All posts by Miranda Hassett

Inclusive church, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, November 17

The letter to the Hebrews is a challenging read. We are, fundamentally, not its intended audience, and you need a lot of context to understand what any given passage is trying to say. But let’s try to find a foothold in the text, today. 

Hebrews was probably written fairly early, like some of Paul’s letters that are also preserved as Epistles. In the year 70, about 35 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Great Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army, in the course of crushing a revolt against Roman rule in Judea. As Jesus predicts, in our Gospel today! 

The loss of the Temple was a HUGE event for both Judaism and early Christianity. Now, the author of Hebrews writes a lot about the religious practices of the Temple. The destruction of the Temple would fit into their argument really well – but they don’t mention it. So, they’re likely writing before that happens, the mid-60s or so. 

The letter is clearly addressed to a Jewish Christian audience – people who were pious and committed Jews, and then also became followers of Jesus, without abandoning their Jewish identity. That’s why it’s called the letter to the Hebrews – meaning, here, people of Jewish heritage. 

The letter offers Jewish Christians a series of ways to think about Jesus in terms of Jewish faith and teaching, such as presenting Jesus as a new Moses, and Jesus as both a great High Priest, and the ultimate Sacrifice, in the terms of Temple worship. The overall message is: You can be deeply grounded in Judaism and still follow and worship Jesus!

There’s also a recurring call in the letter to stay faithful to Jesus and the church. This author may be writing to people who are considering abandoning their new faith and returning to Judaism – perhaps in the face of some persecution. 

It’s hard to tell in English translation, but scholars say this letter is a very literate and sophisticated piece of writing. It’s written in more elegant Greek than, for example, the letters of Paul. This author was educated and eloquent. 

So… who was this author? Who wrote this letter? In terms of theme and timing, it was probably someone close to the apostle Paul, and with a significant role as a leader and teacher in the early decades of the church. But interestingly, this person’s name isn’t recorded. Hebrews is anonymous; if a name was ever attached to it, it was lost early on. 

There’s a theory among some scholars that this letter might have been written by Priscilla, or Prisca. Priscilla and her husband Aquila were Jews from Italy who met Paul in Judea and became Christians. They then traveled with Paul on some of his missionary journeys. They’re mentioned several times in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. On one occasion they take another preacher aside to explain some Jesus stuff to him more clearly. 

The couple is also mentioned twice in Paul’s letters. Priscilla and Prisca are the same name – the “illa” is a diminutive. Paul doesn’t use the diminutive; he calls her Prisca. It’s a little like everyone else calls her Becky but Paul calls her Rebecca. Make of that you will! 

Paul also names her as a co-worker: “Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus,” in Romans, implying they had ended up in Rome. And in First Corinthians: “Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord.” So, this couple were leaders of a local church community, at one point.  

But why name Prisca, specifically, as the possible author here? BECAUSE the letter comes down to us as anonymous. This fairly remarkable piece of early church theology, clearly the work of one voice, is not attributed. We know from the trajectory of New Testament writings that for the first couple of decades, the church followed Jesus’ lead in taking women seriously as spiritual leaders. Paul joyfully shared leadership and ministry with women like Prisca, Phoebe, and Lydia. 

But over time patriarchy reasserted itself. Women started to be sidelined, and told to be quiet in church. Formal church leadership became mostly a dude thing, for a couple of millennia. 

So, the theory goes – and it makes sense to me! – maybe Prisca wrote this letter, and the first generation of Christians knew that. But over time that tradition fell away, and the book became anonymous… kind of like the Harry Potter novels. 

If any of the men surrounding Paul had written this, their name would still be attached to it. One scholar writes, “The lack of any firm data concerning the identity of the author… suggests a deliberate blackout more than a case of collective loss of memory.” (Gilbert Bilezikian)

So what does Prisca have to say to us today? 

In the verses just before this passage, Prisca is wrapping up one of her extended analogies about Jesus and Temple worship. She says: in the Great Temple, the high priests have keep offering the appointed sacrifices, every day, because those rites can never fully take away human sinfulness. But Jesus gave himself as the ultimate sacrifice, which restores and sanctifies all believers, and eliminates the need for any further ritual sacrifices, ever. 

(By the way, for the folks who feel particularly burdened by substitutionary atonement theology – the idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed in our place, in order for an angry God to forgive us – the letter to the Hebrews, as a whole, could be a helpful read. Prisca does play with that idea, or something close to it; but she also works through four or five other ways of framing the meaning of Jesus’ life and death through Jewish Scriptures and practices. The early church was using all kinds of metaphors to try to describe what folks had experienced and come to believe about Jesus. It’s much later that substitutionary atonement emerged as a dominant theme, and you are 100% free to take it or leave it.) 

As our passage begins, Prisca continues to riff on the practices of Temple worship: the curtain that separated the holiest place that only a few could enter; the blood and water sprinkled in rituals of repentance and purification; the ritual washing that prepared someone to approach God. Prisca says: We have all that, always, already, through Jesus. It’s done, once and for all. All we have to do is hold onto it, to our commitment to Christ and our hope in Christ, without wavering. To be as faithful to Jesus as he is to us.

And then she says one of my favorite lines in the Epistles: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”  … 

That bit about “not neglecting to meet together” is clearly a little dig at folks who don’t get to church that regularly. And “all the more as you see the Day approaching” is pointing towards the end of time, the day when God will turn the world upside down and right side up. 

Prisca’s generation of Christians expected it any moment. We have learned, two thousand years later, that there will be many seasons of war, and rumors of war; of conflict, famine, and disaster; and that all of that is still just the birthpangs of the new world God is laboring to bring forth, with our help. 

Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. Provoke is an attention-grabbing word there, isn’t it? It’s only in the New Testament in three other places: once about a fight among the apostles; once when Paul is stirred up by idol worship in Athens; and once in the famous passage about love, from 1 Corinthians: Love is not irritable – not easily provoked. The Greek word means: Provoke, irritate, exasperate, incite… 

Provoke one another to love and good deeds? Can’t we encourage each other, instead? Inspire one another, maybe? … 

But the thing is: I know exactly what it feels like to be provoked to love and good deeds. 

It’s the interruption of someone at the church door who needs help with rent, or gas to get to their new job, or some clothes for the kids they just took in. 

It’s a longtime member asking a tough question that opens up a whole new direction in ministry. Or it’s a new member with particular needs, or particular hopes, pushing us, pushing me, to make space for new priorities.

It’s having someone tell me: We can’t just pretend that conflict didn’t happen. We should talk it out and learn from it. 

It’s deciding, a decade ago, to clarify our welcome for LGTBQ+ people, and then discovering we have work to do on actually BEING truly welcoming. And then having new people show up and say: I heard about y’all; are you ready be my church? 

And having people who’ve been here their whole lives say: Will you still be my church if I show up as my true self? 

So many of the directions in which we’ve changed, grown, stretched, or deepened, in the past many years, are because some person or group in this parish, or outside it, provoked us to love and good deeds. 

I love this verse because for Prisca, it’s not enough for people to keep the faith, to hold fast to the confession of our hope. Her vision for the church extends beyond some kind of bunkered, locked-down faithfulness. She wants to see her people, Christ’s people, living faith in action, in love and good deeds. 

And she knows that the way that happens isn’t all warm fuzzies and affirmation, marshmallows and daisies. We ask things of each other. We challenge each other. We struggle, sometimes, with directions, priorities, balancing needs, allocating scarce resources, managing anxiety, holding grief. 

But Prisca knows that that’s just how it is – that’s what happens when people choose to belong to each other, and to God. It’s part of the work, and even when it’s hard, it’s good. It’s holy. 

So let us consider, beloveds, how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, and to encourage one another – all the more as we see God’s Day approaching. Amen. 

Big Questions, Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Nov. 10

There’s a strong theme that runs through our readings today. 

And that’s a little bit of a surprise, because these readings don’t belong together. 

The Gospel we just heard is the Gospel assigned for this Sunday. 

The Leviticus reading comes from the Our Money Story materials we’re using this season, in conjunction with our giving campaign. 

And the Ruth lesson was supposed to be last week – but we did All Saints on Sunday instead of the regular Sunday readings. So I bumped this reading forward because I love the book of Ruth!

So these are very assorted readings. But somehow they hang together better than the assigned readings often do. And the thread – or maybe it’s a rope! – that ties them together is the question of how we tend to the needs of the vulnerable. 

Leviticus is one of the books of the Torah, the Law, telling God’s people how to live as holy people of a holy God. Leviticus has some hard and weird stuff in it, and has kind of a bad reputation. But there’s also a lot in Leviticus about justice and mercy and ecological wholeness. 

The parts we heard today lay out the practice of gleaning. If you are growing food, whether it’s wheat or grapes or olives or whatever: at harvest time, you don’t have your workers take everything. You leave the corners of the field untouched; you leave some bunches of grapes on the vine. Then those who need it can come and harvest, too. That’s what gleaning is. 

The text goes on to talk about the year of Jubilee – how every fifty years, everybody’s supposed to get their ancestral land back, and you’re supposed to let the land rest, and just eat what grows naturally. And celebrate a year of human and ecological restoration. 

This week’s theme in the Our Money Story materials is reimagine. These passages invite reimagining our relationships with land, work, resources, neighbors, God. What if our bounty is meant for everybody? What if the land’s health matters more than what it can give us? What if there is enough? 

In the happy little accident of our readings this week, we get to see gleaning in practice in the book of Ruth. The book of Ruth begins with an ending – and not a happy one. Naomi loses her husband and sons. She has no grandchildren, and her daughters-in-law aren’t even Israelites; they are from Moab, a long-time neighbor and sometimes enemy of ancient Israel. This is the end – of Naomi’s family; of her happiness and hope; of her wellbeing, without male family members to provide for her. She decides to go home to Israel, even though there’s nothing for her there, either. But then… Ruth insists on going with her. Ruth pronounces this beautiful oath, by which she makes herself Naomi’s daughter, and a Jew. And so – a story begins, after all. 

But the women still have nothing and nobody, except apparently a place to stay, some rickety ancestral hut. So Ruth goes gleaning. “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain, behind someone in whose sight I may find favor.” Ruth and Naomi will fend off starvation, because at least some of the farmers and landowners of the region follow the laws of Leviticus, and leave some grain for the poor, at harvest time. 

Next week we’ll hear how Ruth’s story turns out. (It’s only four chapters long, if you want to just sit down and read it!) What I want us to notice right now is that within their time and place, in a starkly patriarchal society, these women are incredibly vulnerable. Naomi and Ruth are both widows, and within the Biblical world, widows are seen as one of the the most socially and economically vulnerable kinds of people, lacking male protection and provision, and without the ability to own land or wealth. They are at risk of desperate poverty; of starvation; of sexual assault. That’s why, again and again and again, the Hebrew Bible defines mercy, justice, and righteousness in terms of making provision for outsiders, orphans, and widows. 

Which brings us to the widow in our Gospel, giving two copper coins to the great Temple in Jerusalem, while Jesus watches. This story has too often been treated as the jumping-off point for a stewardship sermon, with this woman’s self-sacrificial generosity praised as an example for all of us – “Give till it hurts!” Now, listen! This church’s continued existence depends on y’all’s generosity. But I can’t preach that sermon. Jesus is angry, here. The Temple, as the religious headquarters of society, is supposed to be gathering donations from those who have enough, or more than enough, and using those gifts to make provision for those with little or nothing. Instead, Jesus accuses the religious leaders who hang around the Temple of “devouring widows’ houses.” The implication is that they’re preying on the lonely and desperate, perhaps telling them that if they just give a little more, then surely God will favor them and turn things around for them. 

Jesus’ words here do point to something important about how we measure gifts – or, in this season, pledges. In our fall pledge drive we always have goals to meet and bills to pay. But we also know that a $20 a month pledge from one household may be a bigger sacrifice than a $500 a month pledge from another household. And we honor all gifts, and the care and the hope they represent. 

But Jesus is not glad to see this woman give away the money she might otherwise have used to feed herself that day. If a church or faith community is encouraging someone to give to the point of not being able to care for themselves, that is spiritual abuse. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Mieke Vandersall writes, “Widows and the perennially dispossessed were to be cared for through safety nets…, yet the systems weren’t working and needed reimagining. This widow gives all that she has and the system fails her. What would it mean if Jesus tells this story to use her act of giving as a way to highlight the corruption of the economic system in power?… How can we reimagine systems of charity that… fail to provide true transformation and liberation?”

The through-line in these readings is the question of how societies or communities tend to the needs of the vulnerable. It’s one of the more consistent themes across the complexity and diversity of the Bible: God judges us on the basis of how we, together, care and provide for those at greatest risk. Sometimes God’s expectation of care is for a whole society or people, as with the laws of Leviticus. Sometimes it’s for the church at large, or for a specific local faith community. It’s a theme in many of the Epistles, letters to the first churches. How y’all doing at caring for one another, especially the most socially and economically vulnerable among your members? And as you have capacity, how y’all doing at extending care to the same kinds of folks in your wider community? … 

That’s been the work, beloveds; that will always be the work.  

It’s not all of the work; there’s other stuff too, like learning and living God’s story, and cultivating joy, and so on.

But it’s a core part of the work. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Always. 

This week we elected our next president.

There are a lot of big feelings in the room about that. 

And a lot of big fears. 

We wonder how, as this next chapter unfolds, our society will end up treating the most vulnerable. 

Some folks have justified fears of being forgotten.

Some folks have justified fears of being targeted. 

Some folks think it’ll be fine… maybe better than fine. 

Regardless: We are almost certainly facing big changes.

I’ve read and heard so much wisdom this week. And not passive “it is what it is” wisdom. Brave wisdom. Fierce wisdom. Kind wisdom. And one big theme – for those in deep distress, grief, and fear, and for those seeking to respond to them – one big theme has been: don’t rush. Take time. 

Take time to feel. To grieve. To lick your wounds. To rest, if you can rest. To do things that bring you back to yourself. To connect and reconnect, because community, mutual belonging, is going to keep being really important.

One of the voices that stuck with me this week is Ethan Tapper, an ecologist who has a book called How to Love a Forest. He was talking about resilience. Now, the word “resilience” has gotten used and overused in reference to marginalized communities. It sometimes gets used to shame or silence suffering or struggle. “Just be more resilient!” 

Resilience doesn’t mean that big changes or big challenges don’t affect you. Tapper says, “Resilience is not capitulation. It’s not just accepting whatever happens.” 

Rather, he says, “In ecosystems, resilience is… the ability of these systems and all the species that comprise them to respond to adversity.”

Being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t take damage or get knocked down for a while. It means that there’s capacity in the organism or the system to come back, somehow. To rebound and rebuild. Even if it takes time, to rest and gather strength. Even if the new looks different from the way things were before. 

And that got me thinking about our jack pine. You may know that we have a variety of conifers on our grounds, including some that don’t usually grow around here. One is a jackpine, which does OK here, but really prefers the western mountains. Jackpines are interesting because they are adapted for the inevitability of forest fires. They have cones that hold their seeds, like any other conifer. And some of their pinecones look pretty much like any other pinecone, like the pinecone that you’re imagining right now.

But some of their cones stay closed. All those little scales don’t open up. Here’s what that looks like. 

It looks a little like a dragon toe – or some kind of poop. It doesn’t smell like a poop, though. It smells like summer in a pine forest. 

START BASKETS GOING AROUND. TELL PEOPLE: take a cone and a bean. 

Why does the jackpine make these strange closed cones? Well: The jackpine has a deal with time and fire. Like a phoenix, jack pines are reborn through flame. These cones last a long time. They can lie for years on the forest floor. They will finally open when they’re exposed to heat. So when a fire tears through a forest – as it will – and kills most of the mature trees, those jackpine cones are ready. They open, and release their seeds. The soil is newly enriched by ash, and there’s plenty of sun, with the big trees gone. Jackpine seedlings become one of the first species that help a landscape recover after fire. Resilience lives in these weird little knobby cones. 

I knew this in theory but then I did it by accident, once. I had a batch of assorted pinecones from around our grounds for some craft project, and I put them in the oven on low heat for an hour, like you’re supposed to, to kill any bugs. And when I came back, the jackpine cones had opened. The hidden surfaces between the scales were the most beautiful dark reddish-brown. 

The Our Money Story materials offer us a little prayer practice, today. It goes with filling in the next circle of our circle prayer. You can see there are motifs of wheat and seeds, representing the crops left for gleaning, for sharing, and the bounty of Jubilee.

I’m supposed to give you two beans, a red one and a white one, to hold while we receive a prayer about reimagining. 

You’re supposed to give back the white bean, putting it in the offering plate – those will get added to our banner – and take home the red bean, as a reminder of our capacity to reimagine. Or maybe our capacity for resilience – those aren’t the same thing, but they definitely overlap. 

Instead of the red bean, I’m giving you jackpine cones. Our tree lost a branch this past summer, and I collected a bunch of cones from the branch at the time, not knowing what I would do with them. Turns out this is what I’m doing with them. 

Let’s take a moment now for an embodied prayer, holding your bean and your cone. Let us imagine what Jubilee could look like, in our community, our nation, our time. 

I’m inviting …. To lead us through the prayer from our Money Story materials, with a few minor edits! …  

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Nov. 3 (All Saints)

In the early church – among the first Christians – the word “saints” meant everybody in the church. All who believed in and sought to follow Jesus. For example: the Apostle Paul begins his letters, preserved in the New Testament, with greetings to the saints in Ephesus, or Rome, or Corinth. Meaning, the members of the churches there. 

Over the next couple of centuries of church life, Christians started to name and honor particular saints, and draw distinctions between ordinary Christians and capital-S Saints. Those who lived remarkable lives – or in many cases died remarkable deaths – showing forth their faith. 

Eventually there became enough of those special saints that the Church chose to honor, that the calendar started to get a little crowded, and there grew up a custom of having a day to honor all the extra saints who might not have their own special day. 

So All Saints Day became a tradition. 

But: people also wanted to remember their own beloved dead. People who might not have lived lives that attracted the Church’s official notice, but who nonetheless showed forth goodness and grace, and who were loved and missed. 

And so All Souls Day became a tradition – on the day after All Saints. 

(Incidentally, Halloween as we know it has lots of sources, but it’s not a coincidence that it’s the evening before All Saints Day. The word Halloween comes from All Hallows’ Eve, an old way of saying All Saints’ Eve. It’s a time when the dead feel close at hand…) 

Our practice of All Saints’ Day here at St. Dunstan’s reunites All Saints Day and All Souls Day, in the spirit of the early church’s conviction that we are all set apart to live holy lives. We gladly honor and remember the church’s capital-S Saints… and we remember our beloved dead, whether they went on ahead recently or long ago. 

People new to the Episcopal Church sometimes ask me: Does the Episcopal Church do saints? The answer is, Well, kinda.

It depends on the particular parish how much you hear about saints. We’re somewhat saint-y, here. We’ve got all those holy images, icons, of some of the faithful whom we particularly honor here, keeping watch over the baptismal font. In an Orthodox church we’d call that an iconostasis. 

And we have a growing practice of having something about some saint or another at our prayer candle station, many weeks. 

The most formal expression of how the Episcopal Church handles saints is the book Lesser Feasts and Fasts, a liturgical resource that contains information about people to commemorate, for most days of the calendar year. If you’d like to take a look at it, I can send you the link for where it lives online! 

The preface to that book says, “Christians have since ancient times honored people whose lives represent heroic commitment to Christ and who have borne witness to their faith, [sometimes] even at the cost of their lives. Such witnesses, by the grace of God, live in every age… What we celebrate in the lives of the saints is the presence of Christ expressing itself in and through particular lives lived in the midst of specific historical circumstances. In the saints we are not dealing with absolutes of perfection but human lives, in all their diversity, open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.” 

It’s hard to find a copy of Lesser Feasts and Fasts as a book because we – the Church – revise it a lot, often every three years. 

There’s been a lot of hard work over past couple of decades to make sure that our calendar includes people of many races, genders, times and places, to correct for the biases of earlier decades that tended to spot holiness more easily in some kinds of folks than in others. 

I have twice served on the churchwide legislative committee on liturgy and music, thereby getting a front row seat to some deliberations about who to add to the calendar – and rarely, whom to remove. In adding someone to our calendar of commemorations in the Episcopal Church, we are not looking for people who are somehow ontologically different from the rest of us. No post-humous miracles are required or expected. 

Fundamentally, what we are doing is more formational: who will it help today’s church to remember and honor? What lives meaningfully illuminate what it looks like to live out one’s faith in a broken world, in a way that may bless and guide us in the living of these days? 

So, yes, we Episcopalians do saints. But possibly not in the way you’ve encountered in other traditions. 

There are a lot of meanings woven into All Saints Day. The Scriptures for this Sunday in our three-year cycle of readings point to some of them. Our call to righteousness and holiness of life. The promise of an inheritance with God, after life in this world. And – remembering the faithful departed. 

This year’s assigned readings really invite us to dwell tenderly with the memories of our beloved dead, and the reality of death. 

They are all readings that can be – and often are – used at funerals. 

That first reading, from the Wisdom of Solomon, takes the experience of losing a loved one – which can feel like disaster and destruction – and offers the mysterious but hopeful promise that that person has passed through suffering and is now at peace in God’s hands. We used this reading at John Bloodgood’s funeral. And Jerry Bever’s, and Frances Verhoeve’s. 

The second reading, from Revelation, describes the culmination of human history. The Day of Judgment that sounds so terrifying when many people speak about it, and oddly beautiful and hopeful, here. Heaven and Earth renewed, restored! God among us; Death and suffering abolished; God tenderly wiping every tear from our eyes, and proclaiming: Behold! I make all things new! 

The text enfolds the reality of human suffering within the expansive promise of God’s redemption and renewal. 

We used this one for Mike and Terri Vaughan’s funeral services.

I wouldn’t mind having it read at mine. 

The third reading is from John’s Gospel. We read this one for Kaaren Woods, and Sybil Robinson. It’s a story of resurrection, of death miraculously reversed, of grief annulled. But first: It really dwells with the reality of grief. Lazarus’s sisters are devastated by his loss. The community is grieving – and angry, which can happen! Jesus himself is moved to tears. The fact that, this time, a family had their loved one restored to them, doesn’t mean that those feelings and thoughts and experiences didn’t matter. Don’t matter. We commend our loved ones to God – and we miss the heck out of them, too. 

With all these readings, and all these people, in mind, I want to say here what I often say at funerals about our church’s teaching about resurrection. 

Jesus and the other voices of the New Testament are super super clear that when we die, we don’t end. 

What that means or looks like is mysterious, and muddied by millennia of people dreaming up pearly gates and cloud landscapes and magnificent wings. 

And even without all those bells and whistles, it’s a hard idea to grasp and hold. Even if we really want to believe that our loved ones aren’t simply gone – and we do – we may find it difficult. 

Nonetheless we are invited – by the Church, the saints, by Christ himself – to trust and know that there is an After. There is a More. 

That when we leave this place, we are received into Love. 

And that those whom we miss are already there. 

The readings for All Saints this year invite us to honor the dead.

But here we all are, living. 

I can’t let this sermon, and this day, go by without observing that we are at a point of peak anxiety for most Americans. 

I saw an article that said 70% of Americans reported feeling very or extremely anxious about this election – and that was back in August. Now, it’s three days away. 

People casting their votes, no matter the candidate, feel that this is an election with incalculably huge consequences for our nation’s future and our human and planetary wellbeing. 

And here we are on All Saints Day.

I was talking to my husband Phil early this week about trying to preach this Sunday, and mentioned that it’s All Saints Day, and he said, Good. We need them. 

What does remembering our beloved dead mean for us in this moment? On November 3 of the year of our Lord 2024? 

If you grew up in the Episcopal Church, you may have grown up, as I did, singing “For all the saints” on All Saints Day. 

All eight verses. We only sang four today!…

But even those four contain some language that probably challenges some of us, doesn’t sit well. 

“Thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight… O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold, fight as the saints who boldly fought of old…”  And in the verses we didn’t sing: “And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong…” This hymn uses militaristic language to lay out an extended metaphor of Christian life as a battle. In so doing, it’s exploring the concept of the church militant and the church triumphant, an idea from Christian thought and theology. 

The “Church Militant” consists of Christians alive today, who are engaged in the struggle against – well, all the things we say we’re against in the baptismal rite: the spiritual forces of wickedness, the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, the sinful desires that draw us from the love of God. 

And the “Church Triumphant” consists of believers who have died, and are now in God’s presence, having come through their own seasons of struggle in this world. 

This hymn, For All the Saints, is about how the Church Triumphant can encourage and support those of us who are still on the battlefield as the Church Militant. 

I remember learning about the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant when I was in my teens, and thinking it was really cool! I liked – I still like – the idea that we are all one church together, the living and the dead, and that they’re looking out for us and cheering us on and maybe even helping us in subtle and mysterious ways, now and then. 

But! I absolutely understand discomfort with those militaristic images. There are good reasons for us to be wary of such language. We are painfully aware of other Christians who frame the battle between good and evil in our times very differently than we do. We know that Christianity has often been used to justify violence. We would far rather describe ourselves as disciples of the Prince of Peace.

I share that discomfort and wariness. I absolutely believe that the core work of the church is the reconciliation of all peoples and creation with God. Restoration, not conquest or domination. 

And yet: there are moments when this fierce metaphorical language offers me something I need. The military images in this and other hymns may not be the metaphors we’d choose, but they are the work of poets seeking language for the very real struggle involved in being people of justice, mercy, and love, in a broken world. 

As the letter to the Ephesians says: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.”

Who’s watched the West Wing? The long-running show about a fictional President of the United States? … I have not. But this week I saw a video of Martin Sheen, who prays President Bartlet, telling this story: “A man arrives at the gates of Heaven and asks to be let in. St Peter says, Of course! Just show us your scars! The man says, I have no scars! St. Peter says, What a pity! Was there nothing worth fighting for?…” 

Has anybody ever heard the expression, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”? Anybody know who said it? … 

Mother Jones was an Irish-born American labor organizer and activist. Her husband and four young children died in an epidemic in 1867, when she was thirty; four years later, her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Her work helping the city rebuild led to her joining a group called the Knights of Labor, and she later became an organizer for the United Mine Workers. “In 1902, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing miners and their families against the mine owners.” 

One of her favorite tactics was to organize the wives and children of workers to demonstrate, protest, on their behalf – to make the point that the working men deserved a fair wage and safe living conditions so they could provide for their families. 

“In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the [summer] home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.” The children marched with banners demanding “We want to go to school and not the mines!” and held rallies each night in a new town on the way with music, skits, and speeches, to build support for their movement.  (Source for all this: Wikipedia, some paraphrased, some directly quoted.) 

There’s a lot more to Mother Jones’s story. But I think that’s enough to give context to her most famous saying. 

For Mother Jones, to fight like hell for the living didn’t mean taking up weapons. It meant showing up where people were suffering, and seeking to understand the causes of that suffering. It meant an utter refusal to accept that some people are doomed to grinding poverty. It meant forcing those with economic and political power to face the impact of their decisions on human lives. It meant organizing kids and teens to walk across two states and annoy the president on his summer vacation. 

Mother Jones was a Christian – Roman Catholic. And she is absolutely up there, out there, right now, with the Church Triumphant, along with all the folks we named earlier in our service, and all the folks we’ll name in a few moments. 

Think of your own beloved dead. What wisdom, what hope, what consolation, counsel or courage do they offer you, for the living of these days? 

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, beloveds. And when the strife gets fierce, listen – listen for the faint echos of the Church Triumphant singing us onward. 

Amen. 

Finances, Giving Campaign

About our 2025 Draft Budget

This page contains the same content as the information that went out in our pledge packets in late October, 2024. 

St. Dunstan’s Draft Budget for 2025: Sustaining and Growing

Sustaining… 

Our parish leaders want to sustain our budget at its current level as much as possible. 

  • The early draft of our 2025 parish budget is about $346,000 – about a 1% increase over 2024. 
  • The increase is largely due to increased insurance rates and a cost of living increase for some staff, as recommended by our diocese, offset by some other changes like a reduced diocesan assessment. 
  • Our goal this year is to keep our budget as steady as possible – while increasing our capacity to fully fund our common life, and to build towards the future. 

Your pledged giving will help sustain our parish’s mission and ministries. 

  • We adopted a deficit budget for 2024, knowing we could cover the deficit if necessary, but hoping to reduce the gap through generous giving and careful spending. 
  • In 2025 we hope to move towards fully funding our budget, with less reliance on reserve funds, gifts and grants. 
  • By sustaining our budget now, we seek to prepare financially to allow for future growth. 
  • We know that folks are hearing about – and being asked to help with – budget shortfalls in many settings right now. By keeping our parish budget as stable as possible, we seek to be responsible with and respectful of our shared resources. 

The goal of our giving campaign is to sustain our common life as a parish: shared prayer, worship, and learning, care for one another, serving our neighbors and the wider world, and boldly proclaiming God’s love for everybody, no exceptions. 

Growing…

We can keep our budget stable, while still moving forward. 

  • We continue to grow our common life by building community, deepening our learning and practices of faith, and extending our capacity for mutual care, care of others and care for God’s world.
  • We have already taken a bold step by adding a quarter-time youth minister role. One priority for this year and beyond is to grow our capacity to support that position, beyond special grants and gifts. This is our faithful response to the joy and solace that our youth find through this program, and the ways they give back to the parish. 
  • Growth is not just about numbers – but we rejoice in welcoming new members and discovering how they shape the church we are becoming. This will continue to be a priority and a delight! 
  • We are mindful of the need to grow our financial base beyond pledged income. This year, the Good Futures Accelerator team began the work of imagining ways of using underutilized parts of our church property to meet community needs and generate income.  The Place-Keeping Fund, a fund intended to help cover property-related expenses, is a different step in the same direction. Work on both fronts will continue in 2025 and beyond. 

Thank you for all the ways your presence, participation, and gifts have brought us to this moment, and will help us move towards God’s future, together. 

Goals for 2025

Our pledge goal for 2025 is $290,000. This is ambitious; it’s a big step up from our 2024 pledge total of $282,000. It reflects the hope of moving towards fully funding our budget. 

We know that just as St. Dunstan’s budget continues to be stretched by rising costs, so are your personal and household budgets. But even small pledge increases can add up, and new pledges can help us move towards our church’s financial goals. 

While we anticipate about $47,000 in income from other sources, including plate offerings, rental income, fund proceeds and diocesan grants, our main source of income is the pledged giving of members and friends of the parish. You regularly give 85% or more of our budgeted income.  THANK YOU!

When we pledge, we choose to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Every pledge, in any amount, is important and appreciated. You can invest in the ministry and community of St. Dunstan’s by returning your pledge card by November 17.   

 

St. Dunstan’s Money Story

In August, a group gathered to reflect on St. Dunstan’s “money story,” using the prompts from the Our Money Story reflection process that we’re sharing this fall. Here’s part of the report from that gathering. 

Ups and downs, but a throughline of generosity… 

We have gone through hard times in nearly seventy years as a parish, but there is an ebb and flow to our story which has kept us moving forward. Our history includes a legacy of very generous givers, who have helped carry us into this century. Big-picture economic and demographic changes, fear of deficits and other obstacles are part of our church’s money story today, but only a part. 

Generosity is a core word in our community’s money story. We have taken bold and hopeful steps in recent years. People are willing to put resources into something in the hope of helping it grow and thrive – and to build something together, not just maintain something the way it’s always been. 

A mission to care for one another, our neighbors, and our world…

Our community believes that money should be used to help others, and that God calls us to be a blessing.  At the same time, we know that we must care for ourselves and one another, in order to continue to care for others. People come here looking for something – community, healing, growth, connection with the Holy, a place to share their gifts. What we offer one another here, and what we become together, matters. 

Moving towards God’s future… 

St. Dunstan’s is a church that is choosing to have a future. But how we find – and fund! – that way forward is very much something to be explored, discerned and created together. Our annual pledging and budgeting process, and continued exploratory work towards longer-term financial sustainability, are both crucial aspects of our journey towards the future God wants for us.  

Diocesan, Episcopal Church

A report on Diocesan Convention…

Rev. Miranda and elected deputies Gail Jordan-Jones and Shirley Laedlein attended the first convention of our new, reunified diocese on October 4th and 5th. Since this was not just “diocesan convention as usual,” Gail wrote up a report on what she experienced and noticed. Shirley added a few thoughts, too – read to the end! Here’s Gail’s report.

“Earlier this month Shirley Laedlein and Gail Jordan-Jones joined Miranda as delegates for the very first Diocese of Wisconsin Annual Convention at the Holiday Inn Conference Center in Steven’s Point Wisconsin.  Tom McAlpine, Connie Ott and Sarah Errington were there as well (thank you!).  Connie brought yarn and knitting projects galore to give away in hopes those bundles of yarn would soon turn into plenty of warm hats and mittens!  Sarah Erlington spent her time helping Diocesan staff with the logistical details of the event.

As we began the conference, late Friday afternoon, there were various introductions and we learned that the chief planner of this very first ever state-wide diocesan convention resigned with about two weeks left til the event.  Her colleagues wished her well–although the timing was tough on everyone.  Hence, Sarah had lots of jobs at the convention.  Special shout-out to Sarah!
Friday night, there was a nice Build your own Taco buffet–followed by some remarks from the Presiding Bishop-Elect, the Rt. Rev. Sean Rowe.  We would hear from him again as the preacher at our Saturday Eucharist.  Between both opportunities to hear him we got a dose of his personal ideology about church doctrine and growth and his deep faith in the Trinity and our common humanity.  The Episcopal Church is in good hands.
After breakfast on Saturday, we all participated in our first joint Eucharist with the installation of our Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Gunter.  It was a special service with participation from the Oneida tribe and many parishes from around our newly reunited diocese.  The participants included our own Isaac Gildrie-Voyles!  Thanks, Evy, for the transportation services!
In the business sessions of the convention, we spent a fair amount of time voting for both Lay and Clerical members of the various offices and committees of our newly formed diocese.  Starting from scratch requires lots of people willing to serve–we were so grateful to all those who stepped up to give us a firm beginning.
The budget aspect of the meeting went quickly.  Those who scrutinize the budget had likely already done so and had their issues addressed.
We said our goodbyes and departed Steven’s Point reflecting on our experiences at this First meeting of the reunified Wisconsin Diocese.  It was an honor.”
Shirley Laedlein adds,
“First, I think that this was a well run event, and time management was good.  That’s especially impressive considering the changes in Diocesan staff.
Also, I was impressed with how everyone there seems invested in making this Diocese of Wisconsin work.  And Presiding Bishop Elect Sean Rowe seems very excited about what we are doing in Wisconsin.  In both his Friday remarks and Saturday homily, he implied that what we do here will be closely watched by the national church, and we may have an impact on how things are done in the future.  I find that exciting!
I found that people from all over the state are willing to meet each other and are eager to work together to find and carry out what God has planned for us.
Finally, I am SO delighted to have the Oneida parish be part of our diocese.  What they contribute in history and liturgy is impressive!  The sung Te Deum they contributed to the Eucharist was wonderful!  I believe we have a bright future.”
Uncategorized

Homily, Oct. 20

Text from Job here. 

Let’s pause here and talk for a moment about Behemoth, the creature – monster? – described in this passage from the book of Job. Behemoth eats plants, hangs out in rivers and swamps, and is incredibly, perhaps terrifyingly strong – does that make anyone think of a real animal?… 

Yes! Behemoth seems to be sort of a super-hippo, perhaps based on what this author has heard about hippos from travelers to Egypt and beyond. 

Who’s seen pictures or videos of Moo Deng?…  Moo Deng is the new baby hippo who’s taken the Internet by storm. She’s a baby pygmy hippo, who lives at a zoo in Thailand. 

She is small and very cute, and doesn’t really match this Biblical description! But she’s definitely having a moment. There’s all kinds of Moo Deng memes, merch, and fan art on the Internet. 

Okay. Why are we talking about hippopotamuses? It’s a very fair question, not just to me but to God, and/or to the author of the Book of Job. For 36 chapters, Job has been crying out to God, demanding an explanation for his suffering, while various “friends” tell him he can’t talk to God like that. 

In chapter 38, God finally speaks up…. And then talks for four chapters. Four chapters of nature poetry. 

But this isn’t poetry about how a field of daffodils made somebody feel better once. This is about how strange and wild and fierce Nature can be. 

God begins with the cosmic – the depths of the sea, the homes of darkness and light, the rules that govern the movements of the stars, the sources of rain and snow. 

Then God moves on to some of God’s favorite animals: lions, ravens, mountain goats. Wild donkeys, who wander the wilderness; they scorn the tumult of the city, and don’t have to listen to the shouts of a human trying to get them to cooperate. 

Likewise the wild ox, who will not spend the night in your barn or help you plow your fields. 

There’s a terrific passage about ostriches and how stupid they are – they lay their eggs on the ground, where they can easily be crushed, and barely take care of their young; and yet when an ostrich runs – it laughs at horse and rider. 

After describing Behemoth, we get to Leviathan, some sort of sea-monster or super-crocodile. God is really pleased with Leviathan and spends a whole chapter describing how badass it is. 

And that’s it, really. Job says, Okay. I hear you, God. There’s a bigger picture here that I didn’t understand.

Job says, I repent in dust and ashes – a ritual expression of humility. He has dropped his charges against God. 

God goes on to tell Job’s friends that God is angry with them because they have not spoken rightly about God, as Job did! As puzzling and unsatisfactory as God’s response to Job may feel, at least we see Job’s rage prayers ratified, as God smacks down the friends’ smug assurance about what God is like. 

I love the fierce nature poetry of God’s answer to Job. But in what sense does God answer Job’s anger and anguish? 

Bible scholar Robert Alter writes: “Through that long chain of vividly arresting images… Job has been led to see the multifarious character of God’s vast creation, its unfathomable fusion of beauty and cruelty, and through this he has come to understand the incommensurability between his human notions of right and wrong and the structure of reality.” (577) God’s answer, then, invites Job into appreciation of the bigger picture beyond his personal pain. 

On the other hand, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman writes, “After Job relates in great detail his anguish and pain and bewilderment, [God] responds, ‘Let me tell you about my crocodile.’ Any pastoral supervisor evaluating this act of ministry would say to [God], ‘You couldn’t stand the pain and you changed the subject.’” That’s fair. 

And yet. And yet. 

We do seek out mountains and beaches and stars. 

We do revel in the glory of a thunderstorm. 

We travel to volcanoes and glaciers. 

We’re drawn to the power and danger of apex predators.

My social media has been overwhelmed lately with people’s photos of the Northern Lights. Now, maybe 50% of that is the thrill of taking a cool photo and posting it online. But standing at the edge of a field in rural Wisconsin, looking up at the night sky, and knowing that the faint shimmering green you’re seeing is because there’s a storm on the Sun… can create a certain exhilarating sense of smallness. 

Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis points out that the natural phenomena God describes in Job are not useful to, and often not even friendly towards, humans. God describes a world, a universe, in which we – humanity – are neither center nor pinnacle. God loves the wild, the fierce, the mysterious. 

And – so do we, often. 

This remains true even in the deep shadow of the devastating impacts of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. As with every such event, it’s wise to consider the degree to which a natural disaster is also a human disaster: the product not only of natural systems intensified by climate change, but of poor planning and regulation, the failure of warning systems, political roadblocks to effective climate adaptation and adequate funding for relief work. 

There are no easy explanations for suffering, but part of the answer, surely, is that we choose poorly, individually and together. 

But even in the face of such loss, humans continue to find a strange consolation in the power and danger of creation. 

People will return and rebuild because they love the wooded wilds of the Blue Ridge mountains, and the moody glory of the ocean visible from vulnerable oceanfront homes in Florida. 

The thing about Moo Deng is that people don’t love her because she’s cute and cuddly.

People love her because she’s filled with rage.

She’s constantly trying to bite her keeper on the leg, or chase him around the enclosure. 

And it’s adorable, but also: Me too,  Moo Deng. Me too. 

God’s answer to Job does not explain or resolve Job’s pain, anger, and desolation. 

Go look at the stars, or Let’s talk about crocodiles, is not a good response to deep suffering. 

But it’s not the worst response, either? … 

There is an impulse here that we recognize. 

It’s something that sometimes helps, a little – turning our eyes and minds and hearts towards creatures and landscapes and cycles that are living their own vivid lives and care not at all about the things that overwhelm us. 

And there’s an invitation here, I think – embedded in the rich poetic tapestry of this text – to venture beyond the familiar and fallible moral frameworks of virtue and reward, into a sense of a sense of self and world and God that is stranger and riskier, less reassuring, more capacious and paradoxical.

Into the wild, fierce faith of Job. 

Giving Campaign

St. Dunstan’s Money Story

In August, a group gathered to reflect on St. Dunstan’s “money story,” using the prompts from the Our Money Story reflection process that we’re sharing this fall. Here’s the full report from that gathering. You can also watch and listen to a video of the same material here. 

The Setting for Our Money Story

St. Dunstan’s sits at the intersection of several very different neighborhoods, with a lot of socioeconomic diversity within a mile of our front doors. Our larger setting, Dane County, has a growing economy and population, but lack of affordable housing puts an intense squeeze on many households. Most of our members are economically stable, but there’s more economic diversity within our congregation than we might readily realize, as well. 

The setting for our money story also includes some widespread economic and generational trends. Churches have long been sustained financially by their more settled members, those in middle age and above. But we are beginning to lose our older generation of faithful and generous givers, and today’s younger generations may not be able to give at levels comparable to their elders, since basic expenses like health care, housing, and education cost many times more than in previous decades.

The Characters in Our Money Story

We can easily name long-time members – some departed, some still with us – who made big gifts to help St. Dunstan’s get established, make necessary changes, and move through difficult seasons. The generational transition as we lose some of those beloved folks is a source of both sadness and financial uncertainty. Strong voices over the decades have shaped a financial culture of giving beyond ourselves, and of using what we have, rather than having money “sit around.” Our leaders, formal and informal, have been bold in stepping up to what seems important – such as major renovations, youth ministry, outreach giving, and so on – even when it’s a financial stretch for us. 

The Plot and Conflict in Our Money Story

Reflecting on the past reminded us of some seasons of strain and conflict. Some remember that the 1995 capital campaign that built most of our main building was surrounded by conflict involving the rector at the time, who left soon after amid misconduct concerns. Many of us remember a season of scarcity and large budget deficits of $30,000 or more in the early 2010s, which led to a budget repair process in 2013 that helped us move towards balance. We also remember tensions, during that same season of deficit budgets 10 to 15 years ago, over funding the church’s core expenses and ministries versus sending funds out to help meet needs in the wider community.

But we also remembered the resilience and generosity that helped the parish survive those difficult seasons and even undertake a $1 million plus renovation in 2018-2019. Today it feels like there’s a clearer shared sense that both our common life, and the needs of our neighbors and the wider world, merit our shared generosity. 

One continued “subplot” is the lack of a substantial fund or endowment to help cover building and property expenses beyond minor maintenance and repair. For example, long-delayed maintenance on the 170-year-old farmhouse that we call the Rectory has caused many expenses to mount up. Some churches have large endowments or other funds that can be drawn on to address those kinds of needs. St. Dunstan’s does not, so we have to stretch, scramble, and borrow from our own reserves when a furnace goes out. In addition, when our annual budgets are stretched, it’s really hard to set aside much money for longer-term property maintenance and improvements. 

The main “plot” in our shared money story right now is probably the project of figuring out how to keep funding our common life as a congregation. Although every year we have many new and increased pledges, we are once again in a season of deficit budgets, due to the generational loss of many long-term sustaining members. We also continue to live with the long-term impact of Covid on every aspect of our common life, including our shared financial life. In balance with the strain of financial uncertainty, we also see a lot of vitality and potential for continued growth (numerical and spiritual!) in the life of the parish. Hopeful steps like hiring a part-time youth minister call us to stretch our budget to be able to sustain the good things happening here. 

Those in leadership have known for several years that we needed to begin some substantive work on exploring paths to sustainability for St. Dunstan’s, but surviving and adapting to the Covid pandemic delayed that work. Today, a core group is beginning some of that exploration, using the Good Futures Accelerator course as a tool. Our new Place-Keeping Fund is another approach to the same fundamental challenge.  

The Tone of Our Money Story

In reflecting on the tone of our money story – how we talk, act, and feel about money, together – several themes emerged. Generosity and gratitude are big themes. People give, with love and boldness, to the parish in general – and to specific ministries and projects that matter to them. And we are grateful, together, for what that makes possible. 

Health, trust, and transparency are another theme. We try to talk openly about our shared financial life. Money is taken seriously; we are realistic, but hopeful. 

There isn’t a current sense of conflict about money or how money is used in the parish. There seems to be a general sense that it’s important both to build and sustain this community, and to help fund what God is doing in the world around us. 

The visible presence of more youth and families have changed the tone and feeling of church and of giving. There is a sense of hope and possibility. 

However, anxiety and uncertainty are also part of the tone of our money story right now. Can we keep doing the things that matter to us? What changes will we have to make, to be able to move froward? Because those questions can feel overwhelming or frightening, the tone of our money story can also sometimes be avoidant, focusing on the present instead of the longer term, or apologetic (“we don’t want to ask for more but we have to”). 

How We Understand God’s Money Story

We believe God’s dream for the world includes hope, wholeness, and delight for all God’s children. Everyone should have enough, and there should be mutual flourishing, for humans and our non-human neighbors and ecology. Nobody’s success should come at the cost of someone else’s suffering. 

We remember the Biblical theme of jubilee – a financial reset that means unburdening and liberation. We wonder about God’s currency: how does God measure a successful transaction or a healthy budget? God’s money story seems very different from one of the dominant money stories of America, that money equals success equals goodness/worth. 

The Big Themes of Our Money Story

We have gone through hard times as a parish but there is an ebb and flow to our story which has kept us moving forward. Our history includes a long line of very generous givers – a legacy that has carried us into this century. People in our community inspire, lead, and guide our story. Economic changes, fear of deficits and other obstacles are part of our story today, but only a part. 

Our community believes that money should be used to help others and that God calls us to be a blessing. At the same time, we know that we must care for and sustain ourselves in order to continue to care for others. While maintaining our longstanding commitment to giving and serving beyond our church walls, St. Dunstan’s today has a strong sense that this community itself matters. People come here looking for something – community, healing, growth, a place to share their gifts. What we offer one another, and what we become together, matters. 

Generosity is a core word in our community’s money story. People are willing to invest – to put resources into something in the hope of helping it grow and thrive – and to build something together, not just maintain something the way it’s always been. We are willing to be bold and hopeful, together – and that has mostly worked out for us, so far!

St. Dunstan’s is a church that is choosing to have a future. But how we find (and fund!) that way forward is very much something to be explored, discovered, discerned and created, together. The next few years will be really important for us, and there’s work to do. 

Big Questions, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 13

From the introduction to Job by scholar and translator Robert Alter:
“The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon…” (That means it’s not like anything else in the Bible!)

… “Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers” – that means a lot of other Biblical texts assume that this is how things work, though there’s some grappling with it elsewhere too! – 

Alter again: That dissent is “compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward…” I’ll say more about that next week. Upshot: the world, the universe, were not created to serve humanity, we’re not the center of it all, as many other Biblical texts assume. (Alter, the Writings, p. 457) 

It’s a remarkable book in lots of ways! Who wrote it and when? … 

Part of the broad category of Wisdom literature in the Bible & across the the Ancient Near East. Texts from other cultures also struggling with why people suffer and what it all means, though Job has its own perspective. It’s Job’s friends that sound the most like other Wisdom literature texts, with their advice – “just turn from evil and do good” – while Job himself – and eventually God – push back. 

As is common in the wisdom literature, there’s very little here about Israel’s covenant history or the specific obligations of the Law. You could say that Job is a deeply faithful book but not a very religious book, per se, in that it’s not very interested in worship or practice. 

Dating: Linguistic evidence places it probably 500 years before the time of Jesus, give or take half a century or so. 

Beyond that: We know nothing about the author of the Book of Job. But Alter suspects – based on the quality of the poetry and the uniqueness of the voice – that this is one author, though the text has been altered and some portions were added later. 

Alter: “One should probably think of [this author] as a writer working alone— a bold dissenting thinker and a poet of genius who produced a book of such power that Hebrew readers soon came to feel they couldn’t do without it, however vehement its swerve from the views of the biblical majority.” (458) 

What’s the relationship of all this poetry with the preface we heard last week? – in which God brags about how pious Job is, and Satan says, He only worships you because you’ve given him everything he wants; let me at him and we’ll see how long it takes for him to turn from you!… 

Alter notes the “palpable discrepancy” between the frame story and the core text. He thinks this is a much older folktale that this author uses to set the scene and get us into the meat of what he really wants to explore – the experience and meaning of suffering. 

Ultimately it’s easy to set the folktale aside because you don’t need it. You don’t need a pissing context between God and Satan to have someone lose their home, their family, everything except their life. People face that kind of agony all the time. 

The book of Job is remarkable because it explores the meaning of suffering though tens of thousands of words of incredible poetry. Alter: “Its astounding poetry eclipses all other biblical poetry, working in the same formal system but in a style that is often distinct [both in vocabulary and images] from its biblical counterparts.”

Alter notes Job’s linguistic and metaphorical breadth and creativity – this author someone who’s really stretching the bounds of language in order to create incredibly rich expressive text. Think of Shakespeare, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. 

The book is also notable for its passages about nature, in some of Job’s speeches and especially in God’s response, which we’ll hear a tiny bit of next Sunday. This author is someone who paid close attention to the natural world, including the wild and frightening parts of it – not just a stroll through the garden. 

I’ve done a terrible thing in creating this script, by simplifying and clarifying the language. I did that because I wanted us to be able to easily hear and follow the debate about the meaning of Job’s suffering, which is often a little more elusive in the Biblical text. 

But go read some of the poetry of Job, sometime soon! 

Listen, now, to Job’s first few lines, in Alter’s translation: 

“Annul the day that I was born, 

And the night that said, “A man is conceived.” 

That day, let it be darkness. 

Let God above not seek it out, nor brightness shine upon it.

Let darkness, death’s shadow, foul it; 

Let a cloud-mass rest upon it; 

Let day-gloom dismay it. 

That night, let murk overtake it.

Let it not join in the days of the year, 

Let it not enter the number of months.

Let its twilight stars go dark. 

Let it hope for day in vain, 

And let it not see the eyelids of dawn.”  (3:2-9)

Alter says of Job’s poetry: “Anguish has rarely been given more powerful expression.” 

That amazing poetry isn’t for its own sake. It’s in the service of diving into the problem of theodicy. (Spell it) 

Theodicy: The problem of evil and suffering: how do we make sense of these things if we believe in a good God who is actively involved in the world? It is one of the big questions, and it’s the question at the heart of the book of Job. 

Job’s friends have lots of answers, but they’re not very satisfying. 

Working on the script: my attention drawn to the friend who tells Job, You just don’t know God. Questions his faith. 

But I think Job is the person with the strongest faith, here. 

With the friends, I almost wonder whether what they think is their faith in God, is actually a kind of naive belief in a clockwork universe where people get what they deserve. It doesn’t take a lot of sustained attention to reality to know that people don’t get what they deserve. But Job’s friends cling to this idea SO HARD: “You must have secret sins, because that’s the only possible explanation.” The thing about a moral universe like that – where everyone’s fortunes in life are determined by their behavior – is you don’t really need God to run it. You don’t even need AI; we were building computers that sophisticated by the 1960s. 

Job is the person here who sees reality most clearly. And Job is the person with the strongest faith, the deepest conviction that there is actually a God out there somewhere, even when he feels utterly betrayed and abandoned. The most familiar passage of Job for many folks comes from chapter 19. It’s used – without attribution – as one of the texts at the beginning of the funeral rite: “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, God will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold the Holy One, who is my friend and not a stranger.”

This is beautiful. It’s also a paraphrase of the Biblical text, making it substantially more hopeful and tender towards God. 

Job is not tender towards God. Job is furious at God. 

He denies God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s availability to humanity, period. And yet: Job is very, very sure that however distant and unresponsive God seems right now, God is. And he believes that he will, someday, get to see God with his own eyes. 

In working on this script, it was hard to end it, without resolution. 

We’re still in the middle of the book; there is more to come! But still, as a writer and as a pastor, I wanted to be able to offer some closure, some sense of grace and peace beginning to emerge. But one of the big messages of the Book of Job is, I think, that the point at which suffering resolves into meaning is often elusive. Sometimes terrible things stay terrible. No silver linings in sight. 

We know nothing about the author of the book of Job, but I wonder if we can reasonably guess that they had experienced great loss. And that this book is an expression of their conviction that God is present, even in the unthinkable. 

In November, I’ll invite folks to join me in a seasonal study group on prayer – what it is, what it can be. I’ve got a few things we might read and discuss: a lovely, light book by a friend that’s kind of an overview and introduction. A beautiful book about praying our way into Advent, with art and poetry. And I just ordered a brand new book called Rage Prayers. Sounds very promising! 

Job’s friends keep telling him to silence his rage prayers. That he can’t talk to God like that. But he can. We can. You can. Job refuses their rebukes, again and again – insists on his right to cry out to the Holy in anger and pain. One of the big gifts of this strange, difficult, beautiful book of the Bible is its utter conviction that prayer doesn’t have to be polite. That we can scream and weep and break things. That there’s nothing we can say or do that will make the Holy One turn away from us. 

God heard Job; God will hear you. 

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, October 6

This was a tough week to figure out what to preach on! There’s a lot of strange and difficult stuff here. There’s beginning of the book of Job – a piece of folklore probably much older than the rest of the book, in which an unknown author living perhaps 500 years before Jesus takes this darkly funny story of God allowing Satan to torment someone to prove his piety, and uses it as the jumping-off point for a staggeringly profound and unique work of ancient theology written completely in dialogic poetry. I’ll talk more about Job next week, I promise! 

Then there’s the first bit of the letter to the Hebrews, which is interestingly preoccupied by the relationships among Jesus, the angels, and humanity. The project of Hebrews – which is really more of a sermon or theological essay than a letter – is to explore the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross through the ritual practices of worship at the Great Temple in Jerusalem. It’s interesting stuff but requires a lot of context to follow, and we are not its intended audience. It was likely written for early Jewish Christians and seekers who were trying to fit Jesus into their existing religious framework. 

There’s plenty of meat there for a sermon. But then… there’s this Gospel. Let me tell you, the temptation to just edit out the divorce talk and focus on the little children is strong! But this week I read a short commentary that convinced me to talk about the whole thing. The commentary – on the Working Preacher website – was written by Phil Ruge-Jones, who’s a Lutheran pastor in Eau Claire and a Biblical storyteller. 

Phil’s specialty as a Biblical storyteller is the Gospel of Mark. He has memorized and told the entire Gospel – there are videos online. That commitment to Mark’s voice and Mark’s witness gives Phil a valuable lens on how any given passage fits into Jesus’ overall message as Mark understands it. 

In his commentary, Pastor Phil names the elephant in room immediately. He says, “Beware this week. As soon as you read the word ‘divorce’ aloud, a whole sermon will appear in people’s heads. Some will hear… sermons that were launched at them or someone they loved… Others will conjure up [judgment] based on this single word.” 

This is exactly why it’s tempting to skip these verses! I know that talking about divorce stirs up a lot of stuff for a lot of people. Pain, shame, defensiveness, judgment, fear, and more. I know people for whom divorce has been liberation, even salvation. I know people for whom divorce has been a bitter loss, a deep wound. And many experiences of divorce are complex mixtures of hurt and healing, grief and relief. Regardless of folks’ experiences: NOBODY wants me to try to preach about divorce. 

So let’s step back from divorce to the setting for this passage. Pastor Phil notes, “Our lectionary still has us in the section of Mark where Jesus is leading the disciples toward Jerusalem. He is also trying to help the disciples find their way into what God desires. Interestingly, he is not calling them to acts of spiritual prowess. Rather, he is asking them to live well in their common human condition and in such mundane realities as family, wealth, and their gathered community. Jesus has consistently asked them to use what they have in service of those who are most vulnerable: children, the poor, those denied status.”

Three weeks ago, in our Gospel, in Mark chapter 8, we heard Jesus say, What good does it do anyone to gain the whole world and lose their soul? Two weeks ago, in chapter 9, we heard Jesus rebuke the disciples for arguing about who’s the greatest, saying, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” and reminding them that greatness looks like welcoming those who are unimportant by the world’s standards. 

Last Sunday, still in Mark 9, we heard Jesus caution the disciples against being too eager to say who’s in and who’s out – “Whoever isn’t against us is for us!” And urging his followers to stay salty. 

In today’s text, the beginning of chapter 10, he’s preaching again, and some Pharisees have a question for him. Jesus and the Pharisees had a lot in common!  They were both interested in calling ordinary people into renewed relationship with God. They clashed a lot because of the overlap in their missions. And it’s helpful for us to understand that arguing about how to interpret and apply Scripture is a really core practice in Judaism, past and present. For example: The Talmud, a core source of Jewish law and theology, consists of a block of Scripture surrounded on the page by the commentary of generations of rabbis, debating with each other about what the text means. I think we tend to read these encounters in the Gospels as hostile when this kind of religious sparring was very normal. 

I’m not sure why the Pharisees ask Jesus about divorce. Maybe it’s because they’ve gotten mixed messages about whether he’s really strict or really lenient in his teaching – he is kinda both! – so they’re trying to suss it out. Maybe it’s because divorce is a difficult, tender issue, and they want to see if they can corner him into saying something awkward that will upset people. 

What Jesus does is actually really interesting. He knows the Law perfectly well; he knows that Moses, the great interpreter of God’s laws for God’s people, allowed for divorce. But, Pastor Phil writes, “Jesus relativizes the law of God in light of the story of God. (Repeat.) Jesus argues that God’s creational desire for integrity in our relationships remains. While Moses might have made allowances in some cases, this does not nullify God’s original intent.”

Jesus says: the Law is secondary to God’s intentions for humanity and creation. God’s underlying purpose and desire for the cosmos is for right relationship, mutual flourishing and joy – whether that’s between nations and peoples, between humanity and the non-human created order, between members of a household or partners in a marriage. 

For all kinds of reasons: right relationship and mutual flourishing often fail, and so, God through Moses permitted divorce, among other concessions. But that doesn’t change what God wants for us: wholeness together, for many different togethers. 

One of the reasons mutual flourishing often fails is the development of social structures that give some power over others, because of wealth, anatomy, skin color, etcetera. Pastor Phil notes something about the dialogue in today’s Gospel that I had never noticed: what Jesus does with the pronouns. The Pharisees want to keep their question abstract, theoretical. They ask, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” They say, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

Jesus is having none of it. He says, “What did Moses command you?” He says, “Because of your hardness of heart [Moses] wrote this commandment for you.” He refuses to let this be abstract. In Judaism at the time, a man could divorce a woman, but not the reverse. Jesus’ questioners are men.

So Jesus is saying: Moses made an allowance for divorce because dudes like you didn’t want to commit to love and to cherish, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until you are parted by death. You want to be able to nope out if you start to find her annoying or boring or burdensome, or just spot someone you like better….  

And that’s cruel, because the way things work here and now, she has no protection and no livelihood, outside of a father or husband. So: Yeah, divorce is legal, because some of you are jerks. That’s a paraphrase and expansion of what Jesus says, but I think it’s the gist. 

Then Jesus goes home, and talks more with his disciples. So maybe this next scene with the little children is the next morning – or maybe it’s a thing that happened a lot, and this passage records what Jesus had to say about it. There’s no obvious connection with the divorce conversation… but then again, maybe there is. A social system in which women are often made vulnerable is also a social system in which children are often made vulnerable – true in Jesus’ time, true today. WayForward Resources, our local food pantry and resource center, regularly reminds us of the high numbers of children among their clients. And I think that, in both parts of this text, Mark wants us to hear Jesus’ insistence that his way is a way that cares for and honors those seen as less important, or pushed to the edges.

When Jesus holds up little children – literally and metaphorically – and says things like, “Whoever welcomes a little child in my name welcomes me,” and “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” he is profoundly challenging a social order in which adult men made most of the decisions affecting the welfare of others. Pastor Phil writes, “Marriage, as well as relationships between adults and children…, are proposed as spheres where we can live toward the other in the promise of our divine image.” 

It’s an election year, beloveds. I know that’s on many of our hearts and minds. I don’t talk about it a lot when I’m standing up here. I think it’s more important for us to pray through this season together, than for you to hear me hold forth about what I think. 

But our way of faith does have some big things to say, in seasons like this. And this year, here we are in our Sunday readings, deep in these chapters of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus keeps talking about the fact that wealth and power don’t mean you’re God’s favorite. About the ways our hardness of heart have distorted God’s intentions for our common life. About mercy, justice, love of neighbor, as the path to true greatness. About how a community that seeks to follow Jesus needs to look to those often pushed to the edges, and call them to the center, to care for them and learn from them. About how we can continue to live toward the other, toward one another, in the promise of our divine image. 

Jesus didn’t live in a democracy. But for us, using our votes and voices as citizens is a really important way we can practice our faith and love our neighbors. Who’s vulnerable in our world today? Where does your faith inform – or challenge – your opinions and convictions on the big issues in the public square? How does this election season call you as a person of faith, as a follower of Jesus, to show up and speak up?

May God guard us, guide us, and empower us, for the living of these days. Amen. 

Phil Ruge-Jones’s commentary on this Gospel: 

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-27-2/commentary-on-mark-102-16-6

Intergenerational Church, Sermons

Homily, Sunday, Sept. 29

Jesus said to his friends, “Salt is good; but if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? Keep salt in yourselves and keep peace with each other.”

Let’s wonder together about what that might mean! 

What is salt? ….

Jesus says salt is good. I wonder why! 

Do YOU think salt is good? … 

How do you use salt at your house?

Do you know about any other ways to use salt?

– Melting ice… 

Do you know what it means to dissolve salt in water? …

Anybody ever gargle with salt water when you have a sore throat or a canker sore? … 

Or use a saline spray or saline drops for their nose or their eyes? 

People have been using salt to clean things and care for wounds, for thousands and thousands of years. And now that we have science to study how salt works, it turns out they were right! Salt kills a lot of bacteria. It sucks the water out of their cells so they shrivel up and die!!

Salt doesn’t work on all bacteria or other kinds of tiny things that can make us sick. So we have more effective cleaners, now. 

But people still use saline solution – which means, salt dissolved in water – for some things, like our noses and eyes and mouths, because it’s pretty gentle for our bodies. 

(Please don’t just mix salt and water and put it up your nose! Saline solution from the store is clean and safe to use.) 

 

Does anybody like pickles?

Does anybody like bacon? 

How about cheese? …

Besides taking care of our bodies, another way salt is useful is in preserving food! 

Pickles and cheese and bacon, or salted meat in general, are very old and very important. 

Think about people living a long, long, long time ago, without refrigerators or stoves or electricity at all. 

People living in warm places where food can go bad quickly.

What happens when food goes bad?…

  • It can get gross so you don’t want to eat it
  • It could make you sick if you do eat it

So for people living long, long ago: If you milk your goat, or you kill a chicken, or you pick some vegetables, you have to use them RIGHT AWAY… 

Or you have to find a way to preserve them, to do something to the food so it doesn’t go bad quickly. 

Long, long, long ago, people started to figure out some ways to do that. And salt is a really important tool. 

It kills bacteria so it helps preserve foods, and it tastes good, too. 

Pickling is a way of making vegetables last a long time. 

Salt-curing meat is a way to make meat last a long time. 

Cheese is a way to make milk last a long time. 

And all of those processes use salt. A lot of salt!

Salt really changed human history, because our long, long, long ago ancestors could save food. They could spend less time looking for food. They could travel farther. They could trade their pickles and cheese with other groups, and used those connections to learn and share. 

Where does salt come from? … 

(The ocean, or rock salt that can be mined in certain places.) 

  • Seeing salt gatherers in Tanzania

Today it’s easy to get salt. You can even get all kinds of fancy salt. 

But in those long, long, long ago times, salt was hard to get and pretty special and valuable. 

Salt was sometimes used as a kind of money. 

In some times and places salt has even been as valuable as gold!

Cities and nations that had access to salt could get really rich. 

In my research, everything I looked at said that salt was actually REALLY REALLY important for the development of human civilization around the world! 

Because salt was so important in real life, it also became an important symbol. 

Have you noticed how when something is really important to people, they start to stick ideas to it? 

One idea that people stuck to salt was the idea of something lasting forever. 

Because salt was good for preserving food, in some cultures it started to be a symbol of permanence, of eternity. 

Another idea that people stuck to salt was the idea of purification.

That’s like making something clean, but in a more symbolic way. 

Because salt was good for cleaning wounds, in some cultures it started to be seen as having the power to drive out bad energy or evil spirits, or for healing the part of us that isn’t our bodies, after somebody has done or experienced something bad. 

In some churches, when somebody is baptized, they give them a tiny bit of salt, as a symbol of purity… 

And I have heard of people, even Episcopalians!, using salt to help purify a space where something bad happened. 

So: Salt has a lot of uses, and a lot of meanings – a lot of ideas stuck to it!

Let’s look back at what Jesus says. 

Salt is good.

Now we know a lot of different ways salt is good, right? …

If salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? 

How could salt lose its saltiness? In science classes we learn that salt – the kind we use every day – is made of two elements, sodium and chlorine. You can’t really un-salt salt. 

But in those long-ago times, people weren’t getting salt from the grocery store. In Judea their salt probably came from seawater, because the coast was nearby. 

So that salt might have other stuff in it – other chemicals, a little grit, a little gunk. If that salt got wet, the actual salt might dissolve into the water and flow away, and leave that other stuff behind. That would be your not-so-salty salt, that’s not good for much anymore. 

Then Jesus says, 

Keep salt in yourselves and keep peace with each other.

This is from the gospel of Mark, the earliest version of the story of Jesus. Another version of the story, Matthew, has Jesus say this to his friends and followers: You are the salt of the land.  (5:13)

Start popcorn circulating??? 

I wonder what Jesus means by, Keep salt in yourselves! 

I wonder what Jesus means by, You are the salt of the land! 

We live 2000 years later, but we are friends and followers of Jesus, too. When he says these things, he’s talking to us.  

Why does Jesus want us to be salty? What does that mean?? 

Well, there are those ideas that got stuck to salt. 

Maybe Jesus wants us to help preserve the world, like salt preserves food. 

We could be people who help fight decay and keep things whole and good. 

Maybe Jesus wants us to help purify the world, like salt cleaning wounds. 

We could be people who look for the hurt places, and try to help heal and restore… and we could look for what’s causing hurt and harm, and fight to change those things. 

Either of those could make sense. Even both of them. 

Symbols can mean lots of things at the same time.

But I think there might be one more thing.

Because I think Jesus is talking about food and flavor.

Jesus liked food. People used to get mad at him because he enjoyed a good meal. 

I am sending around some popcorn. 

One kind has salt, and one kind doesn’t have salt. 

Which one do you like better?… 

How would you describe the difference? … 

The salty popcorn tastes brighter, to me. It makes my mouth pay attention. It’s more interesting and more satisfying to eat. 

With the unsalted popcorn I don’t think I’d eat very much. It’s kind of boring. 

(Some people have to eat less salt for health reasons!) 

I wonder if, together, we can be people who do for the world what that salt does for the popcorn. Make it a better, brighter place, that’s more fun and interesting and alive. 

Now, the word salty means something in slang today. What does it mean to be salty? …

(Grumpy, sassy…) 

I wonder if sometimes we have to be that kind of salty for Jesus, too!

Last weekend we went to see a show by a group called Bread and Puppet Theater. They use big cardboard puppets to make art about the problems and possibilities of the world. 

Phil and Iona got to help with the show, that was cool!

In one act, the leader shared a quote from the head of Amnesty International, a global human rights organization. 

She said: “We are really as close to the abyss as we have ever been.”  We are really as close to the abyss as we have ever been.

That means: we live in strange, scary times. 

Like Jesus lived in strange, scary times. 

Like Esther lived in strange, scary times.

But Esther had an important role to play, a job to do, in times like that, and maybe we do too. 

The Bread and Puppet performers showed us some Anti-Abyss Calisthenics – that means exercises!

And I want to show you a couple of them. 

Because I think they are also about ways to be salty for Jesus.

This is the first one: “Hey!” 

Like you just saw something bad happen and you’re going to SPEAK UP about it!… 

Let’s try it!… 

And this is another Anti-Abyss exercise: Aaaah.

They didn’t explain things at the performance, they just showed us and let us think about it. 

I think this is a movement about finding our goodness, and sharing it with others. Finding our peace, and sharing it. Finding our hope, and sharing it. 

So let’s practice those again:  

Hey!

Aaaah. 

Keep salt in yourselves, friends! Be the salt of the land! 

Amen.