderly couple comes Isaac….and then Jacob and Joseph…all the way down to King David.

The promise God made to Abraham that he would father many nations and kings all comes to pass.

We may know that there is a lot of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis…specifically struggles between brothers for who has the birth right?

Who is favored one of the family?

Who has God chosen?

Often, we learn there are binaries in these sibling relationships.

One brother is more plodding and pedestrian.

The other brother is the one who is “the gift” or the favored.

And it’s the gifted one whose story gets told and we learn about him.

But the Scriptures aren’t some carefully curated history book.

And they don’t let us get away without acknowledging that there’s more to our biblical story than what gets lifted up in Sunday School.

This morning’s reading…where we hear about Abraham’s older son Ishmael and his mother Hagar….is a prime example of the Bible pulling back the veil and showing us a darker side of Abraham and Sarah….and how they treated in the foreigner in their family.

In fact….how Abraham and Sarah used and abused Hagar was pretty rotten.

Our lectionary does a lot of skipping over large sections of the Genesis narrative. So in order to understand Hagar’s plight, we need to know more of the back story.

So here we go.

Hagar is an Egyptian…given as a slave-girl to Sarah.

We don’t know why…we just know that it is what it is.

Sarah and Abraham were both so old that they didn’t believe they could have children.

We heard last week that Sarah laughed at God’s suggestion she would have a child.

Because Sarah didn’t believe she would have a child….she told Abraham to go sleep with Hagar. From that surrogate relationship…Hagar had a son by Abraham and the child was named Ishmael.

After that…Sarah resented Hagar….treated her cruelly…to the point where Hagar ran away.

An angel of the Lord found Hagar hiding and told her to go back to Sarah….with a promise that there would be a way forward for Hagar.

And that brings us to this moment in today’s reading where Sarah spies Ishmael and Isaac playing.

Our matriarch gets enraged.

She demands that Abraham get rid of Hagar and her son.

Abraham complies.

He casts them out.

Sends them into the wilderness with just a skin of water and some bread.

Good luck!!

Hagar and Ishmael were two characters that stood in the way of the story we have come to follow…the one of Abraham…Sarah…and their son Isaac.

This is OUR story because God pledged to Abraham that it would be Sarah’s child who would carry forward the covenant God was making with God’s people (Gen. 17:19-21).

And it’s through Abraham and Sarah…and their creation of Isaac…that we trace the lineage that leads to a young girl named Mary and her carpenter husband Joseph who raided a child they called Emmanuel…..and we know the rest of that story.

Now the Genesis story could have stopped with sending Hagar and Ishmael away.

But that wasn’t the end….at least not for God.

In fact…Hagar gets to do something no other woman at this point in Genesis has been able to do: she converses with God’s messenger…and thus with the God who has kept watch over her and her son through this whole ordeal.

And just when all seems lost…God provides water in the desert for Hagar and Ishmael.

Hagar’s story isn’t limited to our Scriptures.

She and Ishmael are part of the creation story of Islam.

In Islam…she is Hajar.

The way the story is told in the Qur’an centers more on Abraham…or Ibrahim… and his relationship to Ishmael. Instead of wordlessly sending them off…Ibrahim offers a prayer of protection…seeking kindness for them. And instead of a well appearing in the wilderness…it’s Hajar who runs between two mountains in search of water for her son.

In THEIR telling of the story….God sees her desperation and meets her action with one of God’s own: a spring of water comes up when Ishmael strikes his foot on the ground.

Ishmael becomes an Islamic prophet…and the Hajj…the journey to Mecca with this run between two mountains…is one of the five pillars of Islam.

The same story of deliverance told by Muslims is the story told by Jews and Christians.

And in both…we hear that even though Abraham and Sarah are cruel and dismissive….God has not abandoned Hagar and Ishmael.

God sees and hears the cries of the disinherited.

God’s response to their pleas may seem delayed…but ultimately… God will come to the aid of the one who cries out for help.

God is faithful that way…even when God’s people are not.

God watches over all the nations.

God’s love for Israel…extends to the Egyptian.

Because God’s love is unconditional and all-encompassing.

I think it says something that this story of Hagar didn’t land on the cutting room floor.

It shows us that in our biblical ancestry…not all the stories are heroic.

And…especially in the Old Testament…the scribes didn’t feel the need to edit out the less-flattering tales of even the most highly favored.

That this story is part of the cultural heritage of our Abrahamic cousin…Islam…also shows that there are other stories.

We can have different views of the same event…all descending from that singular truth that God is the faithful one.

And in sharing a common story….we are interconnected…and bound together as part of the larger human family.

I think that can serve as a great reminder to us as we live in a time when there is such debate over who gets to tell the story of who we are as Americans and as people.

There’s been so much noise about how and what stories we get to tell about the way this nation came to be that we forget there are many stories…many understandings.

And we have nothing to fear in hearing those parts that are not as flattering.

On Monday…we marked Juneteenth…a new federal holiday which celebrates the delayed news delivered to slaves in Texas in 1865 that they ere now free. Texas hadn’t bothered to let the slaves know about the Emancipation Proclamation signed two years earlier.

Tuesday…we recognized World Refugee Day.

We have 110-million people displaced from their homelands…many of them due to wars in places like in Syria and Ukraine. We still wrestle with the best way to help resettle people who find themselves in peril.

And, of course, this is also LGBTQ+ Pride month… a time that celebrates the three days in 1969 when the gay community…led by Marsha P. Johnson and drag queens and kings…stood up to police violence in New York City and asserted their rights to live free from state harassment and intimidation. The intimidation is on-going…only now happening with school boards and state legislatures.

These stories are all part of the larger narrative about our country and the world.

They aren’t pretty…but they’re still part of the story…the larger story we tell about ourselves.

The biblical account of Hagar has been particularly important to African-American women as her experience speaks to the abuses and tensions between races and genders.

The author and theologian Wilda Gafney notes that Hagar’s story holds up a mirror to the dominate culture to consider how black women’s bodies have been used as commodities.

And ultimately…Hagar becomes the biblical ancestor for the likes of Harriet Tubman…who led men and women to freedom from the bondage of slavery.

The Hagar story…painful as it is…is still a story of hope.

Amidst the pain and division happening between the people of God…God keeps covenant with both…and ultimately from both Isaac and Ishmael comes many nations.

The task for us now and always is to trust in God’s faithfulness…and trust enough that we are willing to listen to each other’s pain…each other’s stories.

And in that listening…may we see that in the holiness of the Divine…we are truly one.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

Uvalde and the Need to Choose Life: A Sermon for 7C Easter

Memorial to the Uvalde, TX, victims. Image from the BBC News.

Another week, another mass shooting in America. 

And again, we, who are called to preach, must do what we can to reach the people in our congregation with a message that not only stays with the Gospel, but takes the Gospel directly into relationship with what has been happening in the world around us. 

Last week's sermon which included the shooting at the Buffalo grocery store was tough enough to talk about. This week, with the senseless killing of elementary school students and two teachers, was almost impossible. I thought, prayed, wrestled, conversed, read through our weekly lectionary and collect slowly several times. I finally forced myself to sit down and type out my sermon on Saturday morning...making a few revisions to the final product before leaving at 8:15am for Valdosta. 

I preached this message...not ending with the usual "In the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit." Perhaps if I had said it, I would have heard at least an "Amen." Instead, my words this morning were met with a deafening silence. I am painfully aware that there are gun owners in my congregation, and that I am ministering at a church in a state where the Governor has not only posed with guns in his political ads; he's recently signed legislation allowing people to conceal carry without a permit. And my church is in a "red" county.

I'm not sure what to make of that silence today. Were they thinking? Were they praying? Were they closing their ears, stewing over what I'd said? 

No telling. May the Spirit do whatever work on those who heard my message. 

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Scriptures for the 7th Sunday of Easter: Acts 16:16-34; Rev.22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26.

Prayer: Grant us, O Lord, your wisdom as we face the questions of our day; reveal your faithful path and illumine our hearts and minds to your will; through Jesus Christ your son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. (riff off of Daily Prayers for All Seasons, 144)

 

Our opening Collect of the Day asks for God to not leave us “comfortless.” Seems a simple ask for this time in our liturgical calendar year. 

A much more complicated thought…given what has happened in the country in the past two weeks. 

Last Thursday was the Feast of the Ascension, the day when Jesus…again…exits from the everyday existence of the disciples…this time to become reunited with God called “Father.” Once more, the friends of Jesus are left to continue on his mission without their beloved leader at their sides. Just as with his death on Good Friday…this absence plunges them into liminal space. 

Liminal space is that peculiar world of the grief-stricken. 

Everything is moving at warp speed, but grief has put those mourning a profound loss in some kind of weird box of neither here nor there. Sometimes, the only thing one can do when in that box is accept that’s where they are…this liminal space…and about the only thing to be done is slow down…way down…to stillness. And it is in stillness…that many of us…even the least religious of us… turn to prayer. Prayer is the way we stretch our hearts and minds toward the Divine in the hope that we are being heard. We may not have words. Sometimes we only have deep sighs. Always we are expressing our lament in search of that balm for our aching soul.

“Prayer” is at the center of our readings this morning. 

And prayer has power when it is put into action. 

We see how prayers and songs shook the foundation of the prison, freeing Paul and Silas…not to mention others…including the jailer. No longer needing to occupy that space of keeping a watchful eye over these two rabble-rousers against the Roman Empire…the jailer sheds his own shackles to become free to follow Jesus. 

Our Revelation reading contains a most interesting prayer…with the repeated word: “Come.” 

A surface understanding of this passage might lead us to think that “Come” means John is calling down Jesus to us. But the theologian Abraham Heschel puts a different spin on what might be happening here. 

Rather than God being the object of our desire…we are the objects of God’s desire. Instead of Jesus coming to us…John is saying, “Come to Jesus.” Become enlightened when we’d previously been content to sit in darkness. Truly accept that we are creatures of God and become one with Jesus. 

That’s exactly what’s at the center of Jesus’ prayer in our Gospel. 

We’re at the conclusion of his extensive good-bye. And if we look closely we see that this prayer is meant not just for his disciples. It is meant for us, the ones who read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the words and stories of our biblical ancestors.  

Jesus offered this prayer, knowing full well that his own life was about to end in a brutal and horrible way. 

He knew that the glory he was about to experience on the cross was not as the world saw “glory.” 

This glory would bring him in closer contact with the suffering, the forgotten, and the oppressed. 

Jesus brings in love. Not an emotional feeling of love. 

This is the love of God…the experience of being in such a complete relationship with God that transcends all intellectual arguments, and can’t be measured through formulas or mathematical proofs. 

In the stillness of this moment, as Jesus works through his own anxiety about what is to come through his final will and testament, he is calling for future generations to live in unity and Godly love for one another.  

That is his prayer. 

I really do wonder if the disciples felt some pangs of dread listening to their leader pray? Did this prayer give them comfort in those days following the earth-shattering horror of Jesus’ death? 

What about after he returned and then left them again? Were they able to remember these words and to realize that their dread and sorrow at Good Friday turned to hope and joy at the resurrection? Could they hold onto that hope when he ascended for the final time?

Those are some of the same questions for us…especially as our country grapples again…for a second week…with what is nothing less than the evil of gun violence. Last week, it was the terror of white supremacist hatred unleashed on Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo. This week…it was the unthinkable of yet another teenager with an AR-15 entering an elementary school and murdering two beloved teachers and 19 fourth graders in a Texas town the size of Moultrie. 

Just as Buffalo recalled the shocks of past acts of violence…what happened in Uvalde Texas was eerily similar to what happened in Newtown Connecticut almost ten years ago. 

They were two days away from school letting out for the summer. They’d had a celebration of those students who had made the honor roll at Robb Elementary. They’d just come in from recess where they’d been running around and playing with their friends. 

School was going to end in two days. It wasn’t supposed to end at that moment. And this became the 27^th school shooting in America this year alone. 

Like many of us, when I heard the news I sat motionless and numb. Tears would come later. I learned that the wife of one of my friends from seminary had grown up in Uvalde and had gone to Robb Elementary School. Then another Texas friend expressed her hurt and anger on social media because one of her friends had lost a grandchild in the shooting. 

The circles of how this violence touches people extend well beyond the borders of any town or city or state where this happens.  And the circles are getting larger and larger.

Wednesday I was meeting with a couple of different clergy and diocesan groups, and naturally, this subject of gun violence was first and foremost on our minds. And the question came up…as one might expect…about how this violence keeps happening? Is it guns? Is it mental illness? Is it both? And what about God and free will? 

As creatures of God we do have free will. We also have been blessed with reason. And the third leg of our three-legged stool is Scripture.  

If we look at the Book of Deuteronomy, there is a fairly clear directive for how we should exercise that free will: 

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God^* that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days…”(Deut. 30:15-20b)

If we apply reason to this…then it would seem that if we want to see to this cycle of violence end, then we need to choose life over death. 

We need to turn thoughts and prayers into actions and outcomes. 

We need to set aside whatever other gods we have come to worship…and set our hearts, our minds, and our strength back on the God of love.

Jesus prayed, “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me.” May we be brave enough to show the love and light of Christ and stand for an end to this violence.

Come, Lord Jesus.

 

To Tell the Truth: A Trinity Sunday Sermon

The common joke about this day…Trinity Sunday…is that it is often referred to as “Deacon Sunday.” That’s because the priest tends to punt on this day and has the deacon preach the sermon. And since the deacon is in charge today…well…I’m the one in Seminary—so tag I’m it.

Our reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians is peculiar. It’s the conclusion, the wrap-up sentences of this missive to one of his church plants. And what’s interesting is this is the only time Paul ever uses a trinitarian conclusion to a letter. Oh, sure…he often ends his letters with citing the “grace of Christ.” But here it’s extended to include “the love of God” and “the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

The grace of Christ…Jesus’ willingness to go to the grave so that we could have life.

The love of God…so much so that God gave us God’s Word…God’s Son…so that we could taste what it means to live free.

The communion of the Holy Spirit…ah, yes! That Spirit which is our every breath…that blew open the hearts and minds of our ancestors and gave them courage to speak in every tongue their truth as followers of The Way.

Grace and Love all intertwined and knit together in communion…all three. All one.

Paul probably needed to summon the strength of that threesome for the times in which he was living. You see…as nice as this conclusion sounds, it’s coming at the end of three chapters worth of angry appeal…and calling out the corruption and the problems that were growing in the church. People had come into the community and started spreading lies about Paul claiming that he was stealing from them and wasn’t a real apostle. I imagine for the man who had worked so hard to build up this Christian community, such attacks on him and discord probably felt like a gut punch. How could this people turn on him and believe the purveyors of falsehoods? In the lines preceding this passage, Paul says something that I think speaks to us today:

Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! (2Cor.13:5).

This is our now. We too, have the apostle’s words saying to us: examine yourself. Is Christ not within you? We are grappling with the realities of racial division made starkly evident in the most recent deaths of Ahmaud Aubery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Our siblings of color…many of whom are the essential workers we have depended upon during this COVID-19 pandemic and have been the backbone of American business for centuries have told us they are tired.

They’re hoarse from screaming for justice.

They are all cried out for mercy’s sake.

These events have brought us to a place where we must examine ourselves, test ourselves to see if we are living faithfully into the grace of Jesus. This type of self-examination requires us to be willing to be vulnerable and let our guards down. We have to recognize and confess to the ways in which we have been both blind and complicit to the brokenness in our nation.

We recently had a great example of what that honest assessment looks like from our new bishop, the Right Reverend Frank Logue. I don’t know if you watched his sermon from last Wednesday night’s diocesan Evening Prayer service. If you didn’t, I highly commend it to you as Must-See TV. He did truth-telling about his life, his background, and realizations that he was OK just sitting on the sidelines thinking that he was immune from what was happening around him. That is the lullaby of living in a white body in America. I have heard it, too.

When my wife and I signed the lease on the house that we eventually bought in Tallahassee, we were elated. We were in a neighborhood near parks, downtown, and had our friends as neighbors right across the street. The man who was our landlord was also pleased. He didn’t question that we were two single professional women renting this home that he had built for his father. Our friends had vouched for us as the type of people he’d want to have living there. As he handed us the keys and waxed nostalgic about this house and the one next door—which he also had built and had been his family’s home—he told us how he had been mayor during the Civil Rights era in Tallahassee, and he assured us that we would never have to worry about having “colored people” next door. We were the right people for that house…because we were white. And in the comfort of our whiteness…we said nothing.

Truth-telling is difficult work, but it is an important task and it is the work toward true freedom. Jesus in John’s gospel tells his disciples that if they continue in his word…stay true to his teachings…they will know the truth and the truth will set them free (John 8:31-32). Truth meaning that they must remain steadfast in their relationship to God. And this brings us back to Love.

Living in love with one another lifts a weight off the mind and the heart, gives us more lightness in our being and allows us to see more clearly the light of Christ in the other person. We ourselves then can live more faithfully into the grace of Christ, the love of God and in communion with the Holy Spirit. That’s the trinitarian nature of God. It is about three being bound together…being interrelated and interconnected…being unifed even in diversity. God invites us into this same relationship. Right here. Right now.

May the Wisdom of God, the Love of God, and the Grace of God strengthen us to be Christ’s hands and heart in this world, in the name of the Holy Trinity.